Another Look at Bunuel: The Tragic Eye - Tristram Shandy

His hatred of Catholic morality must not he taken as implying that he is without a moral sense. On the contrary he is obsessed by one. It is precisely his detestation of suffering, cruelty, injustice, and hypocrisy that made him judge life so\ severely. His criticisms of Spain are the most severe ever made by a Spaniard.

These words were spoken, not of Bunuel but of the novelist Pio Baroja, and they remind us that without making Bunuel a Spanish hero of our time, it is possible to find, in his background, his teachers and his contemporaries, the clue to much that is puzzling in his work, and its intense and savage power. Towards the end of the last century, the Spanish government, dominated then as now, by the Church, dismissed the leading university professors. A few of them started a 'free' school for higher studies, the Institution Libre de Ensencmza, and around this arose the so-called "Generation of '98", the small group of intellectuals who sought, as a parallel to the growth of working-class movements, to diagnose the stifling inertia, hypocrisy and corruption of Spanish life — the art critic and teacher Manuel Cossio, the philosophers Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset, the economist Joacqum Costa (who summed up his programme for Spain in the words school and larder, the poet Antonio Machado, Pio Baroja. The Institution had an even more remarkable offspring, the Residencia de Estudianles, or Residential College for Students, founded by Alberto Jimenez in 1910. Gerald Brenan gives us this fascinating glimpse of the Residencia:

Here, over a long course of years, Unamuno, Cossio and Ortega taught, walking about the garden or sitting in the shade of the trees in the manner of the ancient philosophers: here Juan Ramon Jimenez wrote and recited his poems, and here too a later generation of poets, among them Garcia Lorca and Alberti, learned their trade, coming under the influence of the school of music and folksong which Eduardo Martinez Torner organised. Never, I think, since the early Middle Ages has an educational establishment produced such astonishing results on the life of a nation, for it was largely by means of the Institucion and the Residencia that Spanish culture was raised suddenly to a level it had not known for three hundred years.

It was to this remarkable environment that Luis Bunuel came in 1917, born in a wealthy land-owning family which he despised, and educated in a Jesuit college which he loathed, with that intense hatred for the Catholic Church which is peculiar to a deeply "religious" people like the Spaniards (see M. L. Berneri's article in Anarchy 5). At the Residencia, Bunuel met his contemporaries Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca, as well as the older writers Rafael Alberti and Ramon Gomez de la Serna : Dali, who was to write with Bunuel the scenaria of his first two films before declining into triviality; Garcia Lorca, who was to become the greatest poet of his generation, and to write, before being murdered in Fascist Spain in 1937, the play which Bunuel was to turn into the film The House of Bernarda Alba; Alberti who is today a poet in exile denied an audience in Spain; and Gomez de la Serna, ten years older than Bunuel, who had already begun to 1910 to write his aphoristic greguerias, or attempts to define the indefinable (a surrealism which antedated that of Breton and Dali).

Bunuel has remained singularly faithful to this generation and its teachers. Compare, for instance, with his work, the conclusion of MaragalPs La Espaciosa y Triste Espaha:

This, then, is the land of Spain. I have raised my eyes and seen the scraggy trees and the houses, the bushes, agaves and cactuses in the brown- red and wretched soil, all covered with the dust raised by wandering beggars as they pass along the roads ... and I have felt within me, as my only reaction to all this, a deep and helpless disgust. . . .

Or Pio Baroja's declaration that:

Every subversive instinct— and the natural is always subversive — carries with it its own policeman. There is no pure fountain which men have not trampled with their feet and dirtied.

Or finally, listen to the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno (who was to die under house arrest after being dismissed for the second time from the rectorship of Salamanca University), confessing his destructive faith, in The Tragic Sense of Life :

But it is my task— I was going to say my mission — to shatter the faith of the one, of the other, and of the third, the faith in affirmation, the faith in negation and the faith in abstention, and to do this out of faith in faith itself. It is my task to fight against all those who resign themselves, be it against Catholicism or Rationalism or Agnosticism. It is my task to make all live in unquiet and longing.

Here, for comparison, is Bunuel, answering in 1959 a questionnaire about the kind of film he would like to make:

If it were possible for me, I would make films which, apart from entertaining the audience, would convey to them the absolute certainty that they do not live in the best of all possible worlds. And in doing this I believe that my intentions would be highly constructive. Movies today, including the so-called neo-realist, are dedicated to a task contrary to this. How is it possible to hope for an improvement in the audience — and conse- quently in the producers — when every day we are told in these films, even in the most insipid comedies, that our social institutions, our concepts of Country, Religion, Love, etc., etc., are, while perhaps imperfect, unique and necessary? The true 'opium of the audience' is conformity; and the entire, gigantic film world is dedicated to the propagation of this com- fortable feeling, wrapped though it is at times in the insidious disguise of art. * * * It is a sobering experience to look at Bunuel's first two films thirty years after they were made. We reflect of course, that Un Chien Andalou and L' Age D'Or were conceived by two young men of bour- geois origins who came from a country which had escaped the first world war, but whose revulsion from their environment was so intense that they could describe their first film as "a despairing passionate call to the slaughter". Today, after the slaughter, we are not so impressed by gratuitous acts of violence. In the second film however, the revolt- ing images develop a more coherent allegory and we notice as Georges Sadoul puts it, that "through the Surrealist extravagance and anarchic scandale comes the thin end of the wedge of social criticism", or as we would prefer to put it, the nihilism becomes tinged with anarchism. For, while Dali moved on to disintegrate his talents, Buiiuel fortified his, and on the fall of the Spanish monarchy, returned to Spain to make, in the Year One of the Republic, Land Without Bread. Garcia Lorca discovered the gypsies of Andalusia, but Buiiuel discovered the deformed and monstrous inhabitants of the desolate region of Las Hurdes. "This then," he might say with Maragall, "is the land of Spain ..." and to the charge that he got a sadistic pleasure from the display of its degrada- tion, he would reply, as did the novelist Valle-Inclan, that the tragic reality of Spanish life could be conveyed only by a systematic deforma- tion, "because Spain itself is a grotesque deformation of European civilisation". This, says Buiiuel, is your liberal republic with its sacred principle of universal suffrage, and we see starving animals, cretinous beggars, cave dwellers and dead children : images with a good deal less surrealist chic than the artfully-arranged dead donkeys on Parisian grand pianos, of his first film.

There follows a great gap in what Buiiuel himself would regard as his creative life, since he disclaims all his subsequent work until The Forgotten Ones of 1950. Transplanted to Mexico (the country whose art, in its preoccupation with suffering and death, most resembles that of Spain), he made his offering on that topic so equivocally precious to the cinema, juvenile delinquency. Why is the adult world so fascinated by this theme? Do we project on to the pointless viciousness of naughty children, the guilt we feel for the massive and purposeful delinquencies of our social and political life? Are we looking for microcosmic scape- goats for our defence programme? Bufiuel does not indulge us by making us vicarious therapists; his anti-social innocents are not restored to the bosom of society, for society itself displays on a grand scale the pitiful petty cruelty and crime of the forgotten ones. Virtue is not rewarded: Pedro and Meche, the adorable children of this film, are as doomed as the vicious Jaibo and the spiteful old blind man, and Buiiuel scorns to offer us any attenuating circumstances or comforting conclu- sions.

Two years later he made Robinson Crusoe. You can imagine the standard cinema treatment which Defoe's story would get : the resource- ful castaway on Do-It-Yourself-Island, always ingenious in making the best of things. ("Grand entertainment for ail the family"). But Bufiuel concentrates his power on the theological aspects of the novel, which the modern reprints leave out, or the modern reader skips. Defoe's Crusoe writes, "I am singled out and separated, as it were, from all the world to be miserable. I am divided from mankind, a solitaire, one banished from human society". And Bunuel's Crusoe rushes, panic-stricken out to sea, yells across deep valleys to hear a human voice in the faint echo of his own, and frantically searches the Bible to learn why he has been forsaken by God.

In these films the manipulation of symbols and dream sequences has been refined and controlled, so that they are neither arbitrary nor arty. What for Salvador Dali was transitory exhibitionism, becomes for Bufiuel a tool of analysis and exposition.

To everyone's surprise Buiiuel returned to Spain early this year, and made, with the same cast as he used for Nazarin, the film Viridiana which was given the highest award at the Cannes festival in June, together with Colpi's Une Aussi Longue Absence. The most incredible thing about this film, writes John Francis Lane in last month's Films and Filming,

is that it was made in Spain. A film packed with erotic and blasphe- mous symbolism made in the country with the most rigid censorship in the Western world.

and he tells us as explanation.

It appears that Genera! Franco wants to confound his critics by demon- strating his 'liberal' attitude to the intellectuals who stood out against his regime in the 'thirties. "Come home and you will be forgiven" is the message he has sent out. A Picasso or a Pablo Casals is obviously not interested. But Bufiuel has taken up the challenge. Told he could make whatever film he liked, he has taken the Generalissimo at his word. The script of Viridiana was given official approval in Madrid. One would like to know, however, how much of the blasphemous material was in that script. I am sure, for example, that nobody expected a beggars' orgy to be turned into a pose of The Last Supper, or that this scene would conclude with an obscene gesture that will make censors all over the world sharpen their scissors feverishly as soon as they hear about it! Bunuel's anguished view of a Catholic-dominated society is very similar to that of Fellini. Viridiana is a ruthless denunciation of the social and religious values in Franco's Spain. The atmosphere is so mediaeval that one is shocked to suddenly see a motor car or hear a pop song on the gramophone.

Only one Spanish newspaper, El Pueblo, reported the award of the prize to Viridiana. Subsequently the censorship has vetoed all mention of the film. Buiiuel himself, talking about the film, in phrases that bring to mind that straining of the very limits of their medium which characterises Spanish painters and musicians, comments : Octavio Praz says but that a man in chains should shut his eyes, the world would explode. And 1 could add But that the white eye-lid of the screen reflect its proper light, the universe would go up in flames. But for the moment we can sleep in peace: the light of the cinema is conveniently dosified and shackled.