The Original Cast Away

Film: Robinson Crusoe (Adventures of Robinson Crusoe)
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on laptop.

Daniel Defoe’s book about Robinson Crusoe is one of those stories, much like Robin Hood, that pretty much everyone knows but that pretty much no one has read. I’m guilty of that myself, although I did once try to read Robin Hood. Anyway, it’s hardly surprising that someone would make the story into a movie. I’m a little surprised it took until 1954, and I’m equally surprised that the person in charge of it was Luis Bunuel. No matter. Robinson Crusoe, also known as Adventures of Robinson Crusoe awaits.

We learn right away that our hero, Robinson Crusoe (Dan O’Herlihy) has gone to see against the wishes of his father since, as a third son, he has few prospects. What we also learn is that our hero Robinson’s first gig away from home is on a slave ship hoping to transport captives from Brazil. We’re off to a rip-roaring, wholesome start for the whole family. A storm forces him to abandon ship and he swims for a nearby island. The next day, he discovers his ship floating and abandoned in a nearby cove. He swims out to it, collects supplies as well as the ship’s cat and dog, and returns back to his island laden down with food, firearms, and other supplies. Sadly, the ship soon sinks, meaning that everything he’s found is all he has, and aside from his pets, he’s now alone.

Blue Balls

Films: That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet Obscur Objet du Desir)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

The filmography of Luis Bunuel has been a mixed bag for me. There have been some of his movies that I have really enjoyed, like The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. There have been others, like Las Hurdes that I have absolutely hated. I’m always a little apprehensive going into a Bunuel film because I’m not sure what I’m going to get. That Obscure Object of Desire (or Cet Obscure Objet du Desir if you prefer) is Bunuel’s last film. I went into it not knowing what to expect.

The biggest issue I have with Bunuel is the problem I have with absurdism in general. I don’t know if I should take it seriously or if I should laugh at it, and if I do laugh at it, there’s a part of me that suspects that’s what Bunuel wants. I don’t know how to react to absurdism and surrealism in general. Fortunately, That Obscure Object of Desire is a film that actually has a plot. While there’s certainly some absurdism here (don’t worry—we’ll get to that), there’s also a story that can be followed, and that helps tremendously.

Trapped in the Closet

Film: El Angel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel)
Format: Streaming video from Hulu+ on laptop.

I’m never sure what I’m going to get when I sign myself up for a film directed by Luis Bunuel. Sometimes I really like his work a lot. At other times, I wonder why I bother. I’d heard a lot good about El Angel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel), but once bitten and all of that. There are too many Bunuel films that I genuinely don’t like at all that I’m going to be suspicious of any of them all the way through. What I’ve found is that I tend to like his work a lot more when, absurd or not, there’s a narrative through-line. Things can be absurd and I’m okay with it; it’s when they don’t make sense that I get bothered.

El Angel Exterminador, while absurd in the extreme, has an internally consistent narrative. A group of people go to a dinner party at the home of a man named Edmundo Nobile (Enrique Rambal). Everything goes well, but for some reason, the servants suddenly find reasons to be away from the house. In the middle of the party all of them except the main butler (Claudio Brook) wander off suddenly with pressing appointments. The party goes off, and eventually everyone retires to the parlor where one of the guests plays the piano.

Seduction of the Innocent(s)

Film: Tristana
Format: Video from The Magic Flashdrive on laptop.

Getting through all of the films by Luis Bunuel on the list has been something of a chore. I’ve admittedly liked a few of them, but several have been noteworthy in their wretchedness, and most just passed over me. I guess what I’m saying is that there’s way too much Bunuel on The List. We can keep Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and maybe Viridiana. The rest can pretty much go scratch, including tonight’s film, Tristana. In the interest of full disclosure, I attempted to watch this last night, but fell hard asleep 30 minutes in and woke up only at the end. This doesn’t really bode well, considering I wasn’t that tired going in.

It’s a tried and true story. A young woman named Tristana (Catherine Deneuve) loses her mother. She is put into the care of a man named Don Lope (Fernando Rey), who has agreed to take care of Tristana. Eventually, though, he realizes that Tristana is a woman and no longer a girl. This distinctly changes their relationship from father/daughter to one much more to husband/wife. Since Don Lope is her guardian, this is creepy to the extreme. This comes more from the relationship itself and less from the vast age difference between the two of them.

Race Relations

Film: La Joven (The Young One)
Format: DVD from NetFlix on kick-ass portable DVD player.

I’ve said before that the Holocaust is probably the most common topic of films on The List, and it may well be. Taken more broadly, though, I’d suggest that a plurality of films deal at some point and on some level with racism. Many of them do this overtly while others do this without intending to. Still others include racial tensions and issues only in retrospect, decades after their original release. Movies not intending to address the idea of racism still do, looked at with modern eyes. Luis Bunuel’s first English language film, La Joven (The Young One) is a film that tackles the idea of race head-on.

Traver (Bernie Hamilton) is on the run from small Southern town justice. He’s been accused of a rape he didn’t commit, but because he’s black, he’s guilty before proven innocent, and nobody is going to try very hard to prove him innocent. He winds up on an island that’s actually a hunting preserve. Little does he know that there are a couple of other people on the island with him.

Fut the Whuck?

Film: Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

As evidenced by the current state of where I stand, I’ve made a real effort at watching the earliest films on The List, and have virtually completed the first 100 films. However, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog) has, until tonight, remained unwatched. My brother Tom is going through much of this list on his own (I think he has the fifth edition), and when I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago, he wondered at the fact that I hadn’t bothered to get through this short little oddity yet. I confess that the reason has been fear.

I know how this film starts. It starts, notoriously, with a man slicing a razor blade across an eyeball. Now, I know this is an illusion of sorts; a cow’s eye was used for the effect. That doesn’t make it any easier for me to watch. In fact, I sat for several minutes with the film frozen just before that moment, trying to steel myself for what was to come. It’s thankfully quick, but still pretty awful, especially if you have a thing with eyes.

Un Chien Andalou is essentially plotless, a series of images that follow one after the other. A cloud slices across the moon and the razor blade slices across the eye and suddenly eight years pass. A man falls off his bicycle, then ants crawl from a hole in his hand (a reference to a French idiom for wanting to kill someone). A severed hand appears in the street, and a woman is run down while the man watches. The man makes sexual advances on the woman from the start of the movie, alternately imagining her clothed and unclothed. He then drags a pair of pianos with a dead donkey on them toward her. There are a couple of priests involved in this as well. More ants in the palm. Hands through a wall act as a doorbell, or are shaking a drink.

You know what? I don’t know. The images seem sometimes related to each other, but often are simply random and have only the meaning I think we ascribe to them. They aren’t particularly meaningful in and of themselves but are only given the meaning that we give them. That, in many ways, is the nature of surrealism, at least to my mind.

I’m not sure I want to ascribe a great deal of meaning to it, really. I know that this is considered one of the great moments of surrealist art, and there’s reason for that. But most of us, myself included, want to ascribe meaning to what we see. We quite naturally want to put a story together, or make some kind of narrative, or at least generate a meaning for what is put in front of us. And there’s no meaning here intentionally.

It makes this film difficult to judge on its face. I’ve seen it now, and I know there is value in what I have seen, but there’s no real desire in me to see it again. I mean, I like it when the man covers his mouth, then pulls his hand away and his mouth is gone. But really, what’s the point of having the woman’s armpit hair appear in its place? And do I really want to create a personal meaning for armpit hair on the face? I think not.

Why to watch Un Chien Andalou: The first instance of real surrealism in film.
Why not to watch: Sliced eyeball.

Ugly World, Ugly Truth

Film: Los Olvidados (The Forgotten; The Young and the Damned)
Format: Internet video on laptop.

A message picture is one that attempts to show a problem to the world, raise awareness, and often to suggest a possible solution to the problem either in the main or in a specific case. That’s the typical message picture, at least. Of course Luis Bunuel was never a typical filmmaker. Los Olvidados (known as either The Forgotten or more commonly The Young and the Damned) is a film that walks like a message picture and talks like a message picture, but does something different entirely. Bunuel isn’t concerned here with finding a solution. It could even be argued that he’s not interested in highlighting a problem. Instead, he’s just showing life as it happens to some of the poorest people in Mexico, a world that we will naturally interpret as being filled with problems. He offers no solutions and no real commentary; instead, he just shows us this slice of possible reality and leaves it to us to judge it.

We spend our time with a group of street kids, boys who may or may not have a home, don’t go to school or have anything like an education, sometimes look for work, and general cause problems and commit minor crimes. A few of these boys will become central to the narrative. The first is Pedro (Alfonso Mejia), a young criminal who feels (rightfully) that his mother doesn’t care about him and that there is nothing for him in his family. Pedro wishes to improve, to please his mother, but can do nothing to make her happy, or much to notice him except negatively. The bad influence comes in the form of Jaibo (Roberto Cobo), who has escaped from reform school. Jaibo is unrepentant, vicious, and feral.

In truth, Jaibo is as sociopathic a character as you are likely to find in a film. His first action when he returns from reform school is to seek out Julian (Javier Amezcua), who he is certain turned him in. Julian’s denial means nothing; when his back is turned, Jaibo beats him over the head with a rock and then a large stick, killing him. Pedro is witness to this, and Jaibo gives him a portion of Julian’s money, swearing him to silence. It is this event that causes Pedro to really want to change for the better, and he gets a job at a blacksmith’s. But Jaibo ruins this as well, stealing a knife, setting it up so that Pedro is accused and sent off to reform school. Meanwhile, Jaibo does what he can to put himself in good with Pedro’s mother (Estela Inda). It’s soon evident that Jaibo isn’t looking for a mother, though.

Los Olvidados pulls no punches, and deals with the reality of the lives of these children. And they are children. Pedro is maybe in his early teens, but he deals throughout with the sorts of cares and concerns that many adults would be hard pressed to understand or work through. These are not kids playing at being criminals, but kids who are fully realized criminals. It’s easy to forget when we see their youth that Jaibo might be all of 14 or 15, not really a child but in no way a man. He is, after all, a murderer within the first half hour or so of the film.

This unflinching look is what makes the film. But unlike most message films, Los Olvidados offers us no respite and nothing to make us feel good at the end. We are left only with the lives of these kids and the hell of their existence, the fact that nothing good happens to them, and that even their best intentions are turned against them. The film is a mere shade away from ending up with the audience watching with a gun in its collective mouth.

That’s the point, of course. To give this a happy ending (more on this in a moment) would be to destroy everything that Bunuel wants to accomplish with this film, which is to show both the poverty and the desperation as realistically as he can. It takes something from Italian Neo-Realism, although Bunuel can’t get completely over his surrealist roots, giving the film an interesting dream sequence. It’s harsh and brutal, and it should be. It’s not interested in telling us how to solve problems like Pedro and Jaibo, but simply to show us that they exist.

There was a happy ending created and tacked on in some versions. Even the idea of it destroys the entire function of the film. It was created because Mexican authorities wanted a more positive image of the country. Fortunately, the original ending is available, and is the one to watch. The tragedy here is that when he is sent to the reform school, it appears that Pedro will turn everything around. That he tries speaks to the human spirit, and what happens when he does speaks to the human experience.

Why to watch Los Olvidados: Brutal and unflinching.
Why not to watch: Bunuel offers only the depiction, not a solution.

I'm Hungry!

Film: Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie)
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on laptop.

Luis Bunuel is a director with whom I have trouble. Since a great deal of his output delves fully into the surreal, I often don’t know how to react to it. Do I laugh? Do I take it seriously? I tend to go into his movies like I go into a cold swimming pool. I dip in a toe, inch my way in, and eventually get to the point where I feel acclimated. The problem is that often with Bunuel’s films, I’m just getting acclimated with the environment when the film ends.

So I was rather pleasantly surprised by Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), which certainly goes to the surreal, but is also in many ways easier to read. We are concerned with three couples who are in many ways the epitome of the upper middle/lower upper class. Throughout the film, the three couples attempt to get together for a meal and are snubbed at every turn.

Our first couple is Don Rafael Acosta (Fernando Rey) and Florence (Bulle Ogier). He is the ambassador to France from the mythical country of Miranda, which might be South American or Caribbean. As a diplomat, Acosta uses his position to smuggle in massive amounts of cocaine, which he shares with his friends. One of those friends is M. Thevenot (Paul Frankeur), who is married to Simone (Delphine Seyrig). It’s entirely possible that Simone and Don Rafael are having an affair. They certainly seem to be, at least, but reality is not always that firm in this case.

Our third couple is Henri and Alice Senechal (Jean-Pierre Cassel and Stephane Audran), who initially are the hosts of a failed dinner party. They also host a second failed dinner party when, instead of going down to greet their guests, they sneak off into the garden for sex. Their sudden disappearance causes Acosta and Thevenot to panic, since they believe the police are on the way to arrest them for drug trafficking.

Meals are interrupted by the Army, by police raids, by dead bodies, and more. In short, the six people almost never get to eat, and when they do, it’s only for a few minutes before something terrible happens and disrupts them.

Around the middle of the film, we starting delving into the world of dreams. Frequently, a scene will take a very strange turn, like the characters arriving for a dinner party only to discover that they are in fact on stage and expected to perform a play that none of them have learned the lines to. Just as the scene comes to a head, one of the characters wakes up and the film continues. From this point forward, it is impossible to tell if anything is actually happening or if we are in the dream state. This is because Bunuel never changes away from reality in the dreams. They are played straight, as if they are really happening, and we don’t discover that reality is being twisted until we see someone sit up.

This more than anything is what makes the film work for me. There is no separation between the dream states of the various characters and their waking reality. We can never be sure what we are seeing is real or if it is the figment of someone’s subconscious. For instance, at one meal the couples are arrested. At the police station, we hear the story of a police lieutenant who was killed, but comes back every year on the anniversary of his death to try to get people to like him. He arrives and releases our characters, but this then turns out to be another dream. The police chief is told the release the prisoners and does. But were they ever really arrested in the first place? It’s impossible to tell.

In short, Le Discret Charme de la Bourgeoisie makes it impossible to tell if something is really happening or if it is something else. Because of this, everything has to be taken at face value until it is proven to be something other than reality. This makes the film more than a little farcical, but it’s a farce that really works. Eventually, we question the entire experience—how artificial was everything that we saw? On a very real level, it’s all artificial since these are actors playing roles in a film. It’s impossible to tell where the story ends and begins, where reality ends and begins, and where the roles end and begin.

As a shock, I liked this film, and I didn’t really expect to. It’s silly and strange, but it’s a film that benefits from a sort of laissez faire attitude of just letting the film happen and worrying about interpretation later. Of course, Bunuel never works on a single level, and he’s making a statement about the bourgeoisie class here, too.

There’s also some genuine humor here. At one point, Acosta tells his friends about people at the airport wanting to search his diplomatic bag—a serious breach of etiquette. He mentions that another ambassador was recently arrested for drug trafficking, discovered when his diplomatic bag was searched. Upon conclusion of the story, Acosta reaches into his own diplomatic bag and pulls out a couple of fistfuls of cocaine.

This film is about attitude, perception, and ego, and it really works. Some may find it difficult and others may be offended by what Bunuel seems to be saying about the upwardly mobile, upper middle class. But so what?

Why to watch Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie: Highbrow silliness.
Why not to watch: Up is down, down is up, and it will remind you strangely of Inception.

Check Out My Shorts

Films: Hold Me While I’m Naked, The War Game, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread)
Format: Internet video on laptop (Naked, Las Hurdes), streaming video from NetFlix on laptop (War Game).

It’s been awhile since I’ve done a short film, since I’ve been trying to concentrate on some of the longer film productions. Normally, I look for something more than running time to connect the films of a given day, but today, it’s all about things under an hour long.

Years ago, I worked for a magazine publisher. One of the guys who worked there made amateur films in his spare time, most of which were perverse, scatological, crude, and often really funny. Hold Me While I’m Naked has that same sort of energy to it. It’s camp, both intentionally and unintentionally. Because it is camp, I’m not sure how to react to it.

We start with a woman in green (Donna Kerness) running as if she is being chased. Two things are noteworthy about this woman. First, she’s quite top heavy. Second, she’s wearing someone’s idea of a classy dress. She runs, and we hear a voice over telling her to run, giving her stage direction. We cut to a man with a camera giving an “okay” sign, and then we have titles.

It becomes evident that this is a film about a man making a film, so we start travelling into meta-territory pretty quickly. The film within the film is evidently soft-core smut. The next scene being filmed as well as the scenes planned by the director (George Kuchar, who also directed the film—he’s both the director and the meta-director) are nothing but Donna Kerness getting naked or being naked. She’s tired of having her boobs filmed, so she quits. And the director’s movie falls apart.

I’m not a great fan of camp, which leaves me wondering how to approach this film. Is Kuchar serious, poking fun, or is he demonstrating his seriousness by poking fun? Or is it all of this at once?

The concluding scene shows evidently a scene from the meta-movie, with Kerness in her green dress and with a man in the shower intercut with the director taking a shower. Kerness and the man are obviously enjoying themselves tremendously while the director pounds his head lightly against the wall under the shower spray. Almost as if he’s trying to recreate the shower scene for himself, he’s wearing a pink gown. The film ends with his mother yelling at him to leave the bathroom and eat, and the director comes out wrapped in a bathrobe and towel turban and says to the camera, “There’s a lot of things in life worth living for, isn’t there?” as if he is trying to convince himself.

Is it a statement? I think it is. The director in the film (Kuchar’s character, and possibly Kuchar as well in another meta-moment) is trying to make something greater than his everyday existence, which consists of of a towel turban and a plate of shapeless meat and what looks like sliced beets. And because his starlet has wandered off the set, his dream is gone and only the sad reality remains.

The bigger question, of course, is whether or not it’s worth watching. Hard to say. I can’t say that it’s so bad it’s good, because so much of the camp quality of this film is absolutely intended. It’s a forced glamour that, if it were completely in earnest, would be pathetically sad—but Kuchar is really attempting to make it look like an earnest bad attempt. It’s very much like the songs in This is Spinal Tap that are bad enough to be ridiculously funny, but also just good enough that it’s possible someone wrote them in earnest.

The War Game was initially conceived as a film designed to run on the BBC. Once it was completed, though, the BBC blanched at the graphic nature of the program and declined to run it. Filmed in a pseudo-documentary style, the film depicts the aftermath of a nuclear attack on the British Isles as well as an actual documentary on the typical opinions of the British population regarding readiness and retaliation in case of Soviet attack.

There’s a good deal of controversy regarding this film, actually. The official line on its banning on television (a ban that lasted until the mid-1980s) is that it was far too graphic for the general viewing public, and it is intensely graphic. The burn victims look terribly real despite the old cosmetic technology used in a film in the 1960s. People’s arms look like charred roasts. Don’t watch this when you’re also thinking about eating.

However, there are some who believe (and this also makes a certain level of conspiratorial sense) that the film was pulled from the BBC because it showed that the British population was uninformed, unprepared, and horribly naïve when it came to the realities of full nuclear war. This film is as much frightening possible future as it is an indictment on the British government’s plans for coping with nuclear war and nuclear winter. We’re told mid-way through the film, for instance, that doctors will be instructed to classify the wounded in three categories. Those in the third category are to be placed in holding rooms where they will be left to die in great pain without any medical assistance or painkillers. This is followed by a scene in which the London police “assist” the doctors by delivering euthanizing bullets to those determined to be too far gone to have a chance at survival.

Whatever the reason, suppression or the graphic nature, it’s actually difficult to disagree with the BBC’s decision. Even now, 45 years after the film was made, this is a terrifying piece of footage. It’s gruesome, ghoulish, and completely sobering. Camera pans across rows and rows of mutilated and burned bodies, empty eye sockets staring up, mangled women and children, destroyed buildings, and the haunted, soulless voices of the rescue workers and doctors combine to make this film seem much, much longer than its 48-minute running time.

It’s worth noting that the acting here is quite good overall. The sound often feels dubbed in, but the people being shown—heads bandaged, bodies shaking—are quite convincing. We learn that even in the “lightly hit” counties, death tolls of up to 50,000 can be expected, with the resultant funeral pyres, since that many corpses couldn’t be reasonable dealt with in any other way.

Director Peter Watkins makes his point by comparing the devastation of a potential nuclear war with the realities that occurred in World War II in places like Nagasaki and Hiroshima as well as conventionally bombed cities like Dresden. The commentator remarks that the scenes being shown, while simulated, actually happened in other places, and would be a part of the new reality of a post-nuclear world. This includes the inevitable collapse into martial law, chaos, and a return to essential primitivism. Watkins doesn’t shy away from the psychological aspects of the war, either. A great deal of this film concerns the mental states of the survivors and what they will likely experience in terms of complete mental breakdowns.

Despite its age, this film is still effective and affecting. I don’t know how sound all of Watkins’s science is—he does claim a great deal of vetting at the end of the film—but what he shows is sobering and terrifying.

Luis Bunuel arguably invented the mockumentary with Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread). This short film (roughly half an hour) tells of the area in northern Spain that is perhaps the most backward region in Europe at the time. The people who live in Las Hurdes, called Hurdanos, are so cut off from the rest of the world that until just before the arrival of the film crew, they were unaware of the existence of bread, hence the name of the film.

Bunuel shows the miserable, terrible lives of the people in the Hurdano villages, wracked by starvation, disease, poverty, and plagued by accidents and the worst of nature. Nothing about the lives of these people is pleasant or comfortable. The richest people in the area slaughter a pig once every year, and thus have meat for three days. The rest of the Hurdanos, says the film, get meat only when one of their mountain goats dies, either through age or through accident.

The people own nothing, are illiterate, and many don’t have shoes. They are crawling with malaria, and in the summer months are so desperate for food that they eat unripe cherries, which gives them dysentery. Misery abounds. Even without the disease and starvation, the people are so isolated that many of them are mentally deficient due to improper medical care and inbreeding. Taking care of the beehives of a nearby region in winter months, the Hurdanos travel to return them to their rightful owners, and several of the men are stung to death. Looking for fertilizer, a man is bitten by an asp. That, combined with the Hurdano cure, kills him.

There is a certain amount of truth to Bunuel’s film, but it is also exaggerated to an extreme degree. The Hurdanos were backward and poor until relatively recently, and have struggled since the release of Bunuel’s film to overcome the stigma of their region. But when Bunuel shows us an ancient woman and claims she is in her early 30s, or any number of the other preposterous and extreme claims he makes, it goes well beyond even willing suspension of disbelief. Bunuel wasn’t above setting up shots to prove his point. At one point a goat falls off a cliff—this was a shot set up by Bunuel, and the goat was sacrificed to take the tumble. In another part, he took a sick donkey and spread it with honey, allowing it to be stung to death by bees, again to increase the evident poverty and pitiable nature of the film’s subjects.

Where the film works, though, is through the combination of image and word. The film is delivered in a straight narration, almost a travelogue as if Las Hurdes were a place high on the list of potential tourist destinations. Interestingly enough, this is now the case—the remote location and beautiful landscape has turned the region into a vacationers’ paradise. For the film, though, the matter-of-fact voiceover reporting on these terrible conditions and tragedies makes an interesting and effective counterpoint to the rest of the film.

What else were you going to do with the next 27 minutes of your life? This film is worth at least that.

Why to watch Hold Me While I’m Naked: A piece of classic camp.
Why not to watch: A piece of classic camp.

Why to watch The War Game: A sobering look at the consequences of nuclear war.
Why not to watch: Lack of appetite afterward.

Why to watch Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan: A surreal documentary that isn’t really a documentary, except that it sort of is.
Why not to watch: The lengths Bunuel went to for certain shots.

Sex is Good

Films: L’Age D’Or (The Age of Gold), W.R.: Misterije Organizma (W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism)
Format: DVD from New Lennox Public Library through interlibrary loan (Gold); DVD from Rockford Public Library (Organism), both on laptop.

I have a degree in linguistics. There are a few realities about linguists that non-linguists don’t know. First, we don’t tend to correct the way people talk. Linguists don’t tell people how they should talk; they study how people actually do talk. Second, all linguists love the art of Magritte. Just like engineers and mathematicians love Escher (I do, too), linguists love a guy who can create a painting of a pipe, write “this is not a pipe” under it, and get away with it.

Magritte was a surrealist, so it wouldn’t shock me if you thought I was really into surrealist art. You’d be wrong. I have an appreciation for some surrealism, but a lot of it leaves me cold. It reminds me a lot of a bunch of Monty Python routines where things will just appear for no reason. That’s surrealism I could get behind. I’m never sure with most surrealists, though, if they’re serious or if I should be laughing at it. I seriously can’t tell. This is especially true with surrealist film.

L’Age D’Or (The Age of Gold) is a perfect example of this. It’s an hour of virtually plotless weirdness that I’m not sure what to make of. Was Bunuel trying to make a statement? Was he just screwing around with his audience? Was the film banned because of something Bunuel did or was it banned because the powers that be assumed that he did something worth banning? It’s a legitimate question when it comes to surrealist film. Regardless of whether or not there is something troubling in L’Age D’Or, it didn’t receive its American debut until nearly fifty years after it was created.

I’d love to go into the plot, but it’s pretty much impossible. It starts as a documentary about scorpions, then becomes…well…I don’t really know. A guy walks down a mountain. There are bishops chanting on the seashore. Guys talk about people from Majorca. A group of people walk to the seashore and the bishops are now skeletons. A woman giggles and the crowd turns to see a man and a woman moments away from getting it on while rolling in the mud. They chase her away, and two guys handcuff our lothario and walk off with him. They turn up later in Rome.

Then there’s a party. A guy shoots his son in broad daylight. The lothario from earlier slaps a woman at the party and people take greater offense to this than the man shooting his child. The guy and the daughter (I think) of the woman he slapped go off to the garden and come moments away from humping each other. They’re interrupted by a phone call, and while he goes off to the phone, she fellates(!) the toes of a statue. Then she goes off with another guy, and our hero has a temper tantrum that involves tossing stuff out a window. Then there’s a reference to the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom involving a guy who looks like Jesus. And then it ends.

Of course, this doesn’t touch all of the bizarre imagery that shows up throughout. There’s a cow on a bed, for instance. The guy’s temper tantrum involves throwing a burning tree, a bishop, and a gigantic plow out a window. Seriously, I don’t know if I should be laughing at it or thoughtfully stroking my beard and commenting on the deep meaning that Bunuel obviously meant with his juxtaposition of elements.

If you put a gun (or, if the surrealist in you prefers, a bright purple socket wrench) to my head, I’d tell you that I think this film is about sex. It’s about the fact that society tends to have a negative view of sex publically but has the opposite opinion privately, and this disparity between our natural desire for it and the societal pressure against it leads to problems and often to violence. That’s a guess, of course. It could just be that Bunuel is screwing with us all.

Is it good? Is it meaningful? Is it worth watching? Hard to say, honestly. I think I’m glad I watched it, but I don’t know that I’d call it good or meaningful, or really anything other than valuable because of what it is. Sorry if that’s a cop-out. I’m entitled every once in awhile.

We’re staying in weird territory with W.R.: Misterije Organizma (W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism).While I don’t have any proof at this point in my lengthy countdown, my guess is that this is about as close to pornography as exists here, considering that the opening ten minutes includes footage of people having sex, albeit in sepia tone and in a strange, hexagonal format.

This film is about half a documentary on the work of William Reich. Reich was a psychoanalyst who worked with Freud, attempting to rationalize Freud’s work with communism. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, Reich fled, eventually winding up in the States. Here is where things started to get really bizarre. Reich claimed that he had discovered a form of energy he called “orgone” that was released during sex. He built a variety of devices that were supposed to harness this orgone and transfer it to patients. Eventually, the Food and Drug Administration got an injunction against Reich, preventing the manufacture and sale of these devices. When Reich refused to comply, he was sentenced to two years in prison, and died before he was released. In an event uncommon for the U.S. government, Reich’s works were burned by the FDA.

Frankly, it’s beyond the scope of this blog and my education to discuss Reich’s theories or the possible existence of cosmic sex energy. I’m not even going to try. The video of people going through Reich’s techniques are some of the damnedest things I’ve seen on a screen.

So what’s the other half? I dunno. A lot of it feels like filmed performance art. The guy wearing the orange jumpsuit and the metal helmet, for instance, feels very much like this.

The rest is a film with an actual story that acts as a metaphor for Yugoslavia’s struggle under Russian communism. Yugoslavia here is represented by Milena (Milena Dravic), a communist revolutionary who preaches that free love needs to be a part of the socialist state—that without sex, the sex instinct gets sublimated into other things that eventually led to social problems and, more importantly, the problems of the world. Her roommate, Jagoda (Jagoda Kaloper) is, for lack of a better term, the local slut, and thus obviously another believer in free love.

Milena’s argument at its heart is the opposite end of Orwell’s argument in 1984 for the existence of the Anti-Sex League. In Orwell’s world, the Anti-Sex League existed as a group that avoided all sexual contact, turning any sexual fervor into love and enthusiasm for the party. Milena essentially argues that without sex, the human race becomes something willingly led into anything.

Much of this story is intercut with the other pieces—discussions of artists, sessions of Reich’s work, and large groups of people screaming, shaking, and engaging in vaguely sexual non-sex. It’s plenty damn disturbing—primal scream therapy is not a pretty thing to look at, and a lot of Reich’s sessions look quite a bit like this. It’s nearly impossible to tell if the people in this footage are at the height of passion or the absolute pinnacle of horrendous pain.

Milena’s story revolves around a Russian ice skater, whom she seduces. It would spoil the film to reveal the ending of this particular affair, but it’s safe to say that filmmaker Dusan Makavejev wasn’t attempting to hide the metaphor; he named his Russian ice skater Vladamir Illyich, which was Lenin’s given name.

Is it good? I don’t really know. I feel almost unable to judge it. It’s not something I’ll watch again. It’s not the kind of thing I would normally watch. Controversial, certainly, but more bizarre than I’m comfortable with. I can’t think of a single person I’d recommend it to.

Why to watch L’Age D’or: Few movies swing this kind of influence.
Why not to watch: It makes no sense.

Why to watch W.R.: Misterije Organizma: Weird ideas never killed anyone.
Why not to watch: Weird ideas can give you a whanging headache.

Return to Spain

Film: Viridiana
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.

First, sorry for the late post. I had some minor computer problems that prevented posting until now.

I understand why many people have problems with a lot of foreign films, and with art films in the specific. Watching a bunch of random, unconnected events and being told by someone smoking a clove cigarette that it is filled with meaning that only the most uncomprehending boob would not be moved by is frustrating. I tend to dislike things like this as well. I have no problem with movies I have to think about to understand, but I also want something more than just what someone tells me is art. For me, there has to be a story to connect with in addition to that artistic statement.

There are few filmmakers who made stronger artistic statements than Luis Bunuel. A film like Viridiana, filmed in his native Spain after a self-imposed exile of years, contains any number of symbolic statements and artistic ideas. However, it also contains a compelling story.

The title character, Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) is more precisely Sister Viridiana, or soon will be. She stands on the brink of taking her vows to make her a nun. In the days before this, her Mother Superior suggests she take a few days and visit her uncle, Don Jaime (Fernando Rey). Jaime has paid for her education and upkeep, but despite this, she has no affection for him, and considers him to be a man of low moral character. She goes, under orders, and discovers that she was both right and wrong.

Don Jaime is a recluse, living on a virtually deserted farm that grows nothing. He asks Viridiana to stay with him and she refuses. To compel her to stay, he drugs her with the assistance of his servant, Ramona (Margarita Lozano). Jaime is extremely conflicted. His wife died on their wedding night in her wedding dress, and Viridiana evidently looks quite a bit like her. In the years that have passed since his failed wedding, Jaime has made an extreme fetish of his late wife’s wedding clothes. He convinces Viridiana to wear the wedding dress before he drugs her, and then attempts to rape her inert body. Conscience overrides him, though. He confesses everything to her, then hangs himself.

What’s left then is the estate, which is to be decided between Viridiana and Jorge (Francisco Rabal), Don Jaime’s son from a pre-marital affair. Viridiana wishes to use her new wealth to help the poor and begins taking care of the beggars in the area, who abuse her largesse as the more cynical of us might well expect them to. And so, the film is in many ways about the real life education of the title character, who learns that the real world is not simply the good-evil, black-white dichotomy she may have envisioned from her convent education.

Throughout, Bunuel injects any number of references, symbols, and allusions, which is to be expected from a director so attuned to his art. For instance, early in the film, Viridiana sleepwalks into her uncle’s room. She throws her knitting into the fire (casting away from her the simple realities and comforts of life, or perhaps throwing away something that connects her to the convent), scoops up a basket of ashes from his fire, and dumps these on his bed. Ashes on his bed—his marriage was destroyed before it could start, and since then, his life in bed has been nothing more than ashes. Additionally, she apologizes for her somnambulism and says that ashes represent penitence and death. Shortly afterwards, Jaime repents of his own actions and kills himself.

Later in the film, the beggars take advantage of Viridiana’s hospitality, conducting an orgy of food and sex in the dining room. Unable to resist this temptation, Bunuel places them all on the same side of a long table, enacting a sinful, beggars’ version of The Last Supper. What’s the message here? That all people are both filled with sin and degradation and can simultaneously be uplifted and holy? Perhaps. That religion itself is filled with nothing more than low grade criminals and the dregs of society? Perhaps. Pick the one that works for you. However, upon its release, the film was banned in Spain and denounced by the Vatican. Use this to guide you in the meaning you select.

There are some politics here as well, which is probably why the film was banned in Franco’s Spain. The film takes place in the present, or at least the present of 1961, roughly 20 years after the fascist revolution of Franco. Early in the film, Don Jaime comments that in his fields, the weeds have taken over for the last 20 years, and that spiders have infested the top floor of his house. It’s not a difficult conclusion to reach that Bunuel was speaking about Spain itself with these lines.

What makes a film like Viridiana worth watching is not the artistic elements or Bunuel’s statements throughout. What makes it worthwhile is that, like any great artist, Bunuel’s message is personal both in the sense that it comes directly from him, and that it can be interpreted in many different ways according to the thoughts, ideas, and predilections of the viewer. What makes it truly great, however, is that even without the symbolism, artistic points, and attempts at deep meaning that extends beyond the short running time, the story is good enough to carry itself. Viridiana can be enjoyed for its own sake without worrying at every turn or in every shot what mood, thought, or artistic ideal Bunuel was trying to portray.

Why to watch Viridiana: Story and art hand in hand.
Why not to watch: Bunuel loved to shock, no less here than anywhere.

A Different Kind of Love

Films: The Philadelphia Story, Belle de Jour
Format: DVD from Davenport Public Library through interlibrary loan on laptop (Philadelphia); DVD from Rockford Public Library on big ol’ television (Belle).

What do you get when you take three of the finest actors of their generation and put them in the same movie? If you answered “a crap shoot,” you’d be right. Put that many powerful egos in one place and you’re apt to get a mess. Of course, if you can get them all to work together, you can end up with something significant. Of course that takes a significant director; fortunately George Cukor is up to the task.

The Philadelphia Story is the sort of film that made Hollywood great back in the day. It opens with perhaps the greatest break-up scene in movie history. C.K. Dexter Haven (the great Cary Grant) is being kicked out of his house by his wife, Tracy Lord Haven (Katharine Hepburn). His arms are full of bags, and she follows with his collection of pipes and his golf clubs. With nowhere for him to hold the pipes, she drops them unceremoniously on the ground, then does the same with all but one of his golf clubs. That, she breaks over her knee, then walks back to the house. Dexter follows her, and when she turns for a last retort, he mimes punching her, thinks better of it, palms her face in his hand, and shoves her to the ground. From there, we get the title card, “Two Years Later.”

Here’s where our other players enter. First, we have Tracy’s younger sister, Dinah (Virginia Weidler), who is at that strange age of innocence and not-so-innocence. She clearly misses Dexter and dislikes Tracy’s current fiancé, George Kittredge (John Howard). Kittredge is an up-and-comer with possible political aspirations. We also need to encounter Macaulay Connor (James Stewart) and Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), a writer and photographer for the society magazine Spy.

Spy also happens to be the employer of one C.K. Dexter Haven. The job of Connor and Imbrie is to get into the big society wedding and get a story for the magazine, with any help that Haven can muster. Of course, Haven isn’t too pleased about the wedding, and might be causing the story himself.

While all of these characters are real characters, the one I enjoy the most without any reservation at all is Dinah. The kid cracks me up. When she and Tracy discover the real reason that Connor and Imbrie are at their house, they do everything they possibly can to give the reporters the impression that the entire family is out of its collective mind. Dinah prances like a ballerina, talks in French, and wallops out a nice version of “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady” on the piano before running off because she might have smallpox. Great stuff.

I’m not entirely sure where to place this film in terms of genre. Is it a screwball comedy? Kind of, but not the sort I’m used to seeing. It is loads of fun though—rather than simply wacky hijinks, the constant situation is one of an elephant in the room. Connor and Imbrie eventually get wise to the fact that they’re being played. The Lord family, particularly the family matriarch Margaret Lord (Mary Nash) knows exactly what’s going on but refuses to admit that there’s anything fishy with her daughters both claiming that her brother is her husband or Imbrie’s constant photographing of everything around her.

This is beautifully played comedy. As Margaret attempts to keep things looking normal, Tracy and Dinah act in a manner to give the reporters a real sensational story, Uncle Willie (Roland Young) is completely confused, Haven stands in the middle attempting the ruin the impending nuptials, and through all of it is the not-so-subtle click of the camera that constantly stops conversation for just a half second each time a new picture is snapped.

This of course says nothing of the fact that there is an evident attraction between Tracy and Connor. She is touched by his evident skill as a writer. And, of course, Kittredge is something of a sweet, little nobody. This is further complicated by the fact that Connor and Imbrie are, without really saying it, something of an item. It’s less a love triangle than sort of a love pile-up.

The way a film like this works, the place to really start paying attention is right around the middle. Dexter Haven absolutely dresses down his ex-wife in a way that can only happen in the movies. And he’s right—Tracy Lord is a scold, a nag, and has the sort of standards that are impossible for anyone but her to live up to. Any deviation from what Tracy wants, since Tracy has always gotten what she wants, cannot be handled. Her father, who has run off with a dancer, tells her essentially the same thing. She doesn’t like it, but she can’t deny it. She is a snooty prig.

Of course, it’s a 1940 romantic comedy, so everything works out in the end. The ending is perhaps a little too pat and cutesy, but it’s still damn fun. And really, Cary Grant in this movie simply reaffirms that he was the most suave man to ever put on pants.

As for Belle de Jour, I’m not really sure where I should start. I’ve had the movie in my possession from the library for close to three weeks and simply haven’t had the courage to watch it until tonight. When a film is called Luis Bunuel’s “erotic masterpiece,” I start to worry a bit. Flatly, erotica makes me a little uncomfortable.

I shouldn’t have been worried. Certainly, Belle de Jour is a sexy film, and that’s most definitely one of the selling points of this movie, but it isn’t the entire point. Rather, it’s about desire and the blurred line between reality and fantasy.

Severine Serizy (Catherine Deneuve) is the young housewife of a doctor named Pierre (Jean Sorel). In her mind, she lives in a fantasy world of kinky and somewhat degrading sex, but in the real world, she’s pretty frigid—to the point where she and her husband sleep in separate beds per The Dick van Dyke Show. A friend of her husband’s, Henri Husson (Michel Piccoli), gives her the creeps because of his rather open sexuality and evident desire to see more than might be appropriate of Severine.

A friend tells her of a mutual acquaintance of theirs who has garnered a new job for herself—working in a local Parisian house of ill repute. Evidently the money is pretty good and it’s exciting, so she keeps doing it. Husson tells her the same thing, and also of a similar place he used to go to that is still in business. Looking for a way to free herself from the boredom of her life, Severine goes and becomes the newest member of the staff.

This isn’t easy for her at first. Madame Anais (Genevieve Page) christens her “Belle de Jour” (beauty of the day) because she can only work during the day. It takes her a few clients to get it right, but Severine quickly takes to this new double life of hers, finding the “work” to be both exhilarating and something much more than she had with her marriage.

The trouble starts with a young client named Marcel (Pierre Clementi). The two are almost immediately attracted to each other—him by her obvious beauty and her by the fact that many of his teeth are metal from an accident and just as much by the fact that she is terrified of him. The problem becomes obvious—Marcel can’t have her, and he wants her. And he’s a violent criminal and will not stop at anything to have her.

The lines blur in this film between the fantasy sex world Severine lives in and the reality of her new life with Madame Anais. This is inherently interesting, of course. What I find more interesting is Bunuel’s incisive look into the human mind and spirit. One of Severine’s early clients is a gynecologist who wishes to be degraded, beaten, and otherwise humiliated. Severine is told to observe so that she can learn something, but she is disgusted by what she sees. This is a brilliant counterpoint to many of Severine’s fantasies, which involve her being degraded, beaten, covered in muck, and then forced into sex. Degradation is fine for her, evidently, but her embarrassment of this leads her to severely judge others who want the same thing.

This is an interesting film, and while there’s plenty of sex, legs, and a naked back or two, it’s not particularly racy in anything more than subject matter. I’m not sure I’d watch it again, but I was certainly wrong to dread it.

Why to watch The Philadelphia Story: A remarkable romance that goes in a lot of directions.
Why not to watch: If you’re at all like me, you’d rather slap Katherine Hepburn than kiss her.

Why to watch Belle de Jour: An interesting look into human psychology with a side of sexy.
Why not to watch: It’s not as sexy as you may be looking for.