Ballad to Buñuel by SMC Founder Craig Hammill

BALLAD TO BUÑUEL #3: L'AGE D'OR (1930) Today, we'd like to sing the praises of totally singular auteur Spanish surreal filmmaker Luis Buñuel (1900-1983). Buñuel made early surrealist masterpieces, middle period Mexican surreal yet socially biting dramas, and a final French period that ended with one of the greatest "last" movies this programmer has ever scene. In his first phase, Buñuel is most known for his short UN CHIEN ANDALOU, made with Salvador Dali, in which all manner of surreal things happen including an infamous scene that appears to show Buñuel slicing an eyeball with a razor blade (it was a dead cow's eye). But the second Buñuel/Dali collaboration L'AGE D'OR really sets the template for the trajectory of Buñuel's career. An equally (if not superior) string of surreal scenes include strange foot eroticism, savage satire of Catholicism, and imagery that sticks with you forever even if you can't quite figure out what it means. L'AGE D'OR is a prototype for Federico Fellini, David Lynch, and others who would swim in the dark ocean of the subconscious and produce powerful works of dreamlike cinema. Buñuel would take these early experiments and find a way to weave them into the powerful narratives of his middle Mexican period.

BALLAD TO BUÑUEL #2: LOS OLVIDADOS (1950, Mexico) Buñuel didn't make a feature film for over 7 years during the turbulent period of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. But finally, in the late 1940's, he began a run of movies he made in Mexico that are collectively this programmer's favorite Buñuel era. For a filmmaker as idiosynchratic as Buñuel, he was also surprisingly practical and made a number of successful bigger budget pictures before he made his first out and out savage surreal/socially critical Mexican masterpiece. LOS OLVIDADOS ("The Forgotten") focuses on poor, homeless, and discarded street children trying to eke out daily existence. It's a very unflinching almost shocking movie that depicts the injustices poor children must endure when the adults and society at large have no idea what to do with them. But at the same time, the movie is also shockingly unsentimental. A trait that has preserved the power/integrity of Buñuel's pictures. He doesn't romanticize the poor. And by having the integrity to admit that no one is free from violence, hypocrisy, shortcomings, he earns his observations. In the middle of all this, Buñuel throws in a shockingly surreal dream sequence in slow motion that suddenly announces to the world he had grown MORE subversive not less with age. From this movie onward, Buñuel would only get more and more daring. A MUST SEE MOVIE.

BALLAD TO BUÑUEL #1: THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE (1977, France/Spain) Unexpected challenges can be the midwives of cinematic genius if the filmmaker can endure/even embrace the difficult birth. So it was with Buñuel's last movie, made when he was 77 years old. It tells the story of an aging Frenchman who becomes obsessed with a younger woman who continually frustrates his attempts to consummate the relationship. The movie was almost abandoned when, after three days of shooting, Buñuel and his producer realized the original actress wasn't working. After two martinis at a bar, Buñuel's surrealism saved the picture. He proposed (half-jokingly) they should re-cast the part with two actresses who would appear interchangeably in scenes. The producer loved the idea. They re-cast. And a MUCH BETTER, STRANGER movie was made. Since the movie is mostly told in flashback by the Man, the whole notion of how men misremember, eroticize, objectify or completely misunderstand (or don't understand at all) female psychology is suddenly brilliantly/cinematically conveyed. At the same time, Buñuel weaves in a B story about terrorists who make day to day life completely unpredictable with sudden bombings. For my money, this movie, Kurosawa's RAN, Scorsese's THE IRISHMAN, John Huston's THE DEAD, Stanley Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT are THE best movies made by moviemakers in the final stages of their careers. Buñuel stayed a bombthrower to the very end. But he never threw bombs just to watch things burn. It always has felt, to this programmer, he threw them to remind us that our hypocrisies will blind us if we don't stay honest.