Things first started going awry, Luis Bunuel joshes, when Napoleon's troops came to liberate Toledo. In the opening scenes of Buñuel's truly anarchic comedy, The Phantom of Liberty, the military execute those who would not be liberated. "Down with freedom!" exclaims one of the condemned. It is the bellow of an overpowered society. The French and American revolutions have let freedom ring on a powerless world, and eternally the population will be incapable of depending on the totalitarian assurance of church and state.
We meet characters, they face a calamity concerning madness, indiscretion, tragedy, sexual obsession, social idiocy or each said alternative, and then, when the root of the predicament is uncovered as an absurdity, the characters intersect with a fresh lot of characters we then follow. Buñuel's camera repeatedly enters a scene with one array of characters and departs with another, a method that was used again in Slacker. This brilliant celebration of chance and insignificance has, in some sense, "a beginning, middle, and end." However it also has numerous other films with beginnings, middles, and ends streaming within it, around its sides, and plunging across it. Its heredity in the episodic structure are even more clear-cut than in the intersecting dreams in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
A disappearance of a little girl is reported to the police by her parents, despite that the girl is physically present though none of the adults admit to her presence, yet still able to see and speak to her. And the partly Oedipal love of the aunt and nephew at the hotel, the comparable fixation of the police commissioner for his dead sister, the gambling of religious medals by Carmelite monks, the autograph seekers swarming around the convicted (and simultaneously released) mass killer, the massacre at the city zoo—a handful of The Phantom of Liberty's nonstop, deadpan absurdities—designate how willingly the human animal preserves an existence completely opposite from its principles over and above its greatly publicized capacity for reason.
It'd be outrageous to recount the "plot" of The Phantom of Liberty, because the film's an abstract abridgement of surprises. You find yourself strongly wondering what'll come next. If I tried to explain them, Buñuel's intermingling but disjointed narratives would seem incomprehensible. Nevertheless his film is oddly eloquent; it has the delicate authenticity of a dream. Buñuel seems to incorporate an impression of shamefaced sadomasochism in his films. His characters are often grown-ups trying to be mischievous children. His fixations are staged with such fastidious timing, with such a guffaw in spite of decency, that we must laugh.
The most remarkable thing about the movie is the way Buñuel pilots us fluently from one madcap fable to the next. We should be winded but we aren't since his editing makes everything appear to ensue with inexorable reason. Naturally it doesn't, though that's liberty's burden: If people want freedom, they shouldn't be required to trust in anything. The Phantom of Liberty is a masterpiece, a victory by a filmmaker defying virtually hopeless barriers and inconsistencies and acing them. It's extremely witty, yes, though keep in mind: With Buñuel, you only double up when it stings.
Buñuel sensed a rational senselessness at work in human dealings. Life has no morals, and the sorts we contrive for ourselves is totally subjective. Buñuel, moreover, never lost touch with the predominance of unconscious instincts. He was, basically, a satirist of human foolishness. At the conclusion of his life, Buñuel had accomplished such grace in his filmmaking that he could take his ingenious pastiche on any trajectory that dawned on him, along the course of last night's dreams, visions from youth, signs of impending doom, or anywhere he cared to. It might be the frankest portrait I've ever seen of the search for truth and the simultaneous need to reject it once you've grasped it.
We meet characters, they face a calamity concerning madness, indiscretion, tragedy, sexual obsession, social idiocy or each said alternative, and then, when the root of the predicament is uncovered as an absurdity, the characters intersect with a fresh lot of characters we then follow. Buñuel's camera repeatedly enters a scene with one array of characters and departs with another, a method that was used again in Slacker. This brilliant celebration of chance and insignificance has, in some sense, "a beginning, middle, and end." However it also has numerous other films with beginnings, middles, and ends streaming within it, around its sides, and plunging across it. Its heredity in the episodic structure are even more clear-cut than in the intersecting dreams in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
A disappearance of a little girl is reported to the police by her parents, despite that the girl is physically present though none of the adults admit to her presence, yet still able to see and speak to her. And the partly Oedipal love of the aunt and nephew at the hotel, the comparable fixation of the police commissioner for his dead sister, the gambling of religious medals by Carmelite monks, the autograph seekers swarming around the convicted (and simultaneously released) mass killer, the massacre at the city zoo—a handful of The Phantom of Liberty's nonstop, deadpan absurdities—designate how willingly the human animal preserves an existence completely opposite from its principles over and above its greatly publicized capacity for reason.
It'd be outrageous to recount the "plot" of The Phantom of Liberty, because the film's an abstract abridgement of surprises. You find yourself strongly wondering what'll come next. If I tried to explain them, Buñuel's intermingling but disjointed narratives would seem incomprehensible. Nevertheless his film is oddly eloquent; it has the delicate authenticity of a dream. Buñuel seems to incorporate an impression of shamefaced sadomasochism in his films. His characters are often grown-ups trying to be mischievous children. His fixations are staged with such fastidious timing, with such a guffaw in spite of decency, that we must laugh.
The most remarkable thing about the movie is the way Buñuel pilots us fluently from one madcap fable to the next. We should be winded but we aren't since his editing makes everything appear to ensue with inexorable reason. Naturally it doesn't, though that's liberty's burden: If people want freedom, they shouldn't be required to trust in anything. The Phantom of Liberty is a masterpiece, a victory by a filmmaker defying virtually hopeless barriers and inconsistencies and acing them. It's extremely witty, yes, though keep in mind: With Buñuel, you only double up when it stings.
Buñuel sensed a rational senselessness at work in human dealings. Life has no morals, and the sorts we contrive for ourselves is totally subjective. Buñuel, moreover, never lost touch with the predominance of unconscious instincts. He was, basically, a satirist of human foolishness. At the conclusion of his life, Buñuel had accomplished such grace in his filmmaking that he could take his ingenious pastiche on any trajectory that dawned on him, along the course of last night's dreams, visions from youth, signs of impending doom, or anywhere he cared to. It might be the frankest portrait I've ever seen of the search for truth and the simultaneous need to reject it once you've grasped it.