As all great poets before him, Buñuel rises from the ashes, covered in ashes in hopes of a new world. He attempts to force open the eyes, to slice them open if necessary, of the masses of society who are destroying themselves in their deluded institutions. Regardless of whether Buñuel’s aesthetic leans toward chaos and confusion, his art becomes a dynamic poetry alive on the screen.
"Sometimes there’s a profound abyss between reality and my imagination"-Luis Bunuel, The Last Sigh
Luis Buñuel’s films have been called by some poetry on the screen. One writer goes so far as to say about Buñuel’s controversial film, Un Chien andalou (The Andalusan Dog) that it is "little more than filmed poetry" (Mellen 156). Actually, few people can watch the film without squirming in their seats as a woman’s eye is sliced open with a razor. Where is the meaning in this scene? What were its author’s intentions?
Was Luis Buñuel a madman or a poetic genius? Was he a man disgruntled with a bourgeoisie society or an artist portraying reality? Was he just a grown up child rebelling against his society’s institutions or was he part of a movement that exploded the art scene forever? Perhaps he was all of those things, but most certainly, he was a poet, with all the chaotic confusion that comes with that title.
To get at the genius that was Buñuel one must read, read, and read some more about Buñuel’s life and the era in which he came to filmmaking. Of course, one must also watch the films and to do so one needs to approach the mastery of the artist with the devotion that Buñuel himself created them. Many have tried to unmask the man and certainly every one of them has failed, including Buñuel himself.
In typical Buñuelian manner, the surrealist filmmaker quite often contradicts himself on the subject of how and why he made his films. He sometimes insists Un Chien andalou is poetry on the screen and other times he insists that the film means absolutely nothing. In fact, Buñuel has been quoted as remarking on the supposed ‘meaning’ in Un Chien andalou, "NOTHING, in the film, SYMBOLIZES ANYTHING. The only method of investigation of the symbols would be, perhaps, psychoanalysis" (Mellen 153).
He also says that Un Chien andalou has nothing to do with dreams, yet in his autobiography, The Last Sigh, he specifically states that he and painter Salvador Dali began the film from dreams they had. "I made Un Chien andalou, which came from an encounter between two dreams" (Buñuel 103). The scene of the moon being sliced by a cloud was Buñuel’s and the ants marching from a hand were from a dream Dali had.
To understand Buñuel’s poetics it is necessary to understand the surrealist movement in which he was firmly entrenched. Andre Breton sums up the surrealist manifesto, "Preoccupied as I still was at that time with Freud, ... I resolved to obtain from myself what one seeks to obtain from (psychiatric) patients, namely a monologue poured out as rapidly as possible, over which the subject’s critical faculty has no control... and which as much as possible represents spoken thought" (Gascoyne 46). The surrealists, and the neorealists that came after them, were very immersed in expressing reality in nonreal terms. "The French regarded it (film) as the vehicle of revelation, and the knowledge revealed was not always expressible in words" (Hill 66).
Salvador Dali recalled the surrealists ideology, "It is possible to systematize confusion thanks to a paranoia and active process of thought and so assist in discrediting completely the world of reality" (Gould 37). Like the French Impressionists, Surrealists made films that portrayed dreamlike states, actual dreams, nonlinear movement, and violent interactions. They express emotions, especially the dark emotions that societies and people in general try to hide from themselves.
In The Last Sigh, Buñuel says of the surrealist movement, "The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself" (Buñuel 107). As with any good poet, Buñuel and his surrealist friends hoped their art would perform the transformation. But he goes on to point out that even though many of the surrealists became famous, "one good look around is evidence enough of our failure" (Buñuel 123). Andre Breton says to Buñuel, "It’s sad, mon cher Luis, but it’s no longer possible to scandalize anybody!" (Buñuel 114).
This statement from a Japanese magazine article illustrates the driving force behind Buñuel’s artistic endeavors. "The greater theme running through his best films is that institutions such as church, state, and family are corrupting only because they give man an entirely false idea of himself" (Mellen 111). For Buñuel, as well as the other surrealists, men could never live an authentic life if they insisted on living the mythic life created for them by the institutions.
