Surrealisme: ode aan Luis Buñuel

Live music will be performed by Oscar Jan Hoogland on his gramophones.Q/A will follow with Ramón Gieling over his film The prisoners of Buñuel (2000).What interested the surrealists was the developing of methods to liberate imagination from false rationality, restrictive customs and structures, and to understand the actual functioning of thought, first through the “pure psychic automatism” of writing and later through other media such as painting, film, theatre. This “unrational” approach allowed the artist to express unconventional ideas and to critique the current, unbearable conditions and habits of society.

The programme:

La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), by Jean Epstein, France, 1928, 68 min (excerpt), with a live gramophone concert.

It is a French horror film directed by Jean Epstein in 1928 and one of the many interpretations of the eponym gothic novel by Edgar Allan Poe (1893). Future director Luis Buñuel co-wrote the screenplay with Epstein, having previously worked as assistant director on Epstein”s film Mauprat (1926). La chute de la maison Usher is often classified as an expressionist avant-garde feature attempting to make innovative cinematic representations in the horror genre. The film is dense of visual experiments and atmospheric effects. A good example is the sequence of the storm, which is characterized by a very modern-looking fast cutting.

Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, France, 1929, 16 min, with live gramophone concert.

This is Buñuel”s first film and it was initially released in 1929 with a limited amount of screenings at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but was met with success and ran for eight months. The film has no plot in the conventional sense. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in a narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.

De gevangenen van Buñuel (The prisoners of Buñuel), by Ramón Gieling, the Netherlands, 2000, 73 min (excerpt).

Ramon Gieling”s documentary “reveals what the village”s people think of Las Hurdes 60-odd years later, and while it”s hardly the last word on Buñuel, it does offer a thoughtful and provocative reflection on the intricate cross-purposes of life and art — not to mention accuracy and truth. One can”t necessarily believe everything the villagers say about the film, especially because some of them contradict one another. But conversely, to take Buñuel”s masterpiece entirely at face value would be to misread it: it”s a metaphysical statement more than anything else, and its off-screen narration mocks the touristic documentary in countless ways. It”s impossible to evaluate The Prisoners of Buñuel adequately if you haven”t seen “Las Hurdes-Land Without Bread”, and Gieling, who jokingly draws attention to the way parts of his own documentary are staged, seems well aware of the problem.

Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Las hurdes – Land without Bread), by Luis Bunuel, Spain, 1933, 30 min.

Film essay on human geography, as Buñuel called it, Las hurdes – Land without Bread (1933) is based on the ethnographic account (Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine, 1927) of a region in mid-western Spain (close to the Portuguese border) by the sociologist Maurice Legendre. The title anticipates already the subversion of this film to the traditional travelogue film genre (with film titles such as Argentina: Land of Passion and Czechoslovakia: Land of Beauty and Change), showing usually beauty, landscapes and not hunger. Buñuel”s documentary was banned in Spain and not shown in France until 1938. Las Hurdes shows how difficult life at its worst can be. It shows the poorest mountainous areas of Spain, left behind by history, by modern progress, so distant from the living standards of the rest of Spain. Hungry people, hungry animals, midgets and lunatics are the result of hundred years of bad hygiene, misery, incest and hunger. Buñuel mercilessly interrogates the inhabitants of the village, without apparent concern for their dignity, and involves the viewers in questioning the reality of what they see and hear. Empathy or pity with the villagers are not allowed, neither is identification: the film refuses to sentimentalize the sufferings of the Hurdanos.