Documentary about Luis Buñuel: Women's legs against film censorship

Wenn man heute in einer Fußgängerzone irgendwo in Deutschland Menschen anhalten und nach großen Filmkünstlern des 20. Jahrhunderts fragen würde, welche Namen würden wohl fallen? Weiß man noch etwas von Hitchcock? Ist es Daniel Kehlmann gelungen, den Namen G. W. Pabst wieder in Umlauf zu bringen? Hat Orson Welles, der mit „Citizen Kane“ viele Jahrzehnte als Schöpfer des besten Films aller Zeiten galt, noch eine Reputation? Von Luis Buñuel, der in diese Preisklasse auch gehört, kursieren vielleicht einzelne Bilder: Menschen, die sich zum Abendessen hinsetzen, und zwar auf Wasserklosetts. Die Szene aus „Das Gespenst der Freiheit“ hat sich längst aus ihrem erzählerischen Kontext gelöst, auf Youtube kann man sie als Clip finden, ein Fragment aus einer analen Gesellschaft, was immer das bedeuten mag.

Buñuel hatte auch ein Talent für Filmtitel, die man sich merkt: „Der diskrete Charme der Bourgeoisie“. „Dieses obskure Objekt der Begierde“. Vor allem in der frühen Phase des 20. Jahrhunderts war er mittendrin in den Bewegungen, die damals als modern galten. Salvador Dalí hat ihn gemalt, seine ersten Filme „Der andalusische Hund“ und „Das goldene Zeitalter“ zählen zum Kanon der Avantgarde des Kinos.

Now Javier Espada has attempted to give today's audience an impression of Luis Buñuel in an hour and a half. He wants to present him as a “filmmaker of surrealism”, probably knowing that surrealism is perhaps the most popular label that has remained of 20th century art. But also one of the most worn. Almost everything that isn't completely exhausted in tautologies, everything that rises from the flow of everyday life can seem surreal today. Jean Epstein, from whom Buñuel learned crucial things about cinema, was of the opinion that every close-up in a film is inherently surrealistic because it isolates objects and faces, highlights them in a strange way, and makes them larger than life.

Luis Buñuel came from Calanda in northeastern Spain. He associated nothing less than “the most powerful sexual oppression in history” with the world of his origins. The drives, the “impulses” had to be kept in check, but they still found their way, in their original way. Buñuel's entire aesthetic is largely based on this model, which comes from psychoanalysis. He shows what has come through the censorship to highlight the censorship mechanisms. Javier Espada finds numerous examples of this in Buñuel's films. Probably nowhere have legs, women's legs with and without stockings, feet with matching and unsuitable footwear been highlighted as much as here.

When Hitchcock once posed for a photo with Buñuel, he only mentioned one scene from his work: the amputated leg from “Tristana,” played by Catherine Deneuve in 1970. In this logic, cinema is an art of partial objects that only add up to a melancholic sum, but no longer to something like happiness. In this context, it is not surprising that the most important miracle of the “virgen” (the “maiden”) of Calanda was an orthopedic one – she gave a leg amputee a lower leg again.

For his film, Javier Espada was able to draw on, among other things, old stereoscopic photographs taken by Buñuel's father: scenes of country life, including a remarkably narrative sequence of three shots that show a death by knife violence. “Back then, everyone carried a knife in their sash.” These images were colored for the documentary, a process that can be seen again and again: color penetrates the original image, and after a few seconds it is processed for a digital present. If one follows Espada's suggestion, then the essence of Buñuel's view of reality would already be established in these documents: not a calm, objective view of the world, but one that makes cathexis, that fetishizes. The father was a merchant who became very rich by contracting for the colonial Spanish army in Cuba. An energetic man, by all accounts, a man who was purposeful in his choice of property. It had to be the most beautiful young woman in Calanda.

But Buñuel took something else with him from this archaic childhood in which “the Middle Ages only ended with the First World War,” something that he had to translate for the cinema. He first noticed a dead donkey in an olive grove because of the smell that hung in the air. The fact that death is part of everyday life every second is one of the clichés about Hispanic cultures, which Buñuel, who worked in Mexico for a long time, reinforces. In the rural world, people are born and die in a rhythm that seems irresistible. He is interrupted by images: “If a picture is shocking, I keep it,” Buñuel is quoted as saying.

The merit of Javier Espada's otherwise quite conventional documentary film is that it makes the 20th century as an era more vivid again. How much everything seemed to work together at that time, especially until 1933, to create something fundamental: the new recording devices that replaced the brush of painting, the unconscious and repressed in Freud, from which constantly distorted and therefore all the more exciting messages emerged, the violence that suddenly… had a character other than that which was natural and inevitable. Buñuel thrived on these experiences until the 1970s and managed to survive the long winter of freedom in Spain. When he was an old man, the Franco dictatorship was also over.

Pedro Almodóvar no longer had to struggle with this opposition; he was then able to invent new surrealisms. “Luis Buñuel: Filmmaker of Surrealism” remains an example because he knew about oppressions that must seem strange today. About things from a distant 20th century.