Stories From the State of Grotesque
In
his surrealist tour de force filmmaker Luis
Buñuel explores the brinks of narrating and staging the big picture of a strange world. From behind the observing eye of the camera he remarks an augmented reality of sights, sounds, actions and urges.
by Kilian
inversion
of opposites
A
lack of logic makes it easy to inverse opposites throughout the film.
The allegedly scandalous pictures that the daughter brings home to
her parents merely show historical buildings and landscapes. The
adults are in fact disgusted by the bad taste of the Greek Acropolis
and the obscenity of the Parisian Arc de Triomphe.
The
most famous inversion of the film questions the etiquettes of
socializing. The
police academy teacher and his wife visit a befriended couple. Instead
of eating dinner in the elegant room they sit down on toilets placed
around a large table with dozens of illustrated magazines on it. With
lowered trousers and tights they talk about Tristan
and Isolde
at the opera and holidays in Spain. After
some time they leave seperately to dine in a locked bathroom-like
room. In a noble apartment these cultivated people go to the toilet
together and eat dinner alone. Here, antitheses don't seem to be
opposed to each other, contrasts appear as not very different.
irregularity in cultural patterns
Opposites
coincide in Buñuel's
work. He unmasks
that going to toilet and eating dinner are objectively in no
contrast. Their perception and valuation is solely defined by social
norms and cultural tradition. And these can be broken and cut. Just
like the monks in the guest-house who take their monastery's tabernakel to the woman's bedroom to pray the paternoster for her
sick father before they start to play cards, smoke and drink in her
room. Later that evening they talk about a famous monk who once was
judged for heresy by the inquisition and then rehabilitated by the
church and other cynical habits of clergy which they perveice as
normal, insisting that it strengthens faith.
Anything can be done if people don't stick to social norms mutually known to us. Deeds and sayings, actions and reactions grow abnormal when ingrained patterns are blurred or scrapped. Beyond common norms the unexpected and unusual becomes the new standard. On the way to her father a fully manned tank passes the woman on a country road. The lieutenant tells her that the soldiers are hunting foxes that were seen around there. She denies to have seen any and the tank moves on. Irregularity determines the course of things.
Anything can be done if people don't stick to social norms mutually known to us. Deeds and sayings, actions and reactions grow abnormal when ingrained patterns are blurred or scrapped. Beyond common norms the unexpected and unusual becomes the new standard. On the way to her father a fully manned tank passes the woman on a country road. The lieutenant tells her that the soldiers are hunting foxes that were seen around there. She denies to have seen any and the tank moves on. Irregularity determines the course of things.
No
cultural pattern
is strong and durable enough not to
be converted or led ad absurdum. In class the police academy teacher
talks about law and delict. He says that law is only conventional,
that all customs and traditions are relative. Whereas polygamy is
common in some regions of the world it is illegal in France. His
example is taken from the works of anthropologist Margaret Mead whose
studies of sexual practices in Southern Pacific societies he
paraphrases. The lesson is interrupted twice by some policemen being
commandeered to firing practice and others to a general alarm for an
exploded gas power plant. After this only two policemen stay in the
classroom and begin to read a communist newspaper reporting on
workers' uprisings in Europe. The teacher goes on talking about the
relativity of culture now with reference to revolutionary movements
in contemporary France. In
this sequence the concept of cultural relativity that the film
depicts over and over again is even put in the mouth of the
protagonist whose social task rather is to claim the opposite.
liberty
and other phantoms
What
does Buñuel want us to hear
from the mouths of these obscure protagonists? If we were to sit in
his classroom, what would have been the lesson taught? The
succession of strange incidents at night in the country house. The arbitrary stringing together of surreal occurences
when Napoleon occupied Spain. Man as
he appears in society and culture or at a police academy and
in a park.
A
glance at liberty. What is liberty? The married couple looks at
architecture photos that remind them of their lustful youth. A doctor
is having a conversation with his befriended patient about liver cancer. The head
of the Parisian police tells an unknown woman in a bar how he heard
his beloved sister play Brahms on the piano naked on a hot summer
afternoon a few days before she died and suddenly receives a call
from her. Are we liberated in absurd events and strange turns?
The
shine of absurdity. The deeper you get, the less it makes sense. A woman
meets four monks at the fireplace in the country house. She tells
them about her sick old father who lives a quiet life in the village
he was born and raised in. One of the monks says that the hectiness
and unsteadiness of modern life causes heart diseases. Another states
that the world would be alright if everybody prayed to Saint Joseph
and held contemplation thirty minutes each day. In Paris a young girl
disappears. Her parents worriedly talk to the pricipal of her school.
Their daugther is in the classroom but they don't recognize her. When
she starts to speak they tell her to be quiet and decide to go to the
police. In the detective's office they point at the girl and say that
she disappeared this morning. Again the detective forbirds her to
speak and fills in the missing person form with the girl standing
next to him.
We
meet in relativity. All norms and conventions are relative.
Everything that we perceive real or solid or eternal will appear as
an opaque phantom from the right perspective. The police academy teacher
gives a lecture on the mutable nature of law and delict while his two
uniformed listeners rejoice in a report on communist revolt. The
sniper who killed a dozen of pedestrians from a high-rise building is
condemned to death and then leaves the courthouse without
restrictions. Two women on a park bench talk about the meaning of the
word paraphernalia. One of them can't even pronounce it fluently
whereas the other gives a lexical outline of the term.
Life is a polyphonic interlude within a score nobody
knows how to play. We are surrounded by semi-permeable borders that
decorate our world.
The
film ends with a police operation that violently disperses a
demonstration at a zoo. To the sound of an upset crowd, shots and
church bells the moving head of an ostrich is shown. It remains for more
than half a minute. Then it fades out to the end credits. No
conclusion. No answers. Just a reality as real as it can be.
movie stills taken from the DVD
