Javier Espada creates a documentary monument to surrealist Buñuel | EUROtoday

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 tried to offer at this time’s viewers an impression of Luis Buñuel in an hour and a half. He needs to current him as a “filmmaker of surrealism”, in all probability realizing that surrealism is maybe the preferred label that has remained of twentieth century artwork. But additionally one of the crucial worn. Almost the whole lot that is not utterly exhausted in tautologies, the whole lot that rises from the stream of on a regular basis life can appear surreal at this time. Jean Epstein, from whom Buñuel realized essential issues about cinema, was of the opinion that each close-up in a movie is inherently surrealistic as a result of it isolates objects and faces, highlights them in a wierd manner, and makes them bigger than life.

Luis Buñuel got here from Calanda in northeastern Spain. He related nothing lower than “the most powerful sexual oppression in history” with the world of his origins. The drives, the “impulses” needed to be saved in test, however they nonetheless discovered their manner, of their unique manner. Buñuel’s whole aesthetic is essentially based mostly on this mannequin, which comes from psychoanalysis. He exhibits what has come via the censorship to spotlight the censorship mechanisms. Javier Espada finds quite a few examples of this in Buñuel’s movies. Probably nowhere have legs, ladies’s legs with and with out stockings, ft with matching and unsuitable footwear been highlighted as a lot as right here.

When Hitchcock as soon as posed for a photograph with Buñuel, he solely talked about one scene from his work: the amputated leg from “Tristana,” performed by Catherine Deneuve in 1970. In this logic, cinema is an artwork of partial objects that solely add as much as a melancholic sum, however not to one thing like happiness. In this context, it’s not shocking that crucial miracle of the “virgen” (the “maiden”) of Calanda was an orthopedic one – she gave a leg amputee a decrease leg once more.

For his movie, Javier Espada was in a position to attract on, amongst different issues, outdated stereoscopic pictures taken by Buñuel’s father: scenes of nation life, together with a remarkably narrative sequence of three pictures that present a dying by knife violence. “Back then, everyone carried a knife in their sash.” These pictures had been coloured for the documentary, a course of that may be seen many times: coloration penetrates the unique picture, and after just a few seconds it’s processed for a digital current. If one follows Espada’s suggestion, then the essence of Buñuel’s view of actuality would already be established in these paperwork: not a peaceful, goal view of the world, however one which makes cathexis, that fetishizes. The father was a service provider who turned very wealthy by contracting for the colonial Spanish military in Cuba. An energetic man, by all accounts, a person who was purposeful in his selection of property. It needed to be probably the most lovely younger lady in Calanda.

But Buñuel took one thing else with him from this archaic childhood, through which “the Middle Ages only ended with the First World War,” one thing that he needed to translate for the cinema. He first seen a useless donkey in an olive grove due to the scent that hung within the air. The indisputable fact that dying is a part of on a regular basis life each second is likely one of the clichés about Hispanic cultures, which Buñuel, who labored in Mexico for a very long time, reinforces. In the agricultural world, individuals are born and die in a rhythm that appears irresistible. He is interrupted by pictures: “If a picture is shocking, I keep it,” Buñuel is quoted as saying.

The benefit of Javier Espada’s in any other case fairly standard documentary movie is that it makes the twentieth century as an period extra vivid once more. How a lot the whole lot appeared to come back collectively at the moment, particularly till 1933, to create one thing basic: the brand new recording units that changed the comb of portray, the unconscious and repressed in Freud, from which continually distorted and subsequently all of the extra thrilling messages emerged, the violence that instantly… had a personality aside from that which was pure and inevitable. Buñuel thrived on these experiences till the Nineteen Seventies and managed to outlive the lengthy winter of freedom in Spain. When he was an outdated man, the Franco dictatorship was additionally over.

Pedro Almodóvar not needed to battle with this opposition; he was then in a position to invent new surrealisms. “Luis Buñuel: Filmmaker of Surrealism” stays an authority as a result of he knew about oppressions that should appear unusual at this time. About issues from a distant twentieth century.