EL ESPAÑOLISMO DE BUÑUEL
Salvador Ortiz-Carboneres
“ Dali has endowed surrealism with an instrument of primary importance, in particular,
the paranoiac critical method, which has immediately shown itself capable of being
applied equally to painting, poetry, the cinema, to the construction of typical surrealist
objects, to fashion, to sculpture, to the history of art, and even, if necessary, to all
manner of exegesis.”
André Breton
There is a Spanish proverb which says "of madmen and poets we all have a little".
Spain, her soil and her people, gave Buñuel the primal elements of his personality
which created the basis of his intellect and laid the way for his development. His
inspiration was fundamentally Spanish; he created from an inner inspiration deriving
from his childhood experiences in Spain. But between café and café, word and word,
sentence and sentence, conversation and conversation, the acorn seed of poetry which
some Spaniards are born with grew into a great tree. Buñuel could take a simple word
and transform it in such a way that it acquired a whole new dimension, as only great
poets know how. Luis Buñuel is considered one of the great film directors of our time;
he was perhaps an even greater scriptwriter. His reading of the classics: the picaresque
novel (we recall this influence in Los Olvidados, 1950 and in Subida al Cielo 1951,)
Don Quixote (Nazarín 1958 - a new Don Quixote), Galdós and Valle-Inclán, amongst
many others, strengthened this tree rooted in the soil of Iberia.
I would like to quote M. Villegas López, who maintains that "The Spaniard is a
surrealist in his pure uncultivated state and Buñuel was first and foremost a Spaniard
in essence ... in other words, like every other Spaniard, a man primarily archaic, who
elaborated the present and the modern overlaying those ancient and remote strata ...
his world was stamped with the outline of an ancient universe... like all things,
Spanish."
Buñuel said: "Mystery is what interests me. I will never tire of saying so: mystery is
the essential element in every work of art." In this, his aims were very closely allied to
those of the surrealists as reflected in Robert Desnes' statement: what we ask of the
cinema is the impossible, the unexpected dreams, surprise which efface the baseness
in souls and rush them enthusiastically to the barricades and into adventures, we ask
of the cinema what love and life have denied us, that is mystery, miracles". But as
Unamuno said: "Beauty is not in mystery, but in the desire to see through it". And
Buñuel was not interested in mystery per se, but by confronting us with it; he invited
us to examine the nature of reality through an exploration of that mystery. Buñuel
established a claim to documentary veracity and doubly underlined aggression as a life
force, which in itself is a common concept in the Spanish mind.
Buñuel's first two films (Un Chien Andalou, L'Age d'Or) conform to surrealist
manifestos. But is surrealism so far from the Hispanic tradition?
Let me quote some of the points contained in the surrealist manifesto:
"The very cornerstone of that violent liberation, which reaches out for a cleaner life in
the hearts of the technological age that corrupts our cities, is love.
... And the fight against religion becomes the fight against the world as it is.
Love demands the sacrifice of every other value, status, family, honour. And the
failure of love within the social framework leads to revolt".
Spain has given the world three great literary types:
Don Juan, La Celestina, Don Quijote.
We can hear Don Quixote saying: "It's the church we're up against Sancho".
Was it not the failure of love which led to Don Juan's revolt? And can we not see in
Don Quixote's words a proof of the power of the church? Is it not the case that the
characters in La Celestina sacrificed all because of love and that the result was tragic?
"L'amour fou", central core of surrealism, was a typically Buñuelian theme which
recurred throughout his work. Buñuel was to do several studies of the liberation of
love from, or more specifically of the antithesis of love and of society which Kyrou
epitomises in these words:
"There are two camps, the lovers and the others. By the very nature of rotting society,
they cannot but find themselves face to face, and society, outraged and terrified by
love, will set in motion all its poison-spilling machines: government officials, priests,
families, fine words, police, members of high society, etc".
Buñuel summed this up: "Bourgeois morality is for me an immorality against
which one must struggle, morality founded on our so unjust social institutions, such as
religion, ‘the Fatherland’, the family, culture, what are called the ‘pillars of society’,
in fact."
During his whole career, Buñuel was the object of attacks of a succession of censors,
clerics, family men, police and assorted do-gooders. The showing of L'Age d'Or in
1931 was received, literally with knives and bottles. Viridiana was not allowed to be
shown in Franco’s Spain.
Buñuel, with great skill and cunning, showed that neither is good to be found where
society considers it to be, nor is evil what society denounces. Buñuel followed the
motto of "destroy or be destroyed". His concern with the nature of reality became one
of his main preoccupations. He described authentic social relations with the object of
destroying conventional ideas about them. Buñuel often repeated that: "You, who
believe necrophiliacs, masochists, rebels, lovers, to be abnormal monsters, are you not
merely covering up your own repressions and trying to nullify - exterminate - other
people's experiences. And if physically and psychologically another person's
experiences are foreign to you - that of the madman, the homosexual, the dwarf, - then
politically speaking, they can be liquidated - the Black, the Jew, the communist."
An old Chinese proverb says: "An image is worth more than a thousand words."
Cinema is image in motion. Knowledge of the world of reality enters through the eyes,
and Buñuel knew it. Buñuel had the great expressive force, and at the same time the
finely-stressed sense of visual nuance of Goya.
Two great themes are a heritage of the Spanish tradition; the erotic, inherited from the
Arabs, and religion. These two themes were present in Buñuel, because he realised the
aboriginal essence of Spain. Buñuel said "For me erotic pleasure is tightly bound to
the idea of religion ... the notion of sin multiplies the possibilities of desire."
Buñuel, like all great artists, did not limit himself to reflecting "the spirit of the time";
he went further than the Zeitgeist. Cinema has its own internal laws, place, time and
events can alter, they can be given new life and force by means of beautiful images.