“What could be less ambiguous than a razor blade through an eyeball?”
Well…it’s unambiguously painful, but that’s about it.
As for the other examples you cite, I think what you’re coming up against is the “Yes, but…” aspect of Bunuel. There’s nothing black and white about his vision of the world. Viridiana isn’t nuts; she’s naive, and within limits a sympathetic figure — considering the fact that she’s molested by her uncle and all but raped by a beggar. You don’t watch the movie and say “Good for her.” If she’s wrong, just what is she wrong about? God? Trusting in people? Trying to help your fellow human being? Should you reject all that completely and just have a tough hard skin? Is the practical realism of Jorge the “right” answer? The movie doesn’t argue for it. It’s too coolly objective.
Daniel, that’s actually what i was talking about, and I’m sorry i didn’t clarify this point, but then again, i thought that we were talking about movies that discuss atheism or theism from a philosophical point of view, that is, discussing God as a concept and a solution to philosophical arguments, not specifically the anthropomorphic God that monotheistic religions preach about, matter of fact i think there’s a very few number of true artists who confined themselves to the cosmology dictated by these religions, even artists that publicly expressed their faith in, for ex, Catholicism (like Graham Greene) or Islam (like Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian Nobel laureate) sooner or later found themselves running into trouble with the religious authorities, so, yes, when i said that Kubrick or Voltaire were not atheists, i meant it exactly in the Bertrand Russell mold that you mentioned which, if we continued his own words, can mean any Gods from the christian one to the pagan Roman gods, and similarly for Deism (which don’t necessarily have to point towards pantheism, even with absence of a belief in religion, it’s just a solution to the first cause argument which, since we have mentioned Bertrand Russell, and in his own words, remains the strongest argument that theists usually offer to prove their point)
Some great posts and observations from all. I think we are proving, once again, that this question has built-in complexity – there is no ‘simple’ answer. I do agree with FF and others have alluded to it, that we DO NOT want the artist of a film to preach a foregone conclusion to us. Major artist are ALWAYS ambiguous (I am not getting into or alluding to the lively discussion about Bunuel here, simply because I am not that familiar with his films to comment about them critically) as to their intentions re any work of art – film or otherwise. Often they change their own minds about their own work, and as a result, you can find fuel for almost any argument. I think a filmmaker’s belief system is totally irrelevant to our enjoyment of a film – on any level. Of course, we can conjecture, and some filmmakers make it more obvious than others, what the beliefs of a filmmaker are. It’s like questions of sexuality, class, background – these are all finally the detritus that the film artist takes from their own life and then makes into the ineffable jewel of the work of art.
I really don’t care if Bresson and Dreyer were religious or not when approaching their work – or Bergman, Bunuel, Pasolini, Kubrick, Russell, etc. etc. All that matters is the work of art – the film itself. Tarkovsky is my own favourite director. I have no idea what his own personal views on religious belief were. I only know that I respond to his films, and their deeper, elusive meaning on a level I cannot put into words. All I can say is that his work effects me on a deep level, and he reveals a sense of wonder in the world that awakens my own. Whether this is Christian, Buddhist, Pantheist, or atheist, is no concern of mine.
Rodney, Viridiana is not molested by her uncle, she’s only convinced that she was, and that she was the cause of his suicide. By her excessive morality, this is enough to prevent her from going back to the convent. And her rape at the end comes after we have witnessed her folly. Yes, Jorge is right. Just as Candide ends by insisting that the only thing to do is “tend our garden,” it comes down to playing cards, having casual sex, and “shaking your blues away.” The rock song that replaces the hallelujah choir.
I feel like you’re holding on to some redemptive, sentimental way of reading Bunuel. Viridiana and his other films are great snarls. They are not humanistic gestures. We live in too squeamish and compassionate an era to truly appreciate the savage intentions of Bunuel.
Amen, Justin. Less humanism, more snarls! Squeamish and compassionate, we are easy pickins.
lol. Thanks, KJ.
The obvious one is Religulous. Maybe Mike Leigh’s Naked.
Religulous is definitely an agnostic film. It’s a polemic against religous certainty and Maher has said that he’s not an atheist because that requires a certainty in itself. This is very interesting. I’m surprised there’s not an obvious atheism film.
Justin, She was molested. She was drugged, laid out, and her uncle runs his hands all over her limp body and very definitely squeezes her tits. What she thinks happened is that she was raped, which of course she was not. You don’t have to be excessively moral to feel abused and exploited in that situation. And, of course, the fact that it’s her uncle and he is reliving a fantasy of his dead wife only adds to the creepiness factor. Not to mention the jump rope.
Also, it’s not merely her excessive morality that keeps her from returning to the convent; the way she sees it, she’s probably following church doctrine as she’s no longer pure. Instead, she thinks that what she should do is to carry on the work of the church by devoting her life to the poor.
“I am intrigued by your statement that “her rape at the end comes after we have witnessed her folly,” which suggests you somehow think she deserved it. What’s her folly? Trust. What’s her punishment? Rape. Bunuel isn’t justifying it; I think he’s saying rather that it’s an unfortunate consequence of religious belief, that it’s unrealistic, that there’s no point in believing in the inherent goodness of others, that there’s no point in believing in a shared common morality. The beggars she tries to help are people who live an entirely hand to mouth existence of taking people for as much as you can. That’s what they do with Viridiana, and she doesn’t see through it.
I’m afraid I don’t buy your interpretation of the ending, because Viridiana doesn’t get anything out of it. As I said, there’s no liberation. When she arrives at Jorge’s room and sees Rita there, she gets a look on her face that is hard and disappointed, and there’s a suggestion that she’s given up faith for cynicism. Does that mean she should have stayed in the church? No. Instead, there’s a kind of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t feeling as the camera pulls away from this menage a trois in the making.
But, that is the world we live in, according to Bunuel — a world that’s so cruel at it’s heart that it doesn’t matter what you do. It made no difference that Viridiana helped a group of beggars — all it led to was destruction, just as it apparently didn’t matter for Jorge to save one poor dog when so many others are suffering equally. This is the essential critique of the film, the big question of it: it asks whether or not charity of any kind is simply pointless.
You say I’m making sentimental claims for Bunuel. I make nothing of the sort. He’s the most unsentimental director I know, and as an artist he certainly doesn’t go for the easy sentimentalism of life “comes down to playing cards, having casual sex, and ’shaking your blues away,” because what that says is that you and you alone are all that is important. Jorge is a character who lives very much for himself, and in this film he is the only one in the end who really succeeds — is that saying (as you suggest) follow his example, or is it passing judgment on a world where looking out for Number One is all that matters? I think it’s the latter. Bunuel is very mysterious that way: he shows what he believes the world to be, cruel and merciless, and at the same time it makes you think about why it is the way it is.
Also, when you say the world is “too compassionate,” aren’t you also saying you are part of the problem?
Bunuel’s films are great mysteries. Jacques Rivette was right about that.
Ingmar Bergman’s Unoffical trilogy: The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light. I’d say they are pretty atheistic, if thats even a real word. I wish I had more to say, I just love Tarkovsky.
I think Bob S, like a Roman soldier and a cross has nailed it…. it is irrelevant what the belief of the artist is as to what one might find in the art. It is more likely that a Kubrick or Bresson may lend itself to atheistic or agnostic interpretations, but as I said on another threat I was appalled to read a review on this site that called 2001 the ‘most religious film I’ve ever seen’! that sound you hear is Arthur C Clarke turning cartwheels in his grave.
People find in art what they are culturally programmed to see…. given the Judeo-Xtian model is dominant still in western thought, some can look at a Bresson or Bergman and see religious overtones where I see none. The Silence is Bergmans god…. he is referencing ancient esoteric thought, common in most religions that reduced god to ‘the void’.
Now I have to go and brush up on my Bunuel….. thanks!
Rodney,
self-importance is the belief that you can save the world. Viridiana is self-important in her missionary work. She is prideful of her piety. Jorge just wants a good time. So does Rita. So do all the beggars. They’re all just accepting of life as it comes. Viridiana isn’t. That’s her problem, more specific than her religiosity. And it is excessive morality to regard yourself as too tainted to belong to the church because someone fondled you. It’s practically pathological — she’s inherited her uncle’s obsessiveness, but in a different direction.
Making you think about the why’s of something does not equal mystery or ambiguity. Bunuel’s films are mysteries only to people who believe in some inherent goodness of society. Of course, we think when we watch Bunuel, but he leaves us nowhere to hide. I believe you are sentimentalizing Bunuel, and relentlessly so: “she helped a group of beggars,” “the world is so cruel,” “why can’t we be compassionate?” This was the filmmaker who kicked off L’Age d’Or with documentary footage of scorpions stinging each other to death, followed by the founding of a city on a pile of dung. This was the filmmaker who showed dinner guests sitting around the table defecating casually, then going into the bathroom to devour food in guilt and shame. You have to get on his wavelength and see the world as bleakly as he saw it.
Of course Viridiana gets nothing in the end. And she’s traumatized, nearly catatonic. She is defeated. That’s the whole point of the movie, to defeat Viridianas. In a perfect world, could and should she help people? Sure, but find that world first. And you leap to a wholly unwarranted conclusion, putting words in my mouth, when you suggest I said she deserved to be raped. She doesn’t deserve it, but neither do the beggars “deserve” her excessive trust and charity. Like Belle, she is going to have to live with the very harsh consequences of her own naivety, and the fantasy that the world will mold itself to the image she has of it.
Winter Light is an interesting case because arguments could be made that it is a film denying the existence of God, and also a film about redemption through God. While Tomas loses his faith but continues to go through the motions of Christian ceremony – showing the emptiness of these gestures in a Godless world – Karin, after having been abandoned by Tomas, turns to prayer in order to not become lost in loathing like Tomas. So I think that Bergman was either showing that human life is Godless and miserable and that Karin is a fool to pray to an absent figure, or that Tomas is the fool for following religious doctrine despite having no faith and Karin is right in her turn toward God since – unlike Tomas – she comes out of her crisis as more faithful; that God was testing both Tomas and Karin and that Tomas failed while Karin succeeded. But I think the ambiguity was intentional and that Bergman presented the story in such a way so that it is neither a denial nor acceptance of God’s existence.
Justin,
You seem to find a loathsomeness for this character, Viridiana, that I do not see in the film. Self-important, yes, disconnected from the real world, certainly, prideful, no doubt. She’s a novice (literally and professionally, so to speak) from a convent that has sheltered her from the real world. She’s an innocent, but the film does not portray her as completely unsympathetic, and it doesn’t present Jorge, Rita or the beggars as models of living. They are people from different worlds who simply clash. No one walks around wearing signs stating whether or not they have the director’s total seal of approval. They are realists who take the world as it is — which I would accept as Bunuel’s own notion if I believed he really liked the world as it is.
As to whether Viridiana found herself tainted, well, she was probably following standard church policy at the time.
Making me think about why people do what they do does, actually, equal mystery or ambiguity, and it’s not true that “Bunuel’s films are mysteries only to people who believe in some inherent goodness of society.” They are mysteries because, if you look at them closely enough, they raise questions. The thing is, it’s easy enough to look at it your way, and to find the whole thing very dark and malefic, but to me that’s always been just the surface. At the surface, he says that the world is a stinking cesspool, but that point of view in itself isn’t even interesting. It’s a common view. Below that surface you sense someone asking what it is that makes people even try when they are doomed to failure, when the world itself — rather than the movie, as you put it — is trying to defeat Viridianas.
“In a perfect world, could and should she help people? Sure, but find that world first.”
Well, this kind of gets to the heart of the matter, in a roundabout way. It’s true. for example, that the beggars “didn’t deserve her excessive trust and charity,” but to me that raises a question that goes well beyond religion and straight into social policy — because you could almost read the film, taken to its logical conclusion, as being rather right-wing, Ayn Randish almost: enjoy life, look out for yourself, reject all notions of charity, and let the rest of the world go fuck off and die. I mean, that’s more realistic, right?
Do I believe that? No. Does Bunuel believe that? I doubt it. So what does that give us: a movie about the real world, but also a movie about a world he doesn’t wish to be so. Maybe in the end it’s the pessimism of a bummed-out idealist.
Rodney,
the stinking cesspool view of the world is only commonplace today because we live in a post-Bunuelian world. You have to understand the battles which Bunuel was fighting in 1930, in 1940, in 1952, in 1961, etc. There was a lot of rosy-colored Pollyanna-ish stuff that had to be cleared out of the way. Bunuel was a steam shovel for doing just that. Now, of course, we look around and there’s a lot of superficially bleak movies, and it seems boring. But believe me, these films were controversial as hell when they were made. They filled a necessary function.
I don’t loathe the character of Viridiana, although I certainly don’t idealize or admire her either. Conservatism and Ayn Rand have absolutely nothing to do with this, unless you believe that Mother Theresa was the world’s biggest liberal, which I certainly don’t believe. Bunuel’s films are not political per se. They are about individual struggles. He skewers the wealthy and the bourgeoisie, but he does not glamorize or romanticize poverty by any means. The slum kids in Los Olvidados are not heroic; neither is Jorge, not even when he rescues Viridiana — he is just establishing his authority and restoring the order of his world, claiming his property, so to speak.
More than anything, Bunuel is not crying for anyone or anything. There’s no evidence that he wants to change the world. That would be prosaic and superficial and commonplace. Again, I think your own good nature is really preventing you from going down to the depths with Bunuel here. You want there to be some redeeming element. But it’s just like the end of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, where they all go traipsing down that road again, looking for the next dinner party where they won’t get to eat. It’s called nihilism, and it may be quaint or unnecessary or offensive to us today, but it was the front line of battle for most of the 20th century. Read Bataille, read Beckett, read Sartre — they have the same things on their minds as Bunuel does. And yes, they basically don’t like people very much. Which is why Bunuel is a director I can watch only when I’m in a certain mood. He doesn’t reach me all the time, or rather, I can’t assimilate his relentless disgust all the time. But when I am in the mood for him I’m sure glad he’s there, without candy coating, without glamour, without apology.
Thinking further on the subject, perhaps Antonioni’s films could be seen as made in a world devoid of any theistic representation – a world without God. Certainly, his themes are never caged in any kind of religious reference (I am thinking at least of his films from 1960 on). His films are existential, in the best Sartrean reference, where man exists in an often hostile environment. People do not connect and are loose and aimless, in a state of anomie. He is certainly as pessimistic as a Bunuel, but he has no need to flaunt religious conventions – because he is long beyond them. Again, it probably irrelevant what his own particular beliefs were, but I think his films qualify in the context of this thread. He was one of the first modernist, where faith is no longer an issue.
Of course, if we think of any Eastern director, those who come from a totally different cultural and belief background, we certainly see that there is no deistic representation in their films – I am thinking particularly of the Japanese school of filmmakers. They have no need of this whole issue of God because their own system of belief, regardless of their own particular beliefs, does not need this. Only in the West is this issue still a concern. Nietzsche long ago raised all the significant points. Basically, unless one is overly concerned about it, who intellectually cares about this whole issue?
What would an atheistic movie look like?
“God is only mocked by believers!” according to Anne Sexton.
Really, I couldn’t agree more. Those who are truly atheists don’t really talk about God, because they don’t believe in Him. Usually, it’s those that are confused about their own faith that wave the whole “GOD IS NOT REAL!!!!!!!!” flag. Fear. It’s like with homophobia, rape, addiction, etc. The people who joke about the aforementioned the most have deep-seeded issues revolving around the subjects.
So, you’ll never find an “Atheist Movie” that’s going to say “THERE IS NO GOD”, because atheists just really don’t care.
Lo, couldn’t one simply flip your argument and pose it about those who profess belief?
One can pretty much pose anything to one’s liking with enough strings & paint.
I know atheists & I know pseudo-atheists. My response is based off of their behavior. I believe it was Mr. Welch who said something similar to what I did, but with more elaboration & less precision.
Yes, what Mr. Welch said was more elaborate and precise, and part of his discussion about Bunuel – your comment was more of a broad stroke of social criticism. I don’t think those who joke about rape, addiction, homophobia, or god are necessarily the owners of massive neuroses related to said topics. “Fear” is terribly simplistic way of describing it.
I agree Bergman and Tarkovsky have approached the realm of a “world sans-God” with enough of a philosophical punch to blow the kneecaps off of any open-minded filmgoer. However, if you want an entire genre that goes beyond the necessity for God and divine justice on the basis of pure humanistic realism, Italian Neorealist films like Umberto D. and Bicycle Thieves may as well be considered atheistic. Their portrayal of humanity as humanity, subject to the consequences of the collective seems to have no room left for tilts skyward.
Also, though it’s a pretty pure literary adaptation, The Fountainhead is most definitely an atheistic film.
Daniel, I only speak of what I know. “Social criticism”? Can you pinpoint who I’m allegedly criticizing?
My “broad stroke” is an attempt to kill a budding ramble. If it makes me appear critical or irrelevant, well, so be it. I’m not about to explain the thought-process behind those statements & the experiences that serve as evidence because doing so would reveal too much of myself, as well as too much of others I’ve encountered. We all absorb information through different filters & we all have incredibly diverse experiences.
Blah. Blah. Blah.
Is fear really that simple? It never fails to snap my stability.
It’s one vague catch-all for a universal affliction, but that doesn’t make it simple.
Well then, so be it indeed.
Justin, please, you need not lecture me about Bunuel’s life, world, experiences, and point of view. I’ve absorbed all that. The problem is that you’re looking at him in a way that is simply very common, uninteresting, useless, and out of date, and I reject it. It’s almost as if you are arguing for his irrelevance.You’re putting him — along with Sartre and Beckett — in a box of nihilism, which basically means their views are shallow, and that they lack complexity or dimension. He’s an artist who reflects what he sees: a world that is both cruel and complex, and it’s only natural that he raises questions in the viewer’s mind about why the world is the way it is. He doesn’t tell you what to do, doesn’t preach, or make recommendations. He says “Here it is,” and he says it with a certain humor, and a deep sense of ambiguity — particularly toward that fact that what we call good, no less than evil, can be counterproductive.
I have to agree with Harry on “The Devils”, but to me it’s more a film about how GOD can be used by the State to manipulate and control a Society who are kept uneducated and in fear; in that world real faith (if that is what Grandier’s pains lead to) and freedom are almost unattainable.
I would classify Nic Roag’s “Eureka” as an atheistic film amongst other things.
Rodney, we completely disagree about Bunuel. You want to subject his films to a contemporary framework of analysis, including massive doses of pity and crying for the unfortunate. It’s just not there, I’m sorry. You want to find a new angle, but at the same time you are destroying what was created. You can’t always revise great art to suit your own point of view. But if you can only stomach these films by pretending that Bunuel secretly cared and was not a nihilist, then I guess that’s what you have to do. Better to sleep with a night light on than to get no sleep at all.
>>KJ mentioned that Kubrick was an avowed atheist, but he wasn’t, certainly he didn’t believe in any organized religions, but he already said that the question of God is in the heart of 2001<,
It is intriguing that shortly before the trip through the stargate, there is a shot of Jupioter at the bottom of the frame with its moons lining up toward the top & the slab slides across the screen (nearly invisible against the blackness of space save for a glint of light alomng its edge) and forms a cross …
Justin, you are right that we disagree completely. I do not recognize Bunuel in your cranky and dyspeptic description, and I certainly don’t recognize myself.
Jake Howell
Religulous, although Bill Maher says he’s more agnostic.