i dont understand what you mean when you say your “assumption” that these films are un-ambiguous. then what was your feeling after you watched them? did you mean to say “assertion” instead?
i havent seen “nazarin”, but lets talk about the others. they have parts that are clear, and parts that are ambiguous, true. but i think ambiguity usually reigns supreme in a lot of bunuel’s work. one of the most powerful symbols of that is the two different actresses playing the same woman who is the “obscure object of desire” in that film. on the subject of the titles of these films alone, ambiguity is stressed more than anything.
so are we hoping to make a statement that there is no ambiguity in these films at all?
Bobby, take a pill. Please. We’ve already covered that. This is a place to talk about Nazarin.
I think Nazarin had a pretty favourable response from the church, well at least compared with many others by Bunuel (which admittedly wouldn’t be difficult). It is critical of hypocrisy (at higher levels in the church too) but allows a more positive reading of genuine faith and goodness looking for a better society. Perhaps the mixed, rather than purely antagonistic or cynically corrosive, messages may have led Franco’s govt in Spain to let him film again there, but Viridiana was certainly not what they’d hoped or expected! I’m not sure what led to their decision, perhaps they imagined his reputation would add to their cultural standing. But still, it’s hardly a coincidence that the well-meaning Father in Nazarin has to pursue his path outside the main body of the church.
you can keep the pills. none for me.
you were talking ambiguity in ambiguous terms in order to set up your point about “nazarin”, so i just wanted to go back to the basics and make sure i understood what your point of departure was. sorry if that made you overreact, or isnt worth discussing. no need to get mad. i sure wasnt, so thats my bad if the post came off that way.
Right, Kenji – he’s dismissed as a heretic, people want to kill him, all these things that supposedly happened to Christ. What I think is ambiguous about this film, well, there’s numerous things. It’s implied that he does have sex with the wounded prostitute he’s sheltering, and at the same time it’s implied that he doesn’t. Given the fact that this is the event which brings about his fall from grace with mother church, it’s fascinating that we don’t know for certain — unlike almost every other Bunuel film I can think of, where we always know what someone has or has not done. The fact is, Nazario never defends himself, so he might have been totally innocent but just unwilling to fight against the perception that he isn’t. Similarly, Christ’s affinity for prostitutes (Mary Magdalen) is explored very fruitfully, in that Nazario “acquires” two ex-hooker converts whom he is trying to teach the ways of spiritual love, and yet the ugly one of the two, Andara, accuses him in one scene of loving the pretty one, Beatriz, more, and though he denies this, we are shown that it may be somewhat true. The dwarf, Ujo, an amazing character, “converts” for a brief period out of love for Andara, who seems to enjoy him although she won’t commit to him. So, although a number of the characters are great typical Bunuel obsessives, they are not juggernauts of obsession, they are filled with doubts, and they recognize when someone is calling them on these doubts.
Bobby, I thought you were doing something I noticed you doing once or twice before with me — reading only the first sentence of my post and then flying off the handle and trying to open a can of cyber whoopass. Assumption is a perfectly right choice of words — that’s my assumption about the films. “Pointed satire and misanthropic disgust” was the way I defined un-ambiguity — I don’t see any ambiguity in my definition of ambiguity. I’m willing to talk about it all again, not that I think we will get much farther (I’m still waiting to hear what’s ambiguous about the razorblade through the eyeball, after all! lol), but I question your understanding of ambiguity — I think, like Rodney, you just want to claim that mantle for Luis because you think it makes him a greater artist, whereas I still place him with Voltaire and Schopenhauer as one of the great, blessedly un-ambiguous heroes. But see Nazarin if possible, because it will truly give you the best of both worlds, the harshly satiric Bunuel and the ambiguous humanist.
Well, i think from Bunuel’s point of view, whether Nazario slept with a prostitute or not he wasn’t committing a sin by it- indeed maybe (Bunuel might think) from Christ’s viewpoint too. Christ did call adultery a sin but i don’t recall him spending much time on defining sexual sins. Of course the church has always been a simple target through a comparison between Christ’s actual message and the church’s largely invented rules and practices, as well as its general dismissal of certain inconvenient things Christ had to say. So whereas the Catholic church approved of Pasolini’s respectful (to Christ) Gospel according to St Matthew, for a Marxist atheist the flaws of the church are also highlighted.
well, for one, i dont want to claim any mantles for bunuel. not only did i not write such a comment on this thread, but i doubt you’ve ever seen me on this website championing bunuel any more than what would be average. ok, so if it seems like i only pick apart a portion of your arguments and fly off the handle, it sometimes seems like you assume someone is a crazed partisan for a director or an issue if they dont see it exactly your way. but hey, thats the slippage of conversing strictly in written words on the internet. meaning gets subsumed.
ok. enough with the bullshit. back to film discussion.
your definition of ambiguity is a little narrow. so its hard to comment on it, plus the fact that i dont think we need a new definition of ambiguity or un-ambiguity (clarity/concreteness). are we to mean that just because his film has some pointed satire, that that means the entire film and everything about it is un-ambiguous? are we totalizing, or can one of his films have ambiguous elements and concrete elements at the same time? thats why i’m confused. where do we draw the line? or better yet, is satire and disgust the sole qualifiers of whats ambiguous or concrete? ok. enough linguistics.
i’ll play devils’s advocate again, because you probably figured out that i like to do that a lot. not the least of the reasons is that i believe in a dialectical critical method to get closer to the truth of a situation. so i gotta oppose, especially when i see an angle. the razor blade and the eyeball. i think it can be read as a very ambiguous image. what does it mean? is it devoid of context? why is it associated with the moon and the clouds? it opens up a number of possibilities. this creates ambiguities of meaning. ok, so bunuel wanted to create a film with dream logic that goes unexplained. thats his intent. his concrete method. it doesnt change the fact that those dreamlike images are ambiguous, and can create multiple associations in the viewer.
The cloud slicing the moon may give the man (Bunuel) the idea to slice the eyeball, or it may simply be simultaneity. Although the mirroring of the visual pattern creates interest, it doesn’t fundamentally confuse or weaken the meaning of each thing that’s being compared. Let’s say it’s an analogy — cloud is to moon as razor is to eyeball. A sardonic thought; after all, the first is romantic, poetic, transitory; the second is unromantic, irrevocable. This doesn’t mean that either term in the analogy is ambiguous; in fact, for this analogy — for any analogy — to come off, the terms have to be extremely concrete. If we can escape something’s meaning, then that thing is ambiguous. If we can question whether it really is what it is, then it’s ambiguous. But Bunuel allows us no escape, and his great courage is to push things so far that you would be foolish to question it. It’s like the physical sight of a dwarf, in Bunuel’s films or in Tod Browning’s Freaks. Of course we can finally be led to say, “This is a human being like any other,” but only after we have swallowed the unambiguous certainty that it is a dwarf in physical shape. The razor through the eye is a dwarf: it cannot be seen as anything other than what it is; it can’t be automatically assimilated. I think that if you are searching for some other meaning, some other way to encode it, then you are basically running away, you are hiding your head in the sand in one sense or another, and resorting to a bourgeois security-blanket way of thinking. My films, my images will slice your eye apart: that is as much of a metaphor as I am willing to extend to the Andalusian dog, and there’s no ambiguity there either.
Dialectical doesn’t necessarily mean saying black when someone else says white. Dialectical thinking says black and white, it says black is white. The two parts form a whole whose parts are mutually necessary and expedient. This doesn’t mean either part is ambiguous; each one is exactly what it is. But all of this parlor-room intellectualizing is so far removed from what Bunuel was doing in Chien Andalou — it’s practically the only film I can think of where the filmmaker is doing, not saying. And that active doing is what I like about Bunuel. He does things directly to you, and if you are really feeling him, there is usually no need to stop and ask yourself what they are.
yes, mirroring doesnt confuse or weaken. but it doesnt concretize either.
if we can escape meaning, then its ambiguous. ok. but isnt that bunuels method? didnt he want a dream logic specifically because he wanted to escape meaning, for himself and his viewer? and i believe bunuel wants us to question everything. thats how he allows us no escape. activity, not passivity. ruthless critique of all existing conditions.
so searching for meaning, questioning, critiqueing, equals hiding one’s head in the sand? dont know if i can agree with that.
Again, you are picking apart my statements and twisting them around.
First of all, Bunuel’s connection to dreaming is much overemphasized. After he dumped Dali, he became very interested in the concrete. His films are incedibly real. I find them so.
Of course, mirroring doesn’t automatically concretize. The images here were already concrete.
Hiding one’s head in the sand only applies if the image or the content is so disturbing that you say, It can’t be this, it has to be something else. That’s what I’m saying. To have the courage to say, yes, it is just what it appears to be, and can you stomach it?
what do you mean overemphasized? we were talking specifically about “andalusian dog”. bunuel said himself that when he made the film he was trying to achieve a dreamlike imagery and succession of images.
if you want to argue that his art became more concrete after he split with dali, ok. thats something interesting, and an analysis i’d like to see.
if you find his films incredibly real, fine. i happen to find them incredibly assaultive on reality. the intrusion of fantasy/dreams in reality in “andalusian dog” and “belle de jour”, and anti-realistic effect of the two women playing one in “obscure object”, so on and so forth. is a dissenting critical opinion allowed?
i dont find it a very courageous act to say, “yes, this is an image of an eye being sliced” rather than “this image must mean something else.” but maybe my definition of courage is different. either way, you still see the image. courage doesnt seem to work well as a critical/analytical term here.
But it’s that very “must” in “must mean something more” that’s so trembling and bourgeois. Why must it? What if it doesn’t mean anything else? What if it just is a very violent, antisocial image? Isn’t that incredible — more unusual than a bunch of perfumed folderol?
Those opening shots of Chien Andalou, I believe, are very different from the rest of the film. They are less dreamlike. It’s Bunuel with a razor, laying out his future manifesto. They are also the part of the film that has not dated in the slightest.
Belle de Jour is extremely easy to parse, in terms of what is fantasy and what is reality. Again, people who are sent into a tailspin of “Oh my god, nothing’s real anymore” are simply not responding to what the movie is about. She wants to be treated roughly, sadistically. She fantasizes about this. When she finally achieves what she wants, there’s no longer any need for fantasy, and everything is real — all too real, because by the end she wishes she could escape again into fantasy.
Have you seen The Devil is a Woman, the Sternberg movie on which That Obscure Object is based? In that film, Dietrich plays the woman, but in alternating scenes she is nice and cruel to Lionel Atwill. The premise is exactly the same in Bunuel’s version, except he emphasizes the difference by having similar looking women trade off scenes. Fernando Rey doubts his sanity, but he never doubts that the women are the same, and we are not meant to doubt this either. Imo.
Of course, dissent, but you never seem to acknowledge any merit in what I say before you just attack, and attack over small semantic things usually. That’s you, Bobby.
Well, i’m not sure how the playfulness with illusion and reality, of the razor and eyeball, that isn’t the woman’s being sliced at all of course, fits in. Is it a concrete image and an illusion too? Illusion travels by Streetcar. The Young One is a film that may disturb many people’s views on sexual abuse, perhaps it’s mainly that times and attitudes have changed. There’s no phoney sentimentalising over racism, but it isn’t simplistic either. The priest is a relatively (not wholly) sympathetic character, not a caricature for bashing the church. It strikes me as quite a rich, complex and yes probably ambiguous film, without losing his sharpness. I’m sorry but my intellectual capacity- especially at this time of night- is wanting, for really understanding properly your debate.
i hear what you’re saying, but i dont know if i agree that many people feel the razor scene MUST mean something else. i know i dont. i think maybe a lot of people feel its the opposite – that its so surreal that it cant possibly have a logical meaning. for me, i agree with you. it symbolizes bunuels assault on perception (reality being one element), which is the classical, accepted analysis. but if that’s the case, is it wrong to analyze it that way? im curious to hear your argument that says no, we must resist this reading or any reading at all. maybe that could be an interesting critical polemic: against reading. i’d read it! and why is the resistance to read anti-bourgeouis?
no arguments about “belle”. i agree.
no, i havent seen sternberg’s movie. but the use of two women in bunuel’s film seems to me the definition of ambiguity in his work, and a really exciting and unique one too.
sorry if i’m a little harsh in my dissenting attacks. my manners are horrible. but you’re a grown man. you can handle it. if i didn’t think there was any merit in your arguments, i wouldnt bother debating them in the first place. believe me, i dont waste time on bullshit. and i like getting small details right, semantic or otherwise, because big concepts get too easy to float around sometimes. i like to try to keep myself sharp, about all the little bullshit that nobody pays much attention to.
You’re right, Bobby, and I do have a lot of respect for your mind. I’ve seen you nail films and build complex arguments. I guess this issue gets me in trouble — I may have a block where Bunuel is concerned. I don’t want to see him as merely clever. Or not absolutely meaning what he says, because what he seems to say comforts me. I think religion is bunk, basically. I’m not really a romantic. I think poverty is the worst affliction on earth. I think these things have to be the bedrock of Bunuel analysis, and when I hear people searching for ambiguity, I think, Why are they trying to take away the certainties I feel in Bunuel’s philosophy? Maybe they’re religious, or romantics, or, I don’t know, rich people, lol. And so I get testy.
i think you can have it both ways. you can enjoy the certainty of bunuel’s method and his philosophy, and also enjoy the ambiguity of his imagery and themes. he’s a master filmmaker, so he’s not giving us only one thing. he’s giving us a wealth of things to feast on. and all of his wonderful contradictions create dimension.
I would encourage everyone to seek out Nazarin. It really is a great, complex masterpiece. And the last scene is incredibly surreal and ambiguous, in that I’m not sure how’s it’s meant as a rewriting of the Christ story. But let’s just say he isn’t given a cross to bear but a rather suggestive and funny-looking piece of fruit!
i’d like to watch it. but then again, bunuel is a filmmaker i’ve really only scratched the surface of. i probably still have over 50% of his movies to go. he had a pretty large body of work.
This would be a great choice for top-notch Mexican Bunuel . . .
…and ten months later, i’ve finally watched it. i thought it was a bit bland. the most interesting scene for me was when the prostitute set nazario’s room on fire. i felt like from that point on, we were diving into hell. the flames consumed the entire image.
in general, the film lacked emotion and power. i know its a very subtle film, but that subtlety made it feel average to me. id love to open up the conversation on this film again, if anyone wants to share reactions.
Justin Vicari
I once had a lengthy discussion with Rodney Welch about the presence of ambiguity in Luis Bunuel’s films. I stand by my assumption that Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Un Chien Andalou, The Discreet Charm, That Obscure Object are essentilly un-ambiguous, masterpieces of pointed satire and misanthropic disgust. However, I have just seen Nazarin, and I would say that this film is filled with ambiguity and is probably Bunuel’s second best film after Exterminating Angel.
Much like the later Viridiana, Nazarin is about a deeply religious figure, Father Nazario, who, after being defrocked, finds that he is leading the same life as Christ did. He both chooses this life and does not choose it. Bunuel doesn’t corner him, doesn’t stack the deck against him, in quite the same way as he does Viridiana. All in all, there are numerous profound issues tackled by the film, and done so in a way that is open to many potential conclusions or meanings: the sublimation of human desire into religious faith, the meaning of spiritual versus physical love, the inevitable hypocrisy of the pact religion makes with the world, the difficulties of being a woman in a sexist society, and the power struggles of the strong and the weak, the healthy and the ill, the normal and the deformed.
Of course, there are also many instances of what I’ve always loved — that brutal, vigorous, Bunuelian satire of the military, eroticism, prostitution, child abuse, as well as the central focus on terrible poverty as the driving force behind life.
I highly recommend this film to Bunuel fans and also to people who aren’t sure they like him — this humanist manifesto will make the sly and sneering Spaniard seem much more tender and wry than you could ever imagine.