Bunuel's influence on 50's and 60's American film?
Patrick Harrington
in film and on Bunuel himself, I have not found explicit influences he has
had on 50's and 60's American cinema. Can anyone point me in the right
direction?
Thank you,
Patrick Harrington
(Please e-mail me if possible. Thank you)
patr...@bu.edu
D. Cochrane
Patrick Harrington wrote:
And you probably won't as his influence in American cinema, during those times
was minimal if at all.However in art cinema {i.e. Warhol } and Madison Ave.{
i.e. commercials } his influences, ideas, were more extensively explored,
exploited, particularly during the sixties and beyond.
DC
Dale Houstman
"D. Cochrane" <w...@telus.net> wrote in message
news:3CC6F402...@telus.net...
I don't necessarily see his influence on either Warhol's art cinema or on
Madison Ave. I could be mistaken. Magritte has had an immense influence on
advertising, which lives on sensational juxtapositions of images. In many
ways Bunuel's most startling processes are not at all useful to American
cinema, which doesn't go heavily into such startling analyses of religion,
classes, and sexuality (except in the most exploitive ways). Warhol's work
in film is cold and distant - like the man himself it seems - and Bunuel -
though very deliberate in pace at times - is full of sadistic and
revolutionary humors at times, and is blatantly political at other times. I
don't know that Bunuel would have - for instance - filmed a static shot of
the Empire State Building, and I find Andy's "explorations" of sexuality to
be pretty dull stuff next to Bunuel. Movies like El Topo show that Bunuel
has touched the Spanish "sensibility" and I suppose a case might be made for
David Lynch being in the mix somehow, with his obsessive imagery, confused
characters, lost people and so on, although he doesn't take on authority all
that much. There are plenty of films I haven't been able to see of course
(both Bunuel's and others I might compare with him) but - right off - I
don't catch the parallels.
dmh
Parry
>
> "D. Cochrane" <w...@telus.net> wrote in message
> news:3CC6F402...@telus.net...
> >
> > Patrick Harrington wrote:
> >
> > > I am working on a research paper and, while I have many books on
> surrealism
> > > in film and on Bunuel himself, I have not found explicit influences he
> has
> > > had on 50's and 60's American cinema. Can anyone point me in the right
> > > direction?
Not really. Certainly surrealism has impacted cinema, but it would be
difficult to say what influence Buñuel specifically has had, even
though he is the most significant surrealist filmmaker. In any case,
the personal influence of a particular director is less relevant than
the principles which motivate his work. But given your question I'd
agree with the others that Buñuel's explicit influence on American
film of this period is scarcely detectable. This is mainly in
reference to commercial cinema, which was Buñuel's medium. There may
be a different argument for some sectors of underground film of the
time.
> > > Thank you,
> > > Patrick Harrington
> > > (Please e-mail me if possible. Thank you)
> > > patr...@bu.edu
> >
> > And you probably won't as his influence in American cinema, during those
> times
> > was minimal if at all.However in art cinema {i.e. Warhol } and Madison
> Ave.{
> > i.e. commercials } his influences, ideas, were more extensively explored,
> > exploited, particularly during the sixties and beyond.
> > DC
>
> I don't necessarily see his influence on either Warhol's art cinema or on
> Madison Ave. I could be mistaken. Magritte has had an immense influence on
> advertising, which lives on sensational juxtapositions of images. In many
> ways Bunuel's most startling processes are not at all useful to American
> cinema, which doesn't go heavily into such startling analyses of religion,
> classes, and sexuality (except in the most exploitive ways).
Also, there was Buñuel's spartan film style which put him against the
grain of both mainstream American cinema and those under the influence
of such foreign trends as Godard's experiments.
> Warhol's work
> in film is cold and distant - like the man himself it seems - and Bunuel -
> though very deliberate in pace at times - is full of sadistic and
> revolutionary humors at times, and is blatantly political at other times. I
> don't know that Bunuel would have - for instance - filmed a static shot of
> the Empire State Building, and I find Andy's "explorations" of sexuality to
> be pretty dull stuff next to Bunuel. Movies like El Topo show that Bunuel
> has touched the Spanish "sensibility" and I suppose a case might be made for
> David Lynch being in the mix somehow, with his obsessive imagery, confused
> characters, lost people and so on, although he doesn't take on authority all
> that much. There are plenty of films I haven't been able to see of course
> (both Bunuel's and others I might compare with him) but - right off - I
> don't catch the parallels.
That Buñuel hadn't much influence on 50s and 60s American cinema might
be taken as a compliment to Buñuel, as I think the 1960s was a pretty
bad decade for American movies. (The same compliment may be paid to
Bresson, Bergman, Kurosawa, and others.) There are some films that
remind me of Buñuel -- the psychological complexity of Nicholas Ray's
movies, the perversity of Roger Corman's Poe adaptations, maybe the
black humour of "The Loved One" or the class realities show in that
independent film about migrant workers which I forget the title of --
but I know of no evidence of a direct influence. On the other hand,
British director Michael Powell had referred to Buñuel as his "mentor"
yet their films aren't very alike, so a working influence isn't
necessarily visible. Or possibly understood, even. I recall an
interview with Monty Python from the time of "Life of Brian" in which
they expressed irritation to discover that every idea they had had
already been covered by Buñuel.
I'd be curious to know, though, how certain directors viewed their
work in relation to Buñuel's -- Kubrick or Hitchcock, Polanski
("Rosemary's Baby") or Charles Laughton ("Night of the Hunter"); even
John Frankenheimer, Sam Fuller or Paul Morrissey (or even the
moralistic writer Rod Serling, if only for the commercialised
surrealism of his tv show). It would be interesting to compare their
writings against the principles laid out in Buñuel's "Cinema,
Instrument of Poetry" address.
-- Parry, who is without a news server
Patrick Harrington
patr...@bu.edu wrote on 4/24/02 7:25 PM:
Thank you to all that replied. Maybe a better question than, would be how
did he challenge American cinema, rather than influence it? Thank you.
Dale Houstman
"Patrick Harrington" <patr...@bu.edu> wrote in message
news:B8ED997A.6B5F%patr...@bu.edu...
Again this is hard to impossible to say, maybe because of the monolithic
nature of the question ("American cinema" as a unit), but probably because I
don't think American cinema ever felt "challenged" by anyone in particular,
although I suppose some directors and writers might have been aware of him.
Parry's mention of Fuller is interesting, but I don't know that the
connection is conscious in any way. I think that this thesis is challenging,
but I don't think there is much material to go on, and you might have to
make it out of whole cloth, because I don't see the threads right off. I
don't really think Bunuel has been influential on (or challenging to)
American filmmakers in any great way, although this isn't to be confused
with any measure of his value. You might better be served by eschewing the
overall "American cinema" approach, and just trying to find if any American
filmmaker has ever even mentioned Bunuel. Then go from there if that search
bears fruit. Otherwise you might easily end up with one of those papers that
compare the "mythos" of George Lucas with the Icelandic Sagas, or Captain
Kirk with Blake's Urizen.
dmh
Dale Houstman
"Parry" <pa...@perfectmail.com> wrote in message
news:36a623f.02042...@posting.google.com...
> Dale Houstman wrote:
> >
> > "D. Cochrane" <w...@telus.net> wrote in message
> > news:3CC6F402...@telus.net...
> > >
> > > Patrick Harrington wrote:
> > >
> > > > I am working on a research paper and, while I have many books on
> > surrealism
> > > > in film and on Bunuel himself, I have not found explicit influences
he
> > has
> > > > had on 50's and 60's American cinema. Can anyone point me in the
right
> > > > direction?
>
> Not really. Certainly surrealism has impacted cinema, but it would be
> difficult to say what influence Buñuel specifically has had, even
> though he is the most significant surrealist filmmaker. In any case,
> the personal influence of a particular director is less relevant than
> the principles which motivate his work. But given your question I'd
> agree with the others that Buñuel's explicit influence on American
> film of this period is scarcely detectable. This is mainly in
> reference to commercial cinema, which was Buñuel's medium. There may
> be a different argument for some sectors of underground film of the
> time.
I discussed this with a friend of mine, and he mentions Hitchcock as the
likeliest candidate for influence. For one thing, Alfred was quite the film
scholar and made mention of Bunuel at times supposedly. Also my favorite
Hitchcock film VERTIGO might be seen to be somewhat reflective of the Bunuel
obsessions, with confused identity and so on. So maybe the subject isn't a
total wash.
dmh
>
Parry
That's interesting. I was supposing that there was at least an
indirect influence there -- something along of the lines of: Michael
Powell was a student, figuratively, of Buñuel and he directed "Peeping
Tom" which influenced "Psycho" blah blah. Now I'll have to finally get
around to reading "Hitchcock On Hitchcock" to see what other sort of
connections are there.
The revised question of how Buñuel "challenged" directors of the
50s/60s is a bit easier to answer in that Buñuel spelled out the
challenge of film-making in his 1953 address "Cinema, Instrument of
Poetry." In it, he argues that because cinema is uniquely suited to
expressing "the subconscious life" and "all that completes and
enlarges tangible reality," it can be used as an instrument of poetry
("with all that that word can imply of the sense of liberation, of
subversion of reality, of the threshold of the marvellous world of the
subconscious, of nonconformity with the limited society that surrounds
us") resulting in a cinema which "will give me an integral vision of
reality, will broaden my knowledge of things and people, will open up
to me the marvellous world of the unknown, of all that which I find
neither in the newspaper nor in the street" -- yet cinema continues to
stagnate in personal stories, sentimentality, conformity and so on
(and still does, but with lots more explosions). He finishes by making
the important caveat that he is not advocating a cinema of escapist
fantasy, but rather (quoting Engels) "a faithful depiction of
authentic social relations" to erode the illusions of the existing
order. Which directors heard or ignored the challenge, or just
responded to ideas which were "in the air," is where the question gets
complicated. As a research question, it may be too many worms for one
corpse, but it makes for interesting speculation.
-- Parry
I previously posted a different translation of this ("Poetry and
Cinema"). This one is from Hammond's "The Shadow and Its Shadow."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Luis Buñuel: "Cinema, Instrument of Poetry" (1953)
The group of young people who form the Dirección de Difusión Cultural
approached me to ask me to give a lecture. Although duly grateful for
the attention, my reply was negative: I have none of the qualities
which a lecturer requires and have a special bashfulness about
speaking in public. Fatally, the speaker attracts the collective
attention of his listeners, only to feel intimidated by their gaze. In
my case I cannot avoid a certain embarrassment in face of the dread of
what can make me somewhat, let us say, exhibitionist. Although this
idea of mine about the lecturer may be exaggerated or false, the fact
of feeling it as true obliges me to ask that my period of exhibition
will be as brief as possible, and I propose the constitution of a
Round Table, in which as a number of friends belonging to distinct
artistic and intellectual activities, we can discuss *en famille* the
problems pertaining to the so-called seventh art: hence it is agreed
that the theme shall be ‘The Cinema as Artistic Expression', or more
concretely, as an instrument of poetry, with all that that word can
imply of the sense of liberation, of subversion of reality, of the
threshold of the marvellous world of the subconscious, of
nonconformity with the limited society that surrounds us.
Octavio Paz has said: ‘An imprisoned man has only to close his eyes to
be able to blow up the world.' I would add, in paraphrase: it would
suffice for the white pupil of the cinema screen to reflect the light
which is proper to it, to blow up the universe. But for the moment we
can sleep in peace, because the cinematographic light is carefully
drugged and imprisoned. None of the traditional arts reveals so
massive a disproportion between the possibilities it offers and its
achievements. Because it acts in a direct manner upon the spectator in
presenting to him concrete people and objects, because it isolates him
by virtue of the silence and darkness from what might be called his
‘psychic habitat', the cinema is capable of putting him into a state
of ecstasy more effectively than any other mode of human expression.
But more effectively than any other, it is capable of brutalising him.
And unhappily the great part of present-day cinema production seems to
have no other mission: the screens rejoice in the moral and
intellectual emptiness in which the cinema prospers; in effect it
limits itself to imitating the novel or the theatre with the
difference that its means are less rich to express psychology: it
repeats to satiety the same stories which the nineteenth century was
already tired of telling and which still continue in contemporary
fiction.
A moderately cultivated individual would reject with scorn any book
with one of the arguments that serve the film. However, sitting
comfortably in a dark room, dazzled by the light and the movement
which exert a quasi- hypnotic power over him, fascinated by the
interest of human faces and the rapid changes of place, this same
almost cultivated individual placidly accepts the most appalling
themes.
The cinema spectator, through this kind of hypnotic inhibition, loses
an important percentage of his intellectual capacity. I will give a
concrete example, the film called *Detective Story*. The structure of
its subject is perfect, the director excellent, the actors
extraordinary, the realisation brilliant, etc. But all this talent,
all this ability, all the complications which the making of a film
involve, have been put at the service of an idiotic story, of a
remarkable moral wretchedness. This reminds me of the extraordinary
machine of *Opus 11*, a vast machine made of the best steel, with a
thousand complex gears, with tubes, manometers, dials, precise as a
watch, as big as a liner, whose sole use was to gum postage-stamps.
Mystery, the essential element of every work of art, is in general
lacking in films. Authors, directors and producers are at pains not to
disturb our peace, by leaving the window on to the liberating world of
poetry tightly closed. They prefer to make the screen reflect subjects
which could compose the normal continuation of our daily life, to
repeat a thousand times the same drama or to make us forget the
painful hours of daily work. And all this naturally sanctioned by
habitual morality, government, and international censorship, religion,
dominated by good taste and enlivened by white humour and other
prosaic imperatives of reality.
If we hope to see good cinema, we shall rarely achieve it through big
productions and those which are accompanied by the sanction of the
critics and the approval of the public. The private story, the
individual drama cannot, in my view, interest anyone worthy of living
in his times; if the spectator shares the joys, the sorrows, the
anxieties of a personage on the screen, this can be only because he
sees reflected in it the joys, sorrows, anxieties of a whole society,
and therefore his own. Strikes, social insecurity, fear of war, etc.,
are the things which affect everyone today, and also affect the
spectator; but that Mr X. is unhappy at home and seeks a girl-friend
to console him, and finally abandons her to return to his wife all
penitent, is no doubt very moral and edifying, but leaves us
completely indifferent.
Sometimes the essence of cinema spurts unexpectedly from an anodine
film, from a farce or a crude novelette. Man Ray said something very
significant: ‘The worst films which I have seen, those which send me
into a deep sleep, always contain five marvellous minutes, while the
best films, the most praised, have scarcely more than five worthwhile
minutes.' This is to say that in all films, good or bad, beyond and
despite the intentions of the makers, cinema poetry struggles to come
to the surface and manifest itself.
The cinema is a magnificent and perilous weapon when wielded by a free
spirit. It is the best instrument to express the world of dreams, of
emotions, of instinct. The creative mechanism of cinema images,
through its manner of functioning, is among all the means of human
expression the one which comes nearest to the mind of man, or, even
more, which best imitates the functioning of the mind in the state of
dreaming. Jacques B. Brunius has pointed out that the night which bit
by bit invades the cinema is equivalent to closing the eyes. Then
begins, on the screen and within the man, the incursion into the night
of the unconscious; the images, as in dream, appear and disappear
through ‘dissolves' and fade-outs; time and space become flexible,
retrace or extend at will; chronological order and relative values of
duration no longer respond to reality; cyclic action is accomplished
in a few minutes or in several centuries; movements accelerate their
speed.
The cinema seems to have been invented to express the subconscious
life, whose roots penetrate so deeply into poetry; but it is almost
never used for that end. Among modern tendencies of cinema, the best
known is what is called ‘neo-realism'. Its films present to the eyes
of the spectator slices of real life, with people taken from the
street, and with real buildings and exteriors. With a few exceptions,
among which I would especially instance *Bicycle Thieves*, neo-realism
has done nothing to produce in its films what is proper to the cinema,
that is to say, the mysterious and fantastic. What use is all this
visual drapery if the situations, the motives which animate the
people, their reactions, the very subjects are taken from the most
sentimental and conformist literature? The one interesting innovation,
not of neo-realism but of Zavattini personally, is to have elevated
the anodine action to the status of dramatic action. In *Umbero D*,
one of the most interesting products of neo-realism, an entire reel of
ten minutes shows a little maid performing actions which, a little
while before, would have appeared unworthy of the screen. We see the
servant enter the kitchen, light the stove, put a pan on the gas,
throw water on a line of ants who advance on the wall in indian file,
give the thermometer to an old man who feels feverish and so on.
Despite the trivial nature of the situation, these activities are
followed with interest and there is even a certain ‘suspense'.
Neo-realism has introduced into cinematographic expression certain
elements which enrich its language, but nothing more. The reality of
neo-realism is incomplete, official and above all rational; but
poetry, mystery, all that completes and enlarges tangible reality, is
completely lacking in its working. It confuses ironic fantasy with the
fantastic and black humour.
‘What is most admirable in the fantastic,' Andre Breton has said, ‘is
that the fantastic doesn't exist; all is real.' In a conversation with
Zavattini, I explained to him a few months ago my disagreement with
neo-realism. As we dined together the first example which offered
itself to me was that of the glass of wine. For a neo-realist, I said
to him, a glass is a glass and nothing more; you see it taken from the
sideboard, filled with drink, taken to the kitchen where the maid
washes it and perhaps breaks it, which will result in its return or
otherwise, etc. But this same glass, contemplated by different beings,
can be a thousand different things, because each one charges what he
sees with affectivay; no one sees things as they are, but as his
desires and his state of soul make him see. I fight for the cinema
which will show me this kind of glass, because this cinema will give
me an integral vision of reality, will broaden my knowledge of things
and people, will open up to me the marvellous world of the unknown, of
all that which I find neither in the newspaper nor in the street.
Don't think from what I have just said that I am for a cinema
consecrated solely to the fantastic and to mystery, for a cinema
which, fleeing or scorning daily reality, would aim to plunge us into
the unconscious world of the dream. Although I have just now indicated
very briefly the capital importance which I attach to the film which
treats the fundamental problems of a modern man, I do not consider man
in isolation, as a particular case, but in his relationship to other
men. I take for mine the words of Engels, who defined the function of
the novelist (understood in this case as that of the film-maker): ‘The
novelist will have accomplished his task honourably when, through a
faithful depiction of authentic social relations, he will have
destroyed the conventional representa tion of the nature of these
relations, shaken the optimism of the bourgeois world and obliged the
reader to question the permanence of the existing order, even if he
does not directly propose a conclusion to us, even if he does not
openly take sides.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dale Houstman
As usual your comments are more detailed than mine, as I just heard it from
a reliable friend. I did know that Hitchcock was a very informed man vis a
vis film history, so it doesn't surprise me. VERTIGO has some of the
qualities found in Bunuel, and the black humor and psychological
"perversities" are rampant. I don't know where Hitchcock discusses Bunuel,
although I think "Hitchcock On Hitchcock" is as good a place as any to look.
But from my personal film-viewing I must say that Bunuel is quite a unique
experience. It might be that his "techniques" have become so pervasive in a
way that it is difficult to assign a definite line of influence, as in the
example of Magritte's effects on modern advertisement. Where does one begin?
dmh