Does anyone know this flick?
Denise noe
who had written a book called "The Right to Kill"--and had taken his own
advice & wound up on Death Row. A young murderer in the next cell had
killed after reading the man's book.
Ring a bell? Does anyone know the title?
****************************
Denise Noe
Koko the Signing Gorilla says: "Fine animal gorilla."
MGMax1919
>presence, throughout. There was a stiltedness to the recounting, to the
>images, that rang (to me) as overconscious rather than subconscious.
I think that's Bunuel's non-style style. I think the baldfaced simplicity
of it is part of what makes it work, versus the overblownness of movie
dream conventions, but if you don't like it, you don't like it. I find it
hard to attribute meaning to it though when it's trying so hard to be
blank, to not carry meaning the way Hitchcock's or Lang's or Fellini's
camera would have conveyed the director's eye. It seems like you're
trying to apply the "male gaze" charge to the hardest subject to make it
stick to. At least, if I were making an argument about its being sexist,
the camerawork is the last place I'd start.
>The husband and the adulterer each embody standard elements of the
>bourgeois ideal. Looks, money, success, oblique charm. But they are
>fools and dullards ... why? Or rather, how is it that the film
>communicates this to us? By their not grasping the means to get, keep,
>or control this beautiful woman. They are unworthy of our admiration
>because they fail to put Severine in her place and get what they want
>from her -- which, the film tells us, was easily gotten.
I could argue the opposite, and I will: they are fools and dullards
because they embody the bourgeois ideal, and they are unworthy of
Severine, who seems like a standard trophy object but has so much more
inside her, so much more that she doesn't even know how to release
herself, until she stumbles on a way outside the normal role of a
bourgeois wife.
>But there is no strength in self-abuse and shamed maneuverings.
Well, a legitimate point to argue, but there's a whole school of
philosophers starting with Foucault who disagree, which at least gives
Bunuel some company for advancing the argument. I don't agree or disagree
with them (or idealize French philosophy), I just bring it up to point out
that it wasn't just my own twisted little notion. And again, you seemed
to half recognize as much when you found a form of it that seemed more
interesting to you-- in the relationship with the madam, which is
certainly a power relationship and debasing in some way.
>Though I might agree that there is a strand of American feminism that
>tends to gloss over the reality that there is pleasure in sex despite
>and/or because of the power game, I think we have to recognize that that
>is a limited group. It is error, I think, to generalize from them.
That's not quite what I meant, and I think what I said started to sound a
little too much like Limbaughesque feminist-baiting, and I'm glad you
didn't rise to that, since it was unintentional. What I mean is,
everybody has a first way of looking at things, and the first instinct, I
think, of many a well-read American would be to read it in terms of
male-female power relations, which have been a major thrust (no pun
intended) of American thought of the last couple of decades. My point is,
that may be 96% irrelevant to a European film from a European book about a
sexual adventurer; she may be female just because she happened to be, or
because Bunuel had no interest in making a homosexual film on that subject
(for that matter, Bertolucci made one, and had to make it heterosexual--
Last Tango), or because, let's face it, that's the kind of movie the Hakim
brothers wanted (and they, indeed, brought the book to Bunuel's
attention). But her gender may be a very secondary point, and of much
less relevance, to Bunuel in regards to what he wished to explore or
express.
>You attribute independence to her because (I get from your writing)
>she chooses to take her pleasure in a way that satisfies her needs.
Yes.
>But she makes no real choice because she takes no responsibility
>for her acts. There is something missing from the independence angle.
>She hides, denies, pretends, evades, and in the end escapes back without
>ever making the commitment to her own sense of pleasure, decadent or
>other.
On the contrary, she has her husband right where she wants him, tamed in
his chair and however she wants to think of him in her head.
>That's not choice. That's simply going with a certain flow ...
A normal bourgeois marriage would be going with the flow. The incredible
wreck of hers is the result of her tiny, admittedly often tentative or
passive choices. Okay, that's a pretty bizarre picture of reality. But
it's a certain form of comedy-- she's almost like a childlike silent
comedian, Harry Langdon or Stan Laurel, innocently doing tiny little
things to her marriage that escalate into increasingly enormous damage.
That's funny!
>In any case, I never suggested that the marriage was idealized ... or
>desirable on any level. What I said was that he was rich, handsome, and
>loving and that their marriage was financially secure. That his image
>hints at an ideal ... and his failure to be that ideal is a scorn the
film
>heaps upon him
Then that's suggesting that he's an ideal, or indicates one by his
failures. I can't accept that. He's a dork, and his destruction is
comedy. Sick comedy, but comedy. If he's ever seen as an ideal, it's
only sardonically.
>True enough. But I can see now better than before what others saw in
>this work ... and though not persuaded on any level, I am enlightened.
Aww, what'd ya have to get complimentary for just as we were having a
hightoned flame war?
Cheers!
P.S.
>Michael Gebert, in another post, suggested that the film was more in the
>tradition of the decadents, as pre-surrealists (which is not how I see
the
>decadents, but that aside
Depends from which end you look. The Surrealists much admired the
decadents and Symbolists as spiritual forebears. That doesn't necessarily
mean that the decadents would have appreciated the fact-- to take the one
whose work I know best, I suspect that Huysmans, whose departures from
Zolaesque naturalism were still very grounded in some sort of philosphical
system (which is why he ultimately wound up an arch-Catholic), would have
regarded Dada and the more Dadaist aspects of Surrealism as youthful
jerking off, aesthetic nonsense, a waste of time. Bunuel he might have
looked more kindly on than most, because he did end up closer to Zolaesque
naturalism (and Galdos is often called the Spanish Zola).
mgma...@aol.com (Michael Gebert)
"It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either
charming or tedious." --Oscar Wilde
Shari L. Rosenblum
blank? I'd agree that Bunuel's style is starker and less intrusive, or
directorial in the actual sense, than Hitchcock's or Lang's or Fellini's.
But does that make it blank? *Can* it make it blank? Or, rather, do you
not think that the blanker the filmmaker tries to be the deeper inside the
director's private mind the audience gets?
Baldfaced simplicity, perhaps, but one that carries some perspective on
its subject. Don't the camera angles, the close-ups, the lighting, the
choices of when to cut and what to cut to all convey a certain
deliberateness of opinion? Do you not think there is an inevitability of
betraying our own subjectivity when we declare something purely objective?
> It seems like you're
> trying to apply the "male gaze" charge to the hardest subject to make it
> stick to. At least, if I were making an argument about its being sexist,
> the camerawork is the last place I'd start.
I still don't think that my charge was "sexism." I don't sense that the
camera hates Severine or thinks she deserves to be debased. That would be
how I'd interpret a "sexist" view in this. What I think is that the
camera misapprehends the nature of woman and yet presents its inaccurate
vision as objective truth. It is a non-judgmental acceptance, I agree,
but of a character that is an invention of a certain male perception
(angry, resentful, etc.). In other words, it is in a sense a
manifestation of superiority in social awareness and objectivity that has
at its source a misconception of its subject grounded in a subjective and
uncomprehending distance with which the "subject" perceives the "other."
I don't mean this to sound so dense ... I'm just not sure how to make the
distinction with less verbiage.
> I could argue the opposite, and I will: they are fools and dullards
> because they embody the bourgeois ideal, and they are unworthy of
> Severine, who seems like a standard trophy object but has so much more
> inside her, so much more that she doesn't even know how to release
> herself, until she stumbles on a way outside the normal role of a
> bourgeois wife.
It seems to me that this is not a contradiction of my point, but rather
the same point given from a different angle. But this still makes the
film about men and their understanding of woman rather than about woman,
or a woman ... I think it foreign to a woman's view, and logical that
some women who've posted here look in it and find a psychological
defense to make the woman more realistic as a woman.
Again, it's difficult to discuss sex differences in interpretation without
sounding like a porte-parole for a rigid political movement. And I don't
doubt that I'm more more sensitive to the issue than many, but it does
frequently feel like I'm being told that if I don't get it, I don't
understand women.
Your analysis is more balanced than that, I know. You see in her a woman
in control with the joke on the men around her. And I can see how you see
that the camera sees that too. Sort of. But it rings false. The
camera's perspective, in such an interpretation, is arrogant. It puts
its perspective over that of a woman-like reality.
But this is not a call for sex-definition in the way Hiroshi interprets my
words, I mean accuracy in character portrait. Not realism. Accuracy.
Make it as aberrant as you like ... but in the nature of things.
> Well, a legitimate point to argue, but there's a whole school of
> philosophers starting with Foucault who disagree, which at least gives
> Bunuel some company for advancing the argument. I don't agree or disagree
> with them (or idealize French philosophy), I just bring it up to point out
> that it wasn't just my own twisted little notion.
Oh, I wasn't blaming you for the interpretation. It seems to me, though
I disagree with you, that you set the film in its proper artistic class.
I can see the place of Belle de Jour in that glorious French tradition of
philosophical arrogance. And it's hard, I think, to separate the
brilliance in Foucault and the rest from the nonsense. (It's actually
easy for me. I heard Foucault once at the College de France, found him
self-important and densely tedious, and became ill as I watched him suck
up the obsequiousness of his uncritically adoring automaton sycophants,
responding more like a Hollywood pinup than a philosophical adventurer.)
> And again, you seemed
> to half recognize as much when you found a form of it that seemed more
> interesting to you-- in the relationship with the madam, which is
> certainly a power relationship and debasing in some way.
Yes. That would be the brilliance of the tradition to which I was
alluding above. And again, it isn't the power play and its consequences
that troubled me in the rest of the work, but the absence of integrity in
their presentation. I think that the interplay between Severine and the
madam was the most complex, and most honest, of the film. And I
attributed that to the comfort the camera felt with woman v. woman scenes.
The camera in these scenes has no stake in the game. There, I think, I
responded to that baldfaced simplicity you speak of. I guess it is only
there that I found the camera succeeded at it.
> My point is,
> that may be 96% irrelevant to a European film from a European book about a
> sexual adventurer; she may be female just because she happened to be, or
> because Bunuel had no interest in making a homosexual film on that subject
> (for that matter, Bertolucci made one, and had to make it heterosexual--
> Last Tango), or because, let's face it, that's the kind of movie the Hakim
> brothers wanted (and they, indeed, brought the book to Bunuel's
> attention). But her gender may be a very secondary point, and of much
> less relevance, to Bunuel in regards to what he wished to explore or
> express.
There we go. ... I don't think a woman's sex (or a man's) is ever a
secondary point in a film about sexual power relations and the search for
satisfaction. Men and women are not the same in this, even when the
outward appearance of their acts might make it seem as they are.
The portrait of homosexuals is always interesting (be they male or female)
beyond the sexuality because of the meshing of aspects "natural" to their
sex (on a social platform) and aspects "borrowed" from the other. It's
an always unexpected analysis of just what is "natural" whatever one's
sexual orientation and what is "affected." But that's a question for a
different thread ... (an analysis of the changes and the things that ring
false in Last Tango, for example).
But back to Belle, if there is not offense in treating the woman as object
of her own quest for liberation (which is the best way I can reconcile
your view with mine), then there is offense in accepting that her inner
core would be no different from a man's. In broad strokes, of course, the
two are more alike than not. But this was not a film about broad strokes.
And in specifics, there are a great many differences.
It is a myth, too, that the European sentiment on this is different. At
least among women. Though brash and outspoken feminist politicism,
sometimes to the extent of male-bashing, exclusion of men from sexual
relationships, and modern puritanism, is identified with the American
branch of the movement, there is no accident in the fact that the first
manifesto of [modern] feminism came out of France or that the most radical
feminist intellectual theorists are French, or French converts.
I see that as the counterpoint -- and a virulent counterpoint at that --
to that tradition you and I both speak of above. When Monique Wittig [if
I'm attributing correctly] attempts to undo the "I" -- to do violence to
the "je" [j/e] -- because it is subject representing the male voice, an
inevitable disenfranchisment of woman from the narrative voice, so to
speak, I read that as a direct response to the conscious and
unconscious arrogance of the philosophical movement of Foucault and
company (and their predecessors, of course). My being American,
therefore, is less likely the reason for my reaction than my being a woman.
> On the contrary, she has her husband right where she wants him, tamed in
> his chair and however she wants to think of him in her head.
But that's not how the film tells it. The husband is powerless against
her as he has always been powerless against her. Tamed, as he was
throughout the film, as she dreaded his being tamed. More potent in
fantasy than in life, as he was throughout the film. She never had her
husband where she wanted him. She doesn't now.
And she's not moved forward at all. An non-obstacle obstacle in her life
has been transformed into another non-obstacle obstacle. But where's the
movement forward for Severine?
Does she now move forever into fantasy? Has the brothel lost its sense
of refuge? Has it become too real? Tell me. What happens after we
leave the theater? What does Belle do for herself?
> > >That's not choice. That's simply going with a certain flow ...
> A normal bourgeois marriage would be going with the flow.
Of another sort, of course. But that doesn't change the fact she was
simply drifting ... making no real choices, committing to nothing, being
anything but responsible for her own pleasure-seeking. The current
merely took her somewhere else.
The wreck of the marriage wasn't funny to me, though I see your analogies
to Stan Laurel et al. Not because I found it hard, but because I didn't
feel the shambles. I saw it as just more of the same. Despite all that
happened, I thought Belle unchanged from start to finish -- her secrets
and her perceptions of her life had simply become more concrete.
Re: Decadents and Surrealists.
> Depends from which end you look. The Surrealists much admired the
> decadents and Symbolists as spiritual forebears. That doesn't necessarily
> mean that the decadents would have appreciated the fact-- to take the one
> whose work I know best, I suspect that Huysmans, whose departures from
> Zolaesque naturalism were still very grounded in some sort of philosphical
> system (which is why he ultimately wound up an arch-Catholic), would have
> regarded Dada and the more Dadaist aspects of Surrealism as youthful
> jerking off, aesthetic nonsense, a waste of time. Bunuel he might have
> looked more kindly on than most, because he did end up closer to Zolaesque
> naturalism (and Galdos is often called the Spanish Zola).
I'd agree with Huysmans on this, though on little else. I've always seen
the Symbolists as somewhat adolescent -- that dark and dingy depressing
view of life tinged with the absolute delight in decadence. Too energized
to be as mournful as it pretends to be. And the Surrealists take that to
an extreme beyond ... they have a sort of glee in their mad assertion that
everyone else just doesn't understand and their aching to prove just how
different they are. I imagine them running to their bedrooms and slamming
their doors, screaming and with their fingers in their ears.
Nevertheless, I prefer them all to Zola, if I'm picking up something to
read, and Zola to all if I'm choosing a film. I can't even imagine what
that might mean ....
Shari
MGMax1919
>I thought the film was realistic.
I think the apparent naturalism (I am not going to say realism) is kind of
the straight man to the comedy of her fantasy world. If she lived in sets
that looked like Caligari and spoke chirping like a bird, her bizarre
behavior wouldn't be funny.
>we should not feed the social class aspect into our thinking.
Bunuel made films about ordinary Mexican people when he lived in Mexico
making low budget films. When he went to work in France for more money he
made movies about more glamorous people. I think he considered that
irrelevant. People used to downplay Hitchcock's work because of its
glossy settings and characters. But who's a richer, more original
character-- Tom Joad, or Jimmy Stewart in Vertigo?
>Michael, do you think it's really possible for a camera's gaze to be
blank?
Oh, yeah, I've seen several lately (Wyatt Earp, maybe?) But no, of course
not. A bit of oversimplification on my part, perhaps, to locate the gaze
solely in the camerawork, but perhaps it carries a point: Bunuel is so
deadpan in style you can read a lot into him and his style-- and I think
you were making a lot of assumptions about how we were supposed to view
Severine and her husband that you were reading into Bunuel's poker face.
We're much better off dealing with the specific content, since you think
the husband and home are semi-idealized and I think they're mocked.
>What I think is that the camera misapprehends the nature of woman and yet
presents its inaccurate vision as objective truth. It is a non-judgmental
acceptance, I agree,
but of a character that is an invention of a certain male perception
(angry, resentful, etc.). In other words, it is in a sense a
manifestation of superiority in social awareness and objectivity that has
at its source a misconception of its subject
To which I would again say, maybe her being female is largely irrelevant.
Maybe it depicting French bourgeois life is convenience only, and if it
had been made in Quebec in 1742, it would be set among the Inuit.
>But this still makes the film about men and their understanding of woman
rather than about woman, or a woman ... I think it foreign to a woman's
view, and logical that
some women who've posted here look in it and find a psychological
defense to make the woman more realistic as a woman
Say it's not about women at all. It's about a kind of sexual adventurer.
In that case especially, trying to argue that it's a more or less precise
portrait of French womanhood circa 1967 is pointless. I would never hunt
for conventional psychological realism in the work of someone who hated
Freudianism (but had a deep, inborn sense of human psychology.
>but it does frequently feel like I'm being told that if I don't get it, I
don't
understand women.
Not by me. I don't think there is such a thing as "women," except to
statisticians and people making generalizations so broad as to be
meaningless, or that Belle de Jour would be successful and valid if it
matched the experience of at least 27.3% of them. That's silly. It is
not a naturalistic film except superficially and for comic effect, it is a
picture of a certain philosphical attitude, acted out to a comically
disastrous yet somehow admirable extreme. You want a realistic picture of
"women," go rent, I don't know, "Lianna" or something else competently
mundane. (Parenthetically, it's revealing that I can't think of a
satisfactory example of a heterosexual movie about women that meets my
notion of mundane realism, though, where I would have said "Marty" or
"Diner" or ten other things for men.)
>The camera's perspective, in such an interpretation, is arrogant.
Then Bunuel must be anti-male in, say, El or The Exterminating Angel. Oh
wait, he is!
>more like a Hollywood pinup than a philosophical adventurer
Oh, but to live somewhere where a philosopher gets that adulation rather
than Brad Pitt!
>And I attributed that to the comfort the camera felt with woman v. woman
scenes.
The camera in these scenes has no stake in the game. There, I think, I
responded to that baldfaced simplicity you speak of. I guess it is only
there that I found the camera succeeded at it.
In the absence of a scene by scene comparison, I can't help but feel that
you're reading your response to the content into the style.
>I don't think a woman's sex (or a man's) is ever a
secondary point in a film about sexual power relations
No, but I don't think it's ABOUT sexual power relations. I think they're
part of the setting, but the real action of the movie isn't about them,
it's about her mental progression. Maybe you think they always have to
take pride of place, but if there was a committed Marxist in this
discussion he'd tell you that no, they're second to the economic disparity
between Belle and the other prostitutes, that THAT always comes first. I
think they affect the story, but I don't think they are the story.
>Tamed, as he was throughout the film, as she dreaded his being tamed.
She looks pretty satisfied to me. Again, don't take it as realism, it's a
comedy about the power of a seemingly powerless, innocent woman.
Admittedly, a depraved comedy, but that's the fun.
>Does she now move forever into fantasy? What happens after we
leave the theater? What does Belle do for herself?
I don't know. Do Laurel and Hardy ever get that piano up the stairs? Do
we worry about them and whether they'll get paid in full?
>And the Surrealists take that to an extreme beyond ... they have a sort
of glee in their mad assertion that everyone else just doesn't understand
and their aching to prove just how different they are. I imagine them
running to their bedrooms and slamming
their doors, screaming and with their fingers in their ears.
One time when Bunuel was very young he and some other Surrealists stomped
a bunch of Christmas presents under the tree of their host in protest
against, shit, Christmas I guess. Happiness. Something.
Years later, the middle-aged Bunuel was mortfied when he was at Charlie
Chaplin's house and Chaplin pulled the presents out from under the tree
and mournfully said, "Well, I suppose you'd better just go straight to
it."
MGMax1919
Germinal or seeing the film of it made recently will give you some idea of
it. Novel as reportage, social analysis.
Huysmans, one of Zola's proteges, grew disgusted with naturalism, feeling
that it was basically materialistic-- in a sense, that when Zola wrote
about a department store, what he did was no more elevated than the
writers for the store's catalog. He searched for a more metaphysical
dimension in art, finding it in the poetry of Baudelaire and Verlaine,
later in the practice of Satanism, and ultimately as an arch-Catholic--
anything, in short, that got away from materialistic 19th century
rationalism. His Decadent phase was the most influential-- "Against
Nature" (aka "Against the Grain") was the book by Dorian Gray's bedside.
A limited, eccentric, but often delightfully disagreeable writer-- the
great complainer of literature.
Arthur Wouk
one point which has not been discussed is the following: i believe that
in belle de jour, bunuel was working from a novel of that name.
i think that it was not his custom to work from someone else's work;
nothing else of his, as i recall, started with someone else's work. am
i wrong?
if so, has anyone read the novel. what does it tell us about the
skeleton on which bunuel hung his film?
i think this is a more important way to proceed, rather than to look
for marxist analyses of the film. :-)
--
--
arthur wouk
internet: wo...@cs.colorado.edu
Hiroshi Amari
: Your analysis is more balanced than that, I know. You see in her a woman
: in control with the joke on the men around her. And I can see how you see
: that the camera sees that too. Sort of. But it rings false. The
: camera's perspective, in such an interpretation, is arrogant. It puts
: its perspective over that of a woman-like reality.
: But this is not a call for sex-definition in the way Hiroshi interprets my
: words, I mean accuracy in character portrait. Not realism. Accuracy.
: Make it as aberrant as you like ... but in the nature of things.
I am beginning to understand why you have been talking about the
debasement. Many movie characters are unbelievable. Heavenly Creatures
characters may not look accurate, but they exist.
--
Hiroshi Amari
Hiroshi Amari
: I could argue the opposite, and I will: they are fools and dullards
: because they embody the bourgeois ideal, and they are unworthy of
: Severine, who seems like a standard trophy object but has so much more
: inside her, so much more that she doesn't even know how to release
: herself, until she stumbles on a way outside the normal role of a
: bourgeois wife.
Do you think the world inside her makes her more desirable? I am
not sure.
: >But there is no strength in self-abuse and shamed maneuverings.
: Well, a legitimate point to argue, but there's a whole school of
: philosophers starting with Foucault who disagree, which at least gives
: Bunuel some company for advancing the argument. I don't agree or disagree
: with them (or idealize French philosophy), I just bring it up to point out
: that it wasn't just my own twisted little notion. And again, you seemed
: to half recognize as much when you found a form of it that seemed more
: interesting to you-- in the relationship with the madam, which is
: certainly a power relationship and debasing in some way.
I missed the point in the movie. There was a power struggle over an older
gangster (?). What is its significance? I am curious to know.
: >That's not choice. That's simply going with a certain flow ...
: A normal bourgeois marriage would be going with the flow.
I agree to both.
: >In any case, I never suggested that the marriage was idealized ... or
: >desirable on any level. What I said was that he was rich, handsome, and
: >loving and that their marriage was financially secure. That his image
: >hints at an ideal ... and his failure to be that ideal is a scorn the
: film
: >heaps upon him
: Then that's suggesting that he's an ideal, or indicates one by his
: failures. I can't accept that. He's a dork, and his destruction is
: comedy. Sick comedy, but comedy. If he's ever seen as an ideal, it's
: only sardonically.
Comedy? I wonder how Shari's interpretation works. He is an ideal, and she
just wanted another man. Finally, that ideal was injured. I cannot
construct any plausible story that ties her real life and fantasy. She
wanted something wild, her husband did not do it, and he was injured.
Then, he is a true victim, isn't he? Scorn the film heaps upon him? I
think, then, that is scorn upon us. Yes, I would be angry, but I choose
to be happier to find a different view.
--
Hiroshi Amari
MGMax1919
from novels by Galdos (whom he admired greatly-- see his autobiography),
Nazarin and Tristana; Diary of a Chambermaid, which is based on Octave
Mirbeau's novel and Jean Renoir's film of the same; and, needless to say,
Robinson Crusoe. The majority were probably original, and everything
after Tristana is.
Bunuel reportedly did not think much of the novel of Belle de Jour; the
author, on the other hand, greatly admired the film.
lang thompson
(Arthur Wouk) writes:
>
>
>one point which has not been discussed is the following: i believe
that
>in belle de jour, bunuel was working from a novel of that name.
>
>i think that it was not his custom to work from someone else's work;
>nothing else of his, as i recall, started with someone else's work. am
>i wrong?
****** Bunuel filmed Wuthering Heights, Nazarin and Diary of a
Chambermaid; all very well-known novels. I haven't seen his Robinson
Crusoe & don't know if it's really an adaptation or not. Part of L'Age
d'Or is based on Sade.
Lang Thompson
Peter Reiher
>A fair number of his other films were adaptations, notably his two films
>from novels by Galdos (whom he admired greatly-- see his autobiography),
>Nazarin and Tristana; Diary of a Chambermaid, which is based on Octave
>Mirbeau's novel and Jean Renoir's film of the same; and, needless to say,
>Robinson Crusoe. The majority were probably original, and everything
>after Tristana is.
Not quite correct - Bunuel's last film, "That Obscure Object of Desire,"
is based on a novel, Pierre Louys' "La Femme et le Pantin." I think
the same novel was the basis for "The Devil is a Woman," one of Dietrich's
films with Von Sternberg. Other Bunuel films like "El," "The Young One,"
and "El Rio y la Muerte" were also based on novels or stories. At a guess,
I'd say that Bunuel's films were about 50/50 divided between original
screenplays and adaptations of novels or short stories. Of course, Bunuel's
adaptation of a novel was often little like what he started with.
--
Peter Reiher
rei...@wells.cs.ucla.edu
<http://www.cs.ucla.edu/project-members/reiher/home_page.html>
MGMax1919
but officially) based on the Louys novel. What I get for posting without
doublechecking.
A number of the 50's ones are probably based on Spanish-language novels
nobody ever heard of in the English-speaking world. Again, probably
fairly loosely.
Michael Brooke
: Oh, of course. You're quite right, Phantom of Liberty is (very loosely
: but officially) based on the Louys novel. What I get for posting without
: doublechecking.
And you've done it again!
'The Phantom of Liberty' was an original screenplay.
You're thinking of 'That Obscure Object of Desire'.
Michael
Michael Brooke
: >A fair number of his other films were adaptations, notably his two films
: >from novels by Galdos (whom he admired greatly-- see his autobiography),
: >Nazarin and Tristana; Diary of a Chambermaid, which is based on Octave
: >Mirbeau's novel and Jean Renoir's film of the same; and, needless to say,
: >Robinson Crusoe. The majority were probably original, and everything
: >after Tristana is.
That sounds impressive until you realise that he only made three films
after 'Tristana' (and one of them was an adaptation - 'That Obscure
Object of Desire' was based on Pierre Louys' 'La Femme et le Pantin').
Incidentally, Joseph Kessel, author of the novel 'Belle de Jour', went
on record as saying the film was a vast improvement on the book in
every possible way.
Michael
MGMax1919
The previous one was obviously a sysop error to my impeccable text.
Michael Brooke
: Aiiiieeeeee!
: I of course meant to say that The Exterminating Angel is based on Jean
: Renoir's film, Discreet Charm of a Chambermaid.
I hope that was a joke!
And in any case, I heard it was 'The Exterminating Age d'Or'.
Michael