World Cinema Strategies: Europe

One of the great directors of arthouse cinema, the Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel, demonstrated a variety of obsessions throughout his lengthy career. One of these was a ruthless desire to strip away the pretensions of the middle classes, a mischievous concern to which he gave particular expression in his Indian summer colour films, although, unlike the many middle-class directors given to idealising their working-class characters, Bunuel had no interest in such politically correct finessing; his characters from lower down the social scale are driven by impulses quite as base as those of their ‘betters’, and the director’s excoriation of them is just as lacerating. Bunuel shows us all of his dramatis personae in the same uncompromising light, although there is no attempt at facile moral judgement. His early film, Un ChienAndalou (1929), made in collaboration with Salvador Dalí, is full of violent sexual imagery; a particularly famous image shows ants crawling from a hole in the centre of a human hand as a (possible) metaphor for sexual desire, while another sequence has male hands grasping a young woman’s breasts as her dress vanishes, leaving her nude. Buñuel and Dalí were concerned with sexual repression in their ‘priest-ridden’ Catholic country (Joyce’s phrase nicely summarises their scathing attitude), and their shot of a sexually unsatisfied woman with her mouth pressed to the marble toe of a statue remains shocking.