Latest / Secret Movie Club Podcast / SMC Pod #212: Luis Buñuel, L'Age d'Or

Transcript

SMC Pod #212: Luis Buñuel, L'Age d'Or · Secret Movie Club Podcast

0:02
Hello, Secret Movie Clubbers, and welcome to Secret Movie Club Podcast 212,
0:09
Louis Boonwell Lodge d'Or.
0:23
My name is Craig Hamill. I'm the founder, programmer of Secret Movie Club.
0:26
It is wonderful to have you today. You'll be hearing this maybe appropriately
0:31
for a surrealist like Louis Bunuel on Friday, March 13th. I decided to call
0:37
this pod Louis Bunuel L'Age d'Or.
0:40
That is the name of the second movie, surrealist movie he made in 1930,
0:44
which we'll talk on briefly.
0:47
But I just also thought it was a good title for his incredible body of work
0:51
from the 1920s to the late 1970s.
0:54
That period of cinema, in many ways, Louis Bunuel represents the 20th century.
1:00
He was born in 1900. We're going to get into all of it.
1:04
He is one of my favorite directors of all time, had one of the biggest influences on me as a teenager.
1:11
And I want to just talk about him. You probably know about him if you're listening to this podcast.
1:19
If you don't, I would love for you to see some of his movies.
1:22
If you do know about him, I hope maybe I tell a few stories here that are interesting
1:27
and don't just regurgitate what you've already heard and read.
1:30
But we're going to get right into it.
1:31
Secret Movie Club Podcast 213 will actually be Ken Loach and the movie Cass,
1:40
which is often considered his greatest movie, a movie about a working class
1:44
boy who develops a fascination with training a hawk, basically.
1:51
I am still working on the programming for March through June,
1:56
I hope to be announcing The moment that we can start announcing movies, we will.
2:01
And I hope I can announce something next week when the final podcast of March
2:07
drops, because we always take a week off after three podcasts.
2:10
But I'm working on it, and I am looking forward to the day when I can be doing
2:14
a podcast and telling you about all the events we're doing.
2:18
Because 2026 is our 10th year anniversary, and I am determined to make it count. So there you go.
2:25
As always, if you want to become a part of Secret Movie Club,
2:29
we would love to have you.
2:30
The easiest way is to do that and learn what we're about and all that good stuff.
2:34
Go to secretmovieclub.com. Wait a moment, and a box should pop up.
2:39
Put your email in there. you'll get on our newsletter.
2:41
We are going to start the newsletter again within the next few weeks.
2:45
And we always send that out on Monday.
2:47
There's been a pause while I've been getting everything ready for 2026,
2:51
but we are going to return to that newsletter. We have a lot of social media.
2:54
You can go at Secret Movie Club. That's our Instagram.
2:58
That's our X Twitter. We've got a Threads. We've got a Blue Sky. We've got a Facebook.
3:02
And we are launching a TikTok. And we do have a YouTube, but we're going to
3:06
lean into the YouTube and the TikTok as well.
3:08
You can also go to Eventbrite and just follow us there. That's where we sell tickets.
3:13
As always, you can also email us at community at secretmovieclub.com.
3:19
We work to respond to every email.
3:21
So if you want to get a hold of us directly, that's the way to do it.
3:25
Okay, let's talk about Louis Bunuel.
3:31
Bunuel is Spanish from Spain. He was born in 1900 in a part of Spain that's considered rural.
3:40
Although his family was quite wealthy, his dad made a lot of money in Cuba as
3:44
a self-made man, came back, married an 18-year-old innkeeper's daughter, had seven children.
3:51
Bunuel was one of them. But the fact that Bunuel was born in 1900 really perfectly
3:56
situates him like a few other directors who were born roughly around that time.
4:01
Directors like John Ford, Jean Renoir, who were born at the turn of the century,
4:08
and Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang. And thus...
4:13
Really represent a lot of the crazy history that happened.
4:17
And their movies reflect the progress and the modernization and the tides of the 20th century.
4:25
And Bunuel is really emblematic of this.
4:28
He was deeply religious and raised Catholic in Spain and went to rigorous Jesuit
4:36
school up until the point he was 16. He took communion every day.
4:40
And then when he was 16, he got really sick of the hypocrisy,
4:45
the brutality, the banality, materialism of the church as an institution.
4:52
And actually, after that, mostly identified to the end of his life as an atheist.
4:57
But he was very playful with that. And that's one of the great mysteries to me.
5:02
One of my favorite quotes of his is, thank God I'm still an atheist,
5:06
which is very emblematic, too. I mean, that's like Boonwell in a nutshell.
5:10
But he just told his mom he got expelled, which he didn't, but he finished out public school.
5:16
After that, Boonwell went on to college in Spain, and he struck up in his young
5:24
manhood two really key relationships,
5:27
one with the famous painter Salvador Dali, with whom he would go on to make
5:32
his first two big splashes in cinema, the silent films Unchon Angelou and Laje
5:38
Dor, which were two surrealist movies now considered surrealist masterpieces.
5:43
But he also struck up a friendship with the Spanish playwright Garcia Lorca,
5:47
and they really all three of them went three different directions.
5:51
But it is interesting that they knew each other. It's like,
5:55
you know, so many things when you find out that, you know, Martin Scorsese and
5:59
Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg are best friends, which they are,
6:02
and they all look at each other's movies and help with each other's movies,
6:06
sort of like that, but 1920s style.
6:10
Boone Well became part of the surrealist movement of the 1920s, and surrealism was,
6:16
Basically, and forgive me for people who really know what surrealism is,
6:20
I only know it in the context of Boone Wells movies and, you know, my love of art and stuff.
6:25
And I think I understand it, but I have a lay person's understanding of it.
6:30
But the surrealist movement was reaction to, I think.
6:37
If this is the right way to put it, very literal art movements,
6:43
very didactic art movements.
6:45
It was meant to shake things up, to shock and scandalize people,
6:48
but I think as a way to wake them up, to get them to see things differently.
6:52
So imagery and surrealism is very dreamlike.
6:55
Dreams play a very key aspect in the creation and ideation and origination of surrealist art.
7:02
Things are not meant to perfectly connect together, but it's not actually Dada.
7:08
It's not fiercely anti-meaning. But rather,
7:13
the way I look at surrealism is, surrealism is trusting that the meaning,
7:19
as long as you're doing it and giving it your all, and trusting the intuition
7:24
and the dream intuition you have, that the meaning will come out of that.
7:27
But not really overanalyzing it, not trying to make it too literal.
7:32
And you can see that approach in filmmakers like David Lynch, I would say,
7:38
and others who really do David Cronenberg, who really trust their dream sense,
7:45
their intuitive sense, their subconscious sense.
7:48
Their id, if that's the way to put it.
7:50
And so Bunuel was part of that group.
7:53
And in the late 1920s, so what Bunuel said was he went and saw a Fritz Lang
8:01
movie, which I think was Dermuda Todd, which I hope I'm saying right.
8:05
It may not be. And it blew him away. And he decided from that point on,
8:09
and that was in the early 1920s, so he's a very young man. He decided he was
8:12
going to devote his life to cinema, and he decided that that's the way to express
8:16
yourself in the 20th century was through images.
8:19
And he held to that to the day he died, although he wrote an autobiography and
8:23
a few other things. But he was also pretty good with the written word.
8:27
So in the late 1920s, Dolly and Bunuel co-directed a short film,
8:32
which I think runs about 15 minutes or so,
8:34
called Un Shen Angelou, which is essentially a series of really strange images
8:41
and scenes and title cards.
8:44
You think it connects together and your brain wants to connect it and they tease
8:48
you with the title cards.
8:49
The title cards say things like two weeks later, the night before,
8:53
three years later. but it's also having fun with you.
8:58
Argument is this whole thing meant to connect, but it does like a dream.
9:02
It very, very much connects and makes sense like a dream.
9:05
Probably the most famous image from it is an image
9:08
where it appears that Bunuel himself pulls out a shaving razor blade and there's
9:14
a woman seated and he looks at the moon and then he looks at her eye and then
9:18
he brings the blade across her eye and then they cut to what they did was they
9:22
actually sliced a cow's eyeball, a dead cow's eyeball.
9:26
But with editing and movie editing, for a moment, it looks like they've sliced this woman's eyeball.
9:30
Definitely a shocking image. One of the most famous images from silent cinema, probably of all cinema.
9:37
And there are other really hilarious things that are in the movie,
9:40
which we may or may not talk about going forward.
9:42
But from this, Dolly and Bunuel make even more ambitious surrealist silent project
9:49
called Lodge d'Or just the next year.
9:52
This one runs about an hour, stars a lot of French actors you'll recognize in
9:57
Jean Renoir movies, Gaston Medeau, I think is in it, and others.
10:03
It is like Unshan Angelou, although there is a little more of a narrative,
10:09
a little more of a continuity.
10:11
But nevertheless, each scene moves to another scene. It's surreal.
10:16
Surreal things happen. Shocking things happen.
10:19
The movie is meant to scandalize you. There are there's fetishistic sexuality. There's nudity.
10:27
There's, you know, an exploration of repressed sexuality.
10:33
That you definitely didn't see in a lot of other cinema, even European cinema of the time.
10:38
And the movie ends with a sort of shocking coda and ode to the Marquis de Sade.
10:44
So definitely you can feel Dali and Boonwell pushing it, trying to go further.
10:50
After this, Spain is plunged into sort of a national nightmare that it didn't
10:56
come out of until the late 70s, early 80s.
10:59
Basically the rising fascist Franco. A war starts.
11:06
Spain is divided into sides. And this is the Spanish Civil War.
11:10
Hemingway wanted to be a part of it. Bunuel became a part of it.
11:13
Many people became a part of it. And in many ways, it presaged World War II.
11:18
But the Democrats lost, the Republicans lost, and the fascists won.
11:22
And Franco was dictator through the 70s until he died.
11:28
And in many ways, Pedro Almodovar, who will become Spain's probably next to
11:33
Bunuel, Spain's most famous filmmaker, he represents the end of the period.
11:38
So if Bunuel is before Franco...
11:41
And Almodovar represents the return to cinema at the end of Franco.
11:45
And I love Almodovar as well.
11:48
But a lot of things happened during the 30s. Bunuel and Dali have a break because
11:53
Dali doesn't want to be political at all.
11:56
There's a very famous story Bunuel talks about where he goes to Dali to say,
12:00
look, we got to get involved in this fight. You know, we got to fight for democracy.
12:04
And Dali says something to the effect of, I don't care about that.
12:07
I just want to paint my nudes and my paintings.
12:09
And Bunuel just can't relate to that. And he can't relate that someone can say
12:15
that they can be closed off to the suffering and the struggle that's happening
12:20
in real life, which is really key to Bunuel and one of the things I love about Bunuel.
12:24
And I think in a weird way, he's the most Jesuit Catholic atheist I've ever
12:31
heard of because a lot of his reactions seem to come like straight out of St. Francis.
12:37
But nevertheless, he has every right also to be an atheist because he sees,
12:44
like Goya did in one of my favorite painters and another incredible Spanish
12:48
artist from another time,
12:50
Bunuel just sees a lot of horrific things happen.
12:53
During this time, Bunuel has a lot of odd jobs in cinema. He's doing dubbing in France.
13:00
He then goes and ghost directs a number of films, which I've actually never seen in Spain.
13:06
Basically to get his feet wet with feature filmmaking.
13:10
But other people get the credit for it, even though Boonwell is the executive producer.
13:14
But most people agree he clearly directed for and Boonwell has talked about
13:19
and even the directors who are named on these Spanish movies.
13:22
And this is during the Civil War. So Franco's not dictator yet.
13:25
Even the named directors say, well, look, he told me what to shoot.
13:29
He approved every decision and I wasn't even in the editing room. He was the editor.
13:33
So, you know, these movies probably operate as Bunuel movies, but I haven't seen them.
13:39
Ultimately, he and his wife and their young son immigrate to the United States
13:45
for a while because it's clear Franco is winning the war and Bunuel does not
13:50
want to be in Spain and Bunuel likes America at that time. And he comes here.
13:56
He is here for quite a while, and he doesn't really direct a film until he and
14:03
his family disillusioned, disenchanted with the sort of grind in the studio factory system.
14:10
Bunuel, one of my favorite autobiographies ever written by a director is Louis
14:15
Bunuel's My Last Sigh, which he co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrier,
14:19
and I highly recommend you read it.
14:21
My three favorites are Akira Kurosawa was something like an autobiography,
14:25
John Houston's An Open Book, and Louis Bunuel's My Last Sigh.
14:29
They're the three greatest director autobiographies I've ever read.
14:32
And you can tell that each of them are clearly writers.
14:34
Bunuel and his family immigrate from America to Mexico, and this is really where
14:40
Bunuel's feature career takes off.
14:43
He directs one or two movies a year from roughly 1946, 1947,
14:49
after World War II, through the, like, 63, 64.
14:54
Now, he does direct two movies in English during this time, comes back to the United States.
15:00
That's in the early 60s. He directs a movie in Spain, Viridiana,
15:03
which we will talk about.
15:05
And then he goes to France, which I'll get to in a moment. But,
15:10
The Mexico period from 46, 47 to 63, 64 is my favorite period.
15:18
Those are my favorite films for the most part, although one of them we'll get
15:22
to is made in Spain, Viridiana.
15:24
But nevertheless, it feels like
15:26
it's of this period. I love the way the movies feel. I love what he did.
15:31
There's so much about how he
15:32
did it and how he conducted his life and career in Mexico that I admire.
15:38
He made classics in Mexico like Los Olvidados, Nazarene, The Exterminating Angel,
15:45
El, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz.
15:48
He also made movies that aren't as well known, but I love that are crazy.
15:53
There's a movie he made called Susanna, which, you know, it plays as melodrama and it is a melodrama,
16:00
but it's like it kind of plays like Visitor Q, if you know that by Takashi Mieke
16:06
or Pasalena's Terrorema before either of those movies.
16:10
Basically, a very sensual young woman, Susanna, comes into a very bourgeois
16:14
middle class Mexican household and just wrecks havoc with everybody.
16:19
The he made but he made musicals he did everything and he just and he was able to smuggle in and,
16:27
A lot of his surrealism, he got more and more confident, and the movies are incredible.
16:32
The last phase of his career, he went to France, came back to Europe.
16:37
He made a number of movies in France that are some of his most famous movies,
16:42
like the Catherine Deneuve starring Belle du Jour in the 1960s.
16:46
He won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film with 1972's The Discreet Charm
16:51
of the Bourgeoisie, which is actually a remake of his movie,
16:55
The Exterminating Angel, or kind of a variation slash remake,
16:59
which we'll talk about in a moment.
17:01
But that's the one he won the Academy Award for. And then he continued making
17:05
movies. And in the late 70s, he made what I consider one of the great last movies
17:12
ever made by any director.
17:13
And that's a very short list. A lot of directors' last films are not their greatest.
17:18
And I think, you know, you can say some of the great old man movies.
17:22
I do have to say, I think Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, Kurosawa's Mamata
17:27
Dayo, which the more you see it, the more amazing it is.
17:31
It was a very quiet last film, but I think a perfect last film.
17:37
And Louis Bunuel and John Huston's The Dead. It's funny how they pop up again.
17:42
And I definitely have to say, Louis Bunuel's That Obscure Object,
17:46
A Desire, is incredible, and we will touch on it.
17:50
He did write an autobiography, My Last Sigh, and then he died in 1983 in Mexico City.
17:57
So he and his wife and his children, he just treated Mexico.
18:01
Mexico was his home until he died.
18:04
That is the brief biographical sketch of Louis Bunuel.
18:08
Let's jump and talk about some of the movies.
18:18
I believe 40 plus films. So somebody one day, and I don't know,
18:24
maybe I'll do it, should write the film by film study of Louis Bunuel.
18:29
I mean, I'd read that book. I'd read that book in a heartbeat,
18:31
but we're not going to do that today.
18:34
But what I do want to talk about are a few films from each period and why I
18:40
think they're incredible.
18:41
And then I may recommend a few others, but just watch everything.
18:45
I've never seen a bad Bunuel movie, so you can never go wrong with Bunuel,
18:49
one of the rare directories you can say that about.
18:52
The we really should look at the two silent films because they're made so early
18:58
in his career when he's in his late 20s, early 30s and actually late 20s, mostly.
19:03
And then by the time that he's really cranking out the Mexican films,
19:07
he's 47, which is fascinating.
19:10
Now, he did a ton of film work in between, but it's instructive to look at those two.
19:17
Unshan Angelou and Lange d'Or are pretty accessible. I bet you could see them
19:22
on YouTube. I bet they're probably on Criterion. I'm sure you can find them.
19:27
Thinking about them in the same family of filmmaker and aesthetic as David Lynch
19:32
and David Cronenberg is helpful.
19:34
Bunuel is not as graphic as either of those two directors.
19:38
It's a different time, a different sensibility. but
19:41
the and pasolini i
19:44
would actually put on this in a weird way too and even
19:47
francesco rossi i would put on on this list and fassbender i would put on this
19:51
list you know it's sort of a bend diagram here but what you see from the very
19:56
beginning is bunwell has an incredible visual sense not in the sense of how
20:03
he moves the camera although i love his camera movements but,
20:07
It's more in what's within the frame, the images.
20:11
He just knows what's going to sear itself on your eyeball. He knows how to create
20:17
things where you're going to be like, what was that about?
20:19
And remember it. And I feel like Lynch is the same way, too,
20:22
in almost a way, a kinetic moving painter feel.
20:27
Whereas, I mean, to contrast that, say, with Martin Scorsese,
20:32
who, you know, really knows how to move the camera and does and loves to move
20:36
the camera, loves to play with all the things that a camera can do and the editing.
20:42
Boonewell is a consummate picture maker and Boonewell is a consummate editor.
20:47
But he really, to me, he's trying to put you in a dream state.
20:50
And just in the same way that when you're in a dream state.
20:53
You're not conscious of, oh, when did I suddenly get in this location?
20:58
When was I suddenly looking here? When was it suddenly this perspective?
21:02
Bunuel films feel like that, but they have an incredible flow.
21:06
And when you watch the two early movies, you see that right away.
21:08
And they're masterpieces.
21:10
I mean, they're world son of a masterpieces. So he's also one of the few people
21:13
who can say that their first movies, you know, were Citizen Kane level.
21:18
And, you know, just showed he had it from the very, very start.
21:23
In Unshan Angelou, there's also Bunuel's humor, which I think is a real defining
21:30
characteristic of what makes him one of the all-time best, is that Bunuel could be fiercely political.
21:38
He could be really brutal, and often was, in what he was communicating,
21:44
what he was examining, how he felt.
21:45
But it was always, always seasoned with a very impish sense of humor,
21:50
which is, I think, what makes those movies great.
21:54
It's like a painter or a musician.
21:57
You know, if you play in all major keys, I mean, a great musician could do that.
22:01
Or if you play in all minor keys, a great musician could do that.
22:04
But often you find that some of the greatest music is alternating between major
22:08
and minor in really interesting ways and creating a tension and a sort of sustain,
22:13
release, tension, release.
22:15
And when you see movie makers, you see that same aesthetic at work.
22:19
And I think here you see Boone Well being shocking, being funny,
22:22
being very humanist, being very brutal.
22:25
And you see that. There's a scene in Unshan Angelou where a man is trying to
22:32
cross an apartment, and suddenly he's pulling two priests and a piano and a
22:37
dead donkey, and he doesn't realize how that happened.
22:40
But I think also Bunuel's trusting his own dream and intuitive sense.
22:46
That made a lot of sense to me, that image, which is how a person carries everything
22:51
that they've been raised with.
22:53
You almost feel like that was Boonewell's psychic baggage, but he doesn't say it.
22:58
And he doesn't say it in dialogue for sure. And he doesn't tell you that's my psychic baggage.
23:02
You just watch this image. It's a very funny image. You're like,
23:05
what is this about? But over time, there's a there there.
23:09
And I often find that many of our greatest movie makers trust that.
23:16
They trust that. And that kind of image making, too, really can cross international
23:23
lines and you don't have to worry about how it's translated or if the dialogue
23:27
reads or that sort of thing.
23:29
L'Age d'Or, I love as well. It's a little longer.
23:34
It's more of an attack on, I feel.
23:38
You sort of feel it's an attack on, attack might even be the wrong word,
23:43
but a satire on a certain kind of adult, the bourgeoisie, a certain kind of
23:49
middle-class personality,
23:50
affectation, the way people behave, society, societal mores,
23:55
what's considered acceptable, and also very Bunuel.
23:58
And already setting up in L'Age d'Or movies like Exterminating Angel and Discreet
24:03
Charm of the Bourgeoisie, that actually would be an incredible triple feature right there.
24:08
Because you can see the through line in those three movies of themes that he
24:12
is exploring through surrealism,
24:14
but basically taking the piss out of sort of all these social customs and things that we do,
24:23
and almost looking at it like an alien or a sociologist or an anthropologist
24:28
from an alien planet, but with a great sense of humor.
24:31
And he had that ability to do that. A lot of people, when they try to do that,
24:36
they're just their own biases, their own politics.
24:40
It doesn't quite work. And in Bunuel, it works incredibly.
24:45
The Mexican period is just too rich. It's too rich. I almost...
24:51
It almost feels like a tragedy to me that I can't just talk about every single
24:55
movie because it would make me feel so good.
24:58
But maybe for you, it'd be like, oh, too much. But I will focus on,
25:03
I'm going to probably pick three movies here.
25:05
One is an early one, which is considered one of his greatest movies,
25:09
a movie from 1950-51 called Los Olvidados, which translates as The Forgotten Ones.
25:14
And is a movie about street kids and their families and the real poor,
25:19
the indigent poor in Mexico. Kind of a miracle that it got made because the
25:23
Mexican government was a one party government for forever until the 21st century.
25:29
I think PRI pre and it's pretty amazing.
25:33
And this is going to be an ongoing theme to Bunuel loves to bite the hand that feeds him.
25:39
Which is another thing I love about him. Must be like the Irish in me.
25:43
Los Olvidados is a brutal film.
25:45
You can feel Italian neorealism in it. It was shot on the streets. the performances.
25:52
There's some non-actors. Boone Well cast some real people with actual issues
25:57
and disabilities in the film. It is not a studio-bound gloss on homelessness.
26:05
Or child abuse or family dysfunction or poverty. It's a rough film.
26:10
And it's also unsentimental.
26:12
And there is a dream sequence in it, which is great.
26:16
There's a very famous shot where someone throws an egg at the camera and the egg breaks on the lens.
26:22
And so you're seeing like these surrealist touches, the dream sequences,
26:26
the throwing the egg at the camera.
26:27
You're seeing his politics, his real emotional investment in the poor,
26:33
but you're also seeing a refusal to be sentimental, which I think is what makes
26:38
him great as well. Doesn't mean he's cold.
26:41
He's not a cold filmmaker at all, but he is not.
26:44
He's brutal. And in fact, I'm going to be nonlinear here and jump back.
26:49
He made a documentary, which is another one of my favorite things he ever did
26:54
in 1933 in Spain, a documentary called Land Without Bread.
26:58
That's how we translate it, but it's called Las Herdes, which I believe is the
27:02
name of the region he went to in Spain.
27:04
And it's about, I think it's 30 minutes, more or less.
27:08
It's a documentary of one of Spain's poorest regions.
27:13
And it is brutal. It is a brutal film.
27:17
And Bunuel made this decision that infuriated people, but I think it's what makes it a masterpiece.
27:23
There's a narrator who has a very, it's almost like you're just watching a travelogue
27:28
of Barcelona or something.
27:31
The narrator talks as if everything you're seeing is just part of a travelogue documentary.
27:37
But there are moments where like there is a child dying of malnutrition.
27:41
And then the narrator says, and when we returned, the child was dead, and then goes on.
27:46
And that kind of narration and the sort of,
27:51
This blithe, discordant, tonal approach. He plays Brahms music,
27:56
happy upbeat Brahms music.
27:58
This narrator is very not synced up with what you're seeing.
28:03
You get sort of like, why is he doing this? Agitated. But I think that was the point.
28:08
I think the point, like great art, I think he wanted people to be like,
28:13
this isn't right. And he wanted to agitate you and he wanted you to realize
28:17
there's this kind of indigent poverty and you can't ignore it.
28:20
You shouldn't put your head in the sand about it.
28:22
And the way he did it was through surrealism.
28:25
The tools that he was good at, surrealism, irony, comedy, land without bread.
28:30
It's a masterpiece. I talked about Susanna, so I'm just going to touch on it very briefly here.
28:36
I think Susanna is a great example of his Mexican period because it's one of
28:39
the lesser known movies, but it's amazing. I love it.
28:43
You can see in Susanna that Boonwell is just a master.
28:49
Like he knows the camera. He knows how to edit. He knows how to cut.
28:52
He clearly knows performances.
28:54
He knows how to make a movie run. He knows how to make it entertaining.
28:57
And because he knows his craft, he just smuggles in so many subversive themes.
29:06
You know, Mexico to this day is a very traditionalist, conservative culture
29:12
in many ways. In many ways, it's not, too.
29:14
That would actually be unfair to describe it one way or the other.
29:18
It's incredible culture.
29:19
But there is that strain. And to be able to kind of throw this little bomb in
29:25
in Susanna where you'd show the hypocrisy of the family, you show the sexuality,
29:31
you show exploitation, you show sort of the fascist violence or violence as
29:37
a substitute for sexuality when there's a kind of impotence on the part of the
29:42
fascist. That's all in Susanna.
29:44
And there's a scene where I think the dad whips Susanna and you're like, what?
29:51
And he gets away with it. Pumwell gets away with it. But it's just,
29:54
you should see it. It's a crazy movie. Great movie.
29:57
Exterminating Angel is the first draft, and actually the one I prefer,
30:02
of the movie he'll make in France called The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie,
30:07
where he really out now has a surrealist premise.
30:12
And in Exterminating Angel, a bunch of rich people, after I think an opera or
30:18
something, go to a rich person's house to have a meal and dessert.
30:23
And afterwards, they all go into a drawing room and suddenly discover they can't leave.
30:28
And they don't understand why they can't leave. Every time somebody gets up
30:33
to leave, something happens, and then they're there for days.
30:36
And not only can they not leave this drawing room, but nobody outside can go in.
30:42
They can't figure out why that is. So there are police outside and onlookers
30:46
that get by. They don't know why they can't enter the big mansion.
30:49
And then all the rich people don't know why they can't leave the drawing room.
30:53
And even in describing it, I'm sure you can pick up these like,
30:55
oh, like, oh, I think I get it.
30:57
You know, he's talking about class. He's talking about money.
31:01
He's talking and there's servants as well. So there's an upstairs downstairs aspect to the movie.
31:07
There is some crazy imagery. There's a disembodied hand.
31:12
There's a suicide. There's weird sexuality. There's a goat at a certain point.
31:18
And it all works. So you can see now, I mean, when Bunuel makes that movie, he's in his 60s.
31:24
And because he makes it in 61, I think. And you can see a confidence that you
31:29
also could see in that period from like Hitchcock, who made Psycho in 1960.
31:33
John Ford, who made the man who shot Liberty Valance in 1960.
31:37
These movie makers who are still got it. And they're actually using all their
31:43
craft to take even bigger swings.
31:46
Moving to the French period, which is my, this is heresy for a lot of people.
31:52
It's my least favorite period of Bunuel. I love the movies.
31:56
This is the thing. Don't, don't get it twisted. I love the films.
31:59
I could sit right now and just watch the French films from Jean Moreau's Diary
32:03
of a Chambermaid, which is kind of a reworking of a genre noir movie,
32:07
all the way through that that obscure object to desire.
32:10
The titles here are titles like The Milky Way, Phantom of Liberty,
32:16
Belle du Jour, Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
32:21
These movies in a weird way, and I don't mean this, I really don't mean this
32:25
as a backhanded thing, but they're so well made.
32:28
They're co-written with Jean-Claude Carrier, and maybe it could be that they're
32:32
in French, which was Bunuel's language or third language.
32:36
Maybe it could be that,
32:39
You know, he's getting into that weird thing, but a beautiful thing that happens
32:42
as people really age where they're kind of in this mellow gold phase where they're
32:48
sort of so accepting that some of the anger of the early work is gone.
32:52
And it's just more of a bemused, that's life and I'm leaving it soon.
32:57
There's a little bit of that feel to me. But that being said,
33:01
I mean, Belle du Jour is about a Catherine Deneuve is a newly married woman
33:05
who doesn't enjoy sex with her really beautiful husband.
33:08
But instead becomes a sex worker by day in a brothel and gets her kicks that way.
33:14
And that's a fascinating film. Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie takes Exterminating
33:19
Angel and flips it on its head.
33:20
Here, a bunch of bourgeoisie, upper middle class, French people are always trying
33:26
to sit down to dinner and something always interrupts it.
33:30
Something always prevents them from having dinner throughout the whole movie.
33:33
And it's hilarious. It's a great movie.
33:35
I mean, it is a great movie. I love it. the the
33:39
very funny but the
33:42
movie i want to talk about in this period is his last movie the obscure
33:45
object to desire this movie was a misery for
33:48
him to make he did not get along with the lead actress that he had hired and
33:53
so midway through the shoot or at some point in the shoot he just fired her
33:57
and cast a new actor and because he was surrealist because he had made so many
34:03
movies because he was so comfortable using dream logic.
34:07
He just went with it. And the movie works incredibly.
34:10
So it revisits a theme that he did quite a lot.
34:14
One of the things that's interesting and that Boonwell was pretty open about
34:16
was that his rural, deeply Catholic upbringing really messed him up sexually in a lot of ways.
34:28
And Hitchcock would be a great example of this too, Irish Catholic,
34:31
but sort of same story, Jesuit education, deeply Catholic. Although Hitchcock stayed Catholic.
34:37
I would argue that Boonewell stayed Catholic, but that's an argument for another time.
34:42
So Bunuel would make a number of movies that were often about older men obsessed
34:49
with younger women and wanting to enact their sex fantasies with these younger women.
34:57
But the sex fantasies were really unsettling, like wanting the women to pretend
35:01
they were dead or they were the older man's dead wife.
35:05
There's intimations of necrophilia, but not actual necrophilia,
35:09
but like, you know, just weird.
35:13
It's the funny thing is it's not misogynistic because boone
35:16
well was smart enough and brilliant enough to know that it was
35:19
the man's issue not the woman's issue so in
35:22
all these movies the older men are very comical they're they're you look at
35:28
them they often have foot fetishes uh tarantino and boone well share that boone
35:32
well had something about women's feet for sure it just comes up too many times
35:36
where a man sucks on some toes or like obsesses over a woman's foot.
35:42
And, uh, but obscure object of desire is in many ways, the culmination of that sub genre of movies.
35:50
And these would include movies like Viridiana, uh, Tristana,
35:54
and I'm trying to think Belle du Jour has a little of this.
35:59
Uh, the, there are many movies that Susanna touches on this a bit.
36:04
And you know i'm not going to get into it today because maybe
36:07
it'll be another pod my favorite bunwell film is
36:10
1961's feridiana which he made in
36:13
spain which in many ways here's the
36:16
surrealist thing i'll do i won't talk about that movie at all um just go see
36:22
it but in a weird way it's everything i'm talking about it's it and i feel it's
36:26
the apotheosis like he gets it all in in that movie and feridiana and there's
36:31
so many amazing stories about that movie It's such an incredible story,
36:34
and I'm not going to tell it.
36:37
Okay. So in that obscure object of desire, Fernando Ray, who he used a lot in
36:42
his later movies, well, actually from his middle period to his late period, is an older man.
36:47
He's obsessed with a woman here, played in two parts. And you do get this feeling
36:54
of a guy who is wrongly trying to possess or own or control a woman.
37:02
And it's only going to drive him crazy. And he's never going to do it.
37:06
And she's never going to do what he wants.
37:08
And it's a fascinating look at psychology and sexuality.
37:13
And it ends with a bomb blast, like an anarchist's bomb blast. And you're like, what?
37:18
You have to see the film. But when I saw that film, I think that film came out
37:21
in 77, maybe, 77, 78, my birth year.
37:25
So Bunuel was in his late 70s. Just what a way to go out with an anarchist bomb
37:30
blast. Okay, let's go to chapter three.
37:33
So to wrap this up, I just want to make a big argument that there is so much
37:42
in Boonwell that could help all of us today.
37:46
I do not see the handle of irony that Boonwell had.
37:52
You could argue that there are great movies, and it's not even an argument, it's a fact.
37:56
Filmmakers like Ruben Ostlund and others have definitely made movies that take
38:03
it to the middle class and the upper middle class and hypocrisy and societal hypocrisy.
38:07
You know, Ruben Ostlund made Force Majeure, The Square, Triangle of Sadness.
38:13
But I would argue that Boonwell, probably because he lived through a world war and a civil war,
38:22
his irony, it's not the irony of a very talented filmmaker.
38:29
It's the irony of lived experience translated into film, or it becomes a tool
38:37
that he is able to use and craft exquisite films.
38:42
He's unsentimental, which I personally think is one of the most important things
38:48
you can be if you want to make lasting work.
38:50
I think you can be emotional. I think you should be emotional.
38:54
I think you can be humanist. But I think when you get sentimental or exploitative
38:58
or manipulative, obviously all cinema is manipulation, but in the way that we
39:04
see that in American cinema, American mainstream cinema at its worst.
39:10
He didn't have...
39:11
Probably because he couldn't do it, but he just didn't have anything like that in him.
39:16
I want to encourage you to see Boone Well, because you see somebody who just
39:21
rolled with the punches,
39:23
kept going, knew he loved cinema, found opportunities where he could grab them,
39:27
make things, got better, learned his craft, and never gave up smuggling in amazing surrealism,
39:38
amazing satire, amazing dream imagery. amazing dream.
39:41
It's incredible how much of that he was able to smuggle in no matter what country
39:48
he was in, what country he was working for, who was producing the movie,
39:51
who was giving him the money.
39:53
He always got it in. So he's also a director to look at as somebody whose ability
39:59
to make sure their vision, their voice landed in every single film. It's pretty stunning.
40:07
And, you know, I will end on, I just have real intense memories I cherish.
40:16
When I was 18 and I was just starting to go to school and at the University
40:21
of Southern California, USC here in Los Angeles.
40:23
So I, during the summers, I had two jobs.
40:27
I would waiter, appetizer waiter at a restaurant called Las Prices in Laguna
40:33
Beach in Orange County, because my mom, my stepdad, my family lived in Orange County.
40:37
I'd be with my dad on weekends, but I'd also, my uncle was head of security
40:42
at the Universal Sheridan, right outside of Universal Studios here in Los Angeles.
40:46
And he gave me jobs doing overnight work. And I loved overnight security guard
40:52
work because all you usually were babysitting some ballroom set up that was
40:58
for a convention the next day.
40:59
Your job was to make sure no one. I have crazy stories from that that I will tell another time.
41:04
I once had to be the security guard for the like sex toy novelty convention.
41:10
And my uncle was like, don't tell your mom. His sister said,
41:13
please don't tell your mom about this. and.
41:16
A bunch of employees from the hotel came all night because they all wanted to
41:20
look at things. I thought that I saw things. I thought I was pretty broad minded.
41:24
I thought I kind of knew everything. I saw toys and things there that I was like, what?
41:30
I remember that very, very Boonewell-esque, Boonewellian maybe.
41:35
But what I would do and what my uncle would allow me to do as long as I did
41:39
my rounds correctly was I could watch movies and I could order from the hotel kitchen.
41:44
So I'd get like a pitcher of root beer, I'd order a pepperoni pizza,
41:48
and I'd have three Bunuel movies.
41:51
And I'd sit in the ballroom, and I'd watch a movie, I'd drink my root beer at
41:56
my pizza, do my rounds, watch the next movie, do my rounds. It's like a triple feature.
42:01
And I got paid. And then the sun would rise and it'd be showtime and I'd go
42:07
home and I'd get some sleep.
42:08
But that was the way that I saw a number of Bunuel films.
42:14
I just remember seeing these movies and loving them.
42:18
Just, you know, if movies are frequencies, I just was always on the Bunuel frequency,
42:26
especially that Mexican period, and even the surrealist period at the beginning.
42:30
And I just, it's that trick that some of the greatest artists have of doing
42:38
everything everybody else wants to do, and yet making it look like they're not doing it.
42:44
Erasing their artistry so that the artistry is just suffused in the entire thing.
42:49
I mean, that's been well.
42:50
And like I said, and I'll end on this, I've often said this,
42:54
that I don't really think it matters to God if you believe in God.
42:58
I don't think it matters to God if you believe or not. I really don't. I think what matters is—.
43:04
Were you a good person? Did you try to do good things? Did you try to help people?
43:08
Did you try to be selfless? Did you try to be humble?
43:10
Did you try to be responsible? Did you try to own up? Did you try to correct your mistakes?
43:15
And I think it's interesting that in a lot of philosophies, whether they're spiritual or secular,
43:21
in other words, you know, God or no God, it seems like a lot of philosophies
43:25
come to that same conclusion of a basically a life of service to others is a life well lived.
43:33
And I think what's interesting about Bunuel is his movies are so deeply caring,
43:40
so deeply humanist, so anguished over human suffering and human iniquity.
43:46
And there's an anger there and a fighting for it that I totally take him at
43:52
his word that he was an atheist.
43:53
But you feel like they're all made by a Jesuit priest when you see these movies,
43:59
a Jesuit priest with a really funny sense of humor and who's real hip with his dreams.
44:04
So check the, and I know Bunuel would hate it that I said that. So I'm sorry, Don Luis.
44:11
But if he is an atheist.
44:20
Louis Bunuel. A master, says Lonely Devil Films.
44:26
Gershon Kreimer says, I hope I'm saying your name, Herson.
44:29
Could be Gershon, Herson Kreimer. Or it could be Herson K. Reimer. Forgive me, man.
44:36
My love for films started after my mother took me to see Unshan Angelou at 14. Wow.
44:42
And then Zedes M replies to Gershon, I cannot imagine seeing this at 14.
44:47
I saw it in undergrad at like age 25 and it still haunts me.
44:51
I think I saw Unshan Angelou at 17, 16 or 17.
44:56
And it was crazy. I loved it. I was all for it. But I get it. I get it, Desem.
45:01
And then ForgottenMadness underscore LA. I'm reading this from Instagram.
45:06
Just, again, writes amazing things. But here's a little bit of what Forgotten
45:12
Madness underscore L.A. wrote.
45:14
Not just a great artist, but a direct, a real director's director,
45:18
inspiring generations by breaking the rules of narrative reality,
45:21
doing for story what Melies did for technique.
45:24
When he flew in to present a screening of his masterpiece, The Discreet Charm
45:27
of the Bourgeoisie, at the Los Angeles International Film Exhibition in 1972.
45:32
Director George Cukor put together a dinner party in his honor and invited a
45:35
number of director friends who were all eager to meet Bunuel and pay their respects.
45:40
The guest list included Billy Wilder, Alfred Hitchcock, William Wyler,
45:43
George Stevens, Robert Mulligan, Robert Wise, Ruben Mamoulian,
45:47
and an ailing John Ford just a few months before his death, who defied the rain
45:52
and ill health to meet him.
45:54
Though, when Ford left early, Billy Wilder joked that now the master shot won't match the close-ups.
46:00
So to answer your question, I love Boonwell, and he was one of the best to ever do it.
46:05
But I don't think my opinion on that matters as much as that of the legends who looked up to him.
46:09
And then Forgotten Madness, L.A., ends this by saying, also,
46:13
if you get a chance, check out his English-language film The Young One from
46:16
1960, which goes right at bias, privilege, and racial prejudice in America in
46:22
a way that mainstream Hollywood didn't dare do yet and still often won't.
46:26
It's more than 50 years ahead of its time.
46:28
Forgotten Madness underscore LA. I actually read this. I have not seen The Young
46:33
One, and I am going to see The Young One.
46:36
So anyway, that's it. There is Louis Bunuel, Lodge Dorf,
46:40
Next week, Secret Movie Club Podcast 213 will be Ken Loach and his movie Kes.
46:46
We're just going to talk about Kes, and we'll talk about Ken Loach a little bit.
46:50
But Kes, incredible film. You need to see it. Always, you can go to secretmovieclub.com.
46:55
Wait a moment, get on our newsletter.
46:57
Email us at community at secretmovieclub.com. Follow us on our socials.
47:01
Most of them are at secretmovieclub. There's a few variations like at Secret
47:05
Movie Club LA or at Secret Movie Club 35MM, just depending on whether the Secret
47:12
Movie Club was taken or not. But that's all our socials.
47:14
And we want to hear from you.
47:16
All right, Secret Movie Clubbers, I wish you all the best. I will see you next week.
47:21
The next week will be our last pod for March. Then we take a week off.
47:25
Then we'll be back early April.
47:27
Fight the good fight. Run the race. Keep the faith. I wish you all the best
47:32
though. And, and I look forward to talking to you next.