Every now and then I have an irresistible urge to travel long distances on my bicycle, partly to explore new areas that speed by too quickly and abstractly in a car, and partly to give myself time to mentally process assorted life issues that weigh in my thoughts. The holiday weekend provided me with such an opportunity, so I rode from my home in Pasadena, California to the Miracle Mile district of Los Angeles and back on Saturday. The 50-mile roundtrip (including diversions) allowed me to visit Koreatown for lunch, where I picked up DVDs of the Korean films My Beautiful Girl Mari (2002) and Nabi (2001), continued on to the New Beverly Cinema for its 2:55 showing of Roman Polanski‘s Cul-de-Sac (1966), and eventually arrived at my destination: the L.A. County Museum of Art‘s 5:00 screening of Luis BuÒuel‘s The Milky Way (1969), recently restored and rereleased by Rialto Pictures.
One of the pleasures of Rialto’s catalogue is the opportunity to reevaluate films that have had little or no distribution on video, seeing them in 35mm splendor and rewatching them later as Criterion Collection DVDs. Like my own journey on Saturday, BuÒuel’s film is an episodic hodgepodge of sights and sounds, a colorful, open narrative through time, space, and philosophy. While it lacks the edge of his earlier works or the polish of his later ones, it’s a marvelously breezy and entertaining look at dogma and its devotees as two French beggars pilgrimage to a holy city in Spain and mysteriously encounter figures throughout Christian history along their way. More witty than Dogma (1999) and more aesthetically refined than the original Bedazzled (1967), The Milky Way is affectionately irreverent and adventurous storytelling.
Luis BuÒuel (1900-1983) has long been acknowledged as one of the grand masters of filmmaking. His transnational career (working in Spain, France, Italy, Mexico, and the US at various times) produced 33 controversial and unique films, from 1929s ground-breaking Un chien andalou (co-created with Salvador Dali) to social realist works like Los Olvidados (1950) to elegantly experimental French productions like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Born to a wealthy family and (like Hitchcock) trained as a Jesuit, BuÒuel subsequently became a surrealist dedicated to countering bourgeois realism (think Thomas Kinkade) with shocking juxtapositions and subversively humorous images of middle class immorality, hypocrisy, and injustice.
Which is to say that BuÒuel’s films are often quite funny despite (or even because of) their hard-hitting surfaces. As William S. Pechter, the one-time film critic of Commentary magazine, wrote in his 1970 article, “Why We Laugh At BuÒuel”:
“…Far from there being, as Pauline Kael contends, ‘no way to get a hold on what BuÒuel believes in,’ BuÒuel’s films constitute, with a singleness of purpose as unwavering as any to be found in art, a continually unfolding fiction in the form of an almost scientifically methodical testing of the proposition that we are living in the worst of all possible worlds–a belief if there ever was one. It is a world emblazoned by its dislocations, whether inflicted by the folly of institutions… or the cruelties of nature,…or, as in the miseries of the Hurdanos in Land Without Bread, by the complicity of both. It is a world evoked by an art in which loathing, a Swiftian revulsion and disgust, is a motive force, but an art in which, if one cannot really discover a recognizable sympathy or compassion…neither is there misanthropy.
…And though we may be unable to appropriate him to any congenial reformism, the fact remains that his refusal to make the reformist statements is precisely that quality in his work which, in its denial of feelings to assuage ours, presses us to our own confrontation. Upon our habitual numbness, BuÒuel’s films exert the terrible pressure of the non-committal. And we laugh.”
On account of this, BuÒuel has often been labeled a surreal anarchist and Pechter further explains why by quoting from BuÒuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh (1982):
“I will let Friedrich Engels speak for me. He defines the function of the novelist (and here he means filmmaker) thus: ‘The novelist will have acquitted himself honorably of his task when, by means of an accurate portrait of authentic social relations, he will have destroyed the conventional view of the nature of those relations, shattered the optimism of the bourgeois world, and forced the reader to question the permanency of the prevailing order, and this even if the author does not offer us any solutions, even if he does not clearly take sides.'”
Much of this desire to poke holes in institutional structures and ideological senses of complacency can be seen in The Milky Way. A fine line often divides an artist’s critiques and obsessions, and BuÒuel’s incessant anti-clericalism suggested a love/hate relationship with the Church. (“Thank God I’m still an atheist,” he often quipped.) In My Last Sigh, he takes pride in the fact that critics disagreed as to whether the film was for or against ecclesiastical thinking, and claimed “in my opinion The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything at all. Besides the situation itself and the authentic doctrinal dispute it evokes, the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology.”
Like the more recent Waking Life (2001), the film uses a loose “database” narrative structure as the two pilgrims encounter one theological conundrum and eccentric persona after another. (Those itching to preview the screenplay may read it in its entirety here. ) In fact, viewers unfamiliar with Catholic doctrines may find themselves at a loss for grasping the significance of one argument or another. (In his 1972 article, “Interruption as Style,” Jonathan Rosenbaum described The Milky Way as coming “dangerously close to being all notations and no text.” For the uninitiated, it might be helpful to check out M. Gail Hammer’s notes on Catholic heresies referenced in the movie catalogued for a Religion and Film course at Syracuse University. Clip and save.)
My own favorite scene is undoubtedly one in which a Jesuit and Jansenist become so infuriated with one another’s obscure pontifications on the role of grace and free will that they engage in a fencing duel interspersed with theological claims. Shot in handheld closeups, BuÒuel intensifies the absurdity of their fanaticism by juxtaposing the life and death struggle with arcane philosophical enumerations.
A picturesque film that puts the French and Spanish countryside to good use, the movie delights in joking about serious matters if only to preserve the mystery of life. The Milky Way can also be seen as a crucial stepping-stone for BuÒuel’s subsequent French productions. As he writes in My Last Sigh:
“When I think back today, The Milky Way, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, and The Phantom of Liberty form a kind of trilogy, or rather a triptych. All three have the same themes, sometimes even the same grammar; and all evoke the search for truth, as well as the necessity of abandoning it as soon as you’ve found it. All show the implacable nature of social rituals; and all argue for the importance of coincidence, of a personal morality, and of the essential mystery in all things, which must be maintained and respected.”
In addition to the BuÒuel films readily available on VHS and DVD, ebay offers various titles for interested seekers. In particular, I’ll note the two all-region DVDs produced by Films Sans FrontiËres, which include excellent transfers of the black comedies The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) and El (1952), and my personal favorites, the previously mentioned Los Olvidados and Land Without Bread (1933).