Luis Buñuel Portorres
was born on February 22, 1900 in the town of Calanda, in the province of Aragon in northeastern Spain. The local mysterious folklore and the desolation, weirdness and cruelty he experienced in his childhood have become important elements in the structure of his artistic life. To please his father, 17-year-old Buñuel came to Madrid to study an engineer course. In the student apartment in Madrid, he met several talented classmates, including the famous poet Federico García Lorca and the painter Salvador Dali. The former made him discover the charm of literature, while the latter He became an important partner in his early art.
In 1925 he came to the birthplace of film - Paris, France, where he created two world-recognized masterpieces of surrealist films - "An Andalusian Dog" (1929) and "The Golden Age" (1930).
As an atheist, Buñuel's writings are full of ruthless critiques of the corruption of the religious system and the degeneration of the bourgeoisie, for which he was ostracized and persecuted by the ruling class. In the late 1930s, after the Franco dictatorship of Spain came to power, Buñuel was forced to work in New York, the United States. A few years later, he settled in Mexico and filmed films such as "The Forgotten People" and "Angel of Destruction" there. After 1964, Buñuel moved his workplace to France, where the film atmosphere is strong, and classics such as "Beauty in the Day" and "Bourgeois Prudence Charm" are the representatives of this period. In 1976, at the age of 76, Buñuel returned to his homeland and filmed his final work "The Obscure Purpose of Desire" in Spain.
Among his later works, "The Charm of the Prudence of the Bourgeoisie" (hereinafter referred to as "Zi") is the best, it not only reflects Bunuel's absurdity of fate, the uncertainty of desire and the mystery of characters thinking, but also injecting sociological ideas into it. The film won the 45th Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the French Mélière Award in 1972.
The protagonist of the film, Raphael, is the ambassador of the fictional South American country, the Republic of Miranda. On the surface, he is well-dressed and virtuous, but he secretly uses his special status as a diplomat to sell drugs and smuggle with his friends. The ambassador's friends mainly include the Devinos, the Senechars and Mrs. Devino's sister Florence, who are all typical representatives of the bourgeoisie. The film is based on the fact that Ambassador Raphael and his friends have met for many times to have dinners at the Senechar couple's house. However, due to various accidents, this long-awaited dinner has been repeatedly unsuccessful. At first, it was because the guests misremembered the date of the banquet and had to go to a nearby small hotel for dinner. Unexpectedly, the store was holding a wake for their recently deceased owner, and the plan fell through again. Another dinner was temporarily canceled due to the Senechar couple's craving for bedtime... In short, the meal was suspended indefinitely, until the end of the film, when the delicious food was ready, it encountered a military exercise , A group of soldiers for exercise rushed in outside the door.
Kieslowski once said: "We are constantly trying to find a way out for ourselves, but we are forever imprisoned by our passions and feelings." In Buñuel's films we always see some characters trying to Looking for a way out for his desires, but struggling to find no way, and then get into trouble. In "Golden Age", it is difficult for couples to get married; in "Angel of Destruction", they cannot leave the apartment after dinner;
On the other side of dream images,
Buñuel's films are full of bizarre props, bizarre characters, absurd events, and tangled dreams. In "Zi", he repeatedly used the narrative technique of overlapping dreams and stories, connecting segments of life, and characters such as ambassadors, lieutenants, lieutenants, and bishops also appeared alternately with these segments. Buñuel is undoubtedly a master of dreams, especially in "Zi", when dreams appear in the story, the audience does not know that the characters in them are dreaming. For example, after the lieutenant colonel promised to hold a banquet to entertain everyone, the next scene was the banquet. Just as the guests were eating, the wall turned into a curtain and was pulled up, making people feel like they were on the stage, and the audience was in an uproar.
Movies involving dreams can be described as the sands of the Ganges River. The author is more convinced by Hitchcock's "Dr. Edward" (1945), Bergman's "Wild Strawberries" (1957), and Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood" (1962), Fellini's "Eight and a Half" (1963), David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" (2001), Jan Svangel's "Nightmare Asylum" (2005)... In the 1950s, Alain Robbe-Grillet, a leading figure in the French "New Fiction School", as the main force of the "Left Bank School", his works will also give people the illusion of being in a dream. Watching "Last Year at Marienbad" written by him is like following the protagonist into a reincarnation-like dream. The "Express Train Across Europe" directed by him, with its layered structure of the play within the play, freely travels back and forth between the two levels of narrative and story, which also creates a dreamlike feeling.
Don't think that the author will use Freud's psychoanalytic theory on dream interpretation to analyze the dream in the movie. I just briefly listed some movies related to dreams. Now, I must emphasize that Bunuel does not like the use of psychoanalysis to explain his films, "I think that psychoanalysis is like a certain class of society. , Conservative therapy for a certain type of people, and I definitely don't belong to this class." Rob-Grillet also pointed out in "The Concept of Film and My Creation": "Freud let the patient tell the dream , this is already the first level of distortion. Dreams are hard to tell. In fact, I thought it was impossible to tell. Dream dictation inevitably involves many repetitions, contradictions, and omissions. From dream to dictation, then the third stage - Transcripts, which produced the second distortion. Freud wrote written materials based on oral materials, which must be narrower and less sufficient. His research on the patient's subconscious was based on his own transcripts. He thought that , the text narrative is exactly the same as the original dream... I think that there is indeed a language structure in consciousness, but there are also many elements similar to pictures. Therefore, those who are interested in studying the human mind should write novels and make movies. " Countless
anti-entropy
articles about Buñuel, in order to highlight aspects of this extremely contradictory director, describe him as an amalgam of contradictions. He is portrayed as an atheist and a Catholic, a communist and an anarchist, a recluse and a joyful, sentimental and grumpy, irrational and intellectual, French and Spanish. However, he was indifferent or even dismissive of the articles about himself. "I've been trying to live with a multitude of contradictions without ever trying to deal with and resolve them. They're a part of me, a part of everything I cherish that is so elusive."
Wang Xiaobo once regarded his writing as an anti-entropy process from the perspective of thermodynamics. "Entropy" was originally derived from the second law of thermodynamics as a state parameter of matter reflecting the irreversibility of spontaneous processes. One of the laws summed up by the second law of thermodynamics based on a large number of observations is that in an isolated system, the actual process always increases the entropy value of the entire system, which is the principle of entropy increase. The process of increasing entropy is a process leading to chaos and disorder. Entropy is a measure of disorder and disorder. The greater the entropy value, the greater the degree of disorder and disorder. Anti-entropy is the opposite, which is an abnormal phenomenon. From this point of view, writing this article is a process of anti-entropy, which is destined to be ignored by Buñuel.
May 1, 2009
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