The eye of the cinema cut. In a case of
Rare Video , the debut of Luis Buñuel film.
do not know if the result is a work of art, but it is certainly cinema.
Cinema, in the sense that no art, no science can make the place (Jean Vigo)
"After the screening of a Chien Andalou , about fifty people showed up at the police station to file a complaint, stating: "We must ban that film obscene and cruel." It was the beginning of a long series of insults and threats, which has haunted me until old age. " Today there is no police complaint but the market from cine-doped watermelons and different banality, to cut out the eyes of a disturbing film, able to undermine the strong convictions of those sitting in the room (or, in the contemporary version of the viewer, in front of the DVD player). No film will be the same, if you allow yourself the vision of the early cinema of Luis Buñuel great, and for those of you more available, it will implement a real revolution of the eye. Un Chien Andalou , L'Age d'or and Las Hurdes , three masterpieces of the so-called surrealist cinema, are available in a boxed set Rare Video (www.rarovideo.com), edited by Enrico Ghezzi and Donatello Fumarola . A box set really well done, which also contains some extras and a booklet with critical notes and texts, among others, Aldo Nove, Jean Vigo and André Breton.
Three films that, eighty years after they first tortured projections, can create havoc in the eyes of every spectator, contributing to a revolution in the very idea of \u200b\u200bcinema and vision, which still maintains its strength. Experience returning at your eye, then.
The first film, Un chien andalou, 1928, is co-written with Salvador Dali, a method which Buñuel called paranoid-critical images and dreams were recorded without any filter, as emerged in discussions between the two authors, without a link or a default logic, but focusing exclusively on their emotional impact. The result is very similar to our experience of dreams, the situations are happening at the same pace of our visions of the night, without a rational explanation. The film begins with a famous sequence in which a man armed with a razor cut eye: a prologue that hardly go unnoticed, a real shock, which increases the power of the Camera, freed from the need to be a true reflection of reality, finally able to reverse the logical succession of vision. Welcomed by a huge interest and very different reactions to each other, with Luis Buñuel film that earned entry into the group of Surrealists, made in those years by André Breton, Aragon, Max Ernst, Man Ray, Picasso, intellectuals who had chosen to to expose the injustices of society through scandal and provocation.
The next film, L'Age d'Or (1930), continues to feed this desire to desecrate, to explore the limits of representation, to upset right-thinking and respectable. Again, the film was greeted with violent protests and attacks by extremists on the right of the room in which it projected, so as to trigger the prohibition of public screening for the film (ban remained in force for several decades until 1980 ). L'Age d'or is a film about a mad man and a woman, eroticism and its extreme consequences. Without the use of a classical narrative structure, but through a succession of visions and extreme situations as in Un chien andalou, even in this movie as a good surrealist Bunuel attacks the pillars of bourgeois society, the Church, the military and patriotism.
Hurdes Las - Tierra sin pan (1932) is the tale of misery and cruelty in a region of Spain, Extremadura, a name that contains the key to understanding the lives of their inhabitants, men and animals, which share a daily life miserable and tragic. Shot in documentary style, Las Hurdes, however, is able to transcend the mere fact of the story, becoming the mirror of human existence. Buñuel himself writes that "those mountains I have won once. The misery of the people fascinated me, as well as their intelligence and attachment to their country lost their land without bread. In at least twenty villages daily fresh bread was a mysterious object. Every time someone brought from Andalusia a loaf of stale bread that was used as a bargaining chip. "
What unites these films is the simplicity of the style of Buñuel, Fumarola writes in the booklet accompanying the DVD, the eccentricity is within all things that are staged. Buñuel not looking for a beautiful picture, does not take a sophisticated style and self, a defect that often unites the avant-garde, but favors an essentiality of the gaze, that remains to be addressed when the reality is when, with eyes closed, you focuses on the world of dreams. The possibility therefore remains the key to seduction: do not let themselves be fascinated by a look capable of restoring the essence of life, letting go to a visual experience that breaks down, overlapping, confusing things and conquest. Without resistance.
