The Phantom of Liberty

This week I am reviewing the film screening for Luis Buñuel's 1974 surrealist film The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté), which took place Monday night at Annenberg Auditorium. Buñuel's film is (purposefully) hard to describe, but if I had to do it in one sentence I would say that it depicts a series of unrelated episodes that are loosely connected by chance rather than any sense of a strong narrative structure. For example, one scene depicts a professor leaving a bed and breakfast motel to go teach a philosophy/legal class to a group of police academy officers, which then transitions to two of those police officers pulling a man over for speeding, which in turn transitions to a story about this man and his medical issues, etc. Characters are abandoned as quickly as they are introduced, and so forth. Therefore, because of this structure, it is impossible for the viewer to form any opinions that traditional film review calls for, such as those about character and thematic development.

Going into this viewing, I had many expectations and probably misguided preconceived notions of what a surrealist work of art is supposed to be. Previously to me, surrealism entailed the use of strange juxtapositions and incomprehensible imagery in order to convey a somewhat existentialist meaninglessness of life. I felt that the "meaning" behind surrealist works were that they were supposed have no meaning. However, I had a profoundly different experience watching The Phantom of Liberty. Firstly, it is important to note that the film had a great handle on humor, irony, and absurdity. One episode that conveys this well is when two parents are informed by a school headmistress that their daughter is missing because she cannot be found anywhere around the school. However, it turns out the daughter was in class where she was supposed to be the whole time. She even responds to her name when the attendance is called. Furthermore, the daughter also accompanies the parents to the police station to help file a missing person's report, and she even helps the sergeant fill in information like her age, eye color, and height.

More importantly though, when trying to understand this film on a broader level, there seems to be a greater trend than mere humor or absurdity. With every episode, Buñuel seems to be poking fun and critiquing modern society, specifically the world occupied by the bourgeoisie class. Indeed, every single one of our societal institutions is attacked somehow: religion, medicine, police, legal, family, parenting, love and sex, education, etc. It is quite remarkable that this is the case, and I could literally list every episode that is relevant, but for the best of everyone's sake, I'll just mention the most poignant ones. For instance, in the sequences that take place at the aforementioned bed and breakfast motel, a group of Catholic monks offer to help pray for one of the female guest's sick father. When the monks assure the woman that their prayer has helped the sick in the past, the woman asks if it actually cured the sickness and the monks humorously respond, "No, but they felt a little bit better." After this, they get on their knees in ritual, light candles in front of a crucifix, and utter many Latin and French prayers for a short while until Buñuel jarringly transitions into a scene where the monks and the woman are seen rowdily playing poker, betting, drinking, and smoking cigarettes. Clearly, the director is presenting satire directed towards the Catholic church and religion in general.

In another completely unrelated scene, a dinner party is shown taking place among a few couples and the host couple's daughter. Here, the dinner party acts as a symbol for middle/upper class stuffiness and self-righteousness. They engage in typical intelligent discussions, talking about things like theater and art, traveling through Spain, and political issues like population control. However, the satirical twist Buñuel offers here is that instead of sitting and eating at a dinner table, they all sit on toilettes instead of seats with their pants undone. Then instead of going for a bathroom break, each individual has to shamefully get up from the "dinner table" to go to a separate private room to eat and drink. This role reversal, while humorous, also attacks the bourgeoisie self-importance and supposed sophistication by equating their lifestyle literally with "piss and shit."

The point I took from all these episodic attacks on our society was that surrealism or at least this particular Buñuel film (which was actually made a good fifty years after the birth of surrealism), has a very clear message to send: we are bound to societal conventions that at the heart of it are arbitrary and only restricting. We shouldn't view life as a story to be told (as the Hollywood narratives have it), but rather we should look at it as a sequence of randomness and absurdity in order to liberate us from our restrictive conventions and customs. This film therefore is mainly a revolutionary statement and it is fitting that it ends depicting a riot of people shouting "Down with liberty!" What is important to note though, is that the power of this work and the surrealist movement in general is not that it tells us this message directly as in an essay/argumentative format but rather it does so artistically. This is why Buñuel makes his audience sit through a 100 minutes of crazy imagery and instead of ending by showing the people rioting shouting his message directly, it rather shows a closeup of a spinning emu's head with the noise of the riot in the background. He makes sure to keep his film absurd, hard to navigate, and more concerned with free association and unconscious message delivery rather than deliberate, thought-out messaging. Because of all of this, I felt--to use terms we are quite familiar with--this film featured a great combination of consonance and dissonance, both giving the audience a graspable message and shocking it at the same time.