The Phantom of Liberty

Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty was an exercise in absurdity.  While every moment was far from typical, I’ll present a moment that captures fairly well the film’s uniqueness and general irony: a man and a woman sit in an investigator’s office, explaining to the investigator that their daughter has gone missing.  Their daughter sits next to them, however, and when the investigator asks what the daughter looks like, the parents point to her so that the investigator might get a physical description.  He then fills out a missing person form, checking her eye color, height and weight in the process, and then concludes by saying to the parents, “I’m glad you brought her.  It helps.”

The film presents a great number of these short encounters, and strays from character to character frequently.  It lacks any sort of coherent narrative or plot, and any extensive character development.  Thematic elements, on the other hand, recur frequently.  Before attempting to draw these elements into any sort of coherent picture--which may be an impossible task in itself--I will try to address some of them individually.

Throughout the film, Buñuel directly and indirectly approaches the subject of customs, or societal norms.  At one point, a group of people sit around a table speaking amiably with each other; their seats, however, are open toilets, and they sit with pants lowered and dresses raised.  The content of their conversation is the amount of feces humanity excretes each day.  When a young girl complains that she is hungry, an older woman scolds her for speaking inappropriately.  At one point, a man asks quietly for the dining room, and then eats by himself in a cramped space.  Buñuel seems to be implying that the customs society has established over time are arbitrary: that the bathroom isn’t inherently foul, but is because we’ve made it so; in a sense, he proves this by demonstrating a group of content people conversing from toilet seats.  At another point, he has a woman play the piano wearing nothing but stockings, while she holds an ordinary conversation with her brother.  He hopes to undermine the perversion of what we consider perverse, or, more broadly, to help us take a second look at societal constraints, and shed them if we want to.  While the shape of society affects us, we also play a role in shaping it.

This idea is a part of the film’s larger notion of liberty, and our misconceptions of it.  By failing to realize the restrictions placed on us by society’s conventions--conventions that can extend to our conceptions of work, education, ways of arranging the day and the week and the year, place, family structure--we end up believing ourselves to be much more free than we are.  In one part of the film, a sniper who kills at least thirty people is brought to court and sentenced to death.  Upon announcement of the verdict, his handcuffs are removed and he leaves the court with a facial expression of contentment, shaking hands and signing autographs as he walks outside.  On one view, Buñuel might be equating death with freedom, or liberty: as soon as the man is required to die, he appears to be unrestricted by anything at all, perhaps because he is no longer subject to society’s conventions.

Buñuel seems concerned with the idea of mischief, with both a mention of foxes by a group of men driving a military tank and a several-second stationary shot of a stuffed fox, and a mention of mischief by a priest.  In addition, numerous students at a police academy behave mischievously.  Because mischief, in one sense, is simply disregard for conventions, and action with that ideal in mind, it seems likely that Buñuel would hold it in high regard.

Even in its structure and overall concept, the film objects to societal conventions: without a plot, without developed characters, with seemingly meaningless, chance transitions between characters and narrative threads, and with its closing thirty seconds occupied by a close-up shot of an emu’s head, the film seems to be shouting with objections to any sort of outside standard.  All in all, Buñuel makes a powerful objection to the blindness that prevents us from realizing that we can live our lives differently than we do--a blindness as severe as being unable to see our own child.