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.

"All of Me": Performance, Skits and Readings by Ignacio Rivera

Ignacio Rivera’s performance was a series of short poems and skits. He portrayed many characters that he had experienced during his life, and highlighted a few that he wrote about based on the time he spent in Hawaii as an entertainer and sex worker.
Rivera, a “Queer-Trans-Entity, and Black Boricua performance artist,” is also an activist and the founder of a non profit dedicated to spreading economic justice as a form of gender and sexual liberation.

The main drive of the poetry was to challenge preconceptions about gender and sexuality. As a member of the trans-community and an activist, Ignacio used he/she pronouns interchangeably, often substituting in they or “ze” so that there would be no gender identification. The skits were meant to be portrayals of certain people in his life, whose names he had changed. He acted as Nena-Chucho (a trans woman), her mother, and her good friend.

Ignacio’s acting was superb. He was able to switch fluidly from character to character, often changing just a garment. He began with a “guyish” button down shirt as his main attire for the evening, but then switched into a dress when playing the mother figure, and into a pink hooded sweatshirt. He also played the ‘trans character’, by changing into high heels. By being able to switch clothes and convincingly act as characters of different genders and sexualities, he really forced questioning of what gender really means, and of what sexuality really means. In that sense, the performance was extremely effective, since the audience had to question how one person could convincingly play so many different parts, almost to the extent of morphing into each one of them. Even by changing clothes, he convincingly looked more feminine or more masculine, challenging our concepts of what that really means.

The poetry, I felt, was intended to capture the idea of humanity and love. Many of his poems were very explicit, but also communicated deep feelings of love and longing, that were very natural. He spoke of a story where he was in the bathroom with another girl and they were exploring sex and sexuality, and at one point, the girl got up and urinated standing up. Ignacio was so amazed that he decided to try himself, and was found by his mother and spanked very hard, and told “Girls Sit.” He finished the poem and told us, “See, even then, how powerful it is to be told what a specific gender is expected to do.”

In another one of his poems, he spoke about how he had a roommate who was a beautiful woman, and she talked about how she wanted to build her house a certain way, and they would lie together and build castles in the sky, and he would lie next to her and love her in his mind. While the image of that would be confusing to a lot of people, since it is hard to conceptualize what gender Ignacio is, and many people have preconceived notions of what gender really means, I was struck by how natural and communicative the poem was, and how the protagonist could be genderless and it wouldn’t matter—the sentiment it communicated was still based in love and longing. I felt the performance effectively challenged notions of what gender means, through visuals as well as through the written and performed word.

The Poetry of Ignacio Rivera

On Monday night some classmates and I experienced the deeply personal and emotion driven poetry of Ignacio Rivera as part of Herstory month. As Ignacio walked to the front of the Tresidder Oak Room, she offered the handful of audience members some insight into her life and her poetry. She first explained that she identifies as trans-gender and that although she has female anatomy, she has a strong disconnect with her physical body. Ignacio explained that neither "he" nor "she" is a correct label and prefers, at the moment, to be referred to as "ze" or "they". Her collection of poetry entitled "All of Me" was dedicated to topics such as race, women, identity, poverty and other subjects she felt were integral to her life.


She opened with a poem entitled Rediscovering Me. Standing calmly behind a plain black music stand, one hand in her pocket, she began to speak with a voice that commanded my attention. In the poem she recalled a time in her life when she felt she really had no idea who she was both racially and sexually. Her flowing river of words were a mix of English and Spanish, conveying her trouble finding her place in a white washed world while staying true to her Black and Hispanic background. She constantly repeated, "Who am I? Who am I?” At times her flow became fast and frantic, mirroring the racing thoughts she once felt and was now attempting to convey. Her language was graphic and uncensored to say the least, but not unnecessarily so. Although some may have considered her word choices offensive or crude, I felt an overwhelming honesty in her poetry. She felt no need to censor any of her thoughts, giving her poems a unique rawness that I have never encountered.


Between each poem, Ignacio gave short anecdotes about her life that were meant to introduce the next poem. These short 30-second stories about her life were completely shocking. She is a survivor of sexual abuse, of incest, and of the welfare system. She's been called a fag, a dyke, and every other ugly word you can think of. She's fought against gender norms and societal expectations all of her life and is still able to stand proud and share her experiences with a room of strangers. And even through all this, she did not preach about how we need to change our mindsets or ourselves. It was not her goal to force the importance of acceptance and tolerance. Ignacio's goal was to expose a part of her life, to share her experiences in a very honest way, and to leave the audience to do what they wished with her words.


I think Ignacio was very successful in affecting the audience in her intended way. In all honesty, a lot of her poetry made me extremely uncomfortable for reasons I have yet to completely understand. But I believe that a lot of Ignacio’s aim was in fact to make people uneasy because with discomfort comes reassessment, and further contemplation on the topics she discussed. The power of her words was in their sincerity. No matter if the audience loved or hated her, at the end of the day she was 100% real and that cannot be argued.

Rodin Sculpture Garden: "Fallen Caryatid," "Martyr," and "Orpheus"

Upon observing the Rodin Sculpture Garden beside the Cantor Arts Center, I notice that these sculptures have really lived. Their facial expressions, their contorted bodies tell stories of pain and despair, of failure and suffering. The sculptures are bare, exposing themselves shamelessly to the harsh critics of the world, uncomprehending children, and curious admirers alike. These figures age, yet they are constant and unchanging; time can rust their color, but not the delicate folds and creases of their bodies. The Sculpture Garden is truly a meditation on emotion and the human soul.

In Fallen Caryatid, Rodin portrays a woman who has fallen under the weight of a bowl-like figure, which she carries over her shoulder. She stands in a crouched position, withdrawn but bare. Her back is curved inwards, mimicking the introverted nature of her expression. Her eyes are closed; she has one breast exposed (the other is welded to her leg), a single eye to observe the world around her. This sculpture is solitary, but carries a hint of remorse; it is as if a faint cloud of darkness hovers over her world. The woman is dealing with failure, having withdrawn from her duty as a column to a building, or caryatid. Rather than bearing a look of distraught, she wears a pensive expression, one that points to a deeper source of melancholy coming from within. Upon recognizing this inner darkness, a pang of sympathy resonates within me when I observe this woman.

Similarly, Rodin’s Martyr causes me to recognize the dark and futile within myself, the world, and the sculpture. Consisting of a woman lying down with her body contorted in pain, Martyr is a tribute to the universality of suffering. This woman is evidently experiencing great torment; one of her hands is fisted, concentrating the suffering in a single point. The woman is exposed and vulnerable; one arm is extended backwards, asking for help, and yet all anyone can do is watch her suffer. She must carry this burden as the Fallen Caryatid carries her bowl-figure. Observing Martyr gives me a feeling of helplessness. I realize my and others’ suffering is inevitable and out of my control; I can reach out for help but will receive none. Martyr is an ode to tragedy; the sculpture itself is hollow, like the human spirit and hope itself.

But I cannot wallow endlessly in this pool of pity and sorrow Rodin creates in these female sculptures; I must turn to the pool of Rodin’s male sculptures, namely, Orpheus. For Orpheus, his tragedy is already known: his love Eurydice has died, and when he goes to the underworld to retrieve her, he is told she may return to the earth as long as he walks in front of her and doesn’t look back. Unfortunately, he forgets and looks back, and Eurydice is gone forever. Orpheus then is left in despair to sing his mournful songs. In Rodin’s rendition, Orpheus is lunging forward and reaching upward as if he is calling Eurydice. His fingers point down towards the underworld and his face wears a tormented expression. In observing Orpheus, I am led to feel the deep sorrow of personal failure, the kind that results from individual responsibility. I wholly empathize with Orpheus, and the detail of his face sing to me of his melancholy.

It seems that, in these sculptures, Rodin is trading on sympathy, on evoking powerful emotions through body positions and angles. And in this regard he completely succeeds, for his work is emotionally despairing and overwhelming. His sculptures tell the universal story of human tragedy, of the pain and suffering inevitable in a single life. When we “read” this story, the strings of our heart bend in such a way as to mimic the bend of the sculptures’ bodies. The empathy we share for the portrayed distress of the sculptures summons the dissonant within us, causing us to reflect upon our own lives and redeem ourselves before we, too, become destined to live eternally in despair.

-Dominique Y

Rodin's Sculpture Garden and the Burghers of Calais

            This weekend, Katie, Dominique, and I met at the steps of the Thomas Welton Art Gallery, hoping to see the Design Unbound exhibit. To our dismay, it was closed. After a fruitless search on the Stanford event calendar, we decided to visit Auguste Rodin’s sculpture garden instead. I focused on his sculptures of women, specifically Fallen Caryatid With Urn, Fallen Caryatid With Stone, Eve, Martyr, and two sculptures entitled Meditation. Later that day, I stopped in the Quad to take a closer look at Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, sculptures that I pass daily. To my surprise, Rodin’s style of the Burghers is quite different of that of his sculptures outside of the Cantor Center. I wondered why the sculptures had such distinct styles and what it means about Stanford University that we choose to display Rodin’s Burhgers of Calais in the center of our Quad.

            Whenever I visit the Cantor Arts Center garden, I feel as though I have been picked up from Palo Alto and transported to a European garden. Stanford has the second largest collection of Rodin’s in the world—and this garden was made to display them. On a Sunday afternoon, one can find children prancing around the sculptures (as their parents attempt to give them lessons on art history), curious students, and even a woman attempting to take portraits of her dogs in front of The Gates of Hell. The sculptures are speckled with yellow pollen and decorated with spider webs.  Everything appears happy and while Rodin’s sculptures of women may look beautiful on first glance, they seem to have a deeper, darker meaning.

Fallen Caryatid With Urn and Fallen Caryatid With Stone are both sculptures of women, crouched in similar positions, with an urn and stone (respectively), on their heads and shoulders. The women’s bodies are closed: their legs and arms are crossed, and their hands hide their faces. Caryatid’s are female structures that take the place of pillars or columns in architectural structures. The stone and urn weigh both women down and it appears that they are hiding in contorted stances because they have been weighted down by society.

The two sculptures entitled Meditation are also two women that are in similar stances. They are both standing with their heads titled downwards and to their side, their shoulders are oddly tilted, their legs are crossed, and their left knee is bend slightly upwards as though it is protecting them. The first Meditation appears purposely unfinished. The sculpture has no knee, no arms, and has jagged lines, reminiscent of Cubism, along its stomach.

While Rodin’s Caryatids and Meditations are presented in vulnerable positions, the woman of Martyr was vulnerable, and has been attacked. Her body lies upon the ground, her fist extends outwards and is clenched tightly, and her head has fallen backwards. Only part of her body is displayed: about a third of it looks as though it has been spliced off and the rest of her body has been wrapped around a stone pedestal. All of these sculptures of women are full of emotion. They may not look entirely natural, as they are composed of expressive textures and lines that are not natural to the human body but they are beautiful pieces of artwork that deserve to represent the Cantor Arts Center.

            Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, which, as previously mentioned, are an integral component of the Stanford Quad, are very different from Rodin’s sculptures of women. They are smooth, polished, proud, and prominent. Each of the six men is represented as a powerful individual: he is not composed of unnatural textures, he is not hiding, and he does not look weighted down by society, despite the fact that he is about to die. Rather, each of the individuals is proud: his head is directed upwards, his eyes are open and confronting the world, his body takes up space, and he looks like a true man. Rodin was commissioned to create these sculptures in honor of six heroes of the One Hundred Years War. The men sacrificed their lives to save their city, Calais, and the message of piece (according to its plaque) is that “ordinary people can perform heroic deeds.”

After examining two of Rodin’s styles, I cannot arbitrarily decide which style I think is better, but rather I can now say that I understand why they are where they are on campus.  Rodin’s sculptures of women are expressive, beautiful, and artistic and represent our Cantor Center. But the Burghers were chosen to be a part of the main Quad because of their individualism, outlook, and message that “ordinary people can perform heroic deeds.”

Ockham's Razor at Battle of the Bands

The “battle of the bands” is one of the most exciting parts of the rock music tradition. In addition to this event’s energized air of competition, the battle of the bands is a particularly fun event in that it provides a unique viewing experience with rock music that emphasizes a band’s ability to put on a captivating live show. As opposed to a regular live performance, or even a recorded album for that matter, in which the emphasis is specifically on the music, a performance in a battle of the bands concentrates additionally on the band’s ability to put on a rockin performance and please the crowd.

 

Last Saturday night, Phi Kappa Psi House at Stanford University hosted a battle of the bands at which a campus band called “Ockham’s Razor” performed a particularly solid show. They played an energetic set of original songs and covers This is my assessment of the night’s performance:

 

The band’s music is not anything particularly special. They play a indie rock style of music with some hints of Billy Joel piano lines and a good use of varied song structure, dynamics, and ambiance. Their first original song wavered from powerful anthemic choruses to cool, almost loungy bridges; their second relied heavily on a crescendo chorus which was a bit weak at the climax but still contained some strong, rocking energy.

 

The highlight of the show from the crowd’s perspective, though, was clearly the audacious covers of Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” and Kanye West’s “Stronger,” as was indicated by the deafening cheers at the recognizable opening segments of each song. The band covered the songs pretty well, and these songs gave their set an unconventional feel in comparison to the standard rock music in the rest of their set.

 

So in terms of winning the crowd’s favor, Ockham’s Razor did a great job at putting on a great battle of the bands performance. Nevertheless, the band did a not so great job at presenting the audience with a picture of the band’s individual sound or identity, especially where their covers were concerned. They practically played the songs exactly as they had been recorded (or at least as close as possible), which is a bad move when trying to stand out or formulate an identity in the minds of the audience at a battle of the bands. For all practical purposes, Ockham’s Razor may be better known to the audience as the band that played Michael Jackson and Kanye West instead of Ockham’s Razor itself, which is the totally opposite of what should happen at a good battle of the bands performance. A good example of a band making a cover song its own is Prince’s Super Bowl performance (which can be found on dailymotion.com).

 

Ockham’s Razor’s performance went pretty well last Saturday. Other than their failure to create a real cohesive picture of their band’s identity, their solid original songs, creative ideas about covers, energetic stage presence, and throngs of cheering fans contributed to a notable battle of the bands show. I don’t know who ended up winning the battle of the bands, but I do know that any other band playing would have had to do a lot to take my vote from such a strong performance by Ockham’s Razor.

Rodin Sculpture Garden

Containing the largest public concentration of Rodin’s bronze sculptures in the world is something many Stanford students do not appreciate, or yet, even are aware of. Walking in front of the quad, one can catch a taste of the amazing collection of Auguste Rodin’s work here at Stanford. I had seen these works before, passing in front of the quad or walking to the oval. This aspect is always included in campus tours and I can often see a clump of tourists from feet away taking pictures. Ordinarily, I saw these sculptures as a mere decoration, and even a piece of art that was insignificant and belittled by the awe-inspiring beauty of Memorial Church’s façade framed by the quad’s front arches. I decided to look deeper and truly analyze Rodin’s unique sculptures that are displayed more as an exhibit outside of the Cantor Art Museum.

The first two sculptures I looked at were very similar, which was further demonstrated by their titles, "Fallen Caryatid with Urn" and "Fallen Caryatid with Stone." There were many things that caught my attention with these pieces—the peaceful, pensive look on the woman’s face, the folds of the cloth covering the lower half of her body, and the portrayal of struggle displayed by the body almost collapsing under this seemingly heavy object. When looking at these aspects, I began to notice that the face was nondescript and the hair simple, while the tensing of the muscles and angles of the body seemed to pop out at me. When getting home, I actually looked up the word “caryatid” as I didn’t know what it meant and discovered it is a term used to describe a stone carving of a female figure that is used as a pillar to support the entablature of a Greek building. This definition represented the basis for what I felt Rodin’s worked represented—support, strength, balance.

As I walked through the garden, I was able to see these ideals in every work. "Orpheus" also had an object with which his body was upholding. The body was able to support this by balance, with the left hip down and left foot forward, balanced with the right arm reaching up away from the body. This sort of balance for strength to hold these objects I could also see in works without external objects, but that displayed balance in the positioning of the body. Rodin’s "Claude Lorrain" is a very different sculpture, very stoic and almost memorial-like, yet showed equality and balance through the body. The man’s left leg and and right arm are bent, with his right leg and head turned to the left. There is an odd symmetry here that leads to a pleasing and balanced sculpture in which pleasure comes from seeing these opposite sides of the body mirroring each other. My classmate who viewed the sculptures with me described the bodies as “crossed,” and without a picture, this idea is hard to describe, but one which I feel is a good explanation of the what I saw in each sculpture. The legs and arms are twisted and crossed in ways that support each other. The body is supple and almost contorted, but in this I see stability and equality across the body. For example, in "Meditation," the crossed left leg comes across the body as the figure’s right hip is out and up. Both arms are crossed, yet one is high with the elbow in the air, and one is low with the elbow bent and pointing down.

Rodin’s sculpted bodies are pleasing, and what I think makes their position and display so appealing is the equality reached by opposition, like having a sculpture with one bent leg and one straight leg, which can be seen in practically each sculpture. Rodin’s famous "Three Shades" shows this one bent leg in three men, furthering the balance across the body with all of them reaching one arm forward and pulling the opposite bent arm back. The heads are turned in the opposite way each body is turned. One can even look more closely and notice the fingers of the sculptures. Their hands are all pointing with their index finger in the outstretched arm; however, the opposite hand has the index finger in and touching the thumb. Even Rodin’s sculpture "Prayer," which has no appendages to display this “crossing of the body,” still has an angle in the body with an arched back and bent knees.

While the first sculptures I looked at required the body’s position to have strength and stability as there was an external object involved, the later sculptures I saw displayed this same strength and stability in the body through a balance across the body achieved by opposing bends and mirroring contortions.