Luis Buñuel was lucky in his time abroad. Even although he felt maligned as a »métèque« (an insult akin to »dago«) during his period in Paris as a 25-year-old bohemian. Wherever he migrated to, he found allies and work. That was true even though he did not always go of his own free will. In 1936 the Spanish Civil War drove him into exile, first of all back to France again, where he stayed in his country’s Republican embassy. In 1939 he moved to Los Angeles, then later to New York. The Museum of Modern Art commissioned him to dub films. Soon however he had to give up his day job, first and foremost because Salvador Dali, once his friend, denounced him as a communist. In 1946 he was taken on for a directing job for the first time in Mexico, after which he settled down in the capital of this country, once colonised by Spain, took Mexican citizenship and made 20 films there over the next 19 years, in a sense somewhere between exile and elective homeland. This Spanish-born director remained a Mexican citizen even after 1961, when for the first time he had a real opportunity to make auteur films in Europe. The circumstances of his nomadic existence are reflected in an ironic vein, for example in »The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie« (shot in 1972 in Madrid): a story about the ambassador of a Miranda Republic, who is entangled in drug-deals and constantly arranging to meet with local accomplices for a meal, all to no avail. This late European film became a classic primarily due to the way in which the Surrealist practice of the 1920s, to which Buñuel made a crucial contribution, is refined into a style and applied to a narration about psychological characters.
The shift in modes of staging seen in Buñuel’s Mexican works from the 1950s could be said to have paved the way for this kind of stylistic cross-over approach: melodrama, comedies, neo-realism. During this period there are only isolated Surrealist touches. The director, working faithfully for the Mexican film industry, avoided the kind of provocative stance he had adopted in France with works such as »Un Chien Andalou« (1929) or »L’Age d’Or« (1930). The discipline and readiness to compromise with which he adheres here to classical formats demonstrates even more the extent to which even privileged immigrants are constrained by foreignness. Buñuel’s intimate acquaintance with the phenomenon of being a foreigner and being uprooted can be seen in the passion and directness with which he placed individualists, adopted children, escaped prisoners or itinerant priests at the heart of his films.
Or in 1950 » Los Olvidados « (»«), a story about young people living on the streets. The struggle just to survive drives them to petty crime, whilst provoking a lack of scruples and mutual betrayal. Jaibo, who has just broken out of jail, meets his younger companions again and drags them to their ruin, especially Pedro, who is younger. However an Indian-looking youth from out of town with a traditional poncho and sombrero resists. The city kids call him »Ojitos« because of his narrow eyes. After initially rejecting him – »You don’t come from round here? ... Then beat it!« – Pedro makes friends with him. The two are united by the fact that their parents leave them in the lurch. Unlike Pedro, who dies fighting against Jaibo, Ojitos survives, although he too, despite being physically weaker, protests at Jaibo’s nastiness. Here Buñuel, of all places in one of his most pessimistic films, finds hope for a foreigner, who wins the respect of those around him by being prepared to give in and to be helpful, as if these were appropriate virtues for him. What’s more, Buñuel subsequently gave in to pressure from the film’s producer to shoot a more optimistic closing scene for Pedro, the local man, suggesting that Buñuel for his part was indeed flexible and willing to compromise. However, this incident did not attract much attention, for the original version of the film garnered critical acclaim and awards in Cannes and could thus remain unaltered.
However, in »Susanna« (also from 1950/51) Buñuel’s perspective on foreignness grew more pessimistic. Instead of helpfulness and compromise, stances like desire and coercion come to the fore here. Susanna – she too has just escaped from prison – finds refuge in a haçienda. Dona Carmen, the lady of the house, believes the laments of the fugitive, who claims she was innocent and harassed by men. However, female solidarity doesn’t work for long, particularly because the young, blonde woman likes to show her naked shoulders and doesn’t stop at charming the servants and the son of the house in the process. Finally Don Guadelupe, initially such an upright character, succumbs to her charms. Dona Carmen’s initial solidarity is promptly transformed into jealousy and brutal revenge. Here this female stranger offers a different blank screen for the projected fantasies of every man and woman in the haçienda community. She serves as a substitute daughter for the married couple, at least as long as she is not too self-willed. The older maid, Felise, sees her pessimism confirmed through Susanna’s shamelessness. And Jesùs finds in Susanna an obstinacy that he would like to tame with a rough hand, as is his wont. Susanna, egoistical and harassed by the others, shakes up this hierarchically ordered community. Things do not calm down until the police arrest her again. Buñuel struggled with the end of this film too, although this was an unspoken struggle he only addressed later in an interview: he felt that the harmonious table scene of the haçienda family, reunited once again, did not fully work as a caricature, for too many in the audience had taken the end of the story seriously.
However, for the time being he remained true to his themes and narrative props. Eight years later the eponymous hero of his film is an outsider once again: »Nazarin« (Mexico, 1958/59), an itinerant priest, who turned his back on an official position in the church and wandered through various poor neighbourhoods. With his Spanish background, by the by, he had a similar migrants’ background to Buñuel. Unlike Susanna, the hallmark of Nazarin is his faith, the extreme selflessness with which he helps others and his willingness to forgive. However, the unequal strangers are linked by a similar dilemma. Both »seduce« local people, either for erotic or religious reasons and therefore finally end up detained by the police to ensure the seduced individuals can find their way back to their marriages. In both films therefore mutual desires and attractions clash, and remain incompatible precisely because the attraction of the foreigner remains one-dimensional for the community members. Whilst Nazarin (like Susanna) turns to various members of the community affected by him (and by her), the community members for their part are looking for a counterpart identical to them – either beloved or detested– and thus ultimately bring about his (her) imprisonment.
When Buñuel finally ended up travelling back and forth between Mexico and Europe in the 1960s, as noted above, he once again drew on the procedures of surrealism. His intensive focus on the foreigner, either male or female, as a defined figure in a constellation again made way for the (stylistic) method of alienation. This may correspond to the attitude of the mature cosmopolitan, who is able to discover his or her own self everywhere, as well as that which is foreign. Or the media-based awareness for which foreignness is solely a question of the degree of familiarity. Both options reflect an anecdote, which Buñuel narrated in his sarcastic yet warm way in the context of »Viridiana« (1961). For this work he returned to film in Spain, which in those days was still ruled by Franco. And for the role of the beggars in »Viridiana«, he took on authentic non-professional actors, who were paid pretty poorly by the production company. Buñuel recounted that after the film was released, enjoying particular success in France, French tourists later recognised one of the beggars, poverty-stricken again, on a park bench in Burgos – Juan García Tienda, who played a striking figure in the film as a leper – and congratulated him on his performance, at which the beggar took his bundle, saying: »I’m going to Paris. I’m famous there.« However, as Luis Buñuel recounts in his autobiography »My Last Sigh«, he died on the way there.
Luis Buñuel’s complete works (1900–1983) were screened from February to April 2008 in the Österreichisches Filmmuseum Wien. The retrospective was organised in conjunction with the Berlinale and the Deutsche Kinemathek.
Translated by Helen Ferguson