#0000E/#290: BUÑUEL, Luis: The Phantom Of Liberty (1974)
BUÑUEL, Luis (France)
The Phantom Of Liberty [1974]
The Booklet
Buñuel:
Commentary
None.
The Phantom Of Liberty [1974]
Spine #0000E/#290
Blu-ray/DVD
OOP
Blu-ray/DVD
OOP
2005 synopsis
Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Buñuel's surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soiree with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of non sequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Buñuel throughout his career — from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.
2021 synopsis
Luis Buñuel's vision of the inherent absurdity of human social rituals reaches its taboo-annihilating extreme in what may be his most morally subversive and formally audacious work. Zigzagging across time and space, from the Napoleonic era to the present day, The Phantom of Liberty unfolds as a picaresque, its characters traveling between tableaux in a series of Dadaist non sequiturs. Unbound by the laws of narrative logic, Buñuel lets his surrealist’s id run riot in an exuberant revolt against bourgeois rationality that seems telegraphed directly from his unconscious to the screen.
104 minutes
Color
Color
Monaural
in French
1:66:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2005
Director/Writers
Screenplay by Luis Buñuel with the collaboration of Jean-Claude Carrière.
Buñuel was 74 when he directed The Phantom of Liberty.
Other Buñuel films in the Collection:
#332: Viridiana (1961)
#459: Exterminating Angel (1962)
#117: Diary Of A Chambermaid (1964)
#460: Simon Of The Desert (1965)
#593: Belle De Jour (1967)
#402: The Milky Way (1969)
#0000E/#102: The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972)
#0000E/#143: That Obscure Object Of Desire (1977)
The Film
Other Buñuel films in the Collection:
#332: Viridiana (1961)
#459: Exterminating Angel (1962)
#117: Diary Of A Chambermaid (1964)
#460: Simon Of The Desert (1965)
#593: Belle De Jour (1967)
#402: The Milky Way (1969)
#0000E/#102: The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie (1972)
#0000E/#143: That Obscure Object Of Desire (1977)
The Film
The opening scene was inspired by a short story by Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer and this Goya painting from 1814:
The Third of May 1808
From there you’re more or less on your own!
Except to say that the French captain is kissing a statue of Doña Elvira de Castañeda, when he is hit on the head by another statue — the husband, Don Pedro López de Ayala. The captain exhumes Doña Elvira’s body (the first of two desecrated tombs in the film) and presumably …
… cut to a nanny on a park bench (Muni) reading out loud the story of this Napoleonic horror … cut to two little girls — the charges of the nanny — playing in the park, and being approached by an older man (Philippe Brigaud) who gives the girls some postcards, telling them not to share them their parents …
… but Véronique (I. Carrière) does show her parents (Jean-Claude Brialy and Monica Vitti) who are shocked to discover …
**
Every episode is connected to the next by some thread, however bare. It is — as Buñuel used as an example — as if we follow Raskolnikov (Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment) up the stairs, to see him pass by a boy who is going out for some bread, and then to leave Raskolnikov and follow the boy, who becomes the main character in the subsequent episode …
The absurdity of Phantom — Buñuel’s penultimate film — is evident from the start and continues to build as each episode reveals new layers of the ridiculously sublime.
The cast features some Buñuel regulars, such as Julien Bertheau and Michel Piccoli, as well as familiar faces like Michel Lonsdale and Jean Rochefort.
Adolfo Celi is Dr. Pasolini, lol …
And of course, the emu.
Film Rating (0-60):
55
The ExtrasThe Booklet
#290: 32-page booklet featuring a new essay by critic Gary Indiana and a reprinted interview with Buñuel.
#0000E: 56-page booklet for all three films, including the above.
Indiana:
“At the end of his life, Buñuel had achieved such fluidity in his filmmaking that he could take Phantom in any direction that occurred to him, along the path of the previous night’s dreams, fantasies from childhood, premonitions of approaching death, or, if he’d care to, into outer space. To call him a film director is like calling Albert Einstein a mathematician. There was no artist like him ever, and there will never be another. He didn’t simply direct a film called The Phantom of Liberty; he was the Phantom of Liberty.”
“The title comes from a collaboration between Karl Marx and me. The first line of The Communist Manifesto reads, ‘A phantom travels over Europe . . . ,’ etc. For my part, I see liberty as a ghost that we try to grasp, and we embrace a misty shape that leaves us with only a wisp of vapor in our hands.”
None.
Interview
From 2000 with screenwriter Carrière.
Brief introduction to the film.
#0000E only:
Analysis of the film from 2017 by film scholar Peter William Evans.
A rather heavy-handed Marxist/Communist analysis with an “Oedipal” reading of the Inn scenes …
**
**
Episode of the French television series Pour le cinéma from 1974 featuring actors Piccoli and Brialy.
Episode of the French television program Le dernier des cinq from 1974 featuring Brialy.
Praising Buñuel, while acknowledging that Buñuel would have hated such praise …
**
Documentary from 1985 about producer Serge Silberman, who worked with Buñuel on five of the director’s final seven films.
Silberman chain-smokes his way through the interview, with Brialy. A Holocaust survivor, he became an important independent producer in the mid-50s, beginning with Melville’s Bob le Flambeur (Spine #150). At the time of this interview, he was producing Kurosawa’s Ran (Spine #316) …
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