Page 2 of
2 The biblical world of Luis
Bunuel By Spengler
Trinity, and escape by stealing the
clothing of modern-day hunters. One finds a rosary
in a pocket of a stolen jacket, and blasts it to
pieces with his shotgun; a few hours later, the
Virgin Mary appears miraculously to return the
rosary to one of the heretics. The heretics arrive
at a modern Spanish country inn and tell the story
to the local priest, who tells them not to get
excited, for the Blessed Virgin appears all the
time and does miracles as a
matter of course. "Faith
doesn't come to us through reason, but through the
heart," the heretic offers.
At the
conclusion, Jesus restores the sight of two blind
men. As they attempt to follow him, they still use
their canes to feel their way along the ground.
Bunuel states in an interview included in the DVD
packet, "He still has a blind man's reflexes and
is not yet accustomed to his new situation.
Besides, he doesn't know what a ditch or a hole
looks like." This striking image captures the gist
of Bunuel's lesson in faith: although divine love
may open our eyes, we see, but do not understand.
It is not the remoteness of God, but rather the
blindness of our own inner eye that makes us
stumble.
In some ways all of this is
horribly sacrilegious, but it does not turn out
that way. The director's biographer, John Baxter,
reports in his 1994 account:
To Bunuel's embarrassment, the
Milky Way was well received by the
Church, sections of which were thawing in the
liberalism of the Second Vatican Council. Rome
even took in good part the fake execution of a
recognizable Pope John Paul [II] by Spanish
anarchists, and when the Italian censor banned
the film, it intervened to reverse the decision.
Despite protests from a few priest critics, the
Spanish government also refused to ban it. The
Festival of Cinema of Religious and Human Values
in Valladolid invited the film, and the US
National Catholic Film Office belatedly gave
[the 1959 film] Nazarin an award as well.
I would argue that Bunuel succeeds at
religious cinema where other much-vaunted efforts
fail, for example by Ingmar Bergman and Federico
Fellini. Bunuel inhabits, and re-creates for us, a
world in which the supernatural is continuously
present. In that respect he is the most biblical
of filmmakers. As Harvard theologian James Kugel
observed in his 2003 volume The God of Old,
the Bible offers us a world in which you may be
walking down the road and meet a man, and the man
is in fact an angel, but the angel turns out to be
God himself.
The divine presence unveils
itself to humankind in unpredictable but highly
tangible ways. Unlike Franz Kafka, who re-creates
something of the style of biblical narrative but
offers a world in which the Divine is unknowable
and absent, Bunuel shows us the Divine in all its
difficulty and absurdity - for the Divine must
appear absurd and unreal to human eyes. Bunuel's
surrealism resembles the so-called magical realism
of certain Latin American writers only on the
surface, for it is not magic, but a higher
spiritual plane that we encounter.
There
is not a flyspeck of spirituality in the dreary
world of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker who
died last month, except perhaps for the pagan
spirits flying about in The Virgin Spring.
The dour Swede placed his characters (or to be
precise, a single character recurrently played by
Max von Sydow) in an existential tantrum over
God's remoteness. Bergman is the only major
director whose actual work is inferior to the
lampoons of it (for example, Monty Python's The
Meaning of Life ). But God is not remote to
Bunuel; on the contrary, God is frighteningly
real, for all his inscrutability, even absurdity.
Fellini is a different case; his beautiful
1954 film La Strada looks for divine
meaning in the simplest and most pathetic human
responses, and comes very close to the point. But
Fellini, the petulant Italian, demands too much of
God; his oracular personage, the Fool, says that
every human being, every star, even every pebble
has to have a meaning, or nothing has a meaning.
Well and good; but what that meaning might be, we
do not know with precision, and could not find
out. Fellini's faith was thin and brittle.
Bitterness overtook him, and self-absorption, such
that his later films are painful to watch.
Bunuel, the Spanish hidalgo, is
unafraid of his own doubts, and charges happily at
whatever windmills and giants might present
themselves. He has the faith of a Job who praises
God despite the terrible unaccountability of his
actions. The DVD release of The Milky Way
is a happy moment, particularly in an edition that
includes critical supporting materials.
Note 1. The Milky
Way (La Voie lactee), directed by Luis
Bunuel; screenplay by Luis Bunuel and Jean-Claude
Carriere. The Criterion Collection, 2007. Price
US$29.95.
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