Oscar Jan Hoogland @ EYE. E*cinema Surrealisme: ode aan Luis Buñuel
Tuesday October 07 19:15 @ EYE
On Tuesday 7 October I will play a solo piece at EYE to the surrealistic film classic ‘Un chien andalou’ (1928) by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali as part of the E*cinema series. I think I will employ the anti-efficiency concept of one man with a lot of stuff that sounds.
Oscar Jan Hoogland
This program will illustrate the multifaceted and creative figure of Luis Buñuel, and his approach to film firstly through script writing and then through directing.
The presenter Anna Abrahams, EYE programmer, experimental film director and teacher at KABK, will discuss the poetics and film mechanisms of the Surrealist art movement, which inspired Buñuel to create avant-garde film classics such as Un chien andalou, L’âge d’or and the controversial documentary, Las Hurdes.
Ths surrealists were interested in developing methods to liberate imagination from false rationality, restrictive customs and structures, and to understand the actual functioning of thought, first through the “pure psychic automatism” of writing and later through other media such as painting, film, theatre.
Live music will be performed by Oscar Jan Hoogland on his gramophones.
Q/A will follow with Ramón Gieling over his film The prisoners of Buñuel (2000).
La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher), by Jean Epstein, France, 1928, 68 min (we screen a fragment of it), with live gramophone concert.
It is a French horror film directed by Jean Epstein in 1928 and one of the many interpretations based on the eponym gothic novel by Edgar Allan Poe (1893). Future director Luis Buñuel co-wrote the screenplay with Epstein, having previously worked as assistant director on Epstein’s film Mauprat (1926).
La chute de la maison Usher is often classified as an expressionist avant-garde feature attempting some innovative cinematic representations in the horror genre. The film is dense of visual experimentations and atmospheric effects of any kind, already adopted until then by the 7th art, but also proposed here for the first time. This is the case of the sequence of the storm, characterized by a very modern-looking fast cutting.
Un Chien Andalou, by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali, France, 1929, 16 min, with live gramophone concert.
Un Chien Andalou is a 1929 silent surrealist short film by the Spanish director Luis Buñuel and artist Salvador Dalí. It was Buñuel’s first film and was initially released in 1929 with a limited showing at Studio des Ursulines in Paris, but was met with success and ran for eight months. The film has no plot in the conventional sense. The chronology of the film is disjointed, jumping from the initial “once upon a time” to “eight years later” without the events or characters changing very much. It uses dream logic in narrative flow that can be described in terms of then-popular Freudian free association, presenting a series of tenuously related scenes.
De gevangenen van Buñuel (The prisoners of Buñuel), by Ramón Gieling, the Netherlands, 2000, 73 min (we screen a fragment of it).
Ramon Gieling’s Dutch documentary The Prisoners of Buñuel reveals what the village’s people think of Las Hurdas 60-odd years later, and while it’s hardly the last word on Buñuel, it does offer a thoughtful and provocative reflection on the intricate cross-purposes of life and art — not to mention accuracy and truth.
One can’t necessarily believe everything the villagers say about the film, especially because some of them contradict one another. But conversely, to take Buñuel’s masterpiece entirely at face value would be to misread it: it’s a metaphysical statement more than anything else, and its offscreen narration mocks the touristic documentary in countless ways. It’s impossible to evaluate The Prisoners of Buñuel adequately if you haven’t seen Land Without Bread, and Gieling, who jokingly draws attention to the way portions of his own documentary are staged, seems well aware of the problem. (Several extracts appear when he screens the film in the village square, but hardly enough to allow for any final verdict.)
Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan, (Las hurdes – Land without Bread), by Luis Bunuel, Spain, 1933, 30 min.
Filmed essay in human geography, as Buñuel called it, Las hurdes – Land without Bread (1933), it is based on the enthnographic account (Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine, 1927) of a region in mid-western Spain (close to the Portuguese border) by the sociologist Maurice Legendre. The title anticipates already the subversion of this film to the traditional travelogue film genre (with film titles such as Argentina: Land of Passion and Czechoslovakia: Land of Beauty and Change), showing usually beauty, landscapes and not hunger. This Buñuel’s unique documentary was banned in Spain and not shown in France until 1938.
Las Hurdes, exemplifies the surrealist critique of realism: it refuses to accept reality as endurable, as something that should be accepted as it is. On the most superficial level, the film describes some aspects of life in a mountainous region of Spain. On a second level, it stages a violent attack against several hegemonic institutions of Western civilization, in particular the Catholic Church, but also the educational system and private property. Most significantly, however, Buñuel’s work subverts dominant systems of representation by gradually undermining its own truth claims.