The Phantom of Liberty

THE PHANTOM OF LIBERTY   ****

Luis Buñuel

1974

IDEA:  From the Napoleonic occupation of Spain in 1808 to contemporary France, an array of characters enter and exit through tenuously related vignettes.

BLURB:  Much of the power of Buñuel’s films lie in how they create the impression of a crumbling Symbolic order through signs that are not only legible, but deceptively mundane; it’s only in the steady accumulation of audiovisual juxtapositions and narrative displacements that one really perceives the extent of the erosion. This is especially true of the films the director co-wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière, and particularly The Phantom of Liberty. Structured like a serial string of anacoluthons, the film proceeds with a dream logic that defies the grammar of linear narrative progress. Characters’ present activities and goals are consistently interrupted or dropped, only for the focus to be redirected toward other unrelated episodes and pursuits, in a sidewinding stream of deferrals, disavowals, and substitutions. The effect not only mimics the scrambled nature of dreams, but sardonically conveys the desultoriness and apathy of the film’s bourgeois characters, who can neither seem to get anything meaningful done nor find good reason for their behavior. Buñuel’s juxtapositions - monks mortified by S&M, the (failed) law and order of a police academy giving way to the connotations of abjection suggested by the image of guests dining on toilets - sharply set into relief the porousness and contradictions of our social mores and structures, whether it’s religious dogma or the very organization of space. The fissures that emerge from his mischievous inversions and subversions don’t so much explode reality as subtly destabilize it, diffusing our naturalized rules and rituals into a still somehow operating disarray. Even in the disruption of revolution, however, The Phantom of Liberty queasily reminds us how power still finds a way to pervert.