(From FB)
“A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an
essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them, the powerful
can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small
difference is very important. When power feels itself totally justified
and approved, it immediately destroys whatever freedoms we have left,
and that is fascism. My ideas have not changed since I was 20.
Basically, I agree with Engels. An artist describes real social
relationships with the purpose of destroying the conventional ideas
about those relationships, undermining bourgeois optimism, and forcing
the public to doubt the tenets of the established order.”
Given the way more and more film personalities in India have been coming
out in solidarity with indomitable masses of students and many others
who have spearheaded the campaigns against the CAA/NRC, Buñuel’s words
above are worth pondering. They were part of the interview he gave the
Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes in 1973; for the interview and Fuentes’
brilliant portrait of the Spanish film maker, see
https://www.nytimes.com/.../the-discreet-charm-of-luis...
<https://www.nytimes.com/1973/03/11/archives/the-discreet-charm-of-luis-bunuel-spain-catholicism-surrealism.html?fbclid=IwAR1jFVR2D7SgyYvFRje6SmKWLa4D1xaO3oPW0pRg3L_sECLsNaLx3bkZ3TE>
“An essential margin of non-conformity”! Though Buñuel’s iconoclastic
surrealism and Visconti’s Neorealism are poles apart in aesthetic terms
(as forms of the wider cinematic construction of reality), both film
makers were practitioners of what one should really call a subversive
realism—Visconti’s inspired by Gramsci, the group around the journal
Cinema, and the gathering opposition to Mussolini’s regime in Italy;
Buñuel’s by the avant-garde movement called Ultraísmo, by the French
Surrealists and by his deep hatred of religion.
Buñuel loathed conformism and the values that made up middle-class
morality (religion, nationalism and family-patriarchy). But his aversion
to conformity extended to the rituals of the party-building Left. In his
memoirs (dictated to his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière) there is
this amusing passage:
“Although I was a Communist sympathizer and belonged to the Association
of Writers and Artists for the Revolution, I never joined the party,
mostly because I didn’t like long meetings. Impatient by nature, I
couldn’t stand all the rules of order, the interminable debates, and the
“cell” mentality. Breton felt the same way; like all surrealists, he
also flirted with the party because it represented a real possibility
for revolution, but he gave up when he was asked, at his very first
meeting, to compile a fully documented report on the coal-mining
industry in Italy. “A report on something I can understand, fine,” he
said sadly. “But…coal?” (Buñuel, My Last Breath, p.138)
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