루이스 부뉴엘 감독 연구 - 70년대 이후 후기 걸작 두 편을 중심으로 -

Abstract

This paper is a study of Luis Bunuel(1900~1983), the greatest Spanish director of international standing who worked in Spain, France and Mexico. Bunuel is widely regarded as the greatest of all the surrealist artists. Like Gance, he had to wait until the world caught up with his very individual sensibility before he could garner the acclaim he deserved. Bunuel was a dashing young Spaniard, lured into film by the work of Fritz Lang, and later became an assistant director to Jean Epstein. Bunuel's first films, Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'or were made in Paris. Both masterpieces established Bunuel as a key figure of the European avant-garde. With them Bunuel became embroiled in the Parisian avant-garde, a small group of insolent intellectuals. What gave Bunuel's work its originality and made it stand apart from the work of other periods, other filmmakers, was a rigorous psychological harshness common to Spanish artists, fueled by the frustrations of a renegade Catholic and combined with an interest in ideas and a fascination with the sensual common the French. Surrealists like Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, and Pablo Picasso were mostly from bourgeois families, but they were in revolt against their staid, middle-class upbringings, attacking their origins with youthful passion and humor of the darkest black. The center for all this inspired madness was Paris, the cutting edge of the art word, where the most radical experimentalists congregated. In this paper, I selected Bunuel' last two masterpieces which deal with social defects and follies of the bourgeois, and analyzed them. Actually, the criticism against the bourgeoisie is a subject-matter repeated in his filmography, however these two works are especially important for showing his maturing thought integrally. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is a story about six characters looking for a decent dinner endlessly. Every time the attempt is made, the dinner is interrupted by some twist of dream logic or by another dream, which will in turn be interrupted by a dream or another attempted dinner party as soon as the situation has become engaging. The Discreet Charm develops the gap between the simple concrete reality such as the banality of property, success, money, social intercourse and eating dinner and the complex levels of super-realities such as wishes, dreams, imaginations and fancies. Bunuel's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire is an urbane and cooly ironic film about a young Spanish girl who teases and ultimately fleeces a middle-aged French widower. Bunuel compounds the irony by having two actresses with distinctly different physical appearances play the single ‘object’ of the title, as if to suggest the polymorphous nature of desire itself. The single female object of desire in That Obscure Object of Desire cannot possibly be embodied by two different women,but there the two women concretely are, both of them the single beloved a man would like to possess. The fact that she is two underscores the impossibility of ever fulfilling the desire to possess, let alone define,another human being. For Bunuel the cinema has always been the realm of the impossible actual. In the former, whenever they try to dine together in a civilized manner, their appetite is interrupted, while a sexual desire of an old man is endlessly deferred in the latter. With these strategy, what is the target for attack of Bunuel?The significance of existence for the bourgeoisie is to enjoy the present(carp diem). They never give up the vested rights and the present pleasure for better tomorrow. Because they have already been blessed with the material conditions which can do everything. Only the low-class people who have nothing are in great hopes that they could be rich in the future. But these hopes are a false dream. Bunuel, who devoted himself to Marxism and Freud' thoughts in his youthful days,and was antagonistic to Capitalism and Catholicism until the his death,have expressed such a consciousness of criticism through his whole works. Therefore, the strategy of Bunuel is to make the bourgeoisie, who look for the carp diem and are content with status-quo, powerless to do anything. In his two masterpieces, Bunuel ridicules the false-consciousness and follies of the bourgeoisie with corrosive wit and sardonic humor.