|
Go for the eye to transform cinema, Eisenstein understood this and here Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí build on the joke, the filmic "cut" that actually slices. (From a moonlit sky to the gooey cascade of the bisected peeper, a précis of surrealism.) "Il était une fois..." Astride the bicycle and down in the curb, just a fellow (Pierre Batcheff) contemplating the stigmata on his palm, ants rather than blood flow from it. The severed hand poked with a stick (cf. Blue Velvet), the androgynous aesthete ran over by a car, a spectacle savored from the reflexive screen of a window. The girl (Simone Mareuil) wields a tennis racket to fend off the groper, whose libidinous urge (weighed down by roped clerics and donkey carcasses on grand pianos) is recalled by Allen in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask. A raid on logic, context, continuity, propriety, anything that might congeal the celluloid with normalcy, by a couple of prankish young Spaniards. Striped boxes for striped ties, books into revolvers. From image to image, the meaninglessness of time: "Eight years later... About six in the morning... Sixteen years ago..." Lautréamont imagined "ma bouche sans lèvres," Buñuel and Dalí erase it only to replace it with pubic armpit hair, or is it a sea urchin? The cocktail-shaker doorbell, the death's head on the moth's back. Pursue desire and it evaporates like a naked torso in a sunny garden, Cocteau takes note of the slow-mo pirouette. Seventeen minutes of ticklish jolts, the sex dream nonpareil, quite the tango of carnality and mortality. "Au printemps..." The punchline on the rocky beach takes from Keaton (College) and passes on to Beckett (Happy Days) and Boorman (Zardoz). In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |