Movie Description
A dreamlike, surrealistic film that playfully looks at politics, religion and sex.
The film offers tantalizing fragments of narrative that it explores briefly and then leaves behind: a child accepts some strange photographs from an unsavory character in a playground -- only the images aren't quite what one would expect; a nurse spends the night at an inn and meets some very bizarre priests; a sniper ascends a glistening new French skyscraper and shoots at the crowds below, only to become a celebrity, not a pariah; and tearful parents beg the police to find their missing child -- who's beside them the whole time insisting she's not lost. Bunuel attacks society's false pretensions to freedom, and its distorted ideas of liberty and religion in this crazy, off- beat comedy that goes from high wit to groundling guffaws.
| Credits | | Cast: | Adriana Asti, Jean-Claude Brialy, Monica Vitti |
Notes
Luis Buñuel, the director of "Phantom of Liberty," was an important international filmmaker. Although born in Spain, he played a major role in the Mexican film industry, where he worked from 1946 till 1965, when he returned to Europe. His most well-known film from that period was "Los Olvidados" (The Forgotten Ones) an unsentimental look at the violent lives of poverty-stricken Mexican teens; also famous was "El Angel Exterminador" (The Exterminating Angel), a surrealist black comedy about wealthy guests at a dinner party who discover that inexplicable forces have somehow trapped them in their host's home, and "El" (Him) a deliciously subversive deconstruction of the macho ethic.
He developed his first film, the silent short "Un Chien Andalou" (An Andalusian Dog), with the noted Surrealist artist Salvador Dali. Like "Phantom of Liberty", this film has a highly discontinuous narrative, with intertitles such as "10 minutes later" that have no relation at all to the action occurring on the screen. Its opening sequence features one of the most notorious shots in film history: a razor slicing an eye -- which maintains a gruesome effectiveness despite the fact that it clearly isn't "real". He followed that up with "L'Age d'Or" (The Age of Gold), whose scathing criticism of religion and irreverent portrayal of Jesus caused a major scandal.
Although Buñuel flirted with the big Hollywood studios, he never ended up working in any of them, and he had to leave his job at New York's Museum of Modern Art amid accusations that he was a communist (accusations that Buñuel felt were fomented by Dali, with whom he had had a falling out). The difficulties of staying in America under these conditions led to his resettling in Mexico.
From the 1950s on, Buñuel directed some of his most political and satiric films: "Viridiana," a scathing criticism of Fascism and Catholicism, won the Palme D'Or at Cannes in 1955 and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" (1972), in which bursts of violence from a world filled with political upheaval continuously intrude upon a group of bourgeois trying to eat their dinner, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film in 1972, and was nominated for Best Story and Screenplay Based on Material Not Previously Published and Produced. "Phantom of Liberty" continued to develop the narrative structure and thematic concerns of those films.
In 1980 Buñuel and his longtime co-scenarist Jean-Claude Carriere collaborated on Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh.
He died in 1980 in Mexico City.
In the opening sequence of "Phantom", two of the "actors" playing monks (and screaming "Down with liberty!") are Luis Buñuel and Serge Silberman, the film's Executive Producer.
"The Phantom of Liberty" was shown at the New York Film Festival in October, 1974.
Color by Eastmancolor.
Editorial Reviews
"...This typically mischievous late-Bunuel pic boasts one of his most celebrated sequences..."
Sight and Sound - Geoffrey Macnab (07/01/2001)
"[I]t's absurdly hilarious, stingingly satirical, and sometimes surprisingly upsetting in its surreality."
Premiere - Glenn Kenny (07/01/2005)
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