Buñuel's Cinema of Desire
A Lacanian Reading of the Four Final Films of Luis Buñuel
Author’s Note:
An “indoor essay” in departure from my beloved nature and plant studies. An ode to my favorite filmmaker who I believe would forgive my too brief mention of his true masterpiece: The Milky Way.
DESIRE AND CINEMA
[The cinema] is an instrument of poetry, with all that that word can imply of the sense of liberation, of subversion of reality, of the threshold of the marvellous world of the subconscious, of nonconformity with the limited society that surrounds us.
Luis Buñuel
Desire is the very essence of man … in so far as it is conceived from one of his affections, conceived as determined and dominated by any one of his affections to do something.
Jacques Lacan
Few filmmakers have had such hyper focused filmographies marked by stylistic fidelity as Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Born in Calanda, Spain in 1900, Buñuel established himself as a leading figure of the Surrealist movement and directed 29 full length films over the course of his career, having independently written 26 films between the years of 1930 and 1977. In his career which spanned 47 years, the final seven years stand out as the pinnacle of his Surrealist tendencies. From 1970 to 1977, Buñuel wrote and directed four of his most widely recognized films: Tristana (1970), Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Le fantôme de la liberté (1974), and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977).
These final four films—his final French films following a lengthy and rocky political period of strife between himself and his home of Spain—conclude his career and encapsulate the subjects which Buñuel spent his entire career exploring: the human experience of desire, repression, and the tendency towards superficial civility. When viewed in succession, the films paint an illustration of the filmmaker’s own desire to understand human desire, to explore the experience of lack, possession, pleasure, and bourgeois lifestyle in a way that represents the oftentimes contrary experience of human life.
During the period in which Buñuel was writing and directing his filmography, the theorist and psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, was practicing in France. Buñuel and Lacan reportedly met at the screening of Buñuel’s film, Él, a film which Lacan would frequently recommend to his students and one he would often screen for his classes. Both men studied the intricacies of the human mind, and both lifetimes of work show an innate desire to understand and make sense of human thought. The four final films of Buñuel, when read through the writings of Jacques Lacan, most notably in his seminar, Desire and it’s Interpretation (1958-1959) produce representations of desire in surrealist cinema, and the human drive to suppress the inner and “true” as Lacan would argue, desires that are natural to the human experience.
Lacan, born April 13th, 1901 in Paris, spent the years between 1943 and 1981 giving seminars in Paris. These seminars explored his psychoanalytical work as well as his interest in film theory. The topic of desire was one of Lacan’s interests, more specifically the relationship and positioning between desire and the law, a topic that is frequently explored in Buñuel’s cinema. Lacan linked desire with pleasure and with the experience of lack, all topics that appear in Buñuel’s final four films.
Lacan defines desire as a means of pleasure, but depicts that pleasure as one that has the capacity of being unknown, “I think that this means of the pleasure, or of something else. In any case, it certainly poses the problem of knowing what is in question, whether it is the representation of the pleasure, or if it is the pleasure” (5) he writes in Seminar I. To Lacan, desire is both the representation of pleasure as much as it is the experience of pleasure itself. Also in Seminar I, Lacan states that desire is linked to the question of what one wants:
“The question posed to the other of what he wants, in other words from the place where the subject meets desire the first time, desire being first of all the desire of the other, the desire thanks to which he perceives, he realizes, as being this beyond around which turns the fact that the other will bright it about that one signifier or another will be or not be in the presence of the word, that the other gives him the experience of his desire at the same time as an essential experience” (9).
In other words, desire to Lacan is something that must be properly situated in order to be experienced, and is an event that requires an “other.” This formula for desire fits nicely in the filmography of Buñuel, beginning with his first of his final four films, Tristana.
In Buñuel’s first film in the seven year span in which he directed his final four films, Tristana, we see a woman who is facing an undesirable domestic and potentially romantic relationship with an older man. Tristana, an orphan portrayed by Buñuel favorite Catherine Deneuve, is taken in by Don Lope, a middle-aged intellectual. The pair begin a relationship at the wishes of Don Lope, who attempts to console his conscience with the thought that at least by living with him, she is saved from a life on the streets. The conflict that Don Lope experiences is one that surrounds his own desire. He wishes to possess Tristana, but somewhere deep in his consciousness knows that it is impossible, yet he continues to try throughout the film.
The film is set in two time periods, and Buñuel’s filmmaking techniques allow for some ambiguity towards which period the audience is viewing. In act one, Tristana is “adopted” by Don Lope, whom she later introduces to her younger lover as her “husband” despite their nonexistent marital status. Don Lope kept Tristana as close and as confined to him as possible, forbidding her from leaving their home while attempting to provide her with any want or desire she could possibly have. He educates her, and it is through this education that Tristana slowly finds ways to leave the household and experience other people and other environments.
As Tristana falls in love with a younger artist, Horatio, she slowly begins to remove herself from Don Lope’s home, only to return following an incident in which her leg is amputated. Tristana’s intentions in returning are flawed, she recounts the earlier period in which she lived with him as a time of misery, yet she still returns because of her desire to live a comfortable life, a life she knows Don Lope can provide for her. In Tristana, Buñuel explores the object of love as something that is not necessarily interchangeable with desire.
Critics often wonder why Tristana chose to return to the care of Don Lope, and in “Love in Psychoanalysis” scholar Renato Silva writes that Buñuel represents love and desire as metaphor in Tristana, citing the work of Lacan on desire which “‘allows us to go further and capture the moment of balance, of turning point where, from the conjunction of desire with its object as inadequate, must emerge that meaning called love’” (50). Silva writes that “It is understood that Tristana loved as a strategy to be loved, to discover herself as the holder of an agalma supposed by the other” (12). In this particular Buñuel film, desire is rooted in the lack of love as well as the character’s feelings of inadequacy.
As Silva points out, Don Lope announces to Tristana “do not give me what I ask of you” so perfectly illustrating the distance between desire and love. Lacan writes that “It is in this interval, in this gap that there is situated an experience which is that of desire, which is first of all apprehended as being that of the desire of the other, and within which the subject has to situate his own desire. His own desire as such cannot be situated elsewhere than in this space” (11). This is the embodiment of the character of Don Lope. Once Tristana finally leaves Don Lope, he continues to speak to her as if she is still there, further proving that Buñuel is attempting to represent the actual physical lack of love in Don Lope’s experience of life.
Following Tristana, Buñuel directed his 1972 film, Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie in collaboration with Jean-Claude Carrière. The film earned Buñuel an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film that same year, and explores a group of friends who attempt to have a simple dinner together. The film explores the aimless lives of the bourgeoisie in a light that depicts the lives of characters portrayed by Paul Frankeur, Jean-Pierre Cassel, Delphine Seyrig, Bulle Orier, and Stéphane Audran as helpless in their wealth.
Throughout the film we see desire as a selfish act, as the group of friends attempt, unsuccessfully, to dine together. As they are faced with a level of suffering they are unfamiliar with, Buñuel portrays it as through brief bouts of homelessness, starvation, and a run in with the police. In Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie desire is represented in the fleeting and bourgeoisie needs of the group of characters. Their desires, Buñuel depicts, are shallow and rather humorous when compared to the actual struggles and desires of the lower class characters their group encounters. In “Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel’s Late Films” scholar Chad Treviette writes that in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie
“The perverse effect of the Lacanian Real arises from the fact that it does not designate any form of reality that we can directly access; rather, the Real is an ‘impossible beyond’ that lies outside the symbolic framework that informs our consciousness. However, the Real does not manifest itself indirectly within such a framework–and it does so at those key moments when any symbolic system reveals its own internal inconsistencies, its own fundamental limits, or its own impossibility as a scandalous feature of its own structure” (215).
These fundamental limits of reality are explored in Buñuel’s characters, and as Treviette writes, “provide ample opportunities for Buñuel to expose the empty norms that govern the lives of his characters” (219). In Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie desire is empty as it has no true lack. The bourgeois characters never desire anything because they do not experience true lack. Their desire is an illusion.
Two years after Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie Buñuel directed Le fantôme de la liberté in 1974. His second to last film explores a comedic take on surrealism told through various vignettes. Scholar Reynold Humphries describes the sections as “Tableaux” (191). Humphries points out that in different sections of the film, the defining line between reality and dreams is blurred. This is a common technique used by Buñuel dating as far back as his first film, Un Chien Andalou made in collaboration with artist Salvador Dalí, as well as his lesser known 1969 masterpiece, La Voie lactée which is considered the first installment in his trilogy attempting to explore the search for truth, followed by Le fantôme de la liberté and Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie.
Treviette writes of desire in Le fantôme de la liberté as an example of the human erratic: “What seems to characterize the various episodes is the sense that the desire for political or sexual freedom and the desire for law, order, and social hierarchy are not stable opposites so much as perverse counterparts of one another'' (221). He continues,
“Just as the desire for order is undercut by a certain unconscious awareness of its own arbitrariness, its own impotence or lack of foundation, the desire for freedom is undercut by a certain unconscious awareness of its own impossibility. It is their mutual lack that drives both forms of desire, ensures their perpetual interplay, and prevents dialectical closure in the film” (221).
For Treviette and, in turn, Lacan, desire in Le fantôme de la liberté is similar to desire in Tristana in the sense that it is represented by its lack and the awareness of it being an impossibility.
One of the unique elements of Buñuel’s Le fantôme de la liberté is his adaptation of famous paintings into scenes that both interrupt the seemingly rambling and incoherent narration as well as enrich the political undertones. One such painting is Goya’s The Third of May, 1808 which depicts Spanish prisoners being executed by the French. Treviette connects his choice in this particular painting with the Lacanian understanding of desire. In the film, the cry from the dying Spaniard is the focus of the scene for Buñuel, and Treviette writes that this cry can be “regarded not only as a repudiation of the soldiers, but also as an ironic mirroring of the soldiers themselves, whose fight for freedom entails its own coercive quality” (223). Buñuel turns the painting on itself, “‘Long life the chains’ in this sense serves as a way of saying: ‘In our perverse embrace of oppression, see the hidden truth of your own perverse desire!’” (223) Treviette writes.
In Le fantôme de la liberté Buñuel depicts the split that occurs in desire as outlined in Lacan. There exists a split subject-position in the film stemming from the lack hanging over the entirety of the plot. “If this lack implies a fundamental impossibility that both undercuts and generates a revolutionary desire for freedom, it implies a fundamental fissure within the bourgeois order as well” (224) Treviette writes. Buñuel consciously chose to return to the problem of the bourgeois order in his second to last film, particularly important to note as it follows the depiction of bourgeois lack in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie.
Perhaps Buñuel’s most notable film was also his last, Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). Similar to his earlier Tristana, this film was an adaptation of a book Buñuel would have encountered and likely read in his youth, a scandalous story surrounding a young servant and her elderly employer with whom she has struck up an illicit affair, yet she refuses to have sex with him. Buñuel focuses on two topics in this film, in his naturally surrealistic fashion. Those topics are similar to the interests of Lacan, desire of men and women, and the seemingly senseless violence that Buñuel masterfully weaves within the story of the train journey taken by the employer, Mathieu.
This film is perhaps the most common example of Buñuel’s filmography, apart from Él that is analyzed alongside the work of Lacan. Scholar Adrian Martin writes for Criterion in his 2021 essay“That Obscure Object of Desire: Desire, Denuded'' that
“It’s no wonder that so many commentators of the time found themselves summing up That Obscure Object by taking recourse to the seventies adage of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, “Il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel.’ That means, roughly: there is no possible relationship between men and women that can ever be genuine or reciprocal, because the cultural differences of internalized gender roles are simply too great to surmount.”
The question of gender roles and the experience of desire is one that Lacan was fascinated with. In his seminars he explores this phenomenon, arguing that men and women experience desire differently.
This is perhaps a key to all of Buñuel’s four films discussed here. In Tristana, we see a distinct difference in the desire of female Tristana and male Don Lope, even in the male experience of Horatio, Tristana’s lover. Both men are depicted as desiring figures who also cannot quite define what their desire is. Meanwhile, Tristana knows that she desires someone to care for her, and this is partly why she returns to Don Lope despite her feelings of abuse and reclusion at his hand. In Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie we see the differences between the men and women of the group who are attempting to dine together. The overarching desire of the group is to dine, yet the frustrations when faced with the inability to do so differ between the men and the women. In Le fantôme de la liberté the male desire to be understood is contrasted with the female desire to be believed. This is seen in the mother’s insistence that her daughter is, in fact, missing, and in the character of the father who is dismissed by his doctor despite his pleas that he is experiencing unusual nighttime disturbances. The difference Buñuel playfully dangles between these genders is that the woman does not have proof, while the man does.
The connections between the filmography of Luis Buñuel and the work of theorist Jacques Lacan frequently come into conversation with one another. Buñuel, in a sense, illustrated the concepts the Lacan grappled with. From the divisions between the genders to the experience of desire and the complicated implication of desire’s lack, both explored the experience of what it means to be human. Martin concludes his essay by writing:
“Buñuel and Lacan in fact met each other at a special Cinémathèque française screening-for psychoanalysts!-of Él, a film that Lacan frequently referred to admiringly in his seminars. But there is also, for Buñuel as much as for Lacan, something eternal, universally human, in the perpetually out-of-phase attempts at emotional alignment across genders-and thus something grotesque and absurd. Women and men both are the obscure objects in each other’s clouded vision” (2021).
It is this clouded vision that intrigued and produced both the filmography of Buñuel as well as the many seminars of Lacan, and is a topic that is so central to the human experience that it remains present in our lives today. We are more similar than not to the flawed characters found in the four final films of Buñuel, as desire is the very essence of our beings.
Works Cited
Francisco, Aranda J. Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography. Da Capo Press, 1976.
Gutiérrez-Albilla, Julián Daniel. “Filming Psychoanalysis: The Documentation of Paranoia and the “Paranoid Gaze” in Luis Buñuel’s Él.” Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230622159_12.
Lacan, Jacques. Desire and Its Interpretation. 1958-1959. Translated by Cormac Fallagher. Lacan in Ireland. http://www.lacaninireland.com/web/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Book-06-Desire-and-its-interpretation.pdf.
Martin, Adrian. That Obscure Object of Desire: Desire, Denuded. Criterion, January 7, 2021. https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7233-that-obscure-object-of-desire-desire-denuded.
Rengifo, Alci. “Anarchy & Desire: The Cinema of Luis Buñuel In Our Time.” Riot Material, December 1, 2017. https://www.riotmaterial.com/anarchy-desire-the-cinema-of-luis-bunuel/.
Silva, Renato de Oliviera. “Love in psychoanalysis: considerations about the movie Tristana, buy Luis Buñuel. Trivium. 2015, vol. 7.
Trevitte, Chad. “Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel’s Late Films.” Film-Philosophy vol 16.1. 2012.