Yes, I would agree. I hope I didn't come across as saying otherwise.DavidHare wrote:Sausage, Bunuel certainly does take religion seriously because he's appalled by it.
Does Bunuel truly think life is meaningless? It seems to me that when Bunuel undercuts religious symbolism and iconography, he does so not by revealing its essential emptiness or inability to contain meaning but by replacing the intended meaning with another, usually bawdy or blasphemous, meaning that has much more value to him. Those "virgin whores" and "semi naked S/M St Sebastians" are all attempts to replace what is frigid and unhuman in traditional religious symbols with something warm and human, revealing the eroticism and fetishism--those most genuine examples of the purely personal and individual--behind those people or things that aspire to be above and outside the world, on a higher plane than the mere human. He drags these would-be transcendentalists back down to the world not to muddy them with meaninglessness, but because the world is the only place to be and where value is most to be found.DavidHare wrote:He is like the obverse of a pantheistic (thus religious) director like Rossellini or Ford, in that he understands the meaningless of life, and the randomness of creation.
Bunuel to me has always been less a radical than a parodist, delighting always in taking the most received and accepted ideas and social norms and magnifying and exaggerating them to reveal all their most grotesque and ridiculous elements. That is to say, his art is not destructive, it's not about breaking things, it's about irony and reversal. Wanting to show every side of a thing is different from wanting to destroy it.
