Word: bunuel
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Actually, another major fault of the Fourth New York Film Festival was that the best films shown were those made by the best-known directors: Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard, Luis Bunuel, Alain Resnais, Adnes Varda. The Festival failed to screen any films of importance by unknown film-makers, and also little that won't be seen again. The box-office power of directors like Resnais and Godard will assure almost all of the Festival's films a theatrical release sooner or later...
...fourth annual session of the most prestigious U.S. cinema congress. In a way, the pebble ricocheted. Too many of the far-out films shown at this year's festival tried hard to be difficult but just turned out dull. Too many others were bad jobs by good directors (Bunuel, Bresson, Godard, Torre Nilsson, Varda). Though the sponsors had doggedly previewed 400 films, their efforts failed to turn up enough hits to fill out the festival's fortnight...
Something for everyone here. Camera-conscious film wonks, alert to Cinema History, will notice something new in this use of Cinemascope: it seems uniquely uninfluenced by Hollywood wide-screen, model of New Wave Americanophiles like Chabrol and Vadim. Bunuel's vision of provincial France seems rather an extension into modern times of the native Renoir tradition of lighting and composition...
...Bunuel leads us along the borderline of bourgeois satire, in a vein as old as Moliere; but only briefly. Sadist Josef is an anti-Semite, and his violent Fascist explosions shatter the relatively calm surface of the satire. A visit from the cure begins as a mild lampoon of the clergy, but breaks all bounds when Madame seeks a little sex-education...
...Bunuel's theme is the seductive power of Evil. Earlier, when Josef and a Fascist friend were composing anti-Semitic tracts, a witless scullery-maid unwittingly contributed a phrase, by voicing her opinion on a point of rhetoric. We are never sure how close to moral seduction our protagonist Celestine is, as she struggles in the currents of circumstance. We too feel seduced when Bunuel's devious camera involves our gaze in the seemingly innocuous--a butterfly on a window--then pulls back to show us our complicity in senseless violence--as the senile grandfather blasts it with a shotgun...