Word: uel
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After the completion of Belle de Jour in 1966, Luis Buñuel Delphically announced: "No more cinema for me-not in Spain, not in France, nowhere. Belle de Jour is my last film, semicolon...
...annihilates time. Centuries collide; the imagined becomes surreal, as when Jean daydreams of the Pope's assassination-and the shot is clearly heard by a passerby. Or when a nun's self-sacrifice becomes actual crucifixion. But where he should use a No. 3 paintbrush, Buñuel too often employs a palette knife. What is intended as subtle Human Comedy becomes broadly laughable, as when Jesus and his disciples run through the woods in chromo-colored sequences, or when Mary miraculously appears after a hunter has shot a rosary from a tree branch, or when an unintentionally...
Cluttered with Buñuel's standard paraphernalia of stigmata, deformity, mud and fire, The Milky Way offers no unified vision, no system of thought or style. The lack of cohesion is deliberate, claims Buñuel: "Mystery is the essential element of every work of art. If a work of art is clear, then my interest in it ends...
...began work on The Milky Way, which he also called his finale. Yet before he and the century have completed their seventh decade, he will have directed his 28th film, Tristana. With another director, such ambiguities of statement and action might seem a bit bizarre; with Buñuel, they are entirely in character. Since his youth, he has fashioned a career from contradictions. The first-born son of a Spanish bourgeois father and an aristocratic mother, Luis became a brilliant pupil of Jesuit tutors. But upon reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, he started the opening battle...
...Milky Way, in fact, seems made of both varieties. Its shards and fragments remain in the retina long after the film has flashed by. Yet the angry whole is never equal to some of its parts-as if, like a doctor attending a plagued patient, Buñuel had been infected by what he was treating. "We have just enough religion to make us hate," said Swift, "but not enough to make us love one another." It is impossible to differentiate between the faults of the church and the faults of Buñuel...