right...saw it right after and using my noggin for a change to answer my own question.domino harvey wrote:You just posted there: the StudioCanal thread
402 The Milky Way
- HistoryProf
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Re: 402 The Milky Way
- colinr0380
- Joined: Mon Nov 08, 2004 4:30 pm
- Location: Chapel-en-le-Frith, Derbyshire, UK
Re: 402 The Milky Way
Of course there is nothing more cutting and dangerous than someone who can comment on certain religious hypocrisies from the 'insiders' perspective of actually having some connection to ideas that they are tackling (which is also why The Devils is still effectively banned).
And Bunuel's foot fetishism moments make Quentin Tarantino look like an amateur!
And Bunuel's foot fetishism moments make Quentin Tarantino look like an amateur!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Jun 13, 2010 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.
- Mr Sausage
- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
- Location: Canada
Re: 402 The Milky Way
Indeed, the Milky Way is almost totally about how spirituality becomes subordinated to obscurantist pedantry when various established churches vie for earthly power. The movie may not be Bunuel's most savage satire, but surely no one can miss the bitter taste when Bunuel shows us people willing to murder each other over baffling questions like whether or not the son is consubstantial with the father.Michael Kerpan wrote:Anti-clerical-establishment might be even closer to the mark -- as he has some surprisingly positive portrayals of "clerics" (my personal favorite being the worker-bishop of "Discreet Charm").Matt wrote:I think Bunuel always maintained that he was not anti-religion but rather anti-clerical.
- Michael Kerpan
- Spelling Bee Champeen
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Re: 402 The Milky Way
The children's pageant featuring recitation of proclamations of anathema also struck me as pretty savage (and funny).Mr_sausage wrote:The movie may not be Bunuel's most savage satire, but surely no one can miss the bitter taste when Bunuel shows us people willing to murder each other over baffling questions like whether or not the son is consubstantial with the father.
- Mr Sausage
- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
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Re: 402 The Milky Way
Hah! I'd forgotten that part. One of the funniest and most sly jabs at religious indoctrination I've seen.Michael Kerpan wrote:The children's pageant featuring recitation of proclamations of anathema also struck me as pretty savage (and funny).Mr_sausage wrote:It may not be Bunuel's most savage satire, but surely no one can miss the bitter taste when Bunuel shows us people willing to murder each other over baffling questions like whether or not the son is consubstantial with the father.
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Re: 402 The Milky Way
One of the reasons that I like The Milky Way is that it's a real pebble in the shoe to those that want to sentimentalize Bunuel. I think the tendency among mainstream critics is to look at Bunuel as that cuddly old surrealist. A man who gently mocks the foibles of humankind with a wry smile. The Milky Way puts the lie to such a view of Bunuel. It's a withering assault on the Church that doesn't fit the typical narrative. Consequently, I think it's been underrated.he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
- Mr Sausage
- Joined: Wed Nov 03, 2004 9:02 pm
- Location: Canada
Re: 402 The Milky Way
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.
- HistoryProf
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Re: 402 The Milky Way
how would that work considering the multitude of quotes he let loose regarding his atheism, not the least of which was an emphatic “I am an atheist still, thank God” in the 60s wasn't it (the ironic pun intended of course)?he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
- zedz
- Joined: Sun Nov 07, 2004 7:24 pm
Re: 402 The Milky Way
In some quarters, Christian 'rehabilitation' of non-Christian cultural figures (especially anybody who ever looked at Christianity sideways) is quite a cottage industry (I know a guy who devoted years of his life to 'proving' that little Bobby Zimmerman had 'always' been a Christian, decades before Slow Train Coming). As with many academic pursuits, there are ways to get around hard evidence to the contrary. Ignoring it seems to work.HistoryProf wrote:how would that work considering the multitude of quotes he let loose regarding his atheism, not the least of which was an emphatic “I am an atheist still, thank God” in the 60s wasn't it (the ironic pun intended of course)?he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
- Florinaldo
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Re: 402 The Milky Way
Indeed, anyone who has read his memoir My Last Sigh and his other writings can have no doubt as to how solid his atheism was. But that will never stop some people from trying to reinvent a famous person's personal convictions after they are dead, as some did with the entirely fictional deathbed reversals of Darwin and Twain for example.HistoryProf wrote:how would that work considering the multitude of quotes he let loose regarding his atheism, not the least of which was an emphatic “I am an atheist still, thank God” in the 60s wasn't it (the ironic pun intended of course)?he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
But of course, only as resolute an atheist as Buñuel could be so fascinated by the pomp of the Church and the recondite subtleties of theological doctrine and dogma to make a film such as this one, espacially considering his religious upbringing which left an inescapable cultural and philosophical frame of reference.
But as others have pointed out, I am not sure he would have agreed with the characterization put forward earlier in this thread that he found life meaningless. It would probably be more correct to say that the found the answers in religious faith to be meaningless and absurd. He managed to find meaning for his life in several other ways, like writing and filmaking, friends, and earthly pleasures like sex and drinking.
- Zinoviev
- Joined: Tue Dec 09, 2008 7:45 pm
Re: 402 The Milky Way
Tolstoy, too.Indeed, anyone who has read his memoir My Last Sigh and his other writings can have no doubt as to how solid his atheism was. But that will never stop some people from trying to reinvent a famous person's personal convictions after they are dead, as some did with the entirely fictional deathbed reversals of Darwin and Twain for example.
- knives
- Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2008 6:49 pm
Re: 402 The Milky Way
My memories off, but isn't Tolstoy way more complicated than any of the three above.
- Zinoviev
- Joined: Tue Dec 09, 2008 7:45 pm
Re: 402 The Milky Way
Undoubtedly, though certain elements in the Russian Orthodox Church claimed that the "heretic" Tolstoy had recanted on his deathbed.knives wrote:My memories off, but isn't Tolstoy way more complicated than any of the three above.
- bottled spider
- Joined: Thu Nov 26, 2009 2:59 am
Re:
Whatever the propriety of bumping a decade old post, I have to say reading this made my day. The world is suddenly a rosier place, knowing that the pateliers really existed.Michael Kerpan wrote:Even "pateliers" are for real: http://tinyurl.com/36nyky