402 The Milky Way

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HistoryProf
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#51 Post by HistoryProf » Sun Jun 13, 2010 2:25 pm

domino harvey wrote:You just posted there: the StudioCanal thread
right...saw it right after and using my noggin for a change to answer my own question.

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colinr0380
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#52 Post by colinr0380 » Sun Jun 13, 2010 3:03 pm

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!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Jun 13, 2010 3:04 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#53 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Jun 13, 2010 3:04 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:
Matt wrote:I think Bunuel always maintained that he was not anti-religion but rather anti-clerical.
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").
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.

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Michael Kerpan
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#54 Post by Michael Kerpan » Sun Jun 13, 2010 3:31 pm

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.
The children's pageant featuring recitation of proclamations of anathema also struck me as pretty savage (and funny).

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#55 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Jun 13, 2010 4:36 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:
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.
The children's pageant featuring recitation of proclamations of anathema also struck me as pretty savage (and funny).
Hah! I'd forgotten that part. One of the funniest and most sly jabs at religious indoctrination I've seen.

Fortisquince
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#56 Post by Fortisquince » Sun Jun 13, 2010 8:03 pm

he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
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.

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Mr Sausage
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#57 Post by Mr Sausage » Sun Jun 13, 2010 8:55 pm

DavidHare wrote:Sausage, Bunuel certainly does take religion seriously because he's appalled by it.
Yes, I would agree. I hope I didn't come across as saying otherwise.
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.
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.

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.

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HistoryProf
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#58 Post by HistoryProf » Mon Jun 14, 2010 1:16 am

he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
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)?

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zedz
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#59 Post by zedz » Mon Jun 14, 2010 4:03 pm

HistoryProf wrote:
he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
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)?
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.

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Florinaldo
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#60 Post by Florinaldo » Sun Jun 27, 2010 8:47 pm

HistoryProf wrote:
he is determinedly an atheist, despite the attmps of some misguided fools to reinvent him.
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)?
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.

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.

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Zinoviev
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#61 Post by Zinoviev » Mon Jun 28, 2010 2:07 am

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.
Tolstoy, too.

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knives
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#62 Post by knives » Mon Jun 28, 2010 2:16 am

My memories off, but isn't Tolstoy way more complicated than any of the three above.

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Zinoviev
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Re: 402 The Milky Way

#63 Post by Zinoviev » Mon Jun 28, 2010 2:26 am

knives wrote:My memories off, but isn't Tolstoy way more complicated than any of the three above.
Undoubtedly, though certain elements in the Russian Orthodox Church claimed that the "heretic" Tolstoy had recanted on his deathbed.

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bottled spider
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#64 Post by bottled spider » Wed Sep 20, 2017 7:06 pm

Michael Kerpan wrote:Even "pateliers" are for real: http://tinyurl.com/36nyky
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.

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