The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luis Buñuel · a film in French, Le Fantôme de la liberté · 1974 · about 104 minutes · written with Jean-Claude Carrière · produced by Serge Silberman · photographed by Edmond Richard
Mode
Surrealist comedy as a relay of episodes; satire, dream, farce and ghost story passed from hand to hand
Mythos
The stone guest who strikes the profaner of a tomb; Goya’s martyrs; the dead who call the living; the bird of the hidden head: summoned, and dropped
Phase
From an execution in Toledo in 1808 to riot police at a Paris zoo in the present, by a chain of about a dozen hand-offs, none of them resolved
Presentation
Feature film in colour, about 104 minutes, French dialogue with a Spanish opening; no protagonist; a cast of French and Italian stars, each held for an episode
Register
Dry comedy, level and deadpan; from a firing squad to a dinner on toilets, the impossible and the ordinary shown in one plain manner
Scale
A society passed through in links: the state, the church, the family, sexuality and death, each held for an episode and let go
Governing Proposition
A story of Toledo under Napoleon’s occupation is closed in a Paris park, and the film passes from one stranger to another, among them a nanny, a sleepless father, a nurse, a hatter, a lecturer, a man told he is dying, a sniper and two prefects of police, dropping each as it takes up the next, and ending among riot police at a zoo. The wager of the film is that the rules of decency and order are conventions with no ground, kept in force by habit and authority, and that a narrative which refuses every consequence can make the viewer feel the expectation of consequence as one more habit.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Toledo, 1808, under Napoleon’s occupation. Spaniards are shot by a French firing squad against a wall, in a tableau staged after Goya’s The Third of May 1808, and the condemned cry the old slogan of Spanish absolutism: “¡Vivan las cadenas!”
“Long live chains!” In a church a French captain makes love to the tomb statue of a dead noblewoman and is struck down by the stone figure of her husband, the stone guest of the Don Juan legend come for the profaner of a tomb. Then the frame breaks. The story is being read from a book by a nanny in a Paris park, in the present, and the captain is not seen again.
Luis Buñuel wrote the film with Jean-Claude Carrière, Serge Silberman produced it, and Edmond Richard photographed it in colour. It is a French production, in French with a Spanish opening, released in 1974, and it runs about 104 minutes. It came two years after The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, made by the same writers and the same producer, and five after The Milky Way, his picaresque. The interrupted dinners of the one and the road of the other are behind it, and behind both the surrealism Buñuel had brought to film in 1929.
Its form is the relay. A character from one episode carries the film into the next and is then dropped, and there is no protagonist at all. Max Ophüls’s La Ronde (1950) is the classic of the relay, but it passes its baton inside one theme, one city, one period and a closed circle of lovers; here the baton passes with no theme announced, across centuries, classes and genres, and the circle is not closed. The turn is real. It was taken by a director of seventy-four, coming off an international success, who used his standing with his producer to make a stranger film than the one before. The commercial risk was cushioned, and the film extends his own proven path more than it breaks from it.
Movement II
In the park a man gives the children in the nanny’s charge some postcards. At home their parents, played by Jean-Claude Brialy and Monica Vitti, are scandalised by what they take for obscene pictures. The pictures are views of monuments. The nanny is dismissed. Nothing on the cards is what the parents see; what they see is the rule they bring to the cards, and the rule is enforced on the nanny all the same.
The father cannot sleep. In the night a rooster, a postman and an ostrich pass through the bedroom, and a letter delivered in the dream is on the table in the morning. The film draws no line between the dream and the waking room, and the camera does not stop to mark the impossible; it arrives in the same plain manner as the ordinary. In a doctor’s surgery a nurse asks leave to visit her sick father. The film never reaches him.
This is the film’s method and its argument. Each episode raises an expectation of consequence, the captain’s fate, the nurse’s father, and leaves it behind when a character crosses a threshold into another story. A plotted film about the arbitrariness of social law would have to argue through causes, and causality is what this film holds to be one more convention. The viewer, waiting for a story to pay off, is made to feel the waiting as a habit, and has it broken a dozen times. The hand-offs are made with skill, a character leaving one frame and carrying the film into another in a single movement. But the chain admits episodes whose places could be exchanged, and the form tolerates slack it could have refused.
Movement III
At a country inn in the rain, friars play poker for holy medals. A young man and his aunt are among the guests. A hatter, played by Michael Lonsdale, is whipped by his companion before the friars, who leave. The inn is the film’s loosest passage. It runs long; the aunt and nephew add little the hatter does not; it obeys the rules of sexual farce more than the film’s own law, which is a law of authority; and it is staged more loosely than anything round it. Remove it, and the argument would stand.
At a police academy a lecturer addresses the cadets, and is interrupted by their duties. He tells them of a dinner party at which the guests sit round the table on toilets and withdraw alone to a small room to eat. It is the best known scene in the film, and its disclosure is the plainest: eating has become the shameful act and excretion the social one, by an inversion so exact that it cannot be unseen. Shame attaches to acts by convention, not by nature, and the convention, once turned over, shows no ground beneath it.
That is what the film brings into the open. The rules of decency and order are conventions with no ground, kept in force by habit and by authority, and the order they keep absorbs whatever threatens it. The title’s liberty is a phantom in two senses: the freedom the condemned in Toledo shout against, and the freedom from causes that the form enacts, which leads nowhere. The disclosure holds, and it is single; once taken, it is taken whole. Several episodes disclose a mood of absurdity more than a meaning, and the satire of the bourgeoisie restates what Buñuel had already made plain in the dinners of 1972.
Movement IV
Two gendarmes are on traffic patrol. A driver, M. Legendre, played by Jean Rochefort, is told by his doctor that he has cancer, and the illness is never mentioned again. His small daughter is reported missing from school while she stands in the room, and the police take her description from her. Rochefort plays it straight, as the whole cast plays every episode straight, and gives the absurd the weight of ordinary conduct.
An ordinary man in a suit, in a tower, chooses targets among the passers-by and shoots them. The film shows it without music or comment, and they fall in the street. It is the height of the film: dread without rhetoric, a cold elevation the comedy round it does not prepare and does not keep. The man is tried and sentenced to death, and released to sign autographs. Few passages rise like this one; the opening tableau after Goya has a gravity the film declines to hold, and between such moments the film keeps the tone of an anecdote told at dinner.
A child declared missing while she is present, a murderer condemned and released to sign autographs, a dying man’s diagnosis dropped as soon as it is given: each is authority operating in a reality of its own, indifferent to the facts it administers. The making serves the point by refusing to mark it. Long takes let the absurd arrive without emphasis, and the cutting will not signal a joke. That plainness carries the argument, and it has a cost: Richard’s colour is flat and serviceable rather than composed, and the uniform manner, right for what the film says, gives the eye little to return to.
Movement V
The prefect of police meets, in a bar, a woman who resembles his dead sister. A telephone call comes from the sister. At night he goes to the family crypt, and he is arrested; a second prefect, played by Michel Piccoli, also holds the office: one post held by two men, a convention operating without reference to fact. The call from the grave touches the oldest pattern of the dead who summon the living, and the crypt at night reaches the uncanny. Both are visited and left, as the stone guest was at the start.
The film ends at the zoo: riot police, a crowd, gunfire, and a last close shot of an ostrich, the bird of the hidden head, staring into the lens. The frame answers itself. Spaniards shot by Napoleon’s troops and riot police firing on a crowd obey one law: authority enforces an order whose ground no one can name, and its subjects cry for their chains. A second law holds without exception: no episode resolves, and each is left by a character passing on. The orders the film passes through are many, the state, the church, the family, sexuality, mortality, history and the natural order, and each is held for an episode and let go; labour and the economy never enter, and no one’s mind is seen from inside.
Fifty-two years on, the film is shown in repertory, at festivals and in retrospectives, and taught with Buñuel and with surrealism in film, though its presence is narrower than that of the best known films of its span, and only the toilet dinner has passed beyond cinema. It still asks what the ostrich is, and whether the cry against liberty mocks reaction or describes what people in fact choose. Beside Buñuel’s other films on this desk it stands lower: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at 8.6, Viridiana at 8.5, The Exterminating Angel and Belle de Jour at 8.3, That Obscure Object of Desire at 8.0. It is the loosest of them: a chain whose design is required and whose links are not, ending on a bird that stares back.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is the hardest this film faces, and on purpose. Its law is that no episode is owed to the one before: the captain’s story is abandoned in a park, the nurse’s father is never reached, the dying man’s cancer is never mentioned again. What is required is the chain itself, each hand-off made by a character crossing a threshold, and the frame, the execution answered by the zoo. The parts are not. Remove the inn or the postcards and the argument would stand; the inn runs long, and the aunt and nephew add little the hatter does not. Necessity belongs to the design, not to its members, and that holds the axis below the cap.
Score: 7.2 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: the rules of decency and order are conventions with no ground, kept in force by habit and authority, and the order they keep absorbs whatever threatens it. The toilet dinner makes the point by an inversion that cannot be unseen, eating made the shameful act and excretion the social one. Postcards of monuments taken for obscenity, a child declared missing while present, a murderer released to sign autographs: each shows authority administering a reality of its own. What holds the axis: several episodes disclose a mood of absurdity rather than a meaning, the meaning once taken is single, and the satire of the bourgeoisie restates what Buñuel had already made plain.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The register is dry comedy, level and deadpan, and elevation is rare by design. When it comes it is cold. The opening tableau after Goya has a gravity the film declines to keep. The sniper is the height: an ordinary man in a suit choosing targets from a tower, shown without music or comment, dread without rhetoric. The prefect’s night in the crypt and the call from a dead woman reach the uncanny, and the last shot, an ostrich staring into the lens after gunfire off screen, is a summit of a strange kind. What holds the axis lowest is frequency: much of the middle hour, the inn and the lecture, rises no higher than a good joke.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Myth is evoked often and built hardly at all, and the evasion is part of the argument. The opening summons the stone guest of the Don Juan legend, who strikes down the profaner of a tomb, and Goya’s execution, a national icon of martyrdom; both are dropped within minutes. The prefect’s sister calling from the grave touches the oldest pattern of the dead who summon the living, and the ostrich, the bird of the hidden head, closes the film as an emblem no one explains. These are sharp. But the relay forbids any pattern to bear weight across the whole: a chain without origin or end is anti-mythic by construction, and its archetypes are visited, not inhabited.
Score: 7.3 / 10
The inheritance is threefold: the relay film, with Max Ophüls’s La Ronde (1950) its classic; Buñuel’s own late manner, the picaresque of The Milky Way (1969) and the interrupted dinners of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972); and the surrealism he had brought to film in 1929. The turn is real. La Ronde passes its baton inside one theme, one city, one period and a closed circle of lovers; here it passes with no theme announced, across centuries, classes and genres, and the protagonist is abolished for a whole feature. What holds the axis is the stake: Buñuel, at seventy-four and after an international success, extended a path already proven, with the commercial risk cushioned.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. A plotted film about the arbitrariness of social law would have to argue through causes, and causality is exactly what this film holds to be a convention. The relay makes the argument structural: the viewer, waiting for the captain’s story, the nurse’s father or the dying man’s illness to pay off, feels the expectation of consequence as a habit and has it broken a dozen times. The frame completes the form, and the camera’s plainness gives the impossible and the ordinary one manner. What holds the axis: the chain admits episodes whose places could be exchanged, and the form tolerates slack it could have refused.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Evidence across fifty-two years, real and limited. The film is returned to and argued over in a smaller literature than that of Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel or The Discreet Charm, and often as one panel of a late trilogy rather than alone. Its questions stay open: whether the frame nests stories or runs in one present, what the ostrich is, whether the cry against liberty mocks reaction or describes what people choose, whether the satire is of the bourgeoisie or of narrative itself. The form yields on return, in the rhymes of the two prefects, the two ostriches and the two judgments. What holds the axis is that many episodes are gags whose point, once taken, does not deepen.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The field is the cinema of the 1970s. The force is a feature built as a relay without protagonist, theme or resolution, joined only by contiguity: a real enlargement of what a narrative film could leave out. Part of that force belongs to La Ronde and to The Milky Way, and the television sketch with its own hand-offs, Monty Python’s Flying Circus (from 1969), was contemporary; that is discounted. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the episodic and network films of later decades, where the debt is diffuse and shared; the toilet dinner, passed into the common stock of cinematic satire; and Richard Linklater’s Slacker (1990), close in form, its debt not settled here. The reach is real and narrow.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, across fifty-two years. The form survives whole: the film as released is the work. Presence has been continuous, in repertory and festival screenings, in home video through a series of editions, and in a regular place in retrospectives and in the teaching of Buñuel and of surrealism in film. It is narrower than the presence of the most widely known films of its span, and it has passed beyond cinema only through the toilet dinner. The surface is partly fixed to its moment, the riot police and the sniper speaking to France in the years after 1968, but the satire’s target is not topical, and it ages as period.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium. Buñuel’s late style is plain by choice: a mobile camera that follows rather than displays, long takes that let the absurd arrive without emphasis, cutting that will not signal a joke. Where the plainness bears weight it is exact, since the argument needs the impossible and the ordinary shown alike, and the hand-offs are made with real skill, in one movement from story to story. Michael Lonsdale, Jean Rochefort and Michel Piccoli give the absurd the weight of ordinary conduct. The charges are not small: Edmond Richard’s colour is flat and serviceable rather than composed, the inn is staged loosely, and the uniform manner gives the eye little to return to.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Spaniards shot by Napoleon’s troops in 1808, and riot police firing on a crowd at a Paris zoo. One law governs both: authority enforces an order whose ground no one can name, and its subjects cry for their chains. It holds across the middle, in the postcards, the toilet dinner, the missing girl, the sniper freed and the two prefects. The second law, the relay, holds without exception: no episode resolves, and each is left by a character passing on. The range is wide, from Goya to bedroom farce. The strain is at the inn, which obeys the looser rules of sexual farce, where the aunt and nephew stand outside the law of authority.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The orders present are many: the state, in soldiers, police, a court, two prefects and a riot; the church, in friars, a profaned tomb and holy medals; the family, in parents and children, an aunt and nephew, a brother and his dead sister; sexuality, in fetish, incest and the hatter’s confessed tastes; mortality, in cancer, the crypt and the sniper’s victims; history; the natural order, in the rooster and the ostriches. Each is held for an episode and let go. One law of arbitrary convention runs through them, an integration of a kind. What holds the axis: consciousness stays at the surface, labour and the economy are absent, and no order is held long enough to be weighed against another.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Living Form at 8.3 and The Inner Law at 8.1. A film whole as released and continuously shown and taught for fifty-two years, its satire ageing as period rather than as topic; a relay form that makes the expectation of consequence felt as a habit, which is the film’s argument; and one law of groundless authority from Toledo in 1808 to the zoo, with the relay itself holding without exception.
Limiting Dimension
The Sublime at 7.1: cold heights in the Goya tableau, the sniper, the crypt and the ostrich, with a middle hour that rises no higher than a good joke. Beside it, The Inevitable and The Encompassed at 7.2: a chain that is required and links that are not, the inn and the postcards removable without loss; and many orders passed from hand to hand, none held long enough to be weighed against another. Then The Archetypal Deep at 7.3, the stone guest, Goya’s martyrs and the dead sister summoned and dropped.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.2 falls three tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 7.9, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of five: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.0, The Swerve at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 and The Archetypal Deep at 7.3 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Sublime, 7.1, The Inevitable, 7.2, and The Archetypal Deep, 7.3, all below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.7, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Le Fantôme de la liberté as released in 1974, in colour, about 104 minutes, from the firing squad in Toledo to the ostrich at the zoo: directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Jean-Claude Carrière, produced by Serge Silberman, photographed by Edmond Richard. The film as released is the unit; restoration bears on its survival only. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the French film and its Spanish opening; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. The register of the French speech is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. One line is quoted, the cry of the condemned in Toledo, in Spanish with an English rendering beneath; no other line is held to the word. The episodes are described from memory, and the order of the smaller hand-offs in the middle of the film is not given. Casting is named only where it is certain. Details that could not be verified, among them the players of the captain, the first prefect and his sister, whether the opening cry returns at the close, the source of the title, the number of versions in circulation, the labels of the home video editions, the exact running time, and the scene and shot counts and share of dialogue, are not given; Richard Linklater’s debt to the film is left open.