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THE INDISCREET CHARM OF DISGUST. THE AESTHETICS OF EXCESS AND PERVERSION IN
THE CINEMA OF LUIS BUÑUEL, MARCO FERRERI AND PETER GREENAWAY
Marie Rebecchi
To cite this version:
Marie Rebecchi. THE INDISCREET CHARM OF DISGUST. THE AESTHETICS OF EXCESS AND PERVERSION IN THE CINEMA OF LUIS BUÑUEL, MARCO FERRERI AND PETER GREENAWAY. Arts & Foods, 2015. �hal-03226507�
THE INDISCREET
CHARM OF DISGUST.
THE AESTHETICS OF EXCESS
AND PERVERSION
IN THE CINEMA OF LUIS
BUÑUEL, MARCO FERRERI AND PETER GREENAWAY
MARIE
REBECCHI
737 L’Âge d’or, by Luis Buñuel, 1930
It is in the conflict between repulsion and attraction, between incorporation and expulsion, and in the very iteration of these experiences that we have to trace the conditions for the possibility of disgust. In fact one of the privileged paths to the aesthetic experience of disgust1 can appear when pleasure and desire are oriented towards disgusting or revolting images or objects.
In the aesthetics of the Enlightenment,2 the founding fathers of the discipline did not contemplate the possibility of a “taste for the distasteful,”3 thereby denying the existence of an aesthetic pleasure caused by the ambivalent attraction of the disgusting. But in twentieth-century aesthetics the landscape changed dramatically.
It is definitely the cinema, more than any other medium, that has wrestled with this outrageous paradox, seeking to show the indigestible and obscene ambiguity that dwells in the feeling of disgust. In this respect, Julia Peker speaks of the
“logical scandal of ambivalence,”4 observing that the attraction of what disgusts us is capable of creating a lacerating contradiction in our feelings, an ambiguity as insoluble as it is recurrent. What happens when we experience desire and disgust for a single “dark object,” either simultaneously or alternately?
It is through the “sensuous”5 experience of disgust, excess, and the unspeakable pleasure procured by the forms of aesthetic perversion of taste that the relation between the food and the cinema is manifested in one of its most extreme and cruel forms.6 Directors and authors such as Luis Buñuel, Marco Ferreri and Peter Greenaway have explored this dimension directly, showing that only the overflowing violence of certain cinematic images is capable of giving visibility to the indiscreet fascination of disgust.
BUÑUEL: FROM THE “LAND OF DESIRE” TO “LAND WITHOUT BREAD”
In Buñuel’s Surrealist cinema of the late 1920s the relation with food and eating is expressed almost exclusively in sublimated ways, in the erotic and perverse dimension of desire. The act of eating is present in the modes of intensive
figuration of sex, for example through a series of explicit replacement images.7 This mechanism is employed in some famous sequences of L’Âge d’or (1930), among them the macro-sequence depicting the two lovers in the garden, where the erotic desires of the man and the woman find an outlet in perverse cannibalistic instincts.
We see the actress Lya Lys who, after voluptuously sucking her lover’s fingers, bites his hand, mutilating it with sadistic gusto. “Eros is mixed with the ugly and mutilation. It seems to imply a kind of esthétique de la laideur that breaks into the film, as had already happened in the sequence of love-making in the mud. Eros is bound up with a disagreeable dimension, represented on a particular plane of ambiguity and polysemy.”8 The other sequence that enables us to observe this replacement mechanism is clearly the one where Lya Lys sucks the big toe of an enormous marble statue: an obvious fetish that Freudian symbolism tends to connect with the phallus.9 The idea of eroticism suggested by this scene, as sacrificial violation and devouring appropriation of the other, is perfectly aligned with some of the ideas underlying Bataille’s theory of eros. In two texts published in 1929 and 1930 in the journal “Documents,” respectively entitled “Le Gros orteil” (The Big Toe)10 and “Bouche” (Mouth),11 one can already find a possible interpretation of the
“FOR THE EYE—AS STEVENSON EXQUISITELY PUTS IT, A CANNIBAL DELICACY—IS, ON OUR PART, THE OBJECT OF SUCH ANXIETY THAT WE WILL NEVER BITE INTO IT.”
GEORGES BATAILLE, DOCUMENTS, 1929, NO. 4
744 L’Âge d’or, by Luis Buñuel, 1930
418 MARIE REBECCHI 419
sequence in question. In particular, the photographs by Jacques-André Boiffard accompanying Bataille’s two texts (the magnification of two toes and a gaping mouth) to highlight two fundamental aspects that the erotic sequence in the garden in L’Âge d’or evokes explicitly: the irrepressible attraction to one of the most disgusting parts of the human body, or the big toe, and the desire to orally satisfy this drive, by opening the mouth wide, the better to taste and devour the object of this same desire. As Bataille says in his provocative article devoted to the “ignoble big toe,” “arrogant and proud” in its hideously cadaveric guise: “As for the big toe, classic foot fetishism leading to the licking of toes categorically indicates that it is a phenomenon of base seduction, which accounts for the burlesque value that is always more or less attached to the pleasures condemned by pure and superficial men.”12 According to Bataille, the most elementary aspect of appropriation is always presented in the form of oral consumption, considered as communion, participation, identification, incorporation or assimilation.13 In this sense the mouth is described by Bataille as the “prow of animals,”14 downgraded to an organ capable of bestially liberating men’s (and women’s) impulses.
In the same way, the eye (the subject of the entry “Œil” in the critical dictionary of Documents by Desnos, Bataille and Griaule15) is definitely not described as the highest and noblest organ of the human body. Through Bataille’s “cannibal” gaze, the eye becomes an edible object, downgraded to a friandise cannibal (a “cannibal delicacy”).16 In Bataille’s article, the eye significantly evokes two cinematic images.
The first is the famous sliced eye in the prologue to Buñuel and Dalí’s Un Chien andalou (1929—it was not published in the review but suggested in a note to the article—and the other, published in the body of the text, represents the eyes of Joan Crawford in a state of ecstasy: i.e. beside herself, bulging out of their sockets … Buñuel’s eye becomes a true friandise cannibal, being concretely turned into a boiled egg dissected by the blade of a knife in the film by Roger Barlow, Harry Hay & LeRoy Robbins, Even – As You and I (1937). The sequences parodying Un Chien andalou are set in a broader framework: three authors decide to participate in a contest for amateur movie makers (Liberty – Pete Amateur Movie Contest), but are unable to think up ideas for the screenplay. After browsing the catalog of the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism, curated by Alfred Barr at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, (in which we catch glimpses of works by Salvador Dalí and Meret Oppenheim), the three decide to write a film in the Surrealist vein, throwing together a variety of motifs inspired by the great European avant-garde auteurs (Hans Richter, René Clair, Abel Gance, Sergei M. Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Luis Buñuel). The movie then shows the shooting, editing and screening of this film, which will be called The Afternoon of a Rubberband.17 Even – As You and I retrieves and reproduces some avant-garde motifs, ironically perverting and downgrading them through a series of mocking references to food: the eyeball sadistically dissected by a razor blade in Un Chien andalou is first evoked by a light bulb lying in a frying pan, then by a razor slicing into the white of a hard-boiled egg.18
Shortly after the release of Un Chien anadalou and L’Âge d’or, in the fall of 1930, Buñuel was invited by a representative of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to stay six months in the United States to “learn some good American technical skills
… and … learn how to make a movie.”19 After the American experience, in April 1931 Buñuel decided to return to Madrid and undertook the considerable feat of making the documentary Las Hurdes, Tierra sin pan (1932), about the wretched and desolate land without bread in the Extremadura, only a few hours from the metropolitan life of Madrid.20 With this documentary of denunciation, Buñuel concretely explored excess and scarcity in relation to food. Excess appears in the violence with which he depicted the destitution of the population of Las Hurdes,
741 Le Fantôme de la liberté, by Luis Buñuel, 1974
while scarcity is directly connected with the hunger and scarcity of food evoked by the title of the documentary. The images of food shortages, starvation, poverty, disease, death, degradation, the deformations of the earth and the inhabitants of Las Hurdes, mercilessly shown through a harrowing visual concert set to the notes of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4, overwhelm the inevitably anguished viewer, exasperated and aware of his own helplessness. It could be argued that in Las Hurdes the viewer is almost forced to adopt the same attitudes as the people who appear in the documentary: there is, in fact, no sign of rebellion or resistance among them. The desperate acceptance of their poverty lies
simply in the awareness of the fact that nothing and no one will intervene to save the life of a newborn child, a sick girl or
a donkey attacked by bees, whose death Buñuel shows as inexorable and ruthless destiny. In particular, the close up of the mouth of a sick and hungry child appalls the viewer by its unacceptable violence. “On a lonely street we see a child. We ask the mayor what is wrong with her. He says the child has been there for three days without moving. Since she moans she must be sick. One of our friends, improvising as a doctor, goes up to her to find out why her throat hurts. He asks her to open her mouth and we can see the inflamed gums. Unfortunately we cannot do anything for her. We return to the village two days later. We ask for news of her and are told the child has died.”21
As Octavio Paz said of the triumphant realism of Las Hurdes, “The ‘poet’ Buñuel withdraws and is silent to let reality itself speak, in a violent struggle with its most intolerable and cruel consequences.”22
BUÑUEL, FERRERI, GREENAWAY: THE CANNIBALISTIC CHARM OF THE BLOW-OUT
In Buñuel’s filmography, the relations between disgust, perversion and food begin to appear increasingly insistently from 1960, when the director shot Viridiana (1961). Here it was the iconographic structure of Leonardo’s Last Supper that was completely perverted. Buñuel repeated the arrangement of the apostles, but replaced them with a brutal group of irate beggars, the sick and lepers.
In the 1970s the themes of disgust, excess, perversion and pleasure taken to fatal extremes became increasingly frequent in films (especially those made in Europe). Examples of this imagery of abandonment and profligacy appear in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972), in which Marlon Brando eats seated on the floor before performing the violent act of sodomy with butter on Maria Schneider; Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), in which the presentation and discussion of the various dishes and drinks—like the unforgettable comments on how to make a dry Martini23 or on red wine with fish—sublimate and replace the occurrence of the event itself: the dinner constantly postponed by a series of blunders, in an absurd repetition compulsion that holds together a group of perverse and corrupt bourgeois;24 The Phantom of Liberty (1974), in which the characters socialize in the act of defecating: seven bourgeois friends talk around a table, with pants and underwear down, sitting on water closets, while lunch is consumed in a secluded closet. In this case it is in the inversion of the spaces (dining room/toilet), and the act of collective defecation that Buñuel reveals the cracks and unmasks the hypocrisy of bourgeois social rituals. Many of these themes recur with the same black humor and aesthetic disinhibition in Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (1973), described by Buñuel himself as a “monument to hedonism” and a “tragedy of the flesh.”25 The four characters in the film—the magistrate (Philippe Noiret), the television director (Michel Piccoli), the cook (Ugo
739 Viridiana, by Luis Buñuel, 1960
422 MARIE REBECCHI 423
Tognazzi) and the pilot (Marcello Mastroianni)—embody four different modes of bourgeois existence, “emblems of a bogus social organization,”26 which they reject by staging an intolerable “tragedy of the flesh,” whose most worthy epilogue can only be to eat until they die. In the La Grande Bouffe food is thus directly related to bulimic perversion and the death drive, brutally transforming a mere source of nourishment into an obscure source of self-destruction. As Maurizio Grande observes, the bodies of the four characters in the film “are used and consumed to excess, opposing materiality to materiality, bodies to things (food, women and erotic acts), order to order (or disorder, if one prefers), so as to
probe in depth the disrupted materiality and flow of the decay of bodily existence in its bulging, expanding, and falling hopelessly
sick.”27 The deaths of the four friends united for a whole weekend in a decadent Neoclassical villa outside Paris is therefore a collective suicide by excessive enjoyment: at the height of taste, and as its necessary dialectical reversal, it can only lead to extreme disgust and the annulment of all the senses in death.
Another significant film about the perverse and excessive relationship between the cinema and food is The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover by Peter Greenaway (1989). Here cannibalism and sadism are the two main ways the characters relate to the act of eating and cooking. As announced in the title, the film revolves around the story of a degenerate love triangle consisting of a violent thief, Albert Spica, his wife Georgina, abused by her husband, and her lover, the intellectual Michael, all gathered in the exclusive restaurant Le Hollandais run by the French chef Richard.28 In a macabre and artificially theatrical setting, with the colors accompanying the action, differentiating the interiors and connoting the characters, over a period of nine days (from the prologue on Thursday to the last dinner on Friday) it stages “an extravagant story, improbable but not impossible, set in a restaurant where it is customary that everything should be eaten, for the sake of experience.”29 In The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover Greenaway denounces the bulimic and engulfing aspect of the opulent consumer society, restoring to food and the act of eating their most obscene and disgusting aspects, emphasizing the anthropophagic urge, the scatological taste and its aphrodisiac and necrophiliac character. The final sequence of the film condenses and exhibits all these elements in exemplary fashion: food, cannibalism and revenge.30 The thief, the only guest at the last Friday dinner, is compelled by his wife to feed on the body of the lover whom he himself killed in a fit of jealousy. The revenge of the thief thus becomes the revenge of his wife, who, before killing her husband, turns to him and utters the last word of the film: “Cannibal.” Vengeance is served: the tension of the cannibal feast explodes in a shot, the husband dies and the red curtain is abruptly drawn.
742 La Grande Bouffe, by Marco Ferreri, 1973
Notes 1
On this point the reader is referred
to the forthcoming publication edited by M. Mazzocut-Mis,
Dal gusto al disgusto. L’estetica del pasto, Raf-
faello Cortina, Milan 2015. See also: C. Korsmeyer
, Savoring Disgust. The Foul and the Fair in Aesthetics, Oxford University Press, Oxford – New York 2011; W. Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sen- sation, State University of New York Press, Albany 2003; E. Franzini, “Tra gusto e disgusto,” Gusto e disgusto
edited by E. Franzini, Nike, Segrate 2000, pp. 1
1–82; M. Perniola, Disgus- ti. Le nuove tendenze estetiche, Costa & Nolan, Ancona – Milan 1998. 2 M. Mazzocut-Mis, Il disgusto nel secolo dei Lumi, “Lebenswelt”, No. 3 (2013), pp. 156–74. 3 Ibid., p. 173. 4 J. Peker, Cet obscur objet du degoût,
Le bord de l’Eau, Lormont 2010, pp. 19–47.
5 The expression “sensuous” is recur-
rent in the writings from the 1930s of the Soviet director Sergei M.
Eisen-
stein to indicate the corporeal and “pre-logical” dimension of thought.
6 A. Cappabianca, L’immagine estrema. Cinema e pratiche della crudeltà, Cos- ta & Nolan, Milan 2005. 7 P. Bertetto, L’enigma del desiderio, Bi- anco & Nero, Marsilio, Venice 2001, pp. 150–56. 8 Ibid., p. 152. 9 Ibid., p. 155.
10 See G. Bataille, “Le gros orteil,” Doc- uments, 1929, No. 6, reprint edited by D. Hollier, J.-M. Place, Paris 1991,
pp. 297–302 (English translation, “The Big T
oe,” G. Bataille, Visions of Excess. Selected Writings 1927-1939, edited by A. Stoekl, University of
Minnesota Press, Minneapolis 1985, pp. 20–23).
11 G. Bataille, “Bouche,” Documents,
1930, No. 5, pp. 299–300 (English translation, G. Bataille,
Visions of Excess, op. cit., pp. 59–60). 12 G. Bataille, “Le gros orteil,” op. cit.,
p. 84. (English translation, op. cit., p. 23).
13 Cf. G. Bataille, “Il valore d’uso di D.A.F. de Sade. Lettera aperta ai miei attuali compagni,” Critica dell’occhio,
editor S. Finzi, Guaraldi Editore, Rimini 1972, pp. 1
19–35. 14 G. Bataille, “Bouche,” op. cit., p. 159. (English translation, op. cit., p. 59).
15 G. Bataille, M. Griaule, R. Desnos, “Œil,” Documents, 1929, No. 4, pp. 215–20. 16 G. Bataille, “Œil - Friandise canni- bale,” Documents, 1929, No. 4, p.
216. (English translation, op. cit., p. 17). 17 See E. Camporesi, “Il luogo comune dell’avanguardia,” Fata Morgana, No. 18 (2012), pp. 87–99. 18 Ibid, p. 92. 19 L. Buñuel, My Last Breath, Flamingo, London 1985, p. 128.
20 See J. Herrera Navarro, “El ‘anti-via- je’ de Buñuel a Las Hurdes,” Luis Buñuel el ojo de la libertad, edited by J.-J. Váquez, A.S. Vidal, C. Tudelilla, exhibition catalog (Sala de exposi-
ciones de la Diputacíon de Huesca, June, 3 – July
, 25, 1999), Residencia
de Etudantes, Madrid 2000, pp. 127–35. See also J. Herrera,
Estudios Sobre Las Hurdes De Buñuel: (Evi- dencia Filmica, Estetica Y Recepcion), Editorial Renacimiento, Sevilla 2006. 21 L. Buñuel, Las Hurdes o Tierra sin pan, in Sette film, L’età dell’oro, Naz- arín, Viridiana, L’angelo sterminatore,
Simone del deserto, La via lattea, Il fascino discreto della borghesia
, edited by G. Fofi, Einaudi, Turin 1974, p. 501. 22 See O. Paz, “El poeta Buñuel”, Las Peras del olmo, Seix Barral, Barcelona 1984 (first ed. 1957), pp. 183–87; passage quoted in Ch. Tesson, “L’autre fin de Los Olivados,” Cahiers du cinéma, No. 546 (May 2000). 23 Buñuel, op. cit., p. 247. 24 A. Cattini, Luis Buñuel, Il Castoro Cinema, Milan 1995, p. 164. 25 Buñuel, op. cit., p. 224. In this
respect see M. Sesti, “La grande abbuffata,”
Marco Ferreri. Il cinema e i film, edited by S. Parigi, Marsilio, Venice 1995, p. 26. 26 A.B. Saponari, Il rifiuto dell’uomo nel cinema di Marco Ferreri, Progedit, Bari 2008, p. 55.
27 M. Grande, Marco Ferreri, Il Castoro
Cinema, La Nuova Italia, Florence 1971, p. 164.
28 D. De Gaetano, Peter Greenaway. Film, Video, installazioni, Lindau, Turin 2008, pp. 165–80. 29 P. Greenaway, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and her Lover, Dis Voir, Paris 1987, p. 7. 30 D. De Gaetano, Peter Greenaway. Film, Video, installazioni, p. 174.
743 The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover, di Peter Greenaway, 1989
426 MARIE REBECCHI 427
