A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, 1954)

Dan O'Herlihy in Robinson Crusoe
Cast: Dan O'Herlihy, Jaime Fernández, Felipe de Alba, Chel López, José Chávez, Emilio Garabay. Screenplay: Hugo Butler, Luis Buñuel, based on a novel by Daniel Defoe. Cinematography: Alex Phillips. Art direction: Edward Fitzgerald. Film editing: Carlos Savage, Alberto Valenzuela. Music: Anthony Collins.

Robinson Crusoe is one of those books I feel like I've read even when I haven't. Its myth, of the solitary man tormented by solitude but inwardly driven to survive, is among the more potent ones. But in a social context, it's also a fable about colonialism. Crusoe, at least in Luis Buñuel's version, is a man carrying the white man's burden, needing to master the environment and its other inhabitants. The ship that carries him to his destiny is involved in the slave trade, and one of the moments in the film that shocked me the most was when Crusoe decides to put Friday in leg shackles, which are among the items that, for some reason, he salvaged from the wreck of his ship. Even after the agony of his long solitude, when he longs to hear another human voice, his first thought when he encounters Friday is not that he has found a companion but that he's found a servant. Presuming to give Friday a name instead of learning the one we assume he must already have, Crusoe also introduces himself as "Master." Both of them must be identified by their relationship. Eventually, Crusoe recognizes Friday as friend as much as servant, admiring the skills he brings to their existence on the island, but it's also Crusoe's "civilization" to which the two men journey at the film's end, rather than remain in the world they have created for themselves. And the relinquishing of the island to the band of mutineers as punishment for their mutiny is filled with irony: Crusoe has founded a penal colony like Australia. Buñuel is acutely aware of these ironies, of course, laying them on without preachiness, just as he slyly undercuts Crusoe's religiosity by having Friday ask Crusoe an unanswerable question about the relationship between God and the devil. Dan O'Herlihy makes a fine Crusoe, in a performance that got him an Oscar nomination, and Jaime Fernández, who learned English for the part, is an excellent foil as Friday. It was Buñuel's first color film, though the print shown on the Criterion Channel suggests that it may be in need of some cleaning and restoration.
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