The Phantom of Liberty - Historical and Social Context

Historical and Social Context

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The Phantom of Liberty was Buñuel's penultimate film. At the time of production, he was 74 years old and considering retirement. Buñuel summarizes many of the concerns that permeate his work:

Chance governs all things; necessity, which is far from having the same purity, comes only later. If I have a soft spot for any one of my movies, it would be for The Phantom of Liberty, because it tries to work out just this theme.

The film contains short incidents and scenarios collected from throughout Buñuel's life, arranged in the style of a surreal game where seemingly disconnected ideas are linked by chance encounters. Writer Gary Indiana notes that the film was written by Buñuel and Carrière "telling each other their dreams every morning."

The film is infused with his personal experience. It opens in Toledo, Spain, a city that so impressed the young Buñuel that in 1923 he founded a group called the "Order of Toledo". When he was a student in Madrid, he saw a dead woman's hair ‘growing’ from a tomb in the moonlight. The sight made a strong impression on him and he used it in this film some fifty years later. In the 1940s, when he lived in Los Angeles but had no prospects of film work, he wrote down an idea about a missing girl whose parents fruitlessly search for her while she is beside them; invisible and yet not invisible. When the Carmelite monk says "If everyone prayed every day to Saint Joseph, peace and quiet would prevail", this was a quote that had stuck with Buñuel when he was visiting a monastery in the 1960s. One of the most poignant biographical details used in The Phantom of Liberty is the sequence when the doctor tries to avoid telling his patient that he has cancer of the liver. This was based on Buñuel's experience of being told that he had a cyst on his liver (he died of cancer of the liver in 1983).

The title of the film is a homage to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ Communist Manifesto, specifically a reference to the opening sentence: "A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Communism" (in French, "spectre" is translated as fantôme). This sentence refers to the way in which the idea of Communism was being used pejoratively by the authorities in the mid-19th century to attack all political parties opposed to the established order (church, aristocracy and state). The Communist Manifesto was written to offer a positive vision of the views, aims and tendencies of Communists from across Europe. Buñuel and the Surrealists were closely linked to the Communists in the 1930s, but by the 1950s he had developed a greater antipathy towards the party.

The title of The Phantom of Liberty is also taken from this line of dialogue from his 1969 film The Milky Way: "I experience in every event that my thoughts and my will are not in my power. And that my liberty is only a phantom." This possibly to the way in which the civil rights movements of the 1960s had been seen as a threat to the established order – the ‘phantom’ of radical liberal ideas ‘haunting’ capitalist society. It is more likely to refer to the illusive nature of freedom, to the ways in which our destinies are controlled by chance, or, as Buñuel would have it:

We so often find ourselves at complicated crossroads which lead to other crossroads, to ever more fantastic labyrinths. Somehow we must choose a path.

This quote not only parallels the structure of the film but also summarizes Buñuel's philosophy of life. After being awarded an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in the previous year (for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, also with producer Serge Silberman and writer Jean-Claude Carriere), he appears to have regained the creative autonomy of his early films. The Phantom of Liberty can therefore be seen as a personal film from a director reflecting back on a long creative career.