The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

140 Guy Maddin
shooting things, I literally just get myself on a 180-degree nipple twist, and
it’s kind of like dialing in Buñuel. It’s just uncomfortable and stinging down
there in my chest. He was like movie experience number one for me, and the
influence has never really gone away.
In their first film, Buñuel and Dalí said, they rejected “any image that
might give us a rational explanation.” But for me, symbolism seems to
permeate those two films.
Maddin: Yeah, they seem to be explicable.
Are we as viewers putting the symbolism there or is Buñuel just being
clever and dodging the question?
Maddin: I think he’s lying most of the time in interviews. I think it just
made for a nice flip explanation, but also, compared to what most of the
world was used to, it did feel pretty irrational and almost insoluble for most
viewers. They might feel smugly secure in the notion that not many people
could have solved those things. They just have the conspicuous shape of
relationships, both those movies, and fortunately most relationships defy
rational explanation too.
Melodrama and surrealism were put on this earth to tell love stories, and
that’s what they do best. They don’t make political arguments, although they
can. I just think that the fervid irrationality of love at its best makes us all a
little bit crazy, and it is the stuff of melodrama and surrealism.
Buñuel and Dalí fought fiercely over this film. Dalí later disowned it
altogether, saying it “betrayed his original vision” or it “placed his own
authentic sacrilege with a primary anticlericalism and over-explicit
political message.” Does that criticism hold any weight?
Maddin: As much as I’ve watched the movie, the political message seemed
generically antibourgeoisie, and that’s fine with me. I didn’t feel like I wanted
to go eliminate the bourgeoisie, but it always felt like fair game for it to be
open season on them all the time. That would be about as far as I’d go with it.
I’m excited by the fact that Buñuel used found footage in the early part,
but I always kind of liked the fact that the scorpion sequence doesn’t really
work very well. I find it kind of boring, but it did turn me on to reading