The_Film_That_Changed_My_Life

L’âge d’or
143
I wanted to talk briefly about style. The title of this book is The Film
That Changed My Life, and, oddly, the film that changed Buñuel’s life
was Fritz Lang’s The Weary Death.
Maddin: Which I’ve never seen.
My question is, do you see a Lang influence either in this film or in
Buñuel’s canon?
Maddin: You know, I wasn’t aware of that. And yet, there is a meanness in
Lang that’s kind of a necessary meanness, a peeling back to get at the truth
of things. My only complaint with Lang is with pacing; while as measured
and delivered as Hitchcock, it doesn’t reward as well. He’s willing to be every
bit as cruel as Hitchcock and Buñuel. And he’s never bogus.
Speaking of other filmmakers, François Truffaut was a big Buñuel fan.
He called him “At once a builder and a destroyer.” Federico Fellini said,
“Buñuel re-established film in its true expression. Non-narrative film
in a literary sense. . . . He used film as an expression that is closer to
dreams. This seems to me film in its truly heraldic expression. His film
language is the language of dreams.”
Maddin: And so often directors are cited for being dreamlike. They’re most
dreamlike or whatever, so it starts to feel like maybe dreams are proliferating
out there as products. He at least set out as his initial mandate to try
to duplicate dreams through chance encounters with things. It’s interesting,
even when he goes with his more disciplined narratives, like Wuthering
Heights, which is a pretty tight narrative, he still manages to get passions
high enough to take people into that heater zone, where all the lines get
happily blurred. I really like his Wuthering Heights, as well, even though it’s
classic literary storytelling, although I think he starts in the middle of the
novel somehow. So he has this hilarious micromontage with really rapid
voiceover that requires that you speed-read the subtitles to bring you up
to pace. It’s almost like Preston Sturges has directed the beginning, in the
opening four minutes.
I’ve only seen the movie once, but it has a proper ending. It makes total
sense that Wuthering Heights would be a Mexican movie somehow. I just