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Abstract
Cet obscur objet du désir (Luis Buñuel, 1977) stands out for its representation of idealized femininity as an impossible desire. Here, this aspect of Buñuel's last film is re-examined from the perspective of two works by the artist Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010)—Janus Fleuri (1968) and Fillette (1968)—and an icon of classical femininity, the Venus de Milo (c.100 BC). Using a psychoanalytical framework to question the relationship between the idealized female archetype and male hysteria, this article traces a pathway from the Venus de Milo to Bourgeois via Buñuel's film. The contrast between repetitive images of passive, mutilated femininity and Bourgeois' challenging pieces may shed new light on the difference between the excess represented by Buñuel (using two physically different actresses in a single role) and that represented by Bourgeois' sculptures. This contemporary perspective on the male hysteric allows us to look back at the two women in this film as the products of a metaphorical arc-en-cercle enacted by both male protagonist and director. Here, woman is more than simply Irigaray's ‘obliging prop’ of masculine fantasy; she is symptomatic of something more extreme, inherently tied to a crisis of self, brought about by the experience of desire.
Notes
1 Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia U. P., 1997), 7.
2 Cet obscur objet du désir, dir. Luis Buñuel (Greenwich Films, Les Films Galaxie, Incine, Serge Silberman, 1977).
3 Aphrodite, more commonly known as the Venus de Milo, is on permanent display at the Louvre in Paris in the Department of Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, <http://www.louvre.fr/en/oeuvre-notices/aphrodite-known-venus-de-milo> (accessed 20 April 2016).
4 ‘Buñuel's knowledge of Freud (and also Jung) was extensive. Having read The Interpretation of Dreams as a student, he was also very familiar […] with many other key texts, including those on paranoia and femininity’ (Peter William Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire [Oxford: Oxford U. P., 2004], 9).
5 Louise Bourgeois’ 1993 piece Arch of Hysteria (bronze, polished patina, hanging piece) provides a helpful visual to frame this article; its deliberate androgyny and ambiguous depiction of pleasure/pain illustrates the complexities of a malady that has often been understood in restrictive and narrow terms. It is on display at the Tate, and can be seen on that website: <http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/exhibition/louise-bourgeois/room-guide/louise-bourgeois-room-7> (accessed 20 April 2016).
6 Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, 2.
7 Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, 3.
8 Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. Alisa Hartz (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 4.
9 Vicky Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows (London: Wallflower, 2006 [1st ed. 2001]), 14.
10 See François Boller, ‘Foreword’, in Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma, ed. J. Bogousslavsky, Frontiers of Neurology and Neuroscience, 35 (2014), vii–viii (p. vii).
11 Dr Thomas Sydenham, in an epistolary dissertation dated 20 January 1682, written to Dr William Cole: ‘Of all chronic diseases, hysteria—unless I err—is the commonest [ … ]. As to females, if we except those who lead a hard and hardy life, there is rarely one who is wholly free from them [hysterical complaints] [ … ]. Then, again, such males as lead a sedentary or studious life, and grow pale over their books and papers, are similarly afflicted [ … ]. The frequency of hysteria is no less remarkable than the multiformity of the shapes it puts on [ … ]’ (J. M. S Pearce, ‘Before Charcot’, in Hysteria: The Rise of an Enigma, ed. Bogousslavsky, 1–10 [p. 4]).
12 Showalter, Hystories, 67; emphasis added.
13 A similar trick is used by comics such as Benny Hill (1924–1992) in, for example, the music hall derived The Benny Hill Show where the match of music to screen image highlights the absurd and has a way of making the unacceptable seem harmless (a man chasing and groping scantily clad women), and demonstrating the transgressive nature of a certain kind of comedy that is situated at the limits of what is acceptable. Clowns have always traced the limit between the funny and the sad, finding the surreal in the everyday.
14 Sherry Velasco, ‘Buñuel Goes Medieval: From Sewing to Cervantes and the Vagina Dentata’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla & Rob Stone (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2013), 362–77 (p. 368).
15 See Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981).
16 Showalter, Hystories, 45–46.
17 Showalter, Hystories, 46.
18 An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel, with a foreword by Jean-Claude Carrière & a new afterword by Juan Luis Buñuel & Rafael Buñuel, trans. by Garrett White (Berkeley/London: Univ. of California Press, 2000), 139.
19 Paul Sandro, Diversions of Pleasure: Luis Buñuel and the Crises of Desire (Ohio: Ohio State U. P., 1987), 141.
20 Jean-Claude Carrière, in Une Œuvre à repriser (Luc Lagier, Studio Canal, 2005), translation from the French extracted from the film's English-language subtitles.
21 Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 250. In the interest of continuity and clarity, I will use the word ‘actress’ to refer to Molina, Bouquet and other female actors, in spite of the potentially pejorative connotations, as it would be confusing to discuss this film, with a specific focus on gender, using the term ‘actor’ for both male and female performers.
22 Ella Shohat writes, ‘two actresses, dubbed by a third voice, play the same role. Split in the image, the character regains a semblance of unity through the soundtrack’, in Taboo Memories, Diasporic Voices (Durham, NC/London: Duke U. P., 2006), 124; Michael Wood notes, ‘both girls are called Concha [ … ] and have the same voice on the soundtrack’ (‘The Corruption of Accidents: Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)’, in Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, ed. Andrew Horton & Joan Magretta [New York: Ungar, 1981], 329–43 [p. 334]); mention of this is also made in Danny Peary's 1990 article on The Criterion Collection website <http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/895-that-obscure-object-of-desire> (accessed 18 April 2016).
23 Linda Williams, Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1981), xvi.
24 Lebeau, Psychoanalysis and Cinema, 6–7.
25 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Israel, 250.
26 Showalter, Hystories, 6.
27 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (London/New York: Routledge, 1993), 1.
28 Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, 1. See also Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia U. P., 1982).
29 Paul Begin, ‘Mutilation, Misogyny, and Murder: Surrealist Violence or Torture Porn?’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, 537–53 (p. 540). See also Noël Carroll, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2001), 238.
30 ‘Reconciling such stylistically diverse sensibilities is the Surrealist emphasis on direct experience: physiological (unconscious as well as intellectual) identification, direct confrontation and communion between artist and viewer, with the work as the “communicating vessel” ’ (Lucy Lippard, ‘Introduction’, in Surrealists on Art, ed. Lucy Lippard [New Jersey: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1970], 1–8 [p. 8]).
31 Janus Fleuri (bronze, gold patina) is part of the Artist Rooms collection at the Tate and National Galleries of Scotland, on long term loan from The Easton Foundation 2013, <http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/bourgeois-janus-fleuri-al00347> (accessed 20 April 2016). Fillette (latex over plaster) is on view at MoMA, New York, Painting and Sculpture II, Gallery 23, Floor 4, <http://www.moma.org/collection/works/81418> (accessed 20 April 2016).
32 The surrealists stressed the importance of ‘total freedom from social repression and destruction of barriers between conscious and unconscious, admissible and inadmissible behavior’ (Lippard, ‘Introduction’, 7).
33 Katherine Singer Kovacs also notes the link with surrealism of the chance meetings between Mathieu and Conchita, in ‘Luis Buñuel and Pierre Louÿs: Two Visions of Obscure Objects’, Cinema Journal, 19:1 (1979), 86–98 (p. 96).
34 Marsha Kinder, ‘The Road and the Room: Narrative Drive in the Films of Luis Buñuel’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, 431–53 (p. 435).
35 Kinder, ‘The Road and the Room’, 435.
36 Kinder, ‘The Road and the Room’, 435.
37 Ronnie Scharfman, ‘Deconstruction Goes to the Movies: Luis Buñuel's Cet Obscur Objet du Désir’, The French Review, 53:3 (1980), 351–58 (p. 353).
38 Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla & Rob Stone, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, 1–58 (p. 10).
39 Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, ‘Introduction’, 10.
40 Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, ‘Introduction’, 41, 10.
41 Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla, Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in His Mexican and Spanish Cinema (New York/London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), 6.
42 Buñuel, My Last Sigh, trans. Israel, 252.
43 I am grateful to Jo Evans for suggesting this striking image. Interestingly, there is an almost direct parallel in Brian Catling's novel The Vorrh (Croydon: Coronet, 2012): here, the male protagonist is ordered by his lover, a dying female shaman, to convert her corpse into a bow and arrow; a living object that remains semi-sentient in its new state: semi-sentient may be the perfect way to think of the object of desire as hysterical projection—to some extent part of the subject, while in other ways its own entity.
44 ‘Charcot had publicized the idea of hysteria as a unified organic disease; Sigmund Freud, who had studied at the Salpêtrière in 1885 and 1886, defined it as a neurosis caused by repression, conflicted sexuality, and fantasy’ (Showalter, Hystories, 37–38). See also Julián Gutiérrez-Albilla, ‘The Encounter with the Real: Social Otherness’, in Queering Buñuel, 16–52 for further discussion of the complex representation of a struggling masculinity.
45 Showalter, Hystories, 9.
46 Showalter, Hystories, 11.
47 Showalter, Hystories, 31. Showalter continues, ‘sketches, drawings, and paintings of the women were also reproduced and sold’ (31). This underlines the issue of woman as tradable commodity and the uncomfortable link between desire, hysteria and capitalism.
48 Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, xi.
49 Showalter, Hystories, 85.
50 Peter William Evans, ‘Splitting Doubles: Ángela Molina and the Art of Screen Acting in Cet obscur objet du désir’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, 494–508 (p. 501).
51 As she is famously depicted in Botticelli's 1482–1485 painting The Birth of Venus.
52 See Gregory Curtis, Disarmed: The Story of the Venus de Milo (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003).
53 Robert Phillip Kolker, The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema (Oxford: Oxford U. P., 1983).
54 René Magritte, Le Viol (oil on canvas), The Menil Collection, Houston, <http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2013/magritte/#/additional/6/3> (accessed 20 April 2016).
55 Fotiade also makes a connection between the director and surrealist artist, referring to the mismatching of sound and image in L’Âge d’Or a ‘Magrittean touch’ (Ramona Fotiade, ‘Fixed-Explosive: Buñuel's Surrealist Time-Image’, in A Companion to Luis Buñuel, ed. Gutiérrez-Albilla & Stone, 156–71 [p. 162]).
56 Much criticism focuses (rightly) on the voyeur in Buñuel. For an in-depth discussion of this theme, see Williams, Figures of Desire, 193.
57 Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca: Cornell U. P., 1985), 25.
58 Salvador Dalí, Venus de Milo with Drawers (painted plaster with metal pulls and mink pompoms) is part of the collection at Art Institute Chicago, <http://www.artic.edu/aic/collections/artwork/185184> (accessed 20 April 2016).
59 Other Buñuelian touches, perhaps in overt homage to Buñuel include a wooden articulated arm, which calls to mind the leg in Tristana and the severed hand in Un Chien andalou.
60 Lippard, ‘Introduction’, 3.
61 Fotiade, ‘Fixed-Explosive: Buñuel's Surrealist Time-Image’, 162
62 Francoise Ghillebaert, ‘The Double in Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire’, in The Double in Movies, ed. Francoise Ghillebaert, Post Script: Essays in Film and the Humanities, 22:3 (2003), 57–68 (p. 63).
63 Todd McGowan, ‘Looking for the Gaze: Lacanian Film Theory and Its Vicissitudes’, Cinema Journal, 42:3 (2003), 27–47 (p. 33).
64 André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Helen R. Lane & Richard Sever (Michigan: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1969), 17 (originally published as Manifestes du Surrealisme, ed. Jean-Jacques Pauvert [Paris: n.p., 1962]).
65 Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Porter with Burke, 26.
66 Showalter, Hystories, 57.
67 Velasco, ‘Buñuel Goes Medieval’, 368.
68 Sandro notes the ‘complementarity between this last shot (the last shot in the production schedule of the film and last in Buñuel's career) and the image of Vermeer's The Lacemaker in Buñuel's first film’ (Diversions of Pleasure, 154).
69 Velasco has examined the ‘obsessive interest in sewn-up female genitals’ and ‘female-phobic practices’, medieval conventions associated with mending the hymen (restituto virginitatis) and genital mutilation in Cet obscur objet du désir and Él (1952), in ‘Buñuel Goes Medieval’, 362–63.
70 Velasco, ‘Buñuel Goes Medieval’, 363.
71 Paul Begin, ‘Buñuel, Eisenstein, and the “Montage of Attractions”: An Approach to Film Theory and Practice’, in BSS, LXXXIII:8 (2006), 1113–32 (p. 1116).
72 Sandro, Diversions of Pleasure, 147.
* Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.