Bunuel: Atheist Thanks To God Buñuel: Athée grâce à Dieu English Subtitles

When we spoke of our intention of making a film...
...on the religious mindset, everyone told us we were mad.
"Why make a film about religion? Religion is dead.
God is dead. These days it's all about politics. "
At the time, education, industry, family - it was all about politics.
God no longer existed.
We were seen as heretics in that particular cinematic climate.
THE PREMIERE OF THE MILKY WA Y
Parisian cinemas are now showing a film by Luis Buñuel, The Milky Way...
...a picaresque tale that lets us explore once again...
...the universe of this great filmmaker.
God, the issues of free will and divine grace...
...are studied by means of a journey...
...by two pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela.
...that Christ was not God, simply a man.
Get rid of this pear, it's overripe.
But he could laugh, couldn't he? He could cough?
He's always depicted as very dignified and solemn...
...walking slowly, holding his hands up like this.
He must've walked like anybody else.
We're late. What's the hour?
Almost the sixth hour.
I'm hungry.
I was called to the studio and had to wait a bit...
...like everyone else.
We all have to wait when we go into studios.
Then the door opened. I went in. Buñuel was there.
He saw me, smiled and said...
"Jesus is here. This is Jesus. "
That's it - That's the basis on which I was hired.
- Master. - What is it?
The guests have all arrived. Your mother and brothers await you.
Here are my mother and brothers.
Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven...
...is my brother and sister and mother.
Buñuel's Christ - I no longer want to see films about Christ after The Milky Way.
This Christ is alive. He laughs.
Buñuel was adamant about that.
He couldn't bear those clichéd representations of Jesus.
Don't shave, my son. You're better with a beard.
We see him shaving.
He only decides to keep his beard because Mary says it looks better.
He's a human Christ. He is incarnate.
Ever since I met him, in other words, since '63...
...he spoke to me about heterodoxy...
...as they say in Spain, which means heresy.
He'd read a book by a great Spanish author, Menéndez Pelayo...
...about heterodox Spaniards...
...and this idea of a heretic...
...of a man who chooses his own mistake, so to speak...
...obsessed him.
He almost exclusively spoke about that word.
We were in Venice for the film festival...
...when Belle de jour won the Golden Lion.
And I remember that we went to see La Chinoise, by Jean-Luc Godard...
...and when we left...
...he was torn between admiration and irritation and said...
"If that's what today's cinema is about, we can make our film about heretics. "
The Milky Way is such an audacious film.
I've often said Buñuel was bold, but in this instance he is particularly so...
...because...
...he takes on the challenge of making a funny, captivating film...
...on one of the most abstract and soporific subjects...
...namely, the history of heresy within the Catholic church...
...from the earliest centuries to this day.
We chose the following theme: Two contemporary pilgrims...
...make the journey to Santiago de Compostela.
In fact, a possible alternative title was The Road to Santiago...
...since the Milky Way more or less shows the way towards Santiago de Compostela...
...and was called that during the Middle Ages.
Pilgrims would follow it by night to get to Spain.
We worked out this scenario where the two pilgrims...
...it's an idea that came to us quite early on...
...interfere with, or rather annihilate the space-time continuum.
So this pilgrimage to Santiago not only crosses various historical eras...
...but space too.
Following that road, you might suddenly find yourself...
...in Palestine in the Middle Ages, or anywhere else.
So the film's dramatic structure, which was quite difficult to establish...
...wasn't a journey through time and space.
It had to be found within the very themes referred to in the film.
Hear me, all of you.
This is dogma, the sole truth.
There is only one God, in three persons:
...the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
The Father is neither created nor engendered.
The Son is not created, but engendered.
The Holy Ghost is neither created nor engendered...
...but originates in the Father and the Son.
The Son and the Holy Ghost exist for all eternity, like the Father.
Whosoever strays from this dogma shall be declared a heretic.
I realized that the notion of heresy is closely linked to that of mystery.
There are six major mysteries within the Christian faith.
The religion is based upon these six great mysteries.
If we are able to define them, to follow them historically...
...we see that all heresies can be linked to one of these mysteries.
In fact, at the time I wrote a fairly academic article...
...which was published by Études, the Dominican magazine.
I also gave quite a few lectures in religious centers on the notion on heresy.
Of these six mysteries, to give you an idea...
...the first, one of the best known, is the mystery of the Holy Trinity.
You must accept it as dogma, even though your mind cannot understand...
...that there is only one God in three forms.
Is it one or three? It's one and three.
That's the mystery. The mystery upsets our sense of logic.
But we must accept it, even if it seems absurd.
Indeed, we're required to believe it because it is absurd.
Credo quia absurdum. I believe because the dogma is absurd.
In other words, given that my limited intelligence cannot comprehend it...
...it can only come from God.
Listen, all of you!
Don't let them fool you.
One God cannot be divided into three.
Father, Son and Holy Ghost...
...are only names we give him.
It is the Father who was made flesh...
...the Father who died on the cross.
The Son and the Holy Ghost are coeternal with the Father...
...by an immanent and necessary operation of the Father.
The Father is the only God!
The Holy Ghost is merely an archangel.
Seize them!
There's something particular about a heretic...
...a person who selects something within a dogma and makes it his.
In other words, he'll replace an untruth within the dogma with a truth of his own...
...even if it means risking murder or death.
To whom have I the honor?
I am Father Billuard, of the Company of Jesus.
I thought Jesuits only come out at night...
...like rats.
I discovered this film when it first came out. I was a student at the time.
I went to see it with a Jesuit...
Father Daniélou, who later became a cardinal.
He was determined that we go see this film.
He said, " You'll see a Jesuit dueling with a Jansenist. It's essential viewing. "
To be worthy or not worthy...
...in the fallen state of nature...
...man need not have free will exempt from necessity.
To be worthy or not worthy in the fallen state of nature...
...man must be delivered of all necessity, absolute and even relative.
An orthodoxy slowly emerges from this game of trial and error.
That's where orthodoxy comes from.
There can be no orthodoxy without heterodoxy.
There can be no canonical doctrine without distinguishing heresies.
If everything is indistinct, neither orthodoxy nor heresy can exist.
Buñuel reflects upon...
The debate surrounding Jansenism and Molinism...
...with a Jansenist and a Molinist fighting a duel...
...the Molinist being a supporter of Molina...
...the Jansenist being a supporter of Jansen...
...and of a more rigid interpretation of the doctrine of predestination...
...and its impact on free will.
The Molinist has a more liberal interpretation of this relationship.
So when Buñuel puts these heretical issues on the screen...
...what I think he's trying to do is illustrate how a doctrine...
...is built upon difference and dissent.
This was all the more powerful since it was '68...
...a time when another great orthodoxy opposed to Catholicism - Marxism...
...was beginning to discover what heresy represented.
So I'd say - And it's understandable that I'd say this...
...that Marxism never recovered from the various heresies...
...that caused it to collapse...
...whereas Catholicism, it seems to me, is enhanced by this debate.
And this debate, with its trials and errors...
...seems to have nourished, for 2,000 years, an organic development of Christianity.
There's a scene I love very much...
...in The Milky Way...
...but then, I love all of it - that is evocative of May '68.
We're at a girls' boarding school, the Pensionnat Lamartine...
Buñuel can't have liked the poet very much, and neither did I -
...and well-behaved little girls are made to recite a speech.
It was very unpleasant - at least I found it so.
Here you have the kind of brainwashing...
...that occurs among sects...
...the kind of place where children are trained as if they were dogs.
If anyone holds that the sacrifice of the Mass...
...is blasphemy against the sacrifice of Christ who died on the cross...
He is anathema.
During the recital, an image pops up on the screen...
...and we see a group of revolutionaries with a red-and-black flag...
...marching down a street, which brings to mind May '68-
...the film was shot soon afterwards - And we see they're about to shoot the pope.
The pope, incidentally, is played by Buñuel.
It was quite interesting. He was wearing white from head to toe.
Fire!
The man playing the beggar says...
I was imagining they were executing a pope.
But if you read Breton's definition of surrealism in the first Manifesto...
I'll read it to you...
...this is a perfect moment of surrealist cinema.
I'll read the passage so as not to get it wrong.
"Everything points to there being a place in the mind...
...where life and death, what is real and what is imaginary...
...the past and the future...
...what can be communicated and what cannot...
...what is above and what is below...
...are no longer seen as contradictions.
It would be vain to seek another motive for surrealist activity...
...than the hope to determine what this place is. "
So it's an extremely ambitious aim.
This is in the second Surrealist Manifesto.
The aim is very ambitious because it involves resolving contradictions.
We could call it a religious ambition...
...in the etymological sense of bringing together what is usually torn asunder.
Breton says that surrealists accept some similarities...
...between themselves and heretics in the realm of the imaginary.
Within the delirious, paranoid fantasies of some of them, as Dalí would say...
...there are indeed similarities between them.
The Milky Way, in this sense, can be called a surrealist film.
It's a journey dictated, in a covert way, by the mysteries.
It illustrates the frenetic reality with which we imbue our beliefs.
As soon as we try to proclaim a dogma...
It's a human instinct to want to formalize something, to be legalistic about it...
...to define it very precisely, using a rigorous vocabulary.
Well, that's precisely when reality slips away from you.
Reality will show you how elusive it is.
That in itself is interesting.
It demonstrates how many cracks appear the moment we try to define an ideology.
There's no need for irony here.
At the highest levels we see that a concept can be solid...
...but that like everything else, it's also fragile.
But what is much more interesting is that from the moment there's a solid concept...
...the moment you say, "It's like this and not like that,"
...someone else will say, "No, it's like that. "
And then violence breaks out.
Buñuel knew a lot about this kind of thing.
Not only was he brought up a Catholic...
...but he was close to the surrealists...
...and each had their dogmas.
Fire!
When May '68 started, Buñuel saw surrealist quotations...
...being scribbled on the walls of the Latin Quarter.
Quotes from his youth.
"Power to the imagination," and things like that.
Slogans which were around when he was young.
He was amazed. On the one hand, he was extremely happy about it...
...and on the other, he foresaw the violence.
He had a presentiment about what would ensue in '68...
...the kind of terrorism he would go on to portray in all his later films.
And he wondered, as did many other surrealists of his generation...
...whether the declarations they'd made in their youth...
...such as Breton's words...
...about the simplest surrealist act being to take to the streets...
...with a gun in one's hand and shoot into the crowd indiscriminately...
...were perhaps the inspiration for the Red Brigades...
...and all the groups that followed.
The Bader-Meinhof gang, for example, became an obsession of his.
They didn't form in '68 but the following year.
But what's certain is that '68...
...from that point of view, was a very violent year...
...that gave rise to movements we may still not have been able to contain.
So The Milky Way is set in this context.
When Milos Forman read the screenplay, he said it was a highly political film...
...because what I'd written about religious dogma...
...could be said about Marxist and Stalinist dogma.
One can say of the deviationists that they are heretics...
...in terms of a dogma that, like the Christian one...
...has its prophets as well as its dissidents.
So we thought we were making a film that transcended time...
...whereas it was very topical, and seeing it today...
...you realize it heralds the inordinate rise of religious tensions we've seen since.
Free will. What's it mean?
What it means is...
...between a good deed and a bad one, you can choose.
Okay, but God knows it all, no?
So if I choose a bad deed, he knew it long before.
Sure, he's always known it.
How can I be free if my actions are fixed before I do them?
That's free will.
God's grace allows you to choose to do good.
But he already knows I'll choose to do evil.
- Why'd he decide I'd choose evil? - God's ways are impenetrable.
"Some dream of an infinite universe.
Others tell us it's finite within space and time.
So we find ourselves between two impenetrable mysteries.
On the one hand, the idea of an infinite universe is impossible to conceive.
On the other, the idea of a finite universe that will one day cease to exist...
...flings me back into an unimaginable nothingness...
...that both fascinates and horrifies me.
I waver between the two. I don't know. "
"If someone could prove God's luminous existence to me right now...
...it would have no effect whatsoever upon my behavior.
I cannot believe that God watches me at all times...
...that he's interested in my health, my desires, my mistakes.
I cannot believe, and in any case I do not accept...
...that he could punish me for all eternity.
What am I to him?
Nothing. A shadow of mud.
My passage on this earth is so brief that I leave no traces.
I am a poor mortal.
I am of no consequence in either space or time.
God has no interest in us.
And if he exists, it's as if he didn't. "
Hey! Hear me up there?
If you really exist, go ahead.
Idiot. I hope you get it.
One, two, three.
You see?
So what? It didn't hit me.
Idiot. Think God's at your disposal?
It seems to me he had a problem with God - That's indisputable...
...and he had a problem with his religious education.
I think these two problems inform the whole of his work.
It's the foundation on which his work is based.
He has an obsessive need for God.
He also has a need to revolt against the basic tenets of his religious education.
There are many things that attract him about Christianity.
This is something I wish to discuss, because it was news to me.
Not long ago, in 2001 or 2002, there was a seminar on Buñuel in Lyon...
...organized by Alain Bergala...
...and a friend of Buñuel's was present - a Dominican from Mexico.
He'd been an intimate friend of Buñuel's up until the time of his death.
His name is Julián Pablo Fernández.
So he made his speech and told us that Buñuel was passionate...
...about the study of Christianity...
...and knew more about it than most people who attend Mass...
...and about its rites - which was very surprising.
He was passionate about its rites, which moved him profoundly.
And he told me - These are his exact words, and everyone there heard him...
"When we speak of the Virgin Mary, tears come into his eyes. "
He's deeply moved by the Virgin Mary.
He's full of contradictions in this sense too.
But he accepts his contradictions. I love that about him.
He can be passionate about de Sade...
...and equally passionate about mystical and religious texts.
The Milky Way is of particular interest to me...
...because the film is based upon these contradictions...
...and upon the important question: "What constitutes faith?"
Faith isn't certainty.
You'd either need to be very naive or...
I'm not sure what you'd need to be...
...to be able to say, "I'm sure I have faith. "
Something the matter?
You're crying?
Can I help you?
You should tell him.
- Listen, Father - - Be quiet.
- See this rosary? - Of course.
The Blessed Mary just gave it to me.
- When? - A half hour ago.
I saw her.
She appeared to me.
To me, who had scorned and insulted her.
Faith does not come to us through reason...
...but through the heart.
Of course.
Here, keep it.
The world is irrational.
Films have to be too.
There's no reason...
...to impart rationality to a drama when life is devoid of it.
He particularly disliked...
You know, I pride myself on having understood him from the beginning.
He disliked people interpreting the symbolism of his films.
He didn't want people to attach any importance to it. He loathed psychology.
In fact, I remember...
...one day he asked me, "Do you know that actor?"
Someone on the set, obviously.
"Yes, of course. "
"He told me something dreadful:
...that he'd finally understood the psychological makeup of his character. "
What he feared most were psychoanalytic interpretations...
...of which there was a relentless succession.
"When Buñuel shows this, what he really means to show is that.
He unconsciously reveals that -"
This kind of analysis horrified him.
What mattered - quoting André Breton regarding a critic...
...who'd been writing about the work of the poet Saint-Pol-Roux...
...and saying, "When he says this, he means that" -
Well, Breton protested, saying, "What matters is not what the poet meant.
What matters is what he said. "
"This obsession to understand, and therefore to belittle.
During my whole life I've been pursued by idiotic questions.
'Why this? Why that?'
This obsession, sadly, is part of human nature.
If only we were capable of leaving our destiny to chance...
...and accepting the mystery that is our life without fear...
...we might discover a happiness that is similar to innocence. "
So you see, this quest for innocence...
I don't think we've used the word up to now.
This respect for mystery and this refusal to rationalize things...
...this refusal to belittle them...
...to render them banal and mediocre...
Buñuel knows something that every artist needs to know...
...which is that our body of work is richer than we know.
The film is always more profound...
...at least when it's crafted with sincerity, with honesty...
...is always more profound than intended, goes beyond what we meant to say.
And we must respect this added dimension...
...welcome it, not reject it.
This added dimension may well be...
...what allows me to communicate with the audience.
Come on.
I love the end of The Milky Way.
We have two blind men who come across Jesus...
...and he will cure them, while telling them not to divulge what he's done.
It's in the Gospel. In it, he does cure the blind.
So here Buñuel inserts a brilliant gag.
Obviously, they're very happy. We understand them.
And one of them says...
"Lord, a bird just flew over. I heard its wings beating. "
So did he really see it, or is he talking though the back of his neck?
And so they pursue their journey towards Santiago...
...and they come across a ditch.
When they reach it, they make a gesture with their canes...
...that suggests they're still blind.
The film comes to an end at that point.
I think it's one of his best endings, because they're often ambiguous.
Some of his endings are much less elegant and much less powerful.
So you're left with the enigma of whether or not they've been cured.
So this allows one to exercise one's intelligence...
...because maybe they didn't want...
Buñuel himself suggests various interpretations.
Perhaps they didn't want to upset Christ.
After all, he'd been so kind and tried to help them.
They might be pretending to have been healed as a way of thanking him.
Why not? So in that case, no miracle took place.
On the other hand, a miracle might well have taken place...
...but they're so used to those gestures that habit takes over.
I don't require an actual explanation.
In any case, I believe that miracles occur all the time.
Many things are beyond our understanding.
Miracles needn't be showy. The point is well made here.
Ifind that being left with the uncertainty is magnificent.
It's extremely honest.
There you are. We needn't make a song and dance about it.
A miracle may well have taken place...
...but true miracles aren't about magic or showmanship.
Not to mention that it perfectly reflects the whole of Buñuel's work...
...which is based on the concept of obstacles.
In this case it's a ditch. Anything that cuts, that separates...
...that acts as a barrier.
Buñuel's films are based on frustration.
Lord, a bird just flew over. I heard its wings beating.
I have come to set a man against his father...
...a daughter against her mother.
Verily I say unto you...
...a man's foe shall be those of his own household.
Son of David, show me the color white...
...the color black.
BUÑUEL - ATHEIST THANKS TO GOD