A Search for Belonging by Mark Ripley

Author:Mark Ripley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film/History & Criticism, PER004010, PERFORMING ARTS/Film/Direction & Production
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2017-11-28T05:00:00+00:00

Figure 8: The latest dance. The final dance. (Producciones Gustavo Alatriste)

Conclusion: liminal teleologies – starting from zero

The endings of both films are, as I have noted, deeply ambiguous, on a psychological and spatial level. Although La Mort en ce jardin ends with a distance shot of Chark and Maria as they sail down the Mambuti river, anchoring the narrative in a realist (albeit fictional) place, the intrepid survivors find themselves in as ambiguous a space as ever. Similarly in Simón del desierto, the ascetic appears in a nondescript yet believable nightclub setting in New York City. On the surface, the characters of both films appear to have escaped their ‘in-between’ locations – for better or worse – thanks to an apparent narrative telos: by dint of her innocence and his pragmatism, Maria and Chark are spared death; because of his weakened spiritual resolve, Simón is transported to what appears to be hell. If we posit a teleology in these and other of Buñuel’s films, we certainly facilitate an ethical or thematic reading of these. According to Cristiana Malaguti (1993: 25), although Buñuel’s characters appear to operate from a self-determinist perspective, ‘in Buñuel the dynamism around the text always unfolds in a teleological manner’.19 Ironically, however, Buñuel’s own teleological model often functions to negate any notion of design, at least any design which is neat in its conclusion, through Deleuze’s idea of cyclical return. Even in the most open-ended of his films, Malaguti notes, there is not a trace of certainty or of redemption (1993: 26). In applying a neat telos to these two films we are therefore dulling their ability to unsettle the audience beyond the end of the narrative. In addition to the two films I have paired together here, we might think of the ending to Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie, where the characters tirelessly continue their perpetual walk through a non-descript countryside space as the camera zooms out, or the final distance shot of Ramón Vázquez after he has freed the chained prisoners in La Fièvre monte à El Pao, for which he will presumably face execution. The expectations and obligations of the individual following the suspension of the liminal period is exactly the conclusion of certitude denied by Buñuel’s narrative telos that works towards an end of ambiguity.

Malaguti highlights this ambiguity in Buñuel’s cinema. That Buñuel’s narratives are constructed cyclically does not escape her notice and she echoes Deleuze’s comments on this point: ‘in Buñuel time assumes the mythical dimension of the eternal return, the predominant rhetorical figure is that of repetition’. Such repetition is made possible because Buñuel’s work features

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