The Phantom of Liberty · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Six people sit down to dinner and each has a toilet instead of a chair. The toilets are arranged around the table, where the plates would be. The talk is about sewage and public health, and it is decent talk, informed, mildly boring, the kind you'd expect from people who read the paper. After a while one guest gets hungry. He asks the hostess, discreetly, where he might eat. She gives him directions. He goes down the hall, shuts himself in a small room, and has his meal alone with the door locked.

Nothing in the staging tips you off. Edmond Richard lights the room evenly and high-key, the way you'd light a television drama about a wedding. The camera sits at chest height in medium shot. The actors observe every courtesy, including the offering of a place to a guest. Buñuel had been working this way since L'Âge d'Or, where a child is shot and a servant burns and the party doesn't alter its conversation: leave the scandal in the frame, withhold the reaction shot, give the audience nowhere to stand.

Deleuze has a name for what that dining room is doing. He calls it a gest: a posture held long enough that you stop reading it as behaviour and start reading the social arrangement it belongs to. The scene doesn't satirise table manners. It relocates them, undamaged, and they go on working perfectly. That is the more wounding observation. Etiquette was never attached to eating. It's a machine that will run on anything you feed it.

The film's actual invention is a rule about attention. The camera is free to lose interest in whoever it is watching. It follows a nurse out of a family drama into a country inn, drops her for a lodger, drops him for his students, and keeps going, from a firing squad in Toledo in 1808 to a police riot at a Paris zoo. Hélène Plemiannikov cuts these hand-offs in orthodox continuity. Someone leaves, someone arrives, someone offers someone a lift. There is no dissolve and no music sting to announce that the protagonist has just been discarded for good, because there is no protagonist and there is no music. Deleuze's terms for this landscape are dispersive situation (many characters, weakly attached to each other) and weak links (a causality gone slack, so scenes touch without gripping).

Why does that matter? In most films a person sees a situation, does something, and the situation changes. Deleuze called that circuit the action-image and called the moment it stopped closing the crisis of the action-image. Phantom is that crisis played for comedy by a man of seventy-four. The police open a missing-child case while the child stands beside them answering questions. A sniper fires from the Tour Montparnasse. A father is dying. Every one of these is a working genre premise, and the film enters it, walks around inside it, and leaves by a side door without resolving anything. The characters are not defeated. They simply live in a world where acting and mattering have come apart, and they haven't noticed.

Calling this surrealism gets you the images and stops. Deleuze gets you the joins, which is where Buñuel is actually radical. Deleuze's irrational cut is a cut that connects two shots across a gap rather than through continuity, an AND rather than a THEN. Usually you can see it coming: a jolt, a mismatch. Buñuel's trick is to commit the irrational cut in a register of complete politeness. He learned false continuity in Un Chien Andalou, where a title card reading "eight years later" leads to the same street; he took the baton-pass chain from Ophüls's La Ronde and deleted the master of ceremonies who used to announce the transfer; he kept the portmanteau shape of Dead of Night and threw away the club room that framed it, so the handoffs have to carry the architecture alone. And from Simon of the Desert, which jumps from a fifth-century pillar to a modern nightclub at normal cutting rhythm, he took the nerve to leave a rupture unmarked.

That unmarkedness is also a raid on film theory's oldest promise. Bazin's realism rested on a contract: the camera was there, the thing was in front of it, and the unbroken, undecorated shot is your guarantee. Phantom honours every clause. Real Paris locations, plain lighting, no optical effects, no score to smuggle in feeling that the images haven't earned. Then it uses the guarantee to certify a rooster, a postman, and an ostrich walking through a bourgeois bedroom at night, cut exactly like the scenes on either side. The film has no ontological hierarchy and refuses to build one, which is Deleuze's powers of the false: not lying, but withdrawing the machinery that would let you rank one image as true and another as dreamt. The obscene postcards that turn out to show the Arc de Triomphe and Chartres are the same operation in miniature, what Deleuze calls a demark — an object that breaks the habit it invoked and hands you the work of interpretation.

The drives are all present. Monks playing cards for holy medals, a flagellation they sit and watch, an incestuous seduction, a lecture on the arbitrariness of sexual taboo. This is Deleuze's naturalism, appetite erupting under the parlour floor, and it is Buñuel's oldest material. What's gone is the slope. Naturalism normally runs downhill toward exhaustion; here nothing degrades, because nothing accumulates. The perversions are furniture. They get the same chest-height medium shot as the ostrich and the police commissioner.

The film opens on Goya. Spanish patriots under raised muskets in nocturnal chiaroscuro, the most composed image in the history of political martyrdom, and they are shouting "¡Vivan las cadenas!" Long live chains. That's a painter's privileged instant, the posed decisive moment, and Buñuel begins there so he can spend two hours refusing to give you another one. At the end, two prefects of police go to break up a demonstration at the zoo, and the camera declines to go with them. We get shouts, gunfire, and cries of liberty over a static close-up of an ostrich's face. Buñuel, substantially deaf by then, built his soundtracks from a few loud legible events, and this is the loudest. The massacre is out of field in Deleuze's absolute sense, not next door but unlocatable, everywhere, structural. Sound and image are telling two different stories and neither yields. Repression is continuous and doesn't require our witness. The bird has no comment.

What this did to narrative is simple to state and was not simple to do. It proved a feature could run on relay instead of plot and still hold, that an anthology needs no frame, that the handoff itself can be the architecture. Buñuel got to make it because The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie had won an Oscar and Serge Silberman let him spend the credit; he spent it on something conspicuously less ingratiating, and the film's reputation grew afterwards, through repertory houses and classrooms, rather than at the box office. Every later film that hands its story to a stranger and never comes back is working the seam he opened.

Watch it again for the joins, not the gags. Notice the exact moment the camera decides to leave, and who it leaves. The one entity in this film with genuine liberty is the camera, and what it does with that liberty is walk out on people mid-sentence. It's worth asking whether Buñuel thought that was freedom or just the ghost of it.