Pynchon and Bunuel

[davemarc]

Marsha Kinder is the editor of a recent Cambridge Film Handbooks anthology
called "Luis Bunuel's *The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie*."

One of the essays in the collection is "The Discreet Charm of the
Postmodern:  Negotiating the Great Divide with the Ultimate Modernist, Luis
Bunuel," by Victor Fuentes of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In the essay, Fuentes makes the claim that Bunuel "represented a cinematic
equivalent to the narrative innovations of the new Latin American novel and
of North American postmodern novelists like Barth, Pynchon, and Coover. 
Many of the strategies that critics such as David Lodge, Brian McHale, and
Jim Collins attribute to postmodern fiction can already be found in
Bunuel's last three films."

Earlier in the essay, Fuentes quotes a comment that Bunuel made to Carlos
Fuentes c. 1970:  "Thanks to the artist, power cannot say that everybody is
in agreement with it....When power feels totally justified and approved it
does not resist the fascist temptation.  The small weapon of a book or film
can still be useful to unmask that fascist potentiality hidden in the
entrails of capitalism."  This is very much like Pynchon's remarks to
Salman Rushdie and Marianne Wiggins in the 3/12/89 New York Times.

Near the end of the essay, Fuentes (Victor) states:  "John Orr outlines a
twin structure of feelings for 'neomodern' filmmakers (whom we could also
call 'prepostmoderns'):  the tragicomedy and the cool apocalypse."  Orr (in
"Cinema and Modernity") counts among these filmmakers Resnais, Godard,
Antonioni, Welles, Coppola, Tarkovsky, and Bunuel.  I mention this because
"the tragicomedy and the cool apocalypse" sounds pretty Pynchonian to me.

d.