Saw the newly restored print of Bunuel's 1964 black and white film, Diary of a Chambermaid, starring Jeanne Moreau. Quite a good and quite cynical movie about a petty-bourgeois, small-town French family and their four servants and several neighbors in the 1930s. It has a bit of everything--commentary on marital problems, the Catholic church, relationships between servants and their masters and among the servants, anti-semitism in France in the 30s, sexual fetishism, a rape-murder all delivered with Bunuel's wry or dry humor. Definitely worth seeing.
Bunuel tells his stories more with objects and less with words to a greater extent than many other directors. He uses ojects and attitudes toward physical objects to define his characters and his own themes. The most obvious example in Diary of a Chambermaid was the elderly father's fetish for high button patent leather shoes which he convinced Jean Moreau to wear while she read to him and while he stroked he calves and feet. After a few minutes of this he would have her remove the shoes and give them to him whereupon he retired to his bed clutching them to his face. (The movie left up to the audience's imagination what went on with the shoes in his bedroom.)
Other character defining symbols included the fine lamps and other household possessions of the matron of the house (daughter of the aforementioned old man) and her posessive attitude toward them and her use of them as a mechanism in her unsuccessful effort to dominate Jeanne Moreau, the chambermaid. A crucifix symbolized religion and evoked the foibles of the church exemplified by the parish priest. Hunting accoutrements defined her husband.
Jeanne Moreau also used physical objects to estabilsh her domination over others. For example, when she came into the room and sat down by the bed of the father to read to him she made a point of moving several of the objects on his tray. She repeated this with her new husband whom she came to dominate soon after her marriage. The more passive characters also had a more passive relationship with physical objects and symbols in the movie.
The villany of the movie's chief villan was defined by his needless torturing of a goose in the process of killing it for the table which turned out to be a prescient indication of his anti-semitic and murderous character.
