Le fantôme de la liberté. Una speranza necessaria

The author reconstructs the presence of the theme of freedom in Luis Buñuel’s filmography, starting with the famous The Phantom of Liberty, which opens with the paradoxical cry «Down with freedom!» addressed by a Spanish patriot about to be shot to the soldiers of the Napoleonic army. The screenplay of the film, consisting of a sequence of micro-stories, that follow one another without giving rise to any coherent narrative, expresses the nihilism of the bourgeoisie, which flounders aimlessly and without plans, remaining «outside History and without stories». Similarly, for the marginalised and oppressed at the centre of other films, such as Viridiana and Los olvidados, there seems to be no possibility of emancipation, within a pessimistic conception of history, that leaves no room for progressive dialectics. And yet, the disturbing gaze of the ostrich, in the final scene of The Phantom of Liberty, seems to say that one cannot give up, that it is necessary to rebel against the power that kills and represses anyone who challenges its absoluteness.