You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Editor's Note: In his essay, Humphries begins with the post-structuralist notion that language controls experience and applies it to Bunuel's film, Le Fantôme de la Liberté. He posits that Bunuel questions empiricist ideas about the individual by suggesting that, while individuals may believe themselves to have control over their own words and actions, they are in fact controlled by social codes and norms—a fact which individuals attempt to repress. Bunuel enacts this theme in his film by calling attention to social norms and then diverging from them in a series of “tableaux” which continually present the viewer with what Humphries calls “reversals of expectations.” Things that seem to be “normal” and “natural” are continually “revealed to be a form of unconscious coding determined by the dominant codes of narration and representation functioning within mainstream cinema, both classic and modern” (Humphries).
Le Fantôme de la Liberté is divided into fourteen sequences which, for reasons I shall clarify in due course, I propose to call “Tableaux.” Given the importance of time, place and, particularly, character in the movie, I refer the reader to the list of these “Tableaux” at the end of this article. How the “Tableaux” function as part of the overall narrative strategy, however, merits attention at once.
Tableau 3 shows the bourgeois husband spending a sleepless night during which the intimacy of his bedroom is invaded by an ostrich and a postman. These outrageous events are presented in the same way as other, more banal, happenings, which means that the ideologically coded binary opposition “awake/dreaming” is no longer overdetermined by specific cinematic codes connoting the social utterance “it's only a dream” and thus fails to function “normally” for the spectators.
We now move to Tableau 4 and the doctor's surgery, where the letter brought by the postman plays the central role, thus maintaining its place in narrative motivation. The husband, understandably, is pe