Read

Surrealism was a 20th-century avant-garde movement in art and literature that sought to release the creative potential of unconsciousness. It pays close attention to the dreaming mind and maintains that dreams are justified escapes from the banality of everyday life.The central theme of Buñuel’s film Belle de Jour (1967) is the subversion and transcendence of reality, and his cinematographic choices purposely confuse the viewer as to what is fantasy and what is reality.

Belle de Jour follows the masochistic fantasies of a bourgeois wife (Catherine Deneuve) whose relationship to her impotent husband becomes tenuous as she delves deeper into secret depravity in both her consciousness and everyday life. Buñuel sets a precedent for the narrative use of camera technique during the film. As one of the pioneers of the surrealist film movement, Buñuel seeks to stir the logic of unconscious, to probe the depths of the mind of his character and the minds of his audience in a visual amalgamation of psychosis, masochism and manipulation.

Buñuel uses a slow zoom on the same setting for the first and last shots of the film. The result of this is uncertainty, a question as to whether or not what transpires in the film has occurred. Beginning and ending the film with the same shot creates cyclical continuity, like a never ending pattern; this allows the viewer to play with their own ideas about whether or not the chronological sequence of the film makes sense within these two identical frames. This brings a certain subjectivity into the viewing experience.

The film relies on middle distance, the consistent use of medium shots, in order to establish objectivity. The camera maintains a consistent distance from the action, and we see hands, feet on carpets, and faces from a similar point of view for much of the movie. The consistent cinematography during both Severine’s reality and fantasies makes it difficult to tell what is real, which places equal validity on both dimensions of her experience.. If during her fantasies there was a different emphasis on light, angles, or camera-to-subject distance, it would become obvious which scenes are fantasy and reality, and one would dominate the other. The objectivity of the “cool middle distance” leaves complete focus on Sévérine’s mental vacillation , without judgement or conclusion. Buñuel’s camera maintains the objectivity between the real and the unreal; his cinematographic equality seems to declare that her fantasies are of equal importance to her real life experiences.

Instead of cinematography, Buñuel uses other signifiers that clue the viewer into the switch from reality to fantasy: the sound of carriage bells, mysterious dialogue about cats and an overarching theme of high-society. There are landaus and mansions and counts and extravagance in her neurotic imaginations that offer stark contrast to the drab tones of her reality-beige paint, beige carpet, and simple clothing. These auditory and visual clues take the viewer along with Sévérine into her ecstatic visions, while also alerting the viewer that we are transitioning into fantasy.

By treating Sévérine’s lapses into her subconscious with the same framing and cinematographic characteristics as he does her mundane life, Buñuel establishes an equality between the two worlds that represents a fundamental tenet of surrealism, which is the substantiation of the subconscious- giving validity to another world that is only seen in dreams or fantasies. Yet the only indication of this equality that Buñuel gives us is the consistency of the cinematography.