Psychological Violence in Buuel's l1

Arturo Serrano Universidad de las Artes, Guayaquil

Prepared for delivery at the 2015 Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, San Juan, Puerto Rico, May 27 - 30, 2015.

1 This paper is a work in progress. The final version of the paper which will be read at the Conference

will include further developments of the main argument as well as analysis of more examples.

Cinema is, above all, a visual medium. This has great repercussions in the sense that

when we talk about an element as translatable to cinema, what we mean to say is that this

element can be represented visually in images. In the case of physical violence (violence

directed to the body) the translation is easy because the harming of the body is in fact

visual: stabs, punches, knifings, and such. Stephen Prince reminds us that violence in

cinema is usually articulated visually: screen violence is the stylistic encoding of a

referential act (Classical Film Violence, p. 35), a referential act characterized by its

graphicness.

A referential act doesnt say, it shows. Pointing is the referential act par

excellence. By pointing, what I want to do is to draw the attention of whomever I am

communicating with towards a thing for him or her to look at it. But what happens when

someone performs a referential act about something that cannot be seen? Is that at all

possible?

There are many scholars who have written about violence in cinema as a visual

element. Karla Oeler2, Stephen Prince

3, Jake Horsley

4, James Kendrick

5, Steven Jay

Schneider6 or J. David Slocum

7 have all written books trying to ascertain how violence has

been portrayed in cinema. This is not the case with psychological violence. When critics

or theorists discuss film violence, they usually have in mind what we might call physical

2 Karla Oeler, A Grammar of Murder (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009)

3 Stephen Prince, Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Films

(Austin:Universitry of Texas Press, 1998); Stephen Prince, Screening Violence (London: The Athlone

Press, 2000); Stephen Prince, Classical Film Violence. Designing and Regulating Brutality in

Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1968 (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 2003) 4 Jake Horsley, The Blood Poets (volumes 1 and 2) (London: The Scarecrow Press, 1999)

5 James Kendrick, Film Violence. History, Ideology, Genre (London: Wallflower, 2009); James

Kendrick, Hollywood Bloodshed. Violence in 1980s American Cinema (Carbondale: Southern Illinois

University Press, 2009). 6 Steven Jay Schneider, New Hollywood Violence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004).

7 J. David Slocum, Violence and American Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2001)

violence killings, beatings, mutilations, and the like. Yet what we might call

psychological violence, though lacking in gore, can be no less brutal and no less

devastating to those subjected to it.8

This paper examines whether there is such a thing as psychological violence in

cinema, and if so, what form it takes. I will address this problem by analyzing Luis

Buuels l (1953). I will try to argue that psychological violence (violence directed to the

psyche) cannot be simply understood as a referential act, or as graphic, since the

pysche evades immediate visual perception. What I mean is that you do not recognize the

existence of the psyche because you see it directly, but rather because you see its

manifestations. You dont see craziness or neurosis, what you see are manifestations of

them (its symptoms).

So the question isnt what does psychological violence look like in cinema?, but

rather what do the manifestations of psychological violence look like in cinema? My

argument is that in l (and indeed in most films, but that remains to be proved)

psychological violence doesnt exist as such. I will show that in cinema psychological

violence does not exist but rather it is always represented as a byproduct of the threat of

physical violence. Films equate psychological violence with the closeness or threat of a

physical violence that never happens.

According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention,

Psychological violence involves trauma to the victim caused by acts, threats of acts, or

coercive tactics. Psychological abuse can include, but is not limited to, humiliating the

victim, controlling what the victim can and cannot do, withholding information from the

victim, deliberately doing something to make the victim feel diminished or embarrassed,

isolating the victim from friends and family, and denying the victim access to money or

other basic resources.9

So in order for psychological violence to exist, there has to be trauma and this trauma

needs to be associated with acts, threats of acts or coercive technics. As we can see,

according to the CDC there isnt necessarily a connection between physical violence and

8 William Rothman, Violence and Film in: J. David Slocum, Violence and American Cinema (New

York: Routledge, 2001), 40. 9 United States Department of Health and Human Services. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Intimate partner violence: Overview. Retrieved on June 28, 2007, from:

http://www.cdc.gov/ViolencePrevention/intimatepartnerviolence/index.html.

psychological violence, since psychological violence has more to do with the exercise of

power than with the harming of the body. In a way, even if physical violence can play an

important part in psychological violence, it is neither necessary that it be present, nor is it

its defining element. This is why I think that psychological violence bears the name

violence more as a metaphor (the harming of the body as a metaphor to the harming of

the psyche), than as an actual kind of violence. I will try to show now that in Buuels l

we can see how psychological violence is erroneously related to the necessity of the feeling

that violence is about to happen.

l (Him, although in the USA it was known as This Strange Passion) was first

distributed in 1953. It belongs to Buuels Mexican period, which begins in 1947 with

Gran Casino and ends in 1964 with Simn del Desierto. The movie script was written by

Buuel and Luis Alcoriza and it was based on a novel by the Spanish writer Mercedes Pinto

in 1926, who based it on her own experiences with her husband who suffered from

paranoid-schizofrenia10

.

When l was presented at Cannes it was misunderstood. The critics werent very

lenient toward the film. At the head of the group of critics who thought this film was of

lesser importance than the rest of Buuels ouvre was Andr Bazin who in a very scornful

manner called it a desolate melodrama, a work immensely antiquated derived from the

worst street theater and went on to say about the protagonist Arturo de Crdova that he

only served to add to the typical dullness of the Hispanic star11. Today, this film is widely

accepted as one of Buuels deepest most interesting films.

l tells the story of Francisco Galvn, the perfect example of a man of means, a

devout Catholic, admired by the community and apparently a man of values. One day, at

church, he sees Gloria and falls in love with her. Despite the fact that she is his best friends

girlfriend, from that moment on he does everything in his power to make her fall in love

with him. They end up marrying and from that moment on his pathological jealousy will

make her life miserable and show a face of him that no one had ever seen before. l is the

story of Glorias torture, although not a physical torture but a psychological one.

10

Gerardo Cummings does a detailed comparison between the novel and the movie in: Gerardo

Cummings, l: De Mercedes Pinto a Luis Buuel in: Filologa y Lingstica, XXX (1), 75-91, 2004. 11

Andr Bazin, El cine de la crueldad (Bilbao: Mensajero, 1977), 82.

To Buuel, l was an exercise in observation of what he thought was an interesting

character . The main character in l is a kind of guy that interests me, just as a beetle or a

mosquito would interest me Insects have been a passion of mine for many years In a

way, I am an entomologist. I am very much interested in examining reality12

Francisco sees himself as a fair man, an example to be followed. The first time we see

Francisco he is helping the priest wash the altar boys feet in a typical Good Thursday ritual

that represents humbleness. But this is a lie, since those first images are part of how people

see Francisco, but not the Francisco hidden from sight.

Francisco has a double face: the one that everyone sees and the one that no one

knows. His hidden face will only surface when under an attack of jealousy. The theme of

what is hidden from the view is also touched upon when Francisco throws a dinner party

(the party where he finally manages to seduce Gloria). While a guest is playing the piano,

Francisco hears a noise coming from an adjacent room. He goes to see what is happening

and sees his majordomo looking for something in a dark room full of furniture, dust, and

trash all thrown chaotically around the room. Francisco says to him: What are you doing

in here? How dare you? Get out immediately and close the door! Since this scene does not

actually add anything to the sequence, we can conclude that it refers to the hiding of

Franciscos true colors. Also later in the film, when Gloria tells Ral (her former boyfriend)

that she is scared, he asks her why she married him, to what she answers: I was fooled like

the others. They all love and respect him. No one can imagine what he really is.

Also, in Francisco this self view goes hand in hand with contempt toward everyone

who doesnt belong to his inner circle. When in Guanajuato with his wife, he goes to a

terrace from which it is possible to see the whole Guanajuato from above. There, he says to

Gloria: I love the height because it makes things look pure and clean. Only from afar he

can see things in a good light, only from afar it is possible for him to glimpse some

goodness in the world. Also, later in the film Francisco takes Gloria to a bell tower and

from there he says: Isnt it marvelous? I like it here, high, free from worries of an evil

world. Behold the people! From here you can see what they actually are: worms dragging

their bodies. I feel the urge to squash them with my feet I despise men, dont you

understand? If I were God I would never forgive them.

12

AAVV, La poltica de los autores (Madrid: Paids, 1996), 154.

Up to the moment when Francisco and Gloria get married, everything seems to be

normal. But, as Gloria herself says, the first surprise came on our wedding night. It was

then that Francisco showed his true face: that of a morbidly jealous man. In bed, leaning

over her with a smile on his face, he asks her what she is thinking. She says that she is

thinking of him, but he starts a violent fit in which he accuses her of hiding something. This

is only the first in a series of episodes of psychological violence in which Francisco shows

his insecurity and his obsession with his idea that Gloria is cheating on him.

In a later sequence, Francisco sees that Ricardo (a friend of Glorias that Francisco

thinks is interested on her) is staying in the same hotel in the room next to theirs during

their honeymoon in Cuernavaca. This raises even more suspicions on Francisco, who is

erroneously convinced that Ricardo is spying on them through the keyhole. Francisco then

introduces a wire through the keyhole thinking that he will blind Ricardo, but when this

fails he goes to Ricardos room and starts a fist fight that ends with Francisco on the floor

and Ricardo is expelled from the hotel. After this he goes to the room and when Gloria is

trying to cure his wounds, he looks at her with hate and says: The blame of what just

happened lies on you. I will never forgive you. It is then that Gloria realizes she has

condemned herself to a life of violence and abuse. That is when I understood the life that

awaited me in my marriage with Francisco.

He looks at her with

hate and says: The

blame of what just

happened lies on you.

I will never forgive

you.

Of all the scenes we could analyze, I will talk about two pivotal scenes. The first

scene happens after Gloria sees a priest who is friends with Francisco. She tells him about

all the abuse (physical and psychological) that Francisco has put her through. When

Francisco finds out about this, he goes in a rage to her room and screams at her for daring

to tell someone about their private life. He takes a gun out of his pocket and fires three

shots at her, after which she falls to the floor, apparently dead. Later we find from Gloria

that the gun had blank shots and that Francisco said he only wanted to give her a lesson.

This scene is a perfect example of psychological violence being understood as the

byproduct of the threat of physical violence. By shooting at her with blanks, he imitates the

violent act. There is no actual violence, no one is harmed and there is no intention of

harming her physically; but nonetheless the non physical violence is dressed as physical

violence. The psychological violence (He said he just wanted to give me a lesson) takes

the form of the closeness of physical violence.

Another important scene comes after Gloria, fed up with Franciscos attitude, answers

a question that has been posed to her many times in the film: Are you being unfaithful? Do

you confess?: Yes. Why not?... You can believe whatever you want. I wish that what you

are thinking was true so I could tell it to your face and that way I could get revenge from all

the suffering you have made me endure. She storms out of the room and leaves him alone.

He then goes to the main stairs of the house and with an iron rod starts banging incessantly

the rail. The noise travels to the whole house reminding Gloria that Francisco is there, with

an iron rod in his hand, mad at her, thinking she was indeed unfaithful. Again, the terrible

threat of physical violence is the way Buuel uses to give the sense of psychological

violence. The hitting on the rails is not just a way to vent his frustrations, but a way to

torment Gloria.

There are many more scenes that will be touched upon during the Conference, but

these two are enough to show my main argument: psychological violence in l is directly

related to the threat of physical violence. By relating psychological violence to physical

violence cinema does what it knows how to do best: make the unrepresentable into

something representable.