subversive

Yesterday was free day at SFMOMA, and I slipped over on my lunch break for a special screening of three short subversive documentaries picked out by filmmaker Paul Clipson.  The first, Luis Buñuel's 1933 Las Hurdes (aka The Land Without Bread), purports to describe the difficult lives of rural Spanish peasants, but there is some distinctly surrealist flavor lurking beneath the straight-faced voiceover.  I had first seen the film at the museum a couple years back in conjunction with their 2007 Picasso exhibit and pretty much took it at face value, and only later did I realize Buñuel was winking at the documentary genre itself while also deliberately stirring up strong emotion in his home country during an extremely volatile period of Spanish history.  George Franju's 1952 doc Hotel des Invalides similarly deals with national self-perception, this time using a bland tour through a Paris military museum to highlight the true cost of war.  I felt my heart tighten in my chest at the end as elderly veterans stand during a service with their medals on their chests and their scars right there on their faces.  Clipson saved the best for last, however, in Alain Resnais's 1958 ode to plastics, Le chant du Styrène.  Filmed in Cinemascope and literally brimming with vibrant colors, the documentary is narrated in epic poetry and also features an avant-garde soundtrack by Maurice Jarre.  Industrialism has never looked so appealing.