🦋 Sketch Comedy
I watched Buñuel's Phantom of Liberty last night (and thanks, Dave, for the recommendation!) and found it... mesmerizing? hilarious? yes, and Pythonesque. This is funny because while I've always thought of Monty Python's humor as "surrealistic," I think this is the closest approximation of their style that I've seen in the work of an actual Surrealist. I wonder what vectors of influence are working -- obviously the Pythons were familiar with Buñuel's work, and I expect Buñuel watched their shows, though I don't know what the timeline would look like; The Phantom of Liberty came out in 1974, a year before The Life of Brian and after Flying Circus had been running for a couple of years.* The individual sketches are hilarious, and the transitions between them are kind of brilliantly jarring -- I am going to watch the movie again tonight because I felt like there was a thread linking the sketches that I was not picking up on because the thread was spinning so fast. Take a look at this sketch on Defecation, which is embedded inside a lecture on moral relativism that the professor (the guy with glasses) is giving at the police academy (hence the cut to the mostly empty lecture hall midway through):
I was thinking as I watched this about the Samuel Beckett quote I read recently, to the effect that he writes in French because he feels too fluent in English -- and really liking listening to the French dialogue in the movie, struggling with the help of the subtitles to understand it. It seems to me like listening to or reading a language you don't quite understand, and the process of understanding what is being said, really opens up some interesting new passageways in my brain.
 * I don't know how many seasons they made Flying Circus for -- it premiered in 1969, may well have been finished by 1974.
posted morning of Sunday, April 19th, 2009
➳ More posts about The Ghost of Liberty
➳ More posts about Luis Buñuel
➳ More posts about The Movies
" Python's last series and the Guardian said "The stench of rotting minds" "
Robyn, "1974"
MP's Flying Circus indeed ended in 74.
posted afternoon of April 19th, 2009 by cleek
Oh!!! right, I had noticed that line but hadn't put the dots together to figure out what it meant. Thanks!
posted afternoon of April 19th, 2009 by Jeremy
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