The Old Age of William Tell (A study of Bunuel's Tristana )

Abstract

Buñuel's Tristana, based on Galdós' 1892 novel of the same title, has attracted many critics interested in the relationship between narrative and film. 1 Most of these critical studies have explored the link between the film and the nineteenth-century novel from which it originates. I would like to follow a different path of study and explore the notion of temporality that is particular to Buñuel's film. In Tristana, time becomes a perspective of the action in which the characters unfold, as Buñuel himself described this film as a movie about the decadence that old age imposes on the individual (Aranda 262). I shall argue that this decadence has two complementary dimensions in the film. First, it is a chronological process that implies physical decay, but it also appears as a force that otherwise modifies the individual. In this respect, age implies the acquisition of a body of knowledge that becomes an active force, for it is used by the subject to avoid the risks that would be taken by the inexperienced. Experience is thus different from chronology, and the effects of each are different as well. Contrary to what happens with physical decrepitude, experience in Tristana is a cause of spiritual depletion. These two complementary forces combine together in Buñuel's notion of decadence, and I shall study them by focusing on the seigneurial [End Page 295] male protagonist, Don Lope. He embodies the two identities that dominate the film. On one hand, there is the aging but still seductive Don Juan, that Buñuel found in the Spanish literary tradition via Galdós and Zorrilla; on the other, the decrepit William Tell, a Freudian motif Dalí developed in his paintings of the thirties that Buñuel will recreate in his movie.