Scattered throughout the whole of Buñuel’s films, there are images, stories within stories, that constitute a fragmentary discourse about the riddle of fetishism. There are anthropological fetishes such as the music box from The Criminal life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, the wedding dress in Viridiana, the female heads of hair nailed to a cross in L’Age d’or. Then, there are a whole lot of images referring to sexual fetishism: Buñuel’s well known foot fetishism, which was initiated in L’Age d’or with Lya Lis vehemently sucking a statue’s foot. In this film, it was a woman who fetishised, her spontaneous passion towards an inanimate toe from a statue prompted by the absence of her violent lover, by a sudden separation.

But rather than foot fetishism, Buñuel seems to constantly refer to shoe fetishism, shoe fetishism fused to beautiful long legs. Perhaps, Buñuel’s most well known example of shoe fetishism, is the old man in Diary of a Chambermaid (1963). The film is set in the 1920s. The opening sequence focuses on the chambermaid’s shoes. She is wearing dainty high heel shoes, the wrong type of shoes to begin with.

A chambermaid, uniforms, subdom games, such a bastion of male desire. This chambermaid, Célestine, is sexually knowing. She playfully keeps the house master at bay. She wears perfume, black stockings, high heels, goods unavailable to rural servants. Her presence in the house speaks about the city, not just any city, but Paris, Paris and its emerging mass-produced market of goods accessible to a wider range of customers, even to a mere chambermaid.

The old man in the film, old Montiel, “old boots and shoes” is the nickname his neighbour gives him, is, according to his daughter, a man of refinement. He calls all his chambermaids “Marie”, regardless of their names, as if all of them were interchangeable, all the same. He asks the chambermaid to read a passage from Against Nature by Huysmans, a bit where the whole of society is condemned. The chambermaid reads. He enjoys her voice. She reads beautifully. He enjoys that. The beauty of a voice, as if her voice was detached from her body. He then makes her try a pair of old boots, fondles them, fondles her leg, makes her walk.

The old boots bring back memories, undoubtedly memories of affection, beautiful memories, memories we don’t know about. This old man seems to be a fetishist of memories, he seems to have survived through the cluster of memories enlivened by various chambermaids wearing old boots and shoes, the last memory perhaps proving too much: he dies hugging the little boots.

In a way, we don’t know much about this old man. There is nothing that gives us a clue as to why he cherishes shoes so much, except for his devotion to the photo album and the title of a book, Against Nature, which could be translated as: against the natural order of things, against decaying flesh, against death.

Culture transcends the reality of the flesh. A whole discourse about culture as a sign of class distinction revolves around the old man’s love for shoes. This old man reminds us to what extent high heels have been a sign of privilege, wealth, prestige, a status symbol, worn only by the privileged classes. The working class, peasants, could not afford to wear such impractical shoes. And this is what the opening image of the film refers to. Marianne (Muni), the subservient maid who has all the signs of reduced lower class inscribed upon her body and mind, could have never been chosen by the old man to wear such sophisticated footwear. The old man’s eccentricity is steeped in class distinction. If the chambermaid submits to something, it is to that, to class distinction.

There is another important pair of shoes in the film. The murderer’s shoes, amended rough shoes a gentleman would not have worn. Célestine had removed a piece of metal from the murderer’s shoes and planted it where the little girl had been murdered for the police to discover. Thus a shoe will be falsely linked to the little girl’s true murderer. True, false, the old man and the little girl died at the same time, as if one reality had to give way to another type of reality. If you take the little girl’s murder as symbolic of an annihilation within the chambermaid, the old man’s shoes stand as a rite of passage into the realities of class distinction anticipating the end of the film, when the chambermaid marries the childish captain and makes him into her servant.

Another fetishist of memories appears in Viridiana (1961). In this film, a wedding dress refers to an erotic invocation. Don Jaime caresses his dead wife’s wedding clothes in adoration. The man then proceeds to slide his foot in one of his wife’s white wedding shoes, caresses her wedding corset, and tries to put it on, but is interrupted. The wedding dress, the wedding shoe, the corset are an erotic invocation connected primarily with absence, with the absence of a cherished person, a cherished deceased wife. These objects clearly speak about a moment of disavowal, but disavowal of the supreme loss: death, actual physical death. Death, loss, absence, separation, this is what these images speaks about. These objects are a memorial to the supreme loss. A female wedding shoe is elevated into a transcendent symbol of death, of the denial of death. Suddenly, a wedding dress becomes a monumentalized sign of mortality, the ultimate separation. Perhaps that is what the white wedding clothes are about, the youthful innocence that denies the end-game of death. In the hands of a fetishist of memories these clothes become sacred, in the hands of the drunk leper who didn’t know the deceased woman they become defaced, an opportunity for carnival celebrated by the group. The problem of private versus collective sense is thus suggested.

The private versus the collective had already been explored in Él (1952). Él starts with images of a Catholic church and its excessive ornament and then proceeds to a Catholic ritual. The opening sequence introduces us to Francisco, the main character, helping in a cleansing ceremony where a priest washes a row of adolescent boys’ feet and then kisses them on the instep, a lingering kiss, a rite of passage. A collective ceremony is followed by a private obsession, foregrounding how collective ritual sanctions behaviour that will be unacceptable when private. Francisco’s gaze goes through the row of adolescent male bare feet, looks quickly at the shoes of the congregation, and then goes back to a woman’s high heel shoe, its distinct shadow a perfect high heel silhouette. His passion for the woman, Gloria, crystallises here, with the sight of her high heel shoe and its beautiful shadow. A passion that crystallises around a foot clad in a beautiful high heel shoe and its beautiful shadow, might not be all that promising. But sometimes things turn out like that, not just the irrational but even the shadow of the irrational.

Francisco’s infernal jealousy starts on the night of his wedding. Later, in a hotel scene, feeling that they might be being watched, he hides his wife’s shoes in the wardrobe as if their erotic presence could arouse a hypothetical peeping tom. And then, there is this scene where he is angry, she, intimidated by his anger. He drops his glasses and when he sees her shiny high heel shoe, he feels relieved, his anxious gaze becomes a reassured gaze. However, Francisco’s problem is that his fetishism is unconscious, thus his implosion, his collapse.

If Francisco’s unconscious fetishism is ultimately an enigma rooted in a forgotten childhood trauma, there is this other character, Archibaldo (in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, 1955), a jinxed serial killer, where fetishism is inextricably linked to separation. Archibaldo is this rather wealthy Mexican man whose hobby is pottery. He crafts pots everyday, working at the beauty of the concave walls, placing his hands inside, a daily acknowledgement of the lovely uterine. And then a chance encounter. The melody from a music box heard while shaving releases an involuntary memory the moment he cuts himself with his razor and sees blood. A memory where death, the erotic, separation and magical omnipotence are inextricably linked. Archibaldo becomes a man haunted by a fatal melody, controlled by a relevant childhood object. Death, death again. But this time death accompanied by the customary gut reaction. After somebody dies, we want to affirm life through death. When a death is already erotic, perhaps you will seek the erotic through death. Archibaldo’s mother left one evening for the theatre and left the child a music box to make do for her absence. Separation from the mother was linked to a substitute, the music box, which had the power to kill through music any other mother substitutes, starting with the governess. Separation, a fetish, the subsequent annihilation or denial of a mother substitute, the erotic release from that dream of annihilation. And then, Lavinia and Lavinia’s sister, her inanimate double, a mannequin, such an overdetermined point of encounter for desire, consumption and the female, such an exquisite corpse in the surrealist game.

Lavinia, a witty she devil, both a mannequin model and a tourist guide, makes Archibaldo the object of her pranks. Before the comical burning of Lavinia’s mannequin, a chance dismemberment takes place, a leg and shoe come off. When Archibaldo burns Lavinia’s mannequin out of frustration, in a way, what he is doing is burning a fetishised construction of femininity. That is the first fetish he gets rid off. Then he gets rid off the box, then the cane. He gets rid off his fetishes to go for the real thing.

Through the burning of the mannequin, a reversal in object relationships takes place: the destructive magical omnipotence released by the music box had made him wish to suppress all these women, when what should have been suppressed from the beginning was the music box, the fetish, the fetish sentence that leads to compulsive blinkers that ignore ninety nine per cent of the world in favour of the eternal return of the same. The music box will go back where it belongs, a pond doomed to stagnate, like compromise fetishism. So will a walking cane, a prop no longer necessary when a reversal in object relationships has taken place.

Buñuel’s polymorphous fascination with the other, with the abject, is embodied in these images. After his first two films Buñuel tried to integrate this polymorphous fascination as part of the everyday life of his characters, small details, single images that flow almost unnoticed and yet, at the end of the film, stand out with the over insistent presence of a hallucinated trompe-l’oeil, a fetishised image about a fetish.

If the fetish is ultimately a reassuring survival tool that might succeed or fail in its task, it also remains an unstable object, open to vertiginous interpretation and the possibility of meaninglessness, or a meaning so hidden in the personal circuits of a brain as to be the most incommunicable idiolect.

Could Buñuel’s images about fetishism speak about a vertiginous debate about unstable objects that in turn speaks about his fascination with unstable images? Are these images black holes? At first, these images seem to be fugues of meaning, black holes that devour all meaning, opening into vertiginous interpretation, into the possibility of things signifying nothing, into the sheer materiality of the signifier. But then you realize this is not the case at all. These images, are overdetermined, they are not black holes, they are metonymies that speak of more or less secret histories, stories within stories, the story of metonymies, a story that has a long tradition in literature, in poetry. There is nothing arbitrary about these images.

There are a few anthropological fetishes in Buñuel’s films such as the cross with female heads of hair, the music box, the wedding dress, but there are so many high heels. High heels, with their emphasis on gravity and minimal contact with the earth. High heels are overdetermined objects in terms of thought translated into matter, objects that in Buñuel’s world are fused to beautiful legs to refer to a sexuality that attempts to transcend nature through culture, through class distinction. In fact, Buñuel’s type of sexual fetishism is highly codified, deeply urban, inextricably linked to distinction, to culture, to consumerism as an image of refinement, of sophistication, historically different from contemporary fetishism as a sub-cultural sign of dissent or an ironic comment reducing it to one of the many life styles you can buy.

Through these images Buñuel is also speaking about the overwhelming importance of female masquerade, about the fact that thought is translated into matter, about the impossibility of returning to a pure natural state, a pure natural body, about cultural signs having taken complete precedence over nature.

The surrealists were fascinated with African fetishes. Buñuel translated this fascination into the catholic vernacular relating it to western fetishism and the ritual of sense. Rather than the irrational, at the centre of Buñuel’s ideas on fetishism is the problem of sense, the ritual of sense. How sense might be sanctioned if backed up collectively, repudiated if it is a private affair. In many of these images, ritual is what invests them with meaning. Yet in others, a compulsive impulse presupposes previous rituals. Buñuel’s fetishes speak about the problem of sense, the ritual of sense, of bestowing sense upon things, ritual as a game of transcendence, transcendence as a way of denying the earth-bound body.

Religious, childhood, sexual and commodity fetishism are explored and sometimes conflated in Buñuel’s ongoing reflection on fetishism. If death is a constant in Buñuel’s oeuvre, Buñuel’s philosophical toys seem to speak about the denial of death, the supreme loss. The denial of death, the ritual of sense, the overwhelming importance of female masquerade, the fetish as intimately related to class distinction through the power of culture to transcend natural reality, these are the main stories Buñuel’s philosophical toys suggest.

Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys is an offspring from Philosophical Toys, a novel about our complex relationship to the world of things. Invited to do a talk for the Buñuel Centenary at Senate House, Susana Medina ended up putting together this short film in three days. Thus the film actually comes about by chance, it becomes a case of what the surrealists called “objective chance”.

2000 “Buñuel’s Philosophical Toys” (24 min film), shown in London at The Lumiére Cinema, The Cobden Club, Senate House, Instituto Cervantes, Calder's Bookshop, Birkbeck College, as well as Magdalen's College (Oxford) and the University of Ottawa (Canada).

Published in Buñuel, Siglo XXI, Prensas Universitarias de Zaragoza, ed. I. Santaolalla, P. d´Allemand, J. Diaz Cintas, P.W. Evans, Consuelo Sanmateu, A. Whyte, M. Witt, 2004.