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List Price: $29.95Amazon.com's Price: $19.49 You Save: $10.46 (35%)Prices subject to change.
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Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 9780780030091
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
ISBN: 0780030095
Label: The Criterion Collection
Manufacturer: The Criterion Collection
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: The Criterion Collection
Region Code: 1
Release Date: May 24, 2005
Running Time: 104 minutes
Sales Rank: 12892
Studio: The Criterion Collection
Theatrical Release Date: October 27, 1974
Editorial Review:
Description:
Bourgeois convention is demolished in Luis Bu±uel's surrealist gem The Phantom of Liberty. Featuring an elegant soir#e with guests seated at toilet bowls, poker-playing monks using religious medals as chips, and police officers looking for a missing girl who is right under their noses, this perverse, playfully absurd comedy of nonsequiturs deftly compiles many of the themes that preoccupied Bu±uel throughout his career-from the hypocrisy of conventional morality to the arbitrariness of social arrangements.
Amazon.com:
Any serious lover of film eventually (if not immediately) succumbs to the genius of Luis Bunuel. The bottomless wit and unsentimental clear-sightedness of the Spanish master is evident throughout his career, but Bunuel has the added bonus of never tapering off, never losing his edge. The Phantom of Liberty was produced when Bunuel was in his mid-70s, and it's as hilariously impertinent as anything he ever made. Along with his (and anybody's) key collaborator Jean-Claude Carriere, Bunuel strings together a series of reverse-logic dreams and surrealist blackouts, which flow from one to another without building into anything like a conventional storyline.
A nurse at an inn is sidetracked by a foursome of poker-playing priests, while an S&M couple down the hall invite everyone to their room for a drink and a show; a sit-down party has guests seated on toilets around a table; a police commissioner receives a phone call from his dead sister. None of it makes sense, except that it makes absolute sense. By the time a little girl is reported missing by her frantic parents, despite the fact that she is manifestly with them in schoolroom and police station, the film has entered the zone where comedy and unnerving observations come together in a perfect way. Many top European actors participate in this exercise, including Michel Piccoli, Monica Vitti, Jean Rochefort, and Jean-Claude Brialy. Perhaps the format limits the film from gaining the resonance of latter Bunuel films such as The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie or That Obscure Object of Desire, but it's a marvelous surrealist variety show. --Robert Horton
Customer Reviews
Average Rating: 
Rating: - Bunuel's Finest Achievement
Luis Bunuel was a director whose work spanned decades, countries and styles, yet, throughout, maintained a keen eye for satire and a talent for presenting surreal imagery.
This film is possibly the best example of these aspects, and is arguably his best. The dinner table scene related by the teacher is one of the most hilarious scenes I've ever watched, and like most of the comedic scenes in the film, never falls flat. Although the movie is essentially a collection of skits, they are ... Read More
Rating: - Genius, surreal absurdity that somehow makes perfect sense
Ok, how can you adequately review this film? Here's one scene--
A mysterious stranger is eyeballing a couple of little kids at the park. As a present for being such lovely little girls, he secretly gives them some "beautiful photographs" and instructs them not to show any grownups. Creepy.
Back at the house, their parents find the pictures and are outraged. The maid is subsequently fired for allowing this travesty to happen to their children.
Finally, when the pictures are shown ... Read More
Rating: - Ostrich...
This film is my favorite of Bunuel's work. It's similar to a full length Monty Python episode, except it's in French, and the women are much better looking. It's very funny, surreal (of course), and strange, yet it makes a great deal of sense. The scene where people defecate in public and eat in private is hilarious, the scene where the priest gives children normal cards to play with, but the adults think they're pornographic is great too. The monks playing poker is quite a vivid image as well. Does ... Read More
Rating: - "On a flimsy ground of reality, imagination spins out and waves new patterns."
This excellent collection of satirical vignettes is my kind of movie - crazy, dark and comical, it goes any direction it wants and does not follow any rules. When we try to grasp for the meaning, it is like a ghost, a phantom that "leaves us with a wisp of vapor in our hands" and disappears - very much like the liberty, the freedom the humans try to find but instead could only see its phantom disappearing. The film follows many characters on its way shifting effortlessly and playfully from the central ... Read More
Rating:  - Spectre of Marx
Harpo, Chico and Groucho, that is, more than Karl. Amusing and entertaining through and through, but not the pinnacle of Bunuel, which, in my eyes, is Tristana. But I've only seen 6 or 7 of his films. The extra feature, The Celebration of Chance, is invaluable. Bunuel's works are greatly helped by the commentaries of Jean-Claude Carriere. Carriere remarks that the title is an allusion to Marx. The truth is that the pursuit of liberty (or the idea that it can ever be attained) is, and has to be, illusory; and ... Read More
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