"Fortunately, somewhere between chance and mystery lies imagination, the only thing that protects our freedom, despite the fact that people keep trying to reduce it or kill it off altogether"
About this Quote
Bunuel wedges a life raft between two forces that usually make adults either cynical or compliant: chance (the world as accident) and mystery (the world as unanswerable). In that narrow channel he plants imagination, not as whimsy but as a survival technology. The line is built like a contraband argument. It sounds generous - "fortunately" - then turns combative, insisting that freedom is less a legal condition than a mental one, maintained internally even when external systems tighten.
Coming from a director who made a career out of surreal sabotage, the subtext is plainly political. Bunuel grew up amid Spanish upheaval, watched authoritarianism harden into routine, and later navigated censorship and bourgeois respectability in exile. His films treat the rational, well-mannered surface of society as a trap: dinner parties that cannot begin, polite conversations that curdle, piety that masks appetite. In that context, "people keep trying to reduce it" points to institutions that fear unruly inner life - churches, states, markets, even the soft tyranny of good taste. Reduction is the preferred method: turn desire into pathology, dreams into content, art into product, questions into slogans.
The sentence works because it refuses to romanticize imagination as escape. It is protection, which implies threat. Bunuel’s imagination doesn’t float above reality; it punctures reality’s official story. Freedom survives not because the world becomes clearer, but because the mind stays stubbornly ungovernable - still capable of making strange connections when power demands straight lines.
Coming from a director who made a career out of surreal sabotage, the subtext is plainly political. Bunuel grew up amid Spanish upheaval, watched authoritarianism harden into routine, and later navigated censorship and bourgeois respectability in exile. His films treat the rational, well-mannered surface of society as a trap: dinner parties that cannot begin, polite conversations that curdle, piety that masks appetite. In that context, "people keep trying to reduce it" points to institutions that fear unruly inner life - churches, states, markets, even the soft tyranny of good taste. Reduction is the preferred method: turn desire into pathology, dreams into content, art into product, questions into slogans.
The sentence works because it refuses to romanticize imagination as escape. It is protection, which implies threat. Bunuel’s imagination doesn’t float above reality; it punctures reality’s official story. Freedom survives not because the world becomes clearer, but because the mind stays stubbornly ungovernable - still capable of making strange connections when power demands straight lines.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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