In 1929, Luis Bunuel directed a film called Un Chien Andalou. Perhaps you've heard of it: co-written with then-Surrealist artist and provocateur Salvador Dali and possessed of an infamous opening sequence that still shocks today, it was met with admiration in artistic circles but with much more widespread revulsion from the general public - though not, as is often apocryphally claimed, with the riots which would eventually greet Bunuel's second collaboration with Dali, 1930's L'Age d'Or. Look at the first two films by this director, and a career trajectory seems immediately obvious. Here is a man who would attack social taboos and mores with shocking, dreamlike images and juxtapositions; a bold, uncompromising filmmaker who could only truly be appreciated by a niche audience. Of course he would continue in the direction suggested by Un Chien Andalou and L'Age d'Or... who could imagine him doing anything else?
Except, of course, he did do something else. Fifteen years later, the film released by Bunuel was not another bizarre psycho-sexual journey into the surreal, but simply an adaptation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. More faithful to its source material than anyone had a right to expect, Bunuel's Crusoe had a coherent plot and a filmmaking style that was "Hollywood" enough to net lead actor Dan O'Herlihy a 1955 Academy Award nomination. So why, you might ask, did such a fearless filmmaker settle for such a "typical" film? Was he under studio pressure? Did he simply recognize that one can only make so many films like Un Chien Andalou before financial concerns force one to either sell out or get a straight job? Perhaps; but the bottom line is, whether Bunuel went from Andalusian dogs to British classics in 15 years for love or for money, he ultimately did it because he wanted to.
Now maybe this is a strange and roundabout way to talk about the new album by Frank Black, but think about it for a moment. The time between Black's glory days with his old band, the Pixies (don't suppose you've heard of them, too?), and Fast Man Raider Man is longer than the 15 years which separated Bunuel's first film and Crusoe; seventeen years, to be exact, since 1989's Doolittle, when, of course, Black brought Bunuel's own Andalou to a wider public consciousness with "Debaser" and its references to "slicin' up eyeballs."
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