# The Phantom of Liberty
**The Phantom of Liberty** (French: *Le Fantôme de la liberté*) is a 1974 surrealist comedy directed by [Luis Buñuel](https://www.edgepedia.org/luis-bunuel) and written by Buñuel with Jean-Claude Carrière, in which a chain of loosely connected episodes passes from the Napoleonic occupation of Toledo in 1808 to present-day France without a consistent protagonist.[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/905-the-phantom-of-liberty) • [2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty) Produced by Serge Silberman and photographed by Edmond Richard, it was Buñuel's penultimate feature and the middle film of his late French period, between *The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie* (1972) and *That Obscure Object of Desire* (1977).[3](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance) • [4](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=67550)
| Key fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Original title | *Le Fantôme de la liberté*; the title echoes the opening of the Communist Manifesto, "A spectre is haunting Europe"[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty) • [5](https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Bun%CC%83uel_My_Last_Breath.pdf) |
| Release | France, 11 September 1974; Spain, 19 April 1975, with 355,140 admissions[6](https://cineuropa.org/en/film/401231/) • [4](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=67550) |
| Runtime | 104 minutes (ICAA); 103 minutes per Criterion[4](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=67550) • [1](https://www.criterion.com/films/905-the-phantom-of-liberty) |
| Structure | A relay of episodes with no consistent protagonist, each abandoned mid-story as a secondary character becomes the next episode's center[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty) • [7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995) |
| Working method | Buñuel and Carrière told each other their dreams every morning while assembling the screenplay[3](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance) |
| Principal cast | Jean-Claude Brialy, Monica Vitti, Michel Piccoli, Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, Jean Rochefort, Michel Lonsdale[1](https://www.criterion.com/films/905-the-phantom-of-liberty) |
| Reception | 85% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (26 reviews) and 91% on the audience Popcornmeter[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty) |
## Spoilers
### Content and targets
The vignettes invert ordinary social assumptions. Guests at a dinner party sit on toilets at the table and retire to the bathroom to eat; a mass murderer is sentenced to death, released, and signs autographs; a little girl is reported missing at school although she is present and accompanies her parents to the police station; a man gives postcards of Paris landmarks to a child, and her parents, finding them "repugnant," fire the nurse.[7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995) • [13](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/le_Fant%C3%B4me_de_la_libert%C3%A9/4203) Other episodes include poker-playing monks, a fox hunt involving the military, an elderly aunt pursued by her nephew, and incompetent police officers.[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty)
The satire moves from the Church and the upper classes, Buñuel's traditional targets, toward common social mores and assumptions about conduct taken for granted.[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty) K. Brenna Wardell, writing in *The Cine-Files*, reads the dinner-party scene as an extension of Buñuel's critique of bourgeois separation from the body and its waste, with characters who quote numbers about environmental damage without confronting the problem itself.[14](https://www.thecine-files.com/current-issue-2/articles/k-brenna-wardell/) The film's late style supports the effect: a mobile camera that follows rather than displays, long takes that let the absurd arrive without emphasis, and cutting that never signals a joke.[11](https://www.thefifthdesk.org/work/the-phantom-of-liberty/)
## Origins and title
Buñuel explained the title in his autobiography *My Last Breath*: the phrase had already appeared in *The Milky Way* (1969), where one character tells another, "Your liberty is only a phantom," and it was invented in homage to [Karl Marx](https://www.edgepedia.org/karl-marx), to the "spectre" haunting Europe at the opening of the Communist Manifesto.[5](https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Bun%CC%83uel_My_Last_Breath.pdf) The first scene drew on the return of the Bourbons, when the Spanish people had shouted "Long live our chains!"; Buñuel and three other men, including producer Serge Silberman, played the executioners themselves.[5](https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Bun%CC%83uel_My_Last_Breath.pdf)
The screenplay followed the success of *The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie*, on which Buñuel and Carrière had also collaborated.[8](https://www.paristheaternyc.com/film/the-phantom-of-liberty-bunuel) Carrière described the assembly as beginning with a story about a crime whose criminal escapes and whose scene is reconstituted, and said the title's "phantom" named whatever decides what a film passes through.[9](https://www.itinerariesofahummingbird.com/jean-claude-carriere.html) Buñuel himself connected the film to a single theme: "Coincidence is the great master of things. I feel a special tenderness toward The Phantom of Liberty, perhaps because it tackles this difficult theme."[10](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/cteq/phantom/)
## Structure and narrative method
The film abandons narrative logic in favor of a relay. Roger Ebert, longtime film critic of the *Chicago Sun-Times* and winner of the 1975 [Pulitzer Prize](https://www.edgepedia.org/pulitzer-prize) for criticism, described the device precisely: Buñuel's camera often enters a scene with one set of characters and leaves with another, a technique later used in [Richard Linklater](https://www.edgepedia.org/richard-linklater)'s *[Slacker](https://www.edgepedia.org/slacker-film)* (1991).[7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995) No episode is owed to the one before it; the captain's story is abandoned in a park, the nurse's father is never reached, and a dying man's cancer is never mentioned again.[11](https://www.thefifthdesk.org/work/the-phantom-of-liberty/)
The film opens in Toledo during the Napoleonic occupation, as soldiers execute those who would not be liberated, a drunken French captain embraces a marble statue and is struck by the statue of the woman's husband, and a grave is exhumed.[7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995) • [3](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance) The story then reaches its climax through the voice of Muni, an actress who appeared in many Buñuel films, reading aloud, before cutting to her sitting on a park bench in present-day Paris; the action stays in contemporary France from then on.[3](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance) • [7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995)
Scholarship has described this design in several ways. A 2026 study by Jesús España Rodriguez of the Universidad de Córdoba argues that the film's apparent randomness is simulated chance, a controlled form of writing that takes chance occurrences as its model, combined with chaining through thresholds and an affinity with the painting of [René Magritte](https://www.edgepedia.org/rene-magritte).[12](https://journals.uco.es/seriarte/article/view/19103?articlesBySimilarityPage=4) Susan Suleiman had earlier analyzed its narrative structure in terms of freedom and necessity in a 1978 article in the *Quarterly Review of Film Studies*.[12](https://journals.uco.es/seriarte/article/view/19103?articlesBySimilarityPage=4)
## Place in Buñuel's late career
*The Phantom of Liberty* is the second of Buñuel's final three French films, which the [Criterion](https://www.edgepedia.org/criterion) essayist Gary Indiana describes as his most uninhibited and best-realized work, though not a trilogy in any formal sense; after seeing all three, he notes, it is difficult to say which indelible scene belongs to which film.[3](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance) Buñuel's aversion to narrative symmetry had grown steadily after *Belle de jour* (1967), and *The Milky Way* (1969) began demolishing the remaining norms of Aristotelian structure.[3](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance)
## Reception and legacy
The film was quickly dismissed on its 1974 release, caught between the Oscar-winning *Discreet Charm* and Buñuel's final film, but it has since been reclaimed as a distillation of his surrealism.[15](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-phantom-of-liberty/) • [16](https://sightlines.media/film/5558/the-phantom-of-liberty-1974/reception) Contemporary critical response ranged widely: [Pauline Kael](https://www.edgepedia.org/pauline-kael) in *The New Yorker* called its surrealism domesticated, without sting or bite, while Joy Gould Boyum in the *Wall Street Journal* called it superb and marvelously witty.[2](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty) Vincent Canby of *The New York Times* praised it as "brilliant, anarchic... hugely funny."[17](https://www.rialtopictures.com/catalogue/the-phantom-of-liberty)
The film's presence has been continuous: repertory and festival screenings, a series of home-video editions, a regular place in retrospectives and in the teaching of Buñuel and of surrealism in film, and a Criterion Collection release (Spine #290) with a high-definition restoration.[11](https://www.thefifthdesk.org/work/the-phantom-of-liberty/) • [1](https://www.criterion.com/films/905-the-phantom-of-liberty) In Spain it drew 355,140 admissions.[4](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=67550) Ebert's summary of its premise remains the most quoted: in a world cast loose of its moorings by freedom, only anarchy is logical.[7](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995)
## References
1. [The Phantom of Liberty, The Criterion Collection](https://www.criterion.com/films/905-the-phantom-of-liberty)
2. [The Phantom of Liberty, Rotten Tomatoes](https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/phantom_of_liberty)
3. [Gary Indiana, "The Phantom of Liberty: The Serpentine Movements of Chance," The Criterion Collection (2021)](https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7234-the-phantom-of-liberty-the-serpentine-movements-of-chance)
4. [ICAA Film Database: El fantasma de la libertad, Ministerio de Cultura de España](https://sede.mcu.gob.es/CatalogoICAA/Peliculas/Detalle?Pelicula=67550)
5. [Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath (autobiography excerpt)](https://web.english.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Bun%CC%83uel_My_Last_Breath.pdf)
6. [The Phantom of Liberty (Le fantôme de la liberté), Cineuropa](https://cineuropa.org/en/film/401231/)
7. [Roger Ebert, review of The Phantom of Liberty, Chicago Sun-Times](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-phantom-of-liberty-1995)
8. [The Phantom of Liberty, Paris Theater](https://www.paristheaternyc.com/film/the-phantom-of-liberty-bunuel)
9. [Jean-Claude Carrière interview, Itineraries of a Hummingbird](https://www.itinerariesofahummingbird.com/jean-claude-carriere.html)
10. [Marco Lanzagorta, "The Phantom of Liberty," Senses of Cinema (2002)](https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2002/cteq/phantom/)
11. [The Phantom of Liberty, The Fifth Desk](https://www.thefifthdesk.org/work/the-phantom-of-liberty/)
12. [Jesús España Rodriguez, "More Connections between Luis Buñuel and René Magritte," SERIARTE (2026)](https://journals.uco.es/seriarte/article/view/19103?articlesBySimilarityPage=4)
13. [Le Fantôme de la liberté, Larousse, Dictionnaire mondial des films](https://www.larousse.fr/encyclopedie/film/le_Fant%C3%B4me_de_la_libert%C3%A9/4203)
14. [K. Brenna Wardell, "Waste Not: Luis Buñuel Frames Space and Waste in The Phantom of Liberty," The Cine-Files](https://www.thecine-files.com/current-issue-2/articles/k-brenna-wardell/)
15. [Ed Gonzalez, "Review: The Phantom of Liberty," Slant Magazine (2003)](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-phantom-of-liberty/)
16. [The Phantom of Liberty (1974): reception, legacy & influences, Sightlines](https://sightlines.media/film/5558/the-phantom-of-liberty-1974/reception)
17. [The Phantom of Liberty, Rialto Pictures catalogue](https://www.rialtopictures.com/catalogue/the-phantom-of-liberty)
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*Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Black comedy and satire films › Released 1939 to 1997*
*Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026*
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