September 30, 2014 (Series 29:6) Luis Buñuel, (1961, 90 min)

Directed by Luis Buñuel Written by Julio Alejandro, Luis Buñuel, and Benito Pérez Galdós (novel “Halma”) Cinematography by José F. Aguayo Produced by Music by Gustavo Pittaluga Film Editing by Pedro del Rey Set Decoration by Francisco Canet

Silvia Pinal ... Viridiana ... Jorge ... Don Jaime José Calvo ... Don Amalio Margarita Lozano ... Ramona José Manuel Martín ... El Cojo Victoria Zinny ... Lucia Luis Heredia ... Manuel 'El Poca' Joaquín Roa ... Señor Zequiel Lola Gaos ... Enedina María Isbert ... Beggar Teresa Rabal ... Rita Julio Alejandro (writer) (b. 1906 in Huesca, Arágon, —d. 1995 (age 89) in Javea, Valencia, Spain) wrote 84 films and television shows, among them 1984 “Tú eres mi destino” (TV Luis Buñuel (director) Series), 1976 Man on the Bridge, 1974 Bárbara, 1971 Yesenia, (b. Luis Buñuel Portolés, February 22, 1900 in Calanda, Aragon, 1971 El ídolo, 1970 Tristana, 1969 Memories of the Future, Spain—d. July 29, 1983 (age 83) in City, Distrito 1965 , 1962 A Mother's Sin, 1961 Viridiana, Federal, Mexico) directed 34 films, which are 1977 That 1959 Nazarin, 1955 After the Storm, and 1951 Mujeres sin Obscure Object of Desire, 1974 , 1972 mañana. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1970 Tristana, 1969 The Milky Way, 1967 Belle de Jour, 1965 Simon of the Desert, 1964 José F. Aguayo (cinematographer) (b. José Fernández Aguayo, Diary of a Chambermaid, 1962 , 1961 1911 in Madrid, Spain—d. May 11, 1999 (age 88) in Madrid, Viridiana, 1960 , 1959 Fever Mounts at El Pao, Madrid, Spain) was the cinematographer for 137 films and 1959 Nazarin, 1956 , 1956 That Is the television shows, including 1996 “Gregorian Chant: Songs of the Dawn, 1955 The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, 1954 Spirit” (TV Movie documentary), 1980 ...And the Third Year, He Illusion Travels by Streetcar, 1954 Robinson Crusoe, 1954 The Resuscitated, 1976 Los hijos de..., 1975 Olvida los tambores, River and Death, 1953 Wuthering Heights, 1953 El, 1953 El 1973 Goya (Documentary), 1973 It Happened at Nightmare Inn, bruto, 1952 A Woman Without Love, 1952 , 1970 The Man from O.R.G.Y., 1970 Tristana, 1966 Camino del 1951 Daughter of Deceit, 1951 Susana, 1950 , Rocío, 1966 He Is My Man, 1964 Minnesota Clay, 1963 The 1949 The Great Madcap, 1947 , 1937 ¡Centinela, Blackmailers, 1961 Viridiana, 1960 Maribel and the Strange alerta!, 1936 ¿Quién me quiere a mí?, 1933 Family, 1960 Una chica de Chicago, 1957 The Last Torch Song, (Documentary short), 1930 L'Age d'Or, and 1929 Un Chien 1952 Come Die My Love, 1946 Path Unknown, and 1945 Andalou (Short). Castañuela.

Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—2

Silvia Pinal ... Viridiana (b. Silvia Pinal Hidalgo, September 12, Series), 1980 ¡Qué verde era mi duque!, 1980 En mil pedazos, 1931 in , , Mexico) appeared in 106 films and 1979 Times of the Constitution, 1978 Soldiers, 1978 Mi mujer no television shows, some of which are 2013 The Last Call, 2010 es mi señora, 1978 El huerto del Francés, 1978 El último “A Woman of Steel” (TV Series, 143 episodes), 1989-2006 guateque, 1964-1977 “Novela” (TV Series, 35 episodes) 1977 “Mujer, casos de la vida real” (TV Series, 707 episodes), 1968 Secretos de alcoba, 1976 “Teatro estudio” (TV Series), 1976 La Guns for San Sebastian, 1965 Simon of the Desert, 1962 The espada negra, 1976 El secreto inconfesable de un chico bien, Exterminating Angel, 1961 Viridiana, 1961 Goodbye Mimi 1976 Las delicias de los verdes años, 1976 Esclava te doy, 1970- Pompon, 1959 The Follies of Barbara, 1958 The Man That 1976 “Estudio 1” (TV Series), 1975 Las bodas de Blanca, 1975 Pleases Me, 1956 La adúltera, 1955 Mortal Sin, 1950 El amor L'uomo che sfidò l'organizzazione, 1975 Pim, Pam, Pum... Fire!, no es ciego, 1950 The King of the Neighborhood, and 1949 El 1974 Barcelona Kill, 1974 Run, Run, Joe!, 1973 “Ficciones” (TV pecado de Laura. Series), 1973 Little Funny Guy, 1972 Tragic Ceremony, 1972 Dust in the Sun, 1972 Carta de amor de un asesino, and 1972 Francisco Rabal ... Jorge (b. Francisco Rabal Valera, March 8, Hector the Mighty. 1926 in Águilas, Murcia, Región de Murcia, Spain—d. August 29, 2001 (age 75) in Bordeaux, France) appeared in 214 films and TV shows, including 2001 Dagon, 2001 Alla rivoluzione sulla due cavalli, 2001 Just Run!, 1998 Talk of Angels, 1996 Oedipo alcalde, 1995 On Earth as It Is in Heaven, 1993 “Una gloria nacional” (TV Series, 10 episodes), 1993 La Lola se va a los puertos, 1986 The Bastard Brother of God, 1985 Padre nuestro, 1983 “Los desastres de la guerra” (TV Series, 6 episodes), 1980 Under Siege, 1980 “Fortunata y Jacinta” (TV Series, 10 episodes), 1975 Eye of the Cat, 1974 Death Will Have Your Eyes, 1972 La guerrilla, 1969 Simón Bolívar, 1968 Bloody Che Contra, 1965 Intimidad de los parques, 1964 The Other Woman, 1962 L'Eclisse, 1961 Death of a Bandit, 1948 Revelación, 1948 Alhucemas, 1947 Don Quijote de la Mancha, 1946 The Prodigal Woman, and 1946 El crimen de Pepe Conde.

Fernando Rey ... Don Jaime (b. Fernando Casado Arambillet, September 20, 1917 in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain—d. March 9, 1994 (age 76) in Madrid, Spain) appeared in 241 films and television shows, including 1994 El cianuro... ¿solo o con leche?, 1994 Al otro lado del túnel, 1993 Madregilda, 1992 Después del sueño, 1992 “Blood and Dust” (TV Movie), 1991 “Don Quijote de la Mancha” (TV Series), 1989 “Il ricatto” (TV Series), 1989 “La moglie ingenua e il marito malato” (TV Movie), 1988 Scent of a Crime, 1988 Winter Diary, 1988 Moon Over Parador, 1988 The Tunnel, 1984 The Hit, 1981 Honey, 1981 Lady of the Camelias, 1979 Quintet, 1977 That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977 The Assignment, 1977 Eyes Behind the Wall, 1976 Striptease, 1976 Voyage of the Damned, 1976 Buñuel by Dali The Desert of the Tartars, 1976 A Matter of Time, 1975 French Connection II, 1975 Seven Beauties, 1975 Smiling LUIS BUÑUEL from World Film Directors V. I. Ed. John Maniacs, 1974 La femme aux bottes rouges, 1974 Say It with Wakeman, The H.W. Wilson Co., NY, 1987. Entry by Flowers, 1973 White Fang, 1972 The Discreet Charm of the Miriam Rosen Bourgeoisie, 1972 The Two Faces of Fear, 1972 Antony and Luis Buñuel, Spanish director, scenarist, and producer, Cleopatra, 1971 The French Connection, 1971 A Town Called was born in the in village of Calanda in Aragon. His father, Hell, 1970 Tristana, 1969 Guns of the Magnificent Seven, 1968 Leonardo, a native of the province had gone to Cuba in his youth Villa Rides, 1967 Young Rebel, 1967 Beyond the Mountains, with the Spanish military and stayed on to make his fortune as a 1966 Return of the Seven, 1966 El Greco, 1965 “Don Quijote hardware merchant. Returning home in 1898, at the age of forty- von der Mancha” (TV Mini-Series), 1965 Son of a Gunfighter, two, he met and married Maria Portoles, a seventeen-year-old 1962 Face of Terror, 1946 Misión blanca, 1945 Tierra sedienta, girl from a wealthy aristocratic family. Luis was the first of their and 1944 Eugenia de Montijo. three sons and four daughters; four months after his birth, the family moved to the town of Saragossa but retained a country house in Calanda, and the atmosphere of this “completely feudal José Calvo ... Don Amalio (b. Jose Calvo Salgado, March 3, village” as Buñuel referred to it, is often reflected in his films. (In 1916 in Madrid, Spain—d. May 16, 1980 (age 64) in Los Palmas later years, Buñuel liked to point out that although he had been de Gran Canaria, Spain) appeared in 151 films and television born in Calanda, he had been conceived in .) shows, among them 1984 Carta a nadie, 1981 “Cervantes” (TV Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—3

Buñuel’s education, though thoroughly religious until (Weary Death, 1921) that finally jarred him into a realization of he reached the age of fifteen, included a year with the French what film could do: ‘I came out of the Vieux Colombier [theatre] order of the Sacred Heart, followed by seven years at the Jesuit completely transformed. Images could and did become for me Colegio del Salvador; an excellent student, he willingly the true means of expression. I decided to devote myself to the immersed himself in scripture and other religious writings, but cinema.’ ” his greatest interest was study of insects and animals. Around the age of fourteen or fifteen, he began to have serious doubts about Making his way to the avant-garde filmmaker Jean the faith, and during two years of study at the secular Instituto Epstein’s academy of cinema (where he found himself in a class Nacional de Enseñanza read Spencer, Rousseau, Marx and above of nineteen, with eighteen White Russians), he convinced Epstein all, Darwin, whose Origin of the Species particularly affected his to let him work as an assistant on Mauprat (1926). Around the thinking. same time he also served as an assistant to Henri Etiévant and In 1917 Buñuel, eager to break away from the enclosed Marius Nalpa on La Sirène des tropiques, starring Josephine environment of Saragossa, he went off to Madrid to enter the Baker, and played a small role in Jacques Feyder’s Carmen. In university. His own inclination was to study music but his father 1927 he had a brief go at a theatrical career, first as a scriptwriter set him on the more practical course of agricultural engineering; for a Spanish Hamlet, performed in the cellar of the Select Café, when it became clear that he was not good enough in math for and then as director of a production in Amsterdam of Manuel de such a program, he switched to the natural sciences and pursued Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro. his long-standing interest in entomology by working as an Buñuel’s inroads into cinema continued apace when he became assistant to a distinguished insect specialist at the Museum of Epstein’s first assistant for La Chute de la Maison Usher (The Natural History. But the decisive education that Buñuel received Fall of the House of Usher), but he wound up quitting the during his first stay in Madrid came not so production after an argument with the director much from the university as from the circle over (to whom Buñuel refused to be of writers and artists that he encountered at civil, dismissing him as a hack [pompier]). The Residencia de Estudiantes (student incident, which reflected basic differences in residence), including Ramón Gómez de la orientation between Epstein and Buñuel, was not Cerna, Rafael Albertini Federico Garcia without repercussions: as Maurice Drouzy points Lorca. Juan Ramón Jiminez (the founder of a out Buñuel was now not only out of work but 1927 group of Surrealist poets) and his future was labeled as a troublemaker in Epstein’s avant- collaborator Salvador Dali. In their company garde circles. In any case, it was at this point that he contributed to the review La Gaceta he once again involved himself with the literaria, became a supporter of the Residencia des Estudiantes in Madrid, anarchist movement, and definitively “organizing the first series of avant-garde films switched from science to the Faculty of ever presented in Spain. The screenings–of René Philosophy and Letters, with a concentration Clair’s dadaist Entre’acte (1924), Alberto in history. Cavalcanti’s “city ” Rien que les In 1925 after completing a degree heures (1926), and Alan Crosland’s pioneering and fourteen months of military service, Buñuel seized an talkie The Jazz Singer, among other films–were a tremendous opportunity to go to Paris as secretary to a Spanish diplomat. As success and gave rise to the establishment of the first Spanish was to be the case over the next few years, his path was cine-club.” smoothed by financial assistance from his mother (his father had By this time, Buñuel was also thinking about films of died two years earlier), and he made his way into the city’s café his own: he wrote a scenario on the Spanish painter Goya (whose culture, already a home for Spanish intellectuals and artists. Two imagery later turns up in his films) and worked with his friend major developments followed in short order: he met his future Ramón Gómez de la Cerna to adapt one of the latter’s short wife Jeanne Rucar (an Olympic gymnast ten years his junior), stories. Neither of these projects got very far, and in January and he realized that he wanted to become a filmmaker. 1928, while visiting Salvador Dali at his home in Fugueras, As Buñuel recalls in My Last Breath, the memoirs he Buñuel suggested that they do a film together. They talked about dictated at the end of his life, he saw his first film at the age of their dreams and decided to use them and other images in a film eight—an animated cartoon featuring a singing pig, whose song that would be constructed by free association. According to came from a phonograph behind the screen. In the years that Buñuel they wrote the scenario in eight days: “We identified with followed, he saw the comedies and adventures of Max Linder each other so much that there was no discussion. We put together and Georges Mélès imported from France romantic melodramas the first images that came into our heads, and conversely, we fropm Italy, and his favorites, the American comedies of Mack systematically rejected everything that came to us from culture or Sennett, Ben Turpin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie education.” Chaplin. The money for production came from Buñuel’s mother; Once in Paris he immersed himself in the city’s rich it was, he explains, the equivalent in intention though not amount cinema offerings. On the basis of articles he wrote for Cahiers of the dowries she’d given two of his sisters. He promptly went d’art, he obtained a movie pass and began spending entire days off to Paris and squandered half on soirées with friends, then and nights at the cinema—attending private projections of realized he’d better get on with the film “because I was a American films in the morning, neighborhood theatres in the responsible man and didn’t want to cheat my mother.” In March afternoon, art theatres at night. It was Fritz Lang’s Der mude Tod he gathered together a cast and crew, mainly friends (including Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—4

Epstein’s cameraman Albert Duverger), rented space at the incongruously idyllic words au printemps (“in the springtime”) Billancourt Studios, bought the film stock, and shot the script in appear in the sky above. ten days; Dali arrived from Spain in time for the final scenes In its evocation of dream states, its forceful expressions only. Neither the cast nor the crew knew quite what they were of sexuality and sexual frustration, and the resulting affront to working on, although Buñuel himself followed the scenario quite bourgeois morality, exemplifies surrealist closely, a practice he continued throughout his career. cinema. In fact, Buñuel’s personal connection with the surrealists The result of this venture was Un Chien andalou (An came only after the film was completed. But both he and Dali Andalusian Dog, 1929), the archetype of surrealist cinema. The were intrigued by the movement from what they had heard and film was originally to be called Es peligroso arsomarse al interio read from a distance. The poems of Benjamin Peret in particular, (Danger: Do Not Lean Inside) —a play on the warning posted Buñuel recalled, “made us die laughing.” As a number of next to the windows of European trains—but the two authors researchers have pointed out, it is probable that the two aspiring decided this was too literary and, at Dali’s suggestion, adopted filmmakers were also aware of a previous venture in the domain the tite Buñuel had selected, equally at random, for a collection of surrealist cinema, La Coquille et le clergyman (The Seashell of his own poems: Un perro andaluz which became in French Un and the Clergyman, directed by Germaine Dulac from a scenario Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929). by Antonin Artaud, and first shown publicly at the Studio des The seventeen-minute film begins with the famous prologue Ursulines on February 9, 1928. Like Un Chien andalou, La where a man on a balcony slits a young girl’s eye as a cloud Coquille was intended to shatter the conventions of narrative and passes over the moon. This was bridge the gap between the Buñuel’s dream image, and it is conscious and the unconscious, Buñuel who wields the razor, with a mix of eroticism and thus opening both the film and violence. If of nothing else, his filmmaking career with one Buñuel and Dali would shocking gesture. (The woman certainly have heard of the was Simone Mareuil; the eye, film’s uproarious screening at filmed in closeup, was actually the Studio des Ursulines, where that of a dead calf.) After this a band of surrealists, believing gruesome introduction–“I that Dulac had betrayed the filmed it,” Buñuel declared, scenario, caused a near-riot. At “because I had seen it in a any rate, having created a dream and because I knew it surrealist film, Buñuel and Dali would disgust people”—the were themselves ready to scene switches to a rainy street become surrealists. The “eight years later,” according to the intertitle. A man connection was made whern Buñuel was introduced to Man Ray incongruously dressed in frills and carrying a small striped box at La Coupole, a Montparnasse café; Man Ray’s own film, Les around his neck (Pierre Batcheff) arrives on a bicycle and Mystères du château du Dé was scheduled to be screened at the tumbles to a halt. The woman of the prologue (eye intact), Studio des Ursulines, and he invited Buñuel to bring Un Chien watching from upstairs, runs down to him, then returns upstairs andalou to show to André Breton and the other surrealists who to engage in a kind of ritualistic display of the contents of a box. were expected to attend. Unsure of how the audience would The man reappears in the room for the second well-known react—and doubtless aware of the pandemonium created by the segment of the film (Dali’s dream): he stares at his hand as ants same crowd at the screening of La Coquille the year before, pour out of a hole in his palm. After a brief cut to the beach and Buñuel came armed with a pocketful of rocks and stood behind then back to the street, where androgynous-looking figure is seen the screen ready to launch a counterattack. As it turned out, the poking at a severed hand with a long stick, there is a sequence of film was a grand success, and the surrealists immediately sexual pursuit. The man (of the bicycle) grabs the woman’s welcomed him into the fold. clothed breasts; these fade to naked breasts, then to buttocks. The Le Chien andalou soon reached a wider audience as man’s face becomes ghoulish, corpselike; he tugs at two ropes well: when the Studio des Ursulines declined to project it lying on the floor and hauls in two bizarre but identical publicly for fear of a ban by the censors, it was purchased by linkages—cork floats, calabashes, Marist brothers, and finally Studio 28, where it enjoyed an eight-month run. Jean Vigo, in his two grand pianos, each propped open to reveal the rotting carcass remarks before the first projection of Á propos de Nice in June of a donkey. 1930, hailed Un Chien andalou as “a capital work, from every Another intertitle indicates that it is “around 3 a.m.”: the same point of view: sureness of mise-en-scene, skill in the lighting, woman in the same room receives another man at the door; the perfect knowledge of visual and ideological associations, solid newcomer-the double of the cyclist—orders the latter to leave. logic of the dream, admirable confrontation of the subconscious “Sixteen years earlier” (intertitle) the cyclist shoots the and the rational” Ironically, even the bourgeois public that newcomer with two books that become revolvers in his hands. Buñuel and Dali sought to affront “appropriated” the film for As he falls, the victim touches the bare shoulder of a woman seen themselves. to be sitting in a park. After a few more abrupt cuts from one Likewise, Un Chien andalou has been subjected to setting to another, the man and the woman appear on a beach, precisely the kind of rational analysis that Buñuel sought to buried in sand up to their chests; a burning sun beats down on discourage. As Buñuel told José de la Colina and Thomas Perez- them, and they are attacked by a swarm of insects while the Turrent in the late 1970s, “a cavalry captain from Saragossa, a Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—5

German professor, and a bunch of others have reached the same apparently obliged to travel to the Vatican to dissuade the Pope conclusions. “The man going toward the woman represents the from excommunicating the couple. sexual drive; the ropes are moral constraints; the two corks, the On December 3, 1930, the day after the film opened at frivolousness of life; the two dry gourds, testicles; the priests, Studio 28, two right-wing vigilante groups, the Patriot’s League religion, the piano, the lyricism of love; and the two donkeys, and the anti-Jewish League, stormed the theatre, hurling ink and death.” But for Buñuel, the significance of these images lay rotten eggs at the movie screen, setting off tear gas and stink outside of narrow symbolism: “They should accept them such as bombs, and clubbing members of the audience to cries of “Death they are, [asking] do they move me? Disgust me? Attract me? to the Jews!” and “You’ll see there are still Christians in They should leave it at that.” France!” Two days later, the police instructed the theatre director In the wake of Un Chien andalou Buñuel threw himself to cut “the two scenes with the bishops,” and although the film into the surrealist movement and its guerilla campaign against had already been cleared by the censors, this was done….On the conventional and repressive…. December 10 police commissioner Chiappe banned the film and As for filmmaking, Buñuel apparently considered ordered all copies confiscated. abandoning his career altogether: the commercial cinema he For the next fifty years, L’Age d’or remained largely a explains in My Last Breath, was not an option, and he couldn’t tantalizing memory….As Marcel Oms points out in L’Age d’or continue asking his mother for money. But on this score too, “Buñuel established his entire personal problematic and initiated saved the day. His friends put him in touch with a a veritable revolution in cinematographic language that he would wealthy patron, the Vicomte de Noailles, who had taken to never cease to amplify right up to his last film.” commissioning a film for his wife’ In its form and in its themes and motifs, birthday every year—this was also the L’Age d’or is significant as the harbinger of origin of Man Ray’s Les Mystères du Buñuel’s subsequent work. Raymond Lefevre château du Dé (1929) and Jean Cocteau’s notes, for example, how the juxtaposition of Le Sang d’un poète (1930-32). In short documentary and drama prefigures Buñuel’s order, Buñuel had a million old francs to constant play on the continuum between reality make his second film. He and Dali had and fiction. Similarly, in terms of themes, the originally planned to incorporate some of repressive “friends of darkness”—the clergy, the the leftover images from Un Chien bourgeoisie, the army, and police—were to appear andalou in a sequel called La Bête again and again, as were the frustrated lovers, the andalouse, but after a brief attempt at domineering mothers, the unsympathetic blind working together in Spain, it became clear man, all manner of animals, and the literary that the two men were moving in different creations of he Marquis de Sade…. directions, and the collaboration (along with their friendship) came to an end. When L’Age d’or came under attack in Buñuel returned to France to write the 1930, the sureealists published a manifesto scenario on the estate of his patron, de condemning the incident, and the leftist press Noailles. At one point Dali wrote to him came to Buñuel’s defense as vigorously as their with additional suggestions (and is credited rightist counterparts denounced him. One of the as co-scenarist), but the making of L’Age d’or was Buñuel’s film’s more unlikely fans, though, was the European agent of work and his great achievement. MGM who indicated that although he didn’t understand it, he The repertoire of themes in L’Age d’or is much the was impressed. As a result he offered Buñuel a six-month same as that of Un Chien andalou—frustrated love and sexuality, contract in Hollywood: for $250 a week, the budding director physical violence, attacks on the clergy and state—and there is was to sit on the sets and learn how American movies were even some repetition of imagery, not to mention the overriding made. Buñuel accepted immediately and left for the United intent to shock the bourgeoisie. But L’Age d’or is at once much States in December 1930 (which meant that he missed the L’Age more complex (and almost four times as long) and much more d’or controversy entirely, and by his own account, never saw the deliberately structured. As Buñuel himself remarked, “In Un film again). Chien andalou there is no conducting thread, while in L’Age Once in Hollywood, he quickly made contact with a d’or, yes, [there is] a line…that runs from one thing to another group of illustrious expatriates—Chaplin, Eisenstein, Sternberg, via certain detail.”… Feyder, Brecht–but his visit ended abruptly after he flatly refused to screen a film that starred Lili Damita as a Spanish- In his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dali speaking courtesan, declaring he didn’t want to “hear the (1942), Buñuel’s former collaborator claimed that his conception whores.” He was back in France by March 1931 and in Madrid of L’Age d’or had been a thoroughly religious one, expressing just days before the end of the Spanish monarchy and the love and passion “imbued with the splendor of the Catholic proclamation of the Spanish Republic. He began working on an church.” As a result he was “terribly disappointed” with Buñuel’s adaptation of Gide’s Les Caves du Vatican to be filmed in the film which, he insisted after the fact, was “a caricature of my Soviet Union, but this fell through, and he turned to a less costly ideas.” Dali was not the only one to attack the film. After a project, a documentary. The idea for the film came from a 1927 premiere on their estate and a second private screening at the study by Maurice Legendre on the human geography of Las Pantheon cinema, the Noailles found themselves thrown out of Hurdes, an extremely isolated and backward region of western the exclusive Jockey Club, and the vicomte’s mother was Spain. With no producer in sight, Buñuel’s friend Ramón Acin, a Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—6 militant anarchist, promised to finance the film if he won the upheaval of Civil War was Buñuel able to find a European lottery–which he did–and despite objections from fellow distributor. During the war, according to Buñuel, a friend in the anarchists, he turned over twenty thousand pesos for the project. Republican government came across his police file, which Borrowing a camera from Yves Allegret, Buñuel set off for Las described him “as a dangerous libertine, an abject morphine Hurdes in April 1932 with his friends Pierre Unik (a fellow addict, and above all as the director of this abominable film, a surrealist and communist) and Eli Lotar and spent just over a veritable crime against the homeland.” month filming. By the time they got back, there was no more money, and Buñuel edited the footage on his kitchen table with a As André Bazin pointed out in a 1951 article, Las magnifying glass. (“Undoubtedly,” he writes in his memoirs,”I Hurdes, despite its documentary form and politicized content, threw out some interesting images that I couldn’t see very hardly constituted a repudiation by Buñuel of his earlier films: well.”). At the first screening, the commentary, written by Unik “On the contrary, the objectivity, the impassiveness of the and Julio Acin was spoken by Buñuel; it was only two years later reportage surpassed the horrors and the powers of the dream. The that a grant from the Spanish donkey devoured by bees attains embassy in Paris enabled him the nobility of a brutal to record the soundtrack. Mediterranean myth that equals Notwithstanding these the power of the dead donkey on constraints, Las Hurdes (Tierra the piano.” And Buñuel himself sin pan, Land Without Bread clearly shared this view; a few 1932) became the most famous years later he told Cahiers du documentary of the Second cinéma, “I made La Hurdes Republic.” It was conceived, because I had a Surrealist vision according to the intertitle at the and because I was interested in beginning,as “a the problem of humankind. I cinematographic essay in saw the reality in a different way human geography,” but the than I would have seen it before result is shockingly consistent Surrealism.” with the surrealist vision of Un The years that followed Chien andalou and L’Age d’or. the filming of Las Hurdes and The camera traces the its release in France were increasingly desolate route to Las Hurdes by way of one church difficult ones for Buñuel. In 1932 he broke with the surrealists: “I after another, while the commentary explains that until 1922 left the group as simply as I joined it,” he recalls in his memoirs. there was no road, and the area was unknown even to most He also decided to give up directing and took a job dubbing films Spaniards. A “curious detail” is noted when the film crew finally in Spanish for Paramount in Paris and Madrid. In 1934 he had a arrive: “In the villages of Las Hurdes we never heard a song.” serious bout with sciatica and nearly quitting filmmaking Grotesque images of a malnourished, mentally retarded, and altogether, but he wound up accepting an offer from Warner physically deformed population are accompanied by a chillingly Brothers to supervise the dubbing of their films in Spain. He and dispassionate account of their afflictions—goiter, snakebite, Jeanne Rucar were married that year and their first child, Juan- malaria, cretinism. Death is everywhere: a donkey is attacked by Luis, was born shortly afterwards. a swarm of insects and eaten alive; a little girl bitten by a snake dies on camera; an infant is buried. There is only one image of At this point Buñuel joined his long-time friend Ricardo well-being—the interior of a church. “The only thing of luxury Urgoïti in a commercial production venture known as Filmofono we encountered in Las Hurdes were the churches. This one is Films. Urgoïti had started out distributing foreign films, but located in one of the most miserable villages.” decided to launch his own productions and turned to Buñuel for Las Hurdes was the most explicitly militant of Buñuel’s help. Over the next two years Buñuel was involved with four films. Unlike the study that inspired it, which took the misery of Filmofono productions….Because of Buñuel’s political notoriety Las Hurdes as a given and proposed charity as the only solution, after L’Age d’or and Las Hurdes—and probably because of the Buñuel’s film sought to expose the underlying causes of the crass commercialism of the Filmofono productions as well—his situation—indifference and exploitation at the hands of the same name appears on the credits as executive producer, but as was old “friends of darkness,” the state and church. Indeed, in an determined years later through interviews with his co-workers, in epilogue added to the film after the election of the Popular Front each case Buñuel actually directed the film as well. In the in 1936, he cited the example of other Spanish peasants, lagging Spanish film industry, his knowledge of modern mountain dwellers, and workers who had succeeded in production techniques and his insistence on disciplined work improving their lot by uniting to demand their rights. Noting the habits were very welcome. But as Marcel Oms points out, the menace of Franco’s royalist forces, he expressed the belief that experience was equally important for Buñuel as his first exposure “with the aid of anti-fascists throughout the world, tranquility, to the demands of commercial production. Filmofono came to an work, and happiness will supercede the Civil War and dispel end with the fascist coup in July 1936, and, as Buñuel writes in forever the centers of misery you have seen in this film” My Last Breath “Although I had ardently hoped for subversion, “The implications of Las Hurdes had not been lost on for the reversal of the established order, when I was suddenly the Second Republic, which had banned the film at home and placed in the center of the volcano, I was afraid.” He accepted a tried to prevent its being shown outside as well; only in the post as cultural attaché for the Republican government at their Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—7 embassy in Paris, where he was responsible for preparing Rome; in the neorealist tradition, Buñuel developed his story propaganda materials. In 1939 he was once again invited to among the people who lived it, spending four or five months in Hollywood, this time to work as historical and technical advisor the slums around , sometimes alone, sometimes with on Cargo of Innocents, a film about the Spanish Civil War, but his coscenarist or his set designer Edward after he got there, the Association Of American Producers, Fitzgerald. ‘My film is entirely based on real cases,’ he said. ‘I yielding to pressure from the US government, suspended all tried to expose the wretched conditions of the poor in real terms productions dealing with the current situation in Spain. because I loathe films that make the poor romantic and sweet.” Stranded in Hollywood with his wife and son Buñuel But at the same time, he insisted that “I absolutely didn’t want to was rescued by Iris Barry, head of the film department at the make a propaganda film….I saw things that moved me, and I Museum of Modern Art who found work wanted to bring them to the screen, but for him on various war-related projects at always with the sort of love I have for the the museum. “The first of these involved instinctive and irrational, which can turn up reediting two Nazi films recently smuggled anywhere…. out of Germany (Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 Los Olvidados managed to shock it Triumph des Willens and Hans Bertram’s viewers. Even the production crew was Feldzug in Polen) to show their impact as hostile, he recalled, and one of the writers propaganda. Buñuel then began supervising refused to allow his name to appear on the the dubbing of anti-Nazi films for credits. The reaction was even more negative distribution in Latin America. But his after the film was released: it was attacked by already precarious existence in exile was Mexican public, the press and the labor totally disrupted in 1942 with the unions for its brutal portrayal of the publication of Salvador Dali’s underclass; it closed after only four days and autobiography, in which Dali characterized there were demands that Buñuel be expelled his former friend as a communist who had from the country. perverted the original idea for L’Age d’or This groundswell of negative opinion was to suit Marxist ideology. This accusation abruptly reversed after Los Olvidados was was picked up by the right-wing Motion shown at Cannes in 1951 and received both Picture Herald, and The Museum of the award for best direction and the Modern Art was soon under pressure to get International Critics Prize. Buñuel was rid of Buñuel. Although Barry and others effectively rediscovered on the international stood behind him, Buñuel opted to quit his job and once again scene, and the film was recognized in all its dimensions. André headed west with his family (now including a second child, Bazin, for example, wrote of Los Olvidados that “at a distance of Rafael, born in 1940). eighteen years and five thousand kilometers, it’s the same Another two years went into working on Spanish inimitable Buñuel, a message faithful to L’Age d’or and Las language versions of films for Warner Brothers; he wrote an Hurdes, a film that lashes the spirit like a red-hot iron and leaves uncredited sequence for Robert Florey’s The Beast with Five the conscience no possibility of rest.” Bazin linked it not only to Fingers (1945) and saw various projects come to nothing, but the Buñuel’s surrealist past but to Spanish traditions in the visual main fruit of this third Hollywood stint was enough money to arts: “This taste for the horrible, this sense of cruelty, this search allow him to take a year off. At the invitation of Denise Tual, the for the extreme aspects of the human being, all of this is also the former wife of Pierre Batcheff (the man in Un Chien andalou), heritage of Goya, Zurbarán, Ribera” (and as Marcel Oms was to he went to Mexico to work on an adaptation of Garcia Lorca’s point out later, there is also no small measure of Spain’s last play, La Casa de Bernarda Alba. Once again the plan fell picaresque literary heritage in the film, notably from Lazarillo de through but the trip turned out to be decisive: Buñuel renewed Tormes). Los Olvidados was always one of Buñuel’s favorite his acquaintance with Oscar Dancigers and signed up to make a films, and its place in the history of cinema is still unchallenged. film for him in Mexico. After a decade of inactivity—and fifteen “Three decades after its jolting appearance at the 1951 Cannes years since he’d made a film under own name—he entered most Film Festival,” J. Hoberman wrote in 1983, “the film remains prolific phase of his career. absolutely contemporary; it anything, it is a prototype whose full The beginning of this Mexico period was inauspicious impact has yet to be felt.” at best. Gran Casino (1947) was a musical melodrama rather Buñuel followed Los olvidados with three commercial inappropriately adapted from a novel about the oil industry in melodramas….After these rapid-fire money-making ventures, Tampico….It was a commercial success in Mexico in 1949, and Buñuel was approached by an old friend from Madrid, the writer as a result, with Oscar Dancigar’s backing now assured, Buñuel Manuel Altolaguirre, who wanted to produce an adaptation of was able to make a film of his own conception. one of his own short stories. The result of this temporary break Los olvidados (The Forgotten/ The Young and the with Oscar Dancigars was a freewheeling and much more Damned, 1950) shows the impact of Italian neo-realism on a successful social comedy, Subida al cielo (Climbing to the Sky, surrealist imagination. …“In the words of J. Hoberman “no film released in 1953)….Subida al cielo brought Buñuel back to has ever been less equivocal than Los olvidados in suggesting Cannes in 1952 and earned him the avant-garde film award, but that suffering does not ennoble.’ It was directly inspired by those who expected more of the harsh violence of Los olvidados Vittorio de Sica’s Sciuscia (Shoeshine, 1946), the pathbreaking were surprised at this revelation of the director’s lighter side. treatment of poverty and crime among young shoeshine boys in Nonetheless, as Marcel Oms suggests, the film was not without a Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—8 serious message: “under the guise of a pleasant comedy, Buñuel “Where do these people dig up what they write? I like talks about freedom of love and desire: conscious of the Nazarin because it’s a film that lets me express certain things I ambiguity of each, he makes every effort to do away with guilt in care about. But I don’t think I’ve renounced or foresworn demystifying the original sin.” anything at all: thank God, I’m still an atheist.”… Returning to Oscar Dancigers in 1952, Buñuel turned out three When Buñuel completed The Young One [(1960) an more films in the course of the year: (L’Enjôleuse/The American-Mexican coproduction and Buñuel’s only film in Brute). The Adventures of English] he was sixty years old, Robinson Crusoe, and El and he had spent nearly twenty- (Him/Torments)….The five years in exile because of Adventures of Robinson Crusoe the Franco dictatorship in his was an American-Mexican co- native Spain. While the time production and Buñuel’s first spent in Mexico had reinforced film in color…Buñuel’s the political break with Robinson Crusoe is no longer an geographic distance, his exemplar of righteous international coproductions— individualism and free and his reputation— brought enterprise, but a man who can’t him back in contact with stand being alone, whose faith Europe. The 1960 Cannes film in God proves useless, and festival, in particular, allowed whose master-slave relationship him to meet a new generation with Friday (Jaime Fernandez) of Spanish filmmakers, and in evolves into a mutual friendship….In his 1954 interview with the course of extended discussions with Calros Saura, Buñuel Cahiers du cinéma, Buñuel explained that “I wanted to show was persuaded to embark on a Spanish-Mexican coproduction to man’s solitude, man’s anguish in human society.”…For Paule be shot in Spain. The decision had tremendous repercussions— Sengissen, who compared Buñuel’s tone to that of Voltaire, along with Pablo Picasso and Pablo Casals, he had been one of “Robinson Crusoe is without a doubt the first great atheist film of the three symbols of cultural opposition to the Franco regime, value that the cinema has given us.” and his apparent concession was strongly condemned by his With the last film of 1952. El, this fairly benign atheism fellow exiles in Mexico. But as might have been expected, the yields to a violent attack on established religion….According to real shock was to come with the film he went on to make. Buñuel, El, like the rest of his Mexican productions, was the Viridiana (1961) was a direct assault on the pillars of the Spanish result of a conscious grappling with the dictates of the producers dictatorship. Significantly, Buñuel himself wrote the story upon on the one hand and his own inclinations on the other….Buñuel which the screenplay was based; his dual point of departure, he continued along much the same line with Abismos de passion recalled, was the fourteenth century Spanish (Viridiana), (Wuthering Heights, 1953), a fairly daring adaptation of Emily and the image of a girl drugged by an old man. “I proceeded Bronte’s romantic novel…. from there,” he explained, “and the work flowed out like a Buñuel followed Wuthering Heights with La illusion fountain.” As Marcel Oms points out, Viridiana is essentially a viaja en tranvia (Illusion Travels by Streetcar, 1953), a social film of return. It is in effect a work in which characters come comedy about two transit workers who learn their streetcar is to back to where they’ve left, others come back to places they’ve be retired from service and decide to make one last junket to the been chased from, events return to the memory of those who city…. lived them, and finally, the trap closes in on everyone.” In a 1963 interview with Wilfred Berghahn [Buñuel] The first return is that of Viridiana (Sylvia Pinal, the explained that in Mexico, “I became a professional. Until then I wife of the film’s Mexican producer Gustavo Alatriste), a young made a film the way a writer writes a book, and with money from novice sent to visit her uncle before she takes her vows. Upon friends. I’m very grateful and very happy to have lived in Mexico her arrival, the uncle Don Jaime (Fernando Rey), is shocked by and to have been able to make each of my films as it would not the resemblance she bears to his wife who died on their wedding have been possible in any other country, It’s true, that in the night. During her stay, Viridiana goes along with his request to beginning, limited by necessity, I had to make films cheaply. But try on the dead woman’s wedding gown, but when her uncle asks I didn’t make one film that contradicted the dictates of my her to marry him, she insists on returning to the convent the next conscience and my convictions; films that were artificial and day. Aided by his servant, Ramona, Don Jaime drugs her, with without interest I didn’t make.”… the idea of making love to her while she sleeps. Though he fails After La vida criminel he accepted an offer to go to to go through with the rape, he tells Viridiana that he did, in France and collaborate with an old friend from the surrealist hopes that she’ll abandon her plans. But she flees his house, and circle, Jean Ferry….. the remorseful Don Jaime hangs himself. Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—9

The second cycle of return begins when Viridiana Buñuel’s oeuvre,” according to Marcel Martin, who also decides not to reenter the convent but to pursue her religious considered it one of his craziest works, one of the most surrealist, vocation out in the world—she will convert her uncle’s estate and “one of the most brilliantly revealing with regard to his into a hospice for beggars. Along with a crew of undesirables morals and humanism.” Like many other critics, Martin worthy of Goya, she is joined by Don Jaime’s natural son, Jorge expressed appreciation for the “treasury” of symbols, the formal (Francesco Rabal), a practical man who comes back with his beauty of the picture, and the simplicity and “necessity” of the mistress, to superintend the farming operation. Like Nazarin, mise-en-scène. At the same time, Martin elaborated on the two Viridiana soon learns the futility of her mission: when she and dominant themes of religion and violence. “He’s a great social Jorge are away, the beggars invade the house and revel their way moralist who has no illusions about human nature but who into an orgy. In the film’s most notorious sequence, a dirty old understands and makes us understand (like Brecht) that people woman “photographs” the banqueting are too often corrupted by the beggars, and the fame obligingly conditions of their lives and that freezes on a travesty of Leonardo da you have to reform society before Vinci’s “Last Supper” (accompanied you can hope to transform human by “The Hallelujah Chorus). The beings.” Buñuel’s next film, reappearance of the two would-be Angel exterminador benefactors only channels the violence (Exterminating Angel, 1962) of the event” one of the beggars attacks deals with very similar social Jorge while another tries to rape preoccupations, but pointedly Viridiana. Saved by her half-cousin at rejects the surface narrative of the last minute, she undergoes a second Viridiana and the Mexican films profound transformation, discovering in a manner that recalls his first her own sexuality and deciding to give surrealist ventures and at the herself to Jorge. When she enters his same time marks the direction he room, he is playing cards with Ramona, who has now replaced was to follow for the rest of his career…. his previous mistress. Confident of his impending conquest, Jorge invites her to join the game: “I’m sure you’ll like it,” he When he presented Exterminating Angel in Paris, tells her. “You won’t believe this, but the first time I saw you, I Buñuel prefaced the film with an explicit warning: “If the film told myself, ‘My cousin Viridiana will wind up playing cards you are going to see strikes you as enigmatic or incongruous, life with me.’” is that way too. . . . Perhaps the best explanation for When Buñuel decided to return to Spain with Viridiana Exterminating Angel is that, ‘reasonably, there isn’t one.’” Like (he had been planning to film it in Mexico), he made his political his Mexican producer, Gustavo Alatriste, who told him, “I didn’t position clear by choosing to coproduce with the anti-Franco understand anything; it’s marvelous,” critics were quick to UNINCI. From there on, he played by the rules of the game, declare the stunningly inexplicable film a masterpiece. Shown at submitting his scenario to the censors and following their Cannes in 1962, it received the International Critics Prize and the directive to change the ending (originally Viridiana was to have prize of the Society of Writers and Television Artists as well as entered Jorge’s room to find Ramona in his bed—he later the André Bazin Prize at , and the grand prize at Sestri- acknowledged that the card game was a great improvement). Levanti. … Apart from the main roles, he selected his cast from a pool of old Le Journal d’une femme de chamber (Diary of a friends and unemployed actors, mostly on the basis of Chambermaid, 1964), the first of Buñuel’s six French appearance. The shooting was done with great speed—Carlos productions, marked the beginning of his collaboration with Saura recalled that Buñuel generally did each scene in one take, producer and scenarist Jean-Claude Carrière. with two or three linking shots to be edited in. Leaving a work …Despite a certain enthusiasm for Jean-Claude Carrière’s print with the censors, the director quickly went off to Paris to dialogue and ’s acting, The Diary of a complete the editing and mixing. The film was to be premiered at Chambermaid was not a great success in France, and Buñuel Cannes, but was not in the official competition because the retreated somewhat from the Parisian scene. He had an offer producers did not want it connected with the government. But from David O. Selznick to do a Hollywood film starring Jennifer once the film was screened (on the last day because of a delay in Jones, but he turned this down and rejoined Gustavo Alatriste for the printing), the jury insisted on awarding the first prize jointly a final Mexican production. Simon del Deserto (Simon of the to Viridiana and Henri Colpi’s Une Aussi Longue Absence. At Desert, 1965), a thoroughly Buñuelian evocation of an early this point the director-general of the Spanish cinema claimed the Christian ascetic who spends thirty-seven years sitting on top of a film as his government’s official entry, but Madrid overrode his column, took up an idea from the director’s student days when enthusiasm, not simply banishing Viridiana, but retroactively Garcia Lorca had drawn Buñuel’s attention to the life of Simeon revoking the authorization to make the picture and destroying the Stylites. The film was intended to be feature length but it was cut out-takes Buñuel had left behind. Viridiana was not shown in off at forty-five minutes when the money ran out; abruptly Spain until 1977; it was reclaimed as a Spanish production in abandoning the remaining sequences, Buñuel ended the story by 1983 with its inclusion among the best films of that year. showing Simon (Claudio Brook) on a junket to New York City in Outside of Spain—and the Vatican, where Osservatore the company of a woman devil (Sylvia Pinal) who condemns him romano denounced Viridiana as blasphemy and sacrilege—the to remain in this “hell on earth” (echoing Garcia Lorca’s film was recognized as a masterpiece, “one of the gems in observation, “Hell is a city much like New York”)…. Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—10

After Simon, Buñuel resumed the collaboration with filming, he demanded what his assistant Pierre Lary called a Jean-Claude Carrière that was to last, in work and friendship, to “terrifying exactitude.” the very end of his life….Buñuel had another bout with the Wherever the juncture of the private man and his public censors before Belle de Jour was released—he wound up cutting oeuvre lay (and according to his collaborator Jean-Claude a scene of necrophilia from one of Séverine’s fantasies-but when Carrière, Buñuel himself had little interest in finding out, the film was shown at Venice in 1967, it received the grand rejecting psychological analysis as “arbitrary, useless”), his prize….Buñuel had made Belle de Jour with the idea that it was legacy of themes, forms, and inspirations has been enormous: to be his last film; he was sixty-six years old and had been “This supposed filmmaker,” wrote Carrière, “was in reality a suffering from deafness and dizzy spells for a number of years. personality of greater stature, monumental for some.” The But after the success at Venice, he turned to Jean-Claude records of Cannes or Venice speak clearly of his European Carrière with an idea he’d been thinking about since he first went trajectory, but his impact in the Third World, and particularly to Mexico twenty years earlier—a film on Christian heresies. The Latin America, is probably even greater. As Glauber Rocha two men spent six weeks in Spain piecing together a scenario, observed even in 1966, with the first stirrings of Brazil’s cinema which Buñuel then took to Mexico novo, “In the absurd framework of the reality of the Third World, and reworked in the same hotel where he had written all the Buñuel is the possible consciousness: in the face of oppression, scenarios since 1948. The resulting film, La Voie lactée (The the police, obscurantism, and institutional hypocrisy, Buñuel Milky Way, 1969), invites what Raumond Lefevre calls “a represents a liberating morality, a breaking of new ground, a Surrealist promenade in the Christian zoo of heresies.”… constant process of enlightening revolt.” Still declaring that The Milky Way was his last film, Buñuel from The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel: proceeded to take up another a Reading of his Films project that had been on his mind— Gwynne Edwards and in the works for a number of years. His was an adaptation of Buñuel delighted in subverting Benito Pérez Gldós’ Tristana, expectations and preconceptions of which Buñuel had first undertaken critics. in 1961…. Declaring Tristana in its Buñuel: I am interested in a life with turn his last film, Buñuel duly ambiguities and contradictions. geared up for another round with the status quo, this time in the form of an original scenario that Buñuel is a master of visual image, especially in relation he wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière. Le Charme discret de la to its representation of inner life. Master also of expression in bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972) spoken word. brings L’Age d’or into the 1970s, in terms of its social preoccupations as well as its cinematic form….For Buñuel, The For Buñuel, the bourgeoisie–which for him always Discreet Charm involved an element of search on more than one signifies those who hold the reins of power–is the embodiment of level. Like The Milky Way, it was one of his rare original all complacency, the principal target for his spirited assaults, and scenarios, and one that, he took pains to point out, had been thus, to a greater or lesser degree, the subject of all his films. reworked five times. Buñuel: The two basic sentiments of my childhood, The mental world of Luis Buñuel—the turbulent which stayed with me well into adolescence, are those of a unconscious given to eroticism, violence, the ways of chance—is profound eroticism, at first sublimated in a great religious faith, well-documented in the thirty-six films that he directed over and a permanent consciousness of death. nearly half a century. But in a body of work that is nothing if not ironic, perhaps the greatest irony of all is the fact that Buñuel’s Morality—middle-class morality, that is—is for me personal life was so remote from the inner world of eroticism, immoral. One must fight it. It is a morality founded on our most violence, and chance that he brought to the screen. In the words unjust social institutions–religion, fatherland, family culture— of his friend , “he was like a monk!” He remained everything that people call the pillars of society. married to one woman for all of his life; he preferred reading a book to going to the movies, and the only indulgence he allowed The thought that continues guiding me today is the same himself was alcohol, which he consumed for one hour a day that guided me at the age of twenty-five. It is an idea of Engels. (with his watch on the table according to Piccoli) late in the The artist describes authentic social relations with the object of afternoon, and never to the point of drunkenness. Disciplined in destroying the conventional ideals of the bourgeois world and his work as well, he wrote and rewrote his scenarios and then compelling the public to doubt the perennial existence of the filmed them with care and precision: he only shot what was in established order. That is the meaning of all my films: to say the scenario and would do a single take if that was at all time and time again, in case someone forgets or believes possible.” otherwise, that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. I And while he was always very considerate of people he don’t know what more I can do. worked with, as well as the people who lived in the places he was Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—11

It’s no good telling people that all’s for the best in this structure, but are much more inventive, extravagant, even crazy. best of all possible worlds. . . .I believe that you must look for Viridiana, for example. To put it another way I prefer the Buñuel God in man. It’s a very simple attitude. who gets from here to there by taking detours and circling around...The Exterminating Angel comes immediately to mind. In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent And so do The Phantom of Liberty and The Milky Way. and dangerous weapon. It is the superlative medium through which to express the world of thought, feeling, and instinct. The from an interview with Jean-Claude Carrière creative handling of film images is such that, among all means of human expressions, its way of functioning is most reminiscent of I met with Buñuel over lunch....I knew the project had the work of the mind during sleep. A film is like an involuntary to do with Diary of a Chambermaid, so I’d read the book several imitation of a dream. Brunius points out how the darkness that times and even had an idea for how to adapt it. When we met, he slowly settles over a movie theatre is equivalent to the act of asked if I liked wine, which I understood immediately to be an closing the eyes. Then, on the screen, as with the human being, important question. He wanted to know if we belonged to the the nocturnal voyage into the unconscious begins. . . .The cinema same world. I told him that I not only enjoyed wine, but that I seems to have been invented to express the life of the came from a family of vintners. His face lit up. Many years later, subconscious. referring back to that meeting, he confessed, “I knew right away that if the work wasn’t going well, we’d at least have something Personally, I don’t like film music. It seems to to talk about.” me that it is a false element, a sort of trick, except of course in We wrote nine screenplays together, and six were made certain cases. into movies. We had eighteen or nineteen years of close collaboration. from Buñuel: 100 Years. Ed. Our work on the first film MOMA. Instituto also deserves a brief commentary. Cervantes/MOMA, NY, 2001 After three weeks of work, Silberman from an interview with came from Paris and invited me to director Carlos Saura dinner. It was extremely unusual that Luis’s work was a Buñuel didn’t come with us, I revelation: to see that in Spain, remember he even made up some there could be a different kind of pretext, that he had something else to cinema, much more imaginative, do...Over dessert, Silberman told me much more in touch with the that Luis was pleased with my work, culture that Luis knew so well. He that he appreciated how serious and knew all of Spanish culture: Quevedo, Calderón, Gracián, all had conscientious I was. Then Silberman added, “But, now and then, a fundamental influence on his films. He took images and you must learn to contradict him.” I realized then that Buñuel had phrases from Gracián’s El criticón, and translated them to the asked Silberman to make the trip solely to give me that message. screen. He assimilated all of our classical culture and transported I admit that I had some trouble contradicting him, but by the end it to the contemporary world, the world of modernity and of that first script, I think I did learn. We each had the right to surrealism. Of all the forms of Surrealism, he was most veto something we objected to. By the second screenplay, he had nourished by the French. written into his contracts that he had to work with me....He taught me to go to the very limit of the imagination...that is to Where would you situate Buñuel in the history of world cinema? say, to bash through any prejudgments, preconceived ideas, During the period in which he worked—and I’m talking reserve, all of that....It’s also true that in every case Silberman only about Europe, not America—I believe there were three was with us all the way. In That Obscure Object of Desire, for extraordinary filmmakers who, each in his own particular way, example, he gave the same role to two actresses. profoundly influence cinematic history: Buñuel, Bergman, and Fellini. The three maintained close relations, and admired each from My Last Sigh. Luis Buñuel. Vintage Books NY 1984 other intensely. Luis had great respect for the other two, perhaps While we’re making the list of bêtes noires, I must state most of all for Bergman. I know that in Madrid, one of the few my hatred of pedantry and jargon. Sometimes I weep with times he went out to the movies, he saw Persona/ He was laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du Cinéma, overwhelmed to the point of exclaiming, “That Bergman! What a for example. As the honorary president of the Centro de phenomenon! What nerve! He does a close-up on the girl’s face, Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City, I once went to the and the camera doesn’t move for ten minutes!” school and was introduced to several professors, including a Luis knew everything about cinematography. It’s my young man in a suit and tie who blushed a good deal. When I personal opinion, but I think that his work follows two very asked him what he taught, he replied, “The Semiology of the different paths. One is narrative, where he’s trying to be a Clonic Image.” I could have murdered him on the spot. By the narrator telling a story, like, for example, John Ford or way, when this kind of jargon (a typically Parisian phenomenon) Kurosawa. In this category I’d put Diary of a Chambermaid and works its way into the educational system, it wreaks absolute a few of the Mexican films. It is the “other” Luis I personally havoc in underdeveloped countries. It’s the clearest sign, in my find much more brilliant: the one who wrote his own scripts, in opinion, of cultural colonialism.... collaboration with others. Those scripts have less dramatic Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—12

When I made The Phantom of Liberty, I was seventy- population explosion, technology, science, and information. I call four years old and seriously entertaining the idea of a definitive these the four horsemen of the apocalypse. I am frightened by retirement. My friends, however, had other ideas, so I finally modern science that leads us to the grave through nuclear war or decided to tackle an old project, the adaptation of Pierre Louls’s genetic manipulations, if not through psychiatry, as in the Soviet La Femme et le pantin, which in 1977 became That Obscure Union. Europe must create a new civilization, but I fear that Object of Desire, starring Fernando Reys. I used two different science and the madness it can unleash won’t leave time enough actresses, Angelina Molina and Carole Bouquet, for the same to do it. role—a device many spectators never even noticed. The title was If I had to make one last film, I would make it about the prompted by Louls’s beautiful phrase “a pale object of desire.” complicity of science and terrorism. Although I understand the Essentially faithful to the book, I nonetheless added certain motives of terrorism, I totally disapprove of them. It solves elements that radically changed the tone. And although I can’t nothing; it plays into the hands of the right and of repression. explain why, I found the final scene very moving—the woman’s One of the themes of the film would be this: A band of hand carefully mending a tear in a bloody lace mantilla. All I can international terrorists is preparing a severe attack in France, say is that the mystery remains intact right up until the final when the news arrives that an atomic bomb has been detonated explosion. In addition to the theme of the impossibility of ever over Jerusalem. A general mobilization is declared everywhere; truly possessing a woman’s body, the film insists upon world war is imminent. Then the leader of the group telephones maintaining that climate of insecurity and imminent disaster—an the president of the Republic. He informs the French authorities atmosphere we all recognize, because it is our own. Ironically, a of the exact location, in a barge near the Louvre, where they can bomb exploded on October 16, 1977, in the Ridge Theatre in San recover the atomic bomb the terrorists have placed there before it Francisco, where the movie was being shown; and during the explodes. His organization has decided to destroy the center of a confusion that followed, four reels were stolen and the walls civilization, but they renounced the crime because world war was covered with graffiti like “This time you’ve gone too far!” There about to break out, and the mission of terrorism had ended. was some evidence to suggest that the attack was engineered by a Henceforth it is assumed by governments, which take up the task group of homosexuals, and although those of this persuasion of destroying the world.... didn’t much like the film, I’ve never been able to figure out why.... In the film I’m thinking about, I would have liked to According to the latest reports, we now have enough shoot in the hall of the Reichstag a meeting of fifteen Nobel nuclear bombs not only to destroy all life on the planet but also prize-winning scientists recommending that atomic bombs be to blow the planet itself, empty and cold, out of its orbit placed at the bottom of all the oil wells. Science would then cure altogether and into the immensity of the cosmic void. I find that us of that which feeds our madness. But I rather think that in the possibility magnificent, and in fact I’m tempted to shout bravo, end we’ll be borne off by the worst, because since Un Chien because from now on there can be no doubt that science is our andalou the world has advanced toward the absurd. enemy. She flatters our desire for omnipotence—desires that lead I am the only one who hasn’t changed. I remain inevitably to our destruction. A recent poll announced that out of Catholic and atheist, thank God. 700,000 “highly qualified” scientists now working throughout the world, 520,000 of them are busy trying to streamline the means of our self-destruction, while only 180,000 are studying ways of keeping us alive. The trumpets of the apocalypse have been sounding at our gates for years now, but we still stop up our ears. We do, however, have four new horsemen: overpopulation (the leader, the one waving the black flag), science, technology, and the media. All the other evils in the world are merely consequences of these. I’m not afraid to put the press in the front rank, either. The last screenplay I worked on, for a film I’ll never make, deals with a triple threat: science, terrorism, and the free press. The last, which is usually seen as a victory, a blessing, a “right,” is perhaps the most pernicious of all, because it feeds on what the other three horsemen leave behind....

Filmmaking seems to me a transitory and threatened art. Rogert Ebert on Viridiana: |. It is very closely bound up with technical developments. If in I can't think of a more mischievous filmmaker than Luis thirty of forty years the screen no longer exists, if editing isn’t Buñuel. After you get to know him, you can catch him winking necessary, cinema will have ceased to exist. It will have become in the first few shots. Under the opening title shot of "Viridiana," something else. That’s already almost the case when a film is we hear Handel's "Messiah," but knowing Buñuel we doubt this shown on television: the smallness of the screen falsifies will be a religious picture. In the second and third shots, we see a everything..... Mother Superior advising a novice at a cloistered convent to visit her old uncle before he dies. No good can come of this in a Today I have come to be much more pessimistic. I Buñuel film. The fourth shot shows a girl skipping rope. Well, believe that our world is lost. It may be destroyed by the not the whole girl, just her feet, observed for a little too long. Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—13

"That was a wonderful afternoon little Luis spent on the floor of kidding anti-clericism in "The Discreet Charm of the his mother's closet," Pauline Kael once observed, "and he has Bourgeoisie" by the bishop whose fetish is pretending to be the never allowed us to forget it." gardener. And everywhere the shoes . Who but Buñuel would So: Buñuel the satirist, Buñuel the anti-clerical, Buñuel film a scene of being dragged through a the fetishist. That's the usual litany, but we should not exclude forest and focus on her feet? I am giving the wrong impression if Buñuel the grandmaster of black comedy. None of his films is you think Buñuel was by then a dirty old man. I think of him lacking a cheerfully sardonic view of human nature. His object is more as amused. There's never anything blatant about his always dry humor. Even when he was working for Hollywood eroticism; he finds fetishes funny, as indeed they are except for studios, recycling the sets and costumes of English-language the hapless fetishist. pictures into Spanish versions of the same screenplays, or later The most famous sequence in "Viridiana" (apart from simply dubbing them into Spanish, he slyly slipped in a few its scandalous reenactment of "The Last Supper") involves the touches that were lacking in the sources. He is one of the great cousin, Jorge (Francisco Rabal), observing a dog tied to the rear originals, creator of satirical delight, sometimes hilarious funny, axle of a cart, and being pulled along the road on a rope. He stops and if you love great movies you sooner or later get to him. the peasant, and buys the dog to free it. He doesn't notice another Buñuel began as a Surrealist, and in Paris collaborated with dog tied to another cart, going in the other direction. This Salvador Dali on "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), which is only 16 summarizes Buñuel's world view. minutes long but remains one of the most famous films of the In the larger world of the film, Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) century. His "L'Age d'Or" (1930), a Surrealist attack on visits her old uncle, Don Jaime (the Buñuel favorite Fernando organized religion, was unseeable for 50 years after his wealthy Rey). For her it is an act of charity. Don Jaime is thunderstruck: patron, Le Vicomte de Noailles, decided to suppress it. Buñuel Having not seen her for years, he realize she is the double of his returned to his native Spain but left after late wife on their wedding night. As a the rise of Franco's fascists, and found favor, he begs her to put on the dead work in America. After the war, Buñuel wife's wedding dress. As a favor, she became a Mexican citizen and lived there does: Form-fitting, with a white corset, until his death, although he made many and of course much attention to the shoes. films in France, and "Viridiana" in Spain. He is transfixed. He is in love. He asks Why, his admirers wondered, her to marry him. She is shocked and tries would he return to Spain, where the to leave. He apologizes, gives her dictator Franco was still in power? He drugged coffee, and then… told various stories. One was that he was Later, he hangs himself. offered four times his salary by a Viridiana has by now given up the idea of producer. Another was that he felt a cloistered life and determined to nostalgia for his homeland. A third that perform works of mercy in the world. She he didn't mention was, I suspect, to make gathers up 13 of the most wretched this particular film. beggars in the town (a drunk, a leper, a Buñuel was anything but a crippled man, a blind man, an angry sentimentalist, and Spain was wrong if it dwarf, a prostitute and so on) and brings expected a joyous homecoming. His film them back to live on the estate. This does was not anti-Catholic nor against the not redeem them, and they quarrel, fight, ruling class, but it established his prove shiftless at the tasks she sets for virtuous nun, her rich landowning uncle them, and ostracize the leper (who says and his son, her cousin, in a dark and his sores are only ulcers). Meanwhile, scandalous story. It ended with the nun, Jorge arrives with his mistress and moves having left the convent, quietly entering into the big house, while Viridiana the bedroom of her handsome young abnegates herself by living in an cousin. The government censors flatly rejected the screenplay. outbuilding. Her experiment comes to a climax when the Buñuel rewrote it so that she found the cousin and his mistress beggars, left on their own, throw a drunken feast and demolish playing cards in the bedroom. As she joins the game, the cousin the dining room. Then, alone or in small groups, they slink away says he was sure that sooner or later they would be playing from the place that gave them shelter. Cut to the card game together. Fade out on the unmistakable implication of a ménage mentioned earlier. a trios. "Even more immoral," Buñuel observed year after. The film is deliberate and controlled. It is funny in that The film left Spain for France, shared the Palme d'Or at way where you rarely laugh aloud but expand in mental Cannes in 1961, and wasn't allowed back into Spain until after amusement. It is elegantly photographed; each shot conveys Franco's death in 1975. In the 1960s and 1970s Buñuel (born something concrete and specific, which is to be expected from a 1900, died 1983) became established in the first rank of fetishist. It makes no clear and precise statement, but instead directors, with Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, and scored one conveys Buñuel's notion that our base natures are always waiting international success after another, most famously with "Belle de to pounce. Despite my plot description, he makes Don Jaime into Jour" (1967). a not altogether evil man--more of a lonely and sad one, who There was always the sly subtext: The virtuous but desires to sin but lacks the necessary indecency. Nor is cousin disgraced blonde of "Belle de Jour" mirroring Viridiana, or the Buñuel—VIRIDIANA—14

Jorge a lecher, nor is Viridiana a fallen women, and the beggars, good lies. It is possible to imagine Buñuel watching a dreadfully after all, only behave as they have been taught by the world. cheery romantic comedy like, say, "The Back-Up Plan," and A film like this is bracing. It is made by a strong, individual laughing tears of derision. He knows the world has its own back- mind. It is not another marked-down version of comforting feel- up plan. There is always another cart and another dog tied to it.

COMING UP IN THE FALL 2014 BUFFALO FILM SEMINARS Oct 7 Agnès Varda, CLEO FROM 5 TO 7, 1962 Oct 14 Akira Kurosawa, REDBEARD, 1965 Oct 21 Nicolas Roeg, PERFORMANCE, 1970 Oct 28 Víctor Erice, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, 1973 Nov 4 Roman Polanski, TESS, 1979 Nov 11 Sydney Pollack, TOOTSIE, 1982 Nov 18 Joel and Ethan Coen, FARGO, 1996 Nov 25 Erik Skjoldbjaerg, INSOMNIA, 1997 Dec 2 Mike Nichols, CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR, 2007

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