Word: bunuel
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...AUTOBIOGRAPHY My Last Sigh, Luis Bunuel, the father of the surrealist cinema, remarks that the one unifying principle of his first film, "Un Chien D'andalou," was that "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." In telling his life story, Bunuel likewise rejects interpretation. His memoirs are a rambling collection of disparate reveries, images, jokes, each of them entirely absorbing. Bunuel does not draw upon these to form conclusions of any sort, to make aesthetic judgements or to evaluate the importance of various events in the development...
What we glean of a family history suggests an atmosphere of caprice and superfluity conducive to the formation of a surrealist temperament. Bunuel's father, a successful businessman whom Bunuel describes as a man of extreme leisure ("the only thing my father would carry in the street was his elegantly wrapped jar of caviar"), seems to have had a surrealist's sense of humor. Bunuel grew up in "a very large and bourgeois apart-grew up in "a very large and bourgeois apart-10 balconies and took up the entire second floor of the building." While this spawning ground...
...countryside. He describes the village of Saragossa as one ritualized by religion, habit, and ignorance and therefore of exquisite spiritual temperament. ("At the age of 12 I still believed that babies came from Paris--not via a stork, of course, but simply by train or car"). The stories of Bunuel's childhood establish an atmosphere and a series of preoccupations that one can pursue at leisure through his films. Many of them touch upon the Catholic horror of sexuality, which Bunuel sees as rooted in the fact that "in a rigidly hierarchical society, sex--which respects no barriers and obeys...
...bottle of brandy provided to steady the nerves of the doctor and his friends. "When it was all over, I was blind drunk and had to be carried home, to be punished not only for drunkenness but for what my father called sadism." A penchant for guns developed early; Bunuel taught himself to use his father's pistol by asking his best friend to serve as target. Despite our desire to correlate these events to later images in his films, Bunuel seldom does; early on he makes it clear that he is not a historian...
...ONLY MENTION of film in Bunuel's childhood disappoints us; he does not speak of having been influenced or inspired in any way. He begins with a description of the architecture of the theater in Saragossa and then mentions some cartoons: "I do remember a French comedian who kept falling down...." Bunuel's nonchalant portrayal of himself as a simple schoolboy is belied by the inclusion of an article written by his sister for the French magazine Positif. The article reveals that he had an artistically active childhood, directing a family puppet theater and delivering, in his early teens, bedtime...