Word: bunuel
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...Bunuel discusses the development of his directing career with the same nonchalance, so that it too seems a series of social events and friendships. His second professional directing experience involved the world-famous conductor Mengelbert in a puppet opera-based on an episode from Don Quixote. Bunuel comments, "Of course, I got my friends to play the silent parts...the work was performed a few times in Amsterdam and played to packed houses. The first evening, however, I'd completely forgotten to arrange for lighting, so the audience saw very little." His career must have been launched by, among other...
...Bunuel's involvement is film stemmed from his work as a critic for Cahier's effort and several Spanish publications. Whether he saw films to write reviews or wrote reviews in order to support his celluloid habit of as many as three films a day is unclear. Fritz Lang's "Destiny," he says, "clarified my life and my vision of the world." One result of that clarification was that he saw that he wanted to make films. He started as an extra and errand boy for Jean Epstein during the filming of "Mauprat," then spent six months in Hollywood hanging...
...after the opening of his first film, "Un Chien D'andalou," written in conjunction with Salvador Dali, that Bunuel was admitted to the Surrealist group. During the opening, Bunuel hid behind the screens, his pockets full of stones "to throw at the audience in case of disaster...
...comments on Surrealism are for the most part limited to specific personalities. Thus Bunuel focuses less on the creative theories of the group than on their fascinating social energies--the excommunications and other rites. The principal weapon of their revolution, he says, was scandal; this is how the bourgeois revolts against the bourgeois. The Surrealist attack "on the notion of work, that cornerstone of bourgeois civilization, as something sacrosanct," and the Surrealist distrust of the rational may lie behind Bunuel's refusal to evaluate the Surrealist's work...
This is the sort of book one savors, a few pages at a time, over a period of days. It is a fascinating conversation; Bunuel's narrative style is as felicitous as was is life, a life rich in experience and dreams. His perceptions, his gossip, his portrait of his time reveal him to have been not only the artistic genius we find in his films, but a charming personality of deep sensitivity and conviction...