Word: uel
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...Chien Andalou (1928), by walking onto a moon-flooded balcony and calmly slitting a young woman's eye. He began his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), by replacing his leading lady with two actresses who alternated scenes in the same role. For Luis Buñuel, the Spanish film maker who died this July at 83, conventions of content and form were mere pieties, best approached with a straight razor and a straight face. He had been, after all, one of the merry pranksters of surrealism, spiking café chat in bohemian Paris with cute conspiracies...
...uel's autobiography (written in collaboration with his longtime screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière) is thus in part the testament of an old man passing ironic judgment on a century that finally learned to accommodate him. If the book offers any shocks, they are of the boomerang variety: the iconoclast at twilight is in danger of becoming a moralist. He condemns "the proliferation of gutter words" in modern literature; he criticizes the excesses of his anarchist comrades in the Spanish Civil War; he expresses relief in the waning of his sexual desire...
Flashback to Buñuel's birthplace, the Spanish village of Calanda, where "the Middle Ages lasted until World...
...seven Buñuel children kept a menagerie of rats, monkeys, falcons, frogs and snakes as pets; Luis, the eldest, paraded through his upper-middle-class youth in religious vestments. In the early days, just about everyone he met was famous. Even before he made his first film at 28, Buñuel tells us, he had vanquished Heavyweight Champ Jack John son at arm wrestling; he had met Jorge Luis Borges, and found him tedious; Picasso had given him a painting (which he lost), and Lorca had written poems to him (which he quotes). Later, in Holly wood, Charlie...
...talk-show badinage on Olympus. They meet the traditional challenge of autobiography: to speak entertainingly about others while revealing as little as possible about yourself. It is the pose that best suits a movie director, whose art is by nature voyeuristic rather than confession al. Of Jeanne, Buñuel's wife of almost 50 years, we learn only that he married her in Paris (forbidding her family to attend), had lunch with her, then took a train alone to Madrid. On his 32 films the Aragonian curmudgeon throws little light; neither Los Olvidados nor Viridiana nor Belle...