15 Footnotes Upon the
Moustache of Bunuel
Episodes of Luis by Don Harrison
I
Luis Bunuel is fingering rocks in hispocket, and nervously hovering over a spinning "Tristan and Isolde."
He has wired two phonographs together tocoordinate background music for his motion picture, "Un ChienAndalou,"1 debuting momentarily before a crowd of 50 patronsinside Paris' cramped Studio Ursullines. Luis pretends to stare at theneedle but is actually darting one big bug-eye on the shadowy crowd mullingin the cinematique.
Luis spots the critic from "Le ToutParis," and begins to figure the precise trajectory of a ricochet off ofthe back wall from his position on the side of the screen.
After the film, the 30-year-oldexpatriate has planned to stage surrealist "performance art" for theassembled throng, who will no doubt be revulsed by his 20 minute film. He will scatter the stones forcefully and curse theoppression of the bourgeois, taking careful aim at the perfumed dogs, theblinking fascists and the supporters of the police. Actually, that is onlywhat he plans to say after the crowd gets unruly and he is forced to defend himself. The throng will surely(and hopefully) gather into a mob after seeing the film, which is inBunuel's own words, "a call to murder." 2
A call to murder for Bunuel, anyway. Itis April 1929 and "Un Chien Andalou"'s co-scenarist, thestruggling artist Salvador Dali, fellow Spaniard, flaky ne'er-do-well, isnowhere to be seen. This is remarkable when you factor in Dali'slifelong propensity to be seen whenever and wherever it was in his bestinterest to be seen.
"Un Chien Andalou," financed byBunuel's well-to-do mother after she felt guilty about giving Luis'sisters extravagant wedding dowries3, was the result of a five-day series of fever dreamsthat Bunuel and Dali had shared with each other. The only criteria forinclusion in the script was that no images, no plot points, no scenes couldbe at all logical, or could be interpreted through any kind of cheap symbolist analysis.4
Half-remembering his favorite Fritz Lang cameraangles from "Der Mude Tod" and improvising new low-budget techniqueson the spot, he shot these dream scenes quickly but economically on thestreets of Paris, and in friends' apartments. Technically, his camera would not succumb to easy photographic effectsbut, rather, a new form of expression through action! Action was king, butobscurity was paramount.
"Too Much is logical intoday's motion pictures," he told his accomplices.
Seeing the projectionist now, giving himthe cue, this was it. Action!
Luis fingers the rocks. Throwing themat the opening would surely grab the attention of Senior Andre Breton, thehaughty father of the Surrealism movement. Breton was a man Bunuel greatlyadmired, who invented a cause-- Surrealism-- that he felt inexplicably drawn to.5
The lights dim and the film starts. Luislowers the Wagner, that is to say the Boom.
Within seconds, the graphic image of awoman's eye sliced by a razor blade startles the crowd into an atonalhum. A rising crescendo of timpani and strings is punctuated by a gasp anda scream. Bunuel is pacing now, wondering why he didn't pack one of his antique dueling pistols. Uh-oh.
Someone applauded.
II
Luis Bunuel is in a Hollywood bungalow, an honored"ambassador of Surrealist Film" visiting the U.S. on Louis B.Meyer's dime.6
Luis is smoking an American cigaretteand stifling a laugh; re-reading a cable from Andre Breton himself. Itappears that Luis' film, "L' Age D'Or," has started a riotin which property was destroyed and people were injured. A throng of RightWing thugs from the "Jeunesses Catholiques," and the antiSemitic "Ligue Antijuive" descended upon Studio 28, destroyingSurrealist art hanging in the cineclub's foyer, and throwing ink andacid on the screen during the pivotal scene when a fiendish gameskeepershoots his young son. The rioters proceeded to start amelee that eventually involved the prefect, nearby cafe-goers and a crowdof Surrealist symphatizers. 7
"A scandal," Breton-- a friendnow-- exclaims. Luis could feel joy from thousands of miles away. Action,illogic, scandal!!
Bunuel inspects the liquor cabinet andsighs. This latest affair. . . after shaming Poor De Noalilles! His richfriend was now in still MORE trouble for financing and exhibiting thebeast. Yesterday's cable from Jeanne mentioned expulsions and a harshresponse from the Vatican. The film is going into theDe Noalilles vault, never to return.
Luis pauses and reflects on "L'Age D' Or's" last image-- the scalps of virgins nailed to across-- and wishes he could have re-shot it. Too dark, too late.Couldn't see the hairs.8
Luis chuckles, finds the date of the riotironic. The fascists had destroyed seats and ripped up paintings by Daliand Max Ernst on the very night that, in Hollywood, Bunuel was destroyingCharlie Chaplin's Christmas tree at a Tinseltown soiree in front of a shocked Hollywood intelligentsia.
Bunuel was still living that one down.He hadn't been invited back.
He looks over the latest issue of the"Hollywood Examiner," which contains a capsule article about the"L' Age D'Or" riots. After his first film had been embraced bythe very factions that it sought to implicate, reproduced in bourgeoismagazines and hailed by society nitwits, Bunuel swore to theSurrealist gang that there would be no such confusion with "L' AgeD'Or." He was making good on that promise. . .
and somehow got to visitHollywood to boot.
Bunuel pours bootleg gin in a spottylittle glass, and stares out at the Hollywood hills. Life was good, therewas scandal, and he was far from its implications. It was true what hisfriend Benjamin Peret had said years before-- blind people do make Mortadella Sausage.9
III
Luis Bunuel is fingering a gun in his pocket-- thelast of the beloved pearl-handled pistols he had purchased his first weekin New York City-- in the bar of the Sherry Netherland Hotel.
He is shaking with anger, waiting forhis former collaborator, Salvador Dali, to join him for a drink. Bunuelplans to kill his former friend, now a fascist sympathizer, and then escapeto his favorite gun shop near Times Square to sell the piece.
The angular gadfly's autobiography,"The Secret Life of Salvador Dali," is still at the top of the bestseller's list, but it has cost Bunuel his job10 in a whirlwind of anti-communist paranoia andCatholic heresy-hunt; And his selective memory over the true authorshipof his two historic, and still potent, motion pictures with Bunuel haveboth diminished and implicated his former partner.11
After reading Dali's account oftheir collborations of Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or in his book, acrazed, right-wing rabblerouser named Arbogast raised hell with the StateDepartment over Bunuel's position at the Museum. The nefarious LuisBunuel (a crazed Marxist anarchist in Dali's unyieldingprattle) was living in New York City and editing documentaries for theU.S. government-- the maker of the life-hating, God-loathing L'AgeD'Or!!
Bunuel resigned when thetabloids got ahold of the scandal.12
Dali's paintings, his lifestyle, hisbizarre sense of humor-- all have combined into a "flavor of themonth" moth-flame for the Surrealist painter in a bored, post-war NYC.His outrageous, and childlike, adherence to the dripping timepiece and thebold non-sequiter has made him and his wife/agent, thedespised Gala, rich beyond reason. There is even a story in "LifeMagazine" that Dali will collaborating with Alfred Hitchcock on a newsuspense film. . .
Bunuel's left hand is in his pocket,fingering the trigger. He will shoot his friend first in the knee, watchinghim suffer, and then he will aim for the groin.Then he. . .
Dali arrives, in a torrent of flashbulbsand hullaballoo. 15 minutes late, dressed in purple velvet, his wingtipmoustache caked with clear goo and shaped into sharp horns. For all thetime past, he still looked to Bunuel like the lost 23-year-old he knew a decade before-- the pre-Gala Salvador! This"genius," a wide-eyed stringbean who needed his sister's hand tocross the street, an easily-confused soul who couldn't even buy a busticket by himself.
Dali looks the restaraunt over, andlooks straight through Luis, not recognizing him. The flashbulbs haveblinded him. Bunuel fingers the gun, thinking that this could be hischance. Did he remember to bring bullets?13
.
IV
Luis Bunuel is directing the piano movers again.
Instead of a movie set, where a deaddonkey might be stuffed, and filled with icky fake blood, and placed on topof a grand piano and moved across the room in a harness by a cuckoldedlover attempting to copulate with his unwilling female, Luis is just in his Mexico City home, showing three burly men howto move a piano without scuffing the floor.
And terrorizing his wife again.14
Startled by unfamiliar voices in thehouse, Jeanne Bunuel puts down the needlepoint in "her" room-- thefarthest room in the house from the room where Luis' beloved bar rests--and calls out to the foyer. "Luis, Luis. . ."
"It is just the piano movers,"Luis bellows in a cackling voice, "come to claim the piano forTomas."
Close up of a wide-eyed woman's face.You could slice her pupil with a razor.
Jeanne Bunuel is out of her room in aninstant. Luis' drunken bet from the night before had not been a baddream, he had intended to follow through on it. Her piano, the piano onwhich she practiced every day and played the "Internationale" at thefew parties in their home Luis would allow, was beingswiveled out of the room by three burly men, her treasured upright tradedto a Los Olvidados extra for a bottle of French Champagne. The piano wasone of the last mementos she had of her earlier days as a carefree mademoiselle, performing recitals.
"A bet is a bet, cheree," Luissays, lighting up a butt.
She begins to cry. Like the uprootedcherry tree, like the forsaken bridge club, Luis had banished another thingof beauty-- another measure of the bourgeoisie civility she had grown toadore as a child of Paris-- from their shared home.
"There, there," Luis said, pattingher on the head. "I shall buy you an accordion. Will that make itbetter?"15
The Footnotes
1 "Un Chien Andalou"-- sliced-up eyeball, armpitmouth and all-- is now shown in American high schools and standard Film 101college courses as an example of film "art." This has more to do withthe overblown reputation of co-scenarist Salvador Dali, the Leroy Neiman of Manufactured Nonsense, than anylong-lasting respect for Don Luis Bunuel's revolutionary 50-year careerin motion pictures.
"Un Chien Andalou" is worthy ofattention, no matter whose estate reaps the rewards-- a free-form odysseythrough fetish obsession, mutilation, violence and the inadequacies of themale-female union that can be said to set precedent for entire ouevres (where would David Lynch and Jan Staamaker bewithout it? Or Wes Craven?), entire genres of film; but it's also awitty romp, with plenty of unusual set pieces that have been plunderedagain and again by filmmakers looking for an easy way to simulate madness on celluloid. Violence against the eye--figuratively and literally an assault on the senses-- would soon beassimilated into the language of the filmmaker thanks to the still searingopening. Bunuel himself would plunder the moody "ralenti" found in his first film for dream sequence after dreamsequence in his later renaissance as a commercial director in Mexico.
2 Those transcendent early moments of "Un ChienAndalou" still shock, and dismay, even after decades of Hitchcock and"Friday the 13th" and "Necromantik"; Bunuel's editing jarsyou and attacks your gut. Thanks to this unusual and highly subjectivestyle of cutting, at least three or four of the other elaboratedream scenes still carry weight; they remain enigmatic and unexplainablebecause they are tied to Bunuel and Dali's irregular dream cycles. Somesequences whiz by, and land straight into quicksand scenarios, effectively simulating the drained R.E.M offitful rest. The closest attempt to simulating the stop-and-start fluidityof Dream Logic was in Don Luis's own "Exterminating Angel," andthe "Mother/Meat" nightmare in "Los Olvidados."
Seeing this film a few years later, CarlJung said simply, "Dementia Praecox".
Attempts to "psychoanalyze" "Un ChienAndalou," and its unique landscape of visual irregularity, didn'tinterest Bunuel. In "Conversations with Bunuel," a collection of rareinterviews with the filmmaker conducted later in his life, he shrugged offany interpretation "For example, in the scene. . . inwhich the protagonist pulls a series of things, anything you like couldhave been tied to the ropes an umbrella, an empty taxi, an elephant, athousand things."
3 If some enterprising scriptwriter wanted to tacklethe life story of film director Luis Bunuel, he'd no doubt make much ofthe fact that this scourge of the Bourgeois, this hater of society's"norms," this savage critic of organized religion, was actually the son of landed Spanish gentry, a socialconservative (although theoretically an anarchist) who was moved byreligious events, even as his atheistic cynicism attacked convention inmovie after movie.
Bunuel the Brat had spent a considerable amount of his mother'sfinancing drinking wine in cafes; when the total had reached a little lessthan half he sheepishly began the production of his film with a sense ofobligation to her, and a rancid stomach burn for the rest of society.
4 Bunuel did not believe in Symbolism. Nor did he putstock in sentiment, or easy motivations for his characters. This was astrue for "Un Chien Andalou" as it was for his last film, 1974's"That Obscure Object of Desire," where he cast two different actresses to alternate scenes as the lead female role,assigning each of them specific aspects of the character'spersonality.
5 Breton, a large-headed Frenchman who adoredscandalizing the middle-class, had dreamed of a body cut in half by awindow and then built a highly disciplined artistic movement in the latehours the night based on the aesthetic of nonsense.
This fever dream would gainsympathizers, cross continents, seek to destroy worlds. In the end, likeeverything else, Breton's brilliant and sometimes contradictory artmovement would be co-opted by the very money-driven social forces that ithad worked to wipe out. To Breton's credit, very few havematched the dream "logic" he usurped for his best poetry, like"Nadja," and still fewer have articulated the cause of irrationalitywith such passion, and fluidity. Breton was the ONLY man who had thesustained vision necessary to keep such a precious conceit(Surrealism) vital and kicking for so long, even if, in the end, he becamemerely one more self-important, insufferable bore with no sense of humor trying to keep his boyhood legacy afloat.
6 A visiting producer, impressed by "Un ChienAndalou," had invited the 31-year-old Surrealist Representative to seefirsthand the Hollywood production machine, but Bunuel had beenceremoniously kicked out of the first set he visited. By Greta Garbo, noless.
Insulted, Bunuel never returned to theMGM lot, except to pick up his paycheck and eat lunch in the studiocommissary. He visited with fellow expatriates Sergei Eisenstein andCharlie Chaplin, learned how to tell good bootleg gin from poison, and sentback witty articles for Surrealist magazines about lifeamong the Hollywood elite. The best of these was "Variations Upon theMoustache of Menjou," an appreciation of character actor Adolph Menjou,written for "Le Surrealisme au service de la Revolution."
It is not known whether the whiff ofscandal blowing from "L'Age D'Or"'s explosive release backin France was the cause, or that affair at Chaplin's Christmas partywhen a drunk Bunuel wrestled a Christmas tree to the ground, but theHollywood brass sent Bunuel home one month early. . . happy to see himgo.
7 "L'Age D'Or" was financed by the richVicomte de Noailles and his wife, who had also funded Jean Cocteau'sdebut motion picture, "The Blood of a Poet." This brilliant filmcontained more than a few (mostly irrelevant) images stolen from "UnChien Andalou," which the de Noalilles had screened for him a fewdays before production began. Needless to say, the scandal of "L'Age D'Or" put an abrupt halt to the couple's dabblings inavant-garde cinema.
A still-pleased Bunuel would recall,years later "The de Noalilles were delighted because all of theirfriends and acquaintances adored cinema. They gave a private screening atten a.m. at the Pantheon, close to the Sorbonne, with a rigorous guestlist Countess So-and-So, Princess Such-and-Such. . . Le Tout Paris! The de Noalilles received everyone at the door ofthe cinema as if they were in their own home. . . later, as they wereleaving (the theater), the guests were indignant and didn't even saygoodbye. De Noailles was expelled from the Jockey Club, of which he was president out! The Pope was on the point ofexcommunicating him. Not me, who was unknown, but him, who had paid forthis."
8 The film began with stock footage of scorpions andended with Jesus Christ as De Sade, raping and killing virgins and placingtheir scalps on a wooden cross. In between the madness, an anarchist(played by Gaston Modot) walks the streets of Paris, kicking blind men, slapping mothers-in-law, shootingministers of culture and tossing priests and-- yes-- Christmas trees outof windows. In one long, sensuous sequence, Modot's lover suckslasciviously on the toe of a statue as the explosive strains of Wagner fills an obstacle-filled courtyard. Besides theriots, reviews from the mainstream dailies were equally as violent toward"L' Age D'Or," the second-ever sound film made in France, and afilm so uncompromising and politically-charged that it would remain banned for almost 50 years.
In the right-wing "Le Figaro,"one critic had called the film, "an insult to any kind of technicalstandard. . . a public spectacle. . . most obscene. . . disgusting andtasteless. Country and family and religion are dragged through the mud."No wonder it became unavailable almost immediately, with onlybootleg prints in circulation for almost 50 years until Bunuel himselfsupervised a reissue in the early '70's
That reissue proved that this movie canstill drag people though the mud-- a nihilist statement that still criesout from the restrictive early days of sound cinema. Years later, whenBunuel was in exile from motion pictures following the release of this celluloid pipe-bomb, the author Henry Miller wouldwrite "Those who are disappointed because they cannot find order orreason (in "L'Age D' Or") will never find order or reasonanywhere."
9 Although it passed into legend fairly quickly amongsta certain left wing contengency (most of whom never actually saw it), thecontroversial "L'Age D'Or" put Bunuel in a forced exile fromdirecting motion pictures; the notoriety of his second film would follow him around for years to come.
In the mid- '30's, he left Franceand worked for as an uncredited line producer at the fledgling FilmofonoStudios in his native Spain until Franco's fascist revolutionaries shutthe operation down. When a Spanish friend won the lottery, he offered to finance Bunuel's documentary on indigenousstarvation in Southern-most Spain, and "Las Hurdes," now considered aminor masterpiece, was edited by hand on Luis' kitchen table. It was tobe the last movie he'd direct for nearly 20 years, and Franco'srepressive regime would force him back to the United Statesfor most of the next decade.
10 For most of the '40's, Bunuel toiled quietlyand professionally as a film editor and a Latin American advisor for theMuseum of Modern Art in New York City, shaping and readying propaganda forthe erupting World War II. Comments in Dali's unfortunate autobiography-- self-serving propaganda that signaled adefiniteend to any further creative collaborations with Bunuel-- forcedthe filmmaker's resignation at the museum in the early days of the RedScare.
11 The truth of the matter Salvador Dali was only onthe set on "Un Chien Andalou" for one day and, although many of theimages in this still-remarkable movie can be attributed to him, he did notdirect or oversee anything upon production and was not present during the editing (one of the film's strengths).These facts haven't stopped the public at large from believing the filmwas mostly his-- there are now popular bar/cafes (one in D.C.) named afterthis film that is marketed solely on the Dali "image" and Dali likenesses, with scarcely a mention of Bunuel.
Dali's contribution to "L' AgeD' Or" was even more minimal. Bunuel said he gave the artistco-credit only out of friendship-- but this was a friendship that wasfalling apart due to Salvador's growing obsession with his one and onlylove, Gala, his wife. Bunuel despised her, and when the same kind of loose"sharing of dreams" that had worked so well in the earlier filmdidn't come so easily in the writing sessions for "L'Age D'Or," he angrily blamed the influence of Gala on Dali's"shallow" mind-state. One image in "L' Age D' Or" that Dalicould claim, and Bunuel begrudged the statue with the rock on its headfrom the hilarious "city" montage.
Just compare any part of their two filmstogether to the wildly-hyped and utterly disappointing dream sequences thatDali designed for Alfred Hitchcock's "Spellbound," and you'llbe struck what's missing Bunuel's warped and unrepentant "dreamlogic."
12 One sublime piece of vintage motion picturememorabillia the "scandalous" issue of "Motion PictureHerald" that carried the news of the "communist" Bunuel'semployment at the Museum, working on U.S. propaganda. . . accentuated bysome particularly damning stills from "L'Age D'Or." A huge, angrypicture of bug-eyed Luis peers out of the centerspread like some kind ofPeter Lorre creation, while the headline screams out the paranoia runningrampant in those days of the Alger Hiss fiasco. No wonder he had to quit.
13 This potentially-volatile lunch between Dali andBunuel at the Sherry Netherland did not end in violence, although Bunuelclaims to have theatened to kill his former friend when Dali offered hishand.
"Why?" Dali asked innocently.
"Because what you have written hascost me my job!" Bunuel shouted.
Dali thought about this. "I did notwrite my book to put YOU on a pedestal," he said. "I wrote it to putME on a pedestal."
They finished their lunch in mostlysilence, Dali tried to stick Luis with the check They didn't talk againuntil the late '60's.
14 Bunuel had to move his family out of New York City,and they eventually settled into Mexico. Bunuel was frustrated during thisperiod, and living hand-to-mouth with a wife and two young sons.
Until financier and Mexican film mogul OscarDancigers came along in 1947 and rescued the former bad-boy ofinternational cinema, he had been penniless, and out of a job, for twoyears. The charismatic Dancigers found him work directing a commercialB-film (a musical called "Gran Casino"!) thatcarried only faint swashes of the celebrated surrealism and notoriousacidity of his early work. The movie sunk like a stone anyway, despitehaving a few of Mexico's most beloved popular singers, and Bunuel wouldwait another two years for Dancigers to call again.
Their next collaboration, 1949's"El Gran Calavara," was a giddy comedy that became a huge popularsuccess in Mexico, still with the occasional Bunuelian flair for thenon-sequiter... but little else; its handsome gate receipts gave Bunuel theautonomy to make "Los Obvidados" in 1950-- a true comebackfilm after twenty years of intellectual and creative exile, anuncompromising and utterly Bunuelian fable about a gang of savage streetchildren that he would later claim as his favorite film of all. Typically, there are no happy endings.
Bunuel's fantasy sequences in "LosOlvidados" echo the uncannily ethereal dream logic of "Un ChienAndalou"-- a young tough, sneaking into his single mother's houseafter a day in which he has participated in a murder, dreams of herserving him raw meat . The victim laughs maniacally under the bed whileroosters cluck, feathers rain down from above, and lightning cracks. Thereal killer comes from out of nowhere to steal the raw meat.
Unforced, illogical, pure surrealism.
15 A new avenue in Bunuel studies was opened early inthe '90's, when Bunuel's widow, Jeanne, broke her 50 year silenceand published, "Woman Without a Piano," a memoir of herlong-suffering days under the near dictatorial control of her husband, thefamous Luis.
Some would say Jeanne's bookconfirms the misogyny that (post-modern) critics often attribute to thefilmmaker's portraits of female characters. In the underrated"Tristana," a later French film which details a possessive anddominating relationship similar to the one Jeanne endured, Bunuel does notflinch in making his autobiographical counterpart (Fernando Rey) the mostpitiful and least symphathetic character in the picture. Was making thisfilm some sort of open penance to his wife?
Yes and no. In "Tristana," theheroine-- played with precision by Catherine Deneuve-- eventually gets herbeloved piano back; Jeanne never did.