by Luis Bunuel
To be sure, making movies was a lovely idea, but how was a very different story. I was Spanish and a free-lance critic—and I had absolutely no connections. The one name I did know, however, from my years in Madrid, was Jean Epstein, who wrote for L’Esprit Nouveau. Along with Abel Gance and Marcel l’Herbier, Epstein, originally from Russia, was one of the best-known directors of the French cinema. When I found out that he ran an acting school, I immediately enrolled, only to find that all the other students were White Russians. For the first few weeks we did exercises and improvisations, on the order of “You are all condemned to death. It’s the night before your execution.” Then Epstein would ask a student to act desperate, another pitiful, another casual or insolent. He also promised that the best of us would have small parts in his films. He was just finishing The Adventures of Robert Macaire, too late for me to be given a part; but one day, when the film was completed, I took a bus out to the Albatros Studios in Montreuil-sous-Bois, where I knew he was getting things ready for Mauprat.
“I know you’re making another movie,” I blurted out, “and I love film, but I know absolutely nothing about it. I can’t do much, but you don’t have to pay me. Just let me sweep the floor, run errands—whatever you want, I don’t care!”
Epstein agreed, much to my surprise. Mauprat, which was shot in Paris, Romorantin, and Châteauroux, was my first real experience behind the scenes at a shoot. I did a little bit of everything; I operated a waterfall, and even played a gendarme during the reign of Louis XV (or was it XVI?) who was supposed to get himself shot during a battle and fall from a height of about ten feet. During the shoot, I met the actors Maurice Schultz and Sandra Milovanov, which was very exciting; but what fascinated me even more was the camera itself. Albert Duverger, the cameraman, had no assistant; he changed his own film and developed his own prints. I can still see him standing there, steadily cranking the handle of his camera.
Since these films were silents, no one had bothered to soundproof the studios; and some of them—the one at Epinay, for example—had glass walls. The projectors and reflectors gave off such a blinding light that we had to wear leaded glasses to protect our eyes. Epstein kept me mostly on the sidelines, perhaps because I had a certain talent for making the actors laugh at the wrong moments. I remember, too, meeting and having coffee with the legendary Maurice Maeterlinck at Romorantin. He was already quite old, and living with his secretary in the hotel where we stayed.
After Mauprat, Epstein began The Fall of the House of Usher, starring Jean Debucourt and Abel Gance’s wife, Marguerite. He took me on as second assistant, in charge of the interiors. I did fine until one day when the stage manager, Maurice Morlot, sent me to the pharmacy to buy some hemoglobin. Unfortunately, the druggist was a rabid xenophobe. He knew I was a métèque from my accent and, after swearing at me violently, refused to sell it to me.
There was another difficult moment one evening, after we’d completed the interiors. Morlot was telling everyone when to meet at the station the following morning, as we were all going to shoot some scenes in the Dordogne.
“Stay a minute with the cameraman, Luis,” Epstein suddenly said to me. “Abel Gance is going to audition two girls, and you might be able to give him a hand.”
With my usual abruptness, I replied that I was his assistant and not Gance’s, that I didn’t much like Gance’s movies (except for Napoleon), and that I found Gance himself very pretentious.
“How can an insignificant asshole like you dare to talk that way about a great director!” Epstein exploded (there are certain horrendous lines that, once spoken, one remembers forever), adding that as far as he was concerned, our collaboration had just come to an end. (Which was true, and I never did get to the Dordogne.) A moment later, he calmed down somewhat and drove me back to Paris in his car.
“You be careful,” he said to me. “I see surrealistic tendencies in you. If you want my advice, you’ll stay away from them.”
I still worked in the studios, wherever and whenever I could. At the Albatros, I had a bit part as a smuggler in Jacques Feyder’s Carmen—Espagne oblige. I also remember Peinado and Viñes playing guitarists in the same film. During a scene with Don José, Carmen was sitting motionless at a table, her head in her hands. Feyder told me to do something, anything, some kind of gallant gesture. I did, but unfortunately the one I chose was an Aragonian pizco, a real hard pinch, which got me a resounding slap from the star.
Albert Duverger, who also worked on both Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or, introduced me to Etiévant and Mario Nalpas, two directors who were making a film with Josephine Baker called The Siren of the Tropics. I must confess it wasn’t one of my nicer memories; the whims of the star appalled and disgusted me. Expected to be ready and on the set at nine in the morning, she’d arrive at five in the afternoon, storm into her dressing room, slam the door, and begin smashing makeup bottles against the wall. When someone dared to ask what the matter was, he was told that her dog was sick. I remember Pierre Batcheff standing next to me when we heard this exchange.
“Well, I guess that’s the movies,” I remarked.
“That’s your movie,” he replied drily, “not mine.”
I couldn’t help but agree with him, and from that time on we were great friends. He even played a part in Un Chien andalou.
It was during the filming of The Siren of the Tropics that the world reacted to the shock of the Sacco and Vanzetti execution. For an entire night, the demonstrators ruled the Paris streets. I went to the Etoile with one of the electricians from the film, where we saw some men put out the flame that burns beside the tomb of the Unknown Soldier—by pissing on it. Windows were smashed; the city was in chaos. A British actress in the movie told me that someone had machine-gunned the foyer of her hotel. The damage to the boulevard Sébastopol was particularly devastating; ten days later, the police were still rounding up suspected looters.
Before we’d finished shooting the exteriors, I quit the tropics and its siren.
*In my kingdom I want / A green path at my door, / A cradle of eglantine / As long as three blades of wheat.
(photograph credit i1a)
My father and mother. (photograph credit i1b)
As a student at the Jesuit school, 1907. (photograph credit i2a)
In the service in Madrid. (photograph credit i2b)
At a carnival, with García Lorca at the wheel, 1924. (photograph credit i2c)
The Order of Toledo, 1924: (from left to right) Salvador Dali, Maria Luisa Gonzalez, me, Juan Vicens, Hinojosa; (seated) Moreno Villa. (photograph credit i3a)
As Jean Epstein’s assistant during the filming of The Fall of the House of Usher, with Marguerite Gance and Jean Debucourt. (photograph credit i3b)
The Living Statues from Un Chien andalou. (photograph credit i4a)
During the filming of L’Age d’or. I am in the middle of the back row. (photograph credit i4b)
Dali during the filming of L’Age d’or, photographed by me. (photograph credit i5)
Jeanne in New York with our son Juan-Luis. (photograph credit i6a)
With Conchita in the Pyrenees. (photograph credit i6b)
Salvador and Gala Dali. (photograph credit i7a)
Pau, France, 1950; Mother and her seven children: Alfonso, Alicia, Margarita, Leonardo, Conchita, María, Dona María, me. (photograph credit i7b)
Mexico, 1959, during the filming of La Fièvre monte à El Pao, with my cameraman Gabriel Figueroa. (photograph credit i8a)
During the filming of La Fièvre monte à El Pao, with Gérard Philipe. (photograph credit i8b)
During the filming of The Young One, 1960.
With my son Juan-Luis, who was also my assistant, during the filming of The Young One. (photograph credit i9)
Spain, 1961, during the filming of Viridiana, with Silvia Pinal and Fernando Rey. (photograph credit i10a)
With Jeanne Moreau during the filming of Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964. (photograph credit i10b)
Directing Catherine
Deneuve in Belle de Jour.
Filming The Milky Way, 1968. (photograph credit i11)
Directing Catherine Deneuve in Tristana, 1970. (photograph credit i12a)
Mexico, 1971, with Jean-Claude Carrière during the filming of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. (photograph credit i12b)
Los Angeles, 1972: (from left to right, standing) Robert Mulligan, William Wyler, George Cukor, Robert Wise, Jean-Claude Carrière, Serge Silberman, Charles Champlin, Rafael Bunuel; (seated) Billy Wilder, George Stevens, me, Alfred Hitchcock, Rouben Mamoulian.
France, 1974, with Bernard Verley during the filming of The Phantom of Liberty. (photograph credit i13)
My producer, Serge Silberman, and I as extras in The Phantom of Liberty. (photograph credit i14a)
Filming That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977. (photograph credit i14b)
Taking a break during the filming of That Obscure Object of Desire. (photograph credit i15)
Rafael, Jeanne, me, and Juan-Luis, 1981. (photograph credit i16)
9
Dreams and Reveries
IF SOMEONE were to tell me I had twenty years left, and ask me how I’d like to spend them, I’d reply: “Give me two hours a day of activity, and I’ll take the other twenty-two in dreams … provided I can remember them.”
I love dreams, even when they’re nightmares, which is usually the case. My dreams are always full of the same familiar obstacles, but it doesn’t matter. My amour fou—for the dreams themselves as well as the pleasure of dreaming—is the single most important thing I shared with the surrealists. Un Chien andalou was born of the encounter between my dreams and Dali’s. Later, I brought dreams directly into my films, trying as hard as I could to avoid any analysis. “Don’t worry if the movie’s too short,” I once told a Mexican producer. “I’ll just put in a dream.” (He was not impressed.)
During sleep, the mind protects itself from the outside world; one is much less sensitive to noise, smell, and light. On the other hand, the mind is bombarded by a veritable barrage of dreams that seem to burst upon it like waves. Billions of images surge up each night, then dissolve almost immediately, enveloping the earth in a blanket of lost dreams. Absolutely everything has been imagined during one night or another by one mind or another, and then forgotten. I have a list of about fifteen recurring dreams that have pursued me all my life like faithful traveling companions. Some of them are terribly banal—I fall blissfully off the edge of a cliff; I’m pursued by tigers or bulls; I find myself in a room, shut the door behind me, the bull smashes its way through; and so on. Or I have to take my final exams all over again; I think I’ve already passed them, but it turns out that I must do them once more, and, of course, I’ve forgotten everything I’m supposed to know.
Another dream, habitual with people in the theatre or movies, is the kind where I absolutely must go on stage in just a few minutes and play a role I haven’t learned. I don’t know the first word of the script. This sort of dream can be long and very complicated; I’m nervous, then I panic, the audience grows impatient and starts to hiss. I try to find someone—the stage manager, the director, anyone—and I tell them I’m in agony, but they reply coldly that I must go on, the curtain’s rising, I can’t wait any longer. In fact, I tried to reconstitute certain images from this dream in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.
Another of my ongoing anxiety dreams is returning to the army. Fifty or sixty years old, dressed in my uniform, I return to the barracks in Madrid where I did my military service. I’m very uncomfortable, I slink along the walls, I’m afraid to tell anyone I’ve arrived. It’s embarrassing still to be a soldier at my age, but there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I have to talk to the colonel, I have to explain my case, to ask him how it’s possible that after all I’ve been through, I’m still in the army.
Sometimes, too, I dream that I’m back home in Calanda, and I know there’s a ghost in the house (undoubtedly prompted by my memory of my father’s spectral appearance the night of his death). I walk bravely into the room without a light and challenge the spirit to show himself. Sometimes I swear at him. Suddenly there’s a noise behind me, a door slams, and I wake up terrified. I also dream often of my father, sitting at the dinner table with a serious expression on his face, eating very slowly and very little, scarcely speaking. I know he’s dead, and I murmur to my mother or sisters: “Whatever happens, we mustn’t tell him!”
Lack of money torments me in my sleep. I don’t have a penny to my name, my bank account is empty—how am I going to pay my hotel bill? This nightmare still haunts me; it’s as real as my train dreams, where the story’s always the same, although the details may vary. I’m in a train, I’ve no idea where I’m going, my bags are on the rack above me. Suddenly the train comes to a halt in a station. I get up to stretch my legs and have a drink at the café on the platform, but I’m very careful because I know that the minute I step onto the concrete, the train will leave. I know all about this trap, I’m suspicious, I place my foot very slowly onto the platform, I look right and left, I whistle casually. The train seems to have stopped dead, so I put my other foot down and then, in a split second, like a cannonball, the train roars out of the station with all my luggage on it. I swear as loudly as I can, but there I am, once again, alone on a deserted platform.
No one’s really interested in other people’s dreams, so I won’t dwell on the subject, although I find it impossible to explain a life without talking about the part that’s underground—the imaginative, the unreal. Perhaps, then, I’ll just indulge myself through one or two others—for instance, the dream about my cousin Rafael: macabre, of course, yet not without its bittersweet aspects. (I reproduced this dream almost exactly in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) Rafael has been dead for a long time, and yet, in my dream, I meet him suddenly in an empty street. “What are you doing here?” I ask him, surprised. “Oh, I come here every day,” he replies sadly. He turns away and walks into a house; then suddenly I too am inside. The house is dark and hung with cobwebs; I call Rafael, but he doesn’t answer. When I go back outside, I’m in the same empty street, but now I call my mother. “Mother! Mother!” I ask her. “What are you doing wandering about among all these ghosts?”
I had this dream for the first time when I was about seventy, and since then it’s continued to affect me deeply. Yet a bit later I had another dream which moved me even more. In it I see the Virgin, shining softly, her hands outstretched to me. It’s a very strong presence, an absolutely indisputable reality. She speaks to me—to me, the unbeliever—with infinite tenderness; she’s bathed in the music of Schubert. (I tried to reproduce this image in The Milky Way, but it simply doesn’t have the power and conviction of the original.) My eyes full of tears, I kneel down, and suddenly I feel myself inundated with a vibrant and invincible faith. When I wake up, my heart is pounding, and I hear my voice saying: “Yes! Yes! Holy Virgin, yes, I believe!” It takes me several minutes to calm down. The erotic overtones are obvious, yet they always remain within the chaste limits of a platonic devotion. Perhaps if the dream had continued, it would have vanished, or given way to desire? I don’t know. I simply feel overwhelmed, my heart is full; it’s an ethereal feeling I’ve often experienced, and not just in dreams.
A long time ago, at least fifteen years now, I used to dream that I was in church. I press a button behind a pillar, the altar pivots slowly, and I see a secret staircase. Nervously, I descend the stairs and find myself in a series of subterranean chambers. It’s a long dream, and mildly upsetting—a feeling I enjoy.
I remember waking up one night in Madrid, unable to stop laughing. When my wife asked what had happened, I told her that I’d dreamed of my sister María, and that she had given me a pillow as a present. That’s all I could remember, so I’ll leave the interpretation to the psychoanalysts.
Finally, a word about the famous Gala, a woman I have always tried to avoid. I met her for the first time in Cadaqués in 1929, during the Barcelona World’s F
air. Salvador Dali and I were there working on L’Age d’or. At that time, she was married to Paul Eluard and had a little daughter named Cécile. Magritte and his wife were with them, as was Goémans, the owner of an art gallery in Belgium. The Magrittes and the Eluards were staying at a hotel in town, and I was at Dali’s, about a kilometer away.
It all began with a mistake.
“A fantastic woman is in town!” Dali announced to me excitedly one day.
We all had a drink together that evening, and the French party decided to walk us back to Dali’s house. Gala was walking next to me, and on our way we talked of various trivial things. At one point, I found myself saying that what repelled me more than anything else in the female anatomy was when a woman had a large space between her thighs. The next day we all went swimming, and, to my embarrassment, I saw that Gala had just this unfortunate physical attribute.
And Dali was transformed. Our ideas clashed to such an extent that we finally stopped collaborating on L’Age d’or. It was a complete metamorphosis. All he could talk about was Gala; he echoed every word she uttered. Eluard and the Belgians left a few days later, but Gala and Cécile remained behind. One day we all went in a rowboat for a picnic among the rocks with Lidia, a fisherman’s wife, and I said to Dali that the view reminded me of a Sorolla (a rather mediocre painter from Valencia).