My Last Sigh

by Luis Bunuel

  My entry into the surrealist group took place very naturally. I was simply admitted to the daily meetings at the Cyrano or at André Breton’s at 42, rue Fontaine. The Cyrano was an authentic Pigalle café, frequented by the working class, prostitutes, and pimps. People drank Pernod, or aperitifs like picon-beer with a hint of grenadine (Yves Tanguy’s favorite; he’d swallow one, then a second, and by the third he had to hold his nose!).

  The daily gathering was very much like a Spanish peña. We read and discussed certain articles, talked about the surrealist journal, debated any critical action we felt might be needed, letters to be written, demonstrations attended. When we discussed confidential issues, we met in Breton’s studio, which was close by. I remember one amusing misunderstanding that arose because, since I was usually one of the last to arrive, I shook hands only with those people nearest me, then waved to Breton, who was always too far away to reach. “Does Buñuel have something against me?” he asked one day, very out of sorts. Finally, someone explained that I hated the French custom of shaking hands all around every time anyone went anywhere; it seemed so silly to me that I outlawed the custom on the set when we were filming Cela s’appelle l’aurore.

  All of us were supporters of a certain concept of revolution, and although the surrealists didn’t consider themselves terrorists, they were constantly fighting a society they despised. Their principal weapon wasn’t guns, of course; it was scandal. Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as the exploitation of one man by another, colonialist imperialism, religious tyranny—in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. The real purpose of surrealism was not to create a new literary, artistic, or even philosophical movement, but to explode the social order, to transform life itself. Soon after the founding of the movement, however, several members rejected this strategy and went into “legitimate” politics, especially the Communist party, which seemed to be the only organization worthy of the epithet “revolutionary.”

  Like the señoritos I knew in Madrid, most surrealists came from good families; as in my case, they were bourgeois revolting against the bourgeoisie. But we all felt a certain destructive impulse, a feeling that for me has been even stronger than the creative urge. The idea of burning down a museum, for instance, has always seemed more enticing than the opening of a cultural center or the inauguration of a new hospital.

  What fascinated me most, however, in all our discussions at the Cyrano, was the moral aspect of the movement. For the first time in my life I’d come into contact with a coherent moral system that, as far as I could tell, had no flaws. It was an aggressive morality based on the complete rejection of all existing values. We had other criteria: we exalted passion, mystification, black humor, the insult, and the call of the abyss. Inside this new territory, all our thoughts and actions seemed justifiable; there was simply no room for doubt. Everything made sense. Our morality may have been more demanding and more dangerous than the prevailing order, but it was also stronger, richer, and more coherent.

  (Interestingly enough, all the surrealists were handsome, a fact Dali once pointed out to me. There was the leonine luminosity of Breton and the more refined beauty of Aragon, Eluard, Crevel, and Dali himself. There was Max Ernst with his startling birdlike face and his blue eyes, and Pierre Unik, and all the others—a proud, ardent, and unforgettable group.)

  After its triumphant premiere, Un Chien andalou was bought by Mauclaire of Studio 28. He paid me an advance of a thousand francs, and since the film had a successful eight-month run, he eventually gave me another two thousand. (Altogether, I received about seven or eight thousand francs.) Despite its success, many people complained to the police about its “cruelty” and “obscenity,” but this was only the beginning of a lifetime of threats and insults.

  Replying to a proposal made by Auriol and Jacques Brunius, I agreed to publish the scenario in La Revue du Cinéma, a journal edited by the publishing house of Gallimard. It never occurred to me that there was anything wrong with this decision, but it seemed that Variétés, a Belgian journal, had decided to devote an entire issue to the surrealist movement. When Eluard asked me to publish the screenplay in this review, I had to tell him I’d just given it to Gallimard. Suddenly, I found myself with a serious moral problem, one that serves as a good illustration of the surrealist mentality.

  “Can you come to my place this evening, Buñuel?” Breton asked a few days after my conversation with Eluard. “Just for a small meeting?”

  Wholly unsuspecting, I arrived—only to find the entire group waiting for me. Apparently, we were going to have a trial. Aragon was the prosecutor, and in violent terms he accused me of selling out to a bourgeois publication. Moreover, there was something suspect about the commercial success of my film. How could such a scandalous film draw such an enormous public? What could I say? Alone before the group, I tried to defend myself, but I didn’t seem to be able to make a dent in their attack.

  “The question is,” Breton finally asked, “are you with the police or with us?”

  Such excessive accusations may seem laughable today, but at the time it was a truly dramatic dilemma. In fact, it was my first real moral problem. Once back in my room, unable to sleep, I told myself that I was free to do what I liked. They had no right to try to control me. I could throw my scenario in their faces and walk out; nothing was forcing me to do what they wanted. They were no better than I, and yet, at the same time, I felt another force which argued that they were right. You may think that your conscience is your only judge, but you’re mistaken. You love these men; you trust them. They’ve accepted you as one of them. You aren’t free, no matter what you say. Your freedom is only a phantom that travels the world in a cloak of fog. You try to grab hold of it, but it will always slip away. All you’ll have left is a dampness on your fingers.

  This inner conflict tormented me for a long time. Even now, when I ask myself what surrealism really was, I still answer that it was a revolutionary, poetic, and moral movement.

  In the end, I asked my surrealist friends what they thought I should do. Get Monsieur Gallimard to agree not to publish it, they said. But how could I get in to see Gallimard? How could I convince him? I didn’t even know the address of the publishing house!

  “Eluard will go with you,” Breton told me.

  And so one day, Paul Eluard and I found ourselves in Gallimard’s office. I told him that I’d changed my mind, that I didn’t want my script to appear in La Revue du Cinéma. In no uncertain terms, he replied that changing my mind was out of the question, that I’d given my word, and that, in any case, the printer had already set type.

  When I returned to the group and gave my full report, the consensus was that I get a hammer, go back to Gallimard, and smash the type. And so once again, accompanied by Eluard, I went to Gallimard, this time carrying an enormous hammer hidden under my raincoat. Now, however, it really was too late; the issue had been printed and the first copies distributed.

  When all was said and done, it was decided that Variétés would also publish the screenplay, and that I would send a letter to sixteen Parisian newspapers “protesting indignantly” and claiming that I’d been the victim of an infamous bourgeois plot. (A few papers actually published the letter.)

  In addition, I’d written a prologue to the scenario for both journals in which I stated that the film was nothing more or less than a public call to assassination.

  A while later, I suggested that we burn the negative on the place du Tertre in Montmartre, something I would have done without hesitation had the group agreed. In fact, I’d still do it today; I can imagine a huge pyre in my own little garden where all my negatives and all the copies of my films go up in flames. It wouldn’t make the slightest difference. (Curiously, however, the surrealists vetoed my suggestion.)

  When I think back on the surrealists as individuals, I see Benjamin Péret as the quintessential surrealist poet; his work seems to flow freely,
untrammeled by any cultural effort, from a hidden source of inspiration, spontaneously recreating a wholly new and different world. In 1929, Dali and I used to read from Le Grand Jeu and weep with laughter. When I joined the group, Péret was in Brazil representing the Trotskyist movement; but he was soon expelled from the country, and I met him on his return. Our most frequent encounters, however, came in Mexico after the war. While I was making Gran casino (En el viejo Tampico), Péret came to ask for work; I tried to help him, but I myself was in dire straits at the time. He was living in Mexico City with the painter Remedios Varo, whose work I thought as good as Max Ernst’s. Péret was a pure and uncompromising surrealist, and most of the time he was very hard up.

  I remember, too, showing the group some photographs of Dali’s paintings (including my portrait), but they were received with only moderate enthusiasm. When they saw the paintings themselves, however, they changed their minds and instantly welcomed him into the group. Breton adored Dali’s “paranoia critique” theory, and they had an excellent relationship; but it wasn’t long before Gala’s influence transformed Dali into an “Avida Dollars.” A few years later he was excommunicated.

  There were several subgroups within the movement, which had formed according to certain curious affinities. Dali’s best friends were Crevel and Eluard, while I felt closest to Aragon, Georges Sadoul, Ernst, and Pierre Unik. Although Unik seems to have been forgotten today, I found him a marvelous young man, brilliant and fiery. He was also an atheist, despite the fact that his father was a Jewish tailor who also happened to be a rabbi. I remember Pierre telling his father one day of my desire to convert to Judaism. (Clearly explained, it was to scandalize my family.) But despite his father’s willingness to see me, I backed out at the last minute, preferring to “remain faithful” to Christianity. We spent many long evenings together, with Pierre’s friend Agnès Capri, a beautiful and slightly lame librarian named Yolande Oliviero, and a photographer called Denise, talking endlessly, discussing our answers to surrealist surveys (primarily sexual ones), and playing some terribly chaste libertine games. Pierre published two collections of poetry and edited the Communist party journal for children. I’ll never forget the fascist riots on February 6, 1934, when he carried in his cap what was left of the brains of a worker whose skull had been crushed. The police took off after him, but he ducked into the subway at the head of a group of demonstrators and got away by running on the tracks through the tunnel. During the war, he was in a prison camp in Austria; when he heard that the Russian army was close by, he escaped to join them and was never heard from again. The report was that he was swept away by an avalanche, for his body was never found.

  As for Louis Aragon, he had a soul of iron under that rather precious and elegant exterior. Once, when I was living on the rue Pascal, I received a pneumatique from him at eight in the morning, begging me to come by as soon as possible because he had something absolutely crucial to say. When I arrived half an hour later at his apartment on the rue Campagne-Première, he announced that his great love, Elsa Triolet, had left him, that the surrealists had just published a pamphlet slandering him, and that the Communist party had voted to expel him. His life had fallen apart; he’d lost everything that mattered. As he spoke, he paced back and forth in his studio, looking handsome and courageous and very much like a lion.

  By the next day everything had returned to normal—Elsa came back, the Communist party changed its mind, and as for the surrealists, what they thought no longer mattered to him. In memory of that day fifty years ago, I’ve kept a copy of Persécuté Persécuteur in which Aragon wrote an inscription. On certain days, it said, it was good to have a friend to come and shake your hand “when you thought your final hour had come.”

  Albert Valentin, René Clair’s assistant on A Nous la liberté, was also part of the group at this time.

  “It’s a truly revolutionary film,” he told us over and over again. “You’re going to love it!”

  The entire group attended the premiere and was profoundly disappointed; the film was so unrevolutionary that Valentin was accused of lying and summarily expelled. Many years later, I ran into him at the Cannes Festival, where he was quite friendly and seemed to be nursing a grand passion for roulette.

  Then there was René Crevel, a charming man and the only homosexual among us. He struggled against this tendency and tried to overcome it, but along with countless other conflicts between Communists and surrealists, his personal anguish was too great, and he committed suicide one night at eleven o’clock. I wasn’t in Paris at the time, but we all mourned his loss.

  André Breton seemed the perfect gentleman, ever courteous and forever kissing women’s hands. He was a very serious person, despised any kind of vulgarity, and had a keen appreciation of dry wit. Along with the works of Péret, the most beautiful literary souvenir I have of surrealism is Breton’s poem about his wife. Neither his serenity nor his beauty nor his excellent taste, however, kept him from sudden violent explosions of temper. He reproached me frequently for not wanting to introduce my fiancée, Jeanne, to the group, insinuating that, like all Spaniards, I was jealous. At last I gave in and agreed to bring Jeanne to dinner at his house. Magritte and his wife were guests, too. The meal began morosely. For some inexplicable reason, Breton kept his nose in his plate, wore a permanent frown, and spoke only in monosyllables. We were all edgy wondering what the trouble was when he suddenly pointed his finger at a small cross that Madame Magritte was wearing around her neck, announced that this cross was an outrageous provocation and that surely she might have worn something else when she came to his house. Magritte took up the cudgels on his wife’s behalf, and the dispute went on energetically for quite some time. The Magrittes made a sterling effort and did not leave before the end of the evening, but for some time afterward the two men didn’t speak to each other.

  Breton also tended to attach inordinate importance to details that no one else ever noticed. When he returned from visiting Trotsky in Mexico City, I asked him what the great man was like.

  “He’s got a dog he absolutely adores,” Breton replied. “One day the dog was standing next to Trotsky and staring at him, and Trotsky said to me, ‘He’s got a human look, wouldn’t you say?’ Can you imagine how someone like Trotsky could possibly say such a stupid thing?” Breton demanded. “A dog doesn’t have a human look! A dog has a dog’s look!”

  Breton was genuinely angry when he told me that story. I remember another occasion when he suddenly rushed out of his apartment and deliberately knocked over a Bible salesman’s stand on the sidewalk. And, like many surrealists, he detested music, particularly the opera. Eager to change his mind, I persuaded him to come one evening with René Char and Eluard and me to the Opéra-Comique. They were doing Louise by Charpentier, and the minute the curtain went up, we were all very disconcerted. Neither the set nor the actors resembled in the least what we loved about traditional opera. At one point, when a woman came onstage with a soup tureen and began to chant an aria to its contents, we were all beside ourselves. Breton finally got to his feet and walked out, enraged at the waste of time. (I must confess that we all followed suit.)

  I often saw Breton in New York during the war, and then later in Paris. I remember running into him in Paris, in 1955, while we were both on our way to visit Ionesco. Since we were early, we decided to stop and have a drink. I asked him why Max Ernst had been excommunicated for winning first prize at the Biennale in Venice.

  “What did you expect, mon cher ami?” he replied. “We separated ourselves from Dali, who’d become nothing more than a money-hungry art dealer, and now we’ve gotten rid of Max, who’s done the same!”

  He remained silent for a while, his face a mask of chagrin.

  “It’s sad, mon cher Luis,” he added, “but it’s no longer possible to scandalize anybody!”

  I was in Paris when he died, and, disguised in dark glasses and a hat, I went to the funeral at the cemetery. (I didn’t want to be recognized, or to have to talk to
people I hadn’t seen for forty years.) The service was short and silent, and afterwards each mourner went his separate way. I regretted only that no one said a few words over his grave as a last goodbye.

  As for me, there was no going back after Un Chien andalou; making a commercial film was totally out of the question. No matter what the cost, I wanted to stay a surrealist. At the same time, I couldn’t bring myself to ask my mother for more money, and since there seemed to be no other solution, I gave up the cinema. Over a period of time, however, I’d kept a list of gags and ideas and images—like a cart laden with workers rumbling through a literary salon, or a father shooting his own son because the boy dropped cigarette ashes on the floor. I read my notes to Dali during a trip to Spain, and he was intrigued; there had to be some sort of film there, but how could we do it?

  Clearly, it was a question of introductions. When I got back to Paris, Zervos from the Cahiers d’Art put me in touch with Georges-Henri Rivière, who offered to introduce me to his friends the de Noailles, who had apparently “adored” Un Chien andalou. As a good surrealist, I figured one couldn’t expect much from aristocrats.

  “But you’re wrong,” said both Zervos and Rivière. “They’re marvelous people, and you must get to know them!”

  In the end, I agreed to have dinner, along with Georges and Nora Auric, at their mansion on the place des Etats-Unis, a jewel of a house which contained an incredible art collection.

  “Our proposal,” Charles de Noailles said to me after dinner as we sat in front of the fire, “is that you make a twenty-minute film. You’ll have complete freedom to do whatever you want. There is only one condition: we have an agreement with Stravinsky to write the music for it.”

  “Sorry,” I replied, “but can you imagine me collaborating with someone who’s always falling to his knees and beating his breast?” (That’s what people were saying about Stravinsky.)