by Luis Bunuel
De Noailles’s reaction was totally unexpected, and earned him my lasting admiration.
“You’re quite right,” he said. “You and Stravinsky would never get along. You choose your composer, and then go make your film. We’ll find another project for Igor.”
I accepted, collected an advance, and went to join Dali in Figueras.
When I arrived in Figueras, it was Christmas 1929. At first, all I could hear were angry shouts; then suddenly the door flew open and, purple with rage, Dali’s father threw his son out, calling him every name in the book. Dali screamed back while his father pointed to him and swore that he hoped never to see that pig in his house again. The rage of the elder Dali was perfectly understandable; it seems that on one of his paintings then at a show in Barcelona, Dali had written—in black ink and large, sloppy letters—“I spit joyfully on my mother’s portrait”!
Banished from Figueras, Dali and I went to his house in Cadaqués, where we began to work. After a couple of days, however, it was obvious that the magical rapport we’d had during Un Chien andalou was gone. Perhaps it was already Gala’s influence. In any case, we couldn’t agree on anything; we found each other’s suggestions impossible, and the vetoes were fast and furious. In the end, we separated amicably, and I wrote the screenplay alone, at the de Noailles’ in Hyères. They left me entirely to my own devices during the day, and in the evening I read them what I’d written. Through it all, they never voiced a single objection; they found everything “exquisite and delicious.”
In its final version, the film ran for an hour, much longer than Chien andalou. Dali sent me several ideas, and one of them at least found its way into the film: A man with a rock on his head is walking in a public garden. He passes a statue. The statue also has a rock on its head!
“It looks like an American movie,” he told me, which was Dali’s idea of a compliment.
The shooting schedule was meticulously set up so as not to waste time or money. My fiancée, Jeanne, served as the accountant. When I gave Charles de Noailles my list of expenses after the film was finished, we came in under budget. He left the sheets on his desk when we went in to dinner; later in the evening, I saw the charred pages and realized that he’d burned the accounts. It was a beautiful and generous gesture, the more so since it was done in private; I admired this lack of ostentation more than any other of his admirable qualities.
L’Age d’or was shot at the Billancourt studios, while Eisenstein was making Romance sentimentale on the neighboring set. I’d met my male lead, Gaston Modot, a guitar player and hispanophile, in Montparnasse; Lya Lys, the female lead, had been sent to me by an agent, along with Elsa Kuprine, the daughter of a Russian writer. (I can’t remember now why I chose Lya.) As in Chien andalou, Duverger was my cameraman and Marval the production manager. (Marval also played one of the bishops who are tossed out the window.) A Russian did the sets for the interiors at the studio, and the exteriors were shot in Catalonia, near Cadaqués, and in the outskirts of Paris. Max Ernst played the bandit chief; Pierre Prévert, the sick bandit; and Jacques Prévert, the man walking down the street. Among the guests in the salon scene are Valentine Hugo, tall and handsome, standing next to a small man with a very large mustache—the famous Spanish ceramist Artigas, a friend of Picasso. (The Italian embassy thought this character was a reference to King Victor Emmanuel, also diminutive, and filed a complaint.)
Although there were problems with several of the actors, particularly the Russian émigré who played the orchestra leader (and not a very good one at that), I was delighted with the statue, which had been made especially for the film. Paul Eluard did the voice-over, the one saying: “Put your head here … it’s cooler on the pillow.” (L’Age d’or was the second or third sound film made in France.) And Lionel Salem, the Christ-role specialist, played the Duc de Blangis in the last part of the movie, as an hommage to de Sade.
I haven’t seen L’Age d’or since it was made, so I can’t really say what I think of it. Although Dali compared it to American films (undoubtedly from a technical point of view), he later wrote that his intentions “in writing the screenplay” were to expose the shameful mechanisms of contemporary society. For me, it was a film about passion, l’amour fou, the irresistible force that thrusts two people together, and about the impossibility of their ever becoming one.
While we were making L’Age d’or, the surrealists attacked a nightclub on the boulevard Edgar Quinet which had unwisely taken its name from the title of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. The surrealists all had a passionate veneration for the works of Lautréamont. I was excused from this exercise because, as a foreigner, I risked serious trouble with the police by participating in an assault on a public place. The action turned into a national scandal; the club was ransacked and Aragon received a knife wound. A Rumanian journalist who’d written a favorable review of Un Chien andalou was present at the fray, but this time he objected strenuously to the surrealists’ tactics. (When he showed up on the set at Billancourt two days later, I had him thrown out.)
The first screening was attended only by close friends and took place at the de Noailles’, who once again said, in their British accents, that they found the film “exquisite and delicious.” Shortly afterward, they organized another screening in the morning at the Panthéon theatre, this time for the tout-Paris. I wasn’t there, but Juan Vicens told me that Marie-Laure and Charles de Noailles stood at the door shaking hands and smiling and kissing all the guests. At the end of the show, they resumed their positions to shake hands goodbye, but also to hear what everyone had to say. Apparently, their guests left quickly, and in total silence.
The day after, Charles de Noailles was expelled from the Jockey Club. Apparently, the Church also threatened to excommunicate him; his mother had to go to Rome to negotiate with the Pope. Like Chien, L’Age d’or opened officially at Studio 28, where it played to packed houses for six days. The Camelots du Roi, the Jeunesses Patriotiques, and the right-wing press, however, attacked the theatre in full battle dress, lacerating the paintings at the surrealist exhibit in the foyer and smashing the chairs. (In the annals of Parisian cultural history, the episode is still known as “the scandal of L’Age d’or.”) A week later, Police Chief Chiappe closed the theatre; the film was censored, and remained so for fifty years. It could be seen only at private screenings and in cinémathèques. Finally, it opened in New York in 1980 and was shown again in Paris in 1981.
I saw the de Noailles each time I returned to Paris. They never blamed me for any of the trouble with the film; in fact, they were delighted that the surrealists received it so enthusiastically. I remember one of their parties in 1933 at Hyères where all of the artists invited were told to do whatever they wanted. Fearing trouble, Dali and Crevel declined the invitation; but Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric, Igor Markevitch, and Henri Sauguet accepted. Each composed and conducted a piece at the municipal theatre; Cocteau designed the programs, and Christian Bérard created costumes for all those who wanted to come in disguise.
Meanwhile, Breton was forever urging all of us to produce, so I decided to take him up on it and write a text in an hour. The finished product was called Une Girafe; Unik corrected my French, and Giacometti, who’d just joined the group, agreed to go down to Hyères with me and cut a life-size giraffe out of pasteboard. Each of the giraffe’s spots was attached by hinges and could be opened easily by hand. Inside each spot I wrote a series of sentences which if placed end to end, and acted upon, would have produced a four-hundred-thousand-dollar spectacle. (The full text was published later in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution.) One spot described “an orchestra of one hundred musicians playing Die Walküre in a basement”; another simply stated “Christ is laughing hysterically.”
We set up the giraffe in the garden of the Abbaye St.-Bernard on the de Noailles estate; and before going in to dinner, each guest was allowed to climb a ladder and read the spots. After coffee, Giacometti and I wandered back out into
the garden, only to discover that our work of art had vanished without a trace! Had this been one scandal too many? (I still have no idea what happened to it, and, oddly enough, Charles and Marie-Laure never once mentioned it to me.)
The de Noailles’ house party continued for several days, until finally Roger Desormière, the conductor, left for Monte Carlo to conduct the first performance of the new Ballets Russes. He invited me to come along, and a large group of guests escorted us to the station.
“Watch out for the ballerinas,” one of them warned me. “They’re young, they’re innocent, they earn next to nothing, and at least one of them always winds up pregnant.”
During the two-hour trip, I lapsed into my habitual fantasies—this time of a bevy of dancers in black stockings sitting side by side on a row of chairs, facing me, like a harem, awaiting my commands. When I pointed to one, she stood up and approached meekly, until I suddenly changed my mind. I wanted another one, just as submissive. Rocked by the movement of the train, I found no obstacles to my erotic daydreams.
As usual, the reality was somewhat different. One of the dancers was Desormière’s special friend, and after the first performance we decided to go to a nightclub for a drink. A very pretty White Russian ballerina was found for me, and, once at the club, everything seemed to be proceeding quite smoothly. Desormière and his girlfriend went home early, leaving me alone with my beautiful ballerina; but, true to form, I was seized by that awkwardness which seemed an inevitable part of my relationships with women. Suddenly there I was, launching into an intense political discussion about Russia, communism, and the revolution. The dancer made it perfectly clear that she was vehemently anti-Communist; in fact, she had no hesitation in talking about the crimes committed by the current regime. I lost my temper and called her a dirty reactionary; we argued for a long time until finally I gave her money for a cab and left in a turmoil. Later, of course, I was filled with remorse, as I had so often been in the past.
DURING this period, there were so many surrealist capers that it’s difficult to decide which to describe, but I remember well the day in 1930 when Sadoul and Jean Caupenne were sitting reading their newspapers in a café somewhere in the provinces. One of the items in the paper concerned the results of a contest at the military academy of Saint-Cyr. The first-prize winner was someone named Keller, and as they read, both were struck by the same notion. There they were, totally at loose ends, all alone in the country, bored to tears with nothing to do, and suddenly they heard themselves saying, “What if we write this idiot a letter?”
No sooner said than done. The waiter brought pen and paper, and our two surrealists composed one of the most eloquently insulting letters in the history of the movement. It included such unforgettable lines as: “We spit on the tricolore. With your own soldiers in revolt, we’ll spill the guts of every officer in the French army. And should they force us to fight, we’ll serve under the glorious pointed helmets of the Germans.”
When the prize winner received the letter, he turned it over to the director of the academy, who in turn gave it to General Gouraud. At the same time, it was published in Le Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution. The scandal rocked the country; Sadoul was expelled from France altogether, while Caupenne was hauled off to jail. The fathers of both men had to apologize to army headquarters in Paris, yet even this wasn’t enough. Saint-Cyr demanded a public apology. Sadoul left France (the ever-generous de Noailles gave him four thousand francs), but rumor had it that Caupenne got down on his knees and begged forgiveness in the presence of the entire student body. When I think back on this story, I can still see the sadness and vulnerability in Breton’s eyes when he told me so many years later that no one could be scandalized anymore.
During this time, I came to know many writers and painters who flirted briefly with the movement, as well as others who went their way alone—painters like Fernand Léger, whom I often ran into in Montparnasse, and André Masson, who rarely came to meetings but maintained friendly relations with the group. The real surrealist painters, however, were Dali, Tanguy, Arp, Miró, Magritte, and Max Ernst. The last, who already belonged to the Dada movement, was a close friend of mine. The surrealist call had found him in Germany, as it had Man Ray in the States. Ernst told me that before the formation of the surrealist group, he, Arp, and Tzara were attending a gallery opening in Zurich. Since he’d always found the idea of child perversion seductive, he’d asked a little girl to come up on the stage in her first communion dress, hold up a lighted taper, and recite a hardcore pornographic text. Of course, she didn’t understand a word of it, but the scandal was considerable, and very satisfying.
Ernst was very handsome; he had the power and majesty of an eagle and, in fact, had eloped during a dinner party with Marie-Berthe, the sister of the scriptwriter Jean Aurenche, who played a small part in L’Age d’or. One year, Ernst spent his vacation in the same village as the darling of Parisian high society, Angeles Ortiz, who’d made more conquests than he could count. It seems that Ortiz and Ernst fell in love with the same woman, and after a short contest Ortiz emerged victorious. A short time later, Breton and Eluard came to see me on the rue Pascal, claiming that Ernst had accused me of helping Ortiz win the lady. On behalf of Max, who was waiting on the corner, they demanded an explanation. I knew absolutely nothing about any of it and replied that I’d certainly be the last person to give Ortiz any advice about how to seduce women.
Then there was André Derain, tall, well built, and very popular, who remained somewhat separate from the group. He was much older than I—at least twenty years—and often used to talk to me about the Paris Commune. He was the first to tell me about men being executed during the fierce repression led by the king’s soldiers, simply because they had had calluses on their hands (the stigmata of the working class).
I was also close to Roger Vitrac, whom Breton and Eluard didn’t much like, and to André Thirion, the most political member of the group. I can still hear Eluard warning me that as far as Thirion was concerned, “the only thing he cares about is politics.” Coups d’état were very much in vogue at the time, and Thirion was predicting that the Spanish monarchy wasn’t long for this world. He used to interrogate me about geographical details—wooded paths, coastline contours—so that he could add them to his maps. (Needless to say, I wasn’t much help.)
Thirion later wrote a book about this period in history called Révolutionnaires sans révolution, which I very much liked. Of course, he gave himself the starring role (something I suppose we all tend to do, albeit often unconsciously) and revealed some unnecessarily embarrassing personal information. (On the other hand, I whole-heartedly endorse what he wrote about André Breton.) After the war, Sadoul told me that Thirion had “betrayed” the cause; as a Gaullist, he was responsible for the subway fare increases.
It was Jacques Prévert who introduced me to Georges Bataille, the author of the infamous Histoire de l’œil, who’d asked to meet me because of the outrageous eye scene in Chien andalou. We all had dinner together. Bataille’s wife, Sylvia, one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen, later married Jacques Lacan. Breton, however, found Bataille vulgar and materialistic, and I thought he had a hard face that looked as if it never smiled.
I’m often asked whatever happened to surrealism in the end. It’s a tough question, but sometimes I say that the movement was successful in its details and a failure in its essentials. Breton, Eluard, and Aragon are among the best French writers in this century; their books have prominent positions on all library shelves. The work of Ernst, Magritte, and Dali is famous, high-priced, and hangs prominently in museums. There’s no doubt that surrealism was a cultural and artistic success; but these were precisely the areas of least importance to most surrealists. Their aim was not to establish a glorious place for themselves in the annals of art and literature, but to change the world, to transform life itself. This was our essential purpose, but one good look around is evidence enough of our failure.
Needless
to say, any other outcome was impossible. Today, we see the place of surrealism in the world as infinitesimal. Like the earth itself, devoured by monumental dreams, we were nothing—just a small group of insolent intellectuals who argued interminably in cafés and published a journal; a handful of idealists, easily divided where action was concerned. And yet my three-year sojourn in the exalted—and yes, chaotic—ranks of the movement changed my life. I treasure that access to the depths of the self which I so yearned for, that call to the irrational, to the impulses that spring from the dark side of the soul. It was the surrealists who first launched this appeal with a sustained force and courage, with insolence and playfulness and an obstinate dedication to fight everything repressive in the conventional wisdom. Where these aspects of the movement are concerned, I see nothing to repudiate.
In fact, I’d even say that most surrealist intuitions were correct—for example, their attack on the notion of work, that cornerstone of bourgeois civilization, as something sacrosanct. The surrealists were the first to reveal the falseness of this ideal, to declare that salaried work was fundamentally humiliating. In Tristana, Don Lope echoes this attitude when he says to the young mute:
“Poor workers! First they’re cuckolded, and, as if that weren’t enough, then they’re beaten! Work’s a curse, Saturno. I say to hell with the work you have to do to earn a living! That kind of work does us no honor; all it does is fill up the bellies of the pigs who exploit us. But the work you do because you like to do it, because you’ve heard the call, you’ve got a vocation—that’s ennobling! We should all be able to work like that. Look at me, Saturno—I don’t work. And I don’t care if they hang me, I won’t work! Yet I’m alive! I may live badly, but at least I don’t have to work to do it!”
Certain parts of Don Lope’s speech come right out of Galdós; but where Galdós was criticizing his character for his laziness, I’m praising him. The surrealists were the first to sense that the work ethic had begun to tremble on its fragile foundations. Today, fifty years later, it’s almost banal to talk about the disintegration of a value that’s always been thought immutable. People everywhere are asking if they were really born merely to work; they’re beginning to envisage societies composed of idlers. (France even has a minister of leisure in the Cabinet.)