My Last Sigh

by Luis Bunuel

  Another enduring aspect of surrealism is my discovery of the profound conflict between the prevailing moral code and my own personal morality, born of instinct and experience. Until I became part of the movement, I never imagined such warfare, but now I see it as an indispensable condition for life itself. More than the artistic innovations or the refinement of my tastes and ideas, the aspect of surrealism that has remained a part of me all these years is a clear and inviolate moral exigency. This loyalty to a specific set of moral precepts isn’t easy to maintain; it’s constantly coming into conflict with egotism, vanity, greed, exhibitionism, facileness, and just plain forgetfulness. Sometimes I’ve succumbed to temptations and violated my own rules, but only, I think, in matters of small importance. My passage through the heart of the surrealist movement helped firm up my resolve, which is perhaps, at bottom, the essential thing.

  In May 1968 I found myself in Paris once again, checking locations for the filming of The Milky Way. One day, we suddenly came up against a barricade put together by students in the Latin Quarter, and in twenty-four hours Paris was turned upside down. I admired the work of Marcuse and agreed with everything he had to say about the consumer society and about the desperate need to redirect the sterile and dangerous course of our way of life. May 1968 was a series of extraordinary moments, not the least of which was seeing old surrealist slogans painted everywhere, slogans such as “All power to the imagination!” and “It is forbidden to forbid!”

  At this point, our work on the film had ground to a halt, and I found myself alone in Paris, like a curious but uneasy tourist. I didn’t know what to do with myself. Tear gas made my eyes sting when I crossed the boulevard St.-Michel. There were many things I just didn’t understand, like why the demonstrators were shouting “Mao! Mao!”—as if they really were demanding that France adopt a Maoist regime. Normally reasonable people lost their heads, and even Louis Malle, a very dear friend, became the leader of some action group. He spent his time organizing his troops for the final assault, and even ordering my son Juan-Luis to shoot the minute the cops turned the corner. (Had he obeyed, he would have been the only victim of the guillotine during this revolution.) The city was filled with serious debate as well as complete confusion. Everyone was seeking his own revolution with only his own small lantern for a guide. I told myself that if this had been happening in Mexico, it wouldn’t have lasted more than two hours, and there would surely have been a few hundred casualties to boot, which is exactly what happened, of course, in October on the Plaza de las Tres Culturas. And yet in Paris a week later, everything was back to normal, and the great, miraculously bloodless, celebration was over.

  In addition to the slogans, May 1968 had other things in common with the surrealist movement—the same ideological themes, the same verve, the same schisms and romance with illusions, and the same difficult choice between words and actions. Like me, the students talked a great deal but did very little; as Breton would have said, action had become just about as impossible as scandal. But even those who opted for terrorism used slogans similar to those of the 1920s—“The simplest surrealist gesture consists in going out into the street, gun in hand, and taking pot shots at the crowd!”

  (The symbolic significance of terrorism has a certain attraction for me: the idea of destroying the whole social order, the entire human species. On the other hand, I despise those who use terrorism as a political weapon in the service of some cause or other—those who kill people in Madrid, for instance, in order to focus attention on the problems in Armenia.)

  No, the terrorists I admire are those like the Bande à Bonnot; I understand people like Ascaso and Durutti who chose their victims carefully, or the French anarchists at the end of the nineteenth century—all those, in other words, who tried to blow up a world (and themselves along with it) that seemed to them unworthy of survival. Sometimes there’s a profound abyss between reality and my imagination—not exactly an unusual discrepancy, I’m sure; but I’ve never been a man of action. I’m simply incapable of imitating those people I so admire.

  As a footnote to surrealism, let me add that I remained a close friend of Charles de Noailles until the end. Whenever I went to Paris, we had lunch or dinner together. On my last visit, he invited me to the home where he’d first welcomed me fifty years before. This time, however, everything had changed. Marie-Laure was dead, the walls and shelves stripped of their treasures. Like me, Charles had become deaf. The two of us ate alone and spoke very little.

  11

  America

  IT WAS 1930, and L’Age d’or still hadn’t been shown. The de Noailles were away, but they gave me the key to their private projection room (the first for “talkies” in Paris) so that I could have a private screening for my surrealist friends. Before the film started, however, the group decided to sample the bar, and before long they were all roaring drunk, particularly Thirion and Tzara. In the end, whatever liquor was left was emptied into the sink, and despite the chaos the screening was a great success. (True to form, when the de Noailles returned a few days later, they never mentioned the empty bottles; all they wanted to know was how the movie had gone.)

  Thanks to my patrons, a representative from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer managed to see the film and, like so many Americans, was delighted to find himself on such good terms with the aristocracy. Afterwards, he insisted I drop by and see him at his office. I declined as impolitely as I could, but he was adamant, and in the end I reluctantly agreed.

  “Saw your movie,” he announced when I walked in, “and I’ve got to tell you I didn’t like it. Didn’t understand the first thing about it, if you really want to know, but somehow I can’t get it out of my mind. So let me offer you a deal. You go to Hollywood and learn some good American technical skills. I pay your way, you stay six months, you make two hundred and fifty dollars a month, and all you do is learn how to make a movie. When you get it, we’ll see what we can do with you.”

  Dumbfounded, I asked for forty-eight hours to think it over. That evening, I was supposed to go to a meeting at Breton’s to discuss my trip to Kharkov with Aragon and Sadoul for the Congress of Intellectuals for the Revolution; but when I told everyone about the MGM proposal, they had no objections. And so in December 1930 I said goodbye to France and boarded the Leviathan in Le Havre.

  The trip was marvelous, partly because of a Spanish comedian named Tono and his wife, Leonor, who were making the crossing with me. Tono had been hired by Hollywood to work on Spanish versions of American films. When talkies first appeared in 1927, the movies instantly lost their international character; in a silent film all you had to do was change the titles, but with talkies you had to shoot the same scenes with the same lighting, but in different languages and with actors from different countries. This, in fact, is one of the reasons so many writers and actors began their hegiras to Hollywood; they’d all been hired to write scripts and play them in their own languages.

  Long before I arrived, I was in love with America. I loved everything—the styles and customs, the movies, the skyscrapers, even the policemen’s uniforms. I spent five dazzling days at the Algonquin in New York, followed everywhere I went by an Argentine interpreter, since I still didn’t speak a word of English. Then I took the train for Los Angeles with Tono and Leonor. As we sped across the country, America seemed to me to be the most beautiful place in the world. When we finally reached L.A., we were met by three Spanish writers who’d already been hired by the studios—Edgar Neville, Lopez Rubio, and Ugarte—and were immediately hustled into a waiting car and driven to the Nevilles’.

  “You’re going to have dinner with the man you’ll be working for,” Ugarte told me on the way.

  At seven that evening, I did indeed meet a gorgeous young woman and a gentleman with gray hair who was introduced as my supervisor. (I also ate avocados for the first time in my life.) Not until dinner was over did I realize who the man was—Charlie Chaplin—and the beautiful woman with him was Georgia Hale, the star of The Gold Rush. Chaplin k
new no Spanish whatsoever, but claimed to adore Spain, although his idea of the country was strictly folkloric, composed as it was of foot stomping and a lot of olés.

  The following day, I moved in with Ugarte on Oakhurst Drive in Beverly Hills. My mother had, once again, given me some money, and the first thing I did was to buy a car (a Ford), a rifle, and a Leica. When my first salary checks arrived, I thought Hollywood, and Los Angeles in general, close to paradise.

  A couple of days after my arrival, I met a producer-director named Levine, one of Thalberg’s right-hand men, and Frank Davis, who was theoretically in charge of my career.

  “Where do you want to start?” he asked me, clearly puzzled by the vague terms of my contract. “You want editing, scriptwriting, shooting, set design?”

  “Shooting,” I answered.

  “Okay. We’ve got twenty-four sets. Pick any one you want, we’ll get you a pass, and you can do whatever it is you have to do.”

  I chose the set where Greta Garbo was making a film; and, pass in hand, I walked in cautiously, careful to stay on the sidelines. The makeup men were fluttering around the star, getting her ready for a close-up, but despite my discretion Garbo spotted me. She signaled to a man with a pencil-line mustache, whispered something, and before I knew it, he was standing in front of me demanding to know just what I thought I was doing. I didn’t know what to say, since I hardly understood what he’d said. In no time at all I found myself back out on the lot.

  From that day on, I stayed quietly at home, never going to the studio except to collect my Saturday paycheck. For the next four months nobody missed me or took any notice of me at all. From time to time I did emerge—once to play a bit part as a barman (the role was made to order) in the Spanish version of a film, once for a studio tour. I remember marveling on the back lot at an entire half of a ship which had been miraculously reconstructed in an enormous swimming pool. Everything was set up for a shipwreck scene—huge water tanks were ready to spill their contents down colossal toboggan runs onto the floundering vessel. I was goggle-eyed at the extraordinarily complex machinery and the superb quality of the special effects. In these studios, everything seemed possible; had they wanted to, they could have reconstructed the universe.

  During this strange time, I met several mythical characters. I loved having my shoes shined in the studio foyer and watching the famous faces go by. One day Mack Swain (Ambrosio, as he was called in Spain)—that huge comedian with the incredibly black eyes who often played opposite Chaplin—sat down next to me, and another evening I found myself sitting next to Ben Turpin in a movie theatre. (He squinted in real life exactly the way he did on the screen.)

  In the end, however, I was overwhelmed by curiosity and went to have a look at the main MGM set, where the master himself, Louis B. Mayer, was scheduled to make a speech to all his employees. There were several hundred of us sitting on rows of benches facing a platform where the big boss was seated in the midst of his chief collaborators. Everyone was there—secretaries, technicians, actors, stagehands—and that day I had an epiphany about America. After several directors had made speeches to great applause, Mayer got to his feet and began to speak. You could have heard a pin drop.

  “My friends,” he began, “I’ve been thinking long and hard, and now I feel I can tell you the secret ingredient in MGM’s success and prosperity. It’s really a very simple formula.…”

  An expectant hush had fallen; the tension was positively palpable. Mayer turned around, picked up a piece of chalk, and slowly and deliberately wrote on the blackboard in huge capital letters: COOPERATION. Then he sat down to a burst of wild, and apparently sincere, applause.

  I was beside myself; the whole scene was beyond me.

  In addition to these enlightening forays into the world of the cinema, I went for long drives in the country at the wheel of my Ford, sometimes as far as the desert. Each day I saw new faces and met new people: Dolores Del Rio, the French director Jacques Feyder. The rest of the time I stayed at home, reading newspaper accounts from my French friends of the L’Age d’or scandal in Paris.

  Every Saturday, Chaplin invited our little group of Spanish refugees out for dinner. In fact, I often went to his house on the hillside to play tennis, swim, or use the sauna. Every once in a while, Eisenstein would drop by; he was getting ready to go to Mexico to make Qué viva Mexico! I remember trembling through Potemkin, but being outraged by the pretentiousness of Romance sentimentale and its absurd shots of a gigantic white piano in a wheat field and swans floating in the studio pond. (I used to comb the cafés in Montparnasse looking for the man just so I could slap him.) Later, he claimed that Romance was really the work of his co-director Alexandrov, an outrageous lie—I watched him shoot that scene himself with the swans at Billancourt. Seeing him in Hollywood, I somehow forgot my anger while he and I talked and drank long, cool drinks alongside Chaplin’s pool.

  At Paramount I met Josef von Sternberg, who invited me onto the back lot while he was shooting a film that ostensibly took place in China; the place was swarming with crowds of extras who floated down the canals, filled the bridges, and jostled each other in the narrow streets. What was more upsetting, however, was to see his set designer positioning the cameras while Sternberg seemed content just to shout “Action!” (So much for auteurs.) In fact, most of the directors I watched seemed little more than lackeys who did the bidding of the studios that had hired them; they had no say in how the film was to be made, or even how it was to be edited.

  In my frequent moments of idleness, I devoted myself to a bizarre document—a synoptic table of the American cinema. There were several movable columns set up on a large piece of pasteboard; the first for “ambience” (Parisian, western, gangster, war, tropical, comic, medieval, etc.), the second for “epochs,” the third for “main characters,” and so on. Altogether, there were four or five categories, each with a tab for easy maneuverability. What I wanted to do was show that the American cinema was composed along such precise and standardized lines that, thanks to my system, anyone could predict the basic plot of a film simply by lining up a given setting with a particular era, ambience, and character. It also gave particularly exact information about the fates of heroines. In fact, it became such an obsession that Ugarte, who lived upstairs, knew every combination by heart.

  One evening, Sternberg’s producer invited me to a sneak preview of Dishonored, with Marlene Dietrich, a spy story which had been rather freely adapted from the life of Mata Hari. After we’d dropped Sternberg off at his house, the producer said to me:

  “A terrific film, don’t you think?”

  “Terrific,” I replied, with a significant lack of gusto.

  “What a director! What a terrific director!”

  “Yes.”

  “And what an original subject!”

  Exasperated, I ventured to suggest that Sternberg’s choice of subject matter was not exactly distinguished; he was notorious for basing his movies on cheap melodramas.

  “How can you say that!” the producer cried. “That’s a terrific movie! Nothing trite about it at all! My God, it ends with the star being shot! Dietrich! He shoots Dietrich! Never been done before!”

  “I’m sorry,” I replied, “I’m really sorry, but five minutes into it, I knew she’d be shot!”

  “What are you talking about?” the producer protested. “I’m telling you that’s never been done before in the entire history of the cinema. How can you say you knew what was going to happen? Don’t be ridiculous. Believe me, Buñuel, the public’s going to go crazy. They’re not going to like this at all. Not at all!”

  He was getting very excited, so to calm him down I invited him in for a drink. Once he was settled, I went upstairs to wake Ugarte.

  “You have to come down,” I told him. “I need you.”

  Grumbling, Ugarte staggered downstairs half-asleep, where I introduced him to the producer.

  “Listen,” I said to him. “You have to wake up. It’s about a movie.”


  “All right,” he replied, his eyes still not quite open.

  “Ambience—Viennese.”

  “All right.”

  “Epoch—World War I.”

  “All right.”

  “When the film opens, we see a whore. It’s very clear she’s a whore. She’s rolling an officer in the street, she …”

  Ugarte stood up, yawned, waved his hand in the air, and started back upstairs to bed.

  “Don’t bother with any more,” he mumbled. “They shoot her at the end.”

  At Christmastime, Tono and his wife gave a dinner party for a dozen Spanish actors and screenwriters, as well as Chaplin and Georgia Hale. We all brought a present that was supposed to have cost somewhere between twenty and thirty dollars, hung them on the tree, and began drinking. (Despite Prohibition, there was, of course, no shortage of alcohol.) Rivelles, a well-known actor at the time, recited a grandiloquent Spanish poem by Marquina, to the glory of the soldiers in Flanders. Like all patriotic displays, it made me nauseous.

  “Listen,” I whispered to Ugarte and an actor named Peña at the dinner table, “when I blow my nose, that’s the signal to get up. Just follow me and we’ll take that ridiculous tree to pieces!”

  Which is exactly what we did, although it’s not easy to dismember a Christmas tree. In fact, we got a great many scratches for some rather pathetic results, so we resigned ourselves to throwing the presents on the floor and stomping on them. The room was absolutely silent; everyone stared at us, openmouthed.

  “Luis,” Tono’s wife finally said. “That was unforgivable.”