"My Last Breath", Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel (1900-83) was a Spanish filmmaker, born in Calanda (whose drums he used for the soundtracks of his films, such as Nazarín (1959)), where he had a Catholic education, which to a greater or lesser extent is satirized in his films. In Paris, he made contact with the surrealist movement, where the friendship he formed with Salvador Dalí led to the creation of two controversial films with Freudian interpretations, Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930). In Spain, Mexico and France, he created his body of work, essentially marked by criticisms of the bourgeoisie with its hypocrisies and neuroses, analyzing humorously the attachment it shows to patriarchy and Catholicism in successive tortuous repressions of desire, where there is no lack of a delicious fetish for legs and feet. Some of his most acclaimed films: Los Olvidados (1950, particularly marked by its social realism), Él (1953), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Belle du Jour (1967), Tristana (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974)…
Mon Dernier soupir (My Last Sigh, 1983, My Last Breath, 1994), published a year before his death, is his autobiography. In it, Buñuel, confronted with the imminent loss of memory and vision, retells the most remarkable events of his life. His childhood in a college of Jesuits, his friendship with Dalí and the purpose of surrealism, the period in which he worked in Hollywood, the discovery of the Marquis de Sade, anecdotes from the production of his movies, among other things, all this and much more help to make this book a crepuscular work of a man confronted with his own mortality, and one of the best sources to understand Buñuel's cinema.
Excerpts:
"You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all, just as an intelligence without the possibility of expression is not really an intelligence. Our memory is our coherence, our reason, our feeling, even our action. Without it, we are nothing."
"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.)"
"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 revolution, 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."
"As I drift toward my last sigh I often imagine a final joke. I convoke around my deathbed my friends who are confirmed atheists, as I am. Then a priest, whom I have summoned, arrives; and to the horror of my friends I make my confession, ask for absolution for my sins, and receive extreme unction. After which I turn over on my side and expire.
But will I have the strength to joke at that moment?"
Link to the complete book in PDF:
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