This I Believe: An A to Z of a Life

Buñuel

In 1950, while studying at the University of Geneva, I attended a film club in the city. It was there that I first saw Un Chien andalou by Luis Buñuel, presented by a gentleman who spoke to us of a reprobate filmmaker who had died in the Spanish Civil War. That was when I raised my hand to correct him, for Buñuel was alive and living in Mexico — in fact he had just finished Los olvidados, which was to be premiered that spring at Cannes.

Los olvidados arrived at the Cannes Film Festival despite the objections raised by the puritanical, chauvinistic bureaucrats in the Mexican government who considered the film to be “denigrating to Mexico.” Octavio Paz, who at the time was the secretary of the Mexican embassy in Paris, defied the official denunciation of the picture and personally distributed a lucid essay on Buñuel and his great film at the entrance to the Cannes Festival Palace. Buñuel never forgot this act of courage and generosity.

I met Buñuel while he was filming Nazarín in Cuautla. The cast included Rita Macedo, my first wife, as well as Marga López and the extraordinary Francisco Rabal, whose air of mystical remove and tender mercy magnificently sustained the fury and ultimate pain of the character of Galdós. The essence of Buñuel’s secret religiosity is patent in Nazarín. His famous quote, “I’m an atheist, thank God,” may be an amusing boutade, but it was also a necessary disguise for a creator who personified, as no one else could, the unsettling declaration of Pascal’s Christ: “Thou wouldst not seek me if thou hadst not found me.” In this light, Buñuel was part of one of the most compelling, if uncategorizable, intellectual tendencies of the twentieth century: that of religious temperament without religious faith. Camus, Mauriac, and Graham Greene, to varying degrees of intensity, bear witness to this inclination, as do filmmakers like Ingmar Bergman, a Protestant to his own chagrin, and Luis Buñuel, an atheist but for the grace of God.

Has anyone ever struggled so valiantly with the drama of Christian conscience as Buñuel did in Nazarín and Viridiana? And has anyone arrived at such bitter realizations regarding the deformations of institutionalized faith and the abuses of power invoked in the name of Christ as did Buñuel in L’Age d’or, Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert) and La Voie lactée (The Milky Way)? Heresy is the theme of this last film, which reminds us that the word heretic, in etymological terms, means “he who chooses.” A brief but brilliant scene from Tristana reveals the protagonist in a moment of indecision as she faces two identical chickpeas in a casserole dish. At times, Buñuel makes his decisions categorically: “The horror I feel toward science and technology brings me back to the detestable belief in God,” says a character in Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty), as Buñuel whispers in my ear, “That is who I am.”

Patriotism, chauvinism, and political ideologies were among the things Buñuel found intolerable. He did, however, tend to qualify some of his anarchist commandments. For Buñuel, anarchism was a marvelous but ultimately impractical idea. Its only altar was that of pure thought. As an idea, blowing up the Louvre was splendid, but in practice it was nothing less than atrocious. Buñuel, ever wise, was able to distinguish the freedom of imagination from the limitations of reality.

As a Surrealist, however, he did share the belief that the world could be liberated simultaneously by art and revolution. And as revolution succumbed to political terror, Buñuel used tradition to lend startling weight to Surrealist creation. Oddly enough, French Surrealism never went beyond the realm of ideas, magnificently articulated by André Breton, who wrote in a language as classic as that of the Duc de Saint-Simon. The Spaniard Buñuel and the German Max Ernst, however, discovered the anchor of the unconscious along with Surrealist illusion and liberation in their own cultural roots. For Ernst, it was through German fairy tales and legends, while for Buñuel, it happened through the picaresque — Fernando de Rojas, Cervantes, Goya, Valle-Inclán.

Fuelled by the culture of Spain, Buñuel liberated the gaze with a remarkable technique. He fills his films with medium and long shots, occasionally gray and monotonous, that suddenly reveal a convulsive detail through a deft, swift close-up: a skull inscribed on an insect’s head, blood burbling from a woman’s thighs, a crucifix that doubles as a switchblade, a chambermaid’s erotic ankle boots, an eye slit through the middle as a cloud moves past the face of the moon. . This dialectic between the world and its infinitesimal secrets is what allows Buñuel to create these climactic shots, true cinematic epiphanies in which passion sometimes rears its grotesque animal face (the hidden Catholic inside Buñuel saw St. Augustine’s more bestiarum act in the sexual relationship, although he did admit that the act “of love without sex is like an egg without salt”). Yet at other times, he recognizes natural instinct as the necessary condition of poetry. The grotesquely savage passion of the violently intertwined lovers in L’Age d’or. The incomparably dreamlike tenderness of the moment when the social castaways of El ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) abandon their anguish, pretensions, vocabulary, and treachery, united by the night, to succumb to the overwhelming beauty of the dreamworld. .

Just as Buñuel attacked the hypocrisy hidden beneath the trappings of false religious devotion, he also attacked what he perceived to be the alienation and insincerity of modern life— and not just the life of the bourgeoisie but that of the dispossessed as well. Clearly, it is far more delightful and tantalizing to observe the discreet charms of a group of bourgeois people who can never sit down to dinner than to contemplate the hideous cruelty of abandoned children in the slums of Mexico. Buñuel, as such, refused to ascribe any intrinsic virtue to the poor simply for the fact of their being poor, nor did he ascribe fatal vices to the rich simply for the fact of their being rich. As far as Buñuel was concerned, the human capacity to injure one’s brother transcended all social barriers. The diabolical blind man or the fearsome Jaibo of Los olvidados are as cruel as the perverse Fernando Rey victimizing Viridiana or Tristana, but there are also those who are equally victimized by the double feminine Medusa, the two faces of Conchita, in Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire), Buñuel’s final, masterful work of art.

In the end, Buñuel’s hero-heroine is an individual: Robinson Crusoe, Nazarín, Viridiana, Belle de Jour, and the chambermaid played by Jeanne Moreau. They each wage their battles through their solitude and incomprehension, but in the end, the only way they can save themselves is through solidarity. Alone on his island, Robinson shouts so that the echo of the mountains may provide him with company. Man Friday finally gives him the companionship he seeks, rescuing him from his solitude as well as a far more appalling fate: that of becoming master to a slave. Nazarín discovers that his lonely imitation of Christ permits him to perform acts of charity and also to receive it from others, though in the incongruous form of a pineapple. Viridiana must abandon her frustrating attempts at charity and finally join the Spanish trio of grifter, procuress, and saint, and from there, she is able to reawaken her Christian humanity. It is the prolific relationship between Buñuel’s personal vision and his camera’s eye, however, that most explicitly expresses the image of his art and his world. Catherine Deneuve, in Belle de Jour, finds the culmination of all her erotic fantasies in a brothel. But the four walls of this house of ill repute dissolve over and over again as the actress’s gaze, never frontal, always oblique, searches beyond the frame of the screen. It is a liberating gaze that constantly looks toward a world beyond, penetrating the walls of the brothel as well as those of the movie theater, transporting us to the exterior, social space that belongs to the others. And these others should not be taken lightly: one need look no further than Jeanne Moreau’s ironic, sovereign gaze in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (Diary of a Chambermaid). In this, the great actress’s greatest role, Moreau looks upon everything with ironic distance — an old man’s shoe fetish, the conventions of a wealthy home, the brutality of a servant — until at last she wraps them all up into one social and political whole. What Jeanne Moreau observes is nothing less than the rise of fascism in Europe.

A congenial man, incomparable friend, possessor of a singular sense of humor. I recall with intense affection the hours I spent with Buñuel in Mexico, Paris, and Venice, and regard them as among the great privileges of my life. Together we discovered that the essence of friendship lay in knowing how to be together without ever saying a word, in contemplating and assimilating the things we said before speaking again, always with a glass of buñueloni in hand. Recipe: half English gin and equal parts of Carpano and sweet vermouth.