It seems to be universally agreed that Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) is the greatest Spanish-language filmmaker we’ve ever had, but getting a clear fix on his peripatetic career isn’t easy. The authorized biography, John Baxter’s 1994 Bunuel, isn’t available in the U.S., and the deplorable English translation of Bunuel’s autobiography, My Last Sigh (1983), is actually an unacknowledged condensation of the original French text. Better are an interview book translated from Spanish, Objects of Desire, and a recently published translation of selected writings by Bunuel in both Spanish and French, An Unspeakable Betrayal, which includes his priceless, poetic early film criticism.
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He made 31 films in all, and a dozen of these—ten features and two shorts—are showing over the next couple of weeks, November 17 through 26, at Facets Multimedia Center as part of a series celebrating the centennial of his birth that’s being presented by the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, the Mexican Cultural and Educational Institute of Chicago, and the Instituto Cervantes. Also part of the series is Ramon Gieling’s The Prisoners of Bunuel, a Dutch documentary about the village where Bunuel’s only documentary, Las hurdes (Land Without Bread, 1932), was made and how its present inhabitants view the film; a U.S. premiere, Gieling’s film is showing at City North 14 on Thursday, November 16, to launch the series. There will also be personal appearances by Silvia Pinal—the female lead of Viridiana (1961) and a prominent character in The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Simon of the Desert—and a beautiful silent avant-garde feature by Jean Epstein, The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), will conclude the series.
Inexplicably, The Fall of the House of Usher is described in the program as a film co-directed by Epstein and Bunuel, which contradicts every credible biographical source I know of. Some references credit Bunuel as assistant director, though according to Bunuel’s memoirs, he was only a second assistant—in charge of the studio interiors—and got fired after he made a derogatory remark to Epstein about filmmaker Abel Gance, whose wife was the film’s costar. I certainly don’t regret the inclusion of Epstein’s masterpiece in the program, since contemporary audiences get so few chances to see it. But it shouldn’t be treated as part of Bunuel’s oeuvre, especially since it was made before he embarked on his own first film, Un chien andalou (which was itself codirected, by Salvador Dali), later the same year.
To some extent, fakery of one sort or another figures in just about every documentary and docudrama ever made. (According to Alan Raymond, who shot the final sequence of the recently re-released Gimme Shelter, Mick Jagger was only pretending to watch a killing at the Altamont Stones concert on the editing machine, because on that particular day the footage couldn’t be found.) Gieling brings up this paradox himself when he shows us the village mayor glimpsing Gieling’s initial arrival in a van from his office window—a camera angle that obviously necessitated another camera—and then presents the mayor’s welcome in two separate, successive takes. But apart from such bits of playfulness—including his leaving a bust of Bunuel with the villagers before he leaves—he winds up having more to say about the village today than about Bunuel or his film. It’s truly a pity that Land Without Bread isn’t being shown alongside The Prisoners of Bunuel, which offers only excerpts of the 27-minute short as it’s being shown in the village square (with English narration and Spanish subtitles, as it happens). Part of what Bunuel is saying with it is that one can’t count on finding enlightenment or even simple common sense anywhere. That one has to go to Facets on a different day to see the film Prisoners of Buñuel is about seems to bear out this piece of wisdom.
For those who might want to explore the impact vanguard 60s filmmaking had on Bunuel’s work, I’d heartily recommend two companion films, black comedies made a decade apart in Mexico and France: The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. The first feature tracks the creepy and uncanny occurrences that transpire when the wealthy guests at a fancy dinner party inexplicably find themselves unable to leave the room; the second, made in color and with slicker production values, follows a similarly wealthy group of individuals as they repeatedly try and fail to have a meal together. Both films are hilarious, corrosive follow-ups to such 60s art-house favorites about the glamorous rich as La dolce vita, Last Year at Marienbad, and La notte, and they exhibit the kind of stylistic freedom found in the contemporary films of Jean-Luc Godard. The Discreet Charm, for instance, resembles a kind of global newspaper, mixing in everything from wry references to The French Connection to mordant asides about “Miranda,” an imaginary South American country that clearly stands for Franco’s Spain. The film also has some of Bunuel’s scariest dream sequences. It’s astonishing to recall that this picture actually won an Oscar for best foreign film of 1972. After it was nominated, a reporter in Mexico asked Bunuel if he thought it would win, and he characteristically replied, without missing a beat, “Of course. I’ve already paid the $25,000 they wanted. Americans may have their weaknesses, but they do keep their promises.”
