Spanish surrealist Luis Bunuel directed The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeosie, a picture released in 1972. It is one of several well-regarded pictures made in France toward the end of the Bunuel’s career. Born in 1900, he died in 1983. Bunuel’s other films from this late flowering are The Phantom of Liberty and his last picture That Obscure Object of Desire. In an understated way, Bunuel is the most uncompromising of all directors, a man who never deviated from a rigorous and morally scrupulous aesthetic. He was the last of the real surrealists, although he would not have accepted that label – indeed, all attempts to characterize systematically the tenor of his imagination, or anyone’s imagination, would have been repugnant to him.
When it’s good...a Bunuel movie has a heady, haunting effect, like an exquisitely enjoyed meal, the weather of a foreign country, something private and inexpressible: a favorite pornographic book...
The luminous edge of the razor
Jackie Robinson, the baseball player credited with integrating the Major Leagues, appeared in a film made in 1950. That film is called The Jackie Robinson Story. It is cheaply made and woodenly acted. A chief flaw in the picture is the fact that Jackie Robinson is unconvincing playing Jackie Robinson. A better actor should have been hired to impersonate the baseball great. At the end of the movie, Jackie Robinson testifies before Congress on the dangers of Communism. "It is important for all Americans," Jackie Robinson tells the camera "to reject this dangerous ideology."
Surrealism is based on disjunction. At a trivial level, such disjunctions involve the collision between things that don’t belong together in the same frame of a picture or film: for instance, the decomposing donkeys freighting a grand piano to which two priests are tethered in Un Chien Andalou. Bunuel’s practice evolved far beyond these powerful, but simple images, made in the early thirties. By 1970, Bunuel had devised a way to make his surrealism integral to his pictures, a discordant presence vibrating throughout his films although mostly not overtly obvious.
The surrealist disjunction achieved in Bunuel’s late films has this effect: a completely lucid, nondescript and fluent narrative style is coupled with the portrayal of events that are absolutely non-narrative, that can’t be coherently assimilated to any kind of dramatic representation of a story. The effect is like that of suspenseful film noir techniques used to depict a still-life, for instance, a bouquet of flowers or a dinner setting. In this respect, Bunuel’s master is de Sade. The French writer is notorious for representing the most atrocious and violent fantasies in a measured, dignified prose style that is the very embodiment of Enlightenment serenity and calm.
Similarly, Bunuel portrays the most outrageous and inexplicable events in the style of a conventional TV sitcom – his interiors are usually well-lit and clearly defined, his special effects rudimentary and unconvincing, his actors merely bemused mannikins; there is no pretense toward beauty or meaning and no straining after significance: his late pictures, although competently made, are completely devoid of any kind of excess – except for the inexplicable and disturbing subject matter shown. Bunuel uses his intentionally inexpressive style to defeat any attempt to impose a thematic meaning on his material. He achieves this paradox – an intensely expressive art that is wholly undemonstrative – by several techniques. First, his pictures, although not exactly without plot, are extremely repetitious – the same general thing keeps happening over and over again. Bunuel avoids anything like a narrative arc – things begin in media res, but there is no progression, no rising action toward a climax and no resolution in denouement. The pictures just begin and end arbitrarily. He scrupulously avoids anything like psychological characterization – his bourgeois characters in The Discrete Charm are polite, well-mannered, and, more or less, devoid of any personality; they are ciphers representing their social class, characterized like medieval saints by one or two attributes, but, even, these emblematic features are inconsistent and not developed throughout the film. (One of the couples is very lustful until they cease to be; one of the women throws up when she drinks martinis – the point is established only to be abandoned.) Bunuel is careful not to privilege any image or sequence over any other part of the film. The way that a maid serves a meal is just as important as the image of a man carefully aiming his rifle at a woman that he believes to be a terrorist – no hierarchy of importance is imposed on the material: every shot is equally significant (or equally insignificant), lit in the same TV studio fashion, edited with the same nondescript precision. It is a cinema without highlights.
Bunuel’s friends characterized his late pictures as a "linked series of gags" – indeed, a movie like The Discrete Charm is more like a Monty Python show than a conventional seventies’ film. The effect is like watching a procession, a parade, a series of episodes sutured together but independent since they don’t cohere into narrative – it is like a tour, a walking trip to nowhere. Jean-Claude Carriere, Bunuel’s frequent collaborator on his late scripts, said that the films are "a narrow passage, a path that threads its way through many dangers." Bunuel described the process of making a movie as strictly linear – a film, he said, is "a silent procession of images through my brain." Like Hitchcock, Bunuel didn’t shoot a movie until he had imagined each image, and sequence of images in full detail. Then, he shot his pictures with unerring economy and efficiency, generally one-take per shot. Once ,Catherine Deneuve accused Bunuel of having committed a showy crane shot that she declared to be "beautiful." Bunuel told her that he was the enemy of all beauty and made an exception with that shot to his one-take method – he re-shot the sequence from the opposite angle making certain that nothing of any picturesque interest could possibly intrude on the image.
Surrealist disjunction is evident in Bunuel’s famous response to a question about whether he was an atheist. "I’m still an atheist, thank God," Bunuel responded. Three of his best friends were priests.
The Deep Blue
You can see the fireworks today. You can hear the boom of the ordinance. You can watch the morons celebrating in the street. They are always celebrating in the street.
Bunuel’s mother was an innkeeper’s daughter who married his father when she was 17. Bunuel pere, 45 when he was wed, was a war profiteer who had made his fortune shipping armaments in the Spanish Civil War. Little Don Luis was the eldest son, much-beloved by his mother – she financed his first films. The family was well-to-do and lived in a place called Calanda, a town that Bunuel said was wholly medieval when he was growing up.
In 1908, Bunuel told interviewers that the town’s ancient slumber ended when a traveling circus brought a cinema peep show to the village. Bunuel was astounded by the moving pictures. Later, he saw Fritz Lang’s Der Muede Tod ("Tired Death"), sometimes called Destiny, in Madrid. The movie made Bunuel want to be a film maker. When he was an old man, Bunuel saw Fritz Lang, who was even older, at a film festival, and excitedly begged him for an autograph.
Bunuel attended college in Madrid. On weekends, he went with his roommates, Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca, to Toledo where the young men drank wine and wandered around the ancient streets. Garcia Lorca, who was homosexual, was probably in love with Bunuel. Back in Madrid, a place that Bunuel said "had the best brothels in the world," Don Luis had no one with whom to go whoring. Several of best friends were priests, Garcia Lorca was gay, and Dali said to be "as asexual as a coffee table." Later, both Garcia Lorca and Bunuel despised Dali’s girlfriend, Gala. Once, Bunuel tried to strangle her.
In Calenda, the patron saint had lost his leg in a cart accident around 1623. The man’s limb had to be amputated but, shortly after, the surgery it grew back – something like the way a salamander is able to regenerate a missing leg. The patron’s saint feast is celebrated by men and boys pounding on drums. Bunuel was very deaf in his old age and said that this was because of the incessant drumming that he had endured when he was a little boy. (In most of his films, he has an episode that is scored to drums – this is his signature.)
In Los Olivados, Bunuel’s harrowing study of juvenile delinquency and poverty in Mexico City, a group of street kids beat up a legless man, rob him, and, then, send his push cart rolling down a steep hill while the unfortunate beggar shrieks and flails his arms like a turtle on his back. Noteworthy about the scene is Bunuel’s complete lack of empathy with the cripple – he is just as morally corrupt and vicious as the children who are tormenting him. The savage cruelty that flows like a vicious and destructive river through Bunuel’s films is motivated by human nature – people get what they deserve and what they deserve is pain and suffering.
When Bunuel’s father died, Don Luis celebrated by smoking his old man’s good Cuban cigars. But he liked his father, was impressed by his rigorously chauvinistic ways – women and girls ate only after the men – and imitated his good manners throughout his life.
A Republican
When Bunuel was in Hollywood – from 1944 to 1946 – the producers thought that his politics were suspicious. He was asked to explain to a government committee the nature of his politics. Bunuel proudly declared that he was a Republican. Some of the committee members were slightly affronted – Roosevelt was the President and the committee members, patronage government workers, were New Dealers, that is Democrats. Nonetheless, the Committee passed Bunuel as "probably loyal". None of them seem to have understood that Bunuel meant that he was Republican in the sense of opposing Franco’s nationalists and supporting the Spanish Republican cause against the Fascists.
But, even, this affiliation was a bit confusing. Bunuel had fled Spain during the Civil War in 1936, hidden out in Paris for awhile, and, then, taken a job at MOMA in New York. For awhile he roomed with Alexander Calder. When he worked for the Museum of Modern Art, Bunuel was tasked with the job of editing Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will from a 2 ½ hour cut to a forty-five minute version. Bunuel went to work on this project with gusto. The version of Triumph of the Will that most of us have seen is Bunuel’s abridgement. No one has ever been able to detect a trace of ideology, either pro or con, in the way that the Spaniard edited the film.
Nonetheless, Bunuel was a little too intimidating for Hollywood. He was blacklisted unofficially although no one really could figure him out.
So he went to Mexico and became the leading film maker in the so-called Golden Age of Mexican Cinema.
St. Michael’s sword
What was Bunuel like? When he was young, he was very ugly with eyes too large for his face protruding from beneath prominent eyebrows. His appearance was Moorish – there was something uncouth and African about him. His nose was broken in a fight when he was a young man; his friends say that he "had a boxer’s nose and an asymmetrical face." His stare is described as "sideways". As he grew older, his ugliness was intensely attractive to beautiful women. He was addicted to martinis that he made using a special technique – he called his drink a Bunueloni. Later in his life, his hearing was very bad. Since he was opposed to "acting" in the popular sense of the word, he generally refused to give much direction to his players – he gestured where they should stand and would wave to them when they were supposed to mouth their lines. His leading ladies in particular observed that he didn’t really care how they spoke their lines, disliked any attempt they made to mime emotion, and, frequently, directed with his hearing aid turned-off so that he would not have to hear the lines said by his actors. He liked to attend costume parties dressed as a priest and, when he was a young man, would frequently wear clerical clothing and impersonate members of the Spanish clergy. Photographs show that he made a fetching nun and, sometimes, dressed in that fashion. Nudity and on-screen kissing disgusted him. He said that "sex without sin is like eggs without salt." He was faithful to his wife Jeanne, a Parisian that he married in the mid-thirties. When he became impotent in his old age, Bunuel rejoiced and said that he was glad that "this tyrant" had departed from his life. He told interviewers that he would "gladly give up sex" if only old age would "spare (his) lungs and liver" so that he could continue to smoke cigars and drink martinis.
Once Marilyn Monroe came to see Bunuel. She hoped that the Spaniard would make a picture with her. Bunuel was shooting The Exterminating Angel in Mexico. In order to increase his actor’s discomfort, Bunuel had smeared their hands and faces with honey and made them act immured in that sticky substance for several days on end. Marilyn Monroe was impressed with his rigor as a director but disturbed by the appearance of the actors smeared with honey It is not recorded what he said to her.
In Mexico, Bunuel was able to make some films in five days. He had no budget but this didn’t bother him. Bunuel didn’t like Mexico, a place that he thought barbaric. He spent the last decade of his life in Paris, but died in Mexico City.
A dead deer
Los Hurdes
, about an impoverished province in Spain, is sometimes called "The Land without Bread." It was made by Bunuel after Age d’Or. Bunuel collaborated with Ramon Acin on this project. In the film, Bunuel dramatizes events and persuades his miserably poor peasant participants to act out various rituals, some of which seem to be invented for the film. Most critics now characterize the picture as a "Mockumentary" – that is, a faked or staged documentary. People who have seen the film regard it as very disturbing, probably Bunuel’s darkest and most fearsome movie.
Nationalist forces in Spain regarded the movie as an affront and they came calling on Ramon Acin in 1936. Acin wasn’t home and so the Nationalist death squad abducted his wife. Acin learned that she had been kidnapped and agreed to meet the thugs who had taken her. The death squad shot her and tortured Acin to death. Bunuel grasped the message and left Spain on the next train.
The Nationalists also killed Bunuel’s college buddy, Federico Garcia Lorca, possibly Spain’s greatest modern poet. Although Bunuel made no public declarations about this murder, he was deeply affected and, apparently, mourned Garcia Lorca’s death all his life. Hollywood film makers today sometimes act as if history is a burden. The great European film makers have a different relationship, of course, to the travails of history. To them, history is a great speckled bird, a fountain, the parking lot of our Walmart, the door to the night, truth, and scandalously low prices.
In Los Hurdes, cretinous-looking children are shown being taught to write, Bart Simpson-style, a sentence over and over again: Respect the property of others.
Menagerie
Fassbinder is a boxer-pitbull mix running on a treadmill that powers the turntable on which a 45 rpm record, probably a Buddy Holly single, is playing. Howard Hawks is a room above Main Street filled with well-worn, if comfortable, furniture; the upholstery smells of cigarettes. Erice is a landslide that has blocked a mountain stream flowing through a stony canyon. Bunuel is an elderly crocodile lumbering through tastefully appointed apartments in the 17th arrondissement at 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier.
Agape
Bunuel wrote The Discrete Charm of Bourgeoisie with Jean-Claude Carriere, a Parisian writer who collaborated with him on many pictures during the span of 19 years. Carriere came to prominence in the early sixties when he adapted Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe into an immensely popular five-part TV series.
Carriere is fantastically prolific – he has written more than ninety films, many of them classics. In this group, we have seen Carriere’s adaptations of Guenter Grass’ The Tin Drum, Proust’s Swann’s Way (both directed by the German Volker Schloendorff), and The Unbearable Lightness of Being. Carriere remains active and films made from his screenplays are in production today. He is famous in France and has been the president and director of a famous Parisian film school. Carriere began working with Bunuel in 1964 on an adaptation of Mirabeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, also a film that we have seen, although in the Renoir version. Subsequently, he worked on every film made by Bunuel until his death – Belle du Jour, The Milky Way, The Phantom of Liberty, That Obscure Object of Desire, and, of course, The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Carriere has written every kind of film, except, it seems, a Western – he has scripted Z-level horror films and worked on highly prestigious European "White Elephant" art films. In 2012, for instance, he was the screenwriter for Abbas Kiastorami’s first film not produced in the Iranian Republic, the excellent Certified Copy.
Bunuel said that he had chosen Carriere to be his collaborator because "(he) liked the sound of his voice" but "usually couldn’t understand anything he said to me" – something that Bunuel thought was helpful in making the kinds of movies that interested him.
Tom is a Misindicator
Ever suave and debonair, Fernando Rey plays the part of Rafael Acosta, Miranda’s ambassador to France. Like all bourgeois men and women, he is a criminal. (In Bunuel’s eyes, to be bourgeois is to be a homicidal criminal; of course, in Bunuel’s view, it is also indisputably true that to be human is to be criminal.) Viewers of the film unfamiliar with the history and geography of South America may not be aware that Miranda was formerly small republic, a protectorate of Bolivia, that has now been absorbed into that nation. It is not surprising that Bunuel imagines Acosta as a man from Miranda. The lost kingdom of Miranda, with it’s "dolphin-haunted lagoons" is a surrealist subject par excellence.
Miranda was comprised of a low-lying archipelago separated from Bolivia’s southwest coast by the main channel of the Cochin river where that watercourse, descending from the Andes, flows into the Pacific Ocean. Formerly, a riparian zone of about seven to eight miles of labyrinthine swamps, salt-marshes, and, more or less, impenetrable mangrove forests divided Miranda’s sodden, but arable barrier islands from the Bolivian mainland. This topography was decisively altered by the Great Krakatoa Tsunami of 1874. Inundation of Miranda by waves generated by the huge eruption in the south Pacific devastated the nation and irrevocably silted the Cochin delta, damming the river north of the archipelago and eliminating the wetlands dividing the small republic from Bolivia. The larger nation annexed Miranda, then, completely depopulated by the deadly tsunami without the world taking much notice. The flood in Miranda had been so lethal that there was no one left to protest Bolivia’s absorption of the small republic.
Although sparsely inhabited by Amerindians, fishing folk who used the shells of large Galapagos tortoises as kayaks, Miranda was claimed for Spain in 1531 by Adrian Trinculo and Alonso Gonzalo. They named the archipelago "Miranda" meaning "admirable" or "worth of admiration" and explored the islands, seeking gold. In fact, Miranda’s only natural resources were its tropical flora and bitumen bubbling from the "Negro" region of the northernmost barrier islands – these islands, later drowned by the great flood, were one of the few places on earth where pitch and asphaltum geysers existed, huge black plumes of bituminous sludge rocketed into the air and spattering the landscape for hundreds of yards around the discharge vents. Humboldt described these geological features as "among the most extraordinary (‘merkwuerdig und ausserordentlich’)" landforms in the world. For almost two-hundred years, the bitumen geysers provided sealant for sea-going vessels and, in fact, Sir Francis Drake visited the islands in 1580 to re-bottom several of his galleons that had suffered damage in action against the Spanish. (Although Miranda was nominally a Spanish colony the archipelago’s isolation from the mainland allowed it’s tradesmen a substantial degree of autonomy from the Crown. In fact, during the era of the Waterhouse concession, when British entrepreneurs were granted a license to exploit the bitumen resources Miranda was more closely aligned with London than the Iberian peninsula.)
By 1600, the first of the archipelagos’ citron and narcissus (a savory tropical fruit with prismatic seeds armoring its surface) plantations had been established. Slaves were imported from the Barbados and sugar cane was also grown in great quantities. The indigenous people were decimated by disease and, in fact, the last Aylanda-speaking tribesman died in 1823. (A missionary, Friedrich Untergang (1837 - 1874) compiled an interesting dictionary of Aylanda words and grammar, a work cited by both Levi-Strauss and Chomsky in their work.) Utilizing Suku Kollus agricultural methods, additional arable land mass was added to the barrier island archipelago and stilt-techniques of horticulture were also employed to make Miranda, briefly, one of the world’s great exporters of orchids and sully-plant, the fibrous grass used extensively in the whaling industry. (Herman Melville wrote a dispatch from Miranda in 1847 when the whaling vessel on which he was serving stopped at El Hado on the northern island for bitumen repairs and to mend their harpoon reels with sully-grass woven rope. Melville said that he thought the islands fortified by mangroves were "steambath colonnades, like the Hamams of the Turkish sultanate, but without odalisques, sunstruck meadows silent except for the somber hum of the moskito and the gnat, a lotus-eaters’ Venice trapped in the revery engendered by the sulfurous stench of boiling asphaltum." Melville was not the only writer to compare the watery lagoons of El Hado with Venice. Prosper Merime also called the city "this melancholy Venice of the equatorial oceans." and said that it’s canals were "dolphin-haunted."
For several hundred years, Miranda slumbered, a drowsy Spanish colony, mostly ignored by Europe and, indeed, the mainland of South America. By all accounts, El Hado developed in a comfortable provincial capitol, a reef of miniature buildings crisscrossed by sultry lagoons with British-style cottages on its outskirts incongruously perched on stilts above the Pacific’s high tide. Miranda’s principal connection with Bolivia was smuggling, mostly rum but also slaves, across the seven miles of estuary and tidewater marsh separating the islands from the mainland.
History aroused Miranda from its torpor during the first half of the 19th century. Thomas J. Waterhouse negotiated a formal bitumen concession between Spain and his firm, Southwest Passage, Ltd, ratifying several centuries of trade between English seamen and the islands. Spain took notice, and during the Napoleonic period, attempted to embargo the bitumen trade. This lead to several sea battles between British man-of-war vessels and the lumbering, ungainly Spanish battleships, combat that inevitably resulted in victory for the Englishmen. Miranda was isolated from the various rebellions and revolutions that convulsed the continent starting in 1825. Miranda had always considered itself essentially independant from both Spain and the Bolivian mainland, too remote and poor to be of much interest to any of the major European powers and so the province remained uninvolved in the battles for South American independence. Unfortunately, however, that movement was to have a decisive and destructive effect on Miranda.
Rather haphazardly, Miranda, through its council of Aldermen, had voted itself independent from Spain in 1830. Spain, occupied elsewhere on the continent, took no notice. Miranda’s first president, Washington Flores, immediately tried to sell his country to the British, attempting thereby to elude some of the contractual obligations embodied in the Waterhouse concession. The British, true to their mercantile principles, declined to interfere with the contract pending between Southwest Passage and the important trading families in El Hado. Someone assassinated Flores shortly thereafter. In 1845, Bolivia’s independence from Spain was finally acknowledged by the European nation. In the decree formally granting Bolivia’s independence, the territory of the newly freed nation was said to encompass the protectorate of Miranda. Although this decree merely stated the obvious, the leading families in Miranda were incensed. They had considered themselves independent from not only from Spain but also the Bolivian colony since 1830. Bolivia sent ministers to El Hado and imposed taxes on the sully-grass cordage factories and the bitumen trade. These measures were deeply unpopular and Miranda’s council of alderman announced that the territory regarded itself as distinct and independent from Bolivia. From these events ensued the so-called "War between the Swamp and the Mountain" – a conflict waged in a desultory fashion between 1860 and 1874.
Briefly stated, the Bolivians purchased seven gunboats from Prussia, iron vessels transported piecemeal in big boxes over the Andes. With this small armada, the Bolivians sailed down the Cochin River and, then, attempted to mount an invasion of Miranda, angling across the mangrove swamps for El Hado. The Bolivians relied upon the good offices of local smugglers to guide them through the intricate web of marshes and tidal ponds forming Miranda’s natural defenses. The smugglers were treacherous and the Bolivian fleet became mired in a pestilential and mosquito-ridden swamp a couple miles from the capitol. According to contemporary accounts, the unfortunate Bolivians, reduced to cannibalism on their entrapped vessels, were only too happy to be taken prison by the Mirandan forces. The ironclad gunboats remained inextricably mired in the mud, useless to both Bolivia and Miranda.
In retaliation for this hapless raid, the president of Miranda, Ferdinando Gonzaga (1822 - 1874) manumitted a force of 800 black slaves on the condition that they agree to form an army against Bolivia. The slave battalion successfully sailed up the Cochin River to make a beachhead on Bolivian territory and, then, advanced into the Andes, winning several small engagements and, ultimately, launching an attack on La Paz. The slaves had spent their lives working in the rum distilleries and sugar cane fields in Miranda, that is, laboring a few inches above sea level. The high altitude at La Paz was lethal to them. In the course of their siege, the army’s troops suffered disastrous altitude sickness, their lungs filling with fluid, and almost all of Miranda’s troops perished on the high altiplano.
The war continued on a small-scale, but both sides deemed it best, apparently, to avoid any additional pitched engagements. Miranda continued to prosper. It’s orchid trade was known throughout the world and explorers from the South American country made important discoveries in Bali, New Guinea and Papua in the course of seeking rare flowers in those places. Miranda’s bitumen reserves guaranteed a reasonably high standard of living in El Hado and the rum business flourished. It was during this time that Miranda’s "slave laureate", Oracio Waterhouse-Castellan (1841 - 1874) wrote in English his great novel The Solitudes of Jamaica, a seven volume picaresque work derived from Cervantes but closely plotted on the model of the Greek epic poet, Nonnus’ sixth century Dionysiaca. (The book was printed in London by the publishing firm predecessor to Faber and Faber in 1872).
Bolivia was preparing to mount a massive campaign against Miranda in early 1874 when the great tsunami rendered those efforts moot. The explosion at Krakatoa engendered a massive series of waves, some of them reputedly 200 feet high, and the full brunt of that tsunami was hurled against Miranda. The result was more than catastrophic. Miranda simply ceased to exist. The impact of the waves against the Bolivian coastline sheered off huge sections of mountain that blocked the Cochin river, damming the watercourse and dislodging vast amounts of silt clogging the wetlands between the battered islands and the mainland. The calamity from the sea was combined with torrential rains and flooding in the highlands, conveying more waterborne detritus to the coast line and effectively converting the mango and saltwater marsh territory into a desolate, muddy prairie. Miranda was now irrevocably linked to Bolivia by a land-bridge made of silt and boulders cast down from the mountains.
Of the population of El Hado and Miranda’s plantations, all perished with the exception of one survivor. According to a tale that is, perhaps, apocryphal, a local villain was waiting to expiate his crimes on the gallows when the tsunami struck El Hado. The scaffold of the gallows made a serviceable raft and the condemned man, trapped on the instrument of his execution, was swept away and to the south. The gallows-raft was said to have made landfall near Puntas Arenas in Patagonia and the castaway was found to be raving mad, the victim of the incessant howling winds that blow north from the Antarctic in those latitudes.
Thus perished Miranda. The Atacama desert has proven relentless in its advance southward. The terrain once enlived by waterfowl and endless mangrove swamps is now a mummified terrain of barren desert, where "lone and level sands" are sometimes blown aside by typhoon winds to reveal to the wreckage of old piers, mission bells, and desiccated mangrove trees. The world-wide energy crisis has impelled the Bolivian government, in partnership with British Petroleum, to survey its coastline in the hope of discovering the bitumen deposits once surrounding El Hado. Five years ago, one of those asphalt geysers, now quiescent under eight feet of water, was discovered. Bitumen is a preservative and the mining engineers studying the site excavated from the asphalt several exquisitely worked silver bridals and harnesses that had once graced pet dolphins, a pair of petrified and intertwined lovers, many bottles, still intact and corked of El Hado’s famous Encantadas rum, and a variety of orchids, perfectly embalmed by the bitumen, and comprising hitherto unknown species of those flowers.
"A journalistic intromission"
The great Mexican poet, Octavio Paz once showed one of his poems to Andre Breton, the leader of the French surrealists. Breton criticized several lines. Paz was surprised that Breton was applying critical standards to a surrealist work of the imagination. "I thought everything was equally valid," Paz said, noting that the offending lines had arisen from the process of "automatic writing." Breton agreed with him, but said that the lines that he had disliked were a "journalistic intromission."
In an important new book on the Spanish artist, Picasso and the Truth, T. J. Clark assets that Picasso’s painting embodies a "retrogressive" response to the catastrophes of the Twentieth Century on the so-called "Dark Continent" of Europe. Picasso’s painting turns away from the disasters and calamities that beset Europe, and Spain in particular between 1900 and 1960 – although his work tangentially addresses Franco, Hitler, and Stalin, Picasso’s principle subject is the "discrete charms of the bourgeoisie," the pleasures of sex, music, and literature. Clark introduces his thesis by writing that "Picasso’s understanding of life is an unshakeable commitment to the space of a small or middle-sized room and (the artist’s) little possession laid out on a table." Clark observes that "his world was of property arranged in an interior, maybe erotic property, but, always with bodies that...may be transposed into familiar instruments and treasures...his view of the world and it’s occupants was essentially room-bound, near at hand, and entirely possessable..."
Ultimately, Clark concludes that bourgeois art, best represented by Picasso, is about the poetry of ownership, possessing and holding things. Marxism, freed from it’s pathology of "chiliasm and scientism," the remnants of the Victorian era that produced it, is, at its best, "a theory – a set of descriptions – of bourgeois society and the way it comes to grief." Thus, Picasso’s work, made from a Marxist perspective, studies with immense grace and tenderness "bourgeois society, its pleasures, and its ending."
At the World’s Fair in Paris in July of 1937, the most distinctive pavilion was that erected by the Spanish Republic. In that pavilion, Picasso’s Guernica was displayed. On the wall facing the vast mural, the Spanish Republicans had posted a huge blow-up image of the lost poet, Bunuel’s old roommate, Federico Garcia Lorca. In between the canvas and the photograph of Lorca, there was a strange fountain designed by Alexander Calder. The fountain substituted mercury, an export from Spain, for water. So between Guernica and the assassinated poet, there was a fountain of deadly quicksilver. Thirty feet away, a large movie screen was installed in one side of pavilion. On that screen were projected moving pictures of the Spanish Civil War. The film had been edited from newsreels by Don Luis Bunuel.
The Solitudes of Jamaica
Five weeks after his death in 1983, Luis Bunuel returned to Paris and announced that he hoped to raise funds to make a new film, tentatively titled The Crimes of Christ. This passion play was to be primarily enacted by tarantulas – Bunuel specified that the spiders be Mexican Redknee tarantulas. Predictably, Christian groups protested and resources for the film became unavailable.
Next, Bunuel worked with Jean-Claude Carriere, his great screenwriting collaborator, attempting a film version of Julio Cortazar’s novel Hopscotch. Carriere said that he had difficulty working successfully with his old colleague because of the "infernal stench emanating from under Bunuel’s bandages and facial mask." The project was abandoned, Bunuel explaining, through a spokesperson, that the novel was "too great to be travestied by film." Rumors circulated that Bunuel intended to make a TV series based on the long Victorian novel by the Miranda novelist, Waterhouse-Castellan, The Solitudes of Jamaica. But this project also failed to materialize.
At last, Bunuel approached German television, Zum Deutschen Fernsehen (ZDF) and sought funding for a new version of the always popular Beyond the Pleasure Principle. At first, ZDF expressed considerable interest in the project but, then, balked when Bunuel demanded that the picture be shot on-location "on the moon or in the caverns at Lascaux."
Frustrated in his attempts at posthumous film making, Bunuel retired to his grave and has not been seen since.
A Cocktail
Admirers of Bunuel and mixology have long debated the precise contents of the Bunueloni, the cocktail Luis Bunuel invented and enjoyed daily. The fundamental source for all recipes seems to be a short film by the Mexican director Arturo Ripstein called El Naufrago de la Calle Providencia ("The Hermit on Providence Street"). In this film, Bunuel is shown several times mixing this drink. There are various interviews, including several with the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes, but no one provides the recipe. Mixologists have pored over this film with great interest, studying the images in slow motion, freeze-frame, and enlarged with compute enhancement. Nonetheless, controversy persists as to exactly what is in the drink. Adding to the dispute is the fact that Bunuel seems to describe making the drink in a way that is different from what we see his hands do.
The simplest formula for the Bunueloni is this: mix over ice one ounce Punt e Mes red vermouth, one ounce bianco vermouth, 3/4 ounces gin, shake through a sieve, and, then, garnish with orange and lemon peels. Variants include adding one ounce of orange juice and one ounce of lemon juice – these seem questionable to me. (I don’t see, nor can I imagine, Bunuel adding fruit juice to his drink.)
One observer, who has carefully studied Ripstein’s movie, says that this is the recipe:
Mix over ice
1.5 oz of gin with
1 oz of Carpano Antica formula vermouth and
1 oz of Cinzano Rosso vermouth.
Shake and pour into a cocktail glass garnished with orange and lemon peels.
People who have enjoyed this drink say that it induces reveries that are necrophiliac, and involve mud, gunshots and gunshot wounds, as well as old-style high-heeled ladies’ boots. If drinking alone, you should peruse de Sade, Marx and Engels, Freud, and the entomologist Lucien Fabre, who was Bunuel’s favorite writer.
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