Luis Buñuel during the filming of The Milky Way
[Now that the screening is over – two links to the film]
Through your local library on Kanopy (among 30K films!) & on Tubi
Mourons pour des idées, d’accord mais de mort lente (Let’s die for ideas, yes, but let’s do it slowly)… Georges Brassens
My interest is not to knock off what others have said [that is too easy], but to knock off what I am saying.
More precisely, I am trying to stop what you are making out of what I am saying. U.G.
– Notes from the Screening –
(what is underlined was read aloud)
Inspired in part by Menéndez y Pelayo’s Historia de los heterodoxos españoles (History of Spanish Orthodoxies)… and coming out in 1969, amidst the post-May 68 turmoil (if you catch a Pope in this film, it is Buñuel!).
- Heresies interested me as all non-conformities of the human spirit interest me, whether in religion, culture, or politics.
A group creates a doctrine and thousands and thousands of individuals adhere to it.
Then dissidents begin to emerge, who believe in everything the religion preaches except for one or two small points.
They are punished, expelled from the group, pursued and sectarian battles develop in which the person whose beliefs differ only slightly is more detested than the declared enemy. - Surrealism taught me that man is never free, yet fights for what he can never be. That is tragic. All of my films, are built around comic situations, but they are played as if they were tragedies. — Luis Buñuel
To some film buffs, the films of Buñuel lack cinematic qualities – he once turned his cinematographer’s camera towards the ground as he was about to film a beautiful cloud formation – there are no special lighting effects or any “tour de force” images as you would find in Orson Welles.
This is no accident, be with Buñuel… not someone else.
_______________
If the film that you are about to see seems enigmatic or odd, so is life. — A warning by Bunuel when he played The Exterminating Angel at Cannes.
Two of Buñuel’s friends had very different reactions. The Argentine writer Julio Cortázar accused the director of having financed it with Vatican money. The Vatican itself, to Buñuel’s dismay, received the film fairly warmly.
And Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes: Buñuel tenía un sagrado temor y una sagrada fe en el poder de la imagen. Buñuel had a sacred fear and a sacred faith in the power of images.
Maybe this is a good place to bring up his famous dictum, Thank God, I Am An Atheist.
The Milky Way is neither for nor against anything at all . . . The film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready, if need be, to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology. — Luis Buñuel
I could also mention one of my favorite films – Buñuel saw it three times – The Saragossa Manuscript is a 1965 Polish film directed by Wojciech Has, based on a novel by Count Jan Potocki. That’s for the Picaresque element, the road movie with no center…
- What is important now is to recover our senses. We must learn to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art, much less to squeeze more content out of the work than is already there. Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.
The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art-and, by analogy, our own experience-more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means. — Susan Sontag in Against Interpretation -
The fury to understand and consequently to shrink, to render mediocre is one of the misfortunes of our nature.Luis Buñuel
- A day without laughing is a day lost. — Luis Buñuel
- Cómo se puede morir con la vida, hay que vivir con la muerte,
No quiere decir nada pero dice todo. Jean-Claude Carrière (about Luis Buñuel) -
He often quoted André Breton’s il ne rêve pas, c’est un salaud. He doesn’t dream, he’s a bastard.
Aporia, that point where as Breton would say “all contradictions resolve themselves”Breton: “Tout porte à croire qu’il existe un point de l’esprit d’où la vie et la mort, le réel et l’imaginaire, le passé et l’avenir, le haut et le bas, le communicable et l’incommunicable cesseront d’être perçus contradictoirement.” - I think that the visible world is only the tiniest part of reality. Je pense que le monde visible n’est qu’une infime partie de la réalité. — Laurent Terzieff (one of the main actors in The Milky Way)
- About dreams:
Henry James : «Racontez un rêve, perdez un lecteur.»
William Burroughs: «Durant des années, je me suis souvent demandé pourquoi les rêves paraissent souvent si plats, quand on les raconte ; et ce matin, j’ai trouvé la réponse, tellement simple que tout le monde la connaît, comme la plupart des réponses : pas de contexte. Comme un animal empaillé posé sur le sol d’une banque.» -
During my whole life I’ve been pursued by idiotic questions, why this? why that ? This obsession, sadly is part of human nature. If only we were capable of leading our destiny to chance, and to accept the mystery that is our life without fear , we might discover a happiness that is similar to innocence. – Luis BuñuelIt was not until I was 60 or 65 that I understood and accepted fully the innocence of one’s imagination. It took me that long to admit that what I suffered in my head was only my concern. — Luis Buñuel
-
I would like to become an an-alphabet, escape culture a bit… There are too many books… One speaks too much, too many opinions, I am a bit asphyxiated. My theoretical desire, a a return to childhood where there is no reading. (Je voudrais devenir analphabète, fuir la culture un peu… il y a trop de livres… on parle trop, il y a trop d’opinions je suis un peu asphyxié. Mon envie théorique , c’est le retour à l’enfance où vous on n’a pas de lecture.) — Luis Buñuel
EXTRAS
(in a variety of languages)
Évocation de Buñuel sur France Culture (in French)
More here: Buñuel sur France Culture
Carlos Fuentes on Buñuel’s work (in Spanish)
Carlos Fuentes speaks about Buñuel/Carlos Fuentes nos habla de Buñuel
Ian Christie on The Milky Way
A propósito de Buñuel (¿Quien esos?)
Once dead, one can be reduced/summarized in this way.
From The New York Times Obituary
“Luis Bunuel, an iconoclast, moralist and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director…a fervent antagonist of organized religion, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, conventional society, particularly the bourgeoisie, and everything else that he deemed organized absurdity. … With startling, often outrageous imagery and sardonic wit, he reviled irrationality and hypocrisy, at first savagely, but later with subtlety and elegance. … He said he sought to challenge conventional attitudes about society, undermine bourgeois optimism and force audiences to doubt the tenets of the established order.“
About An Andalusian Dog:
The rule was to refuse any image that could’ve had a rational meaning or any memory or culture. That meant that any image that appeared to us that we considered impressive or impressed us was accepted
— Luis Buñuel
Another post-mortem view.
Jean-Claude Carrière’s dialogue with Buñuel
(Below is a quick translation into English)
Le Réveil de Buñuel par Jean-Claude Carrière (Éditions Odile Jacob)
II me disait par exemple, autrefois, devant un dry Martini
et quelques olives, a demi rêveur : « Nous passons a toute vitesse
sur la Terre et nous n’avons qu’une idée, tous: lutter contre le
mur énorme, vous savez, le mur du néant, dont la hauteur, la
largeur et la puissance sont sans limites, ce mur qui nous enserre,
d’oú nous venons, oú nous allons. Nous voudrions le trouer,
l’escalader, voir au travers, nous dressons nos maigres échelles,
nous lançons nos boulets, nos grappins. Rien à faire. Le mur est
inattaquable, glissant, mobile, renouvelable. Pas une brèche. II
s’éleve bien au-delà de notre vision, de notre pensée, pour se
perdre dans les brouillards des grandes hauteurs. Nous nous
acharnons, nous nous épuisons, à coups d’ambitions, de preten-
tions, de transes, d’incantations, de prédications, de rêveries
géantes sur la vie eternelle, la métempsychose, la réincarnation,
la vie des esprits et puis quoi encore. Nous nous précipitons, sou-
vent l’arme à la main, dans des vertiges invisibles, dans des tour-
billons de fantômes. Combat frivole et misérable. Perdu
d’avance. Le néant est le néant. »
We rush full speed on the Earth with one single thought, all of us: fight the giant wall, you know, the wall of nothingness with a limitless height, width and power, this wall which entraps us, whence we come, where we go. We would like to pierce through it, scale it, see through it, we set up our flimsy ladders, we throw our cannon balls, our hooks. No use. The wall is indestructible, slippery, mobile, renewable. Not one crack. It reaches way beyond our vision, beyond our thinking to get lost in the fog of greatest heights. We go on the offensive, we tire out, with the strongest zeal, dedication, trances, incantations, predication, giant dreams of eternal life, metempsychosis, reincarnation, the life of the spirit and what else. We throw ourselves, often weapon in hand, into invisible vertigoes and ghostly vortices. Lost in advance. Nothingness is nothingness.
— Luis Buñuel through Jean-Claude Carrière.
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