“On the contrary,” I replied. “It wasn’t unforgivable at all. It was subversive.”
The following morning dawned with a delicious coincidence, an article in the paper about a man in Berlin who tried to take apart a Christmas tree in the middle of the midnight Mass.
On New Year’s Eve, Chaplin—a forgiving man—once again invited us to his house, where we found another tree decorated with brand-new presents. Before we sat down to eat, he took me aside.
“Since you’re so fond of tearing up trees, Buñuel,” he said to me, “why don’t you get it over with now, so we won’t be disturbed during dinner?”
I replied that I really had nothing against trees, but that I couldn’t stand the kind of ostentatious patriotism I’d heard that evening.
That was the year of City Lights. I saw the rushes one day and found the scene where Chaplin swallows the whistle endless, but I kept my mouth shut. Neville agreed with me, but he spoke up, and Chaplin later made some extensive cuts. Curiously, he seemed to lack self-confidence and had a good deal of trouble making decisions. He also had strange work habits, which included composing the music for his films while sleeping. He’d set up a complicated recording device at his bedside and used to wake up partway, hum a few bars, and go back to sleep. He composed the entirety of “La Violetera” that way, a plagiarism that earned him a very costly trial.
Besides being forgiving, he was also a generous man and gave several screenings of Un Chien andalou at his house. I remember the first time. The movie had barely begun when we heard a loud noise behind us and turned around to see Chaplin’s Chinese majordomo, who was running the projector, flat out on the floor in a dead faint. (Much later, Carlos Saura told me that when Geraldine Chaplin was a little girl, her father used to frighten her by describing certain scenes from my movie.)
Another friend was Thomas Kilpatrick. He was a scriptwriter and one of Frank Davis’s assistants, and by some miracle he spoke flawless Spanish.
“Thalberg wants you to go see the Lily Damita rushes,” he told me one day. “He wants to know if she has an accent in Spanish.”
“I’m not here as a Spaniard,” I replied. “I’m here as a Frenchman. And what’s more, you go tell Thalberg that I don’t waste my time listening to women who sleep around!”
Clearly, my time had come. I went to the studios the next day and tendered my resignation. MGM graciously wrote me an elegant letter in which they assured me that they would remember my sojourn in Hollywood for a long time. Today, when I think back over this period in my life—the smells of spring in Laurel Canyon, the Italian restaurant where we drank wine camouflaged in coffee cups, the cops who once stopped my car because they thought I was transporting liquor and then escorted me to my door because I was lost, my friends Frank Davis and Kilpatrick—when I remember that strange way of life, the California heat, the American naiveté, I still have the same good, warm feelings as I did then.
My only real regret was that I never got to the Polynesian islands, which at the time were my idea of El Dorado. I’d always meant to go, but something always came up to prevent it. Once I had to put off the trip because I fell in love (platonically, as usual) with a friend of Lya Lys’s; another time, Breton had done my astrological chart and announced that I would die either from a mixup in medicines or in some distant sea. So instead I took the train back to New York, where I spent ten superb days—it was the heyday of the speakeasy—before leaving on the Lafayette for France.
There were several French actors returning to Europe on the same ship, as well as an English businessman with the curious name of Mr. Uncle, who ran a hat factory in Mexico City and who was kind enough to serve as my interpreter. Altogether, we were a lively group, given the fact that we used to convene every morning at eleven in the bar. Happily, my surrealist affinities were still strong enough, even after all that time in Los Angeles, to provoke a minor scandal on shipboard. One evening, during a party in the grand ballroom to celebrate the captain’s birthday, the orchestra began to play “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Everyone rose, of course—except me. Afterwards, and with excessive fanfare, they played the “Marseillaise”; after the first two measures, I leaned back and put my feet up on the table. At that point, a young man walked over and told me in no uncertain terms that my behavior was unconscionable, to which I replied that nothing was more unconscionable than national anthems. We traded insults for a while until he marched off in a huff, deeply offended.
Half an hour later he was back and full of apologies, but, obstinate as ever, I refused to shake his outstretched hand. (When I arrived in Paris, I proudly told my story to my surrealist friends; today, it seems embarrassingly childish, of course—although the surrealists loved it.)
During the crossing, I also had an odd “sentimental adventure,” once again perfectly chaste (long, long walks on the deck), with an eighteen-year-old American girl who’d decided she’d fallen in love with me. She was setting out alone on the standard European tour, but doubtless she came from a family of millionaires, since a Rolls and chauffeur were waiting for her at the pier. The first day out, she took me to her cabin to show me a picture of a handsome young man in a gold frame.
“That’s my fiancé,” she informed me. “We’re going to get married when I get back.”
Three days later, before we left the ship, I went to her cabin again and saw that the picture had been torn to shreds.
“It’s your fault,” she said simply.
I said nothing, not wanting to denigrate the frivolous fantasy of a too-slim American girl on her first trip to Europe. (Needless to say, once she drove off in her Rolls, I never saw her again.)
By the time I arrived in Paris and was reunited with Jeanne, I didn’t have a penny to my name. Her family lent me enough money to allow me to return to Spain, and I arrived in Madrid in April 1930.
12
Spain and France (1931–1936)
THE bloodless coup that established the Spanish Republic was greeted with wild enthusiasm, but after the king had gone, the celebration gave way to uneasiness, and then to profound anxiety. During the five years before the Civil War, I lived in an apartment on the rue Pascal in Paris and earned my living dubbing Paramount pictures; from 1934 on, however, I lived in Madrid.
I’ve never been one of those people who take trips for the sheer pleasure of traveling. Despite what seems a widespread mania for running about the world, I myself have no curiosity whatsoever about foreign countries. (On the other hand, I love going back to places I’ve been, places full of memories, and staying there for long periods of time.) The Vicomte de Noailles had a brother-in-law, the Prince de Ligne, the descendant of an old and illustrious Belgian family. When de Noailles found out that I had a passion for Polynesia, he assumed I had wanderer’s blood in my veins and proposed that I accompany him on an expedition through sub-Sahara Africa, organized by the prince, who was then the governor general of the Belgian Congo. There were supposed to be a couple of hundred people involved, primarily anthropologists, geographers, and zoologists, who’d be traveling from Dakar to Djibouti; and de Noailles felt I might like to make a documentary about the trip. Strict military discipline would prevail, he assured me. For example, there’d be no smoking while on the road. On the other hand, I was free to film whatever I liked. No one could have asked for more, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to accept; I just wasn’t that interested in Africa. (I did speak to Michel Leiris about it, and he went in my place, bringing back his L’Afrique fantôme.)
Up until 1932, when Aragon, Sadoul, Unik, and Maxime Alexandre left the movement to join the Communist party, I remained active in the surrealist group. Although I was a Communist sympathizer and belonged to the Association of Writers and Artists for the Revolution, I never joined the party, mostly because I didn’t like long meetings. Impatient by nature, I couldn’t stand all the rules of order, the interminable debates, and the “cell” mentality. Breton felt the same way; like all surrealists, he also flirted with th
e party because it represented a real possibility for revolution, but he gave up when he was asked, at his very first meeting, to compile a fully documented report on the coal-mining industry in Italy.
“A report on something I can understand, fine,” he said sadly. “But … coal?”
During a meeting of foreign workers held in the suburbs of Paris at Montreuil-sous-Bois in 1932, I found myself in the same room with Casanellas, one of the supposed assassins of Prime Minister Dato. He’d fled to Russia, become a colonel in the Red Army, and was now in Paris, secretly. The meeting was interminable and I was very bored, so I stood up to leave.
“If you go now,” one of the speakers called to me, “and if Casanellas is arrested, we’ll know that you’re the traitor!”
I quickly went back to my place and sat down. (Casanellas was later killed in a motorcycle accident near Barcelona, before the beginning of the Civil War.)
To be frank, it wasn’t only the political dissension among the surrealists that cooled my ardor for the movement, but also their increasing snobbery, their strange attraction to the aristocracy. I remember my astonishment when I saw the large photographs of Breton and Eluard prominently displayed in the window of a bookstore on the boulevard Raspail when L’Immaculée Conception came out. When I questioned it, they claimed they had the right to publicize their work any way they liked.
In addition, I wasn’t too happy with the surrealist journal Minotaure, which had become increasingly slick and bourgeois. Over a period of time, I gradually stopped going to meetings until finally I left the group as simply as I’d joined it. On a personal level, however, I kept up my old friendships. Now, of course, there are very few of us left—Aragon, Dali, André Masson, Thirion, Joan Miró.
For a few days in 1933, I was busy with a film project, a Russian production of Gide’s The Vatican Swindle (Les Caves du Vatican). Aragon and Paul Vaillant-Couturier, a marvelous man who used to visit me on the rue Pascal accompanied by two plainclothesmen who paced up and down the street under my window, set up the schedule. Gide told me how flattered he was that the Soviet government had chosen his book, but suddenly the Russians changed their minds and backed out. I was disappointed, but not for long, as I was soon to make another of my own films.
This time, however, the filming was in Spain. In Estremadura, between Cáceres and Salamanca, lies a desolate mountain region populated only by rocks, scrub, and goats. Once upon a time, the high plateaus of Las Hurdes were settled by bandits, and by Jews who’d fled the Inquisition. I’d just read a book about the region, written by the director of the French Institute in Madrid, and was fascinated by it. Back in Saragossa, I talked to Sánchez Ventura and Ramón Acin about the possibility of making a documentary.
“I’ll tell you what,” Acin said. “If I win the lottery, I’ll put up the money!”
Sure enough, two months later, he won—and he kept his word. He was a committed anarchist who taught art at night to workers. (When the Civil War began, an extreme right-wing group arrived in Huesca, fully armed, to arrest him. He managed to slip away somehow, so they arrested his wife and announced that they would execute her if Acin didn’t give himself up. He surrendered the following day, and the Fascists shot both of them.) When I was ready to begin filming, I asked Pierre Unik to come down from Paris and be my assistant. Eli Lotar was my cameraman, on a machine we had to borrow from Yves Allégret. Since we had only twenty thousand pesetas, we had to do it all in a month. Four thousand went on a secondhand Fiat, which I repaired myself each time it broke down. We stayed in a spartan, ten-room hotel which had been built inside a desanctified convent called Las Batuecas and which had been empty since Mendizabel promulgated his anticlerical laws in the nineteenth century. We left for the shoot every morning before dawn, drove two hours in the car, then continued on foot, toting our equipment on our backs.
Those graceless mountains fascinated me, as did the poverty and the intelligence of their inhabitants. I was amazed at their fierce attachment to this sterile country, this “breadless” earth. In fact, fresh bread was just about unheard of, except when someone brought back a dried loaf from Andalusia.
Our budget ran out on the last day of the shoot, and I did the editing myself, at a kitchen table in Madrid. Since we had no Moviola, I looked at the film through a magnifying glass and spliced the segments together as best I could. Some good footage must have been tossed into the garbage simply because I couldn’t see it clearly! The first screening took place at the Cine de la Prensa, where, since it was a silent film, I narrated it myself at a microphone. Thinking of his investment, Acin kept pushing me to do some publicity, so we decided to hold a private showing for Marañon, an eminent scholar and president of the governing council of Las Hurdes. At the same time, powerful right-wing forces were putting pressure on the young Republic. Each passing day brought news of another upheaval, another “incident,” like some of Primo de Rivera’s Falangists firing on the newsmen who sold Mundo Obrero (Workers’ World). It was clear that we were on the brink of a long and bloody period.
Because of Marañon’s prestigious position, we were sure he’d help get the necessary authorization for distributing the film, which had, of course, been censored. Unfortunately, his reactions couldn’t have been more negative.
“Why do you want to show everyone all those ugly things?” he asked. “It’s not that bad, you know. I’ve seen carts filled with wheat in Las Hurdes. Why don’t you show something nice, like folk dances?”
Needless to say, the film was never shown. What’s more, as I promptly told Marañon, those famous carts of wheat went by only on the road below, on their way to Granadilla, and even then they were pretty rare. As for folk dances, those trite expressions of misplaced nationalism, Las Hurdes didn’t have any.
Two years later, the Spanish embassy in Paris gave me money to add sound to the film. Pierre Braunberger bought the distribution rights, for better or worse, and managed to pay me in bits and pieces, although I once had to threaten to smash his secretary’s typewriter with a hammer to get even that. It took a long time, but in the end I was able to reimburse Ramón Acin’s investment. Because of his untimely death, however, the money went to his daughters.
When the Republican troops, backed by Durutti’s anarchist column, occupied Quinto, my friend Mantecon, the governor of Aragón, found a dossier with my name on it in the files of the civil guard. In it, I was described as notoriously debauched, a morphine addict, and the author of that heinous film, that crime against the state, Las Hurdes. If I could be found, the note said, I was to be turned over immediately to the Falange, where I would receive my just deserts.
In contrast, I remember the time I showed the film to an audience of workers, at the request of Jacques Doriot, the Communist mayor. Four or five immigrant workers from the area were in the theatre, and when I ran into one of them later, during a visit to those arid mountains, he greeted me with great enthusiasm. (It’s true that the men from Las Hurdas often went away, but invariably they returned to their native land.)
In the middle of this wasteland is the small paradise of Las Batuecas, eighteen small hermitages rising from the rocks and grouped around a ruined church (which has since been restored). Once upon a time, before Mendizabel’s expulsion order, each hermit rang a bell at midnight as proof that he was awake and watching over the town. The best vegetables in the world grow in its little gardens; there’s a mill for olive oil, one for wheat, and even a fountain with mineral water. While I was making the movie, the only people there were an old monk and his servant, but there were drawings of goats and beehives on the walls of the caves. I almost bought Las Batuecas in 1936 for the rock-bottom price of one hundred and fifty thousand pesetas. Everything had been arranged with the proprietor, who lived in Salamanca, even though he was already negotiating with a group of nuns from the Sacred Heart; but whereas they wanted to pay on the installment plan, I was offering hard cash. We were just about ready to sign when the Civil War broke out and all such transact
ions simply became irrelevant. Had I become a landowner and had the outbreak of the war found me in Salamanca (which was one of the first cities to fall to the Fascists), I would certainly have been executed. (Ironically, Franco built roads and schools in an effort to infuse new life into this moribund community.) It wasn’t until the 1960s that I returned to Las Batuecas. The convent was occupied by the Carmelites, and the sign on the door read: “Traveler, if your conscience is troubling you, knock and we shall open. No women.”
I was with Fernando Rey at the time, and he knocked—or rather rang the bell. An intercom replied, the door opened, and a specialist appeared. When we told him our problem, he gave us such judicious advice that I couldn’t resist giving the line to one of the monks in The Phantom of Liberty. “If everyone prayed every day to Saint Joseph,” he said serenely, “everything would be fine.”
EARLY in 1934, I was married at the town hall of the twentieth arrondissement in Paris. I forbade my wife’s family to attend. Hernando and Loulou Viñes, and a stranger we picked up in the street, were our witnesses. After a lunch at the Cochon de Lait near the Odéon, I said goodbye to Jeanne, dropped in briefly on Aragon and Sadoul, and took the train for Madrid.
While I was dubbing Paramount films in Paris with my friend Claudio de la Torre (under the direction of Marlene Dietrich’s husband), I’d made a fair bit of progress with my English; and when I left Paramount, I went to work for Warner Brothers, supervising their dubbing operation in Madrid. I kept at it for about ten months; it was easy work at a good salary, and somehow I never really thought about making another movie. Commercial films were out of the question, yet nothing was stopping me from producing someone else’s. And so I became a producer, a demanding and sometimes rather shady one. When I met Ricardo Urgoiti, a producer of highly commercial films, I proposed a partnership. He laughed, but when I told him I could come up with one hundred and fifty thousand pesetas—half a budget, which my mother was willing to lend me—he stopped laughing and we shook hands. I had only one condition: that my name not appear in the credits.