Whenever I think of blind men, I can’t help remembering the words of Benjamin Péret, who was very concerned about whether mortadella sausage was in fact made by the blind. I find this less a question than a statement, and one containing a profound truth at that. Of course, some might find that relationship between blindness and mortadella somewhat absurd, but for me it’s the quintessential example of surrealist thought.
While we’re making the list of bêtes noires, I must state my hatred of pedantry and jargon. Sometimes I weep with laughter when I read certain articles in the Cahiers du Cinéma, for example. As the honorary president of the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City, I once went to visit the school and was introduced to several professors, including a young man in a suit and tie who blushed a good deal. When I asked him what he taught, he replied, “The Semiology of the Clonic Image.” I could have murdered him on the spot. By the way, when this kind of jargon (a typically Parisian phenomenon) works its way into the educational system, it wreaks absolute havoc in underdeveloped countries. It’s the clearest sign, in my opinion, of cultural colonialism.
And I add to the list John Steinbeck, whom I dislike intensely because of an article he once wrote in which he described—seriously—a small French boy walking by the Elysée palace carrying a baguette raised in a salute to the palace guards. Steinbeck found this gesture “profoundly moving,” but the statement made me furious. How could he be so shameless? It seems clear to me that without the enormous influence of the canon of American culture, Steinbeck would be an unknown, as would Dos Passos and Hemingway. If they’d been born in Paraguay or Turkey, no one would ever have read them, which suggests the alarming fact that the greatness of a writer is in direct proportion to the power of his country. Galdós, for instance, is often as remarkable as Dostoevsky, but who outside Spain ever reads him?
On the other hand, I love Romanesque and Gothic art, particularly the cathedrals of Segovia and Toledo, which for me are living worlds in themselves. Where French cathedrals have only the icy beauty of their architectural forms, the Spanish cathedral has that incomparable spectacle of the retablo with its baroque labyrinths, where your fantasies can wander endlessly in the minute detours. I love cloisters, too, especially the one in El Paular. Of all the memorable places I’ve been, this is the one that’s moved me most deeply. A rather large Gothic cloister, it’s ringed not by columns but by identical buildings with tall ogival windows and old wooden shutters. The roofs are covered in Roman tiles, the wood in the shutters is splintered, and tufts of grass grow in the cracks in the walls. The entire place is bathed in an antique silence; and in the center, hidden now by a stone bench, there’s a lunar dial, testimony to the brightness of those ancient nights. Boxwood hedges run between pollarded cypresses, which must be centuries old. Perhaps its major attraction for me, however, was the row of three tombs—the first, and most majestic, containing the venerable remains of a convent superior from the sixteenth century; the second, two women, mother and daughter, who died in an automobile accident just a few hundred yards from the convent and whose bodies were never claimed. The third tomb, a simple stone almost buried in the dry grass, is inscribed with an American name. The monks told us that the man was one of Truman’s advisers at the time the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and like so many others who were involved in that horror, he developed serious psychological and nervous disorders. He left his family and his work, drifted about Morocco for a while, and finally came to Spain, where one night, thoroughly exhausted, he knocked on the convent door. The monks took him in, and he died a week later.
One day, when Carrière and I were working on a screenplay in the hotel next door, the monks invited us for lunch in their refectory. It was a rather good lunch (lamb and potatoes, as I remember), but talk was forbidden during the meal. Instead, one of the Benedictines read from the Church Fathers until we finished eating, whereupon we went into another room—this one with chocolates, coffee, and television—and talked to our heart’s content. These monks were very simple men; they made cheese and gin—the latter strictly illegal, since they paid no taxes. They also sold postcards and decorated canes to Sunday tourists. The father superior was alarmingly well informed about the diabolical reputation of my films, but he merely smiled when they were mentioned. He never went to the movies, he said, almost apologetically.
I have a horror of newspaper reporters, two of whom literally attacked me one day while I was walking down the road not far from El Paular. Despite my pleas to be left alone, they leaped around me, clicking as they went. I was already far too old to take both of them on at once, and only wished that I’d been foresighted enough to bring my revolver.
Whereas my feelings about reporters couldn’t be clearer, I confess to mixed emotions when it comes to spiders. As I said earlier, this is an obsession I’ve shared with my brothers and sisters, who can talk about them for hours, in the most meticulous and horrifying detail. We are all, it seems, equally fascinated and revolted. On the other hand, I despise crowds, which is to say any gathering that exceeds six people. As for huge crowds, like the famous photograph by Weegee of the beach at Coney Island on a Sunday afternoon, the mystery of it horrifies me.
I do, however, like punctuality—another obsession—and all sorts of little tools like pliers, scissors, magnifying glasses, and screwdrivers. I take a selection of them with me everywhere, rather like my toothbrush. At home, they lie carefully arranged in a drawer, ever ready for immediate use. In addition, I like working-class people whose basic knowhow I admire and envy.
I also like Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, Fellini’s Roma, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, Marco Ferreri’s La Grande Bouffe (a tragedy of the flesh and a monument to hedonism), Jacques Becker’s Goupi Mains-rouges, and René Clément’s Forbidden Games. And I adore Fritz Lang’s early films, Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, and Has’s film of Potocki’s novel Saragossa Manuscript. (I saw this film a record-breaking three times and convinced Alatriste to buy it for Mexico in exchange for Simon of the Desert.) I also admire Renoir’s prewar films, Bergman’s Persona, and Fellini’s La strada, Nights of Cabiria, and La dolce vita. To my regret, I’ve never seen I vitelloni, but I distinctly remember walking out of Casanova well before the end.
I knew de Sica well and especially liked Shoeshine, Umberto D, and The Bicycle Thief, where he succeeded in making a machine the star of the movie. And I love the films of both von Stroheim and Sternberg. On the other hand, I detested From Here to Eternity, which seemed to me little more than a militaristic and xenophobic melodrama. Wajda, too, delights me; I’ve never met him, but I like his films very much. A long time ago at the Cannes Festival, he declared that my early films inspired him to make movies, which reminds me of my own admiration for the early films of Fritz Lang and their instrumental role in determining the course of my life. There’s something very exciting about this secret continuum between films and countries. Other favorites of mine are Clouzot’s Manon, Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante, the delicious collection of English horror stories called Dead of Night, Flaherty’s White Shadows of the South Seas, which I thought infinitely superior to his Tabu, which he made with Murnau, and Portrait of Jennie with Jennifer Jones, a mysterious, poetical, and largely misunderstood work. (On the other hand, I detested Rossellini’s Open City; the scene with the tortured priest in one room and the German officer drinking champagne with a woman in his lap in the other seemed both facile and tactless.)
Although I haven’t seen his most recent films (I never go to the movies at all anymore), Carlos Saura is another director whose work I admire. I loved La caza and La prima Angélica. In fact, Saura and I have known each other for a long time; an Aragonian like me, he even persuaded me to play the hangman in his Llanto por un bandido. I also loved Huston’s Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which was shot near San José Purua. A great director and a wonderfully warm person, Huston saw Nazarin while he was in Mexico and spent the next morning telephoning all over Europe and arrangi
ng for it to be shown at Cannes.
Leaving movies for the moment, I have a soft spot for secret passageways, bookshelves that open onto silence, staircases that go down into the void, and hidden safes. I even have one myself, but I won’t tell you where. And there’s my lifelong love of firearms, most of which I sold in 1964, the year I was convinced I was going to die. I’ve practiced shooting in all sorts of places, including my office, where I fire at a metal box on the bookshelf opposite my desk. My specialty is the fast draw, like the hero in western movies who walks straight ahead, then spins suddenly on his heel and fires. My other preference in the realm of weapons is the sword-cane. I own six of them, and they make me feel safer when I’m out walking.
At the other end of the spectrum are statistics, which I hate with all my heart. It’s impossible now to read a single page in a newspaper without finding at least a dozen of them, most of which are blatantly false. I don’t like acronyms, either—another, and typically American, scourge of our times. In fact, one of the reasons I so delight in nineteenth-century texts is because they don’t use initials, abbreviations, or acronyms.
On the other hand, I’m very fond of snakes and rats. Except for the last few years, I’ve always had pet rats, which I find unusually likable and fascinating. When I lived in Mexico City, I once managed to collect forty of them, but I finally had to drive them into the mountains and get rid of them. Vivisection horrifies me, of course. When I was a student, I remember dissecting a live frog with a razor blade to see how its heart functioned, an absolutely gratuitous experiment for which I still haven’t forgiven myself. One of my nephews, an American neurologist well on his way to the Nobel Prize, actually suspended his research because of his aversion to that barbaric practice. (Sometimes you just have to say shit to science.)
Despite the apparent non sequitur, I love Russian literature. There seems to be a mysterious rapport between Spain and Russia which simply leaps over the countries in between, and which meant that when I first arrived in Paris, I knew the Russians far better than I knew Gide or Breton. I also have a taste for opera, which my father first introduced me to when I was thirteen. It started with the Italians and ended with Wagner; in fact, I’ve actually plagiarized libretti twice—Rigoletto in Los olvidados (the episode with the bag), and Tosca in La Fièvre monte à El Pao. In a strange way, perhaps my love of disguise is connected to both these art forms. I have told how I used to dress up as a priest and walk around the city—a felony punishable by five years in jail. Sometimes I dressed like a laborer, and found that no one ever paid any attention to me at all. I simply did not exist. A friend and I used to pretend to be paletos, rednecks from the provinces. We’d go into a bar, I’d wink at the owner and say, “Give my friend here a banana,” and he’d eat the whole thing, including the peel. (It was always good for a laugh.)
One day, when I was walking around disguised as an army officer, I scolded two artillerymen for not saluting me, and ordered them to report to their commanding officer. Another time, when Lorca and I went out in costume, we ran into a famous young poet we both knew. Federico insulted him with the usual Spanish color, but the poet only stared, not recognizing either one of us. Much later in Mexico, while Louis Malle was shooting Viva Maria, I put on a wig and walked onto the set, right past Malle, who had no idea who I was. No one did—neither my technician friends nor Jeanne Moreau (who’d made a movie with me) nor my son Juan-Luis, who was one of Malle’s assistants.
Disguise is a fascinating experience, because it allows you to experience another life. When you’re a worker, for instance, sales people immediately suggest you buy the cheapest things; people are always cutting in front of you in line, and women never look at you. Clearly, the world simply isn’t made for you at all.
The entrances to movie theatres, with their tasteless publicity, and banquets and awards ceremonies inspire me with undying hatred, even though they are sometimes the scene of amusing incidents. In 1978 in Mexico City, the minister of culture awarded me the National Arts medal, a superb gold medallion on which my name appeared as Buñuelos, which in Spanish means “donuts.”
I like known quantities and familiar places; when I go to Toledo or Segovia, I always follow the same route, stop at the same places, look at the same views, eat the same dishes. When someone offers me a trip to a distant country, I always refuse; the idea of trying to imagine what to do in New Delhi at three in the morning is beyond me.
Where food is concerned, I have eclectic tastes, to say the least. I like cream pies, and have often dreamed of using one in a movie, although somehow or other I always back down at the last minute. I like marinated herring the way they make it in France, and sardines en escabèche, Aragonian style, marinated in olive oil with garlic and thyme. I also like smoked salmon and caviar, but in general my tastes are simple and unrefined. A gourmet I’m not. Two fried eggs with chorizo give me more pleasure than all the langoustes à la reine de Hongrie or timbales de caneton Chambord.
When we get to the media, my irritability knows no limits. I hate the way information proliferates. Reading a newspaper is more harrowing than any other experience I know. If I were a dictator, I’d limit the press to a single daily paper and a single magazine, and all news would be strictly censored, although opinion would remain completely free. The “show business” format is a scandal; those enormous headlines—and in Mexico they can attain prodigious proportions—with their yellow-press sensationalism make me want to throw up. All that energy just to sell more papers! And for what? There’s always another piece of news that comes along to bury the first. I remember reading a copy of Nice-Matin one day at the Cannes Festival and finding, for once, an interesting item about an attempt to blow up one of the domes on the Sacré-Coeur in Paris. Eager to find out who was responsible for this original and irreverent gesture, I bought the same paper the next day, but all mention of Sacré-Coeur had been dropped to make room for a skyjacking.
Similarly, seers, prophets, and psychics bore and frighten me. (I’m a fanatical antifanatic.) For that matter, I don’t like psychology in general. Or analysis. Or psychoanalysis. I have some close analyst friends who’ve written about my films, which is their prerogative, of course; but most of what they say makes no sense to me. On the other hand, my discovery of Freud, and particularly his theory of the unconscious, was crucial to me. Yet just as psychology seems a somewhat arbitrary discipline, forever contradicted by human behavior, so is psychoanalysis severely limited, a form of therapy reserved for the upper classes. During the Second World War, when I was working at the Museum of Modern Art, I thought about making a movie on schizophrenia which would explore its origins, the patterns of its development, and the various treatments then used to cope with it.
“There’s a first-rate psychoanalytic institute in Chicago,” someone told me when I mentioned the idea. “Run by someone named Alexander, one of Freud’s disciples. Why not go out there and talk to him about it?”
Which is exactly what I did. Once there, I found my way to the institute, which filled several luxurious floors of a large building.
“Our subsidy runs out this year,” the famous Dr. Alexander informed me, “and believe me, we’re ready to do just about anything to get it renewed. Your project sounds very interesting. Allow me to place our library and our doctors at your disposal for whatever help you might need.”
I remembered that when Jung had seen Un Chien andalou, he’d called it a fine example of dementia praecox, and when I suggested that Alexander might like a copy of the film, he professed to be delighted.
On my way to their library, however, I accidentally walked into the wrong room and had just enough time to see an elegant lady lying on a couch, obviously in the middle of a session, before the irate doctor rushed to slam the door (which, I assure you, I was trying to close as fast as I could). Later, I was told that only millionaires and their wives came to the institute. It was common knowledge, for example, that if one of these women was caught slipping a few extra bills int
o her purse in a bank, the teller would say nothing, the husband would be discreetly informed, and the wife sent to an analyst.
After I’d returned to New York, a letter arrived from Dr. Alexander, telling me he’d seen the film and, as he put it, “was scared to death.” It goes without saying that he wanted nothing further to do with me. I found his reaction incredible—what kind of a doctor would use that sort of language? Would you tell your life story to a psychologist who was “scared to death” by a movie? How could anyone take this man seriously?
Needless to say, I never made my schizophrenic movie.
Obviously, I like obsessions, my own as well as other people’s, because they make it easier to deal with life; I feel sorry for people who don’t have any. And I like solitude, as long as someone drops by for a chat from time to time.
But then there’s the problem of sombreros, which I hate, as I do all “official” forms of folklore. Mexican charros are fine when I come across them in the country, but when they put on those oversized hats weighed down with yards of gold thread and parade around nightclub stages, I’m revolted.
Dwarves, on the other hand, fascinate me. I’ve worked with several of them during my lifetime and have found them intelligent, thoroughly likable, and surprisingly self-assured. In fact, most of them seem to feel perfectly comfortable with their size and are convinced that nothing could persuade them to change places with the more conventional human model. They also seem to have an impressive amount of sexual energy; the dwarf in Nazarin alternated regularly between two normal-sized mistresses in Mexico City. Indeed, many women I’ve met seem to have a predilection for dwarves, perhaps because they can play both child and lover.
I despise the spectacle we’ve made of death, yet I also feel a certain fascination for strange funeral rites. The mummies in Guana-juato, for instance, are astonishingly well preserved because of the quality of the soil; their ties, their buttons, the black crescents under their nails, are still intact. In a strange way, seeing them is like going to visit a friend who’s been dead for fifty years. I remember a story Ernesto García once told me about his father, who was an administrator in Saragossa in charge of a cemetery which housed innumerable bodies lined up in wall niches. One morning in the 1920s, while some of the alcoves were being emptied to make room for newcomers, Ernesto saw two skeletons—one of a nun still clothed in her habit, the other a gypsy with his staff—tumble out onto the floor and come to rest in each other’s arms.