Luis Buñuel,
An Unspeakable Betrayal: Selected Writings of Luis Buñuel. Translated by Garrett White.
University of California Press: Berkeley, California. 2000.
ISBN 0 520 20840 4 (hb)
275 pp
US$27.50
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)
Uploaded 1 December 2001
An Unspeakable Betrayal is a collection of writings by Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), published originally in French as Le Christ à cran d’arrêt: œuvres littéraires in 1995. The individual pieces were first published in various forms and over a number of years. Many were originally written in Spanish in the 1920s, others are lectures or public addresses delivered in Mexico in Spanish or English; some have not been given a date or publishing details at all, being described as “typescript in Spanish”, or “typescript in English”, or “written at Hôtel des Terrasses, Paris, July 6, 1927”.
The collection is arranged under six broad classifications: Surrealist Writings, An Andalusian Dog (an allusion to an unpublished book of Buñuel’s poems, essays, and stories called Un perro andaluz, 1927), Theatre, On Cinema, Buñuel on Buñuel, and Autobiographical Writings. Each section proceeds more or less chronologically, the earliest piece being a childhood fragment from 1913, and the last being a meditative essay, “Pessimism”, written in 1980.
The pieces cover prose, poetry, and thoughts on film theory and decoupage – the latter seen as a segmented giant tapeworm! There are also notes on films and actors, where we learn Buñuel loves Stroheim’s Greed but has no time for Abel Gance’s Napoleon. He praises American films and rates Buster Keaton over Charlie Chaplin and Adolphe Menjou over Emil Jannings. Included too are some short screenplays and synopses, ideas for “gags” and even a play, a sort of Spanish surrealist Hamlet.
Michael Wood in The London Review of Books (vol 22, No. 17, 7 Sept 2000) points out that besides being a translation of the French version, the collection contains work assembled in Spanish in 1982 and further material published in Francisco Aranda’s 1969 biography which became available in English in 1975. Thus it is rather a mish-mash of a collection, reissuing many already-published pieces, although the reader is assured that “all texts have been newly translated from the original languages for this edition” (iv).
The book purports to contain “selected” writing by Buñuel, but the fact remains that no one is credited with the selection process: there is no firm editorial hand. This leaves the book in a vacuum, and I would like to have known who selected the pieces, what underpinned the selection process, under what circumstances did the typescripts and manuscripts come to light and is there more material still available but rejected for this collection? It is the translator, Garrett White, who has been left with the task of providing notes and footnotes where necessary. An attempt has been made to confer authenticity on the collection by sandwiching it between a Foreword by Buñuel’s long-term collaborator Jean-Claude Carrière and an afterword by (presumably) sons Juan Luis and Rafael Buñuel, but the ploy is a poor substitute for serious editorial ownership. Further, there is no index and no bibliography.
Buñuel created film history in 1928 with his surrealist two-reel short Un chien Andalou, so it was with a certain curiosity that I immersed myself in this collection of early pieces. The paradoxical, the logical, the contradictory, the self-evident, the boring, the surprising, the real and the not-so-real, jostle for the reader’s attention. For instance, a piece of roast meat is described as strolling along a road and coming across “a trillion tiny tailors” who ultimately dissolve in a drop of water, whilst the whole scene (adds Buñuel) is backgrounded with echoes of organ, prayers, and hymns. Breasts, coffins, carriages, tears, dead animals, unattached hands, birds, priests, flowers, blood, and young maidens, all crowd into Buñuel’s early universe. Abstractions or inanimate objects are often personified, so that Time (in “Why I don’t wear a watch”) becomes a vain, affected creature on two spindly legs made of a pen and a pencil, with other accoutrements, like a surrealist image by Picabia or Miro.
In the opening piece, which gives the collection its title, the wind is personified as an unwelcome busybody begging a struggling but smugly self-important writer to let him in. When the wind is allowed entrance to admire the writer’s work, the importunate visitor brings only disaster and betrays the writer’s hospitality. “Frankly, I was angered at his impropriety and the lack of interest he had shown in perusing my work” (4). But the wind in turn is trapped, like the big bad wolf, and hence a double betrayal is enacted. Many of these early pieces have the quality of the fable, the fairytale, with a moral or didactic observation lurking behind their heterogeneous images, a quality which would be woven into Buñuel’s films. Thus, in “A decent story”, a mother oppresses her daughter by the repeated gift of red flowers, or a toboggan slide in “Odor of sanctity” is invested with a fatal meaning, and even a lecture on puppet shows, “Guignol”, betrays a certain Buñuelian mischief as he quotes Cervantes on puppeteers: “vagabonds who treated sacred things indecently”. Buñuel himself was to be attacked for such puppeteer behaviour during his film career.
Beyond the apparent haphazard nature of these dream images we find the idiosyncratic slant which Buñuel brought to all his work. These early writings are uneven in quality but they clearly mark out Buñuel’s mental universe. Evocative, disparate images occur again and again, and this is perhaps the most insistent feature of Buñuel’s style. He is concerned to show the grave, relentless logic of dreams using images which provoke shock, surprise, betrayal, passion, desire, loss, and terror, already experimenting with processes he will fully develop in his films.
Indeed, Buñuel’s early surrealism defines his view of cinema. Writing in “Cinema as an instrument of poetry” (1958), he suggests that “a film is like an involuntary imitation of a dream as in dreams, images appear and disappear through dissolves and shadows, time and space become flexible, shrinking and expanding at will” (139). In the same breath he decries “neo-realism” for capturing only the surface of things. Illustrating this graphically, he points to his wine glass, viewed differently by each of us, “because each person pours a dose of subjective feelings into what he sees, and no one sees it as it really is but as his desires and his state of mind make him see it” (140). Not for Buñuel the visual trappings of plot-driven cinema: what he asks for is poetry, the mysterious, the fantastic, so as to enlarge our understanding of the world.
The childhood fragments are also revealing. Buñuel’s earliest memories are punctuated by religious festivals, the killing of pigs, hunting and shooting birds, the sounds of night watchmen calling to each other, and the language of bells ringing. Pealing bells could sound ferocious, glorious or profound, announcing a birth or a death, vespers, mass or the angelus. Buñuel particularly remembers the smell of a dead donkey being devoured by vultures. Having lived an almost medieval life, where class divides were the norm, he says his childhood was affected by both a “profound eroticism” and “a permanent consciousness of death”. This mix of feelings and memories, the strong awareness of class and bourgeois trappings, will eventually find their way into every Buñuel film.
In the Foreword, Jean-Claude Carrière portrays Buñuel as a reluctant writer, so much so that the director’s autobiography, My Last Sigh, was actually ghost-written by Carrière. “But I wrote it with him, in Mexico, conferring with him for three hours a day and then daring to write, `I, Buñuel”. Carrière also tells us that Buñuel abandoned his pretensions of being a poet and writer the moment he met Garcia Lorca in Madrid. Happily for the world of film, Buñuel realized his strengths lay elsewhere.
It could be argued that surrealism is not suited to prose. Because it relies on images, it suits the painter, the poet, the filmmaker. Prose narrative needs conjunctions, commas, and full stops; it requires reasons and explanations, because logical interstices need to be filled. This is precisely why the surrealist images recounted here in prose seem forced and lame, odd concoctions which have lost their mysterious resonances just as a dream loses its power in the retelling. For instance, in the screenplay of Un Chien Andalou the character is said to have an expression “full of treachery”. This sort of spelling-out is unnecessary in film, the images will suggest treachery – and much, much more. The same goes for the belaboured “lachrymal lake” of “Ménage à trois”. So these early pieces, rare as they might be, do not do justice to what Buñuel went on to achieve. And yet, they give a glimpse into Buñuel’s universe. From the start he seemed to work more as a mosaicist than a broad-brush painter, fitting together what he called “gags”, intuitions, an angle or a twist, so as to question and undermine prior assumptions.
Clearly even geniuses start from humble beginnings. In these whimsical, disparate pieces we can already see Buñuel’s emerging interests and tone: “sarcastic and sentimental, brutal and modest”, says Carrière, but also quirky, mischievous, inventive, and above all, true to himself.
Inge Pruks-Izzo