No Answers

IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY My Last Sigh, Luis Bunuel, the father of the surrealist cinema, remarks that the one unifying principle of his first film, "Un Chien D'andalou," was that "no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted." In telling his life story, Bunuel likewise rejects interpretation. His memoirs are a rambling collection of disparate reveries, images, jokes, each of them entirely absorbing. Bunuel does not draw upon these to form conclusions of any sort, to make aesthetic judgements or to evaluate the importance of various events in the development of his career. He leaves it to us to link images in his description of his childhood to images in his films; the framework of this autobiography is not analysis but memory.

The strategy seems appropriate for a man who appears to have succedded through not only immense talent but also immense gregariousness; he does not try to change our impressions of anything, but simply and sociably tells us some stories. Memories are recounted in the roughly chronological order in which they occur to him and seem somewhat hastily connected by such phrases as "In this vein, I have one last memory to expiate..." This structure does have its limits. Background information inaccessible to memory--for example, genealogical history-- receives short shrift.

What we glean of a family history suggests an atmosphere of caprice and superfluity conducive to the formation of a surrealist temperament. Bunuel's father, a successful businessman whom Bunuel describes as a man of extreme leisure ("the only thing my father would carry in the street was his elegantly wrapped jar of caviar"), seems to have had a surrealist's sense of humor. Bunuel grew up in "a very large and bourgeois apart-grew up in "a very large and bourgeois apart-10 balconies and took up the entire second floor of the building." While this spawning ground may have seemed fairly unrevolutionary to the surrealists, the elder Bunuel seems to have been as impulsive and liberal as his son. "I remember my family telling about the day my father donated his entire account to the Hispano-American bank because they were in financial straits. Apparently, it was enough to keep the bank out of bankruptcy court."

MODERN WEALTH and caprice were tempered, however, by the medieval spirituality of the Aragonian countryside. He describes the village of Saragossa as one ritualized by religion, habit, and ignorance and therefore of exquisite spiritual temperament. ("At the age of 12 I still believed that babies came from Paris--not via a stork, of course, but simply by train or car"). The stories of Bunuel's childhood establish an atmosphere and a series of preoccupations that one can pursue at leisure through his films. Many of them touch upon the Catholic horror of sexuality, which Bunuel sees as rooted in the fact that "in a rigidly hierarchical society, sex--which respects no barriers and obeys no laws--can at any moment become an agent of chaos."

The stories also recall the notion that artists are doomed to live lives of extraordinary vividity. He tells of sneaking into a village autopsy and downing the bottle of brandy provided to steady the nerves of the doctor and his friends. "When it was all over, I was blind drunk and had to be carried home, to be punished not only for drunkenness but for what my father called sadism." A penchant for guns developed early; Bunuel taught himself to use his father's pistol by asking his best friend to serve as target. Despite our desire to correlate these events to later images in his films, Bunuel seldom does; early on he makes it clear that he is not a historian.

THE ONLY MENTION of film in Bunuel's childhood disappoints us; he does not speak of having been influenced or inspired in any way. He begins with a description of the architecture of the theater in Saragossa and then mentions some cartoons: "I do remember a French comedian who kept falling down...." Bunuel's nonchalant portrayal of himself as a simple schoolboy is belied by the inclusion of an article written by his sister for the French magazine Positif. The article reveals that he had an artistically active childhood, directing a family puppet theater and delivering, in his early teens, bedtime lectures on Wagner accompanied by his violin.

Bunuel discusses the development of his directing career with the same nonchalance, so that it too seems a series of social events and friendships. His second professional directing experience involved the world-famous conductor Mengelbert in a puppet opera-based on an episode from Don Quixote. Bunuel comments, "Of course, I got my friends to play the silent parts...the work was performed a few times in Amsterdam and played to packed houses. The first evening, however, I'd completely forgotten to arrange for lighting, so the audience saw very little." His career must have been launched by, among other talents, colonial charm.

Bunuel's involvement is film stemmed from his work as a critic for Cahier's effort and several Spanish publications. Whether he saw films to write reviews or wrote reviews in order to support his celluloid habit of as many as three films a day is unclear. Fritz Lang's "Destiny," he says, "clarified my life and my vision of the world." One result of that clarification was that he saw that he wanted to make films. He started as an extra and errand boy for Jean Epstein during the filming of "Mauprat," then spent six months in Hollywood hanging around the studios and dining with Charlie Chaplin. Back in France, he did "Les Caves du Vatican," which was spliced under a magnifying glass because they'd run out of money.

It was after the opening of his first film, "Un Chien D'andalou," written in conjunction with Salvador Dali, that Bunuel was admitted to the Surrealist group. During the opening, Bunuel hid behind the screens, his pockets full of stones "to throw at the audience in case of disaster."

His comments on Surrealism are for the most part limited to specific personalities. Thus Bunuel focuses less on the creative theories of the group than on their fascinating social energies--the excommunications and other rites. The principal weapon of their revolution, he says, was scandal; this is how the bourgeois revolts against the bourgeois. The Surrealist attack "on the notion of work, that cornerstone of bourgeois civilization, as something sacrosanct," and the Surrealist distrust of the rational may lie behind Bunuel's refusal to evaluate the Surrealist's work.

"Don't ask me my opinions about art, because I don't have any," he writes, "Aesthetic concerns have played a relatively minor role in my life, and I have to smile when a critic talks, for example, of my palette." He refuses to make judgements capable of being extracted and parrotted. "I haven't seen 'L' age d'Or' since it was made, so I can't say what I think of it." He does supply fascinating incidental information. Charles de Noailles was not only expelled from the Jockey Club for Financing "L' age Dor," but threatened with excommunication. He was saved from the latter only because his mother travelled to Rome to plead with the Pope.

This is the sort of book one savors, a few pages at a time, over a period of days. It is a fascinating conversation; Bunuel's narrative style is as felicitous as was is life, a life rich in experience and dreams. His perceptions, his gossip, his portrait of his time reveal him to have been not only the artistic genius we find in his films, but a charming personality of deep sensitivity and conviction.