My Last Sigh by Luis Bunuel
On the other hand, I was very fond of Subida al cielo (Mexican Bus Ride), which I made in 1951 with a scenario based on some adventures that had actually happened to my friend and producer, the poet Altolaguirre, while he was on a bus trip. The film was shot in Guerrero, which even today can boast of more violence than just about any other state in Mexico. Despite the fact that our bus model was embarrassingly unrealistic as it lurched painfully up the mountainside, the shoot itself went quickly, even though we did have the usual series of contretemps, like the production assistant being held hostage in the Hotel Las Palmeras in Acapulco because of unpaid bills. And there was the scene where a little girl who’d been fatally bitten by a snake is buried in a cemetery where a traveling movie theatre has been put up. It was a long scene, and we’d allowed three nights for it, but the union insisted we do it in two hours, so everything had to be rearranged in order to shoot it all in the same take. (In general, my experience in Mexico forced me to become a high-speed worker, a skill I often regret having mastered.)
After Mexican Bus Ride, my next film released was El (This Strange Passion), which was made in 1952 after Robinson Crusoe. Ironically, there’s absolutely nothing Mexican about El; it’s simply the portrait of a paranoiac, who, like a poet, is born, not made. Afterwards, he increasingly perceives reality according to his obsession, until everything in his life revolves around it. Suppose, for instance, that a woman plays a short phrase on the piano and her paranoid husband is immediately convinced that it’s a signal to her lover who’s waiting somewhere outside, in the street.…
El contains many authentic details taken from daily life, but it also has a great deal of invention. In the beginning, for instance, during the washing of the feet in the church, the paranoiac spies his victim immediately, like a falcon spies the dove. This blinding intuition may be fiction, but no one can tell me it’s not based in some sense on a reality. In any case, the movie was shown at Cannes, for some inexplicable reason, during a screening in honor of the veterans of foreign wars, who, as you can imagine, were outraged. In general, it wasn’t very well received; even Jean Cocteau, who’d once written several generous pages about my work in Opium, declared that with El I’d “committed suicide.” (He later changed his mind.) My only consolation came from Jacques Lacan, who saw the film at a special screening for psychiatrists at the Cinémathèque in Paris and praised certain of its psychological truths.
In Mexico, El was nothing short of disastrous. Oscar Dancigers stormed out of the screening room while the audience was convulsed with laughter. I went into the theatre just at the moment when (shades of San Sebastián) the man slides a long needle through a keyhole to blind the spy he thinks is lurking behind the door. Oscar was right; they were laughing. The film played for a couple of weeks, but only thanks to the prestige of Arturo de Cordova, who played the lead.
Apropos of paranoiacs, I remember a terrifying experience that occurred around 1952, just after the El fiasco. In our neighborhood in Mexico City, there was an officer who closely resembled the character in the film. He too used to tell his wife that he was leaving on maneuvers, then sneak back that same evening, fake a voice, and call to his wife: “Open up, it’s me! I know your husband’s gone.…” I told this story, as well as several others, to a friend, who proceeded to write a newspaper article about the officer. Later, when it was too late, I remembered certain ancient Mexican customs involving slander and vengeance. Clearly, I’d committed an unpardonable sin, and I trembled when I imagined what the officer’s response would be. What would I do, I asked myself, if he knocked at my door, gun in hand? In the end, much to my amazement, nothing happened; perhaps he read a different newspaper.
Another strange episode, this time involving Cocteau, took place at the Cannes Festival in 1954, when we both served on the same panel of judges. One day we made a date to meet at the bar of the Carlton Hotel at a quiet hour in the middle of the afternoon. I arrived with my habitual punctuality, but saw no sign of Cocteau. After watching and waiting for half an hour, I finally left, but when I saw Cocteau later that evening, he asked me why I hadn’t shown up for our appointment. I told him that I’d indeed been there, but that he hadn’t, whereupon he said he’d done exactly the same thing at the same time, but certainly hadn’t seen me. Intrigued, we verified each other’s stories, but the mystery remains unsolved.
In 1930, Pierre Unik and I had written a screenplay based on Wuthering Heights. Like all the surrealists, I was deeply moved by this novel, and I had always wanted to try the movie. The opportunity finally came, in Mexico in 1953. I knew I had a first-rate script, but unfortunately I had to work with actors Oscar had hired for a musical—Jorge Mistral, Ernesto Alonso, a singer and rumba dancer named Lilia Prado, and a Polish actress named Irasema Dilian, who despite her Slavic features was cast as the sister of a Mexican métis. As expected, there were horrendous problems during the shoot, and suffice it to say that the results were problematical at best. There’s one scene I remember vividly, however, in which an old man is reading to a child from the bible, a little-known passage which doesn’t appear in all editions but is far superior to the Song of Songs. Of course, the author had to put these words into the mouths of unbelievers in order to get them printed. I can’t resist quoting the passage in full; it’s from the Book of Wisdom, Chapter II, verses 1–9:
For they have said, reasoning with themselves, but not right: The time of our life is short and tedious, and in the end of a man there is no remedy, and no man hath been known to have returned from hell:
For we are born of nothing, and after this we shall be as if we had not been; for the breath in our nostrils is smoke: and speech a spark to move our heart,
Which being put out, our body shall be ashes, and our spirit shall be poured abroad as soft air, and our life shall pass away as the trace of a cloud, and shall be dispersed as a mist, which is driven away by the beams of the sun, and overpowered with the heat thereof:
And our name in time shall be forgotten, and no man shall have any remembrance of our works.
For our time is as the passing of a shadow, and there is no going back of our end: for it is fast sealed, and no man returneth.
Come therefore, and let us enjoy the good things that are present, and let us speedily use the creatures as in youth.
Let us fill ourselves with costly wine, and ointments: and let not the flower of the time pass by us.
Let us crown ourselves with roses, before they be withered: let no meadow escape our riot.
Let none of us go without his part in luxury: let us everywhere have tokens of joy: for this is our portion, and this our lot.
Reading this profession of atheism is like reading one of the more sublime pages in de Sade.
After La ilusión viaja en tranvía (Illusion Travels by Streetcar), I made El río y la muerte (Death and the River), which was shown at the Venice festival. Although the underlying argument in the film seems to be that through education we’ll civilize ourselves—or to put it more simply, if everyone had a college diploma, there’d be no more murder (a belief I find thoroughly absurd)—there’s another aspect of the movie that intrigues me. I’ve always been fascinated by the ease with which certain people can kill others, and this idea runs throughout the film in the form of a series of simple and apparently gratuitous murders. Curiously, each time someone died, the audience laughed and shouted for more. Yet most of the events in the film were based on true stories. In addition, they reveal a dramatic aspect of Latin American culture, Colombian in particular, which seems to hold the belief that human life—one’s own as well as other people’s—is less important than it is elsewhere. One can be killed for the smallest mistake, like a sideways look, or simply because someone “feels like it.” European readers are always shocked when they see their morning paper in Mexico, which is typically filled with reports of all sorts of violent crimes. I remember one particularly diabolical article about a man who’s waiting patiently for a bus when another man arrives and asks him
“Does this bus stop at Chapultepec?” he inquires.
“Yes,” the first man replies.
But the second continues to ask questions about the various buses and their destinations, until he finally gets to:
“And the bus for San Angel?”
“Ah, no,” the man answers, “not the bus for San Angel.”
“Well, then,” the first says, pulling out a gun and shooting him, “here’s for all the others!”
(Even Breton would have found that an authentic surrealist act.)
There’s another story which I remember vividly because I read it just after my arrival in Mexico. A man walks into number 39 on a certain street and asks for Señor Sánchez. The concierge replies that there is no Sánchez in his building, but that he might inquire at number 41. The man goes to number 41 and asks for Sánchez, but the concierge there replies that Sánchez lives at number 39, and that the first concierge must have been mistaken. The man returns to number 39 and tells that concierge what number 41 said, whereupon the concierge asks him to wait a moment, goes into another room, comes back with a revolver, and shoots the visitor.
What shocked me more than anything else about this story was the journalist’s tone; the article was written as if the concierge’s act was perfectly appropriate. Even the headline agreed: “Lo mata por pregunton”—dead because he wanted to know too much. It reminds me of a mayor I once met who told me, “Cado domingo tiene su muertito”—each Sunday has its little death—as if weekly assassinations were the most natural things in the world.
One of the scenes in El río y la muerte evokes a ritual in Guerrero. Every once in a while the government launches a “depistolization” campaign. Then, once all the guns have been collected, everyone rushes out to buy new ones. In the movie, a man is murdered and his family carries his corpse from house to house so that the dead man may “bid farewell” to all his friends and neighbors. At every door, people hug each other, drink, even sing. Finally, they stop at the assassin’s house, where, despite their appeals, the door remains obstinately closed.
This movie uses other aspects of Latin American culture, such as machismo, a notion imported from Spain. Machismo used to refer only to a strong sense of male vanity and dignity, but in Mexico men seem inordinately sensitive to slights of any kind. In fact, there’s no one more dangerous than a Mexican who eyes you calmly and because, for example, you refused to drink a tenth tequila with him, tells you softly, “You’re insulting me.” Should this happen to you, I’d strongly suggest you grit your teeth and drink that last tequila.
In addition to their machismo, Mexicans have a highly developed capacity for vengeance. My assistant on Subida al cielo once told me a story about the time he went hunting one Sunday with a few friends. They’d just stopped for lunch when they found themselves surrounded by armed men on horseback who took away their boots and rifles. One man in the group was a friend of an important local official who lived nearby, and when they went to protest, the official asked them to describe their attackers as closely as they could.
“And now,” he added, once the description was complete, “allow me to invite you for a drink next Sunday.”
When they all returned the following week, their host served them coffee and liqueurs, then asked them to come into the next room, where, to their amazement, they found their boots and rifles. When they asked who their attackers had been and if they could see them, the official only smiled and told them the case was closed. Indeed, the aggressors were never seen again—by anyone—just as thousands of people simply “vanish” each year in Latin America. The League of the Rights of Man and Amnesty International do their best, but the disappearances continue.
Interestingly enough, in Mexico a murderer is designated by the number of lives he “owes.” People say he owes so many lives; and when the police get their hands on someone who owes a lot of them, they don’t bother with formalities. I remember an incident that occurred while we were making La Mort en ce jardin near Catemaco Lake. The local police chief, who’d waged a vigorous campaign to rid the area of outlaws, came by one day and casually invited the French actor Georges Marchai, who had a passion for hunting, to accompany him on a manhunt for a well-known killer. Horrified, Marchai refused. But several hours later, when the police passed by again, the chief stopped to inform us that the business had now been taken care of and that we had nothing more to fear.
There is a peculiarly intimate relationship between Mexicans and their guns. One day I saw the director Chano Urueta on the set directing a scene with a Colt .45 in his belt.
“You never know what might happen,” he replied casually, when I asked him why he needed a gun in the studio.
On another occasion, when the union demanded that the music for Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz) be taped, thirty musicians arrived at the studio one very hot day, and when they took off their jackets, fully three quarters of them were wearing guns in shoulder holsters.
The writer Alfonso Reyes also told me about the time, in the early 1920s, that he went to see Vasconcelos, then the secretary of public education, for a meeting about Mexican traditions.
“Except for you and me,” Reyes told him, “everyone here seems to be wearing a gun!”
“Speak for yourself,” Vasconcelos replied calmly, opening his jacket to reveal a Colt .45.
This “gun cult” in Mexico has innumerable adherents, including the great Diego Rivera, whom I remember taking out his pistol one day and idly sniping at passing trucks. There was also the director Emilio “Indio” Fernandez, who made María Candelaria and La perla, and who wound up in prison because of his addiction to the Colt .45. It seems that when he returned from the Cannes Festival, where one of his films had won the prize for best cinematography, he agreed to see some reporters in his villa in Mexico City. As they sat around talking about the ceremony, Fernandez suddenly began insisting that instead of the cinematography award, it had really been the prize for best direction. When the newspapermen protested, Fernandez leapt to his feet and shouted he’d show them the papers to prove it. The minute he left the room, one of the reporters suspected he’d gone to get not the papers, but a revolver—and all of them took to their heels just as Fernandez began firing from a second-story window. (One was even wounded in the chest.)
The best story, however, was told to me by the painter Siqueiros. It occurred toward the end of the Mexican Revolution when two officers, old friends who’d been students together at the military academy but who’d fought on opposing sides, discovered that one of them was a prisoner and was to be shot by the other. (Only officers were executed; ordinary soldiers were pardoned if they agreed to shout “Viva” followed by the name of the winning general.) In the evening, the officer let his prisoner out of his cell so that they could have a drink together. The two men embraced, touched glasses, and burst into tears. They spent the evening reminiscing about old times and weeping over the pitiless circumstances that had appointed one to be the other’s executioner.
“Whoever could have imagined that one day I’d have to shoot you?” one said.
“You must do your duty,” replied the other. “There’s nothing to be done about it.”
Overcome by the hideous irony of their situation, they became quite drunk.
“Listen, my friend,” the prisoner said at last. “Perhaps you might grant me a last wish? I want you, and only you, to be my executioner.”
Still seated at the table, his eyes full of tears, the victorious officer nodded, pulled out his gun, and shot him on the spot.
This has been a very long digression, but in order not to leave you with the impression that Mexico is no more than an infinite series of gunshots, let me just say that the gun cult seems finally to be on the wane, particularly since the many arms factories have been closed. In theory, all guns must now be registered, although it’s estimated that in Mexico City alone there are more than five hundred thousand guns which have s
Mexico is a country with enormous energy, where the people have an intense desire to learn and to improve the quality of their lives. They are also a very kind people, whose generosity and hospitality have made the country, from the Spanish Civil War to Pinochet’s coup in Chili, one of the most popular choices for refugees. The differences that once existed between native Mexicans and gachupines (Spanish immigrants) have now largely disappeared. In addition, Mexico is perhaps the most stable of all the Latin American countries. For almost sixty years, it’s lived in peace; military uprisings and caudillismo are now only bloody memories. Thanks to oil, the economy—and public education in particular—are well-developed, and relations among the different states, even when they’re run by opposing political factions, are cordial. Even so, the country is often criticized for certain customs which scandalize the European mind but which aren’t in any way forbidden by the constitution. Take nepotism, for example. It’s absolutely normal, in fact traditional, for a president to appoint members of his family to important government posts. No one protests seriously—that’s simply the way it’s always been.