Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

I went to Madrid to talk on avant-garde cinema. I brought along afew films to show-Renk Clair's Entr'acte, the dream sequence fromRenoir's La FiIle de I'eau, Cavalcanti's Rzen que les heures. I also plannedto explain the slow-motion sequence and to illustrate it with shotsof a bullet slowly emerging from the barrel of a gun. The tout-Madridturned out, and after the screenings Ortega y Gasset confessed to methat if he were younger, he'd love to try his hand at movies too. Trueto form, when I realized how aristocratic my audience was, I suggestedto Pepin Bello that we announce a menstruation contest andaward prizes after the lecture; but like so many other surrealist acts,this one never happened.At the time, I was probably the only Spaniard among those who'dleft Spain who had had any experience with the cinema. When theGoya Society of Saragossa asked me to make a film about the life ofthe painter to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of his death,I wrote a complete script, with some technical advice from Jean'ssister, Marie Epstein. Afterwards, however, when I went to see ValleInclin at the Fine Arts Institute, I discovered that he too was makinga movie about Goya. I was all ready to bow out gracefully before themaster when he himself withdrew; but, in the end, the project wasabandoned for lack of funds.One of my favorite authors was Ramon Gomez de la Serna, whoseshort stories inspired my second screenplay. As a unifying device, Iexperimented with clips from a documentary showing the makingof a newspaper. A man buys a paper from a kiosk and sits down ona nearby bench to read it; as he reads, Serna's stories appear on thescreen, each preceded by a newspaper headline~a local crime, afootball match, a political event. When the "stories" are over, theman gets to his feet, crumples up the paper, and throws it away.A few months later, I made Un Chien andalou, which came froman encounter between two dreams. When I arrived to spend a fewdays at Dali's house in Figueras, I told him about a dream I'd hadin which a long, tapering cloud sliced the moon in half, like a razorblade slicing through an eye. Dali immediately told me that he'd