Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

America 131COOPERATION. Then he sat down to a burst of wild, and apparentlysincere, applause.I was beside myself; the whole scene was beyond me.In addition to these enlightening forays into the world of thecinema, I went for long drives in the country at the wheel of my Ford,sometimes as far as the desert. Each day I saw new faces and met newpeople: Dolores Del Rio, the French director Jacques Feyder. The restof the time I stayed at home, reading newspaper accounts from myFrench friends of the L'Age d'w scandal in Paris.Every Saturday, Chaplin invited our little group of Spanish refugeesout for dinner. In fact, I often went to his house on the hillsideto play tennis, swim, or use the sauna. Every once in a while, Eisensteinwould drop by; he was getting ready to go to Mexico tomake Q d viva Mexico! I remember trembling through Potemkin, butbeing outraged by the pretentiousness of Romance sentimentale and itsabsurd shots of a gigantic white piano in a wheat field and swansfloating in the studio pond. (I used to comb the cafes in Montparnasselooking for the man just so I could slap him.) Later, he claimed thatRomance was really the work of his co-director Alexandrov, an outrageousl ie1 watched him shoot that scene himself with the swansat Billancourt. Seeing him in Hollywood, I somehow forgot myanger while he and I talked and drank long, cool drinks alongsideChaplin's pool.At Paramount I met Josef von Sternberg, who invited me ontothe back lot while he was shooting a film that ostensibly took placein China; the place was swarming with crowds of extras who floateddown the canals, filled the bridges, and jostled each other in thenarrow streets. What was more upsetting, however, was to see hisset designer positioning the cameras while Sternberg seemed contentjust to shout "Action!" (So much for auteurs.) In fact, most of thedirectors I watched seemed little more than lackeys who did thebidding of the studios that had hired them; they had no say in howthe film was to be made. or even how it was to be edited.In my frequent moments of idleness, I devoted myself to a bizarre