Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

From Spain to Mexico to France (1 960-1 97 7 )replied that he hadn't written it yet, and that in any case the titlewasn't his. It came, he said, from the Apocalypse, and was thereforein the public domain.There are many things in the film taken directly from life. I wentto a large dinner party in New York where the hostess had decidedto amuse her guests by staging various surprises: for example, a waiterwho stretched out to take a nap on the carpet in the middle of dinnerwhile he was carrying a tray of food. (In the film, of course, theguests don't find his antics quite so amusing.) She also brought in abear and two sheep scene in the movie that prompted severalcritics to symbolic excesses, including the bear as Bolshevism waitingto ambush capitalistic society, which had been paralyzed by its contradictions.In life, as in film, I've always been fascinated by repetition. Whycertain things tend to repeat themselves over and over again I haveno idea, but the phenomenon intrigues me enormously. There areat least a dozen repetitions in The Exterminating Angel. Two menintroduce themselves and shake hands, saying, "Delighted!" Theymeet again a moment later and repeat the routine as if they'd neverseen each other before. The third time, they greet each other withgreat enthusiasm, like two old friends. Another repetition occurswhen the guests enter the hall and the host calls his butler twice; infact, it's the exact same scene, but shot from different angles."Luis," my chief cameraman said to me while the film was beingcut, "there's something very wrong here.""What?" I asked."The scene where they enter the house is in there twice!"(Since he was the one who filmed both sequences, I still wonderhow he could possibly have thought that such a colossal "error" hadescaped both me and the editor.)The Extermimting Angel is one of the rare films I've sat throughmore than once, and each time I regret its weaknesses, not to mentionthe very short time we had to work on it. Basically, I simply see agroup of people who couldn't do what they wanted to-leave a room.