Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

I've forgotten the name. My cousin lived on that street, and we hada terrific view of the screen from her kitchen window. Her familyfinally boarded it up, however, and put in a skylight instead; butwe managed to dig a small hole in the bricks, where we took turnswatching soundless moving pictures.)When it comes to the movies I saw when I was very young, mymemory grows cloudy; I often confuse them with movies I saw laterin Madrid. But I do remember a French comedian who kept fallingdown; we used to call him Toribio. (Could it have been Onksime?)We also saw the films of Max Linder and of Miliks, particularly hisLe Voyage dans la fune. The first American filmsÑadventur serialsand burlesques-arrived later. There were also some terribly romanticItalian melodramas; I can still see Francesca Bertini, the GretaGarb of Italy, twisting the long curtain at her window and weeping.(It was both wildly sentimental and very boring.) The most popularactors at the time were the Americans Conde Hugo (Count Hugo)and Lucilla Love (pronounced Lovk in Spanish). They were famousfor their romances and action-packed serials.In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossawas equipped with its e~pftcador, or narrator, who stood nextto the screen and "explained" the action to the audience. "CountHugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man," he woulddeclaim. "And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opensthe drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate hisunfaithful wife!"It's hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in itsinfancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that mostspectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Nowwe're so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to bothsimultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehensionis automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hardtime deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicadorto guide them from scene to scene.I'll never forget, for example, everyone's terror when we saw our