Bunuel_Luis_My_Last_Breath

first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer,growing larger and larger. We simply couldn't understand that thecamera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trickphotography (as in Mkliks's films), the head only appeared to growlarger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideouslyout of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believedin the reality of what we saw.Although I think my mother did go to the movies occasionally,I'm sure my father, who died in 1923, never saw a movie in his life.In 1909, a friend of his from Palma de Majorca proposed that, theyput up the money to finance the construction of a chain of movietheatres in a selection of Spanish cities. My father only snorted; hehad nothing but scorn for what seemed to him just another kind ofcircus. Had he accepted the offer, perhaps I'd now be the largestmovie distributor in Spain!It's true, though, that for the first twenty or thirty years, thecinema was considered more or less the equivalent of the amusementpark-good for the common folk, but scarcely an artistic enterprise.No critic thought the cinema worth writing about. I remember mymother weeping with despair when, in 1928 or 1929, I announcedmy intention of making a film. It was as if I'd said: "Mother, I wantto join the circus and be a clown." A family friend, a lawyer, had tobe enlisted to convince her that there was a lot of money to be madein films. In fact, he pontificated, someone might even produce aninteresting piece of work on the order of the spectacular Italian filmsabout ancient Greece and Rome. (My mother allowed herself to bepersuaded, but she never saw the film she'd financed.)