Luis Buñuel, in that unrepeatable Paris

At twenty-five, his mother supported him. She guaranteed him generous and regular handouts in exchange for a permanent position at the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation in Paris. He never even applied for the position. Despite this (and despite the family notary's advice against it), she financed his first film. Twenty-five thousand pesetas, not exactly peanuts. Half of the money was squandered in nightclubs—and goodbye, feature film. Then the young man had a sudden change of heart. "A certain seriousness was required; I had to do something," he would write years later, recalling those days—and he thought: a short film to save face? Preface: what doesn't make this story a tale of ordinary childishness is that nothing here is ordinary. That boy who, a hundred years ago, at this very moment, was casually entering a Paris crowded with émigrés was Luis Buñuel . The short film of reparation, “Un chien andalou” – a masterpiece written in a week in the Figueras atelier of Salvador Dalí, his inseparable friend.

Every morning the two met, chased away Dalí's girlfriend, and discussed the images they had dreamed the previous night, dwelling on the most abstruse and rejecting those that even vaguely promised the possibility of being deciphered on an intellectual level. The resulting film ran seventeen minutes. The protagonists were Pierre Batcheff and Simone Mareuil, who a few years later committed suicide by dousing herself in gasoline and setting herself on fire. The minor roles were given to friends and relatives. The director reserved the role of the man with the razor for himself—the carved eye was that of a cow, as Buñuel himself was forced to reveal after several episodes of screaming and fainting among some spectators.

“I was fortunate enough to spend my childhood in the Middle Ages,” the director wrote in his prodigious autobiography, “Of My Last Sighs.” The text is preceded by a kind of warning about the unreliability of memory. From the man who served us the raids of the unconscious on a platter, we consider it a low blow. Except that the introduction contains a gem, this one: “I have often imagined inserting into a film a scene with a man trying to tell a story to a friend. But he forgets one word out of four, usually very simple words like car, street, policeman. He stammers, hesitates, gesticulates, searches for pathetic equivalents, until his friend, extremely irritated, slaps him and walks away.” (Buñuel lives up to his name even in the unfilmed scenes.)

And so: childhood in the Middle Ages, studies with the Jesuits, university residence in Madrid with the peñas in literary cafés like the Gijon, the Castilla, and the Kutz. His friendship with the extremely elegant Federico García Lorca —impeccable tie, magnetic aura, his room at the Residency became the city's most sought-after cultural salon. Buñuel served as his bartender, mixing forbidden rum grogs, while in his spare time he indulged in banjo, hypnotism, and disguises. And then his partnership with Salvador Dalí, nicknamed the "Czechoslovakian painter." Deep-voiced, long-haired, and pathologically shy, when he took his Fine Arts exam, he sat down before the commission and stunned everyone by declaring, "I don't recognize any of you have the right to judge me. I'm leaving."

Shortly before his long stay in Paris, the so-called Order of Toledo was established. It was an idea that came to the director in a dream—clearly, Buñuel was already immersed in Surrealism. The Brotherhood envisioned a very rigid hierarchy. To be a caballero, one had to love Toledo unreservedly, drink all night, and wander aimlessly through the city streets. Anyone who didn't want to could at most aspire to the position of squire. Members were subject to two very strict rules: they had to contribute ten pesetas to the common fund and participate in all the activities on offer—a catalog of sublime nonsense, charlatans, and late-night poetry readings in the street, waking the sleepers. One night, the members of the Brotherhood met a blind man who took them to his home: a family of blind men, living in darkness, with images of cemeteries, tombs, and cypress trees on the walls. Buñuel disbanded the Brotherhood ten years later. During the civil war, a member was nearly assassinated by a group of anarchists who had found a document certifying his membership in the Order, and he had a very difficult time until he was able to prove that he was not a member of the aristocracy.

Buñuel's biography is full of episodes that seem to be taken from a Buñuel film, because life and art speak to each other, if one deserves it. And the Paris of times gone by, "when we were very poor and very happy" —Hemingway wrote in A Moveable Feast, one of the books that makes you most regret not having been there, and besides, Woody Allen shot "Midnight in Paris" to make up for the injustices of the civil registry, a film in which Buñuel himself appears in a hilarious scene— that Paris, the Paris of 1925 , evidently deserved all the artistic population that would enliven its streets and cafés, with its unique atmosphere. In that Paris lived Robert Goffin, the first to approach jazz to study it and published, in 1924, a legendary text for connoisseurs, entitled "Jazz Band." Ten years later, he founded the Hot Club de France, officially establishing the French capital as the European home of a musical genre that until then had been explored only as a folkloric phenomenon. In the Odéon district, the Shakespeare and Company bookstore had recently been opened by American Sylvia Beach—"beautiful legs and a lively face, eyes as lively as animals and as cheerful as a child's," described her to Hemingway, who would never stop thanking her for introducing him to Turgenev. In that Paris, galleries, theaters, and nightclubs abounded, and brasseries were cultural epicenters. In that Paris, the dancer Joséphine Baker arrived from the United States, with the devilish Charleston of the “Revue Nègre”, quickly becoming the star of the Champs Elysées nights and suddenly making a tan desirable – even ladies of a certain age tanned in the sun on the beaches of Deauville.

In that Paris, Marcel Duchamps had given up everything to devote himself to chess, still managing to make a name for himself—between castling and fianchetto, he shot the short film "Anémic Cinéma," a Dada milestone and the copyright of Rrose Sélavy, his female alter ego immortalized by Man Ray. In that Paris, during the memorable 1925 Exposition, with the full triumph of Art Deco, Luis Buñuel also arrived, a former provincial from Calanda, a small town in Aragon that had "two churches and seven priests" and was known for its Good Friday drumming—which went on all night until, by dawn, the drums' skins were stained with blood. His father had died the previous year and had left behind a vast fortune, accumulated thanks to a ferretería in Cuba, a bazaar where one could buy everything from sponges to weapons. He had returned to his native Spain shortly before the island's independence and purchased land. On one of these plots, he built La Torre, a summer residence complete with a lush garden, a private stream, and a navigable pond. This lifestyle paved the way for a film career, which began in the Paris of A Moveable Feast. But beware, Buñuel's Paris chapter, which amounts to little more than ten pages in his autobiography, surpasses the entire Hemingway album in liveliness and atmosphere.

When Buñuel arrived in the French capital, he settled into the Hôtel Ronceray, the very same hotel where he was conceived . Fifty-two years later, he would come full circle; the setting for his final scene would be precisely there. “Three days after my arrival,” the director recounts, “I learned that Unamuno was in Paris. Some French intellectuals, chartering a boat, had taken him from his exile in the Canary Islands.” It was with him, at the Café La Rotonde, that Buñuel would come into contact with those the French right contemptuously called “the foreigners.” After a few weeks, he came down with a severe case of the flu, and a friend recommended a champagne cure. “No sooner said than done. And I also discovered the reasons for the French right’s contempt. Following some devaluation, the franc had collapsed. Foreign currencies allowed one to live like a lord. For a bottle of champagne, only eleven francs, that is, one peseta.” Note: The flu passed, and Buñuel began frequenting the Chinese cabaret adjacent to the hotel where he was staying. The hostess struck up a conversation, and he discovered that "she expressed herself very well, with a subtle and spontaneous sense of conversation, even though she didn't talk about philosophy or literature." But she offered him an unforgettable experience: discovering "a new relationship between language and life."

Life in Montparnasse, the epicenter of almost everything, in spats, vests, and bowler hats—when he discovers that the only ones without caps were labeled pederasts, he'll throw his away forever. Nightlife up and down, bouncing from the Dôme to La Rotonde, from Le Select to the Hôtel Mac-Mahon to listen to jazz, or dancing at the Château de Madrid. But not everything was glittering, not even in the best Paris history has produced. "I discovered anti-Semitism in France. Right-wing groups like the Camelots du roi and Jeunesses Patriotiques organized raids in Montparnasse," says Buñuel. His directorial debut, meanwhile, took place in the basement of the Select. "I had written a play, ten pages in all. It was called Hamlet." Then he directed a puppet comedy in Amsterdam—Buñuel even had actors dressed as puppets in the audience—and the short film "Un Chien Andalou." After filming, a writer published in Les Cahiers d'Art decided to introduce him to that oddball Man Ray, who had just finished shooting a documentary about a castle and needed something to add to the screening program—even coincidences have to be earned. At La Coupole, the two dined with Luis Aragon, who introduced himself "with all the grace of French manners." The next day, they saw the uncut version at the "Studio des Ursulines," enthusiastically christened it Surrealist, and said it should be shown to as many people as possible. But what was Surrealism, at that seminal yet decisive moment? "Something in the air," writes the director. "A sort of appeal received from people who practiced an instantaneous and irrational form of expression, even before they knew and recognized each other. The encounter with the group was essential and decisive for the rest of my life."

The Surrealists gathered at the Café Cyrano on Place Blanche. A popular spot in Pigalle, among prostitutes and pimps. They read, they discussed. They imagined an exemplary action to carry out. Max Ernst and André Breton were there, Paul Éluard and Tristan Tzara, Jean Arp and Magritte. They all attended, en masse, the premiere of Buñuel's film. Paid invitations, the cream of Parisian society—among the audience, Picasso, Le Corbusier, Cocteau, and behind the screen, manning the gramophone, a terrified Luis Buñuel, who played Argentine tangos and excerpts from "Tristan und Isolde." In his pockets, handfuls of stones. "To throw them at the audience, in case I failed. I was prepared for the worst." At the end of the screening there was prolonged applause. Buñuel discreetly disposed of his bullets. “The true goal of Surrealism,” he would recall, “was not to create a new movement, but to explode society. We were almost all bourgeois rebelling against the bourgeoisie. I was an example of this. The idea of ​​burning down a museum always appealed to me more than opening a cultural center. Our morality was different. It exalted insult, mystification, black laughter, the call of the abyss. Our morality was more demanding, more dangerous, more coherent than any other.” And then the Surrealists were beautiful. “The luminous, leonine beauty of Breton. The precious beauty of Aragon. Max Ernst, with his extraordinary bird-like face.” All ardent, proud, unforgettable, in a Paris that will never be repeated.

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