“The Good Spaniard
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
(Shakespeare Act III Scene I, Prospero)

Luis Buñuel seemed like a troubled man—not in a destructive way like Harvey Weinstein, Roman Polanski, or Errol Flynn, but in his thoughts, anxieties, and concerns. Reading his vivid biography reveals a person consumed with death, memory, and how every moment of our life is eventually lost in time like tears in rain—it is in a sense his main theme.

Like the films he made in life, he starts the biography nonlinearly from the end. He is growing old; his memory has started to fade, and he recalls how his own mother lost her mind to the point where she could not even recognize Luis anymore. He feels like he is waiting for the fog of old age to scramble and obscure his own memories; “I search and search, but it’s always futile, and I can only wait for the final amnesia, the one that can erase an entire life, as it did my mother’s” (Buñuel 96).

It is 1982, a year before the great filmmaker would depart this world, and Buñuel is starting to sound a lot like Shakespeare’s Prospero. Like the wizard, the aging artist has broken his own magic staff so to speak, he has retired from filmmaking where his anxieties, worries, and futile outlook were boons rather than deterrents.

The book is aptly named; Buñuel is more than aware that his book really is his last sigh in a weary world that is marching defiantly on. And so, the great man had not much left but to ponder the life he had left behind—but even that is difficult for Buñuel. Like Marcel Proust before him, he mistrusts his own memory, knowing full well that he is the director of his past memories the same way he would direct a film.

Our imagination, our dreams, are forever invading our memories; and since we are all apt to believe in the reality of our fantasies, we end up transforming our lies into truths. Of course fantasy and reality are equally felt, so their confusion is a matter of only relative importance (Buñuel 117).

However, the great thing about memory is how freeing it is, like the best Buñuel pictures his biography is not limited to space and time and so we travel back, before the cameras started rolling, before Franco fell, to a small village in southern Spain that obstinately refused to change its ways or fall prey to outside trends—Calanda.

The year is 1900, and Leonardo Buñuel and Maria Portoles are about to have their first of seven children: Luis Buñuel Portoles. Reflecting back on his youth, Buñuel would describe Calanda as a place where “the middle ages lasted until World War I” (Buñuel 138), an untouched setting where progress is seen as a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy. It was at this age that he would have a long-lasting encounter with death, after discovering the carcass of a rotting animal (the residents of Calanda believing that the corpses were good for the crops);

A dead donkey lay about a hundred yards away, swollen and mangled, serving as a banquet for a dozen vultures, not to mention several dogs. The sight of it both attracted and repelled me… I stood there hypnotized, sensing that beyond this rotten carcass lay some obscure metaphysical significance (Buñuel 185).

Thus, began Buñuel’s long journey away from orthodox believer to an irreverent iconoclast. Death was only one of the many interests that would come to dominate his later work. In his formative teenage years, he would grow to reject the omnipresent Catholic church, decrying it as corrupt. He would later say of his relationship to God:

What am I to God? Nothing, a murky shadow. My passage on this earth is too rapid to leave any traces; it counts for nothing in space or in time. God really doesn’t pay any attention to us, so even if he exists, it’s as if he didn’t. My form of atheism, however, leads inevitably to an acceptance of the inexplicable. Mystery is inseparable from chance, and our whole universe is a mystery… And insofar as no explication, even the simplest, works for everyone, I’ve chosen my mystery. At least it keeps my moral freedom intact (Buñuel 2726).

When I think of Buñuel, I don’t get the impression of Woody Allen-esque hopelessness, but a detached ironic amusement. Watching his films of the 70’s, he shows a bizarre and out-of-synch world devoid of meaning, but instead of being sad—Buñuel laughs. The late Roger Ebert would say of the filmmaker:

Buñuel was cynical, but not depressed. We say one thing and do another, yes, but that doesn’t make us evil–only human and, from his point of view, funny. He has been called a cruel filmmaker, but the more I look at his films the more wisdom and acceptance I find (Ebert).

It is safe to assume that living through the Spanish Civil War, a strong Catholic upbringing, and his painful transition to America, all gave the filmmaker a rather harsh view of the world, but it seems as he was always armed with humor. The world is terrible according to Buñuel, but also hilarious and fascinating in an almost anthropological sense. He was in some ways the forerunner of hipster auteur Wes Anderson whose own films are both highly melancholic yet filled with dry comedic moments. Again, quoting Ebert,

“Most of the films of Luis Buñuel are comedies in one way or another, but he doesn’t go for gags and punch lines; his comedy is more like a dig in the ribs, sly and painful” (Ebert).

After a long career in Spain, France, Mexico and America, Luis Buñuel would spend his last weeks of life in a Mexico City hospital supposedly debating theology with longtime friend Julian Pablo. He died July 29, 1983. True to his character, most accounts say he wasn’t scared of death. His lifelong friend, Jean-Claude Carrière would say of him:

Luis waited for death for a long time, like a good Spaniard, and when he died, he was ready. His relationship with death was like that one has with a woman. He felt the love, hate, tenderness, ironical detachment of a long relationship, and he didn’t want to miss the last encounter (Carriere).

And so, much like Prospero, Luis Buñuel; giant of the cinema, did not rage against the dying light but merely with almost transcendent acceptance retired and died, his imagination, and presumably his memories lost in time—luckily for us though, we still have his films.

Works Cited

Buñuel, Luis. My Last Sigh. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Carriere, Jean-Claude. Luis Buñuel Remembered by Jean-Claude Carriere. Retrieved from https://magicktheatre.wordpress.com/2015/10/04/luis-bunuel-remembered-by-jean-claude-carriere/. Accessed 18 Feb 2019.
Ebert, Roger. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Roger Ebert.com. Retrieved from https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-discreet-charm-of-the-bourgeoisie-1972. Accessed 18 Feb 2019.
Shakespeare. The Tempest. Act III, SceneI. Retrieved from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/tempest/full.html. Accessed 18 Feb 2019.