LUIS BUNUEL
By John Baxter
Carroll & Graf, 324 pages, $24
The once-luminous word “surreal” has grayed down into a cliche, and a misused one at that. It is commonly thought to be synonymous with “weird.” Surrealism wasn’t just weird. It was artfully weird in particular ways: an art of deliberately barbaric juxtaposition, a submersion of rational order in the fluid of dreams. Surrealism was that which stood higher than the real.
In the plastic arts and poetry-less successfully in the novel, which requires a form of narrative se-quence that muffles surrealist jangling-Surrealism in the 1920s and ’30s possessed a vitality that was darker and more brilliant than a smug and uncomprehending Eur-ope deserved. Later, Surrealism broke apart into political fantasias on themes by Lenin, on the one hand, and domestic bric-a-brac on the other. The latter was the way of the best-known Surrealist, the wacky Salvador Dali, with whom Luis Bunuel made his disturbing first film, “Un Chien Andalou” (“An Andalusian Dog,” 1928). Dali made some disciplined, haunted paintings with arresting images before turning himself into a crank producer of tourist kitsch.
One artist incarnated Surrealism all his life: Luis Bunuel, who was born in Spain in 1900, the year Freud published “The Interpretation of Dreams,” and who died in 1983, the year Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. This was the man who, in “Un Chien Andalou,” drew a knife across an open eye; who later, in Mexican exile, made versions of “Wuthering Heights” and “Robinson Crusoe”; who, in his 70s, directed the brilliant “Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “That Obscure Object of Desire.”
Born to the landed gentry, in a house with five servants, Bunuel chummed around with Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca in Madrid in the ’20s, moved to (where else?) Paris and was central to the Surrealist circle that developed there, until he went back to Spain for a flirtation with the anarchists and the left-wing republic before Franco put an end to all that. He urged his Surrealist buddies to join him in Madrid to burn down the Prado, and when they demurred, he set about searching for a Spanish distributor for his second film, “L’Age d’Or” (“The Golden Age,” 1930), which had spurred right-wing riots. Probably a member of the French Communist Party, he liked to joke in later life about writing a dummy will leaving all his earthly goods to Nelson Rockefeller. He worked for the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Warner Brothers in Hollywood. He collected handguns. Serving on the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1954, he was so revolted by its compromised choices that he stormed out of the hall, marched to the beach and threw his dinner jacket into the Mediterranean. A great character for a biography, in short.
But John Baxter’s tour through the exterior facts of Bunuel’s life is not the biography he deserves. The above juicy facts are scattered throughout his book like droplets in tinsel. Baxter, who has published biographies of Stanley Kubrick and Federico Fellini, gives us a pallid Bunuel, a Bunuel without interiority, without the blood or ferocious poetry or piety of Spain, an austere and often ruthless Bunuel who is yet without passion, an intellectual without tears or ideas, a Bunuel of occasional anecdotes. He name-drops. He gives us quick plot summaries of the films but is tone-deaf to their texture. He tells us who brought wine and who brought cheese to a party, but not what Bunuel was reading. He tells us about ailments, not commitments.
The book is littered with lost opportunities. Even delicious anecdotes, in Baxter’s rendition, often go flat. He tells us that in Spain during the Civil War, Bunuel did “a little spying on the side.” On whom, and to what end? Baxter either doesn’t know or isn’t saying. Innocent of political sophistication, Baxter lets us know that in 1945, Bunuel, in exile from Franco’s Spain, either shared a Mexican jail cell with Ramon Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin, or joked that he had done so. He tells us later that Bunuel, long a communist sympathizer, in 1971 received the blacklisted American director Joseph Losey, who was shooting “The Assassination of Trotsky.” What did Bunuel think of such a project? Baxter doesn’t ask, let alone try to make sense of Bunuel’s blank-faced humor. Baxter’s political shallowness has him telling the tale of a colleague of Bunuel’s so inspired by the French student uprising of 1968 that he joins the Communist Party. One small problem: This would never happen because the Communist Party so hated the student rebels. Baxter has this so wrong, the reader doesn’t know what to believe about the rest of his factual claims-especially when he attributes William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity” to Edmund Wilson. Baxter mostly fails to cite specific sources for specific information.
Baxter is equally innocent of a Surrealist sensibility. He gives us a Bunuel neither tormented nor quite joyful. He tantalizes the reader with a mention of a 1975 meeting convened by Mexican President Luis Echeverria Alvarez to discuss politics and movies. Seven years earlier, as minister of the interior, Echeverria had organized the massacre of upwards of 300 Mexican students at a peaceful demonstration. Now he had summoned, along with Bunuel, no less than John Huston, Losey, Roman Polanski, Sergio Leone, Constantin Costa-Gavras and Frank Capra, and lectured them on ” `the manipulation of cinema by international political tendencies, aiming to use it as an instrument to dominate developing nations.’ ” Think about this: The directors of “Un Chien Andalou,” “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” “The Assassination of Trotsky,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” “Z” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” in the same room with the butcher of Mexico City as he lectures them on the imperialism of the movies! If ever a scene called out for evocation, this is the one. Bunuel could have made a whole movie out of such a scene. (Perhaps he did exactly that, prematurely, in his 1962 “The Exterminating Angel,” in which a houseful of bourgeois types cannot bring themselves to leave the scene of a party.) Baxter lets the opportunity slip away with 10 lines.
Baxter’s Bunuel is a double-jointed stick figure-harsh but joking, anti-emotional but wild, disciplined but fun-loving, a communist who believed in harsh fate, a pious Antichrist. Bunuel, were he still with us, would be dumping another jacket in the ocean.
