Good Films, Cheap Wine, Few Friends:

A Memoir

by Juan Luis Buñuel

Edited, and with an introduction, by Linda C. Ehrlich

Design by Jared Bendis

Table of Contents

Title Page

Good Films, Cheap Wine, Few Friends: A Memoir

Acknowledgements

A roadmap though my life

Introduction by Dr. Linda C. Ehrlich

Dedication by Juan Luis Buñuel

Filming

Later Years & Family Histories

People I Have Met

A Few More Thoughts

From The Cover

About the Author & Editor

Tributes

Good Films, Cheap Wine, Few Friends: A Memoir

by Juan Luis Buñuel

First Edition

Copyright © 2014 by Shika Press Ltd.

Edited, and with an introduction, by Linda C. Ehrlich

Design by Jared Bendis

All rights reserved.

Print ISBN 978-0-9858786-4-1

Library of Congress Control Number 2014936939

Published by Shika Press Ltd.

Shaker Heights, Ohio, USA

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank: María Carmen Cabrera. Jared Bendis (Creative New Media Officer for Kelvin Smith Library, CWRU), the office of the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Freedman Center, CWRU, Elena Fernández, Charlotte Sanpere-Godard, Christine Cano, John Givens, Richard Cooper, Esq., Corey Wright, Phyllis Goldenberg, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros of Milestone Film and Video, Linda Dittmar, and Ian Gibson.

∞ ∞ ∞

As editor, I dedicate my efforts on this memoir to the memory of my dear Spanish colleague Antonio Candau (1962-2013) who once wrote to me that editing Juan Luis Buñuel’s memoir would be "a true challenge. Aparte de interesante seguro que es muy divertido…."

A roadmap though my life

Note: There will be comments and indications, "truffées," throughout this work which will help with problems of daily living. Such as...how to make good rice.

Introduction

Dedication

Early Years

PARIS- SNOW WHITE (1934 to 1938)

MADRID, LEAVE FRANCE, 1939

CROSSING THE UNITED STATES

NEW YORK, 1939 to 1944

SCHOOL IN NEW YORK, BUTTERFLY IN CLASS

VACATIONS

RETURN TO CALIFORNIA, 1945

LIFE IN LOS ANGELES

COMIC BOOKS

END OF WWII, MOVE TO MEXICO CITY (D.F.)

DIFFERENT HOMES, D.F.

CALLE EXTREMADURA & PANTEÓN DOLORES

SCOUTS & SNIPE HUNT

AMERICAN FOOTBALL

VISA FOR U.S., 1953

CABARETS IN MEXICO

RANCHO DEL CHARRO

CERRADA FÉLIX CUEVAS

OBERLIN COLLEGE, OHIO

TRIP TO FLORIDA (1956)

TRIP TO TEXAS

ACCIDENTS

Filming

DON QUIXOTE + ORSON WELLES

ACAPULCO AND END OF QUIXOTE

LITTLE GIANTS

VOYAGE TO EUROPE

48 RUE MAZARINE

MONACO BAR AND TRIP WITH CHARLES

ZARAGOZA AND FAMILY, CALANDA

THE CONTRESCARPE

THE YOUNG ONE (La joven), GABRIEL FIGUEROA

INTERLUDES

Recipe for a Dry Martini

VIRIDIANA

GARRET-RUE MAZARINE

LES HALLES

SMUGGLE OUT FLN AGENT

CAMBODIA (1961)

SONATAS

TLALOC

ANTS

NICHOLAS RAY, SAMUEL BECKETT

VIVA MARÍA

SHOOTING AND GUNS

ST. MARK’S PLACE

MALRAUX IN MEXICO

MAY 1968 PARIS – MEXICO

PANAMA

BLACK PANTHERS

WILLARD, CALDER AND MIRÓ

LEONOR

BILBAO FILM FESTIVAL

YUGOSLAVIA

WOMAN WITH RED BOOTS, 1974

MASTROIANNI - BERGMAN

SYNOPSES OF FEATURE FILMS

HOUSE IBIZA (1977)

DEATH OF MY FATHER

THOUGHTS OF LORCA

GUANAJUATO

Later Years & Family Histories

CAN’T SLEEP

DREAMS

CHILE

UNFORGETTABLE MEALS

LA COUPOLE

TRIP TO NORMANDY: LETTER TO JERRY LINDNER

BUÑUEL FAMILY HISTORY AND STORIES:

LEMPEREUR-SÉNÉCHAL-RUCAR (mother’s side)

DEATH OF MY MOTHER (1994)

STORIES MY FATHER TOLD ME

MUSIC

SAN JOSÉ PURUA, MEXICO

1996 - 2010

THINGS I LIKE & DISLIKE

People I Have Met

A Few More Thoughts

NAMES & HOLA

DEATH

ON THE WRONG TRACK

SPANISH CIVIL WAR (An Introduction)

Juan Luis’ article about ALEXANDER CALDER

COLLECTIONS

Introduction

by Dr. Linda C. Ehrlich

Juan Luis Buñuel with his art work in the background

The memoir of Juan Luis Buñuel (b. 1934 in Paris) offers a first-hand look at the life of a vibrant man who has lived through momentous times. The eldest son of filmmaker Luis Buñuel, Juan Luis is a flâneur in a life that spans France, the U.S., Mexico, Spain, and several other intriguing locations. A filmmaker, sculptor, and raconteur in his own right, Buñuel grew up surrounded by important figures of the twentieth century. These include Alexander Calder, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Nicholas Ray, Samuel Beckett, Ingmar Bergman, André Malraux and Eldridge Cleaver, among many others. As his writings reveal, the Buñuelian lucid, dark humor and outrage over society’s pretensions and inequities have certainly passed from father to son.

Juan Luis and two nuns, filming of Viridiana

In this memoir (originally written for his three children), Juan Luis Buñuel offers us a writing style that is imaginative and often surprising. He combines fascinating anecdotes with an acute sense of time and place. The memoir is full of ironies, gaps, and an overarching acceptance of time passing. They are never dull; rather, they present a very human voice, full of irreverence and enthusiasms. The memoir gives us an intimate portrait of Buñuel family life in exile and descriptions of the extended family, all told by Juan Luis with great affection and an eye for the telling detail.

You will find Juan Luis an amicable and insightful companion. His engaging stories range from how he dealt with monkey spectators while working on a documentary in Cambodia to his childhood recollection of how the great sculptor Alexander Calder would make small wire toys for him that he would play with and then toss in the garbage! We learn how Buñuel explored the Mexican visual art scene, how he taught Brigitte Bardot how to shoot a pistol, and how he assisted with the filming, and the subsequent scandalous screening, of his father’s Viridiana at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival (where it won the Palme d’Or and then was immediately denounced by the Vatican).

Juan Luis’ memoir has something for everyone—for film fans, lovers of Spanish and Mexican culture, students of twentieth-century history, and everyone who relishes a good story. They provide another window into a family that has understandably guarded its privacy even as its activities have influenced history. Juan Luis’ memoir can be placed on the bookshelf beside his father’s 1982 autobiography My Last Sigh, and those of his mother Jeanne Rucar de Buñuel entitled Memorias de una mujer sin piano (Memories of a Woman Without a Piano).¹

As a writer, Juan Luis Buñuel is not in a hurry, nor does he feel a compulsion to remember everything. So you can also meander and pause during this roughly chronological journey. There are leisurely digressions of lists of collections, dreams and recipes, and practical notes of advice to his children from a watchful father. On these pages you will even find directions on how to create the famous Buñuel dry martini (and a correction to the recipe revealed in My Last Sigh), and how to savor life…and paella, cocido madrileñeo, huevos rancheros, chorizo, mole poblano, sea urchins, octopus a la gallega….

The memoir includes first-hand accounts of many important historical events, including the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, the Black Panther movement in the U.S., the ups and downs of Orson Welles’ work in Mexico on his (never-finished) Don Quixote film, and the smuggling of the undeveloped reels of his father’s controversial film Viridiana from Spain to France under the cloaks of toreadors.

Beneath his joie de vivre and sense of mischief lies Juan Luis’ serious concern for the forces that bind life unnecessarily, and for the chasm beneath our surface decorum. As he wrote in a note to me:

I was born near the middle of the 20th century...and I lived through the Spanish Civil War, World War II, the French war in Algeria, and another dozen wars fought throughout the world since then. I was lucky. I did not fight in any of them. In fact, in France during the Algerian War, I was considered a deserter. I refused to fight against my fellow man.

An Overview: Juan Luis Buñuel’s Career

This memoir will take you to various countries and continents. You will sometimes see Juan Luis credited as Jean Louis Buñuel, John Buñuel, J.L. Buñuel, etc.. After attending elementary and secondary schools in New York City, Hollywood, and Mexico City, Juan Luis received a B.A. in English Literature from Oberlin College (Ohio) in 1957.

He went on to make film and television documentaries in a host of countries: Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, England, Paris, Chile, and Cambodia, to name a few. One of Juan Luis’ key documentaries turns the lens onto his father’s hometown of Calanda in the province of Teruel with its insistent drum festival (Calanda, 1967) during Semana Santa. Calanda (filmed by Jacques Renoir, of the famous painter and filmmaker family) won the first prize at the Tours International Film Festival for the Documentary, and was invited for screenings at the London Film Festival and the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center.

Juan Luis revisited the city in 2006 to film Calanda: 40 Years Later (Calanda: 40 años después), with his son Diego and Christian Garnier as cameramen. Calanda: 40 Years Later, produced with the assistance of the Centro Buñuel de Calanda (CBC) and Aragon TV, has received screenings at the Berlin Film Festival and in Amsterdam.

Juan Luis and the cultural attaché of Calanda, 2007

The new film is punctuated with interviews of local residents: a shepherd, the mayor, drum makers, a young Spanish woman who has adopted a daughter from China, men from Morocco, Uruguayan bar owners, among others.² Rafael, Juan Luis’ younger brother, is invited for the rompida (break of the hour at noon) to start off the drumming.

As Juan Luis noted in one email to me (24 Feb. 2007): " In Calanda: 40 Años Después, I combine both films and show the town in the Middle Ages (40 years ago) and today, in its modern form, as a European village with several factories, foreign workers, etc." This documentary contrasts the monster-like mechanization of the factories and their polluting billows of smoke with the work of craftsmen, who still make the drums largely by hand.

For the UNESCO Heritage series, Juan Luis made three documentaries: Gaudí: To Dream in Barcelona (1989, about architect Antonio Gaudí, narrated by actor John Hurt); Guanajuato, una leyenda (1990, which focuses on the ancient city of Guanajuato in central Mexico); and The Years of Change (1994, filmed in Chile about the educational system there after the Pinochet dictatorship).

These UNESCO documentaries take us soaring to the heights of creativity (Gaudí) and deep into the depths of the earth’s dark caverns (The Years of Change) and their unfortunate miners. Gaudí: To Dream in Barcelona approaches the city as a vast dream state…a territory of infinite possibilities as it highlights the sinuosity of the architecture. Juan Luis imaginatively cross-cuts between details of the architecture and the natural forms that inspired them, including shots of huge tortoises and hippos cavorting in the water, and the eyes of a komodo dragon. The camera waltzes lyrically along the mosaic tiles of the benches of Parc Güell as kids take possession of the space.

Gaudí: To Dream in Barcelona

In the footage he shot of the May 1968 protests in Paris, Juan Luis, a fledgling filmmaker, captures the sense of unrest and exhilaration in the crowds of students and workers symbolically waving goodbye to French President Charles de Gaulle. In the row of young filmmakers locking arms and marching, we can spot a young Alain Resnais, a bearded Louis Malle, and even a glimpse of the elusive Chris Marker!

During my visit to Paris in December 2013 to work with Juan Luis, I was fortunate to be able to view another of his short documentaries, The Great Camembert Race (not to be confused with the Paris-Camembert bicycle race). Buñuel recorded this truly surreal event with the same care one might expect of a film about a famous marathon or horse race. We see a Danish engraver living in Paris inspect each contribution of cheese for insects, and a woman (wearing empty camembert boxes as earrings) oil a special surface on a slant. Children vociferously cheer their camemberts as the half-chunks of cheese slide down. Alas, the cheeses seem to have a mind of their own. The documentary ends with lovingly captured portraits of some of the key players, as the day ends with glasses of table wine and (of course) bread and cheese.

Juan Luis has also written and directed three feature-length films: Au rendez-vous de la mort joyeuse (At the Meeting with Joyous Death, 1973, shot in France, with Gérard Depardieu); The Woman with Red Boots (La femme aux bottes rouges, 1974, shot in Spain, with Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey); and Leonor (1975, shot in Spain, with Swedish actress Liv Ullmann, French actor Michel Piccoli, and Italian actress Ornella Muti). His first film, At the Meeting with Joyous Death, brought him several prestigious awards: the Georges Sadoul Award in Paris, the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival, and the Clavel de Oro (first prize) at the Sitges Film Festival (Spain). The Woman with Red Boots features Deneuve as a strikingly beautiful, but rather detached, artist with a special skill for strategy on a transparent three-level chess set.

Juan Luis’ feature films for French television continue his role as artistic flâneur. To list just a few: Mort de Franco (filmed for Gaumont, 1976); Ressac (1979, filmed in Normandy with André Dussolier); Les brus (1981); Aveugle, que veux-tu? (1984); and Adriana (1991). His mini-series for television were filmed around the world: Patagonia, Argentina (Tropique du crabe, 1986); Venezuela (Barrage sur l’orénoque (1996); Mexico (Rebellion of the Hanged / La rebellión de los colgados, 1986); and France (two episodes of Fantômas, with Helmut Burger, 1980), and L’homme de la nuit, 1983). The latter production (also filmed in Alsace, with George Wilson, Bulle Ogier, Pierre Clementi, and with Tía Conchita Buñuel’s youngest son Pedro Cristián as an extra) won the prize for Best Series of the Year from the French Critics Award. Tropique du crabe, based on a true event, tells of residents on an island with few supplies, the tyranny of one man over many women and children, and the eventual murder of the man by the Captain’s wife. Juan Luis ponders the question of why the women did not rise up and rebel earlier.

Juan Luis’ one-hour specials include Maelzel’s Chess Player (Joueur d’échecs de Maelzel, with Jean-Claude Drouot, 1981, based on an Edgar Allan Poe story, shot in Mexico); You’ll Never See Me Again (shot in Bristol, England, 1986); The Devil’s Lair (1980, Spain); and Un homme ordinaire (1982) and Le Libertin (France).

He even has a few actor credits. He appeared as an actor in the 1990 film Henry and June (directed by Philip Kaufman), with Mickey Rooney (in an uncompleted film by one of his colleagues), and in several other films, including an (uncredited) role as a torturing monk in Viva María! with the Spanish actor Francisco [Paco] Regueiro (another Republican in exile) as the deceitful Father Superior. (For another Regueiro role, see Juan Luis’ description in this memoir of his work with Orson Welles.) Juan Luis also appeared in television documentaries such as Orson Welles in the Land of Don Quixote (2000), Buñuel in Hollywood, A propósito de Buñuel (Speaking of Buñuel, from the same year), and in the earlier Les paradoxes de Buñuel (1997, which he co-wrote).

In 2007 he served as narrator-character, with Jean-Claude Carrière, of the documentary The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel (El ultimo guión: Buñuel en la memoria). This documentary circumambulates the places most prominent in the family’s history: Calanda, Zaragoza, Toledo, Madrid, Paris, the U.S. (New York City and Hollywood), and Mexico. The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel is designed as a loosely chronological visual scrapbook marking the 25th anniversary of the death of Luis Buñuel. It is also a relaxed chat between the two narrators, who were both intimately connected with the life of the Aragonese director. Returning to the Studio des Ursulines in Paris, where Un chien andalou was first screened, the two men declare that the place is "lleno de fantasmas y recuerdos" (full of ghosts and memories).³

The Last Script (2008): Juan Luis and Jean-Claude Carrière

This documentary offers us glimpses of directors who touched Buñuel’s life, including Jean Epstein, Fritz Lang, Nicholas Ray, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, and Jean Cocteau.

Along with his solo achievements, Juan Luis Buñuel served as assistant director to Orson Welles (the unfinished Don Quixote), Louis Malle (Viva María, 1965, and Le Voleur / The Thief of Paris, 1967), Juan Antonio Bardem (Sonatas, 1959), Henri Verneuil (Guns for San Sebastián / La bataille de San Sebastián, 1968), among others. He also assisted his father on the following films: Fever Mounts at El Pao (1959), The Young One (1960), Viridiana (1961), Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

As one would expect, he has often been called to participate on film juries, including serving as president of the jury in Dijon, Nantes, and Peñiscola, and as a member of the jury in Avoriaz, Biarritz, Madrid, Porto, Brussels, Sitges, and Bilbao. From time to time he participates in various exhibitions, symposia, and homages to the legacy of his father’s work.

Juan Luis with a wall of his paintings, Bourges, France

As a sculptor and painter, Juan Luis has held one-man exhibitions in Mexico City (Misrachi Gallery, the Salon de Independientes, Galería Diana), New York City (Willard Gallery), San Francisco (Wenger Gallery), Paris (Salon de la jeune sculpture, Palais Royale), Barcelona (Galeria Pecannins), Palma de Mallorca, Cadaqués (Galería Carlos Lozano), Bourges (Galeria Autre Rives), and Madrid.

He has also participated in collective shows in Paris and Mexico City. His early art lessons with Mexican painter Rufino Tamayo (recounted in the memoir) and his childhood times with American sculptor Alexander Calder had a lasting effect. Juan Luis’ imaginative brass and copper wire figures give the illusion of people, objects, and animals moving through three-dimensional space.

Letter to Smith sculpture (wood, wire, and found objects)

In his sculptures and paintings, he is not confined to the everyday but also includes such images as skulls, mummies, and skeletons strumming guitars. Found objects are transformed into whimsical, often dreamlike, compositions with such titles as Nocturnal insects, "Poulet sans espoir (chicken / police officer without hope), Lagunilla" (small lake / lacuna), and La nonne (the nun). This latter work is an elaborate wire sculpture resembling a great, but unwieldy, ocean vessel with sails, and punctuated with circles that seem to soar off into space.

A Few notes on Luis Buñuel (Juan Luis’ Father)

Luis Buñuel in the late 1920s

One of the world’s foremost filmmakers, Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was a wild and disciplined poet of the cinema. With the help of cinematographers like Gabriel Figueroa, José Aguayo, and Edmond Richard, Luis Buñuel exposed the hypocrisies of the Church, the horrors of Fascism, and the inadequacies of a bourgeois complacency.

When Spain kicked Buñuel out for the honesty of his filmmaking, he began what film scholar Marsha Kinder described as many successive periods of exile.⁴

Because of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, he lived in Paris, New York City (where he worked at the Museum of Modern Art from 1940-43), Los Angeles, and Mexico.

Novelist Henry Miller reported that people called Luis Buñuel a traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast. But lunatic they do not call him.⁵ As Luis Buñuel himself said in an influential talk entitled Cinema as an Instrument of Poetry:

In the hands of a free spirit, the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon.⁶

Luis Buñuel would not be hemmed in by any interpretation of him. Juan Luis has a keen sense of his father’s films. In one correspondence to me, he stressed:

It makes me really sad to see how solemn-looking and overcomplicated people get about him…He laughed while he was shooting. All the time. There were jokes, ironies…puns on the characters, the actors, the audience and, of course, on himself. And as a faithful if low-profile Surrealist all his life, he never shot or edited a single ‘symbolic’ shot. I think there are no metaphors in Buñuel. If he thought a shot looked suspect, he’d cut it out.

Luis Buñuel and actor Fernando Rey

With Juan Luis Buñuel’s memoir, we again have the pleasure of experiencing the Buñuelian tradition of filmmaking based on a Spanish sense of esperpento (ironic dark comedy), extending also into other visual arts.

Structure of the Memoir

All of the writings in the actual memoir are by Juan Luis alone. As editor, I have helped shape the book, with the assistance of master designer Jared Bendis. We interspersed photographs, frame grabs, and illustrations of art. (The original memoir had no illustrations or annotations.) The images take us immediately to the places described so vividly in words. During my short visit to Paris (all other technology failing), we took photos of old sepia-toned photos as Juan Luis graciously took out old albums for my perusal. Subsequently, I grabbed rare images from documentaries and scanned others to illustrate key points in the memoir.

Juan Luis’ intriguing interludes of dreams, practical advice, and digressions are set off from the chronological tale to give readers visual cues. (As his father once stated: When my films are a little short, I add a dream.)⁷ Readers will note that some sections of the memoir are more ample than others, and that some memories are nested in larger events that are described or implied.⁸ The varied entries in this memoir offers insight into the way of life of a creative man.

It was difficult to decide what material to include as editor’s notes and what was sufficient without additional explanation. I decided to err on the side of completeness, and I compiled information from a host of sources to complement the original writings. However, I did not annotate the final People I Have Metsection. It has an engaging directness just as it is.

The stories meander across several continents, time periods, and languages—a pleasure, but also a challenge, for an editor. For the English-language reader, French and Spanish words are retained with an English translation. Mr. Buñuel is trilingual (English, Spanish, French), so he was able to read my edited draft and add comments and suggestions.

There are repetitions in the memoir, but in some cases I left them in. As in life, repetition is often welcome. I also decided to keep the basic order of entries of the original memoir, even though this means there are occasional flashbacks and flash-forwards.

The pleasure for me was to share for a while in the Buñuelian universe.⁹ A draft of this memoir was in my study closet for several years until I felt the urge to find a way to publish it. For the past nine months, this has been a delightful, challenging project.

Concluding Notes

A memoir is a revisiting and a reinterpreting. Through this memoir we not only catch the outline of a man’s life but we also gain new insights into twentieth-century art and history. A memoir is neither a biography nor an autobiography. Omissions and emphases are partially due to the nature of memory and partially due to editorial choice. While this memoir was written over many years for Juan Luis’ children, it is not necessarily about his personal family. Rather, it is about his experiences, with an emphasis on artistic experiences and travel. In this sense, it is personal but still preserves a sense of privacy. In Patterns of Experience in Autobiography, Susanna Egan notes that memoirs (autobiographies) tend to assume certain dominant narrative patterns: childhood as a paradisal sanctuary, the journey as a recurring metaphor, and confession as a mode often used by autobiographers who write later in life.¹⁰ Some of this applies to Juan Luis’ memoir, but not all.

To be an embodiment of important memories is both a pleasure and a responsibility. To move forward beyond those memories, to one’s own artistic creations, is also crucial. Juan Luis Buñuel understands this dynamic and carries it with grace. As Mieke Bal wrote in her Introduction to Acts of Memory:

Narrative memories, even of unimportant events, differ from routine or habitual memories in that they are affectively colored, surrounded by an emotional aura that, precisely, makes them memorable.¹¹

A bon vivant, Juan Luis is as happy singing the praises of a restaurant set up in a humble clapboard shack on a Spanish roadside as he is drinking martinis with French President François Mitterand. In fact, he’s probably happier. In one correspondence with me, Juan Luis asserted, I have faith in the caustic sense of humor of the human being.¹² I was reminded of this when I later wrote to him of something humorous I had overhead:

I was walking to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Behind me was a family with a little girl who was complaining that all she saw in the museum were ‘pictures of old ladies and naked people.’

To which Juan Luis replied dryly, ‘Oh, a cultured and intellectual family.’

Juan Luis Buñuel is a wonderful raconteur. His