Word: uel
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...uel's autobiography (written in collaboration with his longtime screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière) is thus in part the testament of an old man passing ironic judgment on a century that finally learned to accommodate him. If the book offers any shocks, they are of the boomerang variety: the iconoclast at twilight is in danger of becoming a moralist. He condemns "the proliferation of gutter words" in modern literature; he criticizes the excesses of his anarchist comrades in the Spanish Civil War; he expresses relief in the waning of his sexual desire...
Flashback to Buñuel's birthplace, the Spanish village of Calanda, where "the Middle Ages lasted until World...
...seven Buñuel children kept a menagerie of rats, monkeys, falcons, frogs and snakes as pets; Luis, the eldest, paraded through his upper-middle-class youth in religious vestments. In the early days, just about everyone he met was famous. Even before he made his first film at 28, Buñuel tells us, he had vanquished Heavyweight Champ Jack John son at arm wrestling; he had met Jorge Luis Borges, and found him tedious; Picasso had given him a painting (which he lost), and Lorca had written poems to him (which he quotes). Later, in Holly wood, Charlie...
...talk-show badinage on Olympus. They meet the traditional challenge of autobiography: to speak entertainingly about others while revealing as little as possible about yourself. It is the pose that best suits a movie director, whose art is by nature voyeuristic rather than confession al. Of Jeanne, Buñuel's wife of almost 50 years, we learn only that he married her in Paris (forbidding her family to attend), had lunch with her, then took a train alone to Madrid. On his 32 films the Aragonian curmudgeon throws little light; neither Los Olvidados nor Viridiana nor Belle...
...films are argument enough for his place in movie history. With My Last Sigh, Buñuel allows himself to be seen in another light: as that most engaging of con artists, the raconteur. Reading the memoir is like spending a long, lazy afternoon in his presence. His voice never rises above a murmur. A small smile engages his face as he recalls some long-ago provocation that today scandalizes no one. Now and then he dozes. On one such afternoon this summer, Buñuel nodded off into immortality...