My Last Breath
BY Luis Buñuel
(Vintage Classics, 1994)

Luis Buñuel?

I think he’s the one great Surrealist genius. Film is the Surrealist medium par excellence — you can play all their games with film, it demands them, juxtaposition, magic — Buñuel even incorporated into his films dreams he’d had the previous night — he used it incomparably. And he’s so attractive — that wonderful memoir of his, My Last Breath. And what a beautiful young man! Impossible to reconcile what he was, physically, with what he became. One has to conclude, hair is so important…

One of the reasons I wanted to do this book was the possibility of writing about Buñuel and Dalí. I could see so clearly how they were a product of that quasi-medieval Spanish environment I’d encountered in Madrid. Everything they did originated there — reacting against it, but also deeply drawing from it. For them the Surrealists — anti–religious, modern! — were glamour personified. But when they came to Paris at the end of the 1920s, Surrealism was in a rather unproductive phase. Breton at once sensed, with those infallible antennae of his, that here was new lifeblood, a new direction. So he pounced on them. It was just a wonderful moment for them all.

At the end of Surreal Lives, you make the claim that the world is a surreal place as opposed to an Existential place, as delineated by Camus and Sartre.

I think what I meant was, that when you say something is surreal, everyone at once knows what you mean. It’s about a certain dreamlike weirdness that pervades some events. It probably always has done so, since the world began, but what Breton did was to give that sensation a name. On the other hand, if you said something was existential, no one save a philosopher would know what you were talking about.