My Last Sigh

"Yes. He is fantastic at the celebration of the non-rational which is one of the things that I find very appealing about Spain. This is Buñuel’s autobiography where he talks about how important it is to let his mind wander and to daydream even though it is becoming more and more unfashionable. He is almost like a prophet of non-rationality in this very rational world. He’s lucky in that he lived during a time when other non-rationalists were doing something similar. His group included Pablo Picasso , Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca. So he was part of the surrealist movement for a while, although the surrealists are seen as a strangely hierarchical sort of structure. They don’t seem to be very freedom-loving when it comes to how they act. They were constantly bickering amongst themselves and then kicking people out of their group if it offended their ideas, which is a bit of a contradiction in terms. What is great about the book is that it gives you Buñuel’s life which spanned a large part of the 20th century and Spain entered it pretty much in the Middle Ages in 1900, and by the time he died in 1983 it has gone through two dictatorships, the Civil War and has finally come out as a fledgling democracy. So the 20th century is an amazing century for Spain. I don’t think quite as many countries have been through so much change, and you get a real sense of that with his book. In the early chapters he is talking about his childhood hear Zaragoza in a little village. He came from quite a wealthy family with servants but he is surrounded by this medieval poverty and the feudal system. And he laments the loss of that. I think there is something fundamentally surreal about life in Spain if you are open to it."