About the documentaries (a proposito de los documentarios)

Two documentaries are part of the “Criterion Collection” release of this movie. The largest, most accurate and faithful appears in the second DVD. It is called “A proposito the Buñuel” spoken in Castellano (Spanish for some of you) and follows the straightforward and chronological narrative structure of a biography..
I consider it a model of the genre and a tribute to intellectual and factual honesty. When you see tears in “Serge Silberman’s (the producer of Bunuel’s last films in France) face you will know what humanity is all about. Silberman was a Jew..

The other documentary “El Naufrago de la calle Providencia” that is packed together with the main movie DVD, is an altogether different matter .
It is very superficial concentrating in anecdotes and abilities of Luis Bunuel for mixing cocktails. In Spain and France Bunuel drank wine, for good reasons, at the time…In Mexico, no way…

But, at 3 points in this small documentary a character by the name of Max Aub appears. I quote from the subtitles, what this character says. It is accurate, but not an exact translation:

1 –“I am a well read man, and it is well known, that Luis, uncouth Aragonese as he is, has read little. Not for nothing was he a pupil of the Jesuits and a good one at that”
2 – “Bunuel will be consecrated father of the church”. When saying this, Max Aub makes the sign of the cross.
3 – In the end of this small documentary Max Aub takes a framed picture of Luis Bunuel, as a young man, covers his (Max Aub's) ugly face and bad teeth with it and makes the obscene gesture of sticking out the mid finger of the right hand holding the frame”. For me this is an insult to Bunuel...

For those who read Spanish and are interested by this “typical” character, please take the trouble of going to www.matices.de/19/19kaub.htm to know more about this person.

Luis Bunuel was against the Catholic Church's priests and bishops and the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie.
He never was against God, the Christian’s God.
Jean-Claude Carriere, rightly says: “Alors qu’il parle tout le temps de Dieu dans ses films”. .