The American Buñuel: The Young One and the Politics of Exile

Abstract

PARTV TRAVELLING DIRECTORS THE AMERICAN BUNUEL: THE YOUNG ONE AND THE POLITICS OF EXILE MARGARITA DE LA VEGA-HURTADO University ofMichigan, Ann Arbor Luis Buñuel is variously referred to as the great Spanish filmmaker, the director who invigorated Mexican Cinema and gave impulse to the nuevo cine, and a great "auteur" in the French tradition, transformed after coming to Paris and becoming a Surrealist, who made his best films in France, where he had the freedom to express his personal vision. Since his death in 1983, Buñuel has been reinserted into a Spanish national artistic genealogy that includes Goya, VaUe-Inclán, Lorca, Picasso, and Dalí, and his work has been analyzed as exemplary of Spanish character and national identity. For a filmmaker who Uved most of his life in exüe and who only directed two or three films in Spain, this is a curious destiny. The director himself spoke in several interviews about being Spanish, French, and Mexican, together or separately. Perhaps Buñuel is best understood as a universal human being whose films focused on the absurdity of daily life and on bringing to the screen the complex web of reaUty where the objective and the subjective intermingle. In this essay, I am interested in bringing out a different Buñuel, the American one. In his autobiography, Buñuel tells of having made two "American films:" Robinson Cmsoe in 1952 and The Young One in 1960. Both were made in EngUsh using American actors, in coUaboration with the same American producer and screenwriter, and were distributed by a major US studio. Robinson Cmsoe was made early in BuñuePs Mexican period, giving him a chance to experiment with color for the first time. The decision to adapt a universaUy known novel, and to make two versions, of varying length, in English and in Spanish, indicates an effort to reach a wide audience. The Young One addresses an American subject and takes place in a specific Southern location. Made the same year as Viridiana, as Buñuel returned to work in Europe, it falls at the end of the director's Mexican period. Robinson Cmsoe has been the subject of a number of analyses whüe The Young One tends to be dismissed as a minor work, but neither is weUrepresented in the EngUsh-language bibüography. 01998 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XI No. 21/22, Enero a Diciembre 1998 238____________________________________MARGARITA DE LA VEGA HURTADO Víctor Fuentes, in his exceUent study of Buñuel's Mexican period,1 postulates that the two films made by Buñuel in English are examples of the HoUywood director he might have been, if chance and the industry had allowed . I disagree, since it is hard to imagine Buñuel working in HoUywood, particularly during the McCarthy repression and witch-hunting period, those "years of the Toad" as Dalton Trumbo caUed them. Irrespective ofwhere and how they were made, however, this pair of films constitutes the most approximate instance of Buñuel working within the HoUywood classical narrative style, whose principal characteristic, according to David Bordwell,2 is that aU stylistic markings are subordinated to narrative cohesion and structural logic. Buñuel was always interested in and attracted to HoUywood cinema and wanted to learn from it. After the scandalous success of L'Age d'Or, he traveled to HoUywood in 1930 to learn the studio mode of production and related technical skills. During his two years at Filmófono, the production unit he directed in Madrid during the short-Uved Spanish RepubUc (193536 ), he clearly chose to make films with broad popular appeal, based on the narrative conventions that he had observed and analyzed in Hollywood, whUe experimenting with the formal elements of melodrama and the dialectical relationship between sound and image. That experience would also be essential to his subsequent work in Mexico, where he consistently brought his films in early and under budget. Buñuel moved to Mexico in 1946, after eight frustrating years in the United States during which he had moved back and forth between New York and HoUywood. In the movie capital, he had supervised the Spanish dubbing of several films for Warner...