Wow Mike, thanks, this is great stuff! Can't wait to hear your views
on Exterminating Angel! It will take me a bit to make my way through
all the hyperlinks, but your excellent work is really appreciated.
Concerning your reference to the cows wandering around the mansion in
The Age of Gold.... could you please refresh my memory a bit on what
that scene was comprised of? It has been several years since I've
seen the film.....
I'm intruiged very much by this reference. Over the past few years
I've been really immersed in a few different works by Gabriel Garcia
Marquez, whose novels are also an amazing blend of dream and reality
(in fact he is often described as the father of the "magical realism"
school in literature).
My favorite novel of his would be The Autumn of the Patriarch (which I
would definitely recommend to you if you like Bunuel. It's
incredible; just read the first ten pages if you don't have time for
more; the comparisons to Bunuel are immediate and obvious. After that
I would recommend One Hundred Years of Solitude, for which Marquez won
the Nobel in literature.
But check out the first ten pages of The Autumn of the Patriarch
first. I guarantee you won't regret it if you like Bunuel.
At any rate, a recurring theme in this book (and other works of
Marquez) is that of "misplaced cows" for lack of a better description.
In The Autumn of the Patriarch for example, we have the following
passages, both of which describe the gradual takeover of an incredibly
opulent presidential compound of an unspeakably corrupt Latin American
dictator that had terrorized the population for decades, by vultures,
chickens, cows and lepers.
At first:
"...the cows wandered with no law or order from the first vestibule to
the hearing room, they had eaten the flowered lawns on the tapestries
general, sir, they had eaten the files, but he didn't hear them, he
had seen the first cow come up one October afternoon when it was
impossible to stay outside becuse of the fury of the cloudburst, he
had try tried to chase it away with his hands, cow, cow, remembering
suddenly that "cow" was written with a "c", he had seen it another
time eating the lampshades at a moment in his life when he was
beginning to understand that it wasn't worthwhile moving toward the
stairs to chase a cow away, he had found two of them in the ballroom
exasperated by the hens who were flying up to peck at the ticks on
their backs, so that on recent nights when we saw lights that looked
like navigational signals and we heard a disaster of large-animal
hoofs behind the fortified walls it was because he was going about
with a candle fighting with the cows over a place to sleep while
outside his public life went on without him, every day in the
newspapers of the regime we saw his fictionalized photographs at civil
and military audiences in which they showed him to us with a different
uniform according to the character of the occasion...
Later the takeover of the presidential mansion by the cows becomes
complete:
"In recent years when human sounds or the singing of birds were no
longer heard inside and the armored doors were closed forever, we knew
that there was someone in goverment house because at night lights that
looked like a ship's beacons could be seen throughout the windows of
the side that faced the sea, and those who dared go closer could hear
a disaster of hoofs and animal sighs from behind the fortified walls,
and one January afternoon we had seen a cow contemplating the sunset
from the presidential balcony, just imagine, a cow on the balcony of
the nation, what an awful thing, what a shitty country, and all sorts
of conjectures were made about how it was possible for a cow to get
onto a balcony since everybody knew that cows can't climb stairs, and
even less carpeted ones, so in the end we never knew if we had really
seen it or whether we had been spending an afternoon on the main
square and as we strolled along had dreamed that we had seen a cow on
the presidential balcony where nothing had been seen or would ever be
seen again for many years until dawn last Friday when the first
vultures began to arrive, rising up from from where thy had always
dozed on the cornices of the charity hospital, they came from farther
inland, they came in successive waves, out of the horizon of the sea
of dust where the sea had been, for a whole day they flew in slow
circles over the house of power until a king with bridal feathers and
a crimson ruff gave a silent order and that breaking of glass began,
that breeze of a great man dead, that in and out of vultures through
the windows imaginable only in a house which lacked authority, so we
dared go in too and in and in deserted sanctuary we found the rubble
of grandeur, the body that had been pecked at, the smooth maiden hands
with the ring of power on the bone of the third finger, and his whole
body was sprouting tiny lichens and parasitic animals from the depths
of the sea, especially in the armpits and the groin, and he had the
canvas truss on his herniated testicle, which was the only thing that
had escaped the vultures in spite of its being the size of an ox
kidney, but even then we did not dare believe in his death because it
was the second time he had been found in that office, alone and
dressed and dead seemingly of natural causes during his sleep as had
been announced a long time ago in the prophetic waters of soothsayers'
basins."
from The Autumn of the Patriarch, Gabriel Garcia Marquez (more info on
this book at:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060932678/qid=1058062032/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_1/103-1848163-9756634?v=glance&s=books&n=507846
),
For me at least the similarities in imagery and vision between Marquez
and Bunuel are obvious.
Does anyone know if they ever met? I was so intruigued by your
mentioning of cows inside a mansion in The Age of Gold, because indeed
this was a central theme in Marquez' masterpiece The Autumn of the
Patriarch....
Any thoughts?
Matthew
dinomichael <miles50@earthlink.net> wrote:
Just added an aricle on six Bunuel films Andalusian Dog, Age of Gold,
Hurdes/Land without Bread, Belle de jour, Discrete Charm of the
Bourgeoisie, & That Obscure Object of Desire in which I refer/link to
this group.
http://www.peanut.org/mike/text/bunuel.htm
I will soon be posting an article on Viridiana, Los Olvidados,
Exterminating Angel and maybe one more.
I'm glad to know there are enough people interested in Bunuel to
sustain this group.
Michael
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