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[On _Los Olvidados_ ]

Manuscript

Author

Author André Breton
People cited Luis Buñuel, René Clair, Germaine Dulac, Francisco Franco, Ado Kyrou, Man Ray, Antonin Artaud, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Octavio Paz

Description

Manuscript of a text by Breton about Luis Buñuel for the issue of Paris Match dated 17 November 1951, unpublished.

It was in the autumn of 1951 that Breton, asked by a journalist from Paris Match about Buñuel's film Los Olvidados [The Forgotten Ones], wrote these pages, which were not published until the third volume of the Œuvres complètes, in 1999 (in the section Inédits II). In spite of the ruptures in their relationship, the poet reaffirms his admiration for the director of the only two "completely surrealist" films, L'Âge d'or and Un chien andalou. The text recounts a few anecdotes that give a fairly good idea of the group's atmosphere around 1929-1930. [Atelier André Breton website, 2005]

Signed autograph manuscript, undated [circa 5 November 1951].

- 4 pages in-4° folio, manuscript in ink and signed by Breton, with a few erasures and corrections, of a definitive text relating to his meeting and collaboration with Luis Buñuel, as well as his appreciation of the "integrally surrealist character (in both film-making and intention)" of Buñuel's early films:

"From the very first moment, I was struck by the contrast between these two men: Dalì, extremely slim and supple, very skilled in mental gymnastics, cultivating - moreover with rare joy - singularity for its own sake, as playful as can be; Buñuel, all of a piece, sculpted like a bull, eyes slightly bulging, obviously inclined to aggression, and also of a much darker temperament. [...]

"I still consider Un chien andalou and L'Âge d'or to be the only two films that are completely surrealist [...]. Whatever its subversive value, René Clair's Entr'acte, in the making of which Picabia and Duchamp had taken part, was a ‘Dada’ inspired film [...]. In L'Âge d'or the emphasis is placed on the sexual, in Los Olvidados it is on death. To the paroxysmal degree that is attained in both these areas, we can easily discover that, with Buñuel, we are dealing with a sadistic temperament, one endowed, moreover, with very great resources of 'sublimation', in the psychoanalytical sense of the term [...]." [Auction Catalogue, 2003]

Bibliography

André Breton (Édition de Marguerite Bonnet avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, Marie-Claire Dumas, Étienne-Alain Hubert et José Pierre), « [Sur « Los Olvidados »] », Inédits II, Œuvres complètes, tome III, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, p. 1124-1130, notice p. 1472