Tristana - Tapuscrit original inédit, version de 1963 refusée par la censure franquiste, avec nombreuses corrections et annotations manuscrites de Luis Buñuel, premier plat de couverture illustré d'un collage original du cinéaste rehaussé au pastel

 1963, 210 x 275 mm (8 1/4 x 10 13/16 ”), 155 ff mimeographed, original wrappers

Unpublished original mimeographed typescript of 155 leaves. Signature of Luis Buñuel to lower right of final leaf. Numerous manuscript annotations in biro by Luis Buñuel.
Numerous underlinings (stage instructions) in color pencil.
An original collage by Buñuel to upper cover, made of newspaper and pastels and with the manuscript note “Madrid 1963”. Manuscript title down spine and date at foot.
Adapted from the novel by the Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós, Tristana tells the story of an orphan girl from Toledo claimed by her uncle, who attempts to seduce her. The young woman runs away with her lover, the painter Horacio, to Madrid before coming back to her uncle's two years later with a serious tumor in her leg. Embittered and with a leg amputated, she refuses to marry her lover and instead weds her uncle. A few days later, the latter has a heart attack; Tristana merely pretends to call the doctor, in order to hasten his death. Though Buñuel maintain the narrative themes of the novel, he adapts it freely in moving the scene of the action from Madrid to Toledo and the timing of the piece, originally set at the end of the 19th century, to the 1920s. He nonetheless keeps the figure of the disabled woman who serves to demonstrate the process of emotional suffocation she suffers at the hands of an unenlightened bourgeois.
Luis Buñuel submitted the screenplay for Tristana to the censors in Franco's Spain in 1963; their response was unequivocal. After the scandal caused by the devilish Viridiana (which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1961) he saw permission for the film denied. It must be said that Tristana's ‘elder sister' provoked a number of rebukes – the Vatican thought the film “sacrilegious and blasphemous”, and it was immediately banned by the Spanish regime, which retroactively cancelled the shoot and disowned the film, which became Mexican. Bitter at the failure of a project that he cherished so closely, Buñuel went back to France to direct Diary of a Chambermaid, adapted from a novel by Octave Mirbeau.
Seven years later, Buñuel finally got permission to film Tristana in Toledo and thus completed his trilogy of portraits of women, which he had begun with Diary of a Chambermaid and Belle de Jour.
The script offered here for sale is thus the very first version of Tristana, submitted in 1963 to Franco's censors, and has key differences with the definitive version, filmed in 1970.
First of all, as for the characters, the director opted for serious changes. Don Lope, for example, has a radically more anti-clerical temperament in the script than in the film version. Essentially, several scenes in which he rebukes the young Tristana do not appear in the screen version: for him, the presence of priests is “a bad sign” and he detests to see his niece at prayer. Saturna, his maid, even explains in the screenplay that he sprang a nun from her convent. The sexual attraction of the old man towards his charge is also much more marked in the 1963 screenplay. Thus, Buñuel deleted several scenes of physical contact where he kisses the latter, but also a key piece of dialogue in which the old hedonist – like the Sadean libertine – explains to his young protégé that happiness is not to be found in marriage and that passions must be freely pursued.
Tristana's physical condition after her amputation also undergoes a change. In the script, she is dependent and spends most of her time in a wheelchair, while in the film, she gets about with the aid of crutches. This feature of the original screenplay allows the reader better to understand the progressive decline of this vulnerable character. The Tristana of 1963 is, despite her missing limb, far more sensual and enterprising than that of 1970. Buñuel intimates in the script that after her return to Toledo, her lover Horacio comes to see her and that they have – at her request – a sexual encounter. The director, in his stage directions, gives a long description of the attitude of a woman who is lascivious and available to her suitor. This erotic scene, where painter is at the same time fascinated and repulsed by Tristana's condition, was cut from the film. The two lovers part after a brief discussion and never see each other again. The character of Horacio is also much more complex in the script. In a scene that was cut in the film, he confides to a friend that he loves Tristana less since she lost her leg and that he feels revulsion for her. This does not, however, prevent him from enjoying his mistress' remaining charms. Just like that scene, Buñuel also chose to get rid of a passage in the screenplay where Tristana seduces the gardener, who goes up to her room. In the film, all of Tristana's lasciviousness is condensed into a single scene: the one where she draws open her dressing gown on the balcony under the astounded gaze of Saturno, a naive adolescent bewitched by the beauty of the heroine.
The marriage of Tristana and Don Lope only takes up a few minutes of the filmed version and the viewer has the impression that this is a forced marriage made by the will of the old man. In the screenplay, Buñuel includes an illuminating dialogue in which Tristana explicitly asks the old man to marry her. She even goes so far as to present him with an ultimatum: if he refuses, she will leave him and go off again with Horacio. The uncle, refusing the demand at first, has no other choice if he wants to keep his charge near him.
But the most striking feature of the 1963 version is undoubtedly the ending. In fact, it ends with Don Lope and some priests taking hot chocolate, a scene also present in the film. The film, however, finishes with the death of the old uncle in circumstances sadly aggravated by the fateful behavior of his niece. Though it's snowing, she opens the windows of his room to make sure he dies more quickly. The character of Tristana, played by Catherine Deneuve, seems obsessed with the death of her uncle, as witnessed by a recurring nightmare that she has and that was not in the original script, the decapitated head of Don Lope swinging back and forth like the pendulum of a clock.
This important first version of the screenplay for Tristana is a significant testimony of Buñuel's working method, who took a long time in writing his stories – his favorite part of the directing process – only to bring in important changes and deletions while filming, when he would do very few takes. The example of Tristana is all the more symbolic because the original script having been censored, Buñuel had no choice but to make important cuts. In 1970, the result was a success and Hitchcock, a great admirer of Buñuel's work, declared that Tristana was one of his favorite films. Jean-Claude Carrière, Buñuel's assistant for almost twenty years relates the story of the meeting between the two directors at a dinner in Los Angeles in 1972: “Four minutes later, the sound of delicate steps on the parquet floor. Hitchcock entered, held out his hand and said: ‘Buñuel, I'm so delighted to meet you.' Asked a few months before by an American television channel who his favorite directors were, he replied ‘Apart from me, Buñuel.'...Hitchcock sat down next to him, almost touching him, one hand on his shoulder, and started describing shot for shot a scene from Tristana that he knew by heart. ‘When she's playing the piano and you pan slowly down (gestures with both hands) and we discover that she only has one leg, and then you go slowly back up (gestures again) without cutting, without changing shot, well, when we get back up to her face, she's no longer the same woman.' A lesson in cinema in a single sentence.” (Jean-Claude Carrière, Le Réveil de Buñuel, Paris, 2011).