Luis BUNUEL
Agón o El canto del cisne. Tapuscrit du Scénario original inédit de Luis Buñuel comportant des corrections manuscrites de Jean-Claude Carrière
S.n., s.l. 1980, 21x29,5cm, relié.
Agón o El Canto del Cisne. Original unpublished screenplay by Luis Buñuel with significant manuscript corrections by Jean-Claude Carrière1980, 21 x 29,5 cm, 109 ff., sheep binding
Typescript of Buñuel's last screenplay, which has remained unpublished. Half marbled sheep over beige paper boards, spine in five compartments, bound for Buñuel.
The unpublished original typescript of Buñuel's screenplay, comprising 109 leaves with numerous corrections and deletions from Jean-Claude Carrière, who was a collaborator of the director's for nigh on twenty years, and two leaves entirely written in the latter's hand. 11 leaves bound in at the beginning, extracts from the autobiographical text
Pesimismo (1980) by Buñuel.
This screenplay, entirely unpublished, was written in French. The only known version is of a Spanish translation published in 1995, which was based on a later copy with the corrections and additions from this typescript.
This typescript has no title page. In fact, Buñuel and Carrière had several titles on top: "El Canto del cisne" ("Swan Song"), "Haz la guerra y no el amor" ("Make War not Love"), "Una ceremonia secreta" ("A Secret Ceremony"), "Guerra si: amor, tampoco" ("War yes: love, no more") or even "Una ceremonia suntuosa" ("A Sumptuous Ceremony," in homage to André Breton). The title, in the end, however, was to be
Agón, as Buñuel explained in an interview with José de la Colina:
"I was in Normandy to write with Carrière, the screenplay of a film, but we didn't know what to call it. We had several titles on top. For example, Agón, or 'Agony', whose original meaning is combat. The theme of our plot was the struggle between life and death, just as in our Spanish 'Agony'. This was the shortest of my titles, and that's why I like it. But it could also have been Swan Song, which would have had an ambivalent meaning: the end of Western civilization and Luis Buñuel's final film..." ("Agón o El canto del cisne según Luis Buñuel" in
Contracampo, nº1, 1979)
It was this latter title that was chosen for the binding of the typescript offered now for sale.
Despite a good deal of time devoted to the title and the successful completion of the typescript, the project was strangled at birth. Buñuel and Carrière used to hole up for several months in a little hotel in San José de Purúa (Mexico) to write their screenplays. When they arrived in August 1978, the monastic cells in which they were used to staying had changed, and to Buñuel's great annoyance, there was no bar any more. In his memoirs, Buñuel liked to blame the failure of this project on this loss: "Our destructive era, which sweeps all before it, does not spare even bars," (Luis Buñuel,
My Last Sigh, 1982).
And it is just such a story, anchored in this "destructive era," or rather pre-apocalyptic era, that takes place in this screenplay, denouncing a triple complicity: science, terrorism and information, a macabre marriage, according to Buñuel. He imagines a complicated plot, in which a group of international terrorists are preparing to carry out a major attack in France. In the end, we learn that an atom bomb has just gone off in Jerusalem. World war is imminent and general mobilization is decreed. The leader of the terrorist cell gives up on his project and tells the authorities exactly where they can find the bomb before it goes off: a barge moored beside the Louvre. The terrorists give up on their project, it having become unnecessary since national governments would now see to the destruction of the world, against a background of omnipresent media coverage and information flow.
If the narrative seems strangely relevant today, it was also inherent in the artistic and social reflections in all of Buñuel's work.
"I'm fascinated by terrorism, which is already universal and pursued like a sport. It seems this has now become a temptation for anyone young who wants to go out and make a mark: it's a dandyism of our age... It's a temptation that is deeply stoked by the media, a means of achieving fame. Any old young person with a pistol or a submachine gun who takes over an airplane, terrifying a couple of countries, and getting the eyes of the world on themselves, becomes a star." (José de la Colina,
op. cit.)
This fascination with terrorism had its roots in the ideology of Surrealism, which colored Buñuel's artistic beginnings, as he himself recalled. "One cannot forget the words of our youth, for example what Breton used to say: 'the simplest Surrealist act consists of going out into the street, revolver in hand, and firing at random into the crowd.' As for me, I haven't forgotten writing that
Un chien andalou was nothing less than an incitement to murder," (Luis Buñuel,
op. cit.). Jean-Claude Carrière reiterates elsewhere, thinking about the screenplay for
Agón, this essential and everpresent Surrealist element to Buñuel's cinema: "This was not an entirely realistic film...We went back to Buñuel's hatred of establishment art, his 'Screw Art'. He said he was ready to burn all his films if he had to, in a great cultural sacrifice," (Jean-Claude Carrière,
L'Esprit libre. Entretiens avec Bernard Cohn, 2011).
The destruction of the aesthetic and the aesthetic of destruction: for Buñuel, the leitmotiv of Dada and Surrealism finds a troubling echo in the terrorist violence of the 20th century. Buñuel even saw to some extent Surrealism as partly responsible for what he saw as this modern way of communication.
Though Buñuel never tackled the complex subject of terrorism before this last screenplay directly, he always introduced, in each of his films, a character or a situation that suggested this form of violence. Thus, in his last film,
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), there is an explicit allusion to terrorism, as Manuel Rodriguez Blanco highlights: "a last little wink in his final sequence: the improbable couple are walking down a passage...He gets further away and a bomb goes off. A wink to passing on...but also an evocation of a personal obsessions, terrorism" (Manuel Rodriguez Blanco,
Luis Buñuel, 2000). A tragic premonition - a real bomb was to go off on 19 October 1977 at the Ridge Theatre in San Francisco, which was showing the film.
At the same time a passionate aesthetic flight of fancy and an unbearable everyday threat, terrorism runs through both the work, but also the life of the director. Thus, as he writes in his memoirs, a visit to his office in the rue de la Pépinière from a young repentant fascist, come to tell him, bombs at the ready, of the planning of a major attack. The director tells us how, despite his warnings to both the French and Spanish authorities, he could not prevent the carrying out of the projected plot.
This event was the beginning for Buñuel of his intense thinking about the complex matrices of terrorism, which he envisaged as a re-appropriation of the Surrealist language that had been perverted by science, politics, and the media. At the same time a negation of, and a product of, a self-destructive society, terrorism, for Buñuel, was not a means, but a destructive gesture in itself, devoid of all political or ideological pretext. The peak of absurdity and nihilism, the terrorists in
Agón are thus caught short by society, which deprives them of their rebellion in bringing about Armageddon by itself.
For, as backdrop to this entomological terrorism fomented by fragile criminals, Buñuel paints a portrait of a society that is organizing its own destruction, blinded by science and the media: "One thing is nonetheless for sure: science is the enemy of man. It encourages in us the instinct of omnipotence that leads to our destruction" (Luis Buñuel, op. cit.). The ever-presence of the media in itself plays the role of a catalyst, television being the cynical spokesman of governments and scientists. Buñuel explains this aversion in his memoirs: "I hate the proliferation of information. Reading the paper is the most painful thing in the world...The information-circus is an abhorrence...Just one hunt after another" (Luis Buñuel, op. cit.) The character of the journalist in
Agòn thus approves the actions of the Prime Minister, who affirms that the situation on earth is wonderful, while the viewer sees images showing the destruction of the planet (the destruction of the forests, animal testing, hyper-industrialization, and so on). Buñuel makes a direct link between technological and scientific progress and the irreversible and imminent ecological tragedy of the modern age.
Written in 1978, this swansong of a director who had lived through the century and on various continents, show a stunning sharpness and a prescience for some of the major preoccupations of the 21st century: terrorism, ecology, the technological onslaught and the excesses of the media. "Old and alone, I can only imagine chaos and catastrophe. One or the other seems inevitable to me...I also know that there's a tendency at the end of each millennium to start heralding the end of the world. Nonetheless, it seems to me that this whole century has led to unhappiness. Evil has triumphed in the great, ancient struggle. The forces of destruction and dislocation have carried the day. The spirit of man has made no progress towards enlightenment. It may even have slid backwards. Weakness, terror and death surround us. Where will the fountains of goodness and intelligence that one day may save us come from? Even chance seems to me impotent" (Luis Buñuel,
op. cit.)
This major work, the apotheosis of all the director's preoccupations and a merciless diatribe against a society bent on self-destruction was paradoxically itself condemned by Buñuel never to be published.Thus the screenplay with the uncertain title is very much the "Secret Ceremony" of a director who, at the twilight of his life, goes back over the founding motions of his cinematic œuvre: like
Un Chien Andalou,
Agón is a violent and absurd destruction of a viewpoint.
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