Bunuel Fest NYC

[Rodney Welch]

davemarc --

	The news about the Bunuel fest makes me positively ill -- but 
only because I can't join in.

	Reading your note, it appears that this will be a retrospective 
in the truest sense of the word; they are evidently going to screen 
everything in which Bunuel had a hand. The films you cite are all truly 
hard-to-find. What about Robert Florey's The Beast with Five Fingers 
(Bunuel supposedly did a little work on it) or Epstein's The Fall of the 
House of Usher and Mauprat (where he served as assistant director)?

	Cela S'Appelle L'Aurore was part of a largely unheralded 
three-part French trilogy. 

	The news about Centinela Alerta, La Hija del Engano, La Hija de 
Juan Simon and Don Quintin el Amargao is especially interesting and 
intriguing -- there has always been a question as to whether these 
four are Bunuel films; that's why some accounts say he directed 32 films 
and other, more daring ones, say 36. He is listed, I believe, as 
executive producer; those on the set say he actually helmed the directing 
as well.
	It was after these works that he officially "returned" to cinema 
in the late 1940s, with an idea for a strange film called Los Olvidados. 
He made the usual trade-off -- you know, direct a couple of pieces of 
pedestrian hackwork, and we'll let you make your little art film. I'm not 
sure which was first, The Great Madcap or Gran Casino. By all accounts -- 
even Bunuel's own -- Gran Casino is a fairly unbearable musical (yes, a 
Bunuel musical). Bunuel also said The Great Madcap was a film "without a 
single scene of interest"; for what it's worth, I dound it rather 
charming.
	By about 1950, Bunuel was indeed given the chance to make the 
masterful Los Olvidados. The middle-aged director entered his Mexican 
phase, a truly notable period in which he turned some fairly standard, 
often commercial fare into inescapably surrealist, and often masterful, 
works of art. 
	By the way, are there any hidden overtures to Bunuel in Pynchon's 
works? I am aware that he cites Bergman.

	Damn but I wish I was in New York. Thanks for ruining my day. 
Cheers indeed. RW