The surrealists were a group of post-World War I painters, writers, and other artists who generally believed in expressing subconscious thought through free form and startling juxtapositions. There were different factions of surrealists with different philosophies, many of the surrealists regarded their work as a form of political or social protest, and some of them took themselves quite seriously despite the facetious nature of much of their work. With all of their in-fighting and arguments about who was a true surrealist, they remind me the People's Front of Judea from Monty Python' s Life of Brian.
At least that's the impression I got from reading My Last Sigh, the entertaining autobiography of Spanish-born surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel (translated by Abigail Israel). The surrealists seemed to regard themselves as high-minded revolutionaries who were challenging false rationality and other constrictive aspects of society, yet Buñuel's descriptions make them seem like a petty high-school clique obsessed with the power to ostracize people from their inner circle. Buñuel's description of the surrealists and other topics seem rather candid (although I have no idea if they're entirely accurate), and even people who don't like his films, or haven't seen them, may find My Last Sigh enjoyable.
Buñuel does have an impressive career as a filmmaker, however. Born in a small provincial town in Spain in 1900, he moved to France in the 1920s, became in involved in the Surrealist Movement, and directed the landmark surrealist films Un chien andalou (1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930). Then he returned to Spain (where he directed the documentary Las Hudes (1933)), moved to the United States (he has some choice comments about Hollywood), and relocated to Mexico. His Mexican output includes the highly regarded Los Olvidados (1950) and several other movies that were more mainstream than his earlier work, although he still managed to incorporate some surrealist imagery into his relatively commercial films. He also directed some films in France during the 1960s and 1970s, including Belle de Jour (1967) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), before passing away in 1983.
Buñuel enjoyed criticizing the bourgeoisie, yet he also seemed to fit comfortably in it. Indeed, he seems like he would have been a charming dinner guest who loved sipping martinis (which get quite a bit of attention in the book), making gossipy comments about his famous past associates (including Salvador Dali, with whom he had a fractious relationship), and delivering clever bon mots. Of course, I don't know if he was as pleasant in real life as he seems in his book, and his views on politics and religion (he was an atheist who was highly critical of the Roman Catholic Church) would not have been well received in some households, where people might not share his attitude about the time that Spanish workers formed a firing squad and "executed" a statue of Jesus Christ
I think part of the charm of the book is that Buñuel is highly opinionated (for example, he hates John Steinbeck’s books and loves marinated herring) but not full of himself, at least by the standards of famous film directors. He doesn't seem pretentious when describing his own work -- indeed, he doesn't like when other people get pretentious when describing his films -- and he is perfectly willing to admit, for example, that even though he "had been such an ardent subversive, who had so desired the overthrow of the established order," he was terrified by the lack of order and control during the Spanish Civil War. He also has a knack for seeming both bemused and matter-of-fact, whether he's describing how to mix the perfect drink or how French surrealist André Breton was obsessed with Leon Trotsky's dog.
