Luis Bunuel, who was born in 1900, remembers clearly his first visit to the – itinerant – cinema in 1908 and his first film ever: it was a pig – a singing pig dressed in a tricolour, and it amazed and delighted him. I found an undressed, dancing pig in a 1907 film, the Cochon danseur. Bunuel is a director in whose work the cinema of his childhood lives still, to such an extent that we characterise every other film dating from before 1910 as surreal. He hated narrative causality. His most important films are based on the same principle of discontinuous association as are the chase films and most of the scènes comiques and scènes à trucs. Donkeys and sheep turn up in bourgeois parlours and black humour butts up directly against shocking cruelty. If I had had more screening time, I would have interspersed the films in this programme with scenes from La Vie et passion de Notre Seigneur Jésus Christ (Ferdinand Zecca, 1907). Another interesting possibility would be to reconstruct L’Age d’or from some early films (like reconstructing a crime).

Mariann Lewinsky