1: A propósito de Buñuel (2000, Jose Luis López-Linares & Javier Rioyo)

Owned release: The 2000 Criterion DVD release of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie includes this on a separate disc as an extra.

Acquired: June 14, 2010 - bought the disc from Criterion shortly after the announcement that it was going out of print.

Seen before?: No.

One of the things about this project that I'm looking forward to is re-watching a lot of Luis Buñuel. Buñuel was the first canon director I became obsessed with as a teenage cinephile. I spent a good portion of my teen years trying to watch all the major works of his and got to most of them (Viridiana eluded me until the Criterion release years later, and Los Olvidados came soon after when I realized that my library system at the time still offered VHS tapes - a luxury that, as I found recently, is no longer). I spent one summer reading My Last Sigh. I had a Belle de Jour poster tied to the Scorsese-sponsored Miramax re-release in my room in high school. I was the only one in my college Intro to Film course who had seen Un Chien Andalou prior to it screening in class. (To this day, one of the greatest in-unison reactions I've ever heard from an audience.) I spent years considering him my favorite filmmaker of all time, and if pressed I probably still would hold to that notion.

And the last time I saw a film of his was March of 2011, when my local arthouse theater showed Belle de Jour. That's no way to treat an old friend.

With all that as a foundation upon which I've set a good deal of my cinephilia, it then seems appropriate to start this off with a documentary about Buñuel. Buñuel, who has meant so much to me over the years, serving as a lamplight for this new thing of mine. It's like it was meant to be.

I wish I could say the documentary was deserving of the man, but it is ultimately the kind of basic talking-head documentary that seems all wrong for such a unique and unclassifiable figure. The film even admits this more or less immediately, when Jose Bello says, "With Buñuel, it's difficult to look for the explanation because most of the best things about him had no explanation." The project is undercut before it even begins, really, yet it doggedly goes on anyway. Because... well, what else would you do? What would a properly Buñuelian documentary about the man himself look like? A hall of mirrors, a pile of half-truths, a series of dreams, a disconnected parade of fetishes? Would it simply be an adaptation of My Last Sigh? And would there be cows?

The condition of the film's release, maybe, is telling. If A propósito is relegated to supplemental material status, unable to earn a release on its own, that seems strangely appropriate - consider it also a supplement to the man himself and his work, a conventional adjunct to the much richer and more fanciful Sigh (passages of which are read at various junctures during this film). There is the occasional interesting piece of information (the midfilm passage where several interviewees reflect on Buñuel's strangely conservative stance on sex and eroticism is engrossing - "Love is a secret ceremony to be performed underground"), and stories about the man never get old even as they've been told before. There's also a demonstration of Buñuel's signature cocktail, which as a booze nerd makes me indescribably happy and I can't wait to try it. (Three parts gin, two parts Carpano Antico, one part Cinzano sweet vermouth). Plus, it's made me want to dig up my old copy of Sigh and re-read it - it's been too long for that, too.

What's the point of this?

Short answer: There isn't one, really. At least not one that means anything to anyone other than myself.

Long answer: I've been writing about movies on the Internet in one fashion or another for a very long time. I've also been collecting movies for a very long time. At some point - it feels like only a few years ago, but then again maybe I've always been on the downhill in my mind - I started writing less and buying more. The habit exploded circa 2014, when a sudden desire to protect my future viewing whims against the fluctuating availability of streaming video coupled with a genuine research project that, among other things, allowed me to purchase a great number of discs on the government's dime caused my collection to distend past the bounds of the rational. My collection is in fact too large to keep in my house at this moment, which is why I currently rent a storage closet near my workplace in which to keep them all, boxed up and alphabetized. But as with any collectible, the question becomes: I have them. What do I DO with them?

Enter: an idea, a way to maybe break through my sluggish writing habits while justifying the already-sunken cost. I'm gonna watch everything I own and write about it, film by film. The idea is to get myself back into the habit of writing regularly again, because I miss being able to do it without it feeling like the hardest thing in the world. I'm getting older, I'm getting slower, I'm getting dumber. Doing this as a way to keep myself sharp, to stave off encroaching lethargy... well, why not? It could work.

(Why don't I just do this on my Letterboxd feed, those of you who know me might be asking? The answer's twofold. One: Given that this is devoted to my collection, it seems appropriate to give it a dedicated venue - a shrine to the collection, as it were. And two: Porn. Letterboxd doesn't like porn, and my adoration of Vinegar Syndrome means I own a number of films I can't talk about on that site.)

I've actually attempted this project once before, on my now-disused Tumblr (it was called From the Shelf then, because I couldn't come up with a better title, and I still can't - the title above, or at least the portion before the colon, was contributed by the great Kent Beeson). The collection still numbered in the mid-three figures back then. As of now, I'm in the neighborhood of 2500 titles. If I were to watch and write about one film every day, this blog would remain active for around seven years - and that's assuming the collection remains static. Given the pace at which I tend to progress through things, plus allowing for the fact that of course I'm going to buy more stuff, that timeline starts to look more like twenty years. This is a long haul. If you want to join me, well... I wouldn't mind the company.