Luis Buñuel: My Last Breath (1982-) [Spanish/English]

A provocative memoir from Luis Buñuel, the Academy Award winning creator of some of modern cinema’s most important films, from Un Chien Andalou to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Luis Buñuel’s films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world. Now, in a memoir that carries all the surrealism and subversion of his cinema, Buñuel turns his artistic gaze inward. In swift and generous prose, Buñuel traces the surprising contours of his life, from the Good Friday drumbeats of his childhood to the dreams that inspired his most famous films to his turbulent friendships with Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. His personal narratives also encompass the pressing political issues of his time, many of which still haunt us today—the specter of fascism, the culture wars, the nuclear bomb. Filled with film trivia, framed by Buñuel’s intellect and wit, this is essential reading for fans of cinema and for anyone who has ever wanted to see the world through a surrealist’s eyes.

Originally published in French as Mon dernier soupir, Editions Robert Laffont, 1982

English edition
Translated by Abigail Israel
This translation first published by Alfred A. Knopf, 1983
Publisher Fontana Paperbacks, a division of Collins Publishing Group, London, 1985
266 pages

Mi último suspiro (Spanish, trans. Ana M. de la Fuente, 1982)
My Last Breath (English, trans. Abigail Israel, 1985)

Gretchen Simms: The 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow and the Soviet Artistic Reaction to the Abstract Art (2007)

“The American National Exhibition was an exchange exhibition organised by the United States Information Agency (USIA) and took place at Sokolniki Grounds in Moscow in 1959. The overall director George V. Allen and the Association of Federated Artists (AFA) Vice President Lloyd Goodrich, who was also President of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, were responsible for the art section of the Exhibition. The art committee selected, intended to show the Soviet public the developments in modern American art since World War I.

The Soviet response to the Exhibition can only be fully appreciated by looking back at the developments within Russian and Soviet art as well as the political and social changes which the peoples in the Soviet Union experienced under Khrushchev. Through the analysis of the Soviet reception of the Exhibition, this dissertation shows how the Soviet public and especially the artworld in Moscow perceived specifically the American abstract art.

It reveals how the American abstract art displayed at the Exhibition facilitated the Soviet artists path in looking back at their Russian roots, looking within themselves and looking outside of their immediate boundaries in order to create new Soviet art.” (from the Abstract)

Art History, University of Vienna
Supervisor Dieter Bogner
191 pages

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New German Critique, No. 78, Special Issue on German Media Studies (1999)

With texts by Michael Geisler and Michelle Mattson, Peter Humphreys, Knut Hickethier, Michael Geisler, Norbert Bolz, Siegfried Zielinski, Heidemarie Schumacher, Tom Huhn.

Edited by Michael Geisler and Michelle Mattson
Publisher Telos Press, New York, Fall 1999
196 pages

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