The French filmmaker, photographer and poet Eric Hurtado discovers the setting for the filming of Buñuel and Dalí’s film
The French filmmaker, photographer and poet Eric Hurtado declares himself passionate about dali Y Garcia Lorca, especially in the stages of youth and the relationship between the two. As a result of this curiosity, he was looking for the cabin that appears at the beginning of the film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí L’Âge d’Or, which Pere Vehí, another Dalí lover, had established as Cala Culip. The theory came out of the similarity that the landscape that appears in the exterior spaces of the film has with Culip.
Hurtado was not convinced by the conclusion: he explains that, comparing the Culip and L’Âge d’Or photographs, he admitted that the background was very similar, but on the other hand, the proportions of the cabin and the position of the front door did not add up. entry. “Pere (Vehí) told me that it was because the cabin underwent a reconstruction”but the explanation did not completely convince Hurtado and he kept looking until one day, by chance, he discovered that in Cala Playera there was also a cabin that today is practically in ruins.
He immediately thought that it could be the one from the film, but it was difficult to establish because the appearance had changed a lot in the last almost one hundred years: there is now a lot of vegetation that was not there then. She found the definitive answer in an image found in the book Cadaqués disappearedby Erika Serna and Josep Vila and edited by Efadós, which you can see reproduced above these lines. The image of book comes out of a vintage postcard, and comparing it with the frame that can also be seen in this information, the similarity is evident: mystery solved. The film can be seen in full on Youtube, where the scene starts at minute 05:08
The film, shot in 1930, was directed by Buñuel with a joint script by Buñuel and Salvador Dalí. It is a surrealist film that deals with “the story of a crazy love”, according to Hurtado, suspiciously similar to that of Dalí and Gala. Most of the exterior locations are shot at Cap de Creus, but there are interior scenes, some of which represent the interior of the cabin, which were shot in Paris, perhaps due to the impossibility of entering the cameras of the time in the tiny cabin of the cove
Buñuel had known the place from the hand of Dalí a few years before, and “fell in love with mineral madness”. The circulation of images was much lower than today: “For viewers of the time, the landscapes of Cap de Creus were the planet Mars.” A very curious fact about the filming is that, although it was done in Cadaqués, Dalí was not present, explains Hurtado. The painter’s father had just expelled him from his house and he still didn’t live in Portlligat: it was just when he fell in love with Gala. The filming hides more mysteries, and the published books that establish canon about the lives of well-known people are not always entirely careful. “In Buñuel’s biography, Ian Gibson says that the landing in the film is in Cala Prona, but instead, the landscape is undoubtedly that of Cala Fredosa“. Cap de Creus and surrealism have even more relationships than previously thought, and they don’t always know each other as well as they seemed.