Aragon Guide

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  Luis Bunuel in 1929

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  Calanda Drummers Procession

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  Luis Bunuel with Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and others directors in Los Angeles, 1972

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  Holy Week in Calanda

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  Luis Bunuel, master of surrealism, sharing his passion for drumming

Easter is the best time to visit Calanda, Teruel. Enjoy the famous celebrations of its Holy Week, with the noisy excitement of its drums. After the "rompida" (the moment when all the drummers begin to play) the continuous drumbeat and the mixing of various rhythms and beats becomes a sort of constant buzzing in the brain, that inevitably accompanies any other sensation you enjoy in this Fiesta.

The founder of surrealist cinema, Luis Buñuel was born February 22, 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the province of Teruel, Aragon. Bunuel's parents owned a small cottage in Calanda, which they ripped down to build a larger one. In the mean time, they rented a stately mansion from a rich noble family. Here Luis was born to a wholesale merchant who had spent most of his life in America, and a Spanish native who had married him at the age of seventeen. Luis was baptized in Calanda just prior to his family moving to Zaragoza, the capital of Aragon.

Growing up he was a quiet little boy who served at mass, sang in the choir, and enjoyed playing with his two brothers and four sisters. The Bunuel children would dress up and put on plays using written dialogues. Sometimes Luis would participate in sadistic games, such as daring one another to swallow cigarette butts found in the street, or to eat sandwiches covered with ants. At the young age of six, he was sent to the College of the Brothers of the Sacred Heart, and at seven moved to the Jesuit College where he worked on his baccalaureat, of bachelor degree, until he was sixteen. He always received top grades, but was embarrassed when he received titles like "Laurel Crown", "Carthiginarian". When he was fifteen, he began spending all holidays in San Sebastian, returning home only for Easter. He described his childhood in Calanda, a village in the Spanish province of Aragon, as having "slipped by in an almost medieval atmosphere."

His early life was very relevant to his development later in life as a film artist. Bunuel's work as a film artist was a pitiless analysis of his childhood, filled with aesthetic reminders whether they be musical, literary, or simply objects. Bunuel always spent Holy Week in Calanda. Whether he was in New York, Paris or Rome, he would catch a plane and go to Calanda for three days, and participate in the Holy Week processions, which included drums. He reached a point of saying that he did not stop being an atheist, but "don't say anything against the Virgin of Pilar, or the Miracle, because I do believe in them."

The cover of Luis Bunuel's autobiography, entitled Mon dernier soupir (1983), portraits Bunuel as a drumer, marching hypnotized forward in the midst of an obscure band of drummers whose faces express the constraints and pleasures of everyday life. Once every year, more than one thousand inhabitants of the Spanish village Calanda in the province of Aragon gather around the local church, take up their drums, form bands spontaneously, and start producing more or less arbitrary rhythms. This ritual jamming takes off at noon on Good Friday and ends exactly one day later on Easter Saturday.

For twenty four hours and without pauses or orchestrated compositions, bands of drummers dwell through the streets of Calanda. When one band meets another band, they start duelling, until all drummers find themselves in agreement with a certain rhythm. After their encounter and mutual jamming, the bands move on and prepare themselves for the next battle. For Bunuel, the drumming expresses his philosophy of life: life is rhythm - a hidden rhythm that penetrates everything that exists.

Drumming also provides an opportunity to reveal this penetrative power. Rhythm and drumming, Bunuel argues, have nothing to do with reason or civilization. Rhythm is communication and communion at the same time, beyond reason, an indefinable flux of emotions, evoking a kind of trance or intoxication in which life is expressed and expresses itself, over and over again. In this sense, rhythm is a state of mind, a desire to oscillate with others and a desire to oscillate with the natural or urban habitat - like a pendulum, revealing a permanent interval, a nomadic state of in-between.

For Bunuel, the greatest sensation of the Calanda drumming, is the moment when he closes his eyes and caresses the wall of a house, in order to experience the unity of nature and rhythm. At the same time, rhythm is also a state of the body, an ecstatic performance, a physical statement, a carnal desire to produce sound and noise. After many hours of drumming, the drums are soaked with blood, dripping down from the drummers' hands on the skins of their drums.

As a practice, music is situated in lived experience, in particular social relationships and locations that are a product of complex intersections of culture, class and gender. In Calanda, this dependency is illustrated by the fact that for weeks after the battles of the drums, local people are still talking, or better rapping, in a jerky way, obeying the rhythms of the drums that once dominated the village.