Il rasoio di Buñuel

"In 1980, the director Emidio Greco suggested Alberto make a one-hour, edited documentary about Buñuel for a series called "Uomini e idee del Novecento" on Rai Due. Alberto, who commuted back and forth from Trieste and was worried that I didn't have enough work, accepted as long as I was included in the project. We met Fernando Rey, Serge Silbermann, and Jean Claude Carrière and combined our interviews with Buñuel in Cinéastes de notre temps by André Labarthe and a reportage by Mario Foglietti. Back then, film clips were edited by picking out the sequences, putting a thread there and reprinting the excerpts in 16mm 'from thread to thread.' The prints were made in Milan in Corso Sempione, where the Rai had an internal, ground floor laboratory which was dismantled after I Promessi Sposi by Nocita, and the equipment was transferred to Bologna.
On the specified day, Alberto and I went to Rome to the famous Persichetti to put the threads on the five black and white films, to which Rai obviously owned the rights. If I remember correctly, the films were El Bruto, Ensayo de un crimen (1955), El ángel exterminador (1962) and Viridiana.
We both had the impression that the time limit was outrageous - just one day to select the excerpts from five films, loading and unloading twenty-five reels on a moviola.
We started in. Around two, two-thirty, it was recommended that we - young, industrious, and Milanese - have a bite to eat, take a break. When we returned to the moviola with our sandwiches stuck in our throats, it was being used by someone else. After waiting an hour, we had to almost have a fistfight to get the usurper out of there. It was one of the few times I saw my friend's good manners waver.
In just one day we had learned to 'place the threads,' to 'make television,' to 'do contract work.' Since Buñuel had to be dubbed, Alberto suggested we use Buñuel's favorite Italian critic, the one who always went to the tavern with him in Venice: Ugo Casiraghi, a critic for «l'Unit`», a well-known bear who was very proud of never having set foot in Rai headquarters. When he entered the building in Corso Sempione, Ugo looked at Alberto and me and said, 'I'm only doing this for you!'
Having solved the oversound problem thanks to Casiraghi, the only remaining problem was what the program would be called. After teaching me a memorable lesson about the most famous Un chien andalou, Alberto suggested La mano di Buñuel (Buñuel's Hand), a felicitous example of 'low metaphor' (even if it's a metonymy) which shed light on the Aragonese director's art and the intelligence of the Piedmontese critic. Then he added 'You'll see that they won't accept it…' And that's exactly what happened: our documentary on Rai Due was called Il rasoio di Buñuel (Buñuel's Razor).
Naturally, Alberto wasn't offended. It seemed like he never got offended. Until one time I came upon a wooden hand amongst his books and cassettes, an item he had obviously found in some small shop in one of the cities he taught in. And another day I found another hand… Until twenty years later I read his magnificent book about Buñuel. Well, the gentleman critic who never held a grudge mentioned 'Buñuel's hand' three or four times" (T. Sanguineti, Albert's Hand).