A Bullet for Buñuel

A BULLET FOR BUÑUEL is a project based on Rick Myers’s two-year attempt to realize a project that Luis Buñuel was deemed too powerful to achieve. It encompasses a body of research works including ballistics testing data, video and sound, and an analysis of creases in a shirt worn by the late filmmaker. Buñuel tried for months to create a bullet with such a weak charge that it could slide harmlessly off the filmmaker’s clothes when fired at him. Yet, when testing his reduced-velocity bullet, he had absurdly powerful results. Consulting with the filmmaker’s estate and sources ranging from online forums for bullet makers to a ballistics lab associated with the United States Secret Service, Myers sought to realize the low-velocity that Buñuel had been unable to achieve. In the process, Myers engages the idea of animating a shirt once worn by the filmmaker, as a means of invocation, breathing life into an inanimate effigy as part of an absurdist five-year meditation on failure.