Luis Bunuel
Luis Buñuel (February 22, 1900 – July 29, 1983) was a
Spanish-born surrealist filmmaker and poet.
Life
Buñuel was born in Calanda, Teruel, Aragón, Spain. He had a strict Jesuit education and went to university in Madrid. He was a very close friend of Salvador Dalí and Federico García
Lorca, among other important Spanish artists that were living in the Residencia de Estudiantes. After that, he moved to
Paris to do film-related work though he knew virtually nothing about film. In Paris he
made his important two first films, "Un Chien Andalou" and "L'Age D'Or", working around his technical ignorance by filming mostly
in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot.
After working in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Bunuel moved to Hollywood to capitalize on the
short-lived fad of producing completely new foreign-language versions of hit films for sales abroad. After Bunuel worked on a few
Spanish language remakes, the industry turned instead to simple re-dubbing of dialogue and Bunuel moved to Mexico to try to make
original films there.
He made many films in Mexico, most of them from other people's second-rate scripts, with a few notable exceptions such as
"Simon of the Desert" and "The Exterminating Angel". He won the Palmes d'Or at Cannes in 1961 for the controversial "Viridiana",
which he made in Spain while still living and working in Mexico.
A few years later he moved back to France and made his most famous and acclaimed films - "Belle De Jour", "That Obscure Object
Of Desire", and "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgouisie" - as well as some equally brilliant but lesser-known films such as "The
Phantom Of Liberty" and "The Milky Way".
He married Jeanne Rucar in
1925 and they remained married throughout his life. Buñuel became a Mexican citizen in
1948. His sons are film-maker Rafael Buñuel and Juan Luis Buñuel.
He died in Mexico City of cirrhosis of the liver.
Works
After working on several films as a director's assistant (Jean Epstein on Mauprat and Mario Nalpas on La Sirène des
Tropiques) he co-wrote and then filmed a 24 minute short film Un
Chien Andalou (1929) with Salvador Dalí. This film, featuring a series of startling and sometimes horrifying images (such as the slow
slicing of a woman's eyeball with a razor blade) was enthusiastically received by French surrealists of the time and continues to
be shown regularly in film societies to this day. He followed this with "L'Age D'Or", which was begun as a second collaboration
with Dali but became Bunuel's solo project due to a falling-out they had before filming began. Creative authorship of both films
would be claimed by both men throughout their lives, but Dali's claim doesn't hold up against the great surreal film work later
produced by Bunuel.
Famous are his scenes where chickens populate nightmares, women grow beards and aspiring saints are desired by luscious women.
Even in the many mediocre movies he made for hire (rather than for his own creative reasons), such as "Susana", "Robinson
Crusoe", and "The Great Madcap", he always adds his trademark of genuinely disturbing and surreal images. Running through his own
brilliant films is a backbone of devoted surrealism; Bunuel's world is one in which an entire dinner party suddenly find
themselves inexplicably unable to leave the room and go home, a bad dream hands a man a letter which he brings to the doctor the
next day, and where the devil, if unable to tempt a saint with a pretty girl, will fly him to a disco. "Un Chien Andalou" is
often hailed as a great surrealist work, which it is, but much less is said about "The Phantom of Liberty", made nearly 50 years
later and every bit as surreal, a true masterwork of a filmmaker at his peak. Bunuel kept the faith longer than any other
surrealist in any medium, and true to those roots, never explained or promoted his work; as a result he is little-known and often
totally misunderstood.
Many of his films were openly critical of middle class morals and organised religion, mocking the pretension and hypocrisy of
the Church in ways that are often (then and now) mistaken for vicious and anti-clerical. Many of his most (in)famous films became
the target of priggish fury: "L'Age D'Or" (because a bishop is thrown out a window), "Simon Of The Desert" (because the devil
tempts the saint by taking the form of a naughty, bare-breasted little girl singing and showing off her legs), "Nazarin" (because
the pious lead characher is a fool who wreaks ruin through his attempts at charity) and of course "Viridiana", the story of a
helplessly fallen nun who tries unsuccessfully to help the poor. Bunuel was actually a deeply faithful man, whose early
disillusionment with the corruption of organized religion remained with him for life and spurred him to expose it fiercely in his
films.
The story of the making of Viridiana is illustrative. In 1960 Bunuel's earlier Spanish and French films were still known and
respected - "Un Chien Andalou", "L'Age D'Or", and "Las Hurdes". Though the Mexican film industry was small and exported virtually
nothing, Bunuel was productive there and a few of his films had been seen and reviewed in other countries. Spain, at the time,
had virtually no film industry and very little arts activity going on at all due to years of civil war and the flight of all
artists and dissidents from Franco's Spain. As a result Bunuel was revered in Spain far out of proportion to the number of people
who'd actually seen his films, so Franco decided to approach Bunuel about returning to Spain to make a goverment-subsidized film.
Bunuel (much to the shock and anger of his friends and other Spanish expatriates) agreed to do it. He submitted the script of
Viridiana to the Spanish censors, but did not make any of the changes they requested and made his film as planned. It was sent by
the Spanish goverment to Cannes without being seen, and it won the Palmes D'Or. The next day, the calls and communications
started pouring in - the first from the Vatican - how dare Spain produce and submit to Cannes such blasphemy! Bunuel, untouched
by the scandal, went home to Mexico having made the film he wanted and seen acknowledgement for it.
His direction style was extremely economical. He shot films in a few weeks, never deviating from his script and shooting in
order as much as possible to minimize editing time. He told actors as little as possible, and limited his directions mostly to
physical movements ("move to the right" "walk down the hall and go through that door", etc). He often refused to answer actor's
questions and was known to simply turn off his hearing aid on the set; though difficult at the time, many actors who worked with
him acknowledged later that his approach made for fresh and excellent performances.
Filmography (director)
External links
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