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Film · European

Luis Buñuel

1900–1983 · Spanish (later a Mexican citizen)

Surrealism

Luis Buñuel made the founding film of cinematic surrealism with Salvador Dalí in 1929 and was still making elegant, deadpan attacks on the Church and the bourgeoisie half a century later. Exile took him from Spain to the United States and then to Mexico, where he built a second career in commercial cinema, before a late French period brought him a Palme d'Or, a Golden Lion and an Oscar.

How to spot them

  • ▸Dreams presented flatly, as if they were ordinary events; repetition; interrupted dinners
  • ▸Anticlericalism — bishops, beggars posed as the Last Supper, a nun and a crucifix that is also a flick-knife
  • ▸Foot and shoe fetishism, and a fondness for insects
  • ▸Three national careers: Spain and France, then Mexico from 1946, then France again from 1964
  • ▸Late collaborations with the screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and the actress Catherine Deneuve

Key films

A cloud crosses the moon and a razor crosses an eye; seventeen silent minutes made with a painter from Figueres (1929)

Un Chien Andalou, co-written with Salvador Dalí

A documentary on a wretched mountain region of western Spain, banned by the Spanish Republic that its narration indicts (1933)

Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes)

Street children in Mexico City; the director won Best Director at Cannes in 1951 for it (1950)

Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned)

A novice nun's charity ends with a beggars' banquet arranged as the Last Supper to the Hallelujah Chorus; Spain banned it and the Vatican denounced it (1961)

Viridiana — it shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes

Dinner guests find, without any physical obstacle, that they cannot leave the drawing room (1962)

The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador)

A bourgeois wife spends her afternoons in a brothel; a client's small lacquered box buzzes and is never opened on screen (1967)

Belle de Jour, with Catherine Deneuve — it won the Golden Lion at Venice

A circle of friends are repeatedly prevented from sitting down to the dinner they have arranged (1972)

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie — it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

Two different actresses play the same woman, alternating without explanation, in the director's final film (1977)

That Obscure Object of Desire (Cet obscur objet du désir) — Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina

Key ideas

  • Surrealism in cinema: dream logic filmed with the calm of a newsreel
  • Desire as something perpetually deferred — the meal never eaten, the woman never had
  • 'Thank God I am still an atheist' — his standing joke about his lifelong quarrel with Catholicism

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born at Calanda in Aragon in 1900; at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid he shared rooms with Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca
  • •His second film with Dalí, L'Âge d'Or (1930), caused riots at its Paris screenings and was effectively banned in France for decades
  • •He worked in New York at the Museum of Modern Art's film department during the Second World War, leaving after accusations about L'Âge d'Or
  • •He became a Mexican citizen in 1949 and made around twenty films there
  • •Viridiana was submitted as Spain's official Cannes entry, won the Palme d'Or, and was then banned in Spain
  • •Jean-Claude Carrière co-wrote six of his last films
  • •The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie gave him his only Oscar
  • •His memoir is My Last Sigh (Mon dernier soupir, 1982); he died in Mexico City in 1983

Drill it — 8 cards

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Sources