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Luis Bunuel
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Occupation: Director
Also: Screenwriter, producer, actor
Born: February 22, 1900, Calanda, Spain
Died: July 29, 1983, Mexico City, Mexico
Education: Colegio del Salvador (religion, entomology, zoology); Instituto Nacional de Enseñanza Media; University of Madrid (agricultural engineering, natural sciences, history); Académie du Cinéma, Paris
The founder of surrealist cinema, Luis Buñuel enjoyed a career as diverse and
contradictory as his films: he was a master of both silent and sound cinema, of
documentaries as well as features; his greatest work was produced in the two decades after
his 60th year, a time when most directors have either retired or gone into decline; and
although frequently characterized as a surrealist, many of his films were dramas and
farces in the realist or neo-realist mode. Yet despite all the innovations and
permutations of his work, Buñuel remained suprisingly consistent and limited in the
targets of his social satire: the Catholic Church, bourgeois culture, and Fascism. As he
once commented, "Religious education and surrealism have marked me for life."
Buñuel described his childhood in Calanda, a village in the Spanish province of Aragon,
as having "slipped by in an almost medieval atmosphere." Between the ages of six
and fifteen he attended Jesuit school, where a strict educational program, unchanged since
the 18th century, instilled in him a lifelong rebellion against religion. In 1917 Buñuel
enrolled in the University of Madrid and soon became involved in the political and
literary peñas, or clubs, that met in the city's cafes. His friends included several of
Spain's future great artists and writers, including Salvador Dali, Federico García Lorca
and Rafael Albertini. Within a few years the avant-garde movement had reached the peñas
and spawned its Spanish variants, creacionismo and ultraísmo. Although influenced by
these, Buñuel was often critical of the Spanish avant-garde for its allegiance to
traditional forms.
In 1925 Buñuel left Madrid for Paris, with no clear idea of what he
would do. When he saw Fritz Lang's
Destiny (1921), however, he realized where his vocation
lay. He approached the renowned French director, Jean Epstein, who hired him as an
assistant. Buñuel began to learn the techniques of filmmaking but was fired when he
refused to work with Epstein's own mentor, Abel Gance, whose films he did not like. In a
prophetic statement, Epstein warned Buñuel about his "surrealistic tendencies."
In 1928, with financial support from his mother, Buñuel collaborated with Dali on
Un Chien Andalou, a "surrealist weapon" designed to shock the bourgeois as well as
criticize the avant-garde. As in his earlier book of poems, Un Perro Andaluz, Buñuel
rejected the avant-garde's emphasis on form, or camera "tricks," over content.
Instead, his influences were commercial neo-realism, horror films and American comedies.
Buñuel's three early films established him as a master of surrealist cinema, whose goal
was to treat all human experience-dreams, madness or "normal" waking states-on
the same level. The critical success of L'Age
D'Or (1930), secured Buñuel a contract with
MGM, which he turned down after a visit to Hollywood in 1930.
His next film,
Las Hurdes:
Tierra Sin Pan (1932) was a documentary financed with money won in a lottery and shot with
a camera borrowed from Yves Allégret. Ostensibly an objective study of a remote,
impoverished region in western Spain, the film constituted such a militant critique of
both church and state that it was banned in Spain. The stage had been set, however, for
Buñuel's later work, in which realism - with its pre-established mass appeal - provided an
accessible context for his surreal aesthetic and moral code. After Las Hurdes, Buñuel
would not direct another film until 1947. Although still critical of commercial cinema, he
spent the next 14 years within the industry, learning all aspects of film production. From
1933 to 1935 he dubbed dialogue for Paramount in Paris and then Warner Bros. in Spain;
between 1935 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 he produced popular musical
comedies in Spain; during the Civil War he served the Republican government, compiling
newsreel material into a documentary about the war, Espana Leal en Armas (1937).
In 1938,
while he was in Hollywood supervising two other documentaries, the Fascists assumed power
at home. Unable to return to Spain, Buñuel went to work for the Museum of Modern Art in
New York, reediting and dubbing documentaries for distribution in Latin America. He was
forced to resign in 1942, however, because of his suspected communist background - a
suspicion which he later claimed had been aroused by Dali. In order to survive, Buñuel
narrated documentaries for the Army Corps of Engineers until 1944, when Warner Bros. hired
him to produce Spanish versions of their films.
In 1946 Buñuel moved to Mexico, where
many of Spain's intellectuals and artists had emigrated after the Civil War. He would live
there for the rest of his life, becoming a citizen in 1949 and directing 20 films by 1964.
This period is often described as an "apprenticeship" in which Buñuel was
forced to shoot low-budget commercial films in between a handful of surreal
"classics." Indeed, Buñuel's supposed indifference to style - his minimal use of
non-diegetic music, close-ups or camera movement-is often judged to be largely the result
of the limited resources available to him. Yet his Mexican films can more accurately be
seen as a refinement of the unobstrusive aesthetic style that had been evident since
Un Chien Andalou. As Buñuel himself insisted, "I never made a single scene that
compromised my convictions or my personal morality."
Buñuel's third Mexican film,
Los Olvidados (1950), brought him to international attention once again. Although hailed
as a surrealist film, it owes much to postwar neorealism in its unsentimental depiction of
Mexico's slum children. As in his other Mexican films before
Nazarin (1958), dream
sequences and surreal images are introduced at strategic moments into an otherwise realist
narrative. (Contributing to the relative neglect of these films has been their
unavailability outside Mexico, and perhaps their proletarian and "ethnic"
focus.)
In 1955 Buñuel began to direct international (and more openly political)
co-productions in Europe. In 1961 he was invited to Spain to film
Viridiana. The completed
film was a direct assault on Spanish Catholicism and Fascism and was banned by its
unwitting patron; a succès de scandale, it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and secured long
overdue international acclaim for its director.
After Viridiana, Buñuel worked mostly in
France. The growth of his new international (and consequently educated and middle-class)
audience coincided with his return to a surrealist aesthetic. The
Exterminating Angel
(1962), The Discreet Charm of the
Bourgeoisie (1972) and
The Phantom of
Liberty (1974)
depict a bourgeoisie trapped within their own conventions, if not-in the latter film's
metaphorical conceit-their own homes.
Belle De Jour (1967), Tristana (1970) and
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) explore sexual obsessions and preoccupations. And
The Milky Way (1970) launches a frontal assault on the Church, in a summation of Buñuel's
lifelong contempt for that institution. In 1980 Buñuel collaborated with Jean-Claude
Carrière, his screenwriter since Diary of a
Chambermaid (1964), on his autobiography, My Last Sigh.
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