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Luis Buñuel : The Masters Series
By Le Choismier Christophe
Spanish director, filmmaker and writer, known especially for his early surrealist films, considered revolutionary at the time of release. He is also known for his work in the Mexican cinema and for his late career in the French "Avant Garde". He is distinguished for his highly personal style and controversial obsession with social injustice, religious excess, gratuitous cruelty, and eroticism.
At 17 he entered the University of Madrid, where he became a friend of the painter Salvador Dalí and the poet Federico García Lorca. In 1920 Buñuel founded the first Spanish movie club and wrote critiques of the films shown there.
After discovering Freudian psychoanalysis and breaking away from religion, he went to Paris in 1925 and entered film-making circles, feeling that film would become his true medium of expression. He soon became an assistant director, and in 1928 directed his first picture, Un Chien Andalou (An Andalusian Dog), in collaboration with Dalí. During a 3 day exchange of fantasies and dreams, they wrote a script for a surrealist film, shot in two weeks with assistance from Dalí.
It was made in the hope of administering a revolutionary shock to society. For the first time in the history of the cinema a director tried not to please but rather to alienate all potential spectators.
The resulting 24-minute film, 'Un Chien Andalou', consisted of a series of unrelated and unexplainable images which were only unified by their overwhelming power to shock. The film was well received in a special screening before a gathering of many Paris surrealists, who accepted Buñuel and Dalí in their ranks. It created a sensation at a time when movies tended to be dominated by the natural and the literal. Here, Buñuel discovered a cinema of instinct, inspired by the Surrealist movement. Today, the scandal of 'Un Chien Andalou' remains a legend of the surrealists.
Before Leaving, Spain Buñuel made two other movies of interest. First was 'L'age D'or' where Buñuel assumed the role as director. As with his previous film, he collaborated with Dalí, and the best parts, like when the heroine sucks a statue's toe, are in pure 'Dalínean' style.
The other film was 'Las Hurdes' (Land without Bread), the first and possibly singular Ethnographic Surrealist Film. No anthropological film from that time provided such a comprehensive portrait of a region nor demonstrated such a knowledgeable understanding of ethnographic film style.
After leaving Spain, Buñuel edited film and supervised the Spanish language versions of Hollywood movies. He also worked for a year at the Museum of Modern Art, in New York City, until he was forced to resign after he directed the atheistic 'L'Âge d'or'. In 1947 he left the United States and settled in Mexico City.
In Mexico, Buñuel exercised more and more freedom, allowing open sequences to invade otherwise conventional films. Soon all his films, even those done in collaboration with other producers, such as Robinson Crusoe, rendered the "Buñuelean" universe, a dreamland in which strange and unwonted happenings occur. In his work, poetry is combined with aggressiveness. His great films from this Mexican period include 'Ensayo de un crimen', 'Nazarín' and his critically acclaimed 'Los Olvidados', a masterpiece of urban surrealism (and recently considered by UNESCO as part of the world's cultural heritage).
At the age of 61, Buñuel reached worldwide fame with his direction of 'Viridiana' and the shocking scene referencing Da Vinci's 'Last Supper'. After the release of 'Viridiana', the Spanish government found the completed film to be anticlerical and tried to suppress it. Fortunately, it was smuggled out of Spain and presented at the Cannes Festival, where it was awarded the Palme d'Or.
For the next seventeen years, a period of inspired productivity, Buñuel produced many astonishing films. In 1962, he made another major work, 'El ángel exterminador', which depicts a dinner party where the guests find themselves powerless to leave. Like 'Viridiana', this movie had anticlerical connotations.
His later and better known films, including 'Tristana', 'Le Charme discrete de la bourgeoisie', and 'Cet obscur objet du désir', reflect Buñuel's concern with dream and reality, the confusion between true and false, the inequities and failures of social structures, and the nature of obsession.
Buñuel's preoccupation with sexual aberrations and fetishes, as well as the iconoclastic nature of his work made him the subject of public outcry from the beginning of his film career. As early as 1939, in the wake of the <>L'Age d'Or controversy, Henry Miller wrote in a Paris journal:
"They call Buñuel everything: traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast. But lunatic they do not call him. It is true, it is lunacy he portrays, but it is not his lunacy. This stinking chaos which for a brief hour or so amalgamates under his wand, this is the lunacy of civilization, the record of man's achievement after ten thousand years of refinement."
Indelible and unforgettable are his scenes with horror-stricken ants, when chickens populate nightmares and women grow beards. Buñuel always had the ability of disturbing with surreal images. His filmography demonstrates the inspiration of surrealism in which the physical world is violent, erotic and so shocking that a coherent story is not needed. Buñuel's world is one where a bad dream gives a man a letter which he brings to the doctor the following day, and where the devil, if unable to tempt a saint with an attractive girl, will fly him to a night-club.
Buñuel kept the faith longer than any other surrealist artist in any medium. Loyal to his ideals, he never explained or promoted his work: He simply invented the concept of absurdity as an aesthetic.
Probably the most controversial of filmmakers, always concerned with constructing ideas, Buñuel acquired his fame through his absolute sincerity. Anti-conformist and working within the tight budgets of the film industry, no other filmmaker has been more sincere in expressing personal obsessions as evidently as he does from his first film to his last.
Buñuel was once asked : If you only had 20 years left to live! How would you like to live them? his answer was : "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I will take the other 22 in dreams - provided I can remember them."
- Selected Filmography :
- The Andalusian Dog (Le Chien Andalou, 1928) - 16m
- The Golden Age (L'Age d'Or, 1930) - 1hr
- Las Hurdes (Land without Bread, 1932) - French with English subtitles - 27m
| - - - - -Le Chien Andalou - - - - |
- - - - - - - L'age d'Or - - - - - - - |
- - - - - - - Las Hurdes - - - - - - - |
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- Ref. Extra** : French documentary (April 4, 1964))- Eng. Subs :
click here : Watch Video
- From "Cinéastes de notre temps". Focuses on : surrealist filmmaker, his exile and his early career.
Curriculum
1928 Works - Un Chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog); - , France
1930 Works - L'Âge d'or (The Golden Age) - , France
1932 Works - Las Hurdes (Land Without Bread) - , Spain
1950 Works - Los olvidados (The Young and the Damned) - , Mexico
1952 Works - Robinson Crusoe - , Mexico
1953 Works - El - , Mexico
1955 Works - Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la - , Mexico
1958 Works - Nazarín - , Mexico
1961 Works - Viridiana - , Spain
1962 Works - El ángel exterminador(The Exterminating Angel) - , Mexico
1964 Works - Le Journal d'une femme de chambre (The Diary of a Chambermaid) - , France
1965 Works - Simón del desierto (Simon of the Desert) - , Mexico
1967 Works - Belle de jour - , France
1969 Works - La Voie lactée (The Milky Way) - , France
1970 Works - Tristana - , Mexico
1973 Works - Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of...) - , France
1974 Works - Le Fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty) - , France
1977 Biography - Buñuel por Buñuel - Entrevistas y conversaciones con Luis Buñuel - ,
1977 Works - Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object of Desire). - , France
1983 Biography - My Last Sigh (Auto-Biography) - , France
1987 Bibliography - Diversions of Pleasure: Buñuel & the Crises of Desire (P.Sandro) - ,
2005 Bibliography - Luis Bunuel Filmography (Taschen) - ,
2007 Bibliography - Luis Buñuel - The Complete Films (Book by Bill Krohn) - ,
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