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Luis Buñuel

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File:Bunuel.gif
Portrait of Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel Portoles (February 22, 1900 – July 29, 1983) was a Spanish-born Mexican filmmaker.

Life

Buñuel was born in Calanda, Teruel in the region of Aragón, Spain. He had a strict Jesuit education and went to university in Madrid. While studying at the University of Madrid he became a very close friend of painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spanish artists living in the student dormitories. After that, he moved to Paris to do film-related work though he knew virtually nothing about film. After working on several films as a director's assistant (to Jean Epstein on Mauprat and Mario Nalpas on La Sirène des Tropiques) he co-wrote and then filmed a 16 minute short film Un Chien Andalou (1929) with Salvador Dalí. This film, featuring a series of startling and sometimes horrifying images of Freudian nature (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, although its subversive content (dealing with bisexuality and androgyny) caused audiences to riot. He followed this with L'Age D'Or, which was begun as a second collaboration with Dali but became Buñuel's solo project due to a falling-out they had before filming began. During this film he worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. 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 Buñuel.

Hollywood era

After the Spanish Civil War Buñuel emigrated to the United States. After working in the film archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Buñuel moved to Hollywood to capitalize on the short-lived fad of producing completely new foreign-language versions of hit films for sales abroad. After Buñuel worked on a few Spanish-language remakes, the industry turned instead to simple re-dubbing of dialogue.

Mexican era

Buñuel arrived in Mexico in 1946 at the age of 46, and met film producer Oscar Dancigiers. After directing an film named Gran Casino (1946), produced by Dancigiers, Buñuel thought his career as a filmmaker was over. Three years later he decided to become a Mexican citizen and accepted to direct (under Dancigiers' production) El Gran Calavera (1949), an unpretentious but highly successful film starring superstar (at the time) Fernando Soler. As Buñuel himself has stated, he learned the techniques of directing and editing while shooting El Gran Calavera. Its success at the box-office encouraged Dancigiers to accept the production of a more ambitious film for which Buñuel, apart from writing the script, had complete freedom to direct. The result was his critically acclaimed Los Olvidados (1950), a masterpiece of urban surrealism (and recently considered by UNESCO as part of the world's cultural heritage). Los Olvidados (and its triumph at Cannes) made Buñuel an instant world celebrity and the most important Spanish-speaking film director in the world.

Buñuel spent most of his later life in Mexico, where he directed 21 films. Some of them are masterpieces of world cinema, and were highly acclaimed, specially in European festivals. Among them we find:

  • Él (1952)
  • Ensayo de un crimen (The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz) (1955)
  • Nazarín (1958) (based on the novel by Benito Perez-Galdos, and adapted by Buñuel to the colonial mexican context)
  • Viridiana (1961) (coproduction Mexico-Spain and winner at Cannes)
  • El Ángel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) (1962)
  • Simón del Desierto (Simon of the Desert) (1965).

French Era

After the golden age of the Mexican film industry was over, Buñuel started to work in France along with producer Serge Silberman. During this "french age" Buñuel directed some of his best-known works, such as Belle de Jour, Cet obscur objet du désir (That Obscure Object Of Desire), and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie - as well as some equally brilliant but lesser-known films such as The Phantom Of Liberty and The Milky Way.

After the release of Cet obscur objet du désir (1977) he retired from film making, and wrote an autobiography, containing a classic surrealist sentiment: He said he'd be happy to burn the prints of all his films. He died in Mexico in 1983. He was famous for his atheism. Near the end of his life when he was asked if he a was still an atheist he replied, "Thank god I'm still an atheist."

He married Jeanne Rucar in 1925 and they remained married throughout his life. His sons are film-maker Rafael Buñuel and Juan Luis Buñuel.

He died in Mexico City in 1983 of cirrhosis of the liver.

Surrealism

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 added his trademark of genuinely disturbing and surreal images. Running through his own brilliant films is a backbone of devoted surrealism; Buñuel's world is one in which an entire dinner party suddenly finds 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, 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. Buñuel kept the faith longer than any other surrealist in any medium, and true to those roots, he never explained or promoted his work. On one occasion, when his son was interviewed about The Exterminating Angel, Buñuel instructed him to give facetious answers; for example, when asked about the presence of a bear in the socialites' house, Buñuel fils claimed it was because his father liked bears. Similarly, the several repeated scenes in the film were explained as having been put there to increase the running time. As a result, Buñuel remains little-known, and is often totally misunderstood.

Religious influence

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 - a bishop is thrown out a window
  • Simon Of The Desert - the devil tempts the saint by taking the form of a naughty, bare-breasted little girl singing and showing off her legs
  • Nazarin - the pious lead character is a fool who wreaks ruin through his attempts at charity
  • Viridiana - a well-meaning but self-regarding young nun tries unsuccessfully to help the poor

Buñuel was a lifelong atheist, 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 Buñuel's earlier Spanish and French films were still known and respected - Un Chien Andalou, L'Age D'Or, and Las Hurdes. 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 many artists and dissidents from Franco's Spain. As a result, Buñuel was revered in Spain far out of proportion to the number of people who had actually seen his films. Accordingly, Franco decided to approach Buñuel about returning to Spain to make a government-subsidized film. Buñuel, much to the shock and anger of his friends and other Spanish expatriates, agreed. 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 government to Cannes without being previewed, and won the Palme D'Or there. The next day, calls and communications started pouring in, first from the Vatican, with outrage at the Spanish government's production and submission to Cannes of what was seen to be a highly blasphemous film. Buñuel, untouched by the scandal, went home to Mexico, having made the film he wanted and having received acknowledgement for it.

Filming style and technique

Buñuel's style of directing 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)


Bibliographies

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