Hailed as the master of surrealist cinema, Luis Buñuel is responsible for some of the most provocative, daring and original films of the Twentieth Century.  His work is distinguished by an amazing flair for surrealism, that singular kind of madness that gives his films a strange dreamlike quality, as though reality were viewed through a strange distorting lens.  Through a film career spanning almost fifty years, Buñuel sustained a virulent assault against the bourgeois middle classes, the Church and fascism.  In both his work and his life, Buñuel was anti-establishment, the permanent exile, and perpetual paradox.  “I am still an atheist, thank God”, he said.

Luis Buñuel was born in on 22nd February 1900 in Calanda, in the Aragón  region of Spain.  He was the eldest of seven children born to a wealthy land-owning family.  Aged 17, he began his university studies at the Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid, an establishment that brought together Spain’s greatest creative minds.  It was here that he met the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, who would both have a marked influence on Buñuel’s work.

After the death of his father, Luis Buñuel moved to Paris in 1925 to work for a short time as secretary at the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation. In 1926, he began working as an assistant to avant-garde director Jean Epstein. Then, in 1929, with financial support from his mother, he made his first film, the short surrealist work Un Chien andalou, intended to allow him and Dalí to gain entry to the Surrealist Movement.  The film, a bizarre exploration of identity and sexuality, is famous for its opening scene in which a woman’s eye is slit open with a cut-throat razor, possibly the most shocking image to have been committed to celluloid.

Buñuel worked with Dalí on his next film, another surrealist work with a clear anti-Church subtext, L’Age d’or (1930).  The film provoked riots and was soon banned as a threat to public order.  Buñuel’s next film, Las Hurdes (1932) was an uncompromising documentary short about peasant life in Spain – this too was banned, on account of its realism and anti-authority messages.

From 1934 to 1936, Buñuel worked as a producer for the Spanish film company Filmófono.  After the Spanish Civil War, Buñuel began his lengthy exile in the Americas.  He worked for a time in the archives of the Museum of Modern Art in New York before moving to Hollywood, where he was employed in producing foreign-language versions of popular films.

In 1946, Buñuel moved to Mexico where he gained Mexican citizenship and resumed his filmmaking career.  The failure of Gran Casino (1946) was followed by Buñuel’s first success, El Gran Calavera (1949).  Working on these films allowed him to master the technical side of filmmaking.  Buñuel would win critical acclaim and establish himself as an auteur with Los Olvidados (1950), a grim portrait of Mexico’s forgotten poor which is famous for a surreal dream sequence; the film earned him the Best Director award at Cannes.  Over the following decade, he made around another fifteen films in Mexico, of varying degrees of quality.  The best of these include El (1952), a black comedy of obsession involving a sexually frustrated upper class Mexican and his austere wife, and Nazarín (1958), the first of his intensely ironic explorations of religion and faith.

The early 1960s marked Luis Buñuel’s return to Europe and a marked upsurge in his creative output.  Viridiana (1961) is a kind of parable of the director’s return to Franco’s Spain, filled with anti-authority, anti-Church messages, and with some religious references that provoked great outrage at the time.  This was followed by El Ángel exterminador (The Exterminating Angel) (1962), a flagrant attack on bourgeois inertia, in which the director uses his mastery of surrealism to great effect.  The anti-bourgeois theme is continued in Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1964) and Belle de jour (1967), whilst Simón del desierto (1965) and La Voie lactée (1969) allow Buñuel to explore further his wry atheists’ view of religion.  Tristana (1970) was his final Spanish production, involving another anti-establishment theme that recurs in Buñuel’s work, a woman’s attempt to gain control over the man who thinks he owns her.

Now settled in France, Buñuel was to round off his career with a trilogy of hugely popular films which provide his most effective assault on the bourgeois middle classes.   Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974) and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977) differ from Buñuel’s earlier anti-bourgeois offerings.  Here, the director’s aim is not to stoke the fires of class warfare, but rather to invite us to join him in laughing at the sheer absurdity of the middle classes.  When he died in Mexico City in 1983 (form cirrhosis of the liver), Luis Buñuel left us not with a frown or a snarl but with a smile – a very wry and mischievous smile.

© James Travers 2006