“Thank God, I’m an atheist!” said Luis Buñuel in 1960.
It was an accidental aphorism, but this declaration in French newspaper, L’Express, highlights the suspicion of religion and infectious sense of playfulness that courses through his work.
He was a pioneer of cinematic surrealism, and launched ferocious attacks on the church, fascism, and conventional bourgeois morality, building images with a dreamlike logic, delicious irony and swathes of black humor.
A quarter of a century since his passing he remains cinema’s greatest iconoclast.
Bruñel was born on February 22nd, 1900 and raised in Calanda, Spain.
Being the son of well-to-do landowners, and educated by Jesuit priests, his rebellion against the bourgeoisie and the church may have started early.
He later enrolled at Mardrid University, forming friendships with Salvador Dalí, and playwright and poet-to-be, Federico García Lorca.
In 1925 he studied cinema at the Académie du Cinéma in Paris, and following a brief apprenticeship as an assistant director, he collaborated with Dalí on his firs film, Un Chien andalou (Andalusian Dog), in 1928.
THE SULTAN OF SURREALISM
Running 17 minutes, the film is a series of unconnected incidents, unfolding with a fantastical randomness: ants emerge from the wound in the palm of a hand, dead donkeys lie on two pianos, priests are pulled along the ground and in one of cinema’s most shocking moments, an open eye is slashed in two with a razor, in close-up.
At the film’s Paris premiere, on 26 June 1929, Buñuel hid behind the screen with stones in his pocket for fear of being lynched by an outraged audience.
He need not have worried.
The film was enthusiastically received, in surrealist circles, and French filmmaker, Jean Vigo, called it “a major work of importance, in every respect”.
Buñuel followed this with L’Âge d’or (The Golden Age) in 1930.
Here, he embroiders the plot of two lovers whose sexual desires are thwarted by the conventions of society with provocative and outrageous images: a blind man being kicked, a cow on a bed and actress Lya Lys seductively sucking the toe of a statue.
Over-brimming as it is with anticlerical and blasphemous sentiments; the film was attacked by the right-wing press and banned in Spain for 50 years.
In 1932 Buñuel left Paris for Spain and made Land Without Bread, a powerful and horrifying documentary about peasant poverty in northern Spain that keeps the shocking imagery of his surrealist films – such as the human grotesques caused in inbreeding – but adds searing social realism.
It was banned in his homeland, and the last film Buñuel made for 13 years.
BACK TO BLASPHEMY
Having been prevented from making his own films, Buñuel moved between making musical comedies and Republican propaganda in Spain and dubbing dialogue for the studios in America.
He eventually settled in Mexico, in 1946, and resumed his directorial career, taking on more commercial projects.
After two unremarkable efforts – Gran Casino, El Gran Calavera (Magnificent Casino), and The Great Madcap, (1947 and 1949) – Buñuel entered the big leagues with Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) (1950), a portrait of juvenile delinquents eking out a violent existence in Mexico City’s slums.
Other important films from this period include the black comedy El (This Strange Passion (1955), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955) and Nazarín (1958).
In 1961, Buñuel made Viridiana in Spain, his first film in his homeland for 29 years.
The movie, which was sponsored by the Spanish government, was another scathing satire on the church and fascism, the key set piece depicting a re-enactment of the Last Supper played out by beggars and degenerates.
Astonishingly, government officials did not see the film until its Cannes opening in 1961, where it won the Palme d’Or.
Like much of Buñuel’s Spanish output, it was immediately banned.
Yet this didn’t temper Buñuel’s scorn, his anti-establishment stance striking a nerve with the 1960s counter-culture.
The Exterminating Angel (1962) sees the guests of a high-society dinner party trapped in the dining room together. Belle de jour (1967) has a tour-de-force performance from Catherine Deneuve, as the bored wife of a doctor, who takes pleasure spending her afternoons working in a brothel, entertaining kinky clients.
“I attribute [Belle de jour’s success] more to the marvelous whores than my direction”, was his evaluation of his biggest success to date.
THE BUÑUEL APPROACH
Despite coursing with the seeming anarchy of surrealism Buñuel’s filmmaking style was both economical and structured.
His films were shot in a few weeks on low budgets and rarely strayed from the script, shooting in continuity to minimize the editing time.
Buñuel also eschewed the use of traditional music soundtracks, with films such as Diary of a Chambermaid and Belle de jour containing no music at all, which adds to their discomforting feel.
SHOCKING SEVENTIES
Buñuel entered the 1970s with Tristiana, examining the complicated, tortured relationship between an orphaned girl (Deneuve) and her protector (Fernando Rey) with an assured mixture of intensity and ironic detachment.
Harking back to The Exterminating Angel The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie once again put affluent dinner-party guests into hell.
More shocking than the film itself is, Buñuel won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1972, for Bourgeoisie - the enfent terrible had joined the establishment!
He won again, five years later, with That Obscure Object of Desire, an exploration of a businessman’s (Rey again) frustrated passion for his maid.
When Maria Schneider, originally cast as the maid, left the project three weeks into the shoot, Buñuel, with typical surrealist thinking, cast two actresses (Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina), each revealing different sides to the same woman, and exacerbating Rey’s indecision.
Full of trademark barbs and wit, Buñuel’s final film is a fitting testament to his talent.
Shortly before his death, he was awarded the Grand Cross of the Order of Isabella, by the Spanish government – perhaps in a last-gasp gesture of reconciliation.
Buñuel died, 29 July 1983, as old as the century that had been enriched by his scurrilous, surrealist vision.
Must-see Movies:
Un Chien andalou (1929)
L’Âge d’or (1930
Los Olvidados (1950)
Belle de jour (1966)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
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Religious education, and surrealism, have marked me for life.
Luis Buñuel
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Luis Buñuel |
Luis Buñuel. |
| Born | Luis Buñuel Portolés
22 February 1900
Calanda, Teruel, Aragón, Spain |
| Died | 29 July 1983 (aged 83)
Mexico City, Mexico |
| Occupation | Filmmaker |
| Years active | 1929–1977 |
| Influenced by | Marquis de Sade, Richard Wagner, Fritz Lang, Jean Epstein, André Breton, Federico García Lorca, Salvador Dalí |
| Influenced | Salvador Dalí, Carlos Saura, Arturo Ripstein, David Lynch, David Cronenberg |
| Spouse | Jeanne Buñuel (1925 – his death) |
Luis Buñuel Portolés (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈlwiz βuˈɲwel]; 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who also acquired Mexican citizenship, and worked in Spain, Mexico, France, and the US.
He is considered one of the most influential directors in the history of cinema.[1]
Early years
Buñuel was born in Calanda, a small town in the province of Teruel, in Aragón, Spain, to Leonardo Buñuel and María Portolés.
He would later describe his birthplace by saying, in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I."[2]
The oldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters, Alicia, Concepción, Margarita, and María.
When Buñuel was just four months old, the family moved to Zaragoza, where they were one of the wealthiest families in town.
In Zaragoza, Buñuel received a strict Jesuit education, at the Colegio del Salvador.
After being kicked and insulted by the study hall proctor prior to a final exam, Buñuel refused to return to the Colegio del Salvador.
He told his mother he had been expelled (which was not actually true, and he had received the highest marks on his world history exam)."[3]
Buñuel finished the last two years of his high school education at the local public school.
In 1917, he went to university in Madrid.
While studying at the University of Madrid (current-day Universidad Complutense de Madrid), he became a very close friend of painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spaniard artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes.
Buñuel first studied agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switched to philosophy.
The 2009 biopic, Little Ashes, gives an account of the relationship of Dalí, Lorca, and Buñuel at this time.
Career
First French period
In 1925, Buñuel moved to Paris, where he began work as a secretary in an organization called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation.
He later found work in France as an assistant director to Jean Epstein on Mauprat (1926), Mario Nalpas on La Sirène des Tropiques (1927) starring Josephine Baker, and Epstein on La chute de la maison Usher (1928).
It was during this time he met his future wife, Jeanne Rucar, whom he married in 1934.
The two remained married throughout his life, and had two sons, Juan-Luis and Rafael.
Diego Buñuel, filmmaker and host of the National Geographic Channel's Don't Tell My Mother series, is his grandson.
The legendary shot of the eyeball (actually that of a dead calf) being slit by Buñuel.
Next, Buñuel co-wrote and directed a 16-minute short film, Un chien andalou (1929), with Dalí.
This film – which features a series of startling images of a Freudian nature – was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French Surrealist movement of the time, and continues to be shown regularly in film societies to this day.
He followed Un chien andalou with L'Âge d'Or (1930), partly based on the Marquis de Sade's 120 Days of Sodom.
The film was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, by the time the film went into production, Buñuel and Dalí had had a falling out, and so Dalí actually had nothing to do with the actual making of L'Âge d'Or. During this film, he worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film he shot.
L'Âge d'Or was read to be an attack on Catholicism, and thus, precipitated an even larger scandal than Un chien andalou.
The right-wing press criticized the film, and the police placed a ban on it that lasted 50 years.
Spain
Following L'Âge d'Or, Buñuel returned to Spain and directed Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933), a documentary (or a parody thereof) on peasant life in Extremadura, one of the poorest states in Spain.
This was a convulsive period which led, in 1936, to the Spanish Civil War.
The times were changing quickly and Buñuel could see someone with his political and artistic sensibilities would have no place in a fascist Spain.
He co-wrote and produced a documentary short about the changing political climes in Spain, called, España 1936.
The advent of the Spanish Civil War, in 1936, caused the expatriation of many artists and intellectuals from the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, whose military revolt, and rise to power, had the strong backing of the Spanish Catholic hierarchy.
United States
In exile after the Spanish Civil War, Buñuel settled in Hollywood, to capitalize on the short-lived fad of producing foreign-language versions of American films, for sales abroad.
After Buñuel worked on a few Spanish-language remakes, the industry eventually turned to the dubbing of dialogue.
He then left Hollywood for New York, getting a job at the Museum of Modern Art, from Iris Barry, where he put together compilation films, including a juxtaposition of two Nazi propaganda films: Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934) and Hans Bertram's Feuertaufe.
Dali, in his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí (1942), suggested he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist, and an atheist.
Buñuel was fired (or resigned) from MOMA, supposedly after Cardinal Spellman of New York went to see Iris Barry, head of the film department at MOMA.
Buñuel went back to Hollywood, where he worked in the dubbing department of Warner Brothers, from 1942 to 1946.
In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir (My Last Sigh, 1983), Buñuel wrote he submitted a treatment to Warner Bros. about a disembodied hand, which was later adapted (without his consent and without paying him royalties) into The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) with Peter Lorre.
Buñuel also wrote, over the years, he rejected Dalí's attempts at reconciliation.
In 1972, Buñuel, along with his screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and producer Serge Silberman, was invited by George Cukor to his house.
This gathering was particularly memorable and other invitees included Alfred Hitchcock, Rouben Mamoulian, Robert Mulligan, George Stevens, Billy Wilder, Robert Wise and William Wyler.[4]
Mexican period
Buñuel arrived in Mexico in 1946, and acquired Mexican citizenship in 1949.
He relinquished his Spanish passport, as it was not possible to have dual citizenship then.
The first film he directed there was Gran Casino (1946), a vehicle for Stars Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque, produced by Oscar Dancigers.
Buñuel found the plot boring and it was not hugely successful.
He later again collaborated with Dancigers directing El Gran Calavera (1949), a successful film starring, 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 Dancigers 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), which was 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 remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, although he spent periods of time filming in France and Spain.
In Mexico, he filmed 20 films, including:
Viridiana
In 1960, for political propaganda reasons, Franco instructed his minister of culture to invite the country's most famous filmmaker to return to Spain to direct a film of his choice.
Buñuel accepted and proceeded to make Viridiana produced by Mexican film tycoon Gustavo Alatriste, starring Mexican actress, Silvia Pinal.
He left Spain as soon as he finished the film, but left a few official copies.
After viewing them, the copies were burned by the dictator's authorities.
The minister of culture was reprimanded for having passed the screenplay in the first place.
A copy of Viridiana, however, had been smuggled to France, where it proceeded to win the Palme D'Or at the Cannes International Film Festival.
The film was banned in Spain, but got international attention and praise (with some exceptions).
The Vatican's official newspaper, l'Osservatore Romano, published an article calling Viridiana "an insult not only to Catholicism, but to Christianity itself".
Second French period
After the golden age of the Mexican film industry ended, Buñuel started to work in France, along with Silberman and Carrière.
During this "French Period", Buñuel directed some of his best-known works:
Le Fantôme de la liberté (Poster).
Last years
After the release of Cet obscur objet du désir, he retired from film making, and wrote (with Carrière) an autobiography, Mon Dernier Soupir (My Last Sigh), published in 1982, which provides an account of Buñuel's life, friends, and family as well as a representation of his eccentric personality.
In it, he recounts dreams, encounters with many well known writers, actors, and artists such as Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, and antics such as dressing up as a nun and walking around town.
As one might deduce from these antics, Buñuel was famous for his atheism. In a 1960 interview with Michele Manceaux in L'Express, Buñuel famously declared: "Thank God, I'm an atheist!"
Buñuel repudiated this statement in a 1977 article in The New Yorker.
"I'm not Christian, but I'm not an atheist, either", he said.
"I'm weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine, 'I'm an atheist, thank God!'
"It's outworn.
"Dead leaves.
"In 1951, I made a small film called Mexican Bus Ride, about a village too poor to support a church and a priest.
"The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt.
"It's guilt we must escape from, not God."
Buñuel died in Mexico City in 1983.
His funeral was very private.
There were about 50 people at the most, among them Octavio Paz, José Luis Cuevas, Miguel Littin, his wife, and two sons.
Influences
Surrealism
Buñuel's films were famous for their surreal imagery, including scenes in which chickens populate nightmares, women grow beards, and aspiring saints are desired by lascivious women.
Even in the many movies he made for hire (rather than for his own creative reasons), such as Susana, and The Great Madcap, he usually added his trademark of disturbing and surreal images.
Running through his own films is a backbone of surrealism; Buñuel's world is one in which an entire dinner party suddenly finds itself 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.
An example of a more Dada influence can be found in Cet obscur objet du désir, when Mathieu closes his eyes and has his valet spin him around and direct him to a map on the wall.
Buñuel 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.
Religion
Many of his films were openly critical of middle class morals and organized religion, mocking the Roman Catholic Church, in particular, but religion in general, for hypocrisy.
Many of his most famous films demonstrate this:
Head of Luis Buñuel in Centro Buñuel Calanda.
- Un chien andalou (1929) – A man drags pianos, upon which are piled two dead donkeys, two priests, and the tablets of The Ten Commandments.
- L'Âge d'Or (1930) – A bishop is thrown out a window, and in the final scene one of the culprits of the 120 days of Sodom is portrayed by an actor dressed in a way that he would be recognized as Jesus.
- El Gran Calavera (1949) – During the final scenes of the wedding, the priest continuously reminds the bride of her obligations under marriage. Then the movie changes and the bride runs chasing her true love.
- Ensayo de un crimen (1955) – A man dreams of murdering his wife while she's praying in bed dressed all in white.
- Nazarin (1959) – The pious lead character wreaks ruin through his attempts at charity.
- Viridiana (1961) – A well-meaning young nun tries unsuccessfully to help the poor. One scene in the film parodies The Last Supper.
- El ángel exterminador (1962) – The final scene is of sheep entering a church, mirroring the entrance of the parishioners.
- Simón del desierto (1965) – The devil tempts a saint by taking the form of a bare-breasted girl singing and showing off her legs. At the end of the film, the saint abandons his ascetic life to hang out in a jazz club.
- La Voie Lactée (1969) – Two men travel the ancient pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela and meet embodiments of various heresies along the way. One dreams of anarchists shooting the Pope.
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 actors' questions and was known to simply turn off his hearing aid on the set.
Though they found it difficult at the time, many actors who worked with him acknowledged later his approach made for fresh and excellent performances.
Buñuel preferred scenes which could simply be pieced together, end-to-end, in the editing room, resulting in long, mobile, wide shots, which followed the action of the scene.
Examples are especially present in his French films.
For example, at the restaurant/ski resort in Belle de jour, Séverin, Pierre, and Henri are conversing at a table.
Buñuel cuts away from their conversation to two young women who walk down a few steps and proceed through the restaurant, passing behind Séverin, Pierre, and Henri, at which point the camera stops and the young women walk out of frame.
Henri then comments on the women, and the conversation at the table progresses from there.
Buñuel disliked non-diegetic music (music not intrinsic to the scene itself) and avoided its use, although the traditional drums from Calanda are heard in most of his films.
The films of his French era were not scored and some (Belle de jour, Diary of a Chambermaid) are without music entirely.
Belle de jour does, however, feature (potentially) non-diegetic sound effects.
Tributes
- Luis Buñuel stands with Eisenstein, Chaplin, Renoir, Dovzhenko, Mizoguchi and Fellini as one of the greatest directors ever to work in cinema. – Joan Mellen
- The cinema's prophets are few and lonely; none more formidable than the Spaniard, Buñuel. – Tony Richardson
- Buñuel is a cheerful pessimist, not given to despair, but he has a sceptical mind...
- Like the writers of the eighteenth century, Buñuel teaches us how to doubt... – François Truffaut
- Buñuel is one of those figures in world cinema who is always going to be in world cinema. – Carlos Saura
- They call Buñuel everything: traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast.
- Lunatic they do not call him.
- It is true, it is lunacy he portrays, but it is not his lunacy...this is the lunacy of civilization, the record of man's achievement after ten thousand years of refinement. – Henry Miller
- He has grappled with the most significant problems of his milieu and age valiantly and constantly...
- Buñuel, the uncompromising, truthful. – Ritwik Ghatak
Awards
Luis Buñuel was given the Career Golden Lion in 1982, by the Venice Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize – Honorable Mention in 1969 by the Berlin Film Festival.
In 1977, he received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences, for Fine Arts.
Filmography
Bibliography
- Bunuel Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
- Buñuel biography
- Luis Buñuel, Mi Ultimo Suspiro (English translation My Last Sigh Alfred A. Knopf, 1983)
- Froylan Enciso, "En defensa del poeta Buñuel", en Andar fronteras. El servicio diplomático de Octavio Paz en Francia (1946–1951), Siglo XXI, 2008, pp. 130–134 y 353–357.
- Michael Koller "Un Chien Andalou", Senses of Cinema January 2001 Retrieved on 26 July 2006.
- Ignacio Javier López, The Old Age of William Tell: A Study of Buñuel's '"Tristana", MLN 116 (2001): 295–314.
- Ignacio Javier López, "Film, Freud and Paranoia: Dalí and the Representation of Male Desire in An Andalusian Dog", "'Diacritics'" 31,2 (2003): 35–48.
- Javier Espada y Elena Cervera, México fotografiado por Luis Buñuel.
- Javier Espada y Elena Cervera, Buñuel. Entre 2 Mundos.
- Javier Espada y Asier Mensuro, Album fotografico de la familia Buñuel.
References
External links
- [1] La furia umana, n°6, autumn 2010, dossiér about Luis Buñuel with texts (English, French, Spanish, Italian) by Toni D'Angela, Jean-Charles Fitoussi, Alberto Abruzzese, Gino Frezza, Stéphanie Serre, Gilberto Perez, Adrian Martin, Bruno Andrade, Gianni Rondolino, Gabriela Trujillo, Ignacio Esper ant others
- Luis Buñuel at the Internet Movie Database
- Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
- AllMovie Guide
- They Shoot Pictures, Don't They?
- Thank God I'm an atheist: The surrealistic cinema of Luis Bunuel
- Interview with Jean-Claude Carriere – Bunuel's screenwriter and friend
- The Religious Affiliation of Luis Buñuel
- Luis Buñuel at Find a Grave
| [show]v · d · eFilms directed by Luis Buñuel | | | 1920s | | | | 1930s | | | | 1940s | | | | 1950s | | | | 1960s | | | | 1970s | | |
| Persondata |
| Name | Bunuel, Luis |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | |
| Date of birth | 22 February 1900 |
| Place of birth | Calanda, Teruel, Aragón, Spain |
| Date of death | 29 July 1983 |
| Place of death | Mexico City, Mexico |
