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Luis Buñuel

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File:Luis Buñuel.jpg
Cartoon of Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel Portoles (February 22, 1900 – July 29, 1983) was a Spanish-born filmmaker who worked mainly in Mexico and France, but also in his native country and the United States.

Life

Buñuel was born in Calanda, Teruel in the region of Aragón, Spain. His parents were Leonardo Buñuel and Maria Portoles; his two brothers were named Alfonso and Leonardo, while his four sisters were Alicia, Conchita, Margarita and Maria. He had a strict Jesuit education at the Colegio del Salvador 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. Buñuel first studied engineering at the University but later switched to philosophy. After the death of his father in 1923, Buñuel felt a great need to leave the country and in 1925 he 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 a director's assistant to Jean Epstein on Mauprat and Mario Nalpas on La Sirène des Tropiques and 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 content (dealing with bisexuality and androgyny) caused audiences to riot.

He followed this with L'Âge d'Or (1930), based on a novel by Marquis de Sade, which was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí 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 Dalí's claim doesn't hold up against the great surreal film work later produced by Buñuel. 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 fifty years.

Following L'Âge d’or, Buñuel returned to Spain and directed Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933), a documentary on peasant life. It was during this time that Francisco Franco was slowly gaining power in Spain. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War had begun. Times were changing fast and Buñuel could see that someone with his political and artistic sensibilities would have no place in a Nationalist-controlled Spain.

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 re-dubbing of dialogue. First he moved to Hollywood, and not finding work, went back to New York where he worked at the Musuem of Modern Art where he re-edited a shorter version of Leni Riefenstahl's documentary on Hitler. After being denounced by Dalí as a communist and an atheist, he resigned from the MOMA and went back to Hollywood and worked in the dubbing department of Warner Brothers.

Mexican era

Buñuel arrived in Mexico in 1946 at the age of 46, and, despite having previously had no interest whatsoever in Latin America, ended up getting Mexican citizenship in 1949. The first film he directed there was the Gran Casino (1946), produced by Oscar Dancigers. Buñuel found the plot boring and it was not hugely successful. He later again collaborated with Dancigers in creating 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), 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, especially in European festivals. Among them we find:

French Era

After the golden age of the Mexican film industry was over, Buñuel started to work in France along with producer Serge Silberman and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière. During this "French Period" Buñuel directed some of his best-known works: 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 (with Carrière), which provides an account of Buñuel's interesting life, friends, and family as well as a representation of his eccentric personality. In it he recounts bizarre dreams, interesting encounters with many well known artists, actors, and writers such as 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. Near the end of his life he was asked about his religious beliefs, to which he replied, "Thank god I'm still an atheist."

He married Jeanne Rucar in a town hall in Paris in 1934 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 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 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 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. 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..

Religious influence

Many of his films were openly critical of middle class morals and organized religion, mocking the pretension and hypocrisy of the Catholic Church in ways that are often (then and now) mistaken for vicious and overt anti-clericalism. Many of his most (in)famous films demonstrate this:

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. Buñuel's earlier Spanish and French films from the 1930s were regarded as cinematography's landmarks -- Un Chien Andalou, L'Age D'Or, and Las Hurdes. The advent of the Spanish civil war in 1936, however, caused the expatriation of many artists and intellectuals from the fascist dictatorship of Francisco Franco, whose military revolt and rise to power had had the strong backing of the Spanish Catholic hierarchy.

Had Buñuel stayed in Spain, his fate might have been the same as that of his friend, poet Federico García Lorca, who was assassinated at the outset of Franco's military revolt. After some years of artistic silence forced by the difficult circumstances of his expatriation, Buñuel, then residing in Mexico, returned in full force to writing and directing with some of his best films, which once more won him international acclaim.

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", promptly departing from the country after finishing the film, but leaving 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 of the Cannes International Film Festival. The film was banned in Spain, but got international attention and praise (with some exceptions). The Vatican's official press organ, l'Osservatore Romano, published an article calling "Viridiana" an insult not only to Catholicism, but to Christianity itself.

Filming style and technique

File:Bunuelpromo.jpg
Luis Buñuel at work

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 that 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, and avoided it in his films. The films of his French era were not scored and some (Belle de Jour, Diary of a Chambermaid) contain absolutely no music whatsoever. Belle de Jour does, however, feature (potentially) non-diegetic sound effects, believed by some to be clues as to whether or not the current scene is a dream.

Filmography (director)

Bibliography

External links

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