Luis Buñuel Portolés (; 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish and Mexican filmmaker who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain. He has been widely considered by many film critics, historians, and directors to be one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. Buñuel's works are known for their avant-garde surrealism which was also infused with political commentary.
Often associated with the surrealist movement, Buñuel's career spanned the 1920s through the 1970s. He collaborated with surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L'Age d'Or (1930). Both are considered masterpieces of surrealist cinema. From 1947 to 1960, he honed his skills as a director in Mexico, making grounded and human melodramas such as Gran Casino (1947), Los Olvidados (1950) and Él (1953).
Buñuel then transitioned to making artful, surrealistic and satirical films. He earned the at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival for Viridiana (1961), which criticized the Francoist dictatorship. He satirized social conditions in The Exterminating Angel (1962) and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), the latter of which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He also directed Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967). He earned the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Director for his final film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
Buñuel earned five Cannes Film Festival prizes, two Berlin International Film Festival prizes, a BAFTA Award and an Academy Award in 1972. Buñuel received numerous honors including National Prize for Arts and Sciences for Fine Arts in 1977, the Moscow International Film Festival Contribution to Cinema Prize in 1979, and the Career Golden Lion in 1982. He was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1968 and then in 1972. Seven of Buñuel's films are included in Sight & Sound 2012 critics' poll of the top 250 films of all time. Buñuel's obituary in The New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later".
Early life and education
Buñuel was born on 22 February 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the Aragon region of Spain. His father was Leonardo Buñuel, also a native of Calanda, who had left home at age 14 to start a hardware business in Havana, Cuba, ultimately amassing a fortune and returning home to Calanda at the age of 43, in 1898. He married the 18-year-old daughter of the only innkeeper in Calanda, María Portolés Cerezuela. The eldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters: Alicia, Concepción, Margarita and María. He later described his birthplace by saying that in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I".Luis Buñuel, My Last Sigh, translated by Abigail Israel, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1983.
When Buñuel was 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 private Colegio del Salvador, starting at the age of seven and continuing for the next seven years. After being kicked and insulted by the study hall proctor before a final exam, Buñuel refused to return to the school. He told his mother he had been expelled, which was not true; in fact, he had received the highest marks on his world history exam. Buñuel finished the last two years of his high school education at the local public school, graduating at the age of 16. Even as a child, Buñuel was something of a cinematic showman; friends from that period described productions in which Buñuel projected shadows on a screen using a magic lantern and a bedsheet. He also excelled at boxing and playing the violin.
In his youth, Buñuel was deeply religious, serving at Mass and taking Communion every day, until, at the age of 16, he grew disgusted with what he perceived as the illogicality of the Church, along with its power and wealth.
In 1917, he attended the University of Madrid, first studying agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switching to philosophy. He developed very close relationships with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spanish creative artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes, with the three friends forming the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde, and becoming known as members of "La Generación del 27". Buñuel was especially taken with García Lorca, later writing in his autobiography: We liked each other instantly. Although we seemed to have little in common—I was a redneck from Aragon, and he an elegant Andalusian—we spent most of our time together...We used to sit on the grass in the evenings behind the Residencia (at that time, there were vast open spaces reaching to the horizon), and he would read me his poems. He read slowly and beautifully, and through him I began to discover a wholly new world. Buñuel's relationship with Dalí was somewhat more troubled, being tinged with jealousy over the growing intimacy between Dalí and Lorca and resentment over Dalí's early success as an artist.
Buñuel's interest in films was intensified by Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod: "I came out of the Vieux Colombier [theater] completely transformed. Images could and did become for me the true means of expression. I decided to devote myself to the cinema". At the age of 72, Buñuel had not lost his enthusiasm for this film, asking the octogenarian Lang for his autograph.
Career 1925–1930: Early 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 also became actively involved in cinema and theater, going to the movies as often as three times a day. Through these interests, he met a number of influential people, including the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who was instrumental in securing Buñuel's selection as artistic director of the Dutch premiere of Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera El retablo de maese Pedro in 1926.
He decided to enter the film industry and enrolled in a private film school run by Jean Epstein and some associates. At that time, Epstein was one of the most celebrated commercial directors working in France, his films being hailed as "the triumph of impressionism in motion, but also the triumph of the modern spirit". Before long, Buñuel was working for Epstein as an assistant director on Mauprat (1926) and La chute de la maison Usher (1928), and also for Mario Nalpas on (Siren of the Tropics) (1927), starring Josephine Baker. He appeared on screen in a small part as a smuggler in Jacques Feyder's Carmen (1926).
When Buñuel derisively rejected Epstein's demand that he assist Epstein's mentor, Abel Gance, who was at the time working on the film Napoléon, Epstein dismissed him angrily, saying "How can a little asshole like you dare to talk that way about a great director like Gance?" then added "You seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people."
After parting with Epstein, Buñuel worked as film critic for La Gaceta Literaria (1927) and Les Cahiers d'Art (1928). In the periodicals and , he and Dalí carried on a series of "call and response" essays on cinema and theater, debating such technical issues as segmentation, découpage, the insert shot and rhythmic editing. He also collaborated with the celebrated writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna on the script for what he hoped would be his first film, "a story in six scenes" called Los caprichos. Through his involvement with Gaceta Literaria, he helped establish Madrid's first cine-club and served as its inaugural chairman.
Un Chien Andalou (1929)
After his apprenticeship with Epstein, Buñuel shot and directed a 16-minute short, , with Salvador Dalí. The film, financed by Buñuel's mother, consists of a series of startling images of a Freudian nature, starting with a woman's eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade. was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French surrealist movement and continues to be shown regularly in film societies. The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in Cadaqués. In a letter to a friend written in February 1929, Buñuel described the writing process:
We had to look for the plot line. Dalí said to me, 'I dreamed last night of ants swarming around in my hands', and I said, 'Good Lord, and I dreamed that I had sliced somebody or other's eye. There's the film, let's go and make it.'
In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Buñuel and Dalí made a cardinal point of eliminating all logical associations. In Buñuel's words: "Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why".
It was Buñuel's intention to outrage the self-proclaimed artistic vanguard of his youth, later saying: "Historically the film represents a violent reaction against what in those days was called 'avant-garde,' which was aimed exclusively at artistic sensibility and the audience's reason." Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a popular success with the very audience he had wanted to insult.Roger Ebert called it one of the most famous short films of the century. Buñuel exclaim in exasperation: "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?"
Although is a silent film, during the original screening (attended by the elite of the Parisian art world), Buñuel played a sequence of phonograph records which he switched manually while keeping his pockets full of stones with which to pelt anticipated hecklers. After the premiere, Buñuel and Dalí were granted formal admittance to the tight-knit community of Surrealists, led by poet André Breton.
L'Age d'Or (1930)
Late in 1929, on the strength of , Buñuel and Dalí were commissioned to make another short film by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles, owners of a private cinema on the Place des États-Unis and financial supporters of productions by Jacques Manuel, Man Ray and Pierre Chenal. At first, the intent was that the new film be around the same length as Un Chien, only this time with sound. But by mid-1930, the film had grown segmentally to an hour's duration. Anxious that it was over twice as long as planned and at double the budget, Buñuel offered to trim the film and cease production, but Noailles gave him the go-ahead to continue the project.