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.

Related Topics:
Calanda - Teruel - Aragón - Spain - Jesuit - Madrid - University of Madrid - Salvador Dalí - Federico García Lorca - Paris - Jean Epstein - Mario Nalpas - Un Chien Andalou - 1929 - Freudian - Bisexuality - Androgyny

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~