Luis Buñuel Portolés is Spain's greatest film director and one of the masters of world cinema. From 1920s Surrealism to his French films of the 1970s, his work attacked social conventions, religion and repressed desire with black humour.
The Spanish years
He was born on 22 February 1900 at Calanda, in the province of Teruel in Aragon, into a wealthy family, and studied with the Jesuits in Zaragoza. His home town left him the memory of the drums rolling without pause on Good Friday, which reappear in his films. In 1917 he moved to Madrid, to the Residencia de Estudiantes, where he met Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí.
Surrealism
In Paris, where he worked as an assistant, he wrote with Dalí and directed Un chien andalou in 1929, sixteen minutes of dreamlike images, with an eye slit by a razor and ants emerging from a hand, which opened the doors of the surrealist group to him. In 1930 L'âge d'or, financed by the Vicomte de Noailles, caused a scandal and was withdrawn. Back in Spain, in 1933 he made Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes), a documentary on the poverty of a region of Extremadura, banned by the Republic itself.
Exile and Mexico
During the civil war he worked for the Republic; he then emigrated to the United States and in 1946 to Mexico, where he took citizenship and made some twenty films, from commercial comedies to masterpieces such as Los olvidados (1950), about the street children of Mexico City, awarded at Cannes, Él, Nazarín and The Exterminating Angel (1962), in which dinner guests cannot leave the room.
Viridiana and the late masterpieces
In 1961 the Franco regime invited him to film in Spain: Buñuel made Viridiana, the story of a novice and a Last Supper parodied by beggars, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes but was condemned by the Vatican and banned in Spain until 1977. Then came Tristana (1970), shot in Toledo, and the French films produced by Serge Silberman: Belle de jour (1967) with Catherine Deneuve, Golden Lion in Venice, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Oscar for best foreign film, The Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). In 1982 he published his autobiography My Last Sigh. He died in Mexico City on 29 July 1983.
Buñuel sites
In Calanda the Centro Buñuel traces the director's life and work; in Teruel and the Bajo Aragón area the Drum and Bass Drum Route lets you witness the deafening Holy Week that marked him so deeply (see Holy Week). See also Spanish cinema.