Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), Spanish-born film director who worked in France, Spain, and Mexico. After three independently made films—Un Chien Andalou (1928; An Andalusian Dog), L'Age d'Or (1930; The Golden Age), and Las Hurdes (1932; Land Without Bread), the first two in collaboration with Salvador Dalí—Buñuel did not direct again for 17 years, when his scathing denunciations of the Catholic Church's celebration of poverty and ignorance re-emerged from Mexico.

Buñuel's Surrealist sensibility is scattered throughout such films as Los Olvidados (1950; The Young and the Damned), El Bruto (1952; The Brute), Él (1952; This Strange Passion), Nazarín (1958), and Simón del Desierto (1965; Simon of the Desert), all of which reaffirmed his reputation as a fierce critic of bourgeois pretension, its sexual repression, and its self-serving concerns. His use of profane imagery, especially in Viridiana (1961), which was filmed in Spain at the time of Franco, but completed in France, is frequently dressed in plain documentary form, with a discrete use of sound and music, to emphasize a reality which lies just below surface appearances. His use of dream, in such films as El Angel Exterminador (1962; The Exterminating Angel) and Belle de Jour (1967), strips away the veneer with which polite society covers its real desires and needs. His later films, notably La Voie Lactée (1970; The Milky Way) and Le Charm Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972; The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), gently ridicule the irrationality of much belief and behaviour, and confirmed Buñuel as a “darling” of the class whose values he sought to undermine.