The cinema is an instrument of poetry
This week sees the start of a retrospective of Luis Buñuel, the radical Spanish filmmaker, at London’s ICA. We take a look at the director’s life and work, identifying the key themes at play in his films: sexuality, satire, and surrealism.
Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in Spain, Mexico, and France. Born in 1900, at the very beginning of the new century, he lived to witness two world wars, as well as the liberation of Spain from Francisco Franco’s 36-year-long dictatorship, before his death in 1983.
Considered to have been a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his early years, Buñuel was a dominant figure in international filmmaking, often regarded as a moralist and revolutionary. His career lasted 48 years, spanning from 1929 to 1977, with his work exploring nearly every genre in film, yet despite this versatility, his films possess certain traits that clearly distinguish him as an auteur. One such trait was his highly functional and uncluttered visual style, with an emphasis on character-defining elements in the shot, and elimination of unnecessary detail. Another was his own ‘stock company’ of trusted cast and crew, used repeatedly in his productions (same way that a score by Danny Elfman written for a movie starring Johnny Depp screams ‘Tim Burton’). Finally, his repeated use of the traditional drums from his birthplace of Calanda in his films, have been described as a ‘biofilmographic signature’ of his.
His work explores nearly every genre in film
Buñuel spent his childhood and adolescence in Zaragoza, where he received a strict Jesuit education. By the time he was 16, however, he came to perceive the Church as illogical and had grown disgusted of its wealth and power. Perhaps one of the first signs of his fascination with cinema, were the ‘productions’ he would put on for friends at the time, by projecting shadows on a screen using a bedsheet and a magic lantern – an object which also evoked Ingmar Bergman’s filmmaking talent.
In 1917 Buñuel enrolled at the University of Madrid for a degree in agronomy, but switched to industrial engineering, and then finally to philosophy. It was there that he would meet and develop intimate relationships with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, the three of them forming the core of the Spanish surrealist avant-garde. During his student years, Buñuel became an accomplished hypnotist: in fact, he insisted that the darkness of the theatre and the rapidly changing scenes, lights and camera movements, weaken the spectator’s critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination, akin to hypnosis.
The film that played a catalytic role in Buñuel pursuing his interest in film was Fritz Lang’s Der müde Tod, aka Destiny (1921). “Images could and did become”, for him, “the true means of expression” and he decided to devote himself to the cinema. At age 72, an ever-enthusiastic Buñuel asked Lang for his autograph.
In 1925 Buñuel moved to Paris, where he decided to enter the film industry, enrolling in a private school run by one of the most celebrated commercial directors in France at the time, Jean Epstein. He worked for Epstein as assistant director until 1927, and after that he worked as a film critic, helping to establish Madrid’s first cinema club. It was around that time that he met Jeanne Rucar, whom he married in 1934.
His first picture, Un Chien Andalou, was made at the very end of the silent era, in 1929. It is a 16-minute short, which he co-wrote and directed with Dalí, based on a dream each of them had had, extremely Freudian in nature; the two deliberately contrasted Epstein’s approach to filmmaking by deliberately making a point of eliminating all logical associations from the narrative. “Historically,” he wrote, “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.” Alas, unfortunately for Buñuel, the film was a huge success among the French bourgeoisie!
Due to a clash between Dalí’s eccentric, but nonetheless rightist, ideology and Buñuel’s strong leftist sympathies, his first feature film, L’Age d’Or – originally meant to be a collaboration between the two – ended up being shot entirely by Buñuel himself. Completed in 1930, Dalí proclaimed the film was a deliberate attack on Catholicism; it caused such a scandal that the film was withdrawn from circulation, not to be seen again until 1979.
Thanks to the succès de scandale, Buñuel spent a short while in Hollywood working with MGM, and associated with iconic figures of the time, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Josef Von Sternberg, Charles Chaplin, and Bertolt Brecht, before returning to pre-Civil War Spain in 1932, at a time of political and social turbulence. His next film, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan, focused on peasant life in Spain, and is one of the first examples of a mockumentary. Buñuel was able to reconcile his political ideology with his surrealistic aesthetic in what was labelled as a ‘surrealist documentary’. After this, he worked in dubbing studios in Paris and Madrid, before producing films for a mass audience with Spanish film company Filmófono, insisting that he remain anonymous so that he may preserve his reputation as a surrealist. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), Buñuel essentially functioned as the coordinator of film propaganda for the Republic; the Spanish Ambassador suggested that he revisit Hollywood, where he could give technical advice on films being made there about the war, and so he did.
However, the National Legion of Decency, an organisation combating content in motion pictures objectionable from the point of view of the Catholic Church, saw to it that his work in Hollywood was left unfinished. Buñuel managed to sell some gags to Chaplin for The Great Dictator (1940), but was otherwise unfit for success in Hollywood, lacking the arrogance and pushiness necessary for it, according to his biographer Ruth Brandon. Receiving no interest from even independent producers in LA, Buñuel moved to New York, where he worked at the MoMA, gathering anti-fascist films to be distributed in Latin America.
Finding himself in Mexico in 1946, as the Golden Age of Mexican cinema was climaxing, Buñuel attempted to learn a thing or two about ‘normal’ cinema. Teaming up with Óscar Dancigers, a Russian émigré producer active in Mexico, he directed the musical period drama Gran Casino (1947), which was turned out to be a disaster, perhaps due to Buñuel’s rusty technical skills after so many years out of the director’s chair. El Gran Calavera, on the other hand, a hilarious eccentric satire of the Mexican nouveau riche, was an instant hit at the box office in 1949. Because of this success, he was able to claim more freedom in his next film project: Los Olvidados (1950). However, the film was taken by many as an insult to Mexican sensibilities and the Mexican nation, with some even asking for Buñuel’s recently-acquired Mexican citizenship to be revoked. Fearing a complete fiasco, Dancigers commissioned an alternate ‘happy ending’ to the film, but was forced to withdraw it after only three days in theatres due to poor attendance. Nobel Laureate in Literature Octavio Paz, however, promoted Los Olvidados and Buñuel won the Best Director award at Cannes Film Fesitval for it.
Buñuel remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, completing over 20 more films by the end of his career. His first film in colour, also his first in the English language, was Robinson Crusoe (1954), followed by The Young One (1960), for which a Harlem newspaper even wrote that he should be ‘hung upside down from a lamppost on Fifth Avenue.’ Other films of his that gained international recognition were Él (1953), Viridiana (1961), Belle de Jour (1967), and his very last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).
While some consider the majority of his work to have consisted of films adapted to the norms of the national film industry, others believe there is a deceptive complexity within it, which offers ‘a sustained mediation on ideas of religion, class inequity, violence and desire.’ His work indeed often dealt with themes central to his lifelong concerns, such as sexual pathology, the destructive effects of rampant machismo, the blurring of fantasy and reality, the disruptive status of women in a male-dominated culture, and the absurdity of the religious life. Focusing on the films Buñuel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla argues that Bunuel’s films that there are multiple forms of identity, subjectivity and sexuality present in these films.
In his 70’s, Buñuel once told his friend, novelist Carlos Fuentes: ‘I’m not afraid of death. I’m afraid of dying alone in a hotel room, with my bags open and a shooting script on the night table. I must know whose fingers will close my eyes.’ He died in Mexico City, in 1983.
DIEGO APARICIO