A Companion to Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century, his films invariably included in the critics' lists of the top 100. Born in the Spanish village of Calanda and shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by André Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou [1929] one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema. Subsequently, Buñuel worked in Mexico where, in spite of tight budgets, he made films as memorable as The Forgotten Ones [1950] and He [1952]. From 1960, greater financial and technical resources allowed him to make, in Spain and France, the films for which he is best known: Viridiana [1961], Belle de jour (1966), Tristana (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972], and That Obscure Object of Desire [1977]. Although the French films in particular are less aggressive and more ironic than his early work, they nevertheless reveal Buñuel's continuing preoccupations: sex, bourgeois values, and religion. In this study, Gwynne Edwards analyses Buñuel's films in the context of his personal obsessions and suggests too that, in contrast to many of his fellow artists, he experienced a degree of sexual inhibition surprising in a surrealist.