The films of the Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) emphasize the hypocrisy of conventional morality. Luis Buñuel was born in Calanda, the first of seven children in a prosperous, landowning family. After being educated by the...

PETER WILLAM EVANS AND ISOBEL SANTOALLA (EDS) LUIS BUÃ'UEL: NEW READINGS British Film Institute, London, 2004 In his essay in this volume of essays on Buñuel, published by the British Film Institute, Vincente Sanchez Biosca cites the following explanation of the...

El 22 de febrero, martes, Luis Buñuel, don Luis, cumple 100 años. Cien años de vida en cine, en semilla de cine, en sueño de cine. Se abre el centenario y habrá que aguantar de todo. A ver si también podemos ver y...

Through forty years of filmmaking, Luis Bunuel has been opening our eyes to see what might otherwise evade our notice. And he is not averse to using a razor slash where it is appropriate. (p. 111) The personal dimension in each Bunuel film converts the body of his work into a mosaic of the man. (pp. 111-12)

Luis Buñuel … is first and foremost a Spaniard and after that a surrealist. His view of life has developed from this primary fact. His inheritance has been Spanish, as his response to life seems largely to have been intuitive. It is only in his more playful moods that he sometimes seems cerebral, content to mock his pet hates from merely the surface of his mind. A crucial part of this Spanish inheritance was his Jesuit education. Spanish Catholicism, perhaps more extremely than that of any oth...

Surrealism is born out of despair; its only power is to hasten the general cataclysm by its own prophetic chaos. Max Ernst said of it, "In turning topsy-turvy the appearances and relationships of reality, surrealism has been able, with a smile on its lips, to hasten the general crisis of consciousness which must perforce take place in our time." No other work of the period expressed this so completely as L'Age d'Or. All civilisation is oppression, suffering, frustration; above, t...