Luis Buñuel Portolés (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈlwis βuˈɲwel]; 22 February 1900 – 29 July 1983) was a Spanish filmmaker who worked in Spain, Mexico and France.

When Luis Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in The New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later." His first picture—made in the silent era—was called "the most famous short film ever made" by critic Roger Ebert, and his last film—made 48 years later—won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work "the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality,... scandalous and subversive."

Often associated with the Surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films in six decades, from the 1920s through the 1970s. His work spans two continents, three languages, and nearly every film genre, including experimental film, documentary, melodrama, satire, musical, erotica, comedy, romance, costume dramas, fantasy, crime film, adventure, and western. Despite this variety, filmmaker John Huston believed that, regardless of genre, a Buñuel film is so distinctive as to be instantly recognizable, or, as Ingmar Bergman put it, "Buñuel nearly always made Buñuel films."

Six of Buñuel's films are included in Sight & Sound's 2012 critic's poll of the top 250 films of all time. 14 of his films are included in They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? list of the 1000 greatest films of all time, which is tied with Jean-Luc Godard for third most, and he ranks number 14 on their list of the top 250 directors.

Early years (1900–1924)

Buñuel was born in Calanda, a small town in the province of Teruel, in Aragón, Spain, to Leonardo Buñuel, the cultivated scion of an established Aragonese family, and María Portolés, many years younger than her husband, with wealth and family connections of her own. He would later describe his birthplace by saying that in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I." The oldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters: Alicia, Concepción, Margarita and María.

When Buñuel was just four and a half months old, the family moved to Zaragoza, where they were one of the wealthiest families in town. In Zaragoza, Buñuel received a strict Jesuit education at the private Colegio del Salvador. After being kicked and insulted by the study hall proctor before a final exam, Buñuel refused to return to the school. He told his mother he had been expelled, which was not true; in fact, he had received the highest marks on his world history exam. Buñuel finished the last two years of his high school education at the local public school. Even as a child, Buñuel was something of a cinematic showman; friends from that period described productions in which Buñuel would project shadows on a screen using a Magic lantern and a bedsheet.

Salvador Dalí

In his youth, Buñuel was deeply religious, serving at Mass and taking Communion every day, until, at age 16, he grew disgusted with what he perceived as the illogicality of the Church, along with its power and wealth.

In 1917, he went to university at the University of Madrid, first studying agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switching to philosophy. He developed very close relationships with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spanish creative artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes, with the three friends forming the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde, and becoming known as members of "La Generacion del 27". Buñuel was especially taken with Lorca, later writing in his autobiography: "We liked each other instantly. Although we seemed to have little in common—I was a redneck from Aragon, and he an elegant Andalusian—we spent most of our time together... We used to sit on the grass in the evenings behind the Residencia (at that time, there were vast open spaces reaching to the horizon), and he would read me his poems. He read slowly and beautifully, and through him I began to discover a wholly new world." Buñuel's relationship with Dalí was somewhat more troubled, being tinged with jealousy over the growing intimacy between Dalí and Lorca and resentment over Dalí's early success as an artist.

 

Federico García Lorca

Starting when he was 17, he steadily dated the future poet and dramatist Concha Mendez, with whom he vacationed every summer at San Sebastián, introducing her as his fiancée to his friends at the Residencia. After seven years, she broke off the relationship, citing Buñuel's "insufferable character".

During his student years, Buñuel became an accomplished hypnotist. He claimed that once, while calming a hysterical prostitute through hypnotic suggestion, he inadvertently put one of the several bystanders into a trance as well. He was often to insist that watching movies was a form of hypnosis: "This kind of cinematographic hypnosis is no doubt due to the darkness of the theatre and to the rapidly changing scenes, lights, and camera movements, which weaken the spectator's critical intelligence and exercise over him a kind of fascination."

Buñuel's interest in films was intensified by a viewing of Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod: "I came out of the Vieux Colombier [theater] completely transformed. Images could and did become for me the true means of expression. I decided to devote myself to the cinema." At age 72, Buñuel had not lost his enthusiasm for this film, asking the octogenarian Lang for his autograph.

Career

First French period (1925–1931)

 

Jean Epstein, Buñuel's first film collaborator

In 1925, Buñuel moved to Paris, where he began work as a secretary in an organization called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation. He also became actively involved in cinema and theater, going to the movies as often as three times a day. Through these interests, he met a number of influential people, including the pianist Ricardo Viñes, who was instrumental in securing Buñuel's selection as artistic director of the Dutch premiere of Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera El retablo de maese Pedro in 1926.

He decided to enter the film industry and enrolled in a private film school run by Jean Epstein and some associates. At that time, Epstein was one of the most celebrated commercial directors working in France, his films being hailed as "the triumph of impressionism in motion, but also the triumph of the modern spirit." Before long, Buñuel was working for Epstein as an assistant director on Mauprat (1926) and La chute de la maison Usher (1928), and also for Mario Nalpas on La Sirène des Tropiques (1927), starring Josephine Baker.He appeared on screen in a small part as a smuggler in Jacques Feyder's Carmen (1926).

When Buñuel somewhat derisively refused to acquiesce to Epstein's demand that he assist Epstein's mentor, Abel Gance, who was at the time working on the film Napoléon, Epstein dismissed him angrily, saying "How can a little asshole like you dare to talk that way about a great director like Gance?" then added "You seem rather surrealist. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people."

After parting with Epstein, Buñuel worked as film critic for La Gaceta Literaria (1927) and Les Cahiers d'Art (1928). In the periodicals L'Amic de les Arts and La gaseta de les Arts, he and Dalí carried on a series of "call and response" essays on cinema and theater, debating such technical issues as segmentation, découpage, "photogenia" (founded on the insert shot) and rhythmic editing. He also collaborated with the celebrated writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna on the script for what he hoped would be his first film, "a story in six scenes" called Los caprichos. Through his involvement with Gaceta Literaria, he helped establish Madrid’s first cine-club and served as its inaugural chairman.

It was during this time that he met his future wife, Jeanne Rucar, a gymnastics teacher who had won an Olympic bronze medal. Buñuel courted her in a formal Aragonese manner, complete with a chaperone, and they married in 1934 despite a warning by Jean Epstein when Buñuel first proposed in 1930: "Jeanne, you are making a mistake... It's not right for you, don't marry him." The two remained married throughout his life and had two sons, Juan-Luis and Rafael. Diego Buñuel, filmmaker and host of the National Geographic Channel's Don't Tell My Mother series, is their grandson.

 

Screenshot of the eyeball (actually that of a dead calf) being slit by Buñuel in the film Un Chien Andalou. Un Chien Andalou (1929)

After this apprenticeship, Buñuel co-wrote and directed a 16-minute short, Un Chien Andalou, with Dalí. The film, financed by Buñuel's mother, consists of a series of startling images of a Freudian nature, starting with a woman's eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade. Un Chien Andalou was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French Surrealist movement of the time and continues to be shown regularly in film societies to this day.

The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in Cadaqués. In a letter to a friend written in February 1929, Buñuel described the writing process, "We had to look for the plot line. Dalí said to me, 'I dreamed last night of ants swarming around in my hands', and I said, 'Good Lord, and I dreamed that I had sliced somebody or other's eye. There's the film, let's go and make it.'" In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Buñuel and Dalí made a cardinal point of eliminating all logical associations. In Buñuel's words: "Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why."

It was Buñuel's intention to shock and insult the intellectual bourgeoisie of his youth, later saying: "Historically 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.” Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a huge success amongst the French bourgeoisie, leading Buñuel to exclaim in exasperation, "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?"

Although Un Chien Andalou is a silent film, during the original screening (attended by the elite of the Parisian art world), Bunuel played a sequence of phonograph records which he switched manually while keeping his pockets full of stones with which to pelt anticipated hecklers.[59] Through the film, Dalí and Buñuel became the first filmmakers to be officially welcomed into the ranks of the Surrealists by the movement's leader André Breton, an event recalled by film historian Georges Sadoul: "Breton had convoked the creators to our usual venue [the Café Radio]... one summer's evening. Dalí had the large eyes, grace, and timidity of a gazelle. To us, Buñuel, big and athletic, his black eyes protruding a little, seemed exactly like he always is in Un Chien Andalou, meticulously honing the razor that will slice the open eye in two."

L'Age d'Or (1930)

 

Lya Lys in screenshot from L'Âge d'Or

Late in 1929, on the strength of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel and Dalí were commissioned to make another short film by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles, owners of a private cinema on the Place des États-Unis and financial supporters of productions by Jacques Manuel, Man Ray and Pierre Chenal. At first, the intent was that the new film be around the same length as Un Chien, only this time with sound. But by mid-1930, the film had grown segmentally to an hour's duration. Anxious that it was over twice as long as planned and at double the budget, Buñuel offered to trim the film and cease production, but Noailles gave him the go-ahead to continue the project.

The film, entitled L'Age d'Or, was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, while working on the scenario, the two had a falling out; Buñuel, who at the time had strong leftist sympathies, desired a deliberate undermining of all bourgeois institutions, while Dalí, who eventually supported the Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco and various figures of the European aristocracy, wanted merely to cause a scandal through the use of various scatological and anti-Catholic images. The friction between them was exacerbated when, at a dinner party in Cadaqués, Buñuel tried to throttle Dalí's girlfriend, Gala, the wife of Surrealist poet Paul Éluard. In consequence, Dalí had nothing to do with the actual shooting of the film. During the course of production, Buñuel worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. Buñuel invited friends and acquaintances to appear, gratis, in the film; for example, anyone who owned a tuxedo or a party frock got a part in the salon scene.

"A film called L’Âge d’or, whose non-existent artistic quality is an insult to any kind of technical standard, combines, as a public spectacle, the most obscene, disgusting and tasteless incidents. Country, family and religion are dragged through the mud."

Excerpt from Richard Pierre Bodin's review in Le Figaro, 7 December 1930.

L'Âge d'Or was publicly proclaimed by Dalí as a deliberate attack on Catholicism, and this precipitated a much larger scandal than Un Chien Andalou. One early screening was taken over by members of the fascist League of Patriots and the Anti-Jewish Youth Group, who hurled purple ink at the screen and then vandalised the adjacent art gallery, destroying a number of valuable surrealist paintings. The film was banned "in the name of public order." The de Noailles, both Catholics, were threatened with excommunication by The Vatican because of the film’s blasphemous final scene (which visually links Jesus Christ with the writings of the Marquis de Sade), so they made the decision in 1934 to withdraw all prints from circulation, and L'Age d'Or was not seen again until 1979, after their deaths. The furor was so great that the premiere of another film financed by the de Noailles, Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, had to be delayed for over two years until outrage over L'Age d'Or had died down. To make matters worse, Charles de Noailles was forced to withdraw his membership from the Jockey Club.

Concurrent with the succès de scandale, both Buñuel and the film's leading lady, Lya Lys, received offers of interest from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and traveled to Hollywood at the studio's expense. While in the United States, Buñuel associated with other celebrity expatriates including Sergei Eisenstein, Josef Von Sternberg, Jacques Feyder, Charles Chaplin and Bertolt Brecht. All that was required of Buñuel by his loose-ended contract with MGM was that he "learn some good American technical skills", but, after being ushered off the first set he visited because the star, Greta Garbo, did not welcome intruders, he decided to stay at home most of the time and only show up to collect his paycheck. His only enduring contribution to MGM came when he served as an extra in La Fruta Amarga, a Spanish-language remake of Min and Bill. When, after a few months at the studio, he was asked to watch rushes of Lili Damita to gauge her Spanish accent, he refused and sent a message to studio boss Irving Thalberg stating that he was there as a Frenchman, not a Spaniard, and he "didn't have time to waste listening to one of the whores." He was back in Spain shortly thereafter.

Spain (1932–1937)

 

The classroom scene from Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan is an ironic statement of Buñuel's Marxist sympathies.

Spain in the early '30's was a time of political and social turbulence, a period of intense and bloody upheaval. Mobs led by anarchists and Radical Socialists sacked monarchist headquarters in Madrid and proceeded to set afire or otherwise wreck more than a dozen churches in the capital while similar acts of arson and vandalism occurred in a score of other cities in southern and eastern Spain, in most cases with the acquiescence and occasionally with the assistance of the official Republican authorities.

Buñuel's future wife, Jeanne Rucar, recalled that during that period, "he got very excited about politics and the ideas that were everywhere in pre-Civl War Spain." In the first flush of his enthusiasm, Buñuel joined the Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in 1931 though later in life he denied becoming a Communist. It was soon made abundantly clear to him that he could not be both a Communist and a Surrealist; his artistic collaborator Pierre Unik recounted in a letter of 30 January 1932 that "a comrade from Agit-Prop" called Buñuel and others together to tell them that, "Surrealism was a movement of bourgeois degeneration", continuing, "What will the rank-and-file comrades say the day I have to announce to them, 'Comrades, I no longer have the right to militate amongst you... because I'm a degenerate bourgeois?'" In consequence, on 6 May 1932, Buñuel wrote a letter to André Breton renouncing his membership in the Surrealist group, explaining that the mutual distrust and antagonistic will-to-power of the two movements had obliged him to choose between them: "Given the current state of things there could be no question for a Communist of doubting for an instant between the choice of his party and any other sort of activity or discipline."

 

An early scene from Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan depicts a local wedding custom where the bridegroom tears the head off a rooster suspended by its feet from a scaffold above the main street of town.

In 1932, Buñuel was invited to serve as film documentarian for the celebrated Mission Dakar-Djibouti, the first large-scale French anthropological field expedition, which, led by Marcel Griaule, unearthed some 3,500 African artifacts for the new Musée de l'Homme. Although he declined, the project piqued his interest in ethnography. After reading the academic study, Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by Maurice Legendre, he decided to make a film focused on peasant life in Extremadura, one of Spain's poorest states. The film, called Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933), was financed on a budget of 20,000 pesetas donated by a working class anarchist friend named Ramón Acín, who had won the money in a lottery. In the film, Buñuel juxtaposes documentary images of human degradation, often posed or staged, with a voiceover commentary – written by the poet Pierre Unik – that combines travelogue exaggeration with a matter-of-fact recounting of the grim cost of rural poverty, delivered by a flat-voiced, even bored-sounding, narrator, while the soundtrack thunders inappropriate music by Brahms.

"Though the material is organized with masterly skill, the very conception of 'art' here seems irrelevant. It is the most profoundly disturbing film I have ever seen."

Award-winning film director Tony Richardson on Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan

Las Hurdes was banned by three successive Republican governments, definitively by Franco when he came to power. It has perplexed film critics and historians for decades; it does not fit into any particular film-historical narrative, and tends to be marginalized in most surveys of Buñuel's body of work, as in most accounts of surrealist cinema, documentary cinema, and experimental cinema. Las Hurdes has been called one of the first examples of mockumentary, and has been labeled a "surrealist documentary", a term defined by critic Mercè Ibarz as "A multi-layered and unnerving use of sound, the juxtaposition of narrative forms already learnt from the written press, travelogues and new pedagogic methods, as well as a subversive use of photographed and filmed documents understood as a basis for contemporary propaganda for the masses."

 

Location filming at Filmófono

After Las Hurdes, Buñuel worked in Paris in the dubbing department of Paramount Pictures, but following his marriage in 1934, he switched to Warner Brothers because they operated dubbing studios in Madrid. A friend, Ricardo Urgoiti, who owned the commercial film company Filmófono, invited Buñuel to produce films for a mass audience. He accepted the offer, viewing it as an "experiment" as he knew the film industry in Spain was still far behind the technical level of Hollywood or Paris. According to film historian Manuel Rotellar’s interviews with members of the cast and crew of the Filmófono studios, Buñuel’s only condition was that his involvement with these pictures be completely anonymous, apparently for fear of damaging his reputation as a surrealist. Rotellar insists, however, "the truth is that it was Luis Buñuel who directed the Filmófono productions." José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, the titular director of two of the films created during Buñuel's years as "executive producer" at Filmófono, recounted that it was Buñuel who "explained to me every morning what he wanted... We looked at the takes together and it was Buñuel who chose the shots, and in editing, I wasn’t even allowed to be present." Of the 18 films produced by Buñuel during his years at Filmófono, the four that are believed by critical consensus to have been directed by him are:

• Don Quintín el amargao (Don Quintin the Sourpuss), 1935 – a musical based on a play by Carlos Arniches
• La hija de Juan Simón (Juan Simón's Daughter), 1935 – another musical and a major commercial success
• ¿Quién me quiere a mí? (Who Loves Me?), 1936 – a sentimental comedy that Buñuel called "my only commercial failure, and a pretty dismal one at that."
• ¡Centinela, alerta!, (Sentry, Keep Watch!), 1937 – a comedy and Filmófono's biggest box-office hit.

During the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), Buñuel placed himself at the disposal of the Republican government. The minister for foreign affairs sent him first to Geneva and then to Paris for two years, with official responsibility for cataloging Republican propaganda films. But Buñuel didn't limit his efforts to this alone; some of his other activities included taking left-wing tracts to Spain, occasionally doing some spying, acting as a bodyguard, and supervising the making of a documentary, titled España 1936 in France and Espana leal, ¡en armas! in Spain, that covered the elections, the parades, the riots, and the war. In August 1936, Federico García Lorca was shot and killed by Nationalist militia. According to his son, Juan Luis, Buñuel rarely talked about Lorca but mourned the poet’s untimely death throughout his life.

Buñuel essentially functioned as the coordinator of film propaganda for the Republic, which meant that practically every meter of footage shot in Republican Spain passed through his office, giving him the right to view all the material shot in Spain and decide what sequences should be developed and sent out of the country. The Spanish Ambassador suggested that Buñuel revisit Hollywood where he could give technical advice on films being made there about the Spanish Civil War, so he and his family traveled to the United States using funds obtained from his old patrons, the Noailles. Almost immediately upon his arrival in America, however, the war ended and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America discontinued making films on the Spanish conflict. According to Buñuel's wife, returning to Spain was impossible since the Fascists had seized power, so Buñuel decided to stay in the U.S. indefinitely, stating that he was "immensely attracted by the American naturalness and sociability."

United States (1938–1945)

Returning to Hollywood in 1938, he was befriended by Frank Davis, an MGM producer and member of the Communist Party USA, who placed Buñuel on the payroll of Cargo of Innocence, a film about Spanish refugee mothers and children fleeing from Bilbao to the USSR. The project was shelved precipitately when another Hollywood film about the Spanish Civil War, Blockade, was met with disfavor by the Catholic League of Decency. In the words of biographer Ruth Brandon, Buñuel and his family "lived from one unsatisfactory crumb of work to another" because he "had none of the arrogance and pushiness essential for survival in Hollywood."He just wasn't flamboyant enough to capture the attention of Hollywood decision makers, in the opinion of film composer George Antheil: "Inasmuch as [Buñuel], his wife and his little boy seemed to be such absolutely normal, solid persons, as totally un-Surrealist in the Dalí tradition as one could possibly imagine." For the most part, he was snubbed by many of the people in the film community whom he met during his first trip to America, although he was able to sell some gags to Chaplin for his film The Great Dictator.

In desperation, to market himself to independent producers, he composed a 21-page autobiography, a section of which, headed "My Present Plans," outlined proposals for two documentary films: (a) "The Primitive Man," which would depict "the terrible struggle of primitive man against a hostile universe, how the world appeared, how they saw it, what ideas they had on love, on death, on fraternity, how and why religion is born," [italics in original] and (b) "Psycho-Pathology," which would "expose the origin and development of different psychopathic diseases... Such a documental film, apart from its great scientific interest, could depict on screen a New Form of Terror or its synonym Humour." [italics in original] Nobody showed any interest and Buñuel realized that staying in Los Angeles was futile, so he traveled to New York to see if he could change his fortunes.

 

The staff of the MoMA film department, c. 1941; Buñuel, first row on left; Iris Barry, first row on right

In New York, Antheil introduced Buñuel to Iris Barry, chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Barry talked Buñuel into joining a committee formed to help educate those within the U.S. government who might not have appreciated fully the effectiveness of film as a medium of propaganda. Buñuel was hired to produce a shortened version of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1934) as a demonstration project.The finished product was a compilation of scenes from Riefenstahl's Nazi epic with Hans Bertram's Feuertaufe. Buñuel stayed at MoMA to work for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) as part of a production team that would gather, review and edit films intended as anti-fascist propaganda to be distributed in Latin America by American embassies. While being vetted for the job at the OCIAA, upon being asked if he was a Communist, he replied: "I am a Republican," and, apparently, the interviewer didn't realize that Buñuel was referring to the Spanish socialist coalition government, not the American political party. Describing Buñuel's work at MoMA, his friend, composer Gustavo Pittaluga, stated: "Luis created maybe 2,000 remarkable works. We were sent anodyne documentaries, often extremely feeble primary materials, which the Museum team turned into marvellous films. And not just Spanish versions, but also Portuguese, French and English... He would create a good documentary through editing." [italics in original]

"Luis Buñuel was there, with his thyroid eyes, the moles on his chin which I remember from so long ago when we first saw the surrealist films in the Cinémathèque,... and as he talked I remember thinking that his paleness was most appropriate for someone who spent his life in dark projection rooms... He has a sharp humor, a bitter sarcasm, and at the same time towards women a gentle, special smile."

Anaïs Nin, in her diary entry on encountering Buñuel when he was working at MoMA

In 1942, Buñuel applied for American citizenship, because he anticipated that MoMA would soon be put under federal control. But that same year, Dalí published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, in which he made it clear that he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist. News of this reached Archbishop Spellman, who visited Barry and angrily confronted her with the question: "Are you aware that you are harbouring in this Museum the Antichrist, the man who made a blasphemous film L'Age d'Or?" Buñuel felt himself compelled to resign and in 1944 returned to Hollywood for the third time, this time as Spanish Dubbing Producer for Warner Brothers. Before leaving New York, he confronted Dalí at his hotel, the Sherry Netherland, to tell the painter about the damage his book had done and then shoot him in the knee. Buñuel did not carry out the violent part of his plan. Dalí explained himself by saying: "I did not write my book to put YOU on a pedestal. I wrote it to put ME on a pedestal."

Buñuel's first dubbing assignment on returning to Hollywood was My Reputation, a Barbara Stanwyck picture which became El Que Diran in Buñuel's hands. In addition to his dubbing work, Buñuel attempted to develop a number of independent projects:

• In collaboration with an old friend from his Surrealist days, Man Ray, he worked on a scenario called The Sewers of Los Angeles, which took place on a mountain of excrement close to a highway and a dust basin.
• With his friend, José Rubia Barcia, he co-wrote a screenplay called La novia de medianoche (The Midnight Bride), a gothic thriller, which lay dormant until it was filmed by Antonio Simón in 1997.
• He continued working on a screenplay called "Goya and the Duchess of Alba," a treatment he had started as early as 1927, with the actor/producer Florián Rey and cameraman José María Beltrán, and then resuscitated in 1937 as a project for Paramount.
• In his 1982 autobiography Mon Dernier soupir (My Last Sigh, 1983), Buñuel wrote that at the request of director Robert Florey, he submitted a treatment of a scene about a disembodied hand, which was later included in the movie The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), starring Peter Lorre, without acknowledgement of Buñuel's contribution or payment of any compensation. However, Brian Taves, film scholar and archivist with the Library of Congress, has challenged the truth of this claim.

In 1945, Buñuel's contract with Warner Brothers expired, and he decided not to renew it in order, as he put it: "to realize my life's ambition for a year: to do nothing." While his family enjoyed themselves at the beach, Buñuel spent much of his time in Antelope Valley with new acquaintances writer Aldous Huxley and sculptor Alexander Calder, from whom he rented a house.

In his autobiography, in a chapter about his second spell in America, Buñuel states that "[o]n several occasions, both American and European producers have suggested that I tackle a film version of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano". He says that he read the book many times as well as eight different screenplays but was unable to come up with a solution for the cinema. The movie was eventually made in 1984 by John Huston.

Mexican period (1946–1965)

The following year, an old friend, producer Denise Tual, the widow of Pierre Batcheff, the leading man in Un Chien Andalou, proposed that she and Buñuel adapt Lorca’s play, La casa de Bernarda Alba, for production in Paris. As it turned out, though, before they could both make their way to Europe, they encountered problems in securing the rights from Lorca's family. While in Mexico City, on a stopover, they had asked Óscar Dancigers, a Russian emigre producer active in Mexico, for financing. Dancigers ran an independent production company that specialized in assisting U.S. film studios with on-location shooting in Mexico, but following World War II, he had lost his connection with Hollywood due to his being blacklisted as a Communist. Although Dancigers wasn't enthusiastic about the Lorca project, he did want to work with Buñuel and persuaded the Spanish director to make a film for him.

 

Luis Buñuel during his Mexican period

The so-called "Golden Age" of Mexican cinema, was climaxing in the mid and late 1940s, at just the time Buñuel was connecting with Dancigers. Movies represented Mexico’s third largest industry by 1947, employing 32,000 workers, with 72 film producers who invested 66 million pesos (approximately U.S. $13 million) per year, four active studios with 40 million pesos of invested capital, and approximately 1,500 theaters throughout the nation, with about 200 in Mexico City alone. For their first project, the two men selected what seemed like a sure-fire success, Gran Casino, a musical period piece set in Tampico during the boom years of oil exploitation, starring two of the most popular entertainers in Latin America: Libertad Lamarque, an Argentine actress and singer, and Jorge Negrete, a Mexican singer and leading man in "charro" films. Buñuel recalled: "I kept them singing all the time – a competition, a championship." The film was not successful at the box office, with some even calling it a fiasco. Different reasons have been given for its failure with the public; for some, Buñuel was forced to make concessions to the bad taste of his stars, particularly Negrete, others cite Buñuel's rusty technical skills and lack of confidence after so many years out of the director's chair, while still others speculate that Mexican audiences were tiring of genre movies, called "churros", that were perceived as being cheaply and hastily made.

The failure of Gran Casino sidelined Buñuel, and it was over two years before he had the chance to direct another picture. According to Buñuel, he spent this time: "scratching my nose, watching flies and living off my mother's money", but he was somewhat more industrious than that may sound. With the husband/wife team of Janet and Luis Alcoriza, he wrote the scenario for Si usted no puede, yo sí, which was filmed in 1950 by Julián Soler. He continued developing the idea for a surrealistic film called Ilegible, hijo de flauta, with the poet Juan Larrea.Dancigers pointed out to him that there was currently a vogue for films about street urchins, so Buñuel scoured the back streets and slums of Mexico City in search of material, interviewing social workers about street gang warfare and murdered children.

During this period, Dancigers was busy producing films for the actor/director Fernando Soler, one of the most durable of Mexican film personalities, having been referred to as the "national paterfamilias". Although Soler typically preferred to direct his own films, for their latest collaboration, El Gran Calavera, based on a play by Adolfo Torrado, he decided that doing both jobs would be too much trouble, so he asked Dancigers to find someone who could be trusted to handle the technical aspects of the directorial duties. Buñuel welcomed the opportunity, stating that: "I amused myself with the montage, the constructions, the angles... All of that interested me because I was still an apprentice in so-called 'normal' cinema." As a result of his work on this film, he developed a technique for making films cheaply and quickly by limiting them to 125 shots. El Gran Calavera was completed in 16 days at a cost of 400,000 pesos (approximately $46,000 US at 1948 exchange rates). The picture has been described as "a hilarious screwball send-up of the Mexican nouveau riche... a wild roller coaster of mistaken identity, sham marriages and misfired suicides", and it was a big hit at the box office in Mexico. In 1949, Buñuel renounced his Spanish citizenship to become a nationalized Mexican.

 

"A legless cripple who refuses the children cigarettes is robbed and left to lie on the pavement at some distance from his cart, and yet he is clearly no better than his tormentors." – Film critic André Bazin

The commercial success of El Gran Calavera enabled Buñuel to redeem a promise he had extracted from Dancigers, which was that if Buñuel could deliver a money-maker, Dancigers would guarantee "a degree of freedom" on the next film project. Knowing that Dancigers was uncomfortable with experimentalism, especially when it might affect the bottom line, Buñuel proposed a commercial project titled ¡Mi huerfanito jefe!, about a juvenile street vendor who can't sell his final lottery ticket, which ends up being the winner and making him rich. Dancigers was open to the idea, but instead of a "feuilleton", he suggested making "something rather more serious." During his recent researches through the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel had read a newspaper account of a twelve-year-old boy's body being found on a garbage dump, and this became the inspiration, and final scene, for the film, called Los olvidados (in the U.S.: The Young and the Damned).

The film tells the story of a street gang of children who terrorize their impoverished neighborhood, at one point brutalizing a blind man and at another assaulting a legless man who moves around on a dolly, which they toss down a hill. Film historian Carl J. Mora has said of Los olvidados that the director: "visualized poverty in a radically different way from the traditional forms of Mexican melodrama. Buñuel's street children are not 'ennobled' by their desperate struggle for survival; they are in fact ruthless predators who are not better than their equally unromanticized victims." The film was made quickly (18 days) and cheaply (450,000 pesos), with Buñuel's fee being the equivalent of US $2,000. During the course of filming, a number of members of the crew resisted the production in a variety of ways: one technician confronted Buñuel and asked why he didn't make a "real" Mexican movie "rather than a miserable picture like this one", the film's hairdresser quit on the spot over a scene in which the protagonist's mother refuses to give him food ("In Mexico, no mother would say that to her son."), another staff member urged Buñuel to abandon shooting on a "garbage heap", noting that there were many "lovely residential neighborhoods like Las Lomas" that were available, while Pedro de Urdimalas, one of the scriptwriters, refused to allow his name in the credits.

"The world doesn't work like Hollywood told us it does, and Buñuel knew well that poverty's truths could not be window-dressed in any way. This film continues to provoke reactions for its unapologetic portrayal of life without hope or trust. It stands out among Buñuel's works as the moment when he broke surface and bellowed, before sinking back into the world of the privileged where his surreal view most loved to play.

Booker Prize winning author DBC Pierre on Los olvidados

This hostility was also felt by those who attended the movie’s première in Mexico City on 9 November 1950, when Los olvidados was taken by many as an insult to Mexican sensibilities and to the Mexican nation. At one point, the audience shrieked in shock as one of the characters looked straight into the camera and hurled a rotten egg at it, leaving a gelatinous, opaque ooze on the lens for a few moments. In his memoir, Buñuel recalled that after the initial screening, painter Diego Rivera's wife refused to speak to him, while poet León Felipe's wife had to be restrained physically from attacking him.There were even calls to have Buñuel's Mexican citizenship revoked. Dancigers, panicked by what he feared would be a complete debacle, quickly commissioned an alternate "happy" ending to the film,and also tacked on a preface showing stock footage of the skylines of New York, London and Paris with voice-over commenary to the effect that behind the wealth of all the great cities of the world can be found poverty and malnourished children, and that Mexico City "that large modern city, is no exception." Regardless, attendance was so poor that Dancigers withdrew the film after only three days in theaters.

Through the determined efforts of future Nobel Prize winner for Literature Octavio Paz, who at the time was in Mexico's diplomatic service, Los olvidados was chosen to represent Mexico at the Cannes Film Festival of 1951, and Paz promoted the film assiduously by distributing a supportive manifesto and parading outside the cinema with a placard. Opinion in general was enthusiastic, with the Surrealists (Breton and poet Jacques Prevert) and other artistic intellectuals (painter Marc Chagall and poet/dramatist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau) laudatory, but the communists objected to what they saw as the film's "bourgeois morality" for containing a scene in which the police stop a pederast from assaulting a child. Buñuel won the Best Director prize that year at Cannes, and also won the FIPRESCI International Critics' Award. After receiving these accolades, the film was reissued in Mexico where it ran for two months to much greater acceptance and profit. Los olvidados and its triumph at Cannes made Buñuel an instant world celebrity and the most important Spanish-speaking film director in the world. In 2003, Los olvidados was recommended by UNESCO for inclusion in the Memory of the World Register, calling it: "the most important document in Spanish about the marginal lives of children in contemporary large cities".

Buñuel remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, although he spent periods of time filming in France and Spain. In Mexico, he filmed 20 films in all, including Él (1953), The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (1955), Nazarín (1959) (based on a novel by Spain's Benito Pérez Galdós, and adapted by Buñuel to a Mexican context), Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), and Simon of the Desert (1965).

As busy as he was during the 1950's and early 1960's, there were still many film projects that Buñuel had to abandon due to lack of financing or studio support, including a cherished plan to film Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo's Pedro Páramo, of which he said how much he enjoyed "the crossing from the mysterious to the real, almost without transition. I really like this mixture of reality and fantasy, but I don't know how to bring it to the screen." Other unrealized projects included adaptations of André Gide's Les caves du Vatican, Benito Pérez Galdos's Fortunata y Jacinta, Doña Perfecta, and Ángel Guerra, Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, William Golding's The Lord of the Flies, Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, J. K. Huysmans' Là-Bas, Matthew Lewis's The Monk, José Donoso's Lugar sin límites, a film of four stories based on Carlos Fuentes's Aura, and Julio Cortázar's "Las ménades".

Second French period (1963–1977)

After the golden age of the Mexican film industry ended, Buñuel started to work in France along with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and producer Serge Silberman. During this period, Buñuel directed some of his best-known works:

 

Official film poster for The Phantom of Liberty.

• Diary of a Chambermaid (1964)
• Belle de Jour (1967)
• Tristana (1970, a French/Spanish/Italian co-production)
• The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)
• The Phantom of Liberty (1974)
• That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)

Last years (1978–1983)

After the release of That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel retired from film-making. In 1982, he wrote (along with Carrière) his autobiography, Mon Dernier Soupir (My Last Sigh), which provides an account of Buñuel's life, friends, and family as well as a representation of his eccentric personality. In it, he recounts dreams, encounters with many well-known writers, actors, and artists such as Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin as well as antics, like dressing up as a nun and walking around town.

Buñuel died in Mexico City in 1983. His funeral was very private. There were about 50 people at the most, among them Octavio Paz, José Luis Cuevas, Miguel Littin, his wife and two sons.

Surrealism

Buñuel's films were famous for their surreal imagery, including scenes in which chickens populate nightmares, women grow beards, and aspiring saints are desired by lascivious women. Even in the many movies he made for hire (rather than for his own creative reasons), such as Susana and The Great Madcap, he usually added his trademark of disturbing and surreal images.Some critics have pointed out that one reason why Buñuel found working in Mexico so congenial was that what might seem unusual or even outlandish in Europe or the United States fit comfortably with elements of Mexican culture and the audience's expectations of national melodrama.As filmmaker Tomás Pérez Turrent has commented, when referring to the apparently incredible features that many critics find in Buñuel's films: "In Mexico, it's believable."Certainly, running through the more personal films of Buñuel's early and late years is a backbone of surrealism; Buñuel's world is one in which an entire dinner party suddenly finds itself inexplicably unable to leave the room and go home, a bad dream hands a man a letter which he brings to the doctor the next day, and where the devil, if unable to tempt a saint with a pretty girl, will fly him to a disco. An example of a more Dada influence can be found in Cet obscur objet du désir, when Mathieu closes his eyes and has his valet spin him around and direct him to a map on the wall.

Buñuel never explained or promoted his work, remaining true to his and Dalí's early insistence on the completely irrational and defying symbolic interpretation. On one occasion, when his son was interviewed about The Exterminating Angel, Buñuel instructed him to give facetious answers. As examples, when asked about the presence of a bear in the socialites' house, Buñuel fils claimed it was because his father liked bears, and, similarly, the several repeated scenes in the film were explained as having been put there to increase the running time.

Religion and atheism

Many of his films were openly critical of bourgeois morals and organized religion, mocking the Roman Catholic Church in particular but religion in general, for its hypocrisy. Many of his most famous films demonstrate this:

 

Head of Luis Buñuel in Centro Buñuel Calanda.

• Un chien andalou (1929) – A man drags pianos, upon which are piled two dead donkeys, two priests, and the tablets of The Ten Commandments.
• L'Âge d'Or (1930) – A bishop is thrown out a window, and in the final scene one of the culprits of the 120 days of Sodom is portrayed by an actor dressed in a way that he would be recognized as Jesus.
• El Gran Calavera (1949) – During the final scenes of the wedding, the priest continuously reminds the bride of her obligations under marriage. Then the movie changes and the bride runs chasing her true love.
• Ensayo de un crimen (1955) – A man dreams of murdering his wife while she's praying in bed dressed all in white.
• Nazarin (1959) – The pious lead character wreaks ruin through his attempts at charity.
• Viridiana (1961) – A well-meaning young nun tries unsuccessfully to help the poor. One scene in the film parodies The Last Supper.
• El ángel exterminador (1962) – The final scene is of sheep entering a church, mirroring the entrance of the parishioners.
• Simón del desierto (1965) – The devil tempts a saint by taking the form of a bare-breasted girl singing and showing off her legs. At the end of the film, the saint abandons his ascetic life to hang out in a jazz club.
• La Voie Lactée (1969) – Two men travel the ancient pilgrimage road to Santiago de Compostela and meet embodiments of various heresies along the way. One dreams of anarchists shooting the Pope.

Buñuel is often cited as one of the world's most prominent atheists. In a 1960 interview, he was asked about his attitude toward religion, and his response has become one of his most celebrated quotes: “I’m still an atheist, thank God.” But his entire answer to the question was somewhat more nuanced: "I have no attitude. I was raised in it. I could answer “I’m still an atheist, thank God.” I believe we must seek God within man himself. This is a very simple attitude." Seventeen years later, in an interview with the New Yorker, Buñuel expressed a somewhat different opinion about religion and atheism: “I’m not a Christian, but I’m not an atheist either, ... I’m weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine ‘I’m not an atheist, thank God’ It’s outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called ‘Mexican Bus Ride,’ about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It’s guilt we must escape, not God.” Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has commented that Buñuel represents one of the most compelling intellectual tendencies of the twentieth century: "religious temperament without religious faith."

 

Technique

Buñuel's style of directing was extremely economical; he shot films in a few weeks, rarely deviating from his script (the scene in Tristana where Catherine Deneuve exposes her breasts to Saturno – but not the audience – being a noted exception) and shooting in order as much as possible to minimize editing time. He remained true throughout his working life to an operating philosophy that he articulated at the beginning of his career in 1928: "The guiding idea, the silent procession of images that are concrete, decisive, measured in space and time – in a word, the film – was first projected inside the brain of the filmmaker." In this, Buñuel has been compared with Alfred Hitchcock, another director famous for precision, efficiency and preplanning, for whom actually shooting the film was an anticlimax, since each man would know, in Buñuel's words, "exactly how each scene will be shot and what the final montage will be."

He told actors as little as possible, and limited his directions mostly to physical movements ("move to the right", "walk down the hall and go through that door", etc.), arguing that he had a better chance of capturing reality with inexperienced players who projected a desired sense of awkwardness. He often refused to answer actors' questions and was known to simply turn off his hearing aid on the set. Though they found it difficult at the time, many actors who worked with him acknowledged later that his approach made for fresh and excellent performances.

Buñuel preferred scenes that could simply be pieced together end-to-end in the editing room, resulting in long, mobile, wide shots which followed the action of the scene. Filmmaker Patricia Gruben has attributed this procedure to a long-standing strategy on Buñuel's part intended to thwart external interference: "he would make the whole scene in long four-minute dolly shots so the producers couldn’t cut it." Examples are especially present in his French films. For example, at the ski resort's restaurant in Belle de jour, Séverin, Pierre, and Henri converse at a table. Buñuel cuts away from their conversation to two young women, who walk down a few steps and proceed through the restaurant, passing behind Séverin, Pierre, and Henri, at which point the camera stops and the young women walk out of frame. Henri then comments on the women and the conversation at the table progresses from there.

Mise-en-scene

Critics have remarked on Buñuel's predilection for developing a surrealist mise-en-scène through use of a deceptively sparse naturalism, as Michael Atkinson has put it: "visually Spartan and yet spasming with bouts of the irrational." Buñuel's visual style has been generally characterized as largely functional on the surface, very unshowy with sets stripped of extraneous detail to focus on defining elements. As an example, Buñuel has told about one of his experiences with cameraman Gabriel Figueroa, a veteran who had become famous in cinematography circles by making a specialty of illuminating the beauty of the Mexican landscape using photographic chiaroscuro (stark contrast between illuminated space and dark shadows). Figueroa had set up a shot for Nazarín near the valley of the Popocatépetl: "It was during this shoot that I scandalized Gabriel Figueroa, who had prepared for me an aesthetically irreproachable framing, with the Popocatépetl in the background and the inevitable white clouds. I simply turned the camera to frame a banal scene that seemed to me more real, more proximate. I have never liked refabricated cinematographic beauty, which very often makes one forget what the film wants to tell, and which personally, does not move me." Actress Catherine Deneuve has provided another anecdote illustrating this aspect of Buñuel's style; while shooting Tristana, he had told her frequently of the distaste he felt for the "touristy" side of Toledo, where the film was made, so she teased him about one crane shot that brought out the beauty of the surrounding landscape, to which Buñuel responded by re-shooting the entire scene from a dolly with no background whatsoever, all the while inveighing against the "obviously" beautiful.

Sound

Buñuel has been hailed as a pioneer of the sound film, with L'Age d'Or being cited as one of the first innovative uses of sound in French film. Film scholar Linda Williams has pointed out that Buñuel used sounds, including music, as nonsynchronous counterpoint to the visual image, rather than redundant accompaniment, in accordance with theories that had been advanced by Sergei Eisenstein and others in a 1928 manifesto on the sound film. Critic Marsha Kinder has posited that Buñuel's years as a film dubber in Europe and Hollywood put him in the position of “mastering the conventions of film sound, to subvert them more effectively.” As an illustration of this, scholar Sally Faulkner has described the means by which, in his film Tristana, Buñuel "engineers a kind of figurative deafness, or disability, in the spectator" in scenes which involve deaf characters, by, for example, combining the sound of gushing water with an image of a stagnant pool, or exaggerating the volume level of chiming bells.

Use of music

Music is an important part of Buñuel's early films, to such an extent that, for his one silent film Un Chien Andalou, in his sixties, he took the trouble to create a sonorised version, based on the music (Wagner, a South American tango) played at its original screening. One critic has noted that, in L'Age d'Or, Buñuel employed the music of Beethoven, Mozart, Mendelssohn, Debussy and Wagner "as a kind of connective tissue for, and aural commentary on, the unnerving visuals." As regards Las Hurdes, critics have often remarked on the "nagging inappropriateness" of the score, the fourth movement of Johannes Brahms' Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, a practice called by James Clifford "fortuitous or ironic collage." Although Buñuel's use of this technique declined in frequency over the years, he still occasionally employed incongruous musical juxtaposition for ironic effect, notably during the opening and the climactic scenes of Viridiana, which take place to the strains of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus.

Late in life, Buñuel claimed to dislike non-diegetic music (music not intrinsic to the scene itself) and avoided its use, stating: “In my last films I rarely use music. If I do, it has to be justified, so the viewer can see its source: a gramophone or a piano." One consistent exception, however, is the use of the traditional drums from his birthplace Calanda, which are heard in most of his films, with such regularity that the repetition has been described as a “biofilmographic signature”. Buñuel's explanation of his use of these drums was the statement: "Nowhere are they beaten with such mysterious power as in Calanda...in recognition of the shadows that covered the earth at the moment Christ died."

The films of his second French era were not scored and some (Belle de jour, Diary of a Chambermaid) are without music entirely. Belle de jour does, however, feature non-diegetic sound effects, "to unify spatially incongruous shots or symbolize [the protagonist's] dream world."

Tributes

 

Instituto de Educación Secundaria Ies Luis Buñuel, Zaragoza, Spain

• In 1994, a retrospective of Buñuel's works was organized by the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle in Bonn, as homage to one of the most internationally revered figures in world cinema. This was followed in the summer of 1996 by a commemoration of the centenary of the birth of cinema held by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, which included a unique retrospective, jointly sponsored by the King of Spain and the President of Mexico, called ¿Buñuel!. La mirada del siglo, honoring his special status as Spanish cinema's most emblematic figure.
• A secondary school in Zaragoza, Spain has been named for Buñuel: Instituto de Educación Secundaria Ies Luis Buñuel.
• In Calanda, Spain a bust of the head of Luis Buñuel is on display at the Centro Bunuel Calanda (CBC), a museum devoted to the director. The mission of the CBC is to serve as a reference center both for connoisseurs of Buñuel and for anyone interested in the arts of Aragon.
• One of the main theatres at the Palais des Festivals et des Congrès, where the Cannes Film Festival is held, is named after him: Salle Buñuel.
• To mark the centenary of his birth, in 2000 the Cannes festival partnered with the Spanish film industry, to pay tribute to Luis Buñuel. This tribute consisted of three events: (1) the inauguration, for Cannes 2000, of the Palace's new Luis Bunuel room, (2) an original exhibition organized by L'Instituto de la Cinematografia y de las Artes Audiovisuales entitled "The Secret World of Bunuel", and (3) an exceptional projection of Viridiana, the Palme d'Or winner in 1961, in the presence of specially invited artists.
• The Luis Buñuel Film Institute (LBFI) is housed in the Downtown Independent Theatre, Los Angeles, and has as its mission: "to form the vital and innovative arena for the promotion of the work of Luis Buñuel, and a seminal resource for the development of new research, knowledge and scholarship on his life and work, extending across his body of films and writings."

Characterizations

Buñuel has been portrayed as a character in many films and television productions. A portion of the television mini-series Lorca, muerte de un poeta (1987–1988), directed by Juan Antonio Bardem recreates the student years of Buñuel, Lorca and Dalí, with Fernando Valverde portraying Buñuel in two episodes. He was played by Dimiter Guerasimof in the 1991 biopic Dalí, directed by Antoni Ribas, despite the fact that Dalí and his attorney had written to Ribas objecting to the project in its early stages in 1985. Buñuel appeared as a character in Alejandro Pelayo's 1993 film Miroslava, based on the life of actress Miroslava Stern, who committed suicide after appearing in Ensayo de un crimen (1955). Buñuel was played by three actors, El Gran Wyoming (old age), Pere Arquillué (young adult) and Juan Carlos Jiménez Marín (child), in Carlos Saura's 2001 fantasy, Buñuel y la mesa del rey Salomón, which tells of Buñuel, Lorca and Dalí setting out in search of the mythical table of King Salomón, which is thought to have the power to see into the past, the present and the future. Buñuel was a character in a 2001 television miniseries Severo Ochoa: La conquista de un Nobel, on the life of the Spanish émigré and Nobel Prize winner in medicine, who was also at the Residencia de Estudiantes during Buñuel's time there. Matt Lucas portrayed Buñuel in Richard Curson Smith's 2002 TV movie Surrealissimo: The Scandalous Success of Salvador Dali, a comedy depicting Dalí's "trial" by the Surrealists in 1934 for his pro-Hitler sympathies. A 2005 short called The Death of Salvador Dali, directed by Delaney Bishop, contains sequences in which Buñuel appears, played by Alejandro Cardenas. Paul Morrison's Little Ashes hypothesizes a love affair between Dalí and Lorca, with Buñuel (played by Matthew McNulty) looking on suspiciously. Buñuel, played by Adrien de Van, is one of many notable personalities encountered by Woody Allen's protagonist in Midnight in Paris (2011).

Awards

Luis Buñuel was given the Career Golden Lion in 1982 by the Venice Film Festival and the FIPRESCI Prize – Honorable Mention in 1969 by the Berlin Film Festival. In 1977, he received the National Prize for Arts and Sciences for Fine Arts. At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, he was awarded with the Honorable Prize for the contribution to cinema.