Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography

by J. Francisco Aranda, David Robinson (Translator)

This is the first major consideration of the life and films of the great director, Louis Buñuel. The distinguished Spanish film critic and author, Francisco Aranda, traces Buñuel's phenomenal career of more than forty years—from the sensational classics Un Chien andalou in 1929 and L'Age D'or in 1930 to the Oscar-winning Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie in 1972 and Le Fantôme de la Liberté in 1974. Focusing initially on Buñuel's formative days as a student in the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid and his friendships with Federico Garcia Lorca, Josse Ortega y Gasset, and Salvador Dalí, Aranda discusses the development of Buñuel's surrealist preoccupations through the use of important texts and cinema critiques written by him in the 1920s.Buñuel's collaboration in Paris with Dalí on Un Chien andalou (the first surrealist film, which shocked audiences throughout the world) and L'Age d'or (where the theater was attacked and closed by enraged rightists) are described in full, as are the stark documentaries that have been neglected until Las Hurdes and España leal, en armas! And we are presented with painstaking analyses of the Mexican comedies (once dismissed by critics as his ”bad” films) and Buñuel's favorite film, Los Olvidados, first prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. Finally, Aranda analyzes the films of Buñuel's Viridiana, El ángel exterminador, Belle de Jour, Tristana, Le Charm discret de la bourgeoisie and Le Fantôme de la Liberté. He examines the Buñuelian treatment of violence, cruelty, sexual aberration, sadism, and eroticism.

327 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975