Bunuel

by John Baxter

Bunuel stands among the greatest creative artists of the century. His films, from his collaborative Un Chien Andalou with Salvador Dali in 1928 to a late blossoming in the sixties and seventies with Belle de Jour, Viridiana, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, still retain their power to shock. In this superb biography, Luis Bu-uel comes startlingly into the spotlight as an artist who disguised his sensitivity with cynicism and a calculated use of the grotesque.

Genres: Film

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

John Baxter (born 1939 in Randwick, New South Wales) is an Australian-born writer, journalist, and film-maker.

Baxter has lived in Britain and the United States as well as in his native Sydney, but has made his home in Paris since 1989, where he is married to the film-maker Marie-Dominique Montel. They have one daughter, Louise.

He began writing science fiction in the early 1960s for New Worlds, Science Fantasy and other British magazines. His first novel, though serialised in New Worlds as THE GOD KILLERS, was published as a book in the US by Ace as The Off-Worlders. He was Visiting Professor at Hollins College in Virginia in 1975-1976. He has written a number of short stories and novels in that genre and a book about SF in the movies, as well as editing collections of Australian science fiction.

Baxter has also written a large number of other works dealing with the movies, including biographies of film personalities, including Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel, Steven Spielberg, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, George Lucas and Robert De Niro. He has written a number of documentaries, including a survey of the life and work of the painter Fernando Botero. He also co-produced, wrote and presented three television series for the Australian Broadcasting Commission, Filmstruck, First Take and The Cutting Room, and was co-editor of the ABC book programme Books And Writing.

In the 1960s, he was a member of the WEA Film Study Group with such notable people as Ian Klava, Frank Moorhouse, Michael Thornhill, John Flaus and Ken Quinnell. From July 1965 to December 1967 the WEA Film Study Group published the cinema journal FILM DIGEST. This journal was edited by John Baxter.

For a number of years in the sixties, he was active in the Sydney Film Festival, and during the 1980s served in a consulting capacity on a number of film-funding bodies, as well as writing film criticism for The Australian and other periodicals. Some of his books have been translated into various languages, including Japanese and Chinese.

Since moving to Paris, he has written four books of autobiography, A Pound of Paper: Confessions of a Book Addict, We'll Always Have Paris: Sex and Love in the City of Light, Immoveable feast : a Paris Christmas, and The Most Beautiful Walk in the World : a Pedestrian in Paris.

Since 2007 he has been co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop.

Reviews

[Ernest Hogan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A creative life in world in turmoil. Inspiring.

Luis, Luis Buñuel
Oh no!
Don't cut my eyeball
No no no no no no!

[Joseph · Rating 3 out of 5]

A decent portrait, fairly well researched and probably relying too much on secondary materials. If you know how to read Bunuel's films, the facts of his life will dance along the same subtle lines, the same reeling paradoxa, but keep a weary eye to Baxter who imposes a decidedly humdrum understanding of his subject's complexity. Here is an artist who bypassed rendering the world in shades of gray and made us forget the difference between black and white, but Baxter would have us see a devout atheist rather than a man who turned the very concept of religion on its head. Even his two-page descriptions of the films are often blatantly skewed, strangling the ambiguous interior lives of Bunuel's characters with descriptions of their motivations that are as sloppy as they are banal. And yet, for all the book's fallacies, Bunuel needs the exposure. He belongs on that strata of reverence reserved for the likes of Godard, Wells, Fellini, Bergman, Hitchcock, and Kurosawa, especially when a generation of young Latinos think that publicized gloss of Amores perros and City of God constitute the height of Latin American cinema. The book may fall way behind the master, but at least it doesn't loose sight.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good biography. Doesn't talk about the films much but gives a good overview of his life.