Buuel - The Beginning and the End

The filmmaking career of Luis Buuel (1900 -1983) followed a peripatetic path,
beginning and ending in France, with a long detour to the Americas in between. After a
thoroughly bourgeois upbringing in the Aragon province of Spain, Buuel moved to
Madrid in 1917 to study at what is now the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. There
he became part of the capitals vital avant-garde circles, befriending most famously
Federico Garca Lorca and Salvador Dal. He immigrated to Paris in 1925, where he
became fascinated with cinema and made his first film, in collaboration with Dal: the
Surrealist classic Un Chien Andalou (1928). The films dream logic construction, the
theme of thwarted desire and its subversive indictment of religion all were essential
Buuel as was the accompanying uproar and condemnation. Buuels insubordinate
mockery of all sacred institutions public and domestic would lead to a convoluted
path in and out of trouble with the powers he continued to excoriate cinematically.

After managing to find financing for two more subversive, iconic and iconoclastic
projectsLAge dOr (1930) and Land Without Bread (1933)Buuel went more than
a decade without making another film. In part, this was due to the rise of Fascism in
Europe; when the Republic was overturned, Buuel who had been working for the
Spanish Republican governmenthappened to be in New York, so he stayed in the US.
On the other hand, his body of work at that point did not pave the way to a career in
Hollywood either; although he was briefly under contract at MGM, he worked at
Warner Bros. during World War II, supervising the dubbing of films into Spanish.

Nevertheless, Buuel clearly spent these years on the fringes of the film industry
carefully absorbing what he could of the production process. When he began to work in
Mexico as a director in 1947, he earned a reputation for being extremely calm, prepared
and efficient during shooting. Although Buuel spent roughly fifteen years making
movies in Mexico, this period of his career was later eclipsed by its final chapter. The
critical stock of Buuels Mexican films has been steadily on the rise in recent years,
and we hope to present them in a separate program in the near future.

In 1961, Buuel managed to receive permission to shoot Viridiana in Spain, and the
success of that film and the subsequent The Exterminating Angel (1962) at the Cannes
Film Festival helped pave the way for the final phase of his career. Producer Serge
Silberman brought Buuel to France to make Diary of a Chambermaid and paired the
director with writer Jean-Claude Carrire. The collaboration between writer and director
would continue for five subsequent films, until Buuels retirement to Mexico City
following That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). The acclaim granted these
collaborations led to the worldwide recognition of Buuels genius as a filmmaker.

This program brings together the films from the beginning and the end of Buuels
career. While his Mexican films incorporated elements of genre cinema, Buuels early
and late films show him coming full circle. The later European films, with their play
with narrative form, their fascination with perversity and its discontents, and their
casual mixing of the refined, the grotesque and the absurd, reveal an artist of the avant-
garde returning to his roots in Surrealism. David Pendleton

Film descriptions by Brittany Gravely and David Pendleton