Luis Bunuel Paperback - 1976

This is the first major consideration of the life and films of the great director, Louis Bunuel. The distinguished Spanish film critic and author, Francisco Aranda, traces Bunuel'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 Fantome de la Liberte in 1974. Focusing initially on Bunuel'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 Dali, Aranda discusses the development of Bunuel's surrealist preoccupations through the use of important texts and cinema critiques written by him in the 1920s.Bunuel's collaboration in Paris with Dali 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 now: Las Hurdes and Espana leal, en armas! And we are presented with painstaking analyses of the Mexican comedies (once dismissed by critics as his "bad" films) and Bunuel's favorite film, Los Olvidados, first prize winner at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. Finally, Aranda analyzes the films of Bunuel's maturity: Viridiana, El angel exterminador, Belle de Jour, Tristana, Le Charm discret de la bourgeoisie and Le Fantome de la Liberte. He examines the Bunuelian treatment of violence, cruelty, sexual aberration, sadism, and eroticism.