Weekly quote
“Nothing would disgust me more morally than receiving an Oscar”
Luis Buñuel Portolés,(born Feb. 22, 1900, Calanda, Spain—died July 29, 1983, Mexico City), Spanish director and filmmaker, noted especially for his early Surrealist films and for his work in the Mexican commercial cinema. He is distinguished for his highly personal style and controversial obsession with social injustice, religious excess, gratuitous cruelty, and eroticism.
In 1924 he moved to Paris and worked as an assistant to the filmmaker Jean Epstein. In 1929 he released his first film, “Un chien Andalou”, with a screenplay by Dalí. This was followed by “The golden age”. In Mexico he shot “The forgotten” (1947), which won him his first prize for best director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951. In 1961 he returned to Spain and began filming “Viridiana”, which won him the Palme d’Or in Cannes.
After Viridiana, Buñuel worked mostly in France. The growth of his new international (and consequently educated and middle-class) audience coincided with his return to a surrealist aesthetic. “The Exterminating Angel” (1962), “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” (1972) and “The Phantom of Liberty” (1974) depict a bourgeoisie trapped within their own conventions, if not-in the latter film’s metaphorical conceit-their own homes. “Belle De Jour” (1967), “Tristana” (1970) and “That Obscure Object of Desire” (1977) explore sexual obsessions and preoccupations.
