Luis Bunuel

Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel made his first film with a razor blade slicing an eyeball and spent the next fifty years more or less continuing in the same spirit. Un Chien Andalou, the 1929 short he made with Salvador Dalí, remains one of the most viscerally confrontational openings in cinema history — an act of deliberate assault on the viewer’s comfort and on the conventions of what a film was supposed to do. Buñuel never really stopped assaulting those conventions, though he learned over time to do it with a smile.

He came from a wealthy Spanish Catholic family and spent his career dismantling everything that implied. The Church, the bourgeoisie, respectable desire, social convention — these are his great subjects, and his treatment of them is never merely satirical. Buñuel understood that the bourgeoisie weren’t simply hypocrites but were trapped, that desire isn’t just repressed but genuinely uncontrollable, that the Church’s hold on people was as much psychological as institutional. The films are funnier and more sympathetic than pure satire would allow.

The career has three distinct phases and each is remarkable. The early Spanish and French surrealist work — Un Chien Andalou, L’Age d’Or — is genuinely radical and genuinely strange. The Mexican period, twenty years of commercial filmmaking punctuated by Los Olvidados and Nazarín, is underappreciated and substantially larger than most people realise. Then the late French films with producer Serge Silberman — Belle de Jour, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty, That Obscure Object of Desire — which are the work of a filmmaker in complete command of his instrument, making surrealism look effortless and subversion look elegant.

He made That Obscure Object of Desire at 77 and then stopped, having apparently said everything he wanted to say. The autobiography he published shortly before his death is as good as the films.

Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983)

1928 – Un Chien andalou
1930 – L’Âge d’or
1933 – Land Without Bread
1947 – Gran Casino
1949 – The Great Madcap
1950 – Los Olvidados
1951 – Susana
1952 – El Bruto
1952 – Mexican Bus Ride
1953 – El
1953 – Illusion Travels by Streetcar
1954 – El Río y la muerte
1954 – Robinson Crusoe
1954 – Wuthering Heights
1955 – The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz
1956 – Death in the Garden
1956 – That is the Dawn
1958 – Nazarín
1959 – Fever Mounts at El Pao
1960 – The Young One
1961 – Viridiana
1962 – The Exterminating Angel
1964 – Diary of a Chambermaid
1965 – Simon of the Desert
1967 – Belle de jour
1969 – The Milky Way
1970 – Tristana
1972 – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
1974 – The Phantom of Liberty
1977 – That Obscure Object of Desire

Intro rewrite:

He made That Obscure Object of Desire at 77 and then stopped, having apparently said everything he wanted to say. The autobiography he published shortly before his death is as good as the films.

Similar filmmakers scores:

Alain Resnais — 7, Left Bank surrealist adjacency and the dream logic connection, valid
Alejandro Jodorowsky — 9, the surrealist provocation and anti-clerical fury, direct descendant
David Lynch — 9, the dream logic and bourgeois uncanny, essential
Federico Fellini — 8, the carnivalesque surrealism and Catholic obsession, strong connection
Jean Cocteau — 9, the poetic surrealism and dream cinema, essential ancestor
Jean Renoir — 5, both major European directors of the same era but the warmth and humanism of Renoir is genuinely foreign to Buñuel’s corrosive irony
Jean-Luc Godard — 6, the subversion and anti-bourgeois impulse connects but the methods are quite different
João César Monteiro — 9, the Iberian surrealism and anti-clerical obsession, almost a direct heir, excellent niche pick
Manoel de Oliveira — 8, the Portuguese Catholic world and late-career formal experimentation, strong niche pick
Maya Deren — 7, the surrealist dream film tradition, valid ancestor
Michelangelo Antonioni — 5, both serious European auteurs but the connection is thin, Antonioni’s bourgeois alienation is melancholy where Buñuel’s is savage
Nagisa Oshima — 7, the transgressive sexuality and institutional critique, In the Realm of the Senses has genuine Buñuel DNA
Pedro Almodóvar — 9, the Spanish Catholic world turned inside out, direct heir
Rainer Werner Fassbinder — 7, the bourgeois critique and transgressive sexuality
Raúl Ruiz — 9, the surrealist narrative labyrinth and Latin Catholic sensibility, essential
Robert Bresson — 5, both French and both serious about Catholicism but from completely opposite directions — Bresson’s faith is devout where Buñuel’s is corrosive
Shuji Terayama — 8, the surrealist transgression and anti-institutional fury
Terry Gilliam — 7, the surrealist visual imagination and anti-establishment satire, Brazil is downstream of The Exterminating Angel

Jean Renoir, Antonioni and Bresson are your three weakest — all defensible in a loose sense but the temperamental gaps are significant. Renoir in particular feels like the wrong direction entirely.

Themes:

The Bourgeoisie as Perpetual Target: Buñuel returned to the comfortable middle and upper classes throughout his career not out of repetition but because he found there an inexhaustible source of absurdity, hypocrisy and self-deception. The bourgeoisie in his films aren’t villains so much as people who have organised their entire existence around avoiding reality — and the films keep arranging for reality to intrude anyway.
Desire as Uncontrollable Force: From the explicit sexuality of Belle de Jour to the compulsive repetitions of That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel understood desire as something that resists rational management entirely. His characters want what they’re not supposed to want, and social convention — religion, marriage, class propriety — provides the repression that makes desire more rather than less powerful.
The Catholic Church as Psychological Prison: Having been raised inside it and rejected it completely, Buñuel understood the Church’s hold on people from the inside. His anti-clericalism isn’t the contempt of an outsider but the fury of someone who knows exactly how the mechanism works. Viridiana, Nazarín and The Milky Way all engage with religious faith as something simultaneously beautiful, corrupting and inescapable.
The Dream Logic of Everyday Life: Buñuel’s films don’t mark the transition between reality and dream because for him the distinction isn’t stable. The irrational erupts into perfectly ordinary situations — a dinner party that can’t end, a room nobody can leave, a woman played by two different actresses — and the characters respond with a composure that is itself surrealist.
Social Ritual as Absurdist Theatre: The elaborate ceremonies of bourgeois life — the dinner party, the formal reception, the religious observance — are treated as performances whose arbitrariness has become invisible through repetition. Buñuel makes them visible again by pushing them to the point of breakdown.

The Deadpan Surreal: Unlike the expressionistic surrealism of early cinema, Buñuel’s mature style is almost classical in its restraint. The camera observes bizarre events with complete composure, refusing to signal that anything unusual is happening. This is more disturbing than any amount of expressionist distortion.
The Long Take as Trap: Buñuel uses extended takes not for contemplation but for entrapment — the scene continues past the point of comfort, the situation develops further than it should, the characters remain in the frame when they should have been released. Duration becomes a form of pressure.
Non-Linear and Circular Narrative: Particularly in the late French films, Buñuel constructs narratives that loop, repeat and contradict themselves. The Phantom of Liberty abandons its protagonists for new ones mid-film; That Obscure Object of Desire casts two actresses in the same role without explanation. The instability is the point.
Precise Mise-en-Scène Without Ostentation: Buñuel was not a visual stylist in the conventional sense — no signature camera movements, no elaborate compositions. What he had was total control of what was in the frame and where, a classical economy that makes the surrealist eruptions more shocking for their understated presentation.
The Strategic Eruption of the Irrational: His films establish a convincing realistic surface and then puncture it — not constantly, but at carefully chosen moments. The contrast between the mundane and the inexplicable is the engine of his comedy and his unease simultaneously.

Surrealism as Moral Instrument: Buñuel didn’t use surrealism for its own sake or as aesthetic decoration — it was a tool for exposing what realism conceals. The dream logic, the irrational event, the impossible situation are all ways of getting at truths that conventional narrative smooths over.
Anti-Clericalism as Lifelong Obsession: No other major filmmaker returned so consistently to the Catholic Church as subject, symbol and psychological force. The obsession is too persistent and too personal to be merely satirical — Buñuel was working something out across fifty years of filmmaking.
The Collaborative Late Period: His final run of films with producer Serge Silberman and writers Jean-Claude Carrière represented one of cinema’s great late-career flowerings — a filmmaker in his sixties and seventies producing some of his most formally innovative and commercially successful work simultaneously, which almost never happens.
Comedy as Subversion: Buñuel is funnier than he’s often given credit for, and the comedy is inseparable from the subversion. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie is genuinely hilarious, and the laughter is what makes its critique effective — you can’t dismiss a film that’s made you laugh as mere agitprop.
The Refusal of Resolution: His films don’t conclude so much as stop, or loop back on themselves, or dissolve into further ambiguity. The exterminating angel is never explained. Séverine’s fantasy life is never resolved. The dinner party never ends. Withholding resolution is itself a political and aesthetic position — reality doesn’t resolve either.