Provocateur of surreal screens.

• Author: Casciero, Alberto
• Position: Director Luis Bunuel

Director Luis Bunuel turned a scathing lens on reality, shattering social conventions

SPANISH-BORN FILMMAKER Luis Bunuel, renowned for his shocking yet poetic imagery, died in Mexico City on July 29, 1983. Ten years after his death and fifteen years after his last film, his works remind us of his unique vision and invaluable contributions to the worlds of art and cinema. Bunuel grew up in a devout Catholic family in a most Catholic country. The dogmas and precepts of the Catholic Church, with its imposing repression of sexual drives and hypocrisy, as well as the oppressive values of the bourgeois society in which he was raised, became the subtext for most of Bunuel's works. These elements, combined with a deeply imbedded Spanish character, are the essence of the Bunuelesque trademark.

Luis Bunuel was the first of seven children born to Maria Portoles and Leonardo Bunuel on February 22, 1900, in the town of Calanda in Aragon. (There is a village named Bunuel in Navarra, south of Huesca, probably founded by some branch of the family during the sixteenth century). At a very young age, Leonardo Bunuel joined the army and served in Cuba, where he remained until after the Spanish American War, and where he also acquired considerable wealth. It was not until he was 43 years old that Leonardo returned to his native village and married the prettiest girl in town. Maria was a religious woman with a good education and the perfect match to this self-made, broadly cultured, intelligent Aragonese. The Bunuels lived in a stately mansion in Calanda and, although they later moved to Zaragoza the capital of Aragon, they spent the summer months, as well as most holidays, in Calanda.

The young Luis was greatly influenced by his French Jesuit teachers. He served as an acolyte to an uncle who was a priest and often pretended to be a priest performing mass when playing with his sisters. Demonstrating an adeptness for theatrical performances, he even created his own theater in the family barn.

In 1917, Luis Bunuel went to Madrid to study, establishing himself in the Residencia de Estudiantes, a students resident hall of high repute. There he befriended Salvador Dali, Federico Garcia Lorca, Moreno Villa and Jose Maria Hinojosa, among others. He was immersed in a world of lectures, recitals, theater performances and the nascent cinema. Soon the change from a provincial environment to the big city, the freedom from his family and influence of his intellectual friends awoke in him a sensitivity for the liberal arts. He began to write poetry and short stories, stage theatrical productions and act. His father expected him to study agricultural engineering, but after a stint with entomology, he finally graduated with a degree in history.

While in Madrid, Bunuel was introduced to Surrealism, a philosophy he would embrace even after the movement was no more. Inevitably, Bunuel and his friends were strongly influenced by a movement that embodied the burning desires of their generation: revolt against the established order, aesthetic as well as political. It was a time for dreaming great dreams; a time for a sensitive personality to nurture himself with the fervor of an illusion, the phantom of liberty.

After graduating, Bunuel left Madrid for Paris in 1925 with the consent and help of his mother (his father died in 1923). Spain was in the midst of tremendous political and social turmoil which resulted in the coup d'etat of 1923, ushered in the dictatorship of Primo Rivera, and eventually culminated in the ferocious civil war between the supporters of the Second Republic and its...