Luis Buñuel turned a Jesuit schooling into a lifetime of surreal cinematic revolt
He served at Mass daily as a boy, then walked away from the Church at 16. Luis Buñuel went on to make surrealist shockers with Salvador Dalí, gritty melodramas in Mexico, and late satires of the bourgeoisie that won him the Palme d'Or, an Oscar and two Nobel nominations.
Calanda, the small Aragonese town where Buñuel arrived on 22 February 1900, was a place he joked had stayed medieval until the First World War. His father had left at 14 to build a hardware fortune in Havana, returned rich at 43 and married the innkeeper's 18-year-old daughter. Luis, eldest of seven, moved as an infant to Zaragoza, where the family ranked among the wealthiest in town and he spent seven years under Jesuit teachers. After a proctor kicked and insulted him before an exam, he told his mother he had been expelled; in truth he had topped the world history paper.
At the University of Madrid from 1917 he drifted from agronomy through industrial engineering to philosophy. At the Residencia de Estudiantes he grew close to Dalí and the poet Federico García Lorca, and the trio became the core of Spain's surrealist avant-garde, part of the so-called Generation of 27. Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod convinced him that images were his true medium; decades later, at 72, he asked the elderly Lang for an autograph.
In 1925 he went to Paris, took a secretarial job and watched films up to three times a day. With Dalí he made Un Chien Andalou in 1929 and L'Age d'Or the following year, both counted as surrealist landmarks. Between 1947 and 1960 he worked in Mexico on grounded, humane dramas such as Los Olvidados.
His later films mixed art, dream and satire. Viridiana, a rebuke to Franco's regime, took the 1961 Palme d'Or, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie won the foreign-language Oscar. His last picture, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), earned a best director prize from the National Society of Film Critics. Nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968 and 1972, he had seven films in Sight and Sound's 2012 critics' top 250. He died on 29 July 1983.
Source: Luis Buñuel
