Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) was a Spanish filmmaker born in Calanda, Aragon, who is among the most consequential directors in the history of cinema. He studied at the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid, where his friendships with Salvador Dalí and Federico García Lorca were formative, before moving to Paris in 1925 to assist Jean Epstein and discover the culture of the avant-garde.

His collaboration with Dalí produced Un Chien Andalou (1929), a sixteen-minute film of disconnected, disturbing imagery that became a manifesto of Surrealist filmmaking, and L'Âge d'or (1930), which was banned after riots provoked by its anti-Catholic and sexual content. His documentary Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes, 1933) applied the form of ethnographic film to a community of extreme poverty in Spain with a devastating irony. After years of limited activity during and after the Spanish Civil War, he resumed filmmaking in Mexico, where Los Olvidados (1950) received the Best Director prize at Cannes. His Mexican period also produced Viridiana (1961), which won the Palme d'Or and was immediately banned in Spain. The French productions of his final decades — Belle de jour (1967, Venice Golden Lion), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) — constitute one of the most sustained and formally inventive bodies of late work in cinema.

He published his memoirs as My Last Sigh (Mon dernier soupir, 1982), written with Jean-Claude Carrière. He died in Mexico City.