WHO is he?
Provocative Spanish-born filmmaker and scenarist who directed over 30
films — most of them now hallowed works of world cinema — in a
five-decade career between the 20s and the 70s. Buñuel is considered the
father of cinematic Surrealism and his first work Un Chien Andalou (1929), which he made along with Salvador Dali, is a veritable rallying cry for the notorious movement. His films Viridiana (1961) and Belle du Jour (1967) won the top prizes at the Cannes and Berlin Film Festivals respectively.
WHAT are his films about?
Themes
Taking off from Freud’s idea of repressed drives, the Surrealists,
including Buñuel, attacked the sanitised morality of sterile,
institutionalised art and instead set out to give full play to the
primal forces lurking underneath quotidian life. The hypocrisy,
artificiality and complacence of middle-class life and the moral
corruption of religion are themes that are omnipresent in Buñuel’s body
of work and are fiercely attacked through both irreverent humour and
radical film grammar.
WHAT are his films about?
Style
Buñuel’s early Surrealist films are founded on the movement’s principle
of disrupting the apparent normalcy of everyday life. These films broke
the rational narrative logic of what it discredited as “bourgeois
cinema”, supplanting with the logic of the unconscious. Though he
disassociated himself from the movement later, Buñuel still maintained
his iconoclastic approach to film narrative and scrupulously avoided the
clichés of popular and arthouse cinema. Interruption of conventional
narrative logic on an ideological basis is the most characteristic
stylistic element of Buñuel’s cinema.
WHY is he of interest?
The many dimensions of Buñuel as a filmmaker — Buñuel the satirist, the
documentarian, the neorealist, the chamber dramatist — continue to be a
source of immense interest and inspiration for filmmakers and fans
alike. As important is Buñuel the entertainer, whose movies are instant
crowd-pleasers that nonetheless never compromise their political
commitment or formal rigour. In that sense, these films are genuinely
subversive works that critique the cultural system they are embedded in
from within.
WHERE to discover him?
The Exterminating Angel (1962) works off a patently absurd
premise: a group of dinner invitees finds itself unable to exit the
house even when the door is wide open. Buñuel’s deliciously implausible,
completely hilarious film is a virulent attack on the synthetic social
conventions of the middle-class and demonstrates the essential
irrationality of all human action.
Courtesy- http://www.thehindu.com
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