King Luis

Wally Hammond salutes the career of Spanish film's 'old rogue', Luis Buñuel.

Jan  4 2007

Just thinking about Luis Buñuel cheers you up. If you're feeling bored or depressed this New Year – or anytime up till the end of February, when the complete NFT retrospective of his movies closes – and sample any one of the old rogue's beautiful outrages you might not laugh out loud but, I guarantee, your soul will smile. Okay, you'll have to put up with some fetishism, sacrilege, depravity, deformity, surrealism or plain absurdity, not to mention satirical swipes at authority in all its guises, and sly digs at all manner of social pretentions,
but they are delivered with such ineffably charming manners, you'd have to be a dupe to be offended.

Educated by the Jesuits – which perversely gave him a 'feeling of sin that was positively voluptuous' – Buñuel trained as an entomologist in Paris, casting a number of insects for his debut of 1928, 'Un Chien Andalou', where he blended the film techniques he had been taught by Jean Epstein with the shared eye-slitting, irrationalist and surrealistic vision of his co-director Salvador Dalí. Right from the off, with that film's 'Once upon a time…', Buñuel showed a wit as dry as the climate of the Aragón village of Calanda, where he was born into riches in 1900.

As Anthony Wall's fine 'Arena' doc on Buñuel’s life and work (Weds 3 &17) points out, his Spain was 'medieval' in its class divisions, church and state rituals and feudal social and sexual codes – and it was his desire to mount a revolutionary attack on these repressive forces, as much as his idiosyncratic take on the uniquely, blackly comic Spanish sense of esperpento, that marked his cinema from the off.

If 'Un Chien Andalou' was a succès d’estime, his satan's tango of coitus interruptus 'L'Age d'Or' was a metaphorical and literal riot – 'what Judeo-Bolshevik devil-worshipping Masonic wogs did this?' went a contemporary comment that at least alludes to Buñuel's collaborative methods, a less often acknowledged and important characteristic of his work. His last film before his 14-year exile editing and producing in the US and elsewhere was his half-hour documentary, 'Las Hurdes', an audacious and moving portrait of the poor of a mountainous region of Spain that not only introduced 'realism' to his work, but also revealed the core of humanity, compassion and purity that lay at the heart of this provocateur's special vision.

He moved to Mexico in 1946 to direct 'Gran Casino', a reputedly unremarkable 'ranch comedy' with ageing stars Jorge Negrete and Libertad Lamarque, the first of 20 studio films he made there. Many are rarely screened outside Mexico and often wrongly dismissed as formulaic, but they're nevertheless well worth exploring, not least his mid-period 'documentary' masterpiece, 'Los Olvidados' (1950), an extraordinary demythologising drama set among the street gangs of Mexico City; his pathetic portrait of jealousy 'El' (1952);
his cautionary Galdós adaptation about a priest, 'Nazarín' (1958); and his stunningly simple metaphor for bourgeois constriction, 'The Exterminating Angel' (1962).

He returned to Spain for the Palme d'Or-winning 'Viridiana'(1961) – another portrait of misguided religious fanaticism and sexual repression – before his triumphant return to France, for his series of late masterworks, including 'Tristana' (1970); 'The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie' (1972), which won an Academy Award; the episodic 'Phantom of Liberty' (1974); and his final tease, 'That Obscure Object of Desire' (1977), in which Fernando Rey's obsession with an elusive girl seems unfazed by her being played by two entirely different actresses. If you don't mind your infelicities, conceits, passions and prejudices being shaken and stirred, you couldn't be served by a finer cocktail waiter. But do watch out for that sting in the tail.

The Luis Buñuel season runs at the NFT until the end of February.

• 
•