French postcard by Éditions du Désastre, Paris, no. MR14. Photo: Man Ray. Caption: Luis Buñuel, 1929.
Photo. Luis Buñuel (left), Willem Mengelberg (middle), and the crew of 'El retablo de Maese Pedro' (1926). The roles of Don Quixote and Maese Pedro were performed by the singers from the world premiere: Belgian bass-baritone Hector Dufranne and French tenor Eustase Thomas-Salignac. Source: En torno a Luis Buñuel.
Dutch postcard by Periscoopfilm. Image: still for Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas / Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (Salvador Simó, 2018). (A little mistake in the title of the postcard is that the accent on the u should be on the n: Buñuel). On 7 December 2019, at the European Film Awards 2019, the Spanish/Dutch production Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas / Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles (Salvador Simó, 2018) was the winner of the Best European Animated Feature Film 2019. The film is based on the graphic novel 'Buñuel in the Labyrinth of the Turtles'. Paris, 1930. Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel are already the main figures of the Surrealist movement. Unexpectedly, Buñuel is left moneyless after the scandal surrounding his film L'âge d'or / The Golden Age (1930). In this difficult situation, he cannot even tackle his next project, a documentary about one of the poorest Spanish regions, Las Hurdes. However, his good friend, sculptor Ramón Acín, buys a lottery ticket with the promise that, if he wins, he will pay for the film. Incredibly, luck is on their side.
Spanish postcard by Asociación Filatelica Zaragozana 'Gregorio Sierra', Zaragoza, no. 16.
Very close relationships with Lorca and Dali
Luis Buñuel Portolés was born in 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the Aragon region of Spain. His father was Leonardo Buñuel, also a native of Calanda, who had left home at age 14 to start a hardware business in Havana, Cuba, ultimately amassing a fortune and returning home to Calanda at the age of 43, in 1898. He married the 18-year-old daughter of the only innkeeper in Calanda, María Portolés Cerezuela. The eldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters: Alicia, Concepción, Margarita and María. He later described his birthplace by saying that in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I". When Buñuel was four months old, the family moved to Zaragoza, where they were one of the wealthiest families in town. In Zaragoza, Buñuel received a strict Jesuit education at the private Colegio del Salvador, starting at the age of seven and continuing for the next seven years. After being kicked and insulted by the study hall proctor before a final exam, Buñuel refused to return to the school. He told his mother he had been expelled, which was not true. In fact, he had received the highest marks on his world history exam.
Buñuel finished the last two years of his high school education at the local public school, graduating at the age of 16. Even as a child, Buñuel was something of a cinematic showman. Friends from that period described productions in which Buñuel projected shadows on a screen using a magic lantern and a bedsheet. He also excelled at boxing and playing the violin. In his youth, Buñuel was deeply religious, serving at Mass and taking Communion every day, until, at the age of 16, he grew disgusted with what he perceived as the illogicality of the Church, along with its power and wealth. In 1917, he attended the University of Madrid, first studying agronomy, then industrial engineering, and finally switching to philosophy. He developed very close relationships with painter Salvador Dalí and poet Federico García Lorca, among other important Spanish creative artists living in the Residencia de Estudiantes. The three friends formed the nucleus of the Spanish Surrealist avant-garde and became known as members of 'La Generación del 27'.
In 1925, Buñuel moved to France, where he began work as a secretary in an organisation called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation. In Paris, Buñuel's interest in films was intensified by a viewing of Fritz Lang's Der müde Tod: "I came out of the Vieux Colombier completely transformed. Images could and did become for me the true means of expression. I decided to devote myself to the cinema". He became actively involved in both cinema and theatre. He met several influential people, including the pianist Ricardo Viñes. He secured Buñuel's selection as artistic director of the Dutch premiere of Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera 'El retablo de maese Pedro' in 1926.
Three years earlier, the world premiere of 'El retablo de maese Pedro' was given as a concert performance on 23 March 1923 at the Teatro San Fernando, Seville. It was conducted by the composer. 'El retablo de maese Pedro' was a great success for Falla, with performances and new productions all over Europe within a few years of the premiere. In 1926, the Opéra-Comique in Paris celebrated Falla's 50th birthday with a program consisting of 'La vida breve', 'El amor brujo', and 'El retablo de maese Pedro'. That performance used new designs by Falla's close friend, the artist Ignacio Zuloaga, and new marionettes carved by Zuloaga's brother-in-law, Maxime Dethomas. Also in 1926, on 26 and 27 April, the opera was performed in Amsterdam. Here, the opera was performed with puppets and marionettes designed based on drawings by Manuel Angeles Ortiz and Hernando Vinez, while actors played Don Quichotte and Sancho Panza. Luis Buñuel was the artistic director.
For this post, we read Dutch newspaper articles of 1926 and the Spanish blog En torno a Luis Buñuel, in which author Mfa quotes Buñuel about this period: "Ricardo Viñes, the pianist, was a friend of Mengelberg's, and there were two famous theatres in Amsterdam for symphonic music. In one of them, he presented Stravinsky's 'The Soldier's Tale' to great acclaim, and Mengelberg wanted to premiere something similar in the other theatre. He commissioned Ricardo Viñes to stage 'El Retablo de Maese Pedro'. Ricardo then asked his nephew Hernando which Spaniards were in Amsterdam or Paris. One day, talking to him... I suggested that the human characters should be actors, hiding their faces with masks, so as to accentuate the difference with the puppets, which would also be played by dolls this time. He thought it was a good idea, and I offered to carry it out. I was appointed director, and that is how I came to be in charge of the staging." (...) “I still can't believe it. And besides, I think it cost two hundred florins. We gave three performances, three. And at the end of the first one, since I knew nothing about theatre, when the audience left, I went down to the stalls to check the lighting, leaving the characters on stage, and from below, you couldn't see anything. We fixed it for the second and third performances. The spotlights were set up properly, the amber light, I don't know what. Even today, I shudder when I remember my audacity and that of my friends. We accepted the commission just to get a free trip to Amsterdam, collaborating with Falla, one of the greatest contemporary musicians, with Mengelberg, the famous conductor, and with professional singers from the Comic Opera... The show ended up being the strangest mixture of music and theatre ever seen. I must say that we didn't do badly and that both my friends and I did our best to make such a crazy undertaking a success. No one in the audience even suspected that the visual part of the show was a pure experiment, which, for once, did not end in catastrophe, the result of typically Spanish improvisation. It should also be said that we had been rehearsing for a month.” (Our translation. Dutch advertisements show that there were only two public performances, not three.)
Chinese postcard. Scene from El ángel exterminador / The Exterminating Angel (Luis Buñuel, 1962) with Silvia Pinal.
Romanian postcard by Casa Filmului Acin, no. 445. Photo: Daniel Ivernel and Jeanne Moreau in Le journal d'une femme de chambre / The Diary of a Chambermaid (Luis Buñuel, 1964).
Swiss poster postcard by CVB Publishers, no. 57136. Affiche: René Ferracci / Collection Cinémathèque Suisse, Lausanne. Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour / Beauty of the Day (Luis Buñuel, 1966).
French poster postcard in the Encyclopédie du Cinéma series by Carterie Artistique et Cinématographique, Pont du Casse, no. EDC 1197 VIS. 3 US. American poster of Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour / Beauty of the Day (Luis Buñuel, 1966).
Eliminating all logical associations
Back in Paris after his Amsterdam job, Luis Buñuel enrolled in a private film school run by celebrated filmmaker Jean Epstein and some associates. Soon, Buñuel was working for Epstein as an assistant director on Mauprat (1926) and La chute de la maison Usher / The Fall of the House of Usher (1928), and also for Mario Nalpas on La Sirène des Tropiques / Siren of the Tropics(1927), starring Josephine Baker. He appeared on screen in a small part as a smuggler in Jacques Feyder's Carmen (1926). After parting with Epstein, Buñuel worked as a film critic for La Gaceta Literaria (1927) and Les Cahiers d'Art (1928). In the Catalonian periodicals L'Amic de les Arts and La gaseta de les Arts, he and Dalí carried on a series of "call and response" essays on cinema and theatre. They debated such technical issues as segmentation, découpage, the insert shot and rhythmic editing. He helped establish Madrid's first cine-club and served as its inaugural chairman.
With Salvador Dalí, Buñuel shot and directed a 16-minute short, Un Chien Andalou (1929). The film, financed by Buñuel's mother, consists of a series of startling images of a Freudian nature, starting with a woman's eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade. Un Chien Andalou was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French surrealist movement. Critic Roger Ebert called it'the most famous short film ever made'. The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in Cadaqués. In a letter, Buñuel described the writing process: "We had to look for the plot line. Dalí said to me, 'I dreamed last night of ants swarming around in my hands', and I said, 'Good Lord, and I dreamed that I had sliced somebody's eye. There's the film, let's go and make it.' Buñuel and Dalí made a cardinal point of eliminating all logical associations. It was Buñuel's intention to outrage the self-proclaimed artistic vanguard of his youth. After the premiere, Buñuel and Dalí were granted formal admittance to the tight-knit community of Surrealists, led by poet André Breton.
Late in 1929, on the strength of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel and Dalí were commissioned to make another short film by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles, owners of a private cinema in Paris. The film, L'Age d'Or / The Golden Age (1930), was begun as a second collaboration with Dalí, but, while working on the scenario, the two had a falling out and Dalí had nothing to do with the actual shooting of the film. During the course of production, Buñuel worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. One early screening was taken over by members of the fascist League of Patriots and the Anti-Jewish Youth Group, who hurled purple ink at the screen and then vandalised the adjacent art gallery, destroying several valuable surrealist paintings. The film was banned by the Parisian police "in the name of public order". The de Noailles, both Catholics, were threatened with excommunication by the Vatican because of the film's blasphemous final scene, which visually links Jesus Christ with the writings of the Marquis de Sade. They made the decision in 1934 to withdraw all prints from circulation, and L'Age d'Or was not seen again until 1981, after their deaths. Now, both films are considered masterpieces of surrealist cinema.
After a short Hollywood visit on the invitation of MGM, Buñuel decided to make a film focused on peasant life in Las Hurdes, one of Spain's poorest regions. The film, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933), was financed on a budget of 20,000 pesetas donated by a working-class anarchist friend, Ramón Acín, who had won the money in a lottery. Buñuel later worked in Paris in the dubbing department of Paramount Pictures, and following his marriage in 1934, he switched to Warner Brothers in Madrid. A friend, Ricardo Urgoiti, who owned the commercial film company Filmófono, invited Buñuel to produce films for a mass audience. Of the 18 films produced by Buñuel during his years at Filmófono, four are believed to have also been directed by him. These included the popular musical La hija de Juan Simón / Juan Simón's Daughter (1935) and the comedy ¡Centinela, alerta! / Sentry, Keep Watch! (1937), Filmófono's biggest box-office hit. After a long visit to Hollywood, Bunuel connected in 1947 with French producer Dancigers in Mexico. The Golden Age of Mexican cinema was peaking, and film represented Mexico's third-largest industry, employing 32,000 workers and 72 film producers. From 1947 to 1960, Bunuel made grounded and human melodramas such as Gran Casino (1947) with Jorge Negrete, Los Olvidados (1950), which won the Best Director prize that year at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951, and the psychological Horror film Él /This Strange Passion (1953) starring Arturo de Córdova. In 1949, Buñuel renounced his Spanish citizenship to become a naturalised Mexican. In Mexico, he gained the fundamentals of storytelling.
Luis Buñuel then transitioned into making artful, unconventional, surrealistic, and satirical films. He earned acclaim with the morally complex arthouse drama film Viridiana (1961), which criticised the Francoist dictatorship. The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, but was banned in Spain for the next 17 years. He then criticised political and social conditions in the black comedy El ángel exterminador / The Exterminating Angel (1962) and Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie / The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. He also directed Le Journal d'une femme de chambre / Diary of a Chambermaid (1964) with Jeanne Moreau and Belle de Jour (1967) with Catherine Deneuve. His final film was Cet obscur objet du désir / That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) starring Fernando Rey, Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina who play one character, Conchita, together. That Obscure Object of Desire was not financially successful, but it became a critical favourite. Many later critics have declared the film a masterpiece. Buñuel died in 1983. During his career, he earned five Cannes Film Festival prizes, two Berlin International Film Festival prizes, a BAFTA Award, and an Academy Award in 1972. He was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1968 and then in 1972.
Dutch postcard by Filmmuseum, Amsterdam. Catherine Deneuve in Belle de Jour / Beauty of the Day (Luis Buñuel, 1966).
Swiss poster postcard by CVB Publishers, no. 56983. Affiche: René Ferracci / Collection Cinématèque Suisse / News Productions. Catherine Deneuve in Tristana (Luis Buñuel, 1970).
Chinese Postcard. Stéphane Audran, Bulle Ogier, Delphine Seyrig, Fernando Rey, Paul Frankeur, and Jean-Pierre Cassel in Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie / The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (Luis Buñuel, 1973).
Chinese postcard. Scene from Le fantôme de la liberté / The Phantom of Liberty (Luis Buñuel, 1974) with Michael Lonsdale.
German postcard by Kunst und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn. Photo: Stiftung Deutsche Kinemathek Berlin. Carole Bouquet and Fernando Rey in Cet obscur objet du désir / That Obscure Object of Desire (Luis Buñuel, 1977).
Sources: Luis Buñuel y El retablo de Maese Pedro de Manuel de Falla (MFA at En torno a Luis Buñuel - Spanish), Delpher, Wikipedia and IMDb
