BY PEDRO GARCIA CUETO
Luis Buñuel was born on February 22, 1900, the son of Leonardo Buñuel and María Portolés Cerezuela. His father had been in Cuba and received the nickname Weyler, in memory of General Vañeriano Weyler, Captain General of Cuba from 1896 and 1897. Leonardo was from Indiana and María, a native of Calanda. In 1901 a sister of Luis was born, named María del Pilar who came into the world on March 7 of that year. On May 22, 1904, another Buñuel sister was born, María de la Concepción Rita (Conchita), Luis's favorite sister. Leonardo had a mansion built in the center of Calanda, as a home, it had three floors and an attic and a modernist façade.
Buñuel's parents decided that Luis would begin his studies with the Corazionistas, who had settled in Calle Independencia, 29. The Corazionistas were a group of French religious from the Brothers of the Sacred Heart. They were the ones who taught Buñuel to read in Spanish and French. In 1908, he left the Corazionistas and began his studies with the Jesuits at the Colegio del Salvador, famous in the Aragonese capital. Throughout the 1908-1909 and 1909-1910 academic years, the Jesuits prepared Luis for the formal examination at the school. Subjects included Catechism, Grammar, Arithmetic, and Geometry.
Luis's parents had five children, the last one born on March 19, 1909, named Leonardo Tomás José. In the Jesuits, Luis Buñuel had to accept a strict discipline that did not go well with his rebellious character. Between the sepulchral silence that was imposed in the school, the catechism every day, the lives of saints, apologetics, scholastic argumentation, etc; Buñuel's life was a torment there.
On the morning of April 17, 1910, he received his first communion in the school chapel. Two months later, on June 10, 1910, he appeared before the court of the General and Technical Institute of Zaragoza. It was the entrance exam to the same, a necessary step to integrate into the state education system and to be able to be examined every year, as a collegiate student in El Salvador, in the Baccalaureate subjects. In the fall of that year he started high school.
His first contact with the world of cinema and theater took place in Calanda, when the nanny took him to all the shows, including the circus. She recalled in My Last Breath, her memoirs an operetta she attended based on Jules Verne's The Sons of Captain Grant.
The future director began, already at the age of fourteen, in 1914, to frequent the theaters and cinemas of Zaragoza. That December he goes to the luxurious Salón Doré to see Salammbó. He also attends the theater, since the Buñuels have a box in the Principal theater, there he will see La vida es sueño and El mayor de Zalamea by Calderón de la Barca performed for the first time. He will frequent at that time, given the comfortable situation of the family, the opera and the zarzuela. He then begins, from 1915, his hobby to go out masked, he loves costumes. He is also fond of music, playing the violin at the house of his friend Tomás Pelayo and his aunt Felisa.
Buñuel begins to see comic films, the tapes of the prolific French comedian Max Linder. All this gradually turns Buñuel into a fan of the world of comedy and art, enthusiastic about everything he sees.
At the age of 15, he already behaved irreverently and controversially with the Jesuits, when he began to drink, which led to a punishment without being able to play the drum for two days in Calanda.
In June 1915 he was expelled from the Jesuits when there were only two years left to finish high school. The family went to spend the summer in San Sebastián. He begins to study at the Public Institute and in November 2015, his mother, María Portolés, gave birth to his seventh and last child.
Luis did well at the Zaragoza General and Technical Institute, with fairly high grades. Some friends remembered that Buñuel was a regular in school gangs. He gets acceptable grades in high school and finally finishes high school.
He arrived in Madrid in 1917 and entered the Student Residence run by Alberto Jiménez Fraud. On June 5, 1918, nine months after arriving in Madrid, he entered the Royal Spanish Society of Natural History, founded in 1871, whose magazine states that Luis was a student of Agricultural Engineers, especially attracted to entomology.
The first meeting with what would be his girlfriend, Concha Méndez, Alberti's future wife, took place in the summer of 1918. They met at a dance. They were introduced by the Aragonese Miguel Antonio Catalánn, Ramón Menéndez Pidal's son-in-law, at a dance in Monte Igualdo. They were two privileged people, with rich parents, who spent the summer on the famous La Concha beach. The future poet and future wife of Alberti was a very remarkable gymnast and swimming champion.
Of the many anecdotes about Luis's fondness for boxing, there is one that deserves to be told and that was told by a former resident to his nephew Pedro Christian: "Luis was boxing, barefoot as was his custom, against a very tall architecture student named Herrera Sanchez. He refereed me. When Luis was about to win, a teammate named Casanova threw a bucket of water on top of him, an action that Herrera took advantage of to hit him with a phenomenal blow. While Luis was on the ground, Casanova ran towards the Residence and took refuge in his room on the second floor, barricading himself with furniture. Luis, seeing that he could not enter through the door, went outside, barefoot scaled the façade around its corner, entered through a balcony and after shaking him, threw him several times into the patio.
It is true that Buñuel used many anecdotes to bring them to his films, as happened in El perro andaluz and La edad de oro, where anecdotes lived in the Residence appear, but taken to the extreme of Surrealism. This is how the Aragonese filmmaker was peculiar in everything.
To Concha, Luis' attitude seemed like that of a person who only lived for boxing and insects. So much so, that in the spring of 1919 a Boxing Championship was organized in Spain. In the championship he entered he lost the match. Natalía Cossio, wife of Alberto Jiménez Fraud, remembered Luis "always walking, running fast, always running."
Luis Buñuel began to attend the Pombo gathering, which was run by Ramón Gómez de la Serna and also became a friend of the ultraístas, a movement created by Guillermo de la Torre.
He met Lorca at the Residencia de Estudiantes in April 1919, when he offered a recital at the Residencia. Lorca has just arrived at the Residence. Buñuel was already in a relationship with José Bello Lasierra, known as Pepín Bello, who has been at the aforementioned school since 1915, as Buñuel.
In 1920, Luis Buñuel enrolled, apparently without his father's permission, as a student of the well-known entomologist Ignacio Bolívar, director of the Museum of Natural Sciences. He was already friends with the writer Max Aub at that time.
Luis was assigned for military service to the First Light Artillery Regiment, located in the dilapidated Daoiz y Vearde Barracks, on Calle de Pacífico (now Ciudad de Barcelona Avenue). Buñuel's military service lasted fourteen months, ending on December 1, 1922.
As soon as he graduated, he continued his period at the Residence, meeting Salvador Dalí who entered it in September 1922. They became very close friends.
In 1923, his father died, specifically on May 1 of that year. His cause of death was pneumonia. But Buñuel continued his studies until finishing his degree in Philosophy and Letters (History Section) in 1924. Luis put on plays at the Residence, because he was already passionate about theater and cinema.
He arrived in Paris in 1925, to get to know the capital of art and influenced by the surrealism of the time. He settled in the Latin Quarter. He lives in Paris for three years, in which he meets Jeanne Rucar, whom he will marry. Jeanne was a gymnast and fell in love with the future director. In Paris he hangs out with Jean Epstein, goes to the movies a lot and gets close to the surrealist movement.
In May 1926 Buñuel briefly returned to Madrid after an absence of almost a year and a half. There he met Dalí and Lorca. It would be the last time the three of them were together. As a document, there is a photo in the Jardins de la Bombilla, near Manzanares, next to José Moreno Villa and another friend of the group from the Student Residence, José Rubio Sacristán-
After his visit to Madrid, Luis stayed a few days with his mother in Zaragoza. He then teamed up with Jean Epstein's team for Mauprat's location shoots in Châtearoux and Romorantin. The shoot allowed him to get to know Epstein better. They say they got along well. There is an important document that occurred during filming, in Romorantin, where Buñuel appears dressed as a monk, we already know that he was very fond of costumes since he was a child. He continues to send postcards to Lorca, with whom he still gets along well.
On September 14, 1926, Buñuel wrote to Sánchez Cuesta again to tell you about his project to take Goya's life to the cinema. He wants to start shooting in January. He had already thought of the script that he should start when Goya is a teenager and he wanted to focus it on his relationship with the Duchess of Alba.
In the middle of 1926 Buñuel received a letter from Dalí from Cadaqués. Buñuel follows the lives of both and maintains epistolary contact. The director began to write in La Gaceta Literaria, from 1927, thanks to his friendship with Claudio de la Torre. He does it through movie reviews.
In number 7 of the Literary Gazette, specifically on April 1, 1927, the Aragonese published his first article on film theory, specifically on the filmmaker DW Griffith. For Buñuel, the American filmmaker is the creator of the image, of true photogenicity, far removed from caricature and vaudeville. He already speaks of sensitivity when writing criticism.
It will begin from 1927, the avant-garde cinema in the Student Residence. On May 15 of that year it was commented in La Gaceta Literaria that a cycle of films was going to start at La Residencia. The first screening was held on May 21 of that year and was a great success. It was, for the Aragonese filmmaker, the return home after all the time he spent away. In My last breath, Buñuel's memoirs, he commented that Ortega himself told him that if he had been younger he would have devoted himself to cinema.
He did not abandon his film reviews, one of them about Abel Gance's Napoleon, he was quite negative about the film, commenting that it was the "failure of the Latin spirit in the cinema."
Buñuel decided to set up a Hamlet at the Residence. He was accompanied by Francisco García Lorca, brother of Federico, Augusto Centeno, Francisco Bores, Hernando Viñes and Joaquín Peinado. The Aragonese filmmaker did not include women in the cast, since the two female characters (Leticia and Margarita) were represented by men.
The idea is the comic, therefore, the work is full of gags. Mithridates, for example, offers Hamlet a cigarette and when Hamlet accepts it he challenges him to a duel if he lights it.
The play aroused a lot of interest and proved how irreverent Buñuel was when it came to facing the world of theater. The filmmaker did not forget film criticism, working as a reviewer at the Cahiers d'Art, with two reviews of The Way of All Flesh by Victor Fleming and College by Buster Keaton.
It began then, although he already admired the comedian, his passion for the actor, the film recounted the athletic-sports obsessions in the universities of that time. For the Aragonese filmmaker, Buster Keaton represents the absence of the sentimental, the director being aware that the new comic cinema no longer has to abuse the sentimental, as Chaplin did.
Literary work is increasingly fruitful, as Buñuel becomes director of the film section of La Gaceta Literaria. Buñuel will be very hard with La Mariana Pineda de Lorca and with the bullfighter Sánchez Mejías who did not respond to his letters. He breaks up with Jean Epstein, when Buñuel wrote negatively about the director Abel Gance, who had been the surrealist's teacher.
Another displeasure for the Aragonese filmmaker was the appearance of Lorca's Gypsy Ballads, since he considered that the ballads were full of stereotyped images and Dañi went so far as to say that those who had praised Lorca's book were "great rotten pigs"-
Proof of the Aragonese filmmaker's reaction to Lorca's Romacero was the letter of September 14, 1928 to Pepín Bello in which he said that the book, in his opinion, was very bad, despite participating "in the fine and approximately modern that any poetry of today must have to be liked by the Andrenios, the Baezas and the faggots and Cernudos poets of Seville”.
At the beginning of 1929 Luis, who had already returned to Madrid, announced to Pepín Bello that he was going to work with Dalí on an idea he had for a film project. He spent fifteen days in Figueras, where he was forging El perro andaluz. Every afternoon Luis took the typewriter and smoked, while he thought of an idea for the film, then discussed it with Dalí.
In thirteen days they already have the script and walking through Barcelona they meet the prestigious journalist Josep Puig Pujades, and he talks to him about the script he has written together with Dali. Its original title was ¡Vaya Marista!, there were eight typed pages, whose title was replaced by An Andalusian dog. On March 22, 1929, Buñuel wrote to Dalí to tell him that he already had a studio and would start shooting on April 2. For the role of the main character, she had Pierre Batchef, according to Jeanne Rucar, the actor looked at her in a somewhat lustful way. Buñuel's wife acted as assistant and seamstress during the film. It premiered at the Studio des Ursulines on the night of Thursday, June 6, 1929. It was a social event and left no one indifferent due to its provocative spirit. Lorca, who had distanced himself from Buñuel and Dalí, always thought that the dog thing Andalusian was referring to him.
In 1930 he released La edad de oro, a film absolutely critical of the Church, which raised dust in ecclesiastical sectors. The Golden Age ran in one room for twelve days until conservative protesters rioted during the screening. When he received the news of the altercation, Buñuel was in Hollywood observing the work methods used by Metro Goldwyn Mayer.
It was October 17 when Luis picked up his immigration visa from the US embassy, they had already screened El perro andaluz at Studio 28 in March of that year.
Luis Buñuel settled in an apartment in the house where Eduardo Ugarte Pagés lived, on Oakhurst Drive, in Beverly Hills. He had money from his mother and the first thing he did when he arrived at the movie mecca was buy a car –a Ford-, a rifle and a Leica, a camera that will accompany him for the rest of his life.
A few days later he was introduced to producer-director Irving Thalberg, the big boss of Metro Goldwyn Mayer and also to Albert Lewin, who was Thalberg's man in charge of welcoming foreigners to the Mecca of cinema.
Ivor Montagu in his book In Hollywood with Eisenstein tells that Buñuel frequented the house of Charles Chaplin and comments that the famous actor and director spoke Spanish very well. José López Rubio was also in Hollywood. These, Ugarte, Edgar Neville (who lived at that time in the Mecca of cinema) and Buñuel begged Chaplin to let them appear as extras in City Lights (City Lights). Chaplin agreed.
It was a marked Christmas for Luis and his friends. It all began with Christmas Eve dinner at Tono and his wife's house, attended by Chaplin and Georgia Hale, as well as numerous Spanish friends, such as the famous playwright Gregorio Martínez Sierra and his lover, the actress Catalina Bárcena. He drank alcohol, despite the ban.
On New Year's Eve. Chaplin invited Buñuel and his friends to his house. The Aragonese filmmaker brought the brilliant comedian a copy of El perro andaluz that he made him project to his Filipino servant. It seems that in the first screening the servant fainted, due to the shocking images of Buñuel's film.
For the Aragonese filmmaker, the worst thing was not being able to direct in Hollywood, they did give him a small role in the film La fruta amarga, where he was a bartender. It should be added that La fruta amarga was co-directed by José López Rubio, who wrote the script by Tono.
The Aragonese filmmaker was convinced that American cinema was full of stereotypes, so he decided to create the "synoptic picture", it was a wooden board or cardboard where there are several mobile figures. The first indicated times, the second environments and the third, main characters.
He got to know Josef Von Sternberg there, who invited him to his table and Buñuel showed him the synoptic table. He was very interested in the inventions of the Aragonese filmmaker-
The cause for which he left Hollywood, in addition to the few opportunities to direct, have to do with the anecdote of Lili Damita (who in 1935 would marry the actor Errol Flynn). Irving Thalberg had ordered Buñuel to give his opinion about some tests to this French actress, made to verify if she spoke Spanish with an accent, to expand the sound system for the film El puente de San Luis Rey, where the actress worked. The Aragonese filmmaker said "Tell Mr. Thalberg that I don't want to see whores." This was the trigger for a letter from Frank Davis dated February 27, 1931, in which he explained that Metro Goldwyn Mayer had decided to abandon the production of films in Spanish.
Buñuel leaves the Mecca of Cinema, disinterested in the way of shooting and because he had run out of work.
When the Second Republic triumphed, Buñuel returned to Spain. But this purpose was cut short by the political situation in Spain and Buñuel decided to return to his friends. The film The Golden Age, which had aroused so much controversy, led the Aragonese filmmaker to alternate his stay between Madrid and Paris. But The Golden Age will raise a lot of controversy. Its premiere in Madrid took place on the morning of Sunday, November 31, 1931, at the Palacio de la Prensa cinema, located in Plaza del Callao, an imposing building inaugurated by Alfonso XIII in 1930. It was a unique, strictly private session, five pesetas the entrance. Among the audience was Ernesto Giménez Caballero, who was with Buñuel in Paris shortly after his return from Hollywood and had attended, invited by him, a private screening of the film. On August 15, in an article in La Gaceta Literaria, he published a review of the tape.
The Madrid premiere of the film was not a success, there was a lot of silence regarding the film, which was considered sacrilegious. The hostility of El Heraldo de Madrid, in an article filmed by Miguel Pérez Ferrero, comments that the film is stupid and that much more was expected from the director of El perro andaluz.
Curiously, it was Federico García Lorca who presented the film that day of the premiere. The atmosphere was tense. The filmmaker Carlos Velo, who attended the premiere, recalls the presence of two policemen in the room and the arrival of the Aragonese filmmaker with the rolls of the film in his coat.
Buñuel, after the failure of the tape, decides to go to Paris shortly after. It will be at the beginning of 1932. It seems that the filmmaker had joined the communist party between September 1931 and January 1932. In Paris he dedicated himself to watching movies and became closely related to the surrealists, Aragon, Breton, etc. Viscount Noailles became a great friend of Buñuel. In April of that year, at a party for the viscount, he met Giacometti.
The separation of the surrealist group came in 1932. There is a typed letter, preserved in the National Library, that the filmmaker addresses André Breton in which he informs him that he is leaving the movement. Shortly after he decides to return to Spain.
In 1933 he shot a magnificent documentary in Spain Las Hurdes, where he talks about the isolated mountainous region of Las Hurdes and the poverty and misery in which the peasants live. All the ills occurred in that place, such as malaria, goiter, etc.
Las Hurdes was financed with a lottery prize that won the producer, an anarchist friend of Buñuel's, Ramón Acín. The documentary is inspired by the book by Maurice Legendre, a French Hispanist who had written about the region in 1927. When he screened the documentary before the representatives of the Republican government elected in 1933, of conservative ideology, it was banned. Las Hurdes finally came to an end in 1936 with a grant from the progressive government that had just won the elections, the so-called Popular Front.
Buñuel will have to leave Spain in 1939, due to Franco's victory. He moved to New York, where he worked under the tutelage of Iris Barry, director of the MOMA film archive. Initially, Barry tasked him with overseeing the joint editing of two Nazi propaganda films. The idea was for Buñuel to film propaganda films, but he was soon censured for his intervention in the first proposals, branded as a communist.
Buñuel decided to go to Hollywood where he spent several years dubbing Warner Brothers productions. But the director did not feel fulfilled with his work in Hollywood, because he wanted to direct. His arrival in Mexico arose because the widow of Pierre Batcheff, star of El perro andaluz, Denise Tual, accompanied the country to prepare a film based on The House of Bernarda Alba by her former friend, Federico García Lorca. The film did not prosper, but it did open a door for Buñuel's collaboration in the country, with the intention of shooting movies.
A new phase began with Gran Casino in 1946, where the director directed Libertad Lamarque and Jorge Negrete, based on the novel El rudido del paraíso, by Michael Weber. He would come later El gran calavera, in 1949, with Fernando Soler and Rosario Granados and one of the best films of that time, Los olvidados, in 1950, with Estela Inda and Miguel Inclán. The story of juvenile delinquents in the poor neighborhoods of Mexico was a success. There are many movies that he will shoot in Mexico. The filming in English of Robinson Crusoe in 1951 and The Young Woman in 1960 stand out.
A very important film by Luis Buñuel is El ángel exterminador, shot in 1962, where the motley world of marginal beings who oppress the rich is raised. But before he had returned to Spain, to shoot the unforgettable Viridiana (1961). After reviewing the final script for the film, the censors removed the final scene. In order for the film not to lose the ending where Jorge stays with the two women, it was important to get the negatives out of Spain so that they could reach the film laboratories in Paris.
The only way was to hide the negatives of the film in a van containing a gang of bullfighters and the director and head to Paris. At the border, no one suspected them, as they were a gang of banderilleros. The film was able to be shown in Cannes in its entirety, but a Spanish priest, who worked for the Vatican, rioted at the end and the film was censored in Spain until Franco's death.
After the Viridiana event, Buñuel began his journey in France, shooting films in France. Diary of a Waitress (1964), Bella by Day (1966) and The Milky Way (1969), were shot in France. In between both films, he shot Simón del desierto, again in Mexico, in 1965. He once again had Silvia Pinal, a beautiful Mexican actress who was a marvelous Viridiana.
Although it took six years to shoot, Buñuel already had a script with Julio Alejandro that adapted Galdós Tristana's novel for film. The action, according to the script, was transferred from Madrid to Toledo, but the mistrust of the Spanish Government prevented filming. In the end, the censorship gave the go-ahead and it was possible to shoot in Toledo, in 1969.
The film was full of anecdotes, one of which was Fernando Rey's real tears when he found out that Tristana (a beautiful Catherine Deneuve) wants to get back together with him. The themes of mutilation, the young woman's missing leg, the oppressive world in which she lives under the protection of her old uncle are present. Also the macabre and dark universe of the director, where sexuality has fetish overtones. A Franco Nero, like the young man Tristana meets, completes the shortlist of those actors in a state of grace. The film ends badly, because tragedy is always present in the cinema of the Aragonese director.
In his next film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie we see a group of people who live their false world and the impossibility of realizing their dreams. He won the Hollywood Oscar for best foreign film in 1972. That same year, a famous dinner was held in honor of Buñuel, attended by great directors such as Cukor, Hitchcock, Robert Wise, William Wyler and Billy Wilder, among others.
Another important film from Buñuel's last stage was Ese oscuro objeto del deseo, shot in 1977, where Buñuel returned to his fetishist universe, in addition to the voyeurism present in the film. Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina represent Conchita, a young woman who, in some way, is an archetype of the Buñuelian woman, almost a doll, a being used by men.
The Aragonese director made his last trip to Spain in 1980, when he underwent surgery for prostate cancer. In 1981, fifty years after being banned, The Golden Age was re-released.
He died in Mexico City on July 29, 1983, due to liver and kidney disease, caused by cancer. That same year he had been named doctor honoris causa by the University of Zaragoza. There was no farewell ceremony for him, until in 1987 his ashes were scattered on Mount Tolocha, located in his hometown, Calanda.