El presente volumen incluye una amplia variedad de artículos sobre la figura de Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), escritos por algunos de los especialistas más prominentes dentro del mundo de los estudios fímicos. Se trata de una colección única, que por primera vez recoge en un mismo volumen trabajos en español, francés e inglés. Tal decisión no sólo supone una muestra de respeto hacia los tres idiomas en los que se expresó Buñuel, sino que es también una forma de poner en evidencia el reconocimiento que su obra ha tenido y tiene en los entornos francófono y anglófono, además del hispano. Este libro nace con la ambición de abarcar la totalidad del trabajo de Buñuel, principalmente sus películas, pero también sus escritos. Cuenta, además, con capítulos que abordan cuestiones biográficas, como las relaciones de Buñuel con otros cineastas de la época, o con escritores y artistas. El Buñuel que emerge de estas páginas confirma el hecho de que el director aragonés sigue siendo uno de los cineastas más famosos e influyentes del siglo XX. Los capítulos aquí reunidos dan cuenta de todas las fases de su carrera: la primera etapa surrealista, sus colaboraciones con Dalí, su amistad con Lorca y con otros autores coetáneos, su trabajo en Filmófono, los años del exilio y la fase tardía y más internacional. En distitntas contribuciones se concede importancia a la forma, la ideología, la temática, las "películas alimenticias" de su periodo mexicano y las más personales y artísticas, consideradas su legado más universal y perdurable.

The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause. Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 investigates Buñuel’s commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmófono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935–36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buñuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism. Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director’s life is scant and relies on Buñuel’s own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buñuel’s accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buñuel’s “Red Years” that abounds in new information.

A Companion to Luis Buñuel presents a collection of critical readings by many of the foremost film scholars that examines and reassesses myriad facets of world-renowned filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s life, works, and cinematic themes. A collection of critical readings that examine and reassess the controversial filmmaker’s life, works, and cinematic themes Features readings from several of the most highly-regarded experts on the cinema of Buñuel Includes a multidisciplinary range of approaches from experts in film studies, Hispanic studies, Surrealism, and theoretical concepts such as those of Gilles Deleuze Presents a previously unpublished interview with Luis Buñuel’s son, Juan Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel: A Life in Letters provides access for the first time to an annotated English-language version of around 750 of the most important and most widely relevant of these letters. Buñuel (1900-1983) came to international attention with his first films, Un Chien Andalou (with Dalí, 1929) and L'Âge d'Or (1930): two surprisingly avant-garde productions that established his position as the undisputed master of Surrealist filmmaking. He went on to make 30 full-length features in France, the US and Mexico, and consolidated his international reputation with a Palme d'Or for Viridiana in 1961, and an Academy Award in 1973 for The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. He corresponded with some of the most famous writers, directors, actors and artists of his generation and the list of these correspondents reads like a roll call of major twentieth-century cultural icons: Fellini, Truffaut, Vigo, Aragon, Dalí, Unik - and yet none of this material has been accessible outside specialist archives and a very small number of publications in Spanish and French.

As one of the foremost Spanish directors of all time, Luis Buñuel’s filmography has been the subject of innumerable studies. Despite the fact that the twenty films he made in Mexico between 1947 and 1965 represent the most prolific stage of his career as a filmmaker, these have remained relatively neglected in writing on Buñuel and his work. This book focuses on nine of the director’s films made in Mexico in order to show that a concerted focus on space, an important aspect of the films’ narratives that is often intimated by scholars, yet rarely developed, can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work. Although in recent years Buñuel’s Mexican films have begun to enjoy a greater presence in criticism on the director, they are often segregated according to their perceived critical value, effectively creating two substrands of work: the independent movies and the studio potboilers. The interdisciplinary approach of this book unites the two, focusing on films such as Los olvidados, Nazarín, and El ángel exterminador alongside La Mort en ce jardin, The Young One, and Simón del desierto, among others. In doing so, it avoids the tropes most often associated with Buñuel’s cinema—surrealism, Catholicism, the derision of the bourgeoisie—and the approach most often invoked in analysis of these themes: psychoanalysis. Instead, this book takes inspiration from the fields of human geography, anthropology, and philosophy, applying these to film-focused readings of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema to argue that ultimately these films depict an overriding sense of placelessness, overtly or subliminally enacting a search for belonging that forces the viewer to question what it means to be in place.

The first extended study of Bunuel's Mexican films, which consititute a significant but neglected part of the great film maker's career.