Iconic Luis Buñuel Movies - Masterworks of Surrealist Cinema and Subversive Dissent

A razor cutting an eye open, shown in a disturbing closeup, is one of the most memorable scenes from film history. It is a scene that is impossible to forget, especially as a few shots before, a young girl is shown handled by a man weaving the razor. The link is impossible to escape.

The scene is from the film An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou), 1929, directed by Luis Buñuel. A gigantic figure of Spanish cinema, Buñuel is remembered as a powerful, pugnacious figure in a portrait by his friend and collaborator Salvador Dalí. 

Both being part of the surrealist movement led by André Breton, Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí met as students and made two films, the mentioned An Andalusian Dog and L’Age d’Or. The sequence from Un Chien when a razor slices through an eyeball and a cloud crosses the moon is still considered the classical surrealist dream image. 

Featured image: Spanish director Luis Bunuel, An Andalusian Dog (Un Chien Andalou), film still, 1929, via Creative Commons

Buñuel remained devoted to the aesthetics of the irrational in his subsequent films and created an impressive list of works that shifted the boundaries of the medium. Born in 1900 in Calanda, Spain, Buñuel’s career covered most of the 20th century, and it could be said that he went with the times, exploring the leading ideas and themes of the period up until his death in 1983 in Mexico City. He was a pioneer of the Surrealist cinema and is regarded as the artist who most effectively realized the movement’s aims of emancipation from the rational, linear narrative. 

Luis Buñuel’s movies have an intense, frightening, and visceral character that sets them apart from many other Surrealist movies by other directors like Man Ray or Hans Richter. They feature astonishing contrasts between the real and the fantastical and address the complexity and agony of the human sexual drive with uncompromising images.

As one of his frequent collaborators, Jean-Claude Carrière, explained, Buñuel was the only filmmaker who “has known the Middle Ages” and was nostalgic about the calm period of his childhood, when, in his own words, “one had an interior life.” 

In 1972, Buñuel won an Oscar for Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. He is remembered for his films that pushed viewers out of their comfort zones, showing violence, cruelty, decay, bodily waste, and other desecrations of the human body that destroyed assumptions about existence and reality.  

We exalted passion, mystification, black humor, the insult, and the call of the abyss.

Featured image: Luis Buñuel, That Obscure Object of Desire, film still. 

That Obscure Object of Desire

The first on our list of Luis Buñuel’s movies is 1977 comedy-drama film That Obscure Object of Desire (Ese oscuro objeto del deseo) is based on Pierre Lous’ 1898 novel The Woman and the Puppet. It was Buñuel’s final filmmaking project before his passing in July 1983.

The story is told through a series of flashbacks by an aging Frenchman named Mathieu (played by Fernando Rey), who recalls falling in love with a stunning young Spanish woman named Conchita (played alternately by two actresses, Carole Bouquet and  Ángela Molina), who repeatedly thwarts his romantic and sexual desires. This Luis Bunuel’s film is set in Spain and France against the backdrop of a terrorist insurgency.

Featured image: Spanish director Luis Buñuel – The Phantom of Liberty (French title Le Fantôme de la liberté), film still, 1974

The Phantom of Liberty

Director Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty (Le Fantôme de la liberté) is a 1974 surrealist comedy starring Adriana Asti, Julien Bertheau, and Jean-Claude Brialy. The work consists of a series of increasingly absurd and far-fetched incidents meant to challenge the viewer’s preconceived notions about the stability of social mores and reality and push into thinking about new social relations. 

Featured image: Spanish director Luis Buñuel – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, film still. 

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie ( Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie) the only of Buñuel’s films to have received an Oscar, centres on a group of affluent individuals trying to have a dinner together despite frequent interruptions.

The movie was a critical and commercial hit. The film directed by Buñuel received the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film as well as BAFTA Awards for Best Original Screenplay (Buñuel, Carrière) and Best Actress in a Leading Role (Audran).

Featured image: Luis Buñuel – Belle de Jour, film still. 

Belle de Jour

Luis Bunuel film Belle de Jour features Catherine Deneuve, Jean Sorel, and Michel Piccoli. It is a 1967 drama based on the 1928 novel by Joseph Kessel that depicts a young woman who works as a high-class prostitute in the afternoons while her husband is at work. The film won the Award for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival in 1967, with critics praising Deneuve’s performance as one of her finest. 

Featured image: Luis Buñuel – The Exterminating Angel, film still. 

The Exterminating Angel

The Exterminating Angel (El ángel exterminador) was filmed in 1962 in Mexico, starring Silvia Pinal. The film is an acerbic take on the aristocracy and the savage instincts and secrets it hides. The story follows a group of guests who cannot leave a dinner party after it is over.

The film is listed in the 1000 best films in film history and has influenced the horror genre with the plot depicting a descending into anarchy. At the Cannes Film Festival in 1962 the film received the International Federation of Film Critics (FIPRESCI) award.

Featured image: Luis Buñuel, Los Olvidados, film still. 

Los Olvidados

Los Olvidados or The Forgotten Ones (in the US known as The Young and the Damned) was filmed at Tepeyac Studios in Mexico City in 1950. It is a teen crime film that depicts children in poverty in Mexico.

Although primarily done in the tradition of socialist realism, the movie also contains elements of surrealism, such as a slow-motion dream sequence and a shot of a shattered egg against the camera lens. Buñuel received the Best Director award at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival. 

An Andalusian Dog

The first Buñuel film, An Andalusian Dog or Un Chien Andalou, is considered a masterpiece of early cinema and surrealist considerations translated on screen. The short, silent film produced in 1929 was a collaborative effort of young director Buñuel and his friend Salvador Dalí.

The movie follows aesthetic and narrative tropes of surrealism as it lacks a conventional plot and a sense of the world. The fragmented narrative jumps from one time to another without significant changes in the characters, while the dream sections intercept what would be reality. Starting with a cult scene of an eye slashing, the movie follows a young man and a woman as they find themselves in different, bizarre situations.

The film championed the free-association technique and was inspired by Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, which was the guiding post of the whole surrealist movement.