Luis Bunuel Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Formation
Luis Bunuel Portoles was born in 1900 in Calanda, Aragon, Spain, into a traditional, provincial household that impressed on him the rituals and discipline of Catholic Spain. As a young man he moved to Madrid, where the Residencia de Estudiantes brought him into close contact with a brilliant circle that shaped his intellectual life. There he befriended the poet Federico Garcia Lorca and the painter Salvador Dali, relationships that sharpened his taste for aesthetic rebellion and for the liberating possibilities of dreams, desire, and irreverent humor. At the university he absorbed philosophy, literature, and the emergent ideas of the European avant-garde, preparing him for the decisive move to Paris in the late 1920s.

Surrealist Breakthrough
In Paris, Bunuel entered the orbit of the Surrealists and the modern art world. He worked in the film industry, learned the craft on sets, and fused cinematic technique with the shock tactics of Surrealist art. With Salvador Dali he created Un Chien Andalou (1929), an explosive short composed from dreams, irrational associations, and a ruthless refusal of narrative logic. The film's success led to L'Age d'Or (1930), an even more corrosive attack on social and religious hypocrisy, which provoked scandal and censorship. In these works Bunuel established a method that would define his career: rigorous control of framing and rhythm, images born from the subconscious, and a cold, ironic gaze turned upon bourgeois morality.

Experiment and Political Upheaval
Returning to Spain, Bunuel made Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933), a stark pseudo-ethnographic portrait of poverty. The anarchist Ramon Acin, who had promised to finance the film if he won the lottery, indeed became its patron. The Spanish Civil War and its aftermath shattered any possibility of a stable career in his homeland. Bunuel supported the Republican cause and, like many artists of his generation, entered a long exile that took him to the United States and then to Mexico. In the U.S. he worked around film archives and studios, maintaining contact with cinema while looking for a new base from which to direct.

Mexican Renaissance
Mexico offered Bunuel a home and a production system open to experimentation. Producer Oscar Dancigers helped him reenter feature filmmaking with Gran Casino (1947) and El Gran Calavera (1949). Soon he delivered Los Olvidados (1950), a ferocious portrait of urban marginality whose blend of realism and oneiric ruptures won him Best Director at Cannes and stirred intense debate in Mexico. Across the next decade he explored desire, jealousy, and religious obsession in films such as Susana, El, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz, and Nazarin. In Mexico he built a team: screenwriters Luis Alcoriza and later Julio Alejandro, and the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, whose precise, high-contrast images matched Bunuel's austere style. The actress Silvia Pinal became a key collaborator, and with producer Gustavo Alatriste she helped enable Viridiana, shot in Spain but born from this Mexican nexus.

Viridiana and European Recognition
Viridiana (1961), starring Silvia Pinal and Fernando Rey, won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and was then banned in Spain, a perfect emblem of Bunuel's capacity to provoke authority with cool elegance. The Exterminating Angel (1962) returned to Mexico for a parable of trapped dinner guests and inexhaustible ritual, a synthesis of social satire and metaphysical dread. Simon of the Desert (1965), again with Pinal, condensed his fascination with sanctity and temptation into a wry, minimalist fable.

Late Masterpieces and Collaborations
With the French producer Serge Silberman and the writer Jean-Claude Carriere, Bunuel embarked on a late period of extraordinary vitality. Belle de Jour (1967), fronted by Catherine Deneuve, fused bourgeois decorum with secret erotic life. The Milky Way (1969) drifted across heresies and miracles, a road movie of theological debate. Tristana (1970), shot in Spain with Deneuve and Fernando Rey, examined power, dependency, and vengeance. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) used serial interruptions to fracture the polite rituals of class; it won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The Phantom of Liberty (1974) pushed episodic structure to a surreal extreme, and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), with Carole Bouquet and Angela Molina alternating the same role, crystallized Bunuel's method: desire as an endlessly deferred, self-undoing pursuit.

Style, Method, and Themes
Bunuel's filmmaking married a lucid, economical mise-en-scene with images from dreams and memory. He storyboarded carefully, prized clarity of line over ornament, and used music sparingly. His films mock the idle comforts of the bourgeoisie, reveal the violence buried in respectability, and confront the entanglement of faith and repression. Religious imagery recurs not as piety but as inquiry and provocation, while animals, insects, and everyday objects acquire unsettling symbolic weight. The deadpan tone, precise camera placements, and abrupt ellipses make the irrational feel ordinary and the ordinary uncanny.

Personal Life and Working Relationships
In 1934 Bunuel married Jeanne Rucar, a partnership that endured through exile and constant travel; their household in Mexico City gave him the stability he required to work. Early friendships with Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali informed his sensibility, even as his path diverged from theirs. In Mexico he relied on Oscar Dancigers, Luis Alcoriza, Julio Alejandro, Gabriel Figueroa, Silvia Pinal, and Gustavo Alatriste; in Europe, Serge Silberman and Jean-Claude Carriere became indispensable. Carriere, especially, helped transform ideas into precise scripts, and their collaboration extended to Bunuel's memoir, My Last Sigh, a final reckoning with memory and method.

Legacy
Bunuel became a naturalized Mexican citizen and remained an artist of two continents, binding Spanish cultural memory to Mexican modernity and French production networks. He died in Mexico City in 1983, having left a body of work that reshaped narrative cinema's possibilities. Admired by generations of filmmakers and critics, he demonstrated that rigorous form could house the unruly energies of dreams, and that satire could proceed with the quietest of voices. His films continue to unsettle and delight, proof that the surreal need not be shouted to be unforgettable.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Luis, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Freedom - Free Will & Fate - Human Rights - Letting Go.