Summing up his career, the late, great Luis Bunuel said, "Religious education and surrealism have marked me for life."
That appraisal is very much in evidence in "Regarding Bunuel", an extensively researched documentary about the uncompromising social satirist and founding father of surrealist cinema. The film screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
While employing the usual mixture of archival footage, film clips and fresh interviews with many of the filmmaker's colleagues and collaborators, directors Jose Luis Lopez-Linares and Javier Rioyo manage to dig quite a bit deeper than the average screen biography. This means that the result is somewhat heavy duty for those in the market for a Bunuel primer. Film buffs, on the other hand, will be dazzled by the impressive content.
Given that Bunuel died in 1983 at age 83, it's pretty amazing that Lopez-Linares and Rioyo were able to track down as many of the filmmaker's contemporaries as they did, including childhood friends and even members of the clergy with whom he remained close -- even though he was often quoted as saying, "Thank God I'm still an atheist".
Interspersing observational passages from Bunuel's autobiography, "My Last Breath", the film moves efficiently from those formidable, Jesuit-educated years to his cafe-society existence in Madrid, where he regularly hung out with Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca.
All the career milestones are neatly covered, beginning with the unsettling "Un Chien Andalou", his groundbreaking collaboration with Dali that was designed to rattle the bourgeoisie, his lifelong target of choice.
The documentary touches upon his three-year gig working at the Museum of Modern Art, where among other things, he was responsible for editing down Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" before he was forced to resign in 1942 amid questions about his past communist sympathies.
Attention is also paid to Bunuel's extended Mexican period, starting with his internationally acclaimed "Los Olvidados" and, of course, his profitable French period -- in which biting social commentary, surrealism and his personal sexual obsessions made for a potent combination in the likes of "The Phantom of Liberty", "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire".
Judging from all the carefully chosen film clips, there was very little of Bunuel's life that didn't end up on screen in one form or another.
But the approach isn't all academic. Conversations with frequent script collaborator Jean Claude-Carriere and a number of Bunuel's actors, including Michel Piccoli and Carole Bouquet -- plus footage of Bunuel demonstrating the art of making the perfect martini -- reveal a man as fascinatingly complex and as cleverly mischievous as his remarkable work.
REGARDING BUNUEL
Cero En Conducta
Executive producers: Jose Luis Lopez-Linares, Jorge Sanchez
Directors: Jose Luis Lopez-Linares, Javier Rioyo
Screenwriter: Agustin Sanchez Vidal
Editor: Fidel Collados
Music: Mauricio Villavecchia
Color & black and white/stereo
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating...
That appraisal is very much in evidence in "Regarding Bunuel", an extensively researched documentary about the uncompromising social satirist and founding father of surrealist cinema. The film screened at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.
While employing the usual mixture of archival footage, film clips and fresh interviews with many of the filmmaker's colleagues and collaborators, directors Jose Luis Lopez-Linares and Javier Rioyo manage to dig quite a bit deeper than the average screen biography. This means that the result is somewhat heavy duty for those in the market for a Bunuel primer. Film buffs, on the other hand, will be dazzled by the impressive content.
Given that Bunuel died in 1983 at age 83, it's pretty amazing that Lopez-Linares and Rioyo were able to track down as many of the filmmaker's contemporaries as they did, including childhood friends and even members of the clergy with whom he remained close -- even though he was often quoted as saying, "Thank God I'm still an atheist".
Interspersing observational passages from Bunuel's autobiography, "My Last Breath", the film moves efficiently from those formidable, Jesuit-educated years to his cafe-society existence in Madrid, where he regularly hung out with Salvador Dali and Federico Garcia Lorca.
All the career milestones are neatly covered, beginning with the unsettling "Un Chien Andalou", his groundbreaking collaboration with Dali that was designed to rattle the bourgeoisie, his lifelong target of choice.
The documentary touches upon his three-year gig working at the Museum of Modern Art, where among other things, he was responsible for editing down Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" before he was forced to resign in 1942 amid questions about his past communist sympathies.
Attention is also paid to Bunuel's extended Mexican period, starting with his internationally acclaimed "Los Olvidados" and, of course, his profitable French period -- in which biting social commentary, surrealism and his personal sexual obsessions made for a potent combination in the likes of "The Phantom of Liberty", "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" and "That Obscure Object of Desire".
Judging from all the carefully chosen film clips, there was very little of Bunuel's life that didn't end up on screen in one form or another.
But the approach isn't all academic. Conversations with frequent script collaborator Jean Claude-Carriere and a number of Bunuel's actors, including Michel Piccoli and Carole Bouquet -- plus footage of Bunuel demonstrating the art of making the perfect martini -- reveal a man as fascinatingly complex and as cleverly mischievous as his remarkable work.
REGARDING BUNUEL
Cero En Conducta
Executive producers: Jose Luis Lopez-Linares, Jorge Sanchez
Directors: Jose Luis Lopez-Linares, Javier Rioyo
Screenwriter: Agustin Sanchez Vidal
Editor: Fidel Collados
Music: Mauricio Villavecchia
Color & black and white/stereo
Running time -- 105 minutes
No MPAA rating...
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