A detailed interpretation of nine of the Spanish director's films focuses on the style, technique and themes of his work.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • A provocative memoir from Luis Buñuel, the Academy Award winning creator of some of modern cinema's most important films, from Un Chien Andalou to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Luis Buñuel’s films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world. Now, in a memoir that carries all the surrealism and subversion of his cinema, Buñuel turns his artistic gaze inward. In swift and generous prose, Buñuel traces the surprising contours of his life, from the Good Friday drumbeats of his childhood to the dreams that inspired his most famous films to his turbulent friendships with Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. His personal narratives also encompass the pressing political issues of his time, many of which still haunt us today—the specter of fascism, the culture wars, the nuclear bomb. Filled with film trivia, framed by Buñuel’s intellect and wit, this is essential reading for fans of cinema and for anyone who has ever wanted to see the world through a surrealist’s eyes.

A detailed interpretation of nine of the Spanish director's films focuses on the style, technique and themes of his work.

A study of Luis Buñuel's Oscar-winning masterpiece The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was one of the truly great film-makers of the twentieth century. Shaped by a repressive Jesuit education and a bourgeois family background, he reacted against both, escaped to Paris, and was soon embraced by André Breton's official surrealist group. His early films are his most aggressive and shocking, the slicing of the eyeball in Un Chien andalou (1929) one of the most memorable episodes in the history of cinema. The Forgotten Ones (1950) and He (1952), made in Mexico, were followed, from 1960, in Spain and France, by the films for which he is best known: Viridiana (1961), Belle de jour (1966), Tristana (1970), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). Gwynne Edwards analyses the films in the context of Buñuel's personal obsessions - sex, bourgeois values, and religion - suggesting that the film-maker experienced a degree of sexual inhibition surprising in a surrealist. GWYNNE EDWARDS is Professor of Spanish at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth.

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.

Cinema has been a fortunate art form. It has the immense good fortune to seduce Luis Buñuel, one of the most brilliant representatives of the surrealist movement, into making films and continue making them with unflagging fidelity to his principle for 50 years.

Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia is a comprehensive reference work of some 1,700 entries in two volumes. Its scope includes all of Europe and the successor states to the former Soviet Union. The volumes provide a broad coverage of topics, with an emphasis on politics, governments, organizations, people, and events crucial to an understanding of postwar Europe. Also includes 100 maps and photos.

As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Bunuel's cinema. Much has been written about his first Surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s and the French art movies of the 1960s and 1970s. However, here for the first time is a queer re-reading of Bunuel's Spanish-language films allowing us to view Bunuel's cinema through a lens of queer spectatorship. Focusing on the films Bunuel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla argues not that Bunuel's films have a homosexual subplot, but that there are multiple forms of identity, subjectivity and sexuality present in these films."Queering Bunuel" brings together the fields of film studies, feminist and queer theory, Hispanic studies, psychoanalysis and art theory. Gutierrez-Albilla succeeds in reconceptualizing Bunuel's Mexican and Spanish films beyond geographical, historical and disciplinary boundaries, questioning not just how we see Bunuel, but also how we see cinema.

Uniquely, the book offers an extended analysis of Bunuel's films in the context of contemporary debates in film studies, focusing in particular on questions of subjectivity and desire. Throughout, Bunuel's films are viewed as both the brilliant, subversive expressions of the director's fantasies and obsessions and as reflections of wider cultural norms and preoccupations. Making use of psychoanalysis and gender theory, Peter Evans explores Bunuel's characteristic thematics of transgression and his status as exile or outsider.