09-22-2025, 07:10 PM
This biography of the grand master of surrealistic film, Luis Bunuel is an incident filled and inspiring rampage through the 20th Century and an illuminating history of the fractious relationships that birthed the combustable surrealistic movement.
Perhaps the ultimate independent filmmaker, the subject emerges as a unique, complex man of at times contradictory, tortured emotions and impulses whose vision of a chaotic universe of chance and cruelty inhabited by hapless, deluded humans at the mercy of mysterious desires while either searching fruitlessly for or trying to impose order and meaning on the unknowable while invariably bringing more misery on others and/or themselves is by turns mordantly funny and melancholy.
Bunuel seemingly had no wish for either himself or his work to be remembered, but if the deeply subversive motivations that lay behind the eruption of surrealism have seemingly been blunted by a thousand stupid ad campaigns this singular man's fascinating life and work stand as stirring rallying call for that constant revolution of the imagination when faced with the terrible banality of rationalised, institutionalised evil.
Perhaps the ultimate independent filmmaker, the subject emerges as a unique, complex man of at times contradictory, tortured emotions and impulses whose vision of a chaotic universe of chance and cruelty inhabited by hapless, deluded humans at the mercy of mysterious desires while either searching fruitlessly for or trying to impose order and meaning on the unknowable while invariably bringing more misery on others and/or themselves is by turns mordantly funny and melancholy.
Bunuel seemingly had no wish for either himself or his work to be remembered, but if the deeply subversive motivations that lay behind the eruption of surrealism have seemingly been blunted by a thousand stupid ad campaigns this singular man's fascinating life and work stand as stirring rallying call for that constant revolution of the imagination when faced with the terrible banality of rationalised, institutionalised evil.