1925–1930: Early French period , Buñuel's first film collaborator In 1925 Buñuel moved to Paris, where he began work as a secretary in an organization called the International Society of Intellectual Cooperation. He also became actively involved in cinema and theater, going to the movies as often as three times a day. Through these interests, he met a number of influential people, including the pianist
Ricardo Viñes, who was instrumental in securing Buñuel's selection as artistic director of the Dutch premiere of
Manuel de Falla's puppet-opera
El retablo de maese Pedro in 1926. He decided to enter the film industry and enrolled in a private film school run by
Jean Epstein and some associates. Before long, Buñuel was working for Epstein as an assistant director on
Mauprat (1926) and
La chute de la maison Usher (1928), and also for
Mario Nalpas on (
Siren of the Tropics) (1927), starring
Josephine Baker. He appeared on screen in a small part as a smuggler in
Jacques Feyder's
Carmen (1926). When Buñuel derisively rejected Epstein's demand that he assist Epstein's mentor,
Abel Gance, who was at the time working on the film
Napoléon, Epstein dismissed him angrily, saying "How can a little asshole like you dare to talk that way about a great director like Gance?" After parting with Epstein, Buñuel worked as film critic for
La Gaceta Literaria (1927) and ''
Les Cahiers d'Art (1928). He also collaborated with the celebrated writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna on the script for what he hoped would be his first film, "a story in six scenes" called Los caprichos''.
Un Chien Andalou (1929) After his apprenticeship with Epstein, Buñuel shot and directed a 16-minute short, , with
Salvador Dalí. The film, financed by Buñuel's mother, consists of a series of startling images of a
Freudian nature, starting with a woman's eyeball being sliced open with a razor blade. was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French
surrealist movement of the time and continues to be shown regularly in
film societies to this day. It has been called "the most famous short film ever made" by critic
Roger Ebert. The script was written in six days at Dalí's home in
Cadaqués. In a letter to a friend written in February 1929, Buñuel described the writing process: We had to look for the plot line. Dalí said to me, 'I dreamed last night of ants swarming around in my hands', and I said, 'Good Lord, and I dreamed that I had sliced somebody or other's eye. There's the film, let's go and make it.' '' (1929) In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole, Buñuel and Dalí made a cardinal point of eliminating all logical associations. In Buñuel's words: "Our only rule was very simple: no idea or image that might lend itself to a rational explanation of any kind would be accepted. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why". Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a popular success with the very audience he had wanted to insult, leading Buñuel to exclaim in exasperation: "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?" Although is a
silent film, during the original screening (attended by the elite of the Parisian art world), Buñuel played a sequence of phonograph records which he switched manually while keeping his pockets full of stones with which to pelt anticipated hecklers. After the premiere, Buñuel and Dalí were granted formal admittance to the tight-knit community of Surrealists, led by poet
André Breton. Late in 1929, on the strength of , Buñuel and Dalí were commissioned to make another short film by
Marie-Laurie and
Charles de Noailles, owners of a private cinema on the
Place des États-Unis and financial supporters of productions by Jacques Manuel,
Man Ray and
Pierre Chenal. desired a deliberate undermining of all bourgeois institutions, while Dalí, who eventually supported the Spanish fascist
Francisco Franco and various figures of the European aristocracy, wanted merely to cause a scandal through the use of various
scatological and anti-Catholic images. The friction between them was exacerbated when, at a dinner party in Cadaqués, Buñuel tried to throttle Dalí's girlfriend,
Gala, the wife of Surrealist poet
Paul Éluard. In consequence, Dalí had nothing to do with the actual shooting of the film. During the course of production, Buñuel worked around his technical ignorance by filming mostly in sequence and using nearly every foot of film that he shot. Buñuel invited friends and acquaintances to appear, for nothing, in the film; for example, anyone who owned a tuxedo or a party frock got a part in the salon scene. One early screening was taken over by members of the fascist
League of Patriots and the Anti-Jewish Youth Group, who hurled purple ink at the screen and then vandalised the adjacent art gallery, destroying a number of valuable surrealist paintings. The film was banned by the Parisian police "in the name of public order". The de Noailles, both Catholics, were threatened with
excommunication by
The Vatican because of the film's blasphemous final scene (which visually links
Jesus Christ with the writings of the
Marquis de Sade), so they made the decision in 1934 to withdraw all prints from circulation, and ''L'Age d'Or'' was not seen again until 1981, after their deaths, although a print was smuggled to England for private viewing. The furor was so great that the premiere of another film financed by the de Noailles,
Jean Cocteau's
The Blood of a Poet, had to be delayed for over two years until outrage over ''L'Age d'Or'' had died down. To make matters worse, Charles de Noailles was forced to withdraw his membership from the
Jockey Club. Concurrent with the
succès de scandale, both Buñuel and the film's leading lady,
Lya Lys, received offers of interest from
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and traveled to Hollywood at the studio's expense. While in the United States, Buñuel associated with other celebrity expatriates including
Sergei Eisenstein,
Josef von Sternberg,
Jacques Feyder,
Charles Chaplin and
Bertolt Brecht. but, after being ushered off the first set he visited because the star,
Greta Garbo, did not welcome intruders, he decided to stay at home most of the time and only show up to collect his paycheck. His only enduring contribution to MGM came when he served as an extra in
La Fruta Amarga, a Spanish-language remake of
Min and Bill. When, after a few months at the studio, he was asked to watch
rushes of
Lili Damita to gauge her Spanish accent, he refused and sent a message to studio boss
Irving Thalberg stating that he was there as a Frenchman, not a Spaniard, and he "didn't have time to waste listening to one of the whores". He was back in Spain shortly thereafter. Due to both a surge in anti-clerical sentiment and a longrunning desire for retribution for the corruption and malfeasance of the extreme right and their supporters in the church, Anarchists and
Radical Socialists sacked
monarchist headquarters in
Madrid and proceeded to burn down or otherwise wreck more than a dozen churches in the capital. Similar revolutionary acts occurred in many other cities in southern and eastern Spain, in most cases with the acquiescence and occasionally with the assistance of the official Republican authorities. Buñuel's future wife, Jeanne Rucar, recalled that during that period, "he got very excited about politics and the ideas that were everywhere in pre-Civil War Spain". In the first flush of his enthusiasm, Buñuel joined the
Communist Party of Spain (PCE) in 1931, In 1932, Buñuel was invited to serve as film documentarian for the celebrated
Mission Dakar-Djibouti, the first large-scale French anthropological field expedition, which, led by
Marcel Griaule, unearthed some 3,500 African artifacts for the new
Musée de l'Homme. Although he declined, the project piqued his interest in
ethnography. After reading the academic study,
Las Jurdes: étude de géographie humaine (1927) by , he decided to make a film focused on
peasant life in
Las Hurdes, perhaps the poorest
comarca in
Extremadura, one of Spain's poorest regions. The film, called
Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (1933), was financed on a budget of 20,000 pesetas donated by a working-class
anarchist friend named
Ramón Acín, who had won the money in a lottery. In the film, Buñuel matches scenes of deplorable social conditions with narration that resembles travelogue commentary delivered by a detached-sounding announcer, while the soundtrack thunders inappropriate music by
Brahms.
Las Hurdes was banned by the
Second Spanish Republic and then by the
Francoist dictatorship. It is a film which continues to perplex viewers and resists easy categorization by film historians.
Las Hurdes has been called one of the first examples of
mockumentary, and has been labeled a "surrealist documentary", a term defined by critic as "A multi-layered and unnerving use of sound, the juxtaposition of narrative forms already learnt from the written press, travelogues and new pedagogic methods, as well as a subversive use of photographed and filmed documents understood as a basis for contemporary propaganda for the masses". Catherine Russell has stated that in
Las Hurdes, Buñuel was able to reconcile his political philosophy with his surrealist aesthetic, with surrealism becoming "a means of awakening a marxist materialism in danger of becoming a stale orthodoxy". After
Las Hurdes in 1933, Buñuel worked in Paris in the
dubbing department of
Paramount Pictures, but following his marriage in 1934, he switched to
Warner Brothers because they operated dubbing studios in Madrid. A friend, , who owned the commercial film company , invited Buñuel to
produce films for a mass audience. He accepted the offer, viewing it as an "experiment" as he knew the film industry in Spain was still far behind the technical level of Hollywood or Paris. According to film historian
Manuel Rotellar's interviews with members of the cast and crew of the Filmófono studios, Buñuel's only condition was that his involvement with these pictures be completely anonymous, apparently for fear of damaging his reputation as a surrealist. Rotellar insists, however, "the truth is that it was Luis Buñuel who directed the Filmófono productions". are: •
Don Quintín el amargao (Don Quintin the Sourpuss), 1935 – a musical based on
a play by
Carlos Arniches, the first
zarzuela (a type of Spanish opera) filmed in sound. •
La hija de Juan Simón (Juan Simón's Daughter), 1935 – another musical and a major commercial success • (Who Loves Me?), 1936 – a sentimental comedy that Buñuel called "my only commercial failure, and a pretty dismal one at that". The minister for foreign affairs sent him first to
Geneva (September 1936) and then to Paris for two years (1936–38), with official responsibility for cataloging Republican propaganda films. In August 1936,
Federico García Lorca was shot and killed by Nationalist militia. According to his son,
Juan Luis, Buñuel rarely talked about Lorca but mourned the poet's untimely death throughout his life. Buñuel essentially functioned as the coordinator of film propaganda for the Republic, which meant that he was in a position to examine all film shot in the country and decide what sequences could be developed and distributed abroad. The Spanish Ambassador suggested that Buñuel revisit Hollywood where he could give technical advice on films being made there about the Spanish Civil War, Almost immediately upon his arrival in America, however, the war ended and the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association of America discontinued making films on the Spanish conflict. According to Buñuel's wife, returning to Spain was impossible since the Fascists had seized power, Returning to Hollywood in 1938, he was befriended by
Frank Davis, an MGM producer and member of the
Communist Party USA, The project was shelved precipitately when another Hollywood film about the Spanish Civil War,
Blockade, was met with disfavor by the
Catholic League of Decency. In the words of biographer Ruth Brandon, Buñuel and his family "lived from one unsatisfactory crumb of work to another" because he "had none of the arrogance and pushiness essential for survival in Hollywood". For the most part, he was snubbed by many of the people in the film community whom he met during his first trip to America, although he was able to sell some gags to Chaplin for his film
The Great Dictator. The finished product was a compilation of scenes from Riefenstahl's
Nazi epic with
Hans Bertram's
Feuertaufe. While being vetted for the job at the OCIAA, upon being asked if he was a Communist, he replied: "I am a Republican," and, apparently, the interviewer did not realize that Buñuel was referring to the Spanish socialist coalition government, not the American political party. In 1942, Buñuel applied for American citizenship because he anticipated that MoMA would be put under federal control. News of this reached
Archbishop Spellman, who angrily confronted Barry with the question: "Are you aware that you are harbouring in this Museum the Antichrist, the man who made a blasphemous film ''L'Age d'Or
?" At the same time, a campaign on the part of Hollywood, through its industry trade paper, the Motion Picture Herald'', to undermine the MoMA film unit resulted in a 66% reduction in the department's budget and Buñuel felt himself compelled to resign. In 1944, he returned to Hollywood for the third time, this time as Spanish Dubbing Producer for
Warner Brothers. Buñuel did not carry out the violent part of his plan. Dalí explained himself by saying: "I did not write my book to put YOU on a pedestal. I wrote it to put ME on a pedestal". Buñuel's first dubbing assignment on returning to Hollywood was
My Reputation, a
Barbara Stanwyck picture which became
El Que Diran in Buñuel's hands. • He continued working on a screenplay called "Goya and the Duchess of Alba", a treatment he had started as early as 1927, with the actor/producer
Florián Rey and cameraman
José María Beltrán, and then resuscitated in 1937 as a project for Paramount. • In his autobiography
Mon Dernier soupir (1982, translated in the U.S. as
My Last Sigh, 1983, and in the UK as
My Last Breath, 1984), Buñuel wrote that, at the request of director
Robert Florey, he submitted a treatment of a scene about a disembodied hand, which was later included in the movie
The Beast with Five Fingers (1946), starring
Peter Lorre, without acknowledgement of Buñuel's contribution or payment of any compensation. In 1945, Buñuel's contract with Warner Brothers expired, and he decided not to renew it in order, as he put it: "to realize my life's ambition for a year: to do nothing". While his family enjoyed themselves at the beach, Buñuel spent much of his time in
Antelope Valley with new acquaintances writer
Aldous Huxley and sculptor
Alexander Calder, from whom he rented a house.
1946–1953: Mexico In 1946, an old friend, producer
Denise Tual, the widow of
Pierre Batcheff, the
leading man in , proposed that she and Buñuel adapt Lorca's play
La casa de Bernarda Alba for production in Paris. As it turned out, though, before they could both make their way to Europe, they encountered problems in securing the rights from Lorca's family. The
Golden Age of Mexican cinema was peaking in the mid-to-late 1940s, at just the time Buñuel was connecting with Dancigers. Movies represented Mexico's third largest industry by 1947, employing 32,000 workers, with 72 film producers who invested 66 million pesos (approximately U.S. $13 million) per year, four active studios with 40 million pesos of invested capital, and approximately 1,500 theaters throughout the nation, with about 200 in Mexico City alone. For their first project, the two men selected what seemed like a sure-fire success,
Gran Casino, a musical
period piece set in
Tampico during the boom years of oil exploitation, starring two of the most popular entertainers in Latin America:
Libertad Lamarque, an Argentine actress and singer, and
Jorge Negrete, a Mexican singer and leading man in
"charro" films. Buñuel recalled: "I kept them singing all the time—a competition, a championship". Different reasons have been given for its failure with the public; for some, Buñuel was forced to make concessions to the bad taste of his stars, particularly Negrete, others cite Buñuel's rusty technical skills and lack of confidence after so many years out of the director's chair, while still others speculate that Mexican audiences were tiring of genre movies, called "churros", that were perceived as being cheaply and hastily made. The failure of
Gran Casino sidelined Buñuel, and it was over two years before he had the chance to direct another picture. According to Buñuel, he spent this time "scratching my nose, watching flies and living off my mother's money", Dancigers pointed out to him that there was currently public interest in films about street urchins, so Buñuel scoured the back streets and slums of Mexico City in search of material, interviewing social workers about street gang warfare and murdered children. Although Soler typically preferred to direct his own films, for their next collaboration,
El Gran Calavera, based on a play by Adolfo Torrado, he decided that doing both jobs would be too much trouble, so he asked Dancigers to find someone who could be trusted to handle the technical aspects of the directorial duties. Buñuel welcomed the opportunity, stating that: "I amused myself with the montage, the constructions, the angles...All of that interested me because I was still an apprentice in so-called 'normal' cinema." In 2013, the picture was re-made by Mexican director Gary Alazraki under the title
The Noble Family. In 1949, Buñuel renounced his Spanish citizenship to become a
naturalized Mexican. The commercial success of
El Gran Calavera enabled Buñuel to redeem a promise he had extracted from Dancigers, which was that if Buñuel could deliver a money-maker, Dancigers would guarantee "a degree of freedom" on the next film project. Dancigers was open to the idea, but instead of a "
feuilleton", he suggested making "something rather more serious". During his recent researches through the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel had read a newspaper account of a twelve-year-old boy's body being found on a garbage dump, and this became the inspiration, and final scene, for the film, eventually called
Los Olvidados. and at another assaulting a legless man who moves around on a dolly, which they toss down a hill. Film historian Carl J. Mora has said of
Los Olvidados that the director "visualized poverty in a radically different way from the traditional forms of Mexican melodrama. Buñuel's street children are not 'ennobled' by their desperate struggle for survival; they are in fact ruthless predators who are not better than their equally unromanticized victims". The film was made quickly (18 days) and cheaply (450,000 pesos), with Buñuel's fee being the equivalent of $2,000. another staff member urged Buñuel to abandon shooting on a "garbage heap", noting that there were many "lovely residential neighborhoods like
Las Lomas" that were available; This hostility was also felt by those who attended the movie's première in Mexico City on 9 November 1950, when
Los Olvidados was taken by many as an insult to Mexican sensibilities and to the Mexican nation. In his memoir, Buñuel recalled that after the initial screening, the painter
Frida Kahlo refused to speak to him, while poet
León Felipe's wife had to be restrained physically from attacking him. and also tacked on a preface showing stock footage of the skylines of New York City, London and Paris with voice-over commentary to the effect that behind the wealth of all the great cities of the world can be found poverty and malnourished children, and that Mexico City "that large modern city, is no exception". Regardless, attendance was so poor that Dancigers withdrew the film after only three days in theaters. Through the determined efforts of future Nobel Prize winner for Literature
Octavio Paz, who at the time was in Mexico's diplomatic service,
Los Olvidados was chosen to represent Mexico at the
Cannes Film Festival of 1951, and Paz promoted the film assiduously by distributing a supportive manifesto and parading outside the cinema with a placard. Opinion in general was enthusiastic, with the Surrealists (Breton and poet
Jacques Prévert) and other artistic intellectuals (painter
Marc Chagall and poet/dramatist/filmmaker
Jean Cocteau) laudatory, but the communist critic Georges Sadoul objected to what he saw as the film's "bourgeois morality" because of its positive depictions of a "bourgeois teacher" and a "bourgeois state" in rehabilitating street children, as well as a scene in which the police demonstrate their utility by stopping a pederast from assaulting a child. Buñuel won the Best Director prize that year at Cannes, and also won the
FIPRESCI International Critics' Award. The film was reissued in Mexico where it ran for two months to much greater acceptance and profit.
Los Olvidados and its triumph at Cannes made Buñuel an instant world celebrity and the most important Spanish-speaking film director in the world. In 2003,
Los Olvidados was inscribed by
UNESCO in the
Memory of the World International Register, calling it: "the most important document in Spanish about the marginal lives of children in contemporary large cities". Buñuel remained in Mexico for the rest of his life, although he spent periods of time filming in France and Spain. In Mexico, he filmed 21 films over 18 years. For many critics, although there were occasional widely acknowledged masterpieces like
Los Olvidados and
Él (1953), the majority of his output consisted of generic fare which was adapted to the norms of the national film industry, frequently adopting melodramatic conventions that appealed to local tastes. Other commentators, however, have written of the deceptive complexity and intensity of many of these films, arguing that, collectively, they, "bring a philosophical depth and power to his cinema, together offering a sustained meditation on ideas of religion, class inequity, violence and desire". they often deal with themes that were central to his lifelong concerns: • sexual pathology:
Él (1953),
Ensayo de un crimen (1955), and
Abismos de pasión (1954) • the destructive effects of rampant
machismo:
El Bruto, (1953),
El río y la muerte, (1955); • the blurring of fantasy and reality:
Subida al cielo (1952),
La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954); • the disruptive status of women in a male-dominated culture:
Susana (1951),
La hija del engaño (1951—a remake of the Filmófono production
Don Quintín el amargao of 16 years earlier),
Una mujer sin amor (1952); and • the absurdity of the religious life: As busy as he was during the 1950s and early 1960s, there were still many film projects that Buñuel had to abandon due to lack of financing or studio support, including a cherished plan to film Mexican novelist
Juan Rulfo's
Pedro Páramo, of which he said how much he enjoyed "the crossing from the mysterious to the real, almost without transition. I really like this mixture of reality and fantasy, but I don't know how to bring it to the screen." Other unrealized projects during his lifetime included adaptations of
André Gide's
Les caves du Vatican;
Benito Pérez Galdós's
Fortunata y Jacinta,
Doña Perfecta, and
Ángel Guerra;
Evelyn Waugh's
The Loved One;
William Golding's
Lord of the Flies;
Dalton Trumbo's
Johnny Got His Gun;
J. K. Huysmans's
Là-Bas;
Matthew Lewis's
The Monk;
José Donoso's
Lugar sin límites; a film of four stories based on
Carlos Fuentes's
Aura; and
Julio Cortázar's
Las ménades. The result,
Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, was Buñuel's first color film. Buñuel was given much more time than usual for the filming (three months), which was accomplished on location in Manzanillo, a Pacific seaport with a lush jungle interior, and was shot simultaneously in English and Spanish. When the film was released in the United States, its young star
Dan O'Herlihy used his own money to fund a Los Angeles run for the film and gave free admission to all members of the
Screen Actors Guild, who in turn rewarded the little-known actor with his only
Oscar nomination. At one point during the filming, Buñuel asked Philipe, who was visibly dying of cancer, why the actor was making this film, and Philipe responded by asking the director the same question, to which both said they did not know. Buñuel was later to explain that he was so strapped for cash that he, "took everything that was offered to me, as long as it wasn't humiliating". This film has been called "a surprisingly uncompromising study of racism and sexual desire, set on a remote island in the Deep South" Although the film won a special award at the Cannes Film Festival for its treatment of racial discrimination, At the 1960 Cannes Festival, Buñuel was approached by the young director
Carlos Saura, whose film
Los Golfos had been entered officially to represent Spain. Two years earlier, Saura had partnered with
Juan Antonio Bardem and
Luis García Berlanga to form a production company called UNINCI, and the group was keen to get Buñuel to make a new film in his native country as part of their overall goal of creating a uniquely Spanish brand of cinema. Finally, Buñuel agreed to work again in Spain when further support was provided by producer
Pere Portabella's company
Film 59. Buñuel and his co-scenarist
Julio Alejandro drafted a preliminary screenplay for
Viridiana, which critic
Andrew Sarris has described as incorporating "a plot which is almost too lurid to synopsize even in these enlightened times", dealing with rape, incest, hints of necrophilia, animal cruelty and sacrilege, and submitted it to the Spanish censor, who, to the surprise of nearly everyone, approved it after requesting only minor modifications and one significant change to the ending. Although Buñuel accommodated the censor's demands, he came up with a final scene that was even more provocative than the scene it replaced: "even more immoral", as Buñuel was later to observe. Since Buñuel had more than adequate resources, top-flight technical and artistic crews, and experienced actors, filming of
Viridiana (which took place on location and at Bardem's studios in Madrid) went smoothly and quickly. Buñuel submitted a cutting copy to the censors and then arranged for his son, Juan Luis, to smuggle the negatives to Paris for the final editing and mixing, ensuring that the authorities would not have an opportunity to view the finished product before its planned submission as Spain's official entry to the 1961 Cannes Festival. Spain's director general of cinematography José Muñoz-Fontán presented the film on the last day of the festival and then, on the urging of Portabella and Bardem, appeared in person to accept the top prize, the , which the film shared with the French entry
Une aussi longue absence, directed by
Henri Colpi. Within days, ''
l'Osservatore Romano'', the Vatican's official organ, denounced the film as an insult not only to Catholicism but to Christianity. Muñoz-Fontán was dismissed from his government post, – Jean-Claude Carrière on his long-term collaboration with Buñuel. Buñuel went on to make two more films in Mexico with Pinal and Alatriste,
El ángel exterminador (1962) and
Simón del desierto (1965) and was later to say that Alatriste had been the one producer who gave him the most freedom in creative expression. In 1963, actor
Fernando Rey, one of the stars of
Viridiana, introduced Buñuel to producer
Serge Silberman, a Polish entrepreneur who had fled to Paris when his family died in the Holocaust and had worked with several renowned French directors, including
Jean-Pierre Melville,
Jacques Becker,
Marcel Camus and
Christian-Jaque. Silberman proposed that the two make an adaptation of
Octave Mirbeau's
The Diary of a Chambermaid, which Buñuel had read several times. Buñuel wanted to do the filming in Mexico with Pinal, but Silberman insisted it be done in France. Silberman, however, wanted French actress
Jeanne Moreau to play the role, so he put Pinal off by telling her that Moreau, too, was willing to act with no fee. Ultimately, Silberman got his way, leaving Pinal so disappointed that she was later to claim that Alatriste's failure to help her secure this part led to the breakup of their marriage. The finished 1964 film,
Diary of a Chambermaid, became the first of several to be made by the team of Buñuel, Carrière and Silberman. Carrière later said "Without me and without Serge Silberman, the producer, perhaps Buñuel would not have made so many films after he was 65. We really encouraged him to work. That's for sure." This was the second filmed version of Mirbeau's novel, the first being
a 1946 Hollywood production directed by
Jean Renoir, which Buñuel refused to view for fear of being influenced by the famous French director, whom he venerated. Buñuel's version, while admired by many, has often been compared unfavorably to Renoir's, with a number of critics claiming that Renoir's
Diary fits better in Renoir's overall
oeuvre, while Buñuel's
Diary is not sufficiently "Buñuelian". After the 1964 release of
Diary, Buñuel again tried to make a film of Matthew Lewis's
The Monk, a project on which he had worked, on and off, since 1938, according to producer
Pierre Braunberger. In 1965, Buñuel managed to work again with Silvia Pinal in what was his last Mexican feature, co-starring Claudio Brook,
Simón del desierto.
1966–1983: Acclaim and final films (1967) and Tristana'' (1970), said: "Well, I think it was difficult for him, coping with his deafness. Some people said he was not that deaf, but I think, when you don't hear very well and when you're tired, everything sinks into a buzz, and it is very hard. French is not his language, so on
Belle de Jour, I'm sure that it was much more of an effort for him to have to explain." who offered him the opportunity to direct a film version of
Joseph Kessel's novel
Belle de Jour, a book about an affluent young woman who leads a double life as a prostitute, and that had caused a scandal upon its first publication in 1928. Buñuel did not like Kessel's novel, considering it "a bit of a soap opera", but he took on the challenge because: "I found it interesting to try to turn something I didn't like into something I did." So he and Carrière set out enthusiastically to interview women in the brothels of Madrid to learn about their sexual fantasies. Buñuel also was not happy about the choice of the 22-year-old
Catherine Deneuve for the title role, feeling that she had been foisted upon him by the Hakim brothers and Deneuve's lover at the time, director
François Truffaut. As a result, both actress and director found working together difficult, with Deneuve claiming, "I felt they showed more of me than they'd said they were going to. There were moments when I felt totally used. I was very unhappy," and Buñuel deriding her prudery on the set. The resulting film has been described by film critic
Roger Ebert as "possibly the best-known erotic film of modern times, perhaps the best", even though, as another critic has written, "in terms of explicit sexual activity, there is little in
Belle de jour we might not see in a
Doris Day comedy from the same year". It was Buñuel's most successful film at the box office. After the worldwide success of his 1967
Belle de Jour, and upon viewing
Jean-Luc Godard's film
La Chinoise, Buñuel, who had wanted to make a film about Catholic heresies for years, told Carrière: "If that is what today's cinema is like, then we can make a film about heresies." The two spent months researching Catholic history and created the 1969 film
The Milky Way, a "picaresque road film" that tells the story of two vagabonds on
pilgrimage to the tomb of the Apostle James at
Santiago de Compostela, during which they travel through time and space to take part in situations illustrating heresies that arose from the six major Catholic dogmas.
Vincent Canby, reviewing the film in the
New York Times, compared it to
George Stevens's blockbuster
The Greatest Story Ever Told, in that Buñuel had made a film about Jesus casting nearly all the famous French performers of the time in cameo roles.
The Milky Way was banned in Italy, only to have the Catholic Church intervene on its behalf. Buñuel had wanted to make a film of
Benito Pérez Galdós's novel
Tristana as early as 1952, even though he considered Galdós's book the author's weakest. After finishing
Viridiana and in the wake of the scandal its release caused in 1962, the Spanish censor turned down this project, On this occasion, however, Deneuve and Buñuel had a more mutually satisfactory working relationship, with Deneuve telling an interviewer, "but in the end, you know, it was actually rather a wonderful shoot.
Tristana is one of my favorite films. Personally, as an actress, I prefer
Tristana to
Belle de Jour." The film tells of a group of affluent friends who are continually stymied in their attempts to eat a meal together, a situation that a number of critics have contrasted to the opposite dilemma of the characters in
The Exterminating Angel, where guests of a dinner party are mysteriously unable to leave after having completed their meal. For the first time, Buñuel made use of a
video-playback monitor, which allowed him to make much more extensive use of
crane shots and elaborate
tracking shots, and enabled him to cut the film in the camera and eliminate the need for
reshoots. Buñuel has stated that he made the film as a tribute to poet
Benjamin Péret, a founding member of French Surrealism, but once shooting started, according to Carrière, her drug usage resulted in a "lackluster and dull" performance that caused tempestuous arguments with Buñuel on the set and her eventual dismissal. Silberman, the producer, decided to abandon the project at that point, but was convinced by Buñuel to continue shooting with two different actresses,
Ángela Molina and
Carole Bouquet playing the same role in alternating sequences throughout the film. In his autobiography, Buñuel claimed that this unusual casting decision was his own idea after drinking two dry martinis, saying: "If I had to list all the benefits derived from alcohol, it would be endless". Others have reported that Carrière had first broached the idea while developing the film's scenario, but had been brushed off by Buñuel as "the whim of a rainy day". After the release of
That Obscure Object of Desire, Buñuel retired from filmmaking. In 1982, he wrote (along with Carrière) his autobiography,
Mon Dernier Soupir (translated into English as
My Last Sigh in the U.S.,
My Last Breath in the UK), which provides an account of his life, friends, and family as well as a representation of his eccentric personality. In it, he recounts dreams, encounters with many well-known writers, actors, and artists such as
Pablo Picasso and
Charlie Chaplin as well as antics, like dressing up as a nun and walking around town. ==Personal life==