Midday with Buñuel


Book Description

"Intimate photographs from the Isaac family archive complement the writing, and Bryan T. Scoular's careful translation makes this text available for the first time in English. The foreword by James D. Fernandez offers the reader eloquent insight into this " 'biography' of Luis Bunuel, which is structured not by the stepping-stones of his career, but by the self-spun spider's web of his many contradictions, as they are perceived, assimilated, and recorded by a chronicler who is himself always in motion and full of contradictions."" "Part biography, part memoir, Midday with Bunuel brings to life the creative milieu of Mexico City and gives readers a privileged view of the relationship between these two filmmakers."--BOOK JACKET.




Luis Buñuel


Book Description

The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause. Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 investigates Buñuel’s commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmófono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935–36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buñuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism. Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director’s life is scant and relies on Buñuel’s own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buñuel’s accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buñuel’s “Red Years” that abounds in new information.




Luis Buñuel


Book Description

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.




Conversations with Bunuel


Book Description

This book features extended conversations with Spanish filmmaker Luis Bunuel (1900-1983) and interviews with his family members, friends and colleagues--including Salvador Dali, Louis Aragon and Fernando Rey--conducted by Max Aub in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Notorious for inventing fanciful versions of his life and his creative output, Bunuel was hard put to deceive the astute Max Aub, who shared Bunuel's background in Spain, in Paris during the Spanish Civil War, and in Mexico, where they were friends and collaborators. Originally published in Spain in 1985, this translated (the first in English) and expanded edition (with several significant interviews and a detailed index not found in the original) provides a detailed picture of Bunuel's life and art. Extensive notes contextualize the conversations and acknowledge the discoveries of recent studies on Bunuel.




Film International


Book Description




The Cinema of Luis Buñuel


Book Description




Bunuel


Book Description

This biography draws on original interviews with family members and friends, unpublished documents, letters, and family records.




Buñuel, siglo XXI


Book Description

El presente volumen incluye una amplia variedad de artículos sobre la figura de Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), escritos por algunos de los especialistas más prominentes dentro del mundo de los estudios fímicos. Se trata de una colección única, que por primera vez recoge en un mismo volumen trabajos en español, francés e inglés. Tal decisión no sólo supone una muestra de respeto hacia los tres idiomas en los que se expresó Buñuel, sino que es también una forma de poner en evidencia el reconocimiento que su obra ha tenido y tiene en los entornos francófono y anglófono, además del hispano. Este libro nace con la ambición de abarcar la totalidad del trabajo de Buñuel, principalmente sus películas, pero también sus escritos. Cuenta, además, con capítulos que abordan cuestiones biográficas, como las relaciones de Buñuel con otros cineastas de la época, o con escritores y artistas. El Buñuel que emerge de estas páginas confirma el hecho de que el director aragonés sigue siendo uno de los cineastas más famosos e influyentes del siglo XX. Los capítulos aquí reunidos dan cuenta de todas las fases de su carrera: la primera etapa surrealista, sus colaboraciones con Dalí, su amistad con Lorca y con otros autores coetáneos, su trabajo en Filmófono, los años del exilio y la fase tardía y más internacional. En distitntas contribuciones se concede importancia a la forma, la ideología, la temática, las "películas alimenticias" de su periodo mexicano y las más personales y artísticas, consideradas su legado más universal y perdurable.




On Cinema


Book Description

Glauber Rocha is known as the visionary Brazilian director of landmark films, Black God, White Devil, Entranced Earth and Antonio das Mortes. Hitherto virtually unknown outside Brazil is that he was also a brilliant film critic and innovative thinker on world cinema. On Cinema brings together for the first time in the English language a comprehensive selection of Rocha's film writings, revealing for the first time to English-speaking readers the full critical power, inventiveness and vision of a great filmmaker. Rocha's writings, endowed with critical verve and humour, give insights into key moments of film history, as well as the politics of world cinema. Here he fearlessly confronts the film establishment and debates with a host of sacred filmmakers of the world pantheon. Included is Rocha's early criticism of Brazilian films, landmark manifestoes such as 'An Aesthetics of Hunger' and 'An Aesthetics of Dreams', articles about the development of Cinema Novo, and his international film criticism, including pieces on Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, James Dean, David Lean, John Huston, Stanley Kubrick, John Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Luchino Visconti and Roberto Rossellini. The publication of On Cinema, edited by film scholar Ismail Xavier and in expert translation, is an international publishing event.




Making Waves


Book Description

Spanning thirty years of writing, Making Waves traces the development of Mario Vargas Llosa's thinking on politics and culture, and shows the breadth of his interests and passions. Featured here are astute meditations on the Cuban Revolution, Latin American independence, and the terrorism of Peru's Shining Path; brilliant engagements with towering figures of literature like Joyce, Faulkner, and Sartre; considerations on the dog cemetery where Rin Tin Tin is buried, Lorena Bobbitt's knife, and the failures of the English public-school system.