Luis Buñuel: The Prophet of Cinema
“The cinema’s prophets are few and
lonely; none more formidable than the Spaniard Buñuel.” — Tony Richardson
“I do not wish this film to enchant you. Rather, I wish it to enrage you.”
Every Buñuel film, one after another, has never lulled but unsettled; never caressed but incited. Critics have described his cinema as a mirror of society — an enormous, merciless looking-glass where the spectator confronts his own grotesque reflection, and recoils in both terror and rage.
Buñuel, in the eyes of modern critics, was that rarest of creators who, at once with detachment and with dispassion, laid bare the anatomy of his age. The scholars of cinema, ever eager to file artists into ideological cabinets, failed to imprison Buñuel in any single doctrine. His artistic vision was always multiplicitous, always paradoxical. At times he seemed devout, at others atheistic; sometimes a revolutionary, sometimes a bourgeois conformist. At one moment a philosopher, the next a farmer; a solitary ascetic one day, a reveler the next. He was both cruel and tender, irrational and rigorously logical. He was — depending on the lens through which one looked — poet or logician, mystic or satirist. Volumes have been written debating whether his art was subjective or objective — but perhaps the real answer is that Buñuel himself stood astride that division, collapsing the binary.
Just as Shakespeare or Dostoevsky can be read and reread through countless interpretive prisms, so too Buñuel defies any fixed critical verdict. He was not a carrier of rigid dogma, but a prism of contradictory lights. Consider Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread (1933), an austere, objective documentary, and set it beside Simon of the Desert (1965), a hallucinatory, subjective fable — the two poles of his creative compass. And yet, even across these extremes, one detects a single principle: the supremacy of image over thesis, of vision over ideology. Buñuel beheld society not as participant but as witness, wielding the camera as searchlight. He staged reality with surgical detachment, only to plunge the audience headlong into complicity with what they beheld.
Buñuel’s eye disguised itself as the spectator’s eye, only to invade the spectator’s own subconscious. By this sleight of vision, he broke apart the viewer’s false beliefs and made him face the terror of himself. Everywhere, Buñuel employed cinema to expose the duplicity of human thought and action. His art was, above all, an unveiling: the unconscious thrust before the conscious like a mirror of nightmare. In this sense, his affinity with Dostoevsky is profound — both creators wrestled not with surface socialities but with the abyss beneath.
Henry Miller once wrote: “They call Buñuel everything — traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast. But lunatic they do not call him. It is true, it is lunacy he portrays, but it is not his lunacy.” The same accusations — perversion, treachery — were hurled at Dostoevsky by the conservative salons of nineteenth-century Russia. The State could not tolerate an artist who, like Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, murders the father in the subconscious of every man. So too in Buñuel’s Spain and France: society branded him obscene, dangerous, corrupt. But if the artist dares to capture, with pen or with camera, that darker-than-dark reality which hides behind social masks — what else could the custodians of propriety call him but “perverse”?
Tolstoy himself dismissed Dostoevsky as diseased of mind. Tolstoy — the moral bard of Russian bourgeois society, who wrote of sin and redemption but remained silent about the hypocrisies of his own household — never acknowledged the illegitimate son born of his maid. Such contradictions, Buñuel believed, stained all artists who preached universal harmony while suppressing the disorder of their own lives. His films sought to tear away such masks, to reveal the theft at the heart of piety. Hence his merciless neutrality: he spared neither soldier nor beggar, neither saint nor seductress.
For Buñuel, the shackles of humanity were invisible masks. Every man wore them — rich and poor, believer and skeptic, revolutionary and bourgeois. Behind every noble sentiment lurked a hidden pantomime. In Belle de Jour (1967), the prostitute Séverine is not merely an adulteress; she is the embodiment of society’s unconscious desire, the woman as men collectively imagine and repress her.
Buñuel’s conception of freedom stood far beyond its conventional definitions. Like Freud, he saw man fettered by sexual chains. The “good man” in society was nothing but one who successfully repressed himself. Yet the hunger of suppressed instinct, unacknowledged, gnawed at the very edifice of so-called civilization. In his youth Buñuel learned surrealism at the side of fellow Spaniard Salvador Dalí, that master of dream-logic. From surrealism he wandered toward neo-realism; from neo-realism to what might be called the real beyond reality — the hidden truth beneath appearances, the subterranean realm within the real.
This was another universe: beast within man, anti-sociality within society, untruth within truth, lovelessness within love. Buñuel’s art acknowledged no superior master, no ideological overseer. Like Mayakovsky once said of Lenin — “I cannot take another’s head above mine” — so too no critic or theorist has successfully imposed a school upon Buñuel. His method was Buñuelian, pure and indivisible.
As Indian filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta once remarked: “A director may be indifferent or detached, but if the audience remains indifferent or detached, the film’s very purpose is defeated.” A first encounter with Buñuel’s cinema feels like expulsion: the spectator stumbles from the theater as though kicked in the back. To watch a Buñuel film without rage, without unease, would be to watch as one not of this earth.
The Phantom of Liberty (1974) unveiled the vacuity of bourgeois existence, layer by layer. The upper-class characters of the film move like marionettes trapped in meaningless rituals, haunted by absurd dreams, terrified of their secrets being exposed. Liberty itself becomes a ghost, both obstacle and method in the quest to be human. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), perhaps cinema’s supreme satire of bourgeois life, carries the same method further: with surreal flourishes and cold disdain, Buñuel carved his characters open, then thrust the scalpel into the viewer’s chest as well. Here the bourgeois revealed itself in three truths: its spoken truth, its subconscious truth, its social truth.
Consider his dining table scenes — guests endlessly eating, prattling, mocking one another’s flaws while hiding their own intrigues. Words and gestures mask emptiness; morality is fabricated like counterfeit currency. In Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), he lampooned bourgeois propriety with equal savagery.
For Buñuel, every man was torn: should one obey the call of one’s inner voice, or bow before the teachings and rituals of society? This perpetual tug-of-war birthed the figure of man as eternal absurdist.
At last we arrive at the question: was Buñuel an optimist or pessimist? Did he believe in “art for humanity’s sake,” or in “art for art’s sake”? The evidence suggests that Buñuel, far from didactic, often constructed images without meaning, admitting openly that he intended nothing by them. Such images were pure expressions, not arguments — haunting tableaux without thesis. Ghostly though it may sound, truth itself is always expression without message, reality without doctrine.
Here Tarkovsky’s dictum comes to mind: “To define art is but a cunning attempt to deny death.” And so, perhaps, Buñuel’s refusal to assign meaning to his images was itself his highest affirmation of art. In that sense, his art-for-art’s-sake cinema was not nihilism, but hope: the hope that creation itself, without moralizing, might still testify to life.
“I do not wish this film to enchant you. Rather, I wish it to enrage you.”
Every Buñuel film, one after another, has never lulled but unsettled; never caressed but incited. Critics have described his cinema as a mirror of society — an enormous, merciless looking-glass where the spectator confronts his own grotesque reflection, and recoils in both terror and rage.
Buñuel, in the eyes of modern critics, was that rarest of creators who, at once with detachment and with dispassion, laid bare the anatomy of his age. The scholars of cinema, ever eager to file artists into ideological cabinets, failed to imprison Buñuel in any single doctrine. His artistic vision was always multiplicitous, always paradoxical. At times he seemed devout, at others atheistic; sometimes a revolutionary, sometimes a bourgeois conformist. At one moment a philosopher, the next a farmer; a solitary ascetic one day, a reveler the next. He was both cruel and tender, irrational and rigorously logical. He was — depending on the lens through which one looked — poet or logician, mystic or satirist. Volumes have been written debating whether his art was subjective or objective — but perhaps the real answer is that Buñuel himself stood astride that division, collapsing the binary.
Just as Shakespeare or Dostoevsky can be read and reread through countless interpretive prisms, so too Buñuel defies any fixed critical verdict. He was not a carrier of rigid dogma, but a prism of contradictory lights. Consider Las Hurdes: Land Without Bread (1933), an austere, objective documentary, and set it beside Simon of the Desert (1965), a hallucinatory, subjective fable — the two poles of his creative compass. And yet, even across these extremes, one detects a single principle: the supremacy of image over thesis, of vision over ideology. Buñuel beheld society not as participant but as witness, wielding the camera as searchlight. He staged reality with surgical detachment, only to plunge the audience headlong into complicity with what they beheld.
Buñuel’s eye disguised itself as the spectator’s eye, only to invade the spectator’s own subconscious. By this sleight of vision, he broke apart the viewer’s false beliefs and made him face the terror of himself. Everywhere, Buñuel employed cinema to expose the duplicity of human thought and action. His art was, above all, an unveiling: the unconscious thrust before the conscious like a mirror of nightmare. In this sense, his affinity with Dostoevsky is profound — both creators wrestled not with surface socialities but with the abyss beneath.
Henry Miller once wrote: “They call Buñuel everything — traitor, anarchist, pervert, defamer, iconoclast. But lunatic they do not call him. It is true, it is lunacy he portrays, but it is not his lunacy.” The same accusations — perversion, treachery — were hurled at Dostoevsky by the conservative salons of nineteenth-century Russia. The State could not tolerate an artist who, like Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov, murders the father in the subconscious of every man. So too in Buñuel’s Spain and France: society branded him obscene, dangerous, corrupt. But if the artist dares to capture, with pen or with camera, that darker-than-dark reality which hides behind social masks — what else could the custodians of propriety call him but “perverse”?
Tolstoy himself dismissed Dostoevsky as diseased of mind. Tolstoy — the moral bard of Russian bourgeois society, who wrote of sin and redemption but remained silent about the hypocrisies of his own household — never acknowledged the illegitimate son born of his maid. Such contradictions, Buñuel believed, stained all artists who preached universal harmony while suppressing the disorder of their own lives. His films sought to tear away such masks, to reveal the theft at the heart of piety. Hence his merciless neutrality: he spared neither soldier nor beggar, neither saint nor seductress.
For Buñuel, the shackles of humanity were invisible masks. Every man wore them — rich and poor, believer and skeptic, revolutionary and bourgeois. Behind every noble sentiment lurked a hidden pantomime. In Belle de Jour (1967), the prostitute Séverine is not merely an adulteress; she is the embodiment of society’s unconscious desire, the woman as men collectively imagine and repress her.
Buñuel’s conception of freedom stood far beyond its conventional definitions. Like Freud, he saw man fettered by sexual chains. The “good man” in society was nothing but one who successfully repressed himself. Yet the hunger of suppressed instinct, unacknowledged, gnawed at the very edifice of so-called civilization. In his youth Buñuel learned surrealism at the side of fellow Spaniard Salvador Dalí, that master of dream-logic. From surrealism he wandered toward neo-realism; from neo-realism to what might be called the real beyond reality — the hidden truth beneath appearances, the subterranean realm within the real.
This was another universe: beast within man, anti-sociality within society, untruth within truth, lovelessness within love. Buñuel’s art acknowledged no superior master, no ideological overseer. Like Mayakovsky once said of Lenin — “I cannot take another’s head above mine” — so too no critic or theorist has successfully imposed a school upon Buñuel. His method was Buñuelian, pure and indivisible.
As Indian filmmaker Buddhadeb Dasgupta once remarked: “A director may be indifferent or detached, but if the audience remains indifferent or detached, the film’s very purpose is defeated.” A first encounter with Buñuel’s cinema feels like expulsion: the spectator stumbles from the theater as though kicked in the back. To watch a Buñuel film without rage, without unease, would be to watch as one not of this earth.
The Phantom of Liberty (1974) unveiled the vacuity of bourgeois existence, layer by layer. The upper-class characters of the film move like marionettes trapped in meaningless rituals, haunted by absurd dreams, terrified of their secrets being exposed. Liberty itself becomes a ghost, both obstacle and method in the quest to be human. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), perhaps cinema’s supreme satire of bourgeois life, carries the same method further: with surreal flourishes and cold disdain, Buñuel carved his characters open, then thrust the scalpel into the viewer’s chest as well. Here the bourgeois revealed itself in three truths: its spoken truth, its subconscious truth, its social truth.
Consider his dining table scenes — guests endlessly eating, prattling, mocking one another’s flaws while hiding their own intrigues. Words and gestures mask emptiness; morality is fabricated like counterfeit currency. In Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), he lampooned bourgeois propriety with equal savagery.
For Buñuel, every man was torn: should one obey the call of one’s inner voice, or bow before the teachings and rituals of society? This perpetual tug-of-war birthed the figure of man as eternal absurdist.
At last we arrive at the question: was Buñuel an optimist or pessimist? Did he believe in “art for humanity’s sake,” or in “art for art’s sake”? The evidence suggests that Buñuel, far from didactic, often constructed images without meaning, admitting openly that he intended nothing by them. Such images were pure expressions, not arguments — haunting tableaux without thesis. Ghostly though it may sound, truth itself is always expression without message, reality without doctrine.
Here Tarkovsky’s dictum comes to mind: “To define art is but a cunning attempt to deny death.” And so, perhaps, Buñuel’s refusal to assign meaning to his images was itself his highest affirmation of art. In that sense, his art-for-art’s-sake cinema was not nihilism, but hope: the hope that creation itself, without moralizing, might still testify to life.
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