LUIS BUÑUEL The Beguiling Atheist

Five Essential Films Un Chien Andalou Los Olvidados The Exterminating Angel Belle de Jour The Discreet Charm...Bourgeoisie

Five Rarely Seen Simon of the Desert Death in the Garden Nazarin Diary of a Chambermaid Robinson Crusoe

"Cinema is the superior way of expressing the world of dreams, emotions and instinct. It seems to have been invented for the expression of the subconscious, so profoundly is it rooted in poetry.

Luis Buñuel is like the trickster of cinema. He always seems to be playing a game upon closer inspection he always has something to say. Take religion for example. Although he is famous for saying, "I'm still and atheist, thank god" his films abound with religious themes. His rarely seen film The Milky Way, in fact, won and award from the Catholic Church in Spain because even though it had some elements of blaspheme it at least dealt with the Bible and with religion to a far greater extent than most any film ever made. But the greatness of Buñuel is that his films cannot be mistaken for anyone elses. There is something faintly absurd and ironic about them. For instance his surrealist comedy The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) works so successfully on its own clever logic that by the end there's no way to tell which scenes are dreams from those that are reality. What starts as a simple idea about an affluent French group moving from one house to another with the intention of having a good meal turns into a complex set of inexplicable and dreamlike gags. During Buñuel's long career (which spanned over five decades, 1929 to 1977) he was one of the few filmmakers who could get away with making a whole section of a film into a dream without making it feel like a dream. On more than one occassion in Discreet a seemingly normal scene will take a weird turn and then reveal itself as someones' dream.; one episode turns out to be a mazelike dream within a dream. Because of scenes like this it's not inconceivable that the entire film is a dream that one of the characters is having. Bunuel himself said late in life, "Give me two hours a day of activity, and I'll take the other twenty-two in dreams... provided I can remember them."

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