Luis Buñuel's birthday
On February 22, the cinematic world, and in general, all, as they would say before, the "progressive public of the planet" celebrates the birthday of the great film director - Luis Buñuel.
Luis Buñuel was born on February 22, 1900 in the town of Calanda in eastern Spain. His father, Leonardo Manuel Buñuel González, originally from the same city, was a military man in Cuba and owned a hardware store and a shipping company, from which he made a considerable fortune. After the Spanish-American War, he sold his business and returned to his hometown, where, at the age of 45, he married seventeen-year-old María Portolés Cerezuela. From this marriage seven children were born, and the first was Luis. Luis first studied at Jesuit schools, then at the University of Madrid, where he studied philosophy. Among his friends were Salvador Dali, Frederico Garcia Lorca and many other Spanish intellectuals.
The biography of Luis Buñuel, his entire career as a whole and individual films, in particular, have been described many times. I am not going to retell the numerous publications dedicated to the great Master. But I just want to quote some of Luis Buñuel's observations that I liked the most.
"The need to eat does not justify the prostitution of art"
"Nothing would disgust me more morally than winning an Oscar."
""God and Country" are an unbeatable team; they break all records for oppression and bloodshed"
"To compare me with Goya is a nonsense. Critics speak of Goya because they don't know anything about Quevedo, Theresa of Avila, the picaresque literature, Galdòs, Ramón del Valle-Inclán and others . . . Today's culture is unfortunately inseparable from economic and military power. A ruling nation can impose its culture and give a worldwide fame to a second-rate writer like Ernest Hemingway. John Steinbeck is important due to American guns. Had John Dos Passos and William Faulkner been born in Paraguay or in Turkey, who'd read them?"
When asked why he makes films, Buñuel replied: "To show that this is not the best of all possible worlds."
Luis Buñuel in his life, and he lived for 83 years, made 31 feature films. 8 of them entered the Golden Thousand. Thanks to this indicator, Buñuel is included in the list of 100 greatest directors of world cinema compiled by FilmGourmand.
According to the Russian Wikipedia (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Бунюэль,_Луис#Личная_жизнь), all his life Luis Buñuel remained an atheist and adherent of communist views, a critic of bourgeois society. However, in the cinemas of the atheistic and communist Soviet Union, the film masterpieces of Luis Buñuel were not shown until perestroika times. At least in wide release. Apparently, the communist leadership of the USSR did not recognize any other communism than its own. Probably, even if Marx and Engels suddenly showed up in the 20th century, they would be accused of some kind of "deviation" or revisionism.
However, in today's democratic-capitalist Russia, Buñuel's films are not particularly favored by film distributors and television people. For a different, not ideological, but commercial reason: the audience, for the most part, with brains that are ... fecalized with Marvel and similar film products, simply will not accept Buñuel's works.
In memory of the great Spaniard, I want to remind the fans of his work the frames from his best films included in the Golden Thousand.
