he Spanish-born director Luis Bunuel made his first films with Salvador Dali, whom he met at Madrid University in the 1920s. Their first collaboration, Un Chien Andalou (1928), achieved notoriety for its brutal but comic surreal images; the second, the equally notorious L'Age d'Or (1930), is considered a masterpiece and a major key to Bunuel's later works.
Bunuel exiled himself from Franco's Spain in the 1930s, eventually settling in Mexico. There he made a series of low-budget movies in relative obscurity until he won the Cannes Film Festival director's prize for Los Olvidados (1950), an unsparing portrait of street children in the slums of Mexico City. Viridiana (1961), a tragicomedy with a lurid plot that is nonetheless a masterwork, established him as a major presence on the European film scene. For the next 15 years, Bunuel directed several highly acclaimed films: Belle de Jour (1966), Tristana (1970), and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974). His work is a strange and compelling blend of the real and the surreal, fatalism and anarchy; sexual liberation and dark repression.
Bunuel died in 1983.
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