The Books of My Life: Luis Bunuel (Krohn)

I did not discover the movie director Luis Bunuel until the late 1970s. My introduction to Bunuel his through hi surrealist films Un chien andalou (1929) and L’Age d’or (1930) in film classes at Indiana University in Bloomington. Later, sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s, I saw his El angel exterminador (1962), a film that  is almost certainly is paid homage to in the season six Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode “Older and Far Away", and his last film, Cet obscur objet du desir, at one of the Ryder film series showings probably at Bear’s Back Room off campus in Bloomington. When I lived in Utah in the early 1990s I saw his film La Voie lactee (1969) with my favourite Mormon Yoderian at an art house cinema in the south eastern part of Salt Lake. Thanks to all this viewing I was intrigued with the surrealism, the Marxism, the critique of theocratic religion, and the humour in each of these Bunuel films.

Bill Krohn’s Luis Bunuel (Koln, Germany: Taschen, 2005) follows Bunuel’s movie career chronologically from his 1929 movie Un chien andalou ,which he made in Spain with his fellow surrealist Salvador Dali, to the last film he directed, Cet obscur objet du desir from 1977. As with all of the books in the Taschen books on directors edited by Paul Duncan Krohn’s Luis Bunuel is more like a  profusely illustrated encyclopaedia like entry on whichever movie director the book is about than an in depth study of a film director.

According to Krohn the Spanish born but cosmopolitan film director Luis Bunuel—over the course of his career Bunuel worked in Spain, Mexico, the US (including briefly in Hollywood), and France—Bunuel was simultaneously an avant garde surrealist and a Freudian, and Marxist movie director whose films centred around sex, often “deviant” or “perverted” forms of sexuality including a variety of fetishisms, religion, specifically largely somewhat respectful critiques of the right wing theocratic Roman Catholicism he grew up with, and politics, specifically a Marxist influenced politics that Bunuel was influenced by beginning in his youth. This political aspect of Bunuel’s films marks him off from a latter day filmmaker who is often compared to Bunuel these days, David Lynch, a director whose movies are often compared to Bunuel's but seem to me to lack the political aspects of Bunuel's films and to be be surrealism for surrealisms sake and little more (see Robin Wood on Lynch whose assessment of the director I agree with).

Krohn not only explores Bunuel’s auteurist themes in the essay and photographs in the book he also nicely illustrates the motifs one finds in Bunuel’s movies, motifs that show up again and again in Bunuel’s films. In a series of photographs from several of Bunuel’s films from the late 1920s to the late 1970s Krohn finds a number of recurring motifs in Bunuel’s films including legs, feet/shoes, back/vulva, breasts, young women and older men, bells and towers, religion, mad guns, guns, physical deficiencies and deformities, poultry, insects, animals, boxes, and dreams. The book ends with an excellent and very helpful filmography.

Krohn’s book is largely descriptive. It contains, if briefly, information on the contexts, the production aspects, and the plot of each film, which, as is almost always the case with books and monographs on films and film directors, is not always easy to visualise if one has not seen the films. Though primarily descriptive Krohn does not hesitate to offer his judgement on the quality of the films. Some will miss the analysis one finds in books like those of film critic, historian, and scholar Robin Wood but one must remember Krohn’s brief. His remit, as is true of all of the books in this Taschen series, was to write a brief encyclopaedic like entry and coordinate it with extensive and helpful illustrations. Krohns book does this well. That said the interpretive anaemia of the book is not necessarily a bad thing. Nor is the lack of the crystal ball textualism that so dominates academic film studies these day.