Luis Bunuel

The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Bunuel (1900–1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936–39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause.
??? Luis Bunuel: The Red Years, 1929–1939 investigates Bunuel’s commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmofono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935–36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Bunuel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism.
??? Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director’s life is scant and relies on Bunuel’s own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Roman Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Bunuel’s accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Bunuel’s “Red Years” that abounds in new information.

Roman Gubern is professor at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona and has been a guest researcher at MIT. He is author of numerous screenplays for film and television and of more than forty books on cinema, popular culture, and semiotics, including 1936–1939: La Guerra de Espana en la pantalla. Paul Hammond is author and editor of several books, including The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on the Cinema. Among his many translations is A Panorama of American Film Noir by Borde and Chaumeton. Both authors live in Barcelona.