Luis Buñuel Portolés was born on February 22, 1900, in Calanda, a small town in the province of Teruel, Spain. As a youth he received a Jesuit education, displaying exceptional talent in music, athletics and the natural sciences. He enjoyed a comfortable upbringing in a reasonably wealthy, close-knit family. His family came from liberal, semi-intellectual, land-owning bourgeoisie. To comprehend Buñuel's works, it is essential to understand that he was first a Spaniard and secondly a product of Spanish bourgeoisie.

When he went to study at Madrid University, he made friends with poets Federico Garcia Lorca and Jose Moreno Villa and painter Salvador Dali. He was introduced to Surrealism at the same time. He graduated in 1925 with a degree in philosophy and literature. Buñuel then moved to Paris to study filmmaking. He was introduced to the best intellectual circles in Paris, the city of the avant-garde artists. He married Jeanne Rucar in 1925. He began his career in film as an assistant director to Jean Epstein, 'the only director of that bleak era of the French cinema to merit the title of an intellectual filmmaker.' While assisting Epstein, Buñuel also began contributing articles to various cine-journals. In 1928, he formally entered the Paris Surrealist Group.

He started his first film project as director in collaboration with his compatriot Salvador Dali, entitled An Andalusian Dog. It was as shocking and scandalous as Buñuel and Dali had hoped it would be. It gave rise to a staggering range of interpretations: poetic, scandalous, erotic, incoherent, attacks upon critics, religion and the bourgeoisie (the recurring themes in his films). He collaborated with Dali again in 1930 on another surrealist film, The Golden Age.

As actress Angela Molina, who has worked with him, says, 'He had the art of provocation, but he was so lively about it. That's what he wanted: to disturb people, make them question things and have fun at the same time'. The intent of surreal art is to move one from the conscious mind into the subconscious. It seeks to affect the emotions through the mind. Buñ

uel's three early films established him as a master of surrealist cinema treating all human experiences--sexual desires and aberrations, eroticism, dreams, madness or normal waking states--on the same level. As a Surrealist, Buñ

uel's desire was for revolution brought on by scandal. This meant levelling constant hostility towards the tyranny, hypocrisy, exploitation and injustice practised by the institutions of organised society. 'The real purpose of Surrealism', as he said, was 'to explode the social order, to transform life itself.'

Buñuel became a Mexican citizen in 1948 and died there on July 29, 1983. Buñuel's collaboration with the French screenplay-writer Jean-Claude Carriere has produced some of the best films made in Europe in the 1960s and 1970s. During his lifetime, Buñuel continued to be one of the most creative and productive of all filmmakers. We pay our tribute to this cinematic genius.