Luis Buñuel & The Cinema Of Latin America

Luis Buñuel's career can by crudely broken up into 4 stages : his work in his homeland Spain, his work in the United States of America, his work in Mexico, and his work in France. Interestingly, he spent many years working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he joined the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Here, Buñuel was tasked with editing films serving as anti-fascist propaganda. These films were intended for mass consumption in Latin America.

Buñuel worked closely with representatives of American embassies, and he allegedly masked his communist leanings in the process; that is, until Salvador Dali allegedly outed him. Buñuel had secured his position with the help of American composer George Antheil and in New York he was visited by Spanish composer Gustavo Pittaluga. Buñuel resigned from his position when two thirds of the division's budget was cut.

In Mexico, Buñuel learnt to enjoy life once again. He joined a buzzing community of artists, some of whom were Mexican, others who'd settled there, reminding Buñuel of his youthful years spent living and learning in Paris. Around the same time he might conceivably have been rubbing shoulders with Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, he might also have encountered Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, Argentinian artists Eileen Agar and Leonor Fini, French artists Alice Rahon and Bridget Bate Tichenor, Spanish artist Remedios Varo, Chilean artists Roberto Matta and Nemesio Antunez, Hungarian artist Kati Deutsch, or English artist Leona Carrington (Franco-Polish writer Elena Poniatowska, niece of Mexican poet Pita Amor, recently penned the 2011 historical novel 'Leonora' about the British surrealist and her entourage).

The work of these artists alone amply demonstrates what Pablo Picasso once observed - that Mexico was a hotbed of surreal activity. And as in Paris and Rome, it was common for artists based in Mexico City to lend their talents to the film industry, aiding cross-pollination of the arts.

Luis Buñuel is my favourite filmmaker. Of his Mexican films I've been able to see, the only two I'm not a great fan of are 'Gran Casino' (1947) and 'Adventures Of Robinson Crusoe' (1954). The ones I'd like to see most are 'El' (1951) which Alfred Hitchcock was fascinated by, 'The Daughter Of Deceit' (1951) and 'The Criminal Life Of Archibaldo De La Cruz' (1954).

Some film directors born in South America I identify more readily for their work elsewhere. For example, Chilean director Tito Davison spent the majority of his career living and working in Mexico. Novelist and filmmaker Fernando Fernan Gomez was born in Peru but raised in Spain where he lived and worked for most of his creative life. Argentinian director Leon Klimovsky built a lengthy second career in Spain, having settled there in the mid-1950s. Uruguayan filmmaker Narciso Ibanez Serrador lived and worked primarily in Spain and Mexico. John Llewellyn Moxey was born in Argentina but he worked in film and television in the United Kingdom and the United States of America.
For more recent examples, Venezuelan filmmaker Temistocles Lopez dwells deep within the American underground, while Chilean-born director Alejandro Amenabar is a linchpin of the Spanish film industry.

I've not seen any films made by the Dominian Republic to the best of my knowledge, but I have seen some of documentary filmmaker Rene Fortunato's work. He's one of Latin America's leading filmmakers in the documentary field and I'd recommend his work. I have some American films on dvd that are at least partially shot in the Dominican Republic; films directed by William Friedkin, Francis Coppola, Wes Craven, Abel Ferrara.

It's interesting how many films have been made that are set in fictional Latin American countries, or take place somewhere remote, like on the Amazon River. When I open out my mind to these, there's major international productions like Werner Herzog's 'Aguirre, The Wrath Of God' (1972) and 'Fitzcarraldo' (1982), which I think were largely filmed in Peru and released some ten years apart. Also, William Friedkin's 'Sorcerer' (1977) which is a remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot's 'The Wages Of Fear' (1953), though Friedkin perfers to see it as a return to the source novel by Georges Arnaud who wrote a lot about his experiences in Latin America (he also wrote songs for Edith Piaf and Suzanne Graux back home in France).
Silent picture 'The Americano' (1916) was an early Hollywood production set in a fictionalised South American nation, its influence felt later within subversive satires with a political slant, such as Robert Florey's 'The Magnificent Fraud' (1939), Woody Allen's 'Bananas' (1971), Paul Mazursky's 'Moon Over Parador' (1988) and J.F. Lawton's 'Cannibal Women In The Avacado Jungle Of Death' (1989). These visions seem quite different to those of genre pictures like 'Dr. Cyclops' (1940), 'Green Hell' (1940), 'Creature From The Black Lagoon' (1954) and 'Raiders Of The Lost Ark' (1981), films that revel in the exotic mysteries of the continent's forbidden zones.