Bunuel [Hardcover]

John Baxter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1998

Dangerous, enigmatic, and elusive, Bunuel was one of the greatest creative artists of the twentieth century. Bunuel knew everyone. He helped Picasso hang Guernica, was thrown off a Hollywood set by Garbo, attended orgies arranged by Chaplin, watched Cocteau smoke opium, had his horoscope read by Andr Breton, saw Sergei Eisenstein sell out to capitalism, tried to strangle Paul Eluard's wife, shared a cell with Trotsky's murderer, planned to make a pornographic movie with Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Leger, and fumed while Federico Garcia Lorca tried to seduce his friend and collaborator Salvador Dali.

Bunuel's films, made over a fifty-year period from his 1929 Un Chien Andalou -- with its infamous image of a razor drawn across a girl's eyeball -- to a late blossoming in the sixties and seventies with Belle du Jour, Viridiana, and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, still retain their power to shock.

John Baxter's superb biography brings Luis Bunuel into the light for the first time. With the cooperation of Bunuel's family, and collaborators and friends in Hollywood, France, Spain, and Mexico, Baxter uses original interviews, unpublished documents, letters and family records, revealing a man of charm, compassion and, above all, humor -- an artist who disguised his sensitivity in cynicism and a calculated use of the bizarre.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Stanley Kubrick's biographer turns here to another secretive, obsessive film director: Luis Buñuel (1900-83), creator of such bourgeois-baiting masterpieces as An Andalusian Dog, Viridiana, and Belle de Jour. Making good use of family documents and with the cooperation of Buñuel's son, John Baxter explores the autobiographical roots of the perverse eroticism and lucid, almost cruelly detached view of the human comedy that distinguished the Spanish-born director's artistic vision. But the biography is not all surrealism and cynicism: lots of good anecdotes culled from interviews put flesh and blood on Buñuel's austere public persona.

From Publishers Weekly

This vibrant, anecdote-packed biography of Spanish film director Luis Bu?uel (1900-1983) provides an intimate portrait of a secretive man. Baxter (Stanley Kubrick) zeroes in on the obsessions that drove the filmmaker and nurtured his films: fetishism, an anarchist-tinged faith in communism, hatred of Franco's regime and a near-pathological hostility to the Catholic Church, in which he was raised. Bu?uel emerges as a jealous man of rigid habits, a cross-dresser beset by fear of women, an audacious artist plagued by Meniere's syndrome, an inner ear disorder that destroyed his hearing later in life. Drawing on family papers, interviews with Bu?uel's son and former associates, and archival materials, Baxter plunges readers into Bu?uel's varied milieu, from Madrid to surrealist circles in mid-1920s Paris, to 1940s New York and Hollywood, to the Spanish emigre community in Mexico, where the filmmaker took refuge in 1945, under attack in his native Spain for his left-wing politics. Probing the chemistry among scriptwriters, producers and Bu?uel's personal circumstances, Baxter taps into the creative dynamo that gave us movies like Viridiana, Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Photos.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 324 pages
• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub; 1st Ed. (U.S.) edition (April 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 078670506X
• ISBN-13: 978-0786705061
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,275,516 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Baxter was born in Sydney, Australia, but raised in a small country town called Junee. With little else to do, he went to the movies three times a week for most of his adolescence, which provided an instant education in Hollywood movies with which he was often able to embarrass film celebrities ("You SAW that thing?")
His second interest, however, was science fiction, which he began writing in his late teens. He sold stories to the same British and American magazines as J.G. Ballard and Thomas M. Disch, and in 1966 his first sf novel, THE GOD KILLERS, was published in both the US and Britain. He also edited the first-ever anthologies of Australian science fiction, and wrote the first history of the Australian cinema.
In 1969, he came to Europe, settled in London, and began writing books on the cinema, including a biography of the director Ken Russell, and studies of John Ford, Josef von Sternberg and the gangster and science fiction film genres, and working as an arts journalist for various magazines, and for BBC radio. He also served on the juries of European film festivals.
In 1974 he was invited to become visiting professor at Hollins College in Virginia, USA, where he remained for two years. While in America, he collaborated with Thomas Atkins on THE FIRE CAME BY; THE GREAT SIBERIAN EXPLOSION OF 1908,and wrote a study of director King Vidor, as well as completing two novels, THE HERMES FALL and BIDDING.
Returning to London, he published the technological thriller THE BLACK YACHT. In 1979 he moved to Ireland, and the following year returned to Australia, where he co-scripted the 1988 science fiction film THE TIME GUARDIANS, starring Carrie Fisher and Dean Stockwell. He also wrote and presented three TV series on the cinema, and produced and presented the ABC radio programme BOOKS AND WRITING.
In 1989 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a screenwriter and film journalist. The following year, he met his present wife, Marie-Dominique Montel, and re-located in Paris.
After moving to France, John published biographies of Federico Fellini, Luis Bunuel, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas and Robert De Niro, as well as three books of autobiography, A POUND OF PAPER: CONFESSIONS OF A BOOK ADDICT, dealing with his fascination for collecting books, WE'LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS: SEX AND LOVE IN THE CITY OF LIGHT, of which the SUNDAY TIMES of London wrote "it towers above most recent memoirs of life abroad," and IMMOVEABLE FEAST: A PARIS CHRISTMAS. His most recent book is CARNAL KNOWLEDGE, a guide to erotica in the 20th and 21st centuries. His translations of MORPHINE by Dubut de la Forest and FUMEE D'OPIUM of Claude Farrere will be published shortly by HarperCollins.
John is co-director of the annual Paris Writers Workshop and a frequent lecturer and public speaker. His hobbies are cooking and book collecting. He has a major collection of modern first editions. When not writing, he can be found prowling the bouquinistes along the Seine or cruising the Internet in search of new acquisitions.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Shallow biography, January 21, 2000

By 

Gijs Mulder (Amsterdam) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bunuel (Paperback)

Poor book. The author doesn't understand Spanish nor French - very strange when writing Buñuel's biography. His sketch of B's personality is very poor.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, Involving Read., April 19, 2000

By 

Mr. Fellini "Fellini" (Orange County, California United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Bunuel (Paperback)

"Bunuel" by John Baxter has received some bad press from some of the reviewers here, but this is not a bad book at all. It is probably the second best biographical book about Luis Bunuel right after, of course, "My Last Sigh." Bunuel remains one of the giants of the cinema, a director who's films remain timeless and evocative, seductive and visceral, and sometimes funny. Baxter is not a bad author and elevates his subject to some great intellectual levels, exploring the depth of Bunuel's work and the philosophies, desires, madness and obsessions that spin madly at the center of this man's story. And yet, Baxter reveals that Bunuel was not some lunatic with a camera, he had surprisingly compassionate, funny human aspects, which is the case with most geniuses. Bunuel's life here plays like a great novel, filled with interesting characters from Bunuel's life like the painter Salvador Dali and the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. There is interesting information here, sometimes voyeuristic when we learn Lorca apparently tried to seduce Dali. The book is also a good examination of the films, because to understand Bunuel's mind, one must look at his masterpieces. There are fascinating moments when the book goes into the Surrealist movement and Bunuel's first two surreal films made with Dali, "Un Chien Andalou" (with the immortal image of a razor slicing across a woman's eye-ball) and "L'Age d'Or" (which has touches of De Sade). We follow Bunuel on his exile to Mexico where he makes the classic "Los Olvidados" which left an impact in many directors including, we learn here, Roman Polanski. Bunuel's work is a rich collage of visceral, seductive emotions and images as seen in works like "Viridiana" and "Belle De Jour" (the most famous erotic film ever) and the book makes good use of exploring all of the art. And yet, the human stories are also entertaining. A surprising thing that comes out is the love story between Bunuel and his wife Jeanne Rucar (who wrote a book about their marriage titled "Woman Without A Piano" which I wish someone would put back in print!) which is as involving as the stories of Bunuel's movies. There are comic moments, as when Mexican director Arturo Ripstein calls on Bunuel after seeing "Nazarin" and tells him he wants to be a director just like him. Bunuel gets anrgy, admits him and screens "Un Chien Andalou" and comments, "THIS is what I do." Ripstein, of course, is one of Mexico's greatest directors. "Bunuel" is fascinating, enjoyable, entertaining and sometimes crazy. It manages to capture a man and his art and dissect the wonderful faults and positives of his genius.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Not much of a biography, August 17, 2001

By 

Julie Jones "Julienola" (New Orleans, LA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Bunuel (Hardcover)

Baxter's book is readable, but inadequately researched. Baxter is innocent of Spanish, and this means that many of the documents related to Bunuel are...well, Spanish, to him. It also leads to a number of egregious errors and, in general, to suspect judgements and thin interpretations. A number of questions need to be addressed in a biography of Bunuel, but Baxter either treats them superficially or ignores them. A definitive--or even semi-definitive, if such a thing exists-- biography of Bunuel is yet to come.