page_title: Luis Buñuel
section_title: United States (1938–1945)
hierarchical_section_title: Luis Buñuel / Career / United States (1938–1945)
caption_attribution_description: Man Ray in Paris
context_page_description: Luis Buñuel Portolés was a Spanish-Mexican filmmaker, who worked in France, Mexico, and Spain.
  When Buñuel died at age 83, his obituary in The New York Times called him "an iconoclast, moralist, and revolutionary who was a leader of avant-garde surrealism in his youth and a dominant international movie director half a century later". His first picture, Un Chien Andalou—made in the silent era—is still viewed regularly throughout the world and retains its power to shock the viewer, and his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire—made 48 years later—won him Best Director awards from the National Board of Review and the National Society of Film Critics. Writer Octavio Paz called Buñuel's work "the marriage of the film image to the poetic image, creating a new reality...scandalous and subversive".
  Often associated with the surrealist movement of the 1920s, Buñuel created films from the 1920s through the 1970s. Having worked in Europe and North America, and in French and Spanish, Buñuel's films also spanned various genres.
context_section_description: Returning to Hollywood in 1938, he was befriended by Frank Davis, an MGM producer and member of the Communist Party USA, who placed Buñuel on the payroll of Cargo of Innocence, a film about Spanish refugee mothers and children fleeing from Bilbao to the USSR.  The project was shelved precipitately when another Hollywood film about the Spanish Civil War, Blockade, was met with disfavor by the Catholic League of Decency.  In the words of biographer Ruth Brandon, Buñuel and his family "lived from one unsatisfactory crumb of work to another" because he "had none of the arrogance and pushiness essential for survival in Hollywood".  He just wasn't flamboyant enough to capture the attention of Hollywood decision makers, in the opinion of film composer George Antheil: "Inasmuch as [Buñuel], his wife and his little boy seemed to be such absolutely normal, solid persons, as totally un-Surrealist in the Dalí tradition as one could possibly imagine." For the most part, he was snubbed by many of the people in the film community whom he met during his first trip to America, although he was able to sell some gags to Chaplin for his film The Great Dictator.
  In desperation, to market himself to independent producers, he composed a 21-page autobiography, a section of which, headed "My Present Plans", outlined proposals for two documentary films:
  "The Primitive Man", which would depict "the terrible struggle of primitive man against a hostile universe, how the world appeared, how they saw it, what ideas they had on love, on death, on fraternity, how and why religion is born", [italics in original]
  "Psycho-Pathology", which would "expose the origin and development of different psychopathic diseases... Such a documental film, apart from its great scientific interest, could depict on screen a New Form of Terror or its synonym Humour." [italics in original]
  Nobody showed any interest and Buñuel realized that staying in Los Angeles was futile, so he traveled to New York City to see if he could change his fortunes.
  In New York City, Antheil introduced Buñuel to Iris Barry, chief curator of film at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).  Barry talked Buñuel into joining a committee formed to help educate those within the U.S. government who might not have appreciated fully the effectiveness of film as a medium of propaganda. Buñuel was hired to produce a shortened version of Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will (1935) as a demonstration project. The finished product was a compilation of scenes from Riefenstahl's Nazi epic with Hans Bertram's Feuertaufe. Buñuel stayed at MoMA to work for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) as part of a production team that would gather, review and edit films intended as anti-fascist propaganda to be distributed in Latin America by American embassies. While being vetted for the job at the OCIAA, upon being asked if he was a Communist, he replied: "I am a Republican," and, apparently, the interviewer did not realize that Buñuel was referring to the Spanish socialist coalition government, not the American political party.  Describing Buñuel's work at MoMA, his friend, composer Gustavo Pittaluga, stated: "Luis created maybe 2,000 remarkable works. We were sent anodyne documentaries, often extremely feeble primary materials, which the Museum team turned into marvellous films. And not just Spanish versions, but also Portuguese, French and English... He would create a good documentary through editing." [italics in original]
  In 1942, Buñuel applied for American citizenship, because he anticipated that MoMA would soon be put under federal control.  But that same year, Dalí published his autobiography, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, in which he made it clear that he had split with Buñuel because the latter was a Communist and an atheist. News of this reached Archbishop Spellman, who angrily confronted Barry with the question: "Are you aware that you are harbouring in this Museum the Antichrist, the man who made a blasphemous film L'Age d'Or?"  At the same time, a campaign on the part of Hollywood,
caption: Man Ray – a friend from Buñuel's surrealist period and collaborator on unrealized Hollywood projects.
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