The 10 Favorite Films of Avant-Garde Surrealist Filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Including His Own Collaboration with Salvador Dalí)

You may remem­ber that when we fea­tured the favorite films of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, the 8 1/2 direc­tor’s top-ten list includ­ed… well, 8 1/2. But then, no film­mak­er before Felli­ni or after him has had quite the same sen­si­bil­i­ty, so if Felli­ni made the kind of movies he him­self want­ed to watch — and I sus­pect he made only that kind of movie — then we might won­der why his list did­n’t include even more of his own work. And maybe we should won­der the same about this list of favorites from Luis Buñuel, the Span­ish sur­re­al­ist who start­ed doing for vivid, dream­like, and grotesque Euro­pean cin­e­ma in the 1920s what Felli­ni kept doing for it until the 1990s:

1. Under­world (1927, Josef von Stern­berg)
2. The Gold Rush (1925, Charles Chap­lin)
3. The Bicy­cle Thief (1947, Vit­to­rio De Sica)
4. Bat­tle­ship Potemkin (1925, Sergei Eisen­stein)
5. Por­trait of Jen­nie (1948, William Dieter­le)
6. Cav­al­cade (1933, Frank Lloyd)
7. White Shad­ows in the South Seas (1928, W.S. Van Dyle/Robert Fla­her­ty)
8. Dead of Night (1945, Alber­to Cavalcanti/Charles Crichton/Basil Deardon/Robert Hamer)
9. L’Age d’Or (1930, Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali)
10. I Am a Fugi­tive from a Chain Gang (1932, Mervyn LeRoy)

At the top of the post, you can watch Buñuel’s num­ber-one pick, Josef von Stern­berg’s silent pro­to-gang­ster pic­ture Under­world. Just above, you’ll find his num­ber-nine pick, and the one he had a hand in him­self: L’Age d’Or, the 1930 soci­etal satire on which he col­lab­o­rat­ed with the Span­ish artist Sal­vador Dalí. It came as the fol­low-up to their 1929 silent short Un Chien Andalou, a work wide­ly rec­og­nized as the foun­da­tion stone of sur­re­al­ist cin­e­ma (see also our post on both films), and it came with much greater ambi­tions.

Nei­ther Buñuel’s own direc­to­r­i­al style nor the medi­um of cin­e­ma itself had quite found their form yet; those con­di­tions pro­duced a film that still retains many strik­ing and even cut­ting qual­i­ties today, albeit not, per­haps, to the same degree that they caused con­tem­po­rary right-wingers to toss ink at the screen and start brawls in the aisles. Watch the pre-1930 films on the list, like Bat­tle­ship Potemkin and The Gold Rush, to under­stand what formed Buñuel’s cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty; watch L’Age d’Or to under­stand why, when it comes to his own work, he prefers the ear­ly stuff.

via Com­bustible Cel­lu­loid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Vin­tage Films by Sal­vador Dalí and Luis Buñuel: Un Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or

Read Film­mak­er Luis Buñuel’s Recipe for the Per­fect Dry Mar­ti­ni, and Then See Him Make One

Fed­eri­co Fellini’s List of His 10 Favorite Films … Includes One of His Own

Col­in Mar­shall writes on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.