Luis Buñuel – 1946 – Mexico
Buñuel making a musical? Yes, it happened. This was the first film he was able to get himself hired to direct after the turbulent 30s and 40s that saw him not only blackballed because of his scandalous Surrealist films but scurrying across the globe escaping the chaos of first the Spanish Civil War and then the Second World War. In Mexico, at last, he began a long and fruitful career in which he gradually evolved from a journeyman into one of the world’s greatest auteurs. The films had to be commercial to justify being made at all, and yet Buñuel also managed to infuse them with his surreal vision successfully enough that certain titles – like Los Olvidados (1950) and Nazarin (1958) – became the talk of the festivals and art-houses. Aside from the squalor on screen and the basic idea of the poor being portrayed without romantic leftist ideology, there isn’t a lot in the film that smacks of Buñuel; although I suppose you could argue that the musical is the most inherently surreal film genre of all and therefore the mere fact that he made one is it itself a Surrealist act.
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