Luis Buñuel is a Spanish director and filmmaker, noted especially for his early Surrealist films and for his work in the Mexican commercial cinema. He is distinguished for his highly personal style and controversial obsession with social injustice, religious excess, gratuitous cruelty, and eroticism.
Background
Buñuel was born in Calanda, a small town in the province of Teruel, in the Aragon region of Spain, to Leonardo Buñuel, the cultivated scion of an established Aragonese family, and María Portolés, many years younger than her husband, with wealth and family connections of her own. He would later describe his birthplace by saying that in Calanda, "the Middle Ages lasted until World War I". The oldest of seven children, Luis had two brothers, Alfonso and Leonardo, and four sisters: Alicia, Concepción, Margarita and María.
Education
In Zaragoza, Buñuel received a strict Jesuit education at the private Colegio del Salvador.
In 1917, he went to university in Madrid.Buñuel first studied agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switched to philosophy.
Religion
Buñuel is often cited as one of the world's most prominent atheists. In a 1960 interview, he was asked about his attitude toward religion, and his response has become one of his most celebrated quotes: “I’m still an atheist, thank God.”] But his entire answer to the question was somewhat more nuanced: "I have no attitude. I was raised in it. I could answer “I’m still an atheist, thank God.” I believe we must seek God within man himself. This is a very simple attitude." Seventeen years later, in an interview with the New Yorker, Buñuel expressed a somewhat different opinion about religion and atheism: “I’m not a Christian, but I’m not an atheist either, ... I’m weary of hearing that accidental old aphorism of mine ‘I’m not an atheist, thank God’ It’s outworn. Dead leaves. In 1951, I made a small film called ‘Mexican Bus Ride,’ about a village too poor to support a church and a priest. The place was serene, because no one suffered from guilt. It’s guilt we must escape, not God.” However in 1982, Buñuel had reaffirmed his atheism in his autobiography. Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes has commented that Buñuel represents one of the most compelling intellectual tendencies of the twentieth century: "religious temperament without religious faith.”