Luis Buñuel’s Magnificent Weapon

July 7–November 19, 2023

From the eye slice in his revolutionary collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un chien Andalou, to the explosive finale of his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire, this retrospective offers the opportunity to see films from throughout Luis Buñuel’s career.

Read full description

  • Mexican Bus Ride

  • Illusion Travels by Streetcar

  • Él

  • Nazarín

  • Belle de jour

  • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • The Young One

    • Sunday, November 19 4:30 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1960

    Archival 35mm Print

    Luis Buñuel’s sole English-language film, which follows a Black jazz performer running from false rape charges in the Deep South, is a peculiar portrait of American Southern racism that at first resembles a Hollywood effort; by the end, it’s pure Buñuel. “One of his most sensual, sheerly physical works” (Jonathan Rosenbaum).

  • Nazarín

    • Friday, November 17 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1959

    A turn-of-the-century wandering cleric sheds his priestly garments to aid the rural poor directly, but material reality and human cruelty have other plans. Magnificently photographed by the great Gabriel Figueroa.

  • The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

    • Saturday, November 11 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1955

    A childhood incident has blurred the line between death and desire for mild-mannered, kind, definitely insane Archibaldo—with predictably perverse results. “Light-hearted, benign, and extremely funny” (New York Times). 

  • Wuthering Heights

    • Sunday, November 5 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1954

    Luis Buñuel’s adaptation of Emily Brontë’s novel adds “a touch of the inferno” (Tom Milne) to the otherwise stuffy literary drama. “A blatant hacienda melodrama that camps out on poverty row before blasting triumphantly into the stratosphere” (J. Hoberman).

  • Illusion Travels by Streetcar

    • Saturday, November 4 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1954

    When their beloved streetcar is decommissioned, two tipsy transit workers decide to take it out for one last late-night spin. “Gorgeously photographed by Raúl Martínez Solares, Illusion Travels by Streetcar is in many ways Luis Buñuel’s most visually intoxicating creation” (Ed Gonzalez, Slant Magazine). 

  • The River and Death

    • Sunday, October 29 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1954

    Luis Buñuel’s handling of the story of a doctor who returns to his rancorous hometown, his adoring mother, and a life-threatening blood feud was informed by the director’s ongoing fascination with Mexican machismo and the “ease with which certain people can kill others.”

  • Él

    • Friday, October 27 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1953

    New Digital Restoration

    Arturo de Córdova plays a middle-aged landowner, devout Catholic, and virgin whose marriage to a much-younger woman winds up destroyed by his own jealousy. One of Luis Buñuel’s most outrageous subversions of the traditional commercial melodrama.

  • El bruto

    • Saturday, October 21 5 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1953

    A handsome, hulking slaughterhouse worker takes a side job strong-arming an unscrupulous landlord’s tenants, but he winds up involved with the landlord’s sexually frustrated wife in Luis Buñuel’s heaving study of machismo, brutality, and class awakening. Mexican icon Pedro Armendáriz and Katy Jurado star.

  • Mexican Bus Ride

    • Saturday, September 30 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1951

    An about-to-be-married peasant takes a very long and often-detoured bus ride to visit his dying mother in this surprisingly carefree social comedy, which shows off Luis Buñuel’s more light-hearted, but still biting side.

  • Land Without Bread

    • Sunday, September 24 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, Spain, 1933

    Luis Buñuel’s only documentary showed the deprivation suffered by the inhabitants of the Las Hurdes region of Spain with the intention of jolting viewers out of complacency and into revolutionary action. Screening with Buñuel’s Prisoners, Ramón Gieling’s 2000 account of the lasting effects of the film on its subjects and their descendants.

  • A Woman Without Love

    • Saturday, September 16 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1952

    Lies and insults, passion and heartbreak flow like wine in another of Luis Buñuel’s giddy Mexican melodramas, which follows the lifetime of intrigue that occurs when a young wife’s extramarital dalliance results in the birth of an illegitimate son.

  • Susana

    • Sunday, September 10 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1951

    An extremely loose young woman spreads consternation throughout the hacienda of an ultra-bourgeois family in Luis Buñuel’s over-the-top Mexican melodrama, which takes every cliché and exaggerates it even more.

  • L’age d’or

    • Wednesday, September 6 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, 1930

    New Digital Restorations

    Luis Buñuel partnered with legendary artist Salvador Dalí for two incendiary Surrealist films that both scandalized audiences. Decades later, they still shock. With Un chien Andalou.

  • Los olvidados

    • Friday, September 1 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1950

    BAMPFA Collection Print

    Luis Buñuel’s unsentimental portrait of slum kids in Mexico City. “Its matter-of-fact brilliance continues to astonish” (BBC). 

  • That Obscure Object of Desire

    • Saturday, August 12 7:30 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, 1977

    A seemingly well-heeled elderly man narrates the tale of his obsession with a much younger woman (played by two actresses) in Luis Buñuel’s final treatise on passion, perversion, and the irrationality of human desire.

  • The Phantom of Liberty

    • Saturday, August 5 7:30 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, 1974

    Casual blasphemies and waking dreams, bourgeois improprieties and Surrealist sight gags are strung together in this slippery chain of abortive comic vignettes, loosely coiled around themes of enslavement and the fear of freedom.

  • The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

    • Friday, August 4 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, 1972

    This account of six wealthy people’s thwarted attempts to sit down to dinner is the comedy of manners to end all comedies of manners. “A deeply funny movie. . . . [Luis] Buñuel’s art is as insolent now as ever” (David Denby).

  • Tristana

    • Friday, July 28 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Spain, Italy, France, 1970

    Catherine Deneuve and Fernando Rey star in Luis Buñuel’s tale of amour fou involving a virginal young orphan, a well-to-do older man, and a younger painter. “Extremely funny, bluntly fast-paced, and very, very beautiful” (Vincent Canby).

  • The Milky Way

    • Wednesday, July 26 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, Italy, 1969

    Two derelicts make an impious pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, with many detours in time and space along the way. Part theological fantasy, part shaggy dog story, the film makes manifest Luis Buñuel’s famous motto: “Thank God I’m an atheist!”

  • Belle de jour

    • Saturday, July 22 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, 1967

    In Luis Buñuel’s subversive erotic classic, Catherine Deneuve is a frigid housewife who indulges her masochistic desires by working in a Paris brothel. “A landmark not only of Buñuel’s career, but of the history of motion pictures” (Paul Schrader).

  • Simon of the Desert

    • Thursday, July 20 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1965

    The devil takes many guises to tempt Saint Simon Stylites from his pedestal in Luis Buñuel’s wicked satire of religion and hypocrisy. With Cinéastes de notre temps: Luis Buñuel.

  • Diary of a Chambermaid

    • Friday, July 14 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    France, Italy, 1964

    Jeanne Moreau is a chambermaid in a household of perfectly ordinary bourgeois perverts in this darkly funny update of a Gustave Mirbeau novel, the first film in the long collaboration between Luis Buñuel and screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière.

  • The Exterminating Angel

    • Saturday, July 8 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Mexico, 1962

    A bourgeois dinner turns to chaos when the guests realize they cannot leave in Luis Buñuel’s daring, Surrealist, darkly comic assault on the hypocrisy of the ruling class and organized religion. “The most distinctly and completely Surrealist film since L’age d’or” (Francisco Aranda).

  • Viridiana

    • Friday, July 7 7 PM
    Luis Buñuel
    Spain, Mexico, 1961

    Kindly Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) dreams of becoming a nun until the attentions of her lecherous uncle change her path in Luis Buñuel’s notorious satire of religion and desire. Winner of both the Cannes Palme d’Or and the Vatican’s condemnation.