Here is where he gained the fundamentals of storytelling. He earned acclaim with the morally complex arthouse drama film Viridiana which criticized the Francoist dictatorship. He also directed Diary of a Chambermaid and Belle de Jour He was nominated twice for the Nobel Prize in Literature in and In , he attended the University of Madrid , first studying agronomy then industrial engineering and finally switching to philosophy.
We liked each other instantly. Although we seemed to have little in common—I was a redneck from Aragon, and he an elegant Andalusian—we spent most of our time together We used to sit on the grass in the evenings behind the Residencia at that time, there were vast open spaces reaching to the horizon , and he would read me his poems. He read slowly and beautifully, and through him I began to discover a wholly new world. Images could and did become for me the true means of expression.
I decided to devote myself to the cinema". He decided to enter the film industry and enrolled in a private film school run by Jean Epstein and some associates. Beware of surrealists, they are crazy people. Un Chien Andalou was enthusiastically received by the burgeoning French surrealist movement of the time [ 42 ] and continues to be shown regularly in film societies to this day.
We had to look for the plot line. There's the film, let's go and make it. We had to open all doors to the irrational and keep only those images that surprised us, without trying to explain why". But by mid, the film had grown segmentally to an hour's duration. A film called L'Age d'or , whose non-existent artistic quality is an insult to any kind of technical standard, combines, as a public spectacle, the most obscene, disgusting and tasteless incidents.
Country, family, and religion are dragged through the mud. Spain in the early s was a time of political and social turbulence. Similar revolutionary acts occurred in many other cities in southern and eastern Spain, in most cases with the acquiescence and occasionally with the assistance of the official Republican authorities.
