'[45]In deliberate contrast to the approach taken by Jean Epstein and his peers, which was to never leave anything in their work to chance, with every aesthetic decision having a rational explanation and fitting clearly into the whole,[46] Buñuel and Dalí made a cardinal point of eliminating all logical associations.

"[48] Against his hopes and expectations, the film was a popular success with the very audience he had wanted to insult,[10] leading Buñuel to exclaim in exasperation: "What can I do about the people who adore all that is new, even when it goes against their deepest convictions, or about the insincere, corrupt press, and the inane herd that saw beauty or poetry in something which was basically no more than a desperate impassioned call for murder?

"[49] Although Un Chien Andalou is a silent film, during the original screening (attended by the elite of the Parisian art world), Buñuel played a sequence of phonograph records which he switched manually while keeping his pockets full of stones with which to pelt anticipated hecklers.

[51] Late in 1929, on the strength of Un Chien Andalou, Buñuel and Dalí were commissioned to make another short film by Marie-Laurie and Charles de Noailles, owners of a private cinema on the Place des États-Unis and financial supporters of productions by Jacques Manuel, Man Ray and Pierre Chenal.

[36] All that was required of Buñuel by his loose-ended contract with MGM was that he "learn some good American technical skills",[67] but, after being ushered off the first set he visited because the star, Greta Garbo, did not welcome intruders, he decided to stay at home most of the time and only show up to collect his paycheck.

[74]: p.72 In 1932, Buñuel was invited to serve as film documentarian for the celebrated Mission Dakar-Djibouti, the first large-scale French anthropological field expedition, which, led by Marcel Griaule, unearthed some 3,500 African artifacts for the new Musée de l'Homme.

[82] Las Hurdes has been called one of the first examples of mockumentary,[83] and has been labeled a "surrealist documentary", a term defined by critic Mercè Ibarz [ca; es; eu; fr] as "A multi-layered and unnerving use of sound, the juxtaposition of narrative forms already learnt from the written press, travelogues and new pedagogic methods, as well as a subversive use of photographed and filmed documents understood as a basis for contemporary propaganda for the masses".

[93]: p.255 Returning to Hollywood in 1938, he was befriended by Frank Davis, an MGM producer and member of the Communist Party USA,[53]: p.349  who placed Buñuel on the payroll of Cargo of Innocence, a film about Spanish refugee mothers and children fleeing from Bilbao to the USSR.

[24]: p.358  He just was not flamboyant enough to capture the attention of Hollywood decision makers, in the opinion of film composer George Antheil: "Inasmuch as [Buñuel], his wife and his little boy seemed to be such absolutely normal, solid persons, as totally un-Surrealist in the Dalí tradition as one could possibly imagine.

[106]: p.213 In desperation, to market himself to independent producers, he composed a 21-page autobiography, a section of which, headed "My Present Plans", outlined proposals for two documentary films: Nobody showed any interest and Buñuel realized that staying in Los Angeles was futile, so he traveled to New York City to see if he could change his fortunes.

[87]: p.58  Buñuel stayed at MoMA to work for the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) as part of a production team that gathered, reviewed and edited films intended as anti-fascist propaganda to be distributed in Latin America by American embassies.

"[106]: p.214  At the same time, a campaign on the part of Hollywood, through its industry trade paper, the Motion Picture Herald, to undermine the MoMA film unit resulted in a 66% reduction in the department's budget and Buñuel felt himself compelled to resign.

[110]: p.130 In his autobiography, in a chapter about his second spell in America, Buñuel states that "[o]n several occasions, both American and European producers have suggested that I tackle a film version of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano", but that after reading the book many times as well as eight different screenplays he was unable to come up with a solution for the cinema.

[119] In 1946, an old friend, producer Denise Tual, the widow of Pierre Batcheff,[120] the leading man in Un Chien Andalou, proposed that she and Buñuel adapt Lorca's play La casa de Bernarda Alba for production in Paris.

[134] Although Soler typically preferred to direct his own films, for their next collaboration, El Gran Calavera, based on a play by Adolfo Torrado, he decided that doing both jobs would be too much trouble, so he asked Dancigers to find someone who could be trusted to handle the technical aspects of the directorial duties.

[86]: p.52  The picture has been described as "a hilarious screwball send-up of the Mexican nouveau riche...a wild roller coaster of mistaken identity, sham marriages and misfired suicides",[1] and it was a big hit at the box office in Mexico.

[68] Knowing that Dancigers was uncomfortable with experimentalism, especially when it might affect the bottom line, Buñuel proposed a commercial project titled ¡Mi huerfanito jefe!, about a juvenile street vendor who can't sell his final lottery ticket, which ends up being the winner and making him rich.

[140]: p.60  During his recent researches through the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel had read a newspaper account of a twelve-year-old boy's body being found on a garbage dump, and this became the inspiration, and final scene, for the film, eventually called Los olvidados.

");[145]: p.99  another staff member urged Buñuel to abandon shooting on a "garbage heap", noting that there were many "lovely residential neighborhoods like Las Lomas" that were available;[145]: p.99  while Pedro de Urdimalas, one of the scriptwriters, refused to allow his name in the credits.

For many critics, although there were occasional widely acknowledged masterpieces like Los olvidados and Él (1953), the majority of his output consisted of generic fare which was adapted to the norms of the national film industry, frequently adopting melodramatic conventions that appealed to local tastes.

[160] Other commentators, however, have written of the deceptive complexity and intensity of many of these films, arguing that, collectively, they, "bring a philosophical depth and power to his cinema, together offering a sustained meditation on ideas of religion, class inequity, violence and desire".

"[168] Other unrealized projects during his lifetime included adaptations of André Gide's Les caves du Vatican; Benito Pérez Galdós's Fortunata y Jacinta, Doña Perfecta, and Ángel Guerra; Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One; William Golding's Lord of the Flies; Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun; J. K. Huysmans' Là-Bas; Matthew Lewis's The Monk; José Donoso's Lugar sin límites; a film of four stories based on Carlos Fuentes's Aura; and Julio Cortázar's Las ménades.

[173] In 1960, Buñuel re-teamed with scenarist Hugo Butler and organizer George Pepper, allegedly his favorite producer, to make his second English-language film, a US/Mexico co-production called The Young One, based on a short story by writer and former CIA-agent Peter Matthiessen.

[177] Two years earlier, Saura had partnered with Juan Antonio Bardem and Luis García Berlanga to form a production company called UNINCI,[178] and the group was keen to get Buñuel to make a new film in his native country as part of their overall goal of creating a uniquely Spanish brand of cinema.

[180] Buñuel and his co-scenarist Julio Alejandro drafted a preliminary screenplay for Viridiana, which critic Andrew Sarris has described as incorporating "a plot which is almost too lurid to synopsize even in these enlightened times",[181] dealing with rape, incest, hints of necrophilia, animal cruelty and sacrilege, and submitted it to the Spanish censor, who, to the surprise of nearly everyone, approved it after requesting only minor modifications and one significant change to the ending.

98 Buñuel submitted a cutting copy to the censors and then arranged for his son, Juan Luis, to smuggle the negatives to Paris for the final editing and mixing,[185] ensuring that the authorities would not have an opportunity to view the finished product before its planned submission as Spain's official entry to the 1961 Cannes Festival.

[191] In 1963, actor Fernando Rey, one of the stars of Viridiana, introduced Buñuel to producer Serge Silberman, a Polish entrepreneur who had fled to Paris when his family died in the Holocaust[192] and had worked with several renowned French directors, including Jean-Pierre Melville, Jacques Becker, Marcel Camus and Christian-Jaque.

Initially, the part of the young woman was to be played by Maria Schneider, who had achieved international fame for her roles in Last Tango in Paris and The Passenger,[224] but once shooting started, according to Carrière, her drug usage resulted in a "lackluster and dull" performance that caused tempestuous arguments with Buñuel on the set and her eventual dismissal.

Buñuel's style of directing was extremely economical; he shot films in a few weeks, rarely deviating from his script (the scene in Tristana where Catherine Deneuve exposes her breasts to Saturno – but not the audience – being a noted exception) and shooting as much as possible in order to minimize editing time.

[246] He remained true throughout his working life to an operating philosophy that he articulated at the beginning of his career in 1928: "The guiding idea, the silent procession of images that are concrete, decisive, measured in space and time—in a word, the film—was first projected inside the brain of the filmmaker".