Luis Buñuel

One of the founders of surrealist cinema, Luis Bunuel enjoyed a career as diverse and contradictory as his films: he was a master of both silent and sound cinema, of documentaries as well as features; his greatest work was produced in the two decades after his 60th year; and although frequently characterized as a surrealist, many of his films were dramas and farces in the realist or neo-realist mode. Yet despite all the innovations and permutations of his work, Bunuel remained surprisingly consistent in the targets of his social satire: the Catholic Church, bourgeois culture, and Fascism. As he once commented, "Religious education and Surrealism have marked me for life."