Word: director
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Then, with scarcely a pause, he began work on The Milky Way, which he also called his finale. Yet before he and the century have completed their seventh decade, he will have directed his 28th film, Tristana. With another director, such ambiguities of statement and action might seem a bit bizarre; with Buñuel, they are entirely in character. Since his youth, he has fashioned a career from contradictions. The first-born son of a Spanish bourgeois father and an aristocratic mother, Luis became a brilliant pupil of Jesuit tutors. But upon reading Darwin's The Origin...
Pained Penguin. But Spain, Franco and Buñuel now seem equally aged, if not exactly mellowed. The director and his French wife maintain homes in Mexico and Madrid. Both of his sons dabble in the arts, Raphael as a sculptor, Juan Luis as an experimental-film maker. This fall, the old man returned to his motherland once more, where, again, he is working on his "last" film. Under the sullen skies of Toledo, he directs scenes from Tristana, a dissection of Spanish middle-class society. One scene is purest Buñueliana: a crumpled, baggy-eyed Catherine Deneuve sits...
Grunting in a heavy Aragonese accent, Director Buñuel articulates his mouth little and his bones even less. As a result, actors and production staff are often forced to sift for themselves every mysterious movement. "He's old; he has his own way of working and his own discipline, and you have to fit into that discipline," says Deneuve. "You wake up in the morning knowing you're going to have to accept what he tells you to do without question; not with resignation but with confidence." Her confidence may have been bolstered by another...
...zeal. No one knows whether Tristana will indeed be his finale or whether Luis Buñuel is trying to propitiate fate by loudly leaving art before reality quietly leaves him. If there is any certainty about the enigmatic old film maker, it was recently voiced by New Wave Director Louis Malle: "Buñuel will die with the director's light meter dangling round his neck...
...adulatory biographer like Theodore Besterman is just the further aggravation that a resenter of Voltaire's cocksure reformism does not need. Mercilessly detailed, Besterman's book is a scholarly but unabashed case of hero-worship by the English founder and director of the Institut et Musée Voltaire in Geneva and editor of the 107 volumes of Voltaire's Correspondence. Besterman's zeal can nearly do the impossible: make his scintillating subject dull. Yet Voltaire survives even his sedulous admiration-perhaps because no age can help finding a man fascinating who himself was so fascinated...