Word: uel
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...religious mores, who is best known for what he grudgingly called his "obsessions." Objective parties might more appropriately call them fetishes, but Bunuel was quick to state for the record that these were not his own fetishes. In the delightful book "Objects of Desire: Conversations with Luis Buñuel," he notes that "I am attracted by foot fetishism as a picturesque and humorous element. Sexual perversion repulses me, but I can be attracted to it intellectually...
...Raised Catholic, Buñuel had a religious training that formulated his later, jaded worldview. One childhood game found him entertaining his sisters by pretending to be a priest saying mass; an early sexual experience occurred when he began to study under the Jesuits, who, he revealed to one interviewer, would attempt to channel young boys' sexual urges by encouraging them to masturbate to a statue of the Blessed Mother. Years later, while living at a now-famed students' residence in Madrid (where he first encountered Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali), Buñuel took his childhood game...
...photo from this era shows Buñuel in full nun-drag - making it no surprise that early on in "Chien andalou" (after the infamous eyeball- slitting scene, featuring Buñuel himself) our hero is seen bicycling through the streets wearing nun-like apparel. Later on, as the hero attempts to sexually attack the heroine, he is required to pull ropes connected to a variety of weighty impediments - including two reclining Marist brothers (one of whom is purportedly Dali). "L'Age d'or" followed soon after, but Buñuel was not able to return to his trademark imagery...
...uel reached the height of blasphemy in 1961 when he returned to Spain to make "Viridiana," a film that was instantly repudiated by the Franco government - right after it had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. A biting social satire about a novice (Silvia Pinal) who visits her lecherous uncle's estate before taking her final vows, the film is rife with blasphemous images: a cross that doubles as a pocketknife, a cross of thorns being tossed on a blazing fire, a group of mangy beggars assembling into a "Last Supper" tableau vivant. The Spanish government...
...last two must-see religious-themed Buñuel films draw their plotlines from actual historical events. "Simon of the Desert" (1965) is a low-budget production about a holy man who lives in a remote part of the desert, perched on a high pillar. The devil comes to tempt Simon, in the form of a sexy young woman (Silvia Pinal); for her final act, she shows this ascetic a vision of a modern day "black mass," taking him inside a noisy, sweaty, rockin' 1960s discotheque! "The Milky Way," Bunuel's final statement on Catholicism, is an episodic exploration...