The films of the Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) emphasize the hypocrisy of conventional morality.

Luis Buñuel was born in Calanda, the first of seven children in a prosperous, landowning family. After being educated by the Jesuits in Saragossa, he studied philosophy and literature at the University of Madrid.

In 1925 Buñuel traveled to Paris, where he came under the influence of the surrealist André Breton and the film director Jean Epstein. In 1928 he returned to Spain to collaborate with Salvador Dali on Un Chien Andalou (1928) and L'âge d'or (1929), two innovative surrealist films. The following year Buñuel journeyed to Hollywood. He completed only two short films during the next 10 years: Land without Bread (1932), a realistic study of Spanish provincial poverty, and Madrid 36 to Spain in Arms, a documentary supporting the Loyalist struggle against Franco.

During the early 1940s...