“Morality—middle-class morality, that is—is for me immoral. One must fight it. It is a morality founded on our most unjust social institutions—religion, fatherland, family, culture—everything that people call the pillars of society.” —Luis Buñuel

In an address to the University of Mexico in 1953, Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) decried the unfulfilled promise of cinema, arguing that instead of stimulating the critical and poetic capacities of the audience, movies were, for the most part, banal, stultifying, prosaic, and devoid of mystery, which for Buñuel was essential to art. But, he added, “In the hands of a free spirit the cinema is a magnificent and dangerous weapon . . . a superlative medium through which to express the world of thought, feeling, and instinct.”

From the eye slice in his revolutionary collaboration with Salvador Dalí, Un chien Andalou (1929), to the explosive finale of his last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), Buñuel made incendiary films to counter institutionalized complacency and to plumb the mysteries of the human condition. Staying true to his Surrealist roots throughout, he chronicled everyday strangeness, existential absurdities, desire, and obsession. Mercilessly skewering religious dogma and bourgeois hypocrisy, Buñuel’s films remain as shocking, perverse, and provocative as when they were made.