Film at Eleven

If surrealism floats your boat, and you happen to be in Edinburgh between the end of May and the middle of July, you should give yourself a bit of time to head over the the Edinburgh Filmhouse who have a Luis Buñuel Season running for the start of summer.

One of the most influential and strikingly original filmmakers in the history of cinema, Luis Buñuel (1900 – 1983) enjoyed a long and astonishingly prolific career. From his incendiary surrealist collaborations with Salvador Dalì in the late 1920s through to his final film made more than half-a-century later, the cinema of Buñuel, despite often having female characters at the narrative core, is preoccupied with the representation and interrogation of male desire. Like Fellini or Hitchcock, Bergman or Ozu, Buñuel’s name alone immediately evokes a distinct tone and style. Stripped free of artifice, his films are strikingly honest in exposing human deceit and decadence but are always dipped in mischievous, delicious black humour.

Filmhouse will showcase the work of Bunuel in an unmissable selection of films stretching across his fifty-year career. His surrealist roots are represented by the lacerating Un Chien Andalou (1929) and L’Age D’Or (1930) and his Mexican period by the hugely-controversial Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962). His fruitful, long-standing collaboration with screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière is represented by the French productions The Diary of A Chambermaid (1963), Belle de Jour (1967), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977) - all featuring the cream of European acting talent including Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau, Monica Vitti, Michel Piccoli and Fernando Rey.

Tickets are £12/£7.50 concessions, or you can get a pass for all seven films for £21/£14 concessions.

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