Luis Buel: The Red Years, 1929-1939 (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780299284749)

The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Buel (1900-1983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause.
Luis Buel: The Red Years, 1929-1939 investigates Buel's commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive producer at Filmono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935-36 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and Spain between which Buel shuttled during the 1930s, these became equally embattled as left and right totalitarianisms fought to wrest political power away from a debilitated capitalism.
Where it exists, the literature on this crucial decade of the film director's life is scant and relies on Buel's own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Rom疣 Gubern and Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Buel's accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of Buel's "Red Years" that abounds in new information.