At the close of a year-long, international celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Spanish director Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), Harvard Film Archive presents this special retrospective series, which features a pair of engaging film portraits of the artist as well as ten of the major works from his remarkable fifty-year career. In representing each of the three distinct periods of Buñuel’s enterprise—the succès de scandale of his early Surrealist films, the Mexican comedies and melodramas, and his final triumphant emergence in the international film arena—this program reconfirms the artist’s extraordinary depth and continuity of vision, which transcended the particulars of production budgets and script sources to place an unerring mark of authorship on his singular body of work.

During the course of this centennial year, the Filmoteca Española completed its preservation project to collect prints of all thirty-seven of the films Buñuel directed and produced. Notable also—and decidedly Buñuelian in spirit—were two events that took place in Mexico, where Buñuel produced more than half of his films: the discovery by the Filmoteca de la UNAM of a "happier ending" for the director’s famously downbeat Los Olvidados, unearthed in a lost version of the film; and the restoration of the column on which the title character of his final Mexican film, Simon of the Desert, was perched. The two-ton column, designed by Jesús Bracho, now resides at the entrance to the new offices of the Filmoteca de la UNAM. Here at the HFA, we continue to maintain prints of many of Buñuel’s key works and to present the films of this modern master, who saw in cinema a pathway to the marvelous and the poetic.