DIRECTOR: Luis Buñuel
PRODUCER: Oscar Dancigers  
PRODUCTION CO: Producciones Tepeyac
SCREENPLAY: Luis Buñuel, Luis Alcoriza, based on the novel Pensamientos by Mercedes Pinto
PHOTOGRAPHY: Gabriel Figueroa
EDITOR: Carlos Savage
MUSIC: Luis Hernández Bretón
WITH:Arturo de Córdova (Francisco Galván de Montemayor), Delia Garcés (Gloria Vilalta), Aurora Walker (Doña Esperanza Vilalta), Carlos Martínes Baena (Padre Velasco), Manuel Dondé (Pablo), Rafael Banquells (Ricardo Luján)

FESTIVALS: Cannes

REVIEW

“Among the strangest and most perturbing films of his overlooked Mexican period, Él is Luis Buñuel’s incisive portrait of paranoia, jealousy, and sexual obsession — a nightmarish tale of love gone wrong that prefigures the major themes of his 1960s and ’70s work. Incorporating his personal demons into an adaptation of Mercedes Pinto’s autobiographical novel, Buñuel tells the story of Francisco Galván de Montemayor (Arturo de Córdova), a devout middle-aged bachelor who falls into amour fou with Gloria (Delia Garcés). After breaking her engagement with another man, Gloria realizes something is terribly off about Francisco, whose sophisticated facade masks deep insecurities and an explosive, violent temper. Descending into madness, Francisco drives Gloria to fear for her life — with no refuge offered by either her family or the church. One of Buñuel’s rawest, angriest indictments of religious and social hypocrisy, Él stands as the surrealist master’s great excursion into dark melodrama, where civilization can find no answer to the raging urges of the irrational id.”

– Janus Films

“The tale of Gloria’s miseries is a twist on Gaslight: Francisco isolates her from her friends and family, treats her highly supervised sociability as proof of her adultery, takes coincidences as evidence of conspiracies, and gets her to doubt her own behavior, her motives, and even her sanity…. With eerie point-of-view shots, Buñuel gets inside the mind of a madman whose sadism is inseparable from his high social position; his commanding manner mirrors the folly and the cruelty of society at large.”

– Richard Brody, New Yorker

FILM SOCIETY SCREENINGS

Queenstown
Tuesday, 23 June, 8.00pm

​Wellington     
Monday, 20 July, 6.00pm

Wellington     
Monday, 20 July, 8.30pm

​​​​​Whanganui    
Monday, 17 August, 7.00pm

Dunedin     
Wednesday, 09 September, 7.30pm

​​​Nelson  
Wednesday, 30 September, 6.00pm

​Hamilton     
Monday, 12 October, 6.30pm

Auckland  
Monday, 19 October, 6.15pm

Palmerston North
​Wednesday, 18 November, 6.00pm
RETRO CLASSICS >>