Él

Luis Buñuel · 1953 · 93 minutes
June 11 · Regal Riviera · 7:00 p.m.

“Buñuel’s Mexican period is perhaps his most important. He tackles themes that consolidate him as a filmmaker.” — Guillermo del Toro

“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, The New Yorker

“Él has been taken as a parody of machismo, but it is more pointedly an attack on social class, male privilege and the notion of bourgeois respectability.” — J. Hoberman, New York Times

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.

This 4K restoration was scanned from a dupe positive preserved by Películas y Vídeos Internacionales at the Filmoteca de la UNAM. Color grading was supervised by Gabriel Figueroa Flores. The restoration work was completed at L’Immagine Ritrovata in 2022. The Film Foundation extends special thanks to Guillermo del Toro and Daniela Michel.

Programmer’s Note

Luis Buñuel is best remembered today for his early, landmark forays into surrealism — Un chien andalou (1928), co-directed with Salvador Dalí, and L’âge d’or (1930) — and for his absurdist, star-studded French and Spanish productions in the 1960s and 1970s, including Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), Belle de jour (1967), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

Between those two periods, Buñuel spent nearly a decade in Mexico, where he made a number of remarkable films in a more realistic vein. (I agree with Guillermo del Toro that it’s the most important period of Buñuel’s career.) Like so many of his Mexican films, Él looks like it might have been made in post-war America, with chiaroscuro images that rival those produced by the Hollywood studio system at its peak. It’s a fascinating piece of work, even more perverse than Hitchcock at his most cheeky. (I wouldn’t be the first to point out that Él anticipates Vertigo in fundamental ways.)

I’m thrilled that Buñuel’s Mexican films are being restored and rediscovered, and giddy to see Él on a big screen in Knoxville. — Darren Hughes