Buñuel's films can roughly be divided into three periods: his early Surrealist avant-garde period, living
in Spain and France, which produced three films--Un Chien Andalou (1929), L'Age D'Or (1930),
and Las Hurdes (1933); a period of working in Mexico as a somewhat more commercial filmmaker,
which produced most of his films; and then a period in France and (briefly) in Franco's Spain where
he worked again as an art film director.
The bulk of Buñuel's work in Mexico is unavailable commercially in the United States, including
Los Olvidados and Mexican Bus Ride, but thanks to the internet many of these films can be downloaded
for free or purchased over sites like Amazon and Ebay in foreign editions.
The programs and websites I'm using are pretty easy to get ahold of, even for a mac user:
1. Submerge--a (Mac) program used for hardcoding soft subtitles to video files for burning to DVD.
(There are similar programs for windows computers, btw.) This one cost me only $10 to
download.
2. HandBrake--a free Mac program that rips DVDs, which I will need to use if I decide to buy the
two Spanish language editions of Daughter of Deceit and The River and Death, which are only
available for purchase WITHOUT English subtitles.
3. Allsubs.org--a website offering free soft subtitles for literally everything I've looked up, and even
subtitles for languages other than English.
4. Rapidshare.com--one of the largest file databases on the internet. I've downloaded everything I
can from Rapidshare. It, unfortunately, only allows you to download two files per day as a free
user, and many films come split in as many as twelve files. In any case, I paid for a month's
subscription to Rapidshare for about $9, and the downloads are unlimited and an unlimited
number of files can be downloaded simultaneously. (This is preferrable to torrenting, as many of
these films are unavailable as torrents or have so few seeders that they take weeks.)
5. Megadownload.net--A search engine for Rapidshare and Megaupload that is, as far as I know,
the only way to search their databases.
6. Rar Expander--a mac program (there are windows equivalents) that connects the split up files
from RAR format and makes them into video files.
7. Split and Concat--a mac program (I think the windows equivalent is hjsplit) that connects files
which have been split into the .00x format.
8. Amazon and Ebay--several DVDs that are unavailable for download are available in foreign
language or other region editions on these sites, especially Amazon, whose list is extensive. Fun
fact: you need a region free DVD player to play DVDs from Europe or Asia, and these are hard to
come by, except that most, if not all, computers ARE region free players.
9. Netflix--a more extensive collection of Buñuel than any video store locally. They don't have DVDs
that you can't find on Amazon in US editions, but, of the 32 films, 10 which I don't own are
available on netflix, saving me an enormous amount of money.
All in all, with these tools, I should theoretically be able to see all but two films of Buñuel.
Here's the list (if anybody wants to borrow the DVDs that I own, I will loan them out as long as
they're handled with care.)
I own:
Un Chien Andalou (1929, Transflux)
L'Age D'Or (1930, Kino)
Las Hurdes (1933, burned)
Los Olvidados (1950, burned)
Viridiana (1961, Criterion)
Simon of the Desert (1965, Criterion)
Belle De Jour (1967, Miramax)
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972, Criterion)
The Phantom Of Liberty (1974, Criterion)
That Obscure Object of Desire (1977, Criterion--Buñuel's last film)
In preperation for this project I bought:
A Woman Without Love (1952, $8.00 on Ebay)
Illusion Travels By Streetcar (1954, $45.00 on Amazon)
On Netflix, I found:
Gran Casino (1947)
Susana--The Devil and the Flesh (1951)
The Brute (1953)
Robinson Corusoe (1954)
Death in the Garden (1956)
The Exterminating Angel (1962)
Diary of A Chambermaid (1964)
The Young One (1960)
The Milky Way (1969)
I downloaded:
El Gran Calvera (1947)
Mexican Bus Ride (Subdida Al Cielo) (1952)
El - This Strange Passion (1953)
Wuthering Heights (Abismos de Pasion) (1954)
The Criminal Life of Archibald de La Cruz (1955)
Nazarin (1959)
Tristana (1970)
Films available on Amazon without subtitles, which I may buy:
Daughter of Deceit (La hija del engaño) (1951) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043639/
The River and Death (El río y la muerte) (1955) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047435/
Films which are, to the best of my knowledge, unavailable:
That is the Dawn (1956) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047925/
La fievre al monte a El Pao (1959) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052810/
It seems like an interesting comment on film fandom that it is so hard to see many of these movies here
in the U.S. Luckily, I can find most of them through the labyrinthine linkages of the internet. If
anybody comes across the last four, let me know.
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