The turbulent years of the 1930s were of profound importance in the life of Spanish film director Luis Bu簽uel (1900��983). He joined the Surrealist movement in 1929 but by 1932 had
renounced it and embraced Communism. During the Spanish Civil War (1936��9), he played an integral role in disseminating film propaganda in Paris for the Spanish Republican cause.
��� Luis Bu簽uel: The Red Years, 1929��939 investigates Bu簽uel's commitment to making the politicized documentary Land without Bread (1933) and his key role as an executive
producer at Film籀fono in Madrid, where he was responsible in 1935��6 for making four commercial features that prefigure his work in Mexico after 1946. As for the republics of France and
Spain between which Bu簽uel 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簽uel's own self-interested accounts of that complex period. Rom獺n Gubern and
Paul Hammond have undertaken extensive archival research in Europe and the United States and evaluated Bu簽uel's accounts and those of historians and film writers to achieve a portrait of
Bu簽uel's ��ed Years��that abounds in new information.
