Sospeso celebrates the seventy-fifth anniversary of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's famous short film Un Chien Andalou with four new musical scores, in collaboration with the Film Society of Lincoln Center, in 2004.

One of the screen's greatest artists, a director whose unerring instincts and assured grasp of cinematic technique enabled him to create some of film's most memorable images. Buñuel met painter Salvador Dali while studying at the University of Madrid in the late teens. They later found themselves in Paris at the height of the surrealist movement, where they pooled their considerable talents and made the eyebrow-raising short Un Chien andalou (1928), replete with disturbing and sometimes disgusting images (including a slit eyeball). The film inspired riots at the time, which seemed to please its two anarchic, antibourgeois creators; its follow-up, the featurette L'Age d'or (1930), is more Buñuel's than Dali's, combining dreamlike imagery and anarchic energy with a genuinely hilarious comedic sensibility. 

His directing career began again in Mexico in the late 1940s; many of his films from this period, mostly assignment jobs, are undistinguished but bear interesting touches. Some, however, are genuinely excellent; the best remembered are Los Olvidados (1950), an unflinching look at Mexican poverty and juvenile delinquency, and Nazarin (1958), the story of a humble priest that was one of Buñuel's harshest critiques of Christianity. Buñuel's real renaissance as a filmmaker began in 1960, when he returned to his native Spain to direct Viridiana the deceptively simple tale of a novitiate pulled from the convent to tend to a family tragedy, unprepared for the corruption of the outside world she meets. The Franco regime in Spain banned it on release. Buñuel followed with one great work after another, attacking the most sacred of cowsparticularly the Catholic church and the complacency of society-with remarkable energy and little mercy: The Exterminating Angel (1962), a savage assault on the bourgeois mentality, with guests trapped at a dinner party; Diary of a Chambermaid (1964), a costume picture updated to encompass the rise of fascism in the 1930s; the short religious parable Simon of the Desert (1965); a full flowering of surrealism in Belle de jour (1967), with Catherine Deneuve as a respectable wife who enjoys working at a whorehouse; The Milky Way (1969), a viciously funny, intricate trip through Catholic dogma; and Tristana (1970), with favorite Buñuel actor Fernando Rey as the guardian of Deneuve, and their-to put it mildly-odd relationship. When Tristana was nominated for a Best Foreign Language Film Oscar, the great anarchist, typically, commented, "Nothing would disgust me more, morally, than receiving an Oscar." His next film, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), a marvelous, surrealistic odyssey about a group of dinner guests unable to finish a meal, did win the Oscar. Buñuel's reaction is unknown. (L. Maltin.)