Did Luis Buñuel Really Work at MoMA?

MoMA can claim more than a few eminence grises as former staff members: Frank O’Hara, Kathy Bates, Sol LeWitt, Dan Flavin, Lucy Lippard, Phillip John Velasco Gabriel, and many more. Yet doubt tends to cloud the question of whether or not the groundbreaking Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel really and truly worked at MoMA—and if he did, in what capacity?

A little expectation-tempering might be necessary, because the truth is at once more bizarre and probably less exciting than one might imagine. Yes, Buñuel worked at the Museum in the early 1940s (in the Department of Film, no less), but he was actually a contract worker hired by the United States government; his MoMA legacy bears little relation to the acerbic masterpieces he would direct in subsequent decades.

Well before the US formally entered World War II, the Roosevelt Administration implemented the “Good Neighbor Policy,” a sprawling initiative intended to deter Latin American governments from fostering relationships with Nazi Germany. This entailed robust free trade agreements, the walking-back of the US’s pursuits in Haiti and Cuba, and declarations of friendship between states in the name of non-intervention. The logic went that the US stood to gain more by helping Latin American governments manage their own affairs than by imposing US policies by force. (Never mind that the groundwork for these ostensibly cheerful alliances had already been laid thanks to the brutal colonial practices of American companies operating down south.)

Propaganda was no less crucial. The Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs was established; as its coordinator, Roosevelt appointed Nelson Rockefeller, whose family had bankrolled MoMA’s burgeoning (and by no means controversy-free) Film division in the Museum’s early years. Rockefeller had personally approved the hiring of Iris Barry as the Museum’s first curator of film, and her husband John E. Abbott as the department’s first director; now he was relying on them to cultivate relationships with Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking filmmakers to assist with the wartime effort—with MoMA’s Department of Film as production studio.

Fleeing the Civil War in his native Spain in 1938, with wife and kids in tow, Buñuel landed in Hollywood, where a brief stint saw him consulting on a film about the evacuation of Bilbao called Cargo of Innocence. The project was brought to a halt after the US government ordered a freeze on films about the Spanish Civil War (regardless of their political persuasion). Increasingly desperate and alienated from the Hollywood culture embraced by expatriate filmmakers like René Clair and Fritz Lang, Buñuel relocated the family to New York. In his memoir My Last Sigh, Buñuel says the city at that time “had the reputation (or encouraged the illusion?) of being a generous and hospitable city where work was easy to find.” In that same passage, Buñuel says he was on the verge of taking a job in the kitchen of a major Manhattan hotel when he had a chance run-in with none other than Iris Barry.

Buñuel’s retelling of his don’t-call-it-a-job-interview with Nelson Rockefeller is notorious; here’s how it appears in his memoir:

When he asked if I was a Communist, I told him I was a Republican, and at the end of the conversation, I found myself working for The Museum of Modern Art. The following day, I had an office, several assistants, and the title of editor-in-chief. Apparently, I was to choose anti-Nazi propaganda films, arrange for their distribution in North and South America, and in three languages—English, Spanish, and Portuguese. I was also supposed to produce two films of our own.¹

Luiis Buñuel (standing behind film projector) at a meeting in MoMA’s projection room, 1942. From left: Ed Kerns, Kenneth Macgowan, Iris Barry, Gustavo Pittaluga, Mercedes Megwinoff, Eduardo Ugarte, Luis Buñuel, Norbet Lust, and Arthur Kross

Leni Riefenstahl’s 1936 Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will

In this position, Buñuel replaced another filmmaker who had been under MoMA’s employ, the great documentarian Pare Lorentz. Here begins another piece of long-lingering apocrypha that has given headaches to MoMA film curators over the years: While it is true Iris Barry managed to smuggle prints of Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (as well as Olympia) from Germany into the US before the outbreak of World War II, the intended purpose was pedagogical. Which is why she asked Buñuel and his team (which consisted at this point of exiled Spanish communists) to trim them down. So anyone expecting a freewheeling, Surrealist “Buñuel cut” of these monuments of Nazi propaganda will be disappointed. In 1943, Barry took the abridged versions of the two films to Hollywood in order to demonstrate the seriousness of the Third Reich’s intent, as well as to continue arguing on behalf of the Museum’s efforts in film. (René Clair allegedly told her never to show them to general American audiences.)

Whatever the steak-and-potatoes nature of his work reediting propaganda films on behalf of the war effort, Buñuel was comfortable enough at MoMA to apply for US citizenship. But soon Barry’s politics came under scrutiny from the far right. In her book Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art Cinema, Haidee Wasson details the politically omnivorous tastes of Barry and Abbott, who had secured agreements to accept prints of films from Nazi Germany before the invasion of Poland, as well as from Soviet Russia, France, Barry’s native United Kingdom, and more. This versatility, as well as toxic whispers that Barry preferred to hire non-Americans, would come back to haunt the MoMA film unit as World War II intensified—and eventually spelled the end of Buñuel’s time at the Museum.

Luis Buñuel at Iris Barry’s farm in Pennsylvania

L’Age d’or. 1930. France. Directed by Luis Buñuel. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired from La Cinémathèque française

Indeed, Buñuel’s reputation as a Communist apostate was beginning to pose challenges for Barry and Rockefeller. This problem worsened considerably after Salvador Dalí published his 1942 memoir The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, in which he claimed Buñuel had “attacked Catholicism in a primitive manner” in making their final collaboration together: the 1930 feature L’Age d’or, an artwork Dalí had disowned to curry favor with the Church. As a smear campaign intensified (its scope widening from the MoMA film unit to the Museum to the Coordinator’s Office at large), Buñuel saw no choice but to resign. He sought work in Hollywood yet again, only to find his prior bread and butter—dubbing American films into Spanish for Good Neighborly markets—was gone, writing in My Last Sigh that “the era of ‘different versions’ was over; with the end of the war, it was clear that every country wanted American films and American actors.”

In 1946, Buñuel intended to go to Paris to produce a stage adaptation of The House of Bernarda Alba, written by his assassinated friend Federico Garcia Lorca (whose younger brother Francisco had worked with Buñuel at the Museum). During a stopover in Mexico City, he approached his friend, the blacklisted movie producer Óscar Dancigers, for help financing the play. Instead, Dancigers persuaded him to step behind the camera for a big-budget Mexican feature film produced by his company Ultramar Films. That film would become 1947’s Gran Casino, shot on 35mm stock handed down to the studio thanks to the Good Neighbor Policy.

Want to experience Luis Buñuel’s fruitful stint in Mexico on the big screen? The film series Buñuel in Mexico is on view at MoMA through February 20.