With a passion that still has the power to shock

One day in Paris in 1955, during one of those charmed episodes that seem to fill the biographies of the famous, writer Andre Breton and filmmaker Luis Bunuel ran into each other on their way to visit playwright Eugene Ionesco. Bunuel had left the Surrealists years earlier but had remained friends with the fiery Breton.

As they sat over drinks -- Bunuel doesn’t indicate what kind in his memoir although he had a fondness for dry martinis -- the director asked Breton why artist Max Ernst had recently been excommunicated from the group. Since Ernst had won first prize at the Venice Biennale, Breton explained, he was now no better than a money-grubbing art dealer, unworthy of Surrealism. Breton grew quiet for a moment, then erupted. “It’s sad, mon cher Luis,” he fumed, “but it’s no longer possible to scandalize anybody!”

Breton’s lament seems to ring true to this day. Moviegoers no longer riot over a movie’s politics and moviemakers no longer create works that -- as the young Bunuel infamously claimed of one of his films -- are a “passionate call to murder.” Yet 20 years after his death, Bunuel still retains the power to shock.

Born in 1900, he began his life in movies as an assistant before staking a claim on history with the 1929 film “Un Chien Andalou.” Made with Salvador Dali, the masterpiece opens with the image of Bunuel slicing open a woman’s eye, a calculated outrage (the eye belonged to an unlucky calf) that spurred patrons to lodge complaints with the police, swoon into faints and even miscarry. The film played in a Paris theater for eight months; less than a year later Bunuel was in Hollywood.

He didn’t stay long, soon becoming a filmmaker without borders. During the 1930s, he returned to Spain in between sojourns in France and the United States, before Franco’s victory sent him into exile. After a stint working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and dubbing movies for Warner Bros. in Hollywood, he settled in Mexico, only returning to his native country 25 years later to direct “Viridiana.” The movie won the Palme d’Or at the 1961 Cannes film festival and was banned in Spain, although the generalissimo didn’t much mind it. Just as significant, the film marked the start of an extraordinary renaissance for Bunuel. On Friday, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art begins screening six of the features he made during this end run, one of the most radically original in cinema.

“Viridiana+’s” success opened new doors for Bunuel, who made 20 films during his tenure in Mexico but found new inspiration on the continent, along with decent budgets and actors of his own choosing. He shot the first of these six French films, “Diary of a Chambermaid,” in Paris in fall 1963. Based on a turn-of-the-century novel transposed by Bunuel and co-writer Jean Claude Carriere to the 1920s, the story recounts the journey of an ambitious maid, Celestine (Jeanne Moreau), in a bourgeois household racked by paranoia, sexual fetishism and envy, the only one of the seven deadly sins that bothered Bunuel.

Shot in lustrous black and white, “Diary of a Chambermaid” unfolds along fairly straightforward narrative lines. Much of the story involves Celestine’s attempts to dodge the attentions of a fascist handyman and her two male employers, an authoritarian father and his hapless adult son, who’s atwitch with frustration. Although most of Celestine’s encounters with her would-be predators are comically innocuous-- like Bunuel, the old man has a thing for feet -- her struggle finds a ghastly parallel in the murder of a young girl. It’s a measure of Bunuel’s brilliance that the image of dead child -- abandoned in a forest with snails now sliming across her bare legs -- is at once a surrealist provocation and a testament to barbarism.

What makes the image powerful, more than an aesthetic flourish, is the absence of vulgar sentiment. Bunuel doesn’t sell the horror of the girl’s murder with weeping violins; he trusts that the audience will be suitably appalled without the usual cues. Bunuel’s seemingly pitiless gaze and gift for images that get under your skin help partly explain the furious indignation his work provoked among censors, clerics and critics alike.

Detached but revealing

Responding to those who condemned the director as a sadist, Andre Bazin years earlier earnestly came to his defense, arguing that “the cruelty is not Bunuel’s; he restricts himself to revealing it in the world.” Indeed, in “Diary of a Chambermaid” it’s the coolness of Bunuel’s manner, as impassive as that of an entomologist, which rescues the child’s death from bathos.

None of the other five French films from this same period have a moment as awful as this postmortem tableau. These films may be similarly choked with violence, scandal and perversion, but by and large the violence, scandal and perversion are deployed with satiric wit that sometimes boils over into outright comedy. Even “Belle de Jour,” Bunuel’s 1967 masterpiece about a bourgeois wife (Catherine Deneuve) who finds herself by becoming a prostitute, provokes uneasy laugher. Turned out in Yves Saint Laurent, her face frozen into an alabaster mask, Deneuve’s Parisian Stepford Wife embodies social conformity at its most flesh-deadening and soul-killing. Only when the sexually repressed wife discovers her inner masochist and begins servicing clients can she break free, albeit at great personal cost.

Deneuve’s character is never freer than when she’s trussed up and being pelted with mud. More silly than sexy, the image is a reminder of Bunuel’s longtime admiration for the writings of the Marquis de Sade but, more important, exemplifies the director’s unwavering commitment to subversion. Part of this devotion to reversing accepted norms was a holdover from Surrealism, but the director of “Belle de Jour,” mellowed by life, was no longer hostage to the reflexive “No,” to provocation for provocation’s sake. He had abandoned Surrealism -- just as he had abandoned God -- but he remained in thrall to the mysterious, the irrational and the unknowable. As he asked an interviewer when he was in his late 70s, “Does everything have to have a meaning?”

Not for Bunuel, who folded dreams into his films alongside philosophical inquiry, theological debate and stretches of madcap comedy. The title of his 1974 “The Phantom of Liberty” was inspired by Karl Marx, but much of what happens hews closer to Groucho Marx. In the film’s most notorious scene, a seemingly respectable group of acquaintances perches on toilets around a table, exchanging chitchat while thumbing through magazines and sharing packs of cigarettes. This outrageous inversion would be funny enough, but then one of the guests pulls up his trousers and excuses himself. Furtively asking a maid where the dining room is, he slips down a hall and into a tiny room, whereupon he locks the door and tears into a chicken dinner.

Breton was wrong. It is possible to scandalize us, amid laughter and a passion for everything human. Years after Bunuel’s death, what remains striking about his films aren’t the surreal jolts, the narrative disjunction, the heresies, the disgust, the mischief, the pleasures or even the vibrancy of a visual style that was at once bold, restrained and perfectly calibrated. It is rather that there is something at stake beyond private jokes and genius. In the end, the young man who sounded a passionate call to murder on behalf of art became a filmmaker whose art passionately engaged with the world. “It’s my delight in surprise, shock, confusion, that stays with me,” Bunuel said not long before he stopped making movies -- a succinct summation of a worldview and a legacy.

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Luis Bunuel films

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Tickets: (877) 522-6225. More information: (323) 857-6010.

When: “Belle de Jour” and “Diary of a Chambermaid,” Friday; “The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” and “That Obscure Object of Desire,” Saturday; “The Phantom of Liberty,” July 4; and “The Milky Way,” July 5. All at 7:30 p.m.

Price: $8; $6 for museum and American Film Institute members, seniors 62 and older, and students with ID.