Thought Process Good Films, Cheap Wine Luis Buñuel ’57 Publishes Memoir speakeasies in Lorain. They had great jazz, too.” Juan Luis Buñuel, a sculptor and filmmaker, was born in 1934 in Paris, his hometown for decades. He’s a cosmopolitan at heart who speaks three languages natively. The politics of his father—a staunch atheist, anti-fascist, and one-time card-carrying Communist—condemned the Buñuels to a life in exile. In the first 15 years of Juan Luis’ life, his family lived in France, Spain, the United States, and finally Mexico City—a decidedly friendlier environment than Franco’s Spain or McCarthy’s America. In Mexico, Juan Luis attended the American High School while his father reestablished himself as one of the world’s most creative and controversial movie directors. At Oberlin, Juan Luis majored in English, determined to become a college professor. But the film world beckoned, and his life took a different path. The summer after graduation, Orson Welles BY SEBASTIAAN FABER when juan luis buñuel ’57 first set foot in Oberlin in 1953 as a freshman from Mexico City, he thought he’d landed in a parallel universe. Campus wide, students were mesmerized by the McCarthy hearings. “It was a soap opera,” Buñuel writes in his professors were worried.... That the intellectuals of a huge, ‘free’ country like the United States should be held in terror by an alcoholic madman seemed to me unbelievable.” Half a century later, in the spring of 2004, Buñuel returned to campus to give a series of talks about his films and those of his father, the legendary surrealist Luis Buñuel. Once again, Juan Luis was in for a shock. Walking past the Chinese restaurant on College Street, he noticed wine bottles in the window and stopped in his tracks: “Wait, they sell alcohol here now? That’s outrageous! What is the world coming to? In my day, if we wanted a drink, we went to the HI-O-HI WITH BUÑUEL Yearbook pictures include: (left) Buñuel in 1957, (below) on the bench, looking down, in the football team locker room in 1956, (bottom) Buñuel at a bike auction in 1957. new memoir. “Very serious people were saying outrageous things.” He says he couldn’t help but laugh, but “quickly shut up when I saw the audience’s faces. It seemed that Oberlin was next on the House Un-American Activities list. All the 12 OBERLIN COLLEGE ARCHIVES