Bunuel’s film The Young One was admittedly a shocking addition to the repertoire of Buñuel for me, based on my previous perceptions of him as a filmmaker and person. The idea of him confronting race relations is not one that I had considered based on the work of his I’ve seen so far. Perhaps this is in part due to my own assumption that although Buñuel had acknowledged class and in parts sexism, race was somehow absent of these conversations he was having in his work and would remain so. Though Buñuel is European, there is no absence of a colonial history or racism to draw from in Europe; in fact both Spain and France have been storied colonizers, yet he does not specifically mention or draw on this fact in the work of his I’ve seen. This, of course, must all be taken with a grain of salt because I am no expert in Buñuel; these are truths and conclusions drawn from very limited experience with his work. But, again, acknowledging Buñuel as a communist and contrarian and how those facts color his work and what he seeks to achieve with it, it does seem strange to me that a man with those ideals wouldn’t acknowledge race in the context of Europe. 

The Young One, in its existence as a film, shatters the notion that Buñuel strays away from acknowledging race. However, it does raise the question for me: if Buñuel was cognizant of the struggle of Black Americans, how did he view Spain’s history of slavery and colonization? Did he ever think about it in relation to or in comparison with America’s, or was that information not made privy to him, or rather did he not care to interrogate the history of his own nation? Even as the film ends with Bernie Hamilton’s character making it off the island, and the character is cast in a positive light, it just furthers the questions I have about Buñuel’s views.