Queering Bunuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema
As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Buñuel’s cinema. Much has been written about his first Surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s and the French art movies of the 1960s and 1970s. However, here for the first time is a queer re-reading of Buñuel’s Spanish-language films allowing us to view Buñuel’s cinema through a lens of queer spectatorship. Focusing on the films Buñuel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Julián...
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As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Buñuel’s cinema. Much has been written about his first Surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s and the French art movies of the 1960s and 1970s. However, here for the first time is a queer re-reading of Buñuel’s Spanish-language films allowing us to view Buñuel’s cinema through a lens of queer spectatorship. Focusing on the films Buñuel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla argues not that Buñuel’s films have a homosexual subplot, but that there are multiple forms of identity, subjectivity and sexuality present in these films. Queering Buñuel brings together the fields of film studies, feminist and queer theory, Hispanic studies, psychoanalysis and art theory. Gutiérrez-Albilla succeeds in reconceptualizing Buñuel’s Mexican and Spanish films beyond geographical, historical and disciplinary boundaries, questioning not just how we see Buñuel, but also how we see cinema.
Introduction 11 The Encounter with the Real: Social Otherness, Fragmentation and Mise-en-abime in Los olvidados 162 Pleasure or Punishment? Abjection, the Vampire Trope and Masochistic Perversions in Viridiana 533 The Fall from Grace: Anality, the Horizontal Body and Anti-Oedipus in El angel exterminador 884 The Invisible Trauma: Violent Fantasies, Repetitions and Flashbacks in Ensayo de un crimen 1175 The Refusal of Visual Mastery: Paranoia, the Scream and the Gaze in El 147Conclusion 181Appendix Synopses of the Films 184Notes 189Bibliography 217Index 237
