Where to place Buñuel’s potentially problematic Mexican cinema within his overall, substantial corpus, is a more pressing question for the moment than what the movies of this period can tell us about place. How far can we consider Buñuel a proponent of surrealism in his artistic work? To what extent can we – should we – segregate the various ‘Buñuels’: early; middle; late; Francophone; Anglophone; Hispanic? Unlike the director’s earlier French/Spanish triptych of Un Chien andalou (1929), L’Âge d’or (1930) and Tierra sin pan, and his later French period from Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967) onwards, his Mexican cinema presents a lesser degree of stylistic and formal cohesion. Whereas Elisabeth Lyon (1973) and Gwynne Edwards (2004) propose an association between Buñuel’s first three movies predicated on an aesthetic basis, and Francisco Aranda lends the later films, beginning with El ángel exterminador, the grandiose title of the ‘Great Films of Maturity’ (1976: 206), the intermediate Mexican period offers a collection of commercial, genre-driven pictures peppered sporadically with more auteurist productions. The films made in Mexico constitute the majority of Buñuel’s filmography as director and, as Acevedo-Muñoz suggests, the numerous, largely genre films made by Buñuel in this period prove difficult for some critics to reconcile with ‘Buñuel as the European surrealist phenomenon’ (2003: 11). In addition, the commercial nature of Mexican cinema during its prolific Golden Age, roughly coinciding with Buñuel’s arrival in the country in the mid-1940s, meant that films such as Ismael Rodríguez’s Nosotros los pobres (1948), starring Pedro Infante, or Flor Silvestre (1943), directed by Emilio Fernández and starring Dolores del Río, were constructed around generic conventions – often drawing on melodrama – and the star system in an emulation of the Hollywood model. Buñuel’s own shooting schedules were largely rapid and demanding – except for Robinson Crusoe, filming never lasted for more than 24 days, according to the director (Buñuel 2003: 198), and the films of this period were often released in quick succession: between 1950 and 1953 he was directing two or three films per year. This has directly influenced the dismissive attitude among some critics that the bulk of Buñuel’s Mexican works are little more than ‘studio potboilers’, or its equally flippant equivalent in Spanish, películas alimenticias, loosely translated as ‘bread-and-butter films’, the implication being these were made solely to plug a gap, financially and professionally.1
The culinary metaphor above is fitting, because the Mexican actor and screenwriter, Tomás Pérez Turrent, draws on his own food-related analogy to counter assertions that much of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema was small fry. Asking the question of whether we can in fact speak holistically of a Mexican corpus in Buñuel’s output, Pérez Turrent strongly concludes that we can answer in the affirmative. The doubt about its existence, as it were, Pérez Turrent attributes to the disparity between the Buñuel who directed Un Chien andalou, ‘a bomb [that caused] a great impact on its first spectators’, and the Buñuel who directed his first picture in Mexico, Gran Casino (1947), a film ‘in no way exciting’ (1997: 137).2 As he documents Buñuel’s critical and financial failures in a Mexican film industry driven by generic conventions and narrative codes, Pérez Turrent nevertheless finds that Buñuel found a way to work both within and against the expectations of commercial Mexican cinema, adapting to the demands placed on him while leaving his indelible stamp on the films he made there. Although Pérez Turrent adds his voice to those who separate Buñuel’s Mexican corpus from his earlier and later works, he celebrates its subversive potential. The later Buñuel, he says, ‘is admirable from many points of view but this is a Buñuel who has had his nails clipped’; his later cinema, in comparison, is a ‘decaffeinated cinema’ (1997: 142).3 This so-called nail trimming was partly the result of Buñuel’s reinsertion into an increasingly consumer-driven, Western European society where, he and André Breton lamented, to scandalise had become impossible. Continuing his defence of Buñuel’s Mexican work, Pérez Turrent cites José de la Colina regarding the director’s Mexican cinema in comparison to his later French cinema. De la Colina argues that the Mexican films are based on ‘a density of subject matter, the carnality of the characters’, which is then attenuated in Buñuel’s later French period, to be replaced by an ‘intellectual game and a chess set of spectres (ideas of characters more than [actual] characters)’ (Pérez Turrent 1997: 141).4 I am taking Pérez Turrent and de la Colina’s categorisation of Buñuel’s later French period as more abstract as a rationale for concentrating solely on the Mexican films, which they see as more realist and grounded.
Indeed, although some of the Mexican films could be seen as forerunners of the episodic narrative that structured Buñuel’s mature work – the ever-changing landscapes and the series of encounters of Father Nazario in Nazarín, for example – my readings of these films are based on the premise that the protagonists of the Mexican films are relatable characters in largely realist – if often absurdly Buñuelian – situations. When considering the presentation of the characters’ relationships to their surroundings, de la Colina’s ideas of carnality and density are important. I contend that the characters of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema are, as Manuel Michel puts it, placed in alienation, a position that comes to light when we consider these films as philosophical texts (1961: 27). Buñuel’s greater preoccupation with form and style in his mature works could arguably be said to temper the element of carnality in his Mexican cinema, directing the critical gaze away from the protagonist and refocusing this on ludic questions of metanarrative and structural fragmentation. This conceptual shift in Buñuel’s cinema emerges in conjunction with the end of the Mexican period and is evident in the films after this, beginning with Belle de Jour and escalating with La Voie lactée (1969). In fact, we do not have to look much further than the titles of the films made in Mexico to give us a clue in this respect. The importance of space and setting in grounding the narratives of the Mexican films comes across in their working, alternative and official titles such as Island of Shame (The Young One), Abismos de pasión, Swamps of Lust (La Fièvre monte à El Pao), Los náufragos de la calle Providencia (El ángel exterminador), Evil Eden (La Mort en ce jardin) and Simón del desierto. Opposite this, the titles of the later French movies are more suggestive of social satire – the understated charm of the upper-middle classes, or the idea of liberty as a phantom – exactly the genre with which Virginia Higginbotham aligns them, as she divides Buñuel’s work quite simplistically into ‘character studies’ (Viridiana, Tristana (1970)) and ‘social satire’ (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974)) (1979: 193). The density of the rounded characters and their locations in the Mexican films thus gives way to a texture of micro-narratives in Buñuel’s later French works.
This book is another contribution to this growing area of Buñuel investigation. My objective is to shed new analytical light on the films of the period as a whole by excavating new critical pathways that open up the meaning of these films and recall attention equally to the more independent and the genre-driven movies. Now is the time to take stock of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema, as Barro Hernández argues. My intention in this chapter is to use this opportunity to survey the roots of this compartmentalisation of the filmmaker’s work from this period into two strands, looking primarily at the way this has figured in Anglophone, Hispanic and Francophone criticism, to then position my re-evaluation of these works against this limiting hierarchy. Following this survey of the critical literature on Buñuel’s Mexican period, I then outline the need to turn to paradigms outside of what I term the Buñuelian bedrock of surrealism, Catholicism and psychoanalysis that have encouraged this divide, before moving on to look at the various ways in which space appears as an object of study in previous Buñuel scholarship. Finally, I position my readings of the films in this book within the broader salient trend towards spatial analysis across the arts, which is also driving innovative approaches to film.
Reconsidering the thematic complexity of the Mexican films
Writing on Buñuel has experienced something of a revival over the last two decades, especially in the period after 2000, following the centenary of his birth, and has naturally brought with it an increased focus on the films made in Mexico. Moreover, the increasing availability of even the lesser-known films of the period, for example Abismos de pasión and La Fièvre monte à El Pao, thanks to European, Mexican and US DVD distributors, has contributed to the higher level of attention paid to these films in recent Buñuel scholarship. If still precluded commensurate status with what are widely regarded as the director’s most lauded productions, many of the Mexican films now feature sporadically in research on the director and his work.
The hierarchisation of the two strands of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema can be traced back to the period itself. Articles on Buñuel’s Mexican films in prominent cinema journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Positif during the 1950s and 1960s tentatively scoured this nascent corpus for any traces of Buñuel’s trademark style and thematic preoccupations. Peter Harcourt’s evaluation of the Mexican corpus is indicative of this approach and his memory of the films of this period is ‘one of seriously marred films of considerable interest’ (1967: 11). The reasons why these movies are flawed, Harcourt says, are numerous: weak plot lines; stiff acting; or far-fetched narratives. For him, they can be redeemed only through the interest generated by their more overtly Buñuelian moments and traces of Buñueliana – a term that Acevedo-Muñoz uses to denote the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations such as Freudian surrealism and iconoclasm at play in Buñuel’s cinema (2003: 4). Jean-André Fieschi considers that films such as El gran calavera (1949) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954) served as sketches for more aesthetically accomplished films, and his praise for them is tempered; the ‘creative freshness […] frankness of regard, clarity of expression’ that they possess are not enough in themselves to prevent him from ultimately categorising these as rehearsals for films such as Él (1953) or Nazarín (1966: 34).5 The intra-corpus divisions that this approach in early writing on the period creates is driven by an attempt to ‘legitimise’ the study of the Mexican films by bringing them into line with the auteurist approach often employed in the discussion of Buñuel’s earlier/later work, in order to ‘safeguard the image of the director to the detriment of the other films, which remain overlooked’ (Lillo 1994: 7).6 Ironically, Buñuel’s violent assault on the very act of spectatorship – on the single eye that stands for our collective gaze – in Un Chien andalou, has become a framework for viewing, interpreting and critically appraising his cinema, as his ‘reputation as a surrealist encouraged a particular viewing strategy, looking for dream-like motifs that would transform over the course of the film in unexpected ways’ (Keating 2010: 210), which excludes a great part of the largely realist, linear narratives of many of the filmmaker’s Mexican films.
Nevertheless, the 1990s saw Buñuel’s Mexican cinema revisited in earnest within new or modified paradigms in attempts to unite the two strands of this period. Gaston Lillo (1994) aims to redress the balance between the director’s early and late periods, and the intermediate Mexican era. His consideration of more commercial pictures such as El gran calavera and El bruto (1953) alongside the critically lauded Los olvidados and Nazarín is an effort to bridge the gap between the commercial and the independent films. He draws on genre theory to argue that Buñuel achieves a subversion of commercial cinema in the most genre-driven of his films. His re-envisaging of certain of the director’s Mexican works hinges on the socio-historical context of the films’ production and viewers’ reception of them and his argument is important in its focus on a variety of Mexican films. Writing a year after Lillo, Peter Evans (1995) begins to transcend the rigid commercial-auteurist dyad of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema. He acknowledges the fruitful results of examining Buñuel’s work through an auteurist lens, though without discounting the structures and constraints to which Buñuel was subjected. Indeed, Evans believes that ‘the two Buñuels, commercial and auteurist, cannot be so simplistically polarized’ (1995: 36). Evans’s focus on relationships between male and female characters considered through sexual and psychoanalytical theory problematises the restrictive triad of Catholicism, surrealism and Spanish nationality, as it explodes the privileging of the masculine implicit in, for example, Edwards’s framework through a consideration of female desire in films such as Belle de Jour opposite the manipulation of male desire that we see in Ensayo de un crimen (1955).
Víctor Fuentes’s book in Spanish, Buñuel en México [Buñuel in Mexico], lays claim to be the first monograph-length study solely dedicated to the Mexican films of Buñuel (1993: 15). Fuentes recasts the work of this period in a new light, giving consideration to the generic conventions within which Buñuel often worked and the ways in which he went about subverting these, as well as suggesting new and fruitful pathways for investigation in a more philosophical vein. For instance, using Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema, and in particular Buñuel’s cinema, Fuentes highlights the fetish objects in the director’s cinema that give rise to the impulse-image, a reading that I develop in chapter three of this book in relation to Simón del desierto (1993: 65–70; 73; 148). In addition, Fuentes draws upon the biographical details of the circumstances around Buñuel’s arrival in Mexico in an attempt to consider the dynamics of exile – a theme he has subsequently developed – and the ways in which Buñuel’s state as a Spaniard living and working in Mexico problematises a nationalist (specifically Mexican) reading of his films, which bear ‘the hallmark of this dual nationality’ (1993: 21).7
Catherine Dey (1999) highlights the salient trend towards a reconsideration and reappraisal of Buñuel’s Mexican period, as she points out that criticism throughout the 1990s had begun to unlock a rich spring of Buñueliana through the incorporation of certain Mexican works into the Buñuel canon. Her study came as the surprisingly saccharine alternative ending to Los olvidados was discovered serendipitously in the film archives of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) [National Autonomous University of Mexico], and which I consider in chapter five of this book. Dey draws on a philosophy of ethics and begins to interrogate recurring Buñuelian themes such as the question of morality in a new light, freeing Buñuel analysis from the typical scope of surrealism. Despite the originality of her study, however, she turns almost exclusively to more auteurist films such as El ángel exterminador and Viridiana to support her argument, although Robinson Crusoe is also included.
Acevedo-Muñoz (2003) presents an insightful consideration of Buñuel’s work within the Mexican film industry. He locates his discussion within an industrialauteur analytical framework, focusing on the relationship between the director and the industry he was working in. Thus, films such as Subida al cielo (1952), Una mujer sin amor (1952) and La hija del engaño (1951) are included, framed by their production contexts, counteracting the neglect these have traditionally suffered. Unlike Dey, Acevedo-Muñoz’s approach privileges what he calls ‘Mexican movies’ (Mexican-funded films with typical Mexican subject matter) (2003: 12–13). Although some of the most critically disparaged films find a rightful place in his study, more independent films still made within the Mexican film industry, such as Nazarín, and international co-productions filmed in Mexico, for example La Mort en ce jardin – a Franco-Mexican co-production – or The Young One – a Mexican-US movie – are discounted.
The centenary of Buñuel’s birth in 2000 saw a series of conferences on Buñuel and their subsequent publications. The volume Buñuel, siglo XXI (2003) [Buñuel, 21st Century], edited by Isabel Santaolalla and others, is the result of an international conference held in 2000 and presents an ample selection of research on many of the Mexican films. Like Buñuel, siglo XXI, the multilingual volume in English, French and Spanish, Buñuel: el imaginario transcultural/L’imaginaire transcultural/ The Transcultural Imaginary (Lillo 2003), is a collection of research presented at a conference at the University of Ottawa. Significantly, of these sixteen papers, seven present research exclusively on the director’s Mexican cinema. The year after the release of both conference proceedings, the volume edited by Evans and Santaolalla, Luis Buñuel: New Readings (2004) was published. The aim of this collection was to carry out not only a re-evaluation of certain of the director’s films but also a reconsideration of the man himself. This volume presents a balance between early/ Mexican/late Buñuel; moreover, within the section on the Mexican Buñuel, focus is given to Robinson Crusoe and The Young One, two films which have traditionally been considered too ‘international’ to be absorbed into a discourse of mexicanidad [Mexicanness] and too commercial to be invested with the same critical value as Nazarín or El ángel exterminador.
As has been elaborated by researchers such as Fuentes, Buñuel was the site of conflation for two strands of Hispanism: the Spanish and the Mexican. The latter was the subject of a 2007 exhibition co-organised by the Filmoteca Española in Madrid and the Centro Buñuel in the filmmaker’s birthplace of Calanda, Spain. As part of this exhibition, a selection of photographs taken by Buñuel during the location scouting stage for his Mexican films was included. These photographs are published in a book edited by Elena Cevera (2008), resulting from the exhibition, along with a series of short articles from Buñuel scholars and memoirs detailing the experience of location scouting and shooting with Buñuel, written by his son, Juan Luis Buñuel, and Buñuel’s long-time collaborator and director of photography, Gabriel Figueroa. What is interesting about this volume is the consensus that arises between the various authors as to Buñuel’s treatment and depiction of Mexico and Mexican reality through his aversion to the aesthetic frame compositions of the Mexican landscape that were a feature of Figueroa’s cinematography and work with other directors of the period, such as Emilio Fernández’s María Candelaria (1944). Their observations suggest that a consideration at length of the representation of space in these films would be a valuable and fruitful avenue to explore: while Javier Espada writes that ‘these photographs also show us […] a perception of Mexico removed from a touristic perspective and with a sensibility that often surfaces in little details’ (2008: 24–5), Elena Cevera points to ‘his photographs [that] refer to landscapes without people’ (2008b: 15).8 These observations clearly link with research on Buñuel’s depiction of Mexico from a consideration of exile. However, as the book serves primarily as a record of the exhibition, they remain undeveloped.
Towards the end of the 2000s, more material was released which aims to reposition the Buñuel oeuvre within fresh theoretical frameworks. Gutiérrez-Albilla’s Queering Buñuel (2008) as the title suggests, strives to re-read such canonical films as Los olvidados and Viridiana from a queer subject position. The strength of his work lies in his interdisciplinary approach: building his analysis on the foundations of feminist, psychoanalytical and queer theory allows him to reconceptualise Buñuel’s cinema to explode the heteronormative and misogynistic discourses that he discerns in the ‘textual unconscious’ of the filmmaker’s work (2008: 1). All five films featured in his study are from the Mexican period, and all were filmed in Mexico, with the exception of Viridiana. However, Gutiérrez-Albilla limits his analysis to what have regularly been hailed as the more auteurist of the Mexican films (Él, El ángel exterminador, Ensayo de un crimen, Los olvidados and Viridiana), a decision which again seems to suggest that some of the more commercial Mexican films do not lend themselves to extra-generic, interdisciplinary paradigms. This is echoed in Poyato’s El sistema estético de Luis Buñuel [The Aesthetic System of Luis Buñuel] (2011). Poyato’s intention is to posit a system of aesthetics, a visual and formal strand within the director’s work, which serves to unify and draw together films from different periods of Buñuel’s career. Like Gutiérrez-Albilla’s research, this is a continuation of the trend towards an appreciation of the aesthetic possibilities of Buñuel’s corpus beyond the Buñuelian predicate of surrealism and Catholicism. For instance, in his exposition of a ‘morphology and genealogy of the ugly’ (see 2011: 59–86),9 Poyato coincides with work done by Bikandi-Mejias (2000) who explores the carnivalesque trope within Buñuel’s cinema. However, Poyato’s focus remains on the more independent films that punctuate the director’s body of work. Besides the director’s first three surrealist pictures, and Tristana and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977) from his later period, Poyato focuses on Los olvidados, Ensayo de un crimen and El ángel exterminador.
Most recently, Gutiérrez-Albilla and Rob Stone’s companion volume to Buñuel (2013) gives attention to some of the most critically neglected films of the Mexican period. There are chapters focused on Robinson Crusoe, Susana (1951) and even on the international co-productions of the 1950s that Buñuel filmed in French. Their edition follows the volume on the filmmaker edited by Evans and Santaolalla in its aim of addressing all periods of Buñuel’s production from revitalised, interdisciplinary perspectives. Tom Whittaker, for instance, considers the use of movement in three of the director’s Mexican comedies – El gran calavera, Subida al cielo and La ilusión viaja en tranvía – and links the ‘characters and objects [that] find themselves out of synch with the social worlds they inhabit’ (2013: 226) with the struggle for modernity and the influx of migrants to the city under the presidencies of Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) and Adolfo Ruiz (1952–1958). Similarly novel is Sarah Leahy’s (2013) chapter on La Mort en ce jardin, which focuses on the star system with relation to actors Georges Marchal, Michel Piccoli and Simone Signoret. While Signoret did not work again with Buñuel, the two former actors appeared in numerous other Buñuel films, and Leahy’s focus on Marchal and Piccoli expands the writing on Buñuel and the star system, which, as she points out, has mainly considered his work with Fernando Rey and Catherine Deneuve.
The many voices I have detailed above advocate a renewed focus on Buñuel’s Mexican period and are antidotes to Virginia Higginbotham’s astonishing barb that the majority of the filmmaker’s Mexican output is not worthy of serious attention – she claims only five of the films of this period are memorable (1979: 63) – and Paul Coates’s likening of Buñuel’s role in the Mexican national cinema to ‘a paralysed limb of the industry’ (1985: 99). It may no longer be either accurate or objective to speak of the scholarly attention given to this work as a whole in Auro Bernardi’s terms as a ‘malnourished minority’ (1999: 8).10 However, despite the greater balance in criticism between the two strands of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema, even recent, extended studies of the director’s work still reinforce their stylistic and thematic divisions, as shown in the work of Gutiérrez-Albilla and Poyato. The development of new analytical frameworks through which Buñuel’s films have been studied with fruitful results has seemingly not yet been wholly successful in providing complementary readings of films from the two strands.
It has also been common to hedge any analysis of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema, that is, to hasten to highlight the obvious distinctions between his earlier and later European periods to justify continuity errors or seemingly shoddy filming. The title of an article in the German newspaper Der Spiegel betrays such views through inter-textual reference. Headed ‘The Mexican Chalkcircle’, the title is a nod to Bertolt Brecht’s play The Caucasian Chalkcircle, which depicts a peasant girl (the Mexican film industry) who finds an abandoned baby (Buñuel), eventually, and in spite of limitations, rearing the child better than its birth parents (the European film industries) ever could (Anon. 1974: 112–14). Against this, the most radical voice among all proponents of the films of this era is the Mexican film scholar Gustavo García who elaborates an excoriating response to the maligning of the Mexican period, which is worth quoting at length:
What is certain is that, in making the majority of his filmography here, including various of his masterpieces, he was not doing anyone a favour; enough of this ‘messianic attitude’: if Buñuel had ended up in another country on the [American] continent he would not have made anything, and let his two stretches in the USA be proof of this, one before arriving [in Mexico] and the other to make Robinson Crusoe and The Young One […] if he did not film everything he wanted to, no other ambitious Mexican director did either. (García in González Dueñas 2000: 193)11
Although his response is definitely spirited, García is mistaken in thinking that Buñuel returned to the USA to film Robinson Crusoe and The Young One: both were filmed in the states of Colima and Guerrero, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. Nevertheless, he is very clear: Buñuel was not and should not be considered a ‘saviour’ of Mexican cinema. García’s call to disavow this ‘messianic attitude’ came in 1993, at the very point when interest in Buñuel’s Mexican cinema was beginning to grow, with the publication of Fuentes’s and Lillo’s studies, as detailed above. Now, then, is an opportune juncture to revisit Buñuel’s Mexican cinema, taking some of García’s spirit, to build on the salient trend towards innovative modes of analysis to unlock new readings of these films, showing how within an original approach the films can serve to complement, rather than inhibit, their respective meanings.
Beyond the Buñuelian bedrock: Buñuel and space
In order to position Buñuel’s Mexican cinema within new, interdisciplinary paradigms, it is necessary to break with the Buñuelian bedrock that has underpinned much discussion of the director’s work. The traces of Buñueliana – nods towards Freudian surrealism, religious iconoclasm, critiques of class, insider gags – that form part of, especially, the early readings of Buñuel’s Mexican films, as I have shown, have a place in research on the filmmaker, but that place is not in this book. They are undeniably part of Buñuel’s poetics, but I am wary of reading his work principally through these lenses. I am also hesitant to claim Buñuel’s cinema for, or attribute it to, this or that nationality: Spanish or Mexican, as Edwards goes some way to doing. He asserts that ‘the films made in Mexico bear witness in their themes to Buñuel’s essential Spanishness’ (1982: 26). This assertion holds some weight, of course: Nazarín is based on Spanish writer Benito Pérez Galdós’s homonymous novel, transported from Castile to Mexico; Buñuel himself admitted that Viridiana was inspired by his childhood fantasy of drugging the Spanish Queen, Victoria Eugenie, in order to sleep with her, and, humorously, that the eponymous heroine is a sort of ‘Quixote in skirts’ (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 150; 152). Nevertheless, to suggest such an essential reading of the films is to freeze the filmic image in one specific, monolithic meaning and to reinforce simultaneously both the Buñuel canon and canonised frameworks for analysis within the discipline of film studies (in Buñuel’s case, psychoanalysis in particular).
Attempting to foreground Buñuel’s essential ‘Spanishness’ in his cinema leads us to another aspect of Buñuel studies that has gained currency: the question of exile. Having moved to Paris from Madrid in 1925 and begun his cinematic career there, worked in New York and Los Angeles between 1938 and 1946 as the Spanish Civil War raged and Franco consolidated his regime, and built his home in Mexico City, for some critics such as Fuentes (2003), Buñuel’s exile lasted a lifetime. I am aware, though, that the notion of exile in its strictest sense, when applied to Buñuel, is problematic, given that he became a naturalised Mexican citizen, returning periodically to Spain and even working under the Franco regime to make Viridiana, a Spanish-Mexican co-production that the Spanish censor was quick to attribute solely to Mexico following the scandal this provoked within Catholic circles, as well as Tristana and to film part of La Voie lactée in Santiago de Compostela. For others, Buñuel’s status as exile colours the reception of his films. Marsha Kinder, for instance, believes that ‘Buñuel’s career of exile dialogizes the auteurist and national contexts, revealing that neither perspective is sufficient by itself’ (1993: 291). Hamid Naficy evokes Buñuel in his writing on accented cinema – a cinema of migrants that is affected, or accented, by the filmmaker’s spatial dislocation, often through exile. Naficy points to the problematic of Buñuel as an exile, as he represents ‘both the epitome of exile and its most prominent exception’ (2001: 55).
Chaspoul also examines the notion of exile and its (filmic) spatial resonances in Buñuel. However, his approach is different. He is hesitant to ascribe cinematic effect so readily to biographical cause and his argument is all the more interesting for it. Indeed, he asserts that, although Buñuel himself may have been an exile, he does not represent this subject in his cinema. For Chaspoul, the issue of exile punctuates his films in a more wide-ranging sense:
If [his] physical exile comes to an end, the exile of the gaze is prolonged, for this is the true cinematographic exile. Insofar as Buñuel has never made exile a subject, but always a place which influences the mise-en-scène and has an effect on it, there remains an exile of the gaze despite the end of his physical exile. (1997: 113)12
It is important that Chaspoul considers the position of the viewer, arguing that exile as a subtext in Buñuel’s cinema ends up influencing or ‘contaminating’ [contaminer] the spectator (1997: 118), leading him to conclude that Buñuel’s cinema is a cinema of exile and an exiling cinema in equal measure. Although the first term may be problematic for the reasons detailed above, the second term is far more capacious, turning the spectator’s gaze back on him- or herself as well as containing a patent spatial signification.
Questioning these common tropes in Buñuel analysis was not necessarily new, even before Buñuel had finished working in the Mexican film industry. Already in 1961, against questions of national cinema and the Buñuelian bedrock, Salvador Elizondo asked how else we should read Buñuel outside of these approaches: ‘one invokes psychoanalysis, one invokes the Mysteries, one invokes National Incidents. Has anybody invoked the generalisation of all generalisations: man?’ (1961: 2).13 Stone and Gutiérrez-Albilla recently take up this call and advocate a rebellion against the Buñuelian canon:
If his work has been canonized and hence subjected to fixed symbolization by the numerous studies on his cinema […] how can one engage critically with his oeuvre and yet avoid inserting his ambivalent, paradoxical and elusive films into pre-established critical models that perpetuate their subjection to symbolization? (2013: 1)
Of course, surrealism and Catholicism and transnationalism are tropes that underscore Buñuel’s entire body of work. However, these motifs alone should not monopolise the study of an output as vast and as open to interpretation as his. My approach in this book follows Gutiérrez-Albilla and Stone’s methodology: to break with these tried-and-tested critical paradigms in order to propose a creative, revitalised perspective on the director’s Mexican work and to add one more voice to the growing call for multivocality.
One aspect of Buñuel’s films that is beginning to receive more attention is that of space. Where Buñuel scholarship has highlighted the importance of setting, it has been mainly used to feed into analyses of his films that focus on the themes mentioned above. Buñuel has simply not been considered a ‘spatial director’ in the same way as, for instance, Michelangelo Antonioni or Wim Wenders have been.14 He was staunchly against compositional harmony and exaggerated beauty in his films, which is all the more interesting given that seven of his Mexican films were made with cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, renowned for his strikingly beautiful shot compositions in films such as La Perla (1947) and Río Escondido (1948), both made with director Emilio (El Indio) Fernández. Figueroa’s work with Fernández is an example of lyrical nationalist films that were largely predicated on Mexican national identity as imag(in)ed through the eulogy of oppressed and marginalised social groups – often via indigenous characters. Patrick Keating (2010) draws a parallel between the Fernández-Figueroa partnership and that of Buñuel-Figueroa. He discerns numerous similarities between the two. Crucially, Figueroa’s work with both directors produces ‘a set of films that are designed to be interpreted in spatial terms’ (2010: 202), yet while Fernández’s films attracted a framework of criticism built around nationalist questions of Mexican/Indian identity, Buñuel’s display a preponderance of open, ambiguous motifs. The relevance of this approach and its potential to revitalise writing on Buñuel is spelled out by Tom Conley, who explicitly acknowledges the nascent consideration of space in Buñuel’s films. He writes, ‘[o]ver the passage of time it may be that the spatial dynamics of Buñuel’s cinema may have gained force where the psychoanalytical or religious material has lost some of its luster’ (2008: 45), and Conley’s argument inspires my own research here.
In many ways, the spatial dynamics Conley identifies in Buñuel’s cinema have always been there. Almost from the start of his cinematic career, Buñuel can be considered a director fascinated with space and the possibilities that this presents to the filmmaker. His early – and not entirely objective – documentary Tierra sin pan depicting the wretched lives of the inhabitants of Spain’s isolated and inhospitable mountain region of Las Hurdes in Extremadura, as they struggle in vain against their environment, was a self-proclaimed filmic essay in human geography, stated explicitly as such as the opening credits roll. This is precisely the role that Elliot Rubinstein attributes to Buñuel:
it is the ‘human geography’ that calls up not only Las Hurdes but all the best of Buñuel’s work. In the manner of a geographer who refuses to restrict his field of study, Buñuel with passionate curiosity examines human beings in their longitudes and latitudes, their climates – their spaces. (1978: 247)
Seen in this way, Buñuel’s cinema has always been foregrounded within human and spatial concerns. This is where my approach to the films I read in this book finds its place, between geographical and philosophical concerns with space. The human concern with the world that Rubinstein proposes is at the heart of Buñuel’s work, is an aspect that dialogues with Carlos Fuentes’s essay on Buñuel in which he surmises that tension in the director’s cinema revolves around ‘the decision to connect with the world or to refuse this connection’ (1970: 199) Spatial metaphors abound in this essay, as Fuentes writes:
Buñuel’s characters follow a priesthood: a priesthood of the neighbourhoods, of crime, of bedrooms, of abandonment, of obsessions, of solitudes. They live out a search for their authentic self through the length and breadth of the jungles of subjectivity and the oceans of society. The identity of personal desire and of the authenticity of man in the world grants the Buñuelian priesthood a superior meaning. (1970: 198)15
Fuentes’s imagery evokes the slums of Los olvidados, the jungle of La Mort en ce jardin and the ocean that keeps Robinson Crusoe prisoner on his island. The tension in Buñuel’s cinema according to Fuentes is between freedom and isolation, as the protagonists of his films, after searching for their authentic self, discover either ‘the ties of a precarious community or the sterility of a new and definitive isolation’ (1970: 198–99).16 Certainly, the trope of imprisonment is palpable in the Mexican films, often represented through confined spaces, and Fuentes lists Nazarín’s incarceration, the tomb of Catalina and Alejandro in Abismos de pasión and the second, irreversible confinement of the diners in El ángel exterminador in the church.
Similarly, Michel circumscribes Buñuel’s work within the tension between confinement and freedom. Whereas Fuentes opposes isolation to freedom, however, imprisonment and liberty for Michel become alienation and de-alienation. Like Elizondo, Michel believes the beginnings of Buñuel’s cinema are rooted in ‘the search for man’, and, as such, his output is necessarily concerned with human beings’ position in the world, for ‘if there is a common trait among men, it is not “an immutable human nature”, but the fact of being alienated’ (1961: 21; 24).17 Michel and Fuentes’s essays were originally published during and after Buñuel had finished making films in Mexico – 1961 and 1970, respectively. Alienation, as Michel has it, is arguably a more flexible term than isolation, able to convey a sense of non-belonging to both groups and places even when the person in question is not alone. It is plausible to consider the group of fugitives in La Mort en ce jardin as alienated in that they do not belong to their environment (the jungle) and their interpersonal relationships fail. Similarly, Nazarín’s residence among the dispossessed of Mexico City and his reluctant journey with ‘disciples’ Ándara and Beatriz brings him into contact with others, even if he still remains alienated from them. Naturally, though, both isolation and alienation suggest a spatial dislocation between Buñuel’s characters and their surroundings. This sense of non-belonging is accurately and acutely summarised by Chaspoul when he says simply that ‘Buñuel very often films characters in displacement, who never truly seem to succeed in inhabiting the places where they find themselves’ (1997: 115).18 This – that the characters of the films included in this book are rarely successful in their search for a place of belonging – is the central tenet of my argument and forms the backbone of my reading of the films.
The spatial turn: geography as an exporter of ideas
It is important to point out that my focus on space and place in this book, and the way that I borrow from other disciplines such as human geography and anthropology, is part of a wider turn towards recognising the importance of space, particularly in the arts and social sciences. Barney Warf and Santa Arias make clear, ‘[h] uman geography over the last two decades has undergone a profound conceptual and methodological renaissance that has transformed it into one of the most dynamic, innovative and influential of the social sciences’ (2009: 1). This is reflected in the move from a discipline grounded in empiricism to consider wider avenues of research and interfaces between different fields such as sociology, literary and film studies, and philosophy, meaning that researchers in these areas are increasingly turning to geographers to inform their writing. This turn towards space necessitates an interdisciplinary methodology that has been embraced by many different theorists and researchers. It also speaks to Foucault’s proclamation that the ‘present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space’ (1986: 22). To a large extent, this resurgence has been linked with postmodernism: Fredric Jameson’s assertion that ‘we live in spacious times’ (Jameson in Thacker 2003: 1), for example, resonates with postmodern geographer Edward Soja’s conception of human beings as ‘intrinsically spatial beings, active participants in the social construction of our embracing spatialities’ (1996: 1). The work of geographers and urbanists such as Soja, as well as Doreen Massey and David Harvey, has stimulated this spatial turn within the arts and social sciences, and their influence bleeds into various disciplines.19 The renewed interest in space as a fruitful research area across fields is thanks to a fundamental paradigm shift, according to Foucault: whereas time, throughout the nineteenth century, was privileged over space, this is no longer the case. We now live our lives, he says, aware that ‘our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein’ (1986: 22).
It is possible to look back further and identify contributions to the broader trend of a reconceptualisation of the discipline of geography. Edward Relph’s Place and Placelessness, published in 1976, is a notable forerunner of this spatial turn and a concerted effort to excavate a fuller notion of place outside of empirical geography. Relph writes of the ‘almost total failure of geographers to explore the concept of place’ (1976: 1). His focus is on place as we experience it emotionally, and in this his work is coetaneous with and paralleled by that of geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. Perhaps Tuan’s most well-known text is his study of the affective relationship between people and their environments (1990), in which he echoes Gaston Bachelard’s neologism topophilia, or the love of place, an idea that I discuss in chapter five when considering the ways that Buñuel depicts the home. Like Relph, Tuan underscores the tendency of geography towards a more strictly scientific epistemology, and positions his own work in opposition to this:
Environment […] is not just a resource base to be used or natural forces to adapt to, but also sources of assurance and pleasure, objects of profound attachment and love. In short, another key word for me, missing in many accounts of livelihood, is Topophilia. (1990: xii)
Both Relph and Tuan present convincing cases for a concerted focus on the significance of space and place within the field of human geography, and Paul Rodaway considers Tuan in particular as ‘[v]ery much defining “humanistic geography” for a generation’ (2011: 426), due to his reaction against positivist models of geographical analysis.
The resonances of this spatial turn in various disciplines are myriad. In philosophy, for instance, Edward Casey (2009), whose work inspires my readings of Los olvidados and Nazarín in chapter four, has produced insightful work in phenomenology concerning the human relationship to his or her lived surroundings, while Dylan Trigg (2012) has investigated the link between place and memory, and the role that places play in shaping our sense of self. In literary studies, Elizabeth Jones (2007) examines the interface between geography and literature, considering the importance of the home through the life writing [autofiction] of three twentieth-century French authors. Similarly, Andrew Thacker (2003) carefully outlines the importance of space in literary analysis. Thacker’s project is the portrayal of space in modernist literature and he traces the concepts of influential spatial theorists such as Foucault, Bachelard and Heidegger before applying these concepts to his reading of the works of notable authors such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Moving beyond literature alone, the volume edited by theologian Daniel Boscaljon (2013) on the representation of the home in art and narrative includes considerations of poetry, prose, film and television. The contributions are varied in their scope and demonstrate the permeations of spatially focused analyses across disciplines. The spatial turn also provides the impetus for the edited volume published by Jaimey Fisher and Barbara Mennel (2010a). Although focused specifically on German cultural production, the editors’ main argument is that a focus on space as a theme permits us to reconsider canonical literary and cinematic works from a new perspective, pointing towards the suitability of, and need for, a wider mapping of spatially driven analyses of texts. Although several contributions to the volumes by Boscaljon and Fisher and Mennel detailed above take visual media as their source of study,20 the richness of analyses of space in film comes to the fore in other books and edited volumes specifically on cinema.
Considering space in cinema
As an inherently visual medium, cinema is able to represent space in its multifaceted dimensions. Taking Buñuel’s cinema as an example, we see that films are able to psychologise space, as in the postcard image of Paris which comes to life before Castin’s delirious eyes in La Mort en ce jardin; they are capable of narrativising and reifying space, as in the pestilential symbiosis between human and environment in Tierra sin pan; and, intentionally or not, they aestheticise the locations that structure and form them through an aesthetics of beautification – surprisingly for the ascetic Buñuel, critic Pauline Kael labelled the mise-en-scène of Le Journal d’une femme de chambre as ‘revoltingly “beautiful”’ (1978: 274) – or austerity. In the past few decades, the influence of the spatial turn has emerged in academic studies of filmic representation of space, place and landscape from film scholars, geographers and philosophers.
Feeding into the idea of geography as an exporter of ideas and the interdisciplinary spatial turn, geographers Stuart Aitken and Leo Zonn turn to film to argue ‘cinematic representation needs to be a key part of geographic investigation’ (1994: 5), on the basis that film is mode of cultural production and a social text. They argue in favour of the symbiosis between cinema and culture, or as they phrase it, between ‘real-life and reel-life’:
the way spaces are used and places are portrayed in film reflects prevailing cultural norms, ethical mores, societal structures, and ideologies. Concomitantly, the impact of a film on an audience can mold social, cultural, and environmental experiences. Clearly, a research direction focused on the production and consumption of space and place in cinema deserves serious geographic attention. (Ibid.)
The contributions that make up Aitken and Zonn’s volume are heterogeneous, drawing on documentary film, Third cinema and British cinema, but all affirm the importance of the representation of space in film and the authors hold film to be influential in ‘understanding our place in the world’ (ibid.).
In his study of space in cinema, André Gardies points out that the analysis of narrative space has traditionally been overlooked in favour of that of time (1993: 9). His monograph is a serious attempt to reverse this trend. In classical narrative cinema – largely the realm of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema – Gardies believes that there is frequently concordance between what the films tell the viewer and the viewer’s own knowledge; that is, the ‘anchoring-in-the-real’ [l’ancrage réel] of the film by way of recognisable toponymy helps to build on a viewer’s encyclopaedic knowledge (1993: 77). Buñuel is an interesting figure in this respect: we need only think of Los olvidados – arguably one of his most linear films which appears to borrow from the coetaneous wave of Italian neorealism – to see how Buñuel’s depiction of space is always an ambivalent one. Set unmistakably in Mexico City, the unforgiving slums that form the characters’ world are quite unexpected, coming as they do after the images of grandiose British, French and Mexican metonymy as Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower and the Zócalo in Mexico City flash across the screen in the film’s documentary-like prologue. Gardies’s approach is largely structuralist, frequently drawing on Saussure’s linguistic theories as analogies and Christian Metz’s writing on cinema, examining the transmission of information from the screen to the audience and the audience’s perception of this.
Contrasting with Gardies’s claim that analysis of film has traditionally favoured time over space is Wendy Everett and Axel Goodbody’s assertion that ‘it would be rare today to find any serious study of film that did not in some way take account of the importance of space’ (2005: 9). Their aim is to explore the various ways in which spatial theories and theorists have influenced investigations of filmic space. As such, theorists of contemporary urbanity such as Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre are prominent among the contributions that make up their edited volume. In many respects, the birth of cinema as a medium was coetaneous with the rapid expansion of cities and the redefining of the urban metropolis. Early cinema was perfectly positioned to showcase recent architectural achievements, such as the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s Panorama of the Flatiron Building (1903), and to capture urban life in its totality, from the bright lights and showgirls of commercial Weimar Berlin to the sewers underneath the city in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: die Symphonie der Großstadt (1927). Not surprisingly, the depiction of the city in film is a field of substantial research.21 However, there is also an effort in Everett and Goodbody’s volume to look beyond the urban to different conceptions of space, such as the idyllic spaces of tropical islands and the relationship between space and the male body as represented by actor Javier Bardem.
More recently, researchers in film studies have shown a renewed interest in the ways in which film can represent landscape. Graeme Harper and Jonathan Rayner show that, from its inception, cinema has functioned as a screen on which to bring the landscapes of far-flung places to audiences who may not have had the means to experience these first-hand (2010: 16). As an example of cultural production, film establishes a contract of sorts with the spectator, who is at liberty to interpret the images on screen in his or her own way. Harper and Rayner point towards the affective potential of spatial representation when they suggest that a filmic landscape is a ‘mnemonic offering’, and can be ‘landscapes of the mind, offering displaced representations of desires and values’ (2010: 18; 21). What Martin Lefebvre terms ‘a form of spatial predicate’ (2006: 51), filmic landscapes are the most readily aestheticised element of mise-en-scène. Landscape can either be an integral element of the plot and appear in a so-called narrative mode, or can be separate to plot, where the viewer is meant to contemplate the aesthetic qualities of the landscape independently of the storyline. This, Lefebvre terms the spectacular mode of landscape (2006: 29). I find Lefebvre’s admission that there is much more research to be done on the representation of space in cinema particularly pertinent. Indeed, this book addresses Lefebvre’s view that
While setting concerns narrative representation, and narrative aesthetic representation, it is equally possible to represent space in more ‘anthropological’ terms. Indeed, space may be represented as pertaining to lived experiences other than narrative or aesthetic. This is the case, for example, with ‘identity’ and ‘belonging’ and the myriad ways of engaging with space that both can entail. (2006: 52)
This call for a wider conceptualisation of the possibilities of spatial representation in cinema, beyond aesthetic analysis and in particular with regards to lived experiences, has been taken up by architect Juhani Pallasmaa in his analysis of existential space in cinema and its representation in architecture. According to Pallasmaa, ‘experiential images of space and place are contained in practically all films’, given that ‘[a]rt articulates the boundary surface between the mind and the world’ (2007: 7; 21). His twinning of cinema and architecture springs from his view that ‘[t]hese two art forms create and mediate comprehensive images of life. […] Both forms of art define the dimensions and essence of existential space; they both create experiential scenes of life situations’ (2007: 13). Pallasmaa looks at the work of four directors: Hitchcock, Tarkovsky, Kubrick and Antonioni; interestingly, though, he believes Buñuel’s cinema is equally deserving of his philosophical analysis of architecture in film (2007: 8). His approach coincides with that of film researcher Murray Smith and philosopher Thomas Wartenberg, who ask more generally:
If philosophy is regarded as the attempt to think systematically about fundamental issues of human existence, it seems more plausible to regard film as capable of embodying such acts of reflection. For if philosophy names a range of concerns that are the common property of every thoughtful human being during at least some moments of his or her life, why should films not mobilize these concerns in ways that would count as philosophy in this sense? (2006: 2).
This book addresses both of these concerns, firstly by reading space in the films beyond issues of purely aesthetic and artistic representation and secondly by using Buñuel’s Mexican films to pose deeper questions of what it means to be in place and to belong in a place, and in doing so, widening the scope of Buñuel studies. Beyond aesthetic or narrative concerns, filmic depictions of space, place and landscape are replete with displaced desires and values, and we can take these as explorations of metatextual metaphors and allegories beyond the surface level of plot. This is the thrust behind my reading of these films, and the broad approach considers how film is suited to depict issues of belonging and non-belonging within the interrelated fields of human geography and philosophy.
Notes
1 The Spanish term originates from Buñuel himself in reference to La hija del engaño (1951). See de la Colina and Turrent (1993: 61). Julie Jones uses the term ‘studio potboilers’ in noting how scathing Buñuel was in the early 1950s about his commercial films, quoting him as saying: ‘[a]rtistically, they are zeros. They made it possible for me to shoot the films I believe in’ (2013: 84).
2 [una bomba [que provocó] un gran impacto en sus primeros espectadores]; [de ninguna manera exaltante].
3 [es admirable desde muchos puntos de vista pero es un Buñuel al que le han cortado las uñas]; [un cine ‘descafeinao’ [sic]].
4 [jugueteo intelectual y el ajedrez de fantasmas (ideas de personajes más que personajes)]. This point is echoed almost word-for-word by Gianfranco Corbucci. He argues that in Buñuel’s late films ideas are unmediated, as characters appear as ‘phantasms […] direct representations of ideas’, leading to what he sees as an intellectual game (1974: 41). [Bastano soltanto fantasma di personaggi che siano pure e semplici, dirette rappresentazioni di idee].
5 [une fraîcheur d’invention, une franchise du regard, une clarté d’expression].
6 [salvaguardar la imagen del autor en detrimento de los filmes, que permanecen ignorados]. There is a wealth of European and North American criticism from the 1950s to the 1970s on Buñuel’s Mexican cinema, as more of the lesser-known films made there began to arrive in Europe. Most of this criticism falls foul of the trap that Gaston Lillo identifies. Jean Delmas arbitrarily discerns the ‘Sunday-best Buñuel’ and the ‘everyday Buñuel’ (1978: 193). The latter, of course, refers to his Mexican films. See also Milne (1965–66); Hogue (1976); and Rubinstein (1977).
7 [el sello de esta doble nacionalidad].
8 [estas fotografías también nos muestran […] una percepción de México, alejada de lo turístico y con una sensibilidad que aflora a menudo en pequeños detalles]; [sus fotografías [que] se refieren a paisajes sin gente].
9 [morfología y genealogía de lo feo].
11 [Lo cierto es que al hacer aquí Buñuel la mayor parte de su filmografía, con varias de sus obras maestras, no le estaba haciendo un favor a nadie; ya basta de esa actitud mesiánica: si Buñuel hubiese ido a parar a otro país del continente no hubiera hecho nada, y que lo digan sus dos estancias en Estados Unidos, una antes de venir y otra para hacer Robinson Crusoe y La joven […] si no filmó todo lo que quiso, tampoco lo hizo ningún director mexicano ambicioso].
12 [Si l’exil physique s’achève, l’exil du regard, lui, se prolonge, car il est le véritable exil cinématographique. Dans la mesure où l’exil n’a jamais été chez Buñuel un sujet, mais toujours un lieu depuis lequel s’exerçait la mise en scène, et qui agissait donc sur elle, il demeure exil du regard en dépit de la fin de l’exil physique].
13 [Se invoca el psicoanálisis, se invocan los Misterios, se invocan los Episodios Nacionales. ¿Ha invocado alguien la generalidad de las generalidades: el hombre?].
14 Antonioni’s films are included in a variety of relatively recent monographs and edited volumes on space in film. See, for example, Bernardi (2002) and Gandy (2006). Marko Jobst considers that for Wenders ‘cinematic storytelling is, at its core, a spatial act’ (2008).
15 [la decisión de conectarse con el mundo o de rehusar ese vinculo]; [Los personajes de Buñuel cumplen un sacerdocio: sacerdocio de las barriadas, del crimen, de las alcobas, del abandono, de las obsesiones, de las soledades. Viven una búsqueda del ser auténtico a lo largo y ancho de las selvas subjetivas y los océanos sociales. La identidad del deseo personal y de la autenticidad del hombre en el mundo otorga un sentido superior al sacerdocio buñueliano].
16 [los lazos de una precaria comunidad o la esterilidad de un nuevo y definitivo aislamiento].
17 [la recherché de l’homme]; [s’il y a un trait commun aux hommes, ce n’est pas «l’immuable nature humaine», mais le fait d’être aliénés].
18 [Buñuel filme très souvent des personnages en déplacement qui semblent ne jamais vraiment réussir à habiter les lieux où ils se trouvent].
19 See Santa Arias (2010) for a useful overview of the spatial turn. Arias is a Latin Americanist whose work on colonial Latin America has been influenced by the spatial turn. She co-edited an interdisciplinary volume specifically on the resonances of the awareness of the importance of space in the arts and humanities, discussed in this chapter. See Warf and Arias (2008).
20 See, for example, Seamon (2013: 155–70) and Jacobs (2010: 381–95).
21 Among the numerous examples, see Clarke (1997) or Shiel and Fitzmaurice (2001).