A Search for Belonging: The Mexican Cinema of Luis Buñuel

The notion of home is a wide-ranging concept in research within the humanities and social sciences, and is informed by disciplines from human geography and anthropology to philosophy and psychology. It is, as Jeanne Moore (2000) notes, a singularly loaded term, encompassing micro-levels of individual dwelling to macroscopic concepts such as country, nation and questions of global unity. The sheer breadth of writing on the home has given rise to surveys of the literature in an attempt to venture points of correlation and contention between the multifarious perspectives represented across disciplines. In cinema, for example, Johannes von Moltke (2005) considers how the representation of Heimat – a term left in the original German – in German films dealing with questions of rootedness and locality (the Heimatfilm genre) can encompass an entire nation and even form the basis of an imagined community for German audiences, while David T. Fortin has examined the representation of home and architecture in science-fiction film, as ‘most SF narratives seemingly center on notions of homelessness, homecomings, threats to and invasions of home, and journeys from it’ (2011: 11). Similarly, Tyson Lewis and Daniel Cho (2006) carry out a reading of postmodern representations of home in Hollywood cinema, especially in horror and science-fiction genres, to argue in favour of a new formulation of home beyond its bourgeois historical materialist conceptualisation. In her cross-disciplinary review, Shelley Mallett asks whether home is ‘(a) place(s), (a) space(s), feeling(s), practices, and/or active state of state of being [sic] in the world?’ (2004: 65). Home, undoubtedly, can be all of these and the evocative medium of film has the potential to address these ideas and to propose answers to Mallett’s question.

In this final chapter I draw on largely phenomenologically-inspired readings and interpretations of home – the final suggestion Mallet offers in her definitions of home above – applying these to particular films in Buñuel’s Mexican corpus. In doing so, I continue to take a spatial approach to the director’s Mexican work, to demonstrate how questions of belonging – often prefigured in Buñuel’s narratives by the negative, as non-belonging – is a trope around which the characters coalesce, sewing an aesthetic and thematic thread through Buñuel’s body of work from this period and, thus, a specific way of interpreting it. As I outlined in chapter one, highlighting the relevance of space in these films allows us to link the commercial and auteurist strands of Buñuel’s Mexican output. This chapter continues this linkage, revisiting in turn the island heterotopias of Robinson Crusoe and The Young One, the liminal spaces of the jungle and the desert in La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto and the body-self within the place-worlds of Los olvidados and Nazarín to consider the importance they give to questions of belonging and how they represent this filmically. Buñuel made a great number of films in Mexico and to each of these pairs I add a further companion film: La Fièvre monte à El Pao, Abismos de pasión and El ángel exterminador respectively. It will be shown that, in their respective situations (in the figurative and spatial senses of the word), the characters are often rootless in their search for belonging within Buñuel’s ‘frequently faceless and impersonal’ Mexican canvas (Smith 1995: 26). This completes the approximate move from the outside in, from typologies of exterior space to the implacement of the body-self within the place-world, and finally to what is the kernel of the self-place matrix – the home – will be realised through a consideration of the ways in which Buñuel’s cinema depicts questions of belonging. Importantly, in adding three further companion films, this will allow for a richer, more illustrated discussion whilst forging fresh stylistic, thematic and philosophical links within Buñuel’s cinema and pointing towards possible areas for future research.

Pallasmaa’s focus remains largely on the home as the site of experience, meaning that home comes into being primarily through the occupant. He takes his cue from Bachelard’s Poetics of Space, in which the philosopher explores the oneiric house, an image imprinted in the psyche of all dwellers as he claims, ‘the house image would appear to have become the topography of our intimate being’. Bachelard’s tenet is simple: ‘that all really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home’ (1994: xxxvi). This presumption is potentially questionable in its apparent disregard for cultural and social contexts (indeed, this is one criticism often levelled at phenomenological approaches within the discipline of geography);1 however, Pallasmaa (1995: 133) indicates that the characteristics of the oneiric house are culturally conditioned. Bachelard’s oneiric house, problematically, privileges the white, middle-class, heterosexual male dweller.² We are obviously far from the failed home that Buñuel presents us with in Los olvidados here. However, attempting to move beyond Bachelard’s tacit bourgeois, patriarchal Eurocentrism, Pallasmaa argues that what is vital is the intuitive understanding of home as a ‘complex condition, which integrates memories and images, desires and fears, the past and the present’ (1995: 133). This presents the basis for an intersubjective conceptualisation of home, which is then shaped by the individual’s interaction with his or her environment, as home becomes ‘a gradual product of the dweller’s adaptation to the world’ (1995: 133).

This wider understanding of home beyond its purely material foundations is more relevant to Buñuel’s cinema where the protagonists of films such as Nazarín or Simón del desierto lack a material shelter and, within the Buñuelian repetitious cycle, a past. Janet Donohoe questions the inside/outside binary that a more material conception of home brings with it, believing this ‘leads to misunderstanding, as does the language of security and refuge when speaking of the home place’ (2011: 30, n. 5). It will be clear by now that Buñuel unpicks the idea(l) of home, and the films in this book counteract this misunderstanding. Crusoe’s island, for instance, is a no-place bound inextricably to the home sphere of the dominant culture that pervades it, whilst Simón – who would be free even ‘in a jail cell’, according to Buñuel (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 179) – is as trapped by his liberty in the liminal vistas of the desert as he is in the poky nightclub. Equally problematic are the protagonists’ houses, where these structures are actually represented. Neither Evvie’s cabin nor Pedro’s shack could be described in terms of security and refuge. It is, therefore, something of a misnomer to contend that Buñuel’s protagonists are homeless, even though this may frequently be the case, as this term is often perceived in its material sense. Marina Pérez de Mendiola notes that the films of this period transmit ‘a sense of uprooting’ (2006: 29). I would argue the term rootless is a more accurate description of many of Buñuel’s characters of this period, and one that relates to the lack of a home rather than the want of a house. Attempting to extricate the idea of home from its materialistic underpinnings, Anthony Stein-bock highlights that:

Focusing on The Young One and Robinson Crusoe, in chapter two I explored Buñuel’s predilection for the use of the island as setting. Martín notes Buñuel’s fascination with island spaces, eliding this in turn with a more general trope of confinement which, he asserts, is especially prevalent in the films of the Mexican period, where Buñuel places his characters in ‘closed places, without an apparent exit, [and] he exposes them to extreme situations that bring to the surface their contradictions and their misery, and in the end he redeems them or condemns them’. This journey Martín terms the ‘road to perfection’ and his semantic field clearly points to the protagonists’ attempts to refine and redeem themselves (2010: 742).³ Martín’s argument is pertinent, but rather than considering this within a narrative of religious redemption, as has so often been done when it comes to Buñuel, I view this as part of the protagonists’ search for a more secular, earthly belonging and, with it, a home-place. Neither the island spaces in these films, nor the unseen mainland, offer any such road to perfection.

The depiction of both Crusoe’s desert island and Miller and Evvie’s game-preserve is far from the idyllic setting of an island as both Edenic paradise and site of romantic adventure. The insularity of both islands actually appears to draw Evvie and Crusoe out of themselves via a series of limit-experiences, and we see a change in their behaviour and, in Evvie’s case, a fundamental alteration in her interaction in that space. Her limit-experience as a result of her rape extricates her from her own being and the fade-in shot of the island’s coastline following this act serves as a visual motif of her being ‘drawn out’ of herself. The shot is fleeting and may appear insignificant, but its role as the foremost instance of narrative rupture should not be underestimated. Crucially, it is the only high-angle establishing shot of the island’s coastline in the film and it follows what is arguably the film’s most controversial moment. It would not be an underestimation to say that Evvie is, out of all Buñuel’s characters in the films I am writing about in this book, the most natural, organic and the most close to belonging willingly to her environment until this moment.

Michael Zimmerman says that ‘[i]f we conceive ourselves and treat ourselves as things, we can hardly expect to be “at home”’ (1985: 250). Evvie’s limit-experience that I explained in chapter two during her rape by Miller does just this: it prematurely awakens her cognisance of her corporeality and her awareness of herself as a (sexual) object, external to and at odds with her environment. The shot of the island’s coastline could be seen in this way as Evvie’s being torn from her environment. The spatial and the temporal mise-en-scène is therefore replete with symbolism: more than marking a new day, it signals the rupture in her natural attachment to her home-place and the dawn it depicts is a portent of Evvie’s premature awakening and loss of security (see Figure 13). Her relationship with her home-place is irrevocably altered: she is no longer the incarnation of Artemis, as Santaolalla (2004: 102) puts it; she no longer pets the deer in the yard nor does she tend to the bees. Indeed, a scene cut from the final version of the film showed Evvie, after her second violation, savagely kicking a coyote caught in a trap alongside Traver as he attempts to flee the island (Archer 1960: x5). The effect of her bodily awareness is clear as she is seen wearing a coat over her dress on the morning following the rape despite the continuous heat, where she had previously shown little awareness of her developing body after showering in front of Traver. Also, Miller’s attempts to placate her with mainland commodities are overtly sexual: lipstick and stockings. Via the Buñuelian fetish object – for instance, the close up shot of Evvie’s feet in the high-heeled shoes as she waits on the pier to be taken to town with the Reverend Fleetwood – Evvie is shown to be caught between here and there, between the insularity of the island and the space beyond its borders. She expresses no wish to stay on the island, which has been her home for an unspecified amount of time. Fetishism is important not just here but in Buñuel’s cinema generally: Rubinstein points out that ‘Buñuel’s fetishes are things […] in a world whose desperate souls share no community’ (1978: 243). Although Rubinstein’s statement most clearly recalls the animated postcard and the disparate group of La Mort en ce jardin, it is also clearly applicable to The Young One, whose budding community is tarnished by Miller’s racism and lust.

In a similar way to Evvie’s rape, Crusoe’s isolation undermines his ontology. Buñuel communicates the full extent of this during the scene in which Crusoe screeches hysterically for help, running into the roaring waves to try and escape ‘this tomb, this prison’. As I outlined in chapter two, Crusoe considers himself outside of all places, lamenting his lack of purpose and meaning, removed from the world as the island subsumes his very identity. Unlike the island in The Young One, which could potentially become a home for Evvie, Crusoe’s is an island landing-place, and the flotsam and jetsam of the ship washed ashore with the hero in the opening sequence and subsequently plundered from the shipwreck by Crusoe are the only traces of his original cultural and territorial home-place of England. In a similar way to the fetish objects in The Young One, those in Robinson Crusoe are deliberate reminders of the dominant space and culture in the insular space. Rubinstein notes that fetishes are ‘failed metaphors, or ruined metaphors, functioning for Buñuel as the natural parody of metaphor’ (1978: 243). I would argue that, especially in the case of these two films, the objects are not failed metaphors but metonyms, and the mise-en-scène of one scene in particular mocks Crusoe’s hollow attachment to home.

The scene I am referring to is the hallucination sequence. Here, Crusoe’s cave fortress, furnished with the bourgeois comforts of home, appears incongruous and ridiculous (see Figure 14). This sequence is important when we consider the hero’s original home-place. It is the most overtly surrealist part of the film and it begins as Crusoe is in his hammock, ravaged by fever. Gazing off-screen, he begins to talk with an image of his father, who ignores his pleas for water and promptly sets about washing a pig. The conversation begins on a spatial note as Crusoe’s father, now in shot and responding to his son’s amazement at finding him on the island, says, ‘Yes here. Here, here, here, here, here. Not there, but here. Where else would I be? Are you not here?’. He then admonishes his son for leaving his native country, where he ‘had the best of all possible worlds’. Undoubtedly ironic, this statement is the direct inversion of Buñuel’s often-cited view that, the lasting impression his cinema should leave us with is ‘to repeat […] that we do not live in the best of all possible worlds’ (Edwards 2005: 90). The artificiality of dwelling, or rather, the unrealisable nature of dwelling even within Crusoe’s home culture is suggested through the ridiculous, metonymic nature of the fetish items in his fortress, many of which are of little use to him, as well as the plush curtain, the upholstered chair, the candelabra and the pig, remnants of his English manor that accompany the image of his father. They are skewed fractals depicting a whole that is constantly absent as England remains unseen in the film. This accumulation of fetish items superimposes one cultural milieu onto another and indicates the vacuous nature of existence in either setting, mocking Crusoe’s attempt to recreate in microcosm his home culture on the island before it has fully begun and parodying the home culture itself, from which Crusoe, in his own words, ‘broke loose’.

The relevance of the island spaces as heterotopic sites, as I discussed in chapter two, is not lost when considering questions of belonging and non-belonging. Johnson contends that heterotopias ‘disrupt and test our customary notions of ourselves’ as ‘[t]hese emplacements exist out of step and meddle with our sense of interiority’ (2006: 84). Evvie’s and Crusoe’s islands are unsettling precisely because they are not depicted, in the spirit of de la Mare’s romanticism and More’s perfected society, as utopic spaces. They show that home can and does fail. Heterotopias are also ‘disturbing places’. We should not take this in a purely figurative sense, but rather a literal one of displacement: they ‘display and inaugurate a difference and challenge the space in which we may feel at home’ (Johnson 2006: 84). As the island becomes a crisis space for Evvie, she appears more conscious of her existence in her home-place and is thus disturbed as the artificiality and arbitrariness of her residence there is made clear. The layering of cultural milieus on Crusoe’s island, meanwhile, works on the principle of metonymy, parodying the bourgeois comforts of a longed-for but absent and incomplete home from which the hero escaped and pointing to the ambivalent and incomplete home he has fashioned for himself. Most crucially of all, both protagonists, as well as the racial ‘others’ in the characters of Traver and Friday, leave their islands without a burning desire to stay, and both do so moving towards uncertain futures and, in Evvie’s case, another temporary residence in the children’s home.

The pseudo-documentary opening of the film functions as an anti-travelogue, presenting a contemporary society every bit as miserable as that which Buñuel presents us with in Las Hurdes.4 Ojeda, the voiceover instructs, is located somewhere off the American continent, although its precise position is of little concern to those outside Barreiro’s regime, as no tourist has stepped foot on the island in years. There follows a series of shots of the native islanders’ dilapidated shacks and the prisoners’ labour camp, part of the island’s penal infrastructure. This opening montage reveals a sense of autocratic space construction by means of autochthonous place destruction: it could be Crusoe’s rudimentary mutineer colony taken to sinister extremes. As Paule Sengissen (digitised press cuttings in BFI Library) points out, the pseudo-documentary – and the film as a whole – presents the viewer with an image before cutting to another image that negates the previous one; the film is in perpetual negation and is another example of the ‘yes, but’ dialectic Kyrou sees in Buñuel’s cinema. The sweeping aerial panorama of Ojeda’s verdant coastline gives way to a travelling shot of rows of dilapidated shacks in the mid-distance where the exploited natives reside; the image of the grand colonial buildings, remnants of Spanish occupation, are countered by images of prisoners labouring in the fruit fields; finally, the graveyard containing ex-prisoners becomes the luxurious mansion of Ojeda’s governor.

This sprawling residence is the home of Inés, Governor Vargas’s wife, and becomes the home of her lover, Vázquez, after the Governor is shot. Unlike in both Robinson Crusoe and The Young One, the mansion house here offers the comforts and trappings befitting the political elite. It appears to provide Vázquez and Inés some respite from ‘sequence after brutal sequence, […] against the bitter, cruel and often stifling background that is Mexico’ (National Film Theatre programme notes: La Fièvre monte à El Pao, digitised press cuttings in BFI Library). One scene in particular appears to establish the house as a ‘felicitous space’ that ‘protects the dreamer, […] allows one to dream in peace’ (Bachelard 1994: xxxv, 6). This quixotic view of the house is depicted filmically as Inés and Vázquez stroll leisurely in the mansion’s gardens following her husband’s assassination, framed in long shot by the trees as they stop to reminisce about their pasts. Inés admits that it has taken her years to discover freedom, having escaped from her controlling parents and violent husband, before expressing her joy that a new life lies ahead of the pair. This cocoon-like ideal of the home is undone throughout the film, contrasted with a much later scene, following the outbreak and suppression of the prisoners’ revolt, where the pair is shown in the lounge, arguing over the implications of signing a falsified statement implicating them in the death of Inés’s husband. Here, the establishing shot is of the lovers from behind a translucent curtain, communicating a sense of their luxurious imprisonment. Inés implores Vázquez to escape with her: ‘It doesn’t matter to where. […] Spread your ideals elsewhere – the world is very big.’ When contrasted with her earlier admission that it has taken her years to find her freedom, the viewer may wonder whether Ojeda has only ever provided a semblance of it. According to Bachelard:

In reality, the mansion is simply an extension of the island’s penal institutions. Fuentes considers that the narrative develops between what he terms as two chronotopes: the penal colony and the mansion and government buildings. The mechanisms of power and corruption are omnipresent, reinforcing his observation that there is no distinction between inside and outside power structures. Furthermore, he identifies the constant of surveillance as one of the film’s principal motifs, likening the island to a panoptic watchtower (ibid.). The motif of the colour white serves to link the two chronotopes: the car in which Vázquez first arrives at the mansion to inform Inés that her presence is required at the annual celebrations to honour Barreiro is white, as is Inés’s dress and the uniform of Colonel Olivares, whom Vázquez witnesses kissing Inés in this scene. The starched white uniform of Ojeda’s military society is echoed in the ubiquitous white venetian blinds, a vital aspect of the film’s mise-en-scène. The blinds in the governor’s office remain closed as the post changes hands from Vargas to Gual to Vázquez, and are a visual metaphor for the social ordering of the island, based on surveillance. In the scene in which newly-appointed governor Gual gives Vázquez responsibility for the island’s penitentiary, he makes a point of closing the blinds, stating that he detests the sun. Likewise, the end of the film sees Vázquez peering out from behind the blinds at Inés who is fleeing Ojeda following Vázquez’s refusal to leave and their separation. The blinds symbolise the panoptic power of Ojeda’s institutions and, paradoxically, the curtailing of liberty of those whom they simultaneously shield and imprison, and, crucially, they are seen not only in governmental buildings but also in the mansion’s bedroom. Furthermore, in the scene where political prisoner Cárdenas is telling Vázquez about the prisoners’ plan to revolt, a crude map of Ojeda can be seen on the wall onto which the light filtering through the blinds is projected, running across the island and across Cárdenas and Vázquez in a bar-like effect: the island as a whole is behind the bars of surveillance from the mainland (see Figure 15). This pervasion of authority in both the institutional and domestic realms simultaneously locates the characters within the totalitarian space of the island and places them opposite it. The island as home-place is always mediated by its relationship to Barreiro’s mainland dictatorship.

Finally, whereas Crusoe’s island is presented as an ou-topic no-place and the game-preserve of The Young One is a subverted eu-topic good place, Ojeda comes to represent a conflation of the two. In fact, the three islands are all failed utopias. In a variety of ways, the influence of the respective dominant cultures makes its presence felt, mediating the relationship between the characters and their supposed home-places in manners rendered subtly or explicitly by the films’ respective mise-en-scène. Whether or not they escape their islands, the protagonists are all rootless. Evvie and Crusoe move towards uncertain futures, Inés is killed on her way to the airport as the driver of her car is shot for speeding through a check point as she tries to flee Ojeda and Vázquez remains alone and, in Fuentes’s words, totally disorientated (2000: 133).⁵ It is ultimately their (dis)location between states of rootlessness, or ou-topia, and imprisonment within the hierarchical political order, or subverted eu-topia, that prevents their adaptation to the world.

Writing about the ending of La Fièvre monte à El Pao, Fuentes believes it is ‘the greatest antiphrasis in all of Buñuel’s cinema and the ending in which the director distances himself most from his protagonist’ (2000: 133).6 Buñuel’s distancing from his protagonists is likewise evident, and arguably to a greater extent, in La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto, two films that, as I showed in chapter two, can be fruitfully interpreted through the framework of the spatial liminal. The conclusions of the respective films are largely inconclusive. Chark and Maria in the jungle and Simón in the desert-disco are equally or more disorientated than Fuentes would have Vázquez, and in a manner rendered more explicit than that of La Fièvre monte à El Pao through the mise-en-scène of their endings; the nightclub and the jungle, below their surface function as arenas of narrative development, are examples of Deleuze’s formless, uniform originary worlds. The protagonists of both films are caught within a vicious cycle as the former suffer corporeal degradation and disintegration in the jungle and the latter is removed from his literal desert only to be forever imprisoned in a further, figurative one. Their journeys defy Kim Hopper and Jim Baumohl’s assertion that ‘liminal passages are usually undertaken in well-mapped territory from which the voyager is expected to return’ (1996: 4). Here there is no return, nor the chance to make a home in the interstices. In short, the creation and representation of a home-place is problematic on the limen.

I am returning to La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto in order to consider what this pair can tell the viewer about the idea of home. Undoubtedly, in these two films Buñuel appears preoccupied with questions of belonging, specifically the dynamic of belonging or non-belonging within a certain community – of exiles in a foreign country, or a community built on a religious order – and both films, for their shortcomings, speak philosophically to what it is to be at home (or not) with others. Steinbock’s development of Husserl’s concept of a homeworld/alienworld is key in this reading. This dyadic construct forms the framework for how we experience the familiar and the foreign, and integral to the homeworld/alienworld pair is the reciprocal relationship that the two share: the former is constructed and re-constructed in connection with the latter. As Steinbock puts it simply, ‘a home is formed through appropriation and disappropriation’ (1995: 222). In this way:

Steinbock is clear that we should not privilege the homeworld as that which is familiar over the alienworld simply because this is unknown, as ‘neither […] can be regarded as the “original sphere” since they are in a continual historical becoming as delimited from one another’ (1994: 208). This concept is particularly revealing in terms of La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto where the co-generative ethic of this duality of experience is frequently thwarted: the construction of a home-world after contact with the alienworld is not possible, either because the protagonists remain estranged from both the home and the alien, as is Simón, high on his pillar, or because they are thrust into a claustrophobic, unfurling alienworld with no access to the co-constitutive home, as is the group in La Mort en ce jardin. Finally, it is also important to acknowledge the changing nature of the homeworld, given that it requires us to participate actively in its construction and its reinforcement. What is at first unfamiliar can, through experience, become familiar. This idea of a generative bleeding of the home into the alien and vice versa leads Steinbock to posit the two as liminal experiences in that their borders, while porous, are fundamental to their constitution (1994: 208). Put simply, ‘making ourselves at home as our world to which we belong entails more than a “sub-liminal” belonging, but an active responsibility for setting limits, for repeating, for renewing the homeworld’ (Steinbock 1995: 227).

Here is where liminality finds its resonance with the construction of home. It is this limit-setting process in which the protagonists of La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto fail: Castin and the group are forced out of their village in the jungle and into the boundless wilderness, while Simón’s horizontal existence in the nondescript scrubland and vertical existence is inherently limitless. The punctuation of establishing panoramic shots of the vast rainforest and desert in the two films – three of the former during the final third of the film alone – does not only suggest the importance and magnitude of the setting but also a deeper connection between the exterior space and the psychology of the characters. As opposed to the community of the Francophone villagers in La Mort en ce jardin, Simón is an isolated figure against a backdrop about which Wood writes ‘[Figueroa’s] images are as much about the desert as about Simón, and we can almost see the thinness of the air’ (2009). Friendships, for Simón, are rather thin on the ground, too. Steinbock’s focus on acts of appropriation such as repetition, ritual and communication as a means by which we make and reinforce our homeworlds makes clear that these acts are intrinsically communal and therefore often shared by homecomrades, or ‘subjects qualified constitutively and intersubjectively in terms of a home; they are “transcendental comrades,” “co-bearers of our world”’ (1995: 223). This is the very irony at play in Simón del desierto: as the spatial liminal of the boundless desert and firmament becomes the ontological liminal, Buñuel shows Simón to be incapable of such appropriation and interaction.

The scene in which a fellow monk attempts to instruct the preacher in the concept of personal property shows Simón’s estrangement. Clutching the sack used by the protagonist to winch his meagre sustenance up the column, the monk makes as if to steal the bag, intending to provoke a conflict. However, Simón cannot appropriate the sack any more than he can reciprocate the discourse of the monk, stating: ‘I don’t understand you. We speak in different tongues.’ Fuentes ventures that this interpersonal disjuncture is ‘perhaps the most dramatic Buñuelian enactment of the theme of a lack of communication and dialogue among men’ (1993: 156).7 The camera closes in on the two monks during this sequence, framing them against the formless backdrop of sky (see Figure 16). Behind Simón, the rope at the edge of his pillar is visible, its arbitrary nature revealed as the few metres square area at the pinnacle of the column is not separate from the surrounding smooth space and can never demarcate a successful dwelling. This is because the unfurling smooth-liminal-originary world of the desert, like that of the discotheque after it, is neither home nor alien for the protagonist, who, despite being a fifth-century desert father, is closer to ‘the first astronaut, alone on a Space Platform’ (Durgnat 1977: 138). To this end, Simón’s final words to the Devil are revealing: preparing to leave the disco, he tells her, ‘Have fun. I’m going home’. However, he cannot go home, as his pillar is now neither-home-nor-alien to another tenant. As the Devil struts onto the dance floor, the camera cuts to a mid-close up shot of Simón’s pensive expression, suggestive of his realisation that he is, and likely always has been, homeless both in a material and a spiritual sense. His use of the word home, whether meant in a purely physical sense, or used to denote spiritually or secularly what Steinbock describes as ‘that communal sphere to which we belong’ (1994: 218), therefore rings hollow.

In contrast to Simón’s isolation, the group of Francophone diamond miners in La Mort en ce jardin are ostensible homecomrades, linked by a common origin familiar to them all. On the one hand, unlike Simón, the band of outlaws ‘have [a] home-world as their original basis and point of departure for […] making the acquaintance of alien worlds’, but on the other, they are the embodiment of ‘an entire community [which stands], with respect to this home-world, in the relationship of one who has lost something’ (Landgrebe 1940: 48). The question of whether they have lost their home-place or whether they have actually collectively renounced it seems pertinent here. Despite his dream of returning to France, in one of the film’s most surrealist sequences Castin tears up a photograph of the Arc de Triomphe after burning another. As Wise says, a photograph

Coming after the scene depicting the snake carcass being devoured by ants, Castin’s act is crucial in revealing the group’s idea of home – here, France – to be an illusion. As the camera fades to black on the reanimated serpent, the Champs Elysées appears in the frame. The roar of motor engines and car horns is jarring and incongruous following the jungle soundscape. The scene lasts no more than a few seconds before the sound cuts out and the soundtrack of the jungle fills its place. As Buñuel cuts to a reverse angle shot of Castin’s hand holding the photograph in front of the campfire, the scene is revealed for what it really is: not an allusion to the home-place, but an illusion of it. As Castin destroys the memento in the fire and the camera’s gaze lingers while it crumples into oblivion, the viewer is placed firmly among the drifters, complicit to some degree in the destruction of the illusory home (see Figure 17). The liminal jungle is an impenetrable space and the remnant of the group’s home culture cannot open up into their present originary milieu. Indeed, echoing Malaguti’s comments on the element of repetition inherent in Buñuel’s cinema, Giorgio Tinazzi argues that Buñuel’s films, ‘in demonstrating a substantial closure of the world they represent, very often have a circular structure, […] that world does not have any exits’ (1978: 119).⁸ For all the critical attention that Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie has received in comparison with La Mort en ce jardin, the latter film demonstrates more palpably the claustrophobia of perpetual repetition. Even when the circles the group trace around the jungle seem to be broken by the characters’ discovery of the wreck of the aircraft and the consumerist fetish objects the cadavers of its passengers can provide – here also metonyms of an absent place and culture, as in Robinson Crusoe – there is no exit and the objects are equally meaningless. The jewels coveted by Djin and Maria appear ridiculous in this context and the group’s immersion in the alien means that

With the abstraction of material objects comes the characters’ isolation from one another. Steinbock contends that ‘the identity of the individual […] is revealed as a homecomrade in communal and historical interaction. Who we are is how we are home’ (1995: 223). Here, we can remember Malaguti’s use of the term azzeramento – literally, a setting at zero – that I outlined in chapter three to refer to Buñuel’s quite deliberate use of repetition to undermine any sense the viewer may have that his characters are progressing. The trek through the jungle is repetitive and every day is Groundhog Day. As a result, the generative ontology described by Steinbock is precluded in this film. The characters, although well-rounded, are liminal beings in their instable position in time as well as space, as almost the entire film appears in medias res, as indeed does Simón del desierto. The prolonged contact with what is unfamiliar within a volatile situation is rendered cinematographically as a rupture in everyday experience, and this transposes the anthropological basis of liminality onto a phenomenological level, which is especially relevant to this film. Steinbock writes that events such as the death of a child or a parent (here, Castin), the dismissal of our co-workers and, thus, our communal goals (here, the dissolution of communitas) or a war (here, the civil unrest in the mining village), ‘are just some examples of the disruption of a homeworld experience that give rise to an explicit “limit-situation” [Grenzsituation] that calls into question [the] power to appropriate’ (1995: 241). In short, as a point of contrast to Simón’s location neither here (in the home) nor there (in the alien), in this film the group is forced into the alien, a state that demands ‘a rupture or discontinuity of experience’ (Donohoe 2011: 34) evidenced filmically by the tearing and burning of the photographs of home and the abstraction of material items.

Alongside La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto, Buñuel’s 1954 film adaption of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights gives rise to considerations of a home-place on the limen in both its spatial and philosophical dimensions. Abismos de pasión represents the completion of a project Buñuel began in the 1930s when he drafted a screenplay of the novel with Pierre Unik, the cameraman on Tierra sin pan.10 The sublime force of amour fou between Catherine and Heathcliffe – here Hispanicised as Catalina and Alejandro – attracted Buñuel, who claimed that, unlike Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, he had always had admiration for Brontë’s novel (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 104). Indeed, the surrealist ‘spirit’ of the novel, evident in parts of Buñuel’s adaptation, has earned this Mexican melodrama more scholarly attention than it might otherwise have received and Buñuel himself went as far as to claim that, with a more careful casting, it could have been his best film (Evans 1982: 10).¹¹ Wolfram Schütte even ventures that only Abismos de pasión, after Tierra sin pan, ‘returns to the beginnings, lights the surrealist fire once again with an immense gust of passionate, time- and place-uprooting force’ (1974: 27).¹² The film’s narrative, as that of the novel, takes place between two dwellings. Between the ramshackle abode known as la granja [the farm], inhabited by Catalina’s alcoholic brother Ricardo and which Alejandro appropriates after his ten-year-long absence from the area, and Catalina’s ordered residence with husband Eduardo and sister-in-law Isabel, is the arid landscape of the Mexican state of Guerrero, to replace Brontë’s Yorkshire moors. Here once again, the landscape plays the dual role which it often does in Buñuel’s work, not least in La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto, transcending its utilitarian function as setting and recalling Martialay’s (1969: 8) observation that landscape in Buñuel’s cinema often becomes a character in its own right. This is the arena in which the struggle between dwelling and non-dwelling is played out.

The exterior shots depict a charred, barren landscape from the opening of the film as the credits roll over the image of a lifeless tree. Establishing shots of the two dwellings punctuate the film, suggesting the passage of time and functioning as rudimentary spatial referents that demarcate the precipice of the abyss of the film’s title. Throughout the film, the characters are often shown in long shot, appearing dwarfed by the surrounding landscape. The vast distance between Eduardo and Catalina’s estate and the miserable farm on which Alejandro resides is presented as ‘an irreparably closed space between the hills that seem to stretch on to infinity’ (Rodríguez and Sinardet 2003: 440).¹³ Apart from Alejandro, this is a space where nothing comes and nothing goes, as Rodríguez and Sinardet point out. Like those of La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto, they see this as another Deleuzian originary world, ‘a space undomesticated by man’ (2003: 441, my emphasis).¹⁴ The term ‘undomesticated’ is important, because the tension between the domesticated and the undomesticated, here rendered as the home and the alien through Eduardo and Alejandro respectively, comes to the fore in this film.

In the vein of liminality, we can see Alejandro as a Trickster figure and in this way he bears many similarities to the fugitives in La Mort en ce jardin. Tricksters are ‘[a]lways marginal characters: outsiders, as they cannot trust or be trusted, cannot give or share, they are incapable of living in a community’ (Szakolczai 2009: 155). Alejandro’s lack of (hi)story, his liminal azzeramento following his ten year absence, renders him rootless: there is no doubt he is one of Buñuel’s orphans. Furthermore, he is clearly allied with the exterior, scorched hills, illustrated most clearly in one scene in particular. As Alejandro, Catalina and Isabel are out walking, Catalina mocks Isabel’s growing feelings for Alejandro. Ashamed, Isabel flees between the sand dunes; Alejandro is shown racing along the top of the dune, sliding down it to trap her before frantically kissing and biting her neck in a paroxysm of sadomasochistic desire. Home and the interior are for him exclusively utilitarian, as he is shown numerous times entering and exiting la granja at dawn and dusk and is seen to eat and drink there. Horvath and Thomassen write:

The much-remarked upon ending of the film sees Alejandro fatally shot by Ricardo as he stands over Catalina’s corpse after breaking into her tomb. This is patently the most surrealist sequence in the film. Alejandro seems to be an early incarnation of Don Jaime, the pseudo-necrophile of Viridiana, as he kisses his dead lover before his sublime hallucination of Catalina’s return, her arms outstretched to welcome him to the abysmal afterlife. In reality, the hallucination is Catalina’s brother, Ricardo, and his arms are not outstretched but are in fact aiming a shotgun at Alejandro. María Serjo Richart disavows any potential ambiguity that the film’s conclusion might contain, reading the ending as Ricardo seals the lovers in their tomb as ‘the saddest conclusion: there is nothing after death’ (2002: 32). Certainly, unlike William Wyler’s 1939 Hollywood adaptation where the ghosts of Cathy and Heathcliffe are reunited in the afterlife, Buñuel’s is a more linear and logical conclusion. However, in eschewing Wyler’s romantic metaphysics, Buñuel’s heroes are locked in the abyss of death, a paradoxical state of infinite finitude. To this end, Philip Strick (National Film Theatre Programme Notes, digitised press cuttings in BFI Library) is right to suggest that the entire narrative is concerned with margins and thresholds torn open; none more so than that of death (see Figure 18). Despite having a clearly defined narrative, this film arguably adheres to a more radical surrealism than either La Mort en ce jardin or Simón del desierto through its treatment of amour fou. This paroxysmic force is the vehicle through which Catalina and Alejandro embrace their liminal immortality through repeated references to passion and death: Catalina proclaims, ‘Alejandro means more to me than my soul’; Alejandro implores her spirit, ‘Haunt me. Make me crazy. But don’t leave me alone. Don’t leave me in this abyss’. Alien to Eduardo’s stale, hermetic love, the trope of amour fou is not shown to be negative, and here is where its relevance to questions of dwelling can be seen.

Through the foregrounding of amour fou and the extra-existential position of the Trickster figure the position of death as other is reversed, allowing Catalina and Alejandro to embrace their liminality in a way that Simón and the Francophone fugitives cannot, because we see that they embrace their sense of homelessness, being at home in their rootlessness and ultimate death. This is the film’s paradox. Their romanticised deaths within the film’s Gothic aesthetic contrast with the detached, etymological impetus that leads the anodyne Eduardo to capture his collection of insects in his makeshift laboratory in order to ‘keep them intact’. For Catalina, death as a destructive product of amour fou brings with it a freedom that is lacking in Eduardo’s smothering attentiveness (in her own words the vultures she shoots ‘pass without feeling anything to the freedom of death’, as opposed to Eduardo’s insects). On the evening of Alejandro’s return, Catalina tells her husband, ‘your love and mine will end with death. The love I have for Alejandro is inhuman. Catalina is really a reincarnation of Lya Lys’s character in L’Âge d’or, writhing in ecstasy at the thought of having murdered her own children, albeit her veneer of respectability does not slip as much as this earlier version of herself. Death is the key to Alejandro and Catalina’s being together. Paul Harrison writes: ‘[t]o evoke the concept of dwelling is always to attempt to re-call, to restate or rephrase, an ur-concept; it is to describe an originary spacing’. By this, Harrison means that we ‘will always constitute [our] distances, perspective, gaze, or narrative from the intimacy of dwelling’ (2007: 627). Death, for the rootless Tricksters Alejandro and Catalina, is this originary spacing in reverse, in the sense that while the scorched abyss between the manor and la granja is an obstacle to dwelling together, in the tomb the lovers have achieved their infinite finitude. As Peter Evans and Robin Fiddian put it: ‘Alejandro’s «quiero morir contigo» [I want to die with you] […] is […] a complicated revelation of an individual’s desire for liberation from the prison of mortality’ (1988: 66). Dwelling as belonging is only possible – paradoxically – for the pair in death.

In contrast to the exterior spaces of the jungle and the desert in the discussion of La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto, my reading of Los olvidados and Nazarín in chapter four centred around the representation of the body-self in the place-worlds of the respective films. Casey’s concept of the place-world resonates with the idea(l) of a home-place. A home can be thought of as the kernel of a more extensive territorial place-world and just as the body is instrumental in our negotiation of the place-world, so it is paramount when we construct a home. Steinbock even ventures that, when taking home as a place which structures our experiences and behaviour, ‘it might not be too strained to speak of the lived-body precisely as a “home-body”’ (1995: 233). Here, I reconsider the narratives of Los olvidados and Nazarín as giving rise to the protagonists’ search for a place of belonging – a home – within their respective territories, and the way in which Buñuel frames questions of bodily representation is therefore vital.

To explore the absence of a home-place in Los olvidados I want to return to Pedro’s dream sequence, when he returns home to sleep. Low-key lighting along with discordant music signal that this is an alternate reality, one that gives representation to Pedro’s trauma, based on lack. The lack here is of a nurturing parent (more specifically, a mother) and of a home. Fredrik Svenaeus asks:

Svenaeus’s use of Freudian psychoanalysis and the uncanny lends itself well to this film. In chapter four, I read Marta also as an embodiment of the abject and a cipher for the place-world on an increasing scale from neighbourhood to city to nation. Her most immediate and intimate link, however, is arguably with the home. She is the archetype of the long-suffering, downtrodden single mother fettered to her domestic duties, and is seen outside of the home only on two occasions: when visiting Pedro in the youth court following his sentencing to the farm school and at the end of the film, when out searching for her son after seemingly being struck by an attack of remorse over her treatment of him. According to Kirsten Jacobson:

Buñuel presents the slums as disturbing and threatening, a claustrophobic place that contains little prospect of a home-place. Yet one opportunity presents itself from outside: the farm school where Pedro is sent after his trial. The alternative ending that Buñuel filmed for Los olvidados is crucial here. This was discovered in 1996 in the archives of the Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional de México (UNAM) [the National University of Mexico]. In interview, Francisco Gaytán, the then director of the Filmoteca of the UNAM stated that in all likelihood Buñuel shot this alternative ending to avoid possible censorship, and that it was probably a decision imposed on him by the film’s producer, Óscar Dancigers (Dey 1999: 289). It shows Pedro fighting with Jaibo in Meche’s stable. Their destinies are reversed: here it is Jaibo, not Pedro, who falls and is killed. Pedro then returns to the farm school having reclaimed the director’s fifty pesos stolen by Jaibo earlier in the film. After reclaiming the money, Pedro briefly meets Ojitos, who lends him his poncho as they sleep under a makeshift shelter. The final shot, the briefest but the most important, has Pedro marching triumphantly away from a static camera through the open gates of the farm school, accompanied by extra-diegetic fanfare (see Figure 19). It seems that this is a potential place where he can belong. This ending, which bears none of the disturbing power of the original, is made all the more remarkable if we consider Tuñón’s reading of what drives this film. She asserts that the broken city we are presented with in Los olvidados is ‘[a] fitting setting for his [Buñuel’s] characters who are always searching, a setting that parallels the tortured and dismembered bodies’ (2003: 87).¹⁵ Los olvidados lays before the viewer a painful search: for love, for security, for acceptance. While the original ending, notably with the camera placed at the bottom of a garbage heap as it tracks the rolling motion of Pedro’s tortured corpse down the hill, implicates the viewer in the action of Meche and her grandfather, this alternative ending encourages a distancing of the viewer from the uncomfortable social realities of the film through its static camera, the idea of karmic retribution for Jaibo and a salvation narrative for Pedro. The farm school is the end of this search, a place where bodies are ‘rehabilitated within the collective’, a collective that is uniform and in uniform (Dey 1999: 275). Dey reads this ending as a disavowal of the poetics of cruelty within the rest of the film and believes that Pedro’s assimilation into the homogenous group is anti-ethical in its negation of individual responsibility. I agree that this saccharine ending is an inflection at odds with the rest of the film: the title relates directly to the dynamic of the film: that these ‘forgotten ones’ will be constantly searching. Here, Pedro has found and has been remembered. To view this ending as merely an exercise in censorship manipulation would be to reduce its relationship to the original to mere prescriptive functionality. Rather, it functions in dialogue with Pedro’s earlier dream sequence, representing a realised belonging – the inversion of the uncanny home and abject place-world. The ultimate cruelty, however, is that this ending is more incredible within Buñuel’s narrative than the original.

Whereas Pedro is trapped in a claustrophobic place-world with no home at its centre, Nazarín remains aloof from a sparse place-world with no centre. In chapter four I argued that Nazarín can be considered a kind of existential outsider, perhaps the most concrete example after Simón in his desert of the alienated man across Buñuel’s cinema. Nazarín’s disavowal of his corporeality in a film where Buñuel repeatedly highlights this is the primary stumbling block to his connection to his surroundings, a dislocation that Buñuel obviously intended to be communicated filmically as, according to the shooting script, the protagonist wanders through ‘ordinary road’ after ‘ordinary landscape’. Yet, as opposed to the liminal Simón, Nazarín is constantly confronted by place, moving through an ever-changing set of landscapes, and by the body as this is ravaged by disease.

The default body type in Nazarín is the decaying, diseased or defunct body, with which the hero readily aligns himself in his attempt to sublimate flesh into spirit. The ill body is a constant reminder of Nazarín’s lack of a home-place. Jacobson suggests that in

A more literal nomad than Simón, Nazarín’s peripatetic existence and changing surroundings mean that a successful habitation – a holding of place – is the protagonist’s main challenge. Wise writes, ‘the nomad is the continual struggle between spatial forces and identity, the struggle to make a home, to create a space that opens up onto other spaces’ (2000: 305). This is, in essence, the tension at the heart of Nazarín. The reversal of the hero from giver to receiver in the film’s final sequence as he accepts the pineapple from the roadside fruit-seller, together with an increasing focus on the body via a series of close-ups on the prisoners’ feet as they march and a reinterpretation of Nazarín’s head bandage as a marker of his bodily vulnerability rather than a crown of thorns stigmata, is the priest’s ‘discovery of the reality of man’ (Paz 2012: 43) through a spatial lens: his preliminary engagement with place.¹⁶ There is irony here, however. Dey (1999: 163) bemoans the humanist rebirth/theological epiphany readings of the ending. Her desire is that the viewer see beyond the images on screen and acknowledge the ambiguity in the ending. In light of the focus on the home-place, this element of ambiguity in the film’s final frames inflects ironically my conclusions in chapter four: certainly, Nazarín has moved towards a preliminary habitation, but when he is finally present-in-place and present-in-body – a form of liberation – we find that his body is following the road to physical confinement in prison. After he has accepted the pineapple, the final frames of the film show an anguished Nazarín, described in the script as dominated by ‘un gran dolor’ (Buñuel 1958: 104), tracking the hero in mid close-up as he moves along the road. Ultimately, the camera halts, leaving Nazarín to walk out of the frame, inviting the viewer to contemplate his fate. Just when his nomadic existence opens up to other spaces, his trajectory will be an arrested one, in a literal and metaphorical sense, and Nazarín’s imprisonment will be an enforced, artificial home-place, whereby ‘home can […] become a concretization of human misery: loneliness, rejection, exploitation, and violence’ (Pallasmaa 1995: 134).

Quite obviously, space is crucial in El ángel exterminador. As Rebolledo signals, space is important firstly as a ‘container’, used not only to frame the action but also to contain the characters (1964: 142–47). Pietsie Feenstra (2003: 123–27) grounds what she sees as the film’s project to demythologise the upper classes in the film’s spatial dynamics, and maps this onto an inside/outside binary pair, whereby the guests are the insiders and the gathering crowd and institutional presence of the police and army outside the mansion are outsiders.18 However, Feenstra does not consider the possibility that the guests may in fact be outsiders, yanked from the reassuring but artificial comforts of their collective place-world through a process of exteriority. This is where the filmic portrayal of the body in place comes to the fore as the twenty-one characters are subjected to corporeal disintegration.

The guests’ prolonged imprisonment has obvious bodily implications. Aside from the scatological allusions in the recurring shots of the Chinese urns in the closet that the guests use to alleviate themselves, there are numerous scenes in which the characters perform perfunctory bodily tasks: Alicia is shown cutting her toenails; Silvia is chastised by Juana and her brother Francisco for combing her hair absentmindedly; various male characters are seen shaving their legs. However, Buñuel goes beyond the merely somatic to show the psychosomatic effect of the guests’ imprisonment. Buñuel’s intention to focus on the body here is beyond doubt. According to the staging directions in film’s shooting script: ‘[t]he Director will show with discretion the various “tics” that some of the guests have developed: pulling out hair, twitching of eyes, getting rid of blackheads from the nose’ (Buñuel 1962: 66).¹⁹ Blanca is shown to pull out clumps of hair, and Francisco’s face repeatedly contorts with rage. Furthermore, when the fiancés Beatriz and Eduardo commit suicide in the closet in an act of amour fou, their blood seeps underneath the closed door. These psychosomatic discharges and bodily fluids betray an increasing exteriority of what they hope to keep hidden, rendered in criticism of the film as the bestial instincts of man.²⁰ When taken together with the decomposition of the salon, this degradation has crucial implications for the home.

The claustrophobic room which acts as the prison of the náufragos is, like their bodies, pockmarked by their attempts to burst the water pipe and fuel a fire to roast the three sheep, originally intended as a practical joke during the dinner party, that later wander into the salon. The state of their bodies mirrors that of the room, exposing what is hidden beneath a superficial semblance of respectability and security. For Pérez Soler, the interior becomes ‘the site where all those dreaded miseries from which it [the bourgeoisie] has sought to escape actually emerge’ (2003: 409). The use of the verb ‘emerge’ is interesting. There is palpable sense of something emerging in El ángel exterminador: more concretely, what surfaces from the disintegration of the mansion and the body is anxiety. According to Heidegger:

Anxiety’s symptom is therefore an uncanny affliction. The uncanny as Heidegger explains it is a lack (a nothing and a nowhere) and a not-being-at-home: a lack of home. The fact that Buñuel chooses the house as the space in which to bring this anxiety to the surface is an acerbic comment that exposes the characters’ forced domesticity as a pretence, an idea that Pallasmaa, writing more generally about the affect of architecture in cinema, identifies: ‘[a]nxiety and alienation, hardly hidden by surface rationalization, are often the emotional contents of today’s everyday settings’ (2007: 35). One sequence in particular, through its striking cinematography, vividly illustrates this. After the fiancés Beatriz and Eduardo have committed suicide in the closet and Juana has alerted the group to the puddle of blood oozing under the door, the doctor tentatively opens the closet as the rest of the guests jostle like morbid voyeurs behind him. Buñuel then cuts to a mid-distance shot from inside the closet space as the characters are seen peering in, their faces contorted in dread (see figure 21). The viewer must assume that the object of their repulsion is the pair of bloody corpses but, crucially, the object of their gaze is largely out of the frame, save for a fleeting shot of the fiancés’ heads as the guests are being shepherded away. The visual ambiguity in this mise-en-scène as the characters look in the direction of the camera, almost breaking the fourth wall, is key. Heidegger claims that anxiety is not directed towards a particular material object, but rather towards an indefiniteness, rendering it fundamentally existential. It should be noted that for Heidegger this mode of being is not inherently negative; indeed, it is necessary to disclose ‘the world as world’, in the sense that it individualises a person’s being-in-the-world, preventing this from getting lost in the general, impersonal ‘they’ and from acquiring a ‘tranquillized self-assurance’ (Heidegger 1962: 232, 233). In this striking shot, the guests are looking beyond the camera, into the empty space the audience cannot see because Buñuel will not show it. Buñuel’s closet here is the nothing and the nowhere of Heidegger’s anxiety.

Things do not improve for Buñuel’s shipwrecked souls. As I have argued elsewhere (Ripley 2016), even though they eventually escape the salon, the diners do not manage to escape their collective alienation, as the final sequence of the film in the church suggests. A lateral tracking shot of the characters, clad respectably once again, shows their apathy as the service comes to an end. Attempting to leave the church, they, and the other faithful, find they are again imprisoned, this time on a larger scale. Thus, anxiety as represented in this film does not appear to give rise to a level of attunement of being-in-the-world, or ‘why we are open to the world as a possibility for ourselves’, as Svenaeus (2000: 8) puts it, due to the simple fact that this anxiety is repeated and expatiated. The choice that faces the diners, to acknowledge the uncanny homelessness that underpins their existence, has consequences they are not prepared to face. The only certainty, then, is one of confinement without resolution. Thus, this ending visualises more sardonically the essence of Nazarín’s fate and forms a thematic intertext with the ending of Simón del desierto. It is the Buñuelian repetitious cycle par excellence, as proposed by Deleuze, and the more the characters are confined within, the more they are externalised. Imprisonment is mapped onto micro and macro territories, from home to church to world. They are housed nowhere and everywhere shut in.

The Marxist inside/outside interpretation of this film’s spatial dynamics is too inflexible a distinction, then. Robert Miles believes a ‘concern with border crossing and identification with insiders or outsiders is central to, indeed is the entire pretext for the development of the narrative’. Ultimately, he affirms the validity of a philosophical reading of this film. He writes that the film ‘is structured by the perpetually unstable dynamics of belonging as it performs them’ (2006: 180). I would argue this film does not perform the dynamics of belonging, but shows us the extreme consequences of unbelonging, underscoring in various ways all of the films I have looked at in this book. The increasing externalisation of the characters’ bodies and psyches through the emergence of carnal fluids and compulsions hollows out the meaning of the home. This space shifts from Bachelard’s apotheosised image to an uncanny receptor for the accumulating toll of decay and death, and the unsettling events on screen are also transposed onto the viewer. Gutiérrez-Albilla claims that Buñuel’s own existential anxieties in this film ‘express the idea that human beings have become aware of the absurdity of the world’ (2008: 93). As the mask of tranquillised self-assurance slips, anxiety that the viewer sees on screen induces discomfort in the audience off screen, for ‘what surfaces in anxiety is human existence as such: every “thing” in the world – every project – reveals itself as empty against the backdrop of a basic meaningless – a homelessness of life’ (Svenaeus 2000: 8). To posit a rigid inside/outside binary here is to dull the film’s impact, forcing us to adopt a faux working-class-hero position and identify automatically with the home help rather than the bourgeoisie. The disturbing potential – I use the term with both its emotional and spatial meanings – of the film is brought out by a more flexible reading that acknowledges the film as a comment on the façade of rational human existence. Ultimately, this interpretation is more faithful to Buñuel’s directive to the viewer settling down to watch the film: ‘[i]f the film that you are about to see seems to you enigmatic or incongruous, that is how life is also. […] Perhaps the best explanation for The Exterminating Angel is that, rationally, there is none’ (Miles 2006: 179, n. 15). Buñuel’s non-explanation of this film leads us to believe that celluloid reality has the potential to expose the celluloid, or artificial, aspect of our reality; a case of reel life exposing real life, as Aitken and Zonn put it (1994: 5). Perhaps with this film, more than any of his others, Buñuel understood the affective potential of film, as ‘[c]inema and architecture, as all art, function as alluring projection screens for our emotions’ (Pallasmaa 2007: 32).

Bachelard writes that ‘our house is our corner of the world. As has often been said, it is our first universe, a real cosmos in every sense of the word’ (1994: 4). The home as primordial location from which to set out into the world is negated in Simón del desierto, as Simón remains stranded in the desert, just as it is in La Mort en ce jardin, because the diamond miners of the anonymous Latin American republic are cut off from their origins. My focus on liminal space in chapter three highlights the protagonists’ positions between spatial referents. Bringing this into dialogue with considerations of home and belonging, it becomes apparent that the characters’ respective surroundings – the desert and the jungle – are unequivocally closed worlds, surroundings which do not open onto other, different spaces and which undermine Wise’s assertion that ‘[h]ome […] is a collection of milieus, and as such is the organization of markers (objects) and the formation of space’ (2000: 299). The protagonists’ liminal azzeramento – a setting at zero, temporally without past or future and spatially without a here or there – renders them unable to distinguish a homeworld from an alienworld. Furthermore, the ill-fated lovers in Abismos de pasión are the embodiment of the Trickster, an extra-existential figure at home in a liminal homelessness, rendered as the abyss of the film’s title. The parched landscape of this film does unfold onto another milieu: the infinite finitude of death. Ironically, only in death can the lovers be said to have achieved a belonging, inverting the depiction of the home-place as origin.

The connotation of home most difficult to disavow – the home as a protective shelter – is systematically subverted in Los olvidados. Bachelard’s initial metaphor for the house is a cradle, where ‘life begins well, […] enclosed, protected, all warm in the house’ (1994: 7). Pedro’s shack is pervaded by the cruelty of the surrounding place-world while the idios of this place-world is expressed through his mother’s body in the dream sequence. The structure provides little protection or maternal warmth, and given the elision of the caring, wholesome mother with the home and the homeland, the vitriolic public reaction to the images of maternal neglect could easily be interpreted as an outcry against the representation in Buñuel’s film of a failed home as much as a perverted motherhood. For Evvie, the game-preserve is a site of coercion, leading to her forced sexual initiation. Buñuel counters the association of the island with an idyllic retreat from the opening sequence of The Young One, as Traver is faced with the hostile sign to would-be trespassers. Miller’s abortive utopia, like Crusoe’s, is caught in the skein of cultural influence and the intrusion of the mainland society, against which the island comes to be constituted as a heterotopic space of crisis (for Evvie) and deviation (for Miller), is omnipresent. Furthermore, for Evvie at least, this crisis heterotopia will merely be replaced by another: the children’s home – for children with no home. In this way, Evvie echoes Nazarín: as both characters become aware of their bodies, both move on to uncertain, and presumably institutionalised, futures. Finally, the opulent mansion and plush bureaucratic interiors of Ojeda inhabited by Inés and Vázquez in La Fièvre monte à El Pao are not impervious to the ubiquitous gaze of totalitarian power. As a satellite state, Ojeda is in a condition of authoritarian finality. Heidegger’s often-cited definition of dwelling is that it is a ‘staying with things’ (1971: 151); that is, ‘cultivating a relationship to the broader environment, allowing the indeterminacy of place to grow within us as we adapt to a world of new horizons’ (Trigg 2012: 195). The mise-en-scène of this film suggests that the protagonists are staying under and behind things, oppressed by the heat, the starched white uniforms and the constant surveillance behind closed doors and blinds. Vázquez’s political idealism leads not to change, but indirectly causes Inés’s death and his own certain death: Ojeda offers no indeterminacy, imposing only a state of finality.