Luis Buñuel’s arrival in Mexico in 1946 after having spent eight years working in the United States would herald a new phase in the director’s career. This phase was, if not always critically acclaimed, indisputably prolific until its end in 1965. But it was not necessarily a move that could have been predicted, not even by Buñuel himself. The filmmaker was unequivocal about his lack of interest in Latin America, so little that he told his friends ‘that should I suddenly drop out of sight one day, I might be anywhere – except there’ (2003: 197). Nonetheless, the importance of Mexico in shaping Buñuel’s cinematic career cannot be underestimated. It was here that he rediscovered and honed his craft. He had not acted as the sole director of a film since his 1933 documentary Tierra sin pan, despite working as a producer for the Spanish Filmófono studios in 1935 and 1936, before emigrating to the United States and working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, then spending two years as a dubbing expert for Warner Bros. in Los Angeles. Of a total of thirty-two films of which Buñuel was the sole director, twenty were filmed in Mexico.1 The films that Buñuel shot during this time differ greatly in theme and style, and the thematics of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema often eschew generic conventions and classifications in a national industry which, as Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz has signalled, was saturated with recognisable genres such as the archetypal comedia ranchera, a kind of cowboy musical, and the family melodrama (2003: 5–9). Paradoxically, the iconoclast Buñuel was most productive in a national cinema whose commercial success in its so-called Golden Age, roughly from the late 1930s to the early 1950s, was based largely on strict adherence to generic conventions.2 In fact, Carl Mora goes as far as to say that, as the Golden Age of production drew to a close, Buñuel ‘gave the Mexican cinema whatever vitality it had left in the late 1950s and early 1960s’ (2005: 96).
This book aims to shed new light on Buñuel’s Mexican cinema by considering the spatial dynamics of the films of this period. The films that Buñuel made there have traditionally been segmented into commercial and auteurist strands. This polarity in the films’ critical reception has been largely reinforced by the analytical paradigms employed in the study of these films. For the more independent movies that pepper Buñuel’s Mexican period, such as Los olvidados (1950), Nazarín (1958) and El ángel exterminador (1962), scholars often foreground their readings in what I term the Buñuelian bedrock of Catholicism, surrealism, the bourgeoisie and Spanish identity. In turn, the lesser critical attention paid to the more commercial films has frequently focused on genre and the films’ production contexts. Writing on Buñuel’s Mexican output is at a juncture: studying these films through fresh and original paradigms in recent years has made a significant contribution to Buñuel scholarship and can serve as a springboard for the development of these, and other, theoretical perspectives, independently of preestablished analytical frameworks associated with the director’s cinema. However, these new approaches have, on the whole, not yet succeeded in drawing together the commercial and auteurist films of the period in a convincing and sustained way. Although the period as a whole is attracting growing attention, as recently as 2016 Mario Barro Hernández emphasised that the focus of this critical attention has been largely on
the standout works, to the detriment of the period as a whole. For this reason, it is rare to find reflections on the differences and similarities between popular films such as Los olvidados and other, lesser known films such as Una mujer sin amor. (2016: 636)3
The interdisciplinary approach taken in this book works to free the commercial movies from these modes of analysis; likewise, it seeks to reconsider the auteurist films independently of surrealism, Catholicism and psychoanalysis. In this way the films included – a total of nine of Buñuel’s films from this period – occupy positions of critical renown and, conversely, relative critical neglect, and are simultaneously drawn together outside of the respective investigative approaches within which they have frequently been circumscribed. In concentrating on the representation of space, I actively take advantage of what Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla sees as Buñuel’s position as straddling a ‘liminal slipzone between Spanish, Mexican and French culture, between sexual and political discourse, between sound and image, between surrealism and commercial melodramas and between margins and centre’ (2008: 8). Importantly, he emphasises that this liminal position of Buñuel’s cinema requires us to think beyond disciplines when approaching his films.
In foregrounding the centrality of space in producing alternative readings of Buñuel’s Mexican films, these films are displaced from their interpretive anchors by working within the domains of spatial analysis that is informed by geography and philosophy. Although a variety of spatial theorists and theories are drawn upon in my reading of the movies, I am aware that these should evidence the theory and not vice versa. As such, I provide detailed and film-focused readings of the movies themselves and how these illustrate the theoretical positions at hand. I engage extensively with past scholarship on each of the films, showing how much of this has hinted at, but never concertedly addressed, the spatial concerns that underpin the narratives of these films. At the same time, I refer to Carlos Fuentes, who describes the development of Buñuel’s characters in spatial-philosophical terms, as they plunge the depths of ‘the jungles of subjectivity and the oceans of society’ in a quest to find ‘the authentic self’ (1970: 198).4 I link his writing on Buñuel’s cinema to similar philosophical elaborations of the filmmaker’s work by writers and critics such as Manuel Michel, Elliot Rubinstein and Michael Wood, foregrounding Buñuel’s Mexican cinema within philosophical questions of belonging and non-belonging that coalesce around Charles Chaspoul’s acute assertion that ‘Buñuel very often films characters in displacement, who never truly seem to succeed in inhabiting the places where they find themselves’ (1997: 115).5
In chapter one I outline my approach and the groundwork for the research that underpins this book, beginning with a reconsideration of the thematic complexity of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema. Given the paradox in writing on this period in Buñuel’s corpus – namely, that certain films of this period are now attracting more attention but that this book remains one of a limited number specifically on Buñuel’s Mexican cinema – I believe it is the moment to take stock of the place of the Mexican period within the whole of Buñuel’s output. After reviewing the existing literature on Buñuel’s Mexican films, principally in English, French and Spanish, I turn my attention towards the growing importance of space in analyses of Buñuel’s cinema. I show that a spatial focus can unite the two strands of Buñuel’s Mexican period by bypassing the somewhat prescriptive modes of critical analysis outlined above. Despite the novelty of this approach in Buñuel studies, I am of course not working in isolation; it is important to acknowledge the ways that a focus on space has featured in Buñuel scholarship by outlining his reluctance to represent space aesthetically and examining the trope of exile in writing on Buñuel. I then draw on a philosophical strand of writing on Buñuel that proposes that he can be considered a kind of human geographer, insofar as the characters in his films are frequently subjected to their environments and the films’ narratives can be read as the struggle to resolve this tension between character and place. In addition, I detail the growing significance of the so-called spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences, and consider the relevance of this spatial turn to the study of film.
The remaining chapters are dedicated to film-focused readings of a number of movies from the period. In selecting the films for analysis, I have considered which of them share similarities or exhibit contrasts stylistically and thematically. At the forefront of my choice-making is the need to examine both the commercial and the auteurist films, side by side. Chapter two approaches the island spaces of Robinson Crusoe (1954) and The Young One (1960), Buñuel’s only English-language productions. The narrative of each film presents its island setting as more than simply passive mise-en-scène; it is fundamental to the viewer’s understanding of the films. The island spaces of both films are abortive utopias; that is, Crusoe’s desert island and the game-preserve of The Young One are spaces of utopian intent but which fail in practice, and this has an acute effect on the physical and psychological states of their inhabitants. Connected with the idea of an abortive utopia is Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopias and this underpins my discussion of the films in this chapter. Following Foucault’s brief outline of the concept, heterotopias, literally other or different spaces, have come to be considered as structured according to their own system of power or social ordering, which often contrasts with that of the society in which they are located. Thanks in part to the turn towards space in research in the arts and social sciences, heterotopias have gained currency as a field for analysis in these disciplines, and the concept has been used in writing on cinema.6 As impossible utopias both Crusoe’s island and the game-preserve of The Young One are shown to be unsettling spaces that subvert the romantic image of the island as an idyllic retreat through the negative mental and physical effects that dwelling there has on their inhabitants.
Chapter three delves into the similarly isolated spaces of the jungle and the desert, considering questions of exterior space and the ways in which this is shown to affect the characters placed there. The films I analyse here are La Mort en ce jardin (1956) and Simón del desierto (1965). These have not been considered at any length in Buñuel criticism as aesthetic or thematic companions; here they are taken as a pair because I propose that the spaces of their narratives – the jungle and the desert respectively – are strong examples of liminal spaces. Liminality has its roots in anthropology as a term used to define the middle period during rites of passage, whereby members of a group or tribe are separated from their society and are subjected to different laws, or indeed a suspension of laws, governing their behaviour, before completing the ritual process and achieving a reintegration into society. During this time they are, to cite anthropologist Victor Turner, in a state ‘betwixt and between’ (1967: 93). In this chapter I argue that the group of Francophone villagers in the former film, and Simón, the preacher living on a pillar in the middle of the desert in the latter film, are placed between spatial referents in the unfurling jungle and the seemingly limitless desert, not achieving a reintegration into any society. In doing so, I build upon the considerable body of work within the arts and the social sciences that fruitfully maps the spatial resonances of liminality. Through the analytical framework of the spatial liminal, the films’ respective endings gain a new inflection which contrasts with traditional interpretations that have tended to try and neatly sew up the conclusions of these two films, ignoring the latent ambiguity of these movies by sticking closely to allegorical readings of them.
Chapter four moves towards a rather different philosophical conception of space through a focus on what has been termed the place-world. This is a concept elaborated by the philosopher Edward Casey to designate the ‘inhabitation of places in a circumambient landscape’ (2001a: 683). The films I use to illustrate this exploration of the place-world are two of Buñuel’s most critically acclaimed of the Mexican period: Los olvidados and Nazarín. Thematically, these films are very different, with one focusing on Mexico City’s forgotten street children and the other on an itinerant priest in the Mexican countryside. This is not a question of typologies of external space, however: in positioning my analysis within a geographical-philosophical perspective I avoid contrasting the films from an aesthetic viewpoint as merely the representation of the urban versus the rural. Rather, the unifying thread will centre on the body in place, in both its physical and psychological dimensions. Buñuel unflinchingly highlights diseased, decaying, dying and defunct bodies in his cinema and these two films are prime examples of this. My focus on the body in place allows for an opportunity to extend the work of scholars such as Aitor Bikandi-Mejias (2000) and Pedro Poyato (2011) on Buñuel’s treatment of the body and his preference for showing the marginalised status of characters through their bodies. While Pedro and the gang of street urchins demonstrate an intimate knowledge and dextrous manipulation of both their bodies and slum surroundings, Nazarín, unlike his two female disciples, is shown to sublimate his corporeal urges, not committing himself to a grounding in any place. Again, the spatial focus of this book lays out a new interpretation of these much-commented-upon films, teasing out the latent concern with space that is shown to underscore much of the criticism written on them in order to reconsider their power as philosophical texts.
The aim of chapter five is to reposition the films I examine in the previous chapters within the unifying thread of this book: the impossibility of a home-place, or a place of belonging, within the films’ narratives. This chapter is therefore a synthesis insofar as it is the point of convergence for the previous three, film-focused chapters, as well as being an analytical chapter in its own right, forging a path for further research. I do this by considering each pair of films alongside a third: La Fièvre monte à El Pao (1959), Abismos de pasión (1953) and El ángel exterminador, respectively. Thus, the frameworks for analysis in each preceding chapter are expanded to consider their resonances with the idea of a home-place, casting another interpretational nuance on the films analysed previously. In addressing questions of home and belonging, my discussion is inspired by phenomenological thinkers such as Gaston Bachelard, Martin Heidegger and Anthony Steinbock, upon all of whose work I draw in my reading of the films. I show that a philosophical approach to the idea of the home in a broadly phenomenological vein is well positioned to bring to light alternative readings of belonging and non-belonging, a theme at the heart of the movies analysed here. The frameworks I draw on certainly work across disciplines – stemming as they do from anthropology, geography and philosophy – and they all underscore the way in which these films, independently of their portrayal of typical Buñuelian themes, their subscription to generic paradigms or their being claimed for this or that national cinema, encourage us to think about questions of belonging and non-belonging. Claudia Brosseder has said of Buñuel that he wanted to ‘let people see the realities that they usually avoid’ (2000: 52).7 The interdisciplinary spatial-philosophical approach taken in this book brings this reality to light, reading an alternative narrative through the images on screen to argue that, as Buñuel’s characters show, we are not always securely in place or at home.
1 This figure does not include productions that, although filmed during Buñuel’s Mexican period, were not actually filmed in Mexico. The shooting of Cela s’appelle l’aurore (1956) took Buñuel to Corsica, Viridiana (1961) was filmed in Spain, and Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1964) was shot in France.
2 The chronology of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema is a matter of debate. Emilio García Riera dates this to the years of the Second World War, though admits that the term is used nostalgically, rather than with a definite sense of chronology in mind (1998: 120). Andrea Noble notes that the production output of Mexican films reached its peak of 123 pictures in the year 1950 (2005: 15).
3 [las obras sobresalientes, en detrimento del conjunto. Por ello, es raro encontrar reflexiones acerca de las diferencias o similitudes entre las películas populares como Los olvidados y otras menos conocidas como Una mujer sin amor]. All translations from sources in French, German, Italian and Spanish throughout this book are my own unless stated otherwise.
4 [las selvas subjetivas y los océanos sociales]; [el ser auténtico].
5 [Buñuel filme très souvent des personnages en déplacement qui semblent ne jamais vraiment réussir à habiter les lieux où ils se trouvent].
6 See, for instance, Elliott and Purdy (2006: 267–90) and Blum (2010: 55–66).
7 [Buñuel wollte Menschen Realitäten sehen lassen, denen sie gewöhnlich ausweichen].