Cerebration

I'M TIRED OF SYMMETRY- THE DESTRUCTIVE RHYTHMS OF BUNUEL'S BOURGEOIS TRILOGY

SAVI MUNJAL

Savi Munjal is currently pursuing her M.Phil in English Literature. She teaches at the University of Delhi and her areas of interest include visual culture, history and theory of the representational apparatus in World Cinema and the interdisciplinary aspects of British print culture and literature. Her work on South-Asian cinema has recently been anthologised by Routledge, India.

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"I believe in the future transmutation of those two seemingly contradictory states, dream and reality, into a sort of absolute reality, of surreality, so to speak." (Breton 1936: 66)

"The artist is the eternal non-conformist. Thanks to the artist power cannot say everybody is in agreement with it." (Bunuel 214)

The Surrealist Revolt lent a death blow to all notions of coherence and with it the entire architecture of traditional thought. The genesis of Surrealism can be traced to Dadaism and Breton's Surrealist Manifesto which advocated Freudian free association of dreams, illusion, reality and chance. The contextual, conceptual and formal qualities shared by Breton's 1924 Manifesto on Surrealism and Bunuel's surrealist films forms an important fulcrum to understand the matrix between Surrealism, ideology and psychoanalysis that forms the backbone of much of Bunuel's cinema.


The twin epigraphs refer to the dual foci of this essay- it examines Bunuel's rejection of formal harmony, linear teleology and unity in favor of the asymmetrical, the heterogeneous, the hybrid which characterizes the aesthetics in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974), and The Obscure Object of Desire (1977). The essay will interrogate Bunuel's destruction of the unilinear narrative in favor of a fragmented form as a discursive choice .Bunuel consciously moves away from what Burch calls the Institution Mode of Representation (IMR: Burch defines the IMR as a kind of naturalized discourse, the Hollywood prototype that has established conventional processes of identification ) in order to fashion a minority cinema, opposed to the teleological Hollywood cinema. The hybridity of his narratives seems to arise out of a unique mix of his Spanish heritage, Latin American new narratives; his work with independent producers such as Serge Silberman in the French Cinema industry and his leftist ideological affiliations.


The primary contention is that Bunuel's cinema is not auto-telic--rather it subverts both the social and the cinematographic system as it attempts to grapple with the essentially polyphonic and dialectical nature of 'modern' experience. The latter half of the essay will examine Bunuel's invocation of the networks of family, religion, power and nationhood in order to visibalise and subvert them. In many ways then, Bunuel's bourgeois trilogy provides the audience with a cinematic anticipation of the Foucauldian project. Clearly then, both form and content feed into one another in order to make Bunuel's cinema doubly disruptive, the ideological lynch-pin for buttressing dissenting sentiment. Signification operates through social consensus and the lack of adherence to traditional signification accounts for its "alternative, liberating newness against the absorptive capacity of…established discourses" (Terdiman 13).


Surrealist film-makers including Man Ray, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali celebrated the unconscious as a liberating force which could help escape the deadening pressures of 'rationality'. Surrealists sought to concretize the fantastic, an apt example of Artaud's L'imprevu objectif and manipulated cinematic elements such as time, space and movement in order to disorient the viewer. This prioritization of 'irrationality' and insistence on a state of true authenticity helps to break free of repressive censoring mechanisms like the ego and super-ego and closely resembles Freud's method of free-association. Bunuel's first movie, Un Chien Andalou opened with the eye-ball splitting scene that has now acquired an almost legendary status. The purpose of such scenes, according to Bunuel himself, was to "produce in the spectator a state which could permit the free association of ideas, it was necessary to provoke a near traumatic shock at the very beginning of the film". The irrational montage seeks to alienate rather than placate the viewer and is marked by spatio-temporal incongruity. Images such a man completely wiping his mouth off his face or armpit hair on the face necessitates a purging of rationality.


This irrationality is also reflected in Bunuel's 'perversion' of time. The film starts with a fairy-tale like 'Once upon a time…' and foregrounds constant shifts in time 'Eight years later….' Time makes a very prominent appearance in the cinematographic image as his films seem to revel in autonomous shots with uncertain causality. The fractured causality of The Obscure Object of Desire highlights Bunuel's disdain for conventional clock-time. The dream logic of the The Phantom of Liberty for instance, subverts the rigour of clock time for the focus is on instinctual time. The conflict which comes into play with numerous close-ups of monsieur Foucauld winding up the clock can clearly be defined as la duree vs clock time, instinct vs. the intellect and becoming vs. being. An important sequence is when Monsieur Foucauld sets his alarm and the camera pans from his wife, back to him. Nocturnal visitors include a postman, a hen, a secret agent all in film time but apparently taking up real time too as the acoustic ticking of the clock shows. The presence of the letter makes it hard to determine whether it was dream or reality. The pan shot at the beginning seems to suggest that it was his wife who was dreaming. This could help explain the presence of the letter. For the audience the dream functions as a diegetic device that moves the plot forward but it is indeed impossible to gauge whose dream it was or where it ended. As James Tobias points, the camera is not cutting between two episodes. Bunuel uses continuity instead of jump cuts which could highlight the severance of one shot from another.


David Cook draws attention to Bunuel's avoidance of distorted lenses, super imposed images, and blurred focus or complex camera movements which were cinematic conventions of the day to suggest the dreamlike quality of his film. Unlike Rene Clair's Entr'acte, Bunuel approaches the entire non-narrative in a straightforward manner. He uses the shocking incongruity of the images themselves to build the hallucinatory feeling of anguish that runs through the film. Bunuel's method, Deleuze points out, is essentially restrained and uses definite cuts and static shots. Despite the smooth transition, there is a considerable transition in the colour scheme. This is evident in the scene where the soldier walks up to the ladies sitting in the restaurant. Buñuel uses diffused lighting, dark colors, and shadows in the dream sequences to lend an ominous air to the narratives. At the level of mis-en-scene the dark lighting signals a generic shift from bourgeois satire to a somber, even morbid world of dreams.


This alteration of dream and reality, the 'real' and 'unreal' subverts the kind of coherent referential meaning we expect in Cinema and defines the non-habitual rhythms of his radical work. The essential attempt is to explode what Walter Benjamin calls 'the continuum of history' and wring mankind away from the conformism which threatens to overwhelm entire civilizations. The cyclical narrative of The Phantom of Liberty can be read as a response to the rational, disciplined and ordered bodies of Nazi parades and spectacles as it could to Industrial Capitalism and assembly line production. Most importantly, Bunuel attempts to show how bourgeois concepts of self are as systematically destructive of human freedom and delimiting as Nazi death camps. The cyclical form questions stratified structures, what Derrida calls 'violent hierarchies' in a way that does not present a Utopic world which moves beyond these distinctions. Instead Bunuel addresses these historical power imbalances by thinking through dominant concepts and presenting complications to show the contingency of stratification. The a-centred, non-hierarchical structure ensures that Bunuel's films qualify as what Deleuze and Guittari call 'a film rhizome'. In their book titled A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guittari define a rhizome as a structure which brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even non-sign states… it has neither beginning nor end… it constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency…the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable and has multiple entranceways and exits and its own lines of flight. (21)

Similarly, the aesthetic is colored by a realization that the world has no fixed centre, a realization Eco associated with post-modernism.


The spatial model of the labyrinth is followed as dreams are embedded within other dreams. The perfect example perhaps is The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie where one of the characters wakes up to tell his wife "I was dreaming, no I was dreaming that Sénéchal was dreaming". After a while it becomes impossible to determine whose dream it is? Where does dream end and reality begin? Sample the ending of Belle De Jour. Is the whole film Severine's dream? Did she dream about Pierre's handicap? Or is she dreaming that Pierre is cured? It is this unification of interior and exterior reality that Breton envisages as the final aim of Surrealism. The fabric of Bunuel's surrealist cinema clearly deploys the Hegelian dialectic to achieve a seamless interpenetration of two adjoining realities. The merging of image, thought and camera, depiction of no-signs (Deleuze, in Cinema 2,defines 'No-sign' as an image which goes beyond itself towards something that can only be thought) in a single 'automatic subjectivity' provides a contrast to the objective conception of the American Cinema. Hollywood cinema uses Surreal tropes frequently but these remain limited to the content of the narrative while the form does not lose its linearity. E.g: The dream sequence in Hitchcock's Spellbound (Clip 1.19.19- 23.25) is just one example of the incorporation of surreal elements in canonical Hollywood cinema. However the 'surreality' is limited to the dream sequence designed by Dali. Moreover the dream images scattered throughout the film (impressions of a fork on a sheet which will become stripes on pyjamas, striations on a white cover, a glass of milk, a field of snow marked by ski-lines) are all explained using Freudian psychoanalysis and thus subsumed into the realm of 'rationality'. According to Deleuze it is this that signifies European Cinema's break away from the American limitations of the Action-Image (Deleuze 1989: 55). One images changes to another thereby constituting a becoming which can continue to infinity. In Un Chien Andalou the image of the cloud bisecting the moon passes into the razor bisecting the eye. At another time a tuft of hair becomes a sea urchin, which is transformed into a circular head of hair, which in turn gives way to a circle of onlookers.


In trying to make sense of the images, the viewer must negotiate with the unconscious. In Un Chien Andalou, for instance, the young man is fighting his own unconscious urges for the young woman. In one remarkable scene he strains against the combined weight of a piano, a donkey and two priests - an absurdly humorous representation of the repressive forces of bourgeois culture and religion. L'Age D'Or, largely understood to be a representation of l'amour fou (Mad love) depicts the lovers Modot and Lya Lys who are constantly thwarted in their unacceptable passion by society. Modot can be seen as representing the unconscious in its free, anarchic aspect, while the repressive society is the aggregate super-ego. Modot has no tolerance for the trappings of society; they are but obstacles to the fulfilment of his desires. An example is the way he slaps the mother at the dinner party, and when he kicks the blind man.


Bunuel frequently takes recourse to sound in order to invoke the power of the unconscious or overcome the boundaries of reality. The sounds of wind, bells and barking link the two lovers together even if they are miles apart. In a startling scene the cow bells become louder once the cow has left, providing continuity between spatially disparate shots. Bunuel rejects the unifying synchronization sought by Hollywood in a number of his films- This disjunctive relation between time and image is frequently linked to political discourse. Political discussions around smuggling drugs and the ministers' explanations about why the drug dealers must be released are drowned by urban noise. "To make sure that the spectators realize the suppression of this information is intentional, the pattern of censorship is repeated" (Kinder 13). The importance of the soundtrack in the hermeneutics of the film cannot be ignored. Belle de jour lacks a musical score but non-diegetic sound effects are once again used to unify spatially incongruous shots or symbolize Severine's dream world. In the very first shot cows bells occupy a central place and the sound gains resonance as the movie progresses. Aural cues bridge real time-space (i.e. objective reality) and subjective time-space (i.e. Severine's subjective states) into one continuous plane.


Clearly the Freudian psychology of dreams plays an important part in Bunuel's films. Both Belle de Jour and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie make frequent use of the dream-vehicle. In Belle de Jour the dreams act as wish-fulfilment of the repressed sexual desires of Severine, and in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie the dreams of the bourgeoisie represent their fear of the unmasking of their superficial world--witness the scene where the bourgeoisie suddenly find themselves eating dinner on the stage of a theatre. The importance of dreams, I believe, is indicative not just of Surrealists' Freudian bent but also Bunuel's politics of subversion.


The contention is that complete thematic subversion becomes possible because of Bunuel's appeal to the unconscious- as Althusser points out in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses "What seems to take place outside ideology… in reality takes place in ideology…ideology never says 'I am ideological'" (Althusser 118). This internalization, what Althusser calls 'interpellation' is central to the transformation of autonomous, sovereign individuals into ideological subjects. It follows then that absolute subversion is possible only by appealing to the unconscious and undoing, as it were, the ideological conditioning. Bunuel's French films, made at a later stage in his career, still use surreal techniques but seem to rely less on the 'shock' value central to the surreal schema. This maturation aids the director to systematically expose and dismantle power structures central to bourgeois society, ISA's which perpetrate internalization of hegemonic practices. A ferocious critic of the ideologies of the powerful in his films, he sets to annihilate the unholy trinity of bourgeois complacency, religious hypocrisy and patriarchal authority. This wreckage of convention and the absence of moral or aesthetic censorship can be witnessed in Bunuel's representation of monks in The Phantom of Liberty-- there is a witty transition from the scene of monks and the nurse at prayer to the four chain-smoking monks gambling with their holy medallions in a card game, "I'll open with a virgin", says one while another plays 'a father'. Between these two points the camera cuts away to a close-up of the shrine with its doors open and the virgin on display. This image dissolves into another close-up of the shrine with its doors shut now and the virgin presumably in retirement. The reference to the Virgin brings a series of liturgical codes into play and allows for a denunciation of Catholicism.
A similar exposé of the absurdity of the authoritative Ideological State Apparatus is Aliette's disappearance. Bunuel shows how false words, once confirmed by authority and convention have the power to contradict logic and the direct evidence of our senses. What's more he goes on to undermine conventional pedagogical practices which foreground learning by rote and lead to the invisibility of the individual--"Speak only when you're spoken to" Aliette is told.


In the same vein he overturns the bourgeois ritual of a dinner party on its head as it turns into an endless and eventually incomprehensible ritual that leads nowhere. In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie the drawing room is reconstituted in location after location to prevent the event which is expected there. In The Phantom of Liberty the space of the dining room, the sanctum-sanctorum of the bourgeois home meant to reaffirm bourgeois worth, is cinematically transformed into a heterotopic space (Foucault in his essay titled "Of Other Spaces" defines heterotopia as the space which allows for the articulation of counter-hegemonic sentiment) as commodes are placed around the dining table. Guests make polite conversation as they shit and eating, by corollary, is relegated to a private washroom-like compartment. Using a 'Swiftian ironic reversal'(Kinder 21) Bunuel reminds us that eating and shitting are merely opposite ends of the same biological process and underlines our culture's arbitariness in choosing to glorify one and denigrate the other.


Political networks of nationhood are scrutinized much in the same way in Bunuel's work. In the The Phantom of Liberty M. Berman shuts the door on the Spanish guitarist and dancer even as he invites the other guests to his room. One of the Fathers asks the nurse and M.Berman if they've ever been to the colonies. "Along with Spain, France's poor relation, the colonies provide a geographic space onto which the bourgeoisie can map its repressed fears and desires" (Jones 6). In The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie Rafael Acosta, ambassador to the Latin American Republic of Miranda is subject to Eurocentric clichés about his homeland. The enquiry about pyramids drives home the fact that most guests can distinguish his country from any other Latin American ones. Interestingly Acosta lives up to the violent stereotype disseminated by the French bourgeoisie when he shoots the colonel in retaliation. As Mary Claude Taranger notes, national myths are satirized, asserted and finally undermined through Bunuelian paradox.


Interestingly, it is the women who disseminate geographically correct information in response to the absurd queries of the guests. Canonical critics such a Germaine Greer have suggested that the role of women in Surrealism is stereotypical- they merely function as sexual partners to correspond to the male filmmaker's fantasy. However, Alice Sénéchal's insistence on having sex when the guests arrive, Florence's delight in alcohol and other worldly pleasures, her cynical expression, highlighted by constant close-ups and constant demystification of the foibles of the bourgeoisie, the lack of fulfillment in Sévérine's marriage and finally the erotic fulfillment of her violently masochistic fantasies in a brothel suggest otherwise. The Obscure Object of Desire, inspired by Pierre Louys' novel La Femme et le Pantin (The Woman and the Puppet) is essentially Mateo's family version of the heterosexual narrative is, in effect one where the woman is drenched with water, repeatedly subject to seduction and rape, sold by her mother and finally publicly beaten and ashamed. Mathieu's narration of what could be interpreted as a story of rape to a group of polite bourgeois including a Freudian psychoanalyst exposes platitudes of love, sex and eventually power for what they are. There is a constant threat of terrorist activity, hijackings, robberies punctuated by explosions at the beginning and end of the film. The political and sexual are not far apart for Bunuel, for they are both arenas of power and repression. The two women interchangeably portray the elusive Conchita (Carole Bouquet/Angela Molina), symbolizing the complexity of her character, and Mateo does not seem to notice the difference. The dichotomy parodies the constructedness of femininity as a masquerade and the use of two Conchitas is "a brilliant Surrealist ploy which disturbs and jars the spectator throughout the movie" (Kovacs 92). The scrutinizing camera registers the presence of two women where Mathieu perceives only one. The point is to show that his desire is to possess, not someone in particular but someone. Once again this is reminiscent of the Foucauldian matrix between power and sexuality for Bunuel's point, much like Foucault's is to show that the concept of 'love', central to Mathieu's bourgeois veneer is inextricably tied up with power and sexuality. Bunuel's intention is fore grounded through the disorderly state of the room in the first scene, the bloodied pillow and wet panties the valet is seen carrying and the valet's comments 'she bled', 'she was afraid' and which contradicts Matheiu's story. This testament of sexual violence perpetrated within the patriarchal schema is telling.


Bunuel exposes this imbalance only to reconfigure the woman as the desiring subject. Vestiges of mutual desire can be witnessed in his films as early as 1930. In L'Age D'Or Modot looks at an advertising photo of a woman leaning back in a chair and the film dissolves to Lys in the same pose. She looks into her dressing-table mirror, and the infinite sky replaces her reflection, and she experiences a sublime psycho-sexual longing. The exemplary erotic charge on display is mutual. The dissemination of images that stress on the dismemberment of the body, beginning with the eye in Un Chien Andalou, is characteristic of Bunuelian cinema. Close-ups, what Deleuze calls the 'impulse image' (impulse-image in Cinema 1 is defined as "the only case in which the close-up effectively becomes the partial object; but this is not because the close up 'is' the partial object, it is because the partial object being that of the impulse then exceptionally becomes close-up" (132); The impulse-image celebrates the fragment), like ants crawling on a hand and repeated fetishistic shots of feet, shoes and legs, Bunuel trademarks all, themselves become social transgressive. The complex language of Bunuel's cinema ensures that the woman's body is no longer an erotic object to be looked at. The examination of links between erotic desire and oppressive political systems which lends to Bunuel's Cinema its complexity also has a corresponding effect of negating what Mulvey calls fetishistic scopophilia. The sexual identity of the signatory then need not influence the ideological leanings of the text completely. The freighted topos of films such as The Phantom of Liberty and The Obscure Object of Desire underlines the complex ways in which "phallocentrism and logocentrism are indissoluble" (Derrida 59).


The films, in my view, fashion a counter-discourse as they make way for a cinematic deconstruction of the dominant discourse and try to enact a space different from the totalizing potential of bourgeois discourse. The questioning to totalitarianism is not merely thematic-The auteur seeks the viewer to question his/her affinity for structures. 'Fascistising crystallizations' (Guattari 1995: 163) including networks of class, gender, nationality and family are invoked, interlinked and finally subverted.
Bunuel thus succeeds in the resignification of norms outside the epistemological given. The constitutive limitations of the alternative discourse are evident in its failure to foreground a formula for what Breton and Trotsky called 'a complete and radical reconstruction of society' in their Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art. But inevitably, like the structuring leitmotif of the weary guests walking on a deserted street, it is an endless and incomprehensible path that ultimately leads nowhere. Repeated long shots show that each time we return to it, there is no change, no apparent progress-not even a lapse of time that we can see. Precisely: there is none, the journey is aimless; the road is an empty one. While this successfully conveys the discreetly good life, lived in complacent ignorance of other modes or social classes, is its own empty aim and end, it does not pose a solution to the problem. As Deleuze points out in Cinema 1 'entropy (i.e. degradation)…. (is) replaced by the cycle or eternal return"(Deleuze 132).


While Bunuel succeeds in drawing attention to the illusory nature of all freedom, there is a fatalistic undercurrent in all his films. The jump cuts between present day Rome and Imperial Rome in L'Age D'Or suggests that things do not change. In all three films politics finally invade the soundtrack, in the form of gunshots and explosions, to cut off an impossible narrative that can have no end. The title of The Phantom of Liberty which is a reference to the first line of Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto 'A spectre is stalking Europe' satirizes bourgeois mentality which fears freedom and undermines Communism. Moreover the film begins with Goya's painting (Goya's Executioners of May 3rd, 1808 depicts the execution of Spanish resistance fighters by Napoleonic invaders bringing the French Empire to Spain in the name of Enlightenment values of the French Revolution. The emphasis is on the Spanish resistance fighters who chose to die in the name of autonomy) about Napoleon's troops invading Toledo, Spain in 1808 and ends with a group proclaiming 'Long live chains' in France in 1968. After a long pan through the zoo, so fast that everything goes out of focus, there is a close-up of an ostrich which jerks its head and stares at the audience. The recurrent close-ups of animals in cages and the cyclical narrative of The Phantom of Liberty seem to suggest that both narrative and society are versions of captivity-historical and cultural zoos.


All three films end with an impending sense of doom. In The Obscure Object of Desire an apocalyptic explosion literally engulfs the whole screen as the consumerist society of spectacle and simulacrum goes into flames. Surrealism then veers towards deteriorating into an art-form simply meant to shock the bourgeoisie or worse still degenerate into a destructive and anarchic response to the strategies of containment. In The Phantom of Liberty Bunuel literally visualizes Breton's dictum "The simplest surreal act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand and firing blindly". (Clip POL 2(1) 11.52-13.35). The serial shooting provides a fissure where Bunuel's surreal encounter threatens to degrade into an abstract and anarchic non-conformism. Bunuel comes close to advocating what Papanikolas designates as the groups 'anarchoindividualism'. The carnivalesque inversion then has apocalyptic resonances as well. Purely at the level of form too, the continuous incorporation of diverse elements in a non-symmetrical assemblage and the manipulation of time, space and mis-en-scene to pervert the logic of narrative continuity leads to obscurantism. In that sense, Bunuel represents an "anti-bourgeois form of libertarianism" (Moi 177).
However it is this very 'obscurantism' that is at the centre of Bunuel's revolt. In his autobiography titled My Last Sigh he insists
The principle weapon was not guns, of course, it was scandal. Scandal was a potent agent of revelation, capable of exposing such social crimes as exploitation of one man by another, colonial imperialism, religious tyranny- in sum, all the secret and odious underpinnings of a system that had to be destroyed. (Bunuel 107).


The subversive, Bunuels films seem to insist, cannot be inscribed in common Cinematic Language. The incoherent 'anti-form' actually arouses the cognitive faculty of the audience by frustrating the consumption of the film as a whole. Bunuel's films destabilize relationships between viewer and film, aesthetic and commercial, spectator and object, the self and the world and it is this lack of evolutionary coherence which forces us to accept an open ended text. These 'writerly' texts, marked by indeterminacy, function as communicative acts which initiate a dialogue with the reader/spectator who is "no longer a consumer but a producer of the text" (Barthes 6) and can reconstruct them in infinite ways .Where are the six characters walking on the road going? What are they doing? Will they reach their destination? These are questions the audience must answer for themselves.


Bunuel can be credited with successfully espousing an assault on bourgeois order by his landmark aesthetic and cinematic innovations, the fashioning of a new space of social exchange and destabilizing the divide between the public and the private, aesthetic and commercial. The incorporation of the realm of dreams within the Cinematic medium allows the auteur to escape any censoring mechanism. Utilizing sardonic humor and surreal imagery his films lend a death-blow to notions of bourgeois stability, exposing the bourgeoisie as a decadent class, anti-thetical to human liberation. In his hands, Cinema figures as entertainment, art and the agent of ideological praxis. He counters established power and develops a vocabulary of his own to break away from standardized cinematic practices which are reassuring for the audience. His bourgeois trilogy bespeaks the energies of avant-garde innovation, an enthusiastic embrace of ambiguity and a post-modern distrust of the master-narrative thereby recreating the cinematic edifice to provide the most fitting rendition of the twentieth century experience of 'modernity'.



Works cited

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Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974.
Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History," Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. New York: Schocken, 1969 ,pp. 253-264.
Berman, Mashall. All That is Solid Melts into Air. New York: Viking Penguin, 1988.
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Burch, Noel. Theory of Film Practice. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Praeger, 1973.
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Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 1: The Movement-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
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Derrida, Jacques. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. 'Of Other Spaces'. Diacritics. Spring 1986: 22-7.
---. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. New York: Vintage Books, 1978.
Fuentes, Carlos. Casa Con dos puertas. Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1940. p. 214.
Kinder, Marshall. 'The Tyranny of Convention in The Phantom of Liberty'. Film Quarterly, Vol. 28, No. 4, Summer 1975, pp. 20-25.
Kovacs, Katherine Singer. 'Louis Bunuel and Pierre Louys: Two Visions of Obscure
Objects'. Cinema Journal, Vol. 19, No.1, Autumn 1979, pp.86-98.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema". Visual and Other Pleasures.
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Irigaray, Luce. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Martin. New York: Cornell
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Taranger, Mary-Claude."Le dialogue intercultural chez Bunuel: les films francais et
l'hispanité ".Bunuel: The Transcultural Imaginary. Ed. Gaston Lillo. Ottawa: Ottawa UP, 2003.
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