The cut eye and the denied word

Perturbing emotions in the cinema of Luis Buñuel

Abstract

With this paper we would like to propose an analysis of Luis Buñuel’s filmography through the lens of the Freudian perturbant, that is, of that feeling stimulated by something familiar that has been unconsciously repressed. It is a kind of frightening that emerges, recalling infantile complexes, to question our perception of the world. This emotion, conditioned by animist beliefs and collaborations with renowned artists (think of Dali and Galdós), seems innate to the surrealist poetics inaugurated by the silent short film Un chien andalou (1929) and continually evoked in other Mexican and European productions, up to the last film That Obscure Object of Desire (1977), which is ideally linked to the first. Throughout his long career, Buñuel – through a radical and unprejudiced exploration in the territories of the unconscious – devised expressive solutions characterised by the intention to provoke an effect of disorientation in the bourgeois spectator. Here we would like to focus on the sound dimension of his cinema and especially on certain peculiarities in the use of sound that we believe can be assimilated, in intention, to the director’s most original visual solutions. In Buñuel’s cinema, not only does he dispense with words (this aspect can inevitably be seen in the first two surrealist works, which even when they provide for the introduction of captions do so to the exclusion of their logical-narrative function), but there is an original use of sounds and silences that provoke anguish. The director often plays with the absence of meaning in the dialogues and uses noises that cover them to create confusion in the audience confronted with a reality that is familiar to them but by which they are deeply disturbed. This ability to provoke disquiet is also demonstrated through anecdotes about the audience’s reactions to his works and the expressive power they still have long after they were made.