Abstract
This article explores the under-researched intertextual and intermedial connections between Leonora Carrington’s transdisciplinary practice and the medium of film. The analysis focuses on the artist’s cameo appearances in two 1960s Mexican productions—There Are No Thieves in This Village (Alberto Isaac 1964) and A Pure Soul (Juan Ibáñez 1965)—which mark her creative collaborations with Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Magic Realists Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Carrington’s cameo roles are analyzed within a network of intertextual translations between her visual and literary works that often mix autobiographical and fictional motifs. Moreover, it is argued that Carrington’s cinematic mediations employ the recurring Surrealist tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois satire. The article also investigates Carrington’s creative approach towards art directing and costume design, expressed in the Surrealist horror film The Mansion of Madness (Juan López Moctezuma 1973). The analysis examines the intermedial connections between Carrington’s practice of cinematic set design and her earlier experiments with theatrical scenography. Overall, this study aims to reveal undiscovered aspects of Leonora Carrington’s artistic identity and her transdisciplinary oeuvre.
Highlights
While the British-born/Mexican Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, has claimed no direct interest in expressing herself artistically through the medium of film, her vibrant life across Britain, France, Spain, the USA and Mexico has provoked scholars’ reactions that seem emblematic of the possible relationship between Carrington and cinema
Carrington’s art directing involves aesthetic references to her visual, literary and theatrical works, which expands her oeuvre into a network of intermedial translations across artistic disciplines
In There Are No Thieves in This Village, Leonora Carrington shares an episode with Luis Buñuel who sarcastically performs as a sermonizing priest, while she plays an attentive widow—a creative expression that re-cycles the recurring Surrealist tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois satire and employs the subversive intertextuality of Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet (1960s)
Summary
While the British-born/Mexican Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, has claimed no direct interest in expressing herself artistically through the medium of film, her vibrant life across Britain, France, Spain, the USA and Mexico has provoked scholars’ reactions that seem emblematic of the possible relationship between Carrington and cinema. This article argues that Carrington’s cameo roles could be rather studied within a network of intertextual references to her overall oeuvre and within the context of shared creative approaches among representatives of 1960s Mexican intelligentsia, such as Luis Buñuel. Carrington’s cameo performance as Claudia and Juan Luis’ conservative mother in A Pure Soul signals her self-conscious and ironic imagination that aims to destabilize bourgeois and patriarchal mores by employing personal motifs and representing the “Self as Other”—categorized by Whitney Chadwick as an artistic strategy of female Surrealist self-representation. Carrington’s cameo appearances in Alberto Isaac and Juan Ibáñez’s films signal that her artistic identity is defined by multiple creative collaborations and shared creative approaches with the representatives of the 1960s Mexican intelligentsia. Art Directing—Intertextual Translations between Carrington’s Paintings and Cinematic
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