Luis Bunuel Research Articles

Una iconografía del ojo en <em>Un chien andalou</em>

This article sets out to analyse the eye motif in Un chien andalou. The eye—cut open in the film with a razor blade—has a symbolic function that is present in Bunuel’s entire filmography, where eyes are a recurrent motif: from the eyes of people who were born blind, a key character in Bunuel’s films, to the allusions to the spectator’s eyes. This article lists the eyes appearing in Bunuel’s films, and using reception theory, seeks to explain the significance of this visual symbol in the filmmaker’s work. The conclusion is that when the eye appears in a film it means that the images of the film come from the artist’s inner sources. Therefore, the eye in Luis Bunuel’s work refers to a reflection by the filmmaker about his own creative process.

School of Spanish

Spanish language was among foreign languages, studied at MGIMO from its inception. Maria Luisa Gonzalez Vincens was at the origin of the establishment of the School of Spanish language at MGIMO. She as a philologist, belonging to humanitarian tradition. She studied at the University of Madrid with Luis Bunuel, Federico Garcia Lorca and Salvador Dali, and communicated with people who later became the glory and pride of the world culture. The increased role of the Spanish language in international contacts required the creation of the separate Department of Spanish Language at MGIMO. Since 2002, the Department of Spanish Language separated from the Department of Roman Languages and is teaching students of all Departments and at all stages of educating at MGIMO, including almost all masters programs. It is hard to imagine successful language learning without the understanding of a broad cultural context. This is why the Department supports the Spanish theater for more than 20 years. Currently, the Department is headed by of professor, Doctor of Philology Valery Iovenko. The Department staff includes more than 45 teachers who successfully address new educational and scientific objectives, creating teaching materials, fully adapted to the new educational standards.

Reading Intermediality: Lorca’s Viaje a la luna (“Journey to the Moon,” 1929) and Un chien andalou (Buñuel/Dalí, 1929)

This article will treat two experimental short films, the first one of the most famous in cinema history; the second a little known script, lost for many years and brought to the screen only sixty years after it was written. The former is Un chien andalou of 1929, generally attributed to both director Luis Bunuel and Catalan painter Salvador Dali (who claims first screenwriting credit in the film itself). The latter is Viaje a la luna , written also in 1929 by poet and dramatist Federico Garcia Lorca and filmed by Frederic Amat, a contemporary Catalan painter, in 1998, the centenary of Lorca’s birth. Normal 0 false false false EN-US JA X-NONE

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder

Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, by R. Bruce Elder. Film and Media Studies Series. Waterloo, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2013. x, 765 pp. $85.00 US (cloth). In this companion volume to his earlier Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century (Waterloo, 2013), experimental filmmaker R. Bruce Elder counts Dada and Surrealism among the vanguard movements that heralded cinema as the ottima arte or top In his formulation, Dada and Surrealism were dissident movements whose activities sought to discover conduits that would convey the powerful of their age, a vital, life-enhancing, occult irrationalism (p. 15). The goal was less to create modernist aesthetics or experiment with forms, than to explore the variety of ways in which an objectively heterogeneous world imposes itself upon the human psyche. In this regard, Elder's conception is similar to Breton's notion of passer le pont, whereby phantoms cross the bridge to greet the wayfarer in the same way that projected celluloid images illuminated upon a movie screen force themselves upon the theatre viewer. For Elder, this makes cinema the most powerful pneumatic art. His book is not limited to film studies, however, and Elder more broadly examines a wide range of effects across Dadaist and Surrealist art, literature, and criticism. The formidable size of Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect, organized into three chapters and with several appendices that constitute the final third of the book, produces its own circuitous and imposing journey. Before delving into considerations of Dada and Surrealism, Elder opens with a brief chapter on the crisis in the authority of reason engendered by the proliferation of mathematical systems, pluralities of physics, and the modern rediscovery of primitivism in the early twentieth century. In the chapter on Dada, Elder moves beyond its historical contextualization in response to the traumas of the Great War and its characterization as an anti-art movement, to emphasize its vital life principles in the construction of new art and literature. In keeping with the emphasis upon cinematic effects, Elder weaves Dadaist collage and paracinematic performance art (such as the Lautgedichte sound poem) together with film as related expressions of pneuma or induced thought. The third chapter addresses various ways that the Surrealists sought out hallucinatory aspects of reality that could be formulated into poetic images of a sur-realite (higher reality), through such notions as the occult, objective chance, the marvellous, the uncanny, and psychic automatism. In these chapters, Elder analyzes and provides commentary on various Dadaist and Surrealist films. He finds instantaneous impulses unleashed through the imagery of Francis Picabia and Rene Clair's film Entr'acte (Intermission, 1924), a blurring of distinctions between dream and waking states in May Ray's Emak Bakia (Leave Me Alone, 1926), a surreal supersession of dream and reality in Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel's Un chien andalou (An Andalusian Dog, 1929), and heterogeneous combinations of the sacred and the profane in Bunuel's ethnographic documentary, Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933). …

Dark laughter: Spanish film, comedy, and the nation

In Dark Laughter, Juan F. Egea provides a remarkable in-depth analysis of the dark comedy film genre in Spain, as well as a provocative critical engagement with the idea of national cinema, the visual dimension of cultural specificity, and the ethics of dark humour. Egea begins his analysis with General Franco's dictatorship in the 1960s--a regime that opened the country to new economic forces while maintaining its repressive nature--exploring key works by Luis Garcia Berlanga, Marco Ferreri, Fernando Fernan-Gomez, and Luis Bunuel. Dark Laughter then moves to the first films of Pedro Almodovar in the early 1980s during the Spanish political transition to democracy before examining Alex de la Iglesia and the new dark comedies of the 1990s. Analysing this younger generation of filmmakers, Egea traces dark comedy to Spain's displays of ultramodernity such as the Universal Exposition in Seville and the Barcelona Olympic Games. At its core, Dark Laughter is a substantial inquiry into the epistemology of comedy, the intricacies of visual modernity, and the relationship between cinema and a wider framework of representational practices.

C'est dégueulasse!: Matters of Taste and “La Grande bouffe” (1973)

C'est dégueulasse!: Matters of Taste and “La Grande bouffe” (1973)

El apócrifo, prototipo de una subjetividad en crisis

The introduction of this paper reviews the concept of the subject, which originated in classical antiquity and developed in Western culture up to the Enlightenment and Romanticism with the addition of new aspects but without questioning its foundation as a substantial Subject. The first major crisis of this received view took place in the first quarter of the twentieth century after the assimilation of the works by Marx, Freud or Nietzsche, which laid the foundations of a thorough criticism on the subject. One important feature of this crisis was the proliferation of apocryphal writing, which reached new models in the works of Fernando Pessoa and Antonio Machado. Between them lies the scope of the intensive and extensive collection of Max Aub’s apocryphal writings. This paper explores the significance of his main apocryphal characters Luis Alvarez Torres Petrena and Jusep Torres Campalans, as well as of the borderline case of Luis Bunuel, which was handled by Max Aub as an apocryphal of opposite sign.

Buster Keaton y el surrealismo de la Residencia de Estudiantes. Razones de una confluencia

The aim of this essay is to investigate the connections between the emblematic group of friends at the Madrid Residencia de Estudiantes –Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Federico Garcia Lorca– and the cinema of Buster Keaton, analyzing the motives for this relation, as well as its meaning within the context of nascent Spanish Surrealism.

La subversión de la adaptación literaria en Tristana y ese oscuro objeto del deseo de Luis Buñuel

Tristana y Ese oscuro objeto del deseo son las dos últimas adaptaciones literarias de Luis Buñuel. Aunque el cineasta se permita varios cambios –cortes, síntesis, añadidos– en estas historias al trasladarlas de la novela a la pantalla, produciendo así obras típicamente buñuelianas, los textos literarios de Benito Pérez Galdós y Pierre Louÿs parecen seguir presentes como una referencia reivindicada en las películas. Primero, los diálogos fílmicos se parecen mucho a los de las dos novelas. Se nota lo novelesco en varias réplicas que, demasiado literarias, suenan extrañas. Del mismo modo, si podemos reconocer en las heroínas fílmicas a sus antecedentes literarios como una referencia original, el director provoca este reconocimiento sólo para atraernos mejor en un universo que se vuelve inquietante y que interroga nuestras representaciones y creencias, gracias a sutiles desplazamientos de sentido. Estos textos resisten al proceso de la adaptación y permanecen en el filme bajo la forma de citas, como otro texto, de manera a priori inalterada. Tristana y Ese oscuro objeto del deseo plantean entonces la problemática de la función que puede asegurar la obra literaria adaptada en la escritura del texto fílmico y en la subversión que propone éste del discurso cinematográfico.

DE KESSEL A BUÑUEL E OLIVEIRA: QUANDO O CINEMA RESPONDE À LITERATURA

Análise e comparação de três diferentes obras que dialogam entre si: o romance de Joseph Kessel Belle de Jour (1928) e os dois filmes a ele ligados, Belle de Jour, de Luis Buñuel (1967) e Belle Toujours, de Manoel de Oliveira (2006), com o objetivo de compreender as várias dimensões do processo de transcodificação semiótica operado pelos dois cineastas. Os deslizamentos de sentido, bem como as mudanças formais acontecidas na passagem do livro para a primeira obra fílmica, são acentuados com a realização do filme de Oliveira, o qual, embora desejando explicitamente dialogar com a obra de Buñuel, acaba por manifestar uma continuidade que vai até à origem literária de todo o processo. Desta forma, a obra final testemunha a intertextualidade presente já no filme que a antecede, complexificando esse diálogo através da resposta que fornece tanto às sugestões nesta corporizadas, quanto aos sentidos ocultos nela encontrados. Assim se estabelece uma nova dinâmica de intercâmbio entre as três obras, que favorece uma permanente re-leitura de cada uma delas e lança simultaneamente novos dados sobre o fenómeno da adaptação fílmica e das relações interartes, nomeadamente entre a literatura e o cinema.

Perversity and Post-Marxian Thought in Buñuel's Late Films

This article examines certain motifs from Luis Bunuel's late trilogy-- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgoisie ( Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie, 1972), The Phantom of Liberty ( Le Fantome de la Liberte, 1974), and That Obscure Object of Desire ( Cet Obscur Objet du Desir , 1977)--in order to show how they anticipate key trends in contemporary post-Marxian philosophy. In doing so, it draws upon the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose Lacanian revision of Hegel has provided a model of ideology critique that preserves the structure of dialectical thought while avoiding the impulse to project a closed vision of subjectivity and historical change. In particular, such a model offers a means of reconsidering Bunuel’s concern with the perverse . Rather than having a singular ideological content (i.e., the repressed desire for freedom within consciousness), the perverse in Bunuel’s films serves as a more volatile index of ideological conflict: freedom becomes perverse from the perspective of law, and law becomes perverse from the perspective of freedom. To recognize these dialectical reversals not only offers a means of appreciating Bunuel’s sense of humor, but also sheds light on how the late films situate bourgeois and revolutionary impulses in a much more complex, interdependent, and dynamic relationship with one another.

The Catholic Spectator: Cinema and the Church in France in the 1920s

When French Catholics are mentioned in film history books, it is usually in the context of the scandal surrounding Luis Bunuel's Surrealist film The Golden Age/L’Âge d’or (1930).1 According to an o...

The Origins of Surrealism. Absolutizing the Unconscious

The article analyses three films that marked cinema’s mastering of the leading artistic trend at the turn of the 20-ies-30-ies ,that of Surrealism. Comparing films «Un Chien andalou»(1929) and «L'Age d’Or»(1930) by Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel with the film «Le sang dun poète» by Jean Cocteau (1931) the author follows the transformations the main postulates of Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, underwent.

Re-enacting cinema at the crossroads: Nicky Coutts's Passing Place

Nicky Coutts’s film Passing Place (2009) consists of six re-enactments of the moments in which crossroads appear in the following films: Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex (1967), Jim Jarmusch’s Down By Law (1986), Robert Zemeckis’s Castaway (2000), Maya Deren’s Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (1985), Stuart Rosenberg’s Cool Hand Luke (1967) and Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). The crossroads in Passing Place is located in rural Northumberland and the ‘re-enactors’ are local people who live or work nearby. Th e original films were chosen by both Coutts and the participants, Passing Place being made during Coutts’s residency at VARC (Visual Arts in Rural Communities) at Highgreen Tarset. While artists have been ‘remaking cinema’ for over a decade, Coutts’s film should be seen against the backdrop of the more recent phenomenon of re-enactment in artists’ practices, which focuses on the event of performance rather than on the medium of film per se. In this focus, the interrelationships between temporality and memory, acting and authenticity, become paramount. Rather than writing solely about Coutts’s film, I shall use it to think through these interrelationships, ultimately focusing on those aspects that allow me to unravel my encounter with Passing Place. The work was shown at Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art in 2010 along with two other films by Coutts, Eastern (2010) and Reminsizenzen der Erinnerung (2010), both of which also engage with cinematic re-enactment, but which are beyond the scope of this article.

The filming of modern life: European avant-garde film of the 1920s

In the 1920s, the European avant-garde embraced the cinema, experimenting with the medium in radical ways. Painters including Hans Richter and Fernand Leger as well as filmmakers belonging to such avant-garde movements as Dada and surrealism made some of the most enduring and fascinating films in the history of cinema. In The Filming of Modern Life, Malcolm Turvey examines five films from the avant-garde canon and the complex, sometimes contradictory, attitudes toward modernity they express: Rhythm 21 (Hans Richter, 1921), Ballet mecanique (Dudley Murphy and Fernand Leger, 1924), Entr'acte (Francis Picabia and Rene Clair, 1924), Un chien Andalou (Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, 1929), and Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929). All exemplify major trends within European avant-garde of the time, from abstract animation to cinema pur. All five films embrace and resist, in their own ways, different aspects of modernity.

En la línea del cine y la educación. Una propuesta de análisis sobre el film “Un chien andalus” de Luis Buñuel

This article has two major axes. One is theoretical and focuses on the relationship between cinema and education. In this sense, it is far from establishing a duality between movies that educate and do not educate. Any movie, in order to get an educational quality, must have an educated eye. Likewise, its educational quality has to do with the mindset of the viewer, who looks and not just sees. Is has to do with their will and knowledge in order to be enjoyed and provide a learning opportunity. In addition, there is an invitation to consider the differences between public and audience. The second axis of the article focuses on the presentation of an analysis of the fi lm “Un chien Andalus” (1929) by Luis Bunuel. It represents a lesson that the viewer has to understand and overcome the irresponsible view that rejects a prioris. Key words: cinema, education, educational responsibilities, media education, public and viewer, Luis Bunuel.

De <i>Ella</i> a <i>Él</i>: caras y máscaras en la “novela” de Mercedes Pinto (1926) y en la película de Luis Buñuel (1952)

Mercedes Pinto’s itinerary took her from the Canary Islands, where she was born, to Mexico, after a passage through Uruguay. She first met success through her writings and cultural activities, and was then forgotten. However, her book –published in Montevideo in 1926– was adapted for the cinema by Luis Bunuel in 1952, and the film gave new life to this autobiographical “novel” He. If self-fiction prevails in the literary work, with the clear commitment of a feminist who takes a stand in favour of freedom –the freedom to divorce in that case–, in Bunuel’s Mexican film the study of the clinical case of paranoia acquires a new form of complexity. The attack on a parasitic bourgeoisie is united to the subversion of the melodramatic genre, with a false happy end which distorts established codes and lets the principle of doubt impose itself. In the same way the exploration of sexual roles, heir to the surrealistic trend, is devoid of any manichean simplification and stands out as a fascinating object for any hermeneutic approach.

Bodies in Motion: Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics (review)

Reviewed by: Bodies in Motion: Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics Joy Landeira Bellver, Catherine G. Bodies in Motion: Spanish Vanguard Poetry, Mass Culture, and Gender Dynamics. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2010. Pp. 257. ISBN 978-0-8387-5744-4. Cole Porter may not have gotten a kick from cocaine or flying high in the sky, but his lyrics from the 1934 Broadway musical Anything Goes reflect the lifestyle of flappers, jazz, and excesses of the "roaring" twenties and early thirties in the United States and Europe. Because of the Hays Code, Porter was forced to substitute the first line of "Some get a kick from cocaine / I'm sure that if / I took even one sniff / That would bore me terrifically, too" with "Some like the perfume in Spain." The new verse, while less risqué, includes the notion that Spain also was reveling in the frenzied felices veinte. Against this cultural backdrop, Bodies in Motion evaluates the historical context of Spanish Vanguard poetry and the amazing changes in social activities and gender dynamics that it represents. Bodies in Motion celebrates this joyous movement and its interaction with poetry in three thematic categories: dance, sports, and mechanical marvels. Youth from well-heeled families were getting their kicks from dancing at the new Ritz hotel, the Residencia de Estudiantes, and the Círculo de Bellas Artes. Couples from all walks of life were dancing (together!) at verbenas and restaurants and attending cabarets. From regional folkloric dances to staid waltzes to the foxtrot and Charleston, bodies were moving, and poets like ultraísta Juan Larrea were writing about "Locura del Charleston." Rafael Lasso de la Vega in "Cabaret" uses the same word, "locura," to describe the tango. Famous female Flamenco dancers Antonia Mercé, nicknamed "La Argentina," and Pastora Rojas Monje ("Pastora Imperio") danced solos and headlined in composer Manuel de Falla's El amor brujo. Not to be left out, women poets danced and wrote about it as well. In one of her most anthologized poems, "Danza en tres tiempos," which was first published in 1928 in La Gaceta Literaria, Ernestina de Champourcin explores external and internal dance tempos. Lest we think that all poets of the time were celebrating the high life, I cannot resist noting the contrast between the Vanguard poets' perception of dance and Juan Ramón Jiménez's cautionary pose in 1924: "El verdadero baile es el baile de una persona sola con su alma" ("Diario vital y estético de Estética y ética estética"). Sports poetry is best exemplified by Concha Méndez. Of all the vanguardists, she most actively participated in sporting competitions, and won championships in swimming and diving. Her poetry and contributions are most intricately developed—owing in part to Bellver's extensive expertise in writing about important works by Méndez including Canciones de mar y tierra and Surtidor. Another woman, Josefina de la Torre, was the president of the first Club de Natación, and her poems speak flirtatiously about dancing and water sports, part of life on her [End Page 208] native Grand Canary Island. José Hinojosa dressed in golf attire and tennis whites—for which he was frequently ridiculed—and while Luis Bunuel's athleticism as a boxer and pole vaulter was legendary at the Resi, he only boxed in one match. Male poets, it seems, were likelier to be spectators than dancers or athletes; certainly not daring young men in flying machines. Mechanical marvels include cars, trains, planes, and the energy that powered them. Méndez drove a French Citroën hither and yon. Both men and women wrote about driving and flying, and perhaps some of the most erotic verses about the sensuality of driving were penned by Champourcin. Bellver goes beyond simply finding and analyzing poems with dance/sports/ mechanical themes by studying what she calls "gender dynamics"—how thematic treatment differs between male and female poets, and what that reveals about the changing times and the shifting involvement of women in society and literature. Women were literally and figuratively "on the move." Not only were they dancing like dynamos, they were dynamically active in literary and cultural events, and were changing the...

Daddy

Daddy Molly Haskell (bio) Seasoned with Oedipal Sin—Daddy Review, Village Voice, 1973 I know there are a great number of people, among them some of my best friends, who live in perfect harmony with their libidos, like a man and his dog. They (the libidos) sit, unleashed, by their mistress's side, never misbehaving, asking only for a regular outing where they frisk up but never stray too far afield. These are the lucky women who somehow managed to escape the scars of sexual repression. They took to the whole business like a duck takes to water—they have glowingly healthy sex lives (although they don't look any different from you or me), they bounce around on water beds, make it in taxi cabs, and indulge in a little spouse-swapping at the drop of an after-dinner hint. But I tend to be of the order indicated by Luis Bunuel, who was quoted by Carlos Fuentes in his excellent recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine Section as saying, "Sexual plea sure for me is directly linked with the idea of sin and only exists in a religious context." We don't have to light candles on Saints' days to feel the permanent guilt of sexual transgression. And the sense of sin associated with Oedipal desire may be the most powerful source of eroticism there is. It is in the memory-mold of a Catholic girlhood and a lecherously hovering Daddy-figure that English sculptress Niki de St. Phalle, in conjunction with director Peter Whitehead, casts her first film. "DADDY," which may turn out to be the most controversial of the New Directors Series at the Museum of Modern Art (although advance rumors that "Men hate it, women love it" always make me want to join the other team) is a three-part fantasy in which Niki de St. Phalle as Agnes I, and the two girls who play the snaggle-tooth [End Page 610] moppet Agnes II and the convent-chaste Lolita Agnes III, expose, abuse, tantalize, torture, and finally fling their collective arms around the memory of a father who in life alternated between indifference to and lust for his daughter, but who has finally shaped her emotional pattern as inalterably as Fate. I have made the film sound conceptually coherent whereas it is actually something more and less—a wildly uneven succession of images, of black-and-white and color photography, cartoons, collage, sculpture, action desecration, destructivist art, charades and masquerades, with a look that falls between avant-garde de cadence and soft-core pornography. Titillating passages alternate with dull, plodding ones; terrible dialogue contrasts with occasional electrifying images, and poor acting with provocative ideas. Its cavalierly pursued structure is a progression or—depending on how you look at—retrogression from child to adult. In the first section, the attempt to exorcise the father by envisioning him as a kind of comic Count Dracula in a combination high-school play horror film doesn't work on any level. The foppish German father becomes an unequal match for the girl (at one point she almost succeeds in killing him by kicking him down the steps to see if his blind man's bluff is just a bluff) in a stylized mini-film whose point of view is that of neither the frightened child nor the ironic adult, but seems rather to emanate from the sexual and artistic no man's land of adolescence. The second, where she actually caters to the prurient fantasies of the father (bound in a wheelchair) is ironically the most effective. First (or, as they kept saying on the Academy Awards, firstly) Agnes I has adolescent Agnes shimmy and slowly remove her schoolgirl frock in front of an altar, the centerpiece of a church that is actually a bar, with mirror-top tables and leering playboys. Then she instructs her in the arts of seduction and feigned orgasm. (This provides the occasion of the film's one great line: after the child has given a most convincing display of autoeroticism and ecstasy, her mentor tells her, "You'll make a great actress." "No, I won't," she replies, "I...

Pere Portabella: hacia una política del relato cinematográfico (review)

Hernandez, Ruben. Pere Portobeio: hacia politica del cinematografico. Madrid: Errata Naturae, 2008. 313 pp.Ruben Hernandez makes it clear in the introduction to Pere Portabella: hada politica del that his book should not be read as a monograph of Portabella's filmic career but rather as an essay sobre la relacion entre lo estetico y lo politico que tiene lugar en ambito del relato that posits el cine de Portabella como vehiculo privilegiado de su reflexion (15). While it would be difficult to fault the clarity with which Hernandez explains his methodology, the deliberate, if reductive, homage he pays to the essayistic works of Michel de Montaigne remains curiously underdeveloped throughout the remainder of the book. In moving beyond the introduction and its belabored transparency, Hernandez's emphasis on his essayistic engagement comes off as little more than carefully plotted authorial strategy, a preemptive attempt to exempt the collection from criticism that might take issue with his lack of interest in constructing a chronological or thematic framework for Portabella's cinematic oeuvre.Hernandez coyly underplays the text's objectives by claiming that he seeks to create nothing more than una tentativa: propuesta de lectura para cine de Portabella dentro de un contexto filosofico, estetico y cinematografico (17). The construction of these contexts, as one might expect, is immensely revealing. By defining the aesthetic and political dimensions of Portabella's cinematic project in relation to theoretical interventions by Aristotle, Theodor Adorno, Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Guy Debord, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Roland Barthes, Jacques Ranciere, and Paul Ricoeur, alongside the written works of filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Luis Bunuel, Sergei Eisenstein, and Jean-Pierre Lajournade, Hernandez charts a laudable and intriguing course that clearly seeks to advance the scholarship on the Catalan filmmaker's works. The result of Hernandez's work, however, is rather mixed. The book's vast interpretive framework, while commendable for its ambition, ultimately devours the voice of its author, leaving the reader to make sense of a plethora of theoretical approaches that rarely coalesce to achieve a meaningful synthesis.The first half of Pere Portabella presents an introduction to the cinematic career of the Catalan auteur whose professional history is as defined by its political dissidence as it is by its immersion in avant-garde aesthetic practices. Hernandez breaks this section of the text into seven brief essays that address many of the highlights of the filmmaker's fifty-year career, such as the infamous 1972 exhibition of VampirCuadecuc (Spain 1970) at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Portabella's work as producer of Bunuel's incendiary Viridiana (Spain 1961), his lack of engagement with the Barcelona School, and the similarity of directorial tactics employed by both Bunuel and Portabella. Hernandez's book forgoes analyses of El sopar (Spain 1974), Pont de Varsavia (Spain 1989), and Die Stille vor Bach (Spain 2007) in favor of No compteu amb els dits (Spain 1967), Nocturn 29 (Spain 1968), VampirCuadecuc (Spain 1970), Umbracle (Spain 1970), and Informe general (Spain 1976). It is rather unfortunate, though, that this section's overly reduced chapters, whose average length is just over twelve pages, lack the depth to properly scrutinize such compelling and intricately crafted texts. The scholarship presented in the book's first half left this reader desirous of further exploration on the collaborative nature of Portabella's works (particularly the influence of Joan Brossa and Carles Santos), Portabella's participation in the Grup de Treball, and the tenuously categorized Barcelona School. Regarding this last matter, I have serious reservations concerning not only Hernandez's appraisal of the Barcelona School's filmic output as nothing more than a concepcion banalizada y descafeinada de pour l'art (65), but also with his wholesale acceptance of Portabella's characterization of the Barcelona School's works as devoid of cualquier sentido critico (62). …