Baroque Buñuel

Although Buñuel said the goal of Surrealism was to destroy bourgeois society by attacking its stultifying excess of cultural baggage, in Un Chien andalou we find, surprisingly, an aesthetic of erudition comparable to Góngorás culteranismo. This article examines the traces of a strong Spanish baroque heritage in this film made by Luis Buñuel with help from Salvador Dalí, near the beginning of their careers. Although the film is a paragon of Surrealist filmmaking, it also contains a complex interweaving of intertexts taken from the discourses of Freudian psychoanalysis, Greek mythology, baroque painting and poetry, and entomology. The film is, therefore, not so much an example of automatic writing, as its makers preferred to claim, but rather an avant-garde text crafted with recourse to the rich erudition of Spaińs baroque tradition, what we might call a ‘Surrealist culteranismo’

Art · Art history · Baroque · Bourgeoisie · Filmmaking · Intertextuality · Literature · Movie theater · Mythology · Painting · Poetry · Politics · Cinema History and Criticism · Media, Journalism, and Communication History · Philosophy · Spanish Culture and Identity