Queering Bunuel

As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Bunuel’s cinema. Much has been written about his first Surrealist films of the 1920s and 1930s and the French art movies of the 1960s and 1970s. However, here for the first time is a queer re-reading of Bunuel’s Spanish-language films allowing us to view Bunuel’s cinema through a lens of queer spectatorship. Focusing on the films Bunuel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla argues not that Bunuel’s films have a homosexual subplot, but that there are multiple forms of identity, subjectivity and sexuality present in these films.“Queering Bunuel” brings together the fields of film studies, feminist and queer theory, Hispanic studies, psychoanalysis and art theory. Gutierrez-Albilla succeeds in reconceptualizing Bunuel’s Mexican and Spanish films beyond geographical, historical and disciplinary boundaries, questioning not just how we see Bunuel, but also how we see cinema.

Author Biography

Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla is Assistant Professor in Spanish and Film Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University. He completed his DPhil at Cambridge University in 2004.