As the father of cinematic Surrealism, extensive critical attention has been devoted to Luis Buñuel’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 Buñuel’s Spanish-language films allowing us to view Buñuel’s cinema through a lens of queer spectatorship. Focusing on the films Buñuel produced in Mexico and Spain during the 1950s and 1960s, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla argues not that Buñuel’s films have a homosexual subplot, but that there are multiple forms of identity, subjectivity and sexuality present in these films.
Queering Buñuel brings together the fields of film studies, feminist and queer theory, Hispanic studies, psychoanalysis and art theory. Gutiérrez-Albilla succeeds in reconceptualizing Buñuel’s Mexican and Spanish films beyond geographical, historical and disciplinary boundaries, questioning not just how we see Buñuel, but also how we see cinema.