New Essay on Buñuel

K. Brenna Wardell, an instructor at the University of Alabama, has recently published a great essay in the online journal The Cine-Files. Here is a link to Wardell’s essay, “Waste Not: Luis Buñel Frames Space and Waste in The Phantom of Liberty“ and a short excerpt:

“In 1974, the director and writer Luis Buñuel released The Phantom of Liberty, his second-to-last film in a long career as a scathing critic of bourgeois social, political, and cultural complacency.  In Phantom, Buñuel adds a further critique—blindness and passivity in the face of environmental damage—by developing a trope repeated throughout his films: bourgeois separation from the body, its appetites, and the waste, actual and figurative, produced.  The director does so largely by utilizing Phantom’s mise-en-scène to create uncanny, alienating reversals that pinpoint and attack bourgeois viewpoints about bodies and the natural world and bring viewers face to face with these viewpoints’ damaging results.”