Achtung, veränderte Öffnungszeiten! Alle Veranstaltungen ab Dezember 2022 beginnen um 20 Uhr!

In der „Lecture & Film“-Reihe Kino am Abgrund der Moderne führen namhafte Expert:innen aus Europa und den USA in die vielfältigen Facetten von Buñuels Werk ein. 

Termin: Donnerstag, 13. April 2023, 20 Uhr im Kino des DFF
Film: VIRIDIANA, Frankreich 1969, 101 Min.
Lecture: Fernando Gonzalez de Leon (Springfield) Viridiana: Interpreting Buñuel's Gothic Masterwork
Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Many leading film critics now concur that VIRIDIANA (1961) is not only one of Luis Buñuel’s greatest works, but also one of the most important films in the history of this modern art form.  Even though this director was notoriously reticent in declaring or clarifying his intentions in this or any other film, there is also a certain level of critical consensus around the artistic current to which it belongs, surrealism. However, in addition to a consideration of the film as a surrealist work, we can consider other perspectives on VIRIDIANA: literary, ideological, political, religious, philosophical and ethical. This lecture will entertain multiple points of view, not necessarily mutually exclusive but based on the spectator’s experience with the movie as well as on biographic and historic scholarship. These perspectives will include considering VIRIDIANA as a classic, almost canonical, Gothic film rooted in Buñuel’s early years of apprenticeship, artistic preferences, and certain filmic currents of the 1950s and 60s. This can allow us to evaluate the place of VIRIDIANA in Buñuel’s total corpus as well as in his overall reputation as a major 20th century director.

Fernando Gonzalez de Leon is associate professor of history at Springfield College in Massachusetts, specializing in Spanish and European social and cultural history and on the connections between the Spanish-speaking world and British and American cultures.