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, 29. Juni 2023, 20 Uhr im Kino des DFF
Film: CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DÉSIR, Frankreich/Spanien 1977, 103 Min.
Lecture: Arnaud Duprat (Rennes), Conchita in Cet obscur objet du désir: A Heroine of Testamentary Dimensions?
Vortrag in französischer Sprache mit Übersetzung

This lecture will reflect on Buñuel’s last film, CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DÉSIR (1977), with an emphasis on its testamentary dimension. After some remarks on the adaptation of Pierre Louÿs’ novel, La femme et le pantin (1898), that Buñuel wrote with Jean-Claude Carrière in the mid-1970s, we will focus on the creation of the heroine Conchita. Triply incarnated (by Carole Bouquet and Ángela Molina on the screen, and Florence Giorgetti on the soundtrack), this female character oscillates between a cartoonish vision of a hot-tempered Spanish woman and the embodiment of ideological values recalling certain surrealist principles. This return to the founding movement of Luis Buñuel’s art – at times in a disabused manner, with its representation of a society where scandal is no longer possible – will allow us to envisage CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DÉSIR, through the prism of its heroine, as a testamentary work. Thanks to the enigma surrounding Conchita, Buñuel leads to spectator to seek out the truth in a film where an abundance of symbols serve not to clarify the plot but instead to explode meaning in a typically surrealist manner.

Arnaud Duprat is associate professor at the Université Rennes 2. He is the author of the book Le dernier Buñuel and is preparing a book on the links between Buñuel and French cinema.

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, 22. Juni 2023, 20 Uhr im Kino des DFF
Film: TRISTANA, Mexiko 1970, 94 Min.
Lecture: Jordi Xifra (Barcelona), Tristana: The Impulse of Memory and Reputation
Vortrag in englischer Sprache

It is no exaggeration to state that TRISTANA (1970) is a film that works like a shock. Suddenly, when it looks like it’s heading towards a canonical conclusion, Buñuel suspends his complacency and leaves the audience in a state of astonishment, undermining any sense of certainty. We receive a shock that dilutes what we had understood, imposing itself on us as if everything in it were yet to be comprehended. This refers of course, to the series of images at the end of the film that rewinds the story, redirecting it again to the beginning. A set of images offered to us as a final coda whose meaning is hard to grasp: is it the exception that proves the rule? During the film, other moments provoke in the audience the same effect. What do those enunciative gestures bring about? What meaning can we attribute to them? What link do they have with the rest of Buñuel’s films? This presentation will try to answer these questions with the aid of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the impulse-image.

Jordi Xifra is professor of the Department of Communication at Pompeu Fabra University (Barcelona) and director of Centro Buñuel Calanda, the foundation devoted to promote and preserve the life and work of Luis Buñuel. He has edited the conversations of Max Aub and Buñuel, and Buñuel’s complete literary works.

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, 1. Juni 2023, 20 Uhr im Kino des DFF
Film: LE CHARME DISCRET DE LA BOURGEOISIE, Frankreich/Italien 1972, 101 Min.
Lecture: Marie Rebecchi (Aix-en-Provence), Film Surréaliste: The Indiscreet Charm of Disgust
Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Present in Buñuel‘s films from L’ÂGE D’OR (1930) on, the relations between disgust, perversion and food begin to appear increasingly insistently in the 1960s, when the director shot VIRIDIANA (1961). In this film it was the iconographic structure of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper that was perverted: Buñuel repeated the arrangement of the apostles, but replaced them with a brutal group of irate beggars and lepers. In the 1970s the themes of disgust, excess, perversion and pleasure taken to fatal extremes became increasingly frequent in European cinema. Like Bertolucci’s LAST TANGO IN PARIS (1972) and Marco Ferreri’s LA GRANDE BOUFFE (1973), Buñuel’s THE DISCREET CHARM OF THE BOURGEOISIE (1972) sublimates and replaces the occurrence of the event itself. The dinner planned by the characters is constantly postponed by a series of blunders, while also constantly evoked through the discussion of the various dishes and drinks that are to be consumed (like the unforgettable comments on how to make a dry Martini, or on drinking red wine with fish), in an absurd repetition compulsion that holds together a group of perverse and corrupt bourgeois.

Marie Rebecchi is associate professor in aesthetics and film history at the Université de Aix-Marseille and author of the book Paris 1929. Eisenstein, Bataille, Buñuel.