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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla
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This paper draws on Lacan’s notion of the Real, that which resists symbolization, a gap-inknowledge that subverts the presumption to know it. I explore how Bunuel’s Los olvidados (1950), a fi lm that is often interpreted as a realistic documentation of misery in the Mexican historical context of the traumatic, accelerated push towards a modern industrial economy that characterized Mexico in the late 1940s and early 1950s, can be read in a way that goes beyond conventional semiotics in order to propose that, as Pierre Sorlin formulates, the real cannot be directly apprehended. The contiguity with the real implies an imaginary re-translation of it. More importantly, my reading of the fi lm proposes a critique of realism, or of what passes for realism within our culture’s hegemonic order, producing, thus, a transgressive exemption from symbolic meaning. Using a Barthesian textual analysis that is characterized by extracting a fragment from the whole, which emasculates the coherent whole of narrative structure and opens it up to new kinds of relations and revelations (the cinematic punctum), my paper argues that Bunuel’s fi lm strives to capture a kind of Real that goes beyond the referential sign, beyond the documentation of real issues and conventions of verisimilitude in the cinema, covering, thus, the heterogeneous within the homogeneous idea of reason. Finally, my paper explores how Bunuel’s fi lm is less concerned with a realistic documentation of socio-political concerns than with a self-refl exive discourse about cinematic representation and perception, emphasizing a visceral and disruptive relation or experience in the phenomenological encounter between the spectator and the fi lm. I argue that this phenomenological encounter may be based on pure bodily affect and yet at the same time there is almost a euphoric dissolution, where the absorption in the film involves constantly shifting sensation.
Author(s): Gutiérrez-Albilla JD
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Hispanic Research Journal
Year: 2007
Volume: 8
Issue: 4
Pages: 347-357
ISSN (print): 1468-2737
ISSN (electronic): 1745-820X
Publisher: Maney Publishing
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1179/174582007X218834
DOI: 10.1179/174582007X218834
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