More Connections between Luis Buñuel and René Magritte: collage-discourse, exploded narrative, threshold and moment of panic in "The Phantom of Liberty" (Luis Buñuel, 1974)

Abstract

This article examines The Phantom of Liberty (1974), directed by Luis Buñuel and belonging to what has come to be called the director’s «late French period», as a reactivation of the filmmaker’s original surrealism. Contrary to the traditional reduction of Buñuelian cinema to the merely oneiric, the article argues that the film unfolds a structure based on simulated chance —or on a controlled and conscious form of writing that takes chance occurrences as its model— together with chaining through thresholds, narrative fragmentation in line with the «exploded narrative», and an affinity with the painting of René Magritte, the latter two already described by Pedro Poyato Sánchez in previous research. Dissociation, the hybridization of objects, the collision between conventionally irreconcilable realities, and the «moments of panic» reveal a shared logic: to turn the image into an operator of thought, or into a visual manifestation of «seeing thinking», and to make mystery an aesthetic experience.