Resumen de Buñuel's Phantoms
Through studying select works by auteur Luis Buñuel, focusing in particular on his 1962 masterpiece El ángel exterminador, this article explores cinematic time and the latent, spectral temporalities underlying the medium of film itself—delay, repetition, prolonged or extended time, time constrained or condensed, tempo-ral aporias or gaps, and the sensation of time as asynchronous with actuality. Buñuel’s works wield poetic constructions of time indebted to the surrealist ap-proach, and thus to rupturing order, sense, chronology, and linearity. Across these filmic constructions—what I will call here, meditations on time—there is an acute rendering of time as doubled, lost, and/or unsettled. Buñuel cinematically crafts temporal modes that fold, embed, and/or crystallize other times within them. At the heart of this essay is a deep desire to understand how Buñuel’s cin-ema operates both in and with time, and how it cultivates slowness and modes of deferral tethered to attention and captivation that hold us and make us aware of time’s inner-workings. I locate Buñuel’s oeuvre at the center of a modern cinema invested in philosophical ruminations on time—time’s proliferation, perforation, and entanglements of multiple temporalities, its spectral nature; films that ac-tively contemplate the time created and “sculpted,” to draw on Andrei Tarkovsky’s evocative phrase, by the act of filming and through the experience of film viewing that they invite.
