Luis Buñuel: Aesthetics of the Irrational: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie + Discussion

This screening features a panel discussion on the spectre of terrorism in Buñuel's films with Ian Christie, Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History, Birkbeck and Julian Gutierrez-Albilla, Professor at the University of Southern California and author of Queering Buñuel. This discussion is chaired by ICA Project Coordinator and CHASE PhD student Eleanor Careless.

The master of cinematic surrealism offers a scathing satire of Spanish social mores and provides some of the medium's finest dream (and dream-within-a-dream) sequences in this story of six upper middle class friends who repeatedly try to have dinner together but who find their plans interrupted by various bizarre events.

Julian Daniel Gutierrez-Albilla is Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema (IB Tauris, 2008), and numerous book chapters and articles in the field of Spanish and Latin American Cinema published in the UK, US, Latin America and Spain. His research interests are in Feminist Theory, Queer Theory, Psychoanalysis and Trauma Studies. He is currently working on a book on aesthetics, ethics and trauma in the cinema of Pedro Almodovar for Edinburgh University Press and has co-edited a book on women filmmakers in the Hispanic and Lusophone world with Parvati Nair (Manchester University Press, 2013) and A Companion to Luis Buñuel (Blackwell, 2013).

Ian Christie is Anniversary Professor of Film and Media History at Birkbeck University of London, and formerly Professor of Film Studies at the University of Kent (1997-9) and Visiting Lecturer in Film at Oxford University (1995-8). Previously, he was at the British Film Institute from 1976-96, as head of Distribution, Exhibition, Video Publishing and Special Projects. He advised on the exhibition Modernism: Designing a New World at the V&A in 2006 and in the same year was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University. Director of the AHRB Centre for British Film and Television Studies, with its headquarters at Birkbeck, from 2003-05, he also created the London Screen Study Collection. A regular contributor to Sight & Sound magazine, he has written on Buñuel and given an interview for Criterion's edition of La Voie Lactée.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, dir. Luis Buñuel, France/Italy/Spain 1972, 105mins.

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