Conchita in Cet obscur objet du désir: A Heroine of Testamentary Dimensions?

Lecture & Film „Kino am Abgrund der Moderne. Die Filme von Luis Buñuel“

Vortrag von Arnaud Duprat (Rennes)

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.

Vortrag in französischer Sprache mit Übersetzung

Filmvorführung: CET OBSCUR OBJET DU DÉSIR, Frankreich/Spanien 1977, 103 Min.

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Kuratiert von Daniel Fairfax und Vinzenz Hediger