Dreams of Desire: Belle de jour, Eros and Surrealist Cinema

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

Vortrag von Kristoffer Noheden (Stockholm)

In his autobiography, My Last Breath (1982), Luis Buñuel recalls his discovery of the writings of the Marquis de Sade: “I was about twenty-five when I read The 120 Days of Sodom for the first time, and I must admit I found it far more shocking than Darwin.” BELLE DE JOUR (1967) is one of the many films that demonstrate Buñuel’s persistent interest in the bewildering mechanisms of desire. The film was made parallel to a minor wave of surrealist features and in the wake of contemporaneous investigations into desire. The continued significance of desire and sexuality for surrealism was demonstrated by the large international exhibition EROS at the Galérie Daniel Cordier in Paris in 1959–60. The exhibition furthered the movement’s fascination with de Sade, but it also probed desire as a multifaceted phenomenon. Buñuel’s Sadean L’ÂGE D’OR (1930) was screened as part of a film program shown in conjunction with EROS. But perhaps it is BELLE DE JOUR, with its emphasis on a woman’s explorations of eroticism, that is closest in spirit to EROS.

Kristoffer Noheden is a research fellow at Stockholm University, where he also teaches cinema studies and visual studies. He is the author of Surrealism, Cinema, and the Search for a New Myth (2017), and has published extensively on surrealism in art, film and literature.

Vortrag in englischer Sprache

Filmvorführung: BELLE DE JOUR, Frankreich/Italien 1967, 101 Min.

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Kuratiert von Daniel Fairfax und Vinzenz Hediger