The Best of All Worlds?: Representing Space and Belonging in Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Cinema

This thesis seeks to revisit the Mexican films of the Spanish film director Luis Buñuel in order to show that a concerted focus on space, an important aspect of the films’ narratives that is often intimated by scholars, yet rarely developed, can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work. Although Buñuel’s Mexican films now enjoy a greater presence in criticism on the director, they are often segregated according to an intra-corpus hierarchy of critical value, effectively creating two sub-strands among the films of this period: independent and commercial. The interdisciplinary approach taken in this thesis unites the two, focusing on a total of nine films from the period. In doing so it moves beyond the tropes most often associated with Buñuel’s cinema – surrealism, Catholicism, a fixation on the bourgeoisie – and the approach most often invoked in analysis of these themes: psychoanalysis. Instead, the thesis takes inspiration from the fields of human geography, anthropology and philosophy, applying these to a close reading of Buñuel’s Mexican films to argue that, ultimately, these films depict a sense of placelessness, overtly or subliminally enacting a search for belonging that forces the viewer to question what it means to be in place.