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Abismos de pasión
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Co-author: Cristina Álvarez López How do motifs work in cinema? Something (a word, an object, a shape, a colour, a musical theme) is repeated, underlined, invested with meaning until it forms a recognisable pattern or system. Luis Buñuel’s remarkable Abismos de pasión is tightly structured around windows – a motif borrowed from the source novel, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847). Jacques Rivette returned to the motif in his own, free adaptation, Hurlevent (1985). First, windows stand as the guardians of private property, respectable marriage, and neat domesticity. Filled with social and family values, windows mark the limits of a house to which the desperate lover, Alejandro (Jorge Mistral), is now denied entrance. When Catalina (Irasema Dilián) and Alejandro meet again and resume their love affair, windows are used to spy on and keep track of them. Later, windows stand between the stubborn lovers as an obstacle separating their bodies. But Abismos de pasión complicates and subverts all these values that it initially associates with windows. The glass will eventually be smashed and broken, or it reveals the trace of those spying eyes. Windows may be the emblem of a love that is doomed, but this love will nonetheless never cease manifesting itself through the indomitable forces of nature. When windows are transgressed in this way, so the motif is transformed, taken to another level – to the highest heights or (in Buñuel’s clever title translation inversion) the lowest abismos. The distance given by this window also testifies to an otherworldly bond that goes beyond any conventional definition of love – renouncing all pleasantries, relinquishing every form of orthodox happiness or consummation. A bond that affirms itself only through an undeniable, fierce existence, trespassing the limits of life and death. This text draws upon a 2016 audiovisual essay by the authors, Always a Window, viewable here. MORE Buñuel: Belle de jour, Tristana, The Diary of a Chambermaid, Un Chien andalou © Adrian Martin Cristina Álvarez López & Adrian Martin November 2016 |
