El

Screening on Film

Directed by Luis Buñuel.
With Arturo de Córdova, Delia Garcés, Aurora Walker.
Mexico, 1952, 35mm, black & white, 92 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.

One of the highlights of Buñuel's Mexican period is this delirious portrait of obsessive male desire which follows a wealthy man's descent from love at first sight to blind paranoiac fear that his young wife cannot meet his ever escalating standards of ethics and purity. Reportedly famed psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan's favorite film, El is overripe with unshackled Freudian symbols and oneiric energy. Arturo de Córdova gives one of the great and most memorable performances of Buñuel's entire cinema in his quaking portrait of a man gripped by the fear that his heart's darkest desires might one day actually come true.