Tempests of the impulse-soul : Brontëan elemental paradoxism in Buñuel's Abismos de Pasión

Abstract

Characterised by its obsession with what André Bazin terms ‘the cruelty of creation’, Buñuelian cinema looms in Gilles Deleuze’s movement-image typography as a cinema of ‘the impulse-image’, a cinema that transmutes its ‘cannibalistic, sado-masochistic, necrophiliac’ preoccupations into ‘spiritual impulses and perversions’. Oddly missing, however, from Deleuze’s analysis of Luis Buñuel’s impulse-vision are references to Abismos de Pasión. This Mexican film version of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, which Buñuel had originally conceived in 1932 with Pierre Unik, fulfilled his long-cherished desire to adapt what was for his Surrealist taste the Romantic impulse-text. Significantly, what Buñuel tells Julio Alejandro, his scriptwriter, roots his affinity with Brontë in her concern with ‘the perverse modes of behaviour’ which Deleuze attributes to him as impulse-director: ‘I’ve always liked the story of Wuthering Heights in which love is also enmity and destruction’. Equally crucial in this Deleuzian context is Charlotte Brontë’s testimony about her sister having written Wuthering Heights from ‘the impulse of nature’, for, as Roberto De Gaetano contends, ‘naturalistic worlds are pulsional worlds [and] destructiveness […] characterizes them’. Hence Brontë’s lovers whose ‘tempestuous spirit,’ H. M. Daleski observes, ‘is so insistent that it is imaged as destructive of containment’. Belonging to what Anthony Fragola similarly calls ‘the natural order of instinct’, as the hypertext’s post-credits inter-title actually emphasises, Buñuel’s counterparts likewise morph into what Daleski specifies as ‘[a] kind of powerful, natural, elemental force’. Or as Fragola lyrically puts it, they too manifest as ‘tempestuous storms at the height of passion’. David Cecil’s claim about Brontë, that she makes ‘landscape living’, is therefore equally applicable to Buñuel who, intuiting that she is a kindred artist, imbues Abismos de Pasión with her elemental impulse-soul.