Social Distance and Desire: Isolation and Entrapment in the Films of Luis Buñuel

Abstract

Abstract: In discussions of pre-COVID films seeming to anticipate the anxieties of quarantine, Luis Buñuel's Exterminating Angel is a frequent point of reference. The plight of characters desperately unable to break free of a home has obvious parallels, but related themes of isolation and entrapment play themselves out in varied ways across the filmmaker's fifty-year oeuvre. This article explores these themes in three of Buñuel's Mexican films, comparing the scenario of The Exterminating Angel to those of the lesser-known films, The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1952) and Simon of the Desert (1965). Though they are stylistically diverse, the three films also share the incorporation of surrealist strategies, enabling them to provide a persuasively surrealist take on situations of social distance and desire.