From Eden to Mexico: Sex and Religion in the Cinema of Luis Buñuel

Abstract

Luis Buñuel’s films present an obsessive repetition of motifs, images and objects that create a personal and recognizable universe: the proliferation of shoes, mysterious boxes and insects have already become privileged objects of study. This paper analyzes a motif that is not merely an obsession and that despite its recurrence has gone unnoticed: the exchange of an apple in a context that evokes the rewriting of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. This motif, which appears for the first time in Buñuel’s Mexican period, is present in primarily nonreligious films and summarizes the particular vision of Buñuel about sex, eroticism and religion.