El idiota superviviente: Artes y letras españolas frente a la "muerte del hombre," 1969-1990 (review)

262 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Acevedo-Muñoz presenrs a complex and nuanced account of Bufiuel's relations with and role wirhin rhe Mexican film industry of the period. Bunuel immersed himself in rhe modes of production and concomitant narrative and rhematic strategies of popular genre cinema, a process which, the book argues, allowed him to consolidate his earlier artistic foundations in surrealist aesthetics and ethnographic interests (most apparent in his 1932 documenrary Las hurdes) into a new hybrid, "popular surrealism ," that would transcend the Eurocentric elitism of the original French surrealists (2). Chapter three, devoted to Los olvidados, explores the convergence of specific national, transnational and biographical factors that led to the creation of perhaps the signal expression ofthat vision. Acevedo-Mufioz's reading oÃ- Los olvidados considers rhe film in tandem with Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude, published the same year as the film's release (1950). At the time of the film's premier Paz proved one of its strongest defenders against Mexican critics who lashed out against what diey saw as an outsider's pitiless portrayal of urban squalor and social decay. Looking beyond mere historical coincidence for the sources of rheir shared critical vision of post-Revolutionary Mexican society, Acevedo-Muñoz locates the roots of the affinities between Paz and Buñuel in their cosmopolitan intellectual backgrounds and similar interactions with the European surrealisr group. Both men develop the perspective necessary to formulate their critique of Mexican society and character, he argues, through the deployment of a form of "ethnographic surrealism" that would put familiar national realities under the microscope of a distancing aesthetic-analytic vision (64). Buñuel and México is particularly welcome for the attention it devotes to the majority of the director's Mexican films that were nor so overtly critical and that but for their illustrious parentage would have (and indeed have) been passed nearly undetected as one more family drama, melodrama, or comedy. AcevedoMu ñoz is careful not to make excessive claims for rhe subversive intent of films such as Susana, Una mujer sin amor or El rÃ-o y k muerte. As he notes with regards to Susana, many apparent signs of aesthetic or ideological dissidence, "the film's over-the-top flamboyance and aesthetics of excess [...] exemplified by [the protagonist's] willingness to frame herself as specracle," were in fact more the norm than the exception and "perfectly acceptable in contemporary Mexican melodrama" (89). What the author does claim for Bufiuel's films is a kind of prescient role in revealing the incipient crisis in rhe Mexican classic cinema model and the exhaustion of its narrative and thematic formula as well as its inadequacy in responding to a larger political and cultural crisis. He draws support for that position as well as for his overall argument regarding the fundamenral place of Buñuel within the history of Mexican cinema from the embrace of Buñuel by the "Nuevo Cine" generation of filmmakers and intellectuals in the 1960s. Acevedo-Muñoz finds powerful evidence Bufiuel's legacy in Mexico in the writings published in rhe short-lived journal of rhe same name by figures such as Paz, Carlos Monsiváis, Carlos Fuentes and Emilio GarcÃ-a Riera and later in rhe works of "New Cinema" filmmakers, Alberto Isaac, Felipe Cazáis, Paul Leduc, Arturo Ripstein and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. Kathleen M. Vernon State University of New York at Stony Brook El idiota superviviente: Artes y htras españolas frente a k "muerte del hombre, " 1969-1990 Ediciones Libertarias, 2003 Por Eugenia Afinoguénova En un libro de extraordinaria intensidad y reflexión, Eugenia Afinoguénova nos invira a pensar los lÃ-mites de la subjetividad contempor ánea y nos guÃ-a a través de una propuesta alternativa que las artes y las letras españolas produjeron desde finales de los sesenta hasta principio de los novenra. El tÃ-tulo traza la tensión Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 263 entre los dos conceptos centrales del libro: el idiota y la muerte del hombre. Según la autora, frente a la defunción del sujeto filosófico anunciada por el estrucruralismo franc...