Reframing Buñuel through Neuroscience

This essay uses neuroscience to reframe the work of filmmaker Luis Buñuel. It shows not only how certain concepts in neuroscience illuminate his narrative experimentation but also how his experimental narratives expand our understanding of human consciousness. Drawing on the translational writings of neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Antonio Damasio, who emphasize the role of narrative in the emergence of human consciousness, it tests these ideas against Buñuel's life-long experimentation with non-linear narratives, which interweave post-structuralist theories of reading, modernist literary experimentation, and traditional picaresque fiction. In the process, it shows how simple genres like dreams, serial autobiography, case studies, and picaresque fiction are all database narratives that are crucial to understanding the emergence of consciousness.