Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film

Linda Williams examines the theoretical and poetic writings of the Surrealists during the period from 1910 to 1930 and traces the emergence of a poetics of the cinematic image based upon the fluid associations of dreams and the unconscious. Incorporating both Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and Metz's methodology on film and dream rhetoric, she analyzes the structure of unconscious desire in four key Surrealist films by Luis Buñuel: Un chien andalou and l'Âge d'or (both co-scripted by Salvador Dali) and Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire.