14 Apr 2011

Centro Jose Guerrero: Phantasmatic Scenes. A Secret Dialogue between Alfred Hitchcock and Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) and Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980) are two of the most influential filmmakers in cinema history. Each in his own way has caused an enormous cultural production. However, with rare exceptions – basically as a consequence of their collaborations with Dalí – the relation between the two, or their respective ghosts, has hardly been considered. However, early on Hitchcock was fully aware of Buñuel's work, which made a deep impression. Likewise, Buñuel was influenced by Hitchcock. They both shared contexts, traditions, and ideas on the relevance of film and a special attention to mise en scène.

This exhibition is an attempt to compare two of the greatest art works of the 20th century. The intention is to make an in-depth comparison, to bring out their points of contact, to deal with and make visible the manner in which they were mutually attentive and maintained a dialogue throughout the century that they filled with works at once dark and dazzling, to follow them, in short, along the unexpected paths of their mutual discernment. For if they were so intimately, profoundly and silently attentive to each other as we hope to show here, if each in his own work revealed the stamp and the debt due to the contemplation of the other's, Jesús González Requena has seen this as an invitation to use collage and digital technology in order to prolong a dialogue that was also the dialogue of the century.