In the preceding chapters I have compared the work of a number of directors, whose adaptations have been inspired by a number of writers, within the context of three topics – history, space and gender. In this final chapter I will take Buñuel’s adaptations of Galdós as a case study, not least because Buñuel and Galdós are among Spain’s most influential artists, in the national cinema and modern literature respectively. For this reason Buñuel’s Nazarín of 1958, in many respects a Mexican film, has been included. Unlike some of the adaptations considered in previous chapters, there is a wealth of criticism on Buñuel’s work – especially on Tristana, although the Mexican films are attracting increasing attention – thus I engage with these previous approaches accordingly.

Consideration of Luis Buñuel as literary adaptor may initially appear a contradiction. How can this reputedly irreverent subversive be associated with what has traditionally been considered, both in terms of form and content, a reactionary area of film art? Michael Wood highlights this discrepancy, noting that ‘for a powerfully original moviemaker, Buñuel works relatively rarely from original scripts’. Some twenty-one of Buñuel’s thirty-two films were adaptations, and the remaining were ‘full of allusions and borrowed themes’ (Wood 1981, 331). It is also noteworthy that in his investigation of the literary influences on Buñuel’s early development Antonio Monegal concludes ‘la poética que vertebra la obra de Buñuel no se agota en el ámbito del lenguaje cinematográfico, no es cuestión de “cine puro”, sino del más impuro de los cines, contaminado de literatura’ (1993, 15). The obvious riposte to this apparent questioning of the director’s originality is to emphasize the superiority of a Buñuelian adaptation compared to its literary source. Such an account of Buñuel as an adaptor therefore confirms his creative integrity.

It would be folly to discard this view outright; one need only consider Buñuel’s transformation of Joseph Kessel’s ‘trite’ (Buñuel quoted in Havard 1982, 64) Belle de jour (1929) into his potent attack on the bourgeoisie (Belle de jour 1966), or his knowing reconstruction of the exoticized Spain of Pierre Louÿs’s La Femme et le pantin (1895) (Kovács 1979–80) in his cerebral, surrealist Cet obscur objet du désir (1977). The director also leaves behind him a host of interviews and statements in which he frequently defines his source texts as poor, as if to discourage the would-be student of adaptation.