Leonora Carrington on and off Screen: Intertextual and Intermedial Connections between the Artist’s Creative Practice and the Medium of Film

Abstract

This article explores the under-researched intertextual and intermedial connections between Leonora Carrington’s transdisciplinary practice and the medium of film. The analysis focuses on the artist’s cameo appearances in two 1960s Mexican productions—There Are No Thieves in This Village (Alberto Isaac 1964) and A Pure Soul (Juan Ibáñez 1965)—which mark her creative collaborations with Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel and Magic Realists Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Carrington’s cameo roles are analyzed within a network of intertextual translations between her visual and literary works that often mix autobiographical and fictional motifs. Moreover, it is argued that Carrington’s cinematic mediations employ the recurring Surrealist tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois satire. The article also investigates Carrington’s creative approach towards art directing and costume design, expressed in the Surrealist horror film The Mansion of Madness (Juan López Moctezuma 1973). The analysis examines the intermedial connections between Carrington’s practice of cinematic set design and her earlier experiments with theatrical scenography. Overall, this study aims to reveal undiscovered aspects of Leonora Carrington’s artistic identity and her transdisciplinary oeuvre.

Hans-Ulrich Obrist: I was also wondering if you had an interest in making films?

Leonora Carrington: No, never…absolutely not.

(Obrist [2005] 2013, p. 165)

1. Introduction

While the British-born/Mexican Surrealist, Leonora Carrington, has claimed no direct interest in expressing herself artistically through the medium of film, her vibrant life across Britain, France, Spain, the USA and Mexico has provoked scholars’ reactions that seem emblematic of the possible relationship between Carrington and cinema. Susan Aberth has described Carrington’s life as “cinematic in its scope and dramatic intensity” (Aberth 2004, p. 7), while Susan Rubin Suleiman has noted that “it would make a wonderful movie” (Suleiman 1993, p. 97). This article rather aims to explore the under-researched intertextual and intermedial connections between Carrington’s transdisciplinary oeuvre and film. The study focuses on the artist’s cameo appearances in two 1960s Mexican productions—There Are No Thieves in This Village (Alberto Isaac 1964, En este pueblo no hay ladrones) and A Pure Soul (Juan Ibáñez 1965, Un alma pura)—that mark the artist’s creative collaborations with Surrealist film director Luis Buñuel and Magic Realist novelists Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. Carrington’s cinematic mediations are explored within her Surrealist artistic practice that often fuses autobiographical elements with fictional motifs towards the creation of a complex intertextual expression. The discussion of Carrington’s cameo roles reveals under-recognized aspects of the artist’s transdisciplinary creativity and the production of her female Surrealist subjectivity in relation to the medium of film. Next, the analysis explores Carrington’s creative approach towards art directing and costume design, manifested in the Mexican surrealist art horror, The Mansion of Madness (Juan López Moctezuma 1973, La mansión de la locura), and contextualized within her experiments with theatrical scenography. Carrington’s art directing involves aesthetic references to her visual, literary and theatrical works, which expands her oeuvre into a network of intermedial translations across artistic disciplines.

The early scholarship on Carrington started with Whitney Chadwick’s feminist understanding of the active role of female artists associated with Surrealism. As Chadwick claims in Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (1985), Carrington’s background to a great extent embodies and typifies other female artists’ rebellion (Chadwick 1985, p. 67). Born in Lancashire in 1917 and determined to become an artist, the young Leonora Carrington left England in revolt against the patriarchal norms of her upper-class upbringing. In 1937, she joined her lover and collaborator Max Ernst in André Breton’s Surrealist circle in Paris, where she refused the gendered roles of ‘muse’ and femme-enfant, famously stating “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist” (Chadwick 1985, p. 66).

In Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (1990), Susan Suleiman analyzes further the subversive role of Carrington’s intertextual feminist critique. Departing from Gayatri Spivak’s argument that feminist expressions gain little from being associated with the work of male predecessors, Suleiman claims substantive ideological and existential differences between feminist avant-garde practices and the formal innovations by male avant-garde artists, whose works still reproduce patriarchal structures. In relation to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory on the subversive potential of carnivalesque discourse and the grotesque body, Suleiman defines the double-voicedness or double allegiance of female avant-garde expressions that mimic, re-use and make parody of the formal artistic achievement of male Surrealists in the construction of a feminist critique. “This double allegiance—on the one hand, to the formal experiments and some of the cultural aspirations of the historical male avant-gardes; on the other hand, to the feminist critique of dominant sexual ideologies, […] may be the most innovative as well as the most specifically “feminine” characteristic of contemporary experimental work by women artists,” as Suleiman argues (1990, pp. 162–63). Adopting Julia Kristeva’s conceptualization of intertextuality (also inspired by Bakhtin’s theories on carnival and dialogism), Suleiman addresses the subversive potential of Carrington’s intertextual novel, The Hearing Trumpet (written in the early 1960s), that can be understood as “a feminist parodic rewriting of, among other old stories, the quest of the Holy Grail” (Suleiman 1990, p. 144). In this context, it will be discussed to what extent Carrington’s cameo roles intertextually re-cycle recurring Surrealist tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois satire (e.g., emblematic of Buñuel’s cinematic work). At the same time, the analysis of Carrington’s art directing will explore the intertextual and intermedial connections with her multifaceted oeuvre.

Susan Aberth’s monograph, Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (2004), investigates, in depth, Carrington’s development from early creative efforts towards artistic maturity during the artist’s Mexican years. Before her self-exile to Mexico, Carrington’s cinematic life included a traumatic break-down and hospitalization in a mental institution in Spain after Ernst’s incarceration as an enemy alien by the French and later by the Nazi regime in 1939. In 1941, Leonora Carrington escaped to New York with the help of her first husband, the Mexican diplomat and journalist Renato Leduc. A year later, the couple moved to Mexico City, where they separated amicably. In 1946, Carrington married the Hungarian photographer Emerico “Chicki” Weisz with whom she had two sons, Gabriel and Pablo. In 2011, Carrington died in Mexico City as a renowned Mexican Surrealist, whose practice covered a plethora of artistic disciplines—painting, sculpture, tapestry, creative writing, theatrical experiments and cinematic involvements.

The interrelation between Carrington’s work and the medium of film has nevertheless gained little attention within the proliferation of research perspectives on her oeuvre in the last decade. In this sense, this study attempts to reveal unknown aspects of Carrington’s creative practice and artistic identity, which also contributes to understanding the development of Surrealism in Mexico.

As Gloria Orenstein points out, Antonin Artaud’s Mexican pilgrimage in 1936 and Andre Breton’s visit to Mexico in 1938, followed by the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City, had a profound significance for the internationalization of the Surrealist movement (Orenstein 1975, p. 6). During the 1930s and the 1940s, under President Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico opened its borders for the refugees and victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War (Rivera 2010, p. 136). Thus, European artists, writers and intellectuals in exile, such as Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel, poet Benjamin Peret, Leonora Carrington and painters Remedios Varo, Wolfgant Paalen and poet/artist Alice Rahon, gradually became an intrinsic part of Mexico’s cultural life, along with the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo and writer Octavio Paz. Although officially welcomed by the Mexican government, the European artist émigrés were initially viewed as foreign “colonizers” by the politicized Mexican avant-garde (Kunny 1996, p. 172). As Dawn Ades argues, the reception of surrealism in Latin America “has often been distorted by cultural nationalism and also needs to be disentangled from Magic Realism” (Ades 2010, p. 393). Ades considers that, in the context of Latin America, “surrealism has been accused of neo-colonialism, of being too fantastic, or not fantastic enough, too irrational, or not irrational enough” (Ades 2010, p. 395). The complex relationship between the European Surrealists in exile and the local Mexican avant-gardes is also embedded in the sharp distinction between the Surrealist marvelous as a “surrealist fantasy” and the Latin American lo real maravilloso as a “magic reality”—an opposition drawn by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier in 1949 (Ades 2010, p. 412). To a certain extent, the initial antagonistic relationship between the Mexican community and the European artist expatriates, nevertheless reached dialogical and collaborative transformations in the aftermath of the 1940 International Surrealist Exhibition in Mexico City (Cruz Porchini and Ortega Orozco 2017). Carrington’s associations with the Mexican intelligentsia in the 1950s and involvement with the Surrealist theatre group Poesía en Voz Alta (Poetry Out Loud) offered opportunities for collaborative projects and triggered her creative interest in theatrical forms (Kunny 1996, p. 174; Orenstein 1975, p. 6; Plunkett 2017, p. 74). Simultaneously, her close friendships and creative partnerships with Luis Buñuel and Chilean-born filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, documented in their memoirs, My Last Breath (1982) and The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky (2008), possibly initiated Carrington’s artistic involvement with cinema.

Within the sketched out conceptual framework and outlined art historical context, this research aims to expand the existing scholarship on Leonora Carrington’s versatile work towards uncovering the intertextual and intermedial links between her transdisciplinary practice and the medium of film. By tracing multiple creative collaborations and artistic trajectories, the article also attempts to reflect on Carrington’s artistic identity and her creative impact within the international avant-garde in Mexico.

2. Leonora Carrington’s Cameo Roles—Subversive Intertextuality and Carnivalesque Expression

The recent exhibition, Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales (2018), organized by Mexico City’s Museum of Modern Art (MAM), offers a specific focus and a thematic section on Carrington’s cinematic collaborations. The retrospective claims that Leonora Carrington makes an uncredited appearance in Luis Buñuel’s film Los olvidados (1950) which prompted her artistic involvements with cinema.1 Francisco Peredo Castro points out the intricacies of discovering Carrington’s personal motivation behind taking part in There Are No Thieves in This Village (1964) and A Pure Soul (1965). Castro describes Carrington’s participation as an act of “fraternal solidarity with her intellectual friends, artists and film crews” (Castro 2018, p. 321). Furthermore, Castro suggests that Leonora Carrington’s interest in the films could be ascribed to an empathic attitude towards the protagonists of both stories and the fact that they “alluded to deep complexities in the human soul” (Castro 2018, p. 328). From a different perspective, this article argues that Carrington’s cameo roles could be rather studied within a network of intertextual references to her overall oeuvre and within the context of shared creative approaches among representatives of 1960s Mexican intelligentsia, such as Luis Buñuel.

Buñuel’s third Mexican film, Los olvidados (1950, The Young and the Damned), is an urban drama that represents a stark and realistic depiction of poverty and crime, incest and domestic abuse through the misfortunes of a group of destitute children in Mexico City slums. Initially received as an insult on Mexican national identity, the film obtained critical acclaim after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951 and Octavio Paz praised Buñuel’s grasp of Mexican sensitivity (Acevedo-Muños 2003, p. 74). While Los olvidados functioned as a critique of moral decay in Mexican urbanized society, its cinematic language introduced a novel approach towards the Mexican social reality that marked a turning point towards a “new wave” of cinematic expressions. Buñuel’s Mexican films are central for understanding the two defining periods of Mexican cinema—the Classical, dominated by the representation and the construction of national myths, and the “New Cinema” of the 1960s (Acevedo-Muños 2003, p. 30). The New Cinema emerged as a cinephile group, called El Grupo Nuevo Cine, composed of young intellectuals and filmmakers who expressed criticism towards the state of Mexican national cinema and published a manifesto in 1961 that urged for the creation of a national cinematheque and an institution to teach filmmaking, as well as a network of cineclubs and specialist publications that would generate a wave of new directors, critics and informed spectators (Ramírez Berg 1992, p. 46; Flaherty 2016, p. 182). The Nuevo Cine collective was influenced by Buñuel’s work and included film critics Carlos Monsivais and Emilio García Riera, cinematographer Rafael Corkidi and director Alberto Isaac, among others, whose films advocated creative collaborations with artists and émigré intellectuals, such as Leonora Carrington. The Nuevo Cine group opposed the bureaucratic/business structures in the official agencies and the cultural imperialism exerted by Hollywood, responsible for the mainstream Mexican film culture at the time. The artistic objective of this young generation of filmmakers was to establish a novel and honest approach towards Mexican social reality by drawing upon Italian neo-realism, the French New Wave, the new American directors, as well as Brazilian Cinema Novo and the emerging innovative and independent filmmaking by contemporary Cuban, Chilean and Bolivian directors (Mora 1997, pp. 44–45). The group’s manifesto aimed to “ensure the filmmakers’ freedom of expression and technical innovation outside the structures of the Mexican film industry [and] foster a democratizing cultural space within Mexico’s cinema” (Baugh 2004, p. 26). Nuevo Cine’s formative period between 1960 and 1965 advanced the emergence of a larger transformative project that continued in the years to follow—the New Mexican Cinema of the late 1960s and the 1970s. Also known as the cinema of apertura democrática (democratic liberalization), the New Mexican Cinema was a political project and an economic initiative of President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–1976), who aspired to open up new markets for Mexican film-making (Treviño 1979, pp. 27–28). In the same vein, the New Mexican Cinema directors created “films that dealt frankly with social issues and that were more politically daring, more sexually explicit, and to a degree narratively and aesthetically experimental” (Ramírez Berg 1992, p. 29).

There Are No Thieves in This Village (1964, En este pueblo no hay ladrones,) directed by Alberto Isaac thematically and aesthetically resembles Buñuel’s Los olvidados. The film represents the emerging turn towards “a ‘new’ Mexican cinema, bringing refreshment to a stagnant film industry,” and it keeps up with Alberto Isaac’s status as an avant-garde director and “his own philosophy of ‘seeking some new thing’” (Schwartz 1997, p. 91). Based upon a story by the not yet famous Colombian writer and Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the film follows the experiences of unemployed and unfaithful Damaso and his pregnant and devoted wife, Ana, set in a poor Mexican village. One night, Damaso breaks into the local pool parlor and steals the village’s only billiard balls. The owner of the tavern takes advantage of the situation and claims the loss of additional 200 pesos that had never been in his possession. Damaso’s anonymous act initiates a chain of accusations, xenophobia and aggression targeting a foreigner as the criminal. The theft destroys the mundane life of the village, so that Damaso gradually loses enthusiasm to sell the billiard balls and turn his deed into a profitable business. The guilt felt by his wife, Ana, convinces him further to return the stolen items and restore peace. However, in the act of bringing back the billiard balls, Damaso gets caught and convicted for stealing the fictitious amount of money.

Shot in black and white and slow pace, Alberto Isaac’s debut film won the second prize in the 1965 First Contest of Experimental Cinema launched a year earlier by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica, or STPC (Union of Cinematic Production Workers). The competition publicly introduced some of the new directors who would later be incorporated into the New Mexican Cinema. As Jesús Salvador Treviño has argued, “the talent, themes and potential evident in such films as La formula secreta by Rubén Gámaz and En este pueblo no hay ladrones by Alberto Isaac, both high point winners in the contest, signaled that new cinema was indeed in the offing” (Treviño 1979, p. 27). There Are No Thieves in This Village became known for Isaac’s avant-garde cinematic language and the cameo performances by a number of representatives of 1960s Mexican intelligentsia as featured in the film. The cast includes Gabriel Garcia Marquez himself (in his first of only two cinematic appearances in his career), the esteemed writer Juan Rulfo, journalist and critic Carlos Monsivais, cartoonists Ernesto Garcia Cabral and Abel Quezada, film director Arturo Ripstein, as well as Luis Buñuel and Leonora Carrington—both of whom share the same episode. Buñuel performs a vigorous religious doublespeak as a priest, whose Sunday sermon is attended by a group of devout women, among whom the camera traces Leonora Carrington in the role of a pensive widow. The Sunday mass episode was specifically developed by Alberto Isaac and writer/film critic Emilio Garcia Riera for the cinematic adaptation of the original storyline. In the film, Marquez humorously appears as the ticket vendor of the local makeshift cinema, who sporadically falls asleep. Along similar lines, Buñuel and Carrington’s cameos refer to a broader range of satirical and subversive anti-Catholic repertoires that recur throughout their individual Surrealist oeuvres.

Buñuel’s sacrilegious performance as a priest resembles his favorite childhood game depicted in his memoir, My Last Breath (1982): “I used to play at celebrating Mass in the attic of our house, with my sisters as attendants. I even owned an alb, and a collection of religious artifacts made from lead.” (Buñuel [1982] 1985, p. 12) Moreover, he recounts his love to disguise himself as a priest and “walk around the city—a felony punishable by five years in jail” (Buñuel [1982] 1985, p. 227). The described act resonates with an episode in Un Chien Andalou (1929, An Andalusian Dog)—after the famous eye-slitting scene, the main male character is seen bicycling through the streets in a nun-like attire. Educated by Jesuits and growing up opposite the town’s church (also having a priest for an uncle), Buñuel establishes the use of religious tropes as a hallmark of his anti-Catholic satire. The recurring image of the priest—from the caricature of a religious congregation at the Coliseum evocative of imaginary Vatican Olympic Games in L’Age D’Or (1930, The Golden Age) to the hypocritical priests in his Mexican productions Nazarin (1959) and Simon of the Desert (1965, Simón del desierto)—has marked his subversive approach and attempt to expose the insincerity of the Church as an institution that reproduces bourgeois power structures. In this context, Buñuel’s cameo appearance in There Are No Thieves in This Village can be understood as a version of his anti-Catholic subversion and a form of embodied satire.

Leonora Carrington’s upbringing in the mores of Catholicism and her regular expulsions from Catholic convents, in a similar way, triggered her distrust of the Catholic Church. Her “antipathy would last a lifetime, fuelled later by Surrealism’s anti-clerical stance, and would manifest itself in bitingly satirical depictions of priests in both her writings and artwork,” as Susan Aberth argues (Aberth 2004, p. 18). In this regard, Tara Plunkett has discussed the artist’s humor at the expense of the Catholic Church in several theatre plays authored by Leonora Carrington. El Santo Cuerpo Grasoso (The Holy Oily Body), co-written with Carrington’s close friend, artist and collaborator Remedios Varo, is a theatre script of an un-staged play that was created circa 1947. Carrington and Varo’s parody revolves around the invention of a ‘holy’ substance that reveals one’s true soul when applied to the subject’s buttocks. Likewise, Carrington’s one-act play, The Invention of Mole (c. 1960), satirically employs the figure of an archbishop who claims that ordinary people have no rights in performing holy deeds, such as the invention of the Mexican sauce, mole (Plunkett 2017, pp. 78–79).

In Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the Avant-Garde (1990), Susan Rubin Suleiman specifically analyzes the anti-patriarchal and anti-Christian subversion of Leonora Carrington’s intertextual novel, The Hearing Trumpet, published in 1976. The protagonist—ninety-two-year-old Marian Leatherby, born in England but living in a country whose description resembles Mexico—is sent to a home for elderly ladies by her son Galahad and his family. In her new home, Marian herself is destined to succeed in a fantastic quest for the Holy Grail. In her discussion of The Hearing Trumpet, Suleiman suggests the figure of the ‘laughing mother’ as an extension of Hélène Cixous’s Laugh of the Medusa (1975), and as a symbol of female avant-garde playfulness and feminist social critique, which resists patriarchal ideology (Suleiman 1990, pp. 141–80). Moreover, Carrington’s feminist parody fuses the story of the nonagenarian Marian Leatherby (Carrington’s alter ego, although she wrote the novel in her late thirties) with the framed narrative of Dona Rosalinda—the winking nun from a painting on the wall, who is a devotee of “the Goddess” and aims to combat the male-centric model of Christianity together with her homosexual friend, the bishop of Trêves les Frêles. In caveat, it should be noted that Carrington’s emancipatory depiction of elderly women, or crones, can also be discovered in her paintings, The Magdalens (1986) and Kron Flower (1987). Thus, Carrington’s cameo performance as a widow intertextually relates to her literary and visual works.

As Suleiman notes further, Monty Python’s version of the Grail legend—Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) that appeared relatively at the same time as The Hearing Trumpet’s publication in England—ends with the demystification of the actors’ staged fictional world and a return to reality. Contrarily, Carrington’s own parody of Grail literature ends in “a quite unique (but still humorous) surreality” (Suleiman 1990, p. 177). Thus, within the same conceptual dimensions, Carrington’s carnivalesque cameo performance as a widow attending Buñuel’s satirical sermon in There Are No Thieves in This Village can be understood as an artistic gesture that extends her subversive intertextual practice towards the film medium.

Carrington also makes a carnivalesque cameo appearance in A Pure Soul (1965), directed by Juan Ibáñez and based on Carlos Fuentes homonymous short story. The film traces the dark and complicated relationship of Claudia and her brother and lover, Juan Luis. Claudia acts as the narrator whose intimate letters reveal that Juan Luis leaves Mexico City for a new job at the United Nations headquarters in New York, where he meets and falls in love with a girl, Claire, who resembles Claudia. While the couple expects a child, Claudia’s jealousy escalates and prevents Juan Luis from committing. The siblings’ well-off parents—Leonora Carrington appears in the role of a refined and conservative mother and wife—further insist on the lovers’ separation. Consequently, Claire takes her own life, followed by Juan Luis, whose suicide leaves Claudia with regret for provoking both deaths.

A Pure Soul is the second of two medium length episodes compiled under the title Los bienamados (1965, The Beloved). The first novel Tajimara, directed by Juan Jose Gurrola, opens the topic of forbidden love and disenchantment in a modern world that Ibáñez’s film takes up further. Ibáñez’s contribution to Los bienamados, similarly to En este pueblo no hay ladrones, participated in the 1965 First Contest of Experimental Cinema and shared the third price (Flaherty 2016, p. 188). A Pure Soul also marked the beginning of Ibáñez and Fuentes’ collaboration, whose later film, Los caifanes (1967, The Outsiders), won international recognition for introducing innovative visual textures and soundscapes. The creative partnership between Juan Ibáñez and Carlos Fuentes reflects one of Nuevo Cine’s innovative trends, “the encouragement of cinematic rendering of important Mexican and Latin American literary works,” which is also tangible in Alberto Isaac’s En este pueblo no hay ladrones as an adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story (Treviño 1979, p. 36). Thus, Carrington’s cinematic mediations in both films entail shared creative approaches with the representatives and the associates of the Nuevo Cine group.

The indirect creative collaboration between Carlos Fuentes and Leonora Carrington can also be traced in his contribution to the catalogue of Carrington’s 1965 solo exhibition at the Anglo-Mexican Institute of Culture, where he describes her work as an “ironical sorcery” (Fuentes 1965, p. 5). As Fuentes states further, “all Leonora Carrington’s art is a gay, diabolical and persistent struggle against orthodoxy, which Leonora conquers and disperses with imagination, always multiple and singular, an imagination which she communicates with a loving pride” (Fuentes 1965, p. 6). Similarly, Carrington’s cameo performance as Claudia and Juan Luis’ conservative mother in A Pure Soul signals her self-conscious and ironic imagination that aims to destabilize bourgeois and patriarchal mores by employing personal motifs and representing the “Self as Other”—categorized by Whitney Chadwick as an artistic strategy of female Surrealist self-representation. Chadwick has recognized that women Surrealist artists have reproduced themselves in a multiplicity of roles “within the signs of elaborately coded femininity” in order to conquer the social institutions—family, state, and church—that regulate the place of women within patriarchy (Chadwick 1998, p. 11). As Chadwick argues, “masking, masquerade, and performance have all proved crucial for the production of feminine subjectivity, through active agency” (Chadwick 1998, p. 22).

In this regard, in July 1962, the Iconographia Snobarium issue of the avant-garde Mexican journal S.NOB featured an anonymous photomontage portrait of Leonora Carrington, who was a regular contributor to the publication. “An oval vignette dominates the double-page spread with an ironic mood of staged formality and snobbish disdain—and yet, instead of Carrington’s own visage, an unfamiliar masculine face scowls at the viewer,” as Abigail Susik describes the composition (Susik 2017, p. 105). According to Susik, this satirical montage debunks iconicity as patriarchal and deliberately relates to Marcel Duchamp’s photographic representation as his female alter ego, Rrose Sélavy (Susik 2017, p. 109). The oval photograph of Duchamp posing in women’s clothes was taken by Man Ray circa 1920–1921 (Rubin 1968, pp. 17–19). Thus, the same Dadaist practice of fabricating personalities could be rediscovered in the prankish Iconographia Snobarium photo collage that appropriates Carrington’s biography. The portrait ridicules her personal history as a daughter of a wealthy English textile merchant and a reluctant debutante who revolted against the patriarchal and bourgeois norms of her upper-class background—a motif that recurs in Carrington’s painting, Self-Portrait/Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–1938), and her short story, The Debutante (1937–1938), featured by André Breton in his Anthology of Black Humour (1940). While in The Debutante, the artist represents herself as a young lady refusing to comply with the restrictions of imposed marriage, in A Pure Soul Carrington reverses the code and parodies her biographical stance by entering the role of a compliant mother and wife. The anti-patriarchal and counter-Catholic nuances of her role involve the episodes of strolling around accompanied by her serious husband and kissing the hand of a priest whom they meet. In this sense, Carrington’s performance in A Pure Soul once again functions as an expression of the artist’s subversive irony and embodies Suleiman’s conceptualization of ‘the laugh of the mother.’

Carrington’s cameo appearances in Alberto Isaac and Juan Ibáñez’s films signal that her artistic identity is defined by multiple creative collaborations and shared creative approaches with the representatives of the 1960s Mexican intelligentsia. As Jonathan P. Eburne and Catriona McAra have argued, “Leonora Carrington reveals much about the very nature of the international avant-garde activity itself: experimental art and thought demanded persistent reflection on the vicissitudes of modern life” (Eburne and McAra 2017, p. 10). In this respect, Carrington’s on-screen appearances can be understood as an extension of her creative experiments across disciplines and mediums of artistic expression.

3. Art Directing—Intertextual Translations between Carrington’s Paintings and Cinematic Set Design

Leonora Carrington’s practice of art directing, expressed in The Mansion of Madness (1973, La mansión de la locura), was introduced to the general public within the 2015 TATE Liverpool exhibition, Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline. The retrospective aimed at uncovering the artist’s multifaceted oeuvre and initiated curatorial and scholarly interests on the relation between Carrington’s work and the medium of film. The Mansion of Madness is Juan López Moctezuma’s directorial debut—an art-horror loosely based on Edgar Allan Poe’s short story, The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether (1845). Created under the artistic supervision of Leonora Carrington and her son Gabriel Weisz (responsible for the realization of the designed sets), the film indirectly resonates with the title of Carrington’s own story, The House of Fear (1938), and her memoir, Down Below (1943), that retells her traumatic experience of madness and hospitalization in a mental asylum in Santander, Spain, in 1940. Carrington’s autobiographical narrative has often been read as a conceptual response to André Breton’s novel, Nadja (1928), that, as Katharine Conley has argued, represents Surrealists’ romanticized perspective on female mental instability (Conley 1996, p. 22). Thus, Down Below can be recognized as an authentic and visceral version of the re-enactment and mimicry of insanity that Surrealists practiced as a source of creative inspiration.

Juan López Moctezuma’s perspective on the subject of madness follows the journey of the newspaper journalist Gaston LeBlanc to a peculiar mental sanatorium set in 19th-century France. Gaston returns from a long exile in America, on the commission to report the unconventional methods of the infamous Dr. Maillard whose treatment encourages patients to express their innermost idiosyncrasies. Soon after arrival, Gaston reveals that the eccentric doctor’s identity is the performed alter ego of Raul Fragonard—one of the asylum’s inmates who, with a group of accomplices, has locked up the psychiatrists and overtaken the madhouse. Gaston and Eugenie, the daughter of the incarcerated actual Dr. Maillard, attempt a futile escape, which results in being captured and sentenced to death. Meanwhile, the imprisoned former guards succeed in breaking free and stage a counter-revolt that leads to Gaston and Eugenie’s release and Fragonard’s dramatic end.

The Mansion of Madness’ depictions of excessive human irrationality mixed with elements of violence, religious iconoclasm and eroticism builds on the aesthetic language of Panic Theatre—a movement and artistic collective established by the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal, the Chilean-born director Alejandro Jodorowsky and the French artist Roland Topor in Paris in 1962. Inspired by Buñuel’s Surrealist films, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and its predecessor the Grand-Guignol (the Parisian theatre of horror that staged Poe’s The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether in 1903), the movement was named after the Greek mythological god Pan and aimed at creating deliberately shocking grotesque comedies (Marwick 2002, pp. 78–80; Hand and Wilson 2016, pp. 1–9). In this context, The Mansion of Madness itself could be understood as a political grotesque that renders any system of control as suppressive and brutal. The film’s representation of carnivalesque (in Bakhtinian sense) anarchy and surrealist phantasmagoria attempts an artistic subversion of any form of oppression. Therefore, it can be noted that The Mansion of Madness conceptually corresponds to Leonora Carrington’s subversive surrealism.

Juan López Moctezuma’s involvement with the Panic collective can be traced back to Jodorowsky’s full-length cinematic debut, Fando y Lyz (1967)—based on Fernando Arrabal’s play and produced by Moctezuma himself. This creative exchange of ideas and similar aesthetic endeavors continues in The Mansion of Madness, which employs the very same cinematographer (Rafael Corkidi) and composer (Nacho Mendez) who worked on Jodorowsky’s cult film, El Topo (1969). In addition, both films share the same producer (Roberto Viskin), as well as some of the performers and actors appearing as extras in each of the productions. To a great extent, the aesthetic parallels between Moctezuma and Jodorowsky’s cinematic expressions could be ascribed to comparable visual compositions of the mise-en-scène influenced by Leonora Carrington’s imagery. Moreover, the similarities between Jodorowsky and Moctezuma’s films involve each director’s specific approach of re-using Bunuelian motifs and tropes.

The Mansion of Madness stars Claudio Brook as Dr. Maillard/Fragonard—the actor who regularly performs in Luis Buñuel’s films. Brook plays the protagonist in the anti-Catholic satire Simon of the Desert (1965, Simón del desierto) and previously appears in Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962, El ángel exterminador). Simon of the Desert tells the story of a religious recluse and healer—a character based on the fifth-century Syrian saint Simeon Stylites (Saxton 2013, p. 420). In the opening scene, the ascetic Simon performs a miracle and cures the amputated hands of a robber—a motif that Moctezuma takes up further, reverses and ridicules in the figure of the hedonistic Dr. Maillard and his unorthodox curing methods. Thus, Moctezuma employs the ‘residues of meanings’ and ‘symbolic resonances’ of Claudio Brook’s Bunuelian role—a creative strategy that Jeffrey Bussolini has defined as intertextuality of casting in relation to Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva’s theorizations on the translation of significations across texts (Bussolini 2013). The Mansion of Madness’ intertextual network of references expands into Moctezuma’s female vampire film Alucarda (1977, Sisters of Satan) that features Claudio Brook in the role of the rational physician, Dr. Oszek, propagating science instead of religion in curing diabolic Alucarda and her resurrected female friend from supernatural powers and demonic possessions. Brook also appears in the horror drama Cronos (1993) by Guillermo del Toro, who has commented on the formative effect of Moctezuma’s films (and specifically Alucarda) on his own creative process (Del Toro 2004). As Rob Stone has commented, “horror had always had its claws into Surrealism, with the more preposterous representations of monsters and ghouls providing a superficial frisson of contact with the unknown” (Stone 2007, p. 32). A corresponding relationship between the horror genre and Surrealism can be traced within Carrington’s work, but rather as an expression of her creative affinity with esotericism.

The Mansion of Madness owes its Surrealist nuances and mystic ambience to Leonora Carrington’s artistic supervision that represents her own interests in alchemy, magic, astrology and occult practices as Tarot and I Ching (the Chinese Book of Changes). As Jonathan P. Eburne has noted, Carrington’s esoteric surrealism is “multifariously allusive”—it simultaneously draws from “continental philosophy and contemporary cosmology, from the writings of Mabille, Carl Jung, George Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky and Robert Graves, as well as from fairy tales, alchemical treatises, Buddhist and pre-Columbian religion and Celtic myth” (Eburne 2017, p. 142). Moreover, Ernest Schonfield has argued that via the mixture of various mythological traditions, Carrington establishes her own form of mythopoesis across paintings and literary texts (Schonfield 2010, pp. 250–55). The famously recognized influences on her visual expressions include Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, while her texts borrow from Jonathan Swift and Lewis Carroll, as Ara H. Merjian has discussed further (Merjian 2017, pp. 39–56). Seán Kissane has suggested certain visual parallels between Carrington’s work and William Blake’s illustrations of Dante Alighieri’s The Devine Comedy (1320) dating from 1862 (Kissane 2014, p. 55). Carrington’s affinity with Blake has been previously tackled by her close friend and art collector, Edward James (Ades 2014, p. 104). It could also be acknowledged that Leonora Carrington’s hybrid creatures, often featuring anthropomorphic bodies with floral or zoomorphic heads, such as in the triptych Took My Way Down, Like a Messenger, to the Deep (1977), to a certain extent resemble H.P. Lovecraft’s drawings of fantastic monsters. As a devoted Lovecraftian, Guillermo del Toro has credited the influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s visuals on his own cinematic imagination (Del Toro 2013, 2016)—a connection that signals and explains possible allusions between Del Toro and Carrington’s visual systems.

The hypothetical interrelation between Carrington’s imagery and Del Toro’s artistic imagination has been suggested by Francisco Peredo Castro, although he recognizes no concrete published evidence of Carrington’s influence on Del Toro’s films. Nevertheless, Castro considers that “various associations are plausible between Leonora Carrington’s mythical/fantastic universe and her artwork in general, in The Mansion of Madness, as well as in some of the elements cited in Guillermo del Toro’s film [Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)]” (Castro 2018, pp. 339–40). According to Castro, the parallels between Pan’s Labyrinth and Carrington’s work involve the labyrinth itself, the stone arch/doorway, the tree as a portal between fantasy and reality, as well as the character of the faun (a mythological creature) and the magical rituals performed by the protagonists (Castro 2018, pp. 339–40). Castro’s analysis identifies Carrington’s impact in The Mansion of Madness within the “very peculiar initial credit sequence, with deformations and coloring of the imagery (in red), […] the forest, the fog, and the white horses that advance among beams of light” (Castro 2018, p. 331). From another perspective, it can be observed that the mise-en-scène of The Mansion of Madness features ruined gallery spaces and hollowed-out industrial settings that evoke the architectural elements and color tonality of Leonora Carrington’s paintings, Samain (1951), The Flying Ur Jar (1953), El Rarvarok (1963) and Forbidden Fruit (1969).

Carrington’s earlier attempts of connecting her creative output to film art direction date to the 1946-47 Bel Ami International Art Competition. The contest and organized exhibition presented the works of eleven distinguished American and European artists, among whom Leonora Carrington, Salvador Dali, Paul Delvaux, Max Ernst, and Dorothea Tanning. The exhibited paintings on the given topic of The Temptation of St. Anthony competed for the final selection of a single tableau to “serve a dramatic purpose” in Albert Lewin and David L. Loew’s motion-picture The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947), based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1885 novel (Lewin 1947, p. 5). Albert Lewin’s previous movies, The Moon and Sixpence (1942) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), followed a similar approach of using paintings as central components of the diegesis and the mise-en-scène. The renowned jury including Marcel Duchamp, Alfred H. Barr and Sidney Janis awarded Max Ernst’s artistic interpretation of the subject (Lewin 1947, pp. 5–8). As Susan Aberth has observed, Leonora Carrington’s entry to the completion completion—The Temptation of St. Anthony (1947)—borrowed many of its compositional elements from Hieronymus Bosch’s homonymous painting (c. 1500s) (Aberth 2004, p. 70). Specifically, in The Mansion of Madness, the influence of Carrington’s spatial imagination, that inherits Bosch and Bruegels’ complex multi-character compositions, can be grasped within the framing of the group scenes. Thus, it can be concluded that Carrington’s creative practice of art directing establishes intertextual and intermedial references between her paintings and cinematic scenography.

4. Costume Design—Intertextual and Intermedial Correspondences between Carrington’s Theatrical Experiments and Film

Carrington’s intertextual symbolic system created across her visual and literary expressions becomes obvious in the costume design of the characters inhabiting The Mansion of Madness. The most bizarre representatives of the sanatorium include a malicious spiritual leader in a red cape with spiral rope embroidery on the chest, a bird-like man named Mr. Chicken who lives in a henhouse and behaves like a fowl, a plethora of hysterical patients and heroines who perform suggestive ritual dances and puppetry shows for the entertainment of Dr. Maillard. The costume of the mystic villain bears formal similarities to Alfred Jarry’s personage Ubu Roi (King Ubu), depicted in a woodcut by Jarry as an obese man wearing a cloak with a large spiral ornament on the front. Alfred Jarry’s satirical farce Ubu Roi (first staged in 1896) as a stark critique on bourgeois morality was formative for Dada and Surrealism, Antonin Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty and the Theatre of the Absurd, and Fernado Arrabal’s Panic movement (Knopf 2001, pp. 77–80). Max Ernst (among other Surrealist painters, such as Joan Miró, Dora Maar and Sebastian Matta) creatively re-appropriated Ubu Roi in the painting Ubu Imperator (1923) (Hubert 1978, pp. 259–78). Moreover, in 1937, Ernst designed the sets for the continuation of the play Ubu in Chains/Ubu Enchaîné (Schumacher 1984, p. 112). Possibly, Ernst created the sets with Leonora Carrington’s assistance as the recent exhibition catalogue, Surrealist Women and Their Connection with Catalonia, points out (Galeria Mayoral 2017, pp. 110–11). This potential creative collaboration could be understood as the beginning of Carrington’s creative experiments with scenography and costume design. Often Leonora Carrington’s personages, who traverse the boundaries between her paintings and written narratives, emerge in distinctive and extraordinary outfits that render the characters’ temperaments and spiritual states. In a similar manner, the costume design for The Mansion of Madness is interwoven with the dramatic development of the protagonists—an interconnection, which is mostly tangible in the identity of Mr. Chicken.2 Within Carrington’s visual grammar, birds are often depicted as black crows (reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 poem The Raven), such as in the paintings Self-Portrait in Orthopedic Black Tie (1973), Tribeckoning (1983) and Crow Catcher (1990). At the same time, Mr. Chicken’s attire indirectly resonates with Carrington’s Portrait of Max Ernst (1939) that shows Ernst in a mantle of crimson feathers as a reference to his chosen animal alter-ego Lop Lop—The Bird Superior. Comparable bird-like costumes also appear in Carrington’s short stories. In The House of Fear (1938), the mistress of the castle wears a fluttering gown “made of live bats sewn together by their wings” (Carrington [1938] 1988, p. 31). In The Sisters (1939), the main heroine Juniper is a female vampire (as Moctezuma’s Alucarda) and an avian creature—“feathers grew from her shoulder and around her breasts. Her white arms were neither wings, nor arms” (Carrington [1939] 2017, p. 91). Thus, it can be suggested that in intermedial order, Carrington has employed certain elements from her paintings and fiction in the visual construction of The Mansion of Madness’ characters.

Moctezuma’s The Mansion of Madness also features another recurring motif from Carrington’s work—the white horse—the artist’s totemic animal and spiritual alter-ego. As Susan Aberth has argued, horses occupy a central place in Carrington’s overall oeuvre, while the importance of the white horse as a feminine archetype in her work can be ascribed to Carrington’s identification with the Celtic deity Epona (supposedly linked to the folktale of Lady Godiva) after reading Robert Graves’ 1948 Celtic study The White Goddess (Aberth 2004, pp. 32–33). In Self-Portrait/Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–1938) and the short story The Oval Lady (1937–1938), the white horse represents Carrington’s rebellious nature and desire to break free from social, sexual and gendered restrictions. In The Oval Lady, the protagonist Lucretia is able to sporadically metamorphose into a white horse, while she also enjoys playing with a rocking horse named Tartar—a game that is strictly forbidden by her suppressive father. He punishes his daughter’s frivolous behavior and unwillingness to obey to the rules by burning down her favorite toy that suffers the flames as a real animal. The very same plot is re-contextualized in Carrington’s theatre play, Penelopé, that she wrote in 1946. Carrington also created sets and costumes for this script, which was later staged by Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1957. Marina Warner comments that the theatre adaptation of the story “ends on a new note of savage optimism,” since the heroine escapes on Tartar’s back and the repressive father commits suicide (Warner [1987] 1989, p. 20). Furthermore, it should be noted that the play’s intertextual title—referencing the Greek myth of Ulysses’s wife as a symbol of marital fidelity—already suggests subversion of patriarchal norms.

The visual aspects of Carrington’s stage design of the performance directed by Jodorowsky feature elements of Tarot cards from the major arcana, such as The Hanged Man, The Magic Wand and The World. Circa 1950, Carrington created her own Tarot deck that represents a synthesized version of her visual style and recurring themes. In his autobiography, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro Jodorowsky (2008), the former mime and future cult director recounts several ritualistic meetings with Leonora Carrington, who at that time served as his spiritual guide (Jodorowsky 2008, pp. 24–42). Jodorowsky acknowledges Carrington’s esoteric influence for sharing with him the Tarot symbolism, which has become the basis for his popular philosophy and practice of psychomagic (Barton-Fumo 2012; Jodorowsky [2009] 2018, p. 417). In parallel, Juan López Moctezuma’s employment of Tarot-like archetypes could be mapped within The Mansion of Madness’s characters and plot.

Jodorowsky and Carrington’s collaboration also includes the un-staged short operetta, La princesa Araña: asquerosa operetta Surrealista para niños mutantes (1957–1958, The Spider Princess: A Disgusting Surrealist Operetta for Mutant Children), as Abigail Susik points out. Moreover, Susik has suggested that Carrington’s works have influenced Jodorowsky’s films (Susik 2017, pp. 120–25). Drawing upon this observation, it can be argued further that specifically The Holly Mountain (1973), described by Jodorowsky as “an anthology of symbols,” (Cobb 2007, p. 275) establishes aesthetic parallels with Carrington’s oeuvre by employing certain elements from her mythopoesis and visual expression.

Within her collaborations with the theatre group Poesía en Voz Alta, Leonora Carrington also created decors and costumes for Octavio Paz’s play La fille de Rappaccini (1956), based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story, Rappaccini’s Daughter (Orenstein 1975, p. 73). In addition, her theatre-related artistic output includes designs for two Shakespearean productions in Mexico—papier-mâché masks for The Tempest (1959) and costume drawings for Much Ado About Nothing (1962), presented within the TATE Liverpool retrospective, Leonora Carrington: Transgressing Discipline (2015), and bricolage masks for her eco-feminist play, Opus Siniestrus (1969), staged for the first time within the recent exhibition, Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales (2018), at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Mexico City. Both exhibitions clearly uncover Carrington’s multifaceted practice in relation to the mediums of theatre and cinema, evoking a network of intermedial and intertextual translations between her creative expressions across artistic disciplines. Moreover, the employed exhibition narratives and specific curatorial methods shape the discursive construction of Leonora Carrington’s artistic identity—a research perspective that deserves further investigation in its own right.

5. Conclusions

The specific objective of this article has been to explore the under-researched intertextual and intermedial translations between Leonora Carrington’s creative practice and the medium of film. It has been argued that Carrington’s cinematic mediations, similar to her visual artworks and literary texts, fuse autobiographical elements with fictional motifs towards the creation of a complex intertextual symbolic system. In this respect, Carrington’s cameo roles in There Are No Thieves in This Village (Alberto Isaac 1964) and A Pure Soul (Juan Ibáñez 1965) express self-conscious irony and function as forms of artistic subversion. In There Are No Thieves in This Village, Leonora Carrington shares an episode with Luis Buñuel who sarcastically performs as a sermonizing priest, while she plays an attentive widow—a creative expression that re-cycles the recurring Surrealist tropes of anti-Catholic and anti-bourgeois satire and employs the subversive intertextuality (in Suleiman’s terms) of Carrington’s novel The Hearing Trumpet (1960s). Next, in A Pure Soul, Leonora Carrington emerges as a conservative mother and wife—a cinematic appearance, which potentially parodies the autobiographical motifs from her short story The Debutante (1937–1938) and her self-portrait Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–1938). Thus, Carrington masquerades the “Self as Other”—an artistic strategy which, according to Whitney Chadwick, destabilizes the social institutions (family, state and church) that regulate the place of women within patriarchy (Chadwick 1998). Therefore, Carrington’s cameo performances could be understood as artistic gestures that extend her subversive intertextuality and experimental practice towards the film medium.

The analysis also addressed Leonora Carrington’s creative approach towards art directing which has been contextualized within a network of intertextual and intermedial links to her paintings, literary works and theatrical experiments with scenography and costume design. The Surrealist art-horror film The Mansion of Madness (Juan López Moctezuma 1973), created under Carrington’s artistic supervision, translates visual motifs from her esoteric surrealism and pictorial compositions. The mise-en-scène of The Mansion of Madness reflects Carrington’s spatial imagination that inherits Hieronymus Bosch’s complex multi-character compositions. Furthermore, it was suggested that the early tangential relations between Carrington’s visual expression and film art direction could be dated to the 1946–47 Bel Ami International Art Competition, when she submitted the Bosch-inspired painting The Temptation of St. Anthony (1947) for Albert Lewin and David L. Loew’s motion-picture The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947).

It has also been argued that Carrington’s intertextual symbolic system across visual and literary works defines the costume design of the characters in The Mansion of Madness. The discussion drew examples from her personages, who often emerge in extraordinary and distinctive outfits, and traverse the boundaries between her paintings and written fiction. Similarly, the attire of the fowl-like protagonist in The Mansion of Madness resonates with Carrington’s Portrait of Max Ernst (1939) as his animal alter-ego, Lop Lop—The Bird Superior, and with comparable bird-like costumes and characters that appear in Carrington’s short stories The House of Fear (1938) and The Sisters (1939). The analysis also showed that Moctezuma’s film features the recurring motif of the white horse—Carrington’s animal alter-ego—which intertextually connects her self-portrait Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–1938) with her short story The Oval Lady (1937–1938). Moreover, the intertextual and intermedial translations of this motif expand into the plot and the stage design of Carrington’s theatre play, Penelopé (1946), staged by Alejandro Jodorowsky in 1957—a creative collaboration that allows for further research on the aesthetic parallels between Carrington’s oeuvre and Jodorowsky’s films.

While Carrington’s creative practice does not directly involve filmmaking as a form of artistic expression, her collaborations on and off screen signal the necessity of uncovering and understanding the artist’s cinematic involvements. Thus, this research aimed at revealing undiscovered aspects of Leonora Carrington’s transdisciplinary work and the production of her artistic identity in relation to the medium of film.