Midnight in Andalusia: Mainstream Cinema and the Avant-Garde

A number of important thinkers have argued that experimental cinema and mainstream cinema are discrete domains with little or no overlap. This chapter seeks to complicate this argument by giving close attention to the work of the Surrealist filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Not only were Buñuel’s avant-garde films heavily influenced by the silent comedies of Buster Keaton, they also went on to influence the mainstream narrativenarrative films of Woody Allen. An analysis of Buñuel’s cinema and its intertexts suggests that experimental and mainstream films often exist in a state of symbiosis rather than one of radical alterity.