Sylva as Anima Mundi. Animals, Maps and Outposts as Project-Related Tools in the Work of Luis Buñuel

The appearance of a flock of sheep in front of a staircase of honour, in "El Ángel Exterminador2 (1962), shows the scenographic parable of the Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel, through which to determine tools and methods for interpreting bourgeois domesticity. The auteur’s filmography constructs through optical focus points the system of the fin de siècle house, going beyond the Age of Enlightenment and opening–paradoxically–the field of the project and of the representation of space to a superior degree of depth which updates the notion of place and of interior in relation to the wilderness. The space is pervaded by the relationship between men, animals and vegetation, combined with the components of the anima mundi in which the compositional sphere takes place through a-typological sequences within a “dark mass”, such as an endlessly dense forest. These are maps for a mock domesticated geography that reveals to be actually wild and uncontrolled. The anisotropy of the interiors, in "Le fantôme de la liberté" (1974), translates the sense of the “formlessness” of spaces into a continuous flow of speaking images without any moral content which, however, can define a field of application of the representation of the uncontrolled in architecture. The article intends to inquire through the relationships between animals, plants, objects and spaces, into the spectrum of dwelling as interpreted by cinematographic tools, into the place in which it is possible to identify the alliance between the biological and the artefact in architecture. These elements allow us to update the various disciplinary positions regarding the space-house, examining methods for traversing it and exploring those systems in which the biological overlaps the architecture, and where the relationship between horizontal and vertical elements, as in a forest, is continuously questioned.