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How to watch The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz

1955 · Luis Buñuel · The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz on Sightlines

4 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.

On a first viewing

1. Watch for the frame isolating one object completely. (camera)

   When something catches Archibaldo's attention, a leg, a box, an object, Buñuel gives it the whole frame instead of keeping it inside a wider shot.

   Payoff: Your eye goes where his obsession goes, before you decide to look there yourself. In the reading: fetish. Deleuze calls a piece of a person torn loose and overcharged with meaning a fetish, and the camera keeps performing that tearing for you.

2. Listen for the music box's waltz returning again and again. (sound)

   The same tinkling melody recurs at key moments, functioning less like background music than like a cue that something in Archibaldo has just been triggered.

   Payoff: The waltz is doing the work of a warning bell for an urge, not decorating a scene.

3. Notice the lighting stay bright and even, even in disturbing scenes. (light)

   Buñuel and Jiménez light drawing rooms and Archibaldo's darkest fantasies in the same clean, high-key studio style, with no shadow cueing you to feel afraid.

   Payoff: The evenness of the light is its own kind of joke, refusing to treat horror as different from a dinner party.

4. Watch Alonso's face for whether he's charming or unsettling. (performance)

   He plays Archibaldo with the same urbane courtesy in every scene, whether he is making small talk or planning a murder, and never signals which mode you are in.

   Payoff: The performance keeps you deciding, scene by scene, whether to laugh at him or step back.

Once you have seen it

1. Watch Archibaldo carry the wax figure to the kiln. (staging)

   He burns a life-size wax double of a woman he cannot bring himself to kill, watching its face melt as if the effigy itself were the real murder.

   Payoff: The wax figure stands in so completely for the woman that destroying it feels like the crime actually happening. In the reading: crystalline-description. Deleuze calls this a crystalline description, an image that composes its object so completely it can be destroyed in the object's place.

2. Notice each murder attempt get cut away from at the last second. (cutting)

   Every time Buñuel builds toward a killing with careful deliberation, the film cuts away or resolves the scene with the woman dying by some unrelated cause instead.

   Payoff: You can never quite prove whether Archibaldo's wish or plain accident caused any of these deaths. In the reading: index-of-equivocity. Deleuze calls this an index of equivocity, one event that fits two explanations at once with nothing in the image to settle it.

3. Notice how the film's opening frame turns out to be a confession. (structure)

   Archibaldo has been narrating his whole account to a magistrate throughout, and by the end you realize he has been trying to convince someone, including himself, that he is guilty.

   Payoff: He is not confessing to something he did. He is manufacturing a guilt he never actually earned.

Carry this in: Watch the music box. It never announces a death. It only ever announces a wish.

A Deleuzian reading of The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz →

How The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz was received →