Cinegrafía and the abject in Federico García Lorca's Viaje a la luna (1930)

Federico García Lorca's screenplay Viaje a la luna (1930) is an example of what Spanish film critic Antonio Espina called cinegrafía in that it theorizes the relationship between the written word and the film image. It is also a work that intertwines the desire for sexual freedom with an anxiety for artistic innovation. Drawing on Julia Kristeva's psycho-linguistic feminist rereadings of Freud and Lacanian formulations of the construction of human subjectivity known as the abject, this article explains how Lorca looked for new ways to enlist the possibilities of film in his search for a more open and fluid artistic subjectivity and ways of representing normative and non-normative sexual identities.