How is the film structured as a narrative? Are the links between one episode and the next purely arbitrary? Or is there a "logic" to the film's movement? How does the film regard cause and effect? In what ways does the film make use of narrative expectations in order to subvert them?
Why is Buñuel so concerned with policemen? with children? with ostriches and other animals?
What views of "liberty" are expressed in the movie? Why is it a "phantom"? Do the characters have freedom?
What is the role of transgression in the movie? Think of incestuous episodes like that of the nephew and the aunt at the inn, or the Prefect of Police and his sister; of episodes involving the limits of death, like the Prefect and his sister (again) or the Napoleonic soldier who seeks to violate a corpse; and of episodes that seem to mock or invert social taboos, like the defecation scene, the scene with the "dirty" postcards, and the scene where the mass murderer is let free after being convicted. Does Buñuel see these transgressions as forms of liberation? To what extent are arbitrary social norms affected by the sorts of inversions depicted in the film?