On Viridiana

On Viridiana

Follow this link to read Michael Wood´s article for the Criterion´s Collection, a review of Viridiana that includes interesting insights into the context and intent of the film. 

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/423-viridiana-the-human-comedy

There are many controversies surrounding Buñuel´s Viridiana (1961), among others, whether it is really a Spanish film, since the director had not returned to his native country since 1926. Some Spanish critics say that, because his films were forbidden in Spain under Franco, he might not even have influenced any of the emerging directors of the 1960s and 70s. But that is easily refuted. In an interview regarding his return to Spain in 1960 in order to prepare the filming of Viridiana, Buñuel mentions meeting with Bardem (we know him, the director of Death of a cyclist), Carlos Saura (we will meet him soon), and others to discuss the state of cinema in the country, and after the scandal created by Viridiana the latter two directors even joined forces to  create a production company that tried to distribute Buñuel´s films in Spain --they almost went broke, because after the Viridianda fiasco Franco´s government forbade the showing of films by Buñuel. 

The beggars´supper

Michael Wood argues, as we mentioned in class, that Buñuel   insisted his films were not meant as political critiques, but rather as explorations of the human psyche. His explanation fits his own Freudian beliefs, developed from the influences of surrealism. But through psychoanalytical theory we could argue that Buñuel´s "subconscious" also deals with the social, political, and cultural concerns he confronts in his everyday life, and therefore will be reflected in his plots and characters. One example is the reference Jorge makes to the land he has inherited from his father, which "has not been tilled for 20 years" (the same time it had passed since the end of the Spanish Civil War).

On the other hand, perhaps because he had not lived in Spain for such a long time he might have been able to perceive traits of the Spanish character not noticeable to the Spaniards themselves.  That geographical distance might have made him more sensitive to  more extreme --more stereotyped?-- expressions of the national character: we discussed in class the role of the "esperpento", the grotesque figures explored in the paintings of Goya, a tradition of cartoonish representation that dates back to pre-Christian times in the Iberian Peninsula. That tradition has informed Spanish artwork through the 20th and 21st century, (we will see how some of these traits apply to the work of other directors', including many of Almodóvar´s characters), also including the work of a good friend of Buñuel´s, the surrealist painter Salvador Dalí, who admired and imitated those distorted figures because they  represented a society corrupted by vice, and perhaps spoke more loudly to him as to what it is to be Spanish, than it did to the Spaniards.

Compare Spanish Painter Francisco de Goya's "esperpento" with Buñuel´s paupers

Perhaps because he did not live in Spain, Buñuel had the opportunity to explore from a different perspective the relationship between the psychoanalytical theories that sprouted Surrealism and the Volkgeist of the Spanish, especially when it comes to the influence of myth and religion.

One of the aspects that caught my attention in Wood´s article is his view that Buñuel has created a universal tale, and that his critique is not specific to the Spanish circumstances, but "a reminder that pleasure and curiosity and appetite can always turn to destruction and violence. This is not an argument against pleasure and curiosity and appetite, or an appeal for law and order. It is a picture of a society that doesn’t understand its own needs." This, of course, could be a reference to Franco´s Spain (or a broader critique of the Spanish character), but Wood´s consideration that "Buñuel’s skepticism and his sense of outrage concern the smallness of our vision of progress, our narrow attempts to achieve it through rational or moralistic planning, and our anxious disregard of the disruptive forces without which no society would be human" lends it that broader, universal significance (and can be applied, I think, to a reading of Almodóvar´s Talk to Her).

 To support that universalizing ideal, we can point at Buñuel´s appropriation of some easily identifiable elements the Western cultural tradition. The reference to Goya applies here, since he is a Spanish artist but also considered a universal one; another Western referent is the music: from the opening we hear the notes of the Messiah, by German composer George Friederic Handel, one of the most famous pieces of classical choral music, echoes through Don Jaime´s estate. There is even a reference to the  Western literary canon that adds to the symbolic meaning of the story: In the first part of the film, as Viridiana is exiting the barn, her hair covered with a scarf, her shoulders wrapped in a woolen cape, she runs into her uncle Jaime. Viridiana comments on how early he is up: "The longer to see you", is his reply, a clear allusion to Little Red Ridinghood. The reference to Leonardo Da Vinci´s "Last Supper" is also part of this inscription of the story into the Western tradition, and of the history of religious imagery. Jorge´s "freethinking" attitude, including his attitude towards marriage, charity, etc. can also be read as a critique of Spain in the context of European humanistic values versus the Catholic tradition promoted as key to the Spanish heritage by the Franco regime.

But, intentionally or not, the journey of Viridiana from the convent to the world of her family´s country home is full of referents to the conflicts between tradition and modernity that we have argued are at the heart of the tensions that both the state and the artists are trying to resolve in Spain in the 1960s.