Many of his films were openly critical of
middle class morals and
organized religion, mocking the
Roman Catholic Church for hypocrisy. Many of his most famous films demonstrate this:
*
Un chien andalou (1929) -- A man drags pianos, upon which are piled two dead donkeys, two priests, and the tablets of
The Ten Commandments.
*
L'Age D'Or (1930) -- A
bishop is thrown out a window, and in the final scene one of the culprits of the
120 days of Sodom is portrayed by an actor dressed in a way that he would be recognized as
Jesus.
*
Ensayo de un crimen (1955) -- A man dreams of murdering his wife while she's praying in bed dressed all in white.
*
Simón del desierto (1965) -- The devil tempts a
saint by taking the form of a bare-breasted girl singing and showing off her legs. At the end of the film, the saint abandons his
ascetic life to hang out in a
jazz club.
*
Nazarin (1959) -- The pious lead character wreaks ruin through his attempts at charity.
*
Viridiana (1961) -- A well-meaning young nun tries unsuccessfully to help
the poor.
*
La Voie Lactée (1969) -- Two men travel the ancient
pilgrimage road to
Santiago de Compostela and meet embodiments of various
heresies along the way. One dreams of
anarchists shooting the
Pope.
The story of the making of
Viridiana is illustrative. Buñuel's earlier Spanish and
French films from the 1930s were regarded as cinema landmarks --
Un Chien Andalou,
L'Age D'Or, and
Las Hurdes (also known as
Tierra sin Pan or
Land Without Bread) (1933). The advent of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, however, caused the
expatriation of many artists and intellectuals from the fascist
dictatorship of Franco, whose military revolt and rise to power had had the strong backing of the Spanish Catholic hierarchy.
Had Buñuel stayed in Spain, his fate might have been the same as that of his friend, poet
Federico García Lorca, who was
assassinated at the outset of Franco's military
revolt. After some years of artistic silence forced by the difficult circumstances of his expatriation, Buñuel, then residing in Mexico, returned in full force to writing and directing with some of his best films, which once more won him international acclaim.
In 1960, for political
propaganda reasons, Franco instructed his minister of culture to invite the country's most famous filmmaker to return to Spain to direct a film of his choice. Buñuel accepted and proceeded to make
Viridiana, promptly departing from the country after finishing the film, but leaving a few official copies. After viewing them, the copies were burned by the dictator's authorities. The minister of culture was reprimanded for having passed the
screenplay in the first place. A copy of
Viridiana, however, had been smuggled to France, where it proceeded to win the
Palme D'Or of the
Cannes International Film Festival. The film was banned in Spain, but got international attention and praise (with some exceptions). The
Vatican's official press organ,
l'Osservatore Romano, published an article calling
Viridiana an insult not only to Catholicism, but to
Christianity itself.
