SIMON OF THE DESERT (SIMON DEL DESIERTO) (1965) B/W 42m dir: Luis Bunuel

w/Claudio Brook, Silvia Pinal, Hortensia Santovana, Jesus Fernåndez Martinez, Enrique del Castillo, Enrique Alvarez Félix, Luis Aceves Castaneda, Francisco Reigura, Antonio Bravo Sanchez, Eduardo MacGregor, Enrique Garcia Alvarez

Director Luis Bunuel's anarchic humor was never more pungent, his visual style more subtly formal, his gibes at holiness and purity more telling. Simon has ben standing on a pillar in the wilderness for years, avoiding temptation; then the devil (Pinal) glides over to him in a self-propelling casket.

From Luis Bunuel: A Critical Biography by Francisco Aranda: "In Mexico, [Gustavo] Alatriste paid Bunuel almost five million pesetas to maintain his exclusive services. Simeon el estilita, which was the idea that resulted in Simon del desierto, was begun for him. When the money ran out, Bunuel offered to extend the film to a showable length at his own expense, provided that the film was not presented at the Venice Film Festival. Originally conceiving it as a feature film of eleven reels, Bunuel succeeded in leaving it sufficiently realized in only five, though the forced solution of creating an improvised epilogue before all the consequences of them have been explored remains apparent. Even so, Simon remains an important and very personal work, though its awkward length of 42 minutes limits its commercial showings.

"The film is surprising and profound, serious and entertaining, full of gags and of clear Surrealist inspiration. Simon is one of the innumerable stylites who proliferated in Egypt at the beginning of the Christian era, holy men or ascetics who pray in the middle of the desert, perched on the top of a column. Believers gather at his feet to hear his preaching. Fourteen years pass. Food is sent up to him in a basket on the end of a rope. (St Simeon was a stock theme for discussion and private jokes in the Residencia, where Surrealist comedy was built around his situation and arrangements. Garcia Lorca was a master at this kind of improvisation, and invented fables and fantastic episodes around the mystical figure, describing for example how 'his excrements glide down the column as beautifully as wax falling from a candle.')

"In the film, Simon moves to a new and bigger column which a believer has constructed for him. He has diverting conversations with the monks; performs miracles, in face of the total indifference of those who do not revere them; talks with a dwarf; struggles against the temptations of the devil who appears to him in the form of a beautiful woman and then in the form of the Good Shepherd (both metamorphoses are played by Silvia Pinal), who is subsequently transformed into a goat-bearded figure who kicks the Pascal Lamb grazing nearby; blesses everything in sight, good and bad, including the insects. In the Epilogue, Satan translates him to the New York of our own times, where Simon regards night clubs with people dancing rock and roll. 'Vade retro!' he murmurs, to drive away Satan; with no effect. Bunuel, in his apocalyptic vision, appears to see no escape for the saint any more than there was for Nazarin or for Viridiana (who was also exposed to rock and roll at the end). 'The basic structure is the same,' commented Ulrich Gregor (Filmkritik, Munich, No 19, 1965). 'Christian ideas crumble away before reality without the ability to change, and the saint will end overwhelmed with doubt, under the form of an allegorical epilogue. Otherwise the film is presented on the surface as pure comedy. Although Bunuel takes his saint seriously, he sees him in an ironic perspective. He shows the division between the exalted prophet and the blind idolatry of the believer, from which many-faceted and comic contrasts result; but behind every gag, every irony, every Surrealist image of the film, is concealed a philosophic intention.'"

SIMON OF THE DESERT was awarded the Silver Lion of St. Mark and the FIPRESCI prize at the 1965 Venice Film Festival.