![]() Sixty years later, Viridiana is as bold and astonishing as ever.Viridiana is one of the best films in the history of cinema, the best work of one of the giants of celluloid, Luis Buñuel, but it is also much more than that.It is the poisoned gift that this exiled gave to the Franco regime and which showed that the man who had gone with his pockets full of stones to the premiere of Un perro andaluz(1929) still had the same desire to provoke at the age of 60 as he did at the age of 30.Īnd if the film is a marvel in itself, everything about it is fascinating: how it came to be made, how Buñuel returned to his home country, how it got around censorship and how the Franco regime, which considered itself the guarantor of the Catholic religion in the West, won the most important prize at the Cannes Film Festival with a film that was considered blasphemous by the Vatican. He turned everyday life into signs and symbols, and held up a merciless mirror to society that, in his eyes, could not be saved. Rather, Buñuel intended to render on screen, in cinematic language, the Spain that he knew and that he’d left behind. When asked about his intentions in shooting the film, Buñuel remarked with his characteristic offhand wit, “I didn’t deliberately set out to be blasphemous, but then Pope John XXIII is a better judge of such things than I am.” However, by then Viridiana had become an international sensation and garnered a vast reputation, both for itself and its director. After being condemned by Franco’s government, the film wasn’t shown in Spain until 1977. Viridiana, regardless of Franco’s personal position on the film, caused a considerable stir in its own right - the Catholic Church was up in arms over it’s release and went so far as to call it “blasphemous” in the Vatican’s official newspaper, L’osservatore Romano. ![]() ![]() Several of the director’s previous films, particularly Los Olvidados (1951), Él (1952), and The Exterminating Angel (1962), all shot in Mexico, are now regarded as monumental, but prior to the splash caused by Viridiana were not as widely known to the world at large (although Los Olvidados did garner Buñuel the award for Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival in 1951). The film therefore marks an important moment in Buñuel’s career, representing his return not only to Spain, the country of his birth, but also to international fame and filmmaking. ![]() Shot in Spain in the early months of 1961 and also starring Francisco Rabal Jorge and Fernando Rey, Viridiana was the first film Buñuel made in his motherland since his departure to the United States and then Mexico in 1939. The film is also the only Spanish-language Palme d’Or winners in the history of Cannes (the Mexican film María Candelaria by Emilio Fernández was presented the Grand Prix du Festival International du Film in 1946).īanned in Spain by the dictatorial government of Francisco Franco and vehemently denounced by the Vatican, Buñuel’s Viridiana follows the story of a novice nun who does her utmost to maintain her virtuous Catholic principles, but is then sent to live with her lecherous uncle who, alongside a motley assemblage of paupers, forces her to confront the limits of her own idealism. The day after its premiere, the film was announced the winner of the prestigious Palme d’Or, sharing the honor with The Long Absence by French director Henri Colpi. Viridiana, the irreverent masterpiece by Spanish-born Mexican director Luis Buñuel starring Mexican actress Silvia Pinal and now widely regarded to be one of the best films of all time ( Viridiana ranked 37th on the British Film Institute’s 2012 director’s poll of the greatest films in history), premiered on this day at the 14th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in 1961. ![]()
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