The Face Knife

The Face Knife* believes that the optimal ending sequence for a film should include either an extended dance number, or a death, or both (though I haven’t seen this done). There’s nothing that will leave an audience in a better, more invigorated mood that seeing someone dance their cares away. Exemplary final dance sequences include Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman, Russian Ark, and the film I’d like to discuss, Luis Buñuel’s Simon of the Desert.

Inspired by the story of St. Simeon Stylites, a 4th century saint who retreated to the desert to live atop a column in order to avoid sin. Buñuel’s film opens with the droll humor of Simon being awarded a taller, more ornate column by the monks of his order and the surrounding townspeople. Through the power of prayer, he manages to restore the hands of a thief who had them amputated**, who proceeds to use them to smack his kids. The townspeople are really not that impressed with the miracle - it’s sort of anticlimactic. Simon is not that impressed by the townspeople either - he certainly doesn’t love them at all. There’s a midget who proudly displays his goat’s full udders to a slightly disgusted Simon (mirroring the cow-milking scene in Viridiana), and a beautiful woman whom he reflexively calls a “cross-eyed hag.”

Maybe he has a good reason to be afraid of her, besides body-terror, because it’s Silvia Pinel as the Devil, to come and tempt him off his column. She enjoins him with such aphorisms as “What you have lost, consider as totally lost” and “indulge yourself until pleasure sickens you” (as she kicks a lamb). Simon, though tormented, resists all her temptations until the final one, where she brings him on an Jumbo Jet across time and space to a “black mass,” which turns out to be a rock concert. I think
Pope Benedict XVI can explain the connection better than I can:

… Rock music seeks release through liberation from the personality and its responsibility … [it is] among the anarchic ideas of freedom which today [1985] predominate more openly in the West than in the East. But that is precisely why rock music is so completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite.

Simon watches the dancers raptly, and asks Satan what the name of the dance they’re doing is. She replies that it’s the latest - and last - dance, “Radioactive Flesh.” Simon wishes to leave the club, but he can’t he’s stuck there til the end, and just as in Viridiana, the night is long and you’ve got to find something to do…

It’s a beautiful little film. The features of the monks in the desert remind me of El Greco, all elongated faces and tapered fingers. Run time is less than an hour, because the producer ran out of money. In his autobiography, Buñuel states that many sequences ended up “literally on the cutting room floor”, so perhaps that footage exists and can be used in an eventual criterion style DVD package.

As such, it’s currently not available on DVD, but if you want to check out the 3 minute 31 second version, click here for Canadian power-pop demigods The New Pornographer’s video for their song The Laws Have Changed, which is about the fact that there’s no better place to throw a party than a decaying empire.*** Buñuel was Joycore before his time.

* Don’t really like this convention, but…what else can I do?
**No wonder this is a Face Knife favorite.
***Another song on the same record (Electric Version), Chump Change, written by Destroyer main dude Dan Bejar, fits in more with the Simon of the Desert treatment, featuring lines about how “The saints in the desert use their hands”, the carnal/spiritual opposition of “there is you/and then there is your body” and a wittgensteinian injunction that “the world is that which is the case.”

Luis Buñuel film in which Fernando Rey plays an aging lecher. Okay, that’s a feeble joke. Look for a “Which Buñuel film am I watching?” flowchart to completed sometime this summer.

Viridiana is a blasphemous film about the consolations and proper uses of religion.The titular character is a novice nun who returns to the world one last time before taking her vows in order to spend some time on the estate of her widower uncle Don Jaime (Rey), who has sponsored her entry into the convent. As with most of the characters played by Rey in the Buñuel canon, Don Jaime is very wealthy and inflamed with lust by any young woman, and as such he tries to tempt Viridiana to marry him and stay with him. The night before Viridiana is to return to the convent, Don Jaime asks the naif if she would do him a favor, which consists of wearing his dead wife’s wedding dress and shoes, which we had seen him caressing earlier. With the help of his maid and some drugs, Don Jaime prepares to ravish Viridiana only to find that he cannot go through with it. In deep shame, he kills himself, though Viridiana only finds this out as she is about to board the bus back to the convent.

Viridiana inherits the estate, but she has to share it with Don Jaime’s out of wedlock son, Jorge, who is a typical modern smoothy who wants to bring electricity and modern farming methods to the estate.

Viridiana wants to use her wealth to help people, and starts a home for some begging invalids. This doesn’t turn out to well, as as soon as they are left unsupervised, they throw a raucus party culminating in a tableau vivant of Leonardo’s “Last Supper” and dancing to Handel’s Messiah, the only phonograph record Don Jaime had, which he used to play the organ along to.

As the beggars give in to their urges, one of them says of his cohorts “Let them sin…it’s good for the soul….then they can repent.” which to me is pretty much the summation of any functional version of Christianity. The rules-based ascetiscism Viridiana learned in the convent and tries to apply to real life is just not practical for human beings.

In the wonderful ending, (which, apparently Buñuel adapted from the censors’ suggestions) Jorge invites a chastened (but ready to become unchaste) Viridiana to play cards with him and maid, with whom he is already having an affair (unlike his father, who remained faithful to his dead wife, or so we are led to believe). A rock and roll record blares on the phonograph, with the chorus “Shake your cares away,” and Jorge explains the rules of the game to Viridiana, and that they play cards because the “nights are long and you have to fill them somehow.” The consolation of other people, of being the bride of the world rather than the bride of Christ, is the only option left to us, born sinners who would certainly not be able to deal with paradise even if it were given to us. It seems a little odd for me to use a film banned in Spain and other countries for blasphemy as an example of the kind of religion I find attractive, but I really see a kinship between the themes of this movie and the earthly spirituality of a Dostoevsky or Bresson, and I don’t think that Buñuel would necessarily think that that’s a bad thing.

Viridiana is currently unavailable on Region1 DVD