Nothing is Sacred — Nothing is Sacred( Blu Ray boxset)

Here’s another good reason to give Radiance even more of your hard-earned money: Nothing is Sacred: Three Heresies by Luis Buñuel is one of those ‘no-brainers’ for those interested in film and its history, and indeed surrealist art. I’m only reviewing promo discs, but as usual, I can guarantee that the boxset proper will be a thing of beauty, and also includes a 80-page book. The set has three discs, with three films: Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel (1962), Simon of the Desert (1965), and an overwhelming amount of extras - genuinely stunning. It’s simply a great set and you don’t need to read further. But here you are.  

First up is Viridiana; I did see the film many years ago, but watching it I’d clearly completely forgotten it and moreover couldn’t read where the film was going at any point. That’s an impressive skill, and Buñuel’s black and white film is a lot to take in on first viewing, sparking many trains of thought. The plot is with hindsight simple enough, and without ruining the narrative it concerns Viridiana, a novice nun, who leaves her nunnery a few days before taking her vows to visit her uncle; she has little affection for him, and marks the time till she can return to the nunnery. However, on the last night he drugs her, and the next morning pretends that he has slept with her, in order to stop her from rejoining her sisters; she leaves regardless, and he hangs himself out of shame. After this, Viridiana decides to stay at the house, and open it to several local paupers; the film unfolds from there into a surprisingly grotesque ending.

The film ruminates on themes of hypocrisy and charity, levelling its main force against the well-meaning but innocent and somewhat deluded Viridiana, who is completely unworldly and sees the good in all things. This naivety is thoroughly trashed throughout the film, sealed in a nicely ‘quiet’ ending that is inconclusive but points to a different future. Buñuel’s filmic language is heavily symbolic, sometimes subtle, sometimes with the force of a sledgehammer, but after the film has finished it’s these aspects that play in the mind. Viridiana has some beautiful shots, and the film quality itself is pristine apart from one short damaged section near the start. The nunnery, the uncle’s large house, and its surrounding grounds all provide excellent locations and backdrops for the actors, all of which are accomplished. In the main roles, the great Fernando Rey is fantastic as Viridiana’s uncle, a sad, pained man who gets his maid Ramona to carry out all of his dirty work; whilst Sylvia Pinal is also wonderful as Viridiana, with chinks in her otherworldly poise and dignity slowing appearing as the film progresses. Viridiana slowly sucks you into a world of carnival - the world turned upside down; as several of the extras point out, its not a surrealist film, but it is a film made by a Surrealist.

Those extras are absurdly rich and compelling, dominated by a 1983 BBC Arena special, The Life and Times of Don Luis Buñuel, which at 101 minutes is longer than Viridiana itself. This authoritative documentary is exhaustive, and positions Buñuel as a key figure in film and art history. It combines archive footage, talking heads, film footage, and spoken extracts from Buñuel’s biography - indeed, it opens with a fantastic and very revealing account of his childhood. Some of the footage is essentially home video footage, with Buñuel relaxed and chatting with his friends. There’s too much to summarise here, but it’s incredible, from an era when the BBC would regularly produce high-quality, high-brow documentaries; however, it narrates his earlier years with the circle of Surrealists in Paris - though he made Un Chien Andalou (1929) with Salvador Dali before entering their ranks - and mentions his love of Fritz Lang, it also contains his excellent commentary on the difference between bars and cafes in Paris. Equally substantial and fascinating is a 1964 French interview with Buñuel, recorded for Cinéastes de notre temps, which displays how obtuse, even difficult, Buñuel could be. It too documents his surrealist years, and his eventual falling out with Salvador Dali, and also covers his 1930 film L’Age D’Or, which was attacked in an antisemitic riot and subsequently banned for over 40 years. Interestingly, Buñuel stated that he was less interested in aesthetics and composition, and more in the interaction of people on screen - regardless all three films here are visually striking. The disc is completed by a gallery of images and an engrossing commentary on Viridiana by the film writer Michael Brooke, who reveals Viridiana was inspired by a painting of Saint Viridiana - and a recurring teen dream of Buñuel where he raped the Queen of Spain - and a further, short, appreciation of Buñuel and Viridiana by the filmmaker Lulu Wang.

The second disc contains The Exterminating Angel, an intriguing and provoking film, but one that is difficult to describe without ruining. So I will restrict myself to simply saying that it depicts a set of wealthy guests meeting at a grand mansion for an evening meal; just before the meal begins the majority of the servants leave, and the waiter trips over carrying the first course. This rupture is followed by a guest smashing a window after the meal, and then a piano recital. As the guests prepare to leave, the lights are switched off, and the guests sleep on the floor or sofas. Upon awaking, it becomes apparent that for some unknown reason they cannot leave the room, despite their best efforts. Thereafter the group descend into boredom, madness, sex, and violence, before an ending as cryptic as Viridiana. So it’s a film critiquing bourgeois social mores, aiming barbs at religion along the way. It never fully tips out of control, and that restraint gives it, for me at least, a strange atmosphere, even dream-like. The film is very much an ensemble performance, and is really shaped by the severe restriction of location, unsurprisingly developing a claustrophobic feel. It doesn’t share the clearer narrative structure of Viridiana, but it is equally imbued with symbolism and ideas, and its defiant rejection of any obvious explanation makes it a fascinating work.

The disc is filled out with some excellent extras; there’s an insightful appreciation from Guillermo del Toro, a ‘behind the scenes’ gallery, and a charming overview of Buñuel’s work from Alex Cox, showing us a bullet he was given that had been retrieved from Buñuel’s house, and detailing how Marilyn Monroe had visited the set of The Exterminating Angel. Alexandra Heller-Nicholas presents an illuminating short video essay on the theme of Buñuel and dining, highlighting the temporal and spatial aspects of The Exterminating Angel, and finally there is a 55 minute documentary, A Mexican Buñuel, further detailing Buñuel’s Mexican years, utilising many interviews with those who knew and worked with him, and including footage of his first, and apparently terrible, effort there, Gran Casino.

 

The last film here is Simon of the Desert, at a comparatively short 46 minutes. As the title suggests, it depicts Simon, a pillar hermit, in the desert, and the majority of the action takes place with Simon standing on a perhaps 35-foot pillar. During the film, Simon’s quest for solitude and communion with God is constantly interrupted by visits from various people: priests, his mother, a goat herder, and the local population. In-between these visits he questions God, criticises priests and humans in general, and extolls a severely ascetic life. At points he is troubled by negative thoughts, weighing his weaknesses - and then the Devil turns up. Sylvia Pinal - who appears in all three films in this boxset - has a film-stealing role here as Lucifer, making her grand appearance with the costume and behaviours, initially, of what might be a Victorian schoolgirl - it’s hard to place; however, she soon abandons girlish behaviour for more womanly attempts to seduce Simon into relinquishing his asceticism. The Devil fails, but returns twice, once wearing a fake beard and pretending to be God, and lastly arriving in a coffin which startlingly propels itself through the desert to Simon. You can see the ropes at points, but, accompanied by a loud scraping drone, it’s an incredibly exciting sequence regardless. So the film plays with the contrast between the earthy and the heavenly (as does Viridiana), and also between the sublime and the ridiculous. This is illustrated perfectly, and cryptically, by the film’s ending, as an aeroplane appears to pick up the Devil and Simon, transporting them to a swinging sixties concert in a modern city, where they watch hip young things twitch ecstatically to the music whilst dressed as beatniks.

Visually the film is beautiful: Simon really is on top of a tall pillar in the middle of nowhere and this means plenty of stark shots of him against the sky; this provides an effective contrast with the crammed clutter of The Exterminating Angel. Like the latter film, Simon of the Desert is also based around a sole restrictive location, and this again concentrates matters, and really focusses attention on Simon’s words and behaviour, as well as the question of Simon’s solitude. The film is paced well; it seems to slow when Simon is indeed on his own, and then speed up when he is visited or indeed tormented.

Accompanying the obligatory gallery in the extras is an appreciation of the film from Richard Ayoade, who really does bring insightful thoughts to the table; he rightly talks about the clear comedic, and dream-like, aspects, and also defends Simon as a figure of deep and genuine religiosity, and not the heresy you might expect from Buñuel. Along the way he also argues that Simon of the Desert’s length is a golden length for films, as well as giving us the provocative idea that you can judge what a culture values by asking what its highest buildings are… It’s a really very good, and stimulating, analysis. Abraham Castillo Flores’s video essay, The Other Trinity: Alatriste, Buñuel and Pinal, examines the relationship between Buñuel, Pinal, and her husband Gustavo Alatriste, and it’s a fascinating piece. It explains how Viridiana was funded by Alatriste explicitly to showcase his wife’s talents, and how the Vatican and Franco both worked to suppress the film, with copies smuggled out of Spain personally by Pinal and prints even buried in a famous bullfighter’s garden. It even describes how Pinal forgot her invitation to the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, and was only allowed in after much pleading, whereupon she entered as Viridiana won the esteemed Palme d'Or. We also learn that Simon of the Desert’s shorter length was due to Alatriste’s funding running out, and on a lighter note, that Buñuel believed electric guitars to be satanic, which enriches the significance of the ending of that film. The final extra is a long, 84 minute, documentary, Buñuel: A Surrealist Filmmaker, which picks through themes in Buñuel’s life and works, chronicling his childhood obsession with death and its intersection with catholicism, and indeed a few of the extras have striking archival footage of Spanish religious processions, complete with hooded figures. It highlights the influence of surrealism on his work, his political motivations, and his complexity as a person.

This is a wonderful set, I don’t need to say much more. Each film has so much going on that they demand to be rewatched, and that fact plus the incredible extras means that this is a box set that will last and be returned to. There is of course crossover of materials with the various documentaries, but each is good and offers different angles and viewpoints. All told it’s a very comprehensive package and one that can only spur even further interest in Buñuel’s works in the viewer.