SHOULD WE FEEL SORRY FOR CANELO?

Viridiana, is a morality tale about a young novice about  to take her vows as a nun She later acts out what she takes to be the pure Christian life by organizing a haven for a blind man, a leper, a cripple and a beggar and sundry other unfortunates. Full of Freudian symbolism, the film ends in a famous orgy of destruction, containing Bunuel's blasphemous parody of The Last Supper. The film that got Bunuel kicked out of Spain by the religious and transcendentalist thought-police.


There is a famous scene from Bunuel's film in which some people hear the squeaking sound of an ungreased axle which heralds the approach of a horse-drawn cart. Eventually a rickety wagon hoves into view drawn by an emaciated horse, its rib-bones sticking out and its head hung low. A man sits on the cart with a long whip which he applies to the horse with gratuitous and needless force. Behind the cart, tied by a thin string to the rear axle, a small dog is being half dragged along in the dust, the cord has bitten into its neck. It is so weak it can hardly keep up with the pace of the slow-moving horse.

A decent man called Jorge who witnesses this scene is mortified and outraged at this cruel spectacle. Jorge rushes into the road to remonstrate with the carter. The driver growls back that it is his cart, his horse and his dog, and they can all get back to where they came from. He rejects all demands to stop and ease the noose about the dog's neck and give the horse a drink of water and a rest. He ignores all these demands. At last the Jorge decides that the only way that he can relieve the suffering of the little dog and rescue it from it tormentor is to buy it from the man. This is done and the creaking cart with the squeaking axle slowly disappears from view leaving the little dog (called Canelo) gratefully lapping from a bowl of wate.

Suddenly, shortly afterwards, there is the sound of squeaking from another ungreased axle, and the crack of another whip, and it is not long before yet another cart drawn by another emaciated horse appears slowly from around the corner with a small  whimpering cur being dragged after it tied to the axle by a tight string..

The instructive moral of the scene is of course that single acts of charity alon cannot eliminate the abuse which mankind inflicts upon animals and  ot humans with which they share the world. Obviously the well-meaning do-gooder couldn't buy EVERY little dog in order to save them and to release himself from the angst of "guilt by association." The film contains many other telling  moral insights and lessons that individual acts of charity are worthless while illustrating the utter uselessness of religious devotion and charity as opposed to pragmatic socio-political action for organised improvement and change.

Single acts of compassion towards animals or acts of kindness extended to individual metaphysicalists or transcendentalists are not really capable of relieving the angst-ridden attitudes and self-abusive beliefs of these unfortunates who have lost all contact with reality. The knowledge that these psychic walking wounded (like the "heroine" Viridiana) have allowed themselves to be tied to the axle of their own inadequacy, or that they are the naive victims early imprinting in their formative years does not help in eradicating the general evil of transcendentalism and religion - though, like the group of people who paid money for the little dog to be released - it might make one feel better.

If one cares anything at all for the future of humanity one must do one's best to oppose the social roots of such mental abuse rather than address the ignorance of individuals particularly in the ever increasingly dangerous modern world which transcendentalism has produced.

THE PSYCHIC WALKING WOUNDED

Take the case of the Philosopher of Nazism.  Should we be sorry for him?  Nowhere in the first eighty pages of Being and Time does Heidegger investigatorily question the very questionability of his eponymous gerundial Being of Being and Time and the non-questioning of his straw-man abstraction - The Question of *Being.*

The whole tenor of his preparatory approach is an unquestioning acceptance of the conventional, a priori, bizarre, historical notion of *Being* as handed down to him as a conceptual captive-cord to tie himself robotically to the transcendentalist tumbril hyped-up from within the musty masturbatoriums of his priestly scholastic medieval informants.

The philosophising disaster that was Blut-obsessed Heidegger was nothing more than the end  result of the early societal brainwashing suffered by other such as Hitler-worshipping  inadequate who replaced the reification God with the gerundial reifications The God-look-alike Being and a Hitlerian-style Dasein.

Do such a monsters deserve any pity?  

Speaking personally I prefer to reserve my sympathy for Canelo - as for Heidegger he can rot in hell..

THE CART AND THE LITTLE DOG SCENE

Here is the actual dialogue for the scene from the original film-script:

Jorge, sickened by the cruelty of the scene, comes up to the wagon. He is frowning and speaks harshly to the peasant.

JORGE: That animal can't take any more. Now that the wagon's empty, why don't you let him ride?

The peasant straightens up and stares at Jorge.

PEASANT: It's for people!

JORGE: Then let him go and he'll follow you.

PEASANT: And let him get run over by somebody else?

The apparent contrast between the peasant's cruelty and his care for the dog bewilders Jorge. He bends down and strokes the animal.

JORGE: I'll buy him.

The peasant looks at him for a moment. He is perplexed but reacts immediately.

PEASANT: He's good at rabbiting and he knows it. When we're in the country, if he doesn't hunt he doesn't get fed.

JORGE: How much do you want for him?

PEASANT: (hesitating) I wasn't thinking of selling him, but if you want ... I'll leave it to you.

Jorge pulls some notes out of his pockets and gives two to the peasant.

JORGE: All right, untie him.

The peasant does so and hands the string, which is used as a lead, to Jorge.

PEASANT: Thank you, and God keep you and bless you.

(Jorge  taps the wagon and addresses the driver,)

Get moving!

He gets onto the wagon and sits down. The wagon moves off.

PEASANT: (to Jorge) And remember, the less he eats, the better he runs.

JORGE: (as the cart is going away) What's he called?

PEASANT: (shouting) Canelo!

On hearing his name, the dog tries to jump toward his master, but Jorge pulls him back with the string.

JORGE: Be quiet! Where are you going? Come here, Canelo! Canelo! Come on!

Jorge and his companion leave the road and cross the field toward their workers. The wagon continues on its way. Another carriage comes from the opposite direction toward the camera. The second carriage, with another miserable dog attached to its axle, passes in front of the camera. The two men do not notice the unhappy dog as the cart goes by. Neither Jorge nor the foreman pays any attention to it.

Screenplay by Luis Bunuel (in collaboration with Julio Alejandro) Translated by Piergiuseppe Bozzetti

AND NOW - THREE EXCELLENT REVIEWS:

Keith F. Hatcher

Buñuelesque Extravaganza,

30 August 2001 Author: Keith F. Hatcher

La Rioja, Spain

Forty years on and `Viridiana' is one of the very few, almost unique, examples of classical Spanish cinema to have survived the turmoil of the latter half of the last century. It remains as a little light in the midst of the darkness of the Franco Régime, which promptly banned it, or as an insouciance to the Vatican, which promptly excomulgated everyone concerned with it.

Buñuel's genius is apparent in every frame: the eye for detail, nonetheless permitting that impromptu evanesqueness which lends exquisiteness to these memorable scenes, above which shines the `Last Supper'. And it is precisely this scene which gives one the impression that the real stars in the making of this film were the motley beggars taken in from the streets. Silvia Pinal and Francisco `Paco' Rabal are not outstanding in this piece; even the incomparable Fernando Rey is overshadowed by the band of social outcasts. The sheer poeticness so brilliantly captured by the camera roaming among the vagabonds is cinematographic exquisiteness carried to its extreme: every grimace, every wrinkled nose, the debauchery, is what makes the principal actors be no such thing, but secondary actors overwhelmed by the nuances and gestures of these `untouchables". Brilliant filming, indeed - whether intentional or not or whether this be only my personal interpretation after seeing this film three times in the last twenty five years, is of course open to debate.

Suffice just to mention Lola Gaos: (Tristana (1970) - also by Buñuel - is one of her other films worthy of mention, surprisingly accepted by the censor's blue pen). In the 70s her voice began to break up, such that in the end she lived out her last years in poverty, forgotten by the times and cinema makers, until hauled out of hiding for a last TV appearance, sardonic way of giving her a few pennies to eke out to the end of her existence, but by then (1989) her voice was so fragmented it was near impossible to understand her. Her throat-cancer was never treated adequately.

Luis Buñuel (`Thank God I am an atheist') has gone; Fernando Rey has gone; Paco Rabal died yesterday in an aeroplane flying over the English Channel, returning from the Montreal Film Festival where he received his last award...

They leave `Viridiana' as testament to those historical and difficult times, an isolated exposé amid what was, for Spain, a cinematographical desert.

Luis Buñuel:

Viridiana
By Derek Malcolm

Thursday April 1, 1999

A great many directors, when asked to name their favourite film-maker, invoke the name of Luis Buñuel. It isn't surprising, since he was undoubtedly a genius who had the invaluable capacity to offend and delight at the same time. You could choose any of a dozen of his films as one of the best 100. Viridiana is my choice, since it caused the maximum annoyance to people one is quite glad to see offended. It was made in Spain in 1960 after Franco had told his minister of culture to invite the country's leading film-maker back from exile in Mexico to make whatever film he liked. But once he completed it, Buñuel sensibly decamped, deliberately leaving a few out-takes behind to be instantly burned by the authorities.

The film was, of course, banned outright in Spain and the minister reprimanded for passing the script. But it won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, despite protests about it representing Spain and articles in l'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican's official organ, saying it was an insult not just to Catholicism but to Christianity itself.

That was exactly what Buñuel intended. He had long ago lost his faith and Viridiana was the score he had to settle with the Catholic Church, for its support of Franco and what he considered to be many other sins. "I hope I don't go to hell", he once said, "imagine the table talk of all those popes and cardinals".

Viridiana, played by Silvia Pinal, is a young nun about to take her final vows. She's so devout that she wears a crown of thorns and a large wooden crucifix hangs over her bed. Unfortunately her uncle (the great Spanish actor Fernando Rey) is hopelessly obsessed with her and gets his servant to drug her. Seduction is beyond him though, and he hangs himself in a fit of guilt after telling her that he had deflowered her.

Disorientated by these strange events, she invites a band of beggars to live in her uncle's old crumbling estate, hoping to reclaim them, and possibly herself, through prayer and charity. They have different ideas, however, and take over the house for an orgy. One of them even rapes her. Totally disillusioned (like Buñuel), she plays a game of cards, to the strains of Shake Your Cares Away, with her uncle's illegitimate son and the servant who is his mistress. The game ends is a kind of menage à trois.

Sequence after sequence of this extraordinary film - incredibly Spanish and yet incredibly offensive to conservative Spaniards - show both Buñuel as a master film-maker, telling a story that is simultaneously simple and sophisticated. The scene in which Viridiana piously collects her beggars, each more ugly or deformed than the next, and their singing of the Angelus as a rubbish truck thunders by, is later contrasted with their ungrateful party in the villa. A leper dresses as a bride and the company are suddenly frozen into a replica of da Vinci's Last Supper (to the crackling strains of Handel's Hallelujah Chorus on the gramophone, which continues as the nun is molested).

This, suggests Buñuel, is what happens to saints - their virtue is thrown back in their faces. People, and the world, cannot be changed, and acceptance of things as they are is the only course.

People have said that Buñuel was first and foremost a Spaniard and then a surrealist, and it is no accident that the ending of Viridiana resembles that of L'Age d'Or, his great surrealist masterpiece made 30 years previously. But there's a despair about this film which wasn't in that earlier work.

"I should like", he once famously said, "to make even the most ordinary spectator feel that he is not living in the best of all possible worlds". The forces of darkness, he suggests, await us all. The perfect candidate for Prozac then. But then we would never have had Viridiana, one of the great feelbad movies of all time.

A Good Review

by Michael Brooke

Viridiana: Luis Buñuel

As a character in a John Ford film released only a few months after Viridiana wisely recommended, "when the facts don't fit the legend, print the legend." So let's kick off with the legend.

Though a native of Spain, Luis Buñuel spent most of the period from the late 1930s to the early 1960s in self-imposed exile in the USA and Mexico, where he built up a reputation as one of the Spanish-speaking cinema's greatest talents. Hearing of this, Spain's Fascist dictator General Franco invited Buñuel back to make a film in his native country for the first time in thirty years...

... and Buñuel, in a masterly demonstration of how to bite the hand that feeds you clean off, used this largesse to make a film so calculatedly offensive to right-wing Catholic sensibilities that Franco immediately banned it when he saw it and ordered the negative to be seized. Fortunately, it was smuggled out of the country and a print was screened at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it promptly won the Palme d'Or - setting in train the extraordinary flowering of Buñuel's late career.

Just how much of the above is true is a matter for speculation: Buñuel denied most of it and even claimed that Franco liked the film, though wouldn't intervene when his censors took against it. But it's hard to believe that Buñuel didn't know exactly what he was doing - not least given the evidence of Viridiana itself. Working with the biggest budget that he'd enjoyed up to then, it's as clear-eyed and lucid as any of his other films, with a near-total absence of stylistic flashiness. There's plenty of symbolism if you like that sort of thing, but the film never runs the risk of slipping into arty pretension: the story and subject-matter are too strong.

Viridiana (Silvia Pinal, foreshadowing the icy blonde characters Catherine Deneuve would play in Belle de Jour and Tristana) is on the verge of becoming a nun, but before she takes her final vows she is summoned to visit her uncle, the middle-aged Don Jaime (the great Fernando Rey).

She's initially worried about the corruption of his wealth, but it's unsurprisingly (to all except her) the corruption of the flesh he's most interested in, largely thanks to Viridiana's startling resemblance to his late wife. After a series of fetishistic games lead to a disastrous seduction attempt, Don Jaime hangs himself and leaves Viridiana his estate.

Vowing to use her new-found money for good causes, Viridiana takes in a group of beggars, but as they take over her house and her life she quickly comes to realise the hard way just how limited and hopelessly idealistic her vision of the world is, and that the cynical rationalism of her cousin Jorge, Don Jaime's worldly son, though less godly, offers far more practical benefits (the closing card game, underscored by a wonderfully trashy and embarrassingly catchy early Sixties pop song in English - as distinct from the Handel and Mozart Viridiana prefers - is a miniature classic of pointed observation in its own right).

It's easy to see why many Catholic groups found Viridiana so offensive (it was condemned by the Vatican, who took particular exception to the beggars' re-enactment of the Last Supper), but Buñuel's anticlericalism - in this film above all - stems from a desire to be painfully honest. If the Church is demonstrably failing its people by substituting practical action for meaningless piety, why stay silent?

The performances are beyond praise, from established actors Silvia Pinal, Francisco Rabal and Fernando Rey (in the first of four marvellous characterisations he would create for Buñuel), right down to the beggars, some of whom were genuine (and apparently their mutual animosity was equally unfaked). Both Viridiana and Don Jaime could easily have been two-dimensional caricatures - we've seen plenty of idealistic, virginal nuns and lecherous uncles in other films - but Buñuel, Rey and Pinal add untold layers of ambiguity and complexity: Don Jaime's unhealthy interest in his niece is counterbalanced with and to a certain extent justified by his grief at losing his wife on her wedding night, a void in his life that he's never been able to fill.

It's often underrated compared with the more high-profile French-made masterpieces that Buñuel would make over the next decade and a half, but two viewings over the last few months have convinced me that it's one of his very best films - and considering Buñuel's unquestioned importance in cinema history that's no small claim, or indeed achievement.