Thank God I’m an atheist: the criticism of priesthood in the cinema of Luis Buñuel

Abstract

This article aims to analyze how the cinema of Luis Buñuel deals with the devotion of leading characters in the exercise of some degree in priesthood, especially the Christian, permeated by the filmmaker’s atheism and the surrealism in his work, since the misfortunes of religiosity are recurrent as a theme in his filmography. From the concepts of surrealism and its strategies in audiovisual construction of rational disarticulation, three films with sacerdotal protagonists are analyzed in terms of how much they align or differ from those attributes of the surrealist movement, in search of particularities. The films are Nazarin (1959), Viridiana (1961) and Simão do Deserto (1965). They are also compared to each other and to the specific surrealistic characteristics and criticism of religion, recurring in the work of the Spanish filmmaker, in order to note to what extent they apply to each of them. In all the three films, the adversities of the protagonists reinforce the sense that their devotion and their sacrifice can’t make the beneficiaries better nor accomplish their own plans. In practice, the supposedly exempt perspective defended by the director reiterates the uselessness of faith, in a logical construction that moves away from the surrealist subconscious principle, a strategy that only Simão do Deserto (1965) clearly recovers, while still maintaining the same thesis.