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![Simon of the Desert (The Criterion Collection) [DVD]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/81fY7nt4t8L.jpg)
Product Description Simon of the Desert is Luis Buñuel's wicked and wild take on the life of devoted ascetic Saint Simeon Stylites, who waited atop a pillar surrounded by a barren landscape for six years, six months, and six days, in order to prove his devotion to God. Yet the devil, in the figure of the beautiful Silvia Pinal, huddles below, trying to tempt him down. A skeptic s vision of human conviction, Buñuel's short and sweet satire is one of the master filmmaker's most renowned works of surrealism.SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES: New, restored high-definition digital transfer A Mexican Buñuel (1995), 50-minute documentary by Emilio Maillé New interview with actress Silvia Pinal New and improved English subtitle translation PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Michael Wood and a reprinted interview with Buñuel .com Simon of the Desert, the last of Luis Buñuel's 20 Mexican films, is one of the pioneer Surrealist's sublime provocations. In Buñuel's re-imagining of the legend of St. Simeon Stylites--the 5th-century ascetic who passed 40 years atop a pillar in the Syrian desert--we first encounter the holy man as he's upgrading from his original modest pedestal to a 28-foot column six years, six weeks, and six days (666!) into his desert solitude. Viewers of Viridiana, Nazarín, and other Buñuel glosses on Catholicism won't be surprised that dogma and piety get short shrift, or that the saint's relentless self-abnegation is tinged with moral superiority and a disdain for his fellow humans. Towering against the sky (and towering all the more in the person of Claudio Brook, the gaunt butler in The Exterminating Angel), Simón heroically resists multiple temptations by Beelzebub-as-blond-hottie (Silvia Pinal, the once and virginal Viridiana) and such blackly comic distractions as exploding frogs, the Devil's motorized coffin, and a dwarf goatherd enamored of his flock. The film's triumph lies in the disarming plainness of Buñuel's style, his masterly use of the spare setting and an almost functional-seeming camera to locate surreality in the mundane. Simón's ritual ordeal ends abruptly in a wildly anachronistic coda, a stroke as brilliant as it is zany ... though how much that was Buñuel's original intention is open to question. The picture runs a mere 45 minutes. In his memoir Buñuel says that producer Gustavo Alatriste "ran into some unfortunate financial problems ... and I had to cut a full half of the film." Alternatively, in a 2006 interview conducted for this Criterion release, Silvia Pinal claims that she and her producer-husband Alatriste had the notion to make an omnibus film starring her in all three short-story episodes: Buñuel's, plus a segment directed by Federico Fellini, plus another by Jules Dassin. Then Fellini and Dassin each proposed casting their actress-wives (Giulietta Masina and Melina Mercouri, respectively) instead of Pinal, so only Buñuel's episode got made. Whichever explanation is true, Simon at 45 minutes is more movie than most films of conventional length, and its unclassifiability as either feature or short subject seems like yet another Buñuelian jest. (U.S. art-house exhibitors in 1969 paired Simon with Orson Welles's 58-minute The Immortal Story to create a viable feature-length program.) Also on the disc Filling out the Criterion disc is A Mexican Buñuel, an hourlong 1997 documentary focusing on the director's life in Mexico and how he managed to do his unorthodox thing in that country's commercial cinema from 1947 to 1965. Emilio Maillé's film includes testimony from frequent screenwriting partner Luis Alcoriza (Sancho Panza to Buñuel's Don Quixote, according to Carlos Fuentes), editor Carlos Savage, and actors Roberto Cobo (the horrific Jaibo in Los olvidados, quite delightful in old age), Ernesto Alonso (Archibaldo de la Cruz), and Katy Jurado, among others. All remember their director as "brusque but cordial, always joking," and we hear how he demanded that the great Gabriel Figueroa, cinematographer of Simon of the Desert and other key Buñuel films, forgo the dramatic storm-sky style for which he was celebrated. There are also passages with Buñuel's wife of half a century (with whom he never talked about his work) and clips from a '60s Buñuel interview conducted in English ("I am the black humor!"). Alcoriza speaks of himself and Buñuel as "atheists intrigued by religion," and the film is framed by images of a 1997 attempt to reclaim Simón's column from the peasant's field where it lay for 32 years, taking up ground that might otherwise support "four or five stalks of corn." --Richard T. JamesonStills from Simon of the Desert (Click for larger image) P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); Review Perfect filmmaking...Bunuel's wit is piercingly sharp, his timing impeccable. --Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader See more
T**R
ST.LUIS
Moving pictures merely repeat what we have been told for centuries by novels and plays. Thus, a marvelous instrument for the expression of poetry and dreams (the subconscious world) is reduced to the role of simple REPEATER of stories expressed by other art forms"-Luis Buñuel.Simon of the Desert (1965) was Buñuel's final Mexican film before moving to France. His Mexican period is often considered a repository of "anti-religious" films, although a more apt description might be "anti-ecclesiastical." This 45-minute pilgrimage is an incomplete work (due to haphazard funding), but even in its truncated state, it is a shockingly substantial work.The ascetic fifteenth century Saint Simon Stylites (Claudio Brook) has spent his life atop a pillar in order to get closer to God. A wealthy patron has an even larger pillar built for the holy man and so, after six years, six months, and six days, Simon, reluctantly, comes down from atop his ivory tower, albeit briefly, to "move up" in the world. Detached irony abounds. As in Nazarin, Buñuel presents a religious figure as a fool, but a stubbornly determined fool to be identified with and admired, with detachment.Kurt Vonnegut once wrote an amusing observation about Christ and the Lazarus story. In his take on the narrative, Vonnegut imagined that, Lazarus' resurrection, it was the recent corpse, not Christ, who became the celebrity with the crowd. Leave it for the masses to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time. But, what Vonnegut was expressing was the inevitable chasm between prophet and audience.Buñuel also emphasizes contrasts. Simon's audience does not desire holiness. They crave tinseled parody only because they do not know the difference. A handless man is resorted and immediately begins using his hand to slap an inquisitive child. Bunuel's integrity and convictions astutely critique, not the faith itself, but the contemporary adherents to the faith, who, with their short attention spans, pedestrian tastes, poverties of intelligence and of aesthetics, are rendered consumers of spectacle as sacrament. Bunuel's shift from the religious to the bourgeoisie was a natural development, seen flowering here.The devil is, naturally, a woman, and Silvia Pinal agreeably fleshes her out. She takes turns as a Catholic school girl, an androgynous messiah who performs a Janet Jackson-style wardrobe malfunction for the unfazed celibate, and finally as a mini-skirted Peter Pan, whisking Saint Wendy away from his Tower of Babel to a modern discotheque.As with all of late Bunuel, he is no mere repeater of old narratives here. As St. Luis (and only a seasoned saint could be this irreverent), he spins a new parable, one that is organically textured and startling in its improvised finale. Bunuel was no hypocrite, and the unexpected loss of cash flow inspired a quixotic bleakness and an unequaled sense of purpose.*MY REVIEW ORIGINALLY APPEARED AT 366 WEIRD MOVIES.
K**G
Some critics see this as Bunuel's greatest masterpiece. I’m not quite there on 1st viewing, but I’m not far off either
A beautifully shot, gently satiric, and often quite funny 45 min film of a man named Simon, who stands alone atop a column, day after day, year after year trying to please God with his ascetic sacrifice. Meanwhile members of the Church come and go, trying to use Simon to their own ends. Poor peasants come, receive miracle cures, and then start to smack their children and leave without even a ‘thanks’. And finally the devil herself comes in various guises to try to tempt Simon off his tower in various odd, humorous and often quite modern ways.Ever the atheist, Bunuel doesn’t really make fun of Simon, in fact he seems to hold him with a combination of respect and pity. Respect for his strength, pity because he can never really ‘win’, and is simply torturing himself to no real end.. Bunuel seems to be drawing a sharp line between ‘faith’ and ‘religion' -- faith is seen as a noble fool's errand, religion as a truly corrupting evil.For a surrealist film, this is actually quite naturalistic in terms of the acting and many of the images. And that works well. The ending is quite odd, and was tacked on by Bunuel when he ran out of money, but the bizzare twist actually works, even if it is a bit more obvious than the movie that preceded it.(mild spoilers ahead)In the end, Simon could stand up there forever, but the world, with it’s lusts and selfishness will continue on, and I think Bunuel sees that as both good and bad. The pleasures of the flesh aren’t in themselves evil. It’s man’s inability not to be cruel and violent that’s the real problem -- and that’s no more dealt with by standing alone on a column in the desert 2000 years ago, then by dancing the night away at a disco in modern day. But at least the dancing is fun.(end spoilers)Some critics see this as Bunuel's greatest masterpiece, his purest expression of his deepest ideas. I’m not quite there, at least on 1st viewing, but I’m not far away either.Criterion's transfer is terrific, and while I'd love to see this beautifully shot film get a blu-ray release this excellent DVD will certainly do.
T**X
A Saint vs Satan.
I have been a admirer of Luis Bunuel films since the 1970s. this is probably in my top five of all his films. Simon is a saintly figure who lives a top a pillar in the desert. He is newly moved to an even higher pillar where he is exalted by local people looking to him for guidance and miracles.A man with no hands prays to Simon for new hands. Simon prays to the lord, and suddenly the guy has hands. As soon as he gets his miracle hands, he proceeds to shove his children around.Piety in a world of retched people seems to be a Bunuel theme.Simon is tempted by the devil who appears in the form of a voluptuous woman played by Silvia Pinal (one of Bunuel's favorite actresses). Guess what?the devil eventually brings Simon down to earth, and the present. Only Silvia Pinal could pull it off.When I saw this in a theater, the subtitles were almost unreadable because they were white on a B&W film.The new tiles are yellow with black edges and standout against the rest of the film.This is a short film, but other extra features including cast interviews are included to make this a full night of entertainment. Recommended to fans of Bunuel and black comedy and satire.
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