The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Luis Buñuel · a film in Spanish · 1961 · written with Julio Alejandro · photographed by José F. Aguayo · a Spanish and Mexican production
Mode
Realist melodrama turned anticlerical satire; a saint’s life told in reverse, in daylight
Mythos
The saint’s life run backwards; the Passion inverted; the sleeping bride; the Last Supper restaged by the poor
Phase
One novice’s passage from the threshold of her vows to a card table, through an uncle’s house, an inheritance and a feast
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, 35 mm, Spanish dialogue; shot in Spain in early 1961; no original score, with Handel’s Messiah and Mozart’s Requiem quoted
Register
From an old man fitting his foot into his dead wife’s shoe to the beggars dancing under Handel’s chorus; one level daylight for the tender, the obscene and the comic
Scale
One house, one inheritance, a congregation of beggars, the order of a country
Governing Proposition
A novice about to take her vows is drawn back into the world by her uncle’s desire and his suicide, and gives the estate she inherits to the poor; the poor, left alone in the house, feast, riot and turn on her, and she ends at a card table with her cousin and his servant. The wager of the film is that charity undertaken as self-perfection is a relation of power, that every act of goodness in this world produces its opposite, and that the plainest realist manner can carry blasphemy further than any dream.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Viridiana, a novice about to take her vows, is sent by her Mother Superior to visit her uncle, Don Jaime, on his country estate. Silvia Pinal plays her, and Fernando Rey the uncle; Margarita Lozano plays Ramona, his servant, and Teresa Rabal the child Rita. The days of the visit are plain. Viridiana is asked to milk a cow and recoils, her hand on the teat. At night she walks in her sleep and lays ashes in her uncle’s bed. Alone at night, Don Jaime tries on his dead wife’s shoes and corset. He gives Rita a skipping rope.
He dresses Viridiana in his dead wife’s bridal gown, and with Ramona’s help has her drugged. He plays Mozart’s Requiem at the harmonium; the sleeping girl in white is the dead wife restaged on a living one. He stops short of violating her. Next morning he tells her that he did, then takes it back. She leaves, and he hangs himself from a tree with the skipping rope he gave the child. Desire, a lie and a death have done what no persuasion could: they bind the novice to the estate by guilt, and turn her vocation outward.
Buñuel wrote the film with Julio Alejandro, and José F. Aguayo photographed it in black and white. It was a Spanish and Mexican production, made in Spain by UNINCI and Films 59, Pere Portabella’s company, with Gustavo Alatriste producing from Mexico, and shot in Spain in early 1961. It was Buñuel’s first feature made in Spain, and his first film shot there since Las Hurdes (1933), after the exile that followed the Civil War. The manner is the plain realism he had refined in Mexico: even light, a level camera, and no dream to excuse what happens.
Movement II
Beneath the tree, Rita skips with the rope. Viridiana renounces the convent and stays on the estate, which she inherits jointly with Jorge, Don Jaime’s natural son, played by Francisco Rabal. She gathers the beggars of the town and houses them: among them Enedina, played by Lola Gaos, and Don Amalio, the blind man, played by José Calvo. Her charity is a rule. The beggars kneel to the Angelus at her word, and are a congregation she governs, as the convent would have governed her.
Jorge arrives with his mistress, Lucía, played by Victoria Zinny, and sets about modernising the land. In the Angelus montage the film cuts Viridiana’s beggars, kneeling at prayer in the field, against Jorge’s workmen at their tasks, and makes an argument without a word: two remedies for the same land, prayer and improvement, and neither adequate to it. The cutting is the whole case, and the film leaves it to stand.
Jorge sees a dog tied beneath a cart. He buys the dog and frees it, and another dog passes, tied beneath another cart. The argument about single acts of mercy is made in one shot, and it is made as a joke. Lucía, who has no part in that argument, leaves. The two heirs now hold the house between them, the one with her prayers and the other with his purchases, and neither has touched the order that keeps the dogs tied.
Movement III
The family goes to town, to the notary, and the beggars break into the house. They sit down at the long table and feast. The hierarchy of the house that excluded them is reproduced at once among them. The blind man who was proud and grasping before the feast is proud and grasping during it, and the congregation that knelt at Viridiana’s word now keeps its own order without her.
The beggars arrange themselves along the table and freeze as Leonardo’s Last Supper, and Enedina takes her obscene mock photograph of them. The tableau is held still. It is a feat of composition that looks like nothing, and it fixed an image the medium has quoted since. Here the sacrament is not mocked by a dream. It is restaged, in daylight, by the poor the sacrament was meant to feed.
A beggar puts on the dead bride’s corset and veil. The gown that Don Jaime laid on a drugged girl in the first movement returns on a beggar at a feast, and the single object carries the film’s law across the hinge of the diptych, from private desire to public appetite. The table is the second household the estate has formed: the old man and his niece, alone, and now the poor, at the long table, in parody of a family at dinner.
Movement IV
The beggars dance to Handel’s “Hallelujah”. The chorus rises to its full height while the blind man lashes out with his stick and the beggar in the dead bride’s corset and veil dances. The music is laid against the action with complete control, and the sequence gathers from slow accumulation into chaos. It is the film’s summit, and its sublimity is real: a terror made of the music’s grandeur meeting what it is sung over.
The family returns. Jorge is tied up, and Viridiana is attacked. It is the second attempt on her, and it repeats the first in the language of another class. Jorge buys her rescue by bribing one beggar to kill another. The charity ends in a killing paid for by the heir who never believed in it, and the woman who gave the poor the house is saved by the man who could pay them.
The film is built of such doubles, and they can be counted. Two attempts on Viridiana, by the old man and by the beggars. Two appearances of the gown, on her and on a beggar who dances in it. Two offers of freedom to a tied creature, the dog and Jorge. Two households formed around the estate, the old man and his niece and the beggars’ parody family at table. What is seen twice is seen as one: the uncle’s private desire and the poor’s public appetite obey the same law.
Movement V
The instruments of Viridiana’s devotion, the crucifix, the crown of thorns and the nails, are carried out to be burned. The saint’s life has been run backwards to its first station: the novice who left the cloister to serve the poor has given up the instruments of the Passion. Then, her hair loose, she knocks at Jorge’s door. He is with Ramona. He seats Viridiana at the card table, and the three play. A modern popular record plays, and the camera pulls away from the three at the table.
The ending judged is the ending in the film; the ending the censor refused is not part of the work. The one shot completes the doubles: a third household at table, after the old man’s and the beggars’, and the hierarchy of the house refounded as a game, with the master, the servant and the convert seated together. Whether it is defeat, liberation or the same order under a new name the film does not say, and sixty-five years of argument have not settled it.
Viridiana shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May 1961. L’Osservatore Romano attacked it as blasphemous. The Spanish authorities banned it; the director general of cinema, who had accepted the prize, lost his post; and the film’s Spanish nationality was disowned, so that for years it circulated as a Mexican film. It was not shown publicly in Spain until 1977, after Franco’s death. Buñuel’s late European films, from Belle de jour to Cet obscur objet du désir, followed on its success, and the image of the beggars at the long table has outlived the regime it was made under.
Act III · The Twelve
Subtract, and the film mostly resists. The first movement cannot go: Don Jaime’s fetish, the drugging and the hanging bind Viridiana to the estate by guilt and turn her vocation outward into charity. The feast cannot go, since it is the reckoning the charity was built for. The small episodes bear weight too. Viridiana recoils from the cow’s teat, the body she refuses; she lays ashes in her uncle’s bed in her sleep, penance and death foretold; Rita skips with the rope beneath the tree. The give is in Jorge’s world. Lucía is a sketch who leaves when the film no longer needs her, and the dog, exact as an argument, is detachable as a parable.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. Charity undertaken as self-perfection is a relation of power: Viridiana’s beggars are a congregation she governs, kneeling to the Angelus at her word, and when her rule lapses they reproduce the hierarchy of the house that shut them out, down to the blind man, as grasping during the feast as before it. Poverty does not ennoble; virtue that refuses the body leaves it to be taken. Behind the parable a social order stands in its parts: the landowning house, the Church’s vocation, the old man’s private law, and the son’s pragmatism, which absorbs piety as easily as it buys a dog. Held from the top: it discloses a mechanism more than a consciousness.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Buñuel builds against elevation, and the film rises in spite of him, four times and coldly. The summit is the beggars’ dance under Handel’s “Hallelujah”: the chorus at full height while the blind man lashes out with his stick and a beggar dances in the dead bride’s corset and veil, grandeur meeting what it is sung over. The Last Supper tableau is a second height, the drugging under Mozart’s Requiem a third, the rope beneath the tree a fourth. What holds the axis here is distance. Only the dance is a full height; the tableau is as much a joke as a summit, the rope a shudder in one shot. Twice the grandeur is borrowed from the music, and every height is watched rather than undergone, with plain daylight between.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The archetype is built, and built as inversion. The load-bearing pattern is the saint’s life: a novice about to be vowed to Christ leaves the cloister to serve the poor, and the film runs that life to its opposite, step by step, until the instruments of her devotion, crucifix, crown of thorns and nails, are carried out to be burned and she goes to the card table. Beneath the plot the Passion runs backwards, and under it the sleeping bride, a dead wife restaged on a living girl. The Last Supper is the emblem, not the structure. Held from the top by distance: the archetype is kept as an object of satire, and does not gain the force of a myth made new.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The turn and the stake are one fact. The turn: Buñuel took the anticlerical and erotic violence of Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’or and set it inside a plain, almost classical realist melodrama, with no dream to excuse it, so that blasphemy arrives as daylight fact. The stake: he made it in Franco’s Spain, on his first return from exile, on a script the censor had passed, and it cost an official his post and the film its Spanish nationality for sixteen years. Few films have risked as much that was not artistic. Held below the top: the targets and the violence were his already, and the realist manner was refined in Mexico, in Los olvidados and Nazarín.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The plainness is the instrument: Aguayo’s even light and Buñuel’s level camera give the fetish, the hanging and the feast the weight of the milking of a cow, and that equality is the argument, that the sacred and the obscene belong to one order of fact. Shot as surrealism, the feast would be a dream and could be dismissed; shot as melodrama, Viridiana’s fall would be a tragedy and could be pitied. The diptych knows too: the second attempt on her repeats the first in another class’s language, so that the old man’s desire and the beggars’ appetite are seen as one. Held from the top only because the form enacts a thesis it held before it began.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Sixty-five years of return are evidence, and the argument has not settled. The film is read as blasphemy and as moral parable; as an allegory of charity against structural change, Jorge’s workmen against Viridiana’s prayers; as a Freudian case, in the fetish, the sleepwalking and the refused body; and as a portrait of Spain only a returning exile could make. The ending keeps yielding: defeat, liberation, or the same hierarchy refounded at the card table. The small objects keep their charge: the rope, the crucifix that opens into a knife, the gown. Held here because the central argument, once seen, is seen whole: the ironies are exact rather than unfathomable, and repay return in detail more than in meaning.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Released in 1961, so force and reach are scored together. The force is a reorganisation of what anticlerical satire could be in cinema: the plainest realist grammar shown to carry blasphemy further than any surrealist device. It fixed one image, the beggars’ Last Supper, that the medium has quoted since, and it stands as a hinge in Spanish cinema, though direct debts are hard to prove. Held below the bar because it redirected less of world cinema than the Bergman, Fellini and Ozu films of its years, and part of its reach was the reach of scandal. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the shared Palme d’Or, the scandal, and Buñuel’s late European period, from Belle de jour to Cet obscur objet du désir, launched on its success.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the film survives as made, and no loss of it is known. Presence is where its history is unusual. The state banned it and disowned its nationality, and it circulated abroad for years as a Mexican film before its first public showing in Spain, in 1977, after Franco’s death. Since then it has been continuously present, in repertory, in the standard histories and in restored editions. What sets the mark is the surface. Its target, the National Catholicism of Franco’s Spain, has receded, and the blasphemy shocks less than it did, though the argument about charity has outlived its occasion. Its audience is narrower than the most present films’.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Buñuel’s craft is economy, and here it is complete and load-bearing. Aguayo’s photography is plain and exact, and the film’s argument, that the sacred and the obscene are one order of fact, rests on that evenness. The Last Supper, the beggars ranged along the table and frozen for the photograph, is a feat of composition that looks like nothing. The Angelus montage argues by its cutting alone. The feast is edited from slow accumulation into chaos under the chorus, the music laid against the action with complete control. Fernando Rey makes Don Jaime tender and his desire monstrous, never caricature; Silvia Pinal holds Viridiana’s purity without sanctimony. Held from the top by a few functional transitions.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One physics governs the film: every act of goodness produces its opposite, and the comic and the horrible obey the same dry law. Take the two most distant elements: Don Jaime alone at night, fitting his foot into his dead wife’s satin shoe, and the beggars’ riot under the “Hallelujah”, one private and almost sorrowful, the other public, grotesque and funny. Both are desire dressed in sacred forms, and the gown is the thread between them. Jorge’s dog is the law stated as a joke; Viridiana’s ruin is the law stated as fate. What holds the axis here is the field it is tested on: one estate and its dependants, with the town, the Church beyond a single convent and the country itself kept outside the frame, so the law is never asked to govern what it was not built for.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Six orders are held in one structure: the sacred, in vocation, liturgy and the instruments of the Passion; the family, in uncle and niece, a dead wife, a natural son, a servant and her child; sexuality, repressed and predatory; property and labour, in the inheritance and its modernisation; class, in the beggars kept and then loose in the house; and the state, in the regime the film addresses. The inheritance integrates them, the hinge between the uncle’s desire and the beggars’ feast. What holds the axis lowest is what stays out or slight: history in its open form, and any inner consciousness beyond Viridiana’s opaque piety. A single feature holds a society in small, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.5 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Living Form and The Made at 8.9, then The Unconcealment and The Swerve at 8.7. A plain form that gives the sacred and the obscene one order of fact and sees the old man’s desire and the beggars’ appetite as one; an economy of light, composition and cutting on which that argument rests; a disclosure of charity as a relation of power that can be stated and holds; and blasphemy moved from dream into daylight, made in Franco’s Spain at the cost of the film’s nationality.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: six orders held in one structure and joined by the inheritance, with history in its open form absent and no inner consciousness beyond Viridiana’s opaque piety. Above it, The Sublime at 8.0, four ironic heights watched rather than undergone, with level daylight between them by design, and The Bottomless Well at 8.2, where the central argument, once seen, is seen whole.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 8.9, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on two axes: The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Swerve at 8.7 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but Pressure on Tradition at 8.4 and The Imperishable at 8.4 each fall a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 8.0, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 101.4, an average of 8.5, and Tier V requires 9.0, so the aggregate would hold the film in Tier IV were the gate met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Viridiana as released in 1961 and as it stands in circulation, black and white, 35 mm, in Spanish, from the novice’s visit to her uncle to the three at the card table: directed by Luis Buñuel, written by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro, photographed by José F. Aguayo, produced in Spain by UNINCI and Pere Portabella’s Films 59 and from Mexico by Gustavo Alatriste. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Spanish film; English renderings are a reader’s aid rather than the object, and nothing here is charged to them. The register of the Spanish speech is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The ending judged is the one in the film; the ending the censor refused is not part of the work. No dialogue is quoted, because the Spanish wording of no line is certain here; the one word quoted is the word of Handel’s chorus, sung in English, and the popular record under the last scene is not named. Figures that could not be verified, among them the running time, the aspect ratio, the scene and shot counts, the share of the dialogue and the credits of most of the beggars, are not given.