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

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #36103 in DVD
• Brand: Image Entertainment
• Released on: 2009-02-10
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, DVD, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled
• Original language: Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 45 minutes

Amazon.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. Jameson

Stills from Simon of the Desert (Click for larger image)

Review
Perfect filmmaking...Bunuel's wit is piercingly sharp, his timing impeccable. --Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

Customer Reviews

SIMON STILL PROVOKES
Forty-four years ago, Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), the Spanish film maestro still living in self-imposed Mexican exile from Franco's rule, directed what was to become his most famous work of surrealism.

Buñuel's last Mexican film, "Simon of the Desert" (Simon del Desierto), was originally intended to be a full-length feature film, but was cut short - literally - when the promised funding evaporated. With about 40 minutes of scripted material in the can, Buñuel radically altered the ending. A change that ensured the movie's well-deserved acclaim.

Simon is based on Symeon the Stylite, also known as the Hermit of the Pillar (around 400 A.D.). He was one of the many ascetics who sought salvation by isolation and deprivation after the fall of the Roman Empire. Simon chose to live atop a column, dependent on the good will of strangers for bread and water.

Like much of Buñuel's work, "Simon of the Desert" is considered blasphemous by some. The "enfante terrible of surrealism," a name Buñuel loved being called, depicts a bearded, bedraggled Simon (a terrific Claudio Brook) atop his pillar for six years, six months, six days (uh oh, 666), when the devil periodically appears (a la sensuous Sylvia Pinal) and taunts him, hoping he will climb down.

"Thank God I'm still an atheist," Buñuel was often quoted as saying. But he was educated by Jesuits and steeped in religious myth, ritual and culture. His mockery of organized religion is often inspired (no pun intended). Perhaps now more than ever as we are engaged in a global conversation regarding the effects religious fundamentalism and fanaticism.

"Simon of the Desert" comes to an abrupt and improvised ending that reminds me of the best of Rod Serling's "Twilight Zone" scripts. Deeply moral and ironic, it's a jolting time-warp leap that gives new meaning to the emptiness of the post-modern age, the banality of evil and the superficiality of pop culture.

The new, restored, high-definition digital transfer is, as with all Criterion titles, as good as possible. Extras include A Mexican Buñuel an 56 minute 1997 documentary and a new interview with actress Sylvia Pinal. An included booklet features a new essay by Michael Wood and a vintage interview with Buñuel.

For the serious collector of world cinema landmarks, this is one for the digital library.

Also new from Criterion is Buñuel's other gem "The Exterminating Angel."

Bunuel takes on Cecil B. Demille.
In an ancient, arid wasteland, the anchorite Simon stands day and night atop a giant pillar, scourging himself, rejecting his mother and surviving on a sustenance diet. The poor of the area come to him seeking bleassings and miracles; the religious elders gain spiritual balm from his example. Simon thinks himself unworthy to take holy orders, and is plagued not only by begrudgers who try to prove his hypocrisy, but by his own inner doubts, fears and distractions. The chief of these latter are the temptations of the Devil, who comes to see him three times. At first she is dressed in a sailor suit and suspenders; next as a lamb-kicking Jesus; and finally in a mobile coffin.

Bunuel is usually, simplistically characterised as an anti-clerical or anti-bourgeois satirist, but this is to miss the ambivalence behind a statement such as 'Thank God I'm an atheist'. From the opening scene, Simon is compromised - he breaks his vigil to accept the gift of a wealthy benefactor. His miraculous abilities don't change a barbarously unjust world in which robbers' hands are lopped off, and the religious hierarchy have the murderous powers of the Inquistion. His miracles don't transform the souls of those he helps, instead amplifying their material self-interest. As MacHeath suggested 'Food is the first thing, morals follow on'. There are doubts about Simon's integrity, the extremity of which is often comical, and which is powerless against the sexual petulance of the Devil.

Nevertheless, this very human frailty and hopelessness makes this lisping, Hispanic Charlton Heston quite sympathetic - he does have suernatural powers, which he uses for the good; and he is quicker to forgive than those in religious authority. The framing of Simon against the sky constantly cuts him off from the desert world and community he looks down on, but he achieves, on occasion, an ecstasy they have no access to.

'Simon' is one of Bunuel's funniest and most perfect films, bursting with memorable scenes, such as the dwarf eulogising his goat's teats to an innocent young priest; the frothing exorcism of a hypocritical elder; or the dream-memories Simon has his former, youthful life. The silent onlooking of his mother on the margins gives the film a melancholy, while the slow, steady camera moves towards Simon are appropriately dizzying. Although this comic look at relgious fervour anticipates the irreverance of Monty Python's 'Life Of Brian', Bunuel never breaks the integrity of his world, never gives his characters a modern consciousness, is faithful to the look, smells, emptiness and sounds of the desert (crunching sand, whistling winds, bleating animals, bells etc.) and its people.

Satirical, irreverent & hilarious
Simon is a wise and healing ascetic who stands on top of a pillar in the desert. He shouts out his prayers, amusingly at times. On one occasion he starts a prayer, and then half way through says, "I forgot the rest". He also cures people. He gives a handless thief some new hands, the thief's wife then says, "Now you can do the gardening", and the man announces, "I can now spank my son". Some of the scenes reminded me of Monty Python's Life of Brian. Throughout the film Simon is visited, and tempted by Satan, who masquerades as a beautiful blonde woman. She entices Simon, and he repudiates her. The film draws to an outlandish and abrupt conclusion, probably because the funding dried up. A very funny and irreverent poke at religion from Buñuel.