Lecture & Film: Luis Buñuel // VIRIDIANA (1961)
»Viridiana: Interpreting Buñuel’s Gothic Masterwork«
Lecture by Dr. Fernando Gonzalez de Leon (Springfield)
Recorded on 13 April 2023 at the cinema of the DFF.
In Franco’s Spain, Buñuel made a fearless (and at times banned) film against the prevailing arch-Catholicism, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1961. Viridiana, an aspiring nun, visits her wealthy uncle at his country estate, where he falls in love with her. In his lecture, Fernando Gonzalez de Leon examines Buñuel’s film for its surrealist influences on the one hand, and its ideological, religious, and philosophical contexts on the other.
Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) is a figure of the century not only in cinema. With UN CHIEN ANDALOU, he gave surrealism its formative face and cinema a new dimension. Like no other, Buñuel understood cinema as the art of a revolutionary imagination, and in his films he explored the abysses of modernity between utopian hope and secular catastrophe.
In this series, renowned experts from Europe and the U.S. present the many facets of Buñuel’s oeuvre – from the early surrealist works to the documentary films of the 1930s, from the films made in Mexico to the great works of the 1960s.
Film:
VIRIDIANA
Spain 1961
Director: Luis Bunuel
