I believe that at this point in our discussions it would be good to highlight the contribution of atheists to religious themes in today’s cinema. And I’ll suggest an extreme example right away: Buñuel’s film Simón del desierto (1965). Extreme in the sense that the only subject of the whole film is God, Satan and man — or rather, men — while Buñuel, in the combat that is fought around Simon the hermit, introduces the most varied human types, from a theologian friar to an ignorant shepherd, from the mother to the beatnik of the New York nightclub. I believe that in no film has there ever been so much talk about God as in this spectacle of a mere fifty-eight minutes. That the film later mocks faith, or rather, certain faiths, that it stinks of profanity but surely not of heresy, seems to me of secondary importance in relation to the essential fact that the atheist Buñuel speaks to us at length, coherently and dialectically, of a god which according to him does not exist. And he speaks of it with an enthusiasm and a passion which often only atheists have, with a certain emotional charge, a desire for clarity which leaves the spectator disturbed but not bewildered: a spectator who will no longer be able to interrupt this discussion but will be forced to continue it within himself, with a merciless examination of his own consciousness. Besides, in the history of thought and letters atheists have also on many occasions had a catalyzing function; they were the hammers that struck the deaf anvil of indifferent observation, of religious conformism and above all of the charity frozen in place by privileged social conditions. If in the relationship between man and God prayer is of premier importance, then blasphemy is the next most important thing: indifference creates no relation between man and God, and therefore blasphemy already announces the first step on the path of the itinerarium towards God. And I think that precisely in this sense Simón del desierto occupies an important place among films of religious themes, since, perhaps, it is the warmest and most passionate ‘cinematographic blasphemy’ ever made.
From Ai poeti non si spara: Vittorio Cottafavi tra cinema e televisione (Edizione Cineteca di Bologna, 2010), p. 154. Transcription of a comment by Cottafavi during the
annual conference on cinema of Assisi, organized by Sezione Cinema and Pro Civitate Christiana. Originally published in Dio nel cinema d’oggi (Pro Civitate, 1967).
Simón del desierto (Luis Buñuel, 1965)