Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Nazarín
1959 · Luis Buñuel · Nazarín on Sightlines
A priest walks onto a construction site and offers to work for free. He means it as charity. He has no money, he wants to earn his bread, and free labor seems to him the purest form of the offer. Within minutes the paid laborers are swinging at each other in the dust, because a man who works for nothing has just cut the price of everyone's day. Nazario doesn't understand what he did. He almost never does.
That brawl is the whole film in one scene, and it's why Deleuze is worth bringing along here rather than draping over the top. In the cinema Deleuze called the movement-image, films run on a circuit: a character takes in a situation, the situation calls for an act, the act changes the situation. Perception, action, new equilibrium. That circuit powers most films you have ever seen. Deleuze's name for its collapse is the crisis of the action-image — characters who can no longer respond adequately to what they perceive. We usually meet the crisis in its passive form, someone drifting through Antonioni's Italy unable to want anything. Buñuel found a stranger door. Nazario acts constantly. He is the most willful person in the frame. The break happens on the far side of his will: his acts land, they just never resolve. They produce brawls, arrests, infection, ruin. Charity goes in, damage comes out, and the machinery of cause and effect keeps working perfectly.
The shape Buñuel gives this is the picaresque, which in Deleuze's terms is the voyage-balade: the trip that transforms nothing. Carlos Savage's cutting is flat and unemphatic, laying episodes end to end, each self-contained, joined by weak links — the road, the next village, the next encounter — instead of by causes tightening toward a climax. Buñuel learned that from Bicycle Thieves: an ordinary man moving through discrete street-level incidents that refuse to add up. Bazin loved that refusal, because the neorealist event stayed uninterpreted and the world kept its ambiguity. Buñuel takes the structure and distrusts the surface. Under the street he is looking for something Bazin never went after.
Naturalism. Deleuze built an entire category of the movement-image around Buñuel: the impulse-image, where the visible social world is a crust over an originary world of appetite and compulsion. It has two floors. The derived milieu is the concrete place — village street, jail cell, sickroom, work site, the dust-level poverty Figueroa photographs. The originary world is what those places are actually made of: drives indifferent to the moral vocabulary laid on top of them. Notice who attaches to Nazario. Andara, a prostitute whose violence starts the plot and who burns down his lodging to cover herself. Beatriz, jilted and prone to hysteria, following him with an ardor nobody in the film mistakes for purely spiritual. Ujo, hopelessly in love with Andara. These are naturalist figures in Deleuze's sense: their acts are symptoms of a force they cannot name. And the film has a line of slope, the irreversible downward run of the impulse-image. Roof, then road, then beggary, then a cell. Nothing reverses.
For the work-site scene Deleuze has a small, exact term: the index of equivocity, an act that could belong to two entirely different situations, with the film declining to say which. Nazario's free labor is sanctity from where he stands and sabotage from where the workers stand. Both readings are complete. Neither cancels the other. Nearly every episode is built on that hinge, which is why the film feels cold to viewers who want a verdict and merciless to those who don't.
Twice Buñuel takes away even the equivocal act. In the typhus village Nazario can do nothing; the dying are past anything a blessing reaches. A woman refuses the consolation of heaven and calls for her earthly lover instead. Deleuze's word for what Nazario becomes there is the seer, the voyant — a figure who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher, facing a purely optical situation with no move available. Rabal plays it with a grave stillness that holds the feeling and never discharges it.
Then something inexplicable turns up in the corner of an ordinary scene. This is the oldest thing in Buñuel, the device he invented in Un Chien Andalou: the irrational image erupting inside a legible one, with no dream frame to excuse it. Deleuze calls an object torn loose from its customary chain a demark — habit fails, and the image has to be read instead of followed. L'Age d'Or had already fixed the tone: sacrilege delivered flat, no caricature, no wink. Los Olvidados fused that flatness with street realism. Nazarín is where the fusion goes quiet and gets patient. Buñuel even hires Gabriel Figueroa, whose monumental skies in María Candelaria defined golden-age Mexican beauty, and then curbs him. Fewer cloudscapes, more dust. The grandeur is present as something withheld.
What is the film arguing? Deleuze's discourse-image names an image that poses a problem it cannot resolve, and that is the honest description. Nazarín asks whether the Gospel can be lived literally and answers with a shrug that costs everyone near Nazario dearly. Compare Diary of a Country Priest, eight years earlier: Bresson also makes holiness an unresolved formal problem, but he goes inward, through writing and voice and a face. Buñuel goes outward, through consequences. Same difficulty, opposite direction.
The part that outlasted the argument is structural. Buñuel proved a film could run an idea as an experiment — set a premise, apply it to case after case, record the results, refuse a conclusion — and still grip you, because the cases keep hurting. No arc. No growth. Nothing learned. It became the first panel of a trilogy that reruns the test on a novice in Viridiana and on a hermit atop a pillar in Simón del desierto, both ending in failure.
The last thing you hear is not an argument. The drums of Calanda, the Good Friday percussion of Buñuel's home village, come up over a quiet exchange on the road, and they are not scoring an emotion. They are a physical pressure, pure intensity with no story attached — what Deleuze calls a quality presented for its own sake, a power-quality. What they do is make the ending undecidable. Something passes between Nazario and a stranger. Is it his first real contact with another human being, unpriestly and unearned, or the last humiliation of a man who has lost even his errand? The film won't say. The drums crown the moment and drown it at once.
Watch it again, and don't watch Nazario. Watch what happens to the people he helps.
Concepts in play
- crisis-of-the-action-image — Nazario perceives each situation and acts charitably, yet every act misfires: offering free labor provokes a brawl among the paid workers; the dramatic engine is irony in which pure good yields harm, humiliation or indifference, with no redemptive resolution.
- voyage-balade-form — Expelled from his lodging, Nazario takes to the highways as a beggar-pilgrim trailed by two disciples; the road narrative stages a series of self-contained moral experiments that transform nothing.
- weak-links — Carlos Savage's functional, unshowy cutting lays episodes end to end in a picaresque chain, each self-contained, so the film accrues its argument cumulatively rather than through tightening causality.
- impulse-image — Andara's violence, Beatriz's ardor that is 'not entirely spiritual,' and Ujo's hopeless devotion give the film a substratum of appetite and compulsion beneath its religious surface; the fetishized details and sudden objects carry the charge the smooth realist surface suppresses.
- naturalism — Beneath the Porfiriato's social order the film exposes a world of drives — the prostitute's crime, the possessive loves of the two disciples, the dying woman who wants her lover instead of heaven.
- derived-milieu — Sickrooms, jail cells, work sites and village streets, shot by Figueroa at grinding dust level rather than in his monumental Fernández register.
- originary-world — Those concrete milieux turn out to be the surface of a savage world indifferent to charity: free labor becomes sabotage, typhus defeats blessing, devotion turns possessive.
- line-of-slope — The irreversible descent from priest with lodgings to fugitive to mendicant on the road to prisoner, with no upturn permitted.
- index-of-equivocity — The offer to work for nothing is sanctity in Nazario's situation and wage-cutting sabotage in the laborers' situation; the deadpan editing refuses to adjudicate.
- pure optical & sound situations — Tending the typhus victims, Nazario is helpless before death; the dying woman rejects the consolation of heaven and he has no available act, only looking.
- voyant — Rabal's grave, still interiority in the epidemic scenes: a man reduced from agent to witness, gentle, stubborn, and finally shaken.
- demark — The sudden, inexplicable surrealist images and fetishized details that erupt inside an ostensibly realist fabric, inherited from the device Buñuel invented in Un Chien Andalou.
- discourse-image — The film poses the problem of whether Christian charity can be lived literally and withholds any resolution, holding sanctity and social ruin indistinguishable — the same unresolved formal problem Bresson pursues inwardly in Diary of a Country Priest.
- qualité-puissance — The non-diegetic Calanda drums swelling over the final quiet exchange as Nazario walks on, deployed as an almost physical force rather than melody.