Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Simon of the Desert
1965 · Luis Buñuel · Simon of the Desert on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how small Simón looks against the empty sky. (camera)
Figueroa composes him with grand, low-angle monumentality atop the column, an isolated vertical mark in a vast horizontal void.
Payoff: The grandeur of the image keeps undercutting the man it is supposedly honoring.
Watch Simón bless things reflexively, again and again. (performance)
Claudio Brook plays the gesture with total, unwavering seriousness, never once signaling that it might be funny or empty.
Payoff: His straight face is what lets the joke land without the film ever having to point at it.
Notice the basket hauled up with Simón's food and water. (setting)
The film stages the practical logistics of living on a pillar with deadpan literalism, treating sainthood as a job with daily chores.
Payoff: Holiness here has to eat and drink like everyone else, and the film never lets you forget it.
Watch Silvia Pinal change her look and manner between scenes. (performance)
She arrives as a coquettish schoolgirl and keeps shifting her manner, sliding between guises with sly relish.
Payoff: Her fluidity is set directly against Simón's fixity, and she is by far the livelier of the two.
Listen for how quiet the desert stays: wind, prayer, a crowd's murmur. (sound)
Buñuel keeps music almost entirely out of the film, letting the ascetic setting's near-silence stand on its own.
Payoff: The quiet makes you feel exactly how little happens on top of that column.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Stay with the crowd at the bottom of the column. Watch who climbs, who watches, who tempts.