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 who she is playing scene to scene. (performance)
She arrives as a coquettish schoolgirl, then later as a bearded figure resembling Christ, 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.
Once you have seen it
Watch what the thief does with his hands right after they're restored. (structure)
Simón's prayer regrows the man's amputated hands, and the man immediately uses one to strike his own child.
Payoff: A perfect miracle changes nothing about the world it lands in. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. Deleuze's crisis of the action-image names exactly this: an act that succeeds completely and still fails to change the situation.
Watch the single cut that jumps fifteen centuries with no warning. (cutting)
One unmotivated edit hurls Simón from his ancient column into a 1960s discotheque, with nothing in the story preparing you for it.
Payoff: The cut itself becomes the point, joining two eras only by the shock of the gap between them. In the reading: irrational cut / interstice (the AND). Deleuze calls this an irrational cut, a join that carries meaning through the break rather than smoothing it over.
Watch who gathers at the base of the column, and why. (staging)
Pilgrims, monks, and beggars cluster below while Simón stays aloft, and the crowd behaves like one body rather than separate individuals.
Payoff: The devotion on display looks less like individual faith than a single crowd performing one reaction.
Carry this in: Stay with the crowd at the bottom of the column. Watch who climbs, who watches, who tempts.