Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Simon of the Desert
1965 · Luis Buñuel · Simon of the Desert on Sightlines
A thief's hands have been cut off for stealing. His family brings him across the sand to the foot of a column, and the holy man standing on top of it prays, and the hands grow back. The man looks at them. Then he uses one to hit his child.
Buñuel doesn't underline it. No reaction shot, no music sting, no cutaway to a scandalized monk. Carlos Savage's cutting stays plain and transparent, Claudio Brook goes on blessing things (he blesses more or less everything, reflexively, the way people say "bless you" after a sneeze), and the film moves to the next episode.
That slap is the whole film in one gesture. It is also a quiet demolition of the way movies had worked for sixty years.
Consider what a miracle is, structurally. A situation exists: no hands. Someone acts: prayer. The situation changes: hands. Deleuze called that circuit the action-image, and it is the engine of nearly all narrative cinema — perceive a problem, act, transform the world, cut to the next problem. Deleuze thought the circuit broke after the war, in Italy, where characters could no longer respond adequately to what they were seeing. Buñuel arrives at the same wreckage from the opposite direction. His man responds with total, supernatural efficacy, and the world absorbs it and closes over it without changing a thing. That's the crisis of the action-image staged as theology, and it's funnier than the Italian version.
What Simón does the rest of the time is stand. Deleuze's word for a character who has stopped being an agent and become a watcher is voyant, the seer: someone to whom no action is available, who can only look and endure. Buñuel takes this literally. A man on a pillar cannot walk toward a problem. The film is a machine built to manufacture a pure seer, and then to audit what pure seeing is actually worth.
Meanwhile the running time fills with the logistics of the vocation. Food hauled up. Bodily needs. The tedium of prayer, staged with deadpan literalism. Deleuze called these stretches temps mort, dead time, the everyday held rather than advanced. In most films dead time is what sits between events. Here it is the calling itself. Sanctity as a job with hours.
The staging is vertical and repetitive, and it is a film about bodies holding attitudes. Deleuze, writing late about the cinema of the body, said that when a posture is held long enough to expose the social arrangement propping it up, it becomes a gest. Simón's standing is a gest. Look at it long enough and you stop seeing devotion and start seeing an arrangement: who climbs, who watches from below, who hauls the basket, who comes to tempt. A man being holy at an audience. The blessing hand is the same thing in miniature, a sacrament worn down by repetition into a tic.
Gabriel Figueroa photographs all this with the monumental low angle he had perfected for Emilio Fernández on Río Escondido, figures small against enormous cloud-loaded sky, hard high-contrast monochrome in a year when everyone else was going to color. The grandeur is genuine, and it is being used against its owner. The angle lends Simón a majesty the content keeps puncturing. The desert stops functioning as a location and becomes an abstract stage holding one tiny vertical mark in a horizontal void: what Deleuze called an any-space-whatever, a space that no longer hosts action and now only holds a feeling. Underneath it is the thing Deleuze thought Buñuel had found before anyone — the originary world, a savage substrate of appetite showing through the social crust. The monks, the processions, the pilgrims are the crust. The sand is what they are standing on.
Into that rigid geometry Buñuel drops Silvia Pinal, who moves. She arrives as a coquettish schoolgirl who shows her legs. Later she arrives bearded, as a figure evoking Christ. Deleuze has a name for a character like this: the forger, who doesn't merely lie but manufactures truth, sliding from one identity to the next so that no version can be nailed down as the real one. The detail that matters is that she can play Christ, and play him well enough. Cinema had spent decades on the contract that the camera testifies, that a face photographed in agony is evidence — Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc staked an entire film on Falconetti's face as proof. Simon inherits that hagiographic register and then demonstrates that the face can be counterfeited. Holiness has no photographic signature.
Then, with no preparation whatsoever, it is 1965 and we are in a discotheque. Amplified rock at volume, after forty-odd minutes of wind and murmured prayer. It is worth knowing that the money ran out: Buñuel had further temptations written, couldn't shoot them, and rather than pad the film or shelve it he cut. The most famous rupture in his career is an accident he refused to disguise. Deleuze's term for this kind of join is the irrational cut, one that doesn't link two spaces but sets an unbridgeable gap between them and makes the gap carry the meaning. The interstice. The AND. It is the grammar of Un Chien Andalou, the incongruous match yoking unrelated things, lifted out of dream logic and aimed at history. What it hands you is not a passage of time but time itself: two eras held as one present, with the suggestion that the trance on the pillar and the trance on the dance floor are the same trance with different equipment. Deleuze calls an image that gives time directly a chronosign. No movement carries us there. The cut simply puts us there.
What it did to narrative is refuse to finish. No catharsis, no conversion, no fall. The episodes don't build, they accumulate, closer to a series of jokes sharing one setup than to a plot. The film argues by doing that a picture doesn't need to conclude, it needs to cut somewhere that reorganizes everything behind it. Buñuel had been assembling the parts for thirty-five years. L'Age d'Or gave him sanctity measured against carnal absurdity. Los Olvidados proved Figueroa's hard Mexican light could carry a surrealist eruption without flinching. Él anatomized Catholic obsession as clinical neurosis. Simon takes the ascetic ideal, the most extreme and least corruptible version of the thing, and finds the neurosis in that too. What it leaves behind isn't a style anyone copied wholesale; it's a licence — that you can cut from a world to its unrecognizable future and let the rhyme make the argument, and that a film can be short, blasphemous, unfinished and still serious to its last frame.
Watch it again for the crowd rather than the saint. Buñuel keeps the camera's attention on who is at the bottom of the column and what they want. And keep the last cut open as a question rather than a punchline: is Simón damned down there, or retired, or has he simply been transferred to the same post under new management?
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — Simón miraculously restores the thief's amputated hands and the man immediately uses them to strike his child; the sensory-motor circuit runs at supernatural power and transforms nothing.
- irrational cut / interstice (the AND) — The single unmotivated cut from the ancient column to a 1960s discotheque, roughly fifteen centuries in one join, substituting for the resolution the collapsed financing denied.
- the seer (voyant) — A protagonist fixed atop a pillar who cannot move toward anything; the drama consists of who ascends, who watches and who tempts while he only looks.
- the gest — The vertical, repetitive staging — the saint aloft, pilgrims and clergy clustered at the base — turns standing into a posture that exposes the theatre of holiness; the reflexive blessing is the same gest in miniature.
- temps mort — The practical absurdities of living on a column — food hauled up, bodily needs, the tedium of prayer — staged with deadpan literalism and allowed to play.
- espace quelconque — Figueroa's barren Mexican desert standing in for Syria becomes an abstract stage, isolating the saint as a tiny vertical mark in a horizontal void rather than a setting for action.
- originary world — The ecclesiastical surface of monks, processions and pilgrims sits on a savage desert substrate; Buñuel poses the ascetic ideal and lets bodily reality corrode it through farce.
- the forger — Silvia Pinal's Devil shifts serially through guises — coquettish schoolgirl exposing her legs, bearded false Christ — her protean mobility set against Brook's fixity.
- chronosign — After the nightclub cut, the fifth century and 1965 are held as coexisting rather than sequential, the ancient silence replaced by amplified rock; time is given directly instead of measured by movement.