Religion and Spanish Film: Luis Buñuel, the Franco Era, and Contemporary Directors

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Introduction: God and the Spanish Director Spanish culture is often perceived as homogenously Roman Catholic, yet everywhere one looks one finds a conflicted or problematic Catholicism. Nowhere is this more visible than in Spanish cinema past and present. The religious picture as a genre has coexisted alongside parodies of the conventions of the same, and ultimately has been displaced by the hybrid reworking of multiple generic discourses that characterizes postmodern directors. It is not a simple task to divide Spanish filmmakers into Jean Baudrillard’s neat categories of iconolaters (or worshippers, for the less skeptical) and iconoclasts, since at every turn the more earnest efforts at producing films that appeal to the religiously zealous crumble into more worldly concerns. On the other hand, those casting a critical light on Hispanic traditions of the sacred often wind up taking a circuitous route to transcendence. Making sense of these contradictions in a way that gives a fresh perspective to Spanish cultural studies at the intersection of religion and film has been the guiding aim of this study. It is first useful to ask whether such a genre as the religious picture exists, and if so, what defines it. A colloquial term for referring to this type of film in Spanish is cine de curas, or priests’ movies. These can be understood as any film that a priest might recommend to the faithful from the pulpit. Priests or other clergy may be protagonists of these movies, or they may dramatize sacred texts or the lives of saints. Others center on a holy event, such as a miracle or a conversion. As important as the subject matter in defining the genre is the attitude of earnestness and reverence that is assumed in the representation of religious personages, as well as a loosely documentary approach in matters of fact as accepted by ecclesiastic authorities. They generally have a mass-oriented commercial audience in mind. For this reason many cater to audience expectations by repeating a tried and true formula with slight variations, as Tzvetan Todorov noted rather dismissively in struggling to distinguish between popular culture and high art. However, as genre theorist Steven Neale contends, every film is unique if only for the fact that each one is marketed as a new industrial commodity. Page 2 → If one ventures any distance from the Jesus story, the boundaries of what constitutes a religious picture are shifting and porous. Adele Reinhartz clearly identified the subtype of the Hollywood Jesus movie as a biopic with elements of costume epic, literary adaptation, and historical documentary (12). Beyond this, one can still rely on Neale’s definition of a film genre as a system of “expectation and hypothesis which spectators bring with them to the cinema and which interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (31). This holds true especially for the religious picture. Without foreknowledge of their religious significance, these plots involving the messianic narrative, hagiography, missionary work, iconography, feast days, miracles, and rituals would have scant meaning. More so than spy movies or westerns, religious pictures depend upon generic identification to make sense to their audience. In an early work of film theory, Béla Balázs hoped that silent film would foster the growth of a universal language of gesture and movement. After a prehistoric scenario in which he imagined that all parts of the human body were as expressive as the mouth, he posited that the emergence of language concentrated expression in the lips and tongue, depriving the rest of the body of its communicative powers, which disappeared out of disuse. He noted Victor Hugo’s statement that with the invention of the printing press, the book came to fulfill the role previously played by the cathedral as the principal method of conveying meaning (39). The printed word concentrated attention on the conceptual and rational side of language and thus stole further from human subjectivity, which survived in other cultural forms such as music (42). Now, Balázs maintained, as the cathedral (as well as painting and sculpture) had been the dominant cultural text prior to the book, the film would take over from the book in the twentieth century and embark upon a restoration of lost expressive and subjective qualities through its combination of visual, auditory, and linguistic components. These founding words of film theory (the first version of this essay dates from 1923) express a faith in the power of cinema to evolve into a more complete and unifying language than any humanity had ever known. It had happened as if evolution had directed our steps toward the multiplicity of this form of communication. From facial expressions and physical gestures, we had progressed to

linguistic/phonetic systems of signs, then on to a visual, concrete artifice that could make meanings last longer, then to the book, with its deepening of the inner voice and thinking. All would be subsumed into cinema as if this were encoded in our DNA as the ultimate expression facilitated by scientific and technological progress. Balázs suggested an almost biological evolution toward the universal Page 3 →medium of cinema. Subsequent film theorists continued to surround the experience of film with an aura of mysticism. None more so than Stanley Cavell when he noted the creation of individualities onscreen, qualitatively different from all other art forms including photography and theater. Cavell saw events projected in film as a past that was not his, yet formed part of his personal memories. Ultimately this signified that “a world complete without me which is present to me is the world of my immortality” (160). The similarity of liturgy to film screenings, of filmic and religious iconography, and the play of presence and absence that suffuse both religious discourse and filmic expression have reinforced this metaphysical dimension of cinema for many other theorists as well. Recently, updated principles of evolution have been used to examine religious behavior and cognition. Nicholas Wade asserts that there is a “faith instinct” embedded in human neural circuitry (270).1 This explains why religions, like languages, are structured in similar patterns the world over despite individual differences (6). Religion increases the survival odds of groups that share DNA by increasing trust within the group and motivating some individuals to sacrifice their lives for the common good. Hence, religion and film are united in the very perception that they are intrinsic to human behavior, though in more complex ways than the more empirically observable instincts involved in selfpreservation. Balázs privileges the cathedral as an artistic text that dominated its age, as the book and cinema have done in their respective ages. One can read or semiotically decode the cathedral much like a novel or a film. Like a film, the cathedral reaches multiple human senses, with the visual sense as primary. Noël Valis underlines the close relationship between books and the sacred that evolved long before the printing press because scripture was the chosen medium of divine-to-human communication for many faiths (7). When film is added to the cathedral and to the book as codifiers for religion, it globalizes the possibilities of outreach. Yet the impact is always rooted in a precinematic tradition that meets with the conflict of modern skepticism and religious debunking at every turn. How different in this respect is the cathedral, directly funded by a religious institution and charged with its representation. While film brought a fuller sensory experience of sight and sound than either the cathedral or the book or theater could offer, the video game brings even more completion with the chance for participation in the medium and self-determination of outcomes. Television itself introduced more instantaneous choices as well. In cinema, on the other hand, narrative is imposed on the viewer. Even in films purposefully left open to interpretation,Page 4 → the writers and directors exercise considerable narrative control. The director, particularly when filming a script of his or her own authorship, acts as a deity in a microcosm that will be observed by viewers for a finite period. Thus another aspect of the special relationship between film and religion is that, unlike the subsequently developed media of television, video games, and the Internet, which grant more freedom to the spectator, cinema is arguably the final medium in which a single godlike creator controls destiny and colors perceptions.2 Peter Wollen articulated and defended the auteur theory as an indispensable means of analyzing themes and structures that can be deployed to focus on lesser-known directors in addition to the consecrated few (532). As long as there is a signature, a recognizable stylistic excess or flourish beyond the generic, an auteur can be said to be at the helm. In this study, auteurist study will be balanced with genre analysis. The auteur method will reveal the godlike director’s designs as he or she projects a religious imagination onto the screen. At the same time, generic markings enable these visions to communicate to the spectator and facilitate their marketing within mainstream cinema. A common assumption holds that creative artists and intellectuals from about the Romantics onward naturally reject established religions as repressive molar structures, while mass-produced popular culture embraces religion.3 The nomadic individual’s objection to systems of belief as misguided forces of social coercion has found recent expression in the writings of Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and A. C. Grayling. In contemporary Spanish philosophy, Fernando Savater expresses the current of atheism that emerges from rationalism: the need to believe for him is the need for an illusion that would be better fulfilled with ethical commitment. Belief in immortality mirrors the fancies of the dreaming mind during sleep (La vida eterna 56). The

post-9/11 association of religious fundamentalism with global terrorism has intensified the vehemence of rational atheists. However, another development in the relationship between secular and religious cultures in postindustrial nations has been the rapprochement between the two, emblematized by Jürgen Habermas’s 2004 dialogue with Joseph (Cardinal at the time) Ratzinger. In an interview conducted two years earlier, Habermas dealt with the Judeo-Christian heritage as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, he held it to be the only source and sustenance of “universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy” (149). On the other hand, he stipulated that “each religious faith must build a relationship with competing messages of Page 5 →other religions, just as much as with the claims of science and a secularized, halfway-scientific common sense” (150). At bottom he maintains that the Judeo-Christian legacy is conducive to the adoption of the perspectives of other people, to critical self-reflection, and to freeing itself from dogma for its own sake. Hence, despite the proliferation of antireligious voices in contemporary intellectual discourse, there is still a solid grounding for the need to perpetuate or at least accommodate worship and faith. In the spirit of this new acknowledgment on the part of cultural theorists of the continued role of religion in fostering community and human rights in cultures based on diversity, this comprehensive study explores the intersections of Spanish film history with religion and spirituality in three extensive cinematic corpuses.4 It is time to delve deeper than the usual assumption that leftist auteur directors infuse their filmic texts with atheism, while popular, mainstream Spanish films inculcate the viewer with Catholic values. Conflicted Catholicism stretches across both kinds of filmmakers. For the purpose of analyzing the sacred in cinema, an auteurist method that seeks out common threads in films by directors who wrote or were at least cowriters of the screenplays of the films in question is employed. Attention to the generic, artistic, and political contexts in which the films were produced will tie them to the world and the flesh. Although as a Mexican filmmaker his work lies outside the focus of this study, Guillermo del Toro’s remarks are paradigmatic concerning cutting-edge directors of Hispano-Catholic background. The process he exemplifies will be called reverse catechization in the chapters that follow.5 The marginalizing traces of Catholic culture might limit an artist who aspires to belong to a transnational art-house cinema and transcend a regional or national cinema that is undervalued by wealthier, more secular or Protestant-dominant nations. The artist thus outgrows and refutes Catholic belief, but for reasons that vary with the individual cannot completely erase the last traces. Hence, del Toro admits to having been very devout as a boy, but attributes this to being born already an old man. Unlike most people, he has grown backward, and is now more like a child. He considers himself an agnostic, and sees the Catholic Church as one of the pernicious influences brought by Spanish colonialism to Mexico, on the same list as smallpox and syphilis. However, he confesses, “Once a Catholic, always a Catholic: you can never escape” (On Point interview). The concept of redemption that springs from pain in his motion pictures is a reminder of his Catholic background. Spain was the most advanced country in Europe when it forced the conversion or expulsion of its large Jewish and Muslim populations. The new Page 6 →cohesiveness of the modern state was harsh in dealing with religious and ethnic difference. The Inquisition was at its most active from 1480 to 1530, targeting mainly conversos accused of engaging in Jewish practices (judaizantes) during this time. It continued to purge Spanish Catholicism of heresy, heterodoxy, and behavior deemed unacceptable, with some respite under the French Occupation and the Liberal Triennial, until it was finally abolished in 1834. José Cadalso outlined during the Age of Enlightenment that Spanish masculine identity was defined by intense religious feeling, as well as by pride, dignity, and bravery; Spanish society was noted for the predominance of the church, the military, and the aristocracy. All three of these institutions, when unchecked in their excesses, blocked the modernization that was already revolutionizing England and the German states. Feminine identity was even more closely associated with religion through the role of the “domestic angel,” which included spiritual guidance within the family, and more circumscribed roles for women in public spheres of activity. Robert Hughes describes the role of the “absolute spiritual dictatorship of Spanish Catholicism” (56). Without a Protestant Reformation to usher in some degree of religious pluralism (however violently at first), all branches of culture remained permeated with a single belief system and linked to a

single ethnicity throughout the crucial century of European Enlightenment, limiting the impact of the Age of Reason. Notable setbacks to progressivism in the early nineteenth century included the Napoleonic occupation of the Iberian Peninsula (although this did spark some degree of self-determination and the writing of the first Spanish Constitution) and the autocratic rule of Fernando VII, during which time many statesmen and writers were forced into exile. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a rigid system of opposition between absolutists who favored the older ruling classes and liberals or progressives who sided with the newer urban classes obstructed the way to a stronger representative government. This became complicated and radicalized by the extremely traditionalist band known as Carlists, who waged three localized civil wars in an attempt to change the course of the monarchy. On the left, radicalization arrived in the form of the new parties of Anarchism and Socialism. Liberalism and modern capitalism were taking root slowly, unevenly, and hand in hand in the time immediately preceding the dawn of cinema. Stanley Payne comments on the unfinished project of liberalism in renovating Spanish society because its philosophy had stimulated the takeover of some public institutions. However, it “stopped far short of democratization or a complete and radical reorganization of society” (97). A major goal of Spanish liberalism in the late nineteenth century was the reorganization of Page 7 →agricultural lands through disamortization, the taking of fallow land from the church or the nobility for distribution among the landless. While this project succeeded in aggravating religious leaders and aristocrats, it never achieved the aim of land for the peasantry, since when the time came to redistribute, the central government succumbed to financial pressures by auctioning off confiscated land to the highest bidders. Hence, land that had been available to the rural poor in the past became less available as the new moneyed classes purchased it and exercised greater economic control over it. These landowners then went to live in the growing cities on the income their lands provided. This new upper middle class could appear superficially liberal or even leftist, as Benito Pérez Galdós posited with the figure of Don Lope Garrido in Tristana (1889). However, Payne sums up this development in stating, “The first liberals soon became the new conservatives and sought the same institutional supports that had sustained their predecessors in the old regime” (97). Luis Buñuel would take up precisely this novel and main character in his own updating of the story, making it clear that the atheist or agnostic was not by definition a champion of the people. Hence atheism, in its parallel antagonism to traditional religion, harbored its own tendencies toward oppression of the disadvantaged. Among late nineteenth-century writers, figures who critique the traditional predominance of Catholicism in matters that go beyond the spiritual are very indicative of the background from which Buñuel and other early Spanish directors would emerge. Emilia Pardo Bazán introduced a liberal military officer, Gabriel Pardo de la Lage, who is keen to modernize his country materially and socially in La madre naturaleza (1878) and Insolación (1882). Gabriel articulates a deistic belief in oneness with an eternal whole. Deism was a rationalist offshoot of Enlightenment Christianity that was heretical to Roman Catholicism. It appealed to men of Christian denominations who rejected dogma and ritual and preferred the idea of a Deity who had created the world and then stepped back to let it function by natural laws. It gained followers in Spain by association with the progressive social philosophy of Krausism. Gabriel inherits a small country estate but spends his youthful career venturing abroad to bring innovation back to Spain, whereupon his senior officers ridicule him. He holds a grudge against the church for robbing him of his beloved when the niece he wished to marry enters a convent, yet his liberalism is exposed as superficial, since he censures and rejects a new love interest for having entertained another gentleman in her home. The prototype for Spanish freethinkers is found in the novel Doña Perfecta (1870). Galdós characterizes the hero, Pepe Rey, as a progressive idealistPage 8 → sacrificed on the altar of bigotry and intolerance. In this initial phase of his fiction, often termed the “thesis novel,” he pitted characters representing social or philosophical principles against each other. The resulting conflict and resolution emerges as a parable for Spanish society. Doña Perfecta is aligned with the church in her provincial domain because it is a power structure that gives her influence not only over her immediate neighbors but also over the young inheritor. Pepe is her nephew, and as such he threatens to break off a piece of her landholdings. A young engineer, he proposes to disturb the existing order with his belief in technological progress and disdain for superstition and the excesses of Catholicism. Perfecta’s practice of

Christianity, however, is uninformed by the Golden Rule. In her actions, she reveals herself to be a self-serving, unscrupulous hypocrite. Pepe for his part falls directly into her clutches by indulging in his socially maladroit tendency to criticize the cherished traditions of others. His amorous attraction to Perfecta’s daughter also suggests a subconscious inclination toward her mother, with all her authoritarian ways. Pepe’s downfall thus is due not only to the invincibility of his foe but also to his internal weaknesses, and a critique of Spanish authoritarian principles along with the susceptibility of its new liberalism emerges. In the 1880s the fiction of Galdós, Pardo Bazán, and Leopoldo Alas (Clarín) was enriched with the introduction of literary naturalism from France. In the previous decades Krausism, a product of rationalism and German idealism, became especially palatable to Spanish intellectuals when it was expounded upon by Julián Sanz del Río and adopted by Francisco Giner de los Ríos for the purpose of Spanish Regenerationism. Krausism promised a utopian social harmony achieved peacefully through improved education. It was secular in focus and geared toward the possibility of perfecting humanity through effort and self-discipline, which religious values could be counted upon to support (Rodgers 89). Roberta Johnson calls Krausism “the gateway through which Spain entered the modern philosophical tradition” (16). With the addition of naturalism in the 1880s, a total reliance on the empirical came to replace any vestiges of spiritual belief for the realist writers. For naturalism (articulated by Taine and practiced in fiction by Zola) the struggle to survive and succeed within one’s social milieu and in adaptation to the changing conditions of one’s historical context is complicated by inherited infirmities of the mind and body. The concentration on pathology and its transmission from one generation to the next shows a new faith in the biological and social sciences, with elements of Darwinism and positivism. This replaces the spiritual and idealistic content of earlier metanarratives. Pardo Bazán strives to make room for Page 9 →Catholic belief in free will, moral imperatives, and grace in her essays in La Cuestión Palpitante (1883). Nonetheless, her fiction reveals a frank enthusiasm for naturalistic character delineation. Her overwhelming insistence on abnormality and its contrast with religious dogma makes her a clear precursor to the surrealist frenzy of the abnormal in Buñuel. In Alas’s La Regenta, the protagonist, Ana de Ozores, is afflicted with a hysteria that has clear mental and physical symptoms and a hereditary background that goes back at least one generation. However, as in Pardo Bazán’s interwoven spiritual and pathological portrayals, Ana’s affliction is also partly religious in nature. She goes through phases of self-denial and self-punishment to please her lascivious and possessive confessor. During psychotic breaks she has mystical trances that turn her into a corrupted St. Teresa of Ávila figure. Ironically, the most genuine believer in provincial Vetusta is none other than a lifelong self-proclaimed atheist and enemy of the church named Pompeyo Guimarán. The narrator notes that during Holy Week processions he was the only one thinking about God, albeit by doubting him. His faith emerges only on his deathbed, when he pleads for confession. This plays right into the hands of the gloating, ego-driven Father Fermín de Pas. Alas’s deconstruction of the Catholic cornerstones of faith in order to expose the abuses of church influence and power in society has much in common with Buñuel’s skepticism, while at the same time it guards a privileged place for a purity of intention found in unlikely places that could facilitate true belief. Mystical experience in both Alas and Galdós is mixed with psychiatric illness. In Fortunata y Jacinta, the young lower-class heroine Fortunata becomes obsessed with her “white idea,” her desire to provide an heir for her married lover, whose wife is infertile. This would give her love the sanctification that it lacks in the eyes of society. Like the Virgin Mary, she will bear the child of someone she worships, even if she must conceive out of wedlock. Her husband, Maximiliano Rubín, struggles with a more psychotic form of mysticism in the same novel; his paranoid delusions convince him that he is divine, the “son of the stars.” In Galdós’s later fiction, he blends a Russian-influenced cultivation of the spiritual into his naturalist somatization. He introduces the failed mystic and crusader Nazarín, whose efforts at living Christianity to the letter in the most marginal social settings bring calamity to himself and his disciples. This plot in particular would fascinate Buñuel; not only did he cowrite and direct a very loose adaptation of this novel, but he also used its concept of deluded holiness as the springboard for other filmic narratives that were more fully his own. The realists’ reception of Krausism and naturalism was the basis for the Page 10 →incorporation of more modern discourses and metanarratives with even less space for religion: the philosophies and social thought of Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Bakunin, and Bergson. As the next wave of writers took the helm after the turn of the century,

the most innovative of them, such as Ramón María del Valle-Inclán and Miguel de Unamuno, espoused a more internalized and subjective focus and a greater artistic freedom in separating their work from representations of reality. For Valle-Inclán, this involved the development in his early fiction of an alter ego named the Marqués de Bradomín, a combination of a Don Juan (modernized by the figure of the libertine and the dandy that had evolved in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and a Don Quixote. Bradomín idealized select trappings of aristocratic and ecclesiastic privilege and then employed them to exalt his absolutely base behavior. Bradomín’s exploits often combined the erotic and the religious, resulting in sacrilege, as when he defiles a nun in her convent cell. In another of his narratives, he declines to rescue a girl from her father’s incestuous embrace because of the sanctity of the parental bond. While Valle-Inclán toyed with transgressive uses of the sacred and the taboo in an aristocratic context in the Sonatas, the fiction of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez sided with social underclasses and exposed the role of the Catholic Church in keeping them oppressed. His clergy are even more exploitative than those of Alas, and he makes no room as Alas did for authenticity buried somewhere in the Catholic heritage. Class struggle between the wealthy and the disenfranchised, with the church upholding the status quo for the dominant classes, is a mainstay for this author who penned many of the sagas upon which international silent film blockbusters were based (Blood and Sand, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse). As polarization between left and right increased in the early twentieth century, Spanish socialists blamed the capitalist system for inequitable rights and wealth distribution. Anarchists and communists, however, were more inclined to see the Catholic Church as the main culprit in the oppression of working and lower classes. For Timothy Mitchell, sexual repression and abuse perpetrated by the clergy and others in the system is the main force behind anticlericalism. Mitchell chronicles the evolution of anticlericalism, which has taken the form of popular sayings (refranes), jokes, rituals, propaganda, vandalism, arson, and homicidal riots. These reactions to the mental and physical anguish caused by an authoritarian sexual system imposed upon Spanish culture by Catholicism go back at least as far as the time of Francisco de Goya. Historical evidence of “institutionalized sexual predation” both heterosexual and homosexual, some of it pedophilic, had come to the attention of the Inquisition and continued to motivate mass Page 11 →killings of clergy under the Second Republic (14). Mitchell’s theory of “schismogenesis” in Spanish Catholicism consists of a cycle of extreme repression of the libido alternating with total loss of control (indulgence in sexual abuse) followed by guilt. The remorse, however, was insufficient to prevent the next episode. This cycle was virtually enforced by structures of abuse such as the confessional, the school, and the seminary. This ensured that generation after generation of young Spaniards would be abused in the context of nonconsensual sexual activities and fall victim to bouts of eroticized suffering (mortification of the flesh in order to block out the reflective faculties) and obsessive guilt (19). Meanwhile, women were restricted from leadership and most other active roles outside of the home. They were enticed instead to identify with the cult of an idealized mother (the Virgin Mary), encouraging them to be manipulative, overinvolved, and controlling mothers in compensation for their lack of direct power (20). They then become perpetuators of the cycle of repression and guilt. The root cause of it all for Mitchell is the impossible ideal of celibacy for the clergy and the containment of sexual impulses for all others within a sanctified male/female lifelong bond for the purpose of procreation only. Schismogenesis is an intriguing theory that explains the prevalence of sexual abuse in religious settings, but is less effective in gauging economic structures that ensured that the church would maintain social power at the price of hypocrisy and corruption. When the Second Republic declared the first significant separation between church and state in 1931, the struggle for religious control of Spanish culture went underground. Mitchell notes that apparitions of the Virgin were reported at Ezkioga and elsewhere, and the new lay order of the Opus Dei spread as a reaction to the unaccustomed secularization (81). The clergy denounced leftist politicians from the pulpit, and the democratic government was destabilized by the election of new reactionary ideologues when women voted for the first time in 1934. The Popular Front victory of February 1936 ignited mob riots in which seven thousand clergy were murdered, along with some of their relatives and members of Catholic political groups. This became a major rationale for the Right to regain control, and the Nationalists staged their coup and waged a Civil War of close to three years. Their victory amounted to the clerics winning a custody battle for the Spanish people; they would now act as good parents steering the children away from moral dangers (Mitchell 104). Under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, Roman Catholicism would be the official and only faith permitted. From his initial blessing by

the pope in 1939, Franco would go on to earn the Vatican’s highest decoration in 1953 (Preston Franco 323, 622). Despite Page 12 →conflict between Franco’s Falangist supporters and the Catholic hierarchy, the regime maintained its Catholic allegiance and identification for a full thirty-six years. In the 1960s, liberalization of Roman Catholicism proved problematic for an authoritarian government intent upon survival through technical rather than political or social modernization. The mid-1970s saw democracy take root again with the death of the dictator. The clergy were decreasing in number and proportion dramatically during this decade, contributing to the ease of secularizing the state. However, the church maintained considerable influence and participation in the fields of education, health care, publishing and broadcasting, and international missionary work for many years after the democratic transition, continuing to enjoy economic subsidies that nonetheless fell short of relieving its shrinking financial base (Payne 222). By the start of the twenty-first century, Spain like other Catholic-dominant societies was rocked by allegations of sexual abuse, particularly toward minors, that had been occurring under the aegis of the church in the second half of the twentieth century. Authorities appeared uninterested in abating it or meting out justice until the complaints reached a crescendo that could no longer be denied. The dirty secret of clerical sexual abuse shocked believers and strained their relationships with the church. The latter was subjected to public outrage and financial settlements that further weakened its financial base. In Spain, distrust was worsened by secrets buried by the Pact of Silence. This tacit policy of amnesty for abuses of human rights committed by the Franco regime and its officials extended back to the Civil War. Especially distressing in this regard are the widespread allegations that Catholic clergy and employees of the Catholic health care system in general conducted human trafficking by stealing babies from families of unfavorable reputation (leftists, nonpracticing Catholics, single mothers, etc.), telling these mothers their children had died, and then offering the children in illegal adoption for a fee to “good Catholic families.” They kept up this illegal practice twenty years into democratic rule because of their control and influence in medical culture. The number of families affected is likely to be in the thousands (Adler). Adding fuel to the flames, John Paul II canonized nine Spanish clergy, and he and Benedict XVI beatified nearly one thousand more for having been “martyred” by Republican militias in anticlerical violence before and during the Civil War, while the families and descendants of slain Republicans received no such official recognition; bodies are still buried in mass graves and the fates of many victims are unknown. Spain in the second decade of the twenty-first century shows the same Page 13 →decline in religious participation that characterizes modernized nations, particularly European ones (Wade 269). Less than 15 percent of Spaniards regularly attend mass, and legal changes that allow divorce, same-sex marriage, and limited abortion rights are in disagreement with church doctrines. Immigration has brought a rising tide of newcomers from non-Catholic as well as Catholic societies. However, 73 percent of Spaniards still define themselves as Catholic (“Pope Benedict”). Catholic values are embedded in the culture and need not be transmitted by religious institutions; they can be found in the mass media, the educational system, and other sites on the cultural grid. In view of the special economic status granted to the Catholic Church by the 1979 Concordat with the Holy See (a revision of the 1953 agreement), there is every reason to expect that Spain will persevere as a predominantly Catholic culture, despite lifestyle changes and a history of grievances and inequities, for quite some time. Freud dismissed religion as immature ideation, the projection of an idealized father figure that fostered the development of a conscience. Modernity should see religion as an illusion and surpass it, moving on to a more reasonable faith in the sciences (Armstrong History 357). In her recent work, however, Julia Kristeva opens the door to the need to believe as a healthy part of the psyche, neither pathological nor regressive. For Kristeva the need to believe is prereligious; reaching out to a loving father who loves one through the mother breaks the stranglehold of the mother-child dyad and supplies the basis for the speaking subject to emerge. She accents the father as a loving third party whose authority acknowledges the child’s symbolic being and initiates the entrance into codes, law, and culture (Need to Believe 10). From the infant as seeker of knowledge emerges the adolescent whose need to believe takes the form of fanatical belief in the existence of an absolute partner who can satisfy every need. Unless sublimated, this expectation leads to self-destructive behaviors such as anorexia, vandalism, and self-mutilation (17). Her focus on the psychological need for faith responds to her mistrust of both fundamentalism in established religions (systems in which doctrines have become calcified and effectively

antisocial) and of the totally secular society (unresponsive to the need for sublimation). In the need to believe Kristeva sees “perhaps our last chance to deal with the rise of obscurantism and its other face: the management via technology of the human species” (Need to Believe 29). Combating the rule of a technologized modern state over the individual will bring religious figures to the surface again in a positive way in later Buñuel films, with a special role reserved for Mary. Kristeva seems to regard some aspects of Christianity as especially beneficial:Page 14 → the copresence of the human and the divine inherited from the Greco-Roman tradition, and “the singular experience of the love of God” in fulfillment of Jewish messianism (Need to Believe 31). She advocates an updated revival of Greco-JudeoChristianity for its assertion of a common world for all and its recognition of the value of individual differences (76). She notes that Catholicism situates woman, through Mary, at the gap between the points of the Holy Trinity and, by contrast, as queen of the church (47). This harks back to Kristeva’s earlier work on matricidal guilt being at the heart of depression and withdrawal, especially for women, who have introjected the maternal body. Such women may develop negative narcissism, from “being immortal in and beyond death (which the Virgin Mary so perfectly embodies)” (Black Sun 29). Any theory of religion that references Kristeva must also take note of the abject, a source of terror that threatens to engulf the speaking subject and plunge it back into a prelinguistic state of dependence. One function of religion is to consecrate the abject, which can take the form of sublimating it into an oceanic feeling of oneness with the divine. The Catholic Eucharist or Communion wafer for Kristeva signals orality as the route to resurrection, shunting energy and attention away from genitality, which is repressed. In cinema, the abject can also find expression in the horrific remnant or in a morbid focus on death: “Abjection is a resurrection that has gone through death (of the ego). It is an alchemy that transforms the death drive into a start of life, of new significance” (Powers of Horror 15). Like Kristeva, Terry Eagleton has worked from a firmly secular position toward a rapprochement with religion. He has joined the religious debate with a critique of Hitchens and Dawkins that also illuminates in many respects how religion works in Spanish film. For Eagleton, rejecting religion for not explaining the material world the way that science does misses the point: “Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever” (7). Science is necessary to understand how the world works, but it cannot address the question of why the world exists (9). Regarding Christianity, Eagleton emphasizes the antiestablishment lifestyle and ideology of Jesus, and the potential within Christianity to support revolutionary discourses. Jesus, for example, was hostile to the family in an antibourgeois way, upholding moral principles over blood ties. Thomas Aquinas’s charity presupposed rather than excluded erotic love (31). The advanced global capitalist system in which we find ourselves, on the other hand, is atheistic to the core and brutal toward the powerless. Barbarism (Eagleton’s term for domination by any means possible over others) does not give way to civilization, but Page 15 →continues to exist alongside it as an enabling condition. The violence of barbarism is sublimated into control and order, and can always erupt anew (96). Religion has the capacity to wed culture (based on brotherhood and justice) to civilization and keep new forms of barbarism at bay. Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms are pernicious in Eagleton’s view, but so is global capitalism, and the atheists (“avatars of liberal Enlightenment”) cannot rescue anyone from the latter adversary (100). Eagleton’s approach to faith goes a long way in explaining Buñuel’s trajectory of anticlericalism and “reverse catechization” that moves onward to a more aware reinvention of his own faith. The first chapter considers films directed by Luis Buñuel to which he also contributed an original screenplay. Though an iconoclast where the sacred was concerned, he nonetheless formulated his own theology over time, with space for the religious as a preserve for the imagination at risk of engulfment by technology. The ingenious frontal attack of his 1930 sound/ silent film L’Âge d’or gave way to his down-to-earth portrayal of Jesus and Mary and valuing of a heartfelt faith in La Voie lactée (1969). Buñuel is a paradigm of the early twentieth-century Spanish avant-garde artist, and had the good fortune and tenacity to survive into the latter half of the century as well, metamorphosing in successive stages. In view of his uses of the sacraments, scripture, doctrines, and the church as social institution, he is often encapsulated as simply atheistic and hostile toward Catholicism.6 However, a reading of the religious in his filmography reveals a more nuanced and complex vision, that of a reinvention of Catholicism for modernity. Returning to his theological intertexts, such as the reactionary historian

Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, shows Buñuel’s meticulous response to accepted dogma. His divergences from the molar religious structure of his upbringing make room for the Deleuzian nomad, the Kristevan “need to believe” in its prereligious form, and Eagleton’s revolutionary potential of religion. Menéndez Pelayo’s vilification of Priscillian inspires Buñuel to resurrect the condemned heretic as a martyr for the cause of freedom and individualistic belief. Faith must enter through the heart in late Buñuelian cinema, but when it does there is no more repressive yoke to cast off. “Thank God I’m an atheist,” was Buñuel’s succinct and paradoxical summation of his credo. He has also been characterized as “the most Catholic of all atheistic filmmakers” (Trujillo 1). His attitude toward religion in general and Catholicism in particular is often framed with reference to the twin influences of Freud and Marx. In accordance with the former, he often portrays religion as a social force contributing to the repression of basic drives and personal desires, relegating these to the subconscious realm of Page 16 →dream or fantasy and often leading to their scandalous expression as perversion or lunacy. In terms of the influence of Marxian political thought, he accentuates the role of the church as a social institution that accumulates wealth and reinforces the hegemony of the moneyed classes, favoring the bourgeois values that uphold a smooth patrilineal inheritance system and the status quo between the ruling classes and the proletariat. However, there is much more to religious imagery in the films of Buñuel and the way that it relates to the discourse on spirituality in Spanish culture. Although always a professed nonbeliever, he perpetuates in minute and loving detail the particularities of belief and his childhood reminiscences of the rituals associated with Catholic worship. In Marxian thought any “magical” element in religion would be seen as an illusion propagated to keep the masses of believers content with their socioeconomic situation or at least resigned to their fates. The magic of religion in Buñuel is not reducible to this function. For Freudian psychoanalysis, strict adherence to behavioral discipline where sex is concerned is deemed paramount to the religious function of developing an automatically repressive superego that maintains social order. Buñuel gives equal weight to the role of religion in cultivating an unbridled erotic fantasy life that often spills into the arena of abnormality or perversion. Vicente Sánchez Biosca has seen the perspective on Catholicism in Buñuel as one that is lived from within rather than externalized. This makes his constant slippages from the religious to the worldly and from the sacred to the profane so pleasurable (173–74). Drawing on the tradition of liberalism that arose in Spain in the latter third of the nineteenth century and which proliferated in the first four decades of the twentieth century before being nearly obliterated by the traumatic turning point of Civil War and dictatorship, Buñuel continued to modify and adapt his religious approach while in exile. His quest for spirituality intensified with the heightened existential alienation of the expatriate experience. He integrated his responses to the social upheaval and transformations of the Cold War, the sexual revolution, and the rise of technology and terrorism. Never far from the consciousness of Buñuel is the possibility that religion may go wrong. Fundamentalism and fanaticism may arise in any community of believers and threaten personal freedom. For Buñuel the need to believe in what is empirically unknowable is accompanied by the irrational tendency to dominate the belief systems and even thought processes of others. This critique of steadfast faith as essentially antisocial in a global community in which diversity must be accepted for the common good is a harbinger of the new humanist or postsecular discourse on religion espoused by Habermas. Unamuno had anticipated the Page 17 →incompatibility of total belief and modernity (resulting in the need to leave space for doubt) in the ironic lack of closure of San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Buñuel meets the challenge of reinventing a Catholic belief system for modernity in ways that would resurface surprisingly in other dissident and skeptical directors of the late twentieth century and into the present one. The second chapter considers the religious genre film during the Franco dictatorship, with emphasis on the first two decades, when it was subsidized as a film type of national interest. It examines both mainstream narratives of saints’ lives, apparitions of Mary, and adaptations of scripture alongside revisionist and subversive approaches to the same material. During this time, the officially Catholic nature of Spanish society, termed National Catholicism, was unquestioned. Clerics were represented among the censors on the Supreme Board of Film Orientation and their rulings in moral matters were definitive.7 Unique to the Spanish religious genre, compared to Hollywood, Russian, and Italian parallels, is a gendered discourse that continues the tradition of women as

“domestic angels.” As such, they were charged with transmitting the Spanish spiritual heritage. Women were indoctrinated so that they might better indoctrinate others. This tendency is examined specifically through an international comparison of film versions of the Virgin of Fátima apparitions. However, even within the limits of Francoist censorship there was room for parody, as when comedic characters implement the conventions of the Marian apparition narrative in order to fake a visitation from a saint. Their plans are thwarted by the “real saint,” who shows up looking like a normal person, in Luis García Berlanga’sLos jueves, milagro (1957). Berlanga’s struggle with censorship altered the direction of this satire. He had to contend with a priest assigned to keep vigil and help him rewrite objectionable parts (Hopewell 77). In the final years of the dictatorship, the regime’s interest in fostering a culture of international prestige was balanced against its authoritarian content control. The chapter closes with a look at subversive religious themes in films by Víctor Erice and Carlos Saura. The third chapter follows directors who have emerged during the democratic era in Spain, with studies of films by Josefina Molina, Pedro Almodóvar, Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia, Julio Medem, Icíar Bollaín, Agustín Díaz Yanes, and Ray Loriga. Although the religious genre had receded almost totally from the cinematic scene by the final quarter of the twentieth century, religious themes filtered as if through a prism into the popular modalities of horror, comedy, melodrama, and thriller. There they combined to produce hybrid genre movies with religious elements.8 Thus, contemporary directors have revisited themes of religion and spirituality Page 18 →with freedom from censorship.9 The rejection of Catholicism characteristic of Buñuel’s early career can be found in Almodóvar’s and Amenábar’s denunciations of church influence on Spanish society in La mala educación and Mar adentro, respectively. They exhibit new twists in their attacks on established religion, some of which may stem from their sexual orientation. Acting on homosexual desire is still forbidden by Catholic doctrine at this writing. Furthermore, outrageously postmodern approaches have emerged in the Catholic-gothic horror of de la Iglesia’s El día de la bestia, in the mingling of the erotic and the divine in Medem’s Amantes del Círculo Polar and Lucía y el sexo, and in Loriga’s neo-baroque Teresa: El cuerpo de Cristo. The latter film, in particular, forms a good point for retrospective comparison, being the last of three biopics about St. Teresa of Ávila treated in this book. From the conventionally pious version of the Franco era, through the feminist, less mystical Teresa de Jesús seen in the televised miniseries of the first socialist era, we come to Loriga’s hyperrealist twenty-first-century erotic thriller, featuring a glamorous saint who practices an extreme form of Catholicism. The section on Almodóvar places his eighties convent comedy Entre tinieblas in dialogue with Black Narcissus and reads La mala educación alongside Miércoles de ceniza.10 Taking a generic approach within Hispanic film allows intertextual references to define the religious imagination to prove that “all Almodóvar’s characters are, it seems, bound by history, children of the unholy matrimony of Franco and the Catholic Church” (Acevedo-Muñoz Almodóvar 287). Marvin D’Lugo suggests that spoofing Catholicism may have been a strategy early in Almodóvar’s career for achieving greater international visibility. This is what caused Entre tinieblas to be dislodged from the Venice Film Festival. The controversy that this created resulted in the Italian press championing the film (Almodóvar 36). Like the famed gunslinger that the fledgling gunfighter taunts into a duel in order to spread his notoriety, the Roman Catholic Church makes a good target and gets one noticed. The festive /carnivalesque mode of lampooning Christianity owes much to the Italian master Federico Fellini, whose La Dolce Vita (1960) incorporates a dubious purported apparition of the Virgin Mary and a gigantic stone crucifix hauled surreally through the air by a helicopter. Icíar Bollaín references the latter image inTambién la lluvia. However, she transcends object sacrilege by providing a nuanced view of the role of Catholicism in the conquest of the New World through the unlikely vehicle of a Spanish film crew shooting a historical epic in Bolivia during the water uprising. The prominence of religious-horror hybrids in the contemporary Spanish canon is a salient feature and will probably continue into the twenty-first century. Some might count Buñuel’s first two avant-garde films as the Page 19 →start of the Spanish horror genre, or even the experimental animation and live action combos of early silent director Segundo Chomón. However, these films stand more as precursors and wellsprings of future horror conventions and imagery than as entries in cine de terror itself. Horror in Spanish cinema got off to a late start. Francoist censorship of films thought to be harmful to the collective morale helped to ensure that the only horror film made during the first twenty years of the dictatorship was the 1944 La torre de los siete jorobados directed by

Edgar Neville. Its subplot involved crypto-Judaism and the Inquisition. This singular film was quite obscure until recently. In the sixties and seventies, subgeneric directors like Jess/Jesús Franco and León Klimovsky made lowbudget hybridized horror-and-porn flicks such as El castillo de Fu-Manchú, many as coproductions with France, Italy, and Germany. Víctor Erice quoted in more highbrow fashion from James Whale’sFrankenstein in 1973 to create El espíritu de la colmena, uniting childhood and Gothic motifs in a way that would be quoted in turn by The Others and El laberinto del fauno. The influence of Italian directors Mario Bava and Dario Argento on contemporary horror with gothic elements is considerable; it would be hard to imagine the slasher cycle without the nightmare structure and frenetic music of Suspiria. Vicente Aranda learned the tricks of the horror trade from the confluence of Bava, Argento, and Jesús Franco and put them to use in his literary adaptations (Tiempo de silencio, La pasión turca), period pieces (Juana la Loca), and at least one thriller with a historical basis, Amantes. Meanwhile in France, the horror film arguably was born in 1896 with Georges Méliès’s Le Manoir du diable. Later, Georges Franju’s Les Yeux sans visage put French horror on the map again. This film was adapted in 2011 by Almodóvar into La piel que habito, the Manchegan director’s first true incursion into horror after flirting with the genre in thrillers like Tacones lejanos. De la Iglesia brought his postmodern and parodic approach to the scripturally based horror narrative with the farcical El día de la bestia in 1995. Amenábar arrived at horror after having fashioned postmodern hybrids in the thriller and science fiction genres. The Others has been Spain’s biggest box-office draw to date. Horror is lucrative, though still short on academic and industry prestige. Neither La piel que habito nor Martin Scorsese’s stab at the horror genre, Shutter Island, garnered much in the way of awards or critical accolades. Amenábar’s opening with the creation story in The Others pronounced by a character that turns out to be a homicidal psychotic places him squarely on the side of Dawkins and Hitchens in the cultural war of rational atheists versus the faithful. Mar adentro spells out his opposition to a Catholic culture that interferes with the individual’s right to choose a death “with dignity.”Page 20 → No doubt inspired by Mar adentro in its basis on a recent media figure but partaking of a more ludic comic-book style, Javier Fesser’s Camino took on Opus Dei and its championing of a new child saint. Amenábar’s Ágora goes still further in characterizing early Christianity as a whole as bloodthirsty and intolerant. An interesting failure in its aim to recover a lost martyr for the cause of rationalist atheism, Ágora’s construction of faith-based cultures as necessarily opposed to science and reason becomes stuck in the death drive for lack of a life-affirming impetus behind the protagonist’s martyrdom. It does make clear, however, that for many filmmakers any vestige of the Spanish Catholic tradition constitutes an abject remnant that inspires horror. For an explanation of the omnipresence of conflicted Catholicism in Spanish film, the conclusion integrates the most salient features of religious themes and religious movies from the time of Buñuel through the first decade of the twenty-first century with the notions of the habitus, social positioning, and symbolic capital as formulated by the French social anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002). His concept of the habitus as a structure that constantly improvises new and similar structures without need of a set pattern or governing authority emerges naturally from the study of Spanish directors and their intersections with religious themes. Religion functions as symbolic or cultural capital in films that are themselves destined to have an impact on social positioning. The pushing of the boundary between doxa (values considered natural or objective) and opinion finds its way into films that struggle repeatedly with issues of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. No director thus far can be found to be immune to the presence of Catholicism in the Spanish habitus.

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ONE Luis Buñuel and the Reinvention of Catholicism While Fernando Savater proves that profound and unambiguous atheism is possible even for those culturally anchored in the Spanish tradition, Luis Buñuel’s position on religion cannot be reduced to either side of the belief versus atheism/agnosticism polarity. The skeptical self overshadows the believing self, but at the same time his atheistic self is attracted to religion. Rather than abandoning or attacking Catholicism entirely, as his work progresses his movies add up to a reinvention of the Catholic for the complexities of the twentieth century. He opposed the authoritarian structure of church hierarchies, the hypocrisy of its well-fed elites, and the paralyzing effects of dogma, intolerance, and fanaticism.1 He favored a radical skepticism toward all aspects of the sacred, including scripture, and toward all forms of authority. This skepticism has led to the cliché of citing Buñuel, often alongside Ingmar Bergman, as avowed atheists obsessed with metaphysical concerns (Deacy 46). However, to stave off the encroachment of technology and government into the personal realm, Buñuel made a place for the religious as a site or space for the imagination, where more of what was truly human could be kept alive. What Buñuel subjects to “systematic undermining” is not Christianity as a whole (Edwards 131), but the part of it that has calcified into what Kristeva calls obscurantism, an insistence upon social codes that becomes antisocial (Need to Believe 56–57). The religious imaginary, on the other hand, is a place of endless possibility for the surreal artist who is willing to break a few sacred eggs when necessary. To obliterate the religious, particularly the mystical, the miraculous, and the fetishistic component of ritual, would be to lose entire dimensions of subjectivity and creativity. Hence, out of his closest literary precursors, Buñuel is rather closely aligned with Valle-Inclán, who mined the depths of the Catholic tradition to indulge in decadentista excesses of sacrilege and blasphemy (especially in the Sonatas). In addition, examination of his religious-themed original-scripted films illuminates many nineteenth-century literary sources, such as Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, and José Zorrilla in his magical/religious approach to surrealism.2 Page 22 → Michael Wood has treated the subject of faith in Buñuel (spotlighting Nazarín, Simón del desierto, and La Voie lactée). For him, “another atheism” informs the works, marked by a “dark and ironic dialogue” (93). While Buñuel’s atheism is not militant or goal-oriented (geared toward stamping out belief), Wood nonetheless finds that the director deals with “the lingering of faith” as an inevitable mark on the otherwise liberal mind (107). The flip side of the Spanish Inquisition is the Marquis de Sade’s imagery of torture and confinement at the service of wiping out Christian morals. The point for Wood is not that Sade’s victims are right to uphold their religious ethics, “but that philosophy is not everything” (95). Noting that Christian charity backfires in Nazarín and that evil proves unconquerable in Simón, Wood also signals that “heresy is deviance rather than refusal or opposition” in La Voie lactée (105). In my analysis of these films and others with original screenplays by Buñuel I take this further; the heretic Priscillian is effectively enshrined in La Voie lactée. I will also privilege the Spanish intertexts with which the films dialogue; Wood has already addressed the French and German ones. Through the alignment of marginal and maverick religiosity with freedom, Buñuel reimagines for modern times the magical-ritualistic dimension of Catholicism. The magical-ritualistic dimension of Buñuel’s perpetuation of the Catholic tradition is informed by a social consciousness akin to that of the nineteenth-century novelist Benito Pérez Galdós, whose works he adapted for the screen twice. Buñuel’s Marxian and anarchist sympathies constitute a twentieth-century intensification of Galdós’s Krausism (which valued collective harmony and dialogue among the different social classes). This led him to critique the church’s role in maintaining the rule of the haves over the have-nots. There is an ethical dimension to Buñuel’s reworking of religion, aptly studied by Ignacio Javier López with respect to Nazarín: rather than limiting the vision to a critique of the established order, it amounts to an exploration of the consequences of individual actions (522). López perceives an indifferent God in the background of Nazarín, for example, matched by the apathy in the behavior of humans toward God and each other (528). This results in a Manichaean combat

between Good and Evil: “Al vivir en un mundo ajeno a la providencia, y ante el cual la divinidad es indiferente, el Bien y el Mal aparecen, no solo implicados, sino necesitados, extendiéndose a todos los aspectos de las relaciones humanas” (In a world alien to Providence, and toward whom the Deity is indifferent, Good and Evil appear not only implied but necessary, extending to all aspects of human relations, 529). The tendency of humans to choose to be kind and generous to each other when neither compelled by God nor fearfulPage 23 → of punishment is for López a redeeming quality that arises from this Manichaean duality (532). Both the magical/ritualistic and the ethical dimensions of Buñuel’s reimagining of Catholicism are set up most specifically in historical context by La Voie lactée, the centerpiece of this chapter. Buñuel’s upbringing has been treated by many sources, including the filmmaker himself, although the factuality of his memoirs needs to be taken with many grains of salt. As with James Joyce, Mary McCarthy, and Carlos Fuentes, his Catholic education produced a well of repression and resentment, but also wonder and obsession with fetishism and the miraculous. Often overlooked is the liberal education the director also received when he was removed from a Jesuit school and placed in a local public high school at fifteen. There he learned about Darwin, Marx, and Rousseau while still a teenager (Acevedo-Muñoz Buñuel and Mexico 34). As a young adult, he and his companions at the Madrid Residencia de Estudiantes venerated Toledo for its antiquity and they created an Order of Knighthood devoted to allegiance to the surviving remnants of the medieval Castilian city (My Last Sigh 71). Similarly, throughout his career, the rituals, art and architecture, theology, and history of Catholicism provided him with endless material to be subverted in Marxist/surrealist fashion. This aided him in bringing the subconscious to life. Vicente Sánchez Biosca notes, “For Buñuel Catholicism is a source of perverse pleasure; and this pleasure is nothing other than the pleasure of sin. The more imperative the rule, the more intense will be the pleasure derived from the transgression” (181). By reading the religious through all the main stages of his career, however, I believe more facets become evident. There is a place for theology in his progressive social philosophy, and for ethics in his transgression. The process of reverse catechization, of unlearning the repressive elements of Catholicism while purifying the underlying zeal for equality, love, mysticism, and redemption, takes many forms in his films. With the figure of Priscillian in La Voie lactée, he activates what Eagleton identifies as the revolutionary potential of Catholicism. The witness to an apparition in the same film utters a virtual definition of Kristeva’s concept of the prereligious need to believe: “Faith must enter through the heart.” Buñuel’s continual return to the drumbeats of the Holy Week processions in his hometown of Calanda signals his positioning of Catholic tradition at the heart of his habitus or collective unconscious. He then redirects the march toward a twentieth-century God of artistic freedom, sexual liberation, and social revolution. Buñuel first made his martyrs of sexual repression march to the lugubrious drumbeat that he remembered from childhood. Later, as the need for belief overshadowed his rebellion against the molar structure of Catholicism, his Page 24 →films placed the possibility of achieving sublimation and the semiotic, oceanic state through belief alongside the pitfalls offered by organized religion of dogmatism, tradition for tradition’s sake, and idolatry of simulacra.

LOOKING BACK IN ANGER: ICONOCLASTIC AND ANTICLERICAL ROOTS Un chien andalou, with its dreamlike, spontaneous, and improvised construction, is far from presenting a thesis statement on Buñuel’s treatment of religious themes. As a script it was a fairly even collaboration between the director and his less anticlerical friend Salvador Dalí. Dalí joined in the spirit of object sacrilege in his paintings, with work on La profanation de l’hostie concurrent with his collaboration with Buñuel. However, ten years and one Civil War later, Dalí returned definitively to his Catholic roots and preached to Buñuel to do the same (Gibson Dalí 451). We can assume the tempering effect that Dalí’s influence must have played in this film and in their second and final dual effort, L’Âge d’or, upon the representation of religion (though it tickled him to play the part of a clergyman in a scene involving repression). Dalí did not wish to stray very far from the protection of the Catholic fold. For this reason he kept what was most likely his primary sexual orientation veiled for a lifetime. Finding a female partner willing to engage in practices other than intercourse was probably a key enabling factor in his remaining nominally heterosexual. Despite the pressure Buñuel exerted on his friend to conform to social standards of manliness, he soon felt either repulsed by or jealous of Dalí’s wife Gala. It may be what drove them apart. Because of its singular situation as both a youthful collaboration and a formal experiment, Un chien andalou is unique in the director’s canon.

Nonetheless, many hallmarks of Buñuel’s lifelong devotion to religious themes emerge in his first film. The nocturnal beginning, with Buñuel himself looking up to the heavens, and introduced (as each scene was by nonsensical time markers) as “Once upon a time,” has a literary ring that is unmistakably mystical in the sense of Juan de la Cruz’s “Noche oscura del alma.” Using the allegory of young lovers who meet at night for a secret tryst, the sixteenth-century poet positioned God in the heavens beckoning to the soul to leave its home, or body, to be joined with him in harmonious union, followed by a peaceful afterglow. Each step is related with definite erotic undertones. The celestial text to be read in the Buñuelian scene provokes violence rather than divine union, in the sense that the cloud that cuts Page 25 →across the moon in razor-like fashion appears to propel the entranced knife-sharpening figure (played by the director) to use this weapon to split a woman’s eye in two splendidly even halves. Hence, a surreal rewriting of the topos of the nocturnal mystical union with the divine underlies the first scene, often viewed as a warning issued to the audience that what it holds sacred is about to be violated. As a substitute for the divine revelation of Spanish mysticism, the revelation that is promised to the spectators who continue to watch despite their terror is that of perceiving reality in a new way, purged of old encumbrances and enhanced by psychoanalytic theory.3 The director’s heavenward gaze in the first scene is repeated in the second sequence, which involves a cyclist and motorcar accident witnessed by the eventual desiring male subject and female object of desire from a window one floor above street level. The man on the balcony looks upward just before the accident that will give him voyeuristic delight in sadism, which in turn will spark him to accost the woman inside the apartment. The aggressive current in sexual behavior was receiving new emphasis from surrealists because of psychoanalytic theory. The allegory of erotic union as a vehicle for expressing harmonious fusion between the soul and God would hence be given a more violent cast that was articulated by Bataille in his perspective on erotism as the breaking down of boundaries (223). Destruction was incorporated into the fusion. Further instances of this “neomystical” subtext can be found in the relating of pleasure to pain, as when the desirous man next looks heavenward after cornering the woman and fondling her breasts, which morph into buttocks; the face he next displays is of a suffering martyr or Christ himself during Calvary (Bataille also regarded religious masochism as sexual pleasure). Dalí may be credited for the gender-transformative themes of this scene (not just the breasts-tobuttocks but also the male’s mouth forming a pseudo-anus), as his inner conflict over sexual preference was primary at the time. The other trappings of mysticism, however, such as the pain-pleasure duality and violence within the erotic impulse, would follow Buñuel from film to film. When the female love object closes the door on his hand, the male assailant cringes in what appears to be both agony and ecstasy while ants encircle a stigma in the palm of his hand (the latter a favorite Dalí touch). Buñuel’s protest that the dream images of Un chien andalou are beyond the scope of interpretation and analysis belies their manifestations of personal conflicts that were crucial to each of the two collaborators as young adults. If Dalí’s primary psychosexual conflict at this stage was that of sexual orientation, for Buñuel the most defining tension appears to be the struggle for intimacy versus isolation, a fundamental one for people in Page 26 →their twenties according to the Eriksonian theory of psychosocial stages. The male desiring subject, after being held back physically by the weight of society’s repressive forces in the form of two clergymen, a piano, and a dead donkey, and subsequently blocked by the female’s retreat, has his conscience wrestle outwardly with his inner demon (id), both played by the same actor. The transgressing male is placed head against the wall with arms outstretched in the form of a cross. Next it is the disciplinarian’s turn to play the part of the martyr as the id empties twin pistols into his chest and he falls beatifically, only to be found as a corpse miraculously displaced into a natural outdoor setting, initiating a detective-style mystery for the passersby who happen upon him. The unexpected appearance of the corpse to a group of men who are thereupon united by a common cause may be read, neomystically, as the opposite of the resurrected Christ appearing to his followers. The final frame crowns this extensive chain of martyrdom images. The formerly unwilling woman has turned into a seductress in her own right upon finding the object of her desire (a well-heeled suitor; in psychoanalytic thinking, a good provider for the son she might have with him). When the season changes (absurdly, to springtime), both are engulfed in sand halfway up the torso in the manner of Turkish prisoners of yore. Burial in sand not only served the purpose of confining the prisoner and torturing him with relentless exposure to the sun; it staunched the flow of blood after castration in order to preserve the life of the newly created eunuch, who could then be harnessed as a slave. This concluding martyrdom scene illustrates the stagnation of the libido once it is channeled into the monogamy of

marriage. Religious symbolism surfaces at every turn in the film, but primal desires subvert the possibility of harmony and serenity in the mystical union of the soul with the divine. Hence, even a short and silent film such as this displays a rich interplay with the religious influences that were still fresh in Buñuel’s mind from his Catholic upbringing, and his budding process of reverse catechization for undoing the repressive vestiges. Several scenes both parody the gestures of martyrs and mystics and invert them to stand for the struggle for gratification of the taboo drives of the id. The paradoxical pain-equals-pleasure formula of mysticism comes to signify the duality of Eros and Thanatos when libidinal energy is unleashed. The church is explicitly included among the social forces of repression by virtue of the priest-dragging scene. In the end, these forces enact a definitive martyrdom through obstructing, punishing, or channeling libidinal energy into a shadowy existence equated with castration, stagnation, and death. L’Âge d’or (1930) marks Dalí’s lasting break with his Aragonese friend,Page 27 →and it was precisely on the question of religious attitudes that they were to part company. Dalí did not wish to be involved in the outright anticlerical escapade that he could see their second film becoming. He took credit for the more subdued and whimsical components, such as a scene that shows an iconic statue balancing a stone on its head, copied by a passerby who walks under the same burden, mildly lampooning the practice of hero worship and social conformism.4 However, the brunt of L’Âge d’or, probably Buñuel’s most controversial film of all if the ban of over fifty years is taken into account, lies in its frontal attack on the Catholic Church for collaborating with the most repressive forces in society. From the sixth night of its initial run, when archconservative and anti-Semitic protestors smashed exhibits in the lobby and forced the cinema to close, until its public reappearance in 1980, the film was a mythical symbol of the power of cinematic controversy. The opening sequence of scorpions lays bare the framework of aggression and hostility that shapes the work as a whole. Stirring classical music accompanies shots of scorpions attacking each other and then an intrusive rodent, interspersed with ultra close-ups of the bulbous poison barbs on their tails. When the focus switches to a rocky coastline, and a ragged fugitive who encounters four Majorcan bishops intoning prayers and decked out in all their episcopal regalia, the comparison between the venomous stingers of the arachnids and the pointed mitres and long scepters of the bishops is clear.5 A first soupçon of the science-versus-religion debate, which would come to a head later in the twentieth century with the Scopes Trial and the battle for creationism in schools, can also be detected in Buñuel’s prescient juxtaposition of documentary stock footage with human symbols of religious tradition in all its stasis and blindness.6 Although the fugitive rallies his equally battered brethren to launch a counterattack against this invasion of their shores, it is futile, for upon their return the menace has disappeared into thin air to return later as a set of venerable relics.7 The undead bishops prove more formidable foes than the living ones. They cannot be killed anew; hence they have achieved immortality. Furthermore, they are now objects of worship for the ruling classes, consolidating and calcifying their moral as well as political superiority over the ragtag rebels. The bishops are unassailable by the direct action of these marginal outlaws precisely because they have become “timeless.” The remains of the bishops are easily found by boats full of the admiring faithful, representing the ranks of the military, landed aristocracy and other moneyed classes, as well as the clergy. By now the bleached bones of the four Majorcan bishops Page 28 →are all that remain. What was invisible and thus impenetrable to the rebels, played notably by members of the surrealist group (Max Ernst, Paul Élouard), is accessible to the ruling classes in the form of relics; immortal yet composed of dead matter, they will exert a persistent and inescapable influence over the populace in favor of the principles that support the existing power structure. The first example of this is the condemnation of two lovers who loudly revel in their carnal desires at an indiscreet distance from the pious flock. Initiating a story line of unfulfilled desire that shapes the rest of the movie, the onlookers pull the lovers apart. Splattered with mud that indicates their passions are, for the faithful, on a level with the lowliest bodily functions, the lovers endure a separation that causes frustration necessitated by repression of the body. Just as the bones of the bishops are exalted over the vital bodies of the lovers, the wet cement that is next applied to a neatly shaped monument commemorating the bishops’ miraculous arrival mirrors the mud that covers the lovers. The mud and the wet cement are both associated with excrement (as reinforced by the subsequent sequence of the heroine on the toilet, complete with a mudslide-like flush). The more solid, rectilinear matter of the monument,

shaped by the firm anus of those in power, contrasts with the looser gunk on the ground, associated with the unruly spontaneity of desire. Though they are composed of the same substance, only the disciplined format meets with social approbation. Religion may transform bones into relics and excrement into a monument, but it cannot chasten the lawless passion that runs through L’Âge d’or. Buñuel’s representation of the church in this film is the closest thing in his oeuvre to a textbook leftist assault on established religion, with few of the saving graces that reinvigorate Catholicism in his subsequent work.8 The next main sequence includes aerial shots of Rome, with captions that liken its position for pre-Christian belief systems to its leadership within Roman Catholicism. The combination of bleached bones and shaped feces forms the basis of civilization, rather than the furtive coupling and smeared ooze of the lovers. Upon their separation, the male turns to outward acts of hostility to vent his frustration The heroine turns inward for romantic rumination, as mirrored by a cow on her bed, and for masturbation in her beloved’s absence (her injured finger betrays her indulgence). Their parting paves the way for a longed-for reunion at the dinner party that constitutes the final two-thirds of the film. The motif of the bourgeois dinner party begins here in the Buñuelian canon and it will have a long and rich trajectory, often with reference to the Last Supper as depicted in art. During the dinner party the hero’s initiative and the heroine’s devotion are Page 29 →again tested by the powers that be, this time from sources within their family and then from within their own psyches, since true to Freudian theory they have internalized parental and societal pressures and suffer consequently from neurotic blockages of the libido, as well as from external sources of repression. Although a riot by Christian extremists could have been provoked by any number of scenes in this potent film (or ignited by the Jewish heritage of its patroness, Marie-Laure de Noailles), it was the standing of a monstrance on the sidewalk as the aristocratic partygoers exit their limousines that unleashed the angry protests of Fascists, resulting in the closure of the movie theater six days into the first run, and eventually, the banning of the film and destruction of all but one of its negatives. A curiously impersonal but sublimely visual way of showing the church to be at the service of the moneyed classes, the holder of the Holy Host on the pavement was not tolerated by the gathering storm of intolerance that would sweep over Europe during the next two decades.9 However, the truly sacrilegious onslaught begins in the last reel, when the hero is thwarted for the last time in his quest for consummation of his passion, only to be replaced by a paternal figure in his lady’s arms. At this point, the drums of Calanda, a hometown boyhood memory from the Holy Week procession, accompany the hero’s final revolt against all obstacles to sexual satisfaction. He tosses things as disparate as a marble statue and a live bishop out of a second-story window. The indestructible bishop gets up and runs away, emphasizing the persistence of religious influence. This finally leads to the sixth sequence of the film, its “poison sac” in terms of the scorpion image (as observed by Robert Short). Uniting Sadean themes with religious epic, Buñuel has a Christ figure emerge from a castle where an orgy has been taking place. The narration informs viewers that four godless criminals have been corrupting several innocent maidens with the help of some worldly women inside of the fortress. When one of the torture victims also emerges from the castle, the Christ figure goes back inside with her, not to help her but rather, we can only imagine by her scream, to finish her off. Finally, in an enhanced repositioning of the monstrance on the pavement, a cross that is adorned with six female scalps blowing in the wind provides the final sacrilegious object tableau. In his reading of this film alongside Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, Wood unhesitatingly identifies the evildoer as the Duc de Blangis and only in passing notes the resemblance to representations of Jesus (98). However, in the visual sense, the identification with the Christian Savior is immediate and primary, and makes the scene a culmination of the film’s overall indictmentPage 30 → of religion as the ultimate repression of the human spirit. The double identity of Blangis and Christ was written into the official script. Although it was Buñuel’s idea, Dalí refused to eliminate it even at their aristocratic patron Charles de Noailles’s request (Gubern and Hammond 58). Jesus Christ as corrupter of virgins, sexual sadist, and serial killer not only violates religious doctrine intimately, but parodies the already developed genre of the silent Christian epic, the messianic narrative (Intolerance, The King of Kings, Ben-Hur, Quo Vadis?). It was designed to produce a riot in fanatical believers (as happened) and riotous laughter from the surrealist and Communist opponents of the status quo. In L’Âge d’or as in his next directorial effort, Tierra sin pan, we find Buñuel’s most categorical objections to

religion, its institutions, beliefs, and practices, without the mitigating presence of wonder at the miraculous, mystical, and ritualistic dimensions of spirituality. The heroine applying what looks like fellatio to the toe of a marble statue is an eerie foreshadowing of the foot fetishism in many examples of the Francoist religious motion picture. There is appropriation of martyrdom imagery for the suffering of those repressed by religion and society in general and use of the mystical mélange of pleasure and pain to convey the violent and irrational drives of the id. These two films date from the time of greatest coalescence around the new dogma of Fascism in Europe and the accompanying polarization of the Left. The films oppose the constraints and collaborations of Catholicism with little room for the redemption of the imagination and the irrational that Buñuel often celebrates in his other films. Christian iconography is fair game for iconoclasm, and the clergy is the social enemy. Tierra sin pan (first known as Las Hurdes from 1933 to 1936) treads a tightrope between the documentary genre and travesty, harking to the later construction of the more comical mockumentary hybrid (Spinal Tap, Best in Show, Borat). Robert J. Flaherty had invented the ethnographic documentary for the silent age with Nanook of the North (1922) and Moana (1923–25). Sensationalists soon got in on the act with “local color” documentaries shot in Africa, Polynesia, and Amazonia (Gubern and Hammond 170). In addition to parodying the folkloric element in this type of film, Buñuel was attracted to Marxist documentaries from France and the Soviet Union that focused on the plight of the underclasses (Gubern and Hammond 172). To scandalize and shock while inspiring empathy without sentimentality, and to shake up the very assumptions of ethnography, constituted the complex project of this relatively short film. Much as the director’s fascination with the scientist Jean-Henri Fabre’s work on insects found its way through insect and arachnid imagery into this film and L’Âge d’or, Maurice Legendre Page 31 →inspired Buñuel to film in the Hurdes for one month in the spring of 1933. The French anthropologist had written and lectured about the isolated villages of the Hurdes region, skirted by Salamanca, Plasencia in Extremadura, and the Portuguese border, a forgotten land to which fugitives and exiles had escaped for centuries, but which offered little in the form of sustenance. Román Gubern and Paul Hammond describe both Fabre and Legendre, despite their basis as scientists, as “católicos fundamentalistas” (168). There was something about the intensity of their focus as Catholic researchers that inspired Buñuel even at his most militantly anti-Catholic. His adherence to the fundamentalist-Catholic researchers is a constant in his evolution from militant surrealist in his first two films to militant Communist in his third project. The familiar equation of the church siding with the wealthy and powerful crops up in the classroom scene. The Golden Rule that is pounded into the impoverished pupils is “Respect the property rights of others.” This slogan written neatly on a blackboard is one of several “constructed” situations presented by the documentary as real.10 The voice-over narrator also notes that churches are the only luxurious places to be found in these villages. Religious devotion mingled with the death drive is seen in the two skulls that preside over the fortunes of the inhabitants of Alberca from within a church wall, returning to the association of religion with loss of vitality and death seen in L’Âge d’or. Religion and superstition as dual forces of repression that keep the villagers in a backward state are conflated in shots of babies decorated with intricate crosses and other sacred charms with narration that likens their garb to African tribal costume.11 Religion, superstition, and fear of the unknown spring from the final shot of a grotesque town crier who commands everyone to say a “Hail Mary” or else be possessed by a spirit as it traverses the village at night. There is even a quick jab at what was then a relatively new doctrine: the Immaculate Conception of Mary (formalized only in 1854) is noted via an inscription over a doorway. The irony of finding this one “modern” innovation in an otherwise impregnable and backward area is inescapable. When Tierra sin pan was banned in Spain upon its release in 1933, however, it was not because of Fascist objections as with Buñuel’s previous directorial effort, but because of Spanish Republican censorship. The motive was less religious than political, although both were closely entwined at this time, as they would be later throughout the Cold War. The fragile Spanish democracy would not allow such images of backwardness, marginalization, and social isolation, even with acknowledged ironic distortion, to demoralize and erode its vulnerable support base. Page 32 →

CATHOLICISM REINVENTED IN LATER FILMS

Buñuel’s first self-scripted film (with Luis Alcoriza as co-screenwriter) after Tierra sin pan dates from his Mexican exile seventeen years later. Los olvidados begins a new direction in his treatment of religion. The film shows a world in which Christian principles are powerless. However, the culprit is not religion itself or even the hypocrisy of the devout, but the dehumanization associated with the modern metropolis. Buñuel illustrates how the urbanization and modernization of the capitalist system have produced a culture of poverty unlike any of past ages, but with ties to Spanish picaresque literature. The only hero is killed off conspicuously early in the film to demonstrate that in the underworld of the slum, high-mindedness does not stand a chance. Yet even the most wicked of the young gangsters is humanized by streaks of emotional need. Many perspectives on the antagonist Jaibo cast him as the incarnation of evil (“the archetypal young villain, a Mexican version of Hollywood’s Babyface,” Hart 68). However, it is more a question of gradation and shading that separates Jaibo from his peers; none is truly innocent. In this film that works as a neo-or social-realist drama while perpetuating the surrealist modality (Sánchez Vidal 156), an incarnation of pure evil or goodness would be Manichaeistic. Even the patently heroic and short-lived Julián has possible criminal antecedents that must have led to his association with Jaibo’s gang. Occupying the middle ground are characters with a mixture of evil, selfish, or sadistic tendencies and more noble ones, such as Ojitos, who is generally passive but contemplates murdering his boss, and Pedro, who evolves from a villain’s sidekick into a striving hero in the making. Jaibo, while the most motivated by animalistic rage and instant gratification, also has redeeming glimmers of humanity. His expressions of longing for a mother he never knew, while manipulative, are real enough to melt Pedro’s mother (who in turn conveniently confuses maternal sympathy with carnal desire). Jaibo’s dying moments express a fundamental core of loneliness that could have been remedied by maternal affection. This strain of the missing maternal, aligned with the Virgin Mary and with a messianic subtext, forms a new chapter in Buñuel’s cinematic religious discourse, in which the religious imaginary is a potential solution to the soul-crushing marginalization of the modern state. A fascination with New Testament symbolism, particularly in the form of animals, is one sign of the new polysemic depth linked to the sacred. The rooster that crows on the morning of the Crucifixion (forming the end point to the time frame for Peter’s three betrayals of Christ) makes a string of Page 33 →conspicuous appearances at moments of betrayal, highlighted by screeching music. A commotion caused by chickens is the final giveaway of the hiding Pedro to his assailant. This develops the eerie presence of feathers in the torn pillows of L’Âge d’or into a full-fledged metaphor for an ominous reversal of fortune. The donkey is another significant animal presence because it was the bearer of Jesus on Palm Sunday, and its dorsal cross is linked with him in folklore. The donkey of the forgotten is said to produce milk that is a cure-all elixir as well as a beautifying skin treatment. The equine peers through a window to convey to its masters an unannounced guest in the stable, and carries the body of the converted and just as quickly sacrificed Pedro to the rubbish heap. The elaborate use of animals from the Christ story is more than a calligraphic flourish; it alludes to a veritable battle between Messiahs and Judases, Virgins and sinful women. The parable-like opening narration, which denies any specificity to Mexico City as the setting, but rather opines that the story could take place in any large city with slums (Paris, London, and New York City are shown), strives for the universality of scripture. As a modernized scriptural form, its deterministic message that poverty irrevocably leads to criminal behavior flouts the Catholic dogma of free will; yet Pedro’s truncated redemption is presented as authentic. Jaibo initially occupies center stage after his escape from the reformatory, ready to lead his band of followers, who look upon him as their messiah. Rather than spiritual salvation, he promises them earthly sustenance: they will never be hungry as long as he is around. A resurrected Christ returned to his disciples, he pledges vengeance against his Judas: Julián, who is said to have turned him in to the police. His Golden Rule is quite the opposite of that of Christianity. In place of the miracles of helping and healing for which Christ is known, Jaibo soon begins his string of misdeeds, assaulting and robbing the handicapped and sexually accosting a young and presumably virginal young girl. The focus gradually switches from Jaibo as Antichrist to Pedro, who is engaged in a struggle for social and personal redemption that his former savior inevitably thwarts, but not before Pedro sets in motion the process of Jaibo’s destruction. Scholars have tended to place the emphasis on an absence of paternal figures in the slum families, impeding the development of the Oedipal complex, as the cause of the marginal characters’ antisocial behavior (Sánchez Vidal 156). However, missing maternal sustenance is much more visual throughout the film and forms a crucial part of

reading the religious in Los olvidados. There are surrogate fathers, after all, in the form of the reformatory director and his employees, but he is idealistic to the point of abandoningPage 34 → Pedro to his fate because of his unwavering belief in his own secular gospel of social reform (behaving foolishly under the influence the actual Gospels will plague Nazarín and Viridiana). The blind man is the flip side of this coin: a dismally pragmatic and pernicious paternal figure who alludes to Lázaro de Tormes’s blind boss, he waxes nostalgic for the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. Half-buried memories of a nurturing mother that remains just out of reach appear in dreams and visions to both Pedro and Jaibo. Kristeva’s theory of buried rage holds that maternal abandonment is the cause of depression when the resulting guilt is introjected within the sufferer (Black Sun 29). Maternal abandonment in Los olvidados triggers outward rage directed at others by the marginal characters. In Tierra sin pan, Buñuel briefly took aim with irony at the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception by focusing on a mural inscription. His process of reverse catechization would have to involve refuting the newest (and for progressives, the most fanatical) articles of faith about Mary. In transplanting himself from Spain to Mexico, he trades one predominantly Catholic country with a strong Marian tradition for another, in which the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe is as powerful as Our Lady of the Pillar is for Spain (the latter apparition occurred in his native region of Zaragoza and was present in his childhood folklore). Hence in his first truly personal Mexican film, he clothes Pedro’s mother in a Middle Eastern veil and tunic (despite her situation as an urban laundress) and has her incarnate Mary Mother of God as well as the sinful woman. She at first denies her son nourishment in a subversion of the iconography of the family in Mexican Golden Age cinema that incited harsh criticism, even from the film’s crew (Hart 69). While asleep, Pedro sees the other side of his mother. She walks across the beds to greet him as if descending from heaven, offering her empty hands and then a piece of freshly butchered, dripping meat or entrails (snatched by a ravenous Jaibo). One is reminded of religious genre painting, in which visions of Mary sometimes show her squeezing her breast, with milk flowing into the mouth of the portrait subject. This Mary, however, seems to say, “Eat or be eaten”; the struggle to survive is inevitably compromised by aggression and hostility. The carnivorous Virgin is more appropriate for the dog-eat-dog slum and more nurturing in a realistic sense for a slum child than a Mary who meekly offers her own milk. Jaibo’s Holy Mother / idealized earthly mother appears to him in a vision when he is on the verge of death (the encounter, as in the Ave María, “now and at the hour of our death”). As in Pedro’s dream, she gives a realistic slant to her intervention in his harsh existence; rather than comforting him and dispelling his loneliness, she assures that he has always been Page 35 →alone, confirming his worst fears, and that now he should not think any more about it as he approaches union with her. Peter William Evans also glimpses a Virgin surrogate in the young Meche (83). Hence we find a departure from a purely secular view of life in the ghetto; the continuation of a progressive, Krausist, or Marxist line of thinking would require that the boys’ inner lives be devoid of spiritual inclinations, much less a direct link to traditional Catholicism. Marian imagery provides a cultural code for the semiotic desire for fusion with the lost mother that engulfs the urchins in dream and in death. In Los olvidados Buñuel’s overall project of reinvention of the religious, rather than rebellion against it, is a guiding principle. While a voice or a glimpse of a divine mother who is in some sense on the same wavelength as the hoodlums softens the depths of their consciousness, in waking life they must deal with woman as she has adapted herself to the grim surroundings. Here the figure of Mary Magdalene brings the less virtuous woman into the reinvented Catholic discursive system. Religious art and cinema has conflated Mary Magdalene with Mary of Bethany, who washed her spiritual master’s feet, and with the anonymous sinful woman defended by Christ from execution by stoning.12 Pedro’s mother admits that she was widowed five years ago; we see Jaibo doing the math as he contemplates her toddler child who is still in diapers. This emboldens him to try a seduction strategy that both manipulates her maternal feelings and exposes his real vulnerability. For a time Pedro’s mother not only rejects her son but sides with his new enemy; she has decided to mother the wrong person, and to mother in a perverted, incestuous manner. This twist is introduced by a scene of the mother washing her feet in a basin, reminiscent of the foot-washing that has become associated with the figure of Mary Magdalene. Like the repentant sinner, she later shows remorse for having sided with Jaibo, repudiates him, and becomes supportive of her real son, who feels momentarily empowered to defy the destructive influences that had surrounded him and to strive to make something of himself.

At least as important as the absence of father figures, then, is the presence of maternal ones. The maternal figures are encoded using familiar Christian icons, with a subversive twist of dirty realism. The Divine Mother reinvented for the ’hood is a mixture of Mary Magdalene and an avenging angel; passive holiness and virginal purity are not enough in the urban environment. Yet this is still insufficient. After losing his final struggle against Jaibo, Pedro is hidden in a sack on the burro’s back. He passes by his mother in her search, shrouded and demure like the Virgin Mary and now actively devoted to her son for the first time. This is Christ crossing his mother’s path on the way to Calgary, except that Pedro’s earthly remains Page 36 →wind up on trash heap outside of town with no resurrection in sight. The yearning for a spiritual solace proves as sadly unattainable as the craving for material well-being. In order to trace Buñuel’s reinvention of Catholicism through sacrilege, reverse catechization, and subversive iconography, I have limited the focus of this study to films in which he was not only the director but also the main author of an original screenplay (his cowriters helped with the conventions of dialogue and narration). However, many creative touches can be found in his uses of religion in films that he based on preexisting sources, particularly in his Mexican era.13 As Sánchez Biosca notes, Catholic iconography weighed heavily on Mexico in the Golden Age of its motion picture industry, and Buñuel often resorted to the liturgy to structure his films of the forties and fifties, in contrast to the collage-like style he employed before and afterward (175). Sánchez Biosca also comments on the centrality of the church and monastery as ceremonial space or stage in Él (completely absent from the Mercedes Pinto novel upon which it is based), the importance of original sin in La ilusión viaja en tranvía, and the twin turning points constituted by two prayer sequences in Ensayo de un crimen as religious flourishes added by the director to deepen his source material (174–82). Susana in the film that bears her name steps on prison bars in the shape of the cross as she escapes confinement (Acevedo-Muñoz Buñuel and Mexico 86), branding herself an unrepentant sinner along the lines of Eve and Salomé. As has been amply studied, the screen adaptation of Nazarín takes Galdós several steps further by radicalizing the realist novelist’s skeptical approach toward the Catholic faith. As in L’Âge d’or, the remembered drums of Calanda mark the final path to martyrdom, or humiliation. Much of the message of anachronism and the importance of pragmatics over preaching that Nazarín brings to bear on Catholicism can be seen more openly in Viridiana, to which we now turn our attention. Viridiana has aptly been considered as two consecutive movies in one (or two sequential psychogeographies, in Conley’s view, 48). The first is a fable of corruption with gothic/horror overtones; the second, a drama of failed idealism with picaresque embellishment. In the former plot, the church receives a progressive critique for being mercenary and siding with those of means (Viridiana’s convent all but pimps her out to her uncle Don Jaime, a virtual stranger, in exchange for his money) and the rituals of asceticism are exposed as masochistic fetishism. After this subversive prologue, it comes as a twist that the second half of Viridiana is an illustration, not a refutation, of Jesus’s words in the Gospel: Page 37 → Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. (Matt. 7:6) Viridiana thus springs, not from a rejection of Christianity, but from a separation of what is authentic and what is false or hypocritical. Going Dostoyevsky one better, Buñuel points out that even Christ would not be so naive as to entrust family heirlooms, unlimited food and drink, and female purity and honor to a crowd of desperate men and women as represented by Viridiana’s idle street people. The dialectical structure that has been noted at the heart of Buñuelian cinema has definite consequences for the religious subtext. Viridiana is patently molded around two sets of polar opposites. First, there is the youthful innocence of Viridiana the convent novice, pitted against the perverse desire of her corrupt uncle, a substitute for paternal authority in the orphan’s life. The father-daughter seduction plot unravels when the uncle takes on the purity of the orphan and sacrifices himself out of a suddenly selfless (indeed, self-loathing and self-destructive) love for her. The second dichotomy emerges, that of Viridiana’s idealistic charitable project competing with the preference for a simple work ethic on the part of the other inheritor, Don Jaime’s son out of wedlock, Don Jorge.

Viridiana’s bootless prayers are juxtaposed with the material progress made by Jorge’s workers. Finally, Viridiana is a broken idol, with her nose permanently made crooked during the rape scene, and she has surrendered to sexuality in desecration of her ascetic rituals. Jorge, her new master of flesh and blood, is triumphant and promises only exploitation, but only because Viridiana cast her pearls before swine in an ultimately narcissistic attempt at charity. As usual in Buñuel’s oeuvre, class status and wealth are associated with the superficial appearance of religiosity and with exploitation of dogma and doctrine for financial gain. The Abbess consciously exposes the young novice to the advances of a man who is a stranger to her in exchange for his having paid her dowry; despite her veil of purity she becomes a Celestina procuring an innocent for her customer’s carnal appetites. The portrayal of the Abbess was actually toned down by religious censorship as too disagreeable (Gil 185). Perhaps this distracted censors from the more blatantly outrageous scenes later in the movie. In this rather complex worldly parable, the heroine’s progression from innocence to corruption begins from within, in a way that resonates with the inner blockages that arise against the normal libido in the second half of L’Âge d’or. Viridiana’s sin, or the seed Page 38 →of her sinfulness, is pride or soberbia (one of the seven deadly sins). In psychoanalytical terms, her aim of saintly charity and purity is gradually revealed as a form of narcissism. The trappings of her asceticism could also be easily confused with masochistic paraphernalia, and her deepest urges compel her to parade around while sleepwalking and dressed for bed, thus further arousing the desire of her lascivious uncle through exhibitionism. In a parallel to Viridiana’s fetish for the tools of the trade of Christian martyrdom, Don Jaime’s sex toys are feminine articles of clothing that allow him to cross-dress and fantasize while he waits for a real woman to fulfill his fantasies. Viridiana unwittingly becomes both his sexual redeemer and soul’s salvation, and he willingly sacrifices himself on the altar of her saintliness. Buñuel teases out the extreme of ascetic self-denial as it blends into perversion, in an ironic commentary on the practices of Opus Dei, the Catholic lay organization founded by St. José María Escrivá in 1928 that was beginning to filter into the Spanish government at the time of filming. Opus Dei members eventually provided technocratic leadership for the final years of the Franco dictatorship. Although the Opus professionals and functionaries brought about a modernizing trend toward internationalization, the celibate lifestyle practiced by many of them was firmly rooted in early Christian traditions and employed mortification of the flesh. Most notably emblazoned on the minds of non-Opus Spaniards was the purported use of the cilice and whip to inhibit sexual fantasy and masturbation, though practiced by only a third of the membership (Allen 165). This special link with Spain’s present was also based on its past: Buñuel’s reading of Galdós’s novels involving quixotic Catholicism (Nazarín, Halma, Misericordia) provide the nineteenth-century basis for his more radical rendering of religious lunacy. The title character’s name goes back much further, to a thirteenth-century Italian saint who had made a pilgrimage to Santiago. Upon her death after a life of cloistered prayer, local bells rang spontaneously and miraculously (Aitken 106). With his fondness for the bells of Calanda, it is likely that Buñuel filed this story away for future use, and then resorted to the name alone when he needed one that sounded like Virginia, which would have been too obvious. The demystification of Catholic asceticism as a manifestation of repressed narcissism and path to sexual arousal and perversion would be expressed even more explicitly during the democratic transition in the landmark poetry of Ana Rossetti in Devocionario. As a champion of female desire in the heady years of the destape and Madrid movida, Rossetti was an open, indeed exhibitionistic, proclaimer of the sensuality that could be ignited by such reading material as the lives of martyrs in the Año Cristiano. Her Page 39 →poem “Martirium omnium” conveys her neomystical inflammation upon reading about violence and aggression in the religious context: “Queridos compañeros de la infancia, / . . . En mi regazo todos, puntual asistía / a la cruel peripecia del martirio. / Seductoras palabras: garfios, escorpiones, erizados flagelos, pez hirviente” (Beloved childhood companions, in my lap, I faithfully attended the cruel reversal of martyrdom. Seductive words: hooks, scorpions, spiked scourges, boiling tar, 15). Her reading nostalgia likens the saints’ lives to comic books and pornography. Less morbid but just as blasphemous are her poems devoted to the brawny physique of angels and the sexual curiosity piqued in an adolescent female by the thought of divine beings in manly form: “Muriérame yo, gladiador, arcángel, verte avanzar / abierta la camisa, tenue vello irisado / por tu pecho de cobre” (I would gladly die, gladiator, angel, to see

you approach with your tunic open, and fine iridescent hair on your copper chest, 35). Freed by both the sexual revolution and the end of Franco rule, Rossetti explicitly associates religious practices and imagery with the libido. Viridiana enjoys these surreptitiously and hypocritically, in a way that entraps her, making her easy prey for the pragmatist (Jorge) or for the unscrupulous (the beggar who rapes or attempts to rape her). It is not enough to desire to be saintly in the traditional sense. Viridiana is guilty of feigned ignorance of both the material aspects of life and of the existence of class struggle, as well as wishful thinking in her acceptance of human goodness and the possibility of Christian charity. These shortcomings combine to cause her project to fail miserably. They also lead to the loss of her outward innocence and put the honest working folk in her employ (Moncho) at a disadvantage. The reinvented Madonna of Los olvidados, who takes action too late to save her son from his underprivileged milieu, does not get a chance to take shape in Viridiana. One of the more sycophantic beggars points out the heroine’s resemblance to Mary, which she rejects as immodest flattery. The beggar who eventually assails the heroine’s chastity is the same one she had found painting a portrait of the Virgin Mary for money. She compliments him on his artwork and he brushes it off as all that he can do after losing the use of his leg. Thus, Our Lady of the Pillar (la Virgen del Pilar), the miracle of Zaragoza that restored Juan Diego’s leg in 1554, is embedded into the plot of Viridiana. The beggar, rather than having his mobility restored, is more likely to have lost his life as a result of attacking his benefactress. Viridiana emerges as the Virgin who ceases to be one when she refuses to modernize herself. One of the most celebrated sequences of Viridiana, and probably the one that provoked its condemnation and censorship by the Vatican press and subsequently, by the very Franco regime that had supported it, is the spoof of Leonardo Da Vinci’s The Last Supper. Surrealism was given to sending up canonical works of art with a quick and rebellious moustache on the Mona Lisa, or the use of the Venus de Milo as a chest of drawers. Buñuel unites this surrealist penchant with the more involved postmodern aesthetic of the parody, in which the original text is actually recycled in a different context for a new meaning.14 The intoxicated blind man as Christ, who is then “betrayed” by a cohort and his supposed mistress, being photographed at a drunken bacchanal by a vulva-ascamera, reaches a comic height for lampooning of the sacred in both scripture and art. Page 40 → The da Vinci painting would be re-created solemnly “with the latest visual technologies” by British director Peter Greenaway in 2010 as part of the Italian government-sponsored Milano Initiative at the Park Avenue Armory. While this mixed-media installation is termed “an intellectual response and spiritual experience with the profound moment of the Last Supper and all it prophesized and represented,” and an “unconventional reading of a classical painting” (“Leonardo’s Last Supper” 60), it in fact Page 41 →clones the painting into three dimensions and two or more human senses, without daring to comment on it, much less assail it in the grand fashion that Buñuel employs. Greenaway’s treatment of this work as a sacred cow, and as symbolic wealth in the global cultural marketplace, highlights the pungency and freshness of Viridiana by contrast. More akin to the revisionist thrust of Viridiana, though still lacking in irony, is Martin Scorcese’s dramatization of the Last Supper in The Last Temptation of Christ. This film is marked by the humanization of Jesus, with Willem Dafoe accenting his selfdoubt, reluctance, vulnerability, and even ignorance at every turn. For the Last Supper, Scorsese replaces the centrality of Jesus with a less hierarchical formation, with the apostles seated in a semicircle and interacting with their leader and with each other naturally and spontaneously, though not to the anarchic extent manifested by Buñuel’s beggars. The success of Viridiana, the reason for its position at the very pinnacle of the Buñuel oeuvre, may well lie in its combination of “timeless” Spanish themes like the picaresque of the beggars, who are so spontaneous they are all often taken for nonprofessional actors (whereas most were professionals), the quixotic endeavors of the heroine and her masochistic asceticism (reminders of Senecan stoicism), her Teresian founding of a new “convent,” Don Jaime’s Goyaesque devouring of the young, and the traces of donjuanismo in her cousin Jorge’s womanizing ways. These Spanish archetypes are synchronized with a late twentieth-century present that includes a return to

religious fundamentalism in the political sphere, the Spanish form of which would usher in the Opus Dei, the advent of the sexual revolution and rock music (signaling youthful rebellion), and the art of the postmodern parody (The Last Supper mock-up). All this is accomplished while uniting the more immediate past of surrealism (the bridal travesty was typical of this) and the legacy of nineteenth-century realism. Saintliness, particularly in a false or mistaken sense, is explored by Buñuel in Viridiana and Simón del desierto, films that mark an interval during which he gradually left Mexico and returned to Europe. In between he wrote and directed another Mexican film with religious themes, El ángel exterminador. As explained by Sánchez Vidal, this film has been interpreted religiously in a too literal fashion that matches each symbol to a reading on the scriptural plane (237–38). As Buñuel corrects in a prologue to a subsequent version of the film, such allegorical readings are too neat and clear-cut. This dinner-party movie takes up the theme originated toward the end of L’Âge d’or, which will in turn be developed in his later French movies. It employs the bourgeois dinner party to bring in a sense of chaos as well as the order imposed by the religious imagination: all that is sacred and profanePage 42 → are commingled. The martyrs here are the lovers, who shut themselves off in a side room in what was already an entrapment; the survivors ponder the sublime mystery of how they achieved martyrdom. Political denunciation of the haute bourgeoisie gains the upper hand over purely religious and mystical considerations in this movie. The apocalyptic message of the title shows up visually on the door to the bathroom. Writer and fellow Mexican exile José Bergamín had planned to call a work of his own by this name. Buñuel instantly wanted the title and asked his friend if he could steal it, to which Bergamín replied that it wasn’t really his to begin with, since it emanates from the Book of Revelation. Among the many schoolboy jokes in El ángel exterminador, we have the repetition of the water-from-the-stone miracle executed by Moses, this time employing plumbing inside of a wall. The host implores his guests to be kind to each other, only to be disrespected and wind up enraged. A proclamation that the invincible pope has been sighted is paired with a visual in which he is not visible at all. These instances allude to the miraculous, the mysterious, and the paradoxical as stocks-in-trade of belief systems. They illustrate that mysteries may engross our attention, but they provide no substantive answers and often constitute a detour or distraction. The religious habitus props up a hierarchy that benefits a select few at the top. As Buñuel remarked, the final entrapment in the church is worse than being closed off inside the living room of the stately mansion, for here the guests are crowded in with hundreds of others. The escaping flock of sheep relates the enigmatic ending of escape into conformity, which is in fact another form of confinement. With Simón del desierto (1965), Buñuel irreverently exposes the exhibitionistic side of sainthood. This movie stands at a crossroads between Buñuel’s Mexican career and his full immersion in European cinema after the controversial experiment of Viridiana had caused a temporary move back to Mexico. Based on the early anchorite or hermit saint Simeon Stylites, Claudio Brook’s performance emphasizes the spectacular aspect of Simeon’s feats along with an undermining capriciousness. The anchorite by definition is located at the extreme of saintliness, like the mystic: one shade too much of egotism or a slight departure from orthodoxy and one has a heretic vulnerable to condemnation. Alas refers to Simeon repeatedly in La Regenta as a paradigm for lost simplicity in Christian practice. The saint serves as counterpoint for the worldly ambitions of the provincial priesthood in Vetusta, a consequence of modernity and capitalism unforeseen by the church fathers and early saints. Much as Buñuel’s Nazarín implies a critique of Christianity that is more radical than that of Galdós, his Simeon Page 43 →reveals that Alas’s nostalgia for a lost simplicity and authenticity is hollow; a longing for what never was. Wood’s reading of Simón del desierto privileges its response to Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morals: evil cannot be vanquished by good and remains ever-present in a series of transformations (102). Simón del desierto represents ascetic saintliness as pure performance, and hence, as a contradiction of the humility this anchorite verbalizes repeatedly. Reading the film alongside Miguel de Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir produces two different interpretations of performativity occupying the center of religious life, with similar critical aims. The exhibitionist saint and the doubting priest are simulacra that perpetuate an excessively dogmatic or codified belief system. While it is possible to critique Unamuno as a prisoner of the authoritarian ideological system of Spanish Catholicism in the seeming canonization of a simulacrum, the narrator Angelina renders any form of belief or disbelief as contingent upon the moment and circumstance. Both Simón del desierto and San Manuel Bueno,

mártir present their icons layered with irony. Simeon, while of Syrian rather than Spanish nationality, resonates with many currents of Spanish religious culture. José de Ribera’s portraits of hermit saints helped to fix their austerity as key values. Simeon’s asceticism aligns him with the tradition of Senecan stoicism that Francisco de Quevedo established as essentially Spanish. His female counterpart, St. Mary of Egypt, was the subject of an early medieval manuscript in Spanish, translated and adapted from the French. This desert saint not only appeals to the surrealist sense of the absurd and creates a space for representing the imaginary workings of the subconscious; he also constitutes a valuable springboard for deconstructing an entire branch of the Spanish Catholicism associated with asceticism, stoicism, and mysticism. The extreme forms of Christianity past are suitable vehicles for attacking the National Catholicism of the Francoist present. The creation of Simón del desierto featured the continuity of Julio Alejandro as co-screenwriter and Gabriel Figueroa as cinematographer from previous Mexican productions. Actress Silvia Pinal and her husband, producer Gustavo Alatriste, lent their support as they had done in Viridiana and El ángel exterminador. However, Pinal is employed this time not as the virginal heroine but as a foul temptress for the hero. Her transformations in the role of Satan include that of a shapely female water bearer with hairy devil-hands, a Lolita-like uniformed Catholic schoolgirl, a naked shriveled hag with a broom (for which a body double was used), a bearded Christ-like shepherd, and finally, a contemporary, sophisticated urban femme fatale. The reverse catechization in this film involves exorcising the demons from within the saint’s portrayal as well as from without, and separating the truly holy from the narcissistic or fundamentalist. A trace of the devil-fromwithin can be found in Simeon’s original stay upon the pillar, of six years, six months, and six days, the number of the Beast in the Book of Revelation. Simeon is willing to perform miracles for influential strangers, but he refuses to acknowledge his own mother except for a short embrace when he exchanges his humble column for a taller one. She periodically appears throughout the rest of the film, trying to get his attention, as a reminder of his lack of human warmth. He restores the hands of a maimed man (reminiscent of what Our Lady of the Pillar did for the one-legged Juan Diego), and the criminal promptly uses them to swat his daughter for asking a question. The hollowness of miracles and their pretentious, egotistical side dominate these vignettes in the saint’s story. He is also shown to be excessively critical and even abusive toward those who try to help him, as when he turns hostile toward Brother Matthew, the young and somewhatPage 45 → effeminate monk who brings him supplies. Another monk he banishes for having noticed a woman. He is gradually revealed as not so different from the Devil, when Satan recounts that he too was once God’s favorite as Simeon is now. Simeon is not only aligned at times with Satan, he is comically ridiculed, as when he forgets the end of a prayer (from way atop the column, there is nobody to help him finish), blesses a cricket, amuses himself giving out random blessings, or frivolously stands on one leg to please God. When at the end he time-travels to the contemporary era, he appears to be on a date in a disco with the Devil, now in the guise of a cosmopolitan go-go girl who is his live-in lover. She dances in Dionysian revelry to the tune of “Radioactive Flesh.” Simeon can only watch impotently as a new Rome burns. The irrelevance of this ascetic saint in the context of the peril of Cold War nuclear Armageddon closes the film.15 Page 44 → At the height of the youth countercultural movements of the sixties, Buñuel made his religious concerns relevant with the character-packed road movie La Voie lactée. Two vagabondish pilgrims on their way to the holy shrine of Santiago de Compostela meet up with figures contemporary and historical, and both human and supernatural. Amazingly complete, well-researched, and accurate as any dissertation could be, peppered with surrealist absurdities, schoolboy jokes, and commentary on the current state of humanity, this encyclopedic portrayal of Roman Catholic dogma and those who have departed from it requires a systematic and detailed analysis. M. E. Williams notes how the film makes church history come alive in the present: “Rather than an attack on the Church the film is a statement about the Church and how its history affects the present” (15). Buñuel’s co-screenwriter, Jean-Claude Carrière, researched the heresies presented for six months to get to the essence of heresy as the seed of fanaticism: “Why someone would choose one detail within a dogma, and replace it with a single idea of his own, even if it meant he’d be burned” (French 2). The film’s statement on religion is the most definitive of any

that appear in Buñuel’s work; many threads begun in previous films are tied together in this one. These combine to truly reinvent Catholicism for modernity after the process of reverse catechization, which in this case entails liberation from dogma. The shifting chronotopes start with a largely static glimpse of the old quarter of Santiago de Compostela. The opening then provocatively cuts from a documentary-style reading on the history of the Way of St. James (also known as Camino de Santiago and Chemin de Saint Jacques, and in turn synonymous in astronomy with the Milky Way), accompanied by a map of the medieval pilgrims’ route and the aforementioned footage of the Page 46 →old quarter of Santiago de Compostela, to a modern, bustling highway outside of Paris. Though matter-offact, the narration at once cements the cultural importance of the route, and subverts its religious purpose by pointing to an aura of mystery that clouds the authenticity of the remains that are supposed to be the object of the pilgrimage. If these are truly the remains of the apostle, why was their resting place not spotted until the seventh century? Why did the Catholic Church hide the remains for three hundred years (from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries)? Why did the pope at the time hesitate before declaring them legitimate when they resurfaced? These mildly troubling details are reinforced by the many episodes that follow involving the heretic Priscillian directly or indirectly, culminating in a final declaration that it is Priscillian (about 340–385), not St. James, who lies buried in the crypt. The journey through the provinces of central and western France and northern Spain begins for the two pilgrims /panhandlers who serve as antiheroes. One is a young man and the other states that he is fifty-nine, repeating the motif of a tall, young passerby and a shorter, older one who appear briefly, absorbed in conversation in Un chien andalou. Tired, hungry, and with few resources between them, they echo some of the picaresque elements of the beggars in Viridiana, while exhibiting commitment to a spiritual quest that has not quite settled on a fixed set of doctrines or principles. Their banter is the timeless repartee of those who survive by their wits at the mercy of their circumstances, with an occasional foray into morality, metaphysics, or magic. They promptly encounter a mysterious boy with stigmata, pointing to the miraculous as an issue for religious authority. The stigmata, like the severe asceticism of Simeon or trances of the mystics, is a radical religious phenomenon located on the precarious divider between the ultraholy or miraculous and the heretical or condemnable (anathema is the term often used in the script). In addition, the theatricality of stigmata makes it prone to fakery for financial gain by the unscrupulous, a direction explored by Jesús Fernández Santos in the novel Extramuros. In the sixties, many believers were thronging to see Padre Pío for his famed bleeding palms, but his stigmata would not be accepted officially as miraculous until the twenty-first century. The stigmata thus represented for Roman Catholicism a disconcerting remnant (for those intent on some degree of modern credibility) of early Christian “extreme” saintliness, a vulnerability to fraud, and at once a potential source of media attention, popular support, and profit. From these notes of lingering controversy, the plot takes an abrupt plunge into the patently supernatural with the apparition of a dark-cloaked Page 47 →gentleman with classic Mephistophelian overtones. When the pilgrims ask for a donation, the black-caped figure will only give to the one who already has money, in a reversal of Christ’s Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke. Christ’s blessing of the poor in the Beatitudes is one of the earliest points of contention surrounding his legacy, since many scholars consider the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew and Luke’s Sermon on the Plain to be recordings of the same speech, yet Matthew construes Christ as blessing “the poor in spirit” instead of the materially poor as Luke does. Whether Christianity should truly privilege the poor over the wealthy is thus at the heart of the interpretation of Jesus’s words and the beginning of an endless controversy. As Ian Christie observes, in researching this movie Buñuel and co-screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière studied documentary sources on the early church, and found that “heresy was always the product of mystery” (133). Whenever the church issued dogma to explain away ambiguities and enigmas never clarified in scripture, competing explanations emerged, which the church in turn branded as heresy and persecuted (134). Thus the dialectic between tenets produced or accepted by the molar structure and those generated by nomadic, mutant, desiring subjects (in Deleuzian terms) forms the dynamic for the film. The caped figure also prescribes that upon reaching Santiago they should father children with a prostitute and name one This-Is-Not-My-People and the other No-More-Mercy. The Priscillian belief in the power of demons in the world, especially where the flesh is concerned, to the point of providing stiff competition for God Almighty, is

highlighted in this assignment of a quest to our heroes, not unlike the archetypal Holy Grail quest. The more diminutive caped man (the proverbial lesser of two evils) who joins the first and sets a dove free adds the dimension of the demonic dwarf, or Diablo Cojuelo, known in Priscillian discourse and in the tradition continued by Vélez de Guevara and Larra as Asmodeo. The taller devil in Priscillian lore would be Saclam, the devil-inchief. This Priscillian dimension of the demonic accompanies the Holy Trinity configuration that has often been perceived in the two caped men and the dove. Thanks to this diabolic intervention, the travelers’ luck soon improves, and they receive their first ride in a luxurious limousine. The sequence turns to their reverie about what they learned in childhood about Jesus, and the chronotope switches to New Testament Galilee, where Jesus sharpens a razor in much the same posture in which Buñuel appeared in the first frames of his first film. His mother, meanwhile, kneads dough, a pun on tener las manos en la masa, being caught red-handed. Her moral weakness, which is repeated throughout, is her excessive maternal pride in her son, Page 48 →viewing him mainly as a man and as her offspring. She is shown telling another, younger son of hers to “go play in the street,” and so evidently favors her eldest. She instructs Jesus not to shave because he looks handsomer with a beard. The humanity of both Mary and Christ emerges through this irreverent vignette, interrupted when the limo driver puts the pilgrims out for taking the Lord’s name in vain. This is the first of many injustices committed in the name of keeping true to the letter of religious law and authority. This pattern is repeated, with the added element of disagreement over the nature of Jesus and consequently of the meaning of Holy Communion, in the first country inn at which the travelers stop. The innkeeper treats them with kindness, but a secular authority (the local chief of police) intervenes and ejects them before they have a chance to enjoy their snack. Meanwhile the police chief discusses religion with an affable priest who matter-of-factly asserts that all people have now been converted to Christianity, even Muslims and Jews. While the priest speaks as if logic were on his side, he becomes irrational when his companion denies transubstantiation, the transformation of bread into the body of Christ. In an act symbolic of religious intolerance, he throws hot coffee in the officer’s face, and the ambulance from the insane asylum from which he has escaped soon carts him away. Citing the Pateliers, Albigeois, and Calvinists as groups who could not adhere to the doctrine of transubstantiation, the priest (recently defrocked, we learn) links Roman Catholic theological orthodoxy with fanaticism and insanity. With Vatican II still a controversial update to the Catholic faith, Buñuel could rely upon the history of Catholic theology and its many heretics and heterodox as a source for infusing the surreal into everyday life. Thus he treated over a dozen heretical and heterodox beliefs lovingly and meticulously in La Voie lactée, in a way similar, though diametrically opposed in ideology, to the way they were cataloged and condemned by the nineteenthcentury conservative historian Menéndez Pelayo. Among the most recognizable figures is Priscillian, who put the Iberian Peninsula on the theological map in the fourth century with one of the major early heresies to spring up within Catholicism. As his shrine was in Galicia, the travelers naturally encounter him en route to their sacred site. One of Buñuel’s sources for this and many other historical heresies he either dramatizes or mentions in the script is Menéndez Pelayo’s monumental Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, first published in three volumes from 1880 to 1882.16 The historian confidently offers his scholarship on the many errors that have been conceived within Spanish borders as proof, despite their copiousness,Page 49 → that “El genio español es eminentemente católico; la heterodoxia es entre nosotros accidente y ráfaga pasajera” (The Spanish spirit is eminently Catholic; heresy among us is an accident and a passing gust of wind, 48). After nightfall the pilgrims receive an invitation from a follower of Priscillian to a secret rite in the woods. Since they cannot understand his Latin, they do not attend, but the camera does travel through to the spot where the disciples prepare themselves. Women in varied stages of dress and undress adorn themselves as if they were courtesans about to entertain dignitaries. Priscillian, triumphant for the moment, proclaims himself bishop of Ávila once more; it is the pope who is in error. The heretic believes wholeheartedly in God’s rule of the soul and the Devil’s rule of the flesh, and in the need to purge the body’s evil by satiating it. Women take on an active and more equal role in these practices, since they must work in tandem with men to appease all sensual urges and free the soul from the body’s imprisonment. The graphic depiction glances backward at a path not chosen by church patriarchs in their antisensual, anticorporeal, and sexist doctrines, while at the same time reflecting on the increasingly permissive attitudes toward sexual fulfillment that evolved in Western culture in the sixties,

facilitated by the birth control pill, countercultural youth movements, and the intensification of capitalism with its constant manufacture of drives and desires. Priscillian for his part exhibits the hedonistic maxim of hippies by denying the stain of original sin when he partakes of the Host, and taking two maidens for his implied gratification after the ritual. In his history of those who strayed from approved dogma in heresy or the milder form of heterodoxy, Ménendez Pelayo recounts Priscillian’s defense against the many accusations that were made against him and his followers, including that of licentiousness. The scholar believes him to be guilty as charged: “no eran tan inocentes corderos como al principio ha querido [Priscillian] pintarlos” (They were not the innocent lambs he wished to portray them as, 190). While the reactionary scholar’s view is not that of the consensus of historians, Buñuel decides to expound upon and embellish the notion of a Priscillian who preached promiscuity as an antidote to carnal temptation (appease rather than deny the body, similar to the image some hold of the French Cathars). The standard view among modern historians is that Priscillian preached and practiced celibacy, poverty, and vegetarianism, and that he became a victim of ecclesiastic authority because he refused to segregate men from women in his retreats and prayer meetings as well as for advocating fasting and going barefoot (Chadwick 8, 14). He was accused of lechery and of sorcery in an exaggeration of his actual practices. What is beyond dispute is that Priscillian attracted many followers in Galicia and his influence spread outward toward what is now Portugal, northern Spain, and southwestern France; he gave much authority to laypeople, including women, and allowed rites to be held in women’s homes. He spread the idea of divinity across nature, giving special importance to the sun, moon, animals, plants, and other elements of the environment that had been worshipped by animists in preChristian times. Perhaps out of self-preservation, however, Priscillian maintained that he did not practice pagan polytheistic worship of nature. According to his defense, his group was ascetic and continent and did not hold orgies during its coed lay rituals. He claimed never to have denied the Trinity nor reduced Christ to a shadow or eon, or anything other than God the Son. He was not swayed by the mysticism of the eastern Gnostics or by Manichaeistic dualism, which places the Devil on an even playing field with God, even viewing the former as the Creator of the flesh and its attendant evils. Most importantly for his own survival, Priscillian in his Apology denied that he practiced magic or sorcery, the charge that most certainly resulted in Treveris ordering his execution by beheading (Menéndez Pelayo 186). Page 50 → Page 51 →Buñuel’s recreation of a Priscillianist rite shows the same skepticism as Menéndez Pelayo regarding the bishop’s innocence in matters theological and practical, but this is executed with an air of celebration rather than censure. The scene links Priscillian as transgressor with the surrealists of Buñuel’s generation as well as with the hippies and flower children of the sixties.17 The Priscillianists’ rejection of marriage and of eating meat, their belief in the unlimited perfectibility of humankind, and their refusal to regard anyone who has attained their definition of spiritual purity as capable of sin convinced Menéndez Pelayo that the corporeal denial they preached was merely a cover-up for lecherous depravity (166–67). These doctrines would be virtues for dissident contemporary youth groups. Priscillian is resurrected in La Voie lactée and informs the film globally as a kindred spirit for the implied author/director and his twin generations of surrealists/ Spanish 1927 Group and sixties countercultural rebels. The condemned heretic is not only present in the dramatization of one of his own rituals that parallels a later scene in the forest with Jesus and his disciples. His heresy permeates many of the other scenes, providing a key in particular to the enigmatic apparitions of the initial hitchhiking scene. Priscillian occupies a major role whether he is on-screen or only implied in the practices and beliefs that appear throughout. Buñuel the iconoclast can look to Priscillian as a hero, or Byronian antihero, in much the same way that he pays homage to the Marquis de Sade, Heathcliff, and Don Juan in other films. Just as St. James put Spain on the map for religious pilgrimage, Priscillian places Spain in a privileged position in the annals of heresy, since he was the first heretic to be put to death by Christian authorities. This marks the point where Christianity emerged from persecuted status to persecutor in its own right. If St. James’s mortal remains consecrate Spain with an apostle’s grave, which few European nations can boast, then Priscillian’s life and legacy in Spain makes it the earliest hotbed of religious revolt and controversy. No less than a martyr to the cause of avant-garde sacrilege, Priscillian allowed women a leadership role in his church and acknowledged the power of evil alongside that of

divinity. Further reference to Priscillian’s demonology is found in the “Exterminating Angel” in the car wreck scene. This can be linked to Priscillian’s Abaddon, based on the Greek Apolleon and the Roman Exterminius. This apparition encourages the men to steal the car crash victim’s shoes while driving his own bare feet into the mud. The young pilgrim seems to have willed the accident in the first place by cursing the driver for not giving them a ride. Fleeting diabolical references in previous films like El ángel exterminador are thoroughly codified here. The young beggar succeeds at Page 52 →magic with evil results, the charge that resulted in Priscillian’s execution. Buñuel himself provides the voice-over for the doomsday “repent now for the end is near” message that is heard on the car radio. In Christian antiquity, the year 365 was believed by many to signal the End of Days (birth of the Antichrist followed by Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ). This contributed to the apocalyptic and ascetic fervor surrounding Priscillian’s life (Chadwick 10). In the modern realm, Buñuel’s concern over nuclear holocaust motivates this preaching of repentance, which ironically mirrors the traditional fire-and-brimstone sermons Buñuel had found so repressive to his vitality in youth. Much of La Voie lactée is similarly concerned with an ironic return to religiosity. Priscillian as the tempting road not taken by Catholicism appears eloquent and aristocratic in contrast to Jesus. Priscillian’s investment of power in the Devil/Saclam mirrors Buñuel’s fascination with the Marquis de Sade. His originality as the first heretic to be killed by Christian authorities makes him a martyr for Spanish iconoclasts worthy of resurrection and his shrine a fitting destination for pragmatic and openminded pilgrims. While celebrating the iconoclasm and unbridled imagination of the heretic, the storytelling itself preserves the sacred space of the imagination with magical twists. The viewer does not quite know, for example, whether the ritual that was filmed is to be taken as real or as a dream of one of the travelers as they settle down to sleep. They had been speaking of their anticipation of finding sexual adventure in Santiago, after all. A thunderstorm soon jolts the older one awake, and the younger one challenges God, if he exists, to strike him dead; the classic challenge of the atheist. Lightning does strike the spot after he takes a few steps, making him laugh at his narrow escape while the older one scolds him for presuming to have God Almighty at his disposal. The senior vagabond thereby repeats the classic defense of the faithful to the atheist’s challenge. This irony informs much of the discussion of the degree of participation of divinity in human affairs that follows. Against the currents of heresy represented in the film and the irreverence of its Gospel re-creations, the defenders of the one true faith have ample screen time to render their own positions hypocritical, absurd, or mendacious. When the priest who had been earnestly discussing the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is apprehended for return to the insane asylum, it links the clergy to the insane and religion to madness (as noted by Edwards 128). A scene in a swanky restaurant shows the maître d’ speaking with authority on the combined divinity and humanity of Christ. When his underlings are skeptical, he refers to a passage in the Book of Psalms Page 53 →that settles the matter beyond dispute. His staff agrees that his argument is convincing, but only on account of his authority over them. Similarly, a waitress who expresses her curiosity too loquaciously is ordered back to work, and the pilgrims who enter to beg are met with the furthest from Christian charity. His behavior with paying customers, on the other hand, is exemplary and courteous. The structures of power and wealth govern his treatment of others visibly, regardless of the “gospel truth” of his words. While spouting the very letter of accepted Catholic theology, the maître d’ also condemns the heresies of Marcian, Nestorious, and the Monophysicists as if he were reading straight out of Historia de los heterodoxos. His tirade is intercut with a dark dungeon scene that carries the imperiousness of the atheist to an extreme. The counterbalance is between the believer who is overbearing with others and the nonbeliever who commits torture and rape. Atheism also leads to abuse of power in this brief but powerful eighteenth-century vignette in which a Sade-like nobleman holds a young girl captive. She has been beaten and is about to endure worse treatment, but she will not budge from her position of faith, while he tries to convince her that her belief in a God that will avenge injustices against her is wishful thinking on her part. When verbal persuasion fails, he resorts to superior force. Hence fanaticisms on both sides of the spectrum, ranging from ultra-orthodox belief in the existence of God with specific tenets and practices to adamant belief in God’s nonexistence, cancel each other out. This points to a golden mean of reasonable belief in possibility and openness toward the form divinity might take.

A return to the swanky restaurant allows the maître d’ to put the Sadean aristocrat in his place: his atheism is just as self-serving as the firm belief held by his suffering victim. Meanwhile, a waiter brings up the mystery of Christ’s dual nature as God and man (a common departure from dogma was to hold that one side of the duality dominated the other). He uses the metafilmic example of how Christ always moves slowly and solemnly. The waiter finds movie Jesuses who walk with arms outstretched in a perpetual blessing ridiculous. He conjectures that Christ must have walked like everyone else. From this springboard the meandering road movie borders on Arianism again in the way that it depicts Jesus as utterly human. Bedraggled and late for the wedding at Canaan, he tipsily relates a frivolous parable that exalts cleverness and deceit over virtue. Mary also appears without the accustomed halo of dignity; she gloats over her maternal achievement as she observes him at the wedding feast and goads him to perform the miracle of changing water to wine. The banal humanity of Jesus is emphasized in the few vignettes in which he appears, leading up to the final sequence that Page 54 →casts doubt on his restoration of sight to two blind men. They claim to be healed, but continue using their canes to negotiate the terrain. Even Pasolini’s Jesus from five years before has a primitively mystical dignity that is subverted by Buñuel’s boorish oaf. The theme of Jesus’s nondivinity plays along with the doubt being cast over which martyr is buried at Santiago; it forms a counterpoint to Priscillian’s view of Jesus as nonhuman by highlighting the other major early heresy that took root in Spain, the Arianism of the Visigothic rulers (although Menéndez Pelayo stresses that this foreign heresy that regarded the Son as somewhat less divine than the Father never went beyond the Visigoths themselves). Ingeniously, it springs from a discussion of movie Jesuses with unnatural gestures. By subverting scripture, the conventions of the religious movie genre are subverted as well. A conspicuous lack of portentous music or special lighting effects accompany the Jesus scenes, in contrast to religious epics such as Nicholas Ray’s King of Kings, filmed in Spain eight years earlier. The pilgrims observe a religious school play for which the pupils, young girls in identical uniforms, have been trained to step forward and condemn as anathema various beliefs that diverge from church teachings. The incongruity of their tender age clashing with their stern and absolute pronouncements ridicules the specificity of doctrines that have held sway historically over acceptance or ostracism, or even life or death. Buñuel uses these actresses to lead viewers to the conclusion of Montaigne regarding the impossibility of knowing anything with certainty. In terms of the early Christian tenets they espouse, one can go along with the taboos against bigamy and against viewing babies as evil because of original sin, but then the teacher’s pet steps forward to announce that refusing to eat meat for reasons other than normally prescribed fasting is a sin (from the Council of Braga in 567). This prohibition, meant to stamp out the remnants of Manichaeistic dualism that regarded all flesh as the unholy creation of the Devil, in its new context would apply to the crop of vegetarians who sprang up in the sixties, labeling them a new heretical sect. In Julia Sweeney’s 2004 monologue subsequently filmed as Letting Go of God, she details her loss of faith after reading the Bible closely and finding contradictions, arbitrariness, and folly. Other humorous perspectives on the archaic and inane aspects of organized religions include Bill Maher’s Religulous (2008) and Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979) and The Meaning of Life (1983). Richard Dawkins critiques belief in a more serious documentary style in The God Who Wasn’t There (2005). Of all these attempts, both comic and serious, La Voie lactée stands out for being ahead of its time and for leaving the possibilityPage 55 → of God’s existence open while lambasting those who are convinced that they have definitive answers Just as the heretics lack rhyme or reason, so do the orthodox, and they have the intolerance and fanaticism of the power structure on their side. We see a prisoner about to be condemned to death being questioned by the Inquisition. His doubts are at least reasonable to the nondogmatic ear: he objects to the idea of Purgatory because scripture does not mention it and to the sacraments of confirmation and extreme unction because Christ did not institute them. When the Inquisition offers him a chance to recant and live, he says that he cannot. A witness steps forward to object to the pointless bloodshed of executing their fellow men for their beliefs, but he recants when threatened with the same fate as the heretic. This dramatizes the irony of those with steadfast views being willing to kill or be killed for them, whereas those with more moderate, tolerant views are not willing to lay down their lives for their beliefs. A nun is nailed to a cross so that a benefactor may watch in a burlesque of Jansenism, the desire to suffer exactly as Christ did. In a movie that has much to say about Christ’s humanity as opposed to his divinity, the issue of his mortality and sacrifice is treated only obliquely in a darkly comic manner. Religious fetishism, with the sponsor as

voyeur and the nun as exhibitionist, substitutes for a direct rendering of the Crucifixion. The important thing is that life, with all its absurdities, goes on, as symbolized by the benefactor subsequently fighting a duel with a Jesuit priest over the fine points of Jansenism, with its emphasis on God’s selection of who will receive grace. The Jesuit, on the other hand, defends the Catholic tenet of individual free will as the ultimate determinant of salvation. Their hilarious duel of weapons and words re-creates the eighteenth-century tension between Jesuits and Jansenists. Ultimately, both groups were chastised by the Inquisition. This appears to motivate the enigmatic outcome of their dispute, when both march off arm in arm as comrades after all. Historia de los heterodoxos downplays the theological “content” of Spanish Jansenists. Their privileging of predestination and divine omniscience over free will was secondary, according to Menéndez Pelayo, to their political objections to Roman authority (410–11). However, the intellectual sparring of Jansenist and Jesuit on the question of human autonomy is useful to Buñuel, as it makes the younger hero ponder the classic paradox of how God could be all-knowing and yet give us a choice of what course of action to take and thus be responsible for our own redemption. The older pilgrim provides the answer that rings true with the underlying current of reinvention of Page 56 →Catholicism for modern times: that some of God’s ways are incomprehensible to mortals. A movie that champions Priscillian as an antihero of Spanish heresy cannot ignore the equally distinguished and intriguing sixteenth-century Aragonese scientist and adherent of Unitarianism, Miquel Servet. Historical Unitarianism, also known as Anti-Trinitarianism (a Christian God that is only one person, with God the Father as the source of the Son and the Holy Spirit) was a doctrine of Priscillian and other Gnostics that was elaborated upon by Servet. The latter was unusual among Spanish heretics for winding up burned at the stake by Protestants, having harassed Calvin with defenses of his theories, threatening the newfound religion. Servet’s heresy is an important Aragonese touchstone for the director, as well as representing the sort of heterodoxy that even the staunchly conservative Menéndez Pelayo cannot help but celebrate and admire despite its waywardness: “Entre todos los heresiarcas españoles ninguno vence a Miguel Servet en audacia y originalidad de ideas, en lo ordenado y consecuente del sistema, en el vigor lógico y en la trascendencia ulterior de sus errores” (Among all Spanish heretics none can beat Miquel Servet in the audacity and originality of his ideas, his well-ordered and consistent system, and the logical vigor and subsequent impact of his errors, 872). An encounter with two men in sixteenthcentury garb who cry out in defense of Unitarianism brings Servet indirectly into focus. It also makes possible another positive turning point in Buñuel’s twentieth-century theology: faith enters through the heart (a reworking of Pascal’s dictum on the heart’s reasoning being incomprehensible to the rational mind). Transformed by one mystical meeting with Mary in the woods, one of the Unitarians becomes a symbol of purity and fortitude for the following sequence, when he is tested by bizarre occurrences at a country inn. He rejects all his former criticisms of the papist and Marianist detours of Catholicism because of this one pivotal moment of conversion. In an affirmation of the diversity of human spirituality, however, the other Unitarian rejects the apparition as a hallucination and continues on unchanged. When not abusing their authority or enforcing orthodoxy on others by hook or by crook, the defenders of religious hegemony lie or plagiarize from literature and pass it off as truth. When the priest in the Spanish inn, inspired by the ex-Unitarian’s miraculous conversion, harangues the crowd about the mysteries of the Virgin Mary as being the deepest and sweetest of all, he uses as an example the supposed miracle of a nun who absconded from her convent to marry and then repentantly returned to find that her absence had not been noticed because Mary herself took her place while Page 57 →she was gone. This is none other than a narrative poem by Romantic writer Francisco de Zorrilla, called “Margarita la tornera.” The poem in turn was based on an incident in Berceo’s Milagros de Nuestra Señora, which in turn garnered its information from a German legend. However, no matter the number of literary sources that carry this legend, it remains just that, not a case with any documentation. A few details, such as the nun being seduced and abandoned by her beloved in the original story, are changed in the priest’s tale, which he tells as if it were canonical truth. He stares into the camera conspicuously while telling his tale, highlighting the open disregard for fact and information and the willingness to deceive all listeners for the sake of telling them an enthralling bedtime story. The same priest, in a bid to halt a seduction, recounts the miraculous birth of Mary, and how she gave birth to Christ while remaining a virgin. In a visual pun, this allows him to “penetrate” a room without opening the locked

door. This scene returns to the power of received indoctrination in forming the conscience, which then represses our drives and desires even when the authority figure that instilled it in us is not present. The seduction he strives to prevent is portrayed as a wholesome and innocent meeting of the converted Unitarian and a sweet young girl who happens to be naked in one of the twin beds in his room. At bedtime, both Unitarians were cautioned by the innkeeper not to open their door for anyone, including the proprietor. A haunted-house motif that eerily foreshadows The Exorcist takes over and permeates the establishment. The Spanish inn (Venta del Llopo) makes the ending circular in that figures of both religious and secular authority are present while the pilgrims ask for food and shelter at this place and at the French inn near the beginning. The young man cannot in good conscience enjoy the company of the damsel who has shown up in his room, even if they agree to marry afterward. Yet their tryst appears less sordid than the examples cited by the priest to dissuade them: the early Adamites and Nicolaites who engaged in wife-swapping, for example. Instead, the young couple is held up to an impossible standard of purity, and cautioned that according to some, even the Virgin Mary had certain flaws (according to St. John Chrysostom) and even married sex constitutes a venial sin (according to St. Thomas Aquinas). Meanwhile, the unrepentant Unitarian who stayed in his original room finds a different guest in the other bed: an older man reading quietly who announces that his hatred of science and technology is leading him to an absurd belief in God. In addition to introducing the issue of homosexual sex as a temptation in this inn of ill repute, the man seems to echo the director’s feelings exactly regarding religion at Page 58 →this point in his life and in human history. As we know from Simón del desierto, nuclear holocaust had become the single greatest danger he perceived for the human race. The development of empirical knowledge was predicated upon taking nothing upon faith alone and learning entirely from repeatable experiments and other observations of reality. If the capacity to kill everyone in one fell swoop is where this secularization of Western culture has led, the mature Buñuel wanted a route back to safety. Rather than imbuing the movie with nostalgia for lost ways of being and knowing based on faith, he posits a modernized theology that is enlivened with ambiguity, contradiction, irony, and sacrilege at every turn. Buñuel retained his Marxism to the end, and must have realized that late capitalism in its intensified global form is starkly atheistic, as Eagleton asserts (39). In his reinvention of Catholicism for this nonepic religious film, Buñuel represents the Virgin Mary and Jesus in more human terms. More approachable and convincing than standard portrayals of the Holy Family, they are nonetheless lacking in charisma. Christ’s sacrifice is nowhere present and his final words from Matthew on bringing not peace but a sword result in anticlimactic befuddlement for the two blind men he has just “cured.” Priscillian, on the other hand, emerges as more of a hero for modern times. Part playboy (a messiah who not only gets the girl, but two at once), part refined decadentista Byronic antihero, he becomes the newly revealed objective of pilgrims to Santiago throughout the ages.18 Christ’s miracles, on the other hand, are questioned first as a lark (the Wedding at Canaan) and finally as trickery, subject to the relativism of human perception as much as the events of Antonioni’s Blow-Up (which also ends with a frame full of grass). The accent on the revolutionary Priscillian, a nomadic desiring believer escaping the molar structure of codified belief, and the intimacy of the genuine apparition of Mary with the power to convert on the spot if one’s heart is receptive make room for what Eagleton terms the revolutionary potential of Christianity. It awakens the prereligious need to believe, forming a hedge against the depersonalization threatened by the invasion of technology and the state into all spheres of human activity. Following upon the director’s interest in the religious motivation of individual characters in Nazarín, Viridiana, El ángel exterminador, and Simón del desierto, the intensity of his approach to sacrilegious reinvention reaches a crescendo in La Voie lactée. In the multiple perspectives on the faithful, the heterodox, and the defenders of dogma, religion receives its most systematic and historicizing treatment in this film as well. Buñuel’s final original screenplay would be less of an epic and more of a playground romp, but the multiplicity of its messages concerning the spiritual would be no Page 59 →less astounding. In between La Voie lactée and Le Fantôme de la liberté, Buñuel revisited church iconography on Spanish soil once again in Tristana. In particular, the increasingly sinister character of the heroine as she ages is laced with irony surrounding her religious sentiments, and the priests who hover about her take on the aspect of vultures awaiting the death of her benefactor and their own payoff. Her religiosity is of the fundamentalist, ultimately antisocial variety in Kristevan terms, and it leads

directly into the death drive. The most detailed codification of Buñuel’s reading of religion occurs in La Voie lactée, with further reverberations and unfinished bits of business assembled with both absurdity and clarity in Le Fantôme de la liberté. His final original screenplay (coauthored with Jean Claude Carrière), Le Fantôme de la libertébrings together some of the conceits of La Voie lactée (also a collaboration with Carrière, who played Priscillian). Rather than a sustained narrative, one slightly overlapping piece follows another, in a “baton-passing plot device” that links one story with the next by means of a character and similar themes.19 A story set in the early nineteenthcentury Napoleonic occupation of Spain introduces the Goya painting El tres de mayo de 1808 en Madrid. The work will appear at various points in the movie as a reminder of the assassination of the individual at the hands of molar authority. Spanish prisoners are heard crying out “Down with liberty” and “Death to the French”: the Spanish have sided with repression against modernization, which at the time was associated with going over to the French side, or afrancesamiento. Even the French soldiers of the occupation, however, are won over by the “culture of death” they find inside the Cathedral of Toledo, where they are garrisoned (or as Eagleton would phrase it, they become stuck in the death drive of a restrictive social system). After drinking sacred wine and eating the Host because he was hungry, an officer approaches a comely statue of a deceased noblewoman, only to be struck by her husband, another cold stone statue. This ignites a necrophilic passion in the French officer, to see the body of the beloved in death. Miraculously, she is perfectly preserved, but like “Margarita la tornera” this turns out to be a fictitious tale. The nanny who recounts the tale is actually quoting one of Bécquer’s Leyendas. The nannies allow their charges to run wild at a city park, and the youngsters in turn are accosted by a pedophile. The presumed pedophile gave a pack of postcards to one of the girls. Later, her parents sit and leaf through them, expressing their disgust at the sickening images. Once the viewer is allowed to see them, however, they are nothing but touristic-type postcards of monuments such as the Parthenon and the Paris Opéra. For them, the Sacred Heart is the most abominablePage 60 → image of all, referring no doubt to its centrality as a symbol of nation and religion entwined in modern France. Nonetheless, the parents are “turned on” by the postcards, pointing to the role of structures of authority in igniting passion for the forbidden (in a repressive society, this is the main compulsion). This film is as meandering as La Voie lactée, but rather than follow the basic structure of a road movie with two roguish buddies as travelers, Le Fantôme de la libertétakes the liberty of following a different character from one vignette to another, creating a chain of loosely associated situations in which the links change from one transition to the next. This gives the illusion of freedom, while most of the sites visited on the grid determine identity and status in society. As James Tobias observes, the film turns real-world power networks into narrative networks, in the process exposing those networks of power as such (157, 159). While none of the linking characters is directly connected to religion, the nurse who travels to her hometown to visit her ailing father meets up with four monks at a roadside inn that echoes the two inns of La Voie lactée. As in the first inn (the French one) from the 1969 movie, there is an insane character who at first appears the most rational of the group. Like the second inn of La Voie lactée, once the lights go out, chaos reigns, and the libido rages openly and surreally against the forces of repression. A nephew and his much older aunt arrive as suspicious guests and even more suspicious bedfellows. He calls her his mother when registering, another Buñuelian example of how covering up for a transgression can result in the appearance of a worse sort of perversion (the ménage à trois at the end of Viridiana, and the lie, “uncles always kiss their nieces like that,” told to a small child to excuse Jaime’s groping of the heroine). They are in love, but the aunt holds back because she is a virgin. Her body is as young as that of a twenty-year-old (an effect achieved by means of a body double); refraining from sin seems to have kept her body free from the aging process in much the same way that holiness preserves the bodies of saints from corruption. This fascination with the body and aging /corruption is linked with the first sequence of the noblewoman buried in a church and with a later scene that examines a man whose long-dead sister purportedly telephones him from beyond the grave to arrange a meeting in her tomb (when he has just struck up an acquaintance with a stranger who reminds him of her, or so he claims in order to pick her up). In the tomb, he finds her hair cascading down the side of her coffin as if she had been buried the day before.20 This new concern with the transformation of the body wrought by aging or death (and with

notable exceptions to the rule), while echoing Page 61 →earlier such scenes in L’Âge d’or (the heroine who becomes an old woman in her lover’s arms) and in Simón del desierto (the devil changing from temptress to crone in an instant), deepens in Le Fantôme de la liberté. Together with the softening of the approach to religion, distinguishing between false and authentic religious feeling, the concern for end-of-life issues helps to make this film more than a surreal romp and an exercise in disjointedness, absurdity, and incongruity. While this playful side of the movie is important as well, the treatment of the destiny of body and soul shows that the cultural relativism that gives diversity around the globe does have some common, universal issues that unite all cultures and make them grapple with the finitude of life. The nocturnal inn sequence also demonstrates that while the Roman Catholic Church may be modernizing, there are still limits to its flexibility. The friars explain to the nurse that some saints have been withdrawn or decanonized because the facts surrounding their canonization could not be authenticated. This is the case with St. George and St. Christopher. Savonarola has been saved from condemnation centuries after being burned at the stake; the popular “Little Flower” Thérèse de Lisieux may be the next saint to be cut from the rolls since research reveals that her signs of saintliness may have been caused by a hereditary condition. Yet the miracle of Lourdes is secure and accepted despite the way it defies of the laws of science. The magic surrounding the virginal female body remains intact, much as the Virgin is still capable of provoking an epiphany in the receptive heart in La Voie lactée. A scene in which the nurse and the monks kneel and pray the rosary on behalf of her father’s health is quickly juxtaposed with them all seated at a table playing cards, gambling, smoking, and drinking; one friar is even flirting with the nurse. This shot begins with a friar who announces, “I open with a Virgin.” Opening with a virgin remained a winning gambit for Buñuel and one that never faded in the wake of Vatican II, the sexual revolution, youth counterculture, and other social cataclysms of the late twentieth century. The monks, nurse, and the young man in love with his aunt are confronted with an exhibitionist who lures them into his room to watch his obscene sadomasochistic ritual unfold. Seeing the bare-bottomed gentleman whipped by his mistress/assistant, while calling her a slut and himself a piece of garbage, the free-thinking monks reach their limit and escort the shocked nurse from the room. The oldest monk offers to cane the exhibitionist’s buttocks if he so desires. Here the clerical condemnation is more righteous than repressive: we have come full circle from L’Âge d’or in that the friars of Le Fantôme appear able to impel others toward healthy object Page 62 →relations. From his initial confrontation with religion as force of psychic and social repression, we have seen Buñuel’s treatment evolve into the defense of all idiosyncrasies of theological history as the last protected space of the imaginary and the subconscious. As he grew increasingly suspicious of material and technological progress, he leaned toward faith as the irrational with a potentially positive impact, as long as it was purified of calcified dogma and of the drives toward financial gain and domination over the other.

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TWO The Religious Genre Film and Its Discontents in Francoist Spain Buñuelian parody and subversion anticipated the conventions of the religious cinematic genre as these would take shape in Spain and elsewhere. The present chapter turns to the formation of the religious picture as genre in Spain, with attention to its foreign models and paragons and its association with Francoist ideology. In this way, the study can now maintain a dialogue with the surrealist master while tracing the evolution of the religious thematic within Spain. Buñuel conducted much of his directorial career outside of Spain and his works were banned from public viewing by the dictatorship. Meanwhile, the religious movie developed during the Franco regime, after a slow start during the silent era and the Second Republic, as a powerful vehicle for both ethical/moral and political inculcation. Though often dismissed as cine de curas (priests’ movies) or as a subtype of melodrama, this genre presents a many-faceted view of gender role models and the persistent return of repressed sexualities. First, the normative genre of the religious movie as it emerged in Spain after the Civil War and throughout the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco will be studied, concentrating on the movies of Rafael Gil as the acknowledged “Frank Capra” of the dominant cinematic discourse for Spain in the fifties (with examples by his contemporaries Vajda, Sáenz de Heredia, Orduña, and Torrado as well). The chapter then examines the efforts of directors with dissident viewpoints from within Spain who contributed either satires of religious themes, direct subversions of the religious genre, or social commentary on traditionalism in Spain utilizing the Catholic Church as a point of reference. For these purposes, the comedies of Luis García Berlanga, particularly his controversial Los jueves, milagro, Víctor Erice’sEl espíritu de la colmena, and Carlos Saura’s family drama at the end of the Franco era, Cría cuervos, will be the main focus. Page 64 →

HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGIOUS GENRE FILM It is first necessary to return in greater detail to the question of whether a religious genre in cinema can be said to exist, and if so, how is it defined. It may seem contradictory that a thematic that should transcend mortal circumstancess could be relegated to the same barrels as the lowbrow stuff that constitutes much of what we think of as “genre.” However, classification within a genre does not disqualify a particular film from surpassing the norm in terms of quality. In the twenty-first century the most prestigious directors have shown a willingness to work within established genres. In addition, studies of cinematic genres often disregard the possibility of a religious genre, preferring to classify a biblical spectacle such as Sampson and Delilah as an epic, for example. The present study seeks to remedy this lack of critical attention for Spanish cinema, since only by considering these movies as a group can one fully realize the impact of the discourses of belief and their interplay with gender, national identity, sociocultural norms, and aesthetic/intellectual history. Steve Neale notes, with regard to Hollywood production in particular, that “Genres do not consist only of films: they consist also, and equally, of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis that spectators bring with them to the cinema and that interact with films themselves during the course of the viewing process” (158). Incorporating Jauss’s concept of the “horizon of expectations,” Neale makes a convincing case for the genre as process, in a constant state of evolution as new additions to the category spawn plot structures, forms of dialogue, gesture and costuming, styles of music, lighting techniques, and other conventions that become integrated into an audience’s experience of the genre as a whole (165–66). The system of expectations guides the spectator in perceiving the specific kind of verisimilitude being pursued. A regime of verisimilitude is in play with each viewing of a western, musical, thriller, horror movie, comedy, or war film. Hence, despite their exclusion from most genre studies, religious movies with their leaps of faith make special demands on the audience’s familiarity with their peculiar renderings of probability, possibility, and reality. They must in fact be seen as part of a genre in order to be understood.1

The leap of faith in fact identifies the religious movie. It may be said to be concerned with the divine, the holy, or the sacred as expressed in a person or persons or an event. All other elements are subordinated to holiness as the generic dominant. With regard to Spain, this expression of divinity, until the most recent times, has been inflected by a Roman Catholic belief system. Neale locates origins in entertainment forms that predate the cinemaPage 65 → for most genres (170). For religious film, rather than entertainment sources, preexisting cultural referents abound in scripture, painting and sculpture, and literature, from the cultivated mystics to middlebrow prayer books to pulp-like lives of the saints. While Neale insists on testimony found in journalism (reviews), the industry itself (catalogs, advertising), and other institutional discourses as primary in ascribing certain films to certain genres (163), in the case of religious cinema this seems a less crucial determinant. Although institutional discourses constitute a worthwhile perspective on any genre study, religious movies stand apart conspicuously in their brand of verisimilitude. During the period with which this chapter is concerned, hybridization of the genre does not blur its boundaries as thoroughly as it will in the postmodern (post-1975) age, when internationally the religious comedy (Life of Brian), religious musical (Godspell, Jesus Christ Superstar) and religious thriller-spectacle (The Passion of the Christ) will truly dominate the scene, to the near obscurity of the genre in its original (Neale would say transparent) form. There is a diversity of subgenres within this one cinematic type, each with its own conventions. The life of Jesus, or messianic narrative in a Christian context, is a staple that developed early in the history of cinema. This was a natural step due to the allure of gazing upon noteworthy historical people in the “cinema of attraction.” The Holy Family could be viewed from a respectful distance within the Holy Land in fictional New Testament offshoots (often sword-and-sandals epics), such as Ben-Hur (1925) and the Italian Quo Vadis? (1913). Gradually the less self-conscious moguls tackled the Son of God head on, with D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916) and Cecil B. DeMille’s The King of Kings (1927). It is painfully apparent that Griffith’s creation of content was not on a par with his flair for technical innovation; to fill the gap with something compelling he rummaged about without judgment or scruples, equally happy to resort to the Christ story or to the murderous Ku Klux Klan, as he did in Birth of a Nation (1915).2 DeMille for his part cast a tired-looking actor with an apparent age well beyond that of a man sacrificed in the prime of life, with the result that the Christ figure is one of the weaker links in his own saga. The King of Kings is spiced up with vamps and villains to compensate for an insipid Messiah. Already at the crossroads of silent and sound eras, the savior theme was ripe for subversion with the messiah-turned-sadist that crowns the surrealist masterpiece L’Âge d’or. Direct representations of the Christ story would be scarce as the Spanish religious genre evolved, but the contamination from Buñuel’s early film cannot be blamed since audiences were shielded from it for over fifty years. Page 66 → While Christ as Redeemer is a focal point of Christian discourse, the messianic subgenre is by no means the most prevalent type of religious film, for reasons to be examined presently. The lives of the saints, or hagiographic biopics, provide diversity in personality type, time, and place to appeal to a broad range of moviegoers. They often intersect with costume drama. The miracles of the Virgin Mary constitute a special subgenre within hagiography, especially in societies where Roman Catholicism traditionally has been dominant. The political importance of this type in the mid-twentieth century is surprising. Old Testament biblical dramas fall squarely within the religious picture frame and often cross over into period spectacle, war film, or sword-and-sandals epic. Films involving lives of the clergy often contain religious themes such as missionary work, and there are others with laypeople at the center but with a religious plot element, such as the conversion narrative, arduous challenge or test of faith, experience of the hereafter, and less frequently the road movie about a religious pilgrimage. Buñuel’s La Voie lactée adopted the latter structure plus a feature that is even more rare among these mainstream religious subgenres: theological debate in the context of intellectual history. In addition, another subtype of the religious movie is exemplified in Buñuel’s final original sustained narrative: the antireligious or subversion of religious convention. This kind of film we shall see employed by the more comically dissonant and politically dissident voices from within the dictatorship toward the end of this chapter: Luis García Berlanga and Carlos Saura, respectively. The subversive nature of Buñuel’s sacrilegious cinema becomes clearer in comparison to major movies that fall

squarely within the conventions of the religious genre film. He effects a deformation of elements that exist within the typical genre. His demonization of Christ in L’Âge d’or can be said to exaggerate the curious emphasis on transgressive characters in the paragon of Christological movies, the original The King of Kings. After announcing its pious intention, the Hollywood film launches into an exotic, titillating, and apocryphal sequence with “the courtesan Mary Magdala” cavorting scantily clad with a leopard.3 Her conversion scene is staged for maximal dramatic intensity, and winds up with her head suggestively on Christ’s knee. The adulteress whose stoning Jesus prevents is also presented in stunningly erotic splendor. Another transgressive focus is a darkly handsome Judas Iscariot, who plays a prominent role visually throughout the epic, sitting immediately next to Jesus during the Last Supper. Joseph Schildkraut, who portrays Judas, is teamed with his father Rudolph in the role of another enemy of the faith, the high priest Caiaphas. The morbid shock value of the raising of Lazarus is accentuated in a prolongedPage 67 → representation. The ghastly and transgressive characters and scenes, with their superior entertainment value compared to the relatively bland Jesus, account for their prominence near the birth of the religious genre in The King of Kings. Hence, when Buñuel turns Jesus into a grotesque sinner, he makes him a more compelling cinematic character by highlighting what DeMille had already exploited in the mainstream religious genre: the allure of sin. This chapter juxtaposes another film with the iconoclastic master: Rafael Gil’s La Señora de Fátima (1951). Buñuel’s Simeon Stylites could not be further from the Virgin Mary in Atomic Age splendor mystifying the peasantry as she does in Gil’s politically pointed anticommunist epic. We will examine the genre-defining The Song of Bernadette, which influenced Gil and other mainstream directors under the Francoist dictatorship. The models for standard religious epics made under Franco emanated from other national cinemas, such as Hollywood, France, and Italy. A Hollywood treatment of the same Fátima apparitions was filmed one year after the Spanish homage, and it also provides an instructive point of comparison. In 1896, when the pioneers of moving images displayed on celluloid arrived in Spain to make experimental short films and to exhibit their products to paying audiences, Spain occupied a position that was preindustrial and undeveloped compared to the nations where modern technology had arisen. A failed republic had been replaced by a constitutional monarchy with scant democratic features. Fewer than one out of ten Spaniards lived in a city of over one hundred thousand inhabitants, and what little capital existed for investment came mostly from abroad. Workers lacked basic rights; the resulting anarchist assassinations, attacks on the clergy, riots and strikes, and church interference in governance contributed to Spanish instability and backwardness (Pérez Perucha 22–23). For the operators of the first movie cameras, this social landscape existed to be colonized and captured on film as a land of colorful customs, and indeed the first frames shot on the peninsula are devoted to the “typical Spain” associated with nineteenth-century costumbrismo: bullfights, panoramas of Madrid and Barcelona, military exercises, uniformed schoolgirls, folkloric dance, the making of paella (Pérez Perucha 23, 25). While most sources agree that the first narrative film made in Spain was Fructuoso Gelabert’s Riña de café in 1897, both Marvin D’Lugo and Nuria Triana-Toribio (Cinema 18) identify the first motion picture to be shot in Spain by a Spaniard as Eduardo Jimeno’s Salida de la misa de las doce del Pilar de Zaragoza in 1896. Thus, a short with a religious subject is arguably the first Spanish movie. Barcelona was the initial nucleus of the motion picture industry on the Page 68 →Iberian Peninsula; it would be challenged and surpassed by Madrid in the twenties before the silent era was over. Early cinema in Spain was not a propitious context for the religious genre: the appeal of adventure and intrigue in the sprawling fictions of Vicente Blasco Ibáñez and Pío Baroja was a motor for worldly settings and sympathy for the underdog, while the church offered solace to the moneyed classes or to the poor who were resigned to their fate, not the neo-Romantic “upstarts.” Catholic clergy condemned cinema for the dreaded moral dangers it posed; Triana-Toribio finds that “for an extended period cinema had the status of a fairground attraction, next to the bearded woman and the Siamese twins” (Cinema 16). This suspicion would continue into the Civil War years, preventing the Nationalist side from using cinema for cultural identity propaganda in the way that the Third Reich was able to do (TrianaToribio Cinema 32). However, the permeation of Catholicism in traditional Spanish culture ensured its presence in many early films by association or indirectly. Naturally, the many adaptations that would be made of Don Juan Tenorio began in the silent era and conveyed the salvation of the former antihero after death through the celestial

intervention of his angelic love, Inés. Nonetheless, only by leaving behind the cloister and engaging romantically with the antihero could she facilitate his redemption, and this enables him to have his cake on earth and enjoy it in heaven too. The religiosity of this magical play is famously open to question. La hermana San Sulpicio, like Pepita Jiménez, another favorite of the Spanish silent age, portrayed the religious life as an escape from the real world and its challenges. Convent walls barred the way to authenticity. In this sense, the early decades of Spanish cinema are more secular than those of Hollywood, which began to drum up interest in the religious epic from the dawn of the silent era. The budget of a historical or period piece, particularly one with “divine” special effects, explains this lag in part. In addition, it would have been daunting to represent sacred figures in a narrative film, with inevitable fictionalized elements, which could be taken as blasphemy or sacrilege by Catholic clergy and other conservative authorities. It is not surprising that early Spanish motion pictures tended to focus on the local and the recent past or present (D’Lugo Guide 3), with a reliance on popular theatrical forms such as the zarzuela and sainete (Triana-Toribio Cinema 19). There are few direct adaptations of the Christ story within Spanish cinema, with the notable exception of Rafael Gil’s El beso de Judas, which takes a novel perspective (that of the traitor) appropriate to a cautionary discourse against individual initiative and political activism. In 1954 a documentary with voice-over narration entitled Cristo was made Page 69 →based on a history by the consecrated Falangist medievalist Fray Justo Pérez de Urbel (1895–1979), who also wrote El Año Cristiano, a favorite work of religious indoctrination of the Franco era. An oblique representation of the life of Jesus is found in Ignacio F. Iquino’s El Judas (1952), unusual for its Catalan dialogue, in which a passion play is the drama-within-a-drama of betrayal among the modern actors. The paucity of actual New Testament film adaptations made by Spanish production companies was countered for Spanish-speaking audiences by the appearance of no less than four Mexican productions in this category during the forties and fifties, beginning with Jesús de Nazaret in 1942.4 While Spanish producers were reluctant to compete with Hollywood extravaganzas such as The Ten Commandments, The Robe, and Ben-Hur, Mexican cinema in its Golden Age did venture into this expensive territory, aided by the U.S. subsidy of raw film stock. This subsidy was a way of helping Mexico gain control of the Spanish-language cinema market ahead of Argentina, and of penalizing the latter for its neutrality in World War II (Acevedo-Muñoz Buñuel and Mexico 44). The lack of capital investment during the first two decades of Francoist rule limited the scale of individual productions: a small-scale missionary flick was easier to finance than an all-out re-creation of the Holy Land.5 However, the remake of King of Kings by Samuel Bronston’s studio in 1961 turned the Castilian landscape into the chronotope of the evangelical Holy Land and Spanish extras into its inhabitants for millions of viewers worldwide. Although histories of Spanish cinema generally emphasize the production of religious and historical epics during the first phase of the Franco dictatorship, known as the autarky (1939–51), Steven Marsh notes that this is inaccurate: fewer than twenty of the roughly five hundred films made in Spain during this period were either religious or historical epics. Furthermore, as Alberto Mira notes, the heyday of the high-budget historical epic was brief, spanning from 1948 (Locura de amor) to 1951 (Alba de América), and it was the specialty of the Valencian studio Cifesa (Compañía Industrial Film Español S.A.) (60). The majority of Spanish movies made during the first twelve years of the dictatorship were “popular comedies, melodramas, costume dramas that are often set in the nineteenth century, and musicals” (Marsh 2). Hence, the quantity of films of the religious genre and their popularity with the average filmgoer may have been exaggerated in some accounts, motivated by the perception of a close association between the Franco regime and the Catholic Church. However, as Paul Preston and Stanley Payne have shown in separate histories of the dictatorship, that relationship was more complex and conflicted than was once believed.6 Page 70 →Meanwhile, the political Right criticized Spanish religious films produced during the autarky. Director of Cinema and Theater José María Escudero characterized it as “un cine religioso sin autenticidad” (a religious cinema without authenticity, Gubern “Precariedad” 10). The absence of the messianic subgenre, a tendency to imitate American, French, and Italian models, and the exploitation of the genre mainly to acquire the National Interest Certificate for lucrative motives can be combined to account for this perception of inauthenticity.

PREACHING TO THE CONVERTED: MISSIONARIES AND APPARITIONS OF MARY

The authoritarian order that prevailed after Republican Spain fell to the Nationalist forces headed by General Francisco Franco was a system of National Catholicism that relied upon religious social structures for indoctrination and control. After 1945 in particular, as the regime disassociated itself from Fascism to ensure survival, Catholicism became a more crucial part of its foundation (Payne 184). As Aurora G. Morcillo notes, the recovery of tradition was implemented by means of religion, particularly within the educational system, where teachers of Republican background were rooted out and priests became the favored educators (43). Every classroom had a crucifix and a portrait of Franco the Caudillo, likening one savior to the other. Technical and scientific knowledge faded from the curriculum as re-Christianization in the wake of the Second Republic’s secularism became the order of the day. Teachers whose records were only slightly tarnished by association with the Republic attended government-sponsored religious workshops in order to improve their status; those with deeper affinities were weeded out. University applicants who had supported the Republic were denied admission. Lay teaching became anathema for what the Minister of Education construed as its association with Communism (Morcillo 43). This was Catholicism as a form of social control, a means to an end. The ideological arm of Francoism, the Falange, was supported by reactionaries, the upper and upper-middle classes, and staunch Catholics (Mira 65). Franco himself was only conventionally devout; as with his ideology, his faith was secondary to the desire to maintain power and dominance in the political arena (Preston Franco 622). He would rely upon the familiar figures of Sacred Spain, especially to appeal to women. In the midst of this project of re-Christianization, two cultural ideals of femininity became particularlyPage 71 → useful: Our Lady of the Pillar and St. Teresa of Ávila (Morcillo 36). Queen Isabella, another central icon of the Falange, was photographed to resemble Our Lady of the Pillar in Alba de América, mixing political and religious commentary (Mira 71). The Cifesa version of Locura de amor represented her daughter Juana as a paragon of Spanish feminine purity (72). In ways that Buñuel was quick to subvert, The Song of Bernadette set the tone for the virtues to be exalted in film representations of a saint’s life. Humility (inverted into its opposite, narcissism, by Buñuel’s exhibitionistic Simeon Stylite), self-denial (turned to perverse masochism by Viridiana), and receptivity to mystical experience (shared by the murderous gangsters of Los olvidados) lift the lowborn Bernadette Soubirous of Lourdes to an international religious authority, and transform her hometown into a global site for religious pilgrimage. With an Oscar for its young protagonist (Jennifer Jones, whose extramarital affair with her producer did not tarnish the film) and box-office success around the world, The Song of Bernadette would become seminal in religious moviemaking for decades. It was one of the few non-Spanish films to be rated by Franco’s film regulation office as being of “interés nacional” for exalting “valores raciales o de nuestros principios morales y políticos” (racial values or our moral and political principles, Monterde “Autarquía” 198). This status guaranteed its being shown as long as houses were half-full and granted the most favorable conditions for its premiere and distribution. One might ask why this was necessary for an international blockbuster. Carmen Martín Gaite provided an answer when she reminisced of how young women of the postwar era longed for foreign films that instructed them in the latest fashions and the most modern lifestyles for women. These more compelling idols included Deanna Durbin, Shirley Temple, Greta Garbo, and Paulette Goddard (59). Two conventions of the religious genre were initiated or reinforced in The Song of Bernadette: fictional subplots that dramatize the opposition of both secular and ecclesiastic authorities to the religious visionary, and final documentary footage of the holy place in the putative present. Its pronounced use of dramatic close-ups of the mystic can be traced back to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928). The Song of Bernadette engages openly in confrontations between atheism and belief, with a skeptic played by Vincent Price who approximates the anticlerical perspective of Émile Zola toward the Lourdes phenomena. Franz Werfel, the novelist who wrote the fictionalized account upon with the movie is based, was an Austrian Jew who was captivated by the aura of Lourdes when he was sheltered by families in the Pyrenean town as he escaped from the Gestapo. He vowed to write a book using the accounts he had heard of Bernadette’s Page 72 →experiences from the families who risked arrest to hide him. His wife Alma Mahler, a creative genius in her own right, accompanied him in Lourdes and while he wrote the book in the United States. Based on a historical novel that was written under such extraordinary circumstances, it is easy to see how The Song of Bernadette both sets the tone for the Marian miracle genre and transcends it.

Close on the heels of the remarkable double adaptation, into fiction and then into film, of the Lourdes saga came a Spanish film that epitomizes the religious genre during the autarky and focuses on a miracle almost as close to Spanish soil, La Señora de Fátima (1951). Rafael Gil (1913–1986) was an experienced filmmaker from Madrid whose malleable ideology coincided with the Francoist mainstream in the fifties. He had published a book of film theory (Luz del cinema) in 1933 through the Independent Filmwriters Group (GECI) (Gubern “Cine sonoro” 162). During the Civil War he contributed a film to the anti-Fascist organization Film Popular of Barcelona, Sanidad. He also codirected a short entitled Soldados campesinos for the Communist-based militia about a wife substituting for her farmer husband who has gone to fight on the front, and directly instructed in the use of Soviet-made artillery in Ametralladoras. Yet his allegiance to the Republican side was tenuous, and by 1938 he was slipping pro-Fascist messages into Resistencia en Levante (Gubern “Cine sonoro” 170–72). His Civil War work was formative for his subsequent career in its emphasis on didacticism, especially concerning gender roles. After the war, Gil directed documentary shorts with festive and touristic subjects, and during the ensuing years developed a reputation as a competent and prolific director of “safe” comedies and dramas, often adapted in workmanlike fashion from classic literary sources (Cervantes, Palacio Valdés, Echegaray, Alarcón) or, with a bit more verve, from light-hearted contemporary literary ones (Mihura, Jardiel Poncela, and most often, Fernández Flores). With the historical epic Reina Santa in 1947 he contributed to the surge of Isabelline zeal that sought to unite Francoist Spain with the original unification of Spain under the Catholic Monarchs and cast the Civil War as a religious crusade. The same year, one of his many literary adaptations caused some furor when a woman parishioner tested a priest’s chastity in La fe, but the conflict reached a comforting conclusion. By cultivating film topics that would qualify for the most favored category of “National Interest,” Gil became one of the nine directors whose films garnered 70 percent of the designations in this category.7 No wonder that he approached an accepted Marian miracle on Iberian soil soon after the success of The Song of Bernadette, just before Hollywood could attempt its own portrayal of the momentous and politically charged religious event. Page 73 → Whereas in most of his movies Gil followed a tried-and-true formula of adaptation of an already beloved literary masterpiece or bestseller, in approaching the apparitions at Fátima he would rely upon the proven ability of scriptwriter Vicente Escrivá for crafting a story line that could maintain both spectator interest and fidelity to church-sanctioned perspectives on the still unfolding event. Escrivá had already written or cowritten screenplays for two religious movies that had won acclaim from the Franco regime plus popular approval. La mies es mucha (1948) was a missionary narrative situated in India and directed by the Falangist José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. The latter parlayed his pedigree as first cousin of fallen Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera into a prominent cinematic career. He was the undisputed mouthpiece of the Franco government. For La mies es mucha, much of the total budget was financed by the Catholic missionary organization FIDES. Hence the film was direct theocratic propaganda. The heroic missionary priest challenges the authority of a colonist who practices usury and indentured servitude to extract the maximum profit from his mine. The priest, played by Fernando Fernán Gómez, also ignites the wrath of the local Hindus, who would like to see Catholicism banished from their territory. Close male bonding with unintentional homoerotic undertones, a staple of the Escrivá religious screenplay and of swordand-sandals epics, unites the Spanish priest with a local youth who aspires to the priesthood. They sleep in the jungle together, and the young priest and bare-chested Indian with exotic good looks engage in outdoor pillowtalk.8 The bonding between the missionary and his native pupil becomes complete at the close of the movie, when the Indian preserves a lie (about money kept in a cabinet) told to him by the missionary on his deathbed. The unintended lesson is that if one perpetuates the lie of the cultural imperialists, in time the deception turns into the truth. Balarrasa (1951) contained both a conversion and a missionary plot with a Civil War soldier who winds up in Alaska. This also starred Fernando Fernán Gómez, already a prominent leading actor.9 Escrivá had founded the production company Aspa in 1950, and Balarrasa was its first project.10 Balarrasa was directed by José Antonio Nieves Conde, a Falangist who nonetheless incorporated elements of Italian neorealism, aiming to adapt this style into a social cinema for the Right (Kinder Blood Cinema 31). Thus, Balarrasa, though scripted by Escrivá, is more stark and objective in its treatment of spirituality than either La mies es mucha or the series of religious movies directed by Gil.

Before leaving the missionary subgenre, it should be noted that Gil and Escrivá fashioned a female missionary nun in Sor Intrépida (1952) to answer to Fernán Gómez’s male missionary roles. Their heroine incarnates the Page 74 →feminine ideal of self-denial and sacrifice, giving up her wealthy background and singing career. From scrubbing convent floors she proceeds to tend to a leper colony in India. After being mortally wounded in a raid, she dies with a smile on her face in a grossly exaggerated depiction of female masochism at the service of patriarchy. The local Hindus are portrayed as given to frenzied outbursts when not checked by Christian morality. This discourse of race and religion, with Christianity serving to “civilize” the colonized people who accept it, while others outside the fold threaten them and each other, is a staple in the Franco-era missionary movie. Diana Roxana Jorza notes the “passive-masochistic discourse” of female victim-hood that unites this film with a religious melodrama made the year before, Cielo negro (319). Susan Martin-Márquez has analyzed two missionary movies that reveal much about Spanish colonialist attitudes toward sexual morality and interracial relationships (Misión blanca, 1946) and the capacity for political autonomy (Cristo negro, 1963) in Equatorial Guinea, which did not gain independence until 1968. Cristo negro builds on the popularity of Fray Escoba (1961), the story of the first black saint from the Americas, Martín de Porres (“Cristo negro” 65). This study will revisit the latter two films later in this chapter in discussing the religious genre in the sixties. Although it had no formal link to the Catholic Church, for the first five years Aspa Studios produced religious films exclusively (with the exception of one musical comedy, De Madrid al cielo). It enjoyed the public encouragement of the Vatican secretary of state and the apostolic blessing of the pope, who sponsored private screenings of some of its releases in the Holy See (Monterde “Continuismo” 258–59). Gil would become a frequent Aspa collaborator. The team of Gil as director and Escrivá as screenwriter also armed itself with official ecclesiastic consultants in the form of two Catholic priests for its official Francoist interpretation of the Fátima apparitions. One of these was the charismatic missionary figure Monsignor Angel Sagarminaga. In this film dedicated to the 1917 apparitions in Portugal, the religious and the political are so intermingled that they cannot be expressed separately. Not only does the Spanish film as well as its later American counterpart emerge from a context of mid-twentieth-century Cold War tension between capitalist and Communist nations, the utterances of the Virgin Mary during the six appearances as reported by Lucía dos Santos explicitly address the urgency of Russian conversion in order to achieve world peace. The legacy of devotion to the Virgin Mary, or Marianism, runs parallel to the rejection of Communism at every turn. For each garland that the film piously places upon the figure of Mary, it provides a backhanded stab at Page 75 →Communism, and by extension, the European Left and the Republican foes of Franco defeated during the Civil War. Like the Republicans of the Popular Front, the Portuguese First Republic officials portrayed in the Fátima movies were part of a legitimately elected democratic government. However, they are represented as enemies of the common people because of their intolerance of the essential religiosity attributed to the common folk they govern. With the calculating air of movie villains, these officials of a democratic government project a benevolent attitude toward the populace while covertly controlling them (which entails containing their religious furor) with an iron fist. The stylistic conventions of the religious movie are evident from the start, with its soaring strings, angelic chorus, and opening shot of celestial clouds. A prologue unmistakably articulates the political stance while identifying the religious subject of the film: sixteen revolutions, forty-three ministerial changes, and the assassination of the king (Carlos in 1908) are faulted for an atmosphere of disorder and religious persecution in Portugal at the time of the miracles. The prologue evokes both the Russian Revolution (which was in process during the apparitions) and the eventual Spanish Second Republic with an implicit justification for the overthrow of the latter by Spanish Nationalists and German and Italian Fascists. The mention of a royal assassination would gain sympathy with Spanish monarchists. However, the regicide did not lead directly to the Portuguese First Republic, which was instead formed following the abdication of Carlos’s successor at the instigation of a coup. The Hollywood version, entitled The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, employs dramatic re-creation and voice-over narration in its prologue. The American perspective, based more exclusively on Cold War perceptions of a Soviet menace rather than on vindication of Catholic doctrines, colors the Revolution of 1910 “red” with a sweeping curtain (unlike the Spanish film, it is in color) and characterizes it as the imposition of a “police state” by a minority. Regarding the Portuguese Republic’s claim of liberation of the masses and proletarian rule, the Hollywood version asks, “How often have we heard these same words since then?” Both representations are quick to brand the Portuguese First

Republic as anticlerical, with the Hollywood film showing the arrest of clergy and the prohibition of the religious habit. After the textual preface in the Spanish film, a narrator asserts that God is calling Fátima to awaken, and a montage that could have sprung from Tierra sin pan fills the screen with scenes of human and animal life, humble dwellings, and dusty roads. The paternalistic narration insists upon Fátima’s insignificance as a town without the irony of Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall. The Page 76 →family of the young heroine Lucía soon becomes the focus. The sequence displays a microcosm of the social ills that plagued the townspeople of rural areas according to the Falangist/Nationalist ideology of the sort found at the heart of Cela’s similarly unsympathetic representation in La familia de Pascual Duarte. As in Cela’s novel, the ability of the rural townspeople to determine their own destinies and take part in their own governance is questioned, as an implicit defense of the authoritarianism of the Franco government, as well as the most excessive massacres in the “political cleansing” of the Spanish countryside, which occurred relatively nearby in Extremadura. After this naturalist tour with Falangist overtones of the village and Lucía’s family, the best the narration has to say of the populace is that they bear suffering with resignation. The lifeless village is juxtaposed with Lucía and her companions Francisco and Jacinta as they head out into the fields to tend their flock. Francisco plays country airs on a harmonica as an idyllic modality takes over, in preparation for the first appearance of Mary. The welling up of folkloric exuberance harmonizes with José Enrique Monterde’s finding that the most authentically Spanish cinematic genre of the postwar years was “folkloric cinema,” especially involving Andalusian settings and flamenco-like song and dance (“Autarquía” 238). Here the stark contrast between social/ physical ills of the town and the vitality of the surrounding countryside corresponds also to the buried maternal memory in Kristevan terms. In Black Sun, Kristeva outlines the consequences of redirecting anger inward, resulting in the emotional impoverishment of depression (29). In the town under Socialist rule, real motherhood is depicted as impotent and nonnurturing: the son abandons his home despite the mother’s useless pleas. Her daughter, restricted from leaving home like her brother, goes out into nature to find the idealized mother, or buried maternal memory, that is more capable of sustaining her. The power of this perfectly nurturing mother transforms not only Lucía’s life but also that of her friends and eventually, her whole society. For scholars of abuse within Catholicism, the idealized mother configured in Mary fosters manipulative and controlling childrearing and is a crucial step in perpetuating the cycle of repression and exploitation characteristic of authoritarian sexual systems (Mitchell 24). The pastoral sojourn of the three children runs parallel to the arrival in town of representatives from the central government, already scheming about how to rid the ignorant villagers of their religious beliefs and force atheism upon them. In a parallel sequence, the children exhibit a wholesome religiosity as they tend their flock and stop to pray before eating lunch. Initially frightened by the blurry apparition of Mary, only Lucía is able toPage 77 →hear her words, and they are a mixed blessing indeed: both her little friends will soon die, and world stability is in jeopardy unless Russia reverts to Christianity. She instructs Lucía to learn to read and write so that she may communicate about the visions, and promises to reappear on the thirteenth day of each month through October, when she will be visible to all. Following the conventions of the female mystic movie established by The Song of Bernadette, a structure of opposition develops, with predominantly male antagonists (representatives of the Symbolic state) endeavoring to separate the visionary from her divine vision, in this case one that represents a maternal and comforting presence in her life. The inner search for the buried maternal memory is projected outward as Lucía, first spurred by Jacinta, cannot help but share what she has seen, polarizing witnesses into two groups: the faithful and the doubters. The latter group initially includes her own parents, who fear that her visions will bring the repressive forces of the government down upon the family. Her mother attempts a candle-lit exorcism of her daughter, and the father brutally beats her with a club, but to no avail. A nightmare gives way to a glorious morning for Lucía, when all of Nature seems to greet her at the window, and her friends come to take her back to the happy place of the first vision. Along the way, the other village children tease them. More serious opposition is coalescing around the headquarters of the provincial government in Ourem. The

official Duarte, played by Fernando Rey, is shown breaking the news of exile to Rome imposed upon a priest and his elderly mother for opposing the government. Duarte is sent to Fátima to neutralize and silence the growing hubbub about the apparitions. He meets with objection from his wife, an invalid won over to Lucía’s side through contact with the village women. Duarte faces a more passive resistance from the parish priest, who is apathetic and suspicious of the visions. Soon Duarte confronts Lucía herself, who stands firm in her belief. The provincial governor meanwhile instigates a plan of action that is soft in outward form, but violent in intention, and the mayor of Fátima threatens to jail the half the town. The liberal newspaper O Seculo fans the flames with a skeptical slant on the miracles, and the authorities dismiss them as a repetition of Lourdes orchestrated by local clergy. Whether by intention or a shortfall in the special effects budget, the Virgin’s apparitions in the Spanish Fátima film could easily be confused with the initial glow of a nuclear explosion, bolstering the Cold War paranoia toward the Soviet Union that permeates the movie as a whole. Indeed the citations of the Virgin’s entreaty toward the Soviet Union in its formative stage and her warning of destruction to the rest of the world resulting from Page 78 →Soviet ideology make this particular apparition a crucial and inevitable reference for both Francoist Spain and the United States in the postwar era. For Spain this message merited incorporation into the dictatorial regime’s rhetorical bid for legitimacy. The Nationalist forces sought vindication of their slaughter and repression of Spanish democracy through the presence of Communist and anarcho-syndicalist elements in the Republican side. In the Francoist view the Civil War was a crusade against the enemies of essential Spain. Soviet support of the losing side is an important linchpin to their argument that the redeemers were victorious, and this redemption is elevated to spiritual transcendence if the words from Fátima are marshaled in a political sense as they are in this film. By turning the tables on the leftist Portuguese government of the time, repression is located on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War rather than with the authoritarian governments in power on the Iberian Peninsula at the time of filming. From the American perspective, the wave of anticommunist hysteria in the form of McCarthyism, and the vertiginous process of nuclear armament and military occupation of strategic global sites, seek justification in the Virgin’s declarations against the official atheism of the Soviet state. As a popular genre, the religious movie needs a dose of comic relief to lighten its combined religious and political indoctrination. It also requires heroes with whom the spectator can identify. This is where the Spanish and U.S. versions part company, and in ways expressive of differences in their mainstream ideologies. The Spanish film is aimed at viewers who are more familiar with rural life. Comic relief is supplied by the homespun witticisms of Jacinta’s father (played by Félix Fernández), who is seen cradling a piglet. The most humorous scene is a confrontation between guards of the Portuguese Socialist government and a herd of donkeys in the town square. The bumbling soldiers appear like Keystone cops, foiled by a folksy populist uprising. A spirit of popular rebellion reminiscent of Lope de Vega’s Fuenteovejuna pervades the repeated jousting of authorities from the central government and the religious-minded peasants, who avail themselves of indirect forms of protest. Sympathy for the underdog is acceptable when the “enemies of Spain” are on top. The film also derives humor from the initial, boyish reluctance of Francisco to partake in prayer and believe in the miracles alongside his female companions. Religiosity had been increasingly identified with women in Spanish culture throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries; the male arrival at belief could be conflictive and subterranean, as Valis relates concerning Galdós (239). The film makes allowances for males to arrive at religiosity at their own pace, positing their gender identity as an initial obstacle. Page 79 → The portrayal of heroism is where the gender gap truly makes itself known in the two movies. The Spanish Fátima movie emphasizes the masochistic response of both Jacinta and Lucía when the authorities place them in custody and begin to try their reserve. When Jacinta accidentally cuts herself in the field, she calls it a sacrifice and doesn’t mind the bleeding. Lucía chooses to approach the fire in a scene in which she is menaced with burning. The scene is designed to hark back more to the witch burnings of Protestant nations than to Inquisitorial bonfires. In addition, Lucía’s father beats her brutally when the conflict over the miracles begins; that religious revelation takes place at a physical cost to the female body is made graphically clear in the Spanish version, compared to the American one, in which the more childish Lucía is never harmed. Even when subjected to melodramatic theatrics, the feminine masochism of the young heroines would seem to welcome martyrdom. As with Sor Intrépida, self-

sacrifice for women is exalted as it is in line with the Sección Femenina of the Falange. Another form of feminine heroism is found in the efforts of Duarte’s wife Elena to seek a cure for her illness through the miracles and to thereby convert her husband back to Catholic belief. This subplot reaches a climax when Elena suddenly becomes able to walk again during the final apparition. Her husband responds in tears with “Perdóname. Tú tenías razón” (Forgive me. You were right). Elena saves her body from its affliction (ostensibly polio) and her husband’s soul in this twist that casts her in the role of Inés to Duarte’s Don Juan Tenorio. Though never portrayed as a seducer of women in this sexless film, he had scoffed at religion up to this point and winced at his wife’s fanaticism. The wife’s faith is upheld over her husband’s worldly knowledge. Lucía takes the female redeemer role to a national and international level. In addition to welcoming physical torture from paternal and governmental authority, she is an active heroine in the Spanish version with more resources at her command than her American Shirley Temple-ish counterpart. The real-life Lucía was only ten years old and was still the eldest of the three child witnesses to the first apparition. Hence, the early-teen actress who plays her in the American film is closer in age. The Italian actress used (and presumably dubbed) in the Gil version is a good ten years older. Most likely this choice for a more mature Lucía was for ideological reasons. In order to gain the National Interest Certificate, the film concerned itself with adolescent women, the same group targeted by the Sección Femenina of the Falange Party. Hence Lucía represents an ego ideal for this age group, a young woman with firm resolve and self-confidence in the area in which women are expected to excel in Francoism’s perpetuation of the angel del Page 80 →hogar (domestic angel) paradigm. She holds the family together, is competent at household and farm chores, and works as spiritual and moral guide within and without the family. The mandate of reaching the young female viewer with gender-coded roles of what their lives should be under the dictatorship supports the female answer to the Spanish missionary movie. Similarly, Gil and Escriva composed Sor Intrépida with a protagonist who had a promising career but sacrifices it when she gets the call to enter the convent. Hysteria motivates the female missionary when she is seen talking to a cherished statue of Santiago, and especially when he begins to talk back to her with advice. Even her parents are upset at her selfdenial, but she eventually makes the ultimate sacrifice when her Indian convent is under siege by Hindu rebels. The nun’s final moments are much more openly masochistic than those of ill-fated male movie missionaries, who comfort their survivors or ask God for mercy when their time runs out. María instead thanks God for the chance to be a martyr and dies with a beatific smile on her face, pardoning her killers. In both Fátima and Sor Intrépida the intensity of masochistic self-denial and domestic spiritual leadership go beyond what is expected of males. The repression of sexual themes from the religious film tends to lead to twisted romances that crop up inadvertently, as happens also in Marcelino, pan y vino. Since there can be no romantic partner for the heroine, she is nonetheless “paired off” with her brother in the prologue to the actual miracle narrative. As he departs for the war despite protests from the women of his family, Lucía’s brother Manuel declares that his sister is feminine perfection and he can only hope to find the qualities she possesses in a wife for himself one day. Holding her as he would a sweetheart to whom he bids farewell for perhaps the last time, he proclaims, “Nadie repara en este pequeño angel, siempre callado” (No one notices this little angel who is always silent). To avoid true romance in favor of a queasily incestuous brother-sister embrace is a twist found in Francoist censorship of Hollywood film, which would sometimes turn boy-girl couples into brother-and-sister pairings in order to avoid a permissive representation of courtship, only to have incest flare up when the two become demonstrative. The didactic impact of Gil’s movie on the female viewer is accentuated by its social-realist approach to Lucía’s family. Her father is portrayed as an unrecovered alcoholic who is gradually bartering away the family’s possessions in exchange for drink. Manuel signs up to fight more out of disgust toward the father than commitment to the cause. The mother has a hacking cough that alludes to tuberculosis, still a threat in postwar Spain. Their barren house is devoid of the local color that dresses up the HollywoodPage 81 → interior settings; indeed none of the sordid social-realist (bordering on melodramatic) details of Lucía’s family life make an appearance in the bright and cheery American representation. Gil’s Lucía is pitted against a more openly adversarial background even before the miracles begin; she gains the sympathy and admiration of viewers as a paradigm for the specific heroism that Francoist rhetoric inculcates in young women whether in school, at church, in the press, or through mass entertainment.

The American movie, meanwhile, makes a play more for entertainment value than for didacticism, social realism, or melodrama. The fictional subplot it develops is that of a local rogue named Hugo, played by Mexican actor Gilbert Roland. Hugo appears to side with the child witnesses for personal gain at first rather his belief in the veracity of the miracles. Roland’s role and characterization combine traits associated with a certain Latin stereotype. Equal parts opportunistic pícaro where authority is concerned and pragmatic Sancho Panza to the high-minded heroine, he sprinkles an occasional dash of Don Juan into the mix. Cunning and crafty in pursuit of financial reward but otherwise idle and unmotivated, he is not above cheating, lying, and stealing. The incorporation of a bankable star was necessary for both movies in a time dominated by the original star-system; Gil employs Fernando Rey for the weight he will give the conversion subplot of doubting husband redeemed by devout wife, while Roland runs away with the otherwise bland Hollywood version as he manipulates the children’s actions (even kidnapping Lucía), fools government officials, and hawks souvenirs in the field of the miracles. Finally, he solemnly converses in voice-off with Lucía as they look back, years later, on the momentous events. That the fictitious Hugo is able to usurp such a central role in the portrayal of a historical event is testimony to the power of metafilmic discourse that emerges early in Hollywood film, making its mark in one of the first religious epics, DeMille’s The King of Kings. In the silent Christ story epic, Judas quickly adopts the behavior of a movie mogul, seeking to work as Christ’s agent or manager and thereby profit from his value as a spectacle for the masses. His frustration with Jesus and subsequent betrayal stem from his failure to capitalize on the Messiah as spectacle; the latter’s death will be worth more to Judas than his unprofitable life. Hugo follows much the same pattern, in a comically triumphant mode rather than a tragic vein, with respect to the Fátima apparitions. He tries and succeeds at selling the apparitions as a profitable spectacle that he produces, directs, and markets to the faithful masses. Although he originally chides the peasants as “ignorant, superstitious fools,” true to the wholesomeness of the Hollywood Page 82 →happy ending, he is revealed to have a good and selfless heart, inner faith, and comes to accept the miracles as truth. The empresario / movie mogul / entrepreneur is thereby upheld as a winner in every respect: he defends the community and its values, earns a profit, and turns out to be high-minded in ideals just below the surface. This message was well suited to a postwar America that was gearing up industrially and focused on economic growth, with Hollywood poised to share in the prosperity. The simulacrum of faith is allowed to become real if it is profitable in a capitalist context. We might compare the Spanish Marian miracle movie, with its insistence upon melodrama to motivate the female spectator toward identification with and imitation of the heroine, as well as the special importance it places on the female gender for keeping the religious flame alive, with Buñuel’s entry in this category. We would find in the Mary apparition of La Voie lactée an analogous situation in some respects. In this nocturnal scene, two heterodox believers of the past (anti-Trinitarians, a heresy made notorious by Miquel Servet in the sixteenth century) are surprised in a forest by a sweetly silent Virgin Mary, clothed in recognizable garb. She offers them the rosaries. One traveler is immediately and profoundly converted to Marianistic Catholicism by this experience, while the other remains unchanged in his Protestant beliefs. Hence, the dynamic between the observer and the phenomenon is what determines the validity of a miracle. As with reading or seeing a film, the interaction between reader and text is what actualizes it (in the reader-response paradigm of Wolfgang Iser, for example). Buñuel adds a more nuanced dimension of modern relativism to the Marian apparition that makes it appealing to the nondogmatic, postideological mind of high modernity and late capitalism. However, both movies rely on the sweetness of reunion with a benevolent maternal spirit for the basic appeal of the vision.

LIVES OF THE SAINTS AS MEASURES OF HOLINESS AND CITIZENSHIP The Marian miracle movie is intermingled with the saint’s story, or hagiographic film. However, a distinction is justified since the miracle movie is event-centered and interested in the subsequent canonization of witnesses only as an epilogue. The saint’s life is another religious genre that is well represented in Spanish cinema of the Franco age. With the portrayal of a saint the opportunity for identification is more explicit than in missionary and miracle movies; it hold out an accessible measure of holiness for the Page 83 →viewer, which in an officially Catholic state means a paragon of the ideal citizen as well. We shall examine both a conventional treatment of this (Teresa de Jesús) as well as an “antisaint” in the form of a movie devoted to Judas Iscariot, and fictitious saints’ lives that

inspired devotion (Marcelino, pan y vino) or controversy (Los jueves, milagro). The saint’s story received grand art-film treatment from Carl Theodor Dreyer in the 1928 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc. Using juxtaposition of Joan’s reverent, earnest intensity and the jaded, cynical countenances of her captors and torturers (with the exception of one sympathetic young man who believes in her and comforts her), Dreyer elicits compassion for a saint who tests modern credibility while attracting filmmakers and audiences. Joan is portrayed as the avant-garde visionary who breaks with tradition out of sincere commitment; those who oppose her are akin to the establishment that stands in the way of innovation in the arts. The film was censored and wound up lost for decades (similar to the more scandalously iconoclastic L’Âge d’or). Hence, it could only have influenced subsequent filmmakers by word-of-mouth, private screenings, or as a remembered viewing experience.11 Hagiography would naturally take root in the Spanish cinematic canon as a means of national identity formation, relying upon the life stories of its autochthonous saints. Thus, the life of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order, was undertaken in 1929 and again in 1948. The first version, by Nemesio Sobrevila, whose abortive but interesting career included El sexto sentido and a 1937 documentary short on the bombing of Gernika, ran into the budgetary problems typical within the Spanish film industry of the early through mid-twentieth century; like the vast majority of Spanish silent films, it has disappeared. José Díaz Morales directed the remake from the Franco years. It employs the conventional treatment of exalted personages in the historical epic or costume drama customary in the early postwar era. Stilted dialogue and stiff costumes make this a paint-by-numbers rehash of the life of the founder of the Jesuit order. However, it served the purpose of hero worship while reviving an imperialist time; as such it was a near spin-off of the successful Spanish queen movies (Inés de Castro, Reina santa, Locura de amor). As Virginia Higginbotham reflects regarding El capitán de Loyola, “The adulation of historical figures easily combined with religious themes to produce a kind of hybrid genre, the historical-religious extravaganza” (22). Font additionally remarks that the film’s only purpose was to fuse religious commitment with national unity under the conspicuously militaristic title, recruiting the founder of the Society of Jesus for service in the cinematic fazaña category (old-time heroic deed, 89). The saint’s life biopic was revolutionized for Roman Catholic–dominant Page 84 →cinemas in 1950 by the release of Roberto Rossellini’s Francesco, giullare di Dio (1950).12 This film brings a neorealist style with subtlety and nuance (unlike the melodramatic realism found in La Señora de Fátima). The gentle handling of the monastic and pacifist saint matches his meaning within the Catholic canon. A combination of professional actors and “found” amateurs portray the roles of Francis and his followers. A vignette-style structure makes the film fragmentary and there is little character development, similar to the literary style of the Middle Ages. The work exists to expose the viewer in the form of examples to the features and qualities of the personage, also a fitting correspondence to medieval narrative whether displayed visually in triptych form or in literature. The humility of St. Francis results in his unassuming persona, and the director allows a more theatrical monk, Ginepro, to usurp the moments of highest drama in the middle of the movie as he repels an invading horde through passivity. The pacifism of St. Francis is a message for the Cold War era of countries like those of Western Europe that hoped to remain neutral in the face of growing opposition between the United States and the Soviet Union. It counters the more bellicose vision of saintliness in Alexander Nevsky (1938) by Sergei Eisenstein, also a tale of a medieval saint but one whose great deeds highlight martial achievements and bloody sacrifice for the homeland. Eisenstein’s Middle Ages are an energetic time of thought made word and word made action through expressionist and formalist technique. This is accentuated by geometric composition, a sweeping score by Prokofiev, montage editing, extreme characterizations, and a dynamic camera style that placed the spectator at the center of the action (Parkinson 140). The entire film exists as a call to war against Nazi Germany.13 The Spanish biopic of St. Ignatius of Loyola exalts military virtues but in a static sense that weighs monastic values equally, much like the image Franco projected as “mitad monje, mitad soldado” (half-monk, half-soldier, Mitchell 97). The religious side of the Russian saint is downplayed in favor of a militaristic charisma that stimulates solidarity among all Russians to unite them against a common foe, whose religiosity (the Catholicism of the Holy Roman Empire) is portrayed as sinister. Between these twin poles of dynamic Soviet expressionist propaganda and static Italian neorealism one finds the

uniquely Spanish addition to the international canon of saints’ lives, Marcelino, pan y vino (1955). Based on a legend rather than a confirmed Catholic saint, it includes a musical number but no dancing as in the folkloric musicals. The lurid realism applied to rural society in La Señora de Fátima (most likely under the influence of Florián Rey’s 1929 La aldea maldita) is nowhere to be found in the Hungarian emigré Page 85 →director Ladislao Vajda’s bright and cheery costumbrista opening. A rebuilding of the nation after the devastation of the War of Independence fought against Napoleon provides a hint of Nationalist identity formation. Townspeople “somewhere on the Castilian plain” forget their former anticlericalism to help friars reassemble their crumbled monastery. A child actor is the revitalizing agent for this next phase of populist resistance to modernity and progress, when the autarky oligarchs were squaring off against the more progressive technocrats and the Opus Dei. Nostalgia coalesces around the figure of the little songbird in this screenplay based on a novel by a priest who worked as a film censor, Sánchez Silva (Font 175). Still, the focus on childhood illness with death looming just overhead would have hit many a nerve in postwar Spain, in which shortages and lack of nutrition and medical care had created a high infant and child mortality rate.14 The frame narrative is that of a little girl on her deathbed; she and her parents hear Marcelino’s story from a monk who comes to visit. Marcelino was an orphan raised by the local monks and he also died young, in a miraculous embrace with a Christ figure that descended from the cross to reunite him with his mother. Marsha Kinder emphasizes the Oedipal nature of Marcelino’s bonding with Jesus as a way to get back to his lost mother, and thereby frustrate the punishing father who had wanted to adopt him (the scheming blacksmith, who then becomes mayor of the town). The unsettling notes of homoerotic pederasty underlined by Kinder in Marcelino’s relationships with both the friars and the image of Jesus are beyond dispute. Her searing analysis of the masochism of both Catholicism and Spanish Nationalism in giving death the allure of a curiously sexual climax rings true when Marcelino and Jesus become one under the gaze of the “voyeuristic monks” (Blood Cinema 245). Also prominent in the visual vocabulary of Marcelino is religious iconography, which Kinder deftly traces to representations of St. Teresa in ecstasy, now central images for psychoanalytic theory. Despite these concordances with Kinder’s analysis along general lines, I have to diverge on several points. The image of Jesus is not eroticized, or aflame with baroque excesses; that would imply undulating curves, sensuous textures, or chiaroscuro lighting, all of which are absent. Jesus is not naked but half-clothed and he is not a “beautiful young man” in a seduction scene with “tempting food and drink” (Blood Cinema 244). These are the spartan bread and wine that the monks consume daily. The pain-wracked face of Jesus is etched deeply with premature wrinkles, and the close-ups of his hands as he comes to life show rigid body parts encased in crude makeup to emulate those of a wood-carved statue. If the stark visuals Page 86 →of the mystic sequence are related to religious art, they are most reminiscent of the wood carved saints, Virgins, and Christ figures typical of early modern Castile and now housed in the Museum of Polychromatic Sculpture in Valladolid (the colors were returned to these works as a recent restoration; for centuries they were known to Spaniards in a colorless form more similar to the black-and-white cinematography of Marcelino). These forms are redolent of the Castilian virtue of austerity. In addition to the only slightly concealed Oedipal, transvestite (one monk is the designated house-mom) and homoerotic/pedophilic constructs that underlie Marcelino, it is possible to illuminate the way that they differ from previous models. Rossellini’s Francesco also brims with homosexual overtones: thirteen men live together in a tiny monastery with much physical contact, including one who has a penchant for coming home naked. Here the idealized mother is only a vague presence, in the visit of the Poor Claires, during which the joyful and admiring gazes of the monks dramatize their appreciation of the Eternal Feminine that this brief interaction with their sister community of nuns affords them. The nuns meanwhile look downward in modesty and smile beatifically. The feminine name of the monastery alluding to the Virgin, Santa María de los Angeles, definitely becomes linked to its position as a primeval paradise for the monks, who precisely for this reason give it up and tear themselves out of its protective womb in order to go forth and preach in all directions. The monks ascribe gender when they personalize the life-giving elements of nature, such as Brother Sun and Sister Moon. For chastising father figures we have the invader Nicolai, who is subdued by Ginepro’s unflinching trust and surrender to his aggressive impulses: the very last straw is when he pulls back Ginepro’s head to reveal a submissive smile; it could well be

the beginning of a love scene. The same basic building blocks of Oedipal same-sex bonding occur in Marcelino, however the Italian film partakes of greater equality for real women (the nuns share the same origin, lifestyle, and purpose of the Franciscan monks) and less idealization of a lost (M)mother, who is to be found only in heaven. This idealization leads to the allure of death in Marcelino. Rossellini’s monks display kindness toward children, but they do not play at parenting themselves (with the attendant comic feminizing that this brings about in Fray Papilla’s character). Their sacrifice is that each monk gives up the security of a cherished home at the end, not the death of one innocent so that all the monks can stay in their rebuilt home as in Marcelino. The value of real estate is central to Marcelino; possessing the land one has tilled is the ultimate reward for his brethren that Marcelino achieves Page 87 →for them with his miraculous death and canonization. The Spanish movie emphasizes recovery of the land and communal effort in rebuilding after a traumatic loss (it likens in spirit the Peninsular War of Independence from Napoleonic France to the Civil War). The Virgin and motherhood in general are exalted, and the figure of the child is fetishized, in a way indicative of the pronatalist campaign of the time to repopulate Spain and channel Spanish women into useful reproductive lives (with propaganda for motherhood in the line, “Todas las madres son guapas,” all mothers are pretty). Here as in La Señora de Fátima, the gender-based message rings out: women are not equal to men but rather they are “special” (much as Spain was “different”) and they are to embrace being special instead of seeking equality. This is a far cry from the egalitarian messages of Rossellini’s Francesco, though the friars of Marcelino do read a passage from St. Francis that is prominent just before the end of the Italian saint film. It is St. Francis’s definition of the greatest happiness, and the friars are interrupted before reaching the end, which would have told them that giving up what they love in sacrifice is the greatest happiness. Here they give up a person they love rather than the monastery, whereas giving up material possessions and wealth was what St. Francis had in mind, as evidenced by the conclusion of Rossellini’s movie. Hence I would argue that, in addition to the strong Oedipal conflict that elicits bonding among male equals and striving toward an unattainable (in life) female ideal, Marcelino pan y vino foregrounds nation rebuilding in material terms and the channeling of women’s efforts into motherhood. Though somewhat closer in spirit to Francesco, Marcelino bears some resemblance to the opposite pole in male saint narratives, Alexander Nevsky. Patriotic glorification of national identity and the counterpoint of xenophobia draw the Spanish and the Russian film together. Epic-style music, while not on the celestial level of Prokofiev, animates the building montage and the glorification of folk customs such as the feast day itself and market day in the town. The locals are upheld as noble in contrast to the foreign invaders: the French bring destruction in Marcelino and the Germans even reach the sinister low of wrenching babies from their mothers’ arms and throwing them onto bonfires in Nevsky. Whereas Marcelino targets a foreign foe to the left of the political spectrum, for Nevsky’s Russia the foe is to the far right. The adversary comes from the opposite direction on the compass in each case as well. The Soviet biopic has a clear gender message for female viewers, and it is a more egalitarian one for women than either Francesco or Marcelino. In the Russian milieu, women who fight (and by extension, toil) Page 88 →alongside men are no less feminine or attractive, and are in fact the most coveted wives. The deployment of women in the workforce met with fewer obstacles in the Soviet workers’ state. Part of Marcelino’s popularity over the years and internationally owes to these resonances with psychoanalysis, nationalism, and Catholicism. Another important element was the appeal of the young star Pablito Calvo. He was hired after a massive search similar to the one conducted for the role of Scarlett O’Hara that yielded Vivien Leigh. He stole every scene in which he appeared, but he would go on to make only a few more films, mainly with the same director. His appearance did pave the way for a subgenre in musical comedy and folkloric musicals, the cine con niño or child-star movie. Marcelino had a theme song of its own, but Calvo did not sing it. Later entries in the subgenre would star young vocalists Joselito (José Jiménez Fernández) and Marisol (Josefa Flores González).15 The passion for cine con niño signals the centrality of the child in Franco-era culture with its pronatalist overtones and traditional family values. The rebuilding of the nation would be achieved corporally by raising adorable children. This would be morally superior to the investment of capital and technology, resources that were harder to procure before the “economic miracle” of the sixties. The appearance of a child in the religious movie also makes room for transgression, which, as I have attempted to show in this chapter, is a constant and necessary accompaniment to cinematic depictions of the forces of good.

The saintly and the divine seem to fall flat without a dose of evil, and this evil must be portrayed as human and readily recognizable. Like Mary of Magdala (misidentified with the sinful woman of Luke), Judas, Herod, Salomé, and Caiaphas, who occupy more than their share of screen time in the traditional epics, a character with some taint of sinfulness is more likely to capture spectators’ attention. Most adult saints are cast as too perfect to be interesting in this manner, but since little Marcelino (who cannot be proven to have existed, anyway) never reaches the age of reason, he cannot be blamed for his misdeeds. This results in the livelier, almost carnivalesque sequences of the film: the little boy turning market day into pandemonium through petty thievery, his pilfering of staples from the monks’ pantry, and use of a slingshot against an unwanted guest (the mayor). The entertainment value of transgression being at odds with the striving for perfection in most movies about the Holy Family or the saints, it makes sense that the team of Gil and Escrivá would turn to a psychological study of Judas before long, as they did in the 1954 El beso de Judas. This unusual (for Spanish cinema) biblical-era period piece still steers clear of the “epic sweep” that tended to characterize the large-scale life–of-Christ spectaclesPage 89 → from The King of Kings onward. It concentrates instead on “what made Judas tick”: the combination of commitment to a cause and personal ambition that could lead a follower of the holiest human being to hand him over to hostile authorities.16 Judas is presented as an activist for Jewish autonomy in the Holy Land, but one who is willing to sacrifice other Jews if it might further the cause. He is first attracted to Jesus by hearsay and then by witnessing some of his miracles; these impress him with Jesus’s potential for strengthening his political struggle. His faith is always wavering, but he is won over by tangible proof such as sampling the wine at the Wedding at Canaan. Above all he wants to be called by Jesus (his personal ambition) and thereafter he wants Jesus to proclaim his Kingdom on Earth, which would increase Judas’s political power by association. From the melodramatic character study of Judas several underlying messages for citizens of an authoritarian regime become clear. The first is the yearning for power on earth rather than heavenly reward, a standard of the Gospels that was often emphasized in the Francoist leaning on the resignation under hardship preached by Catholicism of the mid-twentieth century (as a hedge against Communism, in many cases). The mistaken commitment to an earthly cause, however noble the cause may be, is also emphasized in Judas’s obsession with his political faction. If Judas is the face of activism in the New Testament setting, then by extension the opposition to Franco, both internal dissidents, Maquis, exiled critics, and so on, are on the same footing as the greatest traitor of all time. Political activism is united with personal ambition and all the evils that the latter entails. On the other hand, there is a sympathetic portrayal of a Roman centurion by Francisco Rabal. Sparked by true inner faith, the centurion becomes a loyal defender of Jesus, and must be restrained when the latter is condemned and the execution process begins. The centurion represents empire, in a way that can be associated with eternal Spain, and with the status quo and dominant discourse. He opposes the factionalism of Judas and the Jewish-backed Sanhedrin, which is roundly blamed for Jesus’s death in this movie. This was in keeping with Francoist rhetoric that scapegoated modern Jews alongside Freemasons and Communists for most of Spain’s difficulties in the international sphere (Preston Franco 323). Most Hollywood epics spread the blame across the Pharisees and the Roman Empire, casting the latter as a totalitarian power that needed to repress Jesus’s extreme individuality (his divinity). Francoist censors in reaction complained that Hollywood biblical epics were Jewish propaganda (Gil 23). Both individualism and activism for a cause that can be related to democratic leanings (self-determination for the Hebrew population) place JudasPage 90 → at risk for turning into a traitor to the spiritual common good. The political undertones, like those of La Señora de Fátima, fall squarely against exercising the kind of human rights that were absent in Francoist Spain. Those who yearn for personal liberties are cautioned: Judas’s intention was to make a hero of Jesus, not kill him. In addition to the virulent political message (akin to the punishment of Marcelino’s nonconformity), the movie spawns a subtext of fetishism and homoerotism that can be easily deduced from the title. The opening credits run over an illustration of Jesus and Judas in profile during the eponymous kiss. As they face each other in profile, the kiss looks more like sustained “necking” than the peck on the cheek that transmits the Kiss of Death. In actuality, this is the only clear likeness of Jesus the viewer obtains from the movie. In all other appearances, Jesus appears from behind or backlit from the front or side in such a way that his facial features cannot be discerned. Jesus’s feminine aspect in this movie is enhanced by his long, wavy hair. He exhibits

passivity against Judas’s man-of-action demeanor. Judas and Jesus almost fall into a doomed romantic couple dynamic from the Last Supper through to the kiss of betrayal. The generous coverage of the body dictated by the norms of portraying the Holy Land at the time of Jesus leave few body parts exposed. However, recurrent closeups of feet develop into a current of foot fetishism throughout. The first such focus on feet is when Jesus covers up Judas’s feet in the garden where the apostles have fallen asleep during Christ’s impassioned prayer. Judas’s feet are seen when he drops the silver coins to the ground in despair, and thieves rush to take his ill-gotten gains. The camera curiously focuses on the feet of one of the thieves as Jesus’s gaze miraculously transforms him into an honest man and causes him to return the silver pieces, and finally, only the feet of Judas are visible after he has hanged himself with remorse from a tree. One expects foot fetishism from a film that openly dwells on perversion, such as that examined by Tom Conley in Viridiana (55). However, to see it in an earnestly religious picture opens up a whole dimension of repressed homoerotic relationships. Guilt and vulnerability imbue the sustained foot focus in this movie with intense man-to-man interactions from which women are excluded. Women appear in the most ancillary roles, as when Veronica steps out to wipe Jesus’s face. The truly intense conflicts and attractions are among men. The centurion who is loyal to Jesus is chained to a wall during the Calvary and crucifixion scenes. From there he proclaims Jesus’s divinity while he strains against the bondage. Rabal’s muscular physique is shown off to best advantage for this sequence; a macho male who loves Jesus in the right way, not as an effeminately robed Jesus-kisser. The centurion also stands in contrast to the Page 91 →effete, lazy, and degenerate Roman Pontius Pilate. Hence the more patrician stratum of Rome, its cultural elite, is portrayed as unmanly; it is the virile soldier who cultivates virtue. The viewer is presumed to identify with the Rabal character. He upholds the overall structure of empire against the elitist degeneracy represented by Pilate and the grassroots political activism of Judas. The postwar period was notable for the birth of the film noir genre as well as for the appearance of several “instant classics” that define or transcend the religious genre. We have seen the influence of such films in Spain: The Song of Bernadette engendered the Spanish response La Señora de Fátima; Francesco, giullare di Dio and Alexander Nevsky find their response in Marcelino pan y vino; Keys of the Kingdom led to the Spanish missionary epics La mies es mucha and Balarrasa. An unusual combination of French existentialism and spirituality found expression in Robert Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne (1950). Bresson’s understated, simple but layered mise-enscène made him a New Wave director avant la lettre. His style may have floundered in attempting to capture the mythical figure of Joan of Arc, but it was marvelously suited to Georges Bernanos’s novel of a vulnerable individual facing antagonistic circumstances and personal failings on his own. In this way, it seems to project into the life of a Catholic cleric sent into the provinces the problematic found in the film noir, along with some of the same tenebrous lighting effects. The film quietly follows a country priest as he struggles with conflicts both external (rejection, opposition, and antagonism from the sullen townspeople who constitute his parish in a northern French town) and internal (alcoholism and an ailment that causes him to limit his diet to bread soaked in wine, and which turns out to be stomach cancer). Naturalism is added to the mixture, as the priest is diagnosed by a doctor and an older provincial priest as having been soaked in alcohol before birth, and having inherited a reliance on alcohol going back many generations in his modest family tree. The anonymous, self-effacing priest’s life (he is known only as the “priest of Ambricourt”) traces the Stations of the Cross as he goes from persecution to a kiss of betrayal (his classmate from the seminary, now a chemist living in sin) to his own Calvary. Rather than a glorious resurrection, a somber cross occupies the screen for the final moments as a voice-over relates the priest’s fate, alleviated only by his final ironic words, “All is grace.” Another collaboration of Gil and Escrivá responded two years later to the immense critical impact of Journal d’un curé de campagne. The Spanish film answers the downward spiral of the French original with a thoroughly positive outcome that rewards the priest’s perseverance and self-denial. He Page 92 →may be idealistic and bookish but he can also marshal resources of dynamism and charisma when necessary. With persistence and his mother’s support (in contrast to the extreme isolation of his French precursor), he is able to overcome gradually the opposition he finds in the town to which he was sent. His triumph is the victory of Spanish Catholicism over the leftist ideologies of the Republican Popular Front government that had been displaced by the Nationalist uprising and war. Gil even cast Claude Laydu, the Belgian actor who had played the priest of Ambricourt in a quiet, minimalist style, as the protagonist Father Andrés. To the credit of the actor’s versatility, he is barely

recognizable as the same person in the French and Spanish movies. La guerra de Dios (1952) frontally attacks the discourse of anarcho-syndicalism (leftist Spanish unionism). In the fictional mining town of Aldemoz, the miners’ union has squared off against the mine-owners and others of the bourgeoisie, and they see any clergyman as in league with their enemies. The dominant class of oligarchs, meanwhile, expects the priest to uphold their side in exchange for their support as in the past. The synchronization of the filming of this movie with the first outbreaks under Franco of workers’ strikes in Asturias, Euskadi, and Navarra was by no means coincidental (Font 141). The soundtrack is distinguished by the work of Joaquín Rodrigo, composer ofConcierto de Aranjuez, who nonetheless produced a bombastic and thunderous background for this rural melodrama. Rodrigo was not destined to work much for the cinema; in addition to this film he composed soundtracks for one other feature and three short subjects. His Concierto de Aranjuez is often quoted in cinematic and other contexts, however. Completed in 1939, Rodrigo’s masterpiece was one of the few cultural bright spots of the postwar aftermath. It was important for the Aspa Studios to cite the Rodrigo name as a contradiction to the charge of Franco’s forces laying waste to Spanish culture. The triumphalist message of Spanish Catholicism conquering all, without bloodshed or forcible redistribution of wealth, was seemingly bolstered by his participation. The Cain/Abel devastation of the Spanish people at the hands of Franco’s forces could be swept away from consciousness by Rodrigo’s soaring notes. The dismal score that resulted only contributed to the melodramatic tone of this response to the French “instant classic” that lacks all subtlety, despite employing the same actor. The concluding organ arpeggio as the priest runs eagerly back to his beloved village after believing that he had been recalled is the one bright spot. Despite the allusion to war in the title, the film’s references to the Civil War are limited to the first few minutes, which display in writing: “Al temple heroico de nuestras juventudes que lucharon por hacer posible la hermandadPage 93 → social de los hombres españoles, va dedicada esta película” (dedicated to the heroism of our youth who fought to make the social brotherhood of Spanish men possible). The second epigraph quotes Matthew: “Yo no he venido a traer paz, sino espada” (I did not come to bring peace, but a sword, Matt. 10:34). This prologue appears patched on as an afterthought to ingratiate the film with strident Franco supporters, especially veterans of the Nationalist side. For the overall message of the film is the peaceful winning over of a provincial town by a patient parish priest through compassion and quiet bravery; the pacifist discourse of the Gospels is incarnated by Father Andrés. The filmmakers had to hedge their bid for the National Interest appellation by expressing the warrior spirit of “Christian soldiers” in the Bible, appropriated later by Spanish Nationalists to justify their slaughter of fellow Spaniards in the three-year Spanish Civil War (in the dedication, oddly phrased as a struggle to support “social brotherhood”). The actual war in this movie, which casts Rabal as an embittered miner and antagonist to the priest at the outset, is one of words and emotions. The young priest, accompanied by his ambitious mother (whose ambition is more benign than the conniving mother of Mesías inLa Regenta), arrives in Aldemoz to find the miners in poverty and adhering to their anarcho-syndicalist ideology out of alienation and resentment. Father Andrés is prepared for ideological debate, having countered the claims of Marxism from the pulpit and armed himself with the complete works of St. Thomas Aquinas. Getting the townspeople on his side involves physical toil and risk-taking as well as brainpower; he sends the books back when the bill is due and he has spent his salary on soccer uniforms for the local boys. As becomes clear in later films such as La mala educación (showing the hazardous side), the priest’s manner of ingratiating himself with the community is through their children, leading to unsupervised contact and the equivalent of pedophilic grooming, in an era that lacked consciousness of the danger posed by clergymen (or any other strangers) having direct access to children in their guardians’ absence. And as some would argue, the authoritarian sexual system of Spanish Catholicism actively promoted a cycle of extreme repression alternating with abuse of the young that exploded at times into reactions of anticlerical violence (Mitchell 15). In contrast to the pessimistic portrayal of the provincial priesthood in Bresson’s film, La guerra de Dios positions the priest as an authentic bridge between the haves and the have-nots. Andrés’s peaceful mediation between the town elders (mine-owners who are the main employers in the town) and the proletarian workers precludes the necessary step of revolution in the Marxian liberation metanarrative. In the Christian metanarrative,Page 94 → however, a sacrifice in the appeasement between disputing factions is usually required. While Andrés himself escapes this fate, the miner he had honored with the role of steward of the town’s patronage festival (against the

wishes of the well-to-do women’s auxiliary society), is trapped in a mine collapse and dies. Over his sacrificed body, the powerful and the disenfranchised as well as their children become friends. La guerra de Dios is unusual among Francoist religious movies for its direct engagement with the social philosophy of the Left, but the traditional resignation of Christianity is privileged, with its attendant subjugation of the poor to the wealthy in this world. The wealthy are urged to be generous with the poor, but it is their choice whether to practice charity. Predictably, support for the social status quo instead of the revolutionary potential of Christian discourse reigns supreme. The notion of a peaceful “war” was threatening enough to the dominant discourse, however, to necessitate the inclusion of a dedication that glorifies the Civil War and resorts to a Gospel quotation supporting bloodshed that has been taken out of context. In 1955 the Gil-Escrivá team at Aspa once again combated Marxist social thought and political organization with a melodrama of distinct homoerotic bonding. El canto del gallo takes place in the European Soviet bloc. Priests and believers are systematically hunted down in antireligious cleansing. The setting is linguistically identifiable as Hungary, though any land under Communist rule is meant to be a possible location for this dystopia. This time Rabal plays the priest, who is in inner turmoil because he has hidden his clerical identity in order to escape persecution. He informs on his associates, denies the sacrament of confession and last rites to a dying man, and unwittingly gives away his fellow priest, in a reversal of McCarthyism and of Nationalist political cleansing that occurred in the aftermath of their takeover. While it is true that leftist groups targeted the clergy for persecution during the Republic and the Civil War, to associate their sporadic violence with the systematic elimination of religion on a par with the Holocaust is an unjust distortion of where the power really resided. It is also an exaggeration of religious persecution occurring behind the Iron Curtain in the postwar years, when Christianity coexisted with Soviet rule with far less hostility than during the Revolution. The film cleverly casts the SpanishCatholic dominant discourse as the underdog to instill fear and sympathy. Rabal’s Father Müller is paired with a stereotypical fallen woman, whom he counsels to go back to her abusive husband. After returning to his hometown, where his mother has organized a cult surrounding the figure of the son she believed had died as a martyr, he confesses to his cowardice. As penance, the bishop sends him back to his old parish, Page 95 →where he opens a refuge for war and antireligious persecution victims. The tables have turned and the friend who had helped him remain anonymous during the previous regime is now a hunted fugitive. Müller and Ganz are meant to be shown as flip sides of the same coin, but wind up like star-crossed lovers who meet each other at every turn, eventually resulting in a chase scene that mimics the climax of The Third Man. In El canto del gallo, the priest struggles to save his friend from certain death in a police dragnet, only to be shot by him, provoking a long, garish death scene of pseudo-intimacy in which each one expires hand in hand and gazing at the other, their breasts heaving with sighs. The Gil-Escrivá Aspa films constitute a substantial corpus of religious genre pictures. Several overarching tendencies emerge from the films studied here. First of all is the tried-and-true technique of adapting an already successful religious film from another national cinema. Hence, a profit motive is implied in the willingness to capitalize on proven hits, rewriting them in order not to incur royalties. For El beso de Judas, the epic life-of-Jesus story is focalized on a lower budget from the standpoint of a minor but crucial character. Adding in the points toward importation of surefire foreign blockbusters for every special appellation of “Interés Nacional,” the lucrative rather than the doctrinal motive shows through. The second feature that stands out is the overwhelmingly political rather than religious messages of these films, preaching resignation toward the status quo, warning of the dangers of both collectivist activism and individualism, and supporting the sacrifice of women and the working classes as necessary for social harmony. A third feature that manifests itself is sexual repression toward the body, and especially concerning homoerotic contact, that marginalizes the body to glimpses of the foot, which in psychoanalysis is said to stand in for the missing phallus. In the non-Aspa film studied here, Marcelino pan y vino, an association between magic and the hands and feet in an enclosure that excludes all women leads to a highly charged bond between a boy and an adult figure of divinity. In the Aspa film El beso de Judas, an adult male triangle coalesces between a dimly perceived but feminine-looking Christ figure, a manipulative male friend whose kisses lead to betrayal and mutual destruction, and a virtuous “he-man” who must be tied up to prevent him from erupting onto the scene and disrupting the metanarrative of redemption through death that must be allowed to play out. The homoerotics of religion just below the surface of the religious genre threaten to bubble to the

surface in the sewer scene of El canto del gallo, with a death scene similar to that of Romeo and Juliet played by a previously turncoat priest and his close friend turned political adversary. Page 96 → The preference for these murky allegorical fictional plots or subplots means that Aspa and other Spanish studios engaged less with the standard hagiography, a staple of most national cinemas in terms of the religious genre. Young people nonetheless studied the lives of the saints through the Año Cristiano and other publications. By 1961 (after Molokai in 1960 had commemorated the yet to be canonized Father Damian, “apostle of the lepers”) it would seem that conventional saints’ lives would be all but exhausted as a source for popular film, but one subject that could not be overlooked had been passed over. Juan de Orduña, who had directed Aurora Bautista in the early postwar historical epics Locura de amor and Agustina de Aragón, cast her as St. Teresa of Ávila in Teresa de Jesús. Sally Faulkner aptly characterizes Bautista’s acting style as “one of pure histrionic excess” (Cinema of Contradiction 110). The Falangist writer and Royal Academy chair José María Pemán, who had collaborated on the earlier El capitán de Loyola, received top billing for the screenplay. Teresa surpasses the stilted Ignatius of Loyola biopic, but it seems a relic of an already bygone age that has somehow survived largely intact with a faint odor of decomposition. Ecclesiastical censors had rejected earlier scripts for the film, delaying production years after the vogue of the religious genre had ended. Teresa’s fasting and tormentos are graphically displayed. The latter included self-flagellation, and this may have been an affirmation of the corporal self-punishment practiced by about one-third of members of the Opus Dei, a mainly laical secret society that had gained momentum during the previous decade and placed many of its members in the government in the sixties. Although the movie highlights the supernatural mysticism of Teresa’s early years in the first third or so, it nonetheless drains the eroticism from her transfixion. Instead of the handsome angel she described in her autobiography, whose flaming arrow penetrated her body and sent her into throes of ecstasy, a single light beam shines down at an angle from an immense crucifix suspended above the saint. As it passes through the mystic, she collapses. The diagonal line that thus unites Teresa and the elevated Christ in a long shot draws attention to the hierarchical position of God on high and female acolyte below. Her submission to an absolute authority is the visual essence of the sequence, with the pleasure of the encounter, as well as the intervening angel, erased. Later, in a return to the imperial glory beloved of Falangist rhetoric, Teresa embraces her fallen conquistador brother’s sword and declares that while he conquered with the sword, she will conquer with the cross. Triumphant military-style marches accompany several of Teresa’s victories in reforming the Carmelite Order, establishing new convents, and keeping Page 97 →the materialism of the aristocracy from corrupting her religious communities. A peculiar fascination with feet similar to that of the Gil/Escrivá movies arises here from a circular motif; Teresa embraces Jesus’s feet joyfully when she finally achieves the gift of tears in prayer, and her Sancho Panza–like muleteer/chauffeur embraces her bare feet while sobbing moments after her death. The muleteer, in addition to harking back to Sancho Panza, is a fictional add-on who occupies a position similar to Blasillo el Bobo in Unamuno’s San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Throughout Teresa de Jesús, nobles and clerics stare at Teresa’s sandal-clad feet in wonder or disgust. For the founder of the Discalced or barefoot orders, foot fetishism is inevitable in a medium that demands a physical focus of the gaze. The exposure of her feet symbolizes the austerity she sought to reinstitute in the life of the clergy, but in combination with the foot-fondling that dots the movie, it starts to arouse suspicion. In a movie that represses the uncomfortably orgasmic ecstasy of its subject from view (despite the way visual artists had emphasized the erotic in her mysticism during the baroque period and beyond), the foot is a safe focus for a mystic’s life story that intertwines the erotic and the divine. What little room there was in Spanish cinema of the fifties for religious dissidence can be found in the comedies of Luis García Berlanga. Marsh has treated the comedy of the Franco period as a “cheerful relative of melodrama” (191). The straight religious genre lies much closer to melodrama than to comedy, though as we have seen several entries in the category employ comic touches for audience entertainment. Berlanga united religion and comedy in a clearly satirical and irreverent modality. He did so most noticeably in two films: Plácido (1961) makes light of ineffectual religious charity campaigns when a motto of “Sienta a un pobre a tu mesa” (Invite a pauper home for dinner) during the Christmas holidays does nothing but intensify the suffering of the poor while the privileged

seek only to exercise their social superiority and ease their consciences. As we have seen, Buñuel lampooned the concept of Christian charity more radically, with more specifically religious iconography, in Viridiana.17 Marsh calls attention to Berlanga’s eye for small details and rapid-fire accumulation of jokes and gags that often overlap each other (143). It is easy to miss the scene, for example, in which a man defecates on the edge of a Belén or “living Nativity” tableau. This is one way Berlanga evades the censors with sheer satirical momentum. While I cannot agree with Marsh that Berlanga’s attacks are too choral and multifaceted to be satirical (for lack, he claims, of a single object of attack, 100), I do concur with his finding of a conflation of religion, medicine, law, and the military as contiguous and Page 98 →hybrid fields that oppress the individual and are derided in Berlanga’s comedies (130). Whether it is the difficulty of translation of Berlanga’s humor into other languages (his self-defined “barroquismo valenciano,” Higginbotham 43), the cultural specificity of his satires, or a combination of both (plus the unevenness in production values forced on him by low budgets), his films of the Franco era are less known internationally than others, despite being of the same stature and quality. To date much scholarship has focused on Bienvenido, Míster Marshall (1953), with some attention devoted to Plácido (Marsh, Higginbotham) and to Calabuch (Higginbotham). Most scholars and critics understandably gravitate toward El verdugo (1963) as his alltime masterpiece. For its unique reworking of the religious genre, this study will analyze his more obscure and heavily censored Los jueves, milagro (1957). Los jueves, milagro is similar to Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall in its presentation of an isolated, impoverished provincial town, with social types that would be recognizable to the audience. The train passes through the town (unlike Villar del Río in the earlier film), but unfortunately keeps going. Nobody stops anymore for the curative qualities of Fontecilla’s hot springs or mineral water; modern medicine has turned its once thriving tourism industry into a wasteland. As in the earlier comedy, a visit from an outsider/foreigner is viewed as the quick-fix solution. Instead of a diplomatic emissary from a rising superpower nation, a divine visitation will be made to order by the town elders. Reasoning that in Lourdes, “el agua milagrosa acabó con los ateos” (the miraculous water did away with atheists), the elders favor a plan to attract pilgrims to their springs with a fake apparition, after which the curative powers of their local water will suffice to keep the influx of money streaming in. The jokes about Lourdes do not extend to Fátima, which was probably too close for comfort or too sensitive an issue to be derided. According to Francisco Perales, all scenes referring to Lourdes and Fátima had to be cut for the censor’s approval (92), but evidently a few ironic, though not openly skeptical, references to the French holy site escaped censorship. The conspiracy meets in the church behind the parish priest’s back to choose a saint. They decide against the archangel Michael because of the fear his flaming sword might provoke (plus the difficulty of achieving this special effect). They turn down St. Isidro because he might seem “uno cualquiera del pueblo” (just another guy from the town), and so on until they come to the more obscure St. Dimas, forgotten in a corner of the sanctuary. His advantage is the resemblance he bears to Don José, an elder played by José Isbert. Appropriately enough, he is the Page 99 →Good Thief who was crucified next to Christ; little else is known about him. The plan is met with some skepticism by the conspirators, some of whom opine that miracles belong in the movies only, as well as with the anxiety and reluctance of the man who is to play the saint in their work of illusion. In a hilarious subversion of the conventions of the sacred apparition subtype, the elders employ cheap fireworks and lighting effects, plus a musical soundtrack that unfortunately strays from the sacred to Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro at an inopportune moment. The saint is sadly lacking in both presence and speaking ability, and a prompter must help him spit his lines out. However, since they have chosen the most credulous fool in town as their first witness, an unfortunate living in a state of abject poverty who spends most nights intoxicated, their initial success is certain. Mauro rings the church bell and bellows about the apparition and his promised return, to the receptive ears of the townspeople and the somewhat more skeptical priest, played by José Luis López Vázquez. The priest grudgingly agrees to at least move the icon of St. Dimas from its shadowy corner toward the center of the church, but not too close to St. Nicholas. Atheists often compare religious devotion to believing in Santa Claus or a childhood imaginary friend, making this proximity a sensitive issue. Overnight the town crier begins an advertising campaign, and new labels tout the local bottled water as “agua milagrosa,” accompanied by a higher price. As a pilgrimage to the site of the apparition gets under way, with a carnival atmosphere and pasodobles

played by a band, Don José has a panic attack and the saint is a no-show at his next scheduled appearance. What follows is an astonishing twist upon the saintly or Marian apparition movie, for out of nowhere a truly “miraculous” visitor erupts on the scene, invading the town and disrupting the planned chain of events crafted by the elders. The stranger is well dressed in absolutely contemporary clothes and bears an affable and friendly manner. He is a trickster like they are, and is able to outdo them at their own game, because his magic includes feats that cannot be explained. This second half of the movie, so radical in its neorealist representation of a saintly apparition (and fitting for a saint who had spent most of his life as a petty thief and rogue, only to confess and be absolved at the last moment), was dictated by the religious-based censorship that would not allow the plot to develop further in the director’s original intended course of simply amplifying the greed and exploitative behavior of the town elders (Perales 91). This visitor is not welcomed but treated with scorn and assumed to be an escaped convict (a veiled reference to the existence of the Maquis and other political fugitives). He blackmails his way into luxurious accommodation at the expense of the Page 100 →bumbling con men. American actor Richard Basehart plays the stranger (his voice dubbed by a Spanish actor) with a Yankee nonchalance that borders on arrogance. Thus the film defines “saintliness” in the postwar world as picaresque desenvoltura, craftiness, and a complete self-confidence that certain citizens of the United States had come to emblematize. It should not be forgotten that Franco had courted U.S. economic support since 1951 and had subordinated Spain to American defense priorities in 1953, allowing four major airbases, a naval base, and countless smaller facilities in ports in exchange for $226 million in military, technological, and infrastructural aid (Preston Franco 621–23). Hence, the choice of an American actor pokes fun at Franco’s willingness to become a pawn in the Cold War for cash, in close association with a nation previously denigrated as godless and run by Freemasons. The saint’s faith in himself is unshakable and appears to “sell” his holiness to others; he is close to a postmodern simulacrum of a saint with no moorings in scripture or other Catholic theology. As in Baudrillard’s formulation of the simulacrum, the original has disappeared, leaving only a hollow copy devoid of content; a sign that dissimulates that there is nothing (6). What is missing is any direct connection or even an association with God, whether the Holy Trinity or any one of its Persons. Hence, this redefinition of the sacred (forced upon Berlanga by Catholic authorities) avoids the Godhead as too authoritarian, contaminated by the rhetoric of the dictatorship, too antiquated to have an impact on modern Spaniards, and perhaps too likely a target for censorship if treated with heterodoxy. The result is the postmodern situation of a simulacrum inhabiting a holy narrative, with the projection of an image sufficing to convince onlookers of the authenticity of the spectacle. The magic worked by St. Dimas is purported to come from within the believer, just as his unflappable demeanor denotes complete self-possession (another wry hint that modernization and economic salvation comes from the United States with its “can-do” attitude). Among the true miracles performed by the visitor, who calls himself “Martino” for both his first and last names, are the transformation of the miserly Don José into a philanthropist, the healing of the hypochondriac Doña Paquita, and the conversion of the schoolteacher, a confirmed atheist. Circumventing the capitalist zeal of the con men, Martino sends the faithful for free miracle water to the public spigot at the train station where he made his original appearance. He offers the conspirators lavish payment in cash for the profits they would have obtained from their miracle of St. Dimas, but at this point they cannot bear to keep on deluding the people who continue to gather in the town square from all corners of the Iberian Peninsula.Page 101 → The spiritual benefit is what interests Martino; he vanishes as mysteriously as he had appeared. In a note he leaves behind he explains that when the tricksters tried to turn faith into commerce, the faith of the people awakened him, and that the photo he has enclosed, not the statue in their church, portrays the real St. Dimas. A snapshot of a roguishly smiling Martino slides out of the envelope, and the film comes to an abrupt end. A secular humanist conclusion, that the divine resides within each person, and that belief allows the individual to work miracles, coexists with more traditional views on Catholicism in the movie, such as the primary authenticity of saints and the scruples of the church in testing the veracity of miracles. According to Perales, this latter tendency led to the work being rejected by the opposition as reactionary, winning a prize in a Catholic film festival, and being all but disowned by its director (91–92). Yet the result is not a traditional Catholic genre picture, as Perales has asserted (104). Instead, the film documents a transition from a dominant discourse of religion based on the printed word and the static image to

one that is based on postmodern simulacra and projections of the divine. Instead of the “content” of dogma, this postmodern spirituality simulates an image and values the hyperreal over the real. An attitude of easy confidence is all that is required to win over the consumer of faith. In 1964 Spain discontinued the National Interest certificate, opting instead for a “Special Interest” appellation to subsidize works of artistic merit rather than those espousing traditionalist values. The decline in numbers of religious pictures was precipitous. As Faulkner observes, Spanish cinema bifurcated in the sixties into two pathways: the older cinema with broad popular appeal and tried-and-true themes and approaches, and a newer, auteurist art-house cinema to improve its international image of apertura or liberalization (Cinema of Contradiction 3). Nonetheless, she also makes clear that there were many crossover influences between the two modalities. In the religious genre, this principle is well illustrated by two of the final blockbusters from just before the 1964 downfall of the genre, Fray Escoba and Cristo negro, both directed by Ramón Torrado and starring René Muñoz as a protagonist of color. While Fray Escoba celebrates the contribution of a Latin American saint of mixed racial background, Cristo Negro is more somber in its prediction of doom for a conciliatory African (Muñoz) who bases his protection of white colonists on Christian principles of love and charity. Racial polarization and interracial relationships both emerge as evils that imperil a religious and moral way of life for colonized peoples. By the end of the sixties, even a mainstream movie (more old Spanish cinema than new) like the Sara Montiel vehicle Esa mujer (1969) casts doubt on the value Page 102 →of missionary work and the basic altruism of the clergy by having the protagonist defiled by locals and then scorned by the nuns of her own order.

NEW GENRES AND NEW WAVE DIRECTORS OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES The religious genre film became increasingly problematic in Francoist Spain, in part because of the shaky support it received from the state-run production and distributing company Cifesa. In addition, post–Vatican II Catholicism was less consistently traditionalist and soon harbored dissident clergy. Popes John XXIII and Paul VI were committed to liberal reform and ecumenism, leaving Spanish National Catholicism adrift (Payne 194–97). With identification with Catholic causes turned problematic, and more globalized market forces prevailing after the initial period of autarky, the religious genre was less viable for the regime. The missionary and “Crusade” narratives that were seen as dominating genre filmmaking along with historical-imperial and folkloric-musical efforts, soon gave way to imitations of more popular genres that originated abroad. These included spaghetti westerns, gothic horror, up-tempo musicals, and erotic farces (Beck and Rodríguez Ortega 6). Gil, Escrivá, and others who worked within the religious genre in the forties and fifties would also transition into the more secular genres by the seventies.18 Escrivá would subvert his religious screenplay-writing background for profit in films that lampooned or made light of Catholic doctrines and the clergy. His Sor Ye-Yé (1968), for example, continues his habit of adapting a hit foreign movie from Hollywood for Spanish tastes: The Singing Nun (1966) is given a slightly more rocking beat and turned into a cheerful Cinderella story. Escrivá used a synonym (Antonio Vies) for the more irreverent and risqué Alfredo Landa vehicle Un curita cañón (1974). Finally he transitioned into softcore pornography and television material of purely entertainment value. Gil in the seventies turned to the popular staple of social satire combined with erotic farce, often with scandalous elements, making his adherence to the religious genre, like that of Escrivá, seem superficial in retrospect. He put the new freedom in subject matter at the service of burlesquing the new social freedoms, making a mockery of the liberalism and activism that emerged in the Catholic priesthood in the sixties, and later skewering the political figures of the democratic transition. Bereft of a tradition of life-of-Jesus movies of its own, Spain nonetheless participated centrally in the revisionist life-of-Jesus film of the sixties. VaticanPage 103 → II instigated a new look at the very roots of Christianity from a Catholic perspective; this was accompanied in the cinema by motion pictures that placed Jesus on a more human footing, showing his life under the effect of political machinations of his time. Somewhat revisionist along these lines and very important in shaping modern and postmodern notions of Jesus is the remake of King of Kings (1961) by Nicholas Ray. Shot in Spain with Spanish actors cast in some of the supporting roles and as extras (Carmen Sevilla played Mary Magdalene), the production firmly entrenched the Castilian meseta as the Holy Land in the minds of moviegoers the world over. It perpetuated the myth of a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jesus as portrayed by Jeffrey Hunter. The actor’s youth and humanity shows through more than the divinity emphasized in earlier life-of-Jesus films, but he still deports himself with solemn dignity in every scene (this decorum is zestfully

discarded by Buñuel in La Voie lactée). American independent producer Samuel Bronston had set up shop in Spain in 1959, a crucial year because of the currency stabilization that took place. He proceeded to shoot the epic John Paul Jones in Madrid and the surrounding areas of Castile; his studio’s remake of The King of Kings would fund his subsequent epic on a more specifically Spanish theme, El Cid with Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren. American studios had begun using Spain for location shoots several years earlier, but Bronston was unique in not being attached to a Hollywood studio (although MGM would pick up King of Kings after it was made) and for consolidating the filmmaking process within Spain (Besas 55). Maverick director Nicholas Ray teamed with screenwriters Philip Yordan (who often fronted for blacklisted writers based in Europe) and Ray Bradbury (for the voice-over spoken by Orson Welles). Like the Gil-Escrivá El beso de Judas, King of Kings emphasizes the political context of Jewish autonomist activism that brings about Jesus’s betrayal. However, the picture that emerges is more pro-Jewish, representing the oppression of the Roman Empire as at fault throughout the portrayal of Christ’s persecution and death. The Jewish political activists are not vilified as in the Spanish messianic movie. The narration states directly that Rome had appointed a non-Jewish overlord from a people hostile to the Jews, and portrays both Herod the First and the Second as evil, weak, and paranoid. Hence, both Jesus and the Jewish activists are seen as victims of Roman authority. The newfound social and political consciousness of the sixties that informs King of Kings and that would meet with a degree of Roman Catholic sanction in Vatican II permeates more radically Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Il vangelo secondo Matteo (1964). Often termed the Marxist Christ, what stands out Page 104 →most in this movie is the existentialist tone. Christ traverses vast and desolate expanses with his huddled group to the parched hillsides, some encrusted with cave-like dwellings, that form the backdrop for many of his speeches. This is the most literal of all Christian messianic movies; bereft of narration, every line of dialogue is straight from the Gospel of Matthew.19 The director, who was not a conventional believer but chose to dedicate the film to the recently deceased Pope John XXIII, selected Matthew because it directly chronicles Christ’s word and deed without editorial comment, and also because it is the only Gospel that contains the enigmatic proclamation, “I bring not peace but a sword,” which Franco supporters used to justify the bloodshed of the Spanish Civil War initiated by their side (as noted in our analysis of La guerra de Dios). In Pasolini’s film, one assumes that the sword symbolizes a Marxist revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. A marriage of Italian neorealism with the Italian heritage belief system of Roman Catholicism, it nonetheless contains the personal touch of casting the director’s own mother as the older Virgin Mary. The simplicity and immediacy of this film make any other biblical film up to the eighties (when it helped to inspire Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ in 1988) look and sound like Hollywood schmaltz. Despite the Italian and Sicilian locations that make the story familiar to Italian viewers, Pasolini, perhaps in a bid to defamiliarize and thereby poeticize Christ, selected a Spanish nonactor for the role of Jesus: a literary scholar (and eventual computer chess expert) from Barcelona but of Basque and Jewish parents named Enrique Irazoqui. We can now appreciate better how Buñuel goes the revisionist Jesus film one better with a flawed, almost boorish Jesus, by reclaiming for Spain the original Christian heresy, and by converting the heretic Priscillian’s tomb into the unwitting destination of centuries of pilgrims who have thronged to Santiago de Compostela from all over the world. He also brought the concept of the Marian apparition into the fold of psychoanalysis with his mother / Virgin of Guadalupe dream amalgam in Los olvidados. Appearing just a few years after The Song of Bernadette, this was no doubt a response of his to the growing importance of Marian apparitions in the Cold War as a vehicle of opposition to Communism. Buñuel also touched upon the missionary tradition in this movie: the wellintentioned efforts of the elite come to no avail, and in effect doom the marginalized boy they try to save. Whether it is the conversion/missionary subtype, that of the Virgin apparitions (in this subversive vein he was accompanied by Fellini with La Dolce Vita in 1960), lives of the saints, or the Messiah himself, Buñuel has an original answer to each of the forms the religious genre took during the Page 105 →mid-twentieth century, assimilating these figures into his metanarratives of Marxian surrealism and psychoanalysis, and creating a new, uncannily familiar religion in the process. El espíritu de la colmena (1973) looks backward at the silencing of opposition to Franco and forward toward the

use of cinema itself as a substitute for the objects of worship of a waning traditional religion. In this sense it blends the high-modern struggle against authority and a postmodern transcendence of investment in reality through hyperreality. What is more than real is what appears on-screen; what happens off-screen is either a copy (or parody, as Almodóvar will demonstrate) or a quest for the ideals to be found only in technologized media. Firmly entrenched within an Oedipal paradigm, the family is headed by the introverted patriarch Fernando. The father wears a beekeeper outfit that emulates clerical vestments as he contemplates the inner workings of the hive in a mystical discourse that emanates from Maeterlinck’s Life of the Bee (Canby 82). Quotation from the Belgian author, all of whose writings were banned by the Vatican, marks Fernando as a Republican Loyalist. The hive is on the one hand a symbol of Fascism, against which the film mounts a “staunch allegation” (Savater “Initiation” 96). However, the mysterious workings of bees in the hive (especially the making of honey) are also a purely poetic and lyrical metaphor for spirituality and as such have appeared in many mystical sources, culminating in Antonio Machado’s verses “Anoche cuando dormía / soñé, ¡bendita ilusion!, / que una colmena tenía / dentro de mi corazón; / y las doradas abejas / iban fabricando en él, / con las amarguras viejas, / blanca cera y dulce miel.” (Last night as I slept, I dreamed, blessed illusion! that I had a beehive within my heart, and the golden bees inside of it were making, out of old bitterness, white wax and sweet honey, 116–17). In addition to this role of high priest in the parallel world of bees, the father also tries to hear communiqués from afar with a homemade radio, while the mother writes letters to an absent former love who may not have survived the Civil War. Like her parents who are absorbed in a silent grasping for the unseen, Ana becomes fascinated with a “spirit” she associates with the Frankenstein monster in the classic movie, enhanced by her sister’s fanciful interpretation of the movie. The rooms of their home are covered with the tenebrous, morbid religious paintings of José de Ribera and others. Ana creates her own religion surrounding the spirit, which she eventually identifies with the person of a Civil War fugitive or Maquis. When he disappears, she runs away from home, and once found returns to searching for traces of the spirit in the night sky. As Susan Martin-Márquez finds a “poetic fusion” between Ana and the monster to be a reworking of Page 106 →the conventional victimization of the female who dares to look at the monster (Feminist Discourse 228), it is also possible to see Ana as a Teresian precocious mystic who joins forces with the male God, or spirit, that she finds in both the monster and the refugee. That her mother is named Teresa connotes her connection with the saint from Ávila (the mother herself is a “shadowy and contradictory figure,” Martin-Márquez Feminist Discourse 231). The film is carefully weighted in many respects, with a tension between an occult form of worship exemplified by nocturnal shots, the idea of séance and the undead, and the fire-jumping scene (the pagan ritual that survives in St. John’s Eve) and the Christian iconography of a suffering Christ (the refugee laid out in the Town Hall that is also its movie theater) who is sacrificed for the sins of all.20 In either case little Ana has a clear female precursor: Mary Shelley as the author/creator of the Frankenstein monster, and St. Teresa of Ávila as the female Hispanic mystic with the most direct relationship with God. In the end, all three, Ana, her mother, and father, seem to despair of making contact with their unseen idealized beings (termed by Labanyi as embodiments of the “ghost of history,” or legacy of the victims of the Civil War and Francoism, 77). In concordance with the octagonal shapes on their amber windowpanes, their lives are circumscribed within the confines of the hive without their knowing it. In the seventies, Carlos Saura increasingly turned to religious iconography to express the sense of inner exile of Spaniards who lived in conflict with the Franco regime.21 Saura availed himself of religious motifs to make visual the subjugation of the individual to the molar structure of repression. Instead of inciting a spirit of sacrifice in the observer as intended by the church, the emptiness surrounding the religious icons leads the viewer to see the suffering as futile and mainly serving to perpetuate the status quo at the expense of human rights. Saura and screenwriter Rafael Azcona are responsible for the film that is considered the first glaring statement of opposition to the official Francoist line regarding the Civil War. In La prima Angélica (1974), the hero’s recollections of an education that introduced him to denial of freedom and of self was resplendent with religious artwork that embodied physical suffering and agony. A secondary character, a nun with stigmata who offers them up as a sacrifice to God, also incarnates the punishment inflicted on the Spanish people by years of enforced silence. She appears in a dream with her lips locked together painfully by a metal padlock. The cloistered nun and the muted opposition to the dictatorship are entwined, but the holy sacrifice of the former is demythified and presented as devotion to a hollow ideal that only justifies the power of the ruling classes. Page 107 →

La prima Angélica looks backward to rewrite the role of religion, not as redemption but as imprisonment. The director would look forward as well, without the collaboration of Rafael Azcona. As D’Lugo affirms concerning Saura’s haunting 1975 Cría cuervos, it deals with “the individual’s response to the immediate facts of a world whose center appeared lost with the death of Franco” (Saura 138).22 A little girl from a bourgeois family of military background, of the sort that formed the very backbone of the ruling caste under the dictatorship, is the primary focalizer for tragic events within her family that can be linked by the viewer to a broader political allegory of a national identity in crisis. The vanishing center finds symbolic expression in the loss of both parents, both of which are related in religious terms. The death of little Ana’s father occurs later in the story being told but first of all in the events as they are ordered in the movie’s plot. At the very beginning the child encounters her father’s lover leaving the darkened house and then the father himself, lying motionless on the bed in a position similar to that of the Cristo yacente, or Reclining Christ, found in many churches in Spain.23 His eyes stare heavenward in a way similar to that Page 108 →found in paintings of the Crucifixion. Ana contemplates him while she is dressed in her white nightgown, beginning a thread of representations of her as the “Angel of Death” or Angel Exterminador. In fact, as the viewer learns further on, Ana considers a supposed “poison” that she put in his glass to be the cause of death. Her conflicted feelings of vengeance and daughterly affection (or at least respect and awe) are conveyed by the actress Ana Torrent’s uniquely impassive countenance. At the wake, a priest enters the room and stands next to an officer, uniting the clergy and the military as pillars of Francoist society. As the father’s death is linked to Catholic iconography, the mother, whose death preceded his but about which we learn later, is also accompanied by religious imagery. She writhes in agony on her bed that is presided over by a large crucifix; Ana finds her encountering death on her own, bereft of the marital companionship promised to her by the sacrament of marriage to Ana’s father. Blood flows from her wound, but unlike Christ’s external stigmata she has been afflicted inside, at the very core of her female reproductive system. She sacrificed her independent life (partly out of fear of her own autonomy, as Ana notes) to raise a family in the traditional way. Now she finds herself sacrificed on the altar of motherhood, with her reproductive organs plagued by a metaphorical illness one assumes is ovarian or uterine cancer.24 The visuals that associate her death with Spanish Catholicism and the way of life for women within its framework combine with her haunting last words on the value of Catholic belief in the face of the new metaphysics she is learning in this rite of passage: “Todo es mentira; no hay nada. Me han engañado. Tengo miedo. No quiero morir” (It’s all a lie; there is nothing. They’ve tricked me. I’m afraid. I don’t want to die). The emptiness of her Catholic education both in terms of promised happiness in marriage and in the hereafter informs the mother’s despairing look as she heads over the brink of the abyss; a moment that should not be witnessed by such a youngster. This memory brings forth an earlier one, in which the mother, still unaware of the exact diagnosis of her illness but sensing she was falling ill, had told her philandering husband, “Me quiero morir” (I want to die). Ana was a witness to both pivotal scenes despite their being so inappropriate for her to view. Religion is deeply tied to emotion in the multilayered reminiscences that compose Cría cuervos. It was there at the beginning of Ana’s memories and at the end of her parents’ lives. Its hollowness foretells the lack of substance and modern foresight required to approach the challenging future that lies ahead. Ana cannot help but fall back on the vestigial remnants of her Catholic upbringing in dealing with the crises that come to pass. When her cherPage 110 →ished pet guinea pig Roni dies, she buries him with much ritual and smears the earth from his grave on her face, a direct quotation from The Song of Bernadette, in which Bernadette does this to be closer to the soil upon which the Virgin had appeared. Ana’s recycled rituals support a personal religion that looks deathward rather than toward life, bringing to mind the “cult of death” associated with Spanish Catholicism by its critics (Mitchell 7). At play, Ana tells her sister they must “die” as part of a red-light, green-light game; they humor her with elaborate death scenes. She decides when it is time for her overly strict and hypocritical aunt to meet her maker, but this time circumstances do not cooperate, and she is left wondering why the poison did not work as she thought it had on her father. Page 109 → Religion is part of a troubled collective and personal past. The gender messages of Catholicism are especially evident. Ana plays house as a rather spiteful and critical mother at the bottom of an empty swimming pool. As a

family drama, Cría cuervos subverts the gender codes of the earlier mainstream / dominant discourse religious movies, such as La Señora de Fátima, which appealed directly to women to sacrifice themselves and be the moral superiors of men in exchange for eternal reward. Ana and her sisters represent a continuation of the child-musical and child-saint subtypes (Marcelino), with an unsettling twist that shows the seams of the Francoist constructions of family and political life. They listen repeatedly to a pop song that had become popular several years earlier, similar to the positioning of “As Time Goes By” within Casablanca. This ostensibly romantic song has somber religious overtones of abandonment, “Porque te vas” (Because you are leaving, or with a different intonation, Why are you leaving?). Abandoned by their parents, implicitly abandoned by God, and now looking to an uncertain future as the Caudillo faces imminent death with no obvious political direction to follow, the children of Cría cuervos are stripped of the false security with which the religious genre film, along with other cultural texts of the dominant discourse, had swaddled them.

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THREE Breaking Boundaries: Post-Franco and Contemporary Directors Cría cuervos sounded the call of uncertainty as the Franco era drew to a close. What followed was a gradual, sporadic, and often inconsistent journey into a more representative government with greater freedoms of expression and lifestyle. As Payne asserts, the Franco government was never quite a theocracy, but rather an authoritarian state that rested upon Catholic traditions for its rhetoric and justification. The proximity of the regime and the church waxed and waned as technocrats replaced the old-school Falangists, and as segments of the Roman Catholic hierarchy liberalized after Vatican II. There can be no doubt, however, that democracy brought greater secularization. The officially Catholic definition of the Spanish state gave way, and the church released its hold upon the education of the young. Birth control, and some limited access to abortion, brought the sexual revolution to Spain, and homosexuality became less of a taboo in metropolitan areas. Unhappy marriages like the one given painful testimony in Cría cuervos would soon have divorce as a possible endpoint. These changes resulted in a social upheaval that eventually brought women to the workplace and to higher education in larger numbers, lowered the birth rate, and called the cultural dominance of the macho ibérico into question.1 At the same time, the resistance to change in certain areas and the persistence of such problems as unemployment and corruption combined with the refusal to pursue justice against violators of human rights during the Civil War and the dictatorship to produce a disappointment with democracy that became known as desencanto (disenchantment).2 In the heady days of the democratic transition or destape (striptease), some former creators of the religious genre film turned to exploitation of newfound freedoms.3 As they had capitalized on the religious moorings of the dictatorship, they now made a profit from the relaxation of governmental and societal controls. Vicente Escrivá had begun exploiting the loosening of censorship and the growing interest in adult subjects by directing Lo verde empieza en los Pirineos in 1973. After the death of Franco, he directed and wrote screenplays (adaptations of Valencian sainetes) for the soft-core Page 112 →pornographic features Visanteta estate quieta (1979) and El virgo de Visanteta (1979). “S-rated” features of this type accounted for between one-tenth to one-third of the annual Spanish film production from 1977 to 1983 (Kowalsky 198). Rafael Gil, nonetheless, remained faithful to his Falangist orientation and applied the leeway to reactionary satire of the new mores and politics with La boda del señor cura (1979) and Y al tercer año, resucitó (1980). The former depicts a degraded progressive priest and disciple of liberation theology who winds up defrocked and married to a stripper. To take advantage of the S rating and box-office appeal of soft-core, the stripper is portrayed practicing her craft with a voyeurism that both reveals and casts shame upon the new sexual mores. In the cinema as well as on television, there was now little room for the iconic views of the past. The tercera vía emerged as a vehicle for popular stars to explore issues of the day with irony and sting, with titles and situations that immediately caught the public eye, even though few of these films held the attention for long. The cinemas were especially thick with Madrid-based sex comedies and farces. The abundance of neo-noir thrillers hinted at an underlying discomfort with unsettled questions of Nationalist accountability for crimes against humanity and at discord between the independence-minded regions of Catalunya, and Euskadi and the central government. ETA terrorism reached its highest intensity in the late seventies. For the carnivalesque and grotesque comic vision of García Berlanga, the democratic transition afforded the chance to take aim at powerful figures of the former ruling classes. However, many of the latter still wielded power and could occasionally make life difficult for filmmakers, as when Pilar Miró found herself under house arrest and threatened with a military court marshal for her indictment of the Guardia Civil in a historic case of torture and incarceration based on mistaken identity in El crimen de Cuenca.4 Berlanga began his trilogy of movies lampooning an aristocratic family and Francoist bureaucrats with La escopeta nacional. As in his earlier satires, Catholic clergy are at the service of maintaining appearances and the status quo. The family priest beseeches a philandering husband to kneel down in front of “this saint,” his shrewish wife, and abandon his

mistress. Meanwhile, the young scion’s petty nobleman father is a degenerate lecher with an unsavory collection of relics. He keeps samples of pubic hair from each of his many conquests in vials that he labels and organizes meticulously. The Marquis’s obsession with this unholy reliquary subverts one of the physical tests of saintliness, resistance to decomposition. The body’s link to sexuality is celebrated blasphemously Page 113 →over its association with the sacred. This ludic approach to object sacrilege would soon characterize many of the convergences between religion and film in post-Franco Spain. While the old forms of religiosity are criticized scathingly, new forms of spirituality that break the boundaries of self and world without denying sexuality emerge in some of the contemporary filmmakers (though not in Berlanga, for whom esperpentic/carnivalesque excess is the only transcendence). After considering Josefina Molina’s treatment of the life of St. Teresa of Ávila, this study will concentrate on the work of Pedro Almodóvar, Agustín Díaz Yanes, Julio Medem, Alejandro Amenábar, Álex de la Iglesia, and Icíar Bollaín, and wind up with a twenty-first-century St. Teresa of Ávila in the form of a striking biopic by Ray Loriga. When the PSOE (Socialist Workers’ Party) won the election of 1981, an administration came to power that supported a recovery of dissident views through cinematic literary adaptations. The ideology of critics of the Franco regime, and that of earlier writers whose thinking could be presumed affiliated with democratic and Eurosocialist ideals and hostile to authoritarianism, became a prime source for films funded by the Ministry of Culture, especially under Pilar Miró’s leadership of Radio, Television and Cinematography. Valencian novelist Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, whose anarchist sympathies and anticlericalism had made him anathema during the dictatorship, became as prominent on Spanish television of the democracy via the miniseries as he had been in silent cinema the world over. Noteworthy efforts were made to adapt for the screen works of fiction by Camilo José Cela (La colmena was a star-studded blockbuster of 1982), Ramón J. Sender (Réquiem por un campesino español featured a still relatively unknown Antonio Banderas), Luis Martín Santos (Tiempo de silencio, filmed by horror meister Vicente Aranda with a nightmarish abortion scene), Juan Marsé (La muchacha de las bragas de oro), and Miguel Delibes (Mario Camus attempted the Faulknerian multiple narrative perspective in his 1984 Los santos inocentes).5 As the government sponsorship of a still commercially shaky Spanish film industry invested in the formerly repressed literary tradition of dissidents “within limits,” the religious genre, already on the wane in the final fifteen years of the dictatorship, had no hope of resurrection. Many of the novels chosen for adaptation espoused anticlerical views or were at least informed by a thoroughly secular worldview. However, for the purpose of forging a new national identity under democracy, a key figure from the religious past, Teresa de Jesús (St. Teresa of Ávila), could function as a paradigm if subjected to feminist revision. Page 114 →

VARIATIONS ON A THEME OF NATIONAL IDENTITY: RECLAIMING ST. TERESA Josefina Molina (b. 1936) graduated from the Escuela Oficial de Cine, the National Film School attended by Berlanga, Saura, and Erice. She built her career on thought-provoking films and television series in the early seventies, when the dictatorship grew more willing to foster a visual culture with potentially international status.6 During the democratic transition, she took on the religious genre as an assignment, but also as a way of recovering a lost female role model. She openly identified with feminist goals in her work (Vernon “Screening Room” 110). Molina set out to craft a female role model appropriate for democratic Spain by recovering for progressivism the image of St. Teresa of Ávila. Appropriated by religious conservatism, the latter was more closely linked than any other saint to the Francoist dictatorship. The generalissimo took possession of a relic consisting of her hand as part of the spoils of war in 1937. He kept it until the end of his life, proclaiming her officially the “Saint of the Race” who had championed Spanish Catholicism through the colonization of the Americas and the CounterReformation.7 St. Teresa’s arm was the most visible prop used by Franco to confirm and sanctify his supposedly holy crusade of reconquering Spain for Catholicism (against communists, freemasons, atheists, and Jews). As observed in the previous chapter, a mainstream director of the Falangist movement, Juan de Orduña, had put her life on the screen in 1961, with the patriotic hero worship, stiff decorum, and fetishism characteristic of the Francoist religious genre. The task for democratic, now socialist, Spain, with its attendant new freedoms for

women, was to assimilate Teresa as a precursor of power feminism, of the possibilities for women in the world, by returning to her texts themselves and using modern historiography to fully contextualize the bravery of her insertion of a unique female subjectivity into a patriarchal institution. A further encouragement to incorporate Teresa as an authority figure for women of democratic Spain was the relatively recent recognition she had received in being named the first female doctor of the Roman Catholic Church in 1970.8 To develop dialogue and situations in tandem with Josefina Molina, acclaimed novelist Carmen Martín Gaite was recruited for the screenplay. For historical authenticity the literary historian and Royal Academician Víctor García de la Concha also cowrote the screenplay. Martín Gaite, in addition to her consciousness of the woman writer’s situation in male-dominant spheres of activity such as religion and literature of the Renaissance and baroque eras, brought her affinity with popular culture of the Page 115 →pre-mediatic age. This can be sensed in the sung rhymes and other folkloric touches that abound in the screenplay. Teresa de Jesús was a unique giant of a television miniseries in the heyday of this format. Roots aired in 1977 in the United States and brought this hybrid genre of television series/film made for TV to a prominence that it held beyond 1983, when another milestone, The Thorn Birds, was broadcast. Franco Zeffirelli’s Jesus of Nazareth, a coproduction of the United Kingdom and Italy, ushered in the age of the miniseries on European television in 1977. For Spanish television, the adaptation of Blasco Ibáñez’s La barraca inaugurated the zenith of the miniseries in 1979 with its saga of a rural family fighting against the odds to survive in the farmland near Valencia. The relatively recent predominance of an urban over a rural population meant that many Spanish viewers could look to La barraca as a Roots of their own, the epic struggle of past generations in an agricultural milieu that placed a feudal serf-like economic bind on the individual. The potential for national identity formation gave the miniseries immense popular appeal. Teresa de Jesús consists of eight fifty-five-minute episodes in its full version, filled with top cinematic and television actors and meticulous attention to detail in costuming and props. Never before or since has the amount of effort been invested in faithfully bringing to life the story of a Spanish saint. The script emphasizes Teresa as a woman with doubts and weaknesses, as well as the social context of sixteenth-century Spain with the CounterReformation in full swing. In both senses, the series undoes the hero-worshipping attitude of Francoist period pieces. Rather than rooting up past glory, the 1984 Teresa de Jesús delves into problematic family relationships (including her Jewish / New Christian heritage, avoided of course in the Orduña film) and the problems of superstition, poverty, and persecution of heterodoxy by ecclesiastic authority. Teresa’s well-known mysticism receives some attention in the screenplay, but her ecstasies are by no means the main focus. Far more visible are the saint’s inner struggles with self-confidence and her political struggles with male authority as well as with other females who rejected her reinstitution of purity for the clerical life. While the original background music by José Nieto on the soundtrack at times descends to a soap-operatic bombast or mawkishness, on the whole this production not only re-creates but also revises and renews the image of a powerful woman for what she might say to Spanish women of the new democracy. The mystic who glorified the male Godhead, whether this was to give release to her own infinite female desire, as Luce Irigaray asserts in “La Mystérique,” or to be an obedient daughter of the church, as in the Orduña biopic of 1961, is de-emphasized in favor of the humble Page 116 →leader with strong female and male friendships who negotiated with wealth and authority, always on her own terms. Teresa the reformer of convents and founder of an entire religious order, a nun capable of effecting progressive change in the world, is the image that emerges over Teresa the mystic. The episodic nature necessitated by the miniseries structure makes it resemble the Libro de la vida itself, while the absence of voice-over narration mitigates any bookish qualities. The figures and scenes speak for themselves with realism and spontaneity. Interpersonal relationships form a chain of unity throughout the saint’s life span. When Teresa first appears she is on the arm of her friend Juana Suárez. Juana remains an important contact until Teresa leaves to open her first reformed convent in 1561. They part ways because her friend does not believe Teresa’s goal can be achieved; she laments that “una parte de mi vida se va contigo” (a part of my life leaves with you). The aristocrat Guiomar de Ulloa links several episodes as she supports Teresa’s vision of making convent life holier, even after her funds are exhausted. As Teresa’s life draws to a close, Ana de San Bartolomé nurtures and embraces her. Important mentoring from her male peers springs from her friendships with Francisco de Borja, Pedro de Alcántara, Jerónimo Gracián, and Juan de la Cruz. The complicity and solidarity between Teresa and

these kindred spirits is shown to be as important to her as the guidance she feels she receives from God himself. Molina’s Teresa encounters resistance from men because they fear the unknown and unfathomable within her, and from women because of their envy of the recognition she received for her achievements. The run-of-the-mill nuns who reject her reforms and the women of the nobility who seek to capitalize on their connection to her provide further conflict for the story line. The Princess of Eboli is one of the most colorful characters in the series and her flamboyant image reflects the postpunk countercultural chic that could be found on the streets of Madrid during the height of the movida, which coincided with the early eighties. In addition, the insistence of wealthy patronesses such as Eboli upon changing Teresa’s overall vision to allow for their special privileges reflects upon the jockeying for position within the youthful Spanish democracy. Soon the lack of a preexisting democratic infrastructure would lead to gaping chasms of corruption into which the first Socialist government would fall in 1994 (Pilar Miró’s fall from grace led the way for this). Teresa’s struggle with corruption and lack of precursors mirrored that of the young democracy, but their outcomes would be quite different. Martín Gaite excelled at social-realist fiction and at the fantastic twist; both qualities serve the script of this miniseries well.9 While the view of Teresa as an active woman effecting change in the world is foremost, some room for the miraculous must be created and this is handled tactfully, in such a way that nonbelievers would not dismiss the supernatural in her life story as fakery. In the first episode Teresa cures a village priest who had succumbed to the black magic of a temptress. In filming what was held to be Teresa’s first miracle and one of the proofs of her sainthood, the script must achieve a delicate balance. While never actually refuting the notion of sorcery and thereby of the saint’s miraculous triumph, it emphasizes the human and even womanly side of Teresa in winning the priest’s heart and soul back from an unhealthy sexual addiction. The narrative recounts in modern terms without revealing the traditional view to be altogether false. For the benefit of the viewing public, it also plays up a possible romantic attachment or transference between the priest and Teresa when he subsequently begs her to fill the void left by his illicit liaison with the former mistress. Teresa exhibits a trace of countertransference herself, but she firmly instructs the fallen clergyman, “Cerradme la puerta” (Close your door to me). Here and elsewhere, the series effectively wrestles with the challenging issue of celibacy for Catholic clergy. Page 117 → Page 118 → Concha Velasco’s performance also incarnates the steadfastness of Teresa as the spiritual superior of a man who by virtue of gender alone ranked higher than she in the church. The irony that Velasco played many frivolous coquette roles in comedies of the sixties and seventies is not so strange when considering that, just as she tested the limits of censorship then, she increases the human dimension of a canonical legend in ways challenging to authority in this series. In fact, the choice of Aurora Bautista to play Teresa in 1961 compared to Concha Velasco in 1984 goes far in illustrating how the religious film had changed in the intervening years. From the actress of choice (Bautista) to incarnate patriotic heroines exalted through the Nationalist lens (Queen Juana in Locura de amor and the title role in Agustina de Aragón), the performer most associated with the “española moderna y sexy” of the late dictatorship and destape (Velasco) is selected to give a star turn as the first female doctor of Roman Catholicism. The flamboyant Velasco, though subdued in her portrayal, emblematizes the new equality for women in the constitution of 1978. One of the most elaborate tableaux of the series is the Archbishop of Seville, Cristóbal de Rojas Sandoval kneeling before her to ask her blessing, an unheard-of deference to a nun on the part of a highranking male cleric. Another early miracle that formed part of the case for Teresa’s sainthood is her supposed return from death from her mysterious illness (most likely a convulsive disorder). The faithful re-creation of the medical profession in the mid-sixteenth century leaves much room for exaggeration concerning the report of her death. The definitive test is shown to be dropping hot wax on her eyelids to observe a reaction. When there is none, the physician pronounces her dead. Her struggle with this illness becomes another of her many adversities, in addition to that of her female status, accentuated in the series by the subjugation of her sister María to her willful husband. The divine nature of her recovery does not appear ironclad in the treatment of the deathbed scene; it could be explained by medical inexactitude of the time. A bloodletting sequence in chapter 4 adds more weight to the latter explanation. Teresa’s heroism in overcoming her physical setbacks is portrayed as real, though perhaps not miraculous.

Physiology also motivates the portrayal of the saint’s trances or ecstasies; the subjective camera angles and wavering music suggest vertigo, which accompanied her early convulsive illness. Molina adheres to a modern verisimilitude that allows for no heavenly beings to emerge on-screen; religious paintings “illustrate” her visions, giving them less immediacy for the viewer than an actual dramatization. Her famed transfixion, in which Teresa claimed that an angel pierced her heart with a flaming spear Page 119 →and sent her into paroxysms of delight both physical and spiritual, presents a challenge. It was the inspiration for Giovanni Bernini’s 1652 sculpture, shaped by the baroque passion for excess. While Orduña’s 1961 biopic related the transfixion stripped of its sensuality as the ultimate submission of Teresa to patriarchal authority, Molina’s series downplays the transfixion altogether as one more of Teresa’s alarming lapses of consciousness triggered by her illness. The camera angle remains objective for this scene: Teresa sighs and moans in a sensual manner that speaks unmistakably of orgasm, then recounts her mystical experience to Guiomar. Words rather than the more powerful images (in media terms) convey the most personal Teresian vision of divinity, leaving the door open for doubt or belief as in Todorov’s delineation of the reading dynamics of the fantastic literary mode.10 The sensuality that haunts Molina’s Teresa is more earthbound still. A lecherous nobleman appears to spark her desire by engaging her in what she takes to be a metaphorical discussion of God’s grace. She then realizes the conversation was a pretext for talking a bit dirty with her and attempting further liberties. Although she promptly rebuffs him (threatening to have his head cut off), there is an immediate cut to a scene of her own self-flagellation, insinuating that the saint possessed strong heterosexual desires incited by real men, as well as by angels. As Martin-Márquez observes, both market pressures and sociopolitical pressures spurred “the explicit representation of female desire, assumed to have been completely repressed from cinematic works produced under Francoism” (Feminist Discourse 17). The representation of female desire was itself taken as a broadening of the range of female subjectivity and as a sign of women’s empowerment in all spheres. Thus it was important to show Teresa in the throes of divine ecstasy (without the divine figure) in addition to carnal temptations elicited by men (played by actors). Similarly, the secularization in this hagiography shows Teresa’s disciple Juan de la Cruz writing his poem “Noche oscura del alma” after his nocturnal escape from detention, implying that the poem is about his liberation from being a religious-political prisoner rather than about the mystical experience of an intimate encounter with divinity. Both Teresa and Juan de la Cruz are subjected to a demystification that brings them closer to secular socialist Spain of the eighties. In 1989 Carlos Saura further demystified Juan de la Cruz with La noche oscura, completely dispelling any divine dimension and reducing the saint’s life to a series of conflicts both psychological and political. Tenebrous, plodding, and murky, the film associates the inspiration for the poem “Noche oscura del alma” with a temptress nun with whom the saint Page 120 →had contact at one time. The good and evil mutations or incarnations of actress Julie Delpy throughout the film reveal the influence of Simón del desierto, which does not harmonize well with the mode of verisimilitude in Saura’s film. It goes to great lengths to dispel any homoerotic connotation from a male-authored poem in which the speaking subject is a female who engages in a pleasurable rendezvous with a male God. Delpy plays the Soul while Juan himself is God during their lusty tryst, completely destroying the tender humility of Juan de la Cruz’s masterpiece. Aside from its dramatization of Counter-Reformation ideological conflict (which is made to resemble the tactics of a modern authoritarian state such as Franco’s), this film is not regarded as a highlight of Saura’s canon.11 Reclaiming a heroic saint for the lost liberal tradition to reintegrate the latter into national identity was no doubt a challenge for a director accustomed to denouncing the effects of National Catholic repression during the Franco era. The miniseries format of Teresa de Jesús facilitates a more exhaustive approach to the life of a saint than a motion picture. It gives her intellectual life attention by showing titles of books that influenced her, but the lack of narration leaves her reception of theological sources in the dark. The production is less interested in what Teresa learned from St. Augustine, Bernardino de Laredo, and Francisco de Osuna, than in the fact that she lost most of her library when the Inquisition banned books with any hint of heterodoxy as ideological persecution intensified in the middle of the sixteenth century. In a time of transition for Spanish politics, the series shows sensitivity to controversy, distinguishing between Teresa’s self-denial (including her problematic self-scourging) and mystical trances and the more extreme alumbradas, such as the Beata Cardona, who remained on the fringe of accepted practices and were tainted as witches. At times Teresa looks overwhelmed by uncertainty about her own fate or

that of her beloved mentors at the hands of ecclesiastic authority. The political obscurantism that enfolded much of the democratic transition appears to be mirrored in the events portrayed from Felipe II’s reign. Finally, the king himself steps in to confirm what viewers already know: that Teresa de Ahumada is one of the jewels in the Spanish crown, and has his permission to lead an independent order, the Discalced Carmelites. This brings to a close the most heated internecine conflicts for Teresa. Felipe II’s royal intervention parallels the public role played by Juan Carlos de Borbón a few years earlier in quelling a national disturbance, appearing on television to calm fears of his championing the military insurrectionists who took over the Spanish parliament in a failed coup on February 23, 1981. The religious imagination of the team of Molina, Martín Gaite, and García Page 121 → de la Concha places Teresa and her allies at the center of an intense conflict involving power, ideology, gender, and money. Teresa struggled to eliminate corruption from her religion by returning to the primitive era, or rootedness in traditional Christian values of humility, asceticism, work, and prayer. For Spanish Socialism under Felipe González there was no such return to an earlier foundation, since only fragmentary attempts at a truly constitutional representative government existed from the Napoleonic occupation, the 1864 revolution, and the Second Republic. Teresa herself emerges as a political heroine, though not quite in favor of freedom but of ethical behavior and equality, to fill the gap as Spain sought to bury the vestiges of authoritarian rule. Accordingly, the mystical and miraculous elements in her writings and legacy are de-emphasized—the only outright miracle with no possible explanation that is actually represented is her levitation in chapter 3, witnessed by other sisters in the convent from the doorway in a style similar to Marcelino, pan y vino. The acknowledgment of her legacy to modern Spain informs the conclusion and epilogue of the series. As her death draws near, the focus changes from a devastatingly physiological portrayal of her aging process (influenced perhaps by the shocking transformation of Glenda Jackson in the BBC miniseries Elizabeth R) to a return to the miraculous theme present in earlier chapters. An almond tree thought to be dead suddenly blooms, in October. Visitors detect the “saintly fragrance” for which Teresa and some other saints were known (this was codified as one of the identifiers of sainthood long after her death, in the eighteenth century). Her surviving friends foretell with delight the parcelization of her body into relics disbursed around the Iberian Peninsula and beyond. Her physical presence thus envelops modern Spain rather than being identified with a single person as during the Franco dictatorship. The unification theme in this dispersion of her body fragments perhaps speaks to the separatist movement away from the center of certain autonomies that would soon grow even more vocal (Catalunya and Euskadi). Teresa is accused of being biased toward Castile at the expense of Andalusia and its unique customs by one of her patronesses in Seville. To what extent Teresa championed Castile or all of Spain, and to what extent Spain could stay unified with the loosening of central control is a question opened by the miniseries that remains unanswered now as it was then. In order to include the reception of Catholicism in the work of a female director this chapter has switched tracks from cinema into television. However, this miniseries has been released theatrically, albeit in an abbreviated format, and it has been rebroadcast internationally on Catholic cable channels, giving it the broader impact of a film made for the big screen. Without Page 122 →it the study would lack one of the most notable contributions of women film directors to the religious genre and to religious-themed movies made in Spain. While Pilar Miró and more recently, Isabel Coixet, Pilar Távora, and Icíar Bollaín have directed important films that explore contemporary issues such as homosexuality (Távora), immigration (Bollaín), illness (Miró, Coixet), and domestic violence (Bollaín), they have thus far avoided dealing directly with religious themes, with the exception of Bollaín’sTambién la lluvia, to be discussed toward the end of this chapter.12 Their work is often indirect testimony to the impact of Catholicism, however, as Kathleen Vernon demonstrated in an analysis of Miró’s Gary Cooper que estás en los cielos. Here, cancer of the reproductive tract strikes like a divine punishment for the heroine’s termination of a pregnancy years before, despite the exclusively natural laws that seem to govern the heroine’s world (Vernon “Screening Room” 110). The adaptation of Mercè Rodoreda’s novel La plaça del Diamant by Francesc Betriu, first as a miniseries in Catalan and later as a theatrical release dubbed into Castilian, could potentially have addressed the heroine Natalia’s mysticism. In two incidents in the novel, when pushed to an extreme first by romantic passion and then by despair when the Republicans lose the Civil War, the heroine reports visions with divine elements. The first is

when she views Jesus in the clouds while embracing her new boyfriend in the Parc Güell, and the second is a pile of translucent orbs that resemble embryonic sacs piled heavenward in church. She sees them as the souls of the soldiers who have died in the war on both sides, and they make her feel linked to the wealthier woman she has followed into the church, who seems to be grieving for someone close to her as well. In both instances, which are turning points in the novel, the film version omits any dramatization of the miraculous that Natalia feels she is viewing. Just as the feminism inherent in Rodoreda’s novel appears condensed in the film adaptation into a more concentrated affirmation of Catalan identity and suffering (Hart 43), the religious themes in the heroine’s inner world are not allowed to clutter the straightforward representation of her hardships as a heroine symbolic of Catalan nationalism. While on the subject of literary adaptation and women in film, the film version of Jesús Fernández Santos’s social-realist novel Extramuros graced Spanish screens in 1985. It revealed a convent with two nuns involved in a lesbian relationship; the older, more dominant nun uses the younger nun’s affection to draw her into a plot. They conspire to fake a miracle in order to save their convent from penury. Using concealed glass shards to create artificial stigmata, they attract attention and patronage but also suspicion, Page 123 →which ultimately leads to their downfall. The possibility of a religious hoax could be suggested only with utmost delicacy during the dictatorship; the previous chapter details how Berlanga attempted this in Los jueves, milagro but ultimately was forced to distort the message and uphold revelation through miracles. Extramuros openly constructs and then exposes an example of religious fakery. It provided shock value on this account as well as for its representation of a lesbian relationship that fits perfectly into convent life, making it a notable addition to the antireligious genre that would reach a zenith in the twenty-first century with Ágora. In homage to both Berlanga’s comedies and Buñuel’s surrealism, José Luis Cuerda focused satirical attention on Spanish Catholicism in a rural, magical-realist setting in Amanece, que no es poco (1989). With villagers sprouting from the ground in a kind of people farm, this film harks back to the shadowy legacy of buried and unrecognized victims of the Civil War and the Franco era. Fairly direct reference to La Voie lactée motivates an earnest discussion of free will between the village priest and the Civil Guard chief, and a town crier is ordered to inculcate belief in the Holy Trinity. Cuerda followed this with the broader farce of his Holy Family spoof Así en el cielo como en la tierra. A more social-realist discernment of religion in the Spanish rural habitus informs Montxo Armendáriz’s Tasio. This director also introduced a religious reference not present in the original novel in his adaptation of Historias del Kronen, by having the young, self-destructive protagonists dangle precariously from the scaffolding on a church facade as a daredevil stunt. Armendáriz’s quietly testimonial style, approaching that of a documentary, would continue to inform the films of Icíar Bollaín and Fernando León de Aranoa Barrio, ( Los lunes al sol, Princesas) from the nineties into the twenty-first century.

PEDRO ALMODÓVAR AND THE GATHERING STORM There can be no doubt that Pedro Almodóvar (b. 1949) is an auteurist director, one whose personal vision is evident in every aspect of his films. In postmodern film production, being an auteur is not incompatible with engaging with movie genres and even working within genres. In this sense, Almodóvar’s films have been explored for their relationship to the woman’s picture or tearjerker of the forties. This genre is identifiable by its actresses, such as Joan Crawford and Susan Hayward, in much the same way that film noir is identifiable by actors like Humphrey Bogart and John Garfield, and it depicts a flawed heroine fighting an uphill battle to fulfill her Page 124 →dreams. Also present from the start is Almodóvar’s connection to comedy, particularly screwball comedy of Hollywood’s golden age directors Howard Hawks, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder. Somewhat later comes his intertextual dialogue with the thriller and with musical comedy. With all of these genres, Almodóvar pushes generic limits with excesses of camp and kitsch, sexual ambiguity and transgression, and the grotesque. Another genre that Almodóvar reworks is the religious movie. He has done this conspicuously in only two films to date. Entre tinieblas from 1984 situates within convent walls the typical early Almodóvarian romp involving hideand-seek, deceptive appearances, and forbidden fruit. It marks his departure from the tiny-budget underground films made while the democratic transition was still in full swing, but predates his international emergence as a global cinematic enfant terrible. Even the traditional convent films before Entre tinieblas often presented a twist

on audience expectations of religious lives, offering musical nuns (Sor Ye-yé, The Singing Nun, Sara Montiel in Pecado de amor and Esa mujer), entrepreneurial nuns (The Bells of St. Mary’s), nuns with a worldly past (Sara Montiel’s roles once again), and nuns confronting desire and/or foreign cultures (Black Narcissus, The Nun’s Story). However, these challenges were usually handled tastefully and with decorum, leaving the underlying premise of the sanctity of the religious life intact. The nun’s narrative meets the destabilizing postmodern Spanish farce, or pasada, in Entre tinieblas, with nuns who are lesbians, masochists, or murderers (in one case, all three), take hard drugs, harbor prostitutes, write trashy novels, and keep exotic pets in the convent. Mark Allinson observes that this convent “acts as a haven for immorality, a site of opposition to the morality of institutionalized religion” (31). Yet, unlike the dramatic film Extramuros, explicit lesbian activity is not shown, and the attraction the Mother Superior feels toward nightclub singers and ladies of the evening is limited to looks of longing, suggestive dialogue, and an occasional embrace. Paul Julian Smith analyzed the fluctuating attitude toward the lesbian relationships that Entre tinieblas struggles to portray: from one scene to the next the treatment is farcical, tragic, sympathetic, or absurd, and he notes that this stymies the audience’s identification with the characters or their situations (“Lesbian Comedy” 37). He concludes that this is not a consciousness-raising film about the gay scene for women of eighties Madrid, but something more involved in film aesthetics itself and in allegorizing a sociohistorical moment that was important for gay liberation in Spain. I would add that the power relationship within a Catholic religious hierarchy is what throws Entre tinieblas off of the bandwagon of lesbian equality. The Mother Superior abuses her position of leadership within the convent to coerce sexual favors from those who need her protection. The director’s discomfort with this abuse of religious authority perhaps had no name in the early eighties; it would show up more clearly articulated in La mala educación, after the first wave of sex scandals in the Catholic clergy had broken headlines. Page 125 → Drawing from a more heterodox religious-picture tradition from outside of Spain, Entre tinieblas reworks in a still more subversive vein a movie that was considered an edgy psychological thriller when it first appeared in 1947: Black Narcissus. This early vehicle for Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons, rife with female stereotypes, situated a tiny convent of Anglican nuns with a newly promoted Mother Superior on a mountaintop in the Himalayas. An Orientalist approach to the geographic context devoted many shots to the sheer cliff out of which the convent, a former harem building, arose, amid lush vegetation and colorful horizons of clouds and jagged peaks. The women are covered from head to toe, while their main object of desire is an Englishman in short pants, a twist already for this era Page 126 →of the male, presumably heterosexual, gaze (a subplot concerns a local noble ensnared by a low-caste temptress). Each nun has a particular strength except for one (Sister Ruth), and each has a special vulnerability except for one (Sister Honey). Gradually they are overcome with sensual memories of the past from which the convent was meant to be an escape. These are “women on the brink,” which may also inspire the penthouse desperation of the mainly female cast of Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios. Desire proves too much for Sister Ruth; mentally unstable to begin with, she soon plummets into outright hysteria. Entre tinieblas, whether on account of low budget or stylistic claustrophobia, lacks exterior shots of the convent except for two short doorway scenes and a quick shot of the facade two-thirds of the way through the movie.13 Still, the sense of time and place is just as strong, imbued with the Madrid movida with its Bohemian transgression and countercultural marginality. Smith notes that the palm fronds seem out of place in the convent but that they reinforce the tropical strains of the bolero that articulates lesbian desire (“Lesbian Comedy” 38).14 Hence, the convent setting does not evoke a specifically Madrilenian décor, but rather the esthetic ambiance of the movida through the conflicting impulses of order and chaos, old and new, repression and freedom, Europe and the Americas, that emerge. As the Englishman says of the unsuitability of the Himalayan locale for a nunnery in Black Narcissus: “There’s something in the atmosphere that makes everything seem exaggerated.” This exaggeration permeates the convent of Entre tinieblas, particularly the contrast between freedoms previously considered taboo and the squalor of traditional corners of a capital city that had yet to be placed on a par with the modern European metropolis. Repression still rules in that most of these transgressions are kept hidden: the Mother Superior shoots heroin and consorts with prostitutes on the sly, the animal-obsessed Sor Perdida cloisters her pet tiger in an overgrown garden, Sor Víbora secretly lusts after her priest/confessor, Sor Rata de Callejón uses her no-talent

sister’s name as a pseudonym for the popular pulp fiction she writes, and Sor Estiércol keeps masochistic paraphernalia in her cell and in the folds of her habit, enhancing the intensity of her experiences with LSD. Even with all these problems, the major one is money, because the petty noblewoman (the Marquise) whose husband had funded the convent, has withdrawn financial support now that he is deceased. The other major conflict is the Mother Superior’s infatuation with a seedy nightclub singer who has sought refuge in the convent. Julieta Serrano plays the Mother Superior, which connects Entre tinieblas to Saura’s La prima Angélica. In the latter film, Serrano played a nun who suffered from stigmata Page 127 →and plagued the protagonist’s nightmares with haunting images of martyrdom and silence (her lips were literally locked shut in the dream sequence). Choosing the same actress who emblematized social repression through religion in the first film of the dictatorship to challenge the official approach to the Civil War and its aftermath brings Entre tinieblas into the dialogue on the legacy of the Nationalist insurrection and its enforced inner exile for many Spaniards. The last scene of Entre tinieblas records the Mother Superior’s primal scream as she discovers her beloved singer has abandoned her after singing seductively in her honor for her saint’s day. Thus, what began as a Black Narcissus transported to the Madrid movida ends on a note similar to the nun musicals of the sixties, only with an erotic and gyrating Afro-Caribbean beat.15 While the convent will most certainly close, the nuns do not leave in unison as in Black Narcissus. Instead, they are dispersed, and care is taken to assure the viewer that the collective dystopia seen in the movie will soon morph into a utopia for them as individuals.16 The Mother Superior receives the consolation of Sor Estiércol, who loves her without coercion or self-interest; Sor Víbora and her lover the chaplain will form a family with the tiger they adopt from Sor Perdida, who will return to her hometown for a fresh start. The nightclub singer Yolanda, whose “apparition” (likened to those of the Virgin Mary in camera shots in which she is framed in the church doorway or haloed by a Virgin’s corona when she stands in front of a painting) had set in motion the zany plot incidents, will seek refuge this time in the Marquise’s home, along with Sor Rata. The noblewoman is thus willing to be a patroness of a more secular and modern refuge for women who have fallen by the wayside in the Madrid movida. Sor Rata seems ready to publish under her own name and become a popular woman writer; the contrast with Teresa de Jesús, another nun-writer whose televised autobiography was aired the same year, is striking. That the television series Teresa de Jesús, with its mitigation of the miraculous and mystical and its insistence upon the socially constructive influence of the nun saint on Spanish progress into the future, should air the same year that Entre tinieblas was made (to be followed by Extramuros the following year) is certainly a paradox. The former emblematizes the very “institutionalization of culture” that pop avant-gardists like Almodóvar disdained as a continuation of similar efforts on the opposite side of the political spectrum during the Franco years (Vernon and Morris 6). In his film the repressed taboos that were stuffed literally into the back room for so long (like Sor Perdida’s pet tiger) still haunt democratic, now socialist Spain. The visions of Entre tinieblas are drug-fueled, with Sor Estiércol immersedPage 128 → in psychedelia while cooking and Yolanda having nightmares of a bound religious icon while going through withdrawal from heroin. Taking Molina’s democratized sixteenth-century saint and the kaleidoscopic view of Madrid in Entre tinieblas together, we have both reason and the monstrous hallucinations that emerge from the sleep of reason, as in Goya’s haunting Caprichos etching El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (1797–99). Exactly twenty years after Entre tinieblas, as a world cinematic auteur rather than an underground upstart, Almodóvar returned to the religious genre in vengeance mode with La mala educación.17 The importance of this film as a touchstone for his work on personal trauma, gaining a perspective on the past, and social testimony makes an analysis of its recycling of the religious genre essential. Víctor Fuentes amassed the many interviews in which the director insinuated that he had been a victim of similar abuse in his school run by Salesian priests or that he witnessed such abuse firsthand (“Autobiography” 431–32). From the parody of the religious genre seen in Entre tinieblas, La mala educación takes us closer to the antireligious movie, by means of its denunciation of the social vices and flaws of those charged with representing and officiating over the Roman Catholic religion. This is akin to the change from ludic portrayal of substance abuse in the earlier film to the focus on its destructive consequences in the later one (Epps and Kakoudaki 9). However, certain kinds of worship are still worthwhile in the Almodóverian cosmos. For a more pervasively antireligious film one must look to Amenábar’s Ágora, which

critiques the validity of faith in anything beyond the material world. We should look to scientists and mathematicians as our spiritual leaders, in his view. Medem, as we shall see, prefers to strike a balance between a grand design set by Providence and the absence of a meaningful divinity in our lives in practical terms; while a plan for humanity exists on some level, it is forever out of reach to those who seek to harness it or codify it. By the twenty-first century, there is barely a religious genre to speak of from within Spanish borders. A 2008 collected volume of fourteen essays that deal specifically with contemporary Spanish movie genres, for example, does not contain a single one devoted to the topic (Beck and Rodríguez Ortega v–vi).18 Horror, much of it albeit with religious undertones, accounts for four out of the fourteen pieces, with the thriller or neo-noir coming in second, and the musical placing in third position. The comedy, while dominant in terms of box-office appeal (Torrente) is mentioned in the introduction (Beck and Rodríguez Ortega 13). To read the religious in late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century Spanish cinema is still significant, especially considering recent inquiries into the role of Catholicism in Spanish Page 129 →history and literature by Stanley Payne and Noel Valis, respectively. However, it must be done indirectly, by observing the metaphysical elements of life extension in Amenábar’s films, the grand design that hides behind seemingly random events in Medem’s fictive worlds, and the postmodern destabilizing of clerical roles in Almodóvar. The late eighties through the nineties witnessed a resurgence of historical and literary topics in Spanish film, particularly concerning the Civil War, and the role of church and clergy in siding with the Nationalist insurrection was emphasized as never before (as in Réquiem por un campesino and La lengua de las mariposas), with the occasional exception made for the radical priest or nun (the Miguel Bosé and Ariadne Gil roles in Libertarias). At the same time, the Vatican fanned the flames of Spanish indignation by canonizing clergy whose chief merit for sainthood was having been martyred by leftists. La mala educación constitutes nothing short of moral outrage at the Catholic clergy’s sexual abuse of children and young people that the director claims to have witnessed firsthand in his youth. The abuse was consistently hidden and denied by church authority until the end of the twentieth century. When the scandals became known, it shook the foundations of traditionally Catholic societies in Ireland, Spain, and Italy, as well as Catholic-dominant immigrant communities in Canada, Australia, and the United States. One more institution that had been invested with the public’s trust was exposed as contingent upon the basest human drives. Societies of belief were threatened with dissolution into postmodern skepticism and insolvency due to litigation. Almodóvar’s approach to this traumatic phenomenon combines social testimony with a destabilization of the usual abuser/victim paradigms. To this end it teases out contradictions present in the priest, monk, or nun story, a prominent subtype of the Spanish religious movie during the first two decades of the Franco dictatorship. The religious genre of the forties and fifties consisted about equally of films with a supernatural or transcendent dimension involving biblical figures and the saints, alongside more down-to-earth movies chronicling the lives of heroic clergy, often missionaries. In both of these subtypes, the hero worship of a conflated religious and patriotic theme is the raison d’être for this kind of movie, as noted by Virginia Higginbotham (21). The focus on clergy is part of why the genre as a whole was often referred to as cine de curas. El canto del gallo in the midfifties opened a small rift for the admission of human weakness on the part of the clergy, in contrast to the hero worship in clerical films of the first ten postwar years. More blatant denunciations of wrongdoing on the part of priests were left to the cinemas of foreign nations, and were often banned from Spanish theaters. The background of the Page 130 →Cristeros revolution in Mexico made possible the shocking woman’s picture with María Félix in 1958,Miércoles de Ceniza. The protagonist Victoria is raped by a young parish priest, setting the scene for her bitter, lifelong repudiation of Catholicism. The rape is portrayed as almost inadvertent and natural: the priest surprises her among the rushes along the bank of a river, and while rescuing her from drowning, gives in momentarily to desire by ravishing her while she is still semiconscious. He hurries back to church to make a heartfelt and sincere confession before his superior, who chastises him. Since his repentance is real, there is no contemplation of removing him from interactions with the faithful; he remains in his position and Victoria spots him in church, horrifying her and turning her away from religion for good. His sin is depicted as natural and almost blameless; it is Victoria’s flaw as a woman with hurt pride that she cannot forgive and forget, carrying a grudge that results in her causing great damage to herself and others throughout the rest of the movie, until she finally realizes that she has fallen in love with a virtuous priest who refuses to succumb to her charms.

The inspiration Almodóvar received from the mid-twentieth-century woman’s picture has always been palpable (Acevedo-Muñoz Almodóvar 6). This is visually credited in Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, with direct quotation from Joan Crawford in Johnny Guitar. The Hollywood brand of woman’s picture revolved around a strong, resilient female protagonist who faces masculine treachery in a world controlled by men; this gender-based variation on film noir shows women at a disadvantage playing by male rules. If the emulation of Sara Montiel provides a glorious and glossy surface for the movie-within-a-movie of La mala educación, its dramatic entanglements with the tradition of the clerical dramatic genre originate elsewhere. Montiel’s nun stories were only tangentially concerned with religion and the clergy. The convent in her movies was a place of temporary escape from the outside world with its ravaging desires, a site for the contemplation of past transgressions, which form the real intrigue of the plot. The Spanish-language counterpart to the woman’s picture or tearjerker (known in Spain as the lacrimosa, or película de llorar) is more closely represented by Mexican melodramas of the fifties made as vehicles for María Félix. She incarnated the self-sacrifice of Joan Crawford plus a toughness and bitterness not often seen in the English-language tearjerker. The aforementioned Miércoles de Ceniza is thus a building block for La mala educación. In both movies, the ultimate act of clerical violation of the faithful’s trust is committed among tall reeds by the waterside, in an otherwise idyllic setting. The early abuse sets in motion a cycle of immorality and antisocial behavior for the victims, who place more importance on ex-actingPage 131 → revenge than on recovering their well-being. For Victoria, played by María Félix, being raped by a stranger only to find him distributing ashes in church soon afterward sets her on a course of religion-hating and grudge-bearing that extends to her family. She refuses to forgive her mother, whose adulterous affair leads to Victoria’s father’s suicide. She uses her inheritance to run a bordello in an opulent mansion, and rides roughshod over a kind-hearted, long-suffering suitor. The hard-boiled heroine is softened predictably when she falls in love with a mysterious stranger, and of course that stranger has to be a priest in disguise. After deflecting her advances and revealing his identity, the priest gradually melts Victoria’s resentment and turns her toward reconciliation with the church with statements like, “Confesar es librarse del pecado . . . es casi ser perdonado” (To confess is to rid oneself of sin . . . it is almost to be forgiven). La mala educación also quotes visually from the musicals of Sara Montiel, who played a nun for a portion of two of her musical vehicles. Montiel is the perfect diva for the simulation of exaggerated femininity practiced by transvestite entertainers. As an homage to this icon of the Spanish, Mexican, and Hollywood screen, who was rumored to have counted Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Miguel Mihura, Ernest Hemingway, and Indalecio Prieto among her lovers, Gael García Bernal creates one of the most stunning images of his career, with the help of costume designer Jean-Paul Gaultier, and makeup artist Ana Lozano. Bernal’s character Juan or Ángel, also known onstage as Záhara and falsely as Ignacio, is an empty simulacrum who imitates the imitators. Devoid of any true attachment to the musical star, he follows the motions and re-creations of others. Montiel herself was an idol from the Franco era who managed to embody conformity and transgression at once in what D’Lugo terms a “slip zone” (“Postnostalgia” 372). While Ignacio’s surgically constructed female body is hard to gaze upon, Juan’s artificial reenactment of an equally artificial screen goddess is imbued with an unmistakable transcendence and immortality. For Fuentes, Juan’s Záhara is the one character who remains “tantalizingly alive on-screen” after the four principals have been sacrificed like so many Fallas figures (“Autobiography” 443). La mala educación learned well from models such as the Montiel musical for dazzling iconography and from the Mexican tearjerker for its twists and turns.19 It is prepared to go beyond them in its indictment of sexual misbehavior on the part of the clergy. By 2004 the time was ripe in Spain for a cinematic response to the sex scandals that began erupting in the last decade of the twentieth century.20 One of the first was in New York City in 1989, with the accusation that Father Bruce Ritter, who had founded CovenantPage 132 → House in Greenwich Village to shelter young runaways and drug addicts, had been involved in liaisons with young men in his care. Allegations against many other Catholic clergy followed. The highest profile case was that of Paul Geoghan, which transpired from 1998 until he was killed in prison in 2003. World cinema responded to the outrage more decisively than Roman Catholic leaders. The Irish movie The Magdalene Sisters (2002) exposed the cruelty of confining wayward young women to a convent run by severe nuns, a situation similar to one portrayed more benignly in the two “Micaelas” chapters of Galdós’s Fortunata y Jacinta. As in La mala educación, the abusive past to which The Magdalene Sisters returns is the sixties. Soon after these two movies were made, John Patrick

Shanley’s Broadway play Doubt: A Parable gave a nun the task of ferreting out misdeeds committed by a charismatic priest; it became the 2008 motion picture Doubt. In 2006 Amy J. Berg screened her documentary Deliver Us from Evil on a long string of pedophilic crimes by a single Northern Californian priest. Almodóvar’s entry in the category of denunciation of Catholic clerical wrongdoing is appropriately baroque, gender-bending, esperpentic, and filled with postmodern parodies that pay tribute to his true objects of worship, the stars and films of the golden age of the motion picture. Curiously synchronized with the early nineties, when the sex abuse scandals were just starting to come to light, Marsha Kinder clarified the homoeroticism of movies concerning the religious life in a Roman Catholic context in her analysis of Marcelino, pan y vino. This movie gives one an uneasy feeling of sexual repression from the start, and Kinder’s Freudian interpretation articulated the metaphoric and unspeakable crossing of boundaries between a little boy and his male religious caretakers and male Godhead. She highlighted the fetishism of Catholic imagery that pervades this film, with a focus on hands. As discussed in the previous chapter, the basic lines of Kinder’s analysis of Marcelino pan y vino can be applied to many other religious movies. Fetishism and homoeroticism are brought to an even higher level of intensity in Rafael Gil and Vicente Escrivá’s 1954 El beso de Judas. With La guerra de Dios, the disquieting crossing of boundaries between priest and children (a latent condition for abuse) occurs when the new parish priest decides to coach the youngsters in soccer; he approaches the children first as a means of converting their parents and buys them uniforms. Also lurking in the atmosphere is Viridiana, an inspiring intertext that combines anticlericalism with corruption and fetishism. While the pedophilic character in Buñuel’s opus is not a priest but the novice’s uncle by marriage, and his pedophilia is only hinted at (in his gifting of a jump rope Page 133 →to his maid’s daughter, whom he then ogles while she uses it), Don Jaime as portrayed by Fernando Rey makes a model for the trajectory of Father Manuel/Berenguer’s character. Both seduce and corrupt minors under their care and divert them toward wantonness (though young Viridiana’s age is unstated, she is implied to be just coming of age, and Don Jaime has been a paternal figure for her), and both depart from sexually exploitative behavior when they fall in love for real, and this in turn brings about their destruction. The nuns of Viridiana cater to the sexual craving of a donor in hopes of increasing his generosity. To achieve this they do not hesitate to “sacrifice” the virginal body of their novice. This devouring of the bodies of the young becomes molestation and rape by a clergyman in La mala educación. The motif of cross-dressing, present in Don Jaime’s modeling of his late wife’s bridal trousseau prior to ravishing his niece, and still more comically, in the scruffiest beggar’s donning of a girdle, petticoat, and wedding veil for the orgiastic dance scene that follows the Last Supper tableau, becomes baroquely ornate and postmodern/hyperreal in La mala educación. Záhara’s perfect transformation into femme fatale is mediated by the iconic figure of Sara Montiel, much as the real Ignacio’s bitter hunt for revenge is modeled on Maria Félix’s fallen avenging angel in Miércoles de ceniza. La mala educación has a fetishistic poetics of its own; instead of the hands or feet that jump out from religious films of the repressed Franco era, a tension evolves throughout between the male mouth, or orality, and the buttocks (not to limit the area to the anus because the contours of the male bottom are just as important). Ángel /Juan exhibits an exaggerated feminine vulnerability around the lips as he lip-synchs to “Quizás.” The movie’s edgiest scene concerns his delivery of oral sex to a young man too inebriated to care. Orality is also associated with the endless talkiness of the film, one conversation or visita after another that delves deeper into a traumatic past. Confession is elicited through the mouth: in keeping with the abuse of power and sexual politics, the confessional mode, despite its liberating effect in Miércoles de Ceniza, merely serves to keep the subjugated enslaved to the more powerful in Almodóvar’s world. Mouths and bottoms are continually referenced for their role in man-with-man sexuality, as well as for the vulnerability they signify, as we learn that the real Ignacio never got a chance for a healthy love life. He sings for his abuser at suppertime in the artificially high voice of a castrato; his sexual autonomy has been clipped in its infancy and, robbed of an authentic relationship with his friend Enrique, he falls into a cycle of substance abuse, body alterations that “perform” once again his role as a victim, and futile revenge and blackmail. While it would have been possible for the director to deal with the transgendered Page 134 →process of the original Ignacio as self-affirming and positive, it is played decidedly as part of his overall pattern of self-destruction (linked to “drug addiction and death,” as Ballesteros aptly puts it, 94).

His one constructive action as an adult is to reach out in writing to his childhood friend Enrique Goded, now a director in the creative context of the Madrid movida. However, even this contact mutates into the realm of the hyperreal, with the relationship taking the physical form of his younger brother Juan, who simulates like a chameleon whatever role will get him to the next step in his quest for celebrity. If Triana-Toribio posits that ¿Qué he hecho yo parar merecer esto? , filmed during the time span that it dramatizes, “is a story of the migrant rural poor, the urban dispossessed of Spain in the 1980s” (226), La mala educación reaches further back in time to the sixties for another form of dispossession that was not recognized at either of these past moments: sexual selfhood stolen by a respected pillar of society, one that was closely associated with the rhetoric and the structure of the Francoist dictatorship. The segment of the story that occurs in the early eighties predates by a slim margin the impact of another form of sexual trauma with special relevance for the gay community, the AIDS epidemic (this is perhaps hinted at in Father Manolo’s sickliness when he reemerges as Mr. Berenguer). Ignacio’s and Juan’s origins go back to an impoverished matriarchal Galician family; from there they transplanted themselves to Valencia for the portion of the narrative that transpires in 1977, with the democratic transition in process.21 This phase Almodóvar characterizes with parchesi colors, mirroring a board game typical of the era. Smith refers to the masochistic aesthetic of ¡Átame!, which opens with kitschy images of Christ and Mary, emptied of their content. (Desire Unlimited 113); Acevedo-Muñoz pinpoints the start of the queer appropriation of pious symbols as the imprinting of Yolanda’s face on the Mother Superior’s handkerchief, culminating in the latter’s pietà-like position in her subordinate’s arms at the end of Entre tinieblas (Almodóvar 47). For Paquita /Paco of La mala educación, religious objects are simply objects of value to be bartered for drugs and other necessities; the playfully camp attitude toward religious paraphernalia and iconography has vanished, but the masochistic aesthetic remains. As D’Lugo explains, Jameson’s concept of “postnostalgia” is one of the keys to unlocking the obsession with the past, expressed in religious iconography or gay icons such as Sara Montiel: “In a postnostalgic narrative, the text freezes the representation of the past, transforming it into an object of analysis that will enable the reading subject to scrutinize critically the distortions and contradictions inherent in historical representation” (“Postnostalgia” 376).22 Enrique investigates Ignacio’s story and directs the movie based on his script, making liberal departures of his own, as a means of freeing himself from an illusory, fetishized past. Page 135 → Enrique’s relationship with “Ignacio”/Ángel/Juan and his filming of La visita coincide with the early eighties, during the Madrid movida. His innovation on Ignacio’s story is to change Záhara’s escape into her murder at the hands of the abusive priest’s assistant. Four years earlier, the original Ignacio had mailed his story to the now former priest to blackmail him, but wound up a victim of Berenguer and Juan, just managing to finish his story and a letter to Enrique before succumbing to the intentional heroine overdose they gave him. Ignacio and Enrique were ten years old when Father Manolo/Berenguer molested and then raped Ignacio, expelling Enrique in order to get him out of the way. The choice of 1964 for the backstory is no accident, since it was the year Breakfast at Tiffany’s opened, supplying the central gay icon of Holly Golightly as lovable hustler, and the melancholic theme song “Moon River,” sung in Spanish translation by a preadolescent Ignacio. Page 136 →The visual analogy within Enrique’s film of La visita equates the movie house or theater with a house of worship. The church, in contrast, feels cold and empty, and the priest’s confession of sin, with his arms out in the form of a cross, is unconvincing.23 The religious upbringing of his childhood, with its traumatic revelations of sexual abuse by the end of the twentieth century, elicited from Almodóvar his finest, most complex and nuanced work to date.24 After its indictment of the Roman Catholic Church in Spain sinks in, he practices another religion, oriented toward hyperreality, with veneration for motion pictures and by extension, performance, identity transformation, and simulation of immortal screen idols. The immortality offered by this religion is a constant projection, imitation, and recycling of celluloid images revered by cinephiles: divas like Sara Montiel, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Audrey Hepburn, and María Félix. While attendance at Mass and at the traditional religious movie is assumed female-dominant, with devotées

worshipping a male God guided by male clergy, La mala educación abandons women of flesh and blood in favor of an almost all-male cast. In Entre tinieblas, as noted by Acevedo-Muñoz, the male figures associated with Christian dogma are marginalized in contrast to the female desiring subjects (Almodóvar 43). La mala educación all but erases women from reality to circumscribe them as goddesses of a more lasting hyperreality; the church is supplanted by the (movie) theater. These are the two most impressive interiors in the film. One could say that if women did not exist, Almodóvar would have had to invent them. They are his objects of metafilmic deification; though there may be a sense of postnostalgic warning on an intellectual level about being caught in the trap of a repressive past, in visual and auditory terms, which are more visceral, Záhara reigns immortal. Whatever ignites “passion” (the last word emblazoned on the screen before the credits) is what deserves to live forever. Religious worship as renovated by Almodóvar has a more antiessentialist edge than Buñuel’s reinvention of an authentic Catholicism for modernity. Entre tinieblas goes the route of postmodern parody as theorized by Linda Hutcheon: quotation from revered cultural texts with playful irony rather than ridicule as a means of destabilizing the status quo. His placement of the divine in the hyperreal dimension of movie stars, to be mediated by burlesque simulacra of the same, is in harmony with Baudrillard’s notions of the simulation factor in postmodern culture. The road toward canonization for iconic film figures had already begun, in a more earnest high-modern vein, by Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena, and was continued in the Sartrean paradigms of Miró’s Gary Cooper que estás en los cielos (1980), in Page 137 →which the heroine retreats into nostalgia and fantasy by praying to photographs of her adolescent crush that she has elevated to a mythic level (Vernon 190). Almodóvar takes film worship over the top with the campy queer aesthetic of drag queens forming a bridge between female film goddesses and gay male acolytes. Transvestites take the place of priests in this new faith; crossing of the gender divide is a sacred power. A bridge between the human and the divine is also constructed in the afterlife comedy written and directed by Agustín Díaz Yanes (b. 1950),Sin noticias de Dios (2001). This film relies on the iconic presence of female stars Penelope Cruz, Victoria Abril, and Fanny Ardant to sustain a vision of the hereafter from which God is totally absent. In his place are puzzled managers and agents scrambling to cover their bases and keep their corporate model of either heaven or hell in good financial health. Both sides compete for the soul of a sinful boxer whose mother has interceded for his salvation. True to the Buñuelian model of the religious movie of theological debate, there is reference to inexplicable paradoxes (that an all-powerful God would allow evil to happen) and a Manichaeistic struggle between the flesh and the spirit. An attempt at transnational humor has French spoken in heaven, English in hell, and Spanish on earth. Mixing musical numbers (one character’s heaven is the illusion that she is an acclaimed chanteuse), dance (Cruz puts her ballet training to use to the tune of “Kung Fu Fighting”), spy movie, gangster, and film noir conventions, the mélange devolves into quirky social satire that rehashes the eternal questions without hope of happening upon fresh answers.

POSTMODERN SKEPTICISM VERSUS THE NEED TO BELIEVE Alejandro Amenábar (b. 1972) approaches religion with affinity for the rejection of modern metanarratives as espoused by Jean-François Lyotard. The Chilean transplant to Madrid used the Picasso Tower for the finale of Abre los ojos to simulate religious transcendence since the skyscraper is “itself a symbol of an improbable, futuristic Madrid, and in a way a simulacrum of eternal corporate life” (Perriam 213). In Amenábar films, the assimilation of the individual’s free will and rational choice into any preconceived pattern is objectionable and leads directly into abject horror. Tesis goes beyond good and bad, where the naive fascination with evil threatens to kill the spectator/investigator whose appetite has been whetted by popular culture. Abre los ojos casts the prolongation of life based on ability to pay as a source of terror and loss of self. The Others posits religiousPage 138 → fanaticism as part and parcel of the madness that causes a mother to kill her two young children, in a twist on the springboard filmic text The Innocents, which targets repressed sexual desire in the manner of the Freudian metanarrative. Mar adentro, through its priest/patient dialogue, sides with the freedom to choose a dignified death over the horror of living in a dependent state. It portrays the life of a handicapped person as a return to abject infancy rather than as the possibility for a differently abled but altogether viable existence. The epic Ágora portrays Christianity as intolerant and evil from the beginning, stamping out knowledge that is based on empirical observation. The Kristevan notion of the need to know lies at the heart of the child’s struggle for identity as a

speaking subject. Christianity engulfs the subject in abject ignorance instead. This melodrama of reason versus faith sides with the atheists of contemporary debate (Hitchens, Dawkins, Savater), bearing the signs of the culture wars that pit science against religion in an either-or dichotomy. Like several of his contemporaries (including Álex de la Iglesia), Amenábar appears locked in a struggle against remnants of Catholicism that refuse to vanish entirely. They project its visions of a hereafter onto gothic undead and ghosts. The horror film resuscitates many of the themes involved in the religious genre. The latter has grown scarce in postmodern culture, but the former thrives and is both profitable and appealing to auteurist directors. Scorsese sought to make his most personal statement of the eighties through the religious film, with a Last Temptation of Christ that renders homage to Pasolini’s Vangelo. In the first decade of the twenty-first century he switched to the horror film, with a version of the incognizant-protagonist narrative called Shutter Island. This illustrates the entrance of horror into the dignified art-house domain while retaining box-office viability. For making meaning out of life in an age of growing instability and shifting epistemic paradigms, horror is more adaptable and certainly more marketable. For directors of Catholic background, it also offers a means of confronting past demons of authoritarian sexuality. Once again, Buñuel foreshadowed this trend by blending religion with horror in the sinister ending of L’Âge d’or, the gothic family romance of the first part of Viridiana, and the triumph of Satan in Simón del desierto. The other major Spanish precursor in the horror genre is Jesús Franco, whose Gritos en la noche (1962) was arguably the first full-fledged horror movie produced in Spain. Horror was a “safe” genre in the last fifteen years of the dictatorship, as long as specific religious references were deleted (the penetration by crucifix in The Exorcist was of course censored in 1975).25 Gritos en la noche includes a half-dead young woman reclining in a glass coffin not unlike that of a Cristo Page 139 →yacente or an exhibited saint’s body. However, the mad doctor and serial murder by monstrous proxy plot adheres to traditional morality with showgirls and prostitutes punished for their uninhibited ways, while Buñuel had twisted a “good girl” into a bad one in Viridiana, breaking down the distinction. The gothic motif in literature, a precursor to romanticism, has been traced to its inception as a championing of Protestant values over Catholic ritual and dogma in British novels of the late eighteenth century.26 For Amenábar, the gothic serves to paint all faith-based conceptions of reality as irrational at heart and conducive to insanity. However, he often references Catholicism as specifically enmeshed in magical thinking and ritualistic reliance on special artifacts such as the rosary and the communion veil. Amenábar is unique among Spanish directors in that he was born in Chile to a Spanish mother and a Chilean father, and moved to Spain in early childhood. He is also unusual among immigrants in that he studied his craft in Spain with Spanish mentors (such as Miguel Picazo). Neither an insider in Spanish culture nor a total outsider, and professing an openly gay orientation, Amenábar rejects and denounces Christian tradition explicitly in his films. He not only targets hypocrisy, exploitation, and excessive repression as Almodóvar does. For Amenábar, the very desire for immortality or for measuring one’s morality against a communal standard leads into abject horror through loss of individuality. The Others situates religious fanaticism at the core of a tragic slaying of children in a desolate mansion.27 The place specified is Jersey in the Channel Islands, for heightened isolation and proximity to the enemy (as dialogue recounts, the islands were invaded and occupied by German forces in the Second World War, and many of the British residents fled), although the filming locale was on the outskirts of Santander in the Cantabrian region of northern Spain.28 The islands are closer to France than to England and form an ideal no-man’s-land and threshold for the living and the dead to interact. The year cited is 1945, with the men ceasing to fight on the front. One woman is still in a sort of limbo. The young mother, portrayed by Nicole Kidman, must also deal with caring for her two children who are afflicted with extreme photosensitivity, which forces them all to live in an artificial twilight. Her indeterminate, borderline situation is worsened by not knowing whether her husband survived the war, placing her identity as a married woman or a widow in uncertainty. The opening words highlight the strict religious upbringing that informs her worldview: she narrates a brief sevenday creation story in storybook fashion, insisting that only God could have made all things because in Page 140 →the beginning only He existed. The just-so assumption about the origin of the universe, paired with the childish phrasing, constitute the first clue that this is an unreliable narrator whose version of truth is warped by preconceived, even self-serving, notions. Her words also point to the cultural wars raging at the end of the

twentieth and start of the twenty-first centuries between the creationist and scientific/Darwinian perspectives on the origin of life. Illustrations occupy the screen and the soft music of a flute plays in the background in a quotation from El espíritu de la colmena, which uses both elements in its opening credits (in similarity to its own model, To Kill a Mockingbird). While the mother’s voice is comforting as she explains God’s creation of the world, the drawings become progressively more terrifying as children’s faces react to an unknown and ominous menace and the music swells to a lush orchestral shudder. As Aviva Briefel notes, the prologue places viewers in the position of the children who have already fallen victim to their mother’s irrationality (106). This opening sequence skillfully sums up the film’s message on the ultimate impact of the Catholic, Christian, or any theistic belief system; that it has the capacity to take away any solace that it provides children and deprive them instead of their status as speaking subjects. The same confidence in a benign Providence and intelligent design to the universe can become an intentional evil that controls all and stamps out the vulnerable. Grace may seem a loving and protective mother, but as the film progresses, her mental trait of taking “leaps of faith,” combined with psychological rigidity and paranoia, causes her to jump to a conclusion that snuffs out her own life and that of her children. In the narrative present of the film, she continues to believe in the fictions of her own mind, until the facts are finally presented to her in a séance. The need to believe is aligned with rejection of empirical reality, and the resulting illusory beliefs can prove fatal. The Others, in taking aim at the maternal instinct gone wrong, also subverts the Marianist cult in Catholic devotional culture. The obsession with an idealized, heavenly mother can form an important step in the perpetuation of an authoritarian sexual system. Mitchell argues that the organized sexual predation of Catholic society, involving banishing desire through mortification of the flesh, enforced celibacy for the clergy, and surrender to religious authority in body and soul, appealed to one generation of mothers to the next through the symbolic power vested in the figure of the Virgin Mary (24). All mothers conceivably shared in her influence and social significance in compensation for their lack of real power in the patriarchal hierarchy. This enticed mothers to deliver children into a system of sexual self-denial that could potentially make them victims of clerical sexual abuse Page 141 →and other consequences of extreme repression. Though Mitchell does not delve into the relevance of his theory in same-sex scenarios, the rejection of the homosexual orientation as one of its extreme forms of denial is doubtless at the heart of Amenábar’s targeting of the maternal combined with religious fanaticism and turning Grace Stewart into an anti-Mary in her horrific treatment of her children. Making the murderess an actual mother rather than a mother-surrogate like the governess in The Turn of the Screw and the first movie adaptation of this Henry James novella (The Innocents, 1961) bears witness to the Catholic-gothic in the director’s vision that unites religion with abject horror in the figure of the maternal body. The twist in The Others, involving the dead being unaware of having crossed the threshold into the other world, implies a continuation of life beyond death (an overlooking of death that Briefel finds reassuring to the viewer, making of death a narratological happenstance rather than a metaphysical phenomenon, 100). In this continuation, one is held fast to a particular place if there is an unresolved issue or a denial of the truth.29 This responds to Grace’s conviction that there are precisely four hells, each one designed for a particular kind of soul (the damned, purgatory, unbaptized children, and the just from before Christ); none of these correspond to the one in which she and her children are living; the film thus posits a fifth hell, for the religiously delusional. Religious fanaticism is part of the fabric of this young mother’s madness and drives her to commit an unimaginable atrocity as a twist on the earlier model for The Others, The Innocents. The latter film, based more closely on James’s The Turn of the Screw, implies that female hysteria caused by sexual frustration is the impetus that sends a governess into homicidal insanity with pedophilic overtones. In Amenábar’s rereading, the modern metanarrative of Freudian hysteria is replaced by a discrediting of the older Christian metanarrative. Not only is the creation story from Genesis quoted in this film; the older child, who is studying to receive first Holy Communion, reads to her mother from a passage about Abraham. Abraham is the parent whose faith was put to the test when Yahweh asked him to sacrifice his son Isaac. That Abraham was prepared to take his son’s life upon hearing the divine command is converted by reference in The Others into a chilling scriptural precedent for child murder under the influence of pseudo-mystical paranoia. Although at first Grace has no memory of having slain her children and taken her own life (only the impression of past trauma), once her memory is recovered in the cathartic sequence of the film she remembers the moments afterward too, when she believed that God had given her a second chance by restoring

the children to life. True to the Christian paradigm Kristeva elucidates as the murdered Page 142 →father unable to intervene to save the son, the children’s father had already died in the war and his ghost can only inquire about them after the fact. The veiled Communion dress is transformed into the customary ghost outfit; early in the film the children insist that all ghosts wear white and look as though covered by a sheet. When Anne dons her Communion apparel, it ironically matches her status in the spirit world and she is finally dressed for the part she plays. The veil also plays into the film’s references to the art-house supernatural thriller Don’t Look Now, which features parental guilt surrounding the death of a child, a séance with a blind woman, and age metamorphosis. Don’t Look Now warns of the danger of being trapped in the past; it uses the occult as an alternative belief system capable of providing wisdom in a nonrational way to modern people who are too engulfed in reason, logic, and common sense to listen to their feelings. Traditional belief enters the picture in the father’s church restoration; appropriately the church and other older buildings in Venice harbor threats, although Christian belief itself is not targeted as the source of danger. The Others anchors itself more firmly in the Catholic belief system with references to praying the rosary, asking the Virgin Mary for forgiveness (a deformation of Catholic devotion to Mary, since Catholics ask for Mary’s intervention and only God can forgive), and the traditional white Holy Communion garb for children. Don’t Look Now warns of staying too rational when irrational intuition should be heeded. According to The Others each person must save him-or herself by use of reason and lucid perception. However, even after coming to terms reasonably with the facts, Grace and her children are stuck in a living death, or hell, of their own invention. As Eagleton states of the death drive and its pseudo-immortality: “It is a state in which we prevent ourselves from dying for real by clinging desperately to our morbid pleasure in death as a way of affirming that we are alive” (21). A house seemingly taken over by intruders has important precedents in the Hispanic literary and filmic canon. Julio Cortázar’s “Casa tomada” and Buñuel’s El ángel exterminador deal architecturally with the static qualities of oligarchy, with an odd couple composed of a brother and sister in the former ceding one room after another to invisible invaders, and a collection of dinner party guests held hostage by an uncanny force of inertia in the latter as they revert to barbaric behaviors. The stubbornness of the ruling classes in holding on to their possessions, such as real estate, and demanding their social privilege, even beyond death, is perhaps an unwitting twist of The Others that likens it to these two central texts of the Hispanic gothic. Grace’s mantra of “This house is ours” rings much more convincingly than Page 143 →her other refrain, of professing love for the children she killed. Like ownership of property, class identity also transcends mortal existence in The Others. The persistence and rigidity of the class system is such that after death, those who served their social superiors naturally turn up to work as nannies, maids, and gardeners again, without the possibility (or need, presumably) of drawing wages. The servant class is thus more rigid than it would be in a caste system, since the caste confers identity from birth to death. The haute bourgeois family must face the fact that their mortal lives have been extinguished and they now have to share their home with living inhabitants of their own social class, but being waited on from dawn to dusk by the faithful and uncomplaining working class is not a perishable privilege. The final comforting exchange between Grace and Mrs. Mills conveys the tacit obedience and subservience of the latter; she will be content to serve the mistress afternoon tea for eternity. While no doubt an unintended result of Amenábar’s refutation of the Christian master narrative, this perpetuation of class identity beyond death reflects globalized capitalism’s concentration of wealth in an ever smaller percentage of affluent individuals and the widening gap between those who serve and those who are served, a master/servant split so powerful it crosses the chasm into the next life. The Others supplies primal horror that can be illuminated by the Kristevan concept of the remainder. The children’s hypersensitivity to light is poorly worked out in the plot. It remains ambiguous whether this is part of the mother’s delusional state or a physical pathology of her offspring. The condition, whether real or imagined, enforces a womb-like shrouding of the house in daylight hours (which Briefel notes makes it resemble a movie house, developing its metafilmic dimension). The uterine qualities present in the gothic building per se are thus intensified, and there is no way to expel the remainder of the maternal creation and the maternal destruction within. The new intruders (or rightful owners in the capitalist system) withdraw in horror, but others will invade again and periodically be sensed. The cycle of the house filling up and emptying will continue although these

remnants (Grace, her children, and hired help) refuse to vacate the premises. The sense of a womb that has not been purged, whether of the remainder of a menstrual cycle or of a pregnancy, lends a monstrously abject horror to The Others. We never see a corpse, yet the entire film is about the Kristevan infection of life with death (Powers of Horror 4). The specificity of the maternal in bringing out the abject in Amenábar has strong religious, psychological, and political connotations. Perhaps we are willing to continue to identify with these ghosts because they love each Page 144 →other and their property in ways that are familiar. However, the mother’s dogmatic and perseverant beliefs in the face of evidence to the contrary, while condemning others’ beliefs as superstition, and her willingness to commit violence based upon magical thinking, place the viewer on alert. The horror genre and religious themes in contemporary Spanish cinema have also found their way into the work of Álex de la Iglesia (b. 1965). El día de la bestia (1995), produced by Almodóvar, goes back to the ritual/ scriptural wellsprings of the Catholic gothic horror film with sources such as The Exorcist and The Omen. A subsequent pinnacle in this vein of scriptural horror was achieved by Lars von Trier’s Antichrist, which posits a woman as a possible modern version of the Beast from the Book of Revelation, with extreme consequences for her husband. Von Trier’s film is filled with grotesque parody of this filmic tradition through excesses of violence and misogyny. De la Iglesia engages in an equally grotesque parody of scriptural/ritual horror that derives from esperpento and Goyaesque dark humor.30 De la Iglesia’s version of the Antichrist seems tinged with anticlericalism in the form of a maverick priest who prepares the way for the Beast by committing misdeeds, such as pushing a street mime down a subway stairwell. However, his evil behavior has the ultimate goal of enticing the Antichrist, so that the priest may then vanquish him and keep the Apocalypse at bay. El día de la bestia thus dramatizes the legacy of excusing clerical misdeeds because of the ultimate good priests perform, a crucial part of the Roman Catholic sex scandals and the buried cultural memory of Francoism. The Beast is portrayed straight out of Goya as a goat that walks upright. He has selected a symbol of global capitalism and Spanish European integration called the Puerta de Europa, twin inclined skyscrapers that were nearing completion at the time of filming. These Madrid towers hark eerily forward to the targeting of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center by Islamic terrorists as another pair of skyscrapers symbolizing the internationalization of the free market system. A chase sequence that parodies the Crucifixion has the three human antiheroes (the priest plus a heavy-metal music store clerk and a TV psychic) slung across an enormous neon Schweppes billboard, another mixture of apocalyptic Christianity and the encroachment of global capitalism into Spanish national territory. Much as the priest actively conjures up the Devil in order to fight him, this comedic horror romp celebrates the postmodern while rejecting it. As Marsh observed in his Gramscian analysis of popular comedy in the time of Franco, this genre by definition adopts conflicting attitudes, making identification of a single ideological position close to impossible (192). The warring ideologies of Berlanga comedies seem clear-cut compared to the Page 145 →mishmash of El día de la bestia, which simply unravels by the end into a meaningless anticlimax. The commercial destiny of El día de la bestia curiously matched its uneven critique of Spanish assimilation into postmodern late capitalism. As Vicente Rodríguez Ortega notes, it was dubbed into English, erasing much of its Spanish cultural specificity, and marketed as a standard horror movie rather than as a European art film or independent movie (52). By the 2010 film Balada triste de trompeta, de la Iglesia had become an acknowledged master of a postmodern Spanish grotesque/esperpentic mode, and was ready to put an arsenal of circus and religious imagery to the task of targeting and eradicating the final vestiges of Francoist National Catholic repression. From the Virgin whose apparition incites the clown-hero to revenge on a Day of Wrath, to the bishop’s mitre he wears once he has transformed himself into the avenger of Franco atrocities, to the Valley of the Fallen as locus of a finale that twists North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Phantom of the Opera into a madcap indictment of the horrors of the Civil War and dictatorship, de la Iglesia thoroughly subverts Catholic iconography in a film that has broken free of the classic horror genre. Only the sheer brutality and Spanish specificity of his vision may stand in the way of his internationalization as an auteur, a height Amenábar has already achieved. Amenábar confronted religious belief directly without the mediation of the horror genre or the gothic mode, and received his highest critical kudos to date, through the slightly fictionalized biographical movie Mar adentro. The director became interested in a news story that captivated the Spanish public for several years as Ramón

Sampedro, a tetraplegic from Galicia, petitioned authorities for assistance in terminating his life. Though healthy, he had never adapted to his paralysis, caused by diving into shallow water when he was nineteen, and he preferred to die rather than continue to suffer the indignity of being unable to care for himself or make the simplest movement through space. For five minutes the film dramatizes the arguments against the individual’s right to choose death in this case as presented by various Catholic clergy, including Salvador Paniquer. This is accomplished by voicing the objections in the dialogue of a character named Father Fernando, a wheelchair-bound priest. Amenábar has stated that he and cowriter Mateo Gil took two major liberties with the factual case; in addition to condensing several of the women who had fallen in love with Sampedro in his paralyzed state into the character of Julia, they also made the handicapped priest, who did visit Sampedro but who communicated with him by phone when his chair could not be lifted upstairs, an amalgam of the Catholic opponents of self-chosen euthanasia in the case (DVD commentary)Page 146 →. The screenwriters also added the fictional character of the beleaguered seminarian Brother Andrés, used as a go-between for the men who literally could not see eye to eye in the film’s mise-en-scène since Father Fernando’s state-of-the-art but cumbersome wheelchair could not be lifted to Sampedro’s bedroom, and the latter would not consent to being transported downstairs. Amenábar and Gil stack the deck against this clerical scapegoat by having him insult Sampedro and his devoted family after exhausting his stock of antieuthanasia arguments. He asserts that as human beings we are not the sole proprietors of our lives and that only God can see fit to end them. This finds no footing in the God-free worldview of rugged individualism espoused by Sampedro. By upbraiding the family for failing to keep the tetraplegic’s spirits elevated, Father Fernando epitomizes the insensitivity and disassociation from reality that have traditionally colored anticlerical representations of Catholic priests. After he scowls and turns his back on the family in his orally controlled wheelchair, the villain exits stage right. Father Fernando’s critique of the overly capitalist rhetoric of ownership applied to human life hints at the Marxist leanings of liberal priests in post–Vatican II Europe. Sampedro counters this argument with the historic leanings of the church toward privatization of property over collective ownership as in a socialist state. The filmmakers in turn undermine the priest’s superficial Marxism by focusing on the impressive vehicle that lowers Father Fernando’s high-tech conveyance to the ground, a customized, gleaming Volkswagen van. Sampedro on the other hand resists all commodification of his illness; if he cannot have simple pleasures he does not want technologically assisted mobility.31 Less convincing than the allegation of materialism against Roman Catholicism is the film’s handling of the Catholic stand on termination of human life. Amenábar and Gil once again try to paint the church spokesman with hypocrisy while Sampedro evinces the frankness of secular humanism. Sampedro asserts that the Catholic Church accepts the existence of capital punishment, and Father Fernando does not protest. In reality, although its opposition to it is less vocal than its stands on abortion and euthanasia, Catholicism does not uphold the execution of prisoners under any circumstances. What the scriptwriters may have in mind is the historical issue of Catholic collaboration with genocidal regimes. In the five minutes that the film affords to a meaningful theological/agnostic debate, it is not possible to draw a distinction between the historic collaboration of the Catholic hierarchy with murderous political factions and regimes of the Right and the contemporary social thought of Roman Catholicism as a separatePage 147 → entity. As a social institution, the church, like the state, lands firmly on the side of the foes of individualism for opposing Sampedro’s desire for death by artificial means. Similar to Mar adentro in its reference to a recent case that had been covered by Spanish media extensively, Javier Fesser’s 2008 film Camino swept the Goya Awards with the semifactual story of an adolescent cancer victim whose mother and sister are Opus Dei members. The young patient’s alleged devotion to Jesus is demystified by giving this name to a boy upon whom she has a crush. Rather than the simulacrum of saintly sacrifice that Opus Dei has constructed around her, the film celebrates her vibrancy. The inordinate influence of Opus Dei in canonization decisions is implied. This anti-hagiography of a real saint-in-process (Alexia González-Barros, 1971-1985) casts Catholicism as insensitive to human suffering, with flourishes of erotic vitalism provided by the playful comic-book style for which Fesser is popularly acclaimed within Spain. Amenábar indirectly targeted Catholicism in another sphere of Spanish culture, the lingering presence of religious-based public education, with his next film. Ágora is Spain’s most expensive production to date (50 million euros), by the director of Spain’s highest-grossing movie (The Others). The commercial success of The

Others, which had cost only $17 million to produce but grossed $200 million in theatrical release (Dixon 180), and the critical accolades garnered by the also relatively inexpensive Mar adentro, fueled the burgeoning of the director’s subsequent project into a truly epic spectacle along the lines of the secular sword-and-sandal epics of the new millennium. Most of these immense productions, such as Gladiator, 300, Troy, and The Immortals, combine live action and computer-generated images (eschewed by Amenábar, whose insistence on authenticity pushed the film above its original budget). Rodríguez Ortega observed that prior toÁgora, Amenábar had mastered the genre conventions of thriller, horror, and biopic, each time building upon a “transgeneric sentimental substratum anchored in the problematic of the heterosexual couple” with the result that “a genre-triggered crisis . . . impedes the full realization of a heterosexual match” (51). This remark uncannily predicts how the director would weave a love triangle into an ancient period epic; however, in this instance he would not achieve the same winning formula. Unlike Nicole Kidman’s boost of star power to The Others, Rachel Weisz was not able to lift Ágora out of the mire of story and character problems, and the commercial appeal of a cerebral epic was slight; it received a negligible distribution in the United States. This despite its concessions to the action genre, for this life of the fourth-century astronomer Page 148 →Hypatia features the destruction of the Library of Alexandria, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. At this time Christianity was changing from a persecuted religion of slaves into the dominant and official religion of the Roman Empire as the latter weakened from internal and external causes. Pagans are represented as the patrician or ruling class at first. Their multiple gods and goddesses are worshipped in a classical temple or agora. As the Christians gain more followers and support from the empire, they are able to force conversion on pagans who wish to hold office. At the same time, Jews enter the area, inciting the animosity of Christians who blame them for Christ’s death, while the Jews look down on Christianity as a bizarre offshoot of their own faith that mistakenly venerates one of their own people. On the sidelines of this conflict is Hypatia, a mathematician and astronomer who reveres science alone, which she calls philosophy. Hypatia is loosely based upon a historical figure, a woman who devoted her life to science and teaching and was known to have followers. Amenábar adapts her life story into that of a saint for the atheist/ agnostic cause and for secular education, while denouncing the unchristian behavior of St. Cyril, who was known to have arisen from the same milieu. Like Molina’s Teresa de Jesús, Ágora represents an effort to retrace the steps of a distinguished woman who lived centuries ago and who either had not received authentic cinematic treatment before (as with Teresa) or who simply had fallen into obscurity (as with Hypatia). While Molina’s Teresa emerged as a protofeminist role model suitable for democratic Spain, Hypatia is a ruggedly individualistic victim. Without the knack for or interest in reconciling her differences with patriarchal power structures, Hypatia was stoned by the Christians. Ágora succeeds where Teresa de Jesús falls a bit short in reconstructing the protagonist’s thought and her intellectual contributions to knowledge. The film is truly didactic concerning ancient astronomy and geometry. However, since none of Hypatia’s works have survived, Amenábar and Gil had to speculate about the exact discoveries she made. They often seem to overstate the case, for example when they position her as the first to theorize an elliptical orbit for the earth around the sun and the effect of gravity on falling objects. While Amenábar asserts that he wished to give all faiths portrayed in the film an equal footing, showing good and bad elements of each, the deck appears weighted against Christianity. The figure of Ammonius in particular is a stereotypical villain and con man. He is introduced like a Hindu fakir defying the element of fire as he walks across burning coals (with a visual implication that he carefully steps on areas that are not aflame). This supposedly proves the power of belief in Christ to his onlookers. He goes from charlatan to murderous bully when he subsequently hurls a skeptical pagan into the fire. Unprepared, the fallen patrician is badly burned. Ammonius will also be seen later in the film as the first to begin assaulting the Roman prefect, Orestes, in order to pressure him to fully accept Christ as the Messiah. He is heard rejecting Jesus’s Golden Rule by claiming that a mere mortal who tries to put it into practice is actually placing himself on the level of God. He similarly scoffs at examining the morality of his deeds by maintaining that whatever God allows him to get away with must be God’s will. What does not harmonize with this vilification is when he is shown teaching Hypatia’s slave Davus about Christian charity by distributing bread to the poor and sick. Rather than balancing the negative aspect of Christianity (intolerance) with the positive (charity), this scene appears to cast suspicion over the possibility of

goodness in the act of giving. It comes off as bribing the poor to make them join forces with the mob tactics of the Christians. Page 149 → The outcome of Ágora, based on the factual execution of Hypatia at the Christian patriarch Cyril’s instigation, creates an inversion similar to that Page 150 →of Buñuel’s La Voie lactée. The patriarch, saint, and doctor of the church (after the split, Cyril would be part of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria, but his feast day would be integrated into the Roman Catholic calendar as well) sinks in the viewer’s estimation, and a more heterodox icon is raised in the figure of Hypatia. Cyril is painted as a scheming fanatic; in a more ironic register, Buñuel’s Jesus is a boorish oaf and Mary an insufferably gloating mother. The traditional adversaries of the faith are elevated in status: Hypatia is made a saint and martyr for free thinkers who prefer science, logic, and reason over belief; for Buñuel the shrine of the uninhibited heretic Priscillian is the true destination of pilgrims. Ágora displays some of the same repressed erotic motifs to be found in the traditional religious genre under the Franco regime. Hypatia rejects carnal love and refuses to marry (or she may have married but remained a virgin). Amenábar and Gil chose to include a notorious but probably apocryphal anecdote that has her rebuffing a suitor by offering him a cloth stained with her menstrual blood. Including this scene in a film that otherwise follows modern rules of etiquette and conveys none of the strangeness of the ancient world, without Buñuelian irony or other mollifying factors, brings the movie to a dead halt dramatically from which it never recovers. Amenábar explains that he condensed the historical rejected suitor into the character of Orestes; it then stretches credibility that the two remain close friends and are seen laughing about the incident years later. Hence, problems of verisimilitude in a film that does purport to be strictly realist combines with inconsistency in the characterization of several main characters to mar this film and expose the rigidity of its premise to raise reason above belief. Both the character of Hypatia’s slave Davus and her mentor Aspasius are fictional creations for this hybrid historical film. Davus is a Christian convert who is nonetheless skeptical of the sect’s leaders and sympathetic to non-Christians. Davus is seen attempting to rape Hypatia during a Christian raid on polytheism; when he stops and offers her his sword instead so that she may avenge herself, she rewards him instead with his freedom. From this point onward Davus is on the outskirts of Hypatia’s life. He rushes to prevent her execution, but when confronted by a gang that has already apprehended her, like Peter he does not admit to knowing her. Instead, he waits for a chance to help her in her final moments. The conclusion of Ágora mirrors The Passion of the Christ in its depiction of blood and gore at each turn. The graphic use of violence in the religious movie serves both a devout stance such as Mel Gibson’s and the equally vehement antireligious one of Amenábar. For Hypatia this seems to point to an especially gruesome rendering of her being flayed alive with ceramic shards. However, Page 151 →the invented Davus steps in to rescue her from this death and give her one that is less painful yet eroticizes male-onfemale violence (one is reminded of the Spanish legal term for domestic violence as violencia de género, gender violence). The final embrace as Davus mercy-kills his mentor “with love” is almost as disconcerting as the curative rape Almodóvar places in Hable con ella. A subjective angle catches her last sight of . . . one of her beloved geometrical figures as she gazes heavenward, implying that the diffusion of her consciousness into the dimension of mathematical abstraction will be her afterlife. Ágora bears an interesting relationship to Buñuel’s Simón del desierto as well. St. Simeon Stylites would become an anchorite in what is now Syria. He was an ascetic and hermit of the sort for which early Egyptian Christianity was also known. This denomination would evolve into the Coptic Church of today. The proximity of the desert, with physical challenges that this landform poses to human life, shaped the early Christianity that arose nearby into a community that valued physical resistance to the elements. St. Mary of Egypt is another example; her lore was influential in medieval Spain through a translation of a French narrative of her life, the Vida de Santa María Egipciaca. People through the ages have marveled at the feats of endurance achieved by the anchorites of Egypt and Syria. Buñuel offered his subversive demythification of Simeon’s motivation, showing him as ruled by narcissism. In Ágora, the figure of Ammonium ties in with this tendency toward physical self-denial, to the point of exposure to injury by burning (with a note of masochism). As we have seen, Ammonium is painted as a near villain, with some allowance made for his charitable activities. The ascetic is then transformed into a sadistic bully

when he forces the pagan patrician to roll his way through the flames. Hence, Amenábar conflates asceticism, narcissism, masochism, and sadism in an indictment much more damaging to religious heritage than Buñuel’s irreverent psychoanalysis. The ascetic, as mentioned above more of a fakir who puts on a spectacle for the crowd, harks forward with his pyrotechnics to the legacy of intolerance that would run its course through Spanish history as the Inquisition. Like Almodóvar and de la Iglesia, Amenábar takes the Catholic tradition to task for the consequences of its repression and persecution of difference. However, Almodóvar substitutes another belief system, lovingly crafted and based on the metafilmic elements in his work. This worship centers on the icons of the screen themselves, emulation of them and creation of new (albeit recycled) icons. We can trace this as well back to the combined metaphysical and metafilmic dimension in Erice’s El espíritu de la colmena, in which the persecuted messianic figure is equated with a movie Page 152 →monster from Hollywood’s golden age (Frankenstein), which then rubs off onto the fugitive Maquis, whose appearance in the movie ends on a slab. Almodóvar’s infusion of divinity into big screen idols adds a gay and camp sensibility; performing the feminine for males is a circumvention of the heterosexual role imposed on all men, whether gay or straight. Hence quasi-religious reverence is attached to breaking gender boundaries to emulate a different simulacrum from what has been culturally designated for one’s gender. This makes more sense than Ken Russell’s scenes of worship of another simulacrum, the statue of Marilyn Monroe in Tommy. To worship the object of one’s desire is a short-lived quest that can end in conquest or finding another object; to become the subject of one’s worship is a kind of simulation that truly breaks the limits between self and world. Amenábar does not posit an alternative form of worship involving godlike figures. In other words, his creation is nondeistic; what emerges from his rejection of Christian metanarratives is scientism, a reliance on the findings of empirical research and enshrinement of the scientific method itself. Yet it does offer a saint/martyr for champions of reason against belief in the figure of Hypatia. Her dying glimpse of an oval leading to celestial light is the only transcendence for the worshipper of pure, impersonal mathematics and astronomy. As noted, Amenábar is unique among these critical directors in that he is an immigrant to the Spanish nation. If Amenábar is unusual in having escaped the same Catholic imprinting of the habitus on his religious imagination as his Spanish-born peers, it may well be attributed to his foreign upbringing and education. Even the lone-wolf director Julio Medem incorporates some degree of deism into his worldview in his ecologically inflected pantheistic designs of karma and fate. Medem (b. 1958) made a bold statement on Basque history in Vacas, then began his chain of movies that explore intersections of personal, regional, and national identity with reference to eroticism and ecology with La ardilla roja (1993). Medem aims to transcend the genre of movie romance by making whom we love part and parcel of who we are. Who we are is only partially answerable by examining the individual and the context. His opening onto the dimension of metaphysics gives his films bearing on the religious genre, and for this reason four of his best-known movies will be studied here. La ardilla roja begins with two characters in need of escape finding each other: a man who contemplates suicide over a lover’s rejection and a woman who is literally running for her life from an abusive relationship with an obsessive psychopath. Each one draws the other into a new relationship based as much on deception as on attraction and affection. Through constant parallels with an animal species, the red squirrel, viewersPage 153 → come to see Jota and Sofía as adaptable and resourceful beings enmeshed with their habitat. Jota’s quick reflexes and running speed mirror the squirrel’s swiftness in pilfering food from humans (and alludes as well to Medem’s youthful distinction as national record holder for the hurdles, Jo Evans 17). Sofía is a fledgling zoologist who eventually is hired by the Madrid Zoo to care for the red squirrel and other animal species, but not before a horrific showdown between her new love and her pursuing husband. A subtle subtext associates the sacraments and dogma of Catholic Spain with the evil persistence of estranged husband Félix: he seems to regard his terrified wife as his property, though he poeticizes his ownership of her with self-indulgent, turgid metaphors. The sanctity of matrimony is exposed appropriately in this case as a bond that can prolong domestic abuse if one does not relinquish it. Humans must be adaptable to survive, like other animal species. Félix refuses adaptation, and his rigidity turns him into a self-mutilating monster. In his discourse, however, he elevates himself to the level of “angel”; presumably like a guardian angel, he will always pursue Sofía. As a proof of his status reminiscent of the physical tests of Catholic sainthood, Félix stretches out the skin of his cheek and cuts off

a clump of it with a scissors, claiming that he will not bleed. The visuals prove what the audience suspected to be the case; that he has lost contact with reality. While the husband represents commitment to tradition and belief in absolutes that were socially upheld in the time of Franco, the newly formed couple changes fluidly with their natural and social environments (Sofía is more interested in the latter than the lone-wolfish Jota). When the conclusion reunites the briefly separated lovers with the red squirrel overhead once again, it anoints or baptizes Jota with a dropping. Sofía reacts as though they now have nature’s blessing and are meant for one another. “Let There Be Love,” in a fifties jazz-inflected pop version by Nat King Cole, is the overlay that harmonizes survivability and the need to mate and procreate by forming a couple bond. The song rings out like the closing hymn of this impromptu natural wedding ritual. Yet it should be noted that facile Darwinism is avoided in the sense that two gay couples figure prominently in the movie, and their union is as healthy and resourceful as the heterosexual couple in the spotlight. One such couple includes Sofía’s brother Salvador, who successfully searched for his soul mate, whom he had known only in passing from being a customer at his gas station, through a call-in radio show. With this subplot Medem foretells the impact of communication technology, which would soon include cell phone texting and the Internet, on mate selection for humanity. The thrown-together lovers of La ardilla roja highlight human resourcefulnessPage 154 → and adaptability by comparison to an animal species. The sacramental and ritualistic trappings of the married pair bond are represented as fossilized, and heterosexuality is not privileged over homosexuality. Harmony with nature or the ecosystem fosters human happiness, while machines (except for those used in communication) bring about rupture and destruction: the motorcycle and automobile, though essential for escape and for the lovers’ hide-and-seek, nearly cut short their lives at pivotal points. A more valid substitute for the angel of Christian lore, referenced by the psychopathic stalking husband, is the red squirrel that works as a true guardian spirit for the couple. Akin to wood sprites and forest gnomes, the red squirrel is the archetype of a benevolent small magical creature, bringing to mind pagan animism. La ardilla roja conflates diverse belief systems by giving an ironic New Age edge to an eco-friendly Jungian animism. The director transcends in this way his own religious indoctrination in a private Catholic high school, an education he felt was mainly “based on parables” (Stone 12). At the same time he playfully tells the story of how his first child, Alicia, to whom the film is dedicated, came into being. The angel is presented in La ardilla roja as a divine being in a traditional belief system. The pernicious influence of Christianity must be overcome, it is implied, in order for the lovers to live in harmony with nature and begin to show each other their real selves rather than the disguises they have adopted while living in society. Medem’s next feature, Tierra (1998), supplied a different answer to the question of celestial bodies and the heavens. Or more accurately, it raises a host of questions while avoiding the possibility of an answer. Tierra is outside of the semblance of verisimilitude maintained by most other Medem films including its predecessor. Best classified as science fiction or fantasy, it unfurls as a fable about a man named Ángel who happens to have a split self, being both half-human and half-angel. His peculiar job is the extermination, using futuristic machinery, of a parasitic larva that has been changing the taste of wine produced in a region of northern Spain. He also claims to have a vast knowledge of metaphysics and astrophysics, and admits that he has been a mental patient (for his overactive imagination). He becomes infatuated with two very different women in the vicinity of his worksite. The film adopts an unconventional solution to the familiar love triangle that forces a hero to choose between a Madonnalike female and a temptress: his angel self will remain with the good, reliable woman, and his human self will ride off into the sunset with the wild and wanton teenager. The double or doppelgänger, identified by Todorov as a staple of the fantastic genre in that it stretches Page 155 →the limits of psychology, opens a new possibility for the classic problem of choosing between two potential loves with very different offerings. Both Jo Evans and Rob Stone have accented the pantheism that informs the worldview of Tierra as a rebellious response to the director’s Catholic upbringing.32 Evans identifies the more sensual woman with the Basque folkloric goddess Mari or Amari, believed to dwell underground and thus venerated by offerings in caves (68). Ángel is more aligned with the Basque thunder god Urtzi, a name that appears on his van (75). The earthiness of Mari pulls down or grounds Ángel’s pretensions at superiority and omniscience. At the same time, Christian iconography is exposed as empty or powerless through the images of the dead shepherd and sheep (84). Leaving the less “real” angel self behind with the good girl Ángela to do the right thing and form a nuclear family solves

Ángel’s moral dilemma and allows him to fulfill himself as a man with the bad girl with whom he is carnally enthralled. In the realm of metaphysics, Ángel also opens possibilities and leaves the specifics undefined, while the prerogative of religion is to provide stable and comforting answers. He claims access to knowledge beyond the ken of the most advanced science, but the certitude of his claim is never confirmed. He knows, for example, that “Morir no es nada” (it’s nothing to die); when we die we head out into the vast expanses of the universe thousands of light-years away to places that would be intolerable to us in our human form, and he knows that clouds are the sea foam of the vast ocean (the universe) that surrounds us. With Tierra, Medem invents a new religion with fewer pat answers than Christianity, one that links the eternal in spiritual terms with the folk beliefs of his native Basque Country and with what science has found to be the closest thing to infinity in the knowable world, the reaches of outer space. Combined with futuristic science fiction is the pre-Christian substratum of Basque gods and goddesses. Even if Ángel’s gospel is to be taken as ridiculous (in the “antimystical” interpretation expressed by Smith as part of the director’s intention of undermining transcendence, “Between Heaven and Earth” 17), the geoscope affords a magical view of distant spaces and different times rather than simple magnification, and it symbolizes the power of cinema itself (Evans 79). Yet the universe runs itself; no central god is mentioned even though a heavenly being branches off from a human being. It is not clear why Ángel is special in this way. Once again the link between madness and faith is underlined in the social reaction to Ángel; no man is a prophet in his own land, and in his hometown the doubters are most dismissive of his good tidings of the heavens and afterlife. Page 156 →Los amantes del Círculo Polar replaces the pantheistic ecologism that envelopes the lovers in Medem’s previous films with a fateful grand design that they are destined to live out. The vestiges of pantheism are muted but surface when Ana chooses to await a coincidence on St. John’s Eve, a Christian overlay of the pagan summer solstice feast, often marked by bonfires, as represented briefly in El espíritu de la colmena. Geography and emotion exercise a gravitational pull on Otto and Ana; travel, escape, and hide-and-seek go from within their household, across regions of Spain, and around the European continent. Cross-generational patterns also shape their lives. Brian Cope has likened this to the Jungian fascination Medem experienced in his youth with the occult and Eastern philosophy, especially Taoism (35). The coincidences of La ardilla roja become a complex web in Los amantes that Cope associates with the theory of synchronicity in Jung, “a discernible interconnectedness between people and between individuals and the universe” (34). Although synchronicity brings Otto and Ana together, it later works against the lovers when they misread signs or try to force random events to happen as they would like, thereby “affirming disconnection rather than interconnection as the structuring principle of the postmodern world” (Cope 47). Cope’s intriguing analysis contrasts the effortless and happy love story of the older Otto (a German pilot who was Otto’s grandfather) and his Spanish wife Cristina, who fell in love despite Otto’s role in bombing Gernika and leaving her an orphan. The older couple has followed the Tao by letting things happen rather than succumbing to the aesthetic impulse to shape life events (Cope 48). Ana and Otto try too hard in Taoist terms; their tragedy is linked to a lack of faith. The benevolent woodland spirit that guides the universe in La ardilla roja, as well as the atavistic Basque deities that underlie Tierra, are absent from Los amantes; there is no face of divinity (only the enigmatic gaze of the reindeer).33 Accordingly, the lovers are cast adrift and overexert themselves to achieve their goals, which would have come to them naturally if they had waited. There is a curious lapse of several moments during which Ana, though seemingly killed instantaneously by being hit by a bus while reading of Otto’s downed airplane (the same red bus that nearly caused catastrophe earlier for careless drivers among the parental generation), believes she is ascending Otto’s grandfather’s stairs to a joyful reunion with Otto himself. As Evans notes, it is possible to interpret the outcome of the film as both lovers having perished in separate accidents, as both lovers somehow still alive, or as Ana succumbing with Otto surviving (88). However, the mise-en-scène, as well as Medem’s subsequent remarks, leans perceptibly toward the latter result, leaving Otto alive and alone to Page 157 →contemplate endlessly the loss of his love.34 The circles of Ana’s staring, lifeless pupils, like the Arctic Circle itself, signify the never-ending life span of the love she shares with Otto, which now exists only in eternity rather than in human time (Stone 134). This final scene gives a nonverbal answer to the unseen question Otto had scribbled as a schoolboy; Stone formulates the question as “Can love be eternal?” and the answer as “Yes, in death” (148). Continuation beyond death in a Medem film illustrates the power of mind and desire over physical reality, a theme that truly comes to the fore in Lucía y el sexo.35

Lucía y el sexo gets its metaphysical dimension from the metafictive revisiting of Unamuno’s Niebla. A writer’s life descends into inconceivable tragedy despite his having found true love as he pursues the figments of his imagination to the point where they become so real that they take over his life. The external obstacles that keep the couple apart appear to have been overcome. As in L’Âge d’or, the internal obstacles to intimacy surface once the external ones subside. The writer is pulled away first by a fantasy of the most intense sexual experience possible (a perfect stranger, a perfect night, and a perfect beach are the ingredients), and subsequently by the prospect of a child that could be born from such a fleeting union, and guilt over complications created by the abandonment of this vulnerable child if he keeps pursuing his desires single-mindedly and self-indulgently. His “real” lover Lucía enters his created world for a glimpse of what has obsessed him, and just as she too is swallowed up in it comes the realization that one can turn back the pages and start over again. Unlike the Unamunian mortality that lies beneath the author’s will toward a protagonist (a mirror of God’s will), Lucía y el sexo exerts a mind-over-matter control that defies the need for an afterlife, since life itself can be replayed over and over through art. Stone finds that Lorenzo places himself as author in the masterful position sexually, eventually attracting three female disciples (167). The centering on Lorenzo in the plot is balanced by a reliance on Lucía for focus of the story line: Smith details the way subjective angles capture her perspective at key moments (“Lucía” 244). As Lorenzo becomes addicted to his creative fantasy life, he winds up abusing or neglecting the real woman who truly loved him (Stone 167). Hence, in addition to Unamuno, we might see a reworking of Poe’s story “The Oval Portrait,” in which an artist is so intent upon capturing his wife’s beauty on canvas that she dies of neglect while he continues to paint her likeness. While Unamuno and Poe kept sexuality repressed below the surface to bubble upward destructively, in Lucía y el sexo it is an ever-present and visible source of both positive and negative Page 158 →energy. Sexuality as a life force is most evident in the island sequences, which isolate the elements of earth, water, and atmosphere in breathtaking scenes. This life force allows Lorenzo to be resurrected infinitely by his perfect reader Lucía, who lovingly confers upon him the immortality Augusto Pérez scornfully bestowed upon Unamuno. In his subsequent narrative feature film Caótica Ana (2007), Medem toys with notions of reincarnation and regression to past lives through hypnosis, although he personally places no stock in them. Smith finds that the very selectively distributed film is intriguing and deserves more attention, although it suffers from superficial gimmickry applied to the developing world (“Chaotic Ana” 32). Where Medem may have taken a misstep with regard to a culture of the developing world, Icíar Bollaín (b. 1967) has made a unique contribution to the array of religious-themed films Spain has produced in the twenty-first century.36 También la lluvia (2010) takes place during the Bolivian water riots of 2000, when a multinational company was allowed to purchase local water rights and charge inhabitants inflated prices, barring them from the local wells to which they previously had free access. Meanwhile a Spanish film crew appears on the scene to make a historical movie about Columbus’s first contact with the indigenous people of the Americas. This film within a film should have the island of Hispaniola (Dominican Republic) for a setting. However, like the multinational firm and Columbus himself, the Spanish producer exploits the economic disenfranchisement of a developing American population. A layered and complex dialogue ensues with a documentary filmmaker who simultaneously films a “making of” short by interviewing the cast and crew. The actors interpret and perform their historic roles (in Spanish the same verb interpretar signifies both activities). The actor who plays Bartolomé de las Casas gives a balanced view of the Dominican’s legacy as both father of international human rights and apologist for the basic authority of Spain and the Catholic Church over the indigenous peoples. He risked his life to denounce the genocide of the Conquest and criticized corrupt bishops. Another actor claims moral superiority despite relative obscurity for the religious figure he portrays, Antonio Montesinos. He proclaimed “Yo soy la voz de Cristo en el desierto en esta isla ¡y estáis en pecado mortal!” (I am the voice of Christ in the wilderness on this island, and you are all in mortal sin!). This becomes a chorus repeated by the film crew as they are drawn into their supporting cast’s fight for access to water. The local who plays the first martyr among the indigenous, Hatuey, happens to be the leader of the grassroots opposition to the multinational and the central government that sold the water rights. Casas protests his execution, but the rest of the clergy are meekly complicit and attempt to Page 159 →baptize the victim, who curses their God and their greed. From a position of seeing Quechuas and Taínos as indistinguishable, the producer played by Luis Tosar becomes an activist by the end of the film. A local priest also champions the people’s cause, chanting that the water belongs to them all. También la lluvia taps into the revolutionary potential

of Catholicism as advocated by Eagleton, and displays its potential to oppose the grinding power of technologized global capitalism in controlling humanity. Like La mala educación, it subsumes moral authority into the realm of hyperreality, since the film’s ultimate redeemers are the cast and crew of the revisionist conquistador movie. To close this chapter with circularity, the last film examined is a revisitation of the Teresian legend in Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo (2007) by Ray Loriga (b. 1967). This is the third film devoted to Teresa de Jesús in this study. Previously we have seen the devout, Francoist approach and the more worldly and feminist Euro-socialist-based rendition. Loriga is a novelist often associated with Spain’s “Generation X.” Unlike most of the Gen X writers, however, Loriga concentrates less on dirty realism and more on the lyrical, inner world of his tortured, heroworshipping protagonists. His heroes in fiction are drawn to media figures, the hyperreal world of rock stars from English-speaking cultures. In Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo he follows a trend of sexualization and corporal brutalization common to movies of the past two decades with a religious or historical theme. One need only look at Vicente Aranda’s bold remake of Locura de amor as Juana la Loca (2001), in which he casts the Catholic Monarchs’ daughter as a sex addict driven by obsessive passion for one man, her husband. Her desire is magnified when she is breastfeeding her first child; as her needs are frustrated she spirals into self-destructive rage. There is certainly carnal prominence, though not actually sexualized or eroticized, in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. The new authenticity the film intends to offer is not only linguistic but anatomical fidelity, with the body of Jesus being ripped apart piece by piece before the viewers’ eyes. This is supposed to elicit greater fervor for Christ’s sacrifice, not turn the stomach. When Ray Loriga scripted and directed his own version of Teresa de Jesús’s life, it is not surprising that he focused on aspects that were hidden or muted in the previous two versions, but which are of keen interest in postmodern culture: the erotic union with divinity present in her mysticism, the embodiment of saintliness in her asceticism, miracles, and boundless passion for all things holy. Loriga’s Teresa practices “extreme Catholicism” in a physical, outwardly glamorous, and spectacular way. Teresa’s self-denial in this film bears the markings of anorexia and cutting Page 160 →(self-mutilation), afflictions that began to imperil young women increasingly in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In fact, we see only the young Teresa, with no aging of the protagonist; a brief postscript highlights her achievements after the founding of her first Discalced Carmelite convent. No epilepsy or other physical disorder is insinuated, as in Molina’s version, as the cause of her youthful illness. Molina presented the very intensity of her inner reveries as the cause for her near-death experience as well as for her levitation. While only a few select miracles made it into the 1984 TVE miniseries, they were staged in such a way as to showcase them as extraordinary moments in the life of an otherwise humble and down-to-earth woman. Showcasing the spectacular, on the other hand, is the order of the day in Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo. It makes a fashion icon living in a museum setting out of the saint. History and ideology collapse, true to Baudrillard’s postmodern implosion and Jameson’s notions of flattening and simultaneity. After a modicum of background about the conflictive milieu of the Reformation and a dash or two of Teresa’s original approach to spirituality (without differentiating her from the Illuminati and other mystics who were not accepted by the church), very little storytelling occurs: the rudimentary plotline follows Teresa’s early struggles to win credibility and confidence in order to establish a new order of nuns with old rules. The drama is in the evocation of Teresa’s mental states through radical corporeality. Paz Vega’s capacity for unabashed yet innocent sensuality supports sequences in which she appears nude and receiving Christ’s caresses, or kissing a supine Christ. Her passion is seen to border on insanity when she swoons over the hemorrhaging of her self-inflicted abdominal wounds (using a spiked belt never seen in earlier versions, as well as the more familiar scourge) and when she lashes out at an invisible Satan with her cross (her accusers have caused her to internalize the notion that her visions come from demonic possession). In postmodern culture there is a fascination with the female body under the influence of the supernatural, as seen in films from The Exorcist through The Exorcism of Emily Rose. Basis in factual cases makes these narratives more absorbing. Thus, Teresa de Jesús would be an irresistible subject for a portrait of the female body pushed to the limit by possession, except that in this case the dominant discourse of Catholicism holds the possession to be divine and voluntary rather than satanic and forced. The saint’s words support the sexual nature of the

interactions: “No es dolor corporal sino spiritual, aunque no deja de participar el cuerpo algo, y aun harto” (It is not physical but spiritual pain, although the body takes part, very much so, 353). Page 161 →Visually, Teresa borrows from the chiaroscuro lighting style of baroque religious art. A single focus of illumination against a dark background had proven effective in Argentine director María Luisa Bemberg’sYo, la peor de todas (1990). The latter film told the story of Colonial Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, who was more of an accidental religious in that she took the habit to find more freedom to be a creative writer and philosopher. The compelling corporeality explored in this case was Juana’s possibly lesbian orientation and the overtones or actual relationship that may have existed between her and one of her patrons, the Spanish Viceroy’s wife. Yo, la peor de todas borrowed from baroque art in that chiaroscuro was the lighting style favored by many painters from José de Ribera to Caravaggio and Velázquez. This is another important generative device for the mise-en-scène of Teresa: baroque painting informs nearly every scene. The shining luminosity of El Greco is present in the lustrous jewel-toned silks and satins worn by Teresa (not something we would immediately associate with the nun who espoused the elimination of “monjas de buen paño” or well-clothed nuns) and in the organization of wondering figures around miraculous events such as her levitation. Velázquez is referenced in the treatment of aristocratic figures, with their brocades and haughty bearing. Teresa’s nocturnal contemplation predictably mimics George de la Tour’s portrait of Mary Magdalene. Most notably Zurbarán flows through many scenes in which the whiter-than-white folds of Teresa’s flowing habit mirror the purity of her intentions. To keep such garments spotless while bathing the infirm or treading busy streets frequented by quadrupeds almost qualifies as a miracle. Just as valid a subtitle for this movie would have been Teresa: Pictures at an Exhibition. Loriga’s approach appeals to twenty-first-century designer culture and takes note of the substitution of high art for religion in postmodern social positioning. Madrid is now known as a city of museums, with about 250 registered. The Prado is the centerpiece, with enhancement from the Reina Sofía and the Thyssen-Bornemisza. Much of Madrid’s revenue as a center for national and international tourism derives from museumgoers, and it is on the map for the international fashion industry as well. Yet the saint herself was not known for being “vistosa” or emphasizing her appearance once she became a nun.37 Only one portrait of Teresa from her lifetime survives (its creation is dramatized in Molina’s miniseries). It is not at all breathtaking, unlike the works of the big names in mannerism and the baroque. Postmodern culture has affinities with the baroque, especially with haute couture inflections, and these are used to embellish Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo. It is striking to compare the use of religiousPage 162 → art just thirty years earlier, in Saura’s La prima Angélica, with its symbolism in Loriga’s movie. For Saura, religious iconography is part and parcel of a shameful, oppressive past. His protagonist Luis’s recollections of school are impregnated with paintings of martyrs that appear to drip blood, and a sprawling statue of a reclining Christ (Cristo yacente, also referenced in Cría cuervos in the father’s death scene). The relentless imagery teams up with a social order that has him stand as if made of marble for long periods. With Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo, a Generation X filmmaker goes beyond the demystification that was necessary for the generation of anti-Franco dissidents and seeks to return the magic and freedom to the emblems of Christianity that survive in mannerist and baroque religious art. The opposite of repressive, they are associated with the wild nomadic desires of the heroine, and help her to escape her milieu of burgeoning early capitalism. The baroque code of representation of Christian martyrdom and suffering had developed from the Counter-Reformational rejection of the individual’s interaction with faith based on scriptural interpretation and examination of conscience. It invited the faithful as mass spectators to partake in “a pictorial language of violent sensuality, spectacle, theatricality, and excess” (Kinder Blood Cinema 141). Yet Loriga appropriates this sanctified masochism glorifying blood and death as a source of individualism for his Teresa, as the definition of her inner space from which her writings and projects would flow. Her union with a rock star Jesus fuels her own transformation into a Catholic hero. The spectacle of baroque painting come to life and the spectacle of Teresa’s body inflected by divine sexuality and masochism are conflated in this film that glistens on the surface and leaves the depths untouched. In the representation of Teresa’s struggle, theological debate over silent prayer does not emerge, nor do the specific sources that she admired and that put her equally at risk of Inquisitorial censure. A Manichaean scenario of church misogyny and anti-Semitism threatening Teresa’s extreme individuality or nomadic desire derives from

the postmodern penchant for conspiratorial motifs as theorized by Jameson.38 The atmosphere of paranoia prevalent in thrillers of the post-Franco years in response to corruption and distrust of authority colors the religious establishment in each confrontation with Teresa. Villains in the ecclesiastical hierarchy display open hostility toward difference of any sort: “no trae la sangre muy limpia”; “alumbradas, brujas, iluminadas son todas una” (her blood is not very clean; Alumbrists, witches, Illuminati are one and the same). They wonder, why do women always get hysterical, and why is faith often so similar to insanity? Teresa is the reservoir of both sensuality and belief; her Page 163 →answer to male accusers is always unflinching in this movie. To lose faith out of fear is the real madness for her. A totally intuitive and irrational Teresa represents faith, the flesh, and the spirit, with none of the pragmatism or common sense given to her by Molina, Martín Gaite, and Concha Velasco’s portrayal. Vega and Loriga’s Teresa, however, never undergoes the indignities of old age and death; she is frozen in time as a glamorous postmodern icon. The cultural capital of Catholic mysticism, baroque art, and vindicated multiculturalism makes Teresa a legitimizing spectacle for Spanish art-house film. Whether they deal with religion from the secularist position of Amenábar or from the revisionist slant of Loriga, approaching the subject of religion sparks a return to melodrama for many contemporary directors.

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Conclusion: Religion and the Spanish Habitus One constant that stretches across the many films studied in this book is the persistence of a conflicted Catholicism either in the foreground or background of films that approach the metaphysical, moral, or ethical from any standpoint. A common religious sense with certain markings, particularly pertaining to the body and gender, inflects Spanish cinema. The Catholic strand in filmmakers of both mainstream and dissident political orientations in the twentieth century, as well as in the diversity of approaches displayed by those of the twenty-first century, supports the notion of the habitus in culture as elaborated by French anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu. Bourdieu defines the habitus as “a system of schemes of perception and thought” (18). These schemes come to be perceived as commonsensical. Language legitimizes the social practices of the habitus and confers objectivity upon it. Religion enters the habitus as symbolic capital and as cultural capital. As symbolic capital it becomes a value that confers greater status and power on individuals and groups, and it can eventually be traded for actual access to economic resources. As cultural capital, it exerts influence over codifying techniques, of which film is no doubt one of the major ones, to perpetuate its access to resources and hold on the suppositions upon which social structures are based. Cultural capital is potentially more lasting in its effects than memories, embodiment, or systematic inculcation. Luis Buñuel paradoxically criticized and attacked the belief system of his formative years, yet resurrected and perpetuated it vividly in film after film. From Un chien andalou to Le Fantôme de la liberté, Buñuel set the standard for continuing to inscribe conflicted Catholicism into the Spanish (and ultimately international) habitus. L’Âge d’or is perhaps his crowning achievement in terms of landing the strongest blows against religion. As a result, it was all but erased from Spanish film history for decades. His works illustrate the multiplicity of interactions between Roman Catholicism and the Spanish habitus more completely than any other director. He anticipated Bourdieu’s assignation of a liberating effect to heterodoxy and heresy; the heretic articulates rebellion within a structure that is still inflectedPage 165 → by the religion he or she defies. Perpetuation of the habitus accompanies the individual’s gratification upon exercising this circumscribed freedom. Buñuel also preserves a basic doxa, increasingly in his later work articulating the need to believe in the most visceral, erotic, and maternal features of Catholicism as a hedge against the technologized state. Buñuelian cinema is so impregnated by the Spanish religious habitus that it appears to delve into the pre-Christian substructure of Iberian matriarchal goddesses visible in archeological treasures such as the Dama de Elche and Dama de Baza and glossed with a Catholic coating in the Marian cults of El Rocío, Macarena, and the Pillar. Under the Franco regime, Catholicism was the official and only religion and its place in the habitus was reinforced. The dictator availed himself of Catholic rhetoric, symbolism, and support to validate his authoritarian rule after a debilitating Civil War. The religious genre in Francoist cinema developed in contamination with the generalissimo’s anticommunist politics and prescription of reactionary gender roles. As cultural capital, the cine de curas exalted the apparitions of Fátima because these proved useful both for keeping all forms of leftism at bay and for channeling women into the “domestic angel” paradigm. One of Bourdieu’s analogies for the habitus is the orchestra that plays its variations on a theme even without a conductor. In the Franco era a conductor indeed entered the pit to throw off the tempo with an overly repetitive and forced melody. For the Franco mainstream directors, religion was a vital form of symbolic capital that could result in rights to higher-grossing, nonreligious foreign films; the genre is almost a currency within the cinematic system. Some dissident directors such as Carlos Saura began to link religion to repression and silence by the end of the regime, preparing the way for the proliferation of different approaches to religion that characterizes democratic Spain. By then the conductors in the pit had begun to respond to a worldwide habitus that placed the art movie along a line of heterodoxy vis-à-vis religious-based traditional culture. Post-Franco directors still respond to the habitus in ways that are no longer enforced but only inflected by the persistence of cultural capital. Pedro Almodóvar entered the religious arena to link Catholicism with the oppressive remnants of the Franco regime and to denounce clerical criminality in the form of sexual abuse. His films nonetheless deploy a quasi-religious worship of screen idols. For a more pervasively antireligious film one

must look to Alejandro Amenábar’s Ágora, which critiques the validity of faith in anything beyond the material world. We should look to scientists and mathematicians as our spiritual leaders, in his view. Yet Ágora partakes of the habitus by placing a sacrificial victim at its center and by displaying Page 166 →an alienation of the female body that is familiar to Catholicism. Julio Medem prefers to highlight the tension between belief in a grand design set by Providence and the absence of any meaningful divinity in modern life in practical terms; while a plan for humanity exists on some level in his films, it is forever out of reach to anyone who seeks to harness or codify it. The author/director plays God, with an echo of Unamuno, to create a world that makes sense out of the primal chaos. Thus he repeats a structure of heterodoxy already fostered within the Spanish habitus. The persistence of the link between film and religion stems from their contiguous roles in the habitus; film codifies cultural capital, of which religion is a central component. Film and religion both address questions of immortality. As Cavell outlined, film viewing allows one to see outside of oneself and to add to one’s stock of personal memories in a manner experienced as supernatural. It extends the self as though one had lived in different times and places and as different people. Religion supplies self-transcendence through the promise of everlasting life in exchange for devotion, but this hoped-for life can never be glimpsed from within this world. Catholicism in particular demands self-sacrifice, while film asks only for time and attention. Both may exact an investment of economic capital for access; once accessed, they become part of the individual’s cultural and symbolic capital. Film and religion have each been perceived as a product of human evolution that enhances the survival skills of the species. In the thinking of Kristeva and Eagleton, the Judeo-Christian ethical tradition is the main source for egalitarianism, social change, and compassion, providing the foundation for a diversity of cultures to cohabitate peacefully on the planet. However, the legacy of Spanish Catholicism that engrosses Spanish directors from Buñuel onward is encumbered with a spectrum of negative collective memories. As the guarantee of the status quo and perpetuator of social inequality, it has preached resignation to the disenfranchised. In opposition to modern social theories of liberation that were dear to Buñuel and many of his compatriots, Roman Catholicism has often chosen oligarchy, wealth, power, and tradition for its own sake over the clamor of protestors. The twentieth century proved especially polarizing in industrialized nations for struggles inflected by class, politics, and religion. This kind of struggle (for Bourdieu, one that pushes or pulls the line between doxa and matters of opinion when there is ongoing social-class upheaval) has moved into the Islamic world in the twenty-first century with especially violent consequences. While advocacy of or challenges to Catholicism as a belief system may not return as an active concern for Spanish cinema as it progressesPage 167 → into the twenty-first century, it is likely that exploring the role of Catholicism in the conflicts of the mid-twentieth century, as well as continuing to unearth covert sexual abuse and human trafficking (in the form of criminal adoption policies in Spanish hospitals with religious employees), will occupy Spanish directors long into the future. If postmodern culture has an affinity for conspiracy plots and theories, as Jameson asserts, then the Catholic Church has supplied and inspired these in authentic form in twentieth-century Spain. John Paul II took care of paying tribute to the thousands of clerical and religious victims of Spanish Republicans with canonization and beatification of modern martyrs by the hundreds. A fundamental part of the process of Spanish historical memory recovery remains to be accomplished on behalf of the far more numerous victims of the Nationalist side. On a cultural scale it will have to weigh the culpability of Catholicism in conspiring with the traditionalist forces that slaughtered its enemies on a much higher magnitude and continued to execute political enemies and to abuse human rights in Spain for decades beyond the Civil War. As a source of psychosexual repression, Catholicism, in common with many religions, has articulated the acceptable and the taboo. The Catholic-inflected markings of the socially informed body in Spanish cinema emerge whether the director upholds tradition, as Gil does in El beso de Judas, or flouts it, as Saura does in Cría cuervos. Cinema has taken up the cause of those marginalized by norms of morality. At other times, in a less studied and more spontaneous way, it has gloried in the enjoyment of forbidden fruit as defined by the Catholic habitus. In rebellion against a classic Catholic upbringing, we have seen Buñuel pursue reverse catechization step by step, turning each sin into a distinct pleasure and toppling each exalted icon. In the wake of this path of destruction, he then reconstitutes spirituality with many of the trappings of his desecrated faith. Buñuel’s reinvention of Catholicism springs in part from holding maternal love sacred (one remnant of doxa, the

unquestioned and objective truth), and nowhere is this kind of love more idealized than in Catholicism. The more restrictive aspect of how images of the Madonna have constrained women’s activity in the world has been tempered by Buñuel’s demythification of ideals as they have been applied directly to human behavior. His modern Madonna of the Mexican slum in Los olvidados is part Mary Magdalene. The individual viewer will not feel compelled to emulate his Viridiana or his Simeon, but is encouraged to accept the love of a heavenly maternal figure if it comes “through the heart.” The possibility of healing and unity lies at the end of Buñuel’s war on and reconquest of his religion, especially as an antidote to the modern technologized state and unbridled global capitalism. And so Page 168 →the struggle with the Catholic habitus continues, with different degrees of iconoclasm and of reconciliation or reinvention for each filmmaker. Almodóvar calls viewers to worship the campy icons of femininity appropriated by a queer sensibility, recycling the ritualized body and hallowed inner space of the church or cathedral. Berlanga constructed a clever picaro of a saint with slick Yankee charm, played by an American, as an ironic dig at Franco’s forging of ties with the United States in the fifties. De la Iglesia dramatized a martyrdom at the site of buried national trauma. Amenábar offered up a bloody sacrifice at the center of what was intended as an antireligious statement and an affirmation of reason alone. Loriga (through Paz Vega) re-created a saint who wears the trappings of postmodern culture well. She indulges in a masochistic corporeality, long associated with female sexuality, while seeking escape from worldly oppression through an eroticized spirituality. Her improbable fashion sense calls attention to the cultural capital of haute couture for Spain of the European Union era while it also rests on the cultural capital of the Spanish mystical tradition. The motifs of Catholicism are never abandoned. All directors are on the grid or matrix of a belief system that is so entrenched in Spanish culture that it may sometimes appear as an essential deep structure akin to Chomsky’s theory of linguistics or Jung’s collective unconscious. However, Bourdieu has demythologized all three of these metaphysical constructs. Just as ascribing a biological grounding to our facility with syntax as in Chomskyan linguistics, or an inherited store of archetypes as in Jungian psychology, goes beyond the observable, Bourdieu found ample explanation for the persistence of religious motifs in his theory of religion as symbolic and cultural capital. As long as we are part of human society, we position ourselves with regard to religion as a symbolic form of capital that has a direct bearing on our economic capital and resources. Religious practices become an ingrained part of the habitus, a structure that spontaneously generates other structures and that inflects the entire culture. This is why those whose intention to embrace the dominant discourse as well as those who reject it all manifest common practices and representations. Spanish directors do not possess Catholicism as part of their habitus; they are possessed by the habitus, which informs all their creations. The organizing principles that emerge from the habitus are implicit rather than unconscious (hence, no need to mine for the subconscious). Rather than applying rules, prescriptions, or norms, it inflects all choices. Hence no maker of rules is necessary, as the systems of concepts present in the habitus are constantly sanctioned by discourse itself. The dispositions of the Page 169 →habitus tend to reproduce “the objective structures of which they are the product” (72). The religious sense, like business sense, common sense, and aesthetic sense, is one of a series of senses and tastes or distastes that may appear universal but are in reality conditioned and structured by social determinants (124). One submits to the rituals, including collective rhythms and daily routines, as part of belonging to a group and enjoying a group identity. The socially disadvantaged submit to their classification as such in order to alleviate the worst effects for themselves, while the dominant class can count on the systems that are in place in order to continue to exert dominance. Doxa is that part of the social order that seems part of the natural world, before even heterodoxy or heresy is possible. Where class struggle exists, it concerns pushing the line between doxa and opinion toward the latter. In this case, orthodoxy emerges as a force toward returning to the unquestioned purity of doxa. Heretics tap into repressed feelings and give their adherents a feeling of liberation by naming and legitimizing points of contention. If these are accepted they in turn move toward becoming official. This is the moment Buñuel dramatizes repeatedly in La Voie lactée; each heretic at bottom tries to establish a new order of his own. As soon as a conviction is accepted, it becomes a doctrine, and that becomes a possible point of contention for the oppressed. What keeps most members of a society in line with current belief systems is the need to acquire symbolic capital (prestige, honor, goodness),

which can be as valuable in social terms as economic capital. Bourdieu illustrates that charity is a form of coercion, increasing the symbolic capital of the generous and placing the recipient in debt. This underlies the suspicion of Christian charity found in Buñuel, Berlanga, Almodóvar, and Amenábar. Some rituals and motifs remain infused with a vestigial religious sense. The symbolic capital that emerges as most sacred in the films of Julio Medem is romantic love. While he exorcises false mysticism and sacramental culture by having manifestly insane characters adhere to them, erotic vitalism consecrates all relationships he privileges as genuine, and this in turn repeats structures of the habitus (God is love). The squirrel who confers a blessing on Sofía and Jota, the never-ending circle in which Ana and Otto are captured (no beginning and no end, like their first names and the director’s last name), and the sunburst that emblazons Lucía and Lorenzo, giving way to credits that roll in reverse, from bottom to top, as if to undo the estrangement between the lovers that occupied most of their story, all serve to immortalize a moment of perfect love through a natural element with a streak of divinity. Spanish mysticism that merged the erotic and the religious in early modern Spanish literature finds its echo more definitively in Page 170 →Medem’s work than in the adaptations of Teresa de Jesús’s autobiography that have been filmed to date. In the traditional religious picture of the Franco era, the absence of love, light, and joy winds up privileging dogma and repression. As in Bourdieu’s theory of social practice, the dominant classes manifest their interest in preserving doxa (that which is taken as naturally true) or failing that, instituting a new orthodoxy (which can be seen in the growth of the Opus Dei). They champion orthodoxy against the heterodoxy of progressive social and political thought, making it clear how wide the field of opinion has become and how little doxa is actually left. Many mainstream religious genre movies become lost in a drive toward intolerance, fanaticism, and death on this account. Gil leaves only cautionary tales against Communism, against activism, and against a woman’s pursuit of autonomy. Vajda’s Marcelino pan y vino promises refuge to its child protagonist but cuts his life short after he experiences nostalgia for maternal love for the first time. El beso de Judas and El canto del gallo eroticize suffering and unintentionally develop homoerotic bonds among their anguished male characters by excluding women as desiring subjects. In endeavoring to put a positive spin on the existential anguish of Journal d’un curé de campagne, Gil’s La guerra de Dios necessitates the sacrifice of the worker and acceptance of the existing social order. Buñuelian cinema opens the door to a modern theology enlivened with ambiguity, contradiction, irony, and ludic sacrilege. For Buñuel it is necessary to transcend blind acceptance of religious doctrine; feigned ignorance and false innocence are at bottom narcissistic and ill adapted to the modern world. Yet in the absence of a sound religion, he portrays humanity at the mercy of government bureaucracy, of capitalist exploitation, and finally, of encroaching terrorism. Not only does the unfinished Simón del desierto end with a post-nuclear holocaust coda; he deliberately graced the finale of his long filmic oeuvre with a bomb blast in Cet obscure objet du désir. As discussed, none of the biopics devoted to Teresa de Jesús has done justice to her ecstasies. These should be portrayed as oceanic-regressive states in which the ego is allowed to lose itself in the id and fluctuate between “revelation and absence, pleasure and nothingness” (Kristeva Need to Believe 11). This seems to be too far from the bounds of reality for Buñuel and those who came after him. Occupied as they are with testimony and denunciation, the dissident films of the dictatorship and many mainstream films of the democracy leave no space for sublimation. The Franco-era Teresian saga limits itself to her austerity, obedience to authority, and her subjugation before the crucified Jesus. In the feminist theology of Mary Daly, Teresa’sPage 171 → image in the Francoist film represents the primitive mother goddess of prehistoric matriarchy usurped by the male god. This is visible beneath representations of the Virgin Mary as well; only Buñuel’s Mary images break free of the silence, conformity, and acquiescence demanded of Mary in traditional Catholic culture. After the initial phase of state-subsidized revisionism under democracy, treatments of the religious in Spanish film proliferated to form a multiplicity of approaches that had never existed before. The persistence of Catholicism as a theme of Spanish cinema is surprising given its association with the authoritarian side of the Civil War and of Francoism from a democratic vantage point. The few exceptions to the rule throw this concentration on conflicted Catholicism into relief. Islamic worship was presented in a positive and respectful light in Armendáriz’s Cartas de Alou (1990), a somewhat sugarcoated story of the struggles of an undocumented sub-Saharan African immigrant

in Spain. Catholicism endures as the deep-seated habitus of Spanish cinema even though it ceased to be the official religion of the nation in 1977. It surfaces often in the mode of vindication of its past victims. Almodóvar exalted the hyperreal simulacra of screen goddesses while exposing the corruption of Catholic clergy. Metafilmic deification is his natural answer to personal faith since the Catholic Church is not only connected to past abuse but also continued to reject his sexual orientation (until Francis I decried this judgment in 2013) and lifestyle as a gay person. Amenábar constructed martyrs for the causes of atheism, rationalism, and scientism. However, like the Francoist religion genre, his antireligious epic, devoted to a new and different orthodoxy, also became mired in the death drive. The further we venture into postmodern culture, the more film iconography itself becomes the object of worship; Víctor Erice set a powerful precedent for this inEl espíritu de la colmena. A play of projected images is sufficient for the rituals portrayed by Almodóvar and Loriga. In a way similar to Amenábar, de la Iglesia concentrates on the horror associated with the Catholic legacy in its affiliation with Spanish Nationalism. There is always the danger of the specter reaching out of the past and into the present. De la Iglesia, like many other contemporary directors, invites viewers to lose themselves in the pleasure of horror: “a jouissance in which the subject is swallowed up but in which the Other, in return, keeps the subject from foundering by making it repugnant” (Kristeva Powers of Horror 9). Much of the abjection he creates bears the remnants of a Catholic habitus that would have consecrated and purified it in the context of traditional culture, but which now constitutes the motor that produces horror. As the movement for recovery of historical memory has proven, there Page 172 →has been insufficient investigation, recognition, and compensation for families who lost loved ones to Francoist atrocities. These injustices persisted in the Spanish health system under democracy with babies that were stolen for adoption by “good Catholic families” and in clerical abuse scandals to which ecclesiastic authorities turned a blind eye. In the economically imperiled Spain of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church also irritates progressive citizens more than ever. This upheaval that threatens the habitus can make even a superficially devout film like the most recent biography of St. Teresa of Ávila into a hotbed of warring generic discourses. Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo inevitably invites comparison with the diabolical possession movie. The extreme form of Catholicism depicted has Teresa taken over physically in ways reminiscent of The Exorcist and other films that invite us to gaze on the spectacle of the female body under the control of a supernatural being. In theory, being taken over by God should be more life affirming than demonic possession. Yet the persistence of sadomasochistic fantasy disrupts what should be the pleasure and delight of divine possession. Mitchell singled out Teresa de Jesús for having overcome the “punitive super-ego” and “despotic object relations” of mystic-ascetic discourse through introspection (4), and this view is widely held even among those most critical of Catholicism. However, in Loriga’s most recent entry in the Teresian hagiography subtype, the saint’s troubling self-mutilations, along with the vividly represented wounds of Jesus, bring to mind the unresolved traumatic violence, from the Civil War through the dictatorship, buried within the national memory that still rends the social fabric. A Catholicism that devours the bodies of the young, which many associate with Goya’s painting of Saturn, lurks in the iconoclastic cinema of Buñuel, Saura, Almodóvar, and Amenábar. Baudrillard finds that iconoclasts destroy false images because it makes their worst fear come true: that the simulacrum was empty and devoid of any divine connection to begin with. His iconolaters, on the other hand, are ahead of the game in that they enact God’s death and disappearance in the epiphany of his representations (4–5). In one or the other of these modalities we find many contemporary directors, but Icíar Bollaín is hard to contain within either one. The transnational film she directed refuses to simply equate the Catholic religion with unresolved trauma haunting Spain since the Civil War and dictatorship, or with the imperialist enterprise of Spain in the conquest of the Americas and the resulting genocide. También la lluvia carefully contrasts the humanitarian solidarity of several individual clerics in the New World with complicity with the power structure displayed by the majority. Being Page 173 →the voice of Jesus in the wilderness in this film is not a bad thing; to the extent that Bollaín’s metafilmic characters accept this challenge, they are perceived as redeemers in their own right. As one of still relatively few female directors, Bollaín’s adoption of a stance of reconciliation toward individuals within the church and the New World conquest may be facilitated by the role of women as intercessors and peacemakers in the habitus. However, what Eagleton underlined as the activation of the revolutionary potential within Catholic teaching, with its equal copresence of

the human and the divine and its support of the socially marginalized, has yet to be realized in a sustained way in Spanish film. While established religion may fade from daily life in Western and other industrialized nations as the twenty-first century progresses, and while film as a communal viewing experience may continue to lose ground to newer media such as video and the Internet, the structures of feeling they created will continue to shape the course of human history for many years to come as part of the habitus. In the mediatic age the cultural grid itself will perpetuate the ideology, iconography, and customs of traditional belief systems even without church attendance or direct religious indoctrination. In Spain this is accentuated by the continued presence of crucifixes at presidential inaugurations and of public officials at religious events, the ongoing public debate over the tax-exempt status of the Catholic Church and its sanctioned role in public education and health care, as well as its legitimation of the monarchy. Hence we can expect further instances of testimony to the damage done by calcified dogma and corrupt power structures within Catholicism, and more merging of the filmic imagination with religious ritual, miracles, and transcendence. Bourdieu posits the art world as the contemporary sanctuary. It has taken the place that theology occupied in the past. Its imaginary anthropology denies the underlying structures of power, wealth, and self-interest. Spanish film with regard to religion has shown this time and again, and nowhere more pungently than de la Iglesia’s Balada triste de trompeta. It leaves us with an instructive vignette. The Valley of the Fallen is the end point of its chase sequence and the site of its climax. This mammoth construction in the vicinity of El Escorial outside of Madrid was meant as the architectural emblem of Francoist ideology. The shrine is a reified social space that calls attention to the role of religion in producing the machinery of Fascism. Franco and the original Falangist leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera are buried in its mausoleum. Republican prisoners of war and political prisoners participated in its construction. Estimates differ regarding the number of injuries and deaths attributable to the working conditions, Page 174 →which included the hazardous dynamiting and hauling of its huge stones. It was consecrated as a Catholic basilica despite the evident abuse of human rights in the construction (which Preston does not hesitate to define as slave labor, Spanish Holocaust 509). De la Iglesia has his heroine unravel like a spool from a long cloth from its vertiginous height. The unraveling stops abruptly as she reaches the end of the cloth, but as her midsection is still attached to it, it snaps her body in two. To remain attached to the binding fabric of the religious habitus is somehow protection from the void below, but the protection it offers places a deadly limitation on freedom. The habitus remains in place, despite the price it often exacts on the individual, because without it the void is too powerful a deterrent.

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Notes INTRODUCTION 1. Daniel C. Dennett cautions that no “God gene” or “spirituality gene” will ever be detected from DNA and that religious thinking does not rely upon specific neural pathways or brain centers. However, he suggests that a general “spiritual sense” may have evolved in human beings as a basic genetic adaptation (315–16, 318). 2. Directorial control is relative since it is exercised in the context of a film industry with a profit motive. As Balázs asserts, “the film as a product of a large-scale industry costs too much and is too complicated a collective process for any individual genius to create a masterpiece in defiance of the tastes or prejudices of his own day” (19). 3. William Blake, for example, conceived of a personal religion that did not repress sexuality, railing against an alien God the Creator through successive mutations in his poetry (Armstrong A History of God 349). 4. Focus on the dominant religious discourse of Roman Catholicism is not meant to minimize the importance of Islam and Judaism in Spanish history. Medieval Spain is the birthplace of both Maimonides, hence of Jewish rationalism, and of the wellspring of Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalah (Armstrong The Case for God 139). 5. Del Toro was born and raised in Mexico. His two most noted films to date are coproductions involving Spain and Mexico (El espinazo del diablo) or Spain, Mexico, and the United States (El laberinto del fauno). They are set in Spain with mainly Spanish casts and crew. Nonetheless, his films are recognized as masterpieces of Latin American cinema, with his Laberinto del fauno winning a tenth spot on the list of “Ten Best Latin American Films of the Decade” (2000–2009), according to a poll taken by New York film professionals for the 2010 Cinema Tropical Awards. 6. Notable exceptions to the hasty characterization of Buñuel as hostile to religion are Peter William Evans and Isabel Santaolalla, who recognize that the director was fascinated by its theatricality, mysteries, and doctrines, and that he found in it “a familiar place, a refuge where, for all its dubious claims and practiced barbarities, he could turn for inward meditation and sources of artistic creativity” (6). 7. John Hopewell notes that the censors were stricter with Spanish productions than with foreign imports; the former were expected to show the utmost Page 176 →respect to the church and Catholic values, the military and police, Franco, historical figures, and traditions (37). A parallel religious censorship group, the influential National Board of Classification of Spectacles, sprang up in the forties to apply even harsher criteria, labeling as “dangerous” works with a critical perspective that had been approved nonetheless by the state board already (41). 8. The religious genre has even merged with the gangster movie (The Boon-dock Saints, 1999). More commonly found are mélanges with comedy (Life of Brian, 1979; Dogma, 1999), the musical (Godspell, 1973), the thriller (Antichrist, 2009), or horror (The Exorcist, 1973; The Omen, 1976; The Prophecy, 1995; Stigmata, 1999). The bona fide religious genre is now mainly the domain of faith-based production companies and television stations and of the rare revisionist auteur film (The Last Temptation of Christ, 1988; The Passion of the Christ, 2004). Hagiographic biopics with potential implications for national identity are occasionally made as well (Molokai: The Story of Father Damien, 1999). 9. The Royal Decree of April 1, 1977, granted freedom of expression in all but three areas: Spanish unity, the monarchy, and the armed forces. State cinematic censorship ended the following November. The lifting of censorship went hand in hand with deregulation of mass media: the government released its monopoly on radio stations and newsreels. In the eighties the Socialist government allowed private television channels (Trenzado Romero 45). 10. A previous study analyzed La mala educación in tandem with Double Indemnity and Vertigo for its mise-en-scène and narrative structure (D’Lugo Al-modóvar 126).

CHAPTER 1

1. This critical stance has led some to attribute to Buñuel the character of a “vigorous opponent of the Catholic Church and its practices” (Edwards 2); however, a more nuanced view emerges upon closer examination, especially of his later films. In addition to Evans and Santaolalla, Tom Aitken has been sensitive to Buñuel’s conflicted but strong Catholicism. This study intends to add a diachronic dimension to the director’s religious imagination, as well as shedding light on some films that have not been studied with these concerns in mind. 2. Beyond the scope of this modern focus is the profane vitalism often found in Spanish medieval texts surrounding the sacred, as in Los milagros de Nuestra Señora and El libro de buen amor. The latter burlesques the sacred, though not with the revolutionary aims of the early Buñuel. 3. For more about the surrealist integration of Freudian and Lacanian theory into avant-garde cinema, see Linda Williams. 4. Ian Gibson’s account plays up Dalí’s collaboration and chides Buñuel for not giving the painter due credit (Dalí 302). 5. Originally, one Majorcan bishop was to have been played by a little person with a handlebar moustache. In the scene in which the female lover daydreams on the toilet, she was to have been dressed in white to resemble the Page 177 →Virgin Mary. These gags were removed as too blasphemous, as well as another one in which a bishop would have finished off the wounded maiden on-screen in the final sequence. In the end, Buñuel opted for choices that were “less tendentious and more sublime” (Gubern and Hammond 35–36). 6. Wood specifies that one of Buñuel’s favorite books, J. H. Fabre’s Memoirs of an Entomologist, gave him the basis for positing the harsh survival ethic of might-makes-right in the arachnid world as natural mirror for human behavior, making Christian forgiveness and charity impossible goals (97). Sting before you are stung makes more sense in the mise-en-scène than turning the other cheek, which would be suicidal. 7. López equates the arrival of the Majorcan bishops with the onslaught of civilization that imposes itself upon the barbarism of the bandits (526). 8. Acevedo-Muñoz notes the “brutally pure attacks on religion and society” in L’Âge d’or, which ironically garnered the director an offer of work in Hollywood (Buñuel and Mexico 37). 9. Ninety years later, this kind of object-sacrilege still provoked conservative forces, prompting the Smithsonian to eliminate, after outcry by a Catholic advocacy group, a video about an AIDS patient by David Wojnarowicz because it contained a shot of ants crawling over a crucifix. 10. Other notorious scenes that were faked for the purpose of outraging and horrifying the audience and questioning the documentary as genre are the ailing girl purported to have died (she lived), the dead baby and grieving mother (the infant was only asleep, with a different villager posing as the mother), the falling goat (killed by gunshot from off-camera, and its owner compensated), and the donkey stung to death by bees (as bees began to engulf the unfortunate equine, it was put out of its misery) (Gubern and Hammond 183). 11. The voice-over narration was not added until 1936. For its debut in December of 1933, the director extemporized with a microphone live during screening. From 1934 to 1936, the film (already banned in Spain) was shown with the French text authored by Buñuel and Pierre Unik (Gubern and Hammond 189). 12. Pope Gregory I lent official acceptance to the error in a published homily around 591. The mistake was refuted by Paul VI in 1969. By then, Mary of Magdala, Mary of Bethany, and the sinful woman of Luke had been linked inextricably in all forms of religious representation for centuries. 13. On the dynamics of Buñuel’s filmmaking in the context of Mexican cinematic production, see AcevedoMuñoz (Buñuel and Mexico). He foregrounds the primarily political message found in the second selfscripted film Buñuel made in Mexico, El bruto (1952), grouping it with several other “macho-dramas” he filmed in the fifties (124). 14. Linda Hutcheon’s theories fully elaborate postmodern parody. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla also points out that the sequence disrupts the filmic visual space by creating “slippages between the realm of painting and that of film” (74). 15. The director formulated the ending hastily in a single night after finding that his producer was out of money. Despite the flourish his conclusion gives, Buñuel was frustrated that the work turned out to be only half the intended Page 178 →length, with relatively low production values (above all in comparison to his next film, the adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s novel Belle de jour), and consequently he never made another

movie in Mexico (Sánchez Vidal 252–53). 16. In addition to Menéndez Pelayo, the Abbey Pluquet’s Dictionary of Heresies proved useful to Buñuel and Carrière (Christie 133). 17. Choosing to portray Priscillian as the reverse of Christian sexual mores put Buñuel at odds with his friend Juan Larrea, who had spoken with the director about his admiration for the maligned bishop (Sánchez Vidal 264). 18. While the conclusion that the Way of St. James actually leads to the burial place of Priscillian has dramatic impact, Buñuel did not create it out of the blue: historians had speculated that the bishop might be buried in the mausoleum beneath the Cathedral of Santiago. Conditions indicate that a holy man of late antiquity is entombed there (Chadwick 233). 19. David Scott Diffrient likens the film’s structure to two other cinematic “rondos”: Max Ophuls’s La Ronde (1950) and Chantal Akerman’s Toute une nuit (1982) (184). 20. Cristina Moreiras Menor emphasizes the repetition of motifs despite the disjointed sets of narratives, all of which culminate in the impossibility of freedom. In this sense the exhumation of the police chief’s sister repeats, on an incestuous note, the already necrophilic exhumation of Doña Elvira by the French officer (La estela del tiempo 48).

CHAPTER 2 1. Scholarship on film genres tends to overlook the religious picture. An informative overview of the major Hollywood entries in the subtype of biblical spectacle (from both Old and New Testaments) can be found in Phillip Dye’s video documentary The Bible According to Hollywood (1994). Some contemporary criticism prefers the term supernatural drama to religious film for non-epics of the religious genre. 2. David Parkinson condemns the “sentimentality, pretentiousness and political naivety” of Griffith’s later work, finding that “in striving for scale and significance, Griffith discarded experimentation and exposed his intellectual shallowness” (25). Reinhartz conjectures that he chose Jesus as a subject in an attempt to repair the damage he had done to his reputation in casting the Ku Klux Klan in a positive light (13). 3. Catherine O’Brien clarifies the juxtaposition between Mary and Magdalene; the latter is the antithesis of the mother of Jesus in her early scenes in DeMille’s film, and she comes to resemble Mary when she repents (126). 4. In addition to Jesús de Nazaret in 1942, the Mexican film industry produced the New Testament genre pictures María Magdalena, la pecadora de Magdala (1945), Reina de Reinas, la Virgen María (1945), and El Mártir del calvario (1952). 5. Domènec Font specifies that the only capital available for investment in the postwar years was that of private banks, which were diminishing in number, concentrating the wealth in fewer hands and intensifying the “oligopolistic”Page 179 → power of a handful of banking families. The bankers did not consider Spanish cinema to be a real industry or worthy of investment risk (32–36). 6. Payne reveals the hostility of several bishops in rural areas to the economic structures of Francoism even in the first two decades (183). Preston characterizes Franco’s behavior toward the church as that of any dominant medieval monarch “ready to impose his will” (Franco 622). 7. Besides Gil, the other directors most often granted the special appellation were Juan de Orduña, José Luis Sáenz de Heredia, Ignacio F. Iquino, Ladislao Vajda, Luis Lucia, Antonio Román, José Antonio Nieves Conde, and Arturo Ruiz Castillo (Monterde “Autarquía” 199). 8. Sáenz de Heredia did not work in the religious genre for the majority of his career, but returned to it toward the end of the dictatorship to direct Proceso a Jesús (1974), an adaptation of a play by Diego Fabbri. This curious bid for modern relevance has contemporary Jews putting Jesus on trial to settle once and for all the issue of the culpability of the Jewish people for the Christian Messiah’s death. 9. Higginbotham notes that the American missionary movie Keys of the Kingdom is the model for Balarrasa, except that in the latter film the Spanish priest is more unflinching when tested by adversity (21). I would add that Keys of the Kingdom is directed at American Roman Catholics who wanted to see their religion as less marginalized and extremist in comparison to the dominant religion of Protestantism. The acceptance of the priest whose thinking diverges on many issues from Catholic orthodoxy ameliorates the

image of Roman Catholicism in America as backward, severe, and anticapitalist. The protagonist played by Gregory Peck adapts his beliefs according to his life experiences, which places empiricism above dogma. This is not to minimize the conflict between the makers of this film and Hollywood censorship, which was heavily weighted with Catholic participation that mandated multiple script rewrites (Walsh 229–40). 10. Despite the shared surname and religious association, Vicente Escrivá, who is from Valencia, is not related to the Opus Dei founder St. José María Escrivá de Balaguer, who was born and raised in Huesca. 11. The midcentury directors Victor Fleming, Otto Preminger, and Robert Bresson revisited the Joan of Arc story. For Bresson the Dreyer masterpiece was a mess of overacting and he turned in a minimalist piece as would be logical for the author of Notes on Cinematography, who urges actors not to act and directors to treat actors like objects. However subtle Bresson’s remake, the Dreyer film remains the more canonical one and a touchstone in cinematic technique and acting. Bresson’s approach to religion was more successful in treating the existential angst of the flawed and anonymous modern priest of Journal d’un curé de campagne. 12. Rossellini’s work was instrumental in changing the relationship between cinema and religion in another way as well. His film Il Miracolo was at first banned by the U.S. Production Code for blasphemy, but a Supreme Court decision overturned the prohibition in 1952, applying First Amendment protection to the cinema in a new way that gradually weakened this kind of censorship until the Code was finally replaced by the MPAA ratings system in 1968 (Parkinson 166–67).Page 180 → 13. War movies of the dictatorship often employed religious motifs to cast the Civil War as Franco’s crusade against evil. Such is the case with Carlos Arévalo’s Harka (1940) and José Luis Sáenz de Heredia’s Raza (1941). Franco scripted the latter film himself under a pseudonym. It includes a scene in which Republicans mow down a row of unarmed priests. Other Civil War movies placed religious objects or priests at the center of a struggle on behalf of sacred Spain: El santuario no se rinde (1948), Cerca del cielo (1951), and El frente infinito (1956) are commentated in this light by Higginbotham (21). 14. Mournful references to child mortality in the Years of Hunger that directly followed the Civil War surface in the conversations of La colmena: “aquel niño muerto, ¿no se acuerda usted?, tenía el pelito rubio, era muy mono y más bien delgadito” (that little boy who died, don’t you remember him? he had short blond hair, was very cute and fairly thin, Cela 47–48). 15. For an analysis of how Marisol embodied both tradition and modernity in her teen musicals, see TrianaToribio (Cinema 84–95). 16. Reinhartz identifies the betrayal story as “the most dramatic portion of the Gospel narrative,” with the use of a kiss heightening the irony (165). 17. Also like the later Viridiana is the central banquet scene of Plácido. The banquet is a focal point in both movies for the subversion of authority, though in Buñuel the pleasure is real, representing a momentary and ultimately destructive catharsis, while in the Berlanga film any sort of socially defined happiness is equated, as Marsh notes, with “joyless desperation” (135). 18. Higginbotham groups Escrivá and Gil motion pictures of the Transition or destape in with farces of the tercera vía, neither totally commercial fodder nor artistic cinema, but somewhere in-between, a mixture of erotic titillation with small doses of social commentary (69–70). 19. Sticking to a text with established authenticity was also the strategy employed by Bresson in Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962), which relied on trial transcripts. 20. This balancing between two religious motifs is mirrored in the tension between referentiality and abstraction that Paul Julian Smith has studied in this film, with particular attention to the intricate lighting techniques of cinematographer Luis Cuadrado (“Rehistoricizing” 103–4). 21. Paul Ilie’s elaboration of the notion of inner exile is related to Saura in D’Lugo (Saura 116). 22. D’Lugo specifies that Cría cuervos was shot in 1975 while Franco was still alive but in deteriorating health. However, its release date grouped it commercially with 1976 motion pictures, and as such it was the sixth-largest-grossing Spanish movie of the year (Saura 127, 138). 23. The most celebrated of these statues is Gregorio Fernández’s Cristo yacente (1614–15), exhibited in the Capuchin monastery of El Pardo, Madrid. Valis describes its lifelike quality that has given it the status of a relic (58). Many imitations have followed. 24. Ana’s mother had entertained dreams of a career as a classical pianist. Her idealism and impracticality liken her to Galdós’s Tristana (Buñuel’s adaptation also refers to her skill as a pianist but sidesteps her

vocational aspirations)Page 181 →. Tristana was also affected by a tumor, but it crippled rather than killed her.

CHAPTER 3 1. Lidia Falcón discusses the consequences for men and women of gender role revolution at this time in El varón español a la búsqueda de su identidad. 2. Teresa Vilarós studies the connections between the Pact of Silence, or refusal to examine the immediate Francoist past, and the dissatisfaction with Spanish progress under democracy in El mono del desencanto. 3. Daniel Kowalsky explains that from 1977 to 1982 the S-rating fostered development of Spanish soft-core pornography “for local consumption” including favored distribution and subsidies (189). In treating religion, some S-rated movies flirted with sacrilege, but many were “ultimately conservative,” titillating viewers with graphic sexuality but showing libertinage as leading to degradation and chaos (196). In 1983 the X rating established new regulations and curtailed subsidies to commercial films, causing the Spanish soft-core feature to disappear (202). 4. Rikki Morgan clarifies that the most controversial aspect of El crimen de Cuenca when it was released was the possible mirror of contemporary abuses of authority that viewers saw in Miró’s harrowing representation of an early twentieth-century case of torture and wrongful imprisonment (176). 5. Since this study concentrates on a directorial vision that incorporates religious imagination, I have steered around adaptations of literary classics. Several studies of these pertaining to Spanish cinema exist, including Thomas G. Deveny, Contemporary Spanish Film from Fiction; Sally Faulkner, Literary Adaptations in Spanish Cinema; Luis Quesada, La novela española y el cine; and José Luis Sánchez Noriega, De la literatura al cine: Teoría y análisis de la adaptación. 6. Martin-Márquez discusses the documentary-style backstage drama centered on gender as performance that Molina directed, called Función de noche, based on a theatrical play she had directed for the stage about a Franco-era widow, from Miguel Delibes’s novel Cinco horas con Mario (Feminist Discourse 202–17). 7. The holy relic of Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda’s hand (colloquially termed her arm, “el brazo de Santa Teresa”) had been stored at the Carmelite Convent of Ronda. By Nationalist accounts, the fleeing Loyalist general left it behind in a suitcase after the fall of Málaga, but Preston asserts that it went from police custody into Franco’s possession (Franco 219). 8. Catherine of Sienna rose to the level of doctor of the church later the same year, and John Paul II named Thèrese de Lisieux in 1997, for a total of three women out of a total thirty-three church doctors. 9. Martín Gaite’s strengths as a social-realist writer shine inEntre visillos; her mastery of the fantastic approach to literature in El cuarto de atrás; her awareness of the Spanish woman writer’s situation in a milieu of conformism and patriarchy in both of these as well as in her essay Desde la ventana: enfoque femenino de la literatura española.Page 182 → 10. Martín Gaite made Todorov her guide to creating a more deeply fantastic narrative inEl cuarto de atrás (1978). The modality he formulated, of the reader’s vacillation between a natural and a supernatural explanation for events, is also considered crucial for interpreting Latin American Boom narrative. 11. On the other hand, D’Lugo signals the film’s saving graces. La noche oscura does express the saint’s “subjective positionality within culture,” and shows how he was able to “transcend the confining limits and constraints that would otherwise block that individual’s self-realization” (Saura 236). 12. Távora adapted Federico García Lorca’s playYerma, which has a strain of religious heterodoxy that so angered Catholic traditionalists in its time that the work is cited as a chief motive for Lorca’s assassination (Gibson Lorca 455). 13. As Acevedo-Muñoz asserts, the budget is actually more generous than it was for the director’s first two features, resulting in a more sumptuous look (Almodóvar 36). Still, it pales in comparison to Jack Cardiff’s sumptuous cinematography for Black Narcissus. 14. Kathleen Vernon pinpoints Almodóvar’s switch from punk-pop music to the Latin American bolero at Matador (1986), the start of his middle period (52). However, the seeds were planted for this transition with Entre tinieblas two years earlier.

15. Isolina Ballesteros contrasts the melodramatic flair of the bolero, sung in private as a duet between the Mother Superior and Yolanda, with the festively public salsa number performed by Yolanda and a trio of nuns in the convent musical (76). 16. The insistence on a “happy ending” to this mock-religious drama supports María Donapetry’s assessment of twentieth-century Almodóvar as so immersed in the religion of his upbringing that he is Catholic malgré lui. 17. As Kinder notes, a scene in La ley del deseo in which a victim pays a visit to an abusive priest foreshadows the outline of La mala educación four years after Entre tinieblas (“Brothers” 267; also Fuentes “Autobiography” 431). The HIV-positive pregnant nun played by Penelope Cruz in Todo sobre mi madre (1999) also evinces the problem of celibacy for Catholic clergy; she delivers a “miracle baby” who overcomes the incurable illness despite being born HIV-positive. Medicine would make this possible more than twelve years later. Hence Almodóvar did not abandon religious themes for a full twenty years although this study focuses on the two milestones. 18. Another source on post-Franco film also omits the religious movie from its enumeration of the dominant genres: comedy, thrillers, melodramas, historical features, musicals, and the “rural genre” (Jordan and Morgan-Tamosunas 63). 19. Vernon enhances the critical view of this film with an analysis of the tensions between sacred and secular music, both inextricable to its treatment of sexual abuse. 20. Ryan Prout notes that Íñigo Ramírez de Haro’s playMe cago en dios also debuted in Madrid in 2004. It assails the damage of a Catholic education upon the child’s psyche differently, by comparison to chronic constipation (76). 21. Complementing the Oedipal treachery of the priest’s seduction of his pupil Ignacio is the fratricidal betrayal of Juan toward Ignacio. Juan, the “fake” Page 183 →transvestite, is destined to become a television actor (Kinder “Brothers” 289). 22. For a perspective that sees the Manchegan filmmaker’s kitschy recycling of cultural symbols associated with Francoism as more celebratory, see Alejandro Yarza, Un caníbal en Madrid. 23. The similarity to the scene in The Exorcist that has Father Damian saying Mass while feeling doubt about his faith and guilt about abandoning his mother is striking. Subsequently, however, Father Damian as assistant to the chief exorcist on the case embarks upon a course of redemption that requires of him the ultimate self-sacrifice. 24. Critical views on the quality of La mala educación differ, with some suggesting it is self-indulgent and unnecessarily convoluted (Acevedo-Muñoz Almodóvar) while others concur with my assessment of its impact and depth (D’Lugo). The reception was one of the most explosive, especially this late in the director’s career, yet it was the first Spanish film ever selected to open the Cannes Film Festival (D’Lugo Almodóvar 128). 25. For a definitive treatment of horror in Spanish cinema, see Antonio Lázaro-Reboll, Spanish Horror Film. 26. Maria Purves sums up these critical views that associate Catholicism with superstition and backwardness in the British Gothic novel from 1790 to 1816 before proceeding to challenge them with exceptions (2–5). 27. Acevedo-Muñoz coincides in citing the treatment of religion as the most distinguishing feature of The Others (“Horror of Allegory” 212). 28. Triana-Toribio enumerates the many transnational aspects of The Others that almost defy its classification as a Spanish film (Spanish National Cinema 162). It does meet my criterion of having a Spanish director, and Acevedo-Muñoz situates it squarely within the Spanish horror genre. 29. Briefel calls this unawareness of being dead “spectral incognizance”; she detects the motif in the 1891 short story by Ambrose Bierce, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” as well as in the films The Spy, La Rivière du Hibou, Carnival of Souls, Jacob’s Ladder, The Sixth Sense, and Stay, and in the Twilight Zone episode “The Hitch-Hiker” (95). In Spanish literature, spectral incognizance dates back to romanticism, when Espronceda and Zorrilla deployed it. They in turn drew inspiration from earlier folktales. 30. Cristina Moreiras Menor mentions the costumbrista dimension of illustrating the quotidian cultural situation of nineties Spain, with emphasis on the presence of United States popular culture, in El día de la bestia. I agree with her conclusion of “undecidability” on the part of this text, which refuses to land squarely

on the side of either the traditional “Spain is different” or the progressive “Spain of differences” (Cultura herida 273). 31. Fouz-Hernández and Martínez-Expósito also note the priest’s “better economic means” in their analysis of the debate scene, which places Sampedro on “higher moral ground” in every way possible (101–2). 32. Stone finds parallels for Medem’s pantheism in the work of Chinese director Wong Kar Wai (9). 33. Txetxu Aguado emphasizes the sacred nature of the love Otto and Ana share; they count on it to compensate for past traumatic losses and reach an amorous utopia together. However, they have not truly overcome their trauma Page 184 →by making sense of it, and the round void of Ana’s vacant eyes is the eternal circle of nothingness after her death. Their utopia did become real, but it was their temporary shared dream and desire for each other (265). 34. Robert A. Davidson’s study of the importance of collisions in this film offers the possibility of an “alternate ending” presented by delaying Ana’s death so that she may reunite one more time with Otto (200); however he concludes that her death closes the circle of destruction begun by the German bombing of Gernika (204). 35. It bears mention that Bigas Luna’s La teta y la luna (1994) also employs an erotic mysticism to overcome physical impossibilities, with a pantheistic divinity present in the moon. However, this serves mainly as an embellishment for soft-core pornography with inappropriate treatment of child actors. 36. It should be noted that the director in this case takes no credit for the screenplay; it is the work of her partner Paul Laverty, who had initially approached Alejandro González Iñárritu to direct it (Santaolalla 220). 37. The adolescent Teresa is another story; in her autobiography she endearingly confessed to youthful narcissism: “Comencé a traer galas y a desear contentar en parecer bien, con mucho cuidado de manos y cabello y olores, y todas las vanidades que en esto podia tener, que eran hartas por ser muy curiosa” (I started to dress up and to want to be pleasing to look at, taking care of my hands and hair and fragrance, and all the vanities I could have in this, which were many since I was very fussy, 124). 38. The postmodern penchant for conspiracy theories and paranoia articulated by Jameson also makes itself manifest in a religious vein in Dan Brown’s 2003 blockbuster novel The Da Vinci Code and its many imitations.

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Filmography of Films Discussed in Detail L’Âge d’or [The Golden Age]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Gaston Modot, Lya Lys. Viscount of Noailles: 1930. Ágora. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Rachel Weisz, Max Minghella. Mod, Himenóptero, Telecinco: 2009. Alexander Nevsky. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Perf. Nikolai Cherkasov, Vera Ivashova. Mosfilm: 1938. Amanece, que no es poco. Dir. José Luis Cuerda. Perf. José Sazatornil, Cassen, Rafael Alonso. Aventuras Comerciales: 1989. Los amantes del Círculo Polar [Lovers of the Arctic Circle]. Dir. Julio Medem. Perf. Fele Martínez, Najwa Nimri, Nancho Novo. Canal+, Sogetel: 1998. El ángel exterminador [The Exterminating Angel]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Silvia Pinal, Enrique Rambal. Alatriste, UNINCI, Films 59: 1962. La ardilla roja [The Red Squirrel]. Dir. Julio Medem. Perf. Nancho Novo, Emma Suárez, Carmelo Gómez. Sogetel: 1993. Balada triste de trompeta [The Last Circus]. Dir. Álex de la Iglesia. Perf. Carlos Areces, Antonio de la Torre, Carolina Bang. Tornasol, TVE, Canal+: 2010. Balarrasa [Reckless]. Dir. José Antonio Nieves Conde. Perf. Fernando Fernán Gómez, María Rosa Salgado. CIFESA: 1951. El beso de Judas [Judas’ Kiss]. Dir. Rafael Gil. Perf. Rafael Rivelles, Francisco Rabal. Aspa: 1954. Black Narcissus. Dir. Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger. Perf. Deborah Kerr, David Farrar, Jean Simmons, Sabu. The Archers: 1947. La boda del señor cura. Dir. Rafael Gil. Perf. Juan Camí, José Bódalo. 5 Films: 1979. Camino. Dir. Javier Fesser. Perf. Nerea Camacho, Carme Elías, Mariano Venancio. Mediapro, Pendelton: 2008. El canto del gallo. Dir. Rafael Gil. Perf. Francisco Rabal, Félix de Pomés. Aspa: 1955. El capitán de Loyola [Loyola, the Soldier Saint]. Dir. José Diez Morales. Perf. Rafael Durán. Caldreón: 1949. Un chien andalou [An Andalusian Dog]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil. Luis Buñuel: 1928. Cría cuervos [Raise Ravens]. Dir. Carlos Saura. Perf. Ana Torrent, Geraldine Chaplin, Héctor Alterio. Elías Querejeta: 1975. Cristo negro. Dir. Ramón Torrado. Perf. René Muñoz, Jesús Tordesillas. Copercines: 1963. El día de la bestia [The Day of the Beast]. Dir. Álex de la Iglesia. Perf. Santiago Segura, Page 186 →Álex Angulo, Armando de Razza. Canal+ España, Iberoamericana, Sogetel: 1995. Don’t Look Now. Dir. Nicolas Roeg. Perf. Donald Sutherland, Julie Christie. Casey, Eldorado, D.L.N. Ventures: 1973. Entre tinieblas [Dark Habits]. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Perf. Julieta Serrano, Carmen Maura, Chus Lampreave,

Cecilia Roth. Tesauro: 1984. Extramuros [Beyond the Walls]. Dir Miguel Picazo. Perf. Carmen Maura, Mercedes Sampietro. Blau: 1985. La escopeta nacional. Dir. Luis García Berlanga. Perf. José Sazatornil, José Luis López Vázquez, Luis Escobar. Impala, Incine: 1978. El espíritu de la colmena [The Spirit of the Beehive]. Dir. Victor Erice. Perf. Ana Torrent, Fernando Fernán Gómez. Elías Querejeta, Jacel Desposito: 1973. Le Fantôme de la liberté[The Phantom of Liberty]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Monica Vitti, Claude Brialy, Bernard Musson. Greenwich: 1974. Francesco, giullare di Dio [The Flowers of St. Francis]. Dir. Roberto Rossellini. Perf. Nazario Gerardi, Severino Pisacane, Aldo Fabrizi. Cineriz, Rizzoli: 1950. Gritos en la noche [The Awful Dr. Orlof]. Dir. Jesús/Jess Franco. Perf. Conrado San Martín, Howard Vernon. Hispamer, Leo Lax, Ydex Eurocine: 1962. La guerra de Dios [I Was a Parish Priest]. Dir. Rafael Gil. Perf. Claude Laydu, Francisco Rabal. Aspa: 1953. Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages. Dir. D. W. Griffith. Perf. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Howard Gaye. Triangle, Wark: 1916. Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest]. Dir. Robert Bresson. Perf. Claude Laydu, Rachel Bérendt. UGC: 1951. Los jueves, milagro. Dir. Luis García Berlanga. Perf. José Isbert, Richard Basehart. Ariel, Domiziana Internazionale: 1957. The King of Kings. Dir. Cecil B. DeMille. Perf. H. B. Warner, Joseph Schildkraut. DeMille: 1927. King of Kings. Dir. Nicholas Ray. Perf. Jeffrey Hunter, Harry Guardino, Carmen Sevilla. Bronston, MGM: 1961. The Last Temptation of Christ. Dir. Martin Scorsese. Perf. Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Barbara Hershey. Universal, Cineplex Odeon: 1988. Lucía y el sexo [Sex and Lucía]. Dir. Julio Medem. Perf. Paz Vega, Tristán Ulloa, Najwa Nimri. Alicia, Canal+, SOGECINE, Sogepaq, Studio Canal: 2001. La mala educación [Bad Education]. Dir. Pedro Almodóvar. Perf. Gael García Bernal, Fele Martínez, Lluís Homar. Canal+, El Deseo: 2004. Mar adentro [The Sea Inside]. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Javier Bardem, Belén Rueda. Sogepaq, SOGECINE, Himenóptero: 2004. Marcelino, pan y vino [The Miracle of Marcelino]. Dir. Ladislao Vajda. Perf. Pablo Calvo, Juan Calvo, Fernando Rey. Chamartín: 1955. Miércoles de Ceniza [Ash Wednesday]. Dir. Roberto Gavaldón. Perf. María Félix, Rodolfo Landa, Arturo de Córdova. Filmex: 1958. La mies es mucha. Dir. José Luis Sáenz de Heredia. Perf. Fernando Fernán Gómez, Rafael Romero Marchent. Chapalo: 1948. The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima. Dir. John Brahm. Perf. Angela Clarke, Gilbert Roland. Warner Bros.: 1952. Page 187 →

La noche oscura. Dir. Carlos Saura. Perf. Juan Diego, Julie Delpy. Iberoamericana, La Générale d’Iamges, New Deal, TVE: 1989. Los olvidados [The Dispossessed]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Alfonso Mejía, Roberto Cobo, Alma Delia Fuentes. Ultramar: 1950. The Others. Dir. Alejandro Amenábar. Perf. Nicole Kidman, Fionnula Flanagan, Christopher Eccleston. Cruise /Wagner, SOGECINE, Escorpión, Dimension: 2001. La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc [The Passion of Joan of Arc]. Dir. Carl Theodor Dreyer. Perf. Maria Falconetti, Michel Simon. Société Général des films: 1928. The Passion of the Christ. Dir. Mel Gibson. Perf. Jim Caviezel, Monica Bellucci. Icon: 2004. La plaça del Diamant. Dir. Francesc Betriu. Perf. Silvia Munt, Lluís Homar. Fígaro: 1982. La prima Angélica [Cousin Angelica]. Dir. Carlos Saura. Perf. José Luis López Vázquez, Lina Canalejas, Julieta Serrano. Elías Querejeta: 1974. La Señora de Fátima. Dir. Rafael Gil. Perf. Inés Orsini, Fernando Rey. Aspa: 1951. Simón del desierto [Simon of the Desert]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Claudio Brook, Silvia Pinal. Alatriste: 1965. Sin noticias de Dios [Don’t Tempt Me]. Dir. Agustín Díaz Yanes. Perf. Victoria Abril, Penélope Cruz, Demián Bichir, Gael García Bernal. Flamenco, Tornasol, Cartel, TeleMadrid: 2001. The Song of Bernadette. Dir. Henry King. Perf. Jennifer Jones, Vincent Price. Twentieth Century Fox: 1943. Sor Intrépida [Path to the Kingdom]. Dir. Rafael Gil. Perf. Dominique Blanchar, Francisco Rabal. Aspa: 1952. También la lluvia [Even the Rain]. Dir. Icíar Bollaín. Perf. Luis Tosar, Gael García Bernal. AXN, Alebrije, Canal+: 2010. Teresa de Jesús. Dir. Juan de Orduña. Perf. Aurora Bautista, José Bódalo. Agrupa: 1961. Teresa de Jesús. Dir. Josefina Molina. Perf. Concha Velasco, Silvia Munt, Francisco Rabal, TVE: 1984. Teresa, el cuerpo de Cristo [Theresa: The Body of Christ]. Dir. Ray Loriga. Perf. Paz Vega, Leonor Watling. Artédis, Lolafilms: 2007. Tierra [Earth]. Dir. Julio Medem. Perf. Carmelo Gómez, Emma Suárez, Silke, Karra Elejalde. Lolafilms, Sogetel: 1996. Tierra sin pan / Las Hurdes [Land without Bread]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Ramón Acín: 1932. Il vangelo secondo Matteo [The Gospel According to St. Matthew]. Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini. Perf. Enrique Irazoqui, Margherita Caruso, Susana Pasolini. Arco, Lux: 1964. Viridiana. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Silvia Pinal, Fernando Rey, Francisco Rabal, Lola Gaos. Alatriste, UNINCI, Films 59: 1961. La Voie lactée [The Milky Way]. Dir. Luis Buñuel. Perf. Paul Frankeur, Laurent Terzieff, Jean-Claude Carrière. Greenwich, Fraia: 1969. Yo la peor de todas [I, the Worst of All]. Dir. María Luisa Bemberg. Perf. Assumpta Serna, Dominique Sanda. GEA: 1990. Page 188 →

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Higginbotham, Virginia. Spanish Film under Franco. Austin: U of Texas P, 1988. Hopewell, John. Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema after Franco. London: British Film Institute, 1986. Hughes, Robert. Goya. New York: Knopf, 2006. Irigaray, Luce. “La Mystérique.” Speculum of the Other Woman. 1974. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. New York: Cornell UP, 1985. 191–202. Johnson, Roberta. Crossfire: Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900–1934. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1993. Jordan, Barry, and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas. Contemporary Spanish Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1998. Jorza, Diana Roxana. “Authority and Excess in Cielo negro (1951): Challenges of Religious Melodrama in the Spain of the 1950s.” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 90.3 (2013): 311–30. Juan de la Cruz. Poesía. Madrid: Cátedra, 1983. Kinder, Marsha. “All about the Brothers: Retroseriality in Almodóvar’s Cinema.” Epps and Kakoudaki 267–94. Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Kowalsky, Daniel. “Rated S: Softcore Pornography and the Spanish Transition to Democracy, 1977–82.” LázaroReboll and Willis 188–208. Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. 1987. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. 1980. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia, 1982. Kristeva, Julia. This Incredible Need to Believe. 2006. Trans. Beverly Bie Brahic. New York: Columbia UP, 2009. Labanyi, Jo. “History and Hauntology; or, What Does One Do with the Ghosts of the Past? Reflections on Spanish Film and Fiction of the Post-Franco Period.” Disremembering the Dictatorship: The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy. Ed. Joan Ramon Resina. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000. 65–82. Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio. Spanish Horror Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2012. Lázaro-Reboll, Antonio, and Andrew Willis, eds. Spanish Popular Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. “Leonardo’s Last Supper: A Vision by Peter Greenaway.” New York Times Style 17 October 2010: 60–61. López, Ignacio Javier. “Ética y vanguardia en Nazarín, de Buñuel.” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 30.3 (Spring 2006): 521–36. Machado, Antonio. Poesías completas. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1980. Marsh, Steven. Popular Spanish Film under Franco: Comedy and the Weakening of the State. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Martín Gaite, Carmen.El cuarto de atrás. 1978. Madrid: Destino, 2000. Page 193 → Martin-Márquez, Susan. “De Cristo negro a Cristo hueco: Formulaciones de raza y religión en la Guinea española.” Memoria colonial e inmigración: La negritud en la España posfranquista . Ed. Rosalía Cornejo

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Index of Film Titles, Theorists, and Directors 300, 147 Abre los ojos, 137 L’Âge d’or, 15, 24, 26–30, 31, 33, 36, 41, 61, 65, 66–67, 71, 83, 138, 157, 164, 176–77n5, 177n6, 177n7, 177n8, 177n9 Ágora, 20, 128, 138, 147–52, 165–66, 168 Agustina de Aragón, 96, 118 Alas, Leopoldo, 8–9, 42–43, 93 Alba de América, 69, 71 La aldea maldita, 84 Alexander Nevsky, 84, 87–88, 91 Almodóvar, Pedro, 17, 18, 19, 105, 113, 123–37, 139, 151–52, 165, 168, 169, 171, 172, 182n16, 182n17, 183n22, 183n24 Amanece, que no es poco, 123 Amantes, 19 Amantes del Círculo Polar, 18, 156–57, 169, 183–84n33, 184n34 Amenábar, Alejandro, 17, 18, 19–20, 113, 128, 137–52, 163, 165–66, 168, 169, 171, 172 An Andalusian Dog. See Un chien andalou El ángel exterminador, 41–42, 43, 51, 58, 142 Antichrist, 144, 176n8 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 58 Aranda, Vicente, 19, 113, 159 La ardilla roja, 152–54, 169 Arévalo, Carlos, 180n13 Argento, Dario, 19 Armendáriz, Montxo, 123, 171 Ash Wednesday. See Miércoles de ceniza Así en el cielo como en la tierra, 123 ¡Átame!, 134

The Awful Dr. Orlof. See Gritos en la noche Bad Education. See La mala educación Bakunin, Mikhail, 10; anarchism, 10, 22, 78, 92, 93 Balada triste de trompeta, 145, 168, 173–74 Balarrasa, 73, 91, 179n9 Balázs, Béla, 2–3, 175n2 La barraca, 115 Barrio, 123 Bataille, Georges, 25 Baudrillard, Jean, 1, 100, 136, 172; simulacrum theory, 24, 43, 100, 101, 131, 136, 152, 160, 172 Bava, Mario, 19 Belle de jour, 178 n15 The Bells of St. Mary’s, 124 Bemberg, María Luisa,161 Ben-Hur (1925), 30, 65 Ben-Hur (1959), 69 Berg, Amy J., 132 Bergman, Ingmar, 21 Bergson, Henri, 10 Berlanga, Luis. See García Berlanga, Luis El beso de Judas, 68, 83, 88–91, 95, 132, 167, 170 Best in Show, 30 Beyond the Walls. See Extramuros Bienvenido, Mr. Marshall, 75, 98 Bigas Luna, 184n35 Page 198 →Birth of a Nation, 65 Black Narcissus, 18, 124–27, 182n13 Blasco Ibáñez, Vicente, 10, 68, 113, 115 Blood and Sand, 10 Blow-Up, 58

La boda del señor cura, 112 Bollaín, Icíar,18, 113, 122, 123, 158–59, 172–73, 184n36 The Boondock Saints, 176n8 Borat, 30 Bourdieu, Pierre, 20, 164–66, 168–70, 173–74; theory of the habitus, 20, 123, 152, 164–74 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 135 Bresson, Robert, 91, 93, 179n11, 180n19 El bruto, 177n13 Buñuel, Luis, 7, 9, 13, 15–17, 18, 19, 21–62, 63, 66–67, 82, 103–5, 120, 123, 132–33, 137, 138, 142, 150, 151, 157, 164–65, 166, 167, 169, 170–71, 172, 176n1, 176n2, 176n3, 177n8, 177n11, 177n13, 177–78n15, 178n16, 178n17, 178n18, 180n17, 180–81n24 Cadalso, José, 6 Calabuch, 98 Camino, 20, 147 Camus, Mario, 113 El canto del gallo, 94–95, 129, 170 Caótica Ana, 158 El capitán de Loyola, 83, 84, 96 Capra, Frank, 63 Cartas de Alou, 171 Casablanca, 110 El castillo de Fu-Manchú, 19 Cavell, Stanley, 3, 166 Cerca del cielo, 180n13 Cet obscure objet du désir, 170 Un chien andalou, 24–26, 46, 164 Chomón, Segundo, 19 El Cid, 103 Cielo negro, 74 Clarín.See Alas, Leopoldo

Coixet, Isabel, 122 La colmena, 113 Cousin Angelica. See La prima Angélica Cría cuervos, 63, 107–11, 162, 167, 180n22, 180–81n24 El crimen de Cuenca, 112, 181n4 Cristo, 68 Cristo negro, 74, 101 Cuerda, José Luis, 123 Un curita cañón , 102 Dalí, Salvador,24–27, 30 Daly, Mary, 170–71 Dark Habits. See Entre tinieblas Darwin, Charles, 8, 23, 140, 153, 140, 153; Scopes Trial, 27 Dawkins, Richard, 4, 14, 19, 54, 138 The Day of the Beast. See El día de la bestia De Madrid al cielo, 74 Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 47; figure of the nomad, 162 Deliver Us from Evil, 132 DeMille, Cecil B., 65, 81 Dennett, Daniel C., 175n1 El día de la bestia, 18, 19, 144–45, 183n30 Diary of a Country Priest. See Journal d’un curé de campagne Díaz Morales, José,83 Díaz Yanes, Agustín,17, 113, 137 The Dispossessed. See Los olvidados Dogma, 176n8 La Dolce Vita, 18, 104 Don Juan Tenorio, 68 Don’t Look Now, 142

Don’t Tempt Me. See Sin noticias de Dios Double Indemnity, 176n10 Doubt, 132 Dreyer, Carl Theodor, 71, 83, 179n11 Eagleton, Terry, 14–15, 23, 59, 142, 159, 166, 173 Earth. See Tierra Eisenstein, Sergei, 84, 87–88 Él, 36 Elizabeth R, 121 Ensayo de un crimen, 36 Page 199 → Entre tinieblas, 18, 124–28, 134, 136, 182n13–16 Erice, Víctor,17, 19, 63, 105–6, 114, 136, 171 Erikson, Erik, 25–26 Esa mujer, 101–2, 124 La escopeta nacional, 112–13 Escrivá, José María,38, 179n10; Opus Dei, 20, 38, 85, 96, 147, 170 Escrivá, Vicente, 73–74, 80, 88–95, 97, 102, 103, 111–12, 132, 179n10 El espíritu de la colmena, 19, 63, 105–6, 136, 140, 156, 171 Even the Rain. See También la lluvia The Exorcism of Emily Rose, 160 The Exorcist, 57, 138, 144, 160, 172, 176n8 The Exterminating Angel. See El ángel exterminador Extramuros, 46, 122–23, 124, 127 Le Fantôme de la liberté, 59–62, 164, 178n19, 178n20 La fe, 72 Fellini, Federico, 18, 104 Fesser, Javier, 20, 147 Flaherty, Robert J., 30

The Flowers of St. Francis. See Francesco, giullare di Dio The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, 10 Francesco, giullare di Dio, 83–84, 86, 87, 91 Franco, Jess/Jesús, 19, 138–39 Franju, Georges, 19 Frankenstein, 19, 105–6, 151–52 Fray Escoba, 74, 101 El frente infinito, 180n13 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 13, 15–16, 28–29, 132, 138, 141; psychoanalysis, 25–26, 38, 85, 104–5, 151 Galdós. See Pérez Galdós, Benito García Berlanga, Luis,17, 63, 66, 97–101, 112–13, 114, 123, 168, 169 Gary Cooper que estás en los cielos, 122, 136–37 Gelabert, Fructuoso, 67 Gibson, Mel, 150, 159 Gil, Rafael, 63, 67, 68, 72–82, 88–95, 97, 102, 103, 112, 132, 167, 170 Giner de los Ríos, Francisco,9 Gladiator, 147 The God Who Wasn’t There, 54 Godspell, 65, 176n8 The Golden Age. See L’Âge d’or The Gospel According to St. Matthew. See Il vangelo secondo Matteo Grayling, A. C., 4 Greenaway, Peter, 40–41 Griffiths, D. W., 65, 178n2 Gritos en la noche, 138–39 La guerra de Dios, 91–94, 103, 132, 170 Habermas, Jürgen, 4–5, 16 Hable con ella, 151 Harka, 180n13

Hawks, Howard, 124 Harris, Sam, 4 La hermana San Sulpicio, 68 Historias del Kronen, 123 Hitchens, Christopher, 4, 14, 19, 138 Hugo, Victor, 2 Las Hurdes. See Tierra sin pan Hutcheon, Linda, 136, 177n14 I, the Worst of All. See Yo, la peor de todas I Was a Parish Priest. See La guerra de Dios Iglesia, Álex de la, 18, 19, 113, 138, 144–45, 151, 168, 171, 173–74 La ilusión viaja en tranvía, 36 The Immortals, 147 Inés de Castro, 83 The Innocents, 138, 141 Intolerance, 30, 65 Iquino, Ignacio F., 69, 179n7 Irigaray, Luce, 115 Iser, Wolfgang, 82 Jameson, Fredric, 160, 162, 167, 184n38 Jauss, Hans Robert, 64 Page 200 →Jesus Christ Superstar, 65 Jesús de Nazaret, 69, 178n4 Jesus of Nazareth, 115 Jimeno, Eduardo, 67 John Paul Jones, 103 Johnny Guitar, 130 Johnson, Roberta, 8 Journal d’un curé de campagne, 91–92, 93, 170, 179n11 Juana la Loca, 19, 159

El Judas, 69 Judas’ Kiss. See El beso de Judas Los jueves, milagro, 17, 63, 83, 98–101, 123, 168 Keys of the Kingdom, 91, 179n9 The King of Kings, 30, 65, 66, 81, 89, 103, 178n3 King of Kings, 54, 69, 103 Klimovsky, León, 19 Kristeva, Julia, 13–14, 15, 21, 23, 34, 59, 76, 138, 141–42, 143, 166, 170, 171 El laberinto del fauno, 19 Land Without Bread. See Tierra sin pan The Last Circus. See Balada triste de trompeta The Last Temptation of Christ, 41, 104, 138, 176n8 La lengua de las mariposas, 129 León de Aranoa, Fernando, 123 Letting Go of God, 54 Libertarias, 129 Life of Brian, 54, 65, 176n8 Locura de amor, 69, 71, 83, 96, 118, 159 Loriga, Ray, 17, 18, 113, 159–63, 168, 171, 172 Lovers of the Arctic Circle. See Los amantes del Círculo Polar Loyola, the Soldier Saint. See El capitán de Loyola Lucía y el sexo, 18, 157–58, 169 Los lunes al sol, 123 Lyotard, Jean-François, 137 The Magdalene Sisters, 132 La mala educación, 18, 93, 125, 128–37, 151–52, 159, 176n10, 182n19, 182–83n21, 183n23, 183n24 Le Manoir du diable, 19 Mar adentro, 18, 19–20, 138, 145–47, 183n31 Marcelino, pan y vino, 80, 83, 84–88, 90, 91, 95, 121, 132, 170

Marx, Karl, 10, 15–16, 22, 23, 30, 35, 58, 93, 94, 103, 104, 146; Communism, 31, 72, 74–75, 78, 89, 94, 104, 114, 170 The Meaning of Life, 54 Medem, Julio, 18, 113, 152–58, 166, 169–70, 183n32 Méliès, Georges, 19 Menéndez Pelayo, Marcelino, 15, 21, 48–51, 53–56 Miércoles de ceniza, 18, 130–31, 133 La mies es mucha, 73, 91 The Milky Way. See La Voie lactée The Miracle of Marcelino. See Marcelino, pan y vino The Miracle of Our Lady of Fátima, 75, 80–82 Miró, Pilar, 112, 113, 116, 122, 136–37, 181n4 Misión blanca, 74 Mitchell, Timothy, 10–11, 93, 140–41, 172 Moana, 30 Molina, Josefina, 17, 113–22, 127–28, 148, 159, 160, 161, 163, 181n6 Molokai, 96 Molokai: The Story of Father Damian, 176n8 Montaigne, Michel de, 54 La muchacha de las bragas de oro, 113 Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios, 126, 130 Nanook of the North, 30 Nazarín, 9, 22, 34, 36, 42, 58 Neale, Steve, 2, 64–65 Neville, Edgar, 19 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 10 Nieves Conde, José Antonio, 73, 179n7 Page 201 → La noche oscura, 119–20, 182n11 North by Northwest, 145

The Nun’s Story, 124 Los olvidados, 32–36, 39, 71, 104, 167 The Omen, 144, 176n8 Orduña, Juan de, 63, 96, 114, 115, 118, 119, 179n7 The Others, 19, 137–44, 147, 183n27, 183n28, 183n29 Pardo Bazán, Emilia, 7–9 La pasión turca, 19 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 54, 103–4, 138 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, 71, 83 The Passion of Joan of Arc. See La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc The Passion of the Christ, 65, 150, 159, 176n8 Path to the Kingdom. See Sor Intrépida Pecado de amor, 124 Pepita Jiménez, 68 Pérez Galdós, Benito, 7–9, 22, 36, 38, 42–43, 78, 132 Pérez de Urbel, Justo, 68–69; El Año Cristiano, 38, 69, 96 The Phantom of Liberty. See Le Fantôme de la liberté The Phantom of the Opera, 145 La piel que habito, 19 Plácido, 97, 98, 180n17 La plaza del Diamante, 122 La prima Angélica, 106–7, 126–27, 161–62 Princesas, 123 Proceso a Jesús, 179n8 The Prophecy, 176n8 ¿Qué he hecho yo para merecer esto? , 134 Quo Vadis?, 30, 65 Raise Ravens. See Cría cuervos Ray, Nicholas, 54, 103

Raza, 180n13 Reckless. See Balarrasa The Red Squirrel. See La ardilla roja Reina Santa, 72, 83 Reinhartz, Adele, 2, 180n16 Religulous, 54 Réquiem por un campesino español, 113, 129 Resistencia en Levante, 72 Rey, Florián, 84 Riña de café, 67 The Robe, 69 Roots, 115 Rossellini, Roberto, 83–84, 86, 87, 179n12 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 23 Russell, Ken, 152 Sade, Marquis de, 22, 29–30, 51–53, 61 Sáenz de Heredia, José Luis, 63, 73, 179n7, 179n8, 179n13 Salida de la misa de las doce del Pilar de Zaragoza, 67 Sampson and Delilah, 64 Los santos inocentes, 113 El santuario no se rinde, 180n13 Sanz del Río, Julián,9 Saura, Carlos, 17, 63, 66, 106–10, 114, 119–20, 161–62, 167, 172, 180n21 Savater, Fernando, 4, 21, 105, 138 Scorsese, Martin, 19, 41, 104, 138 The Sea Inside. See Mar adentro La Señora de Fátima, 67, 72, 74–82, 84, 87, 90, 91, 110 Servet, Miquel, 56, 82 Sex and Lucía. See Lucía y el sexo

El sexto sentido, 83 Shutter Island, 19, 138 Simón del desierto, 22, 41, 42–45, 58, 61, 71, 120, 138, 151, 167, 170, 177–78n15 Simon of the Desert. See Simón del desierto Sin noticias de Dios, 137 The Singing Nun, 102, 124 Sobrevila, Nemesio, 83 The Song of Bernadette, 67, 71, 72, 77, 91, 104 Sor Intrépida, 73–74, 79, 80 Sor Ye-Yé, 102, 124 Page 202 →Spinal Tap, 30 The Spirit of the Beehive. See El espíritu de la colmena Stigmata, 176n8 Sturges, Preston, 124 Suspiria, 19 Tacones lejanos, 19 Taine, Hippolyte, 8 También la lluvia, 18, 122, 158–59, 172–73, 184n36 Távora, Pilar, 122, 182n12 The Ten Commandments, 69 Teresa de Jesús (1961), 83, 96–97, 115, 118, 119, 159, 170 Teresa de Jesús (1984), 113–22, 127–28, 148, 159, 160, 161, 163 Teresa: El cuerpo de Cristo, 18, 113, 159–63, 168, 172 Tesis, 137 La teta y la luna, 184n35 Theresa: The Body of Christ. See Teresa: El cuerpo de Cristo The Third Man, 95 The Thorn Birds, 115 Tiempo de silencio, 19, 113 Tierra, 154–55

Tierra sin pan, 30–32, 34, 75, 177n10, 177n11 To Kill a Mockingbird, 140 Todorov, Tzvetan, 1, 119, 154–55, 182n10; theory of the fantastic, 119, 154–55, 181n9, 182n10 Tommy, 152 Torrado, Ramón, 63 La torre de los siete jorobados, 19 Toro, Guillermo del, 5, 175n5 Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley, 128 Trier, Lars von, 144 Tristana, 7, 59, 180–81n24 Troy, 147 Unamuno, Miguel de, 10, 16–17, 43, 97, 157, 158 Vacas, 152 Vajda, Ladislao, 63, 84–88, 170, 179n7 Valis, Noël, 3, 78, 180n23 Valle-Inclán, Ramón María del,10, 21 Il vangelo secondo Matteo, 54, 103–4, 138 El verdugo, 98 Vertigo, 145, 176n10 El virgo de Visanteta, 111–12 Viridiana, 34, 36–41, 43, 46, 58, 60, 71, 90, 132–33, 138–39, 167, 180n17 Visanteta estate quieta, 111–12 La Voie lactée, 15, 21, 23, 45–59, 60, 61, 66, 82, 103–5, 123, 150, 169, 178n16, 178n17, 178n18 Wade, Nicholas, 3, 12–13 Whale, James, 19 Wilder, Billy, 124 Wollen, Peter, 4; auteur theory, 4, 5 Y al tercer año, resucitó , 112 Les Yeux sans visage, 19

Yo, la peor de todas, 161 Zeffirelli, Franco, 115 Zola, Émile, 8, 71