Religion and Spanish Film: Luis Buñuel, the Franco Era, and Contemporary Directors by Elizabeth Scarlett (review)

The thought of French sociologist-anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu—particularly his influential notion of “habitus”—was instrumental in leading author Elizabeth Scarlett to the following conclusion in Religion and Spanish Film: “Catholicism endures as the deep-seated habitus of Spanish cinema even though it ceased to be the official religion of the nation in 1977 (171).” Her thoroughly researched book traces the remarkable persistence of Catholicism as a theme in Spanish cinema from the early films of canonical auteur Luis Buñuel (Un chien andalou and L’Âge d’Or) to the recent work of contemporary filmmakers, such as Alejandro Amenábar and Julio Medem. This book’s title may, arguably, mislead, since the author frequently strays outside the implied domain of Spanish cinema, for example, in her provocative analysis of the maternal figures and Marian imagery in Buñuel’s Los olvidados, a movie produced entirely within the context of the Mexican motion-picture industry though the maestro himself was, of course, Spanish born and raised.

Scarlett practices contextual criticism: she analyses given films in relation to their depictions and attitudes concerning religion and then situates those attitudes within a broader socio-political context. Her critical approach creatively combines auteurist study with genre analysis. The auteurist approach allows her to identify and analyze the distinctly personal creative markings—systems of belief, imagery, etc.—in the oeuvre of given auteurs; and the genre criticism identifies the esthetic and ideological characteristics of given films that shape viewers’ expectations and facilitate marketing in a mainstream context. The appropriateness of the auteurist approach to filmmakers such as those listed above is rightly taken as self-evident; but before studying Spanish religious pictures Scarlett ably builds her case—by drawing on the scholarship of Steve Neale and others—that the religious genre does in fact exist in cinema. The American blockbuster The Song of Bernadette is examined as a genre-defining production that greatly influenced Spanish filmmakers, such as Rafael Gil, who were working in the mainstream of the motion-picture industry during the Francoist dictatorship, which had imposed the authoritarian order known as National Catholicism.

In the meaty chapter “The Religious Genre Film and Its Discontents in Francoist Spain,” Scarlett identifies and characterizes the different sub-genres of religious pictures commonly produced at this time, such as the Marian miracle movie and the saint’s story or hagiographic film. Ladislao Vajda’s immensely popular Marcelino, pan y vino receives a careful psychoanalytical-ideological-political reading that links its artistry to the tenets of National Catholicism. Well-researched, insightful, and detailed readings of specific films are a strength of this volume. In the case of Marcelino, pan y vino, for instance, Scarlett is careful to dialogue meaningfully with established scholar Marsha Kinder (Blood Cinema) concerning the Oedipal and homoerotic/pedophilic dimensions of the film. Gil’s work (La guerra de Dios, La Señora de Fátima) receives particular attention in this chapter since he is widely regarded as the “Frank Capra” of the dominant film discourse of the era; and, in addition, his aforementioned titles represent prominent examples of movies that hued to Francoist ideology and therefore received the substantial financial stimulus associated with the most favored “National Interest” category. This chapter ends with an examination of the work of the “discontents” of the title, for example, Carlos Saura, whose masterpiece Cría cuervos portrays characters adrift in the mid-1970s—Franco died in 1975—stripped of the supposed certainties of National Catholicism and now facing the uncertain and disturbing legacy of Francoism.

The chapter “Luis Buñuel and the Reinvention of Catholicism” is a high point since it represents a major advance in Buñuelian scholarship. For decades, the dominant strand of this scholarship stressed the auteur’s perceived atheism, his anticlericalism, and his Marxist-surrealist subversion of Catholicism as evidenced in L’Âge d’Or; however, Scarlett’s perceptive...