Parodies of Christian Wandering in Luis Buñuel’s Films

This essay investigates parodic profanations of Christian peregrination in three films by Luis Buñuel: Nazarín (1959), Simón del desierto (1965), and La Voie lactée (1969). Proceeding from Jesus Christ, Simeon the stylite, and Santiago de Compostela, these movies focus on two central figures of religious wandering, the itinerant preacher and the pilgrim, whose devout essence is subverted in manifold ways ranging from heresy and eroticism to social failure and homelessness. In this connection, walking is distinguished from artificial and supernatural forms of locomotion, but at the same time connected to surrealist time travels and narrative digressions. The article traces how the motif of walking is related to the movies’ formal features and carefully examines the intertextual relations that tie the films not only to each other, but also to the picaresque novel as an important model of profanation.