Viridiana: The World, the Flesh, and the Devil

Viridiana is a critically acclaimed film directed in 1961 (made with special permission by Franco himself) by world-renowned director Luis Buñuel. Buñuel’s film was the official entry representing Franco’s Spain at the International Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Vigorously denounced by the Vatican’s newspaper as blasphemous, the film was immediately banned in Spain until Franco’s death. This chapter reads Viridiana allegorically as a film that undermines Francoist kitsch aesthetics from within. By means of its intricate mise-en-scène of the gothic, decadent mansion of its perverse protagonist, a subtle portrayal of Franco himself, the film insightfully depicts Francoism as a rarefied ideology, as a sublimated space suspended in a kitsch melancholy bubble lost in time and space.