M. Leary

Nazarín (Buñuel, 1958) – The (In)Effectiveness of Christian Justice?

For Buñuel, the absurdity of the world is only matched by those who attempt to redeem it by placing themselves in its context. It is this movement of the Church that Buñuel attempts to expose as a Dadaist banality, an undoing of the very thing it seeks to do. Nazarín is the parable of a Church caught up in the very system it is seeking to subvert, only to discover that it has itself been subverted by Orwell’s bootheel, Hitchen’s Missionary Position, the faceless horror of Camus’ prison.