The Museum of Modern Art in New York City has announced the screening of Nazarín, one of the masterworks by Spanish-born Mexican director Luis Buñuel, to take place April 12-18. The film was one of the filmmaker’s personal favorite among the films he made in Mexico, and it had been out of distribution for many years, until its 2019 restoration by Mexico’s Cineteca Nacional and Fundación Televisa.
Nazarín is a blisteringly ironic, hauntingly beautiful parable about an idealistic young priest (Francisco Rabal) whose attempts to lead a truly Christian life are ridiculed by the thieves and prostitutes who make up his urban parish. Driven out, he wanders the countryside begging for food, but when his prayers seem to cure a dying child, he becomes a Christlike figure, pursuing his mission with two former prostitutes (Marga Lopez and Rita Macedo) as his apostles. Despite winning an award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, the film’s treatment of religion proved so controversial that it was not released in the US until 1968, where it was received by an uncomprehending pan in the New York Times.
The screening of Buñuel's film will be accompanied by the 2015 documentary film Following Nazarín / Tras Nazarín by Javier Espada, which is much more than the standard “making-of” documentary. The film locates Buñuel’s 1959 Nazarín within the Mexican landscape, using still photos taken by Buñuel and the great Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo (the subject of a MoMA retrospective in 2014) to link the images of the film to the countryside as it was at the time of the shoot and as it is today. Interviews with Buñuel’s collaborators, among them the screenwriter Jean Claude Carrière and the actors Ignacio López Tarso and Silvia Pinal, evoke Buñuel’s methods; reflections from filmmakers (including Arturo Ripstein and Carlos Reygadas), critics, and scholars position this eternally audacious work in the context of Spanish Catholicism and Mexican history.
For more information visit: www.moma.org
