The Criterion Blogathon: Viridiana

Luis Buñuel's late career has been described as one of the great artistic flowerings in cinema. Starting in (roughly) 1961, the conventional wisdom suggests, Buñuel began making masterpieces as a matter of course. I'm not entirely sympathetic with this point of view. By the time he made Viridiana (1961), he had already made Los Olvidados and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo De La Cruz. It is, perhaps, more correct to say that after 1961, the world noticed that Bunuel was making masterpieces whenever he was given his head. The revival of his reputation occurred, perhaps, because he was no longer working in the ignored cinematic backwater of Mexico. The film cognoscenti can be Eurocentric, sometimes, especially the French. Even two years before Viridiana, French critics were wondering what had happened to Buñuel after the promising start to his career. And then Viridiana happened and Buñuel's fortunes changed. Even if one accepts that Buñuel's late flowering is an illusion or a trick of one's point of view, Viridiana remains a film upon which his career seems to turn.

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Deeper Red

The heroine of Crimson Peak (2015), Guillermo Del Toro's return to horror filmmaking, is named "Edith Cushing," a name with a double dose of allusion. "Cushing" signifies the film's debt to Hammer Studios and the great Peter Cushing, a debt that seems relatively small to my mind. "Edith," on the other hand suggests Edith Wharton, whose savagely genteel melodramas of the turn of the 20th Century the film takes as primary texts for its first act. Wharton, it should also be said, was a crackerjack author of ghost stories which, germane to this particular film, are rife with repressed sexual desires and economic anxiety. Like Wharton, Crimson Peak's heroine is a patrician writer of ghost stories, though from Buffalo, New York rather than the big apple. The allusion is on point. This is a very self-aware movie.

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