General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Simón del Desierto

Simón del Desierto (Simon of the Desert) is a 1965 Mexican film by Luis Buñuel, loosely based on the life of the ascetic Simeon Stylites, in which a hermit named Simón spends years standing on a column in the desert while the Devil, embodied by Silvia Pinal, tries to tempt him. It was the last film Buñuel shot in Mexico, and because its financing ran out it survives as an unfinished medium-length film of roughly 45 minutes.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1965; his final Mexican project²
Length	Unfinished; versions run between 42 and 50 minutes, with listings of 43, 45, and 47 minutes³
Cast	Claudio Brook as Simón; Silvia Pinal as the Devil; Hortensia Santoveña, Luis Aceves Castañeda, Enrique Álvarez Félix¹
Crew	Script by Buñuel and Julio Alejandro; cinematography Gabriel Figueroa; music Raúl Lavista; producer Gustavo Alatriste¹^•⁴
Historical basis	Simeon Stylites, a stylite ascetic of the early Christian era who lived atop a column in the Syrian desert¹
Awards	Special Jury Prize (ex aequo), FICC prize, and Pasinetti Prize at the 17th Venice exhibition; André Bazin Gold Medal (FIPRESCI) at Acapulco⁵
Physical relic	The column capital used in filming is preserved and exhibited by Filmoteca UNAM⁶

Spoilers

Story and subject

The film opens at the moment Simón has spent six years, six months, and six days on his column, and is about to move to a taller one offered by the rich devotee Práxedes Mateo. A crowd gathers asking for miracles, and the Devil appears in various forms to tempt him.¹ Simón's asceticism is rendered in concrete detail: he lives on lettuce leaves and water hoisted up in a satchel, preaches from a rope railing, and treats even an added piece of bread as a temptation.⁷ The one miracle shown, restoring the hands of a mutilated man, is shrugged off by both the beneficiary and the onlookers.⁸

In the ending, Satan manages to transport Simón to New York in the 1960s, taking him to nightclubs where people dance to rock and roll; the band playing there is called The Sinners. Simón tries to drive off Satan without success and ends the film sunk in doubt.¹^•³ Buñuel said he had not wanted to give the story a defined historical period.³

Production and unfinished status

Buñuel developed the story himself and wrote the screenplay with Julio Alejandro as a feature, but the financing of the Mexican producer Gustavo Alatriste, who had also produced Viridiana (1961) and El ángel exterminador (1962), was not sufficient to finish it.² Because the money ran out midway through production, Buñuel ended the film with the devil enticing Simón to a disco rather than, as planned, moving him onto an even higher column at the edge of the sea.⁹ Depending on the version, the film stands at between 42 and 50 minutes.³

Buñuel shot it quickly between two of his French films, Le journal d'une femme de chambre (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967), at the moment he was returning to making European art films.¹⁰ The Brazilian director Glauber Rocha, a friend of Buñuel's eldest son Juan Luis, appears in a small role, a sign of Buñuel's continuing ties to Latin American cinema at the end of his Mexican career.¹⁰

Place in Buñuel's work

The film closes Buñuel's Mexican period and continues the theological satire he had begun with Nazarín (1959) and Viridiana (1961), pitting religious perseverance against earthly temptation.²^•¹¹ The critic Michael Wood, who teaches English and comparative literature at Princeton University, suggests reading it as the middle work of a religious trilogy: Nazarín shows failed simplicity, The Milky Way (1969) shows the elaborate unreason of Christianity, and between them stands Simón on his pillar, a good man trapped by an argument that will not release him. Buñuel himself later thought the film could have been one of the scenes the pilgrims encounter in The Milky Way.¹²

Because most of the film takes place in a desert standing in for the early Christian era, and its modern episode is set in New York rather than Mexico, scholars note that it is usually not categorized as a Mexican film, yet it does not belong to Buñuel's European oeuvre either; it was made in Mexico with Mexican actors.¹⁰

Reception

At the 17th Muestra Internacional de Arte de Cine de Venecia the film received the Special Jury Prize (ex aequo), the prize of the International Federation of Film Societies, and the Pasinetti Prize of the Italian film union; at the 8th Reseña Mundial de Festivales de Acapulco it won the FIPRESCI André Bazin Gold Medal, among other recognitions.⁵ The film has drawn sustained critical attention: the critic Brian Murphy argued in 1969 that it confronts Christianity directly and is essential for understanding Buñuel's thought, presenting the dilemma of an intellectually untenable faith against a spiritually empty modern materialism.¹³ Later scholarship has examined its liminal structure, its erotic and surrealist elements, and its construction of the protagonist suspended between earth and sky.³^•¹⁴

The preserved column capital

The capitel, the capital of the column Buñuel used during filming, is held by Filmoteca UNAM. The documentarian Emilio Maillé located it in the late 1990s, and it was moved to the film archive's facilities; Filmoteca UNAM rescued it in February 2000 to commemorate the centenary of Buñuel's birth, and it now stands at the entrance to the institution.⁶^•¹¹^•¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026