General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Simon of the Desert

Simon of the Desert (Spanish: Simón del desierto) is a 1965 Mexican short feature film directed by Luis Buñuel, a satirical fable about an ascetic who lives atop a pillar in the desert while the Devil, played by Silvia Pinal, tries to tempt him down.¹ It was Buñuel's last film made in Mexico, the last in which he used Mexican actors, and the last on which he worked with the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa.²

Key fact	Detail
Director, year, country	Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1965¹
Running time and format	About 45 minutes, black and white, 1.33:1, Spanish¹
Principal cast	Claudio Brook (Simon), Silvia Pinal (the Devil), Hortensia Santoveña (the mother), Enrique Álvarez Félix (Brother Matías)¹
Key crew	Screenplay Buñuel and Julio Alejandro; producer Gustavo Alatriste; cinematography Gabriel Figueroa; music Raúl Lavista; editing Carlos Savage¹
Literary source	Inspired by Simeon Stylites, a fifth-century Syrian hermit who reputedly lived 37 years atop a pillar³
Awards	Special Jury Award and FIPRESCI Prize, Venice Film Festival 1965⁴
Status in Buñuel's career	Last film made in Mexico and last collaboration with Figueroa²

Spoilers

Story

Simon (Claudio Brook) is a stylite, an ascetic living on top of a pillar, who blesses and heals the faithful who gather below. The film opens as he has completed a stretch of penance reported as six years, six months, and six days by the Criterion essay and AFI synopsis, but as six years, six weeks, and six days by MoMA, Turner Classic Movies, and Rotten Tomatoes; the bishop announcing the figure names the number of the beast from the Book of Revelation, a detail no character in the film remarks on.²^•³^•⁵ A rich benefactor provides a taller column, and Simon is moved upward, an advancement Buñuel treats with irony even within the realm of renunciation.²

Simon's contemplation is interrupted by pilgrims, by an epileptic priest, by a dwarf goat-herder with his goats, and by a self-propelled coffin that squeals across the desert floor toward the pillar's base.⁶^•² The Devil appears repeatedly in forms played by Silvia Pinal: a woman carrying a water pitcher, a seductress in a schoolgirlish sailor suit, a young male shepherd with fake curls and beard, a worldly woman with a fancy hairdo, and finally a miniskirted dancer in a New York nightclub.² In the closing sequence she transports Simon to a modern discotheque where teenagers dance to rock and roll, and the film ends abruptly.⁷

Production

The film was the third and final collaboration between Buñuel, the actress Silvia Pinal, and her producer husband Gustavo Alatriste, following Viridiana (1961) and The Exterminating Angel (1962).³ It was originally planned as part of a trilogy of episodes, with the other segments to be directed by Federico Fellini and Jules Dassin.³ Money ran out midway through production, and Buñuel ended the film with the disco sequence rather than the planned conclusion, in which Simon would have been moved to an even higher column at the edge of the sea.⁸ Despite the truncation from a planned feature into a roughly 45-minute film, it was released as a standalone work.³

Reported running times differ across catalogs: 42 minutes (Larousse), 45 minutes (Criterion, MoMA, AFI, BBFC), 47 minutes (Cinémathèque française), and 49 minutes (TCM).⁹^•¹^•¹⁰^•¹¹

Reception and interpretation

At the 1965 Venice Film Festival the film and its director won a Special Jury Award and the FIPRESCI Prize, awarded by the International Federation of Film Critics.⁴ The British Board of Film Classification, which passed the film for cinema release in 1968 and again in 1995, describes it as a drama in which a devout religious man faces temptation, with content advice noting moderate bad language, brief nudity, and a seduction scene.¹²

The critic Michael Wood, who teaches English and comparative literature at Princeton University, reads the film as the middle work in an informal religious trilogy with Nazarín (1959) and The Milky Way (1969), with Simon a good man who has become the victim of an argument that will not let him go; Buñuel later thought the story could have been one of the scenes the pilgrims encounter in The Milky Way.² Scholarly readings have often taken the discotheque ending as an allegorical hell; Marc Ripley of the University of Leicester has proposed instead that the desert and the disco are contiguous planes on which Simon's cycle of repetition continues indefinitely, with no conclusive narrative end.¹³ A study in the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas situates the film's profanations of religious imagery in Buñuel's experience as a Spanish emigrant in Mexico and in the Mexican amalgamation of Spanish Catholicism and indigenous belief.¹⁴ Buñuel himself deflected interpretive weight with the remark, quoted by the Melbourne International Film Festival, "Thank God I'm still an atheist."⁶

Home video

The Criterion Collection released the film as Spine #460 with a restored high-definition digital transfer, the 1995 documentary A Mexican Buñuel by Emilio Maillé, an interview with Silvia Pinal, an essay by Michael Wood, and a reprinted interview with Buñuel.¹ In the 2012 BFI Sight and Sound critics' poll the film appeared at number 74.¹⁵

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026