European surrealism, and more precisely the French surrealist movement of the 1920s, developed in its beginnings many identity signs, with which it seeked to consolidate its search for imagery subversion in order to find a new reality. We can thus say that surrealism is an iconoclast movement in essence. Subversion of established imagery quickly turned into an attack from the surrealists to the “living forces” that embodied the preservation of a certain vision of the human being. Among these “living forces” there was, of course, the clergy, which was the target of a very heterodox approach in the surrealist works. A good example is the French magazine “La Révolution Surréaliste” which, in 1926, publshed a picture with the title “Our contributor Benjamín Péret insulting a priest”.
Luis Buñuel also appropiated this symbol for his work. In many of his films we can see clergymen in absurd or paradoxical situations.
From the alleged saint who survives six years on top of a pillar in the desert, while a group of monks encourage him, in “Simon of the Desert”, to the bishop who asks for work as a gardener in “The Discreet Charm of the Burgeoisie”, Buñuel’s filmography is full of scenes in which the clergy is placed in illogical circumstances, or in which the filmmaker stretches logic itself until he turns the situation around.
In “L’Âge d’Or” we even see something more explicit: the main character throws many useless objects from a palace window, and the last of these objects is a bishop with his miter and crosier, who, when falling to the floor, disappears from our sight from a zenith shot.
“La Révolution Surréaliste”, 1926
