Death of a Cyclist: screening the delicate balance between pure polemic and pure pleasure

It opens on a stretch of country road so gray, stark and forsaken as to feel pulled from a dream—even the two or three trees look cold and lonely. The image of this landscape stays fixed as the cyclist passes us by, exiting the frame not long before the car enters it, the collision between the two happening off-screen in the eerie, phantasmagoric interim. The car stops and the couple within exits to survey the damage. The man, Juan (Alberto Closas), surmises that he cyclist is dying—all we can see in the framing is the still-spinning wheel. The woman, Maria (Lucia Bosé), urges the man to leave. They drive away, abandoning the cyclist, and the titular event of Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), newly released by the Criterion Collection, has transpired with bracing efficiency.

Accompanied by a score of Herrmannesque portent, a tone of an unmistakably noir melodrama has been set. Yet right there within this brooding atmosphere lies the first of numerous overt, pointed allusions to a troubling class disparity: a humble-looking man on a bike is knocked down by a well-dressed couple in a sleek automobile; the couple, we learn immediately after, are having an affair, and are more concerned with maintaining their secrecy—and with it their comfortable bourgeois existence—than with the welfare of the victim of their negligence.

With each subsequent scene come further layers of social critique: the insularity and nepotism that allows Juan to hold an enviable position at a university; the appearance of a nefarious art critic, a self-described “good for nothing” who lurks in elevated social circles sniffing out opportunities for blackmail with an ingratiating smile (there is the sense that the art critic’s vocation is itself deemed a product of bourgeois decadence); the fact that Juan looks conspicuously similar to Miguel, Maria’s wealthy husband, implying that her extramarital activities are so automated that she doesn’t even require a lover that embodies a genuine variation of her husband. The accumulative effect, made complete by the sudden development of Juan’s class-consciousness, spurred by guilt over the accident, is a depiction of a Spain well-settled into Franco’s triumph, sinking into its own turgid morass of Fascist reactionism.

If Death of Cyclist reads as schematic, that’s because it is, and the supplementary texts in Criterion’s package, including one from Bardem himself, emphasize the director’s schema all the more. Bardem had publicly declared the Spanish cinema as “politically ineffective, socially false, intellectually worthless, aesthetically nonexistent, industrially crippled,” and Marsha Kinder’s essay ‘Creating a Modern Spanish Cinema’ shows in great detail how Death of a Cyclist was designed as the antidote, a work that would subversively exploit the trappings of Hollywood thrillers as a way to synthesize and heighten Bardem’s polemical call to arms, its true stylistic genre being that of neorealism.

The problem with this sort of reading is that is renders the movie as an airless manifesto in which the artist only reluctantly lowers himself to entertaining us. It also does a great discredit to Hollywood—American film noir, for all its compromises, was already a great source of social criticism, frequently pulling back the curtain of American prosperity to reveal the corruption at the heart of the capitalist impulse, and the typical noir already possessed many of the same innovations as neorealism, such as its use of location shooting. Death of a Cyclist arrived right at the climax of the original noir cycle, the same year of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, and Maria, its femme fatale, even attempts to secure her social standing using the same shocking method as Margo in the superb poverty row noir Decoy (46).

Regardless of Bardem’s personal aspirations, focusing all one’s attention on its political promptings can make Death of a Cyclist feel somewhat academic, while the best compliment one can give it is to in fact call it a very elegant, highly effective, often fascinating noir. The film moves superbly, the brisk pacing enhanced by the consistent use of shock cuts, those transitions where one image weirdly matches another in an entirely different scene, as though the storytelling itself infuses disparate events with some creepy synchronicity; exposition is handled with tremendous economy; and there’s a bizarre, fascinating morbidity to the way the accident influences the love affair, which reaches its natural erotic climax in a spray of blood and mechanical impact, acting as a subtle precursor to the bizarre equations of David Cronenberg’s Crash (96).

Death of a Cyclist in the end did not signal much of a revolution in Spanish cinema—not even Luis Buñuel’s return to Spain to make the deliriously perverse Viridiana (60) could manage that. Sweeping changes wouldn’t arrive until the 70s while Franco was either in decline, dying or dead. But Bardem’s film can be admired greatly for the way it gives us a portrait of his country in a period of deep repression and stagnancy, and delivering this portrait in the shape of a thriller sculpted from desire, coincidence, small dreams and the never quite squashed undercurrent of social unrest.

Viridiana: the follies of desire

A quick survey of Entertainment Weekly’s recent “25 Most Controversial Movies Ever” proves that even terms like “controversial” can be baldly co-opted by commercial interests. How else can we account for the presence of Ron Howard’s New Agey, theologically egalitarian, soft-on-the-Vatican adaptation of The Da Vinci Code scoring Number 13? Was anybody actually offended by that movie? Did anyone take it seriously enough to be offended? Did Howard even take it seriously?

I’m not proposing that anyone actually take Entertainment Weekly seriously, but it says something about the narrow range of the mainstream media’s cultural radar when Da Vinci ranks so prominently while Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana doesn’t even make EW’s final cut. Deliciously provocative, caustically insightful, hounded by censors and legal troubles, Viridiana was controversial in the richest sense. It’s the work a seasoned master, playfully confronting the deep-rooted socio-religious ideology that shaped his own life.

After making such an early splash with the scandalous Un chien andalou (1928) and L’age d’or (30), Buñuel underwent years of sporadic activity before reinventing himself in Mexico, where he made numerous films in quick succession, some of which (like 1950’s Los Olvidados) are among his masterworks. He’d garnered an international reputation and proved that, with age, even the most maverick artists earn grudging acceptance by the establishment.

A quarter century after the end of The Civil War, Spanish authorities decided to thaw their previously icy relations with their most notorious filmmaking progeny. Invited home under the auspices of the Franco regime he once fled from, Buñuel, a few restrictions aside, was given free reign. Viridiana was completed just in time for the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Palme d’Or and was declared blasphemous by the Vatican’s newspaper. The director of the Spanish Film Institute who approved the production was dismissed, the film was disowned by Spain and all prints were ordered destroyed. It was never shown there until 1977.

Picking up thematically where Nazarín (58) left off, Viridiana concerns a young nun (Silvia Pinal) who accepts an invitation from her Uncle Jaime (the marvellously melancholy Fernando Rey) to pay him a final visit before entering the convent. Jaime reveals his fetishistic obsession with his dead wife, whom Viridiana closely resembles, convincing Viridiana to dress as her before pleading with her to maintain the role permanently and live on his estate as his spouse. Viridiana leaves in disgust.

Jaime eventually finds a perverse way of making Viridiana stay, but once settled she endeavours to transform his home into a house of Christian charity, inviting vagabonds to work on the estate in return for food and shelter. The benefactors inevitably abuse Viridiana’s charity, making a wild party in her absence, climaxing in a portrait where the drunken bums are positioned at the banquet table in imitation of Da Vinci’s ‘Last Supper.’

With characteristic cool, Buñuel claimed he never set out to blaspheme, and to a degree this seems genuine. Many of Viridiana’s controversial details (the crucifix switch-blade, the tortured dogs) are taken directly from Buñuel’s experiences of Spanish life. His characterization of Viridiana isn’t mocking but sympathetic. Characters aren’t judged morally, but rendered as complex and deeply human in all their weaknesses and strengths, their acts of malice or altruism. Guided by Buñuel’s increasingly elegant, quietly strange camerawork (highlighted by his jarring, erotic isolation of legs), Viridiana is unsparingly, blackly comic, but a keenly observed portrait of the follies of desire.

A French documentary on Buñuel found on Criterion's DVD of Viridiana, features comments by a Jesuit priest from the seminary where Buñuel studied. “Even in his most irreligious films,” the priest says, “some traces of religion can always be found.” This testimony is in keeping with Buñuel's famous anti-declaration "I'm still an atheist, thank God."  If Buñuel could truly offend, it’s only because his films are founded in belief and wonder. And that’s something you’d never say about Ron Howard.