“Religion without mystery is no religion at all! …Any heresy that attacks a mystery can easily seduce ignorant and superficial people, but heresies will never be able to hide the truth.” –(unnamed priest in Buñuel’s The Milky Way).

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) had a long and complicated relationship with the Catholic church. Born to a wealthy family and trained as a Jesuit, Buñuel became a surrealist dedicated to countering bourgeois realism with shocking juxtapositions and subversively humorous images of middle class hypocrisy and injustice. Many hail Buñuel as the first Dadaist filmmaker. He teamed with Salvador Dali for his earliest success, Un Chien Andalou (1929), before moving on to realist portraits such as Los Olvidados (1950) and experimental works like The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972).

In The Milky Way (La Voie Lactée), Buñuel sets about debunking the pomposity and authoritarianism of organised religion in provocative and often hilarious scenes that careen through time, space, and philosophy. In the film, two pilgrims journey through France on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain. Along the way they encounter strange figures from different ages and time periods –a stigmatic child, a lunatic priest, theologian waiters, heretics, fanatics and blasphemers –and are witness to miracles, visions, revelations and discussions of religious mysticism. In his own words “the film is above all a journey through fanaticism, where each person obstinately clings to his own particle of truth, ready if need be to kill or to die for it. The road traveled by the two pilgrims can represent, finally, any political or even aesthetic ideology.” Buñuel reportedly enjoyed the dilemma felt by critics as they disagreed whether the film was for or against ecclesiastical thinking.