i am in a european film class, and we watched this film. before we discussed or even viewed the movie, my professor preempted it all with saying, "you are NOT supposed to feel sorry for her...thats not the point. so do NOT feel sorry for her"
maybe bc he said it, but i dont know all i found myself doing was feeling sorry for her...
so what is it that he meant...what am i supposed to think/feel???
well, i feel she was PATHETIC! about the nicest word i can use to describe her & her actions is NAIVE. I mean throughout the movie i kept waiting for her to end her miserable life, especially after the homeless guy tried to rape her & the others wrecked the house, etc. i just knew that would push her over the edge. but no such luck! she continued her miserable existence. i also kept wondering if she wasnt insane. i looked at this movie without knowing anything about the plot & there was no professor to tell me not to feel sorry. so i think my observations of her behavior are quite un biased. feeling SORRY was not what she evoked from me. but i'm curious to know what did other students in your class feel? i did like the movie, dont know why...... oh! yes i do. the homeless/disabled characters were quite interesting. but then i do prefer the "scourge of society". thats why i just LOVE the 1932 movie "FREAKS", i'm fascinated with deformity & mental illness portrayed in movies. another character from "viridiana" that i did like in a perverse sort of way was her slimy cousin ( forgot his name). he was the consumate woman hater! but i guess in those days men were like that. i cant blame him , they werent blood cousins & she was the best looking woman. his only other choice was the psychotic maid ramona. he also tried to run the homeless man away but yet he rescued that mangy looking dog. now thats my kind of guy!
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In this case then you shouldn't feel sorry for her, but feel sorry for humanity in general. It's like one message of the movie is to demonstrate that humans can be really evil.
"Hate is baggage, life's too short to be pissed off all the time".
It's not to demonstrate that humans can be really evil but more that they can't be good. And that's a big difference.
Now about the main subject of the topic, i don't think feeling sorry or not for Viridiana is the point of the movie. It really doesn't matter, and your teacher didn't get the movie and is stupid to tell you what you should feel.
I don´t think a professor or anyone else should tell anyone what to feel when watching a film. He or she should ask after the viewing what you and everybody else felt . That could me a most interesting topic.
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It is ridiculous that your professor would say something like that. One thing when watching movies (or approaching any artform) is that your immediate feelings are never "WRONG"... they may be the opposite of what was intended, but it's never wrong. Feelings can't be wrong, you just feel what you feel. So asking you to NOT feel something when watching a movie is just ridiculous!
On the other hand, asking you (afterwards) to question why you felt the way you felt should be encouraged. That way, you can revisit your feelings and make sense of them in the presence of what was actually on the screen, and maybe you'll also notice subtle things that you didn't notice before and your feelings may slowly change (or not) based on the act of studying the film (not the act of knowing beforehand what was intended!)
What your professor suggested almost feels to me like telling chemistry students how their lab results are supposed to be before they do the experiment and saying "if your results are different, just fake the numbers and make it correspond to this" instead of saying "well how did you arrive at a different result?" and examining that further.
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Very well said. I teach modern art and teach this film as well actually. We address much of what has been said. She is a character that brings about her own suffering, and in a way she has it coming. But I always want my students to respond sincerely to the film and then after the fact think about why they felt that way. I would not agree with your professor telling you not to feel sorry for her. Let that come out in discussion. Still, I don't think that Bunuel wanted us to hate her either. She is human, just as all the character's are. I don't think that any of the homeless people are "evil" either. They just do some bad things, and represent that side of human nature, that we all have within us, Viridiana included.
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I don't think Bunuel was so direct in making Viridiana a dislikable character. I don't think the point of the movie was "hate this worthless bitch because she's asking for it." She seemed to have good intentions, and I don't see how she was "asking" for anything, as far as her actions being self-absorbed in any sense. The movie didn't get into what her intentions were. She's a victim from beginning to end. Naive? Of course! But I don't see what led anyone to believe she was doing it for her ego and not out of kindness, or why anyone thinks a good-natured but naive person deserves to be taken advantage of. I think why she failed had to do with how she was working within the framework of religion, and the story seemed to be more about Spain, The Church, and in the end, Westernization. I don't think you're supposed to feel sorry for her, but I also don't think you're supposed to be foaming at the mouth with hatred for her either. Again, Bunuel never treated his characters like that. The characters all represent something larger and don't appear to be directly good or evil.
So, Viridiana deserved to be destroyed and her cousin deserved to triumph? A woman deserves to be raped because she tried to help people? Doesn't seem like something Bunuel would have been going for.
I just saw the end of the film as being a representation of how the world was doing away with the old values/systems and replacing them with the ones of a consumer-based, westernized culture.
Though the mood of the films are quite drasticaly different, I couldn't help but see Dogville as a sort of descendant of this film. In both cases I feel the film-makers are making an argument against the classic ideal of martyrdom by putting their victim-protagonists through hell and then either forcing a change in their attitude (as in Dogville) or leaving them as the helpless victim (as we see in this movie). So basically, the point was that people will take and take unless you at some point take a stand for yourself. Nonetheless I couldn't help but find all the rapes and sexual domination to be pretty harrowing, and I certainly didn't think she was asking for it (in either Dogville or Viridiana), I just think that, as others have said, people are naturally evil and self-serving, and altruism--though also a method of self-fulfillment--will only be taken advantage of; there is no reward for 'good' deeds in heaven or earth. Does anyone else find the connection between these films to be as apparent as I do?
shareYour professor is/was an *beep*
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As someone who teaches at the college level I think it is rather poor to tell students how to feel about a certain character in a film. I think it could have been more helpful if it was mentioned to look at the film as more of a study than of individuals.
As for the feelings in the film, my opinion is that you are not supposed to feel pain for anyone. Society is/was corrupt. No one was innocent in this film. Everyone behaved in a manner that they believed was correct, but could not be helpful unless everyone worked together.
Well your professor failed to understand the film. Do tell that to him that he did not understand the film.
Of course maybe your professor was asking you to think of the film in the larger sense and not look at it as a simple melodrama. The thing is the film is already doing that especially in it's final very enigmatic scene that has caused so many misunderstandings.
In any case Bunuel does not hate Viridiana and has no dislike towards her. This greatest of satirists while quite scathing and critical was incapable of hatred.
what am i supposed to think/feel???
Watch the film again preferably by yourself and ask yourself that.
"Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs." - Nathanael West
This greatest of satirists while quite scathing and critical was incapable of hatred.This is an interesting idea. I tend to agree with it, especially in the case of Buñuel, that his whimsicality towards society was more of a curiosity than a scathing criticism of social structures, but I am curious of other satirists who are 'incapable of hatred' as a means to lampoon.