Picturing the beggars in Luis Bunuel's Viridiana: a perverse appropriation of Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper

This article looks at the sequence in which Enedina (Lola Gaos), one of the female beggars, pretends to photograph the other beggars at the dining table in Luis Bunuel's 1961 film Viridiana. Detailed analysis of this kind allows us to understand to what extent Bunuel's film aligns itself with what has been frequently identified as patriarchal Surrealist experimentation with parodic rewriting. Inversely, this analysis also allows us to ask to what extent Viridiana may be appropriated by current sexually dissident modes of rereading and rewriting cultural texts. I consider the different cinematic elements used by Bunuel to represent this parodic image and how Bunuel transforms the conventional function of objects so that they fulfil a different material and symbolic function.