Luis Buñuel’s 1969 La voie lactée (The Milky Way) is a masterpiece of modern religious cinema that remains curiously understudied by scholars of religion and visual culture. Its plot centers around the journey of two vagrants in modern-day France who decide to set out for the city of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, the famous Catholic pilgrimage destination. This plot, however, is largely beside the point. For audiences, it is Buñuel’s avant-garde cinematography and nonlinear storytelling that take center stage, exploring and ultimately reinventing the cinematic language of religious experience. As such, the protagonists’ pilgrimage does not unfold across Spanish landscapes, but rather across a complex of locations in modern France (highways, nature trails, roadside inns, and private schools) and an eccentric roster of historical events (the student protests of Mai 68, Jesus’ ministry, Ancient Roman heresies, and Baroque duels). The film thus offers a Surrealist manifesto for belief, unbelief, and what fellow Surrealist André Breton termed “the eruption of the marvelous.”
This paper focuses on how Buñuel’s cinematography anchors the film’s loose narrative threads through long-form camera pans and establishing shots of architecture. In so doing, the film underscores both the banality and the stability of the landscape, in contrast to the plot’s multiple temporalities and shifting emotional stakes. Here, Buñuel – best known as a Surrealist filmmaker in the 1920s – applies cinematographic techniques from avant-garde filmmaking to pointedly religious subject matter. The film thus operates with its own cinematic language that I term religious surrealism, creating a world where faith, doubt, Catholicism, and heresy coexist, allowing viewers to reflect on the messiness of Catholic doctrine and history. Ultimately, I argue that the film does not seek to dismantle the Church, as some critics have suggested, but instead presents faith and belief as ambiguous choices, demonstrating the nuanced and complex position of Catholicism amidst the social and political upheavals of 1960s France.
This paper focuses on Luis Buñuel’s 1969 film La voie lactée (The Milky Way), a curiously understudied masterpiece of modern religious cinema. The film follows two pilgrims on their way to Santiago de Compostela in Spain, but its real focus is Buñuel’s avant-garde cinematography and nonlinear storytelling, which reinvent the cinematic language of religious experience. Here, pilgrimage is presented not as a pious journey, but as a surreal expedition through time and history, set against the backdrop of modern France and moments like the Mai 68 protests, Jesus’ ministry, and Roman heresies. Buñuel’s long camera pans and striking architectural shots juxtapose the banality of the landscape with the film’s ever-shifting emotional and temporal landscapes. Infused with the techniques of Surrealism, La voie lactée creates a filmic world where faith, doubt, Catholicism, and heresy collide. Ultimately, Buñuel captures the deep ambiguity of belief, revealing Catholicism’s fragile place in 1960s France.