Buñuel’s Pilgrimage: La voie lactée as Surrealist Theology

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.