Death in the Garden
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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La mort en ce jardin ("Death in the Garden") is a 1956 film by director Luis Buñuel based on the novel by José-André Lacour.
Synopsis
Amid a revolution in a South American mining outpost, a band of fugitives—a roguish adventurer (Georges Marchal), a local hooker (Simone Signoret), a priest (Michel Piccoli), an aging diamond miner (Charles Vanel), and the miner's deaf-mute daughter (Michèle Girardon)—are forced to flee for their lives into the jungle. Starving, exhausted, and stripped of their old identities, they wander desperately lured by one deceptive promise of salvation after another. Shot in vibrant Eastmancolor and featuring a star-studded cast, Death in the Garden is an adventure film with Surrealist gestures and symbolism. Additional dialogue was written by Raymond Queneau.
Filmed during the period when Buñuel was rising as a promising figure of surrealist cinema, Death in the Garden proposes a sort of psychological mirror-image of Franco's Spain from which Buñuel exiled himself, with rebellions and oppressors galore.
Cast
- Simone Signoret - Djin
- Charles Vanel - Castin
- Georges Marchal - Shark
- Michel Piccoli - Father Lizardi
- Tito Junco - Chenko
- Raúl Ramírez - Álvaro (as Raul Ramirez)
- Luis Aceves Castañeda - Alberto (as Luis-Aceves Castañeda)
- Jorge Martínez de Hoyos - Captain Ferrero (as Jorge Martinez de Hoyos)
- Alberto Pedret - Second Lieutenant Jiménez
- Marc Lambert - Miner
- Stefani - Miner
- Michèle Girardon - María Castin