February 22, 2022

Luis Buñuel

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of France, Cinema of Mexico, Cinema of Spain, Translations | Tags: , , , |
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[The following is a translation of Luc Moullet’s short monograph Luis Buñuel (1957), the fifth volume in the series Les Grands Créateurs du Cinéma, published bimonthly by the Club du Livre de Cinéma in Brussels. I’m extremely grateful to Samuel Bréan for finding me a copy of this rare volume.]

 

Contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that it moves, has an urge and activity.

– Hegel

In our time, in our era of blockbusters and epic films, Luis Buñuel’s work and career stand out. While the vast majority of important filmmakers choose to marry art and commerce, with varying degrees of success, Buñuel confines himself to low-budget ventures, just like Roberto Rossellini. He thus enjoys a great deal of freedom: producers’ interference is limited to the choice of subject, which is generally very banal, and to the development of the script. The filmmaker imposes the expression of a highly distinct personality on such weak material. El río y la muerte (The River and the Death) was completed in fourteen days; technically it is superior to many French films, and in terms of quality, it has nothing to envy most of Buñuel’s great works. Like a novelist, the maker of L’Âge d’Or and El (This Strange Passion) works for his own pleasure; that is why the most mediocre of his offspring, the most industrial of his films, still bear his mark. This is a kind of miracle that cinema is not familiar with.

 

The Surrealist Experiment

One of the main constants in Buñuel’s work has often been explained using his Spanish origin. I’m referring to his taste for cruelty and violence, which also throw light on the inclinations of his personality. He was born at the dawn of this century, on 22 February 1900, in a small town in Aragon, Calanda, located on the edge of the famous Sierra de Teruel. After spending ten years at a Jesuit school, he left his provincial bourgeois parents for the University of Madrid, where he studied science, particularly neurology: physiological phenomena had always captivated him, as had the life of animals. But the Castilian capital attracted him towards less studious pursuits. He enjoyed idleness and led a merry and dissipated life. This is how he became friends with two of the greatest creators of twentieth-century Spain, Federico García Lorca, the poet, and Salvador Dali, the painter, who were then young unruly students. Buñuel’s films retain some of Lorca’s tragic lyricism and, above all, Dalí’s phantasmagoria.

Un Chien Andalou (1929)

Our young man was soon to be found in Paris, where he worked as a scientific attaché. But he was interested in many other things. Dali, who lived on the banks of the Seine, introduced him to the Surrealist Movement, in which Buñuel discovered an equivalent to his taste for the unusual. Cinema seemed to him to be the best means of expression, one that allows one to show the most amazing aspects of reality. After a first script, written from a surrealist perspective, which he could never shoot for lack of means, he took technical lessons, a trial run for Un Chien Andalou (1928). This small, fifteen-minute silent film made a great impression at the time and is still the biggest hit at film clubs today. The story, written by Dali and Buñuel, doesn’t follow any logical rule; underlying the main plot, a love story, are a series of extraordinary visuals of the purest surrealist tradition: the enormous living room piano stained with the blood of rotting donkeys, to which two seminarians are attached. The virtuosity, the unbridled inventiveness belonged as much to Buñuel as to Dali. And yet the director parted ways with his friend, whom he accused of seeking scandal for the sake of scandal. The next film, L’Âge d’Or (1930), which Buñuel made for a patron, continued the experiments of Un Chien Andalou while respecting factual logic more closely. This time, the scandal was huge: the precision and realism highlighted the filmmaker’s multiple attacks on society and religion, which he said impeded the power of love. Buñuel went from surrealism to documentary with Land Without Bread (1932), a poignant account of the region in Spain called Las Hurdes, one of the most backward and poorest parts of Europe after the Grésivaudan, Slovakia and Haute-Provence. Buñuel went ahead with the same talent, the same critical eye towards modern civilisation, whose most ignoble aspects he unveiled. At first sight, the rigour and honesty of the work contrasted with the fanatic Manichaeism of L’Âge d’Or: but in many beautiful visuals (the donkey devoured by flies, the portrait of idiots), there is that astonishing sensitivity partly inherited from his contact with surrealism.

But the time of patrons and small productions that one could finance oneself was soon over. For fifteen years, Luis Buñuel worked in cinema without making any films. This period of silence was important in its own right: faced with life and its difficulties, the maker of Land Without Bread evolved markedly; with maturity, he moved from revolt to reflection. That is how he was able to resume a body of work that was thought to be prematurely finished: recent films such as Los Olvidados or El are even considered to be of a much higher quality than those of the surrealist period. In charge of dubbing films in Paris, Madrid — where he moved on to production — and Hollywood, a bureaucrat, then a speaker in the United States, Buñuel finally left Los Angeles in 1947 for Mexico City with a very ambitious project in the bag: The House of Bernarda Alba, based on Lorca’s play, which he didn’t finally shoot.

 

(more…)

 

August 11, 2019

Luis Buñuel

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Books, Cinema of Mexico, Translations | Tags: , , , , |
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Otras Inquisiciones (The Exterminating Angel)

Cahiers du cinéma no. 145; July 1963.

The Exterminating Angel

I remember this sally of Rohmer’s: “Moullet, I know why you love Buñuel. It’s because you’re both slackers.” The greatest compliment of my life.

The title was Rivette’s idea. He told me that it was the title of a publication by a certain Borges. So, I read Borges afterwards.

—

This film, among the strangest and most audacious in the history of cinema, could’ve been made only on the momentum imparted by Viridiana, grand prize at Cannes in 1961, and, it seems, Last Year in Marienbad, grand prize at Acapulco in December 1961, awarded just before the shooting of this film in February-March 1962. Not that Resnais influenced Buñuel in any way. But the commercial success of Marienbad, combined with the similarity of characters, setting, the related mystery and the apparent incomprehensibility, allowed Buñuel to imagine a commercial future for his old project The Castaways of Providence Street.

The accidental resemblance to Marienbad stops at this superficial level since the two films are as different as they can be: one is extra-temporal and extra-social; the other is a testimony to our times and our society. One describes the psychological world; the other describes the real world and, if the subjective has a prominent role to play in it, we cannot appreciate the work without resorting to certain fundamental, objective and unquestionable interpretations. Finally, if Marienbad is a point of departure, The Exterminating Angel is a point of arrival in cinema history as well as in the career of its creator.

Even so, it’s important that the viewer is thrown into the film without any warning. The work seeks to be like the life that man encounters at birth without any reference whatsoever. And any warning, even an evasive one, places the meaning of the work in a particular territory that can’t be confirmed as its own before the end of the film. Is the film a materially-explicable prank played by the Nobiles? We can suppose so when the lady of the house tells her servant not to let the bear into the living room as planned because one of the guests doesn’t like jokes. Or when the valet appears to deliberately spill the stew. Is it a prank played by Buñuel? We could think so. Many people think so too and believe, not without reason, that it discredits the film. But that’s to forget that a prank can have deeper meaning. The greatest artists, including the most modest and the most personal, like to conceal the depth and the personal quality of their work under the guise of a prank. But, here, the fundamental explanation isn’t a prank; it’s one of the secondary explanations. Is it an intimate reverie like Marienbad, a symbolic, parabolic or a metaphoric film? And which symbols, which parable and which metaphor are we talking about?

The viewer’s uncertainty and hesitation produce in him the anxiety that haunts him every day and from which the discovery of the Fundamental Secret in the very last shots delivers him. The film’s structure hence models itself on the developmental structure of the human mind, from childhood to maturity. Maturity is an individual conquest. No doubt that, to arrive there, one must make a personal effort of breaking through to the Secret that the film’s apparent incomprehensibility and its prankish appearance weakly guard.

The Exterminating Angel is hence a detective film, the greatest of detective films, since its object is not the discovery of the culprit – although, here too, at the end we discover a culprit the nature of whose identity is crucial – but the discovery of the nature of our human and social condition and its motivations. Through the secret of the enigma and the ascent to knowledge, we discover the secret to happiness.

This need for a protective prank explains Buñuel’s attitude: “The best explanation of The Exterminating Angel is that, reasonably, there is none.” There is none, reasonably, but there are some, unreasonably: the film being cosmic and synthetic, it contains the rational and the irrational at once, one inside the other. Reasonable explanations that we are right in giving apply to a world alien to reason. Like the ending of El and Nazarin, even L’âge d’or and Archibald, the whole of The Exterminating Angel can be explained by a mix of reason and affectivity, demonstration and poetry, which allows Buñuel to declare that there’s no conscious intention here. In his works, reason is linked to instinct, and that’s why his film is the first truly abstract film and why it remains lively at the same time. The Exterminating Angel is the first screen adaptation of The Spirit of the Laws (or of Discourse on the Method, or Ethics, or Principia, as you wish), but it’s The Spirit of the Laws by way of Henry Miller.

The Exterminating Angel indeed has all the trappings of a theorem, but it’s not one, it doesn’t aspire to be one, as Buñuel mentions. It’s that there’s no logical continuity in the meaning of its actions, no dramatic scaffolding at the level of characters and their relationships or their oppositions. The work is made of straight lines – essential elements, relatively reasonable and explicable – interspersed with several broken line segments – hard to explain, secondary elements – that seem to contradict the former on a purely logical level, but reinforce them on a superior level, firstly because their meaning is similar and secondly because their lack of a superficial relationship to a theorem eliminates all impression of didacticism.

These straight lines can be defined with the help of two keys, which are also the only keys to the film and which offer an unquestionable and objective character foreign to the rest of the film.

The first is that the impossibility of leaving (or entering, which amounts to the same) is to be explained not by a physical reason, but by the absence of will in a human being living in a particular milieu, a definite society, who can never follow a personal line of conduct, nor stray away from beaten paths.

The second has to do with a metaphor based on the rule of cross-multiplication: just as they are subjected to a slow and complete degradation of themselves when they can’t leave the Nobiles’ residence, the guests will be victims of a similar degradation when they can’t leave the church. In other words, what takes place at the Nobile residence, in fact, takes place at the church. The fear of censorship seems to have necessitated this metaphor, avoided in L’âge d’or, which was a more biased but less disguised adaptation of The 120 Days of Sodom.

This rule of cross-multiplication is made clear by the impression the viewer has of both sections of the film and their mutual relationship. The two sections, by construction, are placed on the same level, with the difference that the first is all about length and precision while the second is about the allusive and imprecise force of its brevity, the evocative mystery proper to its elliptical nature. If we indicate the living-room section by L and the church section by C, we obtain the following relation, whose numbered quality doesn’t seem to take away from artistic reality too much:

Since L = C, we have,

L (Degradation x 84’) = C [(21 x Degradation) x 4’]

The elliptical brutality of the last section and the speed with which we arrive at the renewal of the phenomenon of avolition gives us the impression that it’s going to return with ten or twenty times the force.

Is the relationship between the two sections located on the level of a superior and meaningful reality that one Cahiers writer called Brechtian or on the level of concrete reality, of psychological evolution? Is there an evolution to be traced in the alienated characters who liberate themselves only to find themselves in another, more serious alienation? Here, we are reduced to interpretation. The two possibilities seem to be well-founded in their own way. The first section of the film tells us that man has no escape if he locks himself up in society’s rules, opposed to the imperative rules of nature, which can manifest themselves within society’s rules only in a barbaric and secret form in direct contradiction with the spirit of these social rules.

The second part reveals the profound cause of these social rules: religion; this time, the exterminating angel of the Bible has turned against the faithful. The only way to escape this grip is to take a step back, by a kind of conjuration, to erase the past through the purification of passions Aristotle spoke about. It’s necessary to pull out evil by its roots so that purification can happen, not at the branch level, namely social reforms which are necessarily ineffective, but at the level of religious reformation, without which the degradation of man will persist, just as social troubles will persist outside, as the last shot clearly indicates.

This message isn’t wholly new as an idea. It’s simple, unsophisticated. It might seem extraneous to us who believe ourselves to be free of religion’s stranglehold. But the messages of Griffith, Welles – whose Rosebud is very similar – are of the same simplicity and they are also biased. What counts, in fact, is not the meaning or the intrinsic and discernible value of the message, but the force with which the filmmaker expresses it and his success in making us accept it as he expresses it on screen.

Now, the presentation of the film in the form of a rebus, justified by the mysterious character of concrete reality, compels the viewer, through the same process by which he has recognized the meaning of the film, to “accept” it as the product of an intimate collaboration with the filmmaker. Had the facts been presented more crudely, without any ellipse, we wouldn’t have bought into it since our participation wouldn’t have been required. So much so that the rigour of “instinctive reasoning” here is admirable and flawless: in eighty minutes, all the various forms of man’s alienation and degradation are envisaged, to the point of making us completely forget that they could be biased. We get the impression of a synthetic and cosmic study, too perfect to be false or even incomplete, even less susceptible to be replaced.

The broken line segments pose a problem: isn’t the outside world, represented by the servants, the people, and the police, also alienated since it suffers from an inverse but nevertheless comparable avolition? Aren’t there other parallel, or opposed, forms of alienation taking shape under the influence of these social rules?

The filmmaker’s dark humour manifests itself in many dissimilar forms. It’s either expressed by the characters or it is expressed by the filmmaker at the expense of his characters, whether they are masters or servants, when they claim to make us laugh.

Is it the raft of the Medusa or the ark of Noah, whose sheep were also destined for consumption, in the last shot, or do they evoke the herd of the faithful to be hoodwinked? Triple ambiguity.

Even when they contradict each other, these elements have a half-logical, half-affective meaning that has nothing symbolic about it.

The Exterminating Angel is the only film where there can be no symbols: a symbol is the sign of something abstract located in a concrete reality. Now, everything here is located on a meaningful reality which claims to take the appearance of concrete reality only to satisfy a dramatic necessity – the viewer must make the effort himself to return the film back to the level of reality it’s located in – and to respond to the demands of a modesty which is one of the dominant qualities of the work.

In contrast to Les Abysses, where Papatakis endlessly repeats the same shocking images to the point that they don’t shock anyone anymore, in The Exterminating Angel, Buñuel softens all the diverse actions which, on reflection, turn out to be of monstrous oddity. He arrives there respecting the hard times specific to all life, hard times that are not dead times because they are nonetheless bestowed with meaning. He arrives there eliminating all dramatization and often resorting to a suggestive and less inhumane ellipse.

It’s that there is no misanthropy in Buñuel. Even men alienated by clerical society aren’t contemptible and their efforts, either to liberate themselves or to save their dignity within these social rules, are evoked here with an attention, a respect devoid of any contempt, with an almost-Christian humility.

It is indeed remarkable that the most anti-religious of filmmakers (The Exterminating Angel, in view of its various mocking titles, its construction right from the credits on, and its meaning, is an essentially religious film, but also the most powerful work ever created against religion) – the most anti-religious in “content”, let’s make it clear – is one of the most Christian in “form”. Following Nazarin (1958) and Viridiana (1961), The Exterminating Angel is the third part of the triptych based on the principle of the Christian parable which, under the guise of a contemplative chronicle, justifies this perpetual, distant and inquisitive aerial survey of the camera and places the film on a superior level, that of facts and characters, which sometimes surprises the viewer, accustomed as he is to the actor, to the point of getting bored or falling asleep, with good reason or otherwise, before these chronicles.

The acting style and the simple, monotonic diction so dear to Buñuel seem to coincide perfectly with the principle of the parable film and the principle of repetition particular to a subject exempt almost in its entirely from any progression. The convergent accumulations produce an unseen poetry of reiteration without a particular shot ever being redundantly used. Taken to its conclusion, this poetry attains the level of fascination1.

Buñuel’s power thus lies in producing emotion and in ending up with the greatest efficiency through unusual means that are apparently at loggerheads with the film’s goal: a classical cinema based on acting and aesthetics gives way to a modern cinema based, as I see it, on the Idea and its multiple poetic possibilities, whose success, rare amidst many failed attempts, is of an incomparable degree and proportional to the originality and the difficulty of the undertaking.

For those who blindly consider this new art as the sign of an impossibility of expressing oneself through means more common to the “essence of cinema”, let’s remember that this definitive film, third part of Buñuel’s triptych of parables and third part of his dark humour triptych following El (1952) and The Criminal Life of Archibald de la Cruz (1956), also reprises certain para-surrealist themes and reveals in the dream sequences a visionary power and an imagination comparable to those of Murnau’s Faust and applied to an entirely new material in the rest of the film. That’s why, better than Faust, The Exterminating Angel constitutes one of the most sublime creations of human genius.

 

1Contrary to its reputation, The Exterminating Angel is not difficult to understand, it’s difficult to like: our admiration is a product of the perfection of a “dramaturgy of de-dramatization” as original as it is discreet in its effectiveness. In this underexplored domain, the construction is of an invisible rigour and audacity comparable to that of The Young One in the classical domain. In the American pure cinema, we were frequently aware of the ideas behind shot changes; here, a similar invention takes place with the change of shots, which are in fact dictated by ideas of succession of ideas, by ideas of succession of subjects.

 

[From Luc Moullet’s Piges choisies (2009, Capricci). See Table of Contents]

 

July 11, 2009

Flashback #63

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of India, Flashback | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Om Darbadar (1988) (aka Om-Dar-Ba-Dar)
Kamal Swaroop
Hindi

“To Prime Minister. Subject: The Googly. Dear Raju, Please ban googly in cricket and life in general. Thanks, A freedom fighter, Babuji B. Sankar.”

 

Om DarbadarIf one is asked to describe briefly what Kamal Swaroop’s Om Darbadar (1988) is, some of the answers could be: carefully constructed non-sense, endless dream of a cinephile, a satire on everything, full stop to Indian parallel cinema, random footage, extremely challenging piece of filmmaking, the great Indian LSD trip, landmark Indian film that aims big. With all the ingredients required to make a cult classic, Om Darbadar is the kind of movie that can easily polarize critics and audiences alike. It is, in fact, surprising that the National Film Development Corporation consented to produce this film. Using image, sound and montage to the maximum extent (and often gratuitously) and dialog that seem like knitted from parts of different sentences, almost always making no meaning (written by Kuku, also the lyricist and the art director of the film), Swaroop’s film is an antithesis to whatever is recognized globally as Indian cinema – a reason good enough to make Om Darbadar a must-see movie.

Here’s the plot of the film: Horoscope, dead frog, cloudy sky, the moon, radio program, caste reservation, bicycle, Mount Everest, women’s liberation, communism, sleeveless blouse, Yuri Gagarin, miniature book, Nitrogen fixation, man on moon, terrorist tadpoles, computer, biology class, turtles, Hema Malini, typewriter, sleazy magazines, hibernation, text inside nose, googly, James Bond, severed tongue, fish rain, shoes in a temple, World War, assassin creed, Gandhi, illicit trade, the lake, goggles, hopping currency, helium breath, counterfeit coins, underwater treasure, diamonds inside frogs, fireworks, the zoo, explosives, town at night, dead man, visit of God, the Panchsheel Pact, foreign tourists, Promise toothpaste, holy men, Fish keychain, Ram Rajya, food chain disruption, anti-cooperation movement, birth control, bagpipes, gecko, Jawaharlal Nehru, Aviation centers, Potassium Cyanide. And I guarantee you, this is as lucid as it can get.  

Om Darbadar

Om Darbadar is, hands down, the most confusing movie I have ever seen and not many movies can come close to dethroning it. Some might propose Buñuel’s first film, but one could at least find one pattern in that work – of anti-narration. This one regularly tantalizes us with a somewhat coherent narrative and just when it seems to get steady, snap! Or Last Year at Marienbad (1961), which is, in fact, an incisive study of the human memory. Om Darbadar, on the other hand, overwhelms us with its utter irreverence for integrity of reality, unity of content and consistency of form. Or the very many avant-garde films of Brakhage, Warhol, Anger, Snow or Smith, which, I believe, have always had a strong theoretical basis. No, this film does not have any single, central factor as its theme or motivation. Of course, one can find shreds here and there in the film that do make it seem like dealing with the idea of identity crisis in suburban India, but that’s strictly on a speculative level.

Often we witness directors claiming to show the world what real India is – a statement negated by the films themselves. Leave alone filming, it is to be accepted that even understanding the dynamics of such a largely diverse country is near impossibility. But, if there was ever a film that attempted to capture the workings of real India almost in its entirety, it has to be this one. Yes, it does bite much more than it can chew, but surely, digestion is not its intention. In a country where science, religion, mythology, arts, politics and philosophy seep into common lives trying to overpower each other, there is no single way to separate these threads so as to examine their influence on the way of life. This is a nation where the apparently inexplicable supernatural walks hand in hand with the most modern of scientific theories (In one scene in the film, Gayatri (Gopi Desai) asks Jagdish (Lalit Tiwari) if women can really climb Mount Everest without the help of men, he tells her: “Why not? After all, goddess Parvati did it”), a culture that is exposed to all the isms of western thinking yet revels in having its own interpretations of them (wearing a sleeveless blouse is equated to emancipation of women) and a country whose emotions are largely dictated by cinema, television and pop culture (Om Darbadar can be seen as a jab at just about every genre in Indian cinema).

Om Darbadar

Conventional (and good) cinema has relied on the fact that human psychology manifests itself in the form of their behaviour and speech and hence, an unhindered documentation of their lives would help us understand them better. But not many filmmakers seem to have embraced the reverse process – an entry into the real via the surreal. Kolker fittingly calls Buñuel “the neo-realist of the unconscious” and each one of his films testifies that. Likewise, the whole of Om Darbadar could well be the ultimate Freudian exercise that could help us (de)construct the actual world that Om lives in – a world that is as much fuelled by a love for pulp novels and thriller movies as it is by an aversion to zoology. But all is not so simple and the film is far from an extended dream sequence. Swaroop could have easily had Om (or his father, who begins the film’s narration) wake up at the end of the film, thereby taking us back to our comfort zones. Instead, he seamlessly blends present reality, past reality and fantastical reality to create an elusive work of cinema that defies literature, science and rationality.

Om Darbadar is an utterly frustrating, endlessly irritating and supremely hilarious film. Is it nonsensical? Yes, that is precisely its function. Is it pretentious? No, that can happen only when a film attempts to be something. Is it a one-of-a-kind movie viewing experience? You bet. Whatever one calls it, you cannot deny one fact – Om Darbadar is an indubitably addictive and thoroughly riveting piece of work that simultaneously repels a viewer by not pandering to his needs and yet, keeps him hooked on to the screen from frame one. Quarter hour into the film, I was completely disarmed and found myself laughing out loud through the rest of the film despite (rather, because of) the meaninglessness of it all. Om Darbadar is perhaps the kind of vision that flashes moments before one’s death. Call it the birth of Indian cinema, call it its death, call it Dadaist, call it anti-art, but be sure to bask in its absurdity while it lasts.

[Meri Jaan A A A…!]

 

May 2, 2009

Flashback #55

Posted by Just Another Film Buff under All Posts, Cinema of Mexico, Flashback | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , |
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Los Olvidados (1950) (aka The Young And The Damned)
Luis Buñuel
Spanish

“Watch out, here’s the mangy dog. Look, he’s coming. That’s it. I’m falling into the black hole. I’m alone. Alone! As always, boy, as always… “

 

los-olvidadosIf there is a synonym for “iconoclasm” in cinema, it might well be Luis Buñuel. It’s almost as if it is a need for him to go against conventions and established practices, – social, cultural and cinematic – pick out their weak points and hit them so hard that their absurdities are exposed. I’m far from being qualified to make general statements (including the above) about Buñuel, but the few films I’ve watched of him provide a more than clear picture about his role as a cinema pioneer and a social critic. In the legendary debut work Un Chien Andalou (1929), Buñuel and Sali present us a plethora of images – ones that would be termed “Lynchian” nowadays – that refuse temporal and spatial continuity on which popular cinema thrived on at that time. Apart from a filmmaker’s impulse to break stereotypes, what Un Chien Andalou showed us was the way we looked at movies and the elements of cinema that we had taken for granted. The conventional viewer, who tries to assemble the images into some form of theme or narrative, would invariably fail.

Buñuel’s follow up to the first authoritative surrealist film, L’Âge D’or (1930) also shattered conventions, but of a different kind. Apart from employing an experimental structure of the script, Luis Buñuel lashes out at the ultra-prudish morals of the hypocritical aristocracy and our own obsession with sex. Fraught with perplexing and often teasing images, L’Âge D’or confirmed Buñuel’s position as an auteur and more importantly, as a genuine firebrand. His definitive comeback film, which he made in Mexico after years of puzzling silence, Los Olvidados (1950) is no less unorthodox.  After turning Hollywood and Expressionist form of filmmaking inside out in his first two features, it looks like Buñuel had deliberately waited for the next big film movement to establish itself. With Neo-realism rising to power after the war, backed by many critics and theorists, it was but a opportune moment for enter the scenario and create chaos.

Los Olvidados opens with the following lines:

“Almost every capital, like New York, Paris, London, hides behind its wealth, poverty-stricken homes where poorly-fed children, deprived of health or school, are doomed to criminality. Society tries to provide a cure. Success for its efforts remains very limited. The future is not bound to the present: The day will come when children rights are respected. Mexico, large modern city, is no exception to the rule. This film shows the real life. It’s not optimistic. The solution to this problem is left to the forces of progress.”

Following this declaration of depiction of reality, Buñuel cuts to the streets where we see a bunch of noisy kids playing. The setting is apt for another neorealist feature – kids on the streets, the scorching heat and images of massive reconstruction. Los Olvidados follows the life of Pedro, a street urchin and the other children of the locality he spends his time with –  Jaibo, the eldest of the lot who ultimately shapes Pedro’s life, Ojitos aka Small Eyes, a lost kid from the country side and Julian, the only “responsible” person in the gang. The film’s content proceeds from being raw, to cruel, to immoral, to misanthropic and culminates in traumatizing despair.

The older people in Los Olvidados are either sick, perverted, physically challenged or drunk. And the young are no good. But their worlds are not, by any stretch of imagination, mutually exclusive. The youth abstain from responsibility and abuse their agility and power. They could easily be labeled Les Enfants Terrible and Mexico, no country for old men. However, there are no angels in Buñuel’s land. The hypocritical seniors, on the other hand, judge them in plurality. They carry on with their old traditions and spend time cheating each other and cursing the younger ones (The blind Don Carmelo, the first victim of the brats’ “ultraviolence”, supplements his street music with his witch-doctor act). The only neutral elements of the film – the police and the judiciary, possibly representing the bourgeoisie – spend time philosophizing about poverty and the urgent need to eradicate it. This isn’t just a generation gap. What we have here is two competing and almost internecine worlds that refuse to conform.

Buñuel applies magnanimous amounts of violence – both simulated and otherwise – to the already unnerving realism of Mexico streets that is sure to make stomachs churn, especially now that CG has made us numb to everyday violence. But Buñuel’s violence is all the more unsettling, than say A Clockwork Orange (1971), because imminence of its possibility. Kubrick’s mystical and often anti-realistic setting prevents the barbarism of the Droogs to seep into the present and the film itself is, at its best, prophetic. Buñuel, on the other hand, exploits the neo-realist premise to situate the events in the tangible present and, as the opening statement of the film says, universalize the hypothesis. The fact that the victims are the violence are the physically challenged, the “morally” good and children makes it exceptionally scandalous to bourgeois sensibilities. Coexisting with the neorealist wave was film-noir craze where (also) the grey heroes never hesitated to pull the trigger unwarrantably. But even there, the victims themselves were like the protagonists – always carrying with them a fair reason to get killed – thus causing no harm to the existing moral framework.

But Buñuel’s world isn’t an appeasing aquarium which can be gazed at from a safe distance. He gets close to the characters, much more than the neo-realists, even giving us glimpses of their dreams but always eschewing psychoanalysis. Nor does he have one-to-one relation between images and their meaning. The chickens that appear throughout the movie may be a symbol that stands for some deeper meaning or a token for entry into the surreal from the real or plainly, a chicken. Like the eye-slitter of Un Chien Andalou or the cow in the bedroom gag of L’Âge D’or, Buñuel shocks us with one inexplicable image after the other, eventually pushing us to a “zone of no reasoning”, after which one just has to accept the reality that he gives us without questions. “This film shows the real life” says the title monologue. “Reality” here is tricky. It is Buñuel’s reality. He is happy to indulge himself into reality that is not just skin deep. And this is where Buñuel departs from and slays Neorealism.

los-olvidadosThe children in the classic Neo-realist films were sympathetic and often pawns of fate or power plays. Buñuel’s Pedro is also a product of his environment and the prejudices against him. But that does not mean all of Buñuel’s kids are sympathy-magnets. Most of them are, in fact, instigators of social disturbances that the “neo-realist kids” are subjected to. Buñuel breaks away from that “objective gaze” of the Italian pioneers and takes us on a tour into the subconscious world of his protagonists. Moreover, Buñuel questions the moral integrity of its protagonists, or rather does away with that concern completely (Buñuel apparently wanted to put an orchestra as the backdrop to some major scenes which would have broken another tenet of the Italians). But all this subversiveness isn’t just a product of a desperate need to break rules. What Buñuel does here is, like he did in his first two movies, that he exposes the inherent flaws of a cinema movement. In other words, Los Olvidados is a critique of a way of filmmaking written in the form of a film.  Buñuel takes up neo-realism in order to explode it from within and boy, does he succeed! In one of the greatest shots in film history, Pedro, in his reformatory, throws an egg at the soberly observing camera. – An in-your-face advice given by the director asking the neo-realists to cease the nonparticipation and do something about it all. Buñuel has driven the final nail into the coffin of Neo-realism.