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When Buñuel meets a new reality
Green 2022-06-20 18:20:19
Los Olvidados, old Buñuel film, 1950, Mexico City, "The Forgotten People", aka "The Young and The Damned". Hopeless, unpretentious cruelty, a little dark humor. - Can you imagine a Buñuel film in the style of neorealism? Poverty, family problems, missing school and unemployment, little boy abandoned by his father, alcoholic man, blind old entertainer, disabled beggar, gangster youth, milking girl, juvenile detention center, adultery, stealing, killing, black and white photography, brevity An objective narrative without value judgments, a short and tragic life oppressed by fate (his birth was a mistake, when his mother, 14 years older than him, passed the donkey, she didn't know that he was beaten to death and dressed in blood. In the burlap sack on the back of the donkey, ready to be dumped on a nameless hill.) — Or, can you imagine a Buñuel-esque neorealist film? Poetic or spooky nightmares, tricky intentions and close-ups, molested girls, eroticized women, surreal means not beyond reality but hyper reality.
Extended Reading
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Pedro: [addressing his mother, just before she leaves him at the Farm School] Just now you remember that I'm your son.
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El director de la escuela granja: I was imagining that we could lock up misery, instead of the children.