Jayclops' musings on his favorite pasttime and escape.
The Young and the Damned.
May 11, 2007Los Olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950) aka The Young and the Damned; The Forgotten Ones
Un Chien Andalou is perhaps one of the most important films of this era, despite it being a 16-minute short. When I was seeing piece by piece the surreal images juxtaposed on film, I can almost hear Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali having a grand time laughing at making a sick joke out of the bummed bourgeois intellectuals, which purportedly it is for. (In the early 70s, Buñuel went to make this cinematic attack on the bourgeoisie in the Oscar-winning The Secret Charm of the Bourgeoisie.) From the moment I read about it on world cinema textbook back in college, I never gotten my mind out of the eye-slicing scenes and other surreal images, that either shock or confound.
However, Los Olvidados marks a thinly slow departure to his early surrealist beginnings, with a close resemblance to Neo-realism. It is a Mexico that has forgotten its people. It centers on the lives of the children whose innocence robbed off by the squalor surrounding them. We see Ojitos ('little eyes') waiting for his father who would never return. He would then encounter a group of young thugs led by El Jaibo, who mug the blind and helpless. The blind man crippled by the young thugs would later adopt Ojitos. Jaibo would commit a heinous crime. The children will be caught up in an inevitable web of events emphasizing Buñuel's exploration of 'the disenfranchised fight for whatever scraps of power left to them'.
In one of my favorite scenes, the child wakes up to a dream (connoting Freudian humanism), and finds his mother (who has completely disregarded him and deprived him of food) giving him a raw meat — shows a touch of Buñuel's surrealism. (Also, an alternate ending was shot by Buñuel but was shelved for obvious political reasons. The 2-minute sequence is available on YouTube.) However, it is the reality of the streets and the shocking exposition of poverty that would make this film unforgettable.
