Los Olvidados 9781844571215, 9781838713133, 9781838716950

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BFI FILM CLASSICS Rob White S E R I E S

E D I T O R

Edward Buscombe, Colin MacCabe, David Meeker and Markku Salmi S E R I E S

C O N S U L T A N T S

L a u n c h e d in 1992, B F I F i l m Classics is a series of b o o k s that i n t r o d u c e s , interprets a n d h o n o u r s 360 l a n d m a r k w o r k s of w o r l d cinema. T h e series includes a w i d e r a n g e of a p p r o a c h e s and critical styles, reflecting the diverse w a y s w e appreciate, analyse a n d enjoy g r e a t films. A treasury that keeps on delivering ... any film person needs the whole collection. Independent on Sunday Magnificently concentrated examples of flowing freeform critical poetry Uncut A formidable body of work collectively generating some fascinating insights into the evolution of cinema. Times Higher Education Supplement The definitive film companion essays. Hot dog T h e choice of authors is as judicious, eclectic and original as the choice of titles. Positif Estimable. Boston Globe The series is a landmark in film criticism. Quarterly Review of Film and Video Well written, impeccably researched and beautifully presented . . . as a publishing venture, it is difficult to fault. Film Ireland

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First published in 2006 by the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W I T 1LN Copyright © Mark Polizzotti 2006 The British Film Institute promotes greater understanding and appreciation of, and access to, film and moving image culture in the UK

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 84457 121 5 eISBN 978 1 83871 694 3 ePDF 978 1 83871 695 0 Series design by Andrew Barron & Collis Clements Associates Typeset in Fournier and Franklin Gothic by D R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks

CONTENTS Acknowledgments 6 1 Feathers 7 2 Land Without Bread 12 3 The Milk of Kindness 29 4 Mother's Meat 50 5 Garbage 63

Notes 5 / Credits 84 Bibliography 86

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For information, encouragement, materials, and support along the way, my heartfelt gratitude goes to Gabriel Bernal Granados, Juan Garcia de Oteyza and Ekaterina Alvarez Romero of Turner Publicaciones (Mexico City), Paul Hammond, Julie Jones, Christopher Sawyer-Lau^anno and Mike Vahala. Javier Herrera Navarro, curator of the Luis Bunuel papers at the Filmoteca Espafiola in Madrid, kindly provided rare documents from Bunuel's preparation of Los Olvidados. At the British Film Institute, Rob White initiated this book and Rebecca Barden saw it through. Sadi Ranson-Polizzotti, my wife, mainstay and best critic, makes the entire notion of acknowledgments seem inadequate.

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FEATHERS The sequence begins with a convention so shopworn that one is tempted to laugh. A boy lies sleeping; from his prone body another sits up, transparent and in slow motion, the universal cue that we are entering a dream. Still, there is something about this dream that feels different, more real, or more unreal. When I first saw Los Olvidados some thirty years ago, on a double bill with The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cru^ this was what initially captured me, what told me I was watching something other than a standard-fare melodrama about street kids; this was the scene I took away from that evening. The dream is one of the set pieces of the film, the moment to which all commentators are inevitably drawn. At my first viewing, I was fortunate enough not to know this, and so could experience it much as audiences had upon its release in 1950. Seeing it repeatedly over these past months, knowing that it is coming, has barely diminished its impact. Man Ray once remarked that every film, great or negligible, has five perfect minutes. In Los Olvidados, this accounts for three of them. In the dark room, everyone is asleep. The prodigal son has crept back into the house to get some rest, having nowhere else to go. He sneaks around the beds of his mother and three younger siblings, large brass beds so crowded together that he can barely navigate through them. Careful not to disturb the others, he lies down on the last empty mattress which, despite everything, is still his. The only thing in this house and this family that is still his. The incongruous squawking of a chicken announces a repetitive flute motif that sounds like a tape run backward. Rising from his bed, from himself asleep in his bed, the boy, whom we know as Pedro, watches as a white chicken drops in slow-motion from the ceiling, wings flapping, as if in reversed ascent. Across the small room, Pedro's mother, a woman still young, still attractive, rises in turn, smiling in her white nightdress; yet when we next see Pedro she is in the background, once more asleep. Bending down to look beneath his bed, Pedro gapes at the cadaver of a boy only slightly older than himself, his head striped with dark blood and laughing uproariously. The corpse's head rolls from side to side, 7

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occasionally snapping back to its initial position; like the repetitive soundtrack, this laugh could continue for all eternity. A snowstorm of white chicken feathers drifts down around him. Pedro climbs back into bed. His mother again rises from hers and now speaks to him. Her tone betrays a gentleness she does not show in waking life. She moves toward him, seeming almost to dance, to skip over the beds between them, while the recumbent Pedro watches this agonising fulfilment of his wishes. She sits beside him, telling him he is a good boy — her words the exact opposite of what she says by day — and accepting his innocence of the other boy's death, the boy under the bed. They speak but their lips don't move; even the words here float and dance, disembodied and disconnected, while the insinuating flute music

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snakes around them. When Pedro voices his greatest fear, that his mother doesn't love him, a fear that everything in life tells him is true, she stretches her hands toward him (toward us). 'Look at my hands from so much washing,' she says, apologising for her menial job; but the pose, the look, are overtly sensual. Promising to get a job so she can rest, Pedro folds himself gratefully into her arms, becoming for a moment the small boy that his street-imposed toughness keeps well buried. The mother turns away, and Pedro, rising suddenly from his reclining position, calls out more urgently. This is the first and last time his lips will move, though the single word they emit —Mama!'— is badly out of synch. Spinning slowly as if in a trance or a waltz, eyes heavy-

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lidded, she now grips a large slab of glistening, rotten meat, which she holds up for Pedro to see. A flash of lightning sears the room, thunder buries the music. All trace of maternal warmth is now gone: advancing on her son with the repellent hunk, she wears a smile that no mother should give, ever. At once erotic and cruel, it is frankly terrifying, the look a child sees in nightmares when a parent steps out of character and is revealed a homicidal maniac. Her face is lit from below and her thick, dark hair flutters to inexplicable air currents, like a knot of vipers. Not Madonna but Medusa. The sound of the risen wind now drowns out any other, while from the edge of the screen we see curtains blowing fiercely. The mother hands the meat to her son, who takes it gratefully: love, nourishment, no matter

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how repulsive, cannot be refused by a starving boy. But no sooner does he ^ accept the gift than a long, thin arm snakes out from beneath the bed, a GO sinewy, grasping branch. This is Jaibo, the true author of the other boy's _ death. With a wild-eyed rictus of triumph, he wrests the meat from ° Pedro's hands as his mother turns away. Jaibo disappears below with his prize. The mother floats gently back to bed, indifferent to the outcome of this new drama. Pedro, cast back to his status of forgotten one, collapses onto his mattress, defeated and exhausted. Bunuel has always been a master of dreams. But unlike in his other films, which more seamlessly blend hallucination and waking life (the ambiguous realities of The Exterminating Angel and Belle de Jour; the reverie interruptus of The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie}, the sequence here is clearly, almost buffoonishly, signalled. And yet, in its crude simplicity, it remains one of the most resonant dream scenes ever shot, full of archetypal imagery and primal suggestion. I know of no other director who has conveyed so well the fine balance between the believable and the impossibly strange, that narrow space where true disorientation takes hold. Occurring fairly early in the film, the scene infuses all that follows with an aura of unreality that lifts it above the melodrama of the story line. In Pedro's dream, the setting is familiar. The strangeness, for him and for us, lies in the details: the piercing, almost Andean sound of the single flute that provides the soundtrack, later joined by the wind howling inexplicably in the room. The stop-motion hilarity of the murdered boy. The lustful shape of the mother's smile as she approaches with the meat. The sinister zigzag of Jaibo's arm emerging from under the bed, as if nourished by the rotting corpse he himself had created. The way the dialogue floats out of synch with the characters' lips, as when we try to cry out in nightmares but can't. Although set in the slums, and despite the debates that surrounded it at the time of its release, Los Olvidados is not a film about poverty or juvenile delinquency. O r rather, poverty, delinquency, neglect, the ineffectiveness of aid programmes, Mexico's rush to modernisation after the war, and other social ills are only secondary themes, an excuse, a backdrop. The real subject of this film is a lack of sustenance — defined as food, love or human dignity — that is familiar to us all, regardless of social stratum; a sense of belonging denied from the outset; a search for redemption forever withheld; the hollow stab of hunger. 11

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2 LAND WITHOUT BREAD 'I had so little interest in Latin America, 'Bufiuel wrote, 'that I used to tell my friends that should I suddenly drop out of sight one day, I might be anywhere, except there.' 1 Yet in May 1946, it was in Mexico City, the threshold of Latin America, that Bufiuel disembarked, his clothes reeking from the D D T with which they had sprayed the plane cabin on arrival, nerves jangled from having to fly at all. It was to be a short business trip, in preparation for filming a play by his old friend Garcia Lorca. Try as one might to follow the script, life has plot twists of its own. Lorca's heirs sold the film rights to someone else. And as the director wryly commented, Mexico, the brief stopover, became his home for the next thirty-six years. For many, Bufiuel had simply dropped out of sight after the succes de scandale of L'Age d'or in 1930, or else following his 1933 documentary Land without Bread. Still today, most viewers see Los Olvidados as a kind of solitary lighthouse, rising from amid the emptiness that stretches between Land without Bread and Na^arin (1958) twenty-five years later. But apart from moments of forced idleness, Bufiuel was active in cinema for most of that time. And before viewing Los Olvidados proper, we need at least to glance at his work leading up to it, and at the Mexican film industry in which it uncomfortably took its place. As is well known, Bufiuel had become an overnight sensation in 1929 with his debut short Un Chien andalou, co-written with college mate Salvador Dali. Its opening close-up of an eye being sliced by a razor (the fellow doing the slicing is Bufiuel himself) and its script based on the premise that 'no idea or image that might lend itself to rational explanation of any kind would be accepted' 2 (a great sound bite, even if it's tripe) captured the fancy of unwashed avant-garde and thrillseeking beau monde alike. The following year, Bufiuel, by then a familiar figure at both the Surrealist roundtable and the Vicomte de Noailles's weekend retreat, was commissioned by Noailles to create one of France's first full-length talkies as a birthday present for his wife. The viscount gave Bufiuel a liberal budget of 1 million francs; the frugal director used about half. The resulting hour-long 'film sonore etparlant\ 12

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UAge d'or, featured such tidbits as the desiccated skeletons of ^ archbishops sitting in full regalia, a blind man being kicked, a couple c/> writhing on the ground in perpetually frustrated erotic frenzy, fellatio _ being performed on a statue's toe, and a character from the Marquis de ° Sade 's infamous 120 Days of Sodom who (as the screenplay helpfully noted) is 'clearly Jesus Christ'. Neither the content nor the outcry over the film seemed to bother its tolerant patrons, who began having second thoughts only after Noailles was blacklisted by his social circle and UAge d'or was emphatically banned by the police — a ban that stayed in effect for fifty years, outlasting numerous government cabinets. Few could bite the hand that fed him as hard as Don Luis. During the brouhaha surrounding UAge d'or, Bufiuel went to Hollywood, on a six-month contract to MGM to study film techniques: although he witnessed almost no actual film-making, he came away with a lasting appreciation for the pacing and efficiency of American cinema. In spring 1931 he returned briefly to Spain, where he was stirred by the idealism of the newly proclaimed Second Republic, and so repelled by the movie milieu he found soon afterward in Paris that he 'didn't want to make any more films'.3 (He joined the Spanish Communist Party at around that time, breaking with both Surrealism and Dali in the process.) Nonetheless, over the next two years he worked on several unrealised projects, including an adaptation of Andre Gide's novel Lafcadio's Adventures-, a second Surrealist screenplay for Charles de Noailles, he of no hard feelings, called A Giraffe-, and a screenplay based on Wuthering Heights, which he would finally film in Mexico in 1953. He also edited down UAge d'or into a bowdlerised version, retitled In the Icy Waters of Egoist Calculation after a phrase from Marx, in a vain bid to have the ban on the film lifted. There was one project Bufiuel did complete during this period, however — the only film signed by him for the next thirteen years — and it has direct bearing on Los Olvidados, not only for its treatment of the earth's wretched but also for the dispassionate stance it adopts. Land without Bread (also known as Unpromised Land or Las Hurdes, after the mountainous region of Spain that it documents) is the non-fiction pendant to Los Olvidados, its extended preface and moral cousin. Although it is often lumped in with Bunuel's first two films as the concluding panel of a Surrealist triptych, it more accurately stands as the pivot between the avant-garde classics and his more mature works of the 50s and 60s. 13

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In a prefatory note to the film, Bunuel states that the region of Las Hurdes, near Salamanca, was unknown even in Spain until the early 1920s and that Land without Bread was shot in 1932, neither of which is strictly accurate. While most Spaniards were made aware of the region by King Alfonso XIIFs historic visit in 1922, there were numerous references to it dating back to at least the 16th century. As for the film itself, it was shot in April and May 1933, largely financed by the lottery winnings of Bunuel's friend Ramon Acin, and edited that summer by its director using a magnifying glass and a razor blade. Predating the film by one year was Bunuel's attempt to forestall its banning by the antiRepublican right wing, which took the elections in the fall of 1933 (as with L'Age d'or, the attempt at mollification failed). But despite these and several other deviations from the truth, Land without Bread remains a seminal study in 'human geography', as the introduction puts it, and is now recognised as one of the most important early documentaries, on a par with such acknowledged classics as Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) (Flaherty himself was inspired by it to make The Land in 1942).4 From the start, the tone of Land without Bread is one of harsh frankness and a complete lack of sentiment. In its twenty-seven minutes of running time, the film documents a multiple wedding ceremony in which the grooms pull the heads off live cocks (though the actual decapitations, considered too graphic, were expurgated from the final version); schoolchildren too poor to own shoes learning that 'one must respect the property of others'; a donkey carrying beehives stung to death by its cargo; and the cadaver of an infant floating in a basket on the river. The listless bodies of the sick litter the roadsides. One small girl, suffering from a nameless illness, is examined on-camera by a member of the crew; the neutral voice-over commentary (written by Bunuel and the Surrealist writer Pierre Unik) mentions that she died two days later. Sickness and death run throughout this film. Skulls nest in the outer walls of houses. The drinking water is infested with anopheles mosquitoes, bringing widespread malaria, while adder bites, rarely deadly in themselves, become fatally infected through attempts to cure them. Because of incest and poor hygiene, the mountains are rife with what the narrator calls 'dwarves and morons'; the dry newsreel voice ('Here's another moron') specifies that they are often dangerous and could be filmed only because a local kept them distracted. In the final 14

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Death in Las Hurdes.- the wedding ceremony; the sick girl

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Life in Las Hurdes: two 'morons', the woman who cries death

sequence, an old woman walks the narrow streets by night, intoning the names of the latest dead. But the film's central leitmotif is the endless, useless search for food. The mountain dwellers spend fruitless months cultivating the dry, sterile fields. Livestock are scarce. Even bread is all but unknown; 16

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sometimes the schoolmaster can give a hunk of it to the children, but they must eat it in his presence to prevent their parents stealing it from their mouths. In one of the film's most controversial scenes, the narrator explains that goat meat is eaten only when one of the animals plunges from the steep mountain rocks to its death. The accompanying visuals of a falling goat reveal gunsmoke drifting in from offscreen (a last resort after the crew failed to startle it off the ledge), evidence that Bunuel was not above arranging the truth to illustrate his point. Like the deadpan narration, the visual presentation of Land without Bread is matter-of-fact, almost crude. The camera (by Eli Lotar) moves around artlessly. The film surface is grainy. Dark and claustrophobic, it draws us into a place of uncompromising brutality, what Bunuel calls 'the plague of the Upper Hurdano mountains'. But what lifts the film above simple reportage are the flashes of unrepentant incongruity: a ruined monastery inhabited solely by frogs, village rooftops that look from afar like 'the carapace of a fabulous animal', and even the presence of the Hurdanos themselves, who despite the misery refuse to leave. As an old woman told Pierre Unik, 'If you want to save us from this hell, take us away from here by force.' 5 Bunuel has often shown a predilection for the conventions of documentary. L'Age d'or famously begins with clips from a pedagogical short on the habits of scorpions. Los Olvidados, which the director labelled a 'documentary' in early interviews, is prefaced by newsreel footage of modern metropolises with a voice-over soberly deploring the delinquency they breed, and some of his subsequent films employ a similar device. Documentary provides a grounding, a facsimile of everyday reality, the better to sneak in the bits of unreality that Bunuel was most eager to introduce. Jean-Claude Carriere once remarked that Bunuel 'wanted his films to have a power of strangeness without being strange', and Bunuel himself said that what interested him most was mystery, 'the essential element in any work of art'. 6 There is something comforting in a fantasy that announces itself. The real disturbance, as the Surrealists preached but couldn't always practise, comes when fantasy intrudes in a setting where it doesn't belong, as in the paintings of Magritte or Pierre Roy's Danger on the Stairs. In Land without Bread, those flashes of disturbance are provided by the blunt absurdity of life in Las Hurdes. In Los Olvidados, they creep in through the fissures Bunuel opens in an otherwise realistic drama. 17

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O L V I D A D O S Pierre Roy, Danger on the Stairs, oil on canvas, 1927 or 1928 (The Museum of Modern Art, New York; gift of Abby Aldritch Rockefeller)

What Land without Bread and Los Olvidados share more than anything, however, is a tone, both visual and moral. It is our sense of shock they mean to provoke, rather than our sense of humour; it is our complacency they seek to undermine (not coincidentally, both films sparked a huge public outcry). While L'Age d'ory despite its undeniable bite, owes as much to the classic silent comedies that the Surrealists adored as it does to social critique, Land without Bread (and to a slightly lesser extent Los Olvidados) eschews humour in favour of a gaze that is dispassionate, removed, unsmiling and thoroughly unsentimental. Atrocities happen. Children die. The situation doesn't improve. That's the way it is.

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Depending on who you listen to, Bunuel planned either to give up films ^ altogether after Land without Bread or to make only documentaries. In GO fact, he did neither: needing work, he took a job for Warner Bros, in ^ Spain, dubbing American films for the local market, and at around the ° same time he joined the fledgling production company Filmofono, an endeavour that offers the second key to understanding the genesis of Los Olvidados. Started by producer and distributor Ricardo Urgoiti, Filmofono aimed to provide commercial product for Urgoiti's chain of movie theatres. Although Bunuel was ostensibly the executive producer, supervising the work of other directors, he apparently directed at least portions of the four films the company produced before the Spanish Civil War shut it down. More important than the nature of the films themselves — broad farces and melodramas with titles like Bitter Don Quintin (1935) and Who Loves Met" (1936) — is the approach that Bunuel, the least auteurish of the auteurs, employed in making them: efficient, economical, dictated by both Filmofono's financial constraints and the workmanlike methods he had seen in Hollywood. 'Luis was marvelous,' Urgoiti said. 'I had given him a ridiculous budget. I stayed in my office, waiting for him to come and ask for more money. Instead, after three weeks, he came in with the

An early stab at formula melodrama-. Bitter Don Quintin

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finished film and part of the money I had given him.' 7 While Mexico is often credited with making Bufiuel into 'a professional in the film world' — the quote is by Bufiuel himself — his ability to handle a variety of popular genres, and to dispatch them quickly and conscientiously, was honed at Filmofono. Without it, he would have been far less able to negotiate his first two Mexican films, and Los Olvidados would probably never have been made. Jump forward ten years. By now, Bufiuel is a family man, having married his longtime girlfriend, Jeanne Rucar, and sired two sons. The Spanish Civil War has been fought and lost, sending the director first to Paris, where he worked on anti-Franco propaganda films, then, with Europe under threat, back to Hollywood. Initially hired by MGM as a technical adviser for Spanish Civil War films, Bufiuel found himself after the Republican defeat 'stuck in America completely alone and without a job' . 8 A letter of January 1939 to Urgoiti, by then in Buenos Aires, reveals both his discouragement and the practical mindset that would serve him during his years in Mexico: The absolute solitude in which I find myself here has made these days that much more bitter ... I am ready to leave here as soon as my money runs out and if there are possibilities and if you're going to do something I'd like to be part of Filmofono again [which Urgoiti planned to relaunch in Argentina] but now as a director or as anything else ... Without my artistic prejudices I think I can be more useful than before.9 Whether or not Bufiuel would ultimately have joined a revived Filmofono is anyone's guess, for the following year he moved his family to New York and began working as a documentary editor for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) under Iris Barry. What his letters to Urgoiti show, however, is how prepared he was to adapt to whatever conditions the market demanded. A number of these notes press his erstwhile partner for details on making films in Argentina, specifically cheap, commercial ones. In any case, adaptation was key in this period. The job at MoMA, a government-sponsored post under Nelson Rockefeller's Office of InterAmerican Affairs, ended after reports of BunuePs Communist past reached the wrong ears. Bufiuel seems never to have been much of a 20

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militant, and he apparently shed his political affiliation without regret when he moved to the US, but once was more than enough for the powers watching over MoMA. Over the following year, he planned non-starter film projects with other European exiles, toyed with the idea of opening a nightclub (its distinctive feature being a cannon at the door that would

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fire every time a client's bill passed one thousand dollars, presumably rousing the workers across town to revolt), and — despite having been tarred as a Red — recorded Spanish-language voice-overs for army training reels: 'In fifteen or twenty films my "fine voice" could be heard expatiating on welding methods, explosives, and airplane parts.' 10 A brief return to Los Angeles followed, where Bufiuel dubbed Hollywood films for the Mexican market, but by early 1946 this too had ended. 11 Enter Denise Tual, ex-wife of Chien andalou star Pierre Batcheff and an old friend of Luis. Having recently tasted success in France as coproducer of Robert Bresson's Angels of the Streets (1943), she was now shopping the film around Hollywood. When that failed, she decided instead to shoot Federico Garcia Lorca's play The House of Bernarda Alha and, over dinner at Rene Clair's home, she proposed that Bufiuel direct it. Bufiuel had no great love of the play, finding the language too flowery, but he had not forgotten his close friendship with Lorca during their student days. Nor did his own prospects in Hollywood look very bright, and recent congressional efforts to root out Communists in the movie industry, even nominal ones, made them darker still. When Tual suggested that he accompany her to Mexico, where she hoped to interest a studio in the project, he agreed; the two of them arrived in early May. It was only after reaching Mexico City (though one might wonder why it wasn't thought of before) that Bufiuel contacted Lorca's brother Paquito in New York to ask about film rights to the play. Meanwhile, Bufiuel and Tual proposed the project to producer Oscar Dancigers, a friend of hers, but he was unenthusiastic. Denise returned to France to drum up backing in her native land. Bufiuel stayed in Mexico to await news. But when the phone did ring, it was not Tual but Dancigers, offering him a different project on condition that he remain in the country to shoot it. To Urgoiti, he wrote that he was being given a 'horrifying' cowboy musical to direct, but that he still planned to go to France in November to make Bernarda Alha. 'I have no great hopes of being able to return to Spain anytime soon, and so am opening new paths for myself in Latin America and France.' 12 Soon afterward, however, Paquito Lorca 21

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informed Bufiuel that a British producer had outbid them. With only the Dancigers offer in hand, and seeing prospects in neither the US nor Europe, Bunuel packed up his family in Los Angeles and, in November, moved lock, stock and barrel to Mexico. He was behind a camera the following month. A French national of Russian origin, the urbane Oscar Dancigers Azbekoff had fled the Nazis in 1940 and settled in Mexico. In short order, he had founded Ultramar Films and achieved considerable success as a small independent producer of upscale commercial vehicles, the profits from which supported an equally considerable gambling habit. Nevertheless, in a place where so many projects fell into the proverbial black hole, Dancigers had a reputation for getting the job done. John Steinbeck, whose novella The Pearl became an Ultramar production in 1945, considered him a man of great integrity, enormous experience, and honesty. He knows how to do everything in Mexico. He knows not only Mexican law, but the laws of the unions, which are equally important, and a violation of any of them will bring your production to a standstill.'13 Perhaps more crucially, he knew when and how to grease palms. And how to spot talent: in his world, Bunuel's proven ability to deliver commercial material well, on schedule, and within budget was a distinct asset.

Almost from the time of its independence from Europe in 1867, Mexico had experienced a series of dictatorships, culminating in the bloody regime of General Porflrio Diaz, which was itself toppled by the Revolution of 1910.14 The folklore of the Revolution had nourished the next several decades of popular culture, the faces of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata staring out from countless murals like Marx and Lenin in sombreros. The 1930s had seen the ideals of the Revolution translated into a series of progressive social programmes during the sexenio of Lazaro Cardenas (1934—40), who undertook to nationalise the Mexican oil fields and buttress a secular, agrarian state against church and industrial interests. In the history of Leftist politics, Cardenas also stands out as the man who welcomed numerous refugees to Mexico, notably

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Spanish Republicans fleeing Franco, which contributed heavily to Mexico City's cultural renaissance. But with the elections of Manuel Avila Camacho in 1940 and Miguel Aleman in 1946, the push for national prosperity took a different turn. Aleman in particular curtailed Cardenas's agrarian subsidies and diverted the funds toward a vast programme of urban development, initiating what proved to be one of the most traumatic ideological and demographic shifts in modern Mexican history. While the rich typically got richer, alemanismo caused a mass migration of poor, largely uneducated campesinos from the countryside to Mexico City, creating in the process one of the world's most densely populated slums on the city outskirts. Bunuel later estimated that the population of these areas grew at a rate of nearly a thousand peasants each day: in Los Olvidados, the character Ojitos is explicitly one of them. During World War II, Mexico had established itself as the leading Latin American producer of movies. It released seventy films in 1943 alone, twice as many as its closest rival, Argentina. Its geographical removal from the theatre of conflict gave it an advantage over ravaged Europe, while its support of the Allied effort won it large amounts of raw film stock and equipment from the United States. In 1942, Avila Camacho had founded the Banco Cinematografico to help subsidise domestic production. With the war over and foreign competition again on the rise, his successor Aleman nationalised the Banco Cinematografico, passed tax incentives for the film industry and halted the import of dubbed Hollywood films (inadvertently costing Bunuel his last job in Hollywood). As with any subsidy, this support came with a price, the most predictable being that the Banco was loath to finance any film it considered a dubious commercial prospect. And the industry carried a certain historical baggage as well. Since the Revolution, the Mexican state had used popular culture as a primary tool of ideological education. Films were expected to promote certain national values, such as the nobility of native Indian culture or the sanctity of the family. Emilio 'El Indio' Fernandez, Mexico's leading director and the purveyor of many such features, once referred to himself as 'the fourth muralist', a reference to the didactic Holy Trinity of Rivera, Orozco and Siqueiros. Among Fernandez's successes were the wildly popular Flor silvestre (1943) and Maria Candelaria (1944), one of the country's

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O L V I D A D O S The noble poor: Pedro Armendariz and Dolores del Rio in Fernandez's Maria Candelaria

highest-grossing films. President Aleman himself appeared in his Rio Escondido (Hidden River, 1947) to give the heroine, a schoolteacher, her sacred mission of explaining the government's reforms to the younger generation. By the 1940s, the hand-in-glove relationship between the movies and national propaganda had solidified into several incontrovertible genres, simple to make and easy to label, which characterised the 'Golden Age' of Mexican film-making. Most notable were the comedia ranchera, an Elvis-meets-John-Wayne hybrid in which sombrero-sporting charros sang to ladies with big hair, who sang back; the historical revolutionary epic, which promoted the ideals and imagery of 1910 (the kind of film at which Fernandez excelled); the family melodrama, much like Hollywood domestic tearjerkers, only a bit more lachrymose; and comedies starring Cantinflas (Mario Moreno) or some variant thereof. Under Aleman, a new genre rose in popularity as well: the urban-oriented cabareteray the 24

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name taken from the well-meaning but loose-moralled nightclub singers who populated them. There was also the arrabalera, or urban melodrama (the genre that most closely fits Los Olvidados), though these were less popular among audiences, perhaps because of their pessimistic tone. Along with the codified genres came a similar codification of movie stars, their status seemingly proportional to the rigidity with which they were typecast. Pre-eminent among the singing cowboys was Jorge Negrete, a man's man, quick with a warble and handy with a pistol and the ladies. The long-suffering paterfamilias of the domestic melodramas was Fernando Soler. Miguel Inclan was the perennial villain. Emilio Fernandez's Indian ideal was generally embodied by the international star Dolores del Rio and by Pedro Armendariz (familiar to Anglophones as James Bond's 'Turkish' fellow spy Ali Kerim Bay in From Russia with Love). Cantinflas, later known worldwide for his role in Mike Todd's Around the World in Eighty Days, was wildly popular at home for his portrayal of thepelado (small-time loser), a kind of south-of-the-border Little Tramp. For Mexican audiences, these actors were the characters they repeatedly played, to a degree that makes the American cult of celebrity pale by comparison. It is also worth noting that many of them later worked with Bufiuel, often in roles that travestied their familiar and all-important personas. Over the following decade, the classic genres would fall into the same kind of irrelevance as Depression-era screwball comedies. In 1946, however, they were still fairly reliable box-office fodder, and it was for one of them, a B-level comedia ranchera, that Dancigers had tapped Bufiuel. Gran Casino, released in 1947, stars an aging Jorge Negrete in one of his quintessential roles — 'an overgrown kid, and more macho than God', joked his director. The flimsy plot casts Negrete as Gerardo, an escaped convict working in the Tampico oil fields, where he meets Mercedes, played by the equally overripe Argentine tango star Libertad Lamarque. The two fall in love, uncover who murdered Mercedes's brother for control of the oil and run off together in the end — all to copious amounts of singing, each star trying to upstage the other. Bufiuel later called it 'a tournament to see who could sing more tangos'. 15 As with most Mexican films of the time, Gran Casino was a vehicle for its two leads, in which story and director were mere bagatelles. Despite the casting, however, it was a commercial failure: if anyone could make a disaster of the foolproof star system, it was Bufiuel.16

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His next film, a lighthearted family drama called The Great Madcap {El Gran calaverd), made in 1949, starred Fernando Soler as a wealthy, embittered widower. Conned by his family into thinking he's lost his fortune, Soler discovers the plot, turns the tables and teaches them all a valuable lesson about money not buying happiness before all ends well. This particular outing fared much better at the box office. Much has been made of what Bunuel called his 'bread and butter' films, both by critics seeking to excuse them and by others searching mightily for signs of the unrepentant Surrealist within. Either course is a fool's errand. Try as we might, it is very hard to recognise what we habitually think of as 'Bunuelian' in most of these films. The Great Madcap, for instance, is an amusing and perfectly enjoyable comedy, but it could have been made by anyone (Soler, in fact, usually directed his own pictures). Even Bunuel's supposedly characteristic moments, such as the Graduate-like finale in which the daughter's poor-but-honest suitor 26

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Fernando Soler (centre) seeing how the other half lives in The Great Madcap

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disrupts her wedding to a rich cad, are less signature touches than bright spots in an otherwise average movie. But more to the point, why apologise for these films at all? There is no question that Bunuel's reputation rests on his early experimental masterpieces, his late French films, and a few in between, Los Olvidados prime among them. But his work in the Mexican movie mill earned him his daily bread and gave him much-needed practice in cinema technique, in which by his own admission he was still an 'apprentice'. It also allowed him entree into the restricted studio system and, on occasion, created opportunities for masterpieces: it was the success of The Great Madcap that paved the way for Los Olvidados. And as Bunuel later pointed out, despite having to accept projects that bored or even embarrassed him, 'I never made a single scene that compromised my convictions or my personal morality.' 17 Bunuel would spend the next ten years working almost exclusively within the Mexican film industry, rapidly learning to navigate its conventions, and did not entirely stop shooting there until 1965, with Simon of the Desert: by his own count, twenty of his thirty-two films were made in Mexico. He also became a Mexican citizen in October 1949, partly to help ensure steady employment, and remained one until his death, in Mexico City, in 1983. His beginnings there were anything but easy. In particular, the post-war wave of protectionism in the film industry, coinciding with his arrival, made it difficult for any new director to break in, especially a foreigner. Only the support of prominent figures like Cantinflas and 27

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Negrete, who backed him for Gran Casino, had gotten Bufiuel around the restrictive policies of the powerful directors' union. Still, there were many aspects of Mexico that appealed to Bufiuel. The country boasted a large community of Spanish exiles like himself, many of whom eventually worked on his films. And while the war had devastated the European capitals, Mexico City had developed into a major intellectual centre. Moreover, Mexico had a notable Surrealist pedigree, having been celebrated by both Antonin Artaud, who had lived among the Tarahumara Indians in 1936, and Andre Breton, who had visited Trotsky, Rivera and Kahlo there in 1938 and proclaimed the country 'the Surrealist place par excellence'. Although Bufiuel, discouraged by the failure of Gran Casino and 'influenced by the land of the Frigidaire', initially had a poor impression of his new homeland, and had even considered returning to Europe, by 1949 he was allowing for tempered optimism. 'I am already beginning to plant roots in this land of free rein, because where else am I going to go?' he wrote to his friend Jose Rubia Barcia after the release of The Great Madcap. 'It would be idiotic if I left Mexico after two years of painful efforts and failures, now that the fruits are just within my grasp.' (It was at around this time that he became a citizen.) In another letter to the same correspondent, he went so far as to call Mexico, 'despite its anarchist tradition ... the most stable, calm, and unified country in the world'. 1 8 It was also to Rubia Barcia that he announced a new project in January 1950, one he considered crucial for his career, 'like a mixture of Land without Bread and L'Age d'or, but with elements evolved throughout these past fifteen years'. 19 The film, soon to become Los Olvidados, called upon the full range of Bunuel's film experience — the dispassionate eye of documentary, the dreamlike quality of Surrealism (as well as its sadistic cat-and-mouse game with audience expectations), and the storycraft of his commercial films — forming a delicate synthesis of all three. Remove one and the whole structure collapses. Bufiuel had always been an economical director, and his experience with Los Olvidados was no different. Shooting began on 6 February 1950, to finish twenty-one working days later, on 9 March. The director used a combination of studio shots in the old Tepeyac studios and numerous location scenes in the sprawling slums north of the city. As in the days of Filmofono, he made the picture on a stringent budget of 450,000 pesos (about three-quarters the cost of the average Mexican churro, or cheap 28

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genre flick), plus the equivalent of two thousand dollars for his salary. Even his use of raw film was spare: a mere ten-to-one ratio of stock to finished footage. But if the production was modest, not so the director's hopes for it. 'The film I'm about to begin making now fills me with enthusiasm and if I do it right it will be talked about,' he had written to Rubia Barcia in September 1949, adding a few months later: 'I hope [Los Olvidados] will be something exceptional in the current world of international filmmaking. It is hard and strong, without the slightest concession to the audience. Realistic, but with a subtle current of fierce and sometimes erotic poetry.' 20

3 THE MILK OF KINDNESS Practically the first thing Bunuel noticed about his new homeland was the nonchalance of murder. 'One can be killed for the smallest mistake, like a sideways look, or simply because someone "feels like it",' he later wrote. 'European readers are always shocked when they see their morning paper in Mexico, which is typically filled with reports of all sorts of violent crimes.' One article that particularly struck him concerned a man who, having gone to an apartment building to check whether a certain Mr Sanchez lived there, was shot by the concierge for being too nosy. 'What shocked me more than anything else about this story was the journalist's tone,' Bunuel later noted; 'the article was written as if the concierge's act was perfectly appropriate.' 21 Another article, later credited as an inspiration for Los Olvidados, reported that the body of a twelve-year-old boy had been found in a garbage pit. One of Buiiuel's aborted plans during his last stay in Los Angeles had been a film with Man Ray based on his discovery of the enormous municipal trash dump, which, he later said, had 'everything from orange peels to grand pianos to whole houses ... Once I saw a young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, emerge from one of the houses, and I fantasized her involved in a love affair in this infernal decor'. 22 That idea, since gone to waste, might well have echoed behind this new fait divers. 29

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In the eighteen months following Gran Casino, Bunuel had proposed a number of projects, including a Simenon novel and a collaboration with the Spanish poet Juan Larrea, a 'throwback to Surrealism' 23 called Illegible, the Son of a Flute, but for various reasons none had made the cut. He had also turned down several films, such as another Libertad Lamarque picture ('one was enough,' he told Dancigers), subsisting instead on the money his compliant mother sent from Spain, as earlier she had financed Un Chien andalou and some of Filmofono's productions. Then, in February 1949, Dancigers put him under contract at Ultramar, guaranteeing him a regular salary and, over the next five years, a steady stream of nine films — six of them in 1951 and 1952 alone. Among Bunuel's first proposals was another collaboration with Larrea, a melodrama provisionally titled Mi huerfanito, jefe ('my little orphan, boss') about a street urchin who sells lottery tickets. Dancigers, inspired by a recent viewing of De Sica's Shoeshine (1946), preferred something weightier, and suggested instead a film about kids in the Mexico City slums. Before undertaking this project, however, Bunuel was persuaded to direct the lighter, crowd-pleasing Great Madcap, which was about to get under way. The pay-off was the increased artistic freedom Dancigers promised him if Madcap was a success. Equally significant, in hindsight, was Bunuel's meeting with the Spanish actor and writer Luis Alcoriza, co-author of the Madcap screenplay and one of the film's stars (as Alfredo, the money-grubbing fiance). A 'sensitive and energetic man' 2 4 was how Bunuel described the thirty-one-year-old Alcoriza. Having fled Spain at the end of the Civil War, he had written scripts for several prominent directors by the time of his meeting with Bunuel, and would ultimately work on over one hundred of them, many in collaboration with his Mexican actress wife, Janet (stage name Raquel Rojas). In 1960 Alcoriza also began a directorial career of his own, and later won an Ariel for the Bufiuelinspired cult classic Mecdnica Nacional. Beginning with Los Olvidados, he would co-author ten films for Bunuel, including some of his most important Mexican works — The Brute, El (This Strange Passion) and The Exterminating Angel among them. The Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes later characterised Bunuel's relationship with Alcoriza as 'Don Quixote and Sancho Panza'. Alcoriza himself remarked of their collaboration, 'I was very humble with him 30

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and we became friends right away, and from then on everything was a game. We agreed on many things: human frailty, the mockery of religion, on everything that was important.' 25 Their main difference, according to those who knew them, was that Alcoriza, a Don Juan and bon vivant, took full advantage of the city's nightlife, while Bunuel, 'a man of monastic habits and great moral rectitude' (Fuentes), was often in bed by eight: despite his professed love of Sade, the director was often shocked by the , flagrant libertinism of his younger colleague. That temperamental divergence aside, Bunuel's partnership with Alcoriza was among the most fruitful of his professional life as crucial as his early exchanges with Dali or his later symbiosis with TeanClaude Carriere. With the Alcorizas, Bunuel reworked his original lottery-seller idea into a harsher, bleaker treatment called The Rotten Apple, the first draft of Los Olvidados. Though Alcoriza and Bunuel are the only scriptwriters listed, numerous details were also provided by Juan Larrea and the playwright Max Aub. Another unnamed collaborator was Pedro de Urdimalas, who recast the dialogues into authentic Mexican street argot, but who insisted his name be removed because (in a foreshadowing of the initial public response) he was displeased at the image the film gave of his country. Urdimalas particularly objected to a planned scene eventually dropped, that showed the kids finding an old portrait of a Spanish nobleman in a garbage dump, only to realise that the same gentleman had ended up as a local beggar: it offended his sense of both Mexican and Spanish honour. While preparing the script, Bunuel spent months exploring the vast, densely populated slums around Mexico City, sometimes in the company of Alcoriza or his set designer, Edward Fitzgerald. Walking in the early morning through the llanos (wastelands) of the Federal District Art imitates life: Luis Alcoriza as the feckless fiance in The Great Madcap

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that provided the film's main setting — the Nonoalco-Tlatelolco neighbourhood (which in 1958 was razed to make way for a huge housing development, only to be levelled by an earthquake in 1985), the shantytowns of Tacubaya and Tlalpan, Plaza de Romita — he took location photographs and noted copious details that would appear onscreen. 'I wore my most threadbare clothes; I watched, I listened, I asked questions,' he recalled. 'Eventually, I came to know these people, and much of what I saw went unchanged into the film.'26 Bunuel also spent many hours consulting with Maria de Lourdes Ricaud of the Department of Social Services and reading hundreds of case files from reform schools, prisons and mental hospitals. And he scanned the papers for human interest stories, such as the one about the boy's body in the garbage dump. He took great pains to ensure the film's authenticity. The voiceover prologue goes out of its way to stress that the film you are about to see is 'based on actual incidents', the miseries it portrays a matter for 'the progressive forces of our time' — a phrase that would have reminded 32

Location photos taken by Bunuel in preparation for Los Olvidados

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many Mexicans of President Aleman's call for a 'progressive society' in his inaugural address four years earlier. 'I was very struck by the wretchedness in which many of [the city's] inhabitants lived,' he later told the magazine Nuevo Cine. 'My story is entirely based on real cases. I tried to expose the wretched condition of the poor in real terms, because I loathe films that make the poor romantic and sweet.' Of the many critiques levelled at Los Olvidados after its release, the one that seemed most to rankle with Bufiuel was the charge that he had falsified certain details for effect. Some thirty years afterward, he still remembered a review 'which argued that three brass bedsteads in a wooden shack was pure whimsy on my part, yet it was absolutely true. I saw those beds and, in fact, much more; some couples went without the most basic necessities just in order to buy brass bedsteads when they got married'. As noted above, he explicitly referred to the film as a documentary in several interviews, though in a letter to Rubia Barcia he more accurately termed it a 'compromise of documentary and fiction, which is necessary for the film to succeed commercially'. 27 Los Olvidados (literally, 'the forgotten ones') was, of course, hardly the first film to portray the dire conditions of homeless children. In 1933, the same year as Land without Bread, Nikolai Ekk's The Road to Life, which follows the criminal misdeeds and eventual redemption of a gang of orphaned youths, had been acclaimed as a bold piece of Soviet realism (and much decried by Bunuel's Surrealist friends for making a virtue of hard work, though Bufiuel himself apparently defended it at the time). In the US, Spencer Tracy had scored a hit as no-nonsense Father Flanagan in Boys Town (1938), while the Dead-End Kids regularly enlivened such tough-guy pictures as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and They Made Me a Criminal (1939). And in Italy, a number of neorealist films focused attention on destitute children in post-war Europe. In proposing a feature about juvenile delinquents, Dancigers was also well aware that the subject was in vogue in Mexico. In 1949 and 1950 alone, some two dozen films, with titles like Angels of the Slums, Four Against the Worldand Victims of Sin, treated some aspect of youth crime, poverty or exploitation. Several years earlier, Ismael Rodriguez's Nosotros lospobres ( We the Poor, 1947), a melodrama about the lives of the urban disenfranchised, had become Mexico's all-time box-office success (a title it held for several decades), spawning one sequel {Ustedes los ricos [You the Rich], 1948) and scores of imitations. 33

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In this regard, Bunuel's opening voice-over serves two mam purposes: it sets a tone of reassuring liberalism, by deploring the unfortunate scourge we are about to witness and, more importantly, it focuses our attention, as spectators, on a reality that human interest stories and previous films have made relatively familiar. In other words, it ushers us into a convention, setting the stage as might any introductory blurb, whether for Boys Town, Sherwood Forest, or 'a galaxy far, far away'. The convention, however, starts falling apart in the scenes following, which show a gang of street kids playing bullfight in a dusty lot What we immediately see of these boys - their dirty clothes, their impossibly ugly mugs (the in-your-face close-up of the boy playing 'bull' all twisted grimace and tangled buck teeth, unmistakably recalls the misshapen 'morons' of Land without Bread), the stolen cigarettes that even the youngest among them smoke - tells us all we need to know about their poverty, their idleness, the aimless violence that has no outlet: these are not the noble poor of Emilio Fernandez or of Nosotros lospobres. The scene also establishes from the outset that this ragtag band is the closest thing most of them have to a family, dysfunctional though it may be. As we soon learn, one of the reasons for their idleness is that the family has lost its patriarch, Jaibo, recently sent to the reformatory and - as one of the older boys, Pockface, tells the others - just escaped. Although Pedro is the nominal protagonist of Los Olvidados and the viewer's emotional anchor, he is not at first singled out. He is present •A-?.\W.-'y»':;£fe

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Pedro's first appearance, barely noticed

in the opening, but the camera glides over him, and his one line of dialogue - 'Work is for donkeys!' he taunts a more responsible member of the band - blends in with the rest of the group's banter. Only the little sailor hat that he '11 wear throughout the film, standing like a tiny beacon against the dull grey of the surroundings, provides a small visual clue to his central role. Jaibo, on the other hand, engages our specific interest at first sight. Immediately following Pockface 's mention of his escape, we dissolve to a medium shot of a young man in torn denim overalls walking nonchalantly down a working-class section of Avenida San Juan de Letran (since renamed Lazaro Cardenas), a bustling thoroughfare that begins at the centre of town and stretches to the heart of Nonoalco. The look on his face is arrogant, his gait cocky: he's not the kind of character you want to mess with. Even the camera, pulling back in reverse tracking, seems anxious to stay out of his way. Though we have yet to be told, there is no doubt who he is, nor that he is a force to be reckoned with. The film historian Augustin Sanchez Vidal has pointed out that the name Jaibo was probably derived fromjaiia, Mexican slang for an astute, dissimulating or wheedling person, a 'sharp operator'. And Jaibo is clearly no fool, nor has reformatory life done much to improve his character. Approaching a street cart, he orders a tortilla 'with everything', then sticks two fingers through the hole in his empty pocket - less a discovery of his impecuniousness than a tip-off to the audience of his intentions. But before he can steal his lunch he runs off into the crowd, having spotted an approaching police car. 35

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Back at the vacant lot, Jaibo regales the boys with stories from the reformatory, their rapt attention making it clear he's the boss; one of the boys even shines his shoes, a homage that Jaibo casually accepts (as well as a possible wink to De Sica's film). Like the others, Pedro is clearly in awe of Jaibo, his elder by several years, feeding him questions that allow him to brag further. At some point, we will realise that Pedro and Jaibo are the only gang members — practically the only characters in the entire film — to have actual names. Except for Meche and Don Carmelo, the others sport such Dick Tracy monikers as Pockface, Skinhead, Shoeshine and Small Eyes, or are given no names at all. Taller than the rest, restlessly wiry, with a shock of black hair permanently over one eye and a wisp of fuzz on his lip, Jaibo clearly dominates the gang. He radiates a dangerous, remorseless energy. He is the definition of the charismatic leader, the tribal chief, the sociopath. He galvanises the passive herd with his constant readiness for action and disregard for consequences. Finding that none of them has money or even a cigarette, he snorts, 'You can see I've done time inside. But I'll 36

Jaibo on the avenue

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show you soon enough. I learned a lot in there. Just do as I say and you won't be short of cash for long.' One of the legends surrounding Los Olvidados is that it was made using untried actors. It is true that a number of them were unknown to Mexican audiences at the time but, as with the goat's fatal plunge in Land without Bread, scrupulous reality sometimes needs a helping shove. While the unfamiliarity of most of the faces onscreen helped reinforce the 'anonymous' quality of the characters, very few of the principals were truly new to film, and some were already stars. Roberto Cobo (Jaibo), for instance, had had minor roles in sixteen movies by this time, and worked as a chorus dancer in local theatres. His stage name, Calambres ('cramps'), which carried through to many of his later films, came from the inordinate elasticity of his lanky limbs — the same elasticity that put the body language behind his best lines. (For that matter, Cobo was itself a stage name: the actor was born in 1930 as Roberto Garcia Romero.) A native of the same poor neighbourhoods in which Los Olvidados was filmed, he was twenty years old when he took on his breakthrough role, a few years older than the seventeen Jaibo is given in the script. 28 He ultimately went on to play nearly one hundred characters, his most famous, apart from Jaibo, being the transvestite La Manuela in the 1978 film Hell without Limits (El Lugar sin limites). Bunuel cast him once more, in 1951, as Oliverio's scheming brother in Mexican Bus Ride (Subida alcielo). He died of cancer in Mexico City in 2002. At the casting call, Cobo worked his way to the director's desk. Bunuel looked at me and gave me a piece of paper to read with the famous line, 'If anyone squeals on me, they pay for it.' Everyone else who said it overacted, so I read it in a flat tone. He said, 'Can you do that better?' I said yes, and the second time I did it the same way. We did five more tries, and each time I did it the same. I think he liked it, and that was that.' 29 Bunuel once remarked that 'there's no one more dangerous than a Mexican who eyes you calmly.' Perhaps more than anything, it is Jaibo's impassiveness, a still, murderous sadness behind the empty gaze, that alerts us to the violence always ready to explode. By contrast, the fresh-faced Alfonso Mejia (real name Manuel Aldecoa), who plays Pedro, was a nearly untried actor when Bunuel 37

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picked him out from among 300 others, though he too had appeared in a few films before this. He had answered an ad in the local paper, calling for boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen (Mejia was fifteen at the time) who had finished elementary school — the latter requirement 'so that three thousand children wouldn't show up instead of the three hundred we could examine'. 30 Twelve finalists were selected, among them Mejia and the future writer and film critic Jose de la Colina. 'I sent my photographs and information to Ultramar Films,' Colina later recounted, and a couple of weeks later I was summoned, along with other aspiring applicants, to a screen test at the Tepeyac Studios. I can barely remember how I acted out the two typed pages of text that corresponded to the role of 'Pedrito.' The camera's gaze made less of an impression on me than the gaze of that robust man with the demeanor of a boxer or a teamster, the head of an excavated statue (as Ramon Gomez de la Serna said), and a strong voice with an Aragonese accent. He seemed like a hunter stealthily observing his prey. Bunuel was then close to fifty years old and his fame as an avant-garde filmmaker was almost something of the past.31 Ultimately, Colina lost out to Mejia because he 'didn't look Mexican enough'. And even Mejia seems to have received some help in that regard: cast photos of the time show that his black 'Mexican' hair was actually dirty blond, and the child of the ghetto a healthy-looking middle-class kid. He went on to make two dozen more films over the next two decades (including yz>?2 Thorpe: All American in 1951, opposite Burt Lancaster), eventually abandoning the screen to practise international law. He and Cobo would meet again in the 1962 sex comedy Jovenes y Bellas {Young andBeautiful), playing rural playboys on the make.

Jaibo's first scheme leads the gang to the marketplace, where they plan to rob the blind beggar Don Carmelo of his satchel as he entertains the crowd. Laden with guitar, drum and pan pipes, singing turn-of-the-century ballads, Carmelo the one-man band is the film's reactionary caricature. The songs he plays are prefaced by homilies to 'his general' Porflrio Diaz, the legendary dictator overthrown four decades earlier, every mention of 38

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Don Carmelo performs in the market square while Skinhead (left) awaits his chance

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whom is accompanied by a respectful doffing of his hat. 'You may laugh,' he chides the snickering crowd. 'But in the time of our great general, people were more respectful! And women stayed at home instead of gadding about and deceiving their husbands like they do today.' Played by veteran film heavy Miguel Inclan, Carmelo is clearly an unsavoury character; and indeed, his over-the-top allegiance to the paternalistic, pre-revolutionary regime — a regime that the prior several decades of Mexican film culture had almost uniformly vilified — marks him from the start as anything but a sympathetic invalid. Bunuel made no secret of his aversion to the blind. His films are full of blind men being mistreated (such as the one kicked over by Gaston Modot in L'Age d'or) or wreaking mischief (Don Carmelo; the beggar chief in Viridiana). Nor should we forget that it was he who razored that eyeball on the first few feet of celluloid he ever ran through a camera. On the other hand, as a young man he had written short Blind street beggar photographed by Bunuel

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stories for a magazine to benefit the blind, one of them featuring a sightless man whose sixth sense and cunning allow him to move about freely — exactly as Carmelo's keen hearing frustrates Skinhead's attempt to slit the strap of his satchel with (yet another) razor blade. On top of which, many of Don Carmelo's platitudes, held up as they are for mirth, were at least partly shared by Bunuel, who nostalgically recalled his privileged childhood in Spain under Primo de Rivera's dictatorship, and whose patriarchal attitudes did not look kindly on his wife, or even his grown sons, leaving the house without his permission. 'At home, Bunuel was a puritan, a terrible Spanish macho,' 32 said his friend and one-time producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce. Thwarted by their intended victim, who moreover injures Skinhead with his walking stick, three of the gang follow the blind man to the empty lot where he lives, pelting him with stones and baiting him like a bull, in a sinister repetition of the opening scene. As he flails about, calling out in self-pity, Jaibo picks up a large rock and heaves it through Carmelo's drum with a senseless crash. This scene is the first true inkling we have of the ambiguous and shockingly cold moral universe in which we find ourselves. Whereas in most films, the taunting of a blind man by street punks would pull our sympathy toward the victim, Carmelo has been established as such a loathsome human being that we can't quite feel sorry for him. Nor can we entirely condemn the teenage aggressors, who are in part avenging Carmelo's wounding of their buddy. The murky moral boundaries that Stanley Kubrick would explore with a heavier hand in A Clockwork Orange (1971), in the scenes of orgiastic violence inflicted by Alex and his droogs for our uncomfortable enjoyment, are here treated much more subtly — so much so that, at least on first viewing, we're not quite sure what to feel. To underscore the ambiguity, Bunuel finishes the scene with a shot of the prostrate and mud-spattered Don Carmelo face to face with a black hen, while the soundtrack blasts a jeering fanfare. In this world, the commonly posited dichotomy between good and evil simply doesn't apply. Tenderness is always shaded by cruelty, generosity by self-interest. The axiom is not so extraordinary in life, but in the artificial world of Mexican cinema it was tantamount to sacrilege. And Bunuel plays on this ambivalence throughout. Jaibo clearly has a vicious nature, but he gives the group stability and direction, receiving in turn its unstinting manpower. Pedro, who will win our empathy in his 40

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efforts to be a 'good boy', here takes part in the assault on Carmelo alongside Jaibo and Skinhead, at one point urging the latter to 'pay him back' for the wound — the same phrase Jaibo repeatedly uses to threaten squealers. Pedro is not a bad kid, but neither is he a cardboard angel. He has adapted to the imperatives of his world: survival, retribution, loyalty at the price of death. Even the mocking black hen that faces down Carmelo is immediately followed by a shot of Pedro in his mother's barn, tenderly stroking one of the family chickens and taking from her an egg — a poor substitute for the nourishment his mother denies him. Just as the opening bullfight acts as a prelude to the tormenting of the blind man, so Jaibo's destruction of the drum foreshadows his run-in with Julian. We have met Julian shortly before this: friendly with the boys in the gang but not really one of them, he holds down a steady job by day and walks his drunken father home from the bar every night. He's a neighbourhood boy like the others, but on his way to making good. He is also the one Jaibo holds responsible for his recent incarceration. The day after the attack on Don Carmelo, Jaibo decides to settle some 'unfinished business'. Borrowing Shoeshine's scarf, Jaibo enlists Pedro's help in going to see Julian. The script calls for Pedro to look happy: this little orphan is proud to have been chosen by the boss, as he is now being singled out to the viewer. The two boys find Julian at the construction site where he works, wearing the same striped T-shirt we have seen him in before - a shirt identical to the one worn by the well-meaning but vaguely 41

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dimwitted Oliverio in Mexican Bus Ridey and that for Bunuel appears a shorthand for guileless, honourable innocence. (And not only Bunuel: the stalwart hero of Nosotros los pobres^ for example, wears a similar shirt.) It is Pedro who trustingly points out Julian when they arrive at the site, just as it was he who indicated Don Carmelo in the market square — in both cases unwittingly acting as Jaibo's operative. And it is Pedro, still clueless, who goes to fetch Julian and bring him to Jaibo, while the latter wraps his left arm in the scarf as if in a sling and slips a large rock inside. Only after the two older boys have greeted each other coldly and moved away to a nearby lot to talk does Pedro begin to sense Jaibo's motives. The original script describes him 'listening very attentively' to their conversation, but the film reinforces his unease by having him take off his hat and run his hand through his hair. Once away from prying eyes, Jaibo accuses Julian of ratting him out, which Julian angrily denies, countering that the only thing saving Jaibo from a good thrashing is his apparently broken arm. Turning to head back to work, he warns Pedro never to pull a stunt like that again. The scene with Julian gives rise to perhaps the most famous still from Los Olvidados (taken by Luis Marquez, and not in the actual film): the three boys poised in electric stillness, as if in a Greek tragedy. Pedro, at right, stares dumbly at the act that is about to transpire and that will ultimately determine his fate. Jaibo, a look of vicious calm in his eye, gauges the distance between his arm and Julian as he winds back the rock he has taken from its hiding place. Julian in the foreground, the largest of the three, his face set in angry determination — he doesn't have time for this shit — walks stiffly toward us, his body tensed in anticipation of the blow even before his brain has registered it. Behind Julian and Jaibo looms a huge willow, framing them both, weeping above their heads. Pedro stands slightly apart, while behind him hovers the ghostly erectorset skeleton of an unfinished high-rise — the future Social Security hospital, according to Bunuel, and to all appearances the same structure that overshadows the blind man's home — a reminder of Aleman's push for modernisation that threatens, metaphorically, to crush Pedro and all his bereft brethren. The next moment, the rock sails through the air and Julian falls to the ground with a horrible cry. This is not stage direction: the cry really is horrible, full of pain and outrage and the realisation of serious harm. 42

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Javier Amezcua, who plays Julian, has no other known films to his credit, but the cry that breaks out of him as he falls is one of the details that lends Los Olvidados its power. The Spanish grito does it better justice: it is the brief, terrified wail of an animal that knows it's dying. As soon as Julian hits the ground, Jaibo grabs a thick branch and begins beating him savagely, his face contorted, out of control — he no longer cares whether Julian has betrayed him or not; his rage is now its own motor — while a horrified Pedro desperately pleads with him to stop. Finally sated, leaving Julian for wounded, he then rifles some money from his pockets, giving half to Pedro. Pedro is frightened, both of Jaibo's violence and of Julian's certain retribution. Jaibo is cocky: 'When he wakes up I'll put him back to sleep again.' What neither of them knows, what they will learn only later, is that Julian is dead. 'I did not want in any respect to make a thesis film,' Bufiuel later told the critic Andre Bazin. I had seen things that had distressed me very much, and I wanted to put them on the screen, but always with the sort of love I have for the 43

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instinctive and irrational that you can find everywhere ... I wanted to introduce mad, completely incongruous elements into the most realistic scenes. One of these incongruous elements, as he often related, was a 100piece orchestra playing soundlessly in the scaffolding of the background high-rise as the rock hits Julian's head, 'just long enough for the audience to wonder if it had really seen them or not'. 3 3 But Dancigers, wary of the cost, vetoed the orchestra. Fortunately.

In the interpersonal dynamics of Los Olvidados, there are four primary couples that take tenuous shape during the course of the story. One of the most important is that of Pedro and his mother, named Marta in the script but never in the film itself. Introduced between the attack on Don Carmelo and the killing of Julian, she is described in the shooting script as 'a woman of around twenty-eight, who despite poverty and hard work has remained rather attractive'. This is accurate to the plot line, even though Estela Inda, the actress who played her, looked closer to her thirty-three years, and the published screenplay places her at forty. With her thick black hair and unmistakably Indian features, Inda (born Maria Soledad Garcia Corona) could have been Dolores del Rio's less refined, more exhausted urban cousin. A well-known screen presence by the time of Los Olvidados, like Miguel Inclan, she had worked with directors such as Norman Foster and 'Indio' Fernandez, and would continue making Marta's refusal to feed her son was one of the film's most controversial moments

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films into the 1980s. She also taught drama and published a treatise on the history of superstitions. She had specifically requested the role of Marta, encouraged by the actor Ernesto Alonso, who provided the opening voice-over for Los Olvidados and later starred in The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cru^. It is evident when we first see her that Marta, plainly harried and saddled with three small children, has little time or affection for her oldest son. Preparing dinner for the youngsters, who hop about her feet like nestlings, she flatly refuses to feed Pedro, who has come home after the attack on Don Carmelo: 'You can go and get fed by all those hooligans you hang around with!' When the starving Pedro tries to grab a sandwich, she slaps his hand away. 'You don't love me!' he accuses. 'Love you? With all the trouble you give me?' she retorts. Later we will hear that Pedro was the result of a rape suffered when she was fourteen; that her resentment of him harks back to an episode of which he is not aware and for which he is not to blame; that all his attempts to be a good son are doomed from the start because the locus of Marta's anger has very little to do with the life he leads or the company he keeps. Rebuffed by her time and time again, he will continue to put himself forward, asking for love, for nourishment, for the most basic maternal care, and meeting only silence. Now, at a loss, he waits until her back is turned and snatches her half-eaten sandwich, running with his prize out of the house and back to the streets. In counterpoint to Pedro and Marta are the pre-adolescent girl Meche and the young Indian boy nicknamed Ojitos ('Small Eyes'), virtually the only characters to emerge from the story uncorrupted — though there are ample hints that they won't be for long. Meche stands at the crossroads of several dramas. As Pockface's little sister, she has a family connection to the gang, though little involvement with them. The house where she lives with her grandfather and ailing mother has a small barn that some of the boys use as an occasional crash pad, and that will provide the setting for one of the film's climaxes. Her mother, a bedridden hypochondriac, is treated by the blind Don Carmelo, who murmurs folk incantations while rubbing a live dove over her naked back: 'All the ills you had, you have passed to him. As soon as he dies, you will be cured.' It is also Meche who becomes Ojitos's protector, big sister and platonic sweetheart, his guide through the confusing world of the big city.

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O L V I D A D O S Innocents in the inferno: Ojitosand Meche

To some extent, this mirrors their relative positions offscreen as well: the fair-haired Alma Delia Fuentes, who plays Meche, was an experienced child actor, winner of an Ariel the same year as Los Olvidados (though for a different film) and a performer well into adulthood. Mario Ramirez, on the other hand, like Ojitos, was an Indian fresh from the countryside, making his the only major role in the film to be authentically filled. Little is known about him, and he seems to have disappeared from the public eye once Los Olvidados was finished. We have first encountered Ojitos in the marketplace, spotted by Pedro while the gang was trying to rob Don Carmelo, then later that evening, sitting in the same place, after Pedro has stolen his mother's sandwich and returned to the square. Abandoned by his father, whom he had accompanied from their rural village, Ojitos is a figure of innocence and pathos: wearing the homemade poncho and straw sombrero that broadcast his origins, he has clearly been left to fend for himself, yet he doggedly sits waiting for his father's return. Only after Pedro has shown him the kindness of sharing his food does he abandon his post, following the older boy —like one of the stray curs that begin tailing them as they leave the market— back to Meche's barn, where Pedro and Jaibo are spending the night. In contrast to the kindhearted Pedro, Jaibo is immediately aggressive toward the newcomer, and the animosity between them is heightened after Ojitos disrupts Jaibo's molestation of Meche in a later scene. Jaibo is a horny teenager just out of reformatory. Meche, though under age, has already been the target of his harassment. Pockface, her brother, puts group loyalty over family and doesn't interfere. Only 46

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Ojitos braves the older boy's violence, earning him Jaibo's threats and a ^ kiss on the cheek from Meche. Like tenderness, purity is never untainted: GO Meche stands as a positive surrogate mother, in direct contrast to Marta, °1 but she is not above agreeing to kiss Jaibo in exchange for two pesos — ° drawing a parallel between her and the 'prostitutes with hearts of gold' who populated the cabaretera films (while Jaibo's attempted rape puts him in the same camp as Pedro's father). Ojitos, meanwhile, the country innocent, also turns out to be a veritable fount of folk wisdom. He knows that the dead man's tooth he wears around his neck, and that he gives to Meche, is a better remedy against illness than Don Carmelo's dove. And that ass's milk is an excellent skin moisturiser, which earns him Meche's further respect and affection. While Pedro and Jaibo are in the barn lamenting their hunger, it is the peasant boy who knows how to milk the nanny goat by sucking from its teats. Milk is one of the film's recurring motifs. It is Don Carmelo's payment for his dubious medical ministrations ('There's nothing like ass's milk for the health!' he smacks his lips appreciatively), and it is what precipitates Jaibo's sexual assault on Meche after he sees her rubbing it on her thighs. It is the primal nourishment, present everywhere by inference, almost always absent in reality. Ojitos also forms part of another symbolic duo, with Don Carmelo. Finding the lost boy in the market, Carmelo delivers him the hard facts about his abandonment and adopts him as a guide and packhorse. As many critics have noted, the association of Ojitos and the sightless beggar is Bunuel's most direct allusion to a major literary antecedent of Los Olvidados, the Spanish picaresque novel La^arillo de Tormes (1554), from which it takes both the pairing of a young innocent with a wicked blind man and its general structure. But more than this, the relation between the two characters underscores the unnatural imbalance they represent, for in this kingdom of the blind not even the small-eyed boy is king. Instead, paralysed by the absence of his father, he submits to this abusive new patriarch. 34 Like milk, eyes and sight recur obsessively in this film. In certain scenes the camera darts about, as if not knowing where to look. A legless cripple, maltreated by the gang just as the blind man was, has a cart bearing the incongruous inscription me mirabas ('you were looking at me'). The viewer's own participation is constantly challenged, from the 47

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aggressive, full-frontal close-up of the boy playing 'bull' at the film's beginning to a scene in which Pedro takes a raw egg and sends it splattering against the camera lens. When Jaibo, turned on by the sight of Meche washing her legs with milk, comes out of hiding to assault her, his furtive point of view is revealed to have been our own. lCria cuervos ... ,' the blind man spits toward the film's end. 'Raise crows and they'll peck out your eyes.' The old proverb here rejoins the juvenile threat of the wicked Sandman, who rips children's eyes out of their heads — a dread, as Freud noted, inspired not so much by the threat of blindness as of abandonment, helplessness, self-mutilation. Pedro, were he fully to realize the oedipal content of his dream, might tear out his own eyes. It is also the pairing of Don Carmelo and Ojitos that underscores one of the film's darker currents, the inevitable corruption of innocence. Brought by the blind man to the vacant lot where his shack is located, Ojitos runs into Jaibo, who has taken a hideout nearby and who warns him not to tell anyone. But Don Carmelo, overhearing them, forces Ojitos to relate the exchange, painfully twisting his ear to get the information. The gentle country boy has had enough: he picks up a large piece of concrete, poised to smash it onto the blind man's head as Jaibo had earlier smashed in his drum. After only a few days in this new hell, Ojitos has already begun acquiring the instincts that could make him Jaibo's successor. But by far the most binding and fatal couple is the one formed by Jaibo and Pedro. Already suggested in various shots framing them together, then further in the scene of Julian's murder, it is cemented one-third of the way through the film, when one of the boys rushes up to announce the discovery of Julian's body. While the others run off to see, Pedro stays behind in horror, as Jaibo cautions him to 'keep his trap shut'. Pedro protests that he's not to blame, but Jaibo reminds him of the stolen cash they split. 'We 're in this together now, so watch out,' he warns, adding the hoodlum's classic ploy: 'If one of us gets caught, the main thing is not to mention the other.' Pedro buries his head in his hands, fully aware only now of what he's been party to. Or perhaps not so fully aware, for at this point what he sees is responsibility for a crime he never intended. Jaibo's words, however, are much more prophetic, and much more terrifying. From this moment on, he and Pedro will maintain a moral tug-of-war, an inescapable struggle for nothing less than survival. 48

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The first stirrings of violence: Ojitosand Don Carmelo

Jaibo smashes Don Carmelo's drum

'We're in this together now, so watch out'

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Fleetingly - so fleetingly that the audience could wonder if it had really seen them or not — two roosters flit across the ground. Bunuel later called roosters and chickens 'nightmare beings,' 35 without being able to explain why. Throughout Los Olvidados they recur as portents of ridicule or disaster, and in this shot their flash across the screen highlights the stab of guilt Pedro suddenly experiences (like the rooster that confronts the scheming Paloma at the end of The Brute). They also usher in the dream scene that immediately follows, a dream that, with its snowing feathers and disembodied cackling, seems to unfold in the mad henhouse of Pedro's mind. At the centre of this dream, even more than the dreamer himself or his mother, is Jaibo, Pedro's mentor and tormentor, his father and big brother, but also, quite literally, his nightmare.

4 M O T H E R S MEAT Played out in relentless slow motion, with starkly contrasted lighting that sets it apart from the rest of the film, Pedro's dream rehearses his guilt over the death of Julian, the corpse under his bed (as children fear nocturnal monsters); his desire to lead an honest life; his unrequited hunger for love and sustenance; and his ill-acknowledged oedipal conflicts. The first part maps out a classic scenario of wish-fulfilment, giving Pedro the maternal tenderness he craves and allowing him to assuage the guilt Jaibo has instilled. But this fulfilment is undercut by the gift his mother then holds out to him, meat that is tainted both literally and, with its aggressively erotic overtones, figuratively: this is not the love Pedro had in mind. (In the shooting script, though not in the film, he shouts in terror, 'No, no, I don't want it!') Jaibo's appearance, moreover, both blocks Pedro's access to the proffered nourishment and steals even this sexualised aspect of his mother's love. The moment Jaibo surges from the bed, Marta loses interest and Pedro is left with nothing: not her affection, not her belief, not even the corrupt flesh she tenders. This hunk of meat, no doubt the most famous in all of cinema, and the disturbing image of its offer, has come to represent the entire sequence, which is often referred to as the 'mother-meat dream'. The 50

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symbolism is so obvious that it can dispense with all commentary, and so insistent that it demands our further attention. On the one hand, the meat clearly displaces Pedro's suppressed carnal desire for this woman he has barely had a chance to know as mother, and who, in her comparative youth and earthy sensuality, stands far apart from the sexless, selfsacrificing maters typical of Mexican films at the time. On the other, it is a nourishment both unattainable and undesirable. In the story, the dream image is motivated by Marta's having refused Pedro a piece of meat during his brief visit home, while preparing it for the other children's dinner. In the dream, the food for which Pedro begged his mother the evening before is inedible, a parody of sustenance without any of its benefits. But more than anything, it embodies the trauma that colours their entire relationship: any love Marta could show her son is tainted at its core by the violence and resentment associated with his conception. For Marta, Pedro will never be more than the unwanted flesh of the assault that has burdened her life.36 Andre Bazin, no fan of LA, wrote that the dream sequence, though created 'in the worst tradition of Hollywood Freudian Surrealism', leaves us 'palpitating with horror and pity'. Pauline Kael less ambivalently

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called it 'perhaps the greatest of all movie dream sequences . . . disturbing long after the lacerations of the more realistic material have healed'. 37 Though it relies in part on conventions that today seem cliche — and a few, such as the doubling of Pedro to announce its beginning, that were old hat even at the time — Bunuel's staging of it shows a remarkable ability to remain fresh, disturbing and affecting after more than half a century of cinematic advances. A believer in the tenets of Surrealism well after he had left the movement proper, Bunuel knew the power of dream condensation, and he infuses the sequence with an atmosphere that illustrates Freud's remarks on the 'uncanny': a sense of dread or horror relating to 'something which is familiar and old-established in the mind' but which has now been made strange and disturbing; something 'which ought to have remained hidden but has come to light'. The accrued elements of Pedro's recent days are gathered here, but in ways that subvert expectation: Julian's corpse laughs hysterically, while his rolling head jerks like a skipping film; Marta's offer of love, uncharacteristic in itself, is couched in terms at once unwanted and too wanted; Jaibo, the friend, here emerges as the threat Pedro is beginning to intuit, and his wild-eyed grimace as he tears the meat away mirrors Julian's frantic laughter. The accompanying soundtrack, a single, sinuous flute underscored by the faint tingling of a bell, spirals down repetitively, unvarying (reprising a theme heard shortly before, when Don Carmelo reached beneath Meche's mother's bed to get the healing dove); at first overlaid with the disembodied cackling of hens, it is then combined with the roar of thunder and high wind the instant Marta turns around holding the meat. Another of Bunuel's touches vetoed by Dancigers called for the meat to be struck by lightning and for rain to fall inside the room, not unlike exfriend Dali's 'rainy taxi' at the 1938 Surrealist show in Paris. As it is, the final shots of the dream sequence give the impression of beds standing in a storm, unprotected by walls or roof. In its various repetitions, moreover, the dream echoes the film as a whole. It is, in essence, a dream within a dream, for even waking life here takes on an oneiric cast, a sense of inescapable fate. Elements repeat throughout the film — milk, chickens, dogs, rocks, vacant lots, sticks, brooms, as well as gestures, images and lines of dialogue — their occurrence all the more disorienting in that they have every reason to be exactly where they are. Just by virtue of their sudden appearance, they 52

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take on strange colouration, creating what one critic calls 'a hauntingly obsessive pattern ... a reality both violent and claustrophobic'. 38 It is perfectly realistic, yet still startling, for that hen suddenly to confront the fallen Don Carmelo, or for the rock we know Jaibo is concealing to strike Julian's head. It is natural for a mother to give love, yet in Marta's case it is the wrong kind, and it rings hollow. In part, this unreality, or alternate reality, is also a function of time. Chronologically, the story spans little more than a week, but the intermingling of events and incidents gives it an elastic feel: it could just as easily take place in a day, or a year. The shots of automobiles and unfinished high-rises set the action in the film's present, specifically the present of Miguel Aleman's rapid urban update, but the crumbling hovels and unpaved byways of Tacubaya, as well as the superstitions and folk wisdom to which the inhabitants cling, the omnipresence of religious artefacts and the powers ascribed to them, create an atmosphere that is starkly medieval. In its removal from and distrust of the world at large, the slums of Los Olvidados recall the mountain villages of Las Hurdes, another place forsaken by time. And in part, the unreality is underscored by the music. 'Personally I don't like film music,' Bunuel (who was deaf) told Bazin, dismissing it as 'a false element, a sort of trick, except of course in certain cases'. 39 In his later films, he reduced the amount of music considerably or virtually eliminated it. In Los Olvidados, on the other hand, Gustavo Pittaluga's score suffuses much of the film with a mood that prolongs the dreamlike atmosphere. It floats above or behind the visuals, occasionally blaring forth in ironic commentary, more often imbuing the scene with an aura of secular mystery. (Because of Pittaluga's Spanish nationality and nonunion status, the music is credited to his friend Rodolfo Halffter, 'based on themes by' Pittaluga. After the outcry over the film's release, Halffter was forced to repudiate his role and was nearly drummed out of the musicians' union.) In a talk given several years later, Bunuel cited Andre Breton's statement, fully applicable here, that 'the most admirable thing about the fantastic is that the fantastic doesn't exist; everything is real'. 40 Part of the genius of Los Olvidados is that the small details of reality constantly realign and reintroduce themselves. Things and events take on a logic of their own, giving the entire film a colouration of unavoidable fate and inescapable nightmare. And as in most nightmares, the terrifying

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repetition must be followed to its preordained conclusion: Pedro, horrified at witnessing Jaibo bludgeon Julian to death, and later at his mother's violent swatting of a rooster that has broken into the henhouse, will himself beat several chickens at the reformatory, before coming full circle and suffering the same dreaded fate at Jaibo's hands.

Released only a few years after such widely acclaimed films as De Sica's Shoeskine (1946) and The Bicycle Thief (1948), Rossellini's Paisan (1946), and Visconti's The Earth Trembles (1948), Los Olvidados has not surprisingly been compared to the masterpieces of Italian neorealism. And in some ways the comparison is apt, given Bunuel's attention to detail, the blend of fiction and documentary, the social actualities the film addresses, as well as its use of location settings and non-professional actors. In addition, Bunuel admired some of the neorealist productions, particularly Shoeshine^ whose child protagonists have several traits in common with their Mexican counterparts (an admiration De Sica apparently didn't share: after seeing Los Olvidados^ the bemused Italian asked in concern, 'But, Bunuel, has society mistreated you? Have you suffered a lot?'). For the most part, however, Bunuel rejected the neorealisation of Los Olvidados^ dismissing the Italian school as 'incomplete, conventional, and above all rational', lacking in 'poetry, mystery, everything that completes and enlarges tangible reality'. 41 Instead, his work transcends the bleakness it portrays, not with glib fantasy or false optimism, but with a layer of ambiguity that is part and parcel of the realities shown. In this regard, Los Olvidados reconnects Bunuel with his Surrealist past, though here again only to a point. 'I am not a Surrealist because I do not belong to any group,' he told an interviewer in 1953. 'I now understand that one cannot confront reality exclusively with Surrealism.' And to another interviewer he quipped that he 'toned down the Surrealist side so that the audience . . . could follow the film . . . I tried to terrify the bourgeoisie a little less'. But Surrealism had also given Bunuel a philosophical context. He later credited it with having shown him 'a coherent moral system that, as far as I could tell, had no flaws. It was an aggressive morality based on the complete rejection of all existing values [and] was also stronger, richer'. Although he had left the movement in 1932 out of Communist loyalty, he remained on friendly

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terms with numerous Surrealists, including the prickly Breton, and was ^ a lifelong adherent of its belief in the marvellous and dreams. And he GO continued his 1953 interview by noting that 'the education and ^ discipline of Surrealism is still in me ... Surrealism is what we needed to ° complete our vision of reality.' 42 You can take the boy out of the movement... But fundamentally (as some critics, notably Acevedo-Munoz, have argued), Los Olvidados depicts a specifically Mexican actuality. Mexico City is itself among the major characters in this film, the first to be introduced (in the film's panoramic prologue), and its barrios and tenements, its vacant lots and construction sites — all visual, visceral evidence of the wrenching shift from agrarian economy to urban boom — form the unifying backdrop against which these lives are played out. Although the Mexican slums are likened at the outset to those in any major metropolis, the social conditions endemic to the country's post-war development and fractured past shape the context and actions of the characters. Even more than this, Los Olvidados reflects a particularly Mexican amalgam of history and myth, the original trauma described by Octavio Paz in his landmark essay The Labyrinth of Solitude, published the same year as the film's release. 'The history of Mexico is the history of a man seeking his parentage, his origins,' Paz wrote. Solitude, the source of anxiety, begins on the day we are deprived of maternal protection and fall into a strange and hostile world. We have fallen, and this fall — this knowledge that we have fallen — makes us guilty. Of what? Of a nameless wrong: that of having been born.' 43 Paz's essay provides perhaps the most apt of all introductions to Bunuel's film, and makes it clear why he became one of its earliest and most fervent champions. 'The world of Los Olvidados' he wrote in April 1951, 'is peopled by orphans, by loners who seek communion ... The quest for the "other," for our likeness, equals, is the other side of the search for the mother. Or the acceptance of her definitive absence: the knowledge that we are alone.' 44 In its depiction of a society forever caught in the gap between two realities — whether Native versus European or traditional versus modern — the film explores a particularly Mexican form of cultural neurosis, and 55

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its psychologically orphaned protagonists ultimately bear as little relation to the Italian urchins of Shoeshine as they do to the decadent nabobs of L'Age d'or or The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. After the film's release, many were amazed — those who weren't too busy deploring Bunuel's vision of their country — that a foreigner had managed to capture so specifically Mexican a world view. Even the characters encapsulate the successive changes in Mexican paradigms. Don Carmelo speaks for those who mourn the repressive order of the Diaz regime (leaving the paternalistic, 'benign' side of the porfiriato to actors like Fernando Soler, in films like The Great Madcap). Ojitos represents the native, agrarian past, uprooted and cast aside by urbanisation. The liberal policies of Lazaro Cardenas are voiced by the well-meaning director of the reformatory where Pedro is sent, who believes he can cure the boy's emotional wounds with a dose of T L C . Jaibo, meanwhile, is a thoroughly modern product of the Aleman regime: a tough, self-interested cAo/o, 'an impassive and sinister clown whose purpose is to cause terror instead of laughter'. 45 But the character who embodies the most deep-rooted Mexican trauma is Marta, in whom Paz and others after him have recognised the figure of La Malinche, the original traitor, the mother of the country's primal psychic gash — Malinche, the native woman who became interpreter to the invading Spanish conquistadors under Hernan Cortes and turned against her own people, abetting his spoliation of her land. And worse, who became not only Cortes's helpmeet but his mistress, adding to her actions the ultimate, unforgivable layer of sexual betrayal. This original act, Stockholm Syndrome or opportunism, lies, says Paz, at the heart of the Mexican's sense of isolation, his distrust of openness — for to be open is to leave oneself exposed, to suffer the original rape, to get fucked over. From this as well comes the highly regulated, highly supervised image of woman, in Mexican culture as in its films (at least through the 1950s), as either closed — selfless, mirthless and ultimately sexless — or open to the pleasures of the self, with every obscene connotation: the neglectful mother, the traitor, the cunt, the chingada. Chinga tu madre — Fuck your mother! — a common Mexican expletive that, if not for the censors and Bunuel's constitutional prudishness, could easily have exploded from the mouths of these boys. 'Who is the Chingada}' asks Paz: 56

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Mexican motherhood: a still from La galUna clueca (Fernando de Fuentes, 1941)

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