Dreaming of Cinema by Adam Lowenstein

Author:Adam Lowenstein
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, SOC052000, Social Science/Media Studies
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-01-19T16:00:00+00:00

LOS OLVIDADOS

Luis Buñuel, cinema’s foremost surrealist, started out as an entomologist. Or at least this was his initial ambition when he left his parents’ home in Zaragoza, Spain, to study at the Residencia de estudiantes in Madrid in 1917. Pressed by his father to decide on a sensible course of study, Buñuel chose entomology because “all living creatures fascinate me…. I’m passionate about insects. You can find all of Shakespeare and de Sade in the lives of insects.”14 By the time Buñuel left the Residencia de estudiantes for Paris in 1924, he had traded in entomology for philosophy and literature, but his films reveal a continuing enthrallment with animals.

This is particularly true of his first three films, those made in closest connection with the surrealist movement that would shape his entire career. The ants and donkeys of Un chien andalou (along with an actual calf’s eye that stands in for a human eye during the infamous slashing that opens the film); the scorpions and cow of L’âge d’or; the goats, mosquitoes, pigs, bees, rooster, and donkeys of Las Hurdes—these are some of the creatures at the heart of Buñuel’s first and most overtly surrealist films. In truth, animal imagery and surrealism are two of the most powerful connecting threads over three films that sometimes seem to share little in common in terms of style, tone, and subject matter. Las Hurdes, in particular, as a documentary on an impoverished region of Spain, might seem at first glance to have few commonalities with the more flamboyant, dreamlike surrealism of Un chien andalou and L’âge d’or. But as Buñuel explains, Las Hurdes “was very different and yet, nevertheless, it was a twin. To me, it seemed very much like my other films. Of course, the difference was that this film was based on a concrete reality. But it was an exceptional reality, one that stimulated the imagination. Furthermore, the film coincided with the social concerns of the surrealist movement, which were very intense at that time.”15

It should not be surprising, then, that when Buñuel returns to surrealism’s “exceptional reality” as it intersects with the “concrete reality” and “social concerns” of Mexico City in Los olvidados, animals play a central role. Of course, the conventional narrative of Buñuel’s “return” that has him disappearing between 1933 and 1950 only to pick up where he left off is not at all accurate. He spent time working in various film-related capacities in Spain, Paris, New York, and Hollywood, but in terms of directing, he spent the most productive years of that period in Mexico beginning in 1946, making commercial studio films that solidified his standing in the Mexican film industry and opened the doors to Los olvidados.16 Still, for most of the international film world the arrival of Los olvidados appeared as it did for André Bazin: “And the miracle took place: eighteen years later and five thousand kilometers away, it is still the same, the inimitable Buñuel, a message which remains faithful to L’âge d’or and

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