Last week (21st Feb) was Don Luis' 100th birthday, and I was privileged to see this masterpiece at the Irish Film Centre introduced by Neil Jordan. Bunuel is always considered one of the giants of cinema, even though his reputation is outrageously in terminal decline. Maybe because it's such an unmanageable oeuvre. Take this film for instance, usually considered one of his five best films. It is one of the cruellest, most vicious and unwatchable films ever made, as well, of course, as one of the most brilliant.
The film treats of the titular heroes, the young and the damned as the subtitles quaintly translate them (the real translation is the far less censorious 'The Forgotten Ones'), young hooligans messing about rubbled shanty towns in Mexico City. Two of these boys are foregrounded: Jaibo, a murderous lout just escaped from reform school who behaves like a hounded animal, lashing out at everyone who gets in his way, hero of all the younger boys; and Pablo, a sensitive child craving his mother's love, who comes to see Jaibo's subversiveness for what it is.
In these unshockable times, it's hard to believe that a film half a century old - in black and white, mind - can have the power to assault the viewer so relentlessly. The catalogue of violent horrors are endless - a blind man is firstly robbed, than mugged: this victim turns out to be a fascist paedophile; a legless man is robbed and his cart is kicked away (this sequence is uncomfortably funny); Jaibo stones a friend in the back of the head and then clubs him to death; a frustrated Pablo, caged in a reform school, violently dispatches some chickens etc.
In the hands of a reactionary director, this ghastly material could have been used to expose the terrors of liberalism and the slipping of moral values. Bunuel, the great Surrealist, atheistic, left-wing auteur, shows that it is those moral values that are the problem. He has great sympathy with his deeply unpleasant heroes, revelling in their energy and invention, never patronising (in one scene they actually attack the camera), while never flinching from their cruelty. Even the most irredeemably vicious of them all, Jaibo, is granted moments of explanatory tenderness and an epiphanic death of sublime beauty denied to the pinched victim-aveugle who urges that all the young toughs are shot.
Bunuel's documentary approach is continually rent by 'breaching' subjectivity, and it is to his outcasts he offers this privilege, Jaibo and Pablo; the latter's haunting dream, mixing guilt, mother-desire, and the reality of meaty, dead animal, flesh is one of the great achievements of the cinema. But Bunuel's surrealism shapes the whole film, the dreamlike nightscapes in the streets, the prison-like houses etc.
Much of the film's anger is aimed at the sheer inhumanity inflicted on los olvidados. The narrative opens with them gathered in bullfighting rites that reverberate throughout the film until Pablo's chicken outburst and the startling climax, where all the rules of identification are cruelly dashed. This idea of being locked in age-old macho patterns is signalled usually in the circles throughout, most literally when a homeless Pablo is forced to manually turn a merry-go-round.
The link with animals is a very Bunuellian motif, and varies throughout the film - the tragedy of the blind man's mugging is mocked by a strutting hen; the boy's abandonment is linked to the stray dogs running around the street; Jaibo finds refuge in an animal-packed barn, where boys suckle on cows for nourishment.
The boys are reduced to the level of animals, they are creatures of instinct, but this also excuses them. Their elders are a sorry lot, absent, abandoning or drunken fathers, frighteningly liberal bourgeois officials, whose paternalistic, rationalist mantras prefigure PSYCHO; the squalid shanty towns of Mexico, wastelands with many buildings are begun but unfinished, abandoned, like the young boys.
Father figures are revealed as paedophiles. There is no division between public and private selves and realms here, the peasants being lucky to have one room to squeeze families (and animals) in. And yet Bunuel is at his most Renoiresque here (as proposed by David Thomson) - everyone does have their reasons (or at least, excuses). Of course the fathers get drunk and flee, what else can they do? How can we expect an unloving mother to be any different when her son is the product of being raped at 14?
Neil Jordan talked about the Biblical fury of the film, and there is a gloomy, parched quality to it, reflected in the almost desert spaces the film occupies, eroding Mexico's modernity. OLVIDADOS, though, has all the relentless force of Greek tragedy, which Bunuel inverts, denying redemptive catharsis. The primary model is Oedipus in reverse; Pablo is a guiltless Oedipus whose mother won't love him, and who has the father-usurper-figure (Jaibo) try to pull out his eyes. Blind Tiresias is not a benevolent messenger but a reactionary sexual abuser. The idea of a world where the natural order has been upturned is compelling here though, disease riddling the land literally and metaphorically.
OLVIDADOS is unusually light in Bunuel's oeuvre in anti-clerical attack - an unkept church overlooks impotently the boys' nefarious activities; the blind man has crosses in his room, appropriately sterile signifiers in a godforsaken world where superstition holds surprising sway, and brief snatches of tenderness are ground down by inexorable violence.
The film treats of the titular heroes, the young and the damned as the subtitles quaintly translate them (the real translation is the far less censorious 'The Forgotten Ones'), young hooligans messing about rubbled shanty towns in Mexico City. Two of these boys are foregrounded: Jaibo, a murderous lout just escaped from reform school who behaves like a hounded animal, lashing out at everyone who gets in his way, hero of all the younger boys; and Pablo, a sensitive child craving his mother's love, who comes to see Jaibo's subversiveness for what it is.
In these unshockable times, it's hard to believe that a film half a century old - in black and white, mind - can have the power to assault the viewer so relentlessly. The catalogue of violent horrors are endless - a blind man is firstly robbed, than mugged: this victim turns out to be a fascist paedophile; a legless man is robbed and his cart is kicked away (this sequence is uncomfortably funny); Jaibo stones a friend in the back of the head and then clubs him to death; a frustrated Pablo, caged in a reform school, violently dispatches some chickens etc.
In the hands of a reactionary director, this ghastly material could have been used to expose the terrors of liberalism and the slipping of moral values. Bunuel, the great Surrealist, atheistic, left-wing auteur, shows that it is those moral values that are the problem. He has great sympathy with his deeply unpleasant heroes, revelling in their energy and invention, never patronising (in one scene they actually attack the camera), while never flinching from their cruelty. Even the most irredeemably vicious of them all, Jaibo, is granted moments of explanatory tenderness and an epiphanic death of sublime beauty denied to the pinched victim-aveugle who urges that all the young toughs are shot.
Bunuel's documentary approach is continually rent by 'breaching' subjectivity, and it is to his outcasts he offers this privilege, Jaibo and Pablo; the latter's haunting dream, mixing guilt, mother-desire, and the reality of meaty, dead animal, flesh is one of the great achievements of the cinema. But Bunuel's surrealism shapes the whole film, the dreamlike nightscapes in the streets, the prison-like houses etc.
Much of the film's anger is aimed at the sheer inhumanity inflicted on los olvidados. The narrative opens with them gathered in bullfighting rites that reverberate throughout the film until Pablo's chicken outburst and the startling climax, where all the rules of identification are cruelly dashed. This idea of being locked in age-old macho patterns is signalled usually in the circles throughout, most literally when a homeless Pablo is forced to manually turn a merry-go-round.
The link with animals is a very Bunuellian motif, and varies throughout the film - the tragedy of the blind man's mugging is mocked by a strutting hen; the boy's abandonment is linked to the stray dogs running around the street; Jaibo finds refuge in an animal-packed barn, where boys suckle on cows for nourishment.
The boys are reduced to the level of animals, they are creatures of instinct, but this also excuses them. Their elders are a sorry lot, absent, abandoning or drunken fathers, frighteningly liberal bourgeois officials, whose paternalistic, rationalist mantras prefigure PSYCHO; the squalid shanty towns of Mexico, wastelands with many buildings are begun but unfinished, abandoned, like the young boys.
Father figures are revealed as paedophiles. There is no division between public and private selves and realms here, the peasants being lucky to have one room to squeeze families (and animals) in. And yet Bunuel is at his most Renoiresque here (as proposed by David Thomson) - everyone does have their reasons (or at least, excuses). Of course the fathers get drunk and flee, what else can they do? How can we expect an unloving mother to be any different when her son is the product of being raped at 14?
Neil Jordan talked about the Biblical fury of the film, and there is a gloomy, parched quality to it, reflected in the almost desert spaces the film occupies, eroding Mexico's modernity. OLVIDADOS, though, has all the relentless force of Greek tragedy, which Bunuel inverts, denying redemptive catharsis. The primary model is Oedipus in reverse; Pablo is a guiltless Oedipus whose mother won't love him, and who has the father-usurper-figure (Jaibo) try to pull out his eyes. Blind Tiresias is not a benevolent messenger but a reactionary sexual abuser. The idea of a world where the natural order has been upturned is compelling here though, disease riddling the land literally and metaphorically.
OLVIDADOS is unusually light in Bunuel's oeuvre in anti-clerical attack - an unkept church overlooks impotently the boys' nefarious activities; the blind man has crosses in his room, appropriately sterile signifiers in a godforsaken world where superstition holds surprising sway, and brief snatches of tenderness are ground down by inexorable violence.