Buñuel Week: Luis Buñuel- La Voie Lactée/The Milky Way (1969)- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

Things have been fairly busy in the alternative universe called life, thus the lack of posts. And that is why Buñuel Week has been extended, because The Milky Way had to be a part of it. Now it is. Buñuel Week is now officially over. Enjoy!




From Vincent Canby at the New York Times:

WOMEN, pronounced St. Chrysostom, are "a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill."

The good, fourth century mysoginist, just one of the dozens of saints, rascals, nuns, picaroons, inquisitors, heretics, bishops, whores and humble people who are either represented or evoked in Luis Buñuel's marvelous new film, "The Milky Way," clearly had an ambivalent attitude towards women. Because of Buñuel's similar preoccupation with things he professes to abhor, the fine, irascible Spanish film director ("Thank God I'm an atheist!") has often been suspected of ambivalent attitudes towards the Roman Catholicism he has renounced and the God he has denied.

While there must always be a certain amount of ambiguity in any proclamation of atheism, there can be no further question about Buñuel and the Church. That is, not after "The Milky Way," which has the form of a lovely fantasy and the density of a theological essay, and which often sounds like the sort of shaggy dog story that might be told in a seminary.




The film, which opened yesterday at the 68th Street Playhouse, is shaped as a sort of surreal Pilgrim's Progress undertaken by two contemporary, not especially pious Frenchmen. Pierre (Paul Frankeur), a bearded, virile, respectful old man, and Jean (Laurent Terzieff), his younger, skeptical companion, are making a pilgrimage (for reasons never specified) to the tomb of the Apostle James at Santiago de Compostella in Spain.

En route, they have a series of extraordinary encounters with personages out of the past, including Priscillian, the fourth century Spanish bishop, martyred for his Manichean unorthodoxies, and the Virgin Mary, who appears to them sitting in a tree.

At one point they meet the devil, lounging in the backseat of a sports car that's just been wrecked. He is a typically Buñuelian devil, both polite and practical, who suggests to the poor Pierre, whose feet hurt, that he take the dead driver's new shoes. Later, they come upon a Jansenist convent whose nuns, not very enthusiastically, are helping one of their order to realize her desire for crucifixion. They also act as seconds in a duel between a Jansenist and a Jesuit, are instructed in the virtues of chasity in marriage, and finally, when they reach Santiago, find, not the Celestial City, but an empty tomb.




While Buñuel is obviously fond of Pierre and Jean, he's not exactly obsessed with them. He doesn't hesitate to drop them from time to time to pursue with greater freedom his principal theme—religion as a man-made phenomenon whose dogmas have been the bases for religious wars, inquisitions and madly irrational theological arguments conducted with the utmost reason.

The movie is constantly side-stepping itself to show, among other things, why Jesus wore a beard (Mary thought it suited him), the Marquis de Sade tormenting a helpless young thing who persists in saying there is a God, Priscillian apologizing to the Communion host ("It was not I who reaped and kneaded Thee").

Through all of the miracles and magical encounters, through all of the deadly nonsensical debates on the true meaning of the Trinity, and through all of the Alice-in-Wonderland-like discussions on the differences between consubstantiation and transubstantiation, Pierre and Jean maintain a saintly sanity that is, in itself, very funny and even moving.

Unlike such an angry film as "Viridiana," in which Buñuel used Freudian psychology to attack the Church (specifically its concept of charity and the subsequent evil of pity), "The Milky Way" goes about its business with a comic, masterly cool that is more remorseless than anything he's done before. The film is closer in tone to his early, surreal "Un Chien Andalou" and "L'Age d'Or" than to the later, non-ironic, malevolent but comparatively gentle "Nazarin" and "Simon of the Desert," which almost persuaded some people that Buñuel was returning to the fold.




One of the nicest things about "The Milky Way," and about the only thing that indicates the director's age (he'll be 70 this year) is its technical facility. Buñuel employs no fantastic effects, though this is a livelier fantasy than, say, "The Wizard of Oz." Everything is photographed straightforwardly, in cheerful but not bilious color, and seen with documentary-like clarity.

For what is, in effect, his "Greatest Story Ever Told," Buñuel recruited a large cast of mostly French performers for many cameo roles, including Pierre Clementi (the Devil), Michel Piccoli (de Sade), Bernard Verley (Jesus), Edith Scob (the Virgin Mary) and Delphine Seyrig (the prostitute).

Even if you're non-Catholic, as I am, "The Milky Way" can also be enjoyed as a kind of Pilgrim's Progress through the Buñuel iconography. The film is packed with symbols that repeatedly recur in all of his films (dwarfs, doves, beggars, blind men, religious instruments, graves). And, if you're willing to do a little homework, the film can become so fascinating that you're likely to recall a disturbing remark made by one character, who materializes briefly and is identified in the cast only as The Lecturer. "My hatred of science," he says with bored resignation, "and my horror of technology will finally lead me to this absurd belief in God. . . ."




Technical Information:

Title: La Voie Lactée/The Milky Way
Year: 1969
Country: France/Italy
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size:7.5 GB
Length: 1:41:53
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: French- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras:
- Interview with Ian Christie
- Atheist Thanks to God
- Interview with Jean-Claude Carriere
- Trailer




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The Milky Way Megaupload Links

Buñuel Week: Luis Buñuel- Viridiana (1961)- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

Another out and out Buñuel masterpiece, with quite possibly the best (and creepiest) film endings ever. God, I love this guy!




From Roger Ebert:

I can't think of a more mischievous filmmaker than Luis Buñuel. After you get to know him, you can catch him winking in the first few shots. Under the opening title shot of "Viridiana," we hear Handel's "Messiah," but knowing Buñuel we doubt this will be a religious picture. In the second and third shots, we see a Mother Superior advising a novice at a cloistered convent to visit her old uncle before he dies. No good can come of this in a Buñuel film. The fourth shot shows a girl skipping rope. Well, not the whole girl, just her feet, observed for a little too long. "That was a wonderful afternoon little Luis spent on the floor of his mother's closet," Pauline Kael once observed, "and he has never allowed us to forget it."

So: Buñuel the satirist, Buñuel the anti-clerical, Buñuel the fetishist. That's the usual litany, but we should not exclude Buñuel the grandmaster of black comedy. None of his films is lacking a cheerfully sardonic view of human nature. His object is always dry humor. Even when he was working for Hollywood studios, recycling the sets and costumes of English-language pictures into Spanish versions of the same screenplays, or later simply dubbing them into Spanish, he slyly slipped in a few touches that were lacking in the sources. He is one of the great originals, creator of satirical delight, sometimes hilarious funny, and if you love great movies you sooner or later get to him.




Buñuel began as a Surrealist, and in Paris collaborated with Salvador Dali on "Un Chien Andalou" (1929), which is only 16 minutes long but remains one of the most famous films of the century. His "L'âge d'or" (1930), a Surrealist attack on organized religion, was unseeable for 50 years after his wealthy patron, Le Vicomte de Noailles, decided to suppress it. Buñuel returned to his native Spain but left after the rise of Franco's fascists, and found work in America. After the war, Buñuel became a Mexican citizen and lived there until his death, although he made many films in France, and "Viridiana" in Spain.

Why, his admirers wondered, would he return to Spain, where the dictator Franco was still in power? He told various stories. One was that he was offered four times his salary by a producer. Another was that he felt nostalgia for his homeland. A third that he didn't mention was, I suspect, to make this particular film.

Buñuel was anything but a sentimentalist, and Spain was wrong if it expected a joyous homecoming. His film was not anti-Catholic nor against the ruling class, but it established his virtuous nun, her rich landowning uncle and his son, her cousin, in a dark and scandalous story. It ended with the nun, having left the convent, quietly entering the bedroom of her handsome young cousin. The government censors flatly rejected the screenplay. Buñuel rewrote it so that she found the cousin and his mistress playing cards in the bedroom. As she joins the game, the cousin says he was sure that sooner or later they would be playing together. Fade out on the unmistakable implication of a ménage a trios. "Even more immoral," Buñuel observed year after.




The film left Spain for France, shared the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1961, and wasn't allowed back into Spain until after Franco's death in 1975. In the 1960s and 1970s Buñuel (born 1900, died 1983) became established in the first rank of directors, with Fellini, Bergman, Antonioni, and scored one international success after another, most famously with "Belle de Jour" (1967).

There was always the sly subtext: The virtuous but disgraced blonde of "Belle de Jour" mirroring Viridiana, or the kidding anti-clericism in "The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie" by the bishop whose fetish is pretending to be the gardener. And everywhere the shoes . Who but Buñuel would film a scene of Catherine Deneuve being dragged through a forest and focus on her feet? I am giving the wrong impression if you think Buñuel was by then a dirty old man. I think of him more as amused. There's never anything blatant about his eroticism; he finds fetishes funny, as indeed they are except for the hapless fetishist.

The most famous sequence in "Viridiana" (apart from its scandalous reenactment of "The Last Supper") involves the cousin, Jorge (Francisco Rabal), observing a dog tied to the rear axle of a cart, and being pulled along the road on a rope. He stops the peasant, and buys the dog to free it. He doesn't notice another dog tied to another cart, going in the other direction. This summarizes Buñuel's world view.




In the larger world of the film, Viridiana (Silvia Pinal) visits her old uncle, Don Jaime (the Buñuel favorite Fernando Rey). For her it is an act of charity. Don Jaime is thunderstruck: Having not seen her for years, he realize she is the double of his late wife on their wedding night. As a favor, he begs her to put on the dead wife's wedding dress. As a favor, she does: Form-fitting, with a white corset, and of course much attention to the shoes. He is transfixed. He is in love. He asks her to marry him. She is shocked and tries to leave. He apologizes, gives her drugged coffee, and then…

Later, he hangs himself. Viridiana has by now given up the idea of a cloistered life and determined to perform works of mercy in the world. She gathers up 13 of the most wretched beggars in the town (a drunk, a leper, a crippled man, a blind man, an angry dwarf, a prostitute and so on) and brings them back to live on the estate. This does not redeem them, and they quarrel, fight, prove shiftless at the tasks she sets for them, and ostracize the leper (who says his sores are only ulcers). Meanwhile, Jorge arrives with his mistress and moves into the big house, while Viridiana abnegates herself by living in an outbuilding. Her experiment comes to a climax when the beggars, left on their own, throw a drunken feast and demolish the dining room. Then, alone or in small groups, they slink away from the place that gave them shelter. Cut to the card game mentioned earlier.




The film is deliberate and controlled. It is funny in that way where you rarely laugh aloud but expand in mental amusement. It is elegantly photographed; each shot conveys something concrete and specific, which is to be expected from a fetishist. It makes no clear and precise statement, but instead conveys Buñuel's notion that our base natures are always waiting to pounce. Despite my plot description, he makes Don Jaime into a not altogether evil man--more of a lonely and sad one, who desires to sin but lacks the necessary indecency. Nor is cousin Jorge a lecher, nor is Viridiana a fallen women, and the beggars, after all, only behave as they have been taught by the world.

A film like this is bracing. It is made by a strong, individual mind. It is not another marked-down version of comforting feel-good lies. It is possible to imagine Buñuel watching a dreadfully cheery romantic comedy like, say, "The Back-Up Plan," and laughing tears of derision. He knows the world has its own back-up plan. There is always another cart and another dog tied to it.




Technical Information:

Title: Viridiana
Year: 1961
Country: Spain, Mexico
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.66 GB
Length: 1:31:06
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Spanish- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras:
- Interview with Silvia Pinal
- Cineastes do notres temps
- Interview with Richard Porton
- Trailer




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Viridiana Megaupload Links

Buñuel Week: Luis Buñuel- L'âge d'or/The Golden Age (1930)- DVD5 (PAL Format)

After L'âge d'or Buñuel kicked Dali to the curb. Good for Don Luis. I never liked Dali either. Oh, and though this is not one of my favorite Buñuel films, from a historical perspective we at ForTheDishwasher have an obligation to post it due to its historical contextuality and historical-ness. (Inside joke. Very inside...). Enjoy!




From Donald Levin at ReelTalk:

Personalities Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí got through Un Chien andalou but soon quarreled and split forever while making L’Âge d’or, the former’s first feature. The painter’s name, however, was left on as co-scriptwriter even though many of the actors went uncredited (and some film historians have bitten on an also unlisted Marquis de Sade “novel”).

Its ironic title hardly ever given in translation (Age of Gold), the hour-long work was, like the earlier twenty-four-minute short, financed by the Vicomte de Noailles, surrealist in execution, shocking in intention, and anti-Establishment, -clerical and –middle class morality. Decades afterwards, the director was to disavow shock tactics “as a negative action . . . after the Nazi mass murders and atomic bombs dropped on Japan,” though hip college and art-house audiences continue to applaud.

Buñuel’s three-pronged attack hit home in 1930, drew the ire and rioting presence of Young Catholics, the Patriot League, the Anti-Jewish (antijuive) League and right-wing press, and following a lone public showing French censors banned the film completely until well after mid-century. Less an intellectuals’ favorite today, less often screened, than Chien and later, equally iconoclastic but more traditional storyline classics -- Nazarin, Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel, Diary of a Chambermaid, Belle de Jour, Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, That Obscure Object of Desire -- L’Âge d’or offers scenes, themes and techniques that are to appear throughout the body of work. It’s illustrative that the single current screening is the next-to-last one of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s twenty-one-film tribute to foreign, restored classics and independent distributor Kino International on its thirtieth birthday.




Images within the 1928 short, most celebrated in the eyeball razoring and ravenous ants, are unrelated, only subconsciously explicable if at all, and targeted at the emotions. More mordantly humorous but less outrageous in imagery and non-sequiturs, L’Âge d’or does exhibit its share of the incongruous or dangling, but nevertheless there is connective tissue. This thread is not the opening band of a half-dozen unromanticized crippled bandits (headed by Dada-Surrealist Max Ernst) who one by one fall asleep on their armed scramble over rocks to where four mitred, robed, crosiered Majorcan bishops sit overlooking the sea so long they become skeletons. But the thread is introduced in the boatloads of officers, top-hatted mustachioed politicians, men in suits and their ladies, who come to dedicate a monument to the four martyrs. The dedicatory speech is interrupted when a well-dressed couple among them begin to make noisy love on the beach, are separated, and the man (Gaston Modot) cuffed and led away after he kicks a lapdog.

Switch to Rome, intertitled “ancient mistress of the pagan world now guardian of the Christian world.” Tourist areas, cafés, “assorted picturesque views of the city,” Saint Peter’s, the Pope, and, in his soiled suit, the lover from the beach trundled along the streets by his guards as the girl from the beach (Lya Lys) sulks in the luxury of her father, the Marquis of X’s (Germaine Noizet), mansion.




Producing a diploma entrusting him with a mission of “noble good will” for the Fatherland, the man shoves a blind man to enter a taxi and shows up at the Marquis’s elegant party. Dressed to the nines, stuffed shirts and empty gowns, among them the girl’s roughly treated mother, unwittingly keep the lovebirds apart, so they sneak off to solitude and consummation in the manicured gardens. Their own hesitations, however, get in the way, along with unlucky intrusions such as that of the elderly orchestra conductor (Duchange) whom she then kisses passionately, so the woman is left sucking the sandaled toes of a Greek statue while the man angrily throws from her bedroom window a plow, stuffed giraffe, tree and live churchman (Marval).

Somewhere along the way, a government minister telephones to accuse the man of having caused an inconvenient massacre of women and children, overstepping his commission, and occasioning a scandal which will lead that minister to bizarre shoeless suicide on the ceiling. With no logical link, three noblemen and a Jesus figure abuse and kill a young woman in a cliffside castle, snow falls on a wooden cross, and Buñuel’s crusade ends.

Subsequently hailed as a masterpiece and the purest expression of its creator’s wry misanthropy, L’Âge d’or is cited as a play on natural, that is to say sexual, instincts perverted every step of the way by religion, state, police, society, fate. Perhaps, although the hapless couple are unlikable, too, and, in any case, the no longer shocking film is today more interesting as a contact sheet of what was to come.




Technical Information:

Title: L'âge d'or/The Golden Age
Year: 1930
Country: France
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: PAL
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 4.12 GB
Length: 1:02:21
Programs used: DVD Decrypter

Resolution: 720x576
Aspect Ratio: 1.20:1
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 25 fps

Audio 1: French- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Audio 2: English Commentary- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Commentary by Robert Short




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L'âge d'or Megaupload Links

Buñuel Week: Luis Buñuel- El ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel (1962)- Two Disc Set- DVD9 (NTSC Format)

This could quite possibly be my favorite Buñuel film. The Exterminating Angel is opposite of Los olivados in P.O.V., but carries the same indictment on Mexican society, with both films showing how poverty can be a dehumanizing experience to all caught in its web. Those who are born into poverty tend to handle it better, though. The rich squirm. Watch the rich squirm.




From Tom Cabin at Filmcritic:

The early 1960s were a real raw deal for Luis Buñuel. After a bungled job at the Museum of Modern Art (due partly to Salvador Dali outing him as a Commie and an atheist) and years shilling for Hollywood as a dub artist, the Spanish-born filmmaker made his way to Mexico and settled into the film industry there for a solid two decades. In 1961, he returned to Spain, after years in exile, in the hopes of making films in his native land. The first film he made upon his return, Viridiana, caused an uproar both in the upper tiers of Mexican society and the Vatican. Despite being awarded the Palme d'Or at the 1961 Cannes Film Festival, the film wouldn't be screened in Mexico until 1977 when Buñuel headed back there to continue his work.

The first film he made upon his return was The Exterminating Angel, and whatever hope the bourgeoisie had of the artist getting off their back was vanquished. Set almost solely in the music room of a Mexico City mansion, the film concerns a pack of upper-class theater-goers who, after a dinner party, find themselves inexplicably trapped inside the small room for no apparent reason. The doors are open, they just can't muster the will to pass through the portals. The host (Enrique Rambal) and a doctor (Augusto Benedico) try to keep everything civil, but soon enough it turns into something both Todorov and William Golding could relate to. A young couple, overwhelmed by sexual frustration and Catholic guilt, commit suicide in the closet while the eldest guest just up and dies. The party fills the sterling vases with their excrement and bouts of hallucinations begin while everyone talks of murdering the host in the hopes that it will free them from whatever is holding them in.




Unlike Viridiana, The Exterminating Angel wears its bitterness and outrage on its sleeve. Poking ribs with a machete, Buñuel casts the upper class as a pack of savages who quickly discard common reasoning and patience the minute they are stuck with one another for longer than one night. There is a particularly vicious bit concerning a pair of incestuous siblings, the brother half of which is the most indefensible character in Buñuel's burnt-black comedy. All the while, the director makes a point of showing the inability of any human to cross the front gates to rescue the contemptible lot, though sheep and a bear roam freely around inside and outside the house. By the time the Valkyrie (Silvia Pinal) finds the mystical key to unlocking their fate, they have all but resorted to cannibalism, which seems not too far off the horizon.

Though not as daring as Viridiana and not quite the headtrip its follow-up, the 45-minute Simon of the Desert, came to be, The Exterminating Angel remains a tough-minded, barbed satire with all the surrealist trimmings, including a dream that pits one of the inmates against a roving, severed hand. Though the group finally escapes the mansion, Buñuel is neither conclusive nor optimistic. In the film's damning coda, the filmmaker flagrantly sends another flock of sheep to the ravenous masses, refusing to allow the hope of social rehabilitation to stand for longer than a few minutes.

When the film premiered publicly in New York in 1967, four years after it opened the very first New York Film Festival, Bosley Crowther blamed its lack of distribution on the fact that 'the ennui and frustration, so purposely conveyed, creep into the patience of the audience as fast as they suffuse the characters.' A little over 40 years after its legitimate release and 26 years after Buñuel's death, the nasty bugger still gets under your skin, but it is now clear that Buñuel wanted nothing more than for a public to sit and watch these captives suffer while they themselves are also stuck in a room, transfixed by a force that, to this day, still can't be completely comprehended.




Disc 1 Technical Information:

Title: El ángel exterminador/The Exterminating Angel
Year: 1962
Country: Mexico
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 6.02 GB
Length: 1:33:11
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~8200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Spanish- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 384 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Theatrical trailer


The Exterminating Angel Megaupload Links




Disc 2 Technical Information:

Title: The Exterminating Angel- Disc Two: The Supplements
Year: 2006/2008
Country: N/A
Director: N/A

Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 5.98 GB
Length: N/A
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~6800 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Spanish- Dolby AC3 Mono @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras:
- The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buñuel
- Interview with Silvia Pinal
- Interview with Arturo Ripstein



Disc Two: The Supplements Megaupload Links

Buñuel Week: Luis Buñuel- Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned (1950)- DVD5 (NTSC Format)

It's Buñuel Week. Yay!
And what better way to start it off than Los olvidados, which I found to be one of the Master's most compassionate films. Oh, and don't forget we have Un chien andalou already creeping about in the bowels of FTD, with much more Buñuel to follow. This is going to be a fun ride, especially if I pepper in some punk rock and Dada along the journey- a journey that will end at Santiago de Compostela. That's a hint. Connect the damn dots and enjoy!




From Ed Gonzales at Slant Magazine:

After completing Gran Casino, Luis Buñuel began work on a screenplay with the Spanish poet Juan Larrea called Ilegible Hijo de Fluta (The Illegible Son of the Flute). When Óscar Dancigers couldn't find financing for the project, Buñuel agreed to direct The Great Madcap as a favor to his Gran Casino producer. The director found the finished product "impossibly banal," though the film's box office success all but guaranteed that Buñuel could now make whatever he wanted. "Oscar was ready for a 'real' film, and proposed that we make one about the slum children, abandoned and living from hand to mouth in Mexico," says Buñuel in The Last Sigh.

Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned), an "attack on the sadness that ruins children before they have a chance," was penned by Buñuel, Madcap writer Luis Alcoriza, and an uncredited Larrea. Inspired in part (at least in spirit) by Vittorio de Sica's similarly themed Shoeshine (a film Buñuel greatly admired), Los Olvidados was vilified by the country's xenophobic press and labor unions who claimed the film dishonored "their" Mexico. By calling attention to the misery of Mexico City's young street urchins, Buñuel exposed an "evil" hiding behind the imposing structures of every big modern city. Los Olvidados would go on to win Buñuel the Best Director prize at the Cannes Film Festival and restore his notoriety as one of cinema's most respected provocateurs.




If the innocent Pedro (Alfonso Mejía) is the film's Jack Dawkins, El Jaibo (Roberto Cobo, star of Arturo Ripstein's excellent The Place Without Limits) is the incorrigible Artful Dodger. Less controversial for the brutality of its images than for the objectivity of Buñuel's point of view, Los Olvidados purposefully lacks optimism; indeed, the director saw danger in giving solutions to problems best left to "the hands of the progressive forces of our times." This objectivity is all over the film, and nowhere is this more memorable than in the way Buñuel powerfully introduces the titular forgotten ones via a mock game of bullfight, with the camera taking the point of view of a red cape as a group of boys with grotesque faces charge toward it as if purposefully antagonizing the spectator. This is the intensity of Buñuel's gaze.

El Jaibo calls a young boy a "pansy" for not smoking and orchestrates a robbery against the blind Don Carmelo (Miguel Inclán), the film's unlikely voice of reason. "Is there no mercy for a poor blind man?" says a manipulative Carmelo, looking for a guide to lead him across a busy street. Carmelo posits a moral hierarchy to suffering when he befriends a young boy, Big Eyes, whose father has abandoned him in the town center. Carmelo scoffs at the boy's pain: "He's not coming back. These things happen every day." At the very least, the boy has his vision. Yet with the pervasive ugliness and desperation that permeates Los Olvidados, Buñuel may as well be contemplating blindness as a luxury: Perhaps it is better not to see what these children are going through. Indeed, the film's obsession with sightlessness is very much Buñuel's way of gauging the political climate of his time: Throughout the film, he shows us how society is responsible for creating its lost ones and how it subsequently refuses to "see" them.




Los Olvidados is a film obsessed with the terror of being left alone in the world and Buñuel evokes this desperation via references to the nourishment of mother's milk: Carmelo drinks goat milk because it cleanses the body; Meche, a local girl, washes her legs with milk because it will preserve their beauty; and Big Eyes throws himself to the grown in a fit of hunger, sucking milk from the teat of a cow. Pedro must tragically plead for the love of his mother, a hard-working woman who punishes her eldest son (she denies him love, refuses him his dinner) because of his supposedly poor behavior. "Why should I love you?" she asks, oblivious that her son is conflicted because he can't provide for his family. Buñuel powerfully stacks one sign on top of another, and the emotional force of the pile-up only intensifies the sadness and desperation of his characters.

Jaibo accuses an older boy, Julien (Javier Amézuca), of sending him to jail and kills him during a fit of rage; Pedro watches in terror, forced to remain silent for fear that he too will be murdered. Jaibo, the film's leg fetishist, grabs Meche's leg when his hand reaches out from inside a pile of hay and later seduces Pedro's mother by staring at her legs and manipulatively engaging the memory of his dead mother ("she looked like a real virgin"). Seduced by Jaibo off-screen, Pedro's mother seems to also take her sexual indiscretions out on her son. The film's oppressive themes all come together in the film's legendary and disturbing dream sequence. Pedro's spirit rises from his body and is tortured by the ghost of the dead Julien and his scantily clad mother—all the while, an inexplicable wind claws at her lily-white nightgown. She floats around the room, smothering her son with love and a raw piece of meat that dangles from her hands. There's no escape from the brutality of their world—not even in dreams.




Carmelo's little wagon bears a sign that reads "me mirabas" (rough translation: "You looked at me"). Perhaps the sign represents the pervasive gaze of the film's youth. When Jaibo is denied a cigarette by a legless man who moves around on a dolly, Jaibo and his posse tear at the helpless man's clothes, throwing him onto the sidewalk and thrusting his dolly down a hill. Though Carmelo defends hungry parents who abandon their even hungrier children ("Extra mouths hinder!"), he is still seemingly aware that he must constantly "look" beneath his blindness at children who turn to evil when forgotten by their parents. Somewhere in the big city, a man approaches Pedro, propositioning him for sex before an approaching police officer interrupts their negotiation. All the while, Buñuel's camera bears silent witness from inside a store's display window, whose expensive trinkets are suggestive of Pedro's nothingness.

Wisked to juvenile court by his uncaring mother, Pedro loses all passion for life: he kills a chicken during a schoolyard fight (a passionate lover of animals, he earlier protected a hen from his angry mother); the 20 pesos given to him as a test by the court's thoughtful supervisor are stolen from him by Jaibo; and he all but guarantees his death when he violates the code of the streets and shouts before a group of children and adults that Jaibo was responsible for Julien's death. Though his viciousness is unflinching, Jaibo remains sympathetic if only because Pedro's loss of passion must be indicative of Jaibo's own journey to nothingness. Jaibo kills Pedro and just as his mother finds love for her angelic child, Carmelo and Mecha throw his corpse into a rocky ravine. "No, no...I'm falling into the black hole. I'm alone...alone...as always...my child...as always...go to sleep and stop thinking...my child...sleep," says Jaibo when he meets his own demise, echoing the universal plight of the film's forgotten ones.




Technical Information:

Title: Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned
Year: 1950
Country: Mexico
Director: Luis Buñuel

Source: DVD5 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 4.18 GB
Length: 1:16:50
Programs used: ImgBurn

Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 4:3
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps

Audio: Spanish- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English, French

Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched

DVD Extras (French only):
- Fiche Historique
- Filmographie
- Fin inedite
- Terre sans pain (Las Hurdes- 1932)




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