CRUELTY AND LOVE IN LOS OLVIDADOS
by André
Bazin
The case of Luis Buñuel is one of the strangest in the history of the cinema.
Between 1928 and 1936, Buñuel only made three films, and of these only
one—L’Age d’Or—was full length; but
these three thousand metres of film are in their entirety archive
classics, certainly, with Le Sang d’un Poète, the least
dated productions of the avant-garde and in any case the only cinematic
production of major quality inspired by surrealism. With Las
Hurdes, a ‘documentary’ on the poverty-stricken
population of the Las Hurdes region, Buñuel did not reject
UnChienAndalou; on the contrary,
the objectivity, the soberness of the documentary surpassed the horror
and the forcefulness of the fantasy. In the former, the donkey devoured
by bees attained the nobility of a barbaric and Mediterranean myth
which is certainly equal to the glamour of the dead donkey on the
piano. Thus Buñuel stands out as one of the
great names of the cinema at the end of the silent screen and the
beginning of sound —one with which only that of Vigo bears comparison — in
spite of the sparse-ness of his output. But after eighteen years
Buñuel seemed to have definitely disappeared from
the cinema. Death had not claimed him as it had Vigo. We only knew vaguely that
he had been swallowed up by the commercial cinema of the New World, where in order to
earn his living he was doing obscure and second-rate work in
Mexico.
And now suddenly we get a film from down there
signed Buñuel. Only a B feature, admittedly.
A production shot in one month for eighteen million (old francs). But
at any rate one in which Buñuel had freedom
in the script and direction. And the miracle took place: eighteen years
later and 5,000 kilometres away, it is still the same, the
inimitable Buñuel, a message which remains
faithful to L’Age d’Or and Las Hurdes, a film
which lashes the mind like a red hot iron and leaves one’s
conscience no opportunity for rest.
The theme is outwardly the same as that which has served
as a model for films dealing with delinquent youth ever since
The
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Road to Life, the
archetype of the genre : the evil effects of poverty and the
possibility of re-education through love, trust, and work. It is
important to note the fundamental optimism of this concept. A moral
optimism first of all, which follows Rousseau in presupposing the
original goodness of man, a paradise of childhood destroyed before its
time by the perverted society of adults; but also a social optimism,
since it assumes that society can redress the wrong it has done by
making the re-education centre a social microcosm founded on the trust,
order and fraternity of which the delinquent had been unduly deprived,
and that this situation is sufficient to return the adolescent to his
original innocence. In other words, this form of pedagogy implies not
so much a re-education as an exorcism and a conversion. Its
psychological truth, proved by experience, is not its supreme instance.
The immutability of scenarios on delinquent youth from The Road to
Life to L’Ecole Buissonnière (the character of the
truant) passing via Le
Carrefourdes EnfantsPerdus, prove that we are faced
with a moral myth, a sort of social parable whose message is
intangible,
Now the prime originality of Los Olvidados lies in daring to
distort the myth. Pedro, a difficult inmate of a re-education centre in the shape
of a model farm, is subjected to a show of trust-bringing back the
change from a packet of cigarettes — as was Mustapha in The
Road to Life — buying the sausage. But Pedro does not return to the
open cage, not because he prefers to steal the money but because it is
stolen from him by Jaibo, the evil friend. Thus the myth is not denied
in essence — it cannot be; if
Pedro had betrayed the director’s
trust, the latter would still have been right to tempt him by goodness.
It is objectively much more serious that the experiment is made to fail
from the outside and against Pedro’s will, since in this way
society is saddled with a double responsibility, that of having
perverted Pedro and that of having compromised his salvation. It is all
very well to build model farms where justice, work and fraternity
reign, but so long as the same society of injustice and pain remains
outside, the evil — namely the objective cruelty of the world
— remains.
In fact my references to the films on fallen youth only
throw light on the most outward aspect of Buñuel’s film, whose
fundamental premise is quite different. There is no contradiction
between the explicit theme and the deeper themes which I now propose
to
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extract from it; but the first has only the same
importance as the subject for a painter; through its conventions (which
he only adopts in order to destroy them) the artist aims much higher,
at a truth which transcends morality and sociology, at a metaphysical
reality — the cruelty of the human condition.
The greatness of this film can be grasped immediately when
one has sensed that it never refers to moral categories. There is no
manicheism in the characters, their guilt is purely fortuitous —
the temporary conjunction of different destinies which meet in them
like crossed swords. Undoubtedly, adopting the level of psychology and
morality, one could say of Pedro that he is ‘basically good’, that he has a
fundamental purity: he is the only one who passes through this hail of
mud without it sticking to him and penetrating him. But Jaibo, the
villain, though he is vicious and sadistic, cruel and treacherous, does
not inspire repugnance but only a kind of horror which is by no means
incompatible with love. One is reminded of the heroes of Genet, with
the difference that in the author of the Miracle de la Rose
there is an inversion of values which is not found at all here. These
children are beautiful not because they do good or evil, but because
they are children even in crime and even in death. Pedro is the brother in
childhood of Jaibo, who betrays him and beats him to death, but they
are equal in death, such as their childhood makes them in themselves.
Their dreams are the measure of their fate. Buñuel achieves the tour
de force of recreating two dreams in the worst tradition of
Hollywood Freudian surrealism and yet leaving us palpitating with
horror and pity. Pedro has run away from home because his mother refused to give
him a scrap of meat which he wanted. He dreams that his mother gets up
in the night to offer him a cut of raw and bleeding meat, which Jaibo,
hidden under the bed, grabs as she passes. We shall never forget that
piece of meat, quivering like a dead octopus as the mother offers it
with a Madonna-like smile. Nor shall we ever forget the poor, homeless,
mangy dog which passes through Jaibo’s receding consciousness as
he lies dying on a piece of waste ground, his forehead wreathed in
blood. I am almost inclined to think that Buñuel has given us the only
contemporary aesthetic proof of Freudianism. Surrealism, used it in too
conscious a fashion for one to be surprised at finding in its painting
symbols which it put there in the first place.
Only Un Chien Andalou, L’Age d’Or and Los
Olvidados present
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us with the psychoanalytical situations in their profound
and irrefragable truth. Whatever the concrete form which Buñuel gives
to the dream (and here it is at its most questionable), his images have
a pulsating, burning
power to move us — the thick blood of the unconscious circulates
in them and swamps us, as from an opened artery, with the pulse the
mind.
No more than on the children does Buñuel make a value judgment on his adult characters. If they
are generally more evil-intentioned, it is because they are more
irremediably crystallised, petrified by misfortune. The most horrifying
feature of the film is undoubtedly the fact that it dares to show
cripples without attracting any sympathy for them. The blind beggar
who is stoned by the children gets his revenge in the end by denouncing
Jaibo to the police. A cripple who refuses to give them some cigarettes
is robbed and left on the pavement a hundred yards away from his cart
— but is he any better than his tormentors? In this world where
all is poverty, where everyone fights with whatever weapon he can find,
no one is basically ‘worse off than oneself’. Even more
than being beyond good and evil, one is beyond happiness and pity. The
moral sense which certain characters seem to display is basically no
more than a form of their fate, a taste for purity and integrity which
others do not have. It does not occur to these privileged characters to
reproach the others for their ‘wickedness’; at the most
they struggle to defend themselves from it. These beings have no other
points of reference than life—this life which we think we have
domesticated by means of morality and social order, but which the
social disorder of poverty restores to its original virtuality as a
sort of infernal earthly paradise with its exit barred by a fiery
sword.
It is absurd to accuse Buñuel of having a perverted taste
for cruelty. It is true that he seems to choose situations for their
maximum horror-content. What could be more atrocious than a child
throwing stones at a blind man, if not a blind man taking revenge on a
child? Pedro’s body, when he has been killed by Jaibo, is thrown
onto a rubbish dump amongst the dead cats and empty tins, and those who
get rid of him in this way — a young girl and her grandfather
— are precisely amongst the few people who wished him well. But
the cruelty is not Buñuel’s; he restricts himself to revealing it
in the world. If he chooses the most frightful examples, it is because
the real problem is not knowing that happiness exists
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also, but knowing how far the human condition can go in
misfortune; it is plumbing the cruelty of creation. This intention was
already visible in the documentary on Las Hurdes. It hardly mattered
whether this miserable tribe was really representative of the poverty
of the Spanish peasant or not — no doubt it was — the
important thing was that it represented human poverty. Thus,
between Paris
and Madrid it was
possible to reach the limits of human degradation. Not in Tibet, in Alaska or in South Africa, but somewhere in
the Pyrenees, men
like you and me, heirs of the same civilisation, of the same race, had
turned into these cretins keeping pigs and eating green cherries, too
besotted to brush the flies away from their face. It did not matter
that this was an exception, only that it was possible. Buñuel’s
surrealism is no more than a desire to reach the bases of reality; what
does it matter if we loose our breath there like a diver weighed down
with lead, who panics when he cannot feel the sand under his heel. The
fantasy of Un Chien Andalou is a descent into the human soul,
just as Las Hurdes and Los Olvidados are explorations of
man in society.
But Buñuel’s ‘cruelty’ is
entirely objective, it is no more than lucidity, and anything but
pessimism; if pity is excluded from his aesthetic system, it is because
it envelops it everywhere. At least this is true of LosOlvidados,
for in this respect I seem to detect a development
since Las Hurdes. The documentary on Las Hurdes was tinged with
a certain cynicism, a self-satisfaction in its objectivity; the
rejection of pity took on the colour of an aesthetic
provocation. LosOlvidados,
on the contrary, is a film of love and one which
demands love. Nothing is more opposed to ‘existentialist’
pessimism than Buñuel’s cruelty. Because it evades nothing,
concedes nothing, and dares to dissect reality with surgical
obscenity, it can rediscover man in all his greatness and force us, by
a sort of Pascalian dialectic, into love and admiration. Paradoxically,
the main feeling which emanates from Las Hurdes and
Los
Olvidados is one of
the unshakeable dignity of mankind. In Las Hurdes, a mother sits
unmoving, holding the dead body of her child on her knees, but this
peasant face, brutalised by poverty and pain, has all the beauty of a
Spanish Pieta: it is disconcerting in its nobility and harmony.
Similarly, in LosOlvidados,
the most hideous faces are still in the image of
man. This presence of beauty in the midst of atrocity (and which is by
no means only the beauty of atrocity),
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this perenniality of human nobility in degradation, turns
cruelty dialectically into an act of charity and love. And that is why
Los Olvidados inspires neither sadistic satisfaction nor
pharisaic indignation in its audiences.
If we have made passing reference to surrealism, of which
Buñuel is historically one of the few valid representatives, it is
because it was impossible to avoid this reference. But to conclude, we
must underline the fact that it is insufficient. Over and beyond the
accidental influences (which have no doubt been fortunate and
enriching ones), in Buñuel surrealism is combined with a whole Spanish
tradition. The taste for the horrible, the sense of cruelty, the
seeking out of the extreme aspects of life, these are also the heritage
of Goya, Zurbaran and Ribera, of a whole tragic sense of humanity which
these painters have displayed precisely in expressing the most extreme
human degradation — that of war sickness, poverty and its rotten
accessories. But their cruelty too was no more than the measure of
their trust in mankind and in painting.
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DoxDoxDox
quinta-feira, 10 de julho de 2014