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Buñuel in Mexico
Gijs Mulder
Chance brought the Spanish cineast Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) to Mexico. He was passing through on his travels from America to France, where he hoped to finally make another film. The job in France fell through and Buñuel stayed in Mexico when he came into contact with the producer Oscar Dancigers, who offered him the chance to work as a director. Buñuel would live in Mexico untill this death and it is where he would make the most films of his long career. In 1946 Buñuel was only known to cinephiles as the maker of three avant-garde films in the thirties, each of which had provoked a scandal and/or had been forbidden. Nowadays, they're monuments of film history: Un chien andalou, L'Âge d'or and Las Hurdes. Buñuel made this energetic and inciting films on the eve of the Spanish Republic which would result in a civil war. Franco's dictatorship following the war, forced Buñuel - and many with him - to go into exile. It wouldn't be untill around 1960 before he could visit his native country again.
The first two films that Buñuel made in Mexico were melodramas produced for a big public. One of them was so successfull that Dancigers offered to make a 'serious' movie about street children. This movie would be Los Olvidados (The Young and the Damned) (1950). The premiere caused strong protests because of the unfavourable way in which the country was depicted and it was quickly taken off the programme. Only after receiving good critiques in France the success came and Los Olvidados was recognized as Buñuel's comeback. It is a key film in his work because it brought together the three trails he had followed thus far: the avant-garde of his first two surrealistic films, the engagement of Las Hurdes and the commercial drama of his first two Mexican films. For the modern day viewer Los Olvidados is still a raw movie. It is a film about streetchildren in a shanty town, but it is also a film with poetry and many surrealist moment, and a touching story about lack of love, about friendship and solidarity.
In Mexico Buñuel got used to making films in a very short time, with a minimal budget and often mediocre actors. He had to work efficiently and developed his characteristic sobre style of filming. Some of the nearly twenty films he made in Mexico are seen as classics (Los olvidados, Nazarín, El ángel exterminador), but most are forgotten because they are not 'real' characteristic Buñuel films. This is partly because of what Buñuel himself has said about it. He used to called them películas alimenticias, films he had to make to earn a living and which aren't really worth much. Even so, they contain small master pieces. Two good examples of undeservingly forgotten films are Subida al cielo and La ilusión viaja en tranvía, both roadmovies from the fifties. The first is about a trip in a shoddy bus through a coastal province of Mexico, the other about an illegal streetcar ride through Mexico-City. They're fresh, quickly told films with a series of memorable passengers and surreal situations. In La ilusión a few butchers board the streetcar at the slaughter house. They're laden with cadavers and one butchers hangs a cow's head from one of the rails in the streetcar. In Subida al cielo a man gets on the bus, taking a coffin which holds the body of his dead daughter.
Buñuel made psychological films in Mexico as well. Él and Ensayo de un crimen are portraits of men with obsessions. About Él, the story of a obsessively jealous man, Buñuel has declared that it is one of his most personal films. The opening scene is one of the most beautiful Buñuel has ever shot. In the church, during the ritual of washing the feet on White Thursday, the protagonist (and the viewer along with him) sees the woman who will be the love of his life for the first time. It is a scene filled with hidden tension and eroticism. Apart from the actors these two films contain very few specifically Mexican characteristics. The same is true for the last films Buñuel made in the sixties in his adopted native country, El ángel exterminador en Simón del desierto. El ángel, who he would have preferred to shoot in England or France, for the most part takes place in a room in which a bourgeous company is locked in for inexplicable reasons. It is a rich film, in which even after multiple viewings you can still discover new layers and intriguing details. Buñuels last Mexican film, about a man living on top of a column in the desert (Simón) is only 48 minutes long, because halfway through there was no more money. He was 65 and tired of the constant difficulties about budgets and Mexico's other limitations. Since then Buñuel only made movies in France. There he had all the freedom and opportunities to make the movies he wanted. Some are unforgettable masterpieces, but his final French movies lack the sobre charm of his Mexican films.
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