LOS OLVIDADOS - The "Alternate Ending"?

An Evening Screening, Presentation & "Noche en Mexico" Fiesta with the Luis Buñuel Film Institute

Saturday, April 21, 2018 - 7:30pm

 

Los Olvidados

Voyage to the Land of Speaking Blood - part one

Tickets: $15 General Admission / $13 VPES Members

https://voyagepartone.bpt.me

Doors 7:00 P.M. / Show at 7:30 P.M.

In 1950 Luis Buñuel won the Best Director award at Cannes and the Ariel award for Best Director (Academia Mexicana de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas) for Los Olvidados. Yet, this film caused controversy for its depiction of a brutal group of street kids living in urban poverty. This film has two endings and tonight, for the first time in Los Angeles, the "Alternate Ending" will be screened alongside the canonical version of the film. This event is presented in partnership with the Luis Buñuel Film Institute.

Our evening includes:

  • "Noche in Mexico" Fiesta with Food & Refreshments
  • Touristic Photo Studio
  • Screening of Los Olvidados with *both* endings
  • Overview of Luis Buñuel's experiences in Mexico
  • Melodic Sounds with DJ Lance Rock

Buñuel's award for Best Director will be on display during the evening.  This event is part one of the series "Voyage to the Land of Speaking Blood."


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Voyage to the Land of Speaking Blood

A three-part series at the Velaslavasay Panorama exploring themes of tourism, documentary, surrealism & archaeology in Mexican filmmaking.

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Los Olvidados
Directed by Luis Buñuel
With Alfonso Mejía, Roberto Cobo, Estela Inda
Mexico 1950,  b/w, 80 min. Spanish with English subtitles (digital projection)

A bracingly frank depiction of poverty and the terrors of alienated youth, Buñuel’s breakthrough film follows a band of young boys captive to the cruel whims of their charismatic and dangerous leader, a violent teenager recently escaped from reform school. Buñuel forged a kind of raw neo-realism demanding a strikingly atypical cinematography from Gabriel Figueroa who eschewed the ennobling shadows of his work for Emilio Fernandez for a harsher kind of direct light, as glaring and unfiltered as Buñuel’s unsparing vision of urban and moral decay. Los Olvidados deeply offended Mexican critics and audiences who punished the film with scathing reviews on its first release, calling it a deliberate affront to the Mexican nation and almost successfully burying Buñuel’s early masterpiece, until it was rescued by the efforts of poet and then cultural ambassador Octavio Paz who championed the film at Cannes where it would win Buñuel the prize for best director. A stingingly pessimistic work, Los Olvidados reveals family and friendship to be viciously double-edged bonds that transform a warm maternal embrace into asphyxiating stranglehold, an outstretched familiar hand into a vicious fist.

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Los Olvidados - an Alternate Ending?

In 1996, an alternate ending to Los Olvidados was discovered at the Film Warehouse of UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico), among the surviving materials for the film. Apparently, due to potential pressure from the Mexican censorship board, the studios urged Buñuel to film an alternative ending that maintained the image of a progressive Mexico in which no one was "poor or illiterate".

In 2002, it was announced that the alternate ending for Los Olvidados (commonly known as "the happy ending") had been restored digitally in order to show it to the public. It is not clear whether Buñuel himself shot the ending but the director never mentioned it in subsequent interviews or in his memoirs. Most likely, the producer asked Buñuel or someone else to shoot it in case the censors objected to the bleak conclusion to the film.

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Buñuel's Mexico

The canonization of Luis Buñuel (1900 - 1983) as Spain’s “greatest” filmmaker is based upon a biased and only partial understanding of the filmmaker’s long and complex career. Ignored is the essential fact of Buñuel’s formative and remarkably productive thirty-five years in Mexico where he worked and thrived within that country’s ascendant studio system. It was in Mexico that Buñuel defined himself as a mature filmmaker, expanding his artistic horizons far beyond the radical avant-garde cinema of his earliest works – the audacious and Surrealist inspired trilogy (Un chien Andalou, L’Age d’Or, Land Without Bread) – by exploring a subversive engagement with popular film genre formulas that would remain constant throughout his career.

According to legend, Buñuel came to Mexico by chance, merely passing through with a friend and with no intention to work in the country that would soon become his adopted home. Yet Mexico gave Buñuel his first major opportunity to work as a director after several frustrating and ultimately unproductive years in the US where he was fired from a coveted job in the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art and then unable to find more than menial dubbing work in Hollywood. Easily integrating himself into the cosmopolitan community of Spanish and international exiles that enlivened post-WWII Mexico City, in 1949 Buñuel renounced his Spanish citizenship to be nationalized as Mexican.

One of the great transnational artists of the twentieth century, Buñuel continues to be celebrated almost exclusively as a European auteur, with the lush, mysterious art films which he directed principally in France during his last years remaining his best known work. Only recently has Buñuel’s equal status as a Mexican filmmaker been acknowledged by renewed interest in the twenty films he made within the Mexican studio system. Often dismissed as compromised genre films or mere preparatory sketches for his later work, Buñuel’s Mexican films are finally being appreciated for their complex and often outspokenly political engagement with many of the great obsessive themes of his oeuvre – the destructive powers of machismo and female desire explored in underappreciated films such as El Bruto and Susana, the loneliness of exile made palpable in the little known The Young One. The recognized masterpieces of Buñuel’s long Mexican years – El, The Exterminating Angel, Simon of the Desert, Los Olvidados – in turn bring a philosophical depth and power to his cinema, together offering a sustained meditation on ideas of religion, class inequity, violence and desire.

- Images from the event -

Photography by Forest Casey

 

The "Voyage to the Land of Speaking Blood" series is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs, by the California Arts Council, a state agency, and by the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors through the Los Angeles County Arts Commission.