Los Olvidados Screening - Voyage to the Land of Speaking Blood Part One

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
•     Touristic Photo Studio
•     Screening of Los Olvidados with *both* endings
•     Overview of Luis Buñuel's experiences in Mexico
•     Melodic Sounds in the garden 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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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.

Velaslavasay Panorama
1122 West 24th Street
Los Angeles, California 90007
www.panoramaonview.org
@velaslavasaypanorama