TRANSLATED
P a 9 e s
BY
RO BE RTO
T E JADA
38 - 39
Los Olvidados: lhe Dark Side of the Earth There is a zone which neither colonialism, plundering, ecological depletion nor the raison d'état has been able to destroy: the territory of childhood. Works like the Alice series by Lewis Carroll , the unsettling Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, The Lord of the Flies by William Golding and, more recently, the horrifying novel Running Wild by G.W. Ballard, all explore the enigmatic universe of childhood, without the abuses of interpretation, concessions to naiveté, or the facile prudery of JudeoChristianity which sees children as mutilated little-ones who should be fitted into the prostheses of good consciences. Thanks to these authors, childhood is maintained as an unch arted world, a perpetually virgin territory. Luis Buñuel 's Los olvidados is essential within this panorama . A cult film among cinephiles and aficionados, this work is one of the most intense inquiries into the universe of the tenderness and cruelty, of the poetry and ritual inhabited by children in the miserable barrios and forgotten neigh-
borhoods of Mexico City. From his first surrealist work Le chien andalous, Buñuel ' s signature is the severed eye . This gash forces us to look beyond to the other side. Such is the primordial premise of surrealism: to explore the dark si de of reality and things. From its title, Los olvidados has a certain psychoanalytic resonance-oblivion is also a slip of the tongue, denial, parapraxis. In it, we are confronted by all that which we do not dare see in the animal kingdom of childhood and in our society: the extreme misery of Buñuel's children, orphans of any hope, forces us to see, petrified, the dark side of the earth. Buñuel is certainly one of the masters of voyeu rism: his camera does not present, it spies . Buñuel , like Lewis Carroll or the painter Balthus, knows that the only way to arrive at the closed universe of child hood is to observe from the cracks and windows. Images : the boy with severed lips and a frenzied glare clutching a polished knife with rage ; the girl with cream-colored legs bathing with jenny ass milk is ca -
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ressed by a libidinous old man; the indigenous boy abandoned by his father: the modern Lazarillo leading the blind man through the ruins or hell in the forgotten Mexico -City neighborhood of Nonoalco". AII of these scenes and others , like the death of Jaibo lead by a dog toward the kingdom of death, are terribly fam iliar: in them we see ourselves and we realize that the dark side of the planet has done nothing but grow up around our children. Buñuel knows that childhood is the zone of ritual and magic. His heroes fulfill the destiny of initiates who discover themselves in a world filled with contradictions: they begin to know that there is no love without loss, no erotic ism without perversion , no compassion without violence, no cruelty without tenderness, no solidarity w ithout deceit , no friendship without hateo Either orphans or children with no means of escape, their destiny can only be resolved by means of death or the brutalization of their adult lives: alcoholism and exploitation. For the ancient Gnostics the entire universe was nothing but the creation of a false demiurge. Originating from a mistake, we its inhabitants are nothing but the forgeries or distortion of divine works. Hidden inside each one of us there flashes a spark of divine creation, a small halo of truth . Buñuel's children