Los Olvidados - Surrealism to Achieve Realism

Los Olvidados - Surrealism to Achieve Realism

It must have been strange, in 1950, to see the director of some of the most iconic surrealist films create a film so strongly influenced by the work of Italian Neo-Realism. It should come as no surprise, then, that critics like André Bazin tended to view Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados as a film composed of two separate tendencies, one of realism and one of surrealism, that run parallel throughout the film without an intersection. There can be no doubt that both elements exist in the film; the slow-motion dream sequence recalls Buñuel’s surreal work strongly while the use of non-actors, on-location shooting, a focus on the poor, and characters who are not clearly good nor evil but rather fully fleshed out people all define the film as neo-realist. While it is true that the instances of surrealism are quite jarring in the film, they are by no means separate from the film, but rather they serve to enhance and define Buñuel’s own sense of realism

In “Cruelty and Love in Los Olvidados,” André Bazin makes a case for realism in Los Olvidados through the depth of the characters. The characters, Bazin says, are not symbols of evil or good, but rather complex characters that we are forced to understand. Buñuel portrays beggars and cripples “without attracting any sympathy for them” (212,) but shows them as they are, just as vengeful as the criminals that rob them. It is true that this sort of realism exists in the film, in addition to the realism in the film’s style and production. Where Bazin errs is on his description of surrealism in Los Olvidados. The last paragraph in the essay begins:

“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...” (214)

It is true that Buñuel’s surrealism is tied with a “sense of cruelty,” but his realism is as well. Bazin’s view of realism as separate from an “accidental” surrealism that pervades the film almost in spite of its realism misses Buñuel’s style of realism entirely.

The first instance of surrealism happens quite early in the film, when a boy, pretending to be a bull, charges at the camera. The camera becomes entirely blocked by the boy’s body, and then we see the boy on the other side, running away from the camera, as if the boy has run through the camera. The scene complexly links many of the ideals of surrealism to realism. First and foremost, the action recalls the surrealist assault on the viewer, a concept epitomized by the eye slicing in Buñuel’s earlier Un Chien Andalou. The audience feels as if the child is charging at him for a moment. But the action can also be considered a refined, albeit exaggerated, attempt at realism. One of the goals of realism was to make the camera “invisible.” This is obvious in many Italian Neo-Realist films, such as Bicycle Thieves, in which the camera tends not to call attention to itself through editing and movement, and the shots are “from eye-level or from a concrete point of view, such as a roof top or a window” (Bazin, 33.) But this technique of realism was perhaps even better embodied in Citizen Kane. Toland’s use of deep focus in this film, as Bazin writes, forms, “a way of considering reality as if it were homogenous and indivisible” (233.) Welles used to deep focus to avoid classical Hollywood editing techniques that call attention to the camera. If a goal of realism was to make the camera invisible, then Buñuel uses surrealism to take this a step further; the camera is not only invisible (the strictly straight on shot provides a realistic perspective on the charging child,) but it does not exist at all. Buñuel is forcing us to believe the child ran through the camera, so the camera is not there. The shot simultaneously places the audience in a position of surrealist attack and removes all equipment from the scene, forces the audience to consider the event even closer to reality than the documentary-like films of Neo-Realists because it was not even filmed—it only happened.

The film’s dream sequence is another element of the film that is often viewed as anomalous to its realism. In this scene we can begin to understand what Buñuel meant when he described the lack of poetry in Neo-Realist cinema. The scene is introduced as any other, and it is only when we see Pedro separate from his body that we understand that he is dreaming. Buñuel uses slow motion and strange dialogue communicates to us that Pedro is dreaming, rather than using a cheap fade in to tell the viewer what is going on. The viewer senses that it is a dream through mise en scéne and atmosphere. Perhaps again Buñuel is playing with an exaggerated version of realist ideals. If the camera should regard reality as if it had uniform density, not just within the frame, in the world and in the mind, then dreams must be portrayed in the same manner. If it was humanist of Italian Neo-Realists to say that even the stories of the poor are worth telling, Buñuel goes further by saying that their dreams are poetry. It is just as important to consider their subjective, individual reality as the objective reality we seen in films like Bicycle Thieves. The dream comes off as another language to be decoded by the viewer, if it is to be understood at all. The style recalls Paisá’s use of multiple languages subtitled to maintain realism (as opposed to American soldiers speaking Italian.) There is no need for the filmmaker to simplify or modify dreams; Buñuel can present them as they are. In this way Buñuel can convey an extremely surreal sequence without distracting from the film’s realism, instead developing the characters and themes through methods true to the ideals of Neo-Realism.

But perhaps the most glaring resurgence of Buñuel’s surrealist technique in Los Olvidados is in the scene where Pedro throws an egg at the camera. The entire atmosphere of the farm Pedro has been sent to work in radiates a certain strangeness; it lacks the entirely natural feeling so dominant in the film up until then (and it is important to note that this segment comes late in the film, after the realism has been established.) The director seems almost too good. We have the sense that Buñuel is giving us exactly what we want, a happy ending, and because of this we know that it can’t last. In a sense, by throwing the egg, Pedro, whose the viewer already understands as a real person, seems to be revolting against his situation and its perfect, surreal nature. He becomes aware of the film because he is real and his surroundings are not. Because he is no longer in a realm of reality, Pedro can sense the camera, and he revolts against the unreal scene by throwing an egg against the audience, who force him into his situation by wanting him inside the facility. When Pedro returns to the world outside of the farm the typical realist style returns as if it never left. It is also important to keep in mind, when viewing this scene, the complex balance that Neo-Realist directors had to work with between the inevitable symbols that their film must inevitably contain, simply by nature of being a film, with the realism they attempt to explore. It is certainly not uncommon for a Neo-Realist film to remind the viewer that he or she is watching a film. In Bicycle Thieves’ ending, a child looks back into the camera staring back at the viewer in a way that is not too different from the Pedro’s egg. In the beginning of the same film, the official who gives Ricci his job enters just as the credits announce De Sica as the director, suggesting De Sica’s role in the events of the film are just as catalytic as the official. Buñuel’s use of these symbols, it should be noted, seems to be much more rooted in realism than De Sica’s. Where De Sica is concerned with allegory and the nature of cinema, Buñuel’s surrealist symbols give insight into complex characters and develop their realism.

It should come as no surprise to us that Buñuel would use surrealism as a method of achieving realism in his work. Many countries have achieved a sort of nationalistic pride through Neo-Realism, and directors have adapted the forms of their nations’ own cinema into their Neo-Realist films—Satyajit Ray’s recollection of the Indian social genre in Pather Panchiali comes to mind. After all, Neo-Realism is a movement of film towards the people of its country. And so it is entirely fitting for a Spanish director to create a neo-realist film that echoes the Spanish Surrealist tradition of artists like Salvador Dalí and Joan Miró. It is limiting to suggest that realism cannot be explored or achieved outside of a strict documentary format. Buñuel does realism justice by bringing it into a more complex plane and exploring true characters and their objective and subjective reality.