Passport to Mexico and Central America
Luis Buñuel Film Festival
August 28, Opening Lecture: A Surrealist Exile in Mexico.
Professor Al LaValley has been teaching film--and Buñuel films---since the 1960s. For 15 years he directed the Film and Television Studies Department at Dartmouth College and has taught film in several California universities. The author of numerous books on film and literature, he is currently working on a study of films made in and about Mexico by Americans and Europeans
who lived there or have been fascinated by it.
The Films
September 4, Los olvidados (1950; 88 minutes).
Buñuel’s third Mexican film reestablished him as one of the world’s great filmmakers. With this harsh and hopeless—and sometimes surreal—look at the lives of children in the slums of Mexico City, Buñuel and his scriptwriter Luis Alcoriza tug at our both our hearts and consciousness.
September 11, Susana (1951; 80 minutes).
Susana was Buñuel’s first film since Los olvidados and a striking departure into the excess of Mexican melodrama. Susana, an imprisoned “bad girl,” magically escapes from prison and takes up refuge as a maid in a nearby hacienda, and promptly empowers herself by seducing every male in sight. Great fun!
September 18, Subida al cielo
(Ascent to Heaven/ Mexican Bus Ride) (1951; 85 minutes).
The first of Buñuel’s film to assume the loose picaresque form of the voyage with a series of incidents grouped around a satiric picture of society and a tone of comic bemusement, a staple of his later masterpieces. Buñuel here turns his attention to the Mexican countryside, the site of perfection for classic Mexican movies, and shows it realistically with all its foibles, backwardness and problems.
September 25, El bruto (1952; 83 minutes).
El bruto revisits the same slums and realistic sets of Los olvidados, this time focusing on the adults and in a slightly more hopeful vein. Buñuel casts that archetype of romantic Mexico, Pedro Armendáriz—a kind of Clark Gable or Tom Cruise of Mexico—in an unfamiliar role as a slow-witted strong man and thug working for an avaricious slumlord.
October 2, La ilusion viaja en tranvia
(Illusion Travels by Streetcar) (1953; 82 minutes).
Illusion Travels by Streetcar forms a kind of diptych with Subida al cielo in its loose voyage structure, its highlighting of incidents over the central characters, and its satiric tone. Two workers for the railway service get drunk and steal their about-to-be-retired trolley, only to sober up and find they don’t know how to get it back. Along the way they give us a picture of modern Mexico City. Filled with surreal incidents and comic types and even a romance, Illusion prefigures Buñuel’s later masterpieces like Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, The Phantom of Liberty and The Milky Way.
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