Los Olvidados

October is half over. Today is 13 October, ten days before Frost Descent (霜降), and the nights have grown long enough for a black-and-white film of eighty-some minutes.

The first reason is internal to this archive: Latin America had been represented by a single Brazilian film, City of God (2002), and Mexico was a blank. Los Olvidados fills that blank — it comes from the most important period in Mexican cinema, and it is the sharpest film of that period.

The second reason is its title: los olividos means the forgotten ones. It is not the story of a criminal but of a city that keeps part of its living population outside its field of vision. It forms a perfect diptych with the archive's M (1931) — a city panicked by one murderer, and a city that forgets a whole class of people, are two faces of the same thing.

A younger Latin American film waits tonight: no one there is forgotten — there is only a pool of murky water no one will jump into first.

1950 年，墨西哥城。一条没有名字的街，几间铁皮顶的房子，一群没有学上的少年。

刚从感化院逃出来的 Jaibo 回到街头，重新当上少年们的头。谁交不出「供品」，就会在夜里被堵在墙角。以卖艺为生的盲人 Don Carmelo 被抢走了全部收入；一对刚取了钱的夫妇在街角被石头放倒；Jaibo 还把 Pedro——一个崇拜他、也想成为他的小个子——拖进了这一切。

Pedro 的另一半生活是母亲：她在别人家的厨房里打零工，对儿子的爱早就被日子磨成了不耐烦。一次机会让 Pedro 被送进城外的感化院，那里的老师说：这些孩子缺的不是自由，是管束。

影片不打算宽恕谁，也不打算解释谁。

（这里不再往下说。）

A surrealist in the street

Los Olvidados premiered in Mexico in November 1950. 88 minutes, black and white, Spanish, produced by Ultramar Films. Directed by Luis Buñuel, more than a decade into his exile from his own continent, living in Mexico City and filming the street outside his window.

The standard-bearer of Surrealism who made Un Chien Andalou (1929) did not deliver spectacle in exile but reality. He kept the surrealist method and simply stopped using it to produce dreams, letting dreams seep through the cracks of reality instead: Pedro's dreams arrive without warning, like flickers in the surface of the real.

Cannes 1951: Best Director

In 1951 the film won Buñuel the Best Director award at the Cannes Film Festival, and the consensus around it was sealed: not a Mexican social-problem picture but an event in world cinema. Ten years later his Viridiana (1961) took the Palme d'Or.

A film that refuses pity

It never turns poverty into spectacle, nor its boys into angels. Both leads carry their own cruelty: Jaibo's violence is a weapon, and Pedro's weakness is a blade too. It records a fact as solid as a city wall, and mounts not one cheap accusation.

Violence in a long shot

The film's most famous killing is not played in close-up: the camera does not approach the face; it withdraws, far enough to make the crime look like something seen from another dream. Buñuel refuses to let an audience consume violence at close range — the exact opposite of every film that later turned murder into a set piece.

Remembered by UNESCO

The film is inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World register — not as a good film, but as a moving-image archive the world is asked to keep.