Marsha Kinder lends Luis Buñuel’s exile status during the Franco regime in Spain to the nomadic discourse found in his films, “a form of mobile mentality one finds in the characters, plots, images, sounds, and textual strategies (2).” In confluence with the schemes he developed amongst the Parisian surrealists, Buñuel uses mobility to draw attention to the participatory nature of film spectatorship, challenging the audience to question their relationship with the text.

In Los Olvidados (1950), Buñuel’s most destitute characters travel perpetually, unable to find physical or mental solace. Julián’s father hopelessly searches for his son’s murderer within a community that sheds him no pity due to his drunkenness. Pedro, Jaibo, and the blind elderly man all roam the streets, homeless, without shelter, enacting violence when frustrated. Mexico City becomes a character itself as the film wanders through its boroughs, hideouts, and abandoned locales. Here, Buñuel emphasizes restlessness, not just within concrete narrative elements like plot and character, but in the text itself. Los Olvidados presents the film’s drama from a myriad of vantage points— close-up shots, long, wide crane shots, tracking sequences. Buñuel also involves dream imagery, textual “suspicions of linear narratives and rational explanations,” and actor-camera participation when Pedro cracks an egg on the lens (5). These textual strategies enable the realization of the anxieties of poverty on-screen, making physical the destitution of Mexico City’s poorest neighborhoods and calling into question the failings of the metropolis to provide for its people.

Such encompassing imagery envelopes the film with an air of voyeurism, transforming the spectator into social critic. Los Olvidados is Buñuel’s attempt to roust his audience out of their comfort zones to question the cultural infrastructures that perpetuate poverty. According to Kinder, this approach grants Buñuel the ability to “shock spectators out of their bourgeois complacency” (5). An immediate suspicion would be that Buñuel’s attack is on Mexican aristocrats that ignore the problems of Mexico’s slums. However, Buñuel’s goal is not solely to make the audience feel sorry for the low-income communities in Mexico City. A close reading of Los Olvidados alongside Buñuel’s Las hurdes (1933) and El ángel exterminador (1962) suggests that the director bridges the poor communities of Mexico City with those in Cáceres, Spain, a region historically pushed to the margins and, at the time, struggling under the Franco regime. The bourgeois spectators, in this case, are Spanish and Parisian friends and critics who have never experienced the anxieties of poverty nor challenge what it means to live outside it.

In this case, Buñuel’s reenactments of poverty play into notions of the aestheticization of impoverishment. His filmmaking strategies use unreal spaces — fabricated studio lots and sectioned-off streets dressed with set decorations — to assert the illusion that locations in Los Olvidados are real. This phantasmic scheme of world-building is appropriative in many ways; namely, financiers generate money, actors rehearse scenes, and the director indexes performances in the hopes that they can convince the audience that what they see is a true representation of poverty. In many cases, low-income communities depicted on-screen have little opportunities to show the bourgeoise what their impoverishment really looks like. Instead, much more privileged people generate an interpretation of such an environment. The result is perhaps a spectatorship that is no true voyeur into impoverishment, but a false imagination. Whilst Buñuel hopes his world in Los Olvidados will travel transnationally and encourage the bourgeoise to take action on behalf of impoverished communities, all he generates within the spectator is sympathy to poverty aestheticization instead of poverty itself.

1. Kinder, Marsha, Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005.

2. Los Olvidados, directed by Luis Buñuel (1950; Mexico: Koch-Lorber Films).