Chicano Film Study: Los Olvidados - Essay Example

Chicano Film Study Chicano Film Study One of the strangest cases in the cinematic field is that of Luis Bunuel. In the cinema by Bunuel, animals are a representation of living things that can easily turn bizarre when devoured. Bunuel portrays a donkey devoured by bees as attaining nobility, turning barbaric, and a Mediterranean myth as well. His major criticism of a society is that, the community exists in advent poverty. For instance, in order for him to earn a living, he engaged in second rate and obscure jobs in Mexico.

Bunuel criticizes the vices of adults as having played a major role in destroying the innocence of children and creating an order of fraternity with due presence of delinquency. Bunuel conveys too much of anguish. The backdrop of his anger lies within the evil effects of poverty suffered by the society described in the film (Bunuel, 1950). He also expresses such anger because Los Olvidados lies within a daring stance to distort the myth of a possible re-education through aspects like trust, love, and work. Like D. H.

Lawrence, Bunuel is indeed an inverted idealist too. Like Lawrence, Bunuel depicts characters without Manichaeism and their guilt is seemingly and purely fortuitous. In the movie, Bunuel highlights his inverted idealism by building a model farm wherein fraternity, work, and justice reign. However, for as long as the injustice in the society continues to exist and remains outside, the evil, which is, the main objective of cruelty in the world remains. In Los Olvidados, Pedro says to his mother that he wants to be good only that he does not know how.

Poverty and social milieu conditions the tragedy of the street children in a number of ways. First, the society has evil friends such as Jaibo and is a thief. Due to poverty and milieu conditions that are present in the community, children like Pedro who believes in goodness compromise their salvation as society plays a double responsibility in subjecting street children to human condition of cruelty (Bunuel, 1950). It is impossible for street children to escape from their social circumstances mainly because, the society is full of cruelty, injustice, and pain remains to be yet another condition conditioning humans to their status.

There seems to be no contradiction between conventions extracted from the painter and transcends of sociology and morality (Bunuel, 1950). This highlights the state of cruelty that makes it impossible for street children to leave their social conditions. When you compare el Jaibo and Pedro, you find out that Jaibo is a villain, sadistic, vicious, treacherous, cruel, and above all, he cannot inspire repugnance but fosters a kind of horror that is incompatible with love by no means. On the other end, Pedro has a fundamental purity and is good.

He is the only person who is morally upright as he always sought to do well. Los Olvidados destroys the moral myth and the social parable of the young delinquent reformed by society in a number of ways. To begin with, Los Olvidados sets up a platform for testing the trust of Pedro by through expecting change upon buying a packet of cigarettes. This stands to distort his societal reformation since he is a difficult inmate of education and prefers not to bring the change since Jaibo stole the money from him.

As such, Los Olvidados has myths that destroy the social parable of young delinquents such as Pedro (Bunuel, 1950). In addition, in Los, there are evils and cruelty that compromises the salvation of the reformed young delinquents perverts them hence lures them into committing immoral things. Commenting on the objective of Bunuel on representation of “the cruelty of human condition”, it is deducible that his judgment is evil intentioned and is full of maximum horror content. It is no more than pessimism as it is anything but lucidity.

In conclusion, according to Bazin, children are beautiful not because they do good or evil, but because they are children even in crime and even in death. This means that determines how one would be like in the future and measures his fate. I do not think that Bunuel still believes in humanity because humanity comprises of happiness, which Bunuel excludes and emphasizes on lucidity and pessimism (Bunuel, 1950). In his films, we can say, “no one is basically ‘worse off than oneself’ “since he asserts that people are equal in death and childhood manifests in themselves.

From Los Olvidados, some of the images that affect my mind include the image of Jaibo lying dead with his forehead wreathed in blood in a piece of waste ground. We can call this film, a film of cruelty where no one seems to care about love. For example, Jaibo betrays Pedro, young children robe and leave a crippled person on a pavement hundred yards from his cart, and everyone struggles in his defense. This is definitely a film of cruelty. In my group, we think that the film by Bunuel is a distraught of human traits.

References Bunuel, L. (1950). Los Olvidados. Retrieved on June 12, 2012 from http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/spanish/sp5/urban/olvidados/Bazin_files/cruelty.html