Buñuel's Impure Modernism (1929–1950)
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12917608 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Sebastiaan Faber (0000-0003-2068-4537, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2012 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 56-76 |
| Publication date | 2012-04-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Modernist Cultures (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-8629 • E-ISSN: 2041-1022 |
| Publisher | Edinburgh University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.3366/mod.2012.0028 |
| OpenAlex | W2077841346 |
| Language | CA |
| References cited | 2 |
A little over an hour into the premiere of Los olvidados in Mexico City on 9 November 1950, some members of the audience could not suppress a muffled shriek of disbelief. One of the film’s two tragic protagonists, Pedro – a young, open-faced boy whose loveless, povertystricken life the film had been following closely – had just looked straight into the camera and thrown a rotten egg at it. Smashing onto the lens, it covered the entire screen in a gelatinous, opaque dribble. Two brief seconds later, the camera had miraculously recovered its transparency and diegetic invisibility, and the film continued its melodramatic narrative arc as if nothing had happened. Yet somehow the movie theatre seats suddenly felt a lot less comfortable. Pedro’s insolent aggression –What are you looking at? Scram! –makes us feel like peeping Toms caught in the act. It forces us to rethink our relationship to the film, but also to the reality
Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Invisibility · Literature · Modernism (music · Narrative · Nothing · Optics · Visual arts · Libraries, Manuscripts, and Books · Philosophy · Spanish Culture and Identity · Spanish Literature and Culture Studies
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |