Little stressed by the liberal message that the producer tacked onto its front end, Luis Buñuel’s The Forgotten Ones (in the U.S., The Young and the Damned) benefits from Thomas Carlyle’s invention of the concept of environment in the nineteenth century. Buñuel draws a causal connection between ghetto poverty and the violent behavior of street […]
Monthly Archives: October 2007
Whereas his Los olvidados (1950) focused on Mexico City’s juvenile delinquent poor, Luis Buñuel’s Él—in Spanish, the masculine definite article, but released in the States as This Strange Passion—addresses elite society. Mexican landowner Don Francisco is to be reckoned with. Él opens in church. A priest washes and kisses a long line of boys’ bare […]
Luis Buñuel’s Spanish documentary, known in the States as Land Without Bread, is a portrait of backward lives barely surviving in abject poverty. The Hurdanos are mountain villagers in a remote, nearly inaccessible region of Spain near Portugal. This study in “human geography,” though, isn’t what it seems. To reach Las Hurdes, Buñuel’s expedition must […]
We all remember the deal with The Watcher, the Chicago-based thriller in which a serial killer sadistically plays cat-and-mouse with a burnt-out former F.B.I. agent heading the police effort trying to nab him. Years before the actual filming, its director, Joe Charbanic, who at the time made music videos, was a participant in a street […]
Amir Bar-Lev, whose Fighter (2001) followed two Holocaust survivors along the route by which one of them escaped from a Nazi death camp, has now made a dazzling, even more brilliant documentary. (In Binghamton—near where I went to college.) The “star” of My Kid Could Paint That is Marla Olmstead, who started painting when she […]
Dennis Grunes 