Martin Scorsese names his favourite film by Luis Buñuel
As a director who was raised on a diet of classic cinema, it stands to reason that Martin Scorsese would eventually praise the talents of Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel. Responsible for early filmic forays into surrealism such as 1929’s Un Chien Andelou, Buñuel helped define the very language of cinema – cutting it adrift from the world of literature through his explorative use of montage. Surely, without Buñuel the likes of Scorsese would be walking on very shaky foundations indeed.
During an insightful conversation with fellow director Spike Lee, Scorsese opened up about some of the films and books that have inspired his work over the years. Discussing Buñuel’s film Los Olvidados, made during his long stint in Mexico, Scorsese said: “I’ve been obsessed with slow-motion since I first saw films. I guess for me, the slow-motion dreams in Los Olvidados are something that stayed with me for a long time.”
Released in 1950, Los Olivados was commissioned following the success of Buñuel’s 1949 picture El Gran Calavera. The original script focused on a young boy who sells lottery tickets in Mexico City. However, producer Óscar Dancigers wanted something more wide-reaching, something that would depict the reality of Mexican children living in poverty. Buñuel subsequently delivered a film that blurred the surrealism of his early career with a hefty dose of unflinching social realism. It is undoubtedly one of the most powerful films about poverty and childhood.
For Scorsese, the brilliance of Los Olivados lies in Buñuel’s sensitivity towards his subjects: “I love the way that people’s expressions change and the movement of the flesh on the arms,” he said of one of the film’s slow-motion sequences. “It’s very, very high speed this camera, Phantom,” Scorsese would later adopt a similar technique in his 2019 picture, The Irishman.
Discussing a particularly harrowing Joe Columbo shooting scene, Scorsese said: “[It] gave me a chance to [capture] the pain of it, the suffering of all the people around, you see all their faces. You see their family, the wife screaming. You see the hands grabbing the gun. It’s almost like Biblical tableau that I was going for. I think that camera gave it to me, but one has to be quite sparing with it, and I like the trance-like film.”
For those of you who aren’t familiar with Buñuel’s Mexican period, I urge you to get a taste of Los Olivados below. You can read more about the director’s life in Mexico here.
