In late 1950 Buñuel released what has become one of the most notable works of his entire corpus. The unflinching depiction of the Mexican underclass via a gang of Mexico City street children in Los olvidados is a point of departure from Buñuel’s first two Mexican films, Gran Casino, a musical which ‘clearly sought to emulate the success of Golden Age musicals’ (Leen 2010: 101), and the comedy El gran calavera. Despite the unequivocal failure of Gran Casino at the box office, the relative success of the subsequent El gran calavera meant that producer Óscar Dancigers – who would work as a producer on ten of Buñuel’s Mexican films produced under his company Ultramar films – allowed Buñuel to undertake a more original project of his choosing. Because of its depiction of disenfranchised youths and its unremitting focus on the everyday reality of life in the slums, Los olvidados has been likened to both Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life (1931), a Soviet drama concerning wayward youths, and Italian neorealism.1 Bazin holds that Los olvidados distorts the myth propagated by Ekk’s paradigm – namely that ‘misery makes an evil counselor, and redemption comes through love, trust, and hard work’, whereas Buñuel seeks to show ‘the evil objective cruelty of the world’ (1978: 195-96). Sebastiaan Faber suggests that, rather than poetic tragedy, the film can be seen as adhering more closely to naturalism, as ‘[the] characters’ fate, after all, seems completely determined by the famous triad of milieu, moment and race – that is, their environment, historical moment and genetic make-up’ (2003: 236).2 To a certain extent, this is indeed true. The deluge of violence and criminality may appear gratuitous and ‘forced’, as Aranda (1976: 143) would have it, but, as Buñuel was keen to point out, was based on his own research into of the lives of the dispossessed within the slums of Mexico City, consulting details of the criminal trials of young people as well as making trips over a period of six months to observe life in impoverished areas of the capital (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 53-54). This pseudo-documentary quality, Xavier Bermúdez argues, is exactly what drives its importance as a challenging film, so much so that in 2003 it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World programme to safeguard its artistic heritage. Bermúdez argues:
It was and it continues to be necessary that cinema reflects as unflinchingly as possible the misery of a world, as the only and desperate way/as a last resort to eliminate the poverty of that world, or at least as the only way not to justify it or praise it. (2000: 112)3
Eight years later, Buñuel began work on Nazarín. Like Los olvidados, Nazarín proved successful at Cannes, receiving the International Prize. Based on Benito Pérez Galdós’s novel of the same name, the narrative depicts the (r)amblings of the quixotic priest Father Nazario, also known as Nazarín, as he drifts indiscriminately about the Mexican countryside accompanied by two unlikely female ‘disciples’, Ándara and Beatriz, while attempting to bring comfort to the diseased and the dying.4 Foreshadowing Viridiana and Simón, the aloofness of Nazarín here is the cause of his naivety. Indeed, just as Edwards posits that Buñuel’s first three films constitute a surrealist triptych, so Gregor proposes a grouping of Nazarín, Viridiana and Simón del desierto predicated on a thematic and ethical reading of these films, as in each it is the protagonists’ submission to a Christian morality of self-negation and sublimation that brings about their downfall (Gregor in Aranda 1976: 225). The film’s enthusiastic reception by Catholic institutions also highlights the difference between Nazarín and the later Viridiana: while the latter was decried in the Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano, the former, as Durgnat (1977: 111-12) points out, came close to being awarded the Prize of the International Catholic Cinema Office.5
Whereas in the previous chapters of this book I have taken two films on the basis of their shared spatial characteristics – heterotopic islands and liminal desert and jungle spaces – in this chapter I will shift the analytical emphasis somewhat from typologies of external space to focus more specifically on the body (and, by extension, the self) in space as read through Los olvidados and Nazarín. While Buñuel, in early press interviews for the film, described Los olvidados as a social documentary,6 effectively creating an affinity between this and the earlier Tierra sin pan,7 with regards to Nazarín he resists any similar such claims to documentary realism, stating: ‘I didn’t aim to make a film portraying that kind of believability, but rather one about an exceptional priest’ (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 132). Los olvidados is set against the backdrop of a Mexico City undergoing rapid but disproportionate modernisation during the presidency of Miguel Alemán (1946-52); the setting for the itinerant Nazarín, however, is given less importance. Galdós’s novel is recast in the countryside of Mexico under the authoritarian president Porfirio Díaz around the turn of the twentieth century. Certainly, the respective settings of the films are important here; however, I am not building my argument upon a premise of the urban as opposed to the rural. Rather, I give consideration to the filmic depiction of the body’s being-in-space – independently of the category of space this is. Both films reveal much about Buñuel’s treatment of the body and its interaction with its surroundings. Key to this chapter, then, will be how the relationship between the corporeal and the psychological, and the places that the characters encounter, is represented filmically. As a framework for investigation, I draw extensively on the philosopher Edward Casey’s concept of the place-world.
The place-world
Casey’s work centres on the relationship between what he calls the geographical self; that is, a combination of the corporeal and the psychological as located in place, through the convergence of geography and philosophy. For Casey, ‘the self has to do with the agency and identity of the geographical subject; body is what links this self to lived place in its sensible and perceptible features’ (2001a: 683). Casey is of course not unique in his emphasis on the body and its relationship to the lived environment; as Phil Hubbard and others signal when they suggest that ‘[i]t seems logical […] that any understanding of the spatiality of society must examine the geographies of the body’ (1998: 97). They make clear that the body’s emergence as a central factor in the discipline of human geography is a relatively recent one.8 Like Casey, they attribute the disregard of the body in part to the Cartesian modality of mind and body as discrete entities, privileging ontology over epistemology. In an attempt to reconcile the body and the psyche with the world in which we live, Casey attempts a more nuanced explication of the linkages between the human subject and place. He argues that this relationship:
is not just one of reciprocal influence (that much any ecologically sensitive account would maintain) but also, more radically, of constitutive coingredience: each is essential to the becoming of the other. In effect, there is no place without self and no self without place. (2001a: 684)
Place and self, Casey holds, are discrete entities that nevertheless play an integral role in the actualisation of the other: the central tenet of his argument is that the self is always implaced.9
The place-world of the geographical self derives from the self ‘s ‘inhabitation of places in a circumambient landscape’, where place is taken to be ‘the immediate environment of [the] lived body – an arena of action that is at once physical and historical, social and cultural’ (Casey 2001a: 684). The place-world, then, corresponds to the immediate lived and enacted world of the self. In the cases of the street gang of Los olvidados and the wandering Nazarín, the place-world is contained within the claustrophobic slums of Mexico City and the open bucolic vistas of the Mexican countryside respectively. Casey proposes three distinct ways in which we engage with the place-world; these mediatrices between self and place, to use Casey’s terminology, are habitus, habitation and idiolocalism. In this chapter, I show how each of these facets of the self-place relationship are shown in these two films. Moreover, in considering the two films in this chapter through the lens of Casey’s spatial philosophy, I show how the fields of philosophy and human geography can inform the discipline of film studies and the act of film spectatorship. Before moving on to the films themselves, however, Casey’s three terms require some initial explanation.
In employing the term habitus, Casey acknowledges his debt to sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and in particular Bourdieu’s Outline of a Theory of Practice in which Bourdieu introduces the habitus as ‘the universalizing mediation which causes an individual agent’s practices’. Habitus, Bourdieu says, is a ‘system of durable, transposable dispositions’ generated by the structures of a particular type of environment or condition (for example, social class), and through the re-enactment of which we are able to comprehend our environment (1977: 79; 72). Linking Bourdieu’s concept more directly to space, Casey affirms that ‘a given habitus qua settled disposition or “habitude” is thus the basis for action in any given sphere – indeed, in any given place’ (2001a: 686). If habitus is the scheme that conditions the way in which we act in any given environment, then habitation, the act of holding place – Casey evokes the Latin root of the verb habere (to have, hold) – is ‘the primary way in which the geographical subject realizes its active commitment to place’ (2001a: 687). We can say, then, that habitation is a product of the systems of behaviour, ‘of taking the habitus that has been acquired and continually re-enacting it in the place-world’ (ibid.). Idiolocalism, as opposed to habitation, shifts the focus from the body in place to place in the body. Through idiolocalism, the persistence of place in the body and, by extension, the psyche is explored – that is, the ways in which places mark their subjects, be it ephemerally or permanently.
My investigation of the construction of what we can take to be the respective place-worlds of Los olvidados and Nazarín is in dialogue with the previous two chapters of this book. Like these, the guiding principle is that space is far from a passive container of the narrative, but is also a vehicle of representation in itself. Like Casey, I generally maintain the space/place distinction whereby space is the more generalised, less personal component of spatiality while place is the more intimate, lived aspect of space. Here, then, as opposed to the external configurations of island heterotopias and jungle/desert liminality, I am moving towards a more philosophical elucidation of space and place through their relation to the body and the self. It is an approximate move from the outside in, and it approaches the more intimate concept of a home-place and the ways that Buñuel’s Mexican cinema problematises what it means to be at home, the subject of the following chapter.
Los olvidados
The metonymic opening sequence
The opening sequence of Los olvidados is an incongruous prologue to the rest of the film. The pseudo-documentary style of the sequence as the viewer is shown stock footage of the cities of London, Paris and New York, together with the voice-over narration, recalls the openings of La ilusión viaja en tranvía and El río y la muerte (1954), with their similar documentary aesthetic and focus on Mexico City. Suddenly, however, in this film the focus shifts solely to Mexico. The voiceover narrator leaves the viewer with little doubt as to the setting of the narrative; city and country share a metonymic bond as we are told that Mexico is a ‘large modern city’. Just as the city is a microcosm for the nation, so the individual is representative of a larger section of the general population, both on a national and international level. Even before the viewer is introduced to the street gang, then, their link to the downtrodden classes who are ‘doomed to criminality’, according to the voiceover, is forged. Buñuel himself highlighted the artificiality of this opening in conversation (de la Colina and Pérez Turrent 1992: 59), which was added later in a bid to disarm Mexican audiences accustomed to what Fuentes has termed ‘[the] ideologised, triumphalist vision of the Mexico of the institutionalised revolution’ (1991: 275) within their national cinema by resituating the reality of wanton poverty within a global context.10 Miriam Haddu sees the film as departing from the arrabal [slum suburb] subgenre through its rejection of the tragi-comic elements common to films of this type, in particular Ismael Rodríguez’s Nosotros los pobres (1948) or Alejandro Galindo’s ¡Esquina, bajan…! (1948). For her, the slums of Los olvidados are ‘place[s] full of misery and anger, of frustration and violence’ (2007: 128). Despite this ostensibly globalist opening, however, Julia Tuñón argues that the film is definitively Mexican in character, given what she sees as its reliance on melodramatic paradigms. For Tuñón, the documentary-style undertones of the film – its rawness – means that it is an ‘atypical melodrama’,11 where emotion does not become a spectacle (2003: 75).
The street children are first seen immediately following this opening of the film. Although this short sequence serves mainly to introduce speculation surrounding the character of Jaibo, recently escaped from a correctional facility, it immediately creates a link between them and their environment. The establishing, mid-distance shot frames Pedro and the group of youths as they engage in child’s play on the street against a backdrop of derelict and dilapidated buildings that will become one of the film’s most visible motifs. The group is absorbed in a game as they mimic the actions of a bullfight complete with a makeshift cape and sword. This is an indicator of their underlying childlike innocence prior to the shocking scenes of theft, brutality and child murder that will occur later in the narrative, effectively disarming the audience. However, their horseplay is significant here for another reason, as it serves to connect the body-self with place in a deeper, more nuanced way, and it does so through habitus.
Habitus and the body techniques of the street children
I have already briefly commented on the dual nature of habitus as generative and generated: it is, in Bourdieu’s words, ‘structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures’ (1977: 72). This means it is a system of enacted dispositions and is part structure, part agency. For Bourdieu, our actions are shaped by and in turn perpetuate the particular social structure of which they are part (he suggests that class is one possible common denominator in habitus, though this is not to limit the habitus solely within a Marxist framework). We act, in turn, within a given ‘field’; that is, the social (placial) arena in which we are placed, both physically and hierarchically (Hillier and Rooksby 2005: 22-24). Our actions within a specific place are a demonstration of habitus, and Marcel Mauss undertakes an explication of human action in the form of body techniques, or ‘the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies’ (1979: 97). He maintains that body techniques are culturally specific and socially inscribed, and offers the example of the act of digging. According to his observations during the First World War, British soldiers struggled to use French-made spades, and, as a consequence, could only work productively with British spades (1979: 99). For Mauss, like Bourdieu, our body techniques are a product of sociality. The particular corporeal habitus of a given culture is therefore acquired through education, which, Mauss avows, is ultimately a form of imitation: effectively, mimetic representation of the body, which he describes as ‘man’s first and most natural instrument’ (1979: 104). Mauss’s theorisation of body techniques underscores more overtly than does Bourdieu the role of the body in the generation of structures and codes through which members of a particular social group can understand one another, but, as interesting as Mauss’s theorisations of bodily movement are, they remain flawed through their gender bias and occasional anecdotal basis. I suggest Mauss’s writing on body techniques is better understood as a point of departure from which to examine in more detail the body’s movement through space.
The body techniques of the street gang in Los olvidados are striking. Most conspicuous of all in the opening scene, perhaps, is the imitation of bestial behaviour during the make-believe bullfight. The extreme close-up shot of the toothless boy, grimacing and grunting like a bull, extends Buñuel’s anti-aesthetic stance from shot composition to the presentation of the body within the shot. There are parallels to be drawn here between this extreme close-up and similar shots of the impoverished Hurdanos in Tierra sin pan. This is more than a mere allusion to Buñuel’s earlier film, as Jones (2005: 25) would have it; it forms the basis of a noticeable link between the two films as the boundary between human and animal becomes increasingly blurred throughout the narrative. In terms of Los olvidados, animal imagery is pertinent to my exploration of the place-world within the film and I will return to this point in my discussion of the psychological persistence of place within the body. There follows a shot of a smaller boy, known in the script simply as Chamaquito,12 as he dexterously scales a column, monkey-like, in the courtyard before we see Jaibo, newly-escaped from the correctional facility, as he swiftly vanishes into the crowd on the street to evade the patrolling police. In the vein of Bourdieu’s habitus as a structured and structuring set of dispositions, the gang’s corporeal adroitness is both a product of their disadvantaged place-world of Mexico City’s slums and a perpetuation of their place within its hierarchy.
A key feature of the children’s behaviour in the film is hurried motion. The boys’ rapid movement suggests their agility and intimate knowledge of their place-world, and is indicative of the youths’ body techniques and how these are used to their advantage in place. More so than in other of the director’s films in this period, especially those in urban settings such as El Bruto or La ilusión viaja en tranvía, the characters’ actions unfold at an often frantic pace. We can think of the mid-distance shot of Pedro, Jaibo and Pelón sprinting back towards the marketplace after they have savagely beaten the blind beggar Don Carmelo, the high-angle shot of Pedro running away from home after stealing his mother’s bread and meat, or Jaibo’s flight from the police officers that leads them to shoot him at the end of the film. For the disenfranchised boys of Los olvidados, hurried motion is part of their criminal world and crime is an artisan practice. After their unsuccessful attempt to steal Don Carmelo’s bag as he sings in the marketplace, the boys’ adroit criminality is evident in one striking scene in which the teenagers accost a legless man wheeling himself along in a trolley, stealing his wallet and jacket before lifting him out of his vehicle and kicking it down the street. The cinematography in this sequence demonstrates the actualisation of the boys’ habitus of criminality within their environment at the same as it augments the viciousness of the attack. The establishing shot tracks the disabled man as he pushes himself along the pavement, before this cuts to a high-angle depicting the gang as they emerge from outside of the frame. After the man refuses to give the boys his cigarettes, the camera remains at an objective distance, documenting the youths in their co-ordinated display of artisan criminality. Stealing his jacket and cigarettes, they leave the amputee powerless on the pavement before running out of the frame in various directions. Their familiarity with criminality simultaneously reflects their position within the micro-structure of the slums and their own role in perpetuating this structure. Habitus, as Bourdieu indicates, is ‘lex insita, laid down in each agent by his earliest upbringing, which is the precondition not only for the co-ordination of practices but also for the practices of co-ordination’ (1977: 81). In a similar vein, Javier Vargas writes that the film’s exterior locations – the marketplace, the square, the avenue – represent ‘the violent motherland that feeds with a cruel condescension the fortuitous union of intentions that the adolescents practice’ (2003: 95, my emphasis.).13 As evidenced in the gang’s assault on the legless man and underscoring the narrative more generally, a practice shown to be firmly entrenched in the youths’ habitus, which is cruelly encouraged by the State that fails them, is the denigration of the body.
‘Broken body-broken city’
Here, I am thinking primarily of the disabled/disintegrated body and the ways in which Buñuel’s examples of these bodies are positioned within the place-world of the slums. Tuñón highlights Buñuel’s focus in his cinema on what she terms the ‘broken body’,14 evident already in the infamous eye-slitting close-up three minutes in to Un Chien andalou. For Tuñón, the pattern is duplicated at the start of Los olvidados with the medium close-up of the toothless grimace of the boy pretending to be the bull (2003: 78). It should come as no surprise that corporeal perfection is untenable within the slums, but Buñuel shows us that corporeal integrity is similarly unlikely: Don Carmelo is blind; the unknown man in the wooden trolley is legless; the mother of Meche and Cacarizo is permanently prostrate in agony.15 Even the bodies of the street children themselves are fragmented cinematographically: ironically, in the scene where the gang accost the legless man, Jaibo’s legs are introduced into the frame as the amputee wheels into him; Marta and Meche are similarly cut off at the waist in two separate scenes as the camera focuses on their bare legs as they wash; Julián’s lifeless legs protruding from behind a bush communicate to the viewer his death as Jaibo clubs him with a branch; Pedro is cut off at the shoulders as he peers under the bed to be met by the bleeding body of Julián in the dream sequence. Bikandi-Mejias (2000: 24) notes that this kind of somatic dismemberment via the lens is common in Buñuel’s cinema, and is an example of the grotesque mode, itself part of the carnivalesque tradition. This observation is especially relevant to Viridiana, with its gargantuan pastiche of da Vinci’s The Last Supper, though Bikandi-Mejias is certainly not incorrect when he points out the links that this dismemberment of the body has with the modernist art tradition of the collage (2000: 24).
Tuñón suggests that the broken body has its counterpart in the broken city. For her, the two are inextricably linked, as ‘the city that Buñuel presents seems more like a broken city, disintegrated, sick and weeping, like the bodies of various characters in the film’ (2003: 80).16 We can therefore glean a symbiotic relationship between the place-world and its inhabitants predicated on the inescapable presence of the spatial and corporeal Other. The visibility of the deformed-disabled-disenfranchised body in the protagonists’ place-world is augmented by the ubiquitous yet disintegrated nature of that place-world itself. Discrete locations such as the marketplace, the domineering skeleton of the social security hospital under construction and Cacarizo and Meche’s family’s stable, surface repeatedly as ‘snapshots’ of this place-world and its various appendages. Indeed, the editing of the film, passing back and forth between discrete and fragmented – though familiar – locations, is reminiscent of the collage technique that Bikandi-Mejias writes about. On both occasions that Pedro is outside of the slums – the sequence in the upmarket district of the city in which he is approached by a paedophile, reminiscent of the scene in the bicycle market in Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri di biciclette (1948), and the scenes that take place in the farm school he is sent to after being falsely convicted of stealing a knife from his boss during his apprenticeship in a blacksmith’s shop – his presence seems incongruous, and he will ultimately return to his place.
The abject and the idiolocal
In considering the ways in which the abject manifests itself within Pedro’s place-world, I am shifting my focus from habitus and the body to idiolocalism and the self. Idiolocalism is based on reciprocity; that is, how the self is marked by the places it has been in, and the ways in which the self sets out to meet places (Casey 2001a: 688).17 The abject, as theorised by Julia Kristeva, is rooted in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis and implies a dissolution of corporeal and psychological boundaries. The experience of abjection, for Kristeva, is a necessary primer of human culture, bound up in part with the feeling of revulsion in order to protect us from that which threatens us. Faeces and the human corpse are the prime examples of the abject due to their rupturing of somatic and psychological boundaries:
These bodily fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such waste drops so that I might live, until, from loss to loss, nothing remains in me and my entire body falls beyond the limit – cadere, cadaver. (Kristeva 1982: 3)
Kristeva’s recourse to Lacanian psychoanalysis, in particular the induction of the infant into the world of the symbolic as it begins to learn language, and its distancing from the maternal via the father, suggests that the female – and more accurately/acutely – maternal body is inherently abject. Although abjection is a defence mechanism to protect us from threats to our sense of self, importantly, Kristeva makes clear that there is pleasure [jouissance] within the abject, an ecstasy which derives from our loss of self in a pre-Oedipal state and to which we must not submit (1982: 9).
The abject in Los olvidados is communicated primarily through the maternal body, that of Pedro’s mother, Marta. However, it is also discernible on a spatial level, and forms part of the street-boys’ place-world. Evans has convincingly argued that Freud’s notion of the uncanny is palpable in this film. This feeling of uneasy familiarity, manifests itself in the spatial as well as the corporeal, arising ‘from the projection of unconscious fears and desires onto one’s surroundings and the people with whom one comes into contact’ (1995: 81). Likewise, Casey stresses that the feeling of alienation we may experience in place is a psychosomatic symptom of displacement and that, at the heart of our implacement, there is always the threat of the unheimlich – literally, the unhomely (2009: 34). I would argue that the abject is also present, permeating the matrix of self and place through idiolocalism. For Kristeva, the abject is ‘essentially different from “uncanniness,” more violent, too’, due to the fact that ‘abjection is elaborated through a failure to recognize its kin; nothing is familiar, not even the shadow of a memory’ (1982: 5). Besides the allusion to the uncanny nature of dwelling, Casey makes no reference to the abject within the place-world, yet it is pertinent when we consider David Sibley’s comments on exclusion and the Other. Sibley is concerned with the socio-spatial exclusionary practices of cultural hegemony against the Other – gypsies, the poor, racial minorities – and he proposes that, to understand these practices of exclusion, it is important to understand abjection (1995: 11). The social, spatial and economic divide between affluent suburbs and poor inner-city slums is an example of strongly classified spatial units. According to Sibley, clearly delineated boundaries are used to minimise the threat of contagion or pollution – literal as in disease or figurative as in a threat to the power structure – and strong classification serves to reinforce the process of abjection (1995: 80-1). Kristeva suggests that the condition of the abject resides in the spatial:
The one by whom the abject exists is thus a deject who places (himself),separates (himself), situates (himself), and therefore strays […]. Instead of sounding himself as to his ‘being’, he does so concerning his place: ‘Where am I?’ instead of ‘Who am I?’ (1982: 8)
The slums Buñuel depicts in Los olvidados are a clearly characterised by the abject, as they are by Pedro’s search for identity, and the two come together in Pedro’s nightmare.
As an exploration of the fantastic within a predominantly realist narrative, critics have often used Pedro’s dream as a springboard for a discussion of Buñuel’s depiction of Freudian iconography. Like Evans, I consider the mise-en-scène here key to any psychoanalytical reading of the film, and Evans’s is a particularly sharp reading. The focus, as he rightly identifies, is on the feminine (Marta). Indeed, he acknowledges the links that Pedro’s mother has to the abject. In the dream, Marta appears as ‘the monstrous-feminine […] castrator and not, following classic Freudian theory, as castrated, as dreaded agent, as victim of mutilation’ (1995: 85). One aspect of mise-en-scène that Evans touches on is perhaps the most obvious: the domestic setting. Pedro’s dwelling provides neither rest nor emotional or physical sustenance. Here, it acts as the arena in which the dangers of the outside world are played out; thus, Julián is subjected to another agonising death under Pedro’s bed while Jaibo, in stealing the chunk of meat offered by Marta, usurps the affection that Pedro craves and reinforces the prophetic bond between the pair. The ramshackle abode is foreboding in its familiarity, a feeling that disquiets the viewer who has seen it before, though not quite as dark as it is now. Neither has the viewer seen Marta as she now appears: the abject mother, seductive and repulsive.
We could suggest a corollary between Marta’s body and the city here. Victoria Rivera-Cordero argues that in Los olvidados, the parallels between the motherland and the mother are clear: both fail their children (2006: 315). Buñuel’s film is also nourished by historico-mythical Mexican archetypes of the treacherous female – La Malinche – the indigenous Nahua translator for the conquistador Hernán Cortés who became his lover and mother of his son.18 As Casey clarifies, ‘idiolocality invokes the subject who incorporates and expresses a particular place’ (2001a: 688-89). The body of the mother becomes idiolocalised in Pedro’s imagination – that is, Marta becomes a cipher for her son’s place-world, expressing the idios not only of the slum but of the nation. Through the figure of Marta in the dream, the tenacity of place for Pedro is revealed. To this end, Vargas’s view that ‘the violent motherland […] feeds with a cruel condescension the fortuitous union of intentions that the adolescents practice’ (2003: 95) obtains special significance. As mentioned, numerous Buñuel scholars have referred to Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude to underscore Marta’s relationship to the Mexican paradigm of La Malinche. By positioning the character of Pedro’s mother within a national narrative of female betrayal, the violence of the patriarchal nation is implicitly feminised: through the figure of Marta, the idios of ‘the violent motherland’ is expressed, and her disdainful attitude towards her son encourages Pedro’s delinquent acts. Furthermore, Vargas’s use of the verb ‘feeds’ is conspicuous: the culinary metaphor resonates with Kristeva’s discussion of food-stuffs as abject – a point I come to now – as well as recalling the chunk of gristle that Marta offers her son in his dream. Blood as a visual trope is key here: the bloody flesh symbolises the giving of life between mother and child (snatched by Jaibo) at the same time as it points to Jaibo’s murder of Julián as he reappears, bleeding under the bed (see Figure 9).
Figure 9: Feeding the violent habits. (Ultramar Films)
Casey explains what he terms the ‘incoming’ aspect of idiolocality, whereby the self bears the traces of the places it has been (2001a: 688). This psychologically-rich resonance of the place-world is important here. In the dream sequence, Marta is the incoming, exiling, castrating, abject mother who horrifies her son not with her lack, but with her abundance. The bloody slab of flesh that she offers her son could be read, as Evans (1995: 86) says, as her torn vagina, an instance of oral pleasure and loss of self, given that ‘food is the oral object (the abject) that sets up archaic relations between the human being and the other, its mother’ (Kristeva 1982: 75-76). This torn vagina, essentially formless and without border, as is the abject, is the symbol of a perverse gestation-generation that has its links with the nascent modernisation of the protagonists’ place-world. The recurring example of this supposed modernisation is the uncanny iron skeleton of the unfinished social security hospital that forms the backdrop to several key scenes of violence within the film, most notably Jaibo’s murder of Julián and the gang’s assault on Don Carmelo. The unfinished hospital should stand as an example of modern Mexican infrastructure under President Alemán’s modernisation project, yet it, like the vagina, remains formless and abject, bound up with criminality and murder. For Pedro, this is a specific place within his environment that has indelibly marked his self through trauma. Casey (2001a: 688) explains that trauma experienced in a particular place engraves that place in our psyche. Pedro wishes to stay with Marta – the familiar/ familial – but he cannot, and is condemned to a life beset by abjection, in a state of exile, looking for his place, rather than his self. His search for his mother, in this sense, is re-enacted in his movement through the dense place-world of the slum. The viewer, too, is often made to wonder as to Pedro’s location: when he awakens in the garbage heap and is hounded by two vagabonds; when he finds work at the shabby fairground; when he is approached by a paedophile in a commercial district; and when his corpse is tossed into the rubbish dump at the film’s climax. He is, to quote Kristeva, an exile asking himself ‘where?’. Furthermore, the film’s ending is Pedro’s irrevocable transformation into the abject. The image of his corpse rolling down the hill into the garbage heap, itself an abject space, indicates that Pedro has ultimately been subsumed by his place-world, forever taken over by the abject.
Finally, that the suburb is filled with animals is relevant, both in terms of the abject and the idiolocality of place. Animals link the inhabitants of the slums: Pedro’s mother breeds chickens; Meche and Cacarizo’s family have a makeshift stable filled with chickens, goats and donkeys; Pedro and Ojitos are followed by a pack of stray dogs in the marketplace at night; the double exposure technique used during Jaibo’s death throes superimposes the image of a mangy canine. Besides the pertinent symbolic link between humans and their animal counterparts in the film, animals are also metaphors for the traumatic effects of place on the characters. The cockerel that bears witness to the boys’ savage beating of Don Carmelo in front of the imposing frame of the unfinished hospital has its parallel in the dog in the frame in the high-angle shot of Jaibo and Pedro speaking to Julián on his worksite prior to the latter’s murder which, in turn, has its parallel in the donkey in the stable where Jaibo kills Pedro. In short, the trauma of the slums is animalistic. Where the idios of place comes tenaciously into the body, Casey speaks of an impressionism of place, whereby ‘this presence is held within the body in a virtual state, ready to regain explicit awareness when the appropriate impression or situation arises’ (2001b: 415). Thus, in the chicken coup shortly after Pedro’s arrival on the farm school for delinquent boys, he clubs a chicken to death in the same fashion as Jaibo beats Julián and Marta beats the cockerel earlier in the film. Although it is only shown briefly, Pedro’s etching on the wall of the isolation room immediately after this incident further represents this. It depicts one bird clubbing another to death – the impressionism of place represented via the bestial self (see Figure 10). This etching acquires an even deeper significance when we consider that, as Polizzotti notes, the cocky Jaibo is identified in the film script as ‘the bully [big rooster] of the group’ (2006: 59).19 The threat of life in the slums is reified for the viewer through the conflation of man and beast, and the idios of place therefore evokes the habitus of violence even when Pedro is away. Furthermore, the animalistic is a form of the abject, as Kristeva points out: ‘[t]he abject confronts us, on the one hand, with those fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal’ (1982: 12). Her use of the word ‘territories’ is interesting here as the children in the film are not simply shown to be acting on animal impulses; their own territory is rendered abject through its connection to the bestial, evident already from the opening scene and the toothless boy’s bovine-like mimesis.
Figure 10: A bestial reproduction of life in the slums. (Ultramar Films)
Nazarín
An unlikely hero
Octavio Paz commends the artistic vision of Nazarín, writing:
These films [L’Âge d’or, Los olvidados, Robinson Crusoe, Nazarín] can be enjoyed, and judged, as works of cinema but also as something belonging to the broader and more permanent universe of those works, each one of them valuable, that have the aim of both revealing human reality to us and showing us a way to transcend it. (2012: 41)20
I share Paz’s sentiments regarding the transcendental nature of Los olvidados and Nazarín, both in relation to their poetic nature as well as their profound humanism, but without subscribing to the dismissive view that the bulk of Buñuel’s more commercial Mexican features have little of worth to show us. Edwards posits a degree of similarity between the two films in that they share a straightforward storyline. In terms of the subject matter, however, Edwards affirms that Nazarín differs from Los olvidados in its more complex, episodic structure. In the latter, perspective is limited as the viewer almost always sees the same group of characters whereas the former is much more ‘panoramic’, in Edwards’s view, representing ‘Nazarín’s journey along the highway and byways of life’ (1982: 135). This can be applied to my spatial reading of the two films. I will continue in the same geographical-philosophical vein to investigate the extent to which Nazarín’s habitation is successful. In addition to the question of habitation and how this is given representation in the film, my reading will be informed by another aspect of the place-world suggested by Casey: that of landscape.
The film’s opening sequence centres on the squalid tenement block, on the top floor of which Nazarín has taken up lodgings. Ironically, this dilapidated block is named Mesón de los Héroes [Lodge of Heroes], a title that parodies its eclectic mix of residents: working-class labourers, groups of children playing in the courtyard and a gang of heavily made-up prostitutes. Although the narrative begins in the city, as a point of contrast with the various locations within the impoverished neighbourhoods of Mexico City in Los olvidados, the initial action in Nazarín, before the protagonist sets out into the world, is contained almost solely within this housing block. Shortly afterwards, Nazarín calls to señora Chanfa, the hardened landlady of the Mesón, as he has been robbed yet again. The interior of his apartment is sparse; in the shooting script it is described as ‘bordering on poverty’ (Buñuel 1958: 9),21 a description that even holds back somewhat from the ascetic mise-en-scène as shown on screen. The spatial dynamics already at play in the opening sequence are significant: not by chance has Nazarín taken up residence on the upper floor of the building, removed from those around him. The similarities between Buñuel’s pair of preachers, Nazarín and Simón, are patent: both are removed, to varying degrees, from the sphere of everyday life, and thus this opening sequence is to be understood in terms of its role as a prefiguration of what is to come as Nazarín sets out on his peripatetic path. Furthermore, in terms of habitation, the film immediately foregoes any connection between character and place, for Nazarín happily leaves behind his place in the city in favour of a life roaming the countryside after the prostitute Ándara has set fire to his room. Nazarín tells his stupefied friend and fellow priest, Don Ángel, that he wishes to accept alms and move to the countryside, ‘where I will feel close to God’. Settled dwelling here is not a home as such and place becomes mere location, and it is telling that in their conversation with Father Nazario, the engineers at the beginning of the film who are working to connect the tenement block to the power grid conclude of the priest that he is ‘not trying to better [his] position’, an insight which invites both a socio-economic and a literal (spatial) interpretation.
The events that unfold in the tenement block communicate the protagonist’s detachment on a spatial level but they also reveal more about his detachment from the realities of the body in one scene in particular. Following her brawl with Carmella, another prostitute, Ándara arrives at the priest’s quarters in the middle of the night with a grisly flesh wound on her shoulder. The two then begin the first of several theological discussions. Ándara wishes to know if the dead have any realisation of their passing; Nazarín responds, ‘your soul knows it, and it’s immortal’. Though they will later attempt to emulate Nazarín’s way of living, this is the first indication that the viewer gets of the chasm between the priest and his two female followers who, unlike their messiah, exhibit a patent preoccupation with the flesh. Echoing Evans’ reading of the bloody chunk of meat in Pedro’s dream sequence in Los olvidados, Fuentes sees in Ándara’s flesh wound a visual marker of her sex (1993: 131). Similarly, his second ‘disciple’ Beatriz is immediately depicted as obsessed with the carnal through her sporadic convulsions brought on by her vivid, erotic fantasies. During Ándara’s fight with Carmella, a close up shot of Beatriz’s face, blinking rapidly, signals her first reverie, where she fantasises about her machista ex-lover Pinto and bites his lip in a paroxysm of sadomasochistic erotic frenzy until he bleeds. As I will suggest, both Ándara and Beatriz’s integral connection to the corporeal serves to anchor them both in a more functional place-world through habitation. This connection is alien to Nazarín.
Nazarín’s habitus, conditioned by the spiritual, leads to his disengagement with place, much like Simón. However, unlike Simón, his detachment from his surroundings is made all the more notable given that the protagonist is constantly confronted by place and by people. After Ándara has set fire to his apartment to remove all traces of her stay there, he sets out into the world. During Nazarín’s trajectory, the viewer witnesses his brief stint as a manual labourer laying a train line in the countryside, his attempt to cure Beatriz’s feverish niece in her home village, his willingness to come to the aid of the moribund members of a plague-ridden town, his arrest on the outskirts of a third town and his humiliating march along with other prisoners back to Mexico City. What is striking here is that, against the ever-changing backdrop to the film, Buñuel’s protagonist remains the same. For instance, as Nazarín passes Beatriz in her home village, the latter is astounded that, having left the city, the two have once more crossed paths, proclaiming the serendipitous reunion to be a miracle. Nazarín’s deadpan response, ‘Why, child? The world is very big’, betrays the priest’s disengagement with the material plane, of which place is a fundamental aspect, bound up with corporeal awareness. As Joseph Grange writes, ‘[w]e sense vastness because our body feels its own limits and thereby grasps the “feel” of voluminous space’ (1985: 74). It appears that the priest has not grasped the feel of voluminous space, as the world seems for him a plane of unremarkable encounters. To this end, it is also fitting to note Nazarín’s repeated use of the term ‘road/way’: when abandoning the job he has just been given among the labourers laying the train track he excuses himself by saying ‘I am on my way’; later, he encourages the dying woman in the plague-infested town to think that life ‘is only a road’. In effect, a physical-metaphysical binary pair forms around the idea of the road and the journey, ironically undermined through the protagonist’s disengagement with place, and the myriad travelling shots of Nazarín and his female followers are offset by the priest’s solely figurative use of the word ‘road’.
Nazarín’s unsuccessful habitation
Don Willis offers a pertinent analysis of Nazarín, shedding light on the social – rather than the spiritual – repercussions of Nazarín’s estrangement. For Willis, ‘[t]he primary polarity in Nazarin is not faith/lack of faith or even theism/ humanism, but passion/detachment’. Though not inherently concerned with the spatial, Willis’s argument is conducive to an exploration of the protagonist’s habitus:
Nazarin is mild, likeable, unprepossessing, and has a slight self-consciousness of movement that seems to come from self-effacement. But his subdued and matter-of-fact manner, although it effectively stifles self-importance or self-righteousness, also unfortunately stifles in him the possibility of spontaneity or responsiveness to others. (1978: 7)
The impossibility of spontaneity of response is ultimately a stumbling block to the protagonist’s contemplation of his place-world and his implacement within it. In effect, we can say that Nazarín is defined from without. In his discussion of the identity of places and the dialogue between this and our personal experience of place, Relph posits that we can experience place as an existential outsider. By this, he intends ‘a self-conscious and reflective uninvolvement, an alienation from people and places, homelessness, a sense of the unreality of the world, and of not belonging’. Relph writes, ‘[f]rom the outside you look upon a place as a traveller might look upon a town from a distance; from the inside you experience a place, are surrounded by it and part of it’ (1976: 51; 49). Fittingly, Relph illustrates the concept of outsideness through the analogy of a traveller approaching a distant town, as Nazarín does several times throughout the film as he flits from village to village. Most telling, though, is the third town, where Nazarín and Ándara are arrested by the local police for the fire in Nazarín’s former tenement block. Here, both Ándara and Beatriz are shown to be actively engaged within the town’s social fabric: a tracking shot depicts Ándara begging for alms on residents’ doorsteps where she meets her admirer, the dwarf Ujo – played by Jesús Fernández, the same actor who appears in Simón del desierto as the goatherd – while Beatriz is shown at the communal water fountain, intending to wash the group’s dirty clothing when she is accosted by her ex-lover, Pinto. Ándara and Beatriz come into contact with place and with people; despite their nomadic existence with Nazarín, the two women are seen to be more successful in their habitation of place – they are engaged from within. By contrast, Nazarín is shown to be an existential outsider. He is never shown in the town; he remains among the ruins of a former edifice on a nearby hill, his elevated position negating his active implacement and encouraging his conscious state of existential outsideness.
As opposed to the frenetic movements of the children in Los olvidados, Nazarín demonstrates little commitment to physical action. His stint as a railroad labourer is short-lived; he does not protest his arrest, and when he is later locked in a cell with other prisoners, he does not defend himself against the brutish criminal accused of parricide. He simply cannot be seen to hold place through his docile body, which suggests a disjuncture between the protagonist and the various locations of the narrative. Explaining the changing nature of the place-world – as is the case in Nazarín as the group moves from town to town – Casey says that, as we journey through this, ‘we live out our bodily habitudes in relation to the ever-changing spatiality of the scenes we successively encounter’ (2001a: 687). Nazarín’s failure to demonstrate the required bodily habitudes indicates his disengagement with situation, a term I use to encompass both location and the action that takes place there. The sequence in which the priest agrees to work as a casual labourer on the construction of the railway line is paradigmatic here. As the other, indignant workers warn the protagonist that he has taken the place of several unemployed men, he makes to leave. Continuing his journey, he stops briefly twice – once after the man overseeing the workers pelts him with a stone and again to pluck a leaf from an olive tree. In his apparently contrived appreciation of nature, Nazarín is shown to be irrevocably distanced from materiality and the consequences of his actions: as he stops to admire the tree, gunshots ring out off-screen, a result of the escalating tension between the boss and the workers caused by Nazarín’s hasty departure. Willis encapsulates this reading of the film: ‘[t]o Nazarin “nature” means “God”; but “nature”, in the film’s context, means “detachment”’ (1978: 6).
‘A nondescript landscape’: the banal landscape
Given that the camerawork in Nazarín largely avoids showing the open vistas of the Mexican countryside, here the term landscape must be considered independently of the romantic connotations it has come to acquire.22 Rather than thinking of landscape as simply a cluster of topographical features within the visual field of the observer, for Casey landscape provides an opportunity for the expansion of the geographical self. His argument is that ‘[t]he empty armature of place-cum-self needs to be fleshed out, in two opposed but complementary directions: downward into body and outward into landscape’ (2001a: 689). Landscape, then, is a derivative of place, gathering and giving unity to distinct yet contiguous places, and its function within the place-world is primarily one of demarcation, a necessary component of implacement through the borders that this brings with it:
In my embodied being I am just at a place as its inner boundary; a surrounding landscape, on the other hand, is just beyond that place as its outer boundary. Between the two boundaries – and very much as a function of their differential interplay – implacement occurs. Place is what takes place between body and landscape. Thanks to the double horizon that body and landscape provide, a place is a locale bounded on both sides, near and far. (Casey 2009: 29)
What is striking in terms of Nazarín, however, is that Casey’s model is not seen to function as expected, and I would argue that this appears to be due to deliberate choices on Buñuel’s part.
The film’s shooting script is revealing of these choices. After Nazarín has left his home in the city following the fire started there by Ándara, he first approaches the band of workers constructing the railway. A reverse tracking shot reveals Nazarín, who has seemingly appeared from nowhere, as the employer of the labourers walks towards him. In the mid-distance, primitive pylons stretch away across parched earth towards rolling hills. The script tells us the setting of this scene is simply ‘a broken landscape’ (Buñuel 1958: 42) and the aesthetic denotations of this direction suggest on a deeper level that the protagonist’s implacement here is destined to fail as the landscape itself is ruptured and broken.23 Later, Nazarín comes across a colonel and his wife travelling along with a priest. Their horse has broken its leg and Nazarín offers to help the party. The establishing shot here is not of Nazarín framed against a backdrop of prairies and hills – though the viewer does catch a brief glimpse of this – but of the horse’s head as the creature lies in the road. Indeed, given that the setting for this scene is described as ‘an ordinary landscape’ (Buñuel 1958: 55),24 any aesthetic appreciation on the viewer’s part should be incidental and transient. Likewise, when the trio approaches the plague-riddled village, the establishing shot is one of disease and death, showing a young victim perishing from his illness on the path leading to the village while other residents flee. Landscape is again secondary: to narrative, as the audience is encouraged to focus attention on the cause of the exodus and not on the ‘ordinary road’ (Buñuel 1958: 61);25 and apparently to Nazarín himself as he is initially shown approaching the village in the same aloof manner to which the viewer has become accustomed.
This intentional invisibility of landscape through its banalisation colludes with the protagonist’s neglect of his bodily realities to impede his implacement. Implacement occurs, as Casey has noted, in the arc between the body and its surrounding landscape. The border to the changing place-world is contained in landscape. The effect of Buñuel’s emphasis on a prosaic mise-en-scène is the dissociation of Nazarín from his environment. Furthermore, that the body is always located somewhere does not necessarily signify that the body is always securely in place. Nazarín is distanced from his corporeality; his body is therefore never fully in place. Unlike in Los olvidados, where the emphasis on corporeality and the claustrophobic nature of the children’s surroundings culminates in the representation of a dense, portending place-world, if we can indeed talk about an arc between body and landscape in Nazarín, this is quickly undone at both ends as the priest’s bodily awareness and, therefore, spatial awareness, appear of little concern.
The sick body
Nazarín subordinates of the realities of the body to his belief in the soul and this has implications for his engagement with place. As he exchanges the confines of his tenement block for the open countryside, the priest is seen to redouble his efforts to focus his attention on the metaphysical. The principle way that this is shown visually is through food.26 Several times throughout the film, the characters are seen to eat and drink. Though their meals are modest, the act of eating is given purposeful representation. Early in the film, Nazarín is seen to eat a plate of tortillas prepared for him by señora Chanfa, the landlady of the lodge, ‘with great appetite’, while a little later, still in his apartment after agreeing to shelter Ándara, he is shown ‘savouring the last mouthful’ of another meal (Buñuel 1958: 15; 29).27 This is last time that the spectator witnesses Nazarín eating, yet during their amblings, Ándara is seen to eat with gusto a warmed taco and to drink from a water jug in the police station after she and Nazarín have been arrested. Even before the group has abandoned the city, she and Beatriz are shown enjoying a serving of pulque shortly before Ándara, ensconced in the priest’s apartment, nursing her stab wound, uses a bottle of tequila ‘for the wounds on the inside and the outside’, and is then seen to drink from the bowl of bloodied water used to bathe her wounds to slake her alcohol-induced thirst. For Nazarín, though, the act of eating becomes conspicuous through its absence during his wanderings, confirming the importance that he places on succour as opposed to sustenance. As I will show, this position appears reversed in the film’s conclusion.
The need for material sustenance signals a healthy body, and Ándara and Beatriz are in tune with their corporeal needs. However, in contrast to those of the protagonists, there is a phalanx of unhealthy bodies in this film. If disabled and disfigured bodies populate the slums of Los olvidados, in Nazarín there are diseased and dying bodies. The sequence in the plague-ridden village is crucial here. The plague is a virulent strain in Buñuel’s cinema, marked not only by the ailing body, but the dysfunctional one, too. Nowhere in Buñuel’s cinema is this more evident than in the languid stupor and descent into madness of the Nóbiles and their dinner guests in El ángel exterminador. Interestingly, actress Silvia Pinal remarked of this film: ‘we all came to the conclusion that it was a plague [caused by] our faults, our aggression […] that doesn’t let us move or progress’.28 Most of the attention given to Buñuel’s depiction of pestilence in Nazarín has focused on the dialogue as the Father Nazario attempts to administer the last rites to Lucía, the dying woman, and the ways in which her insistence on the carnal comforts of her lover, Juan, are at odds with Nazarín’s vision of religious transcendence.29 This episode, beyond the traditional physical/metaphysical binary through which it has frequently been viewed, can be read in light of the sick body to further show Nazarín’s disengagement with place.
The plague sequence begins with a long shot of an ‘ordinary road’ that leads to the damned village as the residents flee. The trio is then confronted with a dying man on the road. Faulkner’s (2004: 145) comment that Ándara and Beatriz are representative of the body rather than the spirit is pertinent here, for both women approach the village and the man with caution, conscious of their own mortality. Nazarín, however, is quick to come to the man’s aid. Eamonn Rodgers believes that his manner contains a masochistic streak:
Though in practice he has to cope with situations where he is called upon to show concern for others, engagement with what lies outside himself is seen essentially as a masochistic search for sufferings and trials which will test his self-discipline. (1995: 52)
Nazarín’s perverted self-interest suggests his engagement with the sick body is essentially hollow: the ambiguity contained within the infirm and the afflicted, between life and death, enables him to focus his attention on the souls of the dying and, through a masochistic and narcissistic process, his own. Seen another way, the threat of degenerative illness to the body is re-envisaged through the priest’s habitus as a generative force for the spirit. Such is the protagonist’s visible sense of satisfaction during this episode that he is described in the script as ‘a different man. It could be said that this is his environment and he takes pleasure in it’ (Buñuel, 1958: 65, my emphasis).30 That Buñuel specifies Nazarín’s enjoyment here is interesting: ethically, Ándara’s enjoyment of food and tequila and Beatriz’s daydreams of carnal pleasure are ultimately no more shameful than Nazarín’s masochistic revelling in disease. Indeed, when coupled with Faulkner’s view that the two women stand for the body to Nazarín’s spirit, and Willis’s view that Nazarín’s displays of emotion are predominately ‘mechanical’ (1978: 6), the two women could be said to exhibit a greater morality – certainly within the Buñuelian narrative – in that they embrace their carnal condition.
Trigg explains that, in illness, our relationship to the places that we inhabit is mediated through that illness:
Figure 11: Disorientating, disembodying illness. (Producciones Barbachano Ponce)
the whole world is mediated through the ill body, so that place and time assume a highly singular appearance that conforms to the strains of the human body. In such a case, […] the intimacy between self and world, so far assumed as a taken-for-granted given of the life-world, is experienced as a self-conscious lack. (2012: 114)
In this way, the tacit engagement between place and self is undermined by our ill body and we feel estranged from both. The estrangement brought on by infection is communicated visually in this episode. One of the most remarkable shots of the film occurs at this moment: a child is seen stumbling along a side-road, dragging behind her a bed sheet. The frame acts here not as a stable reference point, but rather as a destabilising one as the child almost wanders out of its left edge and the reverse tracking shot reveals more linen hung out to dry, momentarily obscuring the lower right-hand part of the shot (see Figure 11). This shot ‘contains all the desolation of the disease; its effect, the way it empties the world, rather than its showy, baroque horrors. The sheet is all the girl has left of her home’ (Wood 1993: 47). In his zeal to come to the aid of the plague victims, Nazarín aligns himself with diseased and defunct bodies. After entering the village and consulting with the mayor, the trio is shown going into a house to comfort a crying infant. The body of the child’s recently deceased mother is quickly covered by the priest with a sheet, leaving only the feet visible (a shot reminiscent of Evvie’s dead grandfather’s feet protruding from under the blanket in The Young One) and it is not coincidental that Nazarín charges Ándara and Beatriz with the infant’s care while he focuses his attention on the dead mother.
Following a brief scene in which Juan, the lover of the dying woman, Lucía, tells the town’s mayor that government help to deal with the crisis is arriving, Buñuel cuts to a disorientating shot of Beatriz, from the shoulders down, as she washes a cloth in a bowl of water in Lucía’s house. Once again, the protagonist’s thoughts are of the hereafter and he advises Lucía: ‘think that this life is only a road’. The exchange between the two as the dying woman refuses the last rites and calls out for the carnal comfort of her lover is well documented. Willis finds that ‘carnality is new to Nazarin’, and that the protagonist is compelled to confront ‘an order – personal, sexual – unknown to him’ (1978: 6). The clash of one order against another – one habitus against another – is never more jarring in Buñuel’s cinema. The protagonist does not belong, either in this place or to this order: when Juan returns, Nazarín and Beatriz are thrown out of the residence. Willis perceptively remarks that ‘Nazarin’s neutrality in physical affairs leaves him in effect bodiless’ (1978: 6) an assertion which renders his later sermon to the two women on the bittersweet nature of death – ‘Death is like that: happy and sad. Happy because it frees us from life’s chains and sad because we love our flesh’ – an empty platitude. To be rendered effectively bodiless is to be rendered without place:
If there are experiences in which my body does not figure, then these experiences will lack a here […]. Hence herelessness inheres in certain intellectual and mystical experiences in which we rejoin a conceptual or religious ‘there,’ an ‘on the other side’ […] that has no proper here. (Casey 2009: 51)
Crucially, Nazarín remains alone in his detachment from both body and place. Responding to Nazarín’s lamentation that he has failed Lucía after her lover returns and they are thrown out of the house, Beatriz exclaims, ‘I wanted that, too’, referring to the corporeal comfort that Juan can give his partner, rather than a desire that Nazarín should deliver Lucía’s soul to the religious ‘there’, as Casey would have it. Realising Beatriz’s engagement with the material aspects of the body – and therefore habitation – Nazarín leaves ‘doubly defeated’ (Buñuel 1958: 69).31
A return to place?: The film’s ending
The orthodox reading of the film’s ending is predicated on a religious-humanist binary. Encapsulating this view, Edwards concludes that ‘[f]rom the ashes of spiritual disillusionment, Nazarín is finally born again into the world, the priest rejected for the man’ (1982: 134). Though his reading of the film’s conclusion reveals a similar ingredience of religious pride, for Rubinstein there is no binary. He concludes that Nazarín, aware now of his unjustified pride, becomes a Christian through his new-found humility (1978: 240). My reading moves beyond the two in its central focus on what has frequently been invoked as a mere by-product of the protagonist’s secular/religious epiphany: place. Both Edwards and Rubinstein refer to this aspect of the film – for Edwards Nazarín is born again into the world, while for Rubinstein the landscape in the film’s conclusion is that of the Gospels – and it is instrumental in the viewer’s understanding of the ending.
Following his and Ándara’s arrest for the tenement block fire as they are camped on the hill above the third town they have visited, Nazarín is condemned to join a gang of prisoners frogmarched through a series of villages on their way back to the capital to be jailed. Locked in a cell and beaten by a man accused of parricide, he speaks with another prisoner who says: ‘you on the good side and me on the bad side. Neither of us are much good at all.’ This is the protagonist’s first epiphany, as the viewer witnesses a close-up shot of the priest’s face, lined now with contemplative realisation. Willis writes that ‘Buñuel, who took his hero out of the film a few scenes earlier, now restores him to it, with an altered perspective’ (1978: 7). Although I have argued that Buñuel encourages a schism between the priest and his place-world from the first moments of the film, rather than merely a few scenes previously as Willis claims, this contemplative realisation is one of purpose and place: to be taken out of the film and then returned to it, is to begin to be re(im) placed. This process will happen again at the very end of the film. When offered a pineapple by a roadside fruit seller while he is being marched through the countryside, Nazarín at first refuses the act of charity then tearfully returns to accept it. Fuentes has commented on the way in which the film’s cinematography works to communicate the idea of imprisonment in these final sequences:
In Nazarín’s walking through desolate landscapes (followed by multiple shots in many of which the camera, at ground level, focuses on the prisoners’ feet) there is a circular movement: the retracing of the paths that he set out on ‘to be closer to God’, only to find himself biting the dust, surrounded by reprobates. (1993: 134)32
Besides communicating a sense of confinement, the close-up shots of the prisoners’ feet as they walk are representative of the connection between the body and the earth. The protagonist’s body, previously denied, now begins to come to the fore. The bandage on his head is not an emulation of Christ’s crown of thorns, but a visual reminder of the priest’s own flesh after being attacked in the jail cell; where food and drink were previously rejected, the pineapple he accepts is an acceptance of his corporeal urgencies (see Figure 12). Also, Nazarín is affected by this gesture of kindness, shown to be weeping as he eventually walks out of the frame as the film ends. To be affected by a gesture is to be seen as being ‘here’ in every sense of the word, as ‘[p]art of the absoluteness of the here is that I cannot detach it from my body-self and thus from the place to which this body-self now gives access’ (Casey 2009: 52). Whether the ending represents Nazarín’s embrace of his fellow (wo)man or his renewed sense of Christian humility is debatable. Either interpretation, however, would necessitate a reciprocal relationship between self and place: the schism between the ethereal priest and his place-world has begun to diminish. In accepting his own flesh, integral to his self, Nazarín has started to move towards a primitive habitation. Edwards sums up this shift succintly:
Figure 12: Nazarín accepts his body and its place in the world. (Producciones Barbachano Ponce)
By the end of the film it is not so much a case of contrasting shots reflecting the gap between the world and Nazarín’s spirituality but of the gap narrowed progressively to the point where the priest is seen to be aware of his own worldliness. (1982: 136-7)
Conclusion: placing the body
My approach in this chapter is a departure from that of the previous two, representing a shift from depictions of exterior space towards the complex matrix of the body-self and place. Such an analysis necessitates an exposition of the reciprocal nature of place and body-self; a geographical-philosophical consideration of the place-world allows for this. In borrowing from the disciplines of phenomenology and geography, I have proposed film-focused readings with the aim of illuminating the representation of both self and place. The point I really wish to stress here is that my readings do not necessarily constitute a radical departure from common interpretations of these films, but are instead an inflection of their critical focuses: Evans’s discussion of the uncanny within the slums depicted in Los olvidados has links to Tuñón’s investigation of the symbiosis between the broken body and the broken city; similarly, Edwards’s reading of the narrative of Nazarín as the hero’s physical and spiritual journey into the world chimes with Willis’s assertion that at the heart of the narrative is a dichotomy of passion/detachment. A common theme in the often philosophical analyses of these films, then, is place – an aspect of the films which, building on previous readings that have paid less attention to this, I have brought to the fore.
Unlike those of Nazarín, the places in which the characters in Los olvidados are positioned are frequently cramped and dingy locations, augmenting the viewer’s sense of claustrophobia. The idios of place is writ large in this film. As I have shown, the attention that Evans draws to the Mexican national narrative of La Malinche within the film, embodied by Marta, is an expression of idiolocalism. Casey explains the power that place exerts over people as an emulsifier of entities, with the potential to determine interpersonal relationships as place comes lastingly, or fleetingly, into the self. In this way, the ‘how’ and ‘why’ are intrinsically linked to the ‘where’. The idiolocal, therefore, ‘is not merely idiosyncratic or individual; it is also collective in character’ (Casey 2009: 23). Marta thus represents the historical-mythical figure of the consuming, rejecting, abject Malinche and her inscription in place. The street children’s body techniques are generated by, and necessary to, their place-world of the slums as they interact with the discrete locations in their immediate surroundings.
Where the urchins of Los olvidados are shown to be immersed in their surroundings through Buñuel’s foregrounding of the body in this film, Nazarín repudiates his connection to his surroundings by denying his. Throughout the narrative he is aligned with the infirm and the dead body, praying for Beatriz’s sick niece and tending to the victims ravaged by plague. The dislocation of the protagonist from the needs of the body and the requirements of place is made all the more apparent by the constant presence of his female disciples, both of whom appear more in tune with their bodily needs. Beatriz’s preoccupation with the carnal leads to her hysterical outburst when her mother suggests that she loves Nazarín not because he is a priest, but because he is a man, while Ándara’s occupation as a prostitute is reinforced as her sweetheart Ujo proclaims: ‘I don’t care if you’re a whore, I want you to be with me.’ The women’s grounding in the physical is not a comment on their gender, however, as their male counterparts Ujo and Pinto are also shown to be so. In contrast, Nazarín’s love for the women is indistinguishable from his general sentiment towards the world, as when he explains that he loves them equally while gazing absently at the snail on his hand, before exiting the frame and leaving the two women to bed down alone as the trio are camped outside one of the nondescript villages. Nazarín therefore remains isolated from those around him in a position of constant existential outsideness, a position that becomes more apparent when the film script is taken into consideration. Unlike the script of Los olvidados, with its frequent references to specific locations such the stable belonging to Meche’s family and Pedro’s house, that of Nazarín works to preclude any such affinity between the protagonist and the places – often qualified simply as ‘ordinary places’ – in which he is shown. The ending of the film, however, suggests the protagonist’s will to return to the world through the acknowledgement of his body.
The difference in the way that the respective films depict the characters’ relationship to their immediate surroundings goes beyond questions of mise-en-scène. Pedro remains affected by the idiolocal, abject character of the slums even while at the farm school, and Nazarín remains aloof from himself and his contemporaries in his own squalid apartment. It is not, therefore, as straightforward a question as one of setting, of the affectivity of the urban versus that of the rural, as I signalled at the start of this chapter. Edwards understands this, writing that ‘Nazarín differs from Los olvidados, for there the same characters reappear throughout the film. Its focus is, therefore, limited, while the effect of Nazarín is much more panoramic’ (1982: 135). If we take the depiction of the character-place matrix to be the unspoken subject of Edwards’ observations here, his argument speaks to the one I have developed in this chapter. There are ultimately many similarities between the two films. For their thematic and stylistic differences, they are profoundly philosophical pieces of work. Their narratives both explore the connection between self and place through the use of the body, an immediate visual object for the viewer. As such, the story of both films can be read as a search for belonging, a concept that requires the collusion of self and place. This search for belonging can be explored more concretely via the various home-places that are represented in Buñuel’s films of this period, and this will be my focus in the following chapter.
1 For a discussion of the broad similarities and contrasting elements between Los olvidados and the Italian neorealist genre, see Jones (2005: 18-31).
2 Faber also finds flaws in a naturalist reading of the film, due to its tendency to assimilate the causes of social issues into a medical discourse. I would agree, given the vitriolic reactions by Buñuel’s bourgeois Mexican acquaintances to the film, suggesting the difficulty on the observer’s part of retaining a clinical, impartial distance from the world on screen.
3 [Era, y continúa siendo, necesario que el cine reflejase con toda la crudeza posible la miseria de un mundo, como único y desesperado modo de conseguir que de ese mundo desaparezca la miseria, o al menos como única manera de no justificarla y bendecirla].
4 For a detailed comparison of Galdós’s novel and Buñuel’s film, see Sinnigen (2008: 190-245).
5 The film was not embraced by every institution influenced by Catholicism. Producer Manuel Barbáchano Ponce’s application to shoot the film in Spain invited an excoriating response. The Francoist censors’ verdict, in the Buñuel archive of the Filmoteca Española, reads: ‘this film cannot be approved [for filming], not even in Mexico. It has a demonstrative crudeness, a narrative audacity that is negative from any point of view’. [no puede aprobarse esta película, ni aun localizándola en Méjico. Tiene una crudeza expresiva, un desenfado narrativo que resulta negativa desde todos los puntos de vista] (Nazarín [material de tesis]. 1958. Madrid, Filmoteca Española, Archivo Rosa Añover (AÑO/01/08).).
6 In an interview with the Mexican newspaper Novedades in 1950, Buñuel states that his motivation for making Los olvidados was a ‘strand or genre that I had been developing since I made “Tierra sin pan”’. [línea o género que venía cultivando desde que hice “Tierra sin Pan”] (Peña Ardid and Lahuerta Guillén 2007: 559). Numerous Mexican and European press cuttings related to the film are meticulously collated in Peña Ardid and Lahuerta Guillén’s volume. See especially pp. 466-633.
7 For Mark Polizzotti, Los olvidados would not have been possible without Tierra sin pan. In his view, ‘[w]hat Land without Bread and Los Olvidados share more than anything […] is a tone, both visual and moral. It is our sense of shock they mean to provoke, rather than our sense of humour; it is our complacency they seek to undermine’ (2006: 18).
8 It should be noted, however, that geographies with ‘other’ focuses (for example, queer or feminist), actively seek to reposition the ‘othered’ subject at the centre of spatial discourse. See, for example, Browne, Lim and Brown (2007). This is a strand of work within film studies, too. See, for instance, Wallace (2009) and Macleod (2014).
9 Casey’s earlier work on place explains the term ‘implacement’. Unlike its virtual homonym emplacement, implacement evokes the immediate placement of the subject and communicates the action of ‘getting in or into, and it carries connotations of immanence that are appropriate to the inhabitation of places’ (2009: 367, n. 9).
10 [[la] visión ideologizada, triunfalista, del México de la revolución institucionalizada].
11 [un melodrama atípico].
12 A chamaco is a colloquial Central American term used to mean a ‘kid’. The script is published in Peña Ardid and Lahuerta Guillén, eds. (2007: 77-300).
13 [la patria violenta que alimenta con cruel condescendencia la fortuita unión de voluntades que los adolescentes practican].
15 As a further example of the damaged body, in Mexican Spanish cacarizo means ‘pockmarked’, a reference perhaps to the scars left on the character’s face by some unknown illness.
16 [la ciudad que presenta Buñuel más parece una ciudad rota, desintegrada, enferma y supurante, como los cuerpos de varios de los personajes del filme].
17 Casey uses the term ‘lived body’. I suggest that the term ‘self ‘ indicates a more fairly weighted balance between the somatic and the psychological.
18 Rivera-Cordero’s parallel alludes to Octavio Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude (1961) and his theorisation of Mexico (Marta) as a Malinche-type figure while Mexicans (Pedro) are sons and daughters of la Chingada – the gash created by the verb chingar [to fuck] being essentially abject. For more on the intertextual references between Los olvidados and Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude, see Acevedo-Muñoz (2003: 74) and Faber (2003: 237-8).
19 The original Spanish is el gallón de la banda. Gallón carries a meaning of bully. However, the etymology renders the meaning ambiguous: gallo actually means rooster and the suffix –ón serves to make this larger and more imposing.
20 [Estas películas [L’Âge d’or, Los olvidados, Robinson Crusoe, Nazarín] pueden ser gustadas, y juzgadas, como cine pero también como algo perteneciente al universo más ancho y permanente de esas obras, preciosas entre todas, que tienen por objeto tanto revelarnos la realidad humana cuanto mostrarnos una vía para sobrepasarla].
21 [rayando en la miseria]. I use the term shooting script to refer to the version used during filming. There are other versions of this script, as Martínez Herranz (2011) details.
22 On Buñuel’s fixation on the mundane in this film and Figueroa’s role as director of cinematography, see Faulkner (2004: 142-3).
23 [un paisaje quebrado].
24 [un paisaje cualquiera].
26 Food is a prominent motif in the Buñuel’s cinema. Bikandi-Mejias (2000: 27-8) positions the use of food within a carnivalesque trope due to the focus that this brings to the body’s orifices. With specific reference to Nazarín, Rubinstein submits that ‘[i]n its perverse attentions to food, Nazarín stands second only to The Discreet Charm in the Buñuel canon’ (1978: 241).
27 [con gran apetito]; [mascando el último bocado].
28 [todos llegamos a una conclusión de que era una peste [causada por] nuestras fallas, nuestras agresiones […] que no nos deja movernos ni progresar]. ‘Interview with Silvia Pinal’, El ángel exterminador, dir. Luis Buñuel (Criterion, 2008) (on DVD) disc 2.
29 On this theme, see Fuentes (1993: 134) and Willis (1978: 6). De la Colina and Pérez Turrent view the ethics of the plague sequence as metonymic of those of the entire narrative, namely that ‘[t]he plague stands for evil. It is impossible to stop it, but within the plague one can give hope and love’ (1992: 109).
30 [un hombre distinto. Se diría que aquél es su ambiente y en él se goza].
32 [En este andar de Nazarín por desolados parajes (seguido por múltiples planos, en muchos de los cuales la cámara, a ras de tierra, enfoca los pies de los presos) hay como un movimiento circular: el desandar de los caminos por los que se lanzó «a estar más cerca de Dios», para encontrarse mordiendo el polvo y rodeado de gente baja].
