Tuesday, October 8, 2024 at 7:30pm
Carlos Saura's Los Golfos
361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn
Los Golfos, Carlos Saura, 1960, digital projection, 88 mins
For this evening at Light Industry we’ll be presenting a new restoration of Carlos Saura’s underappreciated first feature, Los Golfos (The Delinquents). Produced by another great Spanish filmmaker, Pere Portabella, the film concerns a group of charismatic young hoods in Madrid who pass their days with small-time grifts. One among them dreams of making his debut as matador, but lacks the money to do so. Together the gang hatches a plan: a job big enough to guarantee their friend his day in the bullring. Los Golfos has a bracing, documentary immediacy, and displays many of the hallmarks of postwar neorealism. Unfolding in an underclass milieu, it makes brilliant use of non-professional actors and was shot entirely on location, taking the viewer through the city’s dance halls and markets and back alleys. Saura, however, felt its loose, energetic, and largely improvised style had more in common with the Nouvelle Vague; Godard’s Breathless, notably, came out the same year, and Georges Sadoul argued at the time that Los Golfos was the more advanced of the two, though Saura modestly disagreed.
“When I filmed Los Golfos,” the director once explained to an interviewer, “I didn't pose anything to myself. The only thing that we wanted was to make films, and also, each within the realm of his possibilities, to contribute to changing the system of government in Spain, which seemed to us to be this enormous entity that did not let us tell the stories we wanted and kept us from expressing ourselves freely. Keep in mind that I was learning while I was making films. For me, each film is a new adventure, and perhaps for that reason I have embarked on adventures that seem foolish to some people, but I hope to continue doing it anyway.”
Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.