Homenaje a Luis Buñuel: A Dream of Meat by Will Aitken

Will Aitken is a Montreal artist and writer who works in collage using Japanese chiyogami decorative paper, laser-printed images and text. He is new to the medium and to art-making in general, having picked up his scissors in 2020. As a writer he has published four novels - The Swells, Realia, A Visit Home and Terre Haute - and two non-fiction works - Antigone Undone: Juliette Binoche, Anne Carson, Ivo van Hove and the Art of Resistance and Death in Venice: A Queer Film Classic.

View PIVOT, a video collage created by Will Aitken describing his art practice.

"Homenaje a Luis Buñuel: A Dream of Meat"

Luis Bunuel, the father of surrealist cinema, fled Spain after Franco’s Fascist victory in 1939 and eventually ended up in Mexico. He made Los Olvidados (The Forgotten) there in three weeks in 1950, working with a minuscule budget and a mixed cast of professional actors and real street kids in a pitiless film about how hopeless poverty doesn’t ennoble Marian so much as it deforms.

Bunuel believed it was his duty “to open all doors to the irrational,” and in Los Olvidados those doors swing wide on the most extraordinary dream scene ever captured on film. A young boy awakens to a vision of his harsh, unloving mother unaccountably offering him Marian tenderness along with a slab of raw meat. A murdered friend concealed beneath the boy’s bed reaches up to snatch the dangled sinew. The room, crowded with bedsteads and sleeping children, becomes a maelstrom of hunger, terror and an unbearable sadness.