Master Erasmus Mundus Crossways in European Humanities
Mexico in the films of Luis Buñuel
Dissertation Presented by Elsa Barreda Ruiz
Home University: Università degli studi di Bergamo Supervisor at Home University: Prof. Stefano Ghislotti
Facoltà di lingue e letterature straniere
Semester 2 University: University of St Andrews
Supervisor at Semester 2 University: Prof. Bernard P. E. Bentley School of Modern Languages / Spanish Department
Semester 4 University: Universidade Nova de Lisboa
Supervisor at Semester 4 University: Prof. Fernanda de Abreu Departamento de Línguas, Culturas e Literaturas Modernas
Secção de Estudos Espanhóis, Franceses e Italianos
Lisbon, June 2007
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A mis padres
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Contents
Introduction……………………………………………………………………................4 Chapter one Mexican Cinema and the Idea of a Nation
1.1 The Mexican Revolution and the Birth of Nationalism…………..………….6 1.2. The construction of a national identity……………………………………..11 1.3. The Golden Age of Mexican cinema……………………………………….13 1.4. Ideology and the allegories of Mexicanidad………………………………..17
Chapter two Luis Buñuel in Mexico
2.1. Antecedents of Luis Buñuel’s Artistic Trajectory………………………… 21 2.2 Luis Buñuel and the Mexican Film Industry………………………............. 25 2.3 Buñuel’s Mexico: Cultural Encounters and Continuities…………………...29
Chapter three Mexico in the Films of Luis Buñuel
3.1 Analysis of Susana, La ilusión viaja en tranvía and El río y la muerte….... 34 3.2 Patriarchy and the Mexican Family: Susana………………………………..36 3.3 Modernity, class and the illusion of change: La ilusión viaja en tranvía…..40 3.4 Machismo and the State: El río y la muerte……………………………….. 46 3.5 Female Desire: Susana, Lupita, Mercedes….................................................50
Conclusion………………………………………………………………………………55 Annexe Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Filmography…………………………………………………...56 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………….66
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Introduction
This is a work that studies the Mexican films of Luis Buñuel, concentrating on
the ways they were permeated by Mexican history and culture and how the author
adapted to the context of Mexican film industry by appropriating the diverse cultural
traits into his work.
Luis Buñuel directed 21films in Mexico. His capacities as a film director matured
in this country, where he made many of his most outstanding films. Yet, in very few
occasions has the dialectic relationship between the author and the culture of this
country been considered subject of study and nor have the films of this period of the
director’s career been regarded as representative of Mexican cinema or Mexican culture.
It is evident, however, that in these films Luis Buñuel managed to capture the essence of
Mexican idiosyncrasy and merge it with features of his artistic background, his native
country’s literary tradition and his particularly Spanish sense of irony and humour.
Moreover, these films give account of formal, aesthetic, ideological characteristics that
are specific of the Mexican film industry and particular to the period of the Golden Age,
and therefore can also be analysed as cultural texts that reflect on a particular socio-
economic context, and that influence the outcome of his work.
We have, therefore, set out from the consideration that the ways in which Buñuel
adapted to the Mexican cinema narrative paradigm provide with an understanding of the
way he saw and embrace his adoptive country and therefore we pose the question of
what is then, the Mexico that can be read in his films?
The first chapter is an overview of the historical antecedents that gave rise to
Mexican nationalism and of the development of the film industry during the years
known as the Golden Age. In it, we go through the elements that favoured cinema as a
pivotal medium for the construction of a national identity and the endorsement of the
ideology of the post revolutionary governments; we describe how this was accomplished
through the delineation of a set of aesthetic and ideological values that constituted the
narrative paradigm trademark of national cinema
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Chapter two focuses on Buñuel’s artistic trajectory and the way his Mexican
work has been regarded by critical readings. By analysing some of these readings, we
sort out the difficulties of analysing the work of an auteur and surrealist artist within the
context of a national cinema largely regarded as constrictive and ideologically dominant.
We intend to widen these precepts in order to see Buñuel’s Mexican films as cultural
texts that cannot be separated from the context in which they were made but that are also
embodiments and reflection of the author’s specific choices, artistic trajectory, and
personal condition as exile.
Chapter three comprises the analysis of three of Buñuel’s Mexican films: Susana,
La ilusión viaja en tranvía and El río y la muerte. In them we analyse the different ways
in which Buñuel saw and embraced the culture of his adoptive country. This study is
informed by feminist, historical and psychoanalytic analyses of Mexican national
cinema, adapted as reading strategies to look for the ways in which Buñuel’s films
converge or differ with classic Mexican films whilst also functioning as a reflection of
his personal point of view.
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Chapter one Mexican Cinema and the Idea of a Nation
1.1 The Mexican Revolution and the Birth of Nationalism
The Mexican Revolution was a social, popular movement that is considered to be
major rupture in the course of Mexican history, an event that came to break all the
established structures that were settled in the form of a republic in the nineteenth
century, following the war of independence and that still dragged elements from the
colonial system that had not yet completely been eradicated. The revolution is the event
that eventually catapulted the country into a complex process of modernisation and also
set the bases for the political delineation of twentieth century Mexico.
The Mexican Revolution occurred very early in the twentieth century and in
circumstances that drastically separates Mexican history from the history of most of the
countries in the region of Latin America. It can be fairly argued that any country’s
history is particular, but indeed the outcomes of Mexican revolution, the emergence of
mass mobilisation and popular participation in political affairs and the conformation of a
solid –if authoritarian and self perpetrating– political party came quite precociously to
Mexican history and prevented Mexico from undergoing the series of failed revolutions
that carried with them totalitarian and militarised governments across Latin America
later in the century. In opposition to this, Mexico enjoyed a relatively calm process of
transition to democracy, by maintaining a status quo difficult to place in the concepts of
modern democracy: the party that was in the power for over seventy years managed to
maintain peace and a certain amount of freedom, but keeping hold of authoritarian,
totalitarian and repressive mechanisms that left room for little explicit dissidence,
especially before the 1970s. Many argue that much of this was accomplished by the
party’s consistent cultural policies, (Noble, 2005: 12), and indeed one thing that
characterises Mexican society under the institutionalised revolution political system is
the common, social acceptance of governmental authority to apply social order and
maintain a ‘peaceful’ status quo in exchange of social justice and economic equality.
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The Mexican Revolution exploded after a pivotal interview President Porfirio
Díaz, who had held power for 32 years, gave to American journalist James Creelman
from the popular Pearson’s Magazine in February 1908. In it, Díaz said he would
definitely abandon his charge once his ruling period was finished. (Womack 1968: 17)
Díaz was known for constantly promising his resignation and free elections, but his 78
years of age seemed to say this time he meant it.
Díaz’s regime was characterised by authoritarian and repressive policies exerted
to hold central power and by his particular interest in the material modernisation of the
country. He had commanded the construction of the railway system (entrusted to
European companies) whilst at the same time neglecting the precarious situation of
abject misery in which most of the population survived. Wealth and land, were kept in
the hands of a few privileged families who preserved the feudal and casts system that
prevailed from colonial times and that even dragged with it traits from pre-Columbian
hierarchical organization.
The revolution came then to overthrow the regime of Díaz, and, in a first
instance, with the main objective of establishing a true democracy, as was the call to
arms of Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy landowner from the northern state of Coahuila
who became president on the defeat of Díaz. The struggle, however, did not emerge as a
planned and organised movement led by Madero and his elite group holding a specific
ideology; instead, it exploded simultaneously in several places throughout the country,
gathering the general discontent that reigned among the population, which was as varied
and diverse as were the injustices put on them. Different outbursts grouped then
regionally, each group following its leader and brandishing its own specific demands.
Popular demands transcended the elemental and the immediate; as it has been
suggested by many scholars1, the main drive of the revolution was the claim for the
restitution of land, and people adhered to it so fiercely because they searched the
restitution of the core of their communal and social organisation. The struggle for land
dates back to the ancient tradition of the indigenous past that gave land a transcendental
importance and of which values were transmitted from generation to generation.
1 We are concentrating on the writings of Octavio Paz (1993) but on this conception we can also see John Womack (1968) and Carlos Fuentes (2000)
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Mexican thinker Octavio Paz (1993) suggests that the spontaneity of the popular
movement is what separates it drastically from the revolutions of the nineteenth century
across Latin America, but most particularly from the Mexican liberal movement of the
1850s, a movement that followed European ideals and had been influenced by the
French Revolution and the Independence of the United States,
[A la revolución mexicana] no la guió una teoría de la igualdad: estaba poseída
por una pasión igualitaria y comunitaria. Los orígenes de esta pasión están no en
las ideas modernas sino en la tradición de las comunidades indígenas anteriores a
la Conquista y en el cristianismo evangélico de los misioneros
Paz, 1993: 33
[The Mexican revolution was not guided by theories of egalitarianism: it was
possessed by a passion both egalitarian and communitarian. The origins of this
passion are not in modern ideas but in the traditions of indigenous communities
prior to the Conquest and in the evangelic Christianity of the missioners.]
Being a movement that had a profound popular impulse, however, the revolution
was riven by the diversity of the factions that compounded it. In the south, the
movement was mainly agrarian; an army of campesinos led by the charismatic leader
Emiliano Zapata had raised in an authentic and politically disinterested quest for the
disintegration of the feudal system by which they had been perpetually stripped of their
lands; in the north, on the other hand, the groups led by Pancho Villa were mainly
ranchers who adhered more easily –though not quite- to the lineaments of the bourgeois
middle-class leaders from the urban centres, and preparing a new constitution and had
political aspirations.
This diversity of factions would influence dramatically the course of the
revolution and determine its outcome after ten years of devastating civil war. The
struggle was far more complicated than a fight between oppressors and liberators, thus it
cannot be easily put down as a winning-losing situation among groups: The leaders of
the different factions were all victims of subsequent political assassinations by their
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contestants, and the triumphant rise of the middle class Constitutionalists in 1917 was
received with strong opposition by Zapata’s army in the south and Villa’s instigation of
a guerrilla war in the north.
In 1920 Carranza, the leader of the Constitutionalists was assassinated, leaving
the new government in hands of General Plutarco Elías Calles, who established a
mechanism of political continuity that searched to maintain the power in the hands of the
bourgeois, whilst also trying to build a political compromise that would include and
satisfy, at least until a certain extent, the demands of the other factions. The end of the
armed struggle saw then the beginning of the so-called period of institutionalisation of
the revolution in which, after the creation of a ‘revolutionary’ party Calles and the
subsequent governments would apply policies of nationalisation, bureaucratisation and
economic development.
With very different protagonists from the ones that starred the first stage of the
Revolution, -defined by Octavio Paz as a group of politicians and technocrats, the
popular movement turned shortly into an institutional regime with the creation of the
PNR (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, that would later become the PRI, Partido de la
Revolución Institucional) a party of state that would govern Mexico uninterruptedly for
seventy-one years ant that set the bases for an authoritarian political culture, background
to the project for the new nation that held as main objective the political stability of the
country and its modernisation and economic development.
The social tissue of the new nation had, however, changed dramatically. Other
than carrying on with a political compromise, the leaders of the new governments had
also to face up one of the most important legacies of the revolution: the rise of the
pueblo, the real protagonist of the revolution, “not as an elite, bourgeois concept, as it
had been up until this point, but a popular construct embodied in the masses” (Noble,
2005: 10); and that until then had been ignored in every period of Mexican history:
“grupos y minorías que habían sido excluídos tanto de la sociedad novohispana como de
la republicana […] comunidades campesinas y, en menor grado, a las minorías
indígenas” (Paz, 1993: 35) [Groups and minorities that had been excluded both from the
New-Spain and Republican societies (…) peasant communities and, on a lesser degree,
the indigenous minorities]
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Indeed, the toppling of Díaz and the subsequent ten years of struggle that defined
the direction of the revolution had involved a level of mass mobilisation with which
came “new popular forces, manifested in social banditry, guerrilla and conventional
armies, sindicatos and mutualist societies, peasant leagues and embryonic political
parties of both Right and Left” (Knight, quoted in Noble, 2005: 10) and with which the
new governments saw themselves dealing with.
The PRI applied policies derived from the claims of the revolution, such as
agrarian reform, secularisation, and education reforms. At the same time it concocted a
complex hierarchical system that did not differ much from that that had been just
overthrown, and to do so, it had to extend its arms of influence to every corner of social
interaction. A strong bureaucratic mechanism guaranteed the adherence of every small
community to the party, in the form sindicatos, town councils, communal groups who
reinforced and promoted recurrent image of the big “familia revolucionaria” a great
revolutionary family where ‘father government’ was to provide for the population’s (and
this always meant the masses) well being.
Modernisation, however, did not arrive all at once and the policies of
urbanisation and industrialisation had to coexist with the big wounds that ten years of
civil war had left in society: the loosening of the family bonds due to immense death toll
and population shift from one place to another, the almost paralytic state of agricultural
economy and the disintegration of traditional forms of socialisation related to the
immediate, rural community. Therefore, the masses had also to be educated and bridged
to the new forms of socialisation ensued by modern practices. In this process culture and
the mass media played an extremely valuable role as it has been argued by Andrea
Noble (2005) who goes even further arguing the State’s cultural politics articulated the
different media into a project of state that ensured, at the same time, the prevalence of
the social order, noting, however, that it is “important not to over exaggerate the notion
that culture is a top-down hegemonic construct imposed on the masses fro above.
Instead, […] these relationships must be understood in terms of accommodations and
negotiations between the various sectors in society.” (Noble, 2005: 12)
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1.2. The construction of a national identity
The social effervescence of the revolution contributed to the birth of one of the
most important cultural and intellectual movements of Mexican history. The armed
struggle stirred the creativity and the thought of intellectuals and artists, who debated
between the ideas of progress and capitalism and the influence of socialism and the
Russian revolution. Literature, music, cinema and the plastic arts all would be
profoundly marked by the aesthetics of the revolution. The revolution put an end to the
naturalist literature that had predominated in the nineteenth century, and that was very
much influenced by European literary schemes, and replaced it with a more realistic,
rough prose, direct and sometimes crude that gave shape to the ‘novela de la
revolución’, the novel of the revolution that would influence decisively the course of
modern Mexican literature; in the field of the plastic arts, the decades following the
revolution saw the emergence of Muralism, one of Mexico’s most distinctive pictorial
movements.
Muralism was perhaps the artistic expression that embodies Mexico’s systematic
desire to interpret, reinterpret and exalt the revolution and definitely the movement that
passed Mexican cinema its aesthetic and ideological referents.
Muralism can be taken as the art form that embodies Mexico’s many times
contradictory approach towards its search for identity. Its importance as pictorial
movement ranges from aesthetics to politics, and much of the path followed by Mexican
classic cinema could not be understood without taking muralism into account. It
developed the aggrandising and dramatic aesthetics that characterise Mexican art and
that would remain as reference for further artistic expressions, moreover, the movement
was fundamental for the ideological reconstruction of the revolution in Mexican history
and collective memory.
The muralist movement was mainly supported by philosopher José Vasconcelos,
also minister of education (1921-1923) who had propelled an important educational
reform and promoted the redefinition of government policies regarding Indian
communities. He is given credit for modern indigenismo, the governmental, mainly
protectionist, policies regarding the Indian population. He exalted, on the other hand, the
quintessential Mexican-ness as embodied in the mestizo race, the ultimate convergence
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of both Hispanic and pre-Columbian culture in what he called la raza cósmica, the
‘cosmic race’.
Muralism gathered much of Vasconcelos’ ideology and served the purpose of
bringing art and education to the masses. Its major exponents, Diego Rivera, David
Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco, acknowledged and exalted in their work the
participation of the masses in the revolution, and intended to place them as protagonists
in the centre of the historical paradigm as they have never been before. To do so, they
merged different historical symbols that had come to surface as part of the imaginary of
the revolution, and the masses were then portrayed as a compound of the oppressed
groups that carried with them the culture and tradition of ancient Indian civilisation, but
they were both Indian and mestizo, had fought the independence war a century earlier to
bring down Spanish rule and were the ones who fought the revolution to recover their
ancient and mystical right to land and freedom.
Governmental cultural policies adopted also this ideological paradigm to
welcome the masses to the new project of state: the figures of the uttermost popular
leaders of the revolution, Villa and Zapata, were stripped of any political stigma and
mystified as fallen heroes for the people. The masses were recognised as keepers of the
essence of Mexican-ness because they were the ones who had defended it throughout
history, and now they were to be kept safe as children of the revolutionary patriarch: the
system.
The rise of the mass media also contributed for the consolidation of these post-
revolutionary ideals. Modern forms of socialisation implied the birth of cultural
consumerism, and different media emerged to fulfil this need in the form of “tabloid
newspapers, comic books, radio and increasingly cinema [that] began to insinuate
themselves into everyday Mexican experience” (Noble, 2005: 11), forging and
broadcasting a national, common imaginary.
Cinema, a medium whose development already had a long history of ups and
downs since its arrival to Mexico in 1896, emerged as both the public and the
government’s favourite medium. After a deep drawback during the revolution, when all
the incipient developments of the industry were abruptly cut, cinema started recovering
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in great paces, taking advantage of a brief halt in Hollywood industry due to the advent
of sound.
It started taking hold of the market gap left by the absence of appealing
Hollywood films2 and of the incursion of actors and other workers of the industry that
had trained in Hollywood.
Several of the films of this first stage of the Mexican film industry took form and
exploited many of the themes and ideals of the new nation, portraying an optimistic
image of cosmopolitanism and unity. In the same way this period saw the emergence of
many of the stylistic formulas and thematics that were to be constantly re-elaborated
throughout the history of Mexican cinema, such as the good-hearted prostitute
melodrama, who first appeared on Mexican screens as Santa (Antonio Moreno, 1932)
and would give way to the later cabaretera films, the family melodrama, the urban
comedy (especially those of Mario Moreno ‘Cantinflas’) and the most successful genre
of all, the Comedia Ranchera, inaugurated in 1936 by Fernando de Fuentes’ Allá en el
rancho grande.
Even though the consistent blooming of the film industry (in 1933, only one year
after Santa’s release, the Mexican film industry produced twenty-one films, making it
the leading producer of Spanish-language films in the world) it would take one more
decade for Mexican film industry to consolidate as the country’s third major industry,
the main exporter of cultural images and the creator of customs, inventor of traditions
and nourishment “in one or another [of] the diverse social groups that inhabit Mexico”
(Ramírez Berg, 1992: 1)
1.3 The Golden Age of Mexican cinema
Perhaps cinema could not have served so efficiently to the consolidation of
Mexico’s hegemonic system had it not been caught in the middle of a financial miracle
2 In order not to lose the income of the important Spanish-speaking audiences, who were rejecting sound films with subtitles (the rate of illiteracy was particularly high in the 1920s) Hollywood started producing ‘Hispanic’ films, in which Hispanic actors from different nationalities performed together (sometimes a Spanish, a Mexican and an Argentine were members of the same family!) this created confusion to Spanish-speaking audiences, who rejected these products and even considered them to be offensive and denigrating (García Riera ,1969: 20)
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boosted by the Second World War, when political and economic factors influenced its
development and contributed for its becoming of a true industry.
The position that the Mexican government adopted during the war was the factor
that most tellingly beneficed Mexican film industry. In 1942, after the attack of two
Mexican oil ships by German submarines, President Manuel Ávila Camacho declared
war against the Axis power giving Mexico entrance to the conflict on the side of the
Allied.
This decision saved Mexican cinema from virtual extinction. The national
industry was resenting the shortage on raw film and other filming products imposed by
the United States due to the practical use of the material used for their fabrication in the
making of arms. The sales of raw film were limited for Hollywood production, where
mainly propaganda films were being produced.
Latin American audiences, on the other hand, were not being receptive to
Hollywood films as they did not feel identified with the war cause, and Hollywood
studios were suffering the loss of one of its most important marketplaces.
The adherence of Mexico to the Allies, then, made it the only country, among the
other two big film industries in the Spanish-speaking world, Spain and Argentina (who
declared neutral during the war), that could have access to raw film. This move
functioned well for both sides. Mexico became a faithful market partner both consumer
of filming products and films and Mexico had a cleared Spanish-speaking market where
Hollywood’s absence was to be filled.
The Mexican government shortly realised the importance of supporting the
development o the film industry. In 1943 the Banco Cinematográfico was founded, it
began as a private institution backed by official agencies like the Banco de México and
Nacional Financiera, which held 10 percent of its stock. It was evident by the creation of
this entity that the endorsement of the national film industry was a main objective of
President Ávila Camacho’s government (1940-1946). In its first year it extended credits
of 5 million pesos to small, undercapitalized producers and within two years it had
boosted the Mexican production and helped it become a true industry. Seventy films
were produced in 1943, while Argentina’s output declined sharply to thirty-six motion
pictures. (Mora 1992, 59) Only a few years before, the state had guaranteed a loan to
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finance the construction of the first modern film studio in Mexico City in 1934, Estudios
Churubusco. This gave rise to a dynamic economic partnership of nationalized industry
and private enterprise that continues to characterize the Mexican film industry to this
day.
The boom of Mexican cinema favoured the emergence of a new generation of
directors like Emilio Fernández, Julio Bracho, Roberto Gavaldón and Ismael Rodríguez,
and the consolidation of a star system as never seen in the context of Spanish-speaking
cinema: María Félix, Mario Moreno ‘Cantinflas’, Pedro Armendáriz, Andrea Palma,
Jorge Negrete, Sara García, Fernando y Andrés Soler, Joaquín Pardavé, Arturo de
Córdova y Dolores del Río became the equivalent to the big Hollywood names and
attracted audiences steadily into the cinemas.
One of the representative figures of the Mexican cinema of this period is Emilio
“El Indio” Fernández; arguably the director who most successfully projected an ideal
image of the nation and whose epic stories, set in endless and vast landscapes constituted
the trademark of what is known as classic Mexican cinema.
Emilio Fernández effectively managed to convey the nationalist sentiments that
had been gathering since the revolution in other artistic expressions and the ideological
traits that were inherent to this nationalism. He also established, in collaboration with his
working team, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa and scriptwriter Mauricio Magdaleno,
a distinctive narrative style that converged with the characteristic visual lyricism of
strong Eisenstenian influence and the art of the muralist painters of the 1920s and 30s.
When Fernández began directing after having pursued a career as an actor where
he usually played the role of an Indian (hence his nickname, “El Indio”), he chased the
ideal of creating a vital national cinema that would tell Mexican stories that were about
Mexicans and for Mexicans; he believed that until then Mexican cinema had been
derivative and lacked imagination, “copied from Spanish theatre or from Hollywood”
(Ramírez Berg, 1994: 14).
The cinema of El Indio was therefore carrier of great ideological hues that
reinforced the progressive force of modernisation whilst also exalting the Indian
component of Mexican society in an idealised and romanticised representation of Indian
characters and of Mexico’s rural landscape. His cinema skilfully projected a set of
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values that collected symbols and mythologies of the many Mexicos that emerged from
the revolution and catapulted them into an ideal of a modern, post revolutionary nation
that was well articulated into a capitalist system and mainly of mestizo compound. His
cinema also conveyed a message that secured the protectionist role of the state as centre
of the social order by legitimising the figure of the patriarchal family institution by
which all social structures were defined.
The work of Fernández has been defined by many critics as monolithic, for the
way it represents society is mainly static and hieratic, and aesthetic exaltation of the
landscape and the prominence given to strongly typified characters convey a one-
dimensional idea of a nation, one that looks back to reinterpret history from an
ideological standpoint, intending to legitimise the social and political status achieved by
the post revolutionary governments.
A good example of this is Fernández’s first film Flor Silvestre (1943), a
revolutionary melodrama that deals with the issue of the clash of social casts that existed
in the feudal system before the revolution. The film tells the story of José Luis (Pedro
Armendáriz), the son of a wealthy landowner who falls in love with Esperanza (Dolores
del Río) a poor peasant girl, daughter of a peon who works in José Luis’ estate. The
social impediment for the couple is such that the young couple is obliged to elope. They
marry and have a child but the revolution breaks cutting short their idyllic marriage. José
Luis leaves for battle on the side of the revolutionaries; he dies in combat whilst
Esperanza is left to her fortune. The plot is darkened by the cruelty of the revolution but
the film glimpses of hope are embodied in the José Luis and Esperanza’s son, to whom
the story is told in retrospective by his aging mother.
Using memory as a narrative device is frequent in period films for a specific
purpose, argues Andrea Noble (2005: 59-60). Esperanza and her son are the “Symbolic
embodiments of the new society engendered by the revolution” and their going back
ideologically places the spectator in a superior, already better period, that cost the lives
of those who fought,
The revolution is seen as the painful birth of a new generation of families who
are able to live in the more just and equitable society envisioned and created by
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those who came before. As a result, Flor silvestre is able to affirm the traditional
values of the melodrama –the family and the fatherland – at the same time that it
affirms radical social changes, for the painful transitional phase is set in the past
and is shown to contain the seeds of a new and better present.
Mistron, quoted in Noble, 2005: 60
By the 1940s the revolution had “undergone a process of institutionalisation and
passed into the domains of collective memory” (Noble, 2005: 49) and films like
Fernández’s contributed to the prevailing of the specific values promoted by
governmental policies, that included as well the exaltation of Indians in a poetic way that
placed them in a distant, sacred place where they do not interfere with the prevalence of
the new mestizo and modern order, as in María Candelaria (1943).
1.4. Ideology and the allegories of Mexicanidad
Many critics have studied the ideological impact of the Mexican film industry of
the classic period and the ways it managed to cluster a number of ideological precepts
that endorsed the preservation of the political and social post-revolutionary order. In
their essay Intimate Connections: Cinematic Allegories of Gender, the State and
National Identity, Alex M. Saragoza and Graciela Berkovich (1994), analyse the
melodramas Salón México, Nosotros los pobres, and Flor Silvestre as documents of the
conservative ideology of the Mexican state, exploring the ways in which they presented
the official version of history through the affirmation of stereotypes, archetypical
characters that reinforced the prevalence established order.
Saragoza and Berkovich argue that Mexican films often mediated the textual,
political and economic relationships between the state and national identity through the
transmission of gendered allegories, (Saragoza et al 1994: 25), though not necessarily
through the explicit involvement of the Mexican state in the film industry but via an
implicit consensus between the state and the audience, whereby a discreet delineation of
typified familial and gender roles emerged as a common referential network of signs that
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was unquestionably accepted. This accepted status quo promoted the development of
particular genres and cinematic formulas constituted the paradigm of Mexican cinema,
composed primarily of simple plots with standard endings that idealised the family and
endorsed traditional morality through archetypical representations of gender roles.
(Saragoza and Berkovich, 1994: 27)
This ideological consensus not only helped maintain the State’s hegemonic
influence in the many aspects of private and public life, but with its accomplishment, it
also helped to dilute, if only in the imaginary, the strains caused by the country’s
multilayered and despaired social composition. In this way, Mexican cinema insistently
portrayed a society that lived harmoniously in despite differences across gender, class
and ethnicity whereas promoting their inexorable immobility.
As Saragoza and Berkovich, other scholars have argued that the essential
allegories that allowed this mechanism lie on the way the family, the economic system
and the roles of women and men were represented.
In Mexican films, the ubiquity of melodrama made somehow easy to reproduce
these allegories in the different cinematic styles, namely comedies, period films and
even adaptations of novels or plays. Ideology, argues Ramírez Berg, (1992) reveals itself
in each of these archetypes, and its projection of the key issues of mexicanidad reveal
the conflicting nature of Mexico’s history as well as of its social composition.
The following is a description of these archetypes and the way they functioned as
carriers of ideology as identified by Ramirez Berg (1992, 1994), Hershfield (1996) and
Saragoza and Berkovich (1994). This theoretical framework will allow for the analysis
of the films in chapter three and also as an outline of the aesthetic and ideological
platform to which Luis Buñuel adapted at his arrival to the Mexican film industry.
• Family, the patriarchal institution
The family is the basic unit of society. It is the mediation between the state and
the individual, and therefore the place where all forms of socialisation of the
members of a nation are moulded and individual roles of men and woman are
defined.
19
In Mexican cinema, family is the microcosm of society, where patriarchal
authority is unquestioned and absolute, even when it is exercised unjustly.
Patriarchal rules are passed on from generation to generation as men grow into
manhood.
It is within the universe of the family that all the values of Mexican-ness are
engendered and guarded. This is better exemplified by films as Cuando los hijos se
van (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1941), but the same features are respected and can be read
implicitly in almost every Mexican melodrama.
• Capitalism
The economic system in Mexican films was usually portrayed as a given and
unalterable fact. Seen as inherited manifestation of the post revolutionary government, it
is the ultimate force by which all characters’ lives is governed. In many cases he system
can be read as the ultimate antagonistic force that prevents the characters of achieving
happiness for it puts pressure on individuals, who must live by the norms of an
inherently flawed system “Mexico’s capitalistic status quo”, argues Ramírez Berg, is
“automatically suspect, for the system is the result of a bloody revolution that was
supposed to reform Mexican life yet changed little” (Ramírez Berg, 1995: 22)
• Class
An insistent message of social stasis runs under the classic paradigm of Mexican
films. The lower class is portrayed as the ultimate bearer of mexicanidad, and money is
best understood as a corrupting force: there are all sorts of troubles if the working class
can expect it consorts with the upper class or aspires to rise in class stature. “Such
messages suggest not only that the Poor should stay where they are in order not to lose
their humanity and the ability to care and feel for others, but also they must accept the
status quo in order to maintain “legitimate mexicanidad.” (Ramírez Berg, 1995: 25)
• Machismo
Reinforced by the patriarchal institution and metonymically also by an ideological
agreement with the state, machismo is an entrenched social-sexual tradition in
20
Mexican society in which the figure of the male is always associated to a position of
power and the endorsement of masculinity. On the ideological level, the male
receives a secure identity and the state receives his allegiance; the male gains a
favoured place in the patriarchal system while the state accumulates political might.
• Women
Derived from the outline given by the patriarchal family, women in Mexican
cinema –and in Mexican imaginary, exist only to give pleasure to men. Their
representation is always inscribed in the paradoxical virgin-whore paradigm, only in
the Mexican case, the concept has unique characteristics because of the additional
“expectations tradition and history have placed upon Mexican women” (Ramírez
Berg, 1995: 23), for women are expected to be not only virginal, but ‘Virginlike’
“emulating the Virgin of Guadalupe, the spiritual patroness of Mexico” (Ibid) and in
counterpart, the whore refers to the historical figure of La Malinche, the Indian
princess who worked as interpreter for Cortés and who is considered the ‘primordial
traitoress’ of Mexico, who sold out her people to the Spanish conquerors. “Because
of her, Paz and others have argued, feminine sexual pleasure is linked in the
Mexican consciousness not only with prostitution but with national betrayal.
(Ramírez Berg, 1995: 24)
To avoid being perceived as a traitor, a woman must remove herself from the
sphere of sexual pleasure. In Mexican movies –and in Mexican life—the most
common nontreacherous role is that of the asexual, long-suffering mother.
21
Chapter two Luis Buñuel in Mexico
2.1. Antecedents of Luis Buñuel’s Artistic Trajectory
Luis Buñuel is one of the most important figures in the history of cinema. He is
director of a series of very personal films in which it is evident the influence of the
surrealist movement and most crude Spanish realism. Born in Calanda, in the province
of Teruel at the beginning of the twentieth century, Buñuel was son of a rich ‘Indiano’
who had made his fortune in Cuba. He received a Catholic education with the Jesuits of
Zaragoza just before leaving for Madrid, where he dwelled at the “Residencia de
Estudiantes”, the student’s resident where also lived poet Federico García Lorca, painter
Salvador Dalí and other people who would later be outstanding intellectuals or artists of
the so-called “Generación del 27”. Seduced by avant-garde poetry (i.e. creacionism and
ultraism, an interest that would always be with him and that would be fundamental for
his approach to cinema), he published some poems and prose before turning into cinema,
after having been impressed by Fritz Lang’s Der Müde Tod. In 1925 he moved to Paris
where he had the chance to collaborate as film critic for publications in both Paris and
Madrid, leaving stated like this, a few cinematographic concepts and considerations on
the medium that later on his life would refuse to express.
Attracted by the surrealist movement, he gathered with Salvador Dalí to write the
script of Un Chien andalou (1929), a film hat would give him entrance to the group. The
film, financed by the director’s mother, received eloquent praises by intellectuals and
filmmakers of the Parisian scene and beyond like Russian director Eisenstein. Thanks to
this success he managed to get sponsorship from a couple of aristocrats for his next film
L’Age d’or (1930), the film that portrayed the delirium of amour fou so much praised in
the surrealist circle and whose blatant anticlericalism and denounce against social
hypocrisy provoked intense polemic in the Paris of the time. The film’s contents and the
public’s reaction are examples of what would accompany Buñuel throughout his career.
22
In one way or another, Buñuel’s films would always come back to this primordial couple
that is driven by the desire of getting together but stopped continuously by moral,
religious and social norms, on the other hand, this was not to going be the last time one
of his films raised polemic and scandal.
His fame caught the attention of Hollywood producers, who offered him a sort of
internship at the Metro Goldwyn Mayer studios, where he was supposed to observe and
learn the techniques of studio filmmaking. He did learn, but also found no interest on it.
Rapidly bored, Buñuel went back to Spain after a while, where he shot the gripping and
strongly criticised documentary Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1932). Banned by Spain’s
new republican government, Las Hurdes is considered pivotal in the career of Buñuel,
for it is a film that combines elements of surrealism (embedded in the film’s fatalist
narrative) with stark realism and bleak treatment of facts.
Buñuel continued working in Spain as a dubbing supervisor for Paramount and
Warner studios and held an executive position in Filmófono, a state-fund producing
company that attempted to give boost to Spain’s film industry with commercial quality
filmmaking. He produced several films and supervised the direction of others (among
which Don Quintín el amargao, 1935), but the project was interrupted with the outbreak
of the Civil War.
In 1938 Buñuel immigrated to the United States where he worked as a film editor
for the New York Museum of Modern Art. His job consisted of cropping and assembling
documentaries for war propaganda. In 1942 he was fired because of rumours concerning
his previous allegiance to the Communist party in Paris, and more explicitly, because his
employers learned that he was the author of L’Age d’or. Unemployed and without
having worked as a director for almost fifteen years, he accepted the proposition of
Mexican producer Oscar Dancigers to direct a couple of films in Mexico. He moved
south then, and in 1946 shot Gran Casino (1947) starring Jorge Negrete and Libertad
Lamarque, two of the most renowned stars of the then flourishing Mexican film
industry. The film was a financial failure, but Buñuel stayed in Mexico living on a
monthly allowance sent by his mother. Almost three years later, Buñuel was appointed
another film by Dancigers, El gran calavera (1949), a family melodrama that was a
large box-office success and marked the beginning of a long list of films made against
23
time, with appointed scripts and imposed actors, what Buñuel would call “películas
alimenticias” (bread-and-butter films) and that make up the majority of his Mexican
filmography.
In 1950 he directed Los olvidados a film for which he enjoyed absolute creative
freedom as he had not had for a long time. After the commercial success of El gran
calavera, Dancigers proposed Buñuel to make a ‘real film’ and allowed him total liberty
to search for the subject. Buñuel already had it, though his project did not intend to be
much more than a conventional melodrama. With writer Juan Larrea, he had written a
script entitled ¡Mi huerfanito jefe! (My orphan boss!), about a street boy who sold
lottery tickets. Dancigers liked it but was willing to go for something more serious and
proposed Buñuel to write a script about Mexico City’s poor children. (Aranda, 1969:
188)
Buñuel liked the project, during his first years in Mexico he had walked the
streets of the city, observing the lives of the marginalised that dwelled in Mexico City’s
slums. He began a deeper investigation and gathered some real stories from the
reformatory to write the script. The collaboration of Spanish writer Jesús Camacho
(better known as Pedro de Urdimalas) was essential for the portrayal of the typical urban
speech of Mexico City. Urdimalas had written the characteristic dialogues that
determined much of the success of urban comedies like Ismael Rodríguez’s Nosotros los
pobres (1948) and Ustedes los ricos (1948)
From then on, Buñuel’s career would alternate between personal projects and
appointed assignments. In both cases he developed a personal style that explored
different themes and stories within the realm of melodrama, as well as an ability of
directing at an incredibly fast rhythm, one film after another with extreme efficacy. He
directed 21 films; among the most renowned of this first period are, Susana (1950), Él
(1920), Abismos de pasión (1953), La vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo
de un crimen) (1955) and Nazarín (1958); less famous but of considerable commercial
success within Mexico were Subida al cielo (1951) and Una mujer sin amor (1951) and
La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1953).
Buñuel made two films in the United States with the collaboration of Hugo
Butler Robinson Crusoe in 1952 and The Young One in 1960. The latter, made under the
24
production of George P. Werker, tells the story of a black man that, after having been
unjustly accused of raping a white woman, seeks refuge in an island in the Mississippi
River where a young girl and her racist guardian live. The film received bad criticism in
the United States because of its ambiguity in dealing with the issue of racism; it is,
however, one of Buñuel’s subtlest portrayals of human nature, with the characters
moving back and forth in the realms of guilt, violence and desire.
In 1961 he directed a film in Spain for the first time in 30 years. The shooting of
Viridiana was permitted by the Francoist government, in an attempt to please the
international criticism to the regime’s censorship policies. Nevertheless, when the film
was released, the religious authorities were scandalised and demanded Buñuel’s
excommunication, the Spanish government abducted the film from its circulation in
Spain and only a few copies that were circulating abroad were saved. It was awarded the
Palm d’or in Cannes in 1962.
Buñuel would direct two more films in Mexico: El ángel exterminador (1962),
and Simón del desierto (1965). The former is considered one of the most acid critiques
to the bourgeoisie, and it has been widely praised by critics and international audiences.
The film is indeed a delirious portrayal of the hypocrisy of social norms in a feast of
entrapment and desire, full of inexplicable repetitions and surrealist situations that build
up in a crescendo and burst in a final sarcastic laugh.
Simón del desierto, a film based on the story of Simeón el Estilita, a Syrian
ascetic who stood on top of a column with no food or water and as thought to perform
miracles, received attention and applauses for its irreverence and iconoclastic portrayal
of religious symbols, though its fame also comes from the difficulties experienced at the
time of the shooting. The budget was cut out in the middle of the shooting and many of
the scenes had to be left out, in the same way, the film had to do without several effects
and especial features, reason for which it is considerably short and the ending comes in
quite abruptly, it is, nevertheless, one of Buñuel’s best finales.
This episode symbolically closes the Mexican stage of Buñuel’s career, a period
in which low budgets, time shortages, imposed scripts and actors were the norm, A
phase in which Buñuel pulled out outstanding works in despite of the permanent
practical difficulties and inconvenient conditions. As stated in an opportune comment by
25
Francisco Sánchez (quoted by Sánchez Vidal, 1984), the episode shamefully falls on the
inefficacy of the decaying Mexican film industry,
El director que había realizado Viridiana, nada menos, era tratado en su país de
adopción como si fuera un director aficionado. Como que no había derecho. Si a
Alatriste se le acabó el dinero, ¿no hubo en toda la asociación mexicana de
productores nadie que le entrara al relevo? ¿El talento de Buñuel no tenía aún
crédito en el Banco Nacional Cinematográfico?
Sánchez Vidal 1984: 286
[The director that had directed nothing less than Viridiana was being treated in
his adoptive country as an amateur. There was no right. If Alatriste had run out of
money, was not there anybody in the whole Mexican Association of Producers to
help him out? Did not Buñuel’s have yet credit in the Banco Nacional
Cinematográfico?]
From 1963 Buñuel began shooting in France, where he would work with
considerably larger budgets than in Mexico and with total creative freedom. Belle de
Jour (1963) is his first French film of the latter period, to it would follow La Voie lactée
(1969), Tristana (1970), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Le Fantôme de la
Liberté (1974) and Cet obscur objet du désir (1977), his last film. He died in Mexico
City on the 30th of July 1983.
2.2 Luis Buñuel and the Mexican Film Industry
When Buñuel arrived to Mexico in 1946, the Mexican film industry was on its
highest peak and about to start its rapid decline; after the end of the war, with the
support of Hollywood studios cut out, Mexican film industry lingered on “protectionist
laws, semi-obligatory exhibition, attempts to form a monopoly which would finally
become a State monopoly, a production based on stereotypes and an organization that
excludes renovation in all its aspects” (King, 1995: 129).
26
So it meant that the industry in which Buñuel came to work, as offered by Oscar
Dancigers was beginning to be less an industry and more a series of aesthetic and
bureaucratic impositions that moreover had to be followed without the incentive of
monetary gratification. The panorama could not be bleaker for the director, who not only
found himself working with actors whose huge ego interfered with his work, but also
with strong monetary restrictions and very little time for shooting.
The major factor sustaining such a movie industry was the “star system”
Mexican producers and directors were indeed fortunate in that during the 1940s
and 1950s a fortuitous confluence of talented, charismatic, and attractive
performers appeared who could assure commercial success for even the worst of
films., The problem with this was that a motion picture became a vehicle for the
star and consequently the director and the script became of secondary concern.
Mora, 1982: 75
Despite these difficulties Buñuel directed 21 films in Mexico. These films have
been difficult to place both in the context of the Mexican cinema industry and in the
trajectory of his career. On the one hand, critics of Buñuel’s work at the time did not
expect his trajectory as an artist to take a turn on commercial filmmaking, and many
considered it to be “a decline from the excellence of his early work” (Aranda 1975: 146)
and on the other hand, his status as an artist did not allow his work to be considered
thoroughly part of Mexican national cinema, and it is seen to have remained separated
from the dominant modes of Mexican film industry, even though in most cases he
explored and exploited the genre of melodrama and adapted to the formal structures that
were already a routine in the Mexican cinema industry.
Present in his Mexican filmography are, moreover, the typical elements that
made up the billboards of Mexico and most of Latin America and Spain: urban comedy
(La ilusión viaja en tranvía, El gran calavera), rural and ranchera comedy (Gran
Casino, Subida al cielo, El bruto), or family melodramas (La hija del engaño, Una
mujer sin amor, Susana), within which we also find the usual stylistic attributes that
27
these kind of films contained: musical numbers, typified characters and a plethora of
happy endings.
Buñuel’s adscription to the looked-down genre of melodrama and commercial
filmmaking caused that for many years the critics left his so-called “minor” works in
oblivion. Not until recently has the situation changed, due to the revision of the
importance of melodrama as a mode of cultural representation, after being for so long
“accused of complicity with suspect ideological structures” (Noble 2005: 97) and
condemned by critics for several years, who perceived it as “excessively sentimental,
escapist form of entertainment that appealed primarily to an ‘uncultured’ mass
audience”.
Recent studies of Buñuel’s work in Mexico, for example, analyse these films
searching in them the elements in which Buñuel appropriated and transformed the forms,
structures and conventions to the genre. Peter Evans, in his important study The Films of
Luis Buñuel. Subjectivity and Desire, (1995) analyses a number of Buñuel’s melodramas
within this framework, acknowledging Buñuel’s keeping of authorial control but
underlining the fact that they do adapt to commercial and generic demands.
Buñuel’s films, he says, “managed to appeal to both large and minor audiences
through form, sexuality, humour and irony […] reworking the auterist thematics through
the patterns and drives of the popular cinema” (Evans 1995: 38)
A similar approach is taken by Spanish critics Pablo Pérez and Javier Hernández
in the article Luis Buñuel y el melodrama. Miradas en torno a un género (1995), who
argue that Buñuel preferred the genre of melodrama as a medium to portray passionate
characters and stories that could have well been taken out from the Spanish folletín,
another “género chico” which the director was also fond of. They also argue, however,
that Buñuel’s use of melodrama was always consciously stripped of its coarse
sentimentality. Avoiding over-sentimental devices such as close-ups or sympathetic
musical backgrounds, Buñuel kept control of his films even though they are populated
by characters that can be easily stereotyped: (“Susana, la chica descarriada, Don Quintín,
el hombre derrotado por el falso orgullo, el bruto de buenos sentimientos” (40) [Susana,
the stray girl, Don Quintín, the man defeated by false pride, the tough guy with good
feelings]). Pérez and Hernández argue that these films do not pretend to mock the genre
28
of melodrama, instead, Buñuel used its elements as an excuse to tell stories impregnated
of his personal sense of humour and point of view.
From these considerations we can observe how the constant flow of Buñuel’s
work, between the limits of high art and lowbrow products, has made it quite
uncomfortable to place and define in the context of Mexican cinema. Whilst his
presence in Mexico was fundamental, whether he followed the established conventions
of commercial cinema or not, his work is said not to have influenced the trajectory of
Mexican filmmaking outside a few selected circles, and his films were often not fully
appreciated, as was the case of Los olvidados, a film that was initially rejected in
Mexico, both by the critics and the government, who considered “offensive” that a
foreigner would make such bleak portrait of Mexico City’s Poor, whilst Mexican cinema
sacred directors like Ismael Rodríguez could made them look endearing and funny, even
photogenic, as in Nosotros los pobres (1948); in return, it was openly welcomed after it
received the Palm d’or at Cannes Film Festival, it rerun in important venues and
received official recognition. Los olvidados is, nevertheless, looked upon as more a
Buñuelean film than a Mexican one.
The exceptionality of Buñuel's work in the context of Mexican cinema has
provoked that scholars of this national cinema tend to leave him out from their
historiographies on the evolution of the cinema industry and the cinematic styles in
Mexico. Mexican film critic and scholar Jorge Ayala Blanco deliberately leaves out the
whole work of Luis Buñuel from his extensive Aventura del cine mexicano (1968),
arguing that “el cine del gran realizador español de ninguna manera puede integrarse al
desarrollo del cine mexicano y nunca ha conseguido modificar su trayectoria, apenas ha
influido sobre algunas películas muy escasas” (Ayala Blanco 1968: 10) [the cinema of
the great Spanish director can in no way be included in the development of Mexican
cinema and has never influenced on its trajectory, if only on very few films] This is to
say that in a way, Buñuel’s ‘major’ films are considered a rarity among the mass of
productions that were made in Mexico on that period, and as a rarity, they did not
influence much in the development of the style and features of commercial cinema.
Ayala Blanco goes even further, to close the argument: “Si se prefiere la hipérbole, este
libro quiere responder afirmativamente a la pregunta: ¿queda algo valioso en el cine
29
mexicano si quitamos a Luis Buñuel?” (11) [If we prefer the hyperbole, this book
intends to respond with a yes to the question ‘is there anything worthy left in Mexican
cinema if we take out Luis Buñuel?’]
This statement casts light on the fact that, when compared with the attention
given to the director by the international critics, Mexican cinema often passed
overlooked. The same situation occurred in the case of Spain, the director was
considered to be the only representative, even though he did not make a single film there
between the years of 1935 and 1963. In her essay Exile and Ideological Reinscription:
The Unique Case of Luis Buñuel (1993), Marsha Kinder argues how it is this condition
as lifetime exile what contributes to Buñuel’s frequent recognition as the only
representative of Spanish cinema abroad (Kinder, 1993: 279), an assumption that creates
the myth of a country “in which changes never occur” (291), freezing as well the image
of the director: “it ignores the fact that although he was always subversive he was also a
powerful shifter whose meaning changed according to which particular hegemony he
was working against –Francoism, Catholicism, or Hollywood” (291) and we might as
well add here “or Mexico’s hegemonic film industry” for just the same could be argued
of the director’s case in Mexico.
This is perhaps the essentialist perspective that Ayala Blanco wishes to avoid,
implying with his words that, for better or worse, Mexican film industry, and Mexican
films, though not as appealing for international critics (but what mainstream films are?)
did develop, shift and evolve, even if not necessarily influenced by films as Los
olvidados or El ángel exterminador, but perhaps in despite of them.
2.3 Buñuel’s Mexico: Cultural Encounters and Continuities
Buñuel produced most of his films as an exile, but the roots of his humour,
absurd and brutal at times, his detailed, almost morbid analysis of established morality
and the bourgeoisie, his obsession with religion, eroticism, death and the miseries of the
human kind are to be found in Spanish realism (Quevedo, the picaresque novel, Goya
and Valle Inclán) features that Buñuel would combine with his constant surrealist optic.
Both influences flourished and mingled with the different environments to which he was
exposed. His contact with Mexico’s culture, its politics and its conflicting social
30
composite, gave him matter for the exploration of new themes and the development of
incisive projects in which he imprinted his distinctive personal style. We have argued above that Buñuel’s Mexican films have enough elements to be
considered representative of the Mexican film industry. In the same way, we cannot
categorically exclude a consideration of authorial intervention in the case of Buñuel for,
even when mainstream films are circumscribed by ideological constructions, the author
reserves a level of authorial control whereby his personal universe permeates the content
and the form of this work, no matter whether that work was an appointed task or a
personal project.
In the same way, this universe was in many senses constructed by the artist’s
particular condition as an exile. Buñuel, according to Víctor Fuentes was both an exile
and an outsider to the industry of commercial filmmaking. “When arriving to Mexico”
he argues, “the director fought tirelessly on two fronts: on the first to make a poetic,
personal cinema […] and on the second to project his personal and cultural vision on the
commercial cinema within which he was working” (Fuentes 1995: 162).
This is not to imply that Buñuel did not enjoy making those commercial films or
that they lack of the director’s personal sensibility, but that in trying to convey his
sensibility, he had to establish a dialogue with different forms of expression from those
with which he had worked previously. In this dialogue Buñuel reworked the conventions
of a national cinema to produce films that fulfilled his artistic needs.
As an exile, Buñuel was a “unique case”. Out of his natal Spain most of his life,
the whole of his career took place virtually somewhere else, yet the traces of a constant
quest for what is Spanish, can be found in each one of his films. To Marsha Kinder,
Buñuel’s work is characterised by the director’s perennial condition as an outsider, what
results in a certain “indeterminacy”- the result of a series of exiles and reinscriptions into
different cultures. Kinder argues that the “discourse of the exile resists the cultural
‘melting pot’ both in the old and new lands; it retains its Otherness in both contexts.”
(Kinder, 1993: 279)
Both Kinder and Fuentes agree on the fact that Buñuel’s condition of permanent
exile was determinant for the particular representation of the culture of the new country
in his films. On the one hand, Marsha Kinder underlines as pivotal factor Buñuel’s
31
insistency on the portrayal of the clash of social classes and gender, this is the result of a
“cultural continuity”, that of the history of longstanding oppression and violence shared
by Mexico and Spain, “the colonial past is represented in Buñuel’s constant use of social
and class differences” (Kinder, 1993: 301)
It is evident that this history is also represented by the figures of authority and
submission that are constant in Buñuel’s films either explicitly or implicitly, and we
would add here that this is because the inquisitive gaze of the outsider did not fail to
notice that much of that colonial past authoritarian legacy was still present in the 1950s,
and perhaps still is.
For Víctor Fuentes the cultural reinscriptions of the exile are to be read
differently in the different stages of the process of assimilation of the exile to the new
culture. The process begins with the exile passing through a period of resistance slowly
moving into a subsequent one of assimilation, to eventually reach the position of
“transterrado” –an exile that is still an outsider but manages to express specific
characteristics of his new country. Fuentes’ position rounds the edges of what Kinder
expounds: in a first stage of his exile, Buñuel made efforts to infuse the ‘counterpoints’
of Spanishness in the melodramas he was making, starting from the Spanish literary and
theatrical tradition in an attempt to go back to his roots by recreating the myth of
Spanish identity, an effort that came as a result of the crisis of national identity that not
only Buñuel but also his conational also exiled in Mexico were feeling at the time.
(Fuentes notes as example of this the desire that from early on Buñuel had of “not only
to take Nazarín to the big screen, but also Doña Perfecta –also by Galdós- Jacinto
Benavente’s La Malquerida and Carlos Arniches’ El último mono.) (Fuentes 1995: 162)
Buñuel did remake Don Quintín el amargao in Mexico, a film he had produced
in 1935 in Spain when working for Filmófono, and the result gives an interest insight on
how this cultural reinscription took place in both directions.
Don Quintín el amargao is based in the homonymous zarzuela by Arniches and
Estremera, a play of which Buñuel was particularly fond and of which he owned a copy
that he and other Spanish exiles watched frequently “just for fun”. The significant
difference that the Mexican version of the film, La hija del engaño (1951), holds with its
32
Spanish counterpart, though necessary because the film had to be adapted for an
audience that was different both territorially and temporally, tellingly denote how a
strong desire of rewrite their Spanish identity persuaded Buñuel and his collaborators
(Urdimalas and Alcoriza) to adapt the culturally specific genre of zarzuela with its
plethora of jokes based on typical linguistic traits and typical madrilène characters to a
no less culturally specific audiences of 1950s Mexico, and therefore the Spanish humour
that they very much enjoyed had to be modified in the Mexican version, and though Don
Quintín continued to be essentially the same character, instead of the “echao pálante”
madrilène, he became a Mexican macho
The character of Don Quintín does change, however at the end of the Mexican
film. The newer film’s ending makes sure that there are no ambiguities in whether Don
Quintín’s bitterness has been thoroughly shaken off, whereas in the Spanish version, we
can perceive a nervous look, a glimpse of paranoia that hints to what the character of
Arturo Córdova in Él would bring a few years later and tells us that “El amargao” might
as well still be around for a while. The happy ending of the Mexican version is thus
more commercially acceptable; notwithstanding it leaves open the question on whether
familial happiness can be restored once he ties have been so violently torn.
Curiously, some of the best moments of La hija del engaño are not in the
1935 version, and these account for features that are included specifically to address
Mexican audiences: the inclusion of a musical number by Jovita (Lily Aclémar) singing
the bolero “Amorcito corazón” and the hilarious and over-the-top sequence of the rogue
“El Jonrón” to “El Infierno” (i.e. “Hell”, Don Quintín’s casino/cabaret, another common
place feature of classic Mexican cinema and epitome of sin and decadence) pointing his
gun at everyone and creating mayhem with exaggerated macho displays.
The differences between Don Quintín el amargao and La hija del engaño acutely
exemplify Fuentes description of the way the choices of the director are influenced by
his desire to project aspects of his shaded national identity, but they also cast light on the
influence that the cultural specificity of the country of exile delimits and influences this
range of choices since the director, as an exile, had to adapt not only to a new culture,
but to specific ways of representation of that culture. Buñuel’s affection for the popular
Spanish genre is then influenced by his desire to comment on Mexican males proclivity
33
to facile violence, whilst at the same time it functions as an opportunity to introduce an
anticlerical joke by making the priest enter “El infierno” with his cassock buttoned up to
the end.
This is but an example of the ways in which the films of Luis Buñuel were
permeated and enriched from many different stocks. Buñuel’s work in Mexico emerges
therefore as paradigmatic: in the same way as the genius of the artist is composed by the
influences and choices of life, his work cannot be stripped of its cultural specificity. As
seen in the previous example, much of the aesthetic and dramatic choices made by the
director to adapt an old idea were conditioned by the exigencies of the industry. These
exigencies, however, were not to be accounted as negative limitations, but as the
opening of new doors and levels of signification from which to emit a message.
Creativity is a force that finds its way even in the most constricted environments, and
Buñuel’s creativity was evidently not inhibited by these economic restrictions, on the
contrary, as we will see in the next chapter, the director managed to articulate the
integrity of his genius into the apparently flat language of commercial filmmaking,
managing in this way, to attain and reflect the complexities contained in his adoptive
country’s culture.
34
Chapter three Mexico in the Films of Luis Buñuel
3.1 Analysis of Susana, La ilusión viaja en tranvía and El río y la muerte
In the following chapter we will analyse three films of Luis Buñuel through
which we will try to explore the way they account for both “Mexican” and “Buñuelean”
characteristics as has been suggested from the two previous chapters.
The films to be analysed are Susana (1951), La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1953),
and El río y la muerte (1954). They are representative of three types of melodrama that
were typical in the period of the classic Mexican cinema: Susana is a family melodrama
that presents the archetypical devoradora character, the Mexican femme fatale whose
untameable sexuality confronts the familial order and whose best exponent was actress
María Félix in films like Doña Bárbara (Fernando de Fuentes, 1943); La ilusión viaja en
tranvía is a comedy of customs with shades of melodrama, set in Mexico City and
presenting the lives of the urban poor. This is a film closely related to two kinds of films
that enjoyed great popularity during the Golden Age: on the one hand the urban
comedies of Mario Moreno Cantinflas, who made popular the character of “El Peladito”
a poor but honest man, whose humorous appeal was based on a witty use of language
and the ridiculing of the upper classes, (Mexican comedians ever since have been more
or less a reinterpretation of this character) and on the other hand, the set of urban
“weepies” Nosotros los pobres (Ismael Rodríguez, 1947) and its sequels that presented
the predicaments of the working classes of Mexico City, and that marked the rise of
actor Pedro Infante as a national hero (even today he is remembered as “El ídolo del
pueblo”); El río y la muerte is what could be called a ‘serious’ melodrama that deals
with the theme of the confrontation of progress and backwardness as represented by
rural/urban environments that was typical of the modernising official discourse of the
period and that finds its best representative in Emilio Fernández’s Río Escondido (1948),
a film that exalts the educational policies of the governments and portrays progress as
the vehicle to fight the oppression in which the Indian population lived.
The films chosen are also representative of the cinematic styles exploited by
Buñuel during his first years in Mexico. Susana, La ilusión viaja en tranvía and El río y
35
la muerte, are all part of Buñuel’s early work in Mexico. To El río y la muerte would
follow only projects of a more personal nature and also some of his best films, such as
Nazarín and El ángel exterminador.
Above all, these films were addressed to large audiences, they adapt quite
accurately to the conventions of the Mexican cinema narrative paradigm and belong to
the group of films that Buñuel himself called “películas alimenticias”, these three
characteristics are important for the purposes of this work since they allow for the
interpretation of issues of ideology, national representation and cultural interpretation
that we have argued in the previous chapters.
This choice of films allows then for an approximation to the way Buñuel
portrayed the themes that are archetypes recurrently used in Mexican films. As such,
Susana will give us the opportunity to explore the representation of the family as
nucleus of the patriarchal system; La ilusión viaja en tranvía will give material to
explore issues of capitalism and representation of social class and social mobility,
whereas El río y la muerte will provide the opportunity to explore representations of the
male figure, the state and modernising discourses; all three films will also serve to
explore the representation of feminine roles.
A note on the critical approach
As it was stated in the first chapter, classic Mexican cinema favoured the use of a
specific narrative paradigm in which the films of several cinematic styles were inscribed.
According to this paradigm, a number of types and archetypes emerged as standard
forms of representation of specific traits of human interaction, these archetypes
functioned as ideology carriers and in this way, Mexican cinema managed to convey a
message that promoted nationalism, social stasis and the prevalence of a paternalist state
through the reinforcement of the values of the patriarchal family and the subsequent
gendering of the roles of its members.
As a starting point of our analysis, we have decided to search for these
archetypical elements in the films of Luis Buñuel, in order to see the extent until which
they adapted and used the established economy of signs, to this follows a further
36
interpretation of the texts based on a variety of reading strategies (cultural, historical,
feminist, psychoanalytic) to examine how the film calls the viewer into a particular
ideological moment and site.
The following analysis does not intend to be an exhaustively detailed account of
the films’ mise-en-scène and nor is it based strictly on one theoretical platform to which
the films must be forced to enter. It is rather intended as a cultural study of interpretation
that seeks to draw a line of continuity between the films and the context they were made
in order to make up from them what are the pieces of reality they intend to represent.
This analysis tries to give the films the opportunity to speak and show until what extent
they adapted to the lineaments of classic Mexican cinema and also the way the author
imprinted his personal point of view in them, giving as a result a work that was enriched
from many sources.
3.2 Patriarchy and the Mexican Family: Susana
[Synopsis]
During a stormy night, Susana, screaming and kicking, is dragged by four
wardens into the punishment cell of the state’s reformatory. Inside, she kneels
begging for help whilst the cell bars cast the shadow of a cross on the floor; she
bends to kiss it as a black spider passes by her face, Susana jumps in terror and
clings onto the cell bars that give way for her to escape. Susana runs in the rain
until she finds a ranch where she is given refuge by the rich landowners. Lying
about her former life, she is offered protection and work by the mother Doña
Carmen. Desired by all the men of the household, Susana sets out to seduce
them: starting from Jesús the foreman of the ranch, Alberto the son, and finally
Don Guadalupe, the father. The family order is disrupted and all characters stand
against each other as in chain reaction, culminating with Doña Carmen whipping
Susana in rage. As Guadalupe breaks in, he kicks his wife out so Susana can
replace her and live as his mistress. In the midst of havoc the police arrives
rattled by Jesús and takes Susana away. The order is restored and things go back
to the initial normality.
37
Susana adjusts properly to the conventions of Mexican cinema melodrama; it can
be attested by the acting, the mise-en-scène, as well as by the dramatic excesses of the
music and the effects of nature, but most of all by its representation of archetypes: the
family has a clear patriarchal structure, wherein all the characters are subordinate to the
figure of the father (Fernando Soler) who is both paternal (providing) and authoritarian;
the mother, Doña Carmen (Matilde Palou) is the epitome of the Mexican mother,
asexual, virtuous and self-sacrificing, the moral stronghold of the family and the
preserver of its unity and prevalence. The two other males are but two other aspects of
the masculine archetype, different shades of the same figure: Alberto, the son, is the one
who embodies the “good” macho attitudes: he is well educated, caring and protective,
respectful towards Susana and his mother, until he sees his desires frustrated and
explodes in rage. Whereas, Jesús, the foreman of the ranch, on the other hand, embodies
all the traditional macho attitudes; he is virile, sexually assertive and self confident,
manipulative, disrespectful and authoritarian.
Susana and Doña Carmen are opposing feminine characters; Susana, with her
sexual assertiveness, threatens everything Doña Carmen, the asexual mother, is set to
guard: morality, order and patriarchal authority
The patriarchal institution
Family is the institution that mediates the individual’s relationship with the state.
As such, it is the medium in which all the societal practices are learned by the
individuals in order to function in society and therefore affects all spheres of human
interaction, in both the spheres of the private and the public. The family is then, the
microcosms of society in which all social relationships are essayed.
Susana conforms efficiently to the metonymic correspondence that is typical of
melodramas, in which all the individual stands for the collective. The family, protected
and secured by its patriarchal functioning stands for society, the ranch is a microcosm of
the social structure, well functioning into a hierarchical arrangement, governed by men
38
and guarded by women, in a correspondent system of interests in which power is self-
preserving and all norms are observed.
In the familial structure the societal relations and gender roles are delineated,
subservient all to the centralist holding power of the patriarch. Coexisting within the
capitalist system, all the ambits of control that attain the sphere of what is public and
external to the house are reserved to the males of the family: the outside world, with its
connotations of the active (not passive), power and freedom, whereas women are
confined to the interior of the house, performing the correspondent activities of
following orders, guarding and keeping (both the house and the moral and social values).
The constricted space of the ranch stands for the constricted bourgeois society,
and all the relationships knitted into it are subservient, held to patriarchal hierarchy. The
patron delegates the share of work that has to do with the sphere of the external (the
management of the workforce that anonymously takes care of the functioning of the
ranch) to Jesús, a subaltern version of himself; whereas he delegates all the work related
to the sphere of the private (thus the keeping of the household) to the woman
(wife/mother), with whom he has established a distant, asexual and almost contractual
relationship that excludes all forms of affection.
In this way, the patriarch is free to go beyond the limits of the household and
perform activities that are “proper” to his gender and status and that endorse his
authority and masculinity (like hunting) and that apparently allow him to also look for
sexual pleasure in a creature that is for him an object representing all that is denied
within the sacred (contractual) institution of marriage.
The irruption of Susana into the family sets out a chain reaction that upsets this
intricate system of subservient relationships. Susana’s plan of seduction threatens not
only the institution of marriage but also every conceived order within the social structure
that the family stands for.
By seducing Jesús and Alberto in order to reach Don Guadalupe, Susana violates
the hierarchical and social limits, upsetting the order of subordination that exists
between both father and son and patron and employee. Driven by desire, all men become
essentially the same and confront each other in their quest for their prey (captor) Susana,
who by then is already confronting her feminine counterpart.
39
Susana, unlike Doña Carmen, is related to the open space. She arrives from the
wilderness and, like a wild animal (or like men), is associated with freedom and power,
but because her condition of being a woman does not allow her to hold these powers, she
is regarded as the devil. She, however, acknowledges her attributes and wields them at
will. By opposing the sacred figure of the mother/wife, Susana threatens everything
Doña Carmen stands for: the bourgeois home and values, asexual morality and,
ultimately, her passive subordination to male power.
Anarchic explosions like Susana’s irruption cannot be contained within the
conventions of melodrama without being punished. Susana is taken away allowing
things to go back to normality, but without letting the spectator forget that during the
climatic scene the true nature of all these “good” people was unmasked: the self-
sacrificing mother whipped Susana with sadistic pleasure, the protective father and
husband kicked his wife out threatening to leave her out on the streets, the virile macho,
overcome with jealousy, became an informer, and the model son lost all respect and
humiliated his own mother.
By adapting so tightly to the conventions of the melodrama –in which
unexpected, rather than logical resolutions can be inserted, Buñuel’s happy ending can
be nothing but the ultimate exposure of the fragility of the patriarchal family.
Once unmasked by the irruption of a creature that is all untamed desire and
disrespect for social norms, family relations readjust and economic as well as social
assurance is restored –as exemplified by the recovering of the mare and the clearing of
the weather, only everything seems awkwardly fragile, and just as the mare may fall ill
again or the weather may change, the challenge on the position of patriarchal family, and
therefore on the national structure, persists.
The film’s finale also underlines the apparent inflexibility of a system that leaves
no space for change. As noted by Francisco Aranda, (1975) Susana’s removal from the
family and the restoration of the order in the household confirms that that there is no
possibility for the human being when he or she has to struggle to live a different life
from the one in which he or she was born. Social mobility, and social change are,
Buñuel seems to suggest, impossible, for the forces of the bourgeois order are too strong,
40
and even though the weakness of this order and all its contradictions are exposed by the
individual’s irrupting force.
3.3 Modernity, class and the illusion of change: La ilusión viaja en tranvía
[Synopsis]
After having repaired old tram number 133, buddies Tarrajas (Fernando
Soto ‘Mantequilla’) and Caireles (Carlos Navarro) are fired from the garages of
the tram company and learn that their beloved tram will be put out circulation
and dismantled. Disappointed, they head to the nearest ‘cantina’ to sink their
sorrow in alcohol only to go back to the garage during the night to take the tram
out ‘just for a last stroll’. Throughout the night and the following day they
wander the streets of Mexico City and, unable to either hide or put the tram back,
they are forced to let passengers hop on in what becomes a remarkable parade of
different characters and comic situations that underline the marginal life of the
city’s underclass.
La ilusión viaja en tranvía combines high and low-brow features that make it
quite unique, for it is a highly entertaining melodramatic comedy that illustrates the
plight of the lower classes of Mexico City whilst raising the question on crucial issues of
the Mexican socio-political context of the end of the 1940s and the beginning of the
1950s. It does as well draw a captivating picture of urban folklore that grabs hold on
Mexico City’s wealth on linguistic variations, traditional sayings and expressions,
combining the sharp Spanish humour of Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza with surrealist tricks
and a very well written script by Mauricio de la Serna in collaboration with Mexican
novelist José Revueltas.
La ilusión viaja en tranvía enters the category of the urban melodrama, a
subgenre that became popular in Mexico during the years immediately following the
war, with the first signs of decay of the Golden Age once the attentions of the
41
Hollywood industry were deviated from the production of war propaganda and set out to
recover their Latin American markets once more,
To this end, the financial and technological support that the US had extended to
the Mexican industry dried up. This, coupled with a decline in investment rates,
resulting in less investment per film, lead to a stream of low-budget, formula-
based films designed to appeal to a specific audience-namely the urban popular
classes – rather than the more all-embracing tendencies of films produced in the
Golden Age.
Noble, 2005: 94
Along to this phenomenon, the social structure of the country was beginning to
show important changes in terms of cultural consume. Whilst the Golden Age years had
brought to the film theatres “all the people –or at least more than before and since”
(Noble, 2005: 93) creating a socially diverse yet homogeneous audience profile, the
years following the end of the war were characterised for an extensive stratification of
social classes and a growth of the sector of the population considered lower-middle
class, in which were included different variations of income.
The audience for the national production of films was then increasingly
composed by urban popular classes, and this was reflected in the kind of genres that
sprung building on the success of the urban trilogy Nosotros los pobres (Ismael
Rodríguez, 1948)
La ilusión viaja en tranvía clearly belongs to this kind of films that intended to appeal a
targeted urban audience that expected to feel identified with what they saw on the
screen, and whose traditions and form of speech was being represented “faithfully”, for
the first time with no pejorative connotations. It is not surprising then that much of the
humour of all these films lies on the dialogues that reproduce the popular speech, a
characteristic best exemplified by the films of Mario Moreno “Cantinflas”.
La ilusión viaja en tranvía can be grouped along with El gran calavera (1949)
for in both of them the poor are presented within the paradigm made popular by
Nosotros los pobres in which the poor constitute the chunk of the population that holds
the true spirit of the country: proud, happy and good-hearted luchones (literally
‘struggler’) who get by against adversity and poverty with dignity and self-sacrifice,
42
whereas the rich stand for all the opposite: they are embittered, cold-hearted hedonists,
corrupted and incapable of enjoying life in its simplicity3. The ideological implications
of this recurrent motif legitimised the impossibility of social mobility by giving the
masses a plain message: “you are the bearers of legitimate mexicanidad. In order to
maintain it, your responsibility is to stay in your humble place and accept the status
quo.” (Ramírez Berg, 1995: 25)
Whilst films like Nosotros los pobres take this paradigm to unimaginable levels,
it is precisely at this point that La ilusión viaja en tranvía breaks the expectations of the
genre, but still remaining faithful to its conventions. Underneath its conventional
narrative and witty humour, runs an implacable discourse that even when implying
impossibility for social change advocates for social resistance. The characters here
portrayed do not endure poverty with resignation, because poverty, along with all its
consequences is portrayed as the result of specific political and economic policies that
affect directly on the lives of the characters, which acknowledge their condition and
resist to it.
La ilusión viaja en tranvía is a fairytale in which the characters are given the
opportunity, if only for a day, of breaking the rules of the given status quo. The film
does not suggest that social mobility is by any means possible, the journey of illusion
serving only as an excuse to illustrate the rigidity of social structure and to expose the
effects of modernisation in that multilayered social structure.
The way social class is portrayed responds to the two corollaries suggested by
Ramírez Berg, as a typical depiction of class in classic Mexican cinema: “First, authentic
mexicanidad resides in the lower classes and second, the lower the station the more
genuine the Mexican-ness” (Ramírez Berg, 1995: 25), the low class is not, however,
patiently guarding their Mexican-ness by staying poor and low in the class scale;
instead, they resist to the class oppression they are subject to with the very arms of this
Mexican-ness, thus they make fun of it, argue with the corn seller, snatch sacks of corn
from a black market dealer, and wash it all down with a pair of ‘heladas’ staying true to
their roles as goodies, but without being idiots. On the other hand, the characters of the
higher class are not portrayed as being out of this Mexican-ness, on the contrary, they
3 in El gran calavera the rich get to actually learn from the poor how to enjoy life
43
are part of the social tissue and showing different aspects of Mexican-ness themselves.
The message appearing to be then, that Mexican-ness is inevitably conformed by the
permanent almost inherent clash of classes.
Urban Interrupted
If during the opening sequence of La ilusión viaja en tranvía we see long shots of
a dense-populated, urban and modern capital, as the journey on the tram begins and the
plot moves on, its interior functions as a container where all the diverse components of
“modern” Mexico interact, and the contradictions of modernity are exposed. On the tram
hop the most varied characters that make up what earlier the unseen narrator had defined
as “el sector de las gentes que viajan en tranvía” and this term is so wide it cannot be but
an excuse to expose the frictions generated by the forced coexistence of different groups
(more specifically different social classes) that may include characters as varied as the
workers of the slaughterhouse, a duke, an anti-communist American tourist, two
proletariat-hating aristocrats, a group of school children, and an bureaucrat obsessed
with order and rules.
The film’s structure, an assemble of vignettes put together in the form of a road
trip, allows for the analysis of different aspects of urban life, and the way the inhabitants
of the city live and socialise in a world that combines different levels of modernity. The
characters in the film function as guides and mediators of the city’s disparate landscapes
in which, as in successive parading, the strains and frictions of social inequalities are
exposed. Social inequalities seem not to exist when the extremes do not encounter each
other, but the inside of the tram, therefore is a space of encounter and clashing, but most
of all, of recognition of the true nature of the country.
The film’s representation of urban life is paradoxically realistic and onirical, for
the journey is filled with accurate observations of daily life, in combination with several
inexplicable insertions that are provided directly from Buñuel’s surrealistic trick box.
All in all, however, the journey gives an insight of what is modernity in 1950s Mexico: a
mixture of modern and pre-modern ways of living, a constant interruption of the urban
landscape with rural scenarios and activities, a continuous exposure of the strains
44
provoked by the encounters of different classes, different ethnicities and different
genders having to share the same city –or the same tram.
A good example of this is the sequence when the workers of the slaughterhouse
ride the tram, carrying with them pieces of raw meat that are hanged from the holding
tubes (including a hog’s head), along, as if coming from the slaughterhouse himself,
rides also the duke of Otanto (apparently known by Tarrajas) drunk and dressed with
cape and top hat. As if this was not enough, a pair of pious ladies carrying a human-size
statue of Christ also gets on. Everything seems to be out of a surreal story, yet Buñuel’s
comment seems to be that it is not impossible for the surreal and the real to coincide in
the context of Mexico city, for, where else would the butchers take their meat if not with
them?
The film’s concern with Mexico’s social and economic context cannot be
overstated. The continuous insertion of episodes that allude to the adverse economic
situation of the country is more than a simple comment on it, it is clear, in fact, that the
purpose of the film is to expose the situation and transmit a message of contestation.
It is not a coincidence, for example, that the scene that precedes the stealing of
the tram is an actual lecture the Professor of the barrio gives to Don Braulio the
watchman about inflation and its direct consequences on the popular classes. In the same
way, it is not casual that there are two specific allusions to the rise of the price of corn.
In two of the film’s most discreet, yet distressing scenes: the dispute between the tortilla-
dough shop owner with Lupita and the other customers, who rise in protests because he
does not respect the top price of the staple grain, and the other, much stronger but
passing almost unnoticed, is when people steal desperately sacks of corn from a
smuggling truck in the back street where the protagonists are trying to hide the tram.
Nothing about the smugglers is explained but in short the implications of the scene are
huge: both inflation and free market policies affect directly on the most hidden corner of
the city.
The professor’s concerns in the film had indeed foundation on the country’s
political context. In 1953, when the film was made, the country was passing through the
first of a series of devaluations of the peso that followed the so-called economic miracle
of the war years; the regime of President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) had led the
45
country towards a steady industrialisation and a partial transformation of infrastructure
but without the social modernisation that are implicit in these changes, thus contributing
to the polarisation of economy and the indiscriminate rise of prices.
The illusion of social change
La ilusión viaja en tranvía tells a circular story. It begins and ends as a fairytale
and just like a fairytale and as stated by its title, it is an illusion. The illusion of social
change and liberation are stopped by economic rules, rigid social structure and the
strong, omniscient power of a bureaucratic system.
The film is very clear in giving a closing message of impossibility to change.
Towards the end, when the characters manage to put the tram back, the official order is
restored without “the system” even realising it ever changed. The heroes may have
broken the rules of the company but at the end they submit to them and contribute to
their perpetuation by legitimising its superiority.
The film conveys an important message: social mobility is impossible. Even
though the poor resist and try to move up there is and will always be a strong force to
stop them, and this strong force is nothing less but a paternalist and extremely
bureaucratic system (Buñuel and his screenplay writers could not find a better
representation of the official party leaders than the demagogic bureaucrats at the tram
company) that finds its base on the ideology of the bourgeoisie.
Going even further the end suggests that the whole of society and the members of
each class contribute to their social entrapment. If we agree with the metonymy of the
tram company being the representation of the nation, then Papá Pinillos’ final speech
denounces society’s inherent corruption “…lo que pasa es que en estos tiempos desde el
gerente hasta los empleados pasando por el velador y hasta el ultimo de los obreros se
tapan sus pillerías y su incompetencia” [what happens is that in these days everybody,
from the manager to the employees, including the watchman and the very last of the
workers cover each other’s pillages and incompetence] and with it, Buñuel’s final
comment twists once more the expectations of the representations of these characters, by
implying that there is an understanding on every level of this contradictory society that
reaffirms the prevalence of the authoritarian system.
46
3.4 Machismo and the State: El río y la muerte
[Synopsis]
El río y la muerte tells the story of Santa Bibiana, a rural “Tierra
Caliente” Mexican town in which social rules are defined by old vendettas, the
long time familial rivalries. Gerardo, a doctor living in the capital, is the last male
son of the Anguiano, and is expected by his mother and the whole town to go
back to Santa Bibiana and kill the last male of the Menchaca, the son of
Gerardo’s father’s murderer. Gerardo, having grown in the capital, refuses to do
so because he strongly believes people should stop those brutal barbarian
traditions to embrace progress and knowledge in order to live peacefully and
happy.
El río y la muerte is a much more hermetic film compared to La ilusión viaja en
tranvía and Susana. Because of its characteristics as a “thesis” film, the narrative, the
story and the way the characters are structured are more bold and contained forms of
melodrama. The film deals with issues that are enrooted in Mexican imaginary, and that
lay on the foundations of much of Mexican cinema’s archetypes and stereotypes, namely
the myth of the macho figure and its code of honour.
Based in the novel Muro blanco sobre roca negra by Miguel Álvarez Acosta, El
río y la muerte deals with a recurrent dual motif of Mexican cinema: the dichotomy of
backwardness versus progress, in which the rural and traditional stand for backwardness,
and urbanity and modernity stand for progress.
The film’s structure is very conventional and the characters are little more than a
Manichean embodiment of Álvarez’s moralist preaching. In several occasions Buñuel
expressed his reluctance to make a “thesis” film, especially one whose thesis was as
simplistic as this one. It is not hard to see that the novel contains a discourse that is
explicitly modernising and propagandistic, typical of the 1940s and 50s: “the idea that
‘underdeveloped’ nations would achieve ‘take-off’ if they emulated the path of historical
“progress” of the ‘developed’ metropolis.” (Noble, 2005: 107), and the moralising voice
of the author can be heard so loud in the main character that indeed left Buñuel with
little space to deviate the message towards a more diffused or ambiguous conclusion.
47
In this context, it is not surprising then, that the director gave much more
prominence and human depth to the non-protagonist characters of Felipe Anguiano and
Polo Menchaca, the ancestors of Gerardo and Rómulo. Through their story the film
leaves space for the reflection on the issue of masculinity and the validity of the
modernising discourse. It is in the story of these two characters that Buñuel explores the
implications of machismo as a subjugating social practice, moreover exposing the role of
women as both objects and preservers of it.
The core of the film is constituted by a long flashback in which Gerardo (Joaquín
Cordero) tells the story of Santa Bibiana to Elsa (Silvia Derbéz), his nurse friend.
Gerardo’s blatant, self-righteous preaching is left in the periphery while his voice fades
giving way to the image of the river flow. Felipe Anguiano (Miguel Torruco) and Polo
Menchaca (Víctor Alcocer) are exiled from the town on the other side of the river
according to the law of the town, for having killed, respectively, one of each other’s
family members. Their allegiance to their common godfather Tata Nemesio (José Elías
Moreno) brings them together in a sort of unspoken pact of camaraderie. Curiously, they
are the only characters in the film who experience a real transformation as a result of
living away from societal norms and gender expectations. Their ambiguous behaviour,
always on the limit of being brothers or enemies, unravels the desperation of Polo’s
brother Crescencio (Humberto Almazán), a bloodthirsty, permanently angry young man
that symbolises society’s sadism embodied in the obsessive desire of self-perpetuation.
Crescencio’s character, whilst being peripheral, is fundamental for the continuation of
the vendetta that his brother and Felipe had implicitly agreed to end. He instigates the
continuation of the revenges with a desperation that seems to come from angst and rage,
revealing with his behaviour that honour and family pride are but social constructs to
cover human’s insecurities and animal drives.
The Macho reloaded
Machismo in Mexico is the product of a collective psychological trauma
historically dragged since the conquest. As Octavio Paz and others have argued, the
Mexican male is the son of the violation of the Indian woman by the Spanish conqueror.
La Malinche, interpreter and concubine of Cortés, is regarded as the mother of the first
48
mestizo child, and thus when the Mexican male identifies with his mother, the Indian
element of his past, he assumes the passive and open(ed) feminine role. In the
appropriation of history, each time the male assumes any feminine action, he is passively
allowing for the conquest (violation) to take place all over again, and therefore he must
act manly and assume the active role, as in imitation of his violating father. Such an
internal conflict determines the male’s conduct and his obsession with reaffirming his
manhood constantly, especially in front of other men (other potential violators), with
whom he unconsciously competes. He demonstrates his constantly achieved manliness
with the symbols of the masculine, that he brandishes at the smallest of provocations,
“the hat… the pistol, the horse or the automobile are his pride and joy; it is a matter of
compulsively resorting to external manifestations to affirm a lacking internal vigour”
(Ramírez, quoted in Ramírez Berg, 1995: 105)
Machismo is also the societal accommodation through which the patriarchal
State imposes itself. Berg (1995) argues, as we have delineated in the first chapter, that
the individual male and the state empower and reinforce each other’s power attributes,
“more than a cultural tradition, machismo is the ideological fuel driving Mexican
society.” (Ibid: 107)
As if it was intended to be a public reprimand, El río y la muerte exposes and
condemns the typical displays of machismo that populated the charro films, comedias
rancheras and provincial melodramas typical of the Golden Age cinema. Being a film
made in the middle of the 1950s, the story adopts a much more modern point of view,
responding to the exigencies of the better established (or at least established for a longer
time) modernising policies.
Thus, all the bravery, the screaming and the quick pulling of guns at the smallest
provocation that were exalted and praised in earlier films are here delineated in extremis
and exposed to the level of the ridiculous for the didactic purposes of the novel. In the
film’s explicit meaning, this behaviour represents the nation’s former self, the stage that
must be overcome in order to reach progress, modernity and, in general, in order to be
first world.
Metonymically, Gerardo represents the ideology of the already firmly established
industrialising governments of modern Mexico who no longer needed to praise and
49
reaffirm the values of the revolution, but wished to educate the masses into capitalism
and carry out liberalist economic policies. If in the Golden Age provincial melodrama
the charro embodied “the unsullied revolutionary ideal, a man on the side of the people
who cares about and fights for justice, liberty and civil and agrarian rights” (Ramírez
Berg, 1995: 99) and stood for the country’s unity and carried out the ideals of patriotism,
Gerardo is a modern charro (with suit and tie) that has seen the light of progress and
“possesses the ideological fervour” (Ibid) to convert his fellow compatriots, or better to
say, to help them grow up into the new Mexico.
Machismo then, gets to be exposed, but only on the superficial level. Though the
optimistic finale proves right the thesis of the novel that the nation can grow up from its
barbaric past and embrace the modern (capitalistic) world and its social practices, it also
evidences the fragilities of this very change. If Buñuel was hand tied to twist or at least
dilute the novel’s message4, he did not spare in exposing its superficiality and portraying
the promised Mexico unsympathetically, exposing its factual inaccessibility.
The Mexico suggested and ardently promoted by Gerardo, a Mexico of progress
and friendly but superficial pacts with its past, offers not much more of what it tries to
eradicate: the promised Mexico is only another face of the old machista and self-
perpetuating one. In it, women are equally subordinated to men, and power, in the form
of knowledge and status is passed from generation to generation just as vendetta and
honour are transmitted into descendents in Santa Bibiana; Gerardo has only traded his
gun and hat for a demagogic discourse of progress, the same discourse wielded by the
governments in turn.
The ideological implications of this new Mexico go even further: the aseptic
environment of the hospital stands as symbol of the homogeneity that the modernising
system pursues for the country. In the film, progress and change are promoted by white
Europeanised mestizos (not only Gerardo, but also his grandfather Tata Nemesio),
representatives of the bourgeoisie, who, because of their racial and social status are
entitled to clear the country from all its intrinsic diversity, namely barbarian customs as
the vendettas or other traditions that are of a clear Indigenous influence as the masked
4 The author agreed to sell the rights of the novel only under the condition hat the message was not changed.
50
religious processions, or the rituals of the death that are all acutely portrayed in the film
with almost ethnographic eye. After all, the change offered by Gerardo puts the
responsibility of the progress of the country on the people, who, in order to become
better Mexicans should allow themselves to be civilised and embrace change, always
following the commands of the patriarchal authority.
3.5 Female Desire: Susana, Lupita, Mercedes
Cinema representations of women serve as a mechanism to bridge public history
and domestic narrative. As it has been discussed, the cinematic allegories of gender roles
in Mexican cinema had the purpose of conveying ideology, and female characters
functioned as important metaphors of continuation and preservation of this ideology.
As it has been discussed, this was done through the use of specific narrative devices. We
will se in this section how Buñuel’s films analysed here adopt these devices and
undermine them from within.
There are three essential archetypes that enclosed women in this paradigm of
representation. As it has been discussed in the first chapter, these types are derivative
from the roles that are left for women within the construct of the patriarchal family.
Moral rectitude
The boom of the cabaretera (B-girl) films during the Golden Age were revolved
around the story of a good girl who was forced by circumstances to become a prostitute,
and, though she remained good at heart, her incorrect behaviour had always to be
punished by the prevailing moral. Moral rectitude and its prevalence then were
consistently identified with the figure of the state, what legitimised its inherent authority
to punish the dissentions. The saga of these films began as early as 1932 with Santa
(Antonio Moreno) and it remained a recurrent cliché of Mexican cinema. Other films
that take on the same argument are La mujer del Puerto (Arcady Boytler, 1933) and
Emilio Fernández’s Salón México (1949), in which Mercedes, the protagonist (Marga
López) is forced into prostitution in order to pay for her sister’s upper class boarding
school, (thus the sister’s morally and socially accepted upbringing), she is eventually
killed by her pimp, whilst her sister ends up marrying a high range military officer (who
51
has just come back from Second World War) without ever knowing the truth. The death
of the prostitute “reaffirms the moral authority of the state” (Saragoza et al 1994: 28)
whilst the moral dissidence is again punished.
Susana seems to retake the basic arguments of these films, in convergence with
the figure of the devoradora, the femme fatale figure that, also as a result of a troubled
past, remains as an aggressive outcast that refuses to embrace the attributes of “normal”
femininity, i.e. romantic love and motherhood. Susana, however, sets off from two
fundamental differences: she does not have a troubled past that justifies her immoral
behaviour (she seems to be inherently “evil”) and her punishment for having confronted
the moral authority only reveals the arbitrariness of the patriarchal morality.
The portrayal of Susana, as has been noted by Francisco Aranda (1975: 152)
mischievously awakens a sense of justice in the spectator by evidencing the hypocrisy
lying underneath the familial rectitude. In the case of the representation of Susana’s
character, Buñuel has refused to make her appear as a victim of unjust circumstances;
moreover, she is portrayed as a character that does not give way to victimisation. Unlike
her cabaretera counterparts, Susana is a woman who not only does not want to
accommodate to the established norms of society (she is inherently rebel), but her
confronting of the traditional woman role represented by Carmen, as has been argued
above, means her rejection of this very order. What Susana desires is to hold the power
that the established order denies for women, thus the power wielded by men, as
embodied in the character of Don Guadalupe. Susana’s sexual assertiveness is not the
sole threaten to this power, but the fact that she manipulates her position as men’s object
of desire in order to achieve what she desires. Susana’s desire is, therefore, what
eventually unmasks the immorality of the system.
Virgin and whore
In order to underscore the valorisation of the poor as holders of the legitimate
values of Mexican-ness, Mexican films often identified the poor/good girl with the
values of chastity, purity and humility as opposed to the representation of sexy, brazen
women whose immorality threatened the moral of the Mexican family and who were
52
eventually punished by the dramatic thread (by not being worth of becoming mothers
and guard the values of Mexican-ness).
Lupita in La ilusión viaja en tranvía bears ambiguously both sides of this
dichotomy. Unlike films like Nosotros los pobres, in which the two female characters
that are “available” for the protagonist Pepe el Toro, represent distinctively these
contrasting characteristics, Buñuel has the female character of La ilusión viaja en
tranvía move freely between the two extremes. Lupita is simultaneously the chaste, pure
poor girl who does not give in to the several moves of driver Pablo (a character who has
moved up on the social scale) and the sexy, assertive woman who uses her sexual
appeals to obtain what she wants or what she needs from men. She is neither a virgin nor
a whore.
From the beginning, Lupita is identified with the role of the deceitful (whore);
she plays Eve in the neighbourhood’s pastorela, in a scene that is representative of her
ambiguous role: when God asks to both she and Adam if they remember he had
forbidden to eat the apple Adam answers “yes”, whereas Lupita-Eve answers “Yo no” in
a playful tone that represents the dichotomy of the clever girl playing to be a fool.
Lupita plays with the virgin/whore dichotomy; her character undermines the
solemnity of these valorisations by evidencing the fact that they are social constructs that
she can use when it is convenient in order to get what she wants. Lupita plays both roles
at will: she is the virgin when she is being courted by Pablo the driver: she does not let
him touch her face (“¡tentón!”) and refuses to ride his car (implying good girls do not
ride guy’s cars), but dresses up and plays the sluttish one when she needs him to help her
look for her brother (on his car). Both the car and the refusal to let him touch her face
are representations of the established moral that she does not really believe in, but that
she wields and bends at will.
This is made evident in the when she is pretending to be asleep inside the tram.
Caireles enters and sees her sleeping and comes close to her, she allows him to touch her
face and hair and to have a glimpse of her tights. In a few seconds, we see an amazing
mechanism of seduction: Lupita passes from one side to the other of the two extremes,
confusing the expectations of Juan Caireles: her dialogue is the expected for the good
girl “es solo que siendo tu hombre, y yo mujer… bueno…” [It is just that being you a
53
man, and I a woman… well…], but her attitude is marked by force, and assertiveness. In
what eventually becomes a Buñuelean joke, and a remark on the clichés about sexuality,
Lupita allows Caireles to (finally) touch her face, but his hands are dirty with grease and
so he leaves a mark on her face.
The mother
The archetype of the good mother is another one of the ubiquitous narrative
devices used by Mexican cinema regarding the representation of women. Films like the
successful Cuando los hijos se van (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1941), and in fact almost all films
of actress Sara García, who made a career representing Mexico’s good mother, set on to
guard the values of family. The good mother safeguards the prevalence of the patriarchal
authority, whilst ensuring its continuation through the transmission of the values to the
next generations. In order to fulfil these demands, the mother must be submissive to the
authority, even when it is exercised unjustly, and therefore in many cases she had to she
must be either blind, or stupid.
This stereotype is subverted through the role of Mercedes in El río y la muerte.
Mercedes (Columba Domínguez) is a character that experiences a somehow uneasy
transformation within the plot. In the retrospective part of the film, when we see
Mercedes as a young woman and girlfriend of Felipe Anguiano, she adjusts to the
expectations of her role as woman. She is a caring daughter and girlfriend and her role is
adjacent to the doings of men, whereas when she becomes a mother that she turns into a
manipulative, embittered and angry woman. She does not want to protect her son’s life,
and does not support his ideals (and therefore the ideals of the new nation); she has
turned her back on the ideals held by her dead father.
In the transit from the long flashback to the present time of the film Mercedes
had to raise her son alone, and, though we do not see this we can only suppose it was not
an easy task in a world where the rules of men prevail. Mercedes had to come to terms
with solitude, realising that she, as a lonely woman, cannot afford to be an idealist as her
father was and now her son is. Mercedes clings to the old traditions of the town as she
would stand against them in her youth. Her apparently incoherent change of mind hints
to the fact that the backing of the tradition (thus the backing of machismo) puts her on a
54
position from which she can hold power to a certain extent and be respected, and in
order to reach this position, she uses and manipulates her feminine “attributes”. Just as
when she was young she tried and managed to convince her boyfriend Felipe, out of the
vendettas by trading her company (her sexuality) for his staying calm, as a mother she
convinces her son Gerardo to face his enemy by bargaining her “motherhood” –and
instigating his Oedipal complex.
Mercedes, as Susana and Lupita, is a subject that desires autonomy from the rules
of machismo, and as they did in the other films, she uses the attributes of archetypical
femininity to access obtain what she wants.
In the representation of women roles as subjects and not only objects of desire,
the films of Luis Buñuel here analysed, underscore the discourse of resistance that is
conveyed by Luis Buñuel. Whilst the archetypical representation is respected to a certain
extent, it is evident that there is an undermining of these archetypes from within, and the
representation of women, just as it is a catalyst for bridging the public into the private,
functions as an instrument of disruption of the dominant order that is archetypically
represented by men. Even if this disruption is contained within the narrative
conventions, the women in these films are represented not as passive victims of a
machista status quo, but as active dissidents that, like Buñuel did in the Mexican film
industry, use the few arms they are given, and subvert the expected utility they have in
order to set on the quest for their desires.
55
Conclusion
Mexican films of the Golden Age provided the Mexican people with allegories
that represented an idealised form of mexicanidad and endorsed the prevalence of the
centralist power held by the post revolutionary party and its politics.
Cinema, in this way, helped launching the country into the projects of
modernisation and liberalisation that constitute Mexico’s current polity, moreover, it
was a fundamental medium for the creation of an imaginary that provided the nation
with a common identity based on props and stereotypes, but also on a stronghold of
moral values that backed specific economical, political and social practices. Cinema,
and especially the cultural policies that promoted it, had not come to terms with the
country’s problematic history, for the construction of a national identity rather than
being a process of self-recognition, was one of self-invention, and in this process issues
like the country’s ethnic diversity, the unequal economic development, and great class
divisions were all put together as a given, immobile fact, whilst Mexico moved forward
lingering on its historic debts and projecting an image of itself through its cinema that
essentially refuted any form of authentic dynamism.
In the Mexico that can be read through the work of Luis Buñuel emerge the
contradictions of this process of self-invention. The ways in which the director adapted
to the ideological apparatus are most of times faithful to form, but not always to content,
and certainly they do not fail on leaving a little room for a final suspicion that things are
not as simple as they could seem in a happy ending. Through the use and adaptation of
melodrama to his artistic needs, Luis Buñuel reflected the uneasiness with which Mexico
sees itself. All of Buñuel’s films would, in one way or another, through stronger or
milder means, defy the official image of Mexico, expose its internal and social
disparities and invite to take a closer look, a look of self-discovery and recognition.
56
Annexe Luis Buñuel’s Mexican Filmography
Gran Casino (1946-47) Other titles: Tampico / En el viejo Tampico
Country: Mexico
Production House: Películas Anahuac, S.A.
Producer: Óscar Dancigers
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the novel El rugido del paraíso by Michel Weber
Adaptation for the screen: Mauricio Magdaleno
Cinematography: Jack Draper
Cast: Libertad Lamarque (Mercedes Irigoyen), Jorge Negrete (Gerardo Ramírez),
Mercedes Barba (Camelia), Agustín Isunza (Heriberto) Julio Villarreal (Demetrio
García), José Baviera (Fabio), Alberto Bedoya (“El rayado"), Francisco Jambrina (José
Enrique), Fernanda Albany (“Nenette”), Charles Rooner (Van Eckerman), Berta Lear
(Raquel) “TríoCalaveras”, Ignacio Peón (el cochero), Julio Ahuet (el pistolero)
El gran calavera (1949) Country: Mexico
Production House: Ultramar Films
Producer: Óscar Dancigers, Fernando Soler
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on a script of the same title by Adolfo Torrado
Adaptation for the screen: Luis y Raquel Alcoriza
Cinematography: Ezequiel Carrasco
Cast: Fernando Soler (Don Ramiro), Rosario Granados (Virginia), Andrés Soler
(Ladislao), Gustavo Rojo (Eduardo), Maruja Grifell (Milagros), Francisco Jambrina
(Gregorio), Luis Alcoriza (Alfredo), Antonio Bravo (Alfonso), Antonio Monsell (Juan,
the butler)
57
Los olvidados (1950) Country: Mexico
Production House: Ultramar Films
Producer: Óscar Dancigers
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza; Max Aub; Pedro de Urdimalas
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: (Estela Inda (Marta, Pedro’s mother), Miguel Inclán (Don Carmelo, the blind
man), Alfonso Mejía (Pedro), Roberto Cobo (Jaibo), Alma Delia Fuentes (Meche),
Francisco Jambrina (school-farm principal), Jesús García Navarro (Julián’s father),
Efraín Arauz (Cacarizo), Jorge Pérez (Pelón), Javier Amezcua (Julián), Mario Ramírez
(Ojitos), Ernesto Alonso (voice off)
Susana (1950) Other titles: Susana: Carne y demonio and Susana: Demonio y carne
Country: Mexico
Director: Luis Buñuel
Production House: Internacional Cinematográfica
Producer: Sergio Kogan
Story: Short story by Manuel Reachi
Screenplay: Luis Buñuel
Adaptation and dialogues: Jaime Salvador
Cinematography: José Ortíz Ramos
Cast: Fernando Soler (Don Guadalupe), Rosita Quintana. (Susana), Víctor Manuel
Mendoza (Jesús), María Gentil Arcos (Felisa), Luis López Somoza (Alberto), Matilde
Palou (Doña Carmen)
La hija del engaño (1951) Other title: Don Quintín el amargao
Country: Mexico
58
Production House: Ultramar Films
Producer: Óscar Dancigers
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: based in the play by Carlos Arniches and Antonio Estremera Don Quintín el
amargao o El que siembra los vientos
Adaptation for the screen: Raquel and Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: José Ortíz Ramos
Cast: Fernando Soler (Don Quintín Guzmán), Alicia Caro (Marta), Fernando Soto
“Mantequilla” (Angelito), Rubén Rojo (Paco), Nacho Contla (Jonrón), Amparo Garrido
(María), Lily Aclémar (Jovita), Álvaro Matute (Julio), Roberto Meyer (Lencho García)
Una mujer sin amor (1951) Other title: Cuando los hijos nos juzgan
Country: Mexico
Production House: Internacional cinematográfica, for Columbia
Producer: Sergio Kogan
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the story Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant
Adaptation for the screen: Jaime Salvador
Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares
Cast: Rosario Granados (Rosario), Tito Junco (Julio Mistral), Julio Villarreal (Carlos
Montero), Joaquín Cordero (Carlos), Javier Loyá (Miguel), Elda Peralta (Luisa), Jaime
Calpe (Carlitos)
Subida al cielo (1951-52) Country: Mexico
Production House: Producciones cinematográficas Isla
Producer: Manuel Altoaguirre; María Luisa Gómez Mena
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Manuel Reachi; Manuel Altoaguirre
Adaptation for the screen: Manuel Altoaguirre; Juan de la Cabada; Luis Buñuel
59
Cinematography: Alex Phillips
Cast: Lilia Prado (Raquel), Esteban Márquez (Oliverio Grajales), Carmelita González
(Albina), Gilberto González (Sánchez Coello), Luis Aceves Castañeda (Silvestre),
Manuel Dondé (Don Eladio González, the candidate), Roberto Cobo (Juan), Beatriz
Ramos (Elisa), Manuel Noriega (Licenciado Figueroa), Roberto Meyer (Nemesio
Álvarez), Pedro Elvira (El cojo), Paz Villegas (Doña Ester)
El bruto (1952) Country: Mexico
Production House: Internacional Cinematográfica
Producer: Sergio Kogan
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel
Cinematography: Agustín Jiménez
Cast: Pedro Armendáriz (Pedro “El bruto”), Katy Jurado (Paloma) Rosita Arenas
(Meche), Andrés Soler (Andrés Cabrera), Beatríz Ramos (Doña Marta), Paco Martínez
(don Pepe), Roberto Meyer (Carmelo González ), Gloria Mestre (María), Paz Villegas
(María’s mother)
Robinson Crusoe (1952) Other title: Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe
Country: Mexico / USA
Production House: Tepeyac (Mexico) / United Artists (USA)
Producer: Óscar Dancigers (Mexico) / Henry H. Ehrlich (USA)
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the novel by Daniel Defoe
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; “Philip Ansel Roll” (Hugo Butler’s pseudonym)
Cinematography: Alex Phillips
Cast: Dan O’Herlihy (Robinson), Jaime Fernández (Friday), Felipe de Alba (Captain
Oberzo), José Chávez and Emilio Garibay (mutiny)
60
Él (1952-53) Country: Mexico
Production House: Producciones Tepeyac
Producer: Óscar Dancigers
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the novel by Mercedes Pinto Él
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: Arturo de Córdova (Francisco Galván de Montemayor), Delia Garcés (Gloria),
Aurora Walker (Esperanza Peralta, Gloria’s mother), Luis Beristáin (Raúl Conde),
Manuel Dondé (Pablo, the butler), Rafael Banquells (Ricardo Luján), Carlos Martínez
Baena (Father Velasco)
La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1953) Country: Mexico
Director: Luis Buñuel
Production House: Clasa Films Mundiales
Producer: Armando Orive Alba
Story: Short story by Mauricio de la Serna
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Alcoriza, José Revueltas, Mauricio de la Serna, Juan de
la Cabada
Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares
Cast: Lilia Prado (Lupita), Carlos Navarro (Juan Caireles), Fernando Soto “Mantequilla”
(Tarrajas), Agustín Isunza (Papá Pinillos), Miguel Manzano (Don Manuel), Guillermo
Bravo Sosa (Braulio)
Abismos de pasión (1953-54) Other title: Cumbres borrascosas
Country: Mexico
Production House: Producciones Tepeyac
Producer: Óscar Dancigers
61
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brönte
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Julio Alejandro; Arduino Maiuri
Cinematography: Agustín Jiménez
Cast: Irasema Dillian (Catalina), Jorge Mistral (Alejandro), Lilia Prado (Isabel), Ernesto
Alonso (Eduardo) Hortensia Santoveña (María), Luis Aceves Castañeda (Ricardo)
El río y la muerte (1954) Country: Mexico
Director: Luis Buñuel
Production House: Clasa Films Mundiales
Producer: Armando Orive Alba
Story: based on the novel Muro blanco sobre roca negra by Miguel Álvarez Acosta
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Raúl Martínez Solares
Cast: Columba Domínguez (Mercedes), Miguel Torruco (Felipe Anguiano), Joaquín
Cordero (Gerardo Anguiano), Jaime Fernández (Rómulo Menchaca), Víctor Alcocer
(Polo Menchaca), Silvia Derbéz (Elsa), José Elías Moreno (Don Nemesio), Carlos
Martínez Baena (Priest), Alfredo Valera Jr. (Chinelas)
Ensayo de un crimen (1955) Other title: La vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz
Country: Mexico
Production House: Alianza Cinematográfica S.A.
Producer: Alfonso Patiño Gómez
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Inspired by the novel Ensayo de un crimen by Rodrigo Usigli
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Eduardo Ugarte Pages
Cinematography: Agustín Jiménez
62
Cast: Miroslava Stern (Lavinia), Ernesto Alonso (Archibaldo de la Cruz), Rita Macedo
(Patricia Terrazas), Ariadna Welter (Carlota), Andrea Palma (Ms Cervantes), Leonor
Llausás (Governess), Carlos Martínez Baena (Priest), Armando Velasco (Judge)
La Mort en ce jardin (1956) Other titles: La muerte en el jardín / La muerte en la selva
Country: Mexico / France
Production House: Producciones Tepeyac (Mexico) / Dismage (France)
Producer: Óscar Dancingers / Jacques Mage
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the story by José André Lacour
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza; Raymond Queneau
Cinematography: Jorge Stahl Jr.
Cast: Simone Signoret (Djin), Charles Vanel (Castin), Geroges Marchal (Shark), Michel
Piccoli (Father Lizardi), Michèle Girardon (María), Tito Junco (Chenko), Raúl Ramírez
(Álvaro), Luis Aceves Castañeda (Alberto)
Nazarín (1958) Country: Mexico
Production House: Producciones Barbachano Ponce S.A.
Producer: Manuel Barbachano Ponce
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the novel by Benito Pérez Galdós
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Julio Alejandro
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: Marga López (Beatríz), Francisco Rabal (Father Nazario), Rita Macedo (Andara),
Ignacio López Tarso (thieve), Ofelia Guilmain (Chanfa), Luis Aceves Castañeda
(patricide), Noé Nurayama (“el Pinto”), Rosenda Monteros (“la Prieta”), Jesús
Fernández (Ujo, the dwarf), Ada Carrasco (Josefa), Edmundo Barbero (Don Ángel,
priest), Cecilia Leger (woman with pineapple)
63
La Fièvre monte à El Pao (1959) Other titles: La fiebre sube a El Pao / Los Ambiciosos
Country: Mexico / France
Production House: Fimex (Mexico) / Le Groupe des Quatre (France)
Producer: Gregorio Wallerstein
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the novel by Henry Castillou
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza; Charles Dorat; Louis Sapin
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: (Gérard Philipe (Ramón Vázquez), María Félix (Inés Rojas), Jean Servais
(Alejandro Gual), Miguel Ángel Ferris (Mariano Vargas), Raúl Dantés (García)
Domingo Soler (Juan Cárdenas), Víctor Junco (Indarte), Roberto Cañedo (colonel
Olivares), Luis Aceves Castañeda (López)
The Young One (1960) Other title: La joven
Country: Mexico / USA
Production House: Producciones Olmeca (Mexico) / Columbia (USA)
Producer: George P. Werker
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on the story Travelin’ Man by Peter Mathiesen
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; H.B. Addis (Hugo Butler)
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: Zachary Scott (Miller), Kay Meersman (Evvie), Bernie Hamilton (Traver), Claudio
Brook (Father Fleetwood), Graham Denton (Jackson)
Viridiana (1961) Country: Mexico / Spain
Production House: Gustavo Alatriste, P.C. (Mexico) / Uninci, S.A., (Spain)
Producer: Gustavo Quintana
Director: Luis Buñuel
64
Story: Luis Buñuel; Julio Alejandro; Based on an idea by Luis Buñuel
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel
Cinematography: José Fernández Aguayo
Cast: Silvia Pinal (Viridiana), Francisco Rabal (Jorge), Fernando Rey (Don Jaime), José
Calvo (Don Amalio), Margarita Lozano (Ramona), José Manuel Amrtín (“el Cojo”),
Victoria Zinny (Lucía), Luis Heredia (“el Poca”), Joaquín Roa (Don Ezequiel), Lola
Gaos (Enedina), Maruja Isbert (beggar), Teresita Rabal (Rita), Juan García Tienda (José,
leper), Sergio Mendizábal (“el Pelón)
El ángel exterminador (1962) Other title: Los náufragos de la calle Providencia
Country: Mexico
Production House: Gustavo Alatriste P.C.
Producer: Gustavo Alatriste
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: New version of the cinedrama Los náufragos de la calle Providencia, by Luis
Buñuel and Luis Alcoriza
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Luis Alcoriza
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: Silvia Pinal (Leticia, “la Valkiria”), Jacqueline Andere (Alicia de Roc), José
Baviera (Leandro Gómez), Augusto Benedicto (Dr. Carlos Conde), Luis Beristáin
(Cristian Ugalde), Antonio Bravo (Russel), Claudio Brook (Julio, the butler), César del
Campo (Álvaro, the colonel), Rosa Elena Durgel (Silvia), Lucy Gallardo (Lucía de
Nóbile), Enrique Rambal (Edmundo Nóbile), Enrique García Álvarez (Alberto Roc),
Ofelia Guilmain (Juana Ávila), Nadia Haro (Ana Maynar), Tito Junco (Raúl), Xavier
Loyá (Francisco Ávila), Xavier Massé (Eduardo), Ofelia Montesco (Beatríz), Patricia
Morán (Rita Ugalde), Patricia de Morelos (Blanca), Bertha Moss (Leonora)
Simón del desierto (1964-65) Country: Mexico
Production House: Gustavo Alatriste P.C.
Producer: Gustavo Alatriste
65
Director: Luis Buñuel
Story: Based on an idea by Luis Buñuel
Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buñuel; Julio Alejandro de Castro
Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa
Cast: Claudio Brook (Simón), Silvia Pinal (the devil), Enrique Álvarez Félix (Hermano
Matías), Francisco Reiguera (monk), Hortensia Santoveña (Simón’s mother), Enrique
del Castillo (man with no hands), Jesús Fernández (shepard, the dwarf)
66
Bibliography Aranda, Francisco, Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography, David Robinson, Ed. Secker and Warburg, London, 1975 ---- Luis Buñuel: Biografía crítica, Editorial Lumen, Barcelona, 1969 Ayala Blanco, Jorge, Aventura del cine mexicano, Ediciones Era, México, 1968
---- Disolvencia del cine mexicano: entre lo popular y lo exquisito, Editorial Grijalbo, México 1991 Buauche, Freddy, Cinema of Luis Buñuel, Trad. Peter Graham, The Tanity Press, London, 1973 Buñuel, Luis, Mi último suspiro, Random House Mondadori, Barcelona, 1982 Cesarman, Fernando, El ojo de Luis Buñuel. Psicoanálisis desde una butaca, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1976 De la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo, Del muro a la pantalla: S. M. Eisenstein y el arte pictórico mexicano, Universidad de Guadalajara; Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura; Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, Guadalajara, 1997 De los Reyes, Aurelio, Cine y sociedad en México 1896-1930, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México; Cineteca Nacional, México, 1981 Denzin, Norman K., Images of Postmodern Society. Social Theory and Contemporary Cinema, Sage Publications, London, 1992 Edwards, Gwynne, The Discreet Art of Luis Buñuel. A Reading of his Films. Maryon Boyers, London, 1982 Evans, Peter, The Films of Luis Buñuel. Subjectivity and Desire, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1995 Featherstone, Mike (Ed.), Cultural Theory and Cultural Change, Sage Publications, London, 1992 Foster, David William, Mexico City in Contemporary Mexican Cinema, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2002 Fuentes, Carlos, Los cinco soles de México. Memoria de un milenio, Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona, 2000
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Fuentes, Víctor, “The Constant of Exile in Buñuel”, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buñuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 García Riera, Emilio, Historia documental del cine mexicano: época sonora, Ediciones Era, México, 1969 Hart, Stephen, “Buñuel’s Box of Subaltern Tricks: Technique in Los olvidados”, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buñuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 Hershfield, Joanne, Mexican Cinema/Mexican Woman, 1940-1950, The University of Arizona Press, Tucson, 1996 Kinder, Marsha, Blood Cinema. The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain, University of California Press, 1993 King, John, Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America, Verso, London, 1995 Martins, Laura M., “Luis Buñuel or Ways of Disturbing Spectatorship”, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buñuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 Monsiváis, Carlos, Rostros del cine mexicano, Américo Norte editores, México, 1993 Mora, Carl J., Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a society 1896-1980, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1982 Noble, Andrea, Mexican National Cinema, Routledge, London, 2005 Paranagua, Paulo Antonio, Él: Luis Buñuel, Ediciones Paidós, Barcelona, 2001 Paz, Octavio, El laberinto de la soledad, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 1975
---- Itinerario, Fondo de Cultura Económica, México, 1993 Pérez Turrent, Tomás and de la Colina, José, Buñuel por Buñuel, Plot Ediciones, Madrid, 1999 Pérez Rubio, Pablo, El cine melodramático, Paidós, Barcelona, 2004 Ramírez Berg, Charles, Cinema of Solitude: a critical study of Mexican Film, 1967- 1983, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1992 ---- “The Cinematic Invention of Mexico. The Poetics and Politics of the Fernández-Figueroa Style”, in Noriega, Chon A. and Ricci, Steven, The Mexican Cinema Project, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, 1994
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---- Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion and
Resistance, University of Texas Press, Austin, 2002
Reyes Nevares, Beatriz, The Mexican Cinema. Interviews with Thirteen Directors, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1976 Sánchez Biosca, Vicente, “Scenes of Liturgy and Perversion in Buñuel”, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buñuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 Sánchez Vidal, Agustín, Luis Buñuel. Obra cinematográfica, J. C. Ediciones, Madrid 1984
----- Luis Buñuel, Cátedra, Madrid, 1994
Saragoza, Alex M. with Graciela Berkovich, “Intimate Connections: Cinematic Allegories of Gender, the State and National Identity”, 1994 in Noriega, Chon A. and Ricci, Steven (Eds.) The Mexican Cinema Project, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, 1994 Simpson, Phillip, Utterson, Andrew and Shepherdson, K. J. (Eds.), Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies (Vol. 4), Routledge, London, 2004 Stock, Ann Marie (Ed.), Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1997 Womack Jr., John, Zapata e a revolução mexicana, (Trad. Ana Mafalda Tello and Mariana Pardal Monteiro), Edições 70, Lisboa, 1968 Articles Peleado, Floreal, Buñuel “Transterrado” Positif, 543, May 2006 Pérez, Pablo and Hernández, Javier, Luis Buñuel y el melodrama. Miradas en torno a un género. Vértigo. Revista de cine, Num. 11 Marzo 1995, Ed. Ayuntamiento de La Coruña, 1995 Téllez, José Luis, México lindo y querido, Vértigo. Revista de cine, Num. 11 Marzo 1995, Ed. Ayuntamiento de La Coruña, 1995 Online References http://www.imdb.com (Last accessed on: 12 June 2007)