Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema
Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz
Language: English
Pages: 216
ISBN: B017PNUCC0
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Though Luis Buñuel, one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century, spent his most productive years as a director in Mexico, film histories and criticism invariably pay little attention to his work during this period. The only book-length English-language study of Buñuel's Mexican films, this book is the first to explore a significant but neglected area of this filmmaker's distinguished career and thus to fill a gap in our appreciation and understanding of both Buñuel's achievement and the history of Mexican film.
Ernesto Acevedo-Muñoz considers Buñuel's Mexican films—made between 1947 and 1965—within the context of a national and nationalist film industry, comparing the filmmaker's employment of styles, genres, character types, themes, and techniques to those most characteristic of Mexican cinema. In this study Buñuel's films emerge as a link between the Classical Mexican cinema of the 1930s through the 1950s and the "new" Cinema of the 1960s, flourishing in a time of crisis for the national film industry and introducing some of the stylistic and conceptual changes that would revitalize Mexican cinema.
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calls it, “the modernization of patriarchy.”35 Río Escondido was also a kind of self-reflexive glimpse at the mythical significance of the revolutionary cultural project which expanded to multiple areas of Mexico’s life. Mexican Cinema in the Time of Luis Buñuel / 25 With his most famous film, María Candelaria (1943), as with Río Escondido, Emilio Fernández wanted to make it clear that the cinema was an active part of the country’s enormous cultural undertaking. Through his work, he
structures, the films Sandro cares for work to frustrate spectators’ desires. This model, however, once again serves to exclude most of the commercial Mexican films, which were narratively coherent and conventional compared to Buñuel’s other work. In Sandro’s study there is no place for works with such linear, cause-effect narrative structure, such as Una mujer sin amor, El gran calavera, La ilusión viaja en tranvía, or Susana. These movies, however, served well their narrative, generic, and
2 Mexican films are treated as an inevitable detour in an otherwise stylistically and thematically interconnected body of work. Buñuel’s declared marginality from the mainstream of Mexican cinema, his position as an outsider, gave him a privileged perspective. Interestingly, in the chapter on Mexico in My Last Sigh Buñuel speaks more about Mexico than about his Mexican films. However, what is missing about the Mexican films in My Last Sigh, namely the connection between those films and the rest
muerte, Una mujer sin amor) to mediate national identity. Buñuel refined his mastery of popular cinema, both narratively and technically, in Mexico. He rehearsed characters like Belle de Jour (of the homonymous 1966 film), Don Jaime of Viridiana (1961), and Don Lope of Tristana (1969) with rudimentary Mexican versions like Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen, 1955) and Francisco Galván de Montemayor (Él, 1952). Buñuel appropriated and adapted traits of the Mexican cabaretera to his later
3–52. Williams explains the origins of surrealist theories about images, the surrealists interest in dreams, and the importance of dreams in the early works of Freud, particularly his The Interpretation of Dreams. 21. Santí, Introduction to El laberinto de la soledad, 32. 22. André Bazin’s first review of Los olvidados was originally published in Esprit in 1951; quote is from the translated article, reprinted in Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty (55, 57). The Buñuel quote is from a 1954 interview,