Mexico in the Films of Luis Buñuel

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.

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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.

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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)