Hola. This is Barbara, your curator of cultural news from and about Spanish-speaking cultures. Welcome back after the summer break. This year's Locarno Film Festival dedicated its retrospective to classic Mexican cinema. Since I spent 4 days at the film festival, let me take you there and share my impressions of the retrospective with you.
Filmland Mexico
Mexico is one of the most important and productive countries in today’s world of cinema today. Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Natalia Beristain are among the better-known names in international cinema. However, the significance of Mexican cinema is nothing new. The Locarno Film Festival has dedicated this year's retrospective to classic Mexican cinema from the 1940s to the 1960s. The retrospective was curated by programme designer and film critic Olaf Möller, critic Roberto Turigliatto and the director of the film library of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), Hugo Villa. Its title "Espectáculo a diario" (Everyday Spectacle) takes into account the fact that cinema was part of the everyday entertainment of wide (urban) circles of the population in those decades. An overview of all the films can be found in the film festival programme. The retrospective consisted of a total of 30 films from the years 1940 to 1969. The retrospective clearly shows that the Mexican cinema of that era cannot be reduced only to the great names Cantinflas and MarÃa Félix, who are still well-known today.
My selection of films
Unfortunately, I was only able to see a fraction of the films on offer, as I was only on-site in Locarno from August 9th to August 12th. Besides the Mexican retrospective, I also wanted to see some new films. Here is my selection:
La música de siempre (1956, Timeless music) was one of the first colour films made in Mexico. The plot is quite inconsequential. It's about finding a frame story that allows a film crew to string together diverse musical scenes. This is designed to be very funny and entertaining, but the making of the film had a serious social background. The film was, so to speak, a job creation measure for artists, as the head of government of Mexico City at the time was cracking down on the entertainment industry. The film was directed by Tito Davison from Chile.
El caso de la mujer asesinadita (1955, The case of the wee murdered woman) is also a highly entertaining and enjoyable film, again directed by Tito Davison. A rich woman lives a boring life in her stately home. Since she is bored, she reads a lot. These readings cause her to have wild dreams and premonitions about her impending murder. The film is based on the play by Miguel Mihura and Alvaro Laiglesia, which is why the film feels like a kind of chamber play. Â
El corazón y la espada (1953, The heart and the sword) is interchangeable in content with many other swashbuckler films set in the Middle Ages. What makes it special is that it is the first Mexican film to be shot in 3D. So the swords extend into the audience space. The simple film set, which is supposed to represent the interior of the Alhambra palace, thus achieves a wonderfully spatial effect with steep staircases and eerily deep corridors. The plot is also quickly told. A Spanish nobleman wants to take revenge on the Caliph of Granada for the death of his parents. He is accompanied by Ponce de León who is in his search for the Rose of Granada, which promises eternal youth, and Lolita, who is looking for the alchemical recipe for gold in Granada. A monk, confident of the caliph’s niece, also plays an important role. The film does not take the historical facts too seriously. The depiction of the different cultures also serves more to do an exercise in deconstructing historical stereotypes than to establish historical truth.
Unfortunately, this 3D film is only available in short excerpts on YouTube. Incidentally, Lolita is played by Katy Jurado, who was the first Latin American actress to win a Golden Globe Award for her supporting role in the classic film High Noon. The film was directed by Edward Dein and Carlos Véjar Jr.
Overall impression of the retrospective
Unfortunately, there was not enough time to watch more Mexican movies. The following two links contain a complete assessment of the retrospective, once from a Mexican perspective, and once from a Swiss perspective. On the film platform MUBI, some of the films presented in Locarno can be seen for free. You can certainly also find some of them on YouTube. I want to check out the film La mujer murciélago and one of the numerous horror films. That's not usually my genre, but especially in Mexican cinema, I expect an artistically interesting approach towards death and its supposed horrors.
In any case, I was thrilled by the original and self-confident way in which film traditions from the USA, for example, were adopted, emulated or even created from scratch in Mexico. It is also remarkable - as curator Olaf Möller pointed out in his brief introduction to the films - how internationally Mexican cinema was already positioned in those years. Well, it still is today, when I think of the directors mentioned at the beginning. They all work with international crews and deal with themes that attract international attention.
Today's filmmakers in Mexico have received great examples from classic Mexican cinema, which they still value today. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that the film El suavecito could be restored thanks to the collaboration with Guillermo Del Toro. Through access through the organizers of the film festival, a larger cinema audience has also been allowed to rediscover these films. Which ones would you like to watch?
This is all for now. I will be back in September with more news.