Master Erasmus Mundus Crossways in European Humanities

Mexico in the films of Luis Buuel

Dissertation Presented by

Elsa Barreda Ruiz

Home University: Universit degli studi di Bergamo Supervisor at Home University: Prof. Stefano Ghislotti Facolt 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 Lnguas, Culturas e Literaturas Modernas Seco de Estudos Espanhis, Franceses e Italianos

Lisbon, June 2007

A mis padres

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 Buuel in Mexico 2.1. Antecedents of Luis Buuels Artistic Trajectory 21 2.2 Luis Buuel and the Mexican Film Industry............. 25 2.3 Buuels Mexico: Cultural Encounters and Continuities...29 Chapter three Mexico in the Films of Luis Buuel 3.1 Analysis of Susana, La ilusin viaja en tranva and El ro y la muerte.... 34 3.2 Patriarchy and the Mexican Family: Susana..36 3.3 Modernity, class and the illusion of change: La ilusin viaja en tranva..40 3.4 Machismo and the State: El ro y la muerte.. 46 3.5 Female Desire: Susana, Lupita, Mercedes.................................................50 Conclusion55 Annexe Luis Buuels Mexican Filmography...56 Bibliography.66

Introduction

This is a work that studies the Mexican films of Luis Buuel, 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 Buuel 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 directors career been regarded as representative of Mexican cinema or Mexican culture. It is evident, however, that in these films Luis Buuel managed to capture the essence of Mexican idiosyncrasy and merge it with features of his artistic background, his native countrys 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 socioeconomic context, and that influence the outcome of his work. We have, therefore, set out from the consideration that the ways in which Buuel 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

Chapter two focuses on Buuels 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 Buuels 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 authors specific choices, artistic trajectory, and personal condition as exile. Chapter three comprises the analysis of three of Buuels Mexican films: Susana, La ilusin viaja en tranva and El ro y la muerte. In them we analyse the different ways in which Buuel 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 Buuels films converge or differ with classic Mexican films whilst also functioning as a reflection of his personal point of view.

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 countrys 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 partys 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.

The Mexican Revolution exploded after a pivotal interview President Porfirio Daz, who had held power for 32 years, gave to American journalist James Creelman from the popular Pearsons Magazine in February 1908. In it, Daz said he would definitely abandon his charge once his ruling period was finished. (Womack 1968: 17) Daz was known for constantly promising his resignation and free elections, but his 78 years of age seemed to say this time he meant it. Dazs 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 Daz, 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 Daz. 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.

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)

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 revolucin mexicana] no la gui una teora de la igualdad: estaba poseda por una pasin igualitaria y comunitaria. Los orgenes de esta pasin estn no en las ideas modernas sino en la tradicin de las comunidades indgenas anteriores a la Conquista y en el cristianismo evanglico 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

contestants, and the triumphant rise of the middle class Constitutionalists in 1917 was received with strong opposition by Zapatas army in the south and Villas 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 Elas 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 Revolucin 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 minoras que haban sido excludos tanto de la sociedad novohispana como de la republicana [] comunidades campesinas y, en menor grado, a las minoras indgenas (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]

Indeed, the toppling of Daz 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 populations (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 States 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 revolucin, 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 Mexicos most distinctive pictorial movements. Muralism was perhaps the artistic expression that embodies Mexicos 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 Mexicos 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 Jos 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 csmica, 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 Jos 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 postrevolutionary 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 governments 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 films 2 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 All en el rancho grande. Even though the consistent blooming of the film industry (in 1933, only one year after Santas 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 countrys 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 (Ramrez Berg, 1992: 1) 1.3 The Golden Age of Mexican cinema Perhaps cinema could not have served so efficiently to the consolidation of Mexicos 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 (Garca 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 vila 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 Hollywoods absence was to be filled. The Mexican government shortly realised the importance of supporting the development o the film industry. In 1943 the Banco Cinematogrfico was founded, it began as a private institution backed by official agencies like the Banco de Mxico 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 vila Camachos 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 Argentinas 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 Fernndez, Julio Bracho, Roberto Gavaldn and Ismael Rodrguez, and the consolidation of a star system as never seen in the context of Spanish-speaking cinema: Mara Flix, Mario Moreno Cantinflas, Pedro Armendriz, Andrea Palma, Jorge Negrete, Sara Garca, Fernando y Andrs Soler, Joaqun Pardav, Arturo de Crdova y Dolores del Ro 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 Fernndez; 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 Fernndez 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 Fernndez 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 (Ramrez 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 Mexicos 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 Fernndez 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 onedimensional 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 Fernndezs 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 Jos Luis (Pedro Armendriz), the son of a wealthy landowner who falls in love with Esperanza (Dolores del Ro) a poor peasant girl, daughter of a peon who works in Jos 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. Jos 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 Jos Luis and Esperanzas 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 Fernndezs 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 Mara 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 Saln Mxico, 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 States 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 countrys 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 Ramrez Berg, (1992) reveals itself in each of these archetypes, and its projection of the key issues of mexicanidad reveal the conflicting nature of Mexicos 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 Buuel 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 Mexicos capitalistic status quo, argues Ramrez Berg, is automatically suspect, for the system is the result of a bloody revolution that was supposed to reform Mexican life yet changed little (Ramrez 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. (Ramrez 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

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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 (Ramrez 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 Corts 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. (Ramrez 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 lifethe most common nontreacherous role is that of the asexual, long-suffering mother.

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Chapter two

Luis Buuel in Mexico

2.1. Antecedents of Luis Buuels Artistic Trajectory Luis Buuel 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, Buuel 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 students resident where also lived poet Federico Garca Lorca, painter Salvador Dal and other people who would later be outstanding intellectuals or artists of the so-called Generacin 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 Langs Der Mde 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 Dal to write the script of Un Chien andalou (1929), a film hat would give him entrance to the group. The film, financed by the directors 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 LAge dor (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 films contents and the publics reaction are examples of what would accompany Buuel throughout his career.

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In one way or another, Buuels 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, Buuel went back to Spain after a while, where he shot the gripping and strongly criticised documentary Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan (1932). Banned by Spains new republican government, Las Hurdes is considered pivotal in the career of Buuel, for it is a film that combines elements of surrealism (embedded in the films fatalist narrative) with stark realism and bleak treatment of facts. Buuel continued working in Spain as a dubbing supervisor for Paramount and Warner studios and held an executive position in Filmfono, a state-fund producing company that attempted to give boost to Spains film industry with commercial quality filmmaking. He produced several films and supervised the direction of others (among which Don Quintn el amargao, 1935), but the project was interrupted with the outbreak of the Civil War. In 1938 Buuel 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 LAge dor. 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 Buuel stayed in Mexico living on a monthly allowance sent by his mother. Almost three years later, Buuel 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

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time, with appointed scripts and imposed actors, what Buuel would call pelculas 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 Buuel to make a real film and allowed him total liberty to search for the subject. Buuel 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 Buuel to write a script about Mexico Citys poor children. (Aranda, 1969: 188) Buuel 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 Citys slums. He began a deeper investigation and gathered some real stories from the reformatory to write the script. The collaboration of Spanish writer Jess 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 Rodrguezs Nosotros los pobres (1948) and Ustedes los ricos (1948) From then on, Buuels 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), l (1920), Abismos de pasin (1953), La vida criminal de Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen) (1955) and Nazarn (1958); less famous but of considerable commercial success within Mexico were Subida al cielo (1951) and Una mujer sin amor (1951) and La ilusin viaja en tranva (1953). Buuel 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

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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 Buuels 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 regimes censorship policies. Nevertheless, when the film was released, the religious authorities were scandalised and demanded Buuels 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 dor in Cannes in 1962. Buuel would direct two more films in Mexico: El ngel exterminador (1962), and Simn 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. Simn del desierto, a film based on the story of Simen 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 Buuels best finales. This episode symbolically closes the Mexican stage of Buuels career, a period in which low budgets, time shortages, imposed scripts and actors were the norm, A phase in which Buuel pulled out outstanding works in despite of the permanent practical difficulties and inconvenient conditions. As stated in an opportune comment by

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Francisco Snchez (quoted by Snchez Vidal, 1984), the episode shamefully falls on the inefficacy of the decaying Mexican film industry, El director que haba realizado Viridiana, nada menos, era tratado en su pas de adopcin como si fuera un director aficionado. Como que no haba derecho. Si a Alatriste se le acab el dinero, no hubo en toda la asociacin mexicana de productores nadie que le entrara al relevo? El talento de Buuel no tena an crdito en el Banco Nacional Cinematogrfico? Snchez 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 Buuels have yet credit in the Banco Nacional Cinematogrfico?] From 1963 Buuel 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 lacte (1969), Tristana (1970), Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Le Fantme de la Libert (1974) and Cet obscur objet du dsir (1977), his last film. He died in Mexico City on the 30th of July 1983.

2.2 Luis Buuel and the Mexican Film Industry When Buuel 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). 25

So it meant that the industry in which Buuel 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 Buuel 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 Buuels 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 ilusin viaja en tranva, El gran calavera), rural and ranchera comedy (Gran Casino, Subida al cielo, El bruto), or family melodramas (La hija del engao, Una mujer sin amor, Susana), within which we also find the usual stylistic attributes that

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these kind of films contained: musical numbers, typified characters and a plethora of happy endings. Buuels 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 Buuels work in Mexico, for example, analyse these films searching in them the elements in which Buuel appropriated and transformed the forms, structures and conventions to the genre. Peter Evans, in his important study The Films of Luis Buuel. Subjectivity and Desire, (1995) analyses a number of Buuels melodramas within this framework, acknowledging Buuels keeping of authorial control but underlining the fact that they do adapt to commercial and generic demands. Buuels 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 Prez and Javier Hernndez in the article Luis Buuel y el melodrama. Miradas en torno a un gnero (1995), who argue that Buuel preferred the genre of melodrama as a medium to portray passionate characters and stories that could have well been taken out from the Spanish folletn, another gnero chico which the director was also fond of. They also argue, however, that Buuels use of melodrama was always consciously stripped of its coarse sentimentality. Avoiding over-sentimental devices such as close-ups or sympathetic musical backgrounds, Buuel kept control of his films even though they are populated by characters that can be easily stereotyped: (Susana, la chica descarriada, Don Quintn, el hombre derrotado por el falso orgullo, el bruto de buenos sentimientos (40) [Susana, the stray girl, Don Quintn, the man defeated by false pride, the tough guy with good feelings]). Prez and Hernndez argue that these films do not pretend to mock the genre

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of melodrama, instead, Buuel 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 Buuels 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 Citys Poor, whilst Mexican cinema sacred directors like Ismael Rodrguez 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 dor at Cannes Film Festival, it rerun in important venues and received official recognition. Los olvidados is, nevertheless, looked upon as more a Buuelean film than a Mexican one. The exceptionality of Buuel'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 Buuel from his extensive Aventura del cine mexicano (1968), arguing that el cine del gran realizador espaol de ninguna manera puede integrarse al desarrollo del cine mexicano y nunca ha conseguido modificar su trayectoria, apenas ha influido sobre algunas pelculas 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, Buuels 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 hiprbole, este libro quiere responder afirmativamente a la pregunta: queda algo valioso en el cine

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mexicano si quitamos a Luis Buuel? (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 Buuel?] 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 Buuel (1993), Marsha Kinder argues how it is this condition as lifetime exile what contributes to Buuels 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 Mexicos hegemonic film industry for just the same could be argued of the directors 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 ngel exterminador, but perhaps in despite of them. 2.3 Buuels Mexico: Cultural Encounters and Continuities Buuel 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 Incln) features that Buuel would combine with his constant surrealist optic. Both influences flourished and mingled with the different environments to which he was exposed. His contact with Mexicos culture, its politics and its conflicting social 29

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 Buuels 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 Buuel 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 artists particular condition as an exile. Buuel, according to Vctor 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 Buuel did not enjoy making those commercial films or that they lack of the directors 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 Buuel reworked the conventions of a national cinema to produce films that fulfilled his artistic needs. As an exile, Buuel 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, Buuels work is characterised by the directors 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 Buuels 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 Buuels

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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 Buuels 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 Buuels 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 Vctor 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, Buuel 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 Buuel 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 Buuel had of not only to take Nazarn to the big screen, but also Doa Perfecta also by Galds- Jacinto Benaventes La Malquerida and Carlos Arniches El ltimo mono.) (Fuentes 1995: 162) Buuel did remake Don Quintn el amargao in Mexico, a film he had produced in 1935 in Spain when working for Filmfono, and the result gives an interest insight on how this cultural reinscription took place in both directions. Don Quintn el amargao is based in the homonymous zarzuela by Arniches and Estremera, a play of which Buuel 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 engao (1951), holds with its

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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 Buuel 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 madrilne 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 Quintn continued to be essentially the same character, instead of the echao plante madrilne, he became a Mexican macho The character of Don Quintn does change, however at the end of the Mexican film. The newer films ending makes sure that there are no ambiguities in whether Don Quintns 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 Crdova in l 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 engao 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 Aclmar) singing the bolero Amorcito corazn and the hilarious and over-the-top sequence of the rogue El Jonrn to El Infierno (i.e. Hell, Don Quintns 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 Quintn el amargao and La hija del engao 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. Buuels affection for the popular Spanish genre is then influenced by his desire to comment on Mexican males proclivity

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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 Buuel were permeated and enriched from many different stocks. Buuels 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 Buuels 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 countrys culture.

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Chapter three

Mexico in the Films of Luis Buuel

3.1 Analysis of Susana, La ilusin viaja en tranva and El ro y la muerte In the following chapter we will analyse three films of Luis Buuel through which we will try to explore the way they account for both Mexican and Buuelean characteristics as has been suggested from the two previous chapters. The films to be analysed are Susana (1951), La ilusin viaja en tranva (1953), and El ro 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 Mara Flix in films like Doa Brbara (Fernando de Fuentes, 1943); La ilusin viaja en tranva 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 Rodrguez, 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 dolo del pueblo); El ro 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 Fernndezs Ro 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 Buuel during his first years in Mexico. Susana, La ilusin viaja en tranva and El ro y 34

la muerte, are all part of Buuels early work in Mexico. To El ro y la muerte would follow only projects of a more personal nature and also some of his best films, such as Nazarn and El ngel 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 Buuel himself called pelculas 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 Buuel 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 ilusin viaja en tranva will give material to explore issues of capitalism and representation of social class and social mobility, whereas El ro 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 Buuel, in order to see the extent until which they adapted and used the established economy of signs, to this follows a further

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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-scne 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 states 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 Doa Carmen. Desired by all the men of the household, Susana sets out to seduce them: starting from Jess 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 Doa 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 Jess and takes Susana away. The order is restored and things go back to the initial normality. 36

Susana adjusts properly to the conventions of Mexican cinema melodrama; it can be attested by the acting, the mise-en-scne, 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, Doa 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, Jess, 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 Doa Carmen are opposing feminine characters; Susana, with her sexual assertiveness, threatens everything Doa Carmen, the asexual mother, is set to guard: morality, order and patriarchal authority The patriarchal institution Family is the institution that mediates the individuals 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

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and guarded by women, in a correspondent system of interests in which power is selfpreserving 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 Jess, 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. Susanas 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 Jess 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.

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Susana, unlike Doa 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 Doa Carmen stands for: the bourgeois home and values, asexual morality and, ultimately, her passive subordination to male power. Anarchic explosions like Susanas 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 selfsacrificing 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, Buuels 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 films finale also underlines the apparent inflexibility of a system that leaves no space for change. As noted by Francisco Aranda, (1975) Susanas 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, Buuel seems to suggest, impossible, for the forces of the bourgeois order are too strong,

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and even though the weakness of this order and all its contradictions are exposed by the individuals irrupting force.

3.3 Modernity, class and the illusion of change: La ilusin viaja en tranva [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 citys underclass. La ilusin viaja en tranva 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 Citys wealth on linguistic variations, traditional sayings and expressions, combining the sharp Spanish humour of Buuel and Luis Alcoriza with surrealist tricks and a very well written script by Mauricio de la Serna in collaboration with Mexican novelist Jos Revueltas. La ilusin viaja en tranva 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

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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, formulabased 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 Rodrguez, 1948) La ilusin viaja en tranva 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 ilusin viaja en tranva 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,

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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. (Ramrez Berg, 1995: 25) Whilst films like Nosotros los pobres take this paradigm to unimaginable levels, it is precisely at this point that La ilusin viaja en tranva 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 ilusin viaja en tranva 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 Ramrez 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 (Ramrez 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

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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 ilusin viaja en tranva 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 tranva 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 films 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 citys 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 films 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 Buuels 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

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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 hogs 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 Buuels 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 films concern with Mexicos 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 films most discreet, yet distressing scenes: the dispute between the tortilladough 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 professors concerns in the film had indeed foundation on the countrys 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 Alemn (1946-1952) had led the

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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 ilusin viaja en tranva 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 (Buuel 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 Pap Pinillos final speech denounces societys 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 pilleras 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 others pillages and incompetence] and with it, Buuels 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.

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3.4 Machismo and the State: El ro y la muerte [Synopsis] El ro 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 Gerardos fathers 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 ro y la muerte is a much more hermetic film compared to La ilusin viaja en tranva 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 cinemas 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 lvarez Acosta, El ro 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 films structure is very conventional and the characters are little more than a Manichean embodiment of lvarezs moralist preaching. In several occasions Buuel 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 Buuel with little space to deviate the message towards a more diffused or ambiguous conclusion. 46

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 Rmulo. 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 Buuel 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 (Joaqun Cordero) tells the story of Santa Bibiana to Elsa (Silvia Derbz), his nurse friend. Gerardos 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 (Vctor 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 others family members. Their allegiance to their common godfather Tata Nemesio (Jos Elas 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 Polos brother Crescencio (Humberto Almazn), a bloodthirsty, permanently angry young man that symbolises societys sadism embodied in the obsessive desire of self-perpetuation. Crescencios 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 humans 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 Corts, is regarded as the mother of the first

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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 males 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 (Ramrez, quoted in Ramrez 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 others 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 ro 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 films explicit meaning, this behaviour represents the nations 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

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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 (Ramrez Berg, 1995: 99) and stood for the countrys 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 Buuel was hand tied to twist or at least dilute the novels 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 selfperpetuating 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

The author agreed to sell the rights of the novel only under the condition hat the message was not changed.

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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 Buuels 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 clich of Mexican cinema. Other films that take on the same argument are La mujer del Puerto (Arcady Boytler, 1933) and Emilio Fernndezs Saln Mxico (1949), in which Mercedes, the protagonist (Marga Lpez) is forced into prostitution in order to pay for her sisters upper class boarding school, (thus the sisters morally and socially accepted upbringing), she is eventually killed by her pimp, whilst her sister ends up marrying a high range military officer (who 50

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 Susanas character, Buuel 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. Susanas sexual assertiveness is not the sole threaten to this power, but the fact that she manipulates her position as mens object of desire in order to achieve what she desires. Susanas 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

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eventually punished by the dramatic thread (by not being worth of becoming mothers and guard the values of Mexican-ness). Lupita in La ilusin viaja en tranva 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, Buuel has the female character of La ilusin viaja en tranva 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 neighbourhoods 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 (tentn!) and refuses to ride his car (implying good girls do not ride guys 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

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man, and I a woman well], but her attitude is marked by force, and assertiveness. In what eventually becomes a Buuelean joke, and a remark on the clichs 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 Garca, who made a career representing Mexicos 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 ro y la muerte. Mercedes (Columba Domnguez) 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 sons 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

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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 Buuel here analysed, underscore the discourse of resistance that is conveyed by Luis Buuel. 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 Buuel 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.

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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 Mexicos 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 countrys 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 countrys 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 Buuel 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 Buuel reflected the uneasiness with which Mexico sees itself. All of Buuels 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.

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Annexe

Luis Buuels Mexican Filmography

Gran Casino (1946-47)

Other titles: Tampico / En el viejo Tampico Country: Mexico Production House: Pelculas Anahuac, S.A. Producer: scar Dancigers Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the novel El rugido del paraso by Michel Weber Adaptation for the screen: Mauricio Magdaleno Cinematography: Jack Draper Cast: Libertad Lamarque (Mercedes Irigoyen), Jorge Negrete (Gerardo Ramrez), Mercedes Barba (Camelia), Agustn Isunza (Heriberto) Julio Villarreal (Demetrio Garca), Jos Baviera (Fabio), Alberto Bedoya (El rayado"), Francisco Jambrina (Jos Enrique), Fernanda Albany (Nenette), Charles Rooner (Van Eckerman), Berta Lear (Raquel) TroCalaveras, Ignacio Pen (el cochero), Julio Ahuet (el pistolero)

El gran calavera (1949)

Country: Mexico Production House: Ultramar Films Producer: scar Dancigers, Fernando Soler Director: Luis Buuel 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), Andrs Soler (Ladislao), Gustavo Rojo (Eduardo), Maruja Grifell (Milagros), Francisco Jambrina (Gregorio), Luis Alcoriza (Alfredo), Antonio Bravo (Alfonso), Antonio Monsell (Juan, the butler)

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Los olvidados (1950)

Country: Mexico Production House: Ultramar Films Producer: scar Dancigers Director: Luis Buuel Story: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza; Max Aub; Pedro de Urdimalas Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa Cast: (Estela Inda (Marta, Pedros mother), Miguel Incln (Don Carmelo, the blind man), Alfonso Meja (Pedro), Roberto Cobo (Jaibo), Alma Delia Fuentes (Meche), Francisco Jambrina (school-farm principal), Jess Garca Navarro (Julins father), Efran Arauz (Cacarizo), Jorge Prez (Peln), Javier Amezcua (Julin), Mario Ramrez (Ojitos), Ernesto Alonso (voice off)

Susana (1950)
Other titles: Susana: Carne y demonio and Susana: Demonio y carne Country: Mexico Director: Luis Buuel Production House: Internacional Cinematogrfica Producer: Sergio Kogan Story: Short story by Manuel Reachi Screenplay: Luis Buuel Adaptation and dialogues: Jaime Salvador Cinematography: Jos Ortz Ramos Cast: Fernando Soler (Don Guadalupe), Rosita Quintana. (Susana), Vctor Manuel Mendoza (Jess), Mara Gentil Arcos (Felisa), Luis Lpez Somoza (Alberto), Matilde Palou (Doa Carmen)

La hija del engao (1951)

Other title: Don Quintn el amargao Country: Mexico 57

Production House: Ultramar Films Producer: scar Dancigers Director: Luis Buuel Story: based in the play by Carlos Arniches and Antonio Estremera Don Quintn el amargao o El que siembra los vientos Adaptation for the screen: Raquel and Luis Alcoriza Cinematography: Jos Ortz Ramos Cast: Fernando Soler (Don Quintn Guzmn), Alicia Caro (Marta), Fernando Soto Mantequilla (Angelito), Rubn Rojo (Paco), Nacho Contla (Jonrn), Amparo Garrido (Mara), Lily Aclmar (Jovita), lvaro Matute (Julio), Roberto Meyer (Lencho Garca)

Una mujer sin amor (1951)

Other title: Cuando los hijos nos juzgan Country: Mexico Production House: Internacional cinematogrfica, for Columbia Producer: Sergio Kogan Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the story Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant Adaptation for the screen: Jaime Salvador Cinematography: Ral Martnez Solares Cast: Rosario Granados (Rosario), Tito Junco (Julio Mistral), Julio Villarreal (Carlos Montero), Joaqun Cordero (Carlos), Javier Loy (Miguel), Elda Peralta (Luisa), Jaime Calpe (Carlitos)

Subida al cielo (1951-52)

Country: Mexico Production House: Producciones cinematogrficas Isla Producer: Manuel Altoaguirre; Mara Luisa Gmez Mena Director: Luis Buuel Story: Manuel Reachi; Manuel Altoaguirre Adaptation for the screen: Manuel Altoaguirre; Juan de la Cabada; Luis Buuel

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Cinematography: Alex Phillips Cast: Lilia Prado (Raquel), Esteban Mrquez (Oliverio Grajales), Carmelita Gonzlez (Albina), Gilberto Gonzlez (Snchez Coello), Luis Aceves Castaeda (Silvestre), Manuel Dond (Don Eladio Gonzlez, the candidate), Roberto Cobo (Juan), Beatriz Ramos (Elisa), Manuel Noriega (Licenciado Figueroa), Roberto Meyer (Nemesio lvarez), Pedro Elvira (El cojo), Paz Villegas (Doa Ester)

El bruto (1952)
Country: Mexico Production House: Internacional Cinematogrfica Producer: Sergio Kogan Director: Luis Buuel Story: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel Cinematography: Agustn Jimnez Cast: Pedro Armendriz (Pedro El bruto), Katy Jurado (Paloma) Rosita Arenas (Meche), Andrs Soler (Andrs Cabrera), Beatrz Ramos (Doa Marta), Paco Martnez (don Pepe), Roberto Meyer (Carmelo Gonzlez ), Gloria Mestre (Mara), Paz Villegas (Maras mother)

Robinson Crusoe (1952)

Other title: Aventuras de Robinson Crusoe Country: Mexico / USA Production House: Tepeyac (Mexico) / United Artists (USA) Producer: scar Dancigers (Mexico) / Henry H. Ehrlich (USA) Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the novel by Daniel Defoe Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Philip Ansel Roll (Hugo Butlers pseudonym) Cinematography: Alex Phillips Cast: Dan OHerlihy (Robinson), Jaime Fernndez (Friday), Felipe de Alba (Captain Oberzo), Jos Chvez and Emilio Garibay (mutiny)

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l (1952-53)
Country: Mexico Production House: Producciones Tepeyac Producer: scar Dancigers Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the novel by Mercedes Pinto l Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa Cast: Arturo de Crdova (Francisco Galvn de Montemayor), Delia Garcs (Gloria), Aurora Walker (Esperanza Peralta, Glorias mother), Luis Beristin (Ral Conde), Manuel Dond (Pablo, the butler), Rafael Banquells (Ricardo Lujn), Carlos Martnez Baena (Father Velasco)

La ilusin viaja en tranva (1953)

Country: Mexico Director: Luis Buuel Production House: Clasa Films Mundiales Producer: Armando Orive Alba Story: Short story by Mauricio de la Serna Adaptation for the screen: Luis Alcoriza, Jos Revueltas, Mauricio de la Serna, Juan de la Cabada Cinematography: Ral Martnez Solares Cast: Lilia Prado (Lupita), Carlos Navarro (Juan Caireles), Fernando Soto Mantequilla (Tarrajas), Agustn Isunza (Pap Pinillos), Miguel Manzano (Don Manuel), Guillermo Bravo Sosa (Braulio)

Abismos de pasin (1953-54)

Other title: Cumbres borrascosas Country: Mexico Production House: Producciones Tepeyac Producer: scar Dancigers 60

Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the novel Wuthering Heights by Emily Brnte Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Julio Alejandro; Arduino Maiuri Cinematography: Agustn Jimnez Cast: Irasema Dillian (Catalina), Jorge Mistral (Alejandro), Lilia Prado (Isabel), Ernesto Alonso (Eduardo) Hortensia Santovea (Mara), Luis Aceves Castaeda (Ricardo)

El ro y la muerte (1954)
Country: Mexico Director: Luis Buuel Production House: Clasa Films Mundiales Producer: Armando Orive Alba Story: based on the novel Muro blanco sobre roca negra by Miguel lvarez Acosta Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel and Luis Alcoriza Cinematography: Ral Martnez Solares Cast: Columba Domnguez (Mercedes), Miguel Torruco (Felipe Anguiano), Joaqun Cordero (Gerardo Anguiano), Jaime Fernndez (Rmulo Menchaca), Vctor Alcocer (Polo Menchaca), Silvia Derbz (Elsa), Jos Elas Moreno (Don Nemesio), Carlos Martnez 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 Cinematogrfica S.A. Producer: Alfonso Patio Gmez Director: Luis Buuel Story: Inspired by the novel Ensayo de un crimen by Rodrigo Usigli Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Eduardo Ugarte Pages Cinematography: Agustn Jimnez

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Cast: Miroslava Stern (Lavinia), Ernesto Alonso (Archibaldo de la Cruz), Rita Macedo (Patricia Terrazas), Ariadna Welter (Carlota), Andrea Palma (Ms Cervantes), Leonor Llauss (Governess), Carlos Martnez Baena (Priest), Armando Velasco (Judge)

La Mort en ce jardin (1956)

Other titles: La muerte en el jardn / La muerte en la selva Country: Mexico / France Production House: Producciones Tepeyac (Mexico) / Dismage (France) Producer: scar Dancingers / Jacques Mage Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the story by Jos Andr Lacour Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza; Raymond Queneau Cinematography: Jorge Stahl Jr. Cast: Simone Signoret (Djin), Charles Vanel (Castin), Geroges Marchal (Shark), Michel Piccoli (Father Lizardi), Michle Girardon (Mara), Tito Junco (Chenko), Ral Ramrez (lvaro), Luis Aceves Castaeda (Alberto)

Nazarn (1958)
Country: Mexico Production House: Producciones Barbachano Ponce S.A. Producer: Manuel Barbachano Ponce Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the novel by Benito Prez Galds Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Julio Alejandro Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa Cast: Marga Lpez (Beatrz), Francisco Rabal (Father Nazario), Rita Macedo (Andara), Ignacio Lpez Tarso (thieve), Ofelia Guilmain (Chanfa), Luis Aceves Castaeda (patricide), No Nurayama (el Pinto), Rosenda Monteros (la Prieta), Jess Fernndez (Ujo, the dwarf), Ada Carrasco (Josefa), Edmundo Barbero (Don ngel, priest), Cecilia Leger (woman with pineapple)

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La Fivre monte 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 Buuel Story: Based on the novel by Henry Castillou Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza; Charles Dorat; Louis Sapin Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa Cast: (Grard Philipe (Ramn Vzquez), Mara Flix (Ins Rojas), Jean Servais (Alejandro Gual), Miguel ngel Ferris (Mariano Vargas), Ral Dants (Garca) Domingo Soler (Juan Crdenas), Vctor Junco (Indarte), Roberto Caedo (colonel Olivares), Luis Aceves Castaeda (Lpez)

The Young One (1960)

Other title: La joven Country: Mexico / USA Production House: Producciones Olmeca (Mexico) / Columbia (USA) Producer: George P. Werker Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on the story Travelin Man by Peter Mathiesen Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; 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 Buuel 63

Story: Luis Buuel; Julio Alejandro; Based on an idea by Luis Buuel Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel Cinematography: Jos Fernndez Aguayo Cast: Silvia Pinal (Viridiana), Francisco Rabal (Jorge), Fernando Rey (Don Jaime), Jos Calvo (Don Amalio), Margarita Lozano (Ramona), Jos Manuel Amrtn (el Cojo), Victoria Zinny (Luca), Luis Heredia (el Poca), Joaqun Roa (Don Ezequiel), Lola Gaos (Enedina), Maruja Isbert (beggar), Teresita Rabal (Rita), Juan Garca Tienda (Jos, leper), Sergio Mendizbal (el Peln)

El ngel exterminador (1962)

Other title: Los nufragos de la calle Providencia Country: Mexico Production House: Gustavo Alatriste P.C. Producer: Gustavo Alatriste Director: Luis Buuel Story: New version of the cinedrama Los nufragos de la calle Providencia, by Luis Buuel and Luis Alcoriza Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Luis Alcoriza Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa Cast: Silvia Pinal (Leticia, la Valkiria), Jacqueline Andere (Alicia de Roc), Jos Baviera (Leandro Gmez), Augusto Benedicto (Dr. Carlos Conde), Luis Beristin (Cristian Ugalde), Antonio Bravo (Russel), Claudio Brook (Julio, the butler), Csar del Campo (lvaro, the colonel), Rosa Elena Durgel (Silvia), Lucy Gallardo (Luca de Nbile), Enrique Rambal (Edmundo Nbile), Enrique Garca lvarez (Alberto Roc), Ofelia Guilmain (Juana vila), Nadia Haro (Ana Maynar), Tito Junco (Ral), Xavier Loy (Francisco vila), Xavier Mass (Eduardo), Ofelia Montesco (Beatrz), Patricia Morn (Rita Ugalde), Patricia de Morelos (Blanca), Bertha Moss (Leonora)

Simn del desierto (1964-65)

Country: Mexico Production House: Gustavo Alatriste P.C. Producer: Gustavo Alatriste

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Director: Luis Buuel Story: Based on an idea by Luis Buuel Adaptation for the screen: Luis Buuel; Julio Alejandro de Castro Cinematography: Gabriel Figueroa Cast: Claudio Brook (Simn), Silvia Pinal (the devil), Enrique lvarez Flix (Hermano Matas), Francisco Reiguera (monk), Hortensia Santovea (Simns mother), Enrique del Castillo (man with no hands), Jess Fernndez (shepard, the dwarf)

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Bibliography Aranda, Francisco, Luis Buuel: A Critical Biography, David Robinson, Ed. Secker and Warburg, London, 1975 ---Luis Buuel: Biografa crtica, Editorial Lumen, Barcelona, 1969

Ayala Blanco, Jorge, Aventura del cine mexicano, Ediciones Era, Mxico, 1968 ---Disolvencia del cine mexicano: entre lo popular y lo exquisito, Editorial Grijalbo, Mxico 1991 Buauche, Freddy, Cinema of Luis Buuel, Trad. Peter Graham, The Tanity Press, London, 1973 Buuel, Luis, Mi ltimo suspiro, Random House Mondadori, Barcelona, 1982 Cesarman, Fernando, El ojo de Luis Buuel. Psicoanlisis desde una butaca, Anagrama, Barcelona, 1976 De la Vega Alfaro, Eduardo, Del muro a la pantalla: S. M. Eisenstein y el arte pictrico mexicano, Universidad de Guadalajara; Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura; Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografa, Guadalajara, 1997 De los Reyes, Aurelio, Cine y sociedad en Mxico 1896-1930, Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico; Cineteca Nacional, Mxico, 1981 Denzin, Norman K., Images of Postmodern Society. Social Theory and Cinema, Sage Publications, London, 1992 Contemporary

Edwards, Gwynne, The Discreet Art of Luis Buuel. A Reading of his Films. Maryon Boyers, London, 1982 Evans, Peter, The Films of Luis Buuel. 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 Mxico. Memoria de un milenio, Editorial Seix Barral, Barcelona, 2000

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Fuentes, Vctor, The Constant of Exile in Buuel, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 Garca Riera, Emilio, Historia documental del cine mexicano: poca sonora, Ediciones Era, Mxico, 1969 Hart, Stephen, Buuels Box of Subaltern Tricks: Technique in Los olvidados, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buuel: 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 Buuel or Ways of Disturbing Spectatorship, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 Monsivis, Carlos, Rostros del cine mexicano, Amrico Norte editores, Mxico, 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, l: Luis Buuel, Ediciones Paids, Barcelona, 2001 Paz, Octavio, El laberinto de la soledad, Fondo de Cultura Econmica, Mxico, 1975 ---Itinerario, Fondo de Cultura Econmica, Mxico, 1993

Prez Turrent, Toms and de la Colina, Jos, Buuel por Buuel, Plot Ediciones, Madrid, 1999 Prez Rubio, Pablo, El cine melodramtico, Paids, Barcelona, 2004 Ramrez Berg, Charles, Cinema of Solitude: a critical study of Mexican Film, 19671983, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1992 ---The Cinematic Invention of Mexico. The Poetics and Politics of the Fernndez-Figueroa Style, in Noriega, Chon A. and Ricci, Steven, The Mexican Cinema Project, UCLA Film and Television Archive, Los Angeles, 1994 67

---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 Snchez Biosca, Vicente, Scenes of Liturgy and Perversion in Buuel, In Evans, Peter and Santoalla, Isabel. (Eds.), Luis Buuel: New Readings, British Film Institute, London, 2004 Snchez Vidal, Agustn, Luis Buuel. Obra cinematogrfica, J. C. Ediciones, Madrid 1984 ----Luis Buuel, Ctedra, 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 revoluo mexicana, (Trad. Ana Mafalda Tello and Mariana Pardal Monteiro), Edies 70, Lisboa, 1968 Articles Peleado, Floreal, Buuel Transterrado Positif, 543, May 2006 Prez, Pablo and Hernndez, Javier, Luis Buuel y el melodrama. Miradas en torno a un gnero. Vrtigo. Revista de cine, Num. 11 Marzo 1995, Ed. Ayuntamiento de La Corua, 1995 Tllez, Jos Luis, Mxico lindo y querido, Vrtigo. Revista de cine, Num. 11 Marzo 1995, Ed. Ayuntamiento de La Corua, 1995 Online References http://www.imdb.com (Last accessed on: 12 June 2007)

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