Mock Classicism

Latin American Film Comedy, 1930–1960

Nilo Couret

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780520296848
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520969162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

In Mock Classicism Nilo Couret presents an alternate history of Latin American cinema that traces the popularity and cultural significance of film comedies as responses to modernization and the forerunners to a more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. By examining the linguistic play of comedians such as Cantinflas, Oscarito and Grande Otelo, Niní Marshall, and Luis Sandrini, the author demonstrates aspects of Latin American comedy that operate via embodiment on one hand and spatiotemporal emplacement on the other. Taken together, these parallel examples of comedic practice demonstrate how Latin American film comedies produce a "critically proximate" spectator who is capable of perceiving and organizing space and time differently. Combining close readings of films, archival research, film theory, and Latin American history, Mock Classicism rethinks classicism as a discourse that mediates and renders the world and argues that Latin American cinema became classical in distinct ways from Hollywood.
 

CHAPTER 1

Cantinflismo and Relajo’s Peripheral Vision

In 1967, Jacobo Zabludovsky interviewed the Mexican comedian Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno, then approaching the end of his career, in the television news program Efemérides. Pioneers in their fields—television journalism and film, respectively—the two men discuss the origins of the comedic persona el pelado. A foreign cousin to Chaplin’s tramp, Cantinflas’s beloved pelado—his haggard hat, his strip of gabardine draped over his shoulder, his awkwardly groomed mustache, and his pants below the waist—dominated Mexican box office receipts for several decades and became a leading export of this national cinema. Zabludovsky asks the older Cantinflas about the inspiration for the pelado. The interview yields a much-referenced reflection on the provenance of the archetypical character:

Entonces, todo lo que yo he hecho ha sido observación y ha sido extraído del pueblo. Porque yo, Jacobo, en cualquier condición que esté, soy pueblo. Y lo seré toda mi vida porque, porque muchos años y hasta la fecha, convivo con el pueblo y sé lo que es el pueblo, porque yo, si usted sabe algo de mí, mi extracción, en el aspecto social, fue muy humilde. . . . Entonces sé las necesidades del pueblo, conozco el pueblo y soy pueblo.

So, everything I have done has been through observation and has been drawn from the people. Because I, Jacobo, in whatever condition I may be in, am [of] the people. And I will be my entire life because, because for many years and to date, I live with the people and know what the people are, because I, if you know something about me, my upbringing, in the social aspect, was very humble. . . . So I know the needs of the people, I understand the people and I am [of] the people.¹

Cantinflas credits his persona to observation, a creative fashioning of real life drawn from the everyday. The conflation of Cantinflas and the people (and arguably the Mexican film industry) means that writing about Cantinflas has meant also writing the history of the golden age of Mexican cinema and even the broader cultural history of statist postrevolutionary Mexico. Being attendant to this star text allows us to trace the construction and reconstructions of this so-called classical period of Mexican national cinema. The progressive liberalism of cardenismo is yoked to Cantinflas’s restive early film appearances, and the nationalist designs of President Ávila Camacho and the centralization of political power and economic developmentalism of alemanismo are articulated both to Cantinflas’s involvement in labor and syndicate disputes as well as his new production company and its distribution deal with Columbia Pictures. His becoming establishment augured the escalating authoritarianism of single party rule in the following decades.

The pelado has a specificity unlike that of Chaplin’s tramp, less an everyman than an urban peasant from a particular neighborhood in the growing capital city.² The term pelado, originally invented in the 1920s, described a certain class of dispossessed urban lumpen: he “belongs to a most vile category of social fauna; he is a form of human rubbish from the great city. He is less than a proletarian in the economic hierarchy, and less than a primitive man in the intellectual one. . . . He is an explosive being with whom relationship is dangerous. . . . His explosions are verbal and reiterate his theme of self-affirmation in crude and suggestive language . . . so crudely realistic that it is not possible to transcribe many of his most characteristic phrases.”³ How did a dangerous social outcast become beloved national icon? Although Cantinflas was the pelado par excellence, the earlier success of the popular comic strip Las aventuras de Chupamirto by Jesús Acosta led to pelado characters featured in comedic skits at many carpa shows—a form of popular theatrical entertainment that combined elements of vaudeville and circus, taking place in tents, or carpas.⁴ These forms of popular culture were responsible for the transvaluation of the pelado to the peladito, from a sign of urban poverty to a stock picturesque and picaresque type: “Thanks to a comedian, he is rebaptized with the diminutive, the peladito, the smiling suburban [arrabal] rogue.”⁵ Cantinflas and his film success would decisively tame the explosive lumpen figure and make him an irreverent rogue and profitable commodity in the hands of an ascendant culture industry.

Understanding the making of the peladito in relation to the centralization of political power and the expansion of capitalism makes the above transformation a marker for shifting relations between state, people, and mass culture. Both the pelado and the peladito represent the tendency of capital to create surplus labor in the context of a growing capitalist regime in the 1930s.⁶ For Gareth Williams, this transformation functions less as a defusion or co-optation of explicit political content than as a marker of “an emerging nexus between politics and mass culture industries.”⁷ The pelado is a social anomaly whereas the peladito designates a representative subject of and from the people (pueblo). The production of the peladito becomes a narrative about the production of cultural apparatuses. Cantinflas’s senescent reflection calls attention to the formation of the “people” and how the people come to be intelligible. The comedian’s central conceit is “Yo soy pueblo,” which translates loosely both as he is of the people as well as he is the people. The statement functions both as synecdoche and metonymy: he is literally part and parcel of the classed (and loosely nationalized) people. Although this narrative of transvaluation helps us understand the specificity of the Cantinflas character, it reinforces Moreno’s own notion of himself as (of) the people. Because Cantinflas was establishment, most read his films to locate his becoming establishment (often nostalgic for the moments of critical potential before this came to pass). We know the end point and so our reading plots the star text along a predetermined narrative. We risk ignoring how a people become represented and representable through cinema, how a viewing subject was fashioned, and how a metonym came to be.

In articulating state, people, and cinema, these Latin Americanists often leave the last term unexamined. And yet a study of the shifting conceptions of subjectification and publicness that pivot on a screen image should bear in mind how cinema renegotiates the horizon of public experience—this “people” (become mass) is first and foremost a viewing public. Parsing out how cinema shapes this viewing public means returning to the film text but not with a view to assessing the explicit political content of the comedian’s quips. Moreno’s interview already suggests some lines of inquiry. He insists that his character is drawn from direct observation, a claim to a type of realism that might surprise given the stylization of the archetype. Further, the long-winded response performs the type of baroque verbal spiels that would makes Moreno’s character so popular. All the devices used by the pelado to mock officious speech—the chain of subordinate clauses, the asides addressed to an interlocutor, the redundancies, and the dangling modifiers—are here deployed, perhaps an earnest response that functions as ironic rebuke of the status quo Moreno had become or perhaps a slippage of persona and performer. More likely both. Y ahí está el detalle (And there’s the rub).

Starting with Cantinflas’s first successful film, Ahí está el detalle (You’re Missing the Point) (Juan Bustillo Oro, 1940), this chapter examines the comedian’s quick verbal play in addition to formal devices, editing techniques, and doubled narrative structures that “sidestep” on multiple levels. A close analysis of this foundational film examines the operations of cantinflismo in multiple registers, from linguistic play to textual instability and from denotative equivocation to spatial practice. Rather than periodize Cantinflas in relation to production histories, sociocultural context, or the evolution of his pelado character, I consider Cantinflas’s films in relation to their use of formal and narrative devices that capitalize on his play with referentiality, particularly the (ab)use of proper names that no longer denote, and that foreground the maximal specularity of a star famous for dodging (denotative) representation. Although this sidestepping wanes over time, I understand this erosion as a function of spectatorship becoming classical in a mode I contend is different than classicism figured in Hollywood. In the Hollywood context, the transition from early cinema to classical cinema was not simply a function of narrative devices becoming convention but rather the codification of the proper relations among viewer, projector, and screen.⁸ Becoming classical meant changing the spatial arrangement of the cinema experience. Cantinflas’s antics, considered at the level of narrative strategies, aesthetic or affective devices, and material practices, gesture toward a different model of spectatorship where the segregation of film and theater space and the normative pleasures implied are different. Cantinflas’s films present a mock classicism particular to Latin America that harnessed these “other” pleasures, where the spectator derived pleasure from (mimetic) recognition and from the proximate (or at the very least related) spatial arrangement of theater space and screen space.

CANTINFLISMO EN DETALLE

The success of Ahí está el detalle marks a turning point for a Mexican cinema that tripled its production of comedies with the arrival of sound in the late 1930s. García Riera credits Ahí está el detalle as legitimating the market position of comedies and the growing star discourse around comedic actors that had previously been relegated to supporting parts.⁹ Ahí está el detalle presents an intricate comedy of errors where our unnamed protagonist becomes embroiled in a series of escalating misadventures and misunderstandings. By way of synopsis, Cantinflas courts the maid, Paz (Dolores Camarillo), from an upper-class couple’s residence. The couple’s relationship is tumultuous because the husband, Cayetano (Joaquín Pardavé), suspects his younger wife, Dolores “Lola” (Sofía Álvarez), is having an affair. Lola’s former lover, Bobby “The Fox Terrier” Lechuga (Antonio Bravo), threatens to blackmail her with undated love letters meant to incense her jealous husband. At the same time, Cayetano wants to preserve his marriage because of an inheritance his wife is expecting but cannot collect because of the disappearance of her biological brother, Leonardo del Paso. In a complicated play of upstairs-downstairs high jinks, Cantinflas is mistaken for Leonardo. Cantinflas takes advantage of this case of misrecognition until the real Leonardo’s partner, Clotilde, arrives with a gaggle of illegitimate children. Cantinflas’s subsequent attempts to extricate himself are frustrated when the real Leonardo commits murder, and Cantinflas must use his natural gift—“la facilidad de palabra” (a way with words), as he explains in the film—to keep himself out of jail. The film ends with the real Leonardo arriving at the courtroom in the nick of time to confess his crime and recognize his partner and childre...

Table of contents

• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Cantinflismo and Relajo’s Peripheral Vision
• 2. The Call of the Screen: Niní Marshall and the Radiophonic Stardom of Argentine Cinema
• 3. Timing Is Everything: Sandrini’s Stutter and the Representability of Time
• 4. Fictions of the Real: The Currency of the Brazilian Chanchada
• 5. Comedy Circulates Circuitously: Toward an Odographic Film History of Latin America
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index