A Search for Belonging

The Mexican Cinema of Luis Buñuel

Marc Ripley

• Publisher: WallFlower Press
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9780231851091
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

As one of the foremost Spanish directors of all time, Luis Buñuel's filmography has been the subject of innumerable studies. Despite the fact that the twenty films he made in Mexico between 1947 and 1965 represent the most prolific stage of his career as a filmmaker, these have remained relatively neglected in writing on Buñuel and his work. This book focuses on nine of the director's films made in Mexico in order to show that a concerted focus on space, an important aspect of the films' narratives that is often intimated by scholars, yet rarely developed, can unlock new philosophical meaning in this rich body of work.

Although in recent years Buñuel's Mexican films have begun to enjoy a greater presence in criticism on the director, they are often segregated according to their perceived critical value, effectively creating two substrands of work: the independent movies and the studio potboilers. The interdisciplinary approach of this book unites the two, focusing on films such as Los olvidados, Nazarín, and El ángel exterminador alongside La Mort en ce jardin, The Young One, and Simón del desierto, among others. In doing so, it avoids the tropes most often associated with Buñuel's cinema—surrealism, Catholicism, the derision of the bourgeoisie—and the approach most often invoked in analysis of these themes: psychoanalysis. Instead, this book takes inspiration from the fields of human geography, anthropology, and philosophy, applying these to film-focused readings of Buñuel's Mexican cinema to argue that ultimately these films depict an overriding sense of placelessness, overtly or subliminally enacting a search for belonging that forces the viewer to question what it means to be in place.

Chapter 1

Re-locating Buñuel’s Mexican Cinema

Where to place Buñuel’s potentially problematic Mexican cinema within his overall, substantial corpus, is a more pressing question for the moment than what the movies of this period can tell us about place. How far can we consider Buñuel a proponent of surrealism in his artistic work? To what extent can we – should we – segregate the various ‘Buñuels’: early; middle; late; Francophone; Anglophone; Hispanic? Unlike the director’s earlier French/Spanish triptych of Un Chien andalou (1929), L’Âge d’or (1930) and Tierra sin pan, and his later French period from Le Journal d’une femme de chambre (1964) and Belle de Jour (1967) onwards, his Mexican cinema presents a lesser degree of stylistic and formal cohesion. Whereas Elisabeth Lyon (1973) and Gwynne Edwards (2004) propose an association between Buñuel’s first three movies predicated on an aesthetic basis, and Francisco Aranda lends the later films, beginning with El ángel exterminador, the grandiose title of the ‘Great Films of Maturity’ (1976: 206), the intermediate Mexican period offers a collection of commercial, genre-driven pictures peppered sporadically with more auteurist productions. The films made in Mexico constitute the majority of Buñuel’s filmography as director and, as Acevedo-Muñoz suggests, the numerous, largely genre films made by Buñuel in this period prove difficult for some critics to reconcile with ‘Buñuel as the European surrealist phenomenon’ (2003: 11). In addition, the commercial nature of Mexican cinema during its prolific Golden Age, roughly coinciding with Buñuel’s arrival in the country in the mid-1940s, meant that films such as Ismael Rodríguez’s Nosotros los pobres (1948), starring Pedro Infante, or Flor Silvestre (1943), directed by Emilio Fernández and starring Dolores del Río, were constructed around generic conventions – often drawing on melodrama – and the star system in an emulation of the Hollywood model. Buñuel’s own shooting schedules were largely rapid and demanding – except for Robinson Crusoe, filming never lasted for more than 24 days, according to the director (Buñuel 2003: 198), and the films of this period were often released in quick succession: between 1950 and 1953 he was directing two or three films per year. This has directly influenced the dismissive attitude among some critics that the bulk of Buñuel’s Mexican works are little more than ‘studio potboilers’, or its equally flippant equivalent in Spanish, películas alimenticias, loosely translated as ‘bread-and-butter films’, the implication being these were made solely to plug a gap, financially and professionally.¹

The culinary metaphor above is fitting, because the Mexican actor and screenwriter, Tomás Pérez Turrent, draws on his own food-related analogy to counter assertions that much of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema was small fry. Asking the question of whether we can in fact speak holistically of a Mexican corpus in Buñuel’s output, Pérez Turrent strongly concludes that we can answer in the affirmative. The doubt about its existence, as it were, Pérez Turrent attributes to the disparity between the Buñuel who directed Un Chien andalou, ‘a bomb [that caused] a great impact on its first spectators’, and the Buñuel who directed his first picture in Mexico, Gran Casino (1947), a film ‘in no way exciting’ (1997: 137).² As he documents Buñuel’s critical and financial failures in a Mexican film industry driven by generic conventions and narrative codes, Pérez Turrent nevertheless finds that Buñuel found a way to work both within and against the expectations of commercial Mexican cinema, adapting to the demands placed on him while leaving his indelible stamp on the films he made there. Although Pérez Turrent adds his voice to those who separate Buñuel’s Mexican corpus from his earlier and later works, he celebrates its subversive potential. The later Buñuel, he says, ‘is admirable from many points of view but this is a Buñuel who has had his nails clipped’; his later cinema, in comparison, is a ‘decaffeinated cinema’ (1997: 142).³ This so-called nail trimming was partly the result of Buñuel’s reinsertion into an increasingly consumer-driven, Western European society where, he and André Breton lamented, to scandalise had become impossible. Continuing his defence of Buñuel’s Mexican work, Pérez Turrent cites José de la Colina regarding the director’s Mexican cinema in comparison to his later French cinema. De la Colina argues that the Mexican films are based on ‘a density of subject matter, the carnality of the characters’, which is then attenuated in Buñuel’s later French period, to be replaced by an ‘intellectual game and a chess set of spectres (ideas of characters more than [actual] characters)’ (Pérez Turrent 1997: 141).⁴ I am taking Pérez Turrent and de la Colina’s categorisation of Buñuel’s later French period as more abstract as a rationale for concentrating solely on the Mexican films, which they see as more realist and grounded.

Indeed, although some of the Mexican films could be seen as forerunners of the episodic narrative that structured Buñuel’s mature work – the ever-changing landscapes and the series of encounters of Father Nazario in Nazarín, for example – my readings of these films are based on the premise that the protagonists of the Mexican films are relatable characters in largely realist – if often absurdly Buñuelian – situations. When considering the presentation of the characters’ relationships to their surroundings, de la Colina’s ideas of carnality and density are important. I contend that the characters of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema are, as Manuel Michel puts it, placed in alienation, a position that comes to light when we consider these films as philosophical texts (1961: 27). Buñuel’s greater preoccupation with form and style in his mature works could arguably be said to temper the element of carnality in his Mexican cinema, directing the critical gaze away from the protagonist and refocusing this on ludic questions of metanarrative and structural fragmentation. This conceptual shift in Buñuel’s cinema emerges in conjunction with the end of the Mexican period and is evident in the films after this, beginning with Belle de Jour and escalating with La Voie lactée (1969). In fact, we do not have to look much further than the titles of the films made in Mexico to give us a clue in this respect. The importance of space and setting in grounding the narratives of the Mexican films comes across in their working, alternative and official titles such as Island of Shame (The Young One), Abismos de pasión, Swamps of Lust (La Fièvre monte à El Pao), Los náufragos de la calle Providencia (El ángel exterminador), Evil Eden (La Mort en ce jardin) and Simón del desierto. Opposite this, the titles of the later French movies are more suggestive of social satire – the understated charm of the upper-middle classes, or the idea of liberty as a phantom – exactly the genre with which Virginia Higginbotham aligns them, as she divides Buñuel’s work quite simplistically into ‘character studies’ (Viridiana, Tristana (1970)) and ‘social satire’ (Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie (1972), Le Fantôme de la liberté (1974)) (1979: 193). The density of the rounded characters and their locations in the Mexican films thus gives way to a texture of micro-narratives in Buñuel’s later French works.

This book is another contribution to this growing area of Buñuel investigation. My objective is to shed new analytical light on the films of the period as a whole by excavating new critical pathways that open up the meaning of these films and recall attention equally to the more independent and the genre-driven movies. Now is the time to take stock of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema, as Barro Hernández argues. My intention in this chapter is to use this opportunity to survey the roots of this compartmentalisation of the filmmaker’s work from this period into two strands, looking primarily at the way this has figured in Anglophone, Hispanic and Francophone criticism, to then position my re-evaluation of these works against this limiting hierarchy. Following this survey of the critical literature on Buñuel’s Mexican period, I then outline the need to turn to paradigms outside of what I term the Buñuelian bedrock of surrealism, Catholicism and psychoanalysis that have encouraged this divide, before moving on to look at the various ways in which space appears as an object of study in previous Buñuel scholarship. Finally, I position my readings of the films in this book within the broader salient trend towards spatial analysis across the arts, which is also driving innovative approaches to film.

Reconsidering the thematic complexity of the Mexican films

Writing on Buñuel has experienced something of a revival over the last two decades, especially in the period after 2000, following the centenary of his birth, and has naturally brought with it an increased focus on the films made in Mexico. Moreover, the increasing availability of even the lesser-known films of the period, for example Abismos de pasión and La Fièvre monte à El Pao, thanks to European, Mexican and US DVD distributors, has contributed to the higher level of attention paid to these films in recent Buñuel scholarship. If still precluded commensurate status with what are widely regarded as the director’s most lauded productions, many of the Mexican films now feature sporadically in research on the director and his work.

The hierarchisation of the two strands of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema can be traced back to the period itself. Articles on Buñuel’s Mexican films in prominent cinema journals such as Cahiers du cinéma and Positif during the 1950s and 1960s tentatively scoured this nascent corpus for any traces of Buñuel’s trademark style and thematic preoccupations. Peter Harcourt’s evaluation of the Mexican corpus is indicative of this approach and his memory of the films of this period is ‘one of seriously marred films of considerable interest’ (1967: 11). The reasons why these movies are flawed, Harcourt says, are numerous: weak plot lines; stiff acting; or far-fetched narratives. For him, they can be redeemed only through the interest generated by their more overtly Buñuelian moments and traces of Buñueliana – a term that Acevedo-Muñoz uses to denote the aesthetic and thematic preoccupations such as Freudian surrealism and iconoclasm at play in Buñuel’s cinema (2003: 4). Jean-André Fieschi considers that films such as El gran calavera (1949) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1954) served as sketches for more aesthetically accomplished films, and his praise for them is tempered; the ‘creative freshness […] frankness of regard, clarity of expression’ that they possess are not enough in themselves to prevent him from ultimately categorising these as rehearsals for films such as Él (1953) or Nazarín (1966: 34).⁵ The intra-corpus divisions that this approach in early writing on the period creates is driven by an attempt to ‘legitimise’ the study of the Mexican films by bringing them into line with the auteurist approach often employed in the discussion of Buñuel’s earlier/later work, in order to ‘safeguard the image of the director to the detriment of the other films, which remain overlooked’ (Lillo 1994: 7).⁶ Ironically, Buñuel’s violent assault on the very act of spectatorship – on the single eye that stands for our collective gaze – in Un Chien andalou, has become a framework for viewing, interpreting and critically appraising his cinema, as his ‘reputation as a surrealist encouraged a particular viewing strategy, looking for dream-like motifs that would transform over the course of the film in unexpected ways’ (Keating 2010: 210), which excludes a great part of the largely realist, linear narratives of many of the filmmaker’s Mexican films.

Nevertheless, the 1990s saw Buñuel’s Mexican cinema revisited in earnest within new or modified paradigms in attempts to unite the two strands of this period. Gaston Lillo (1994) aims to redress the balance between the director’s early and late periods, and the intermediate Mexican era. His consideration of more commercial pictures such as El gran calavera and El bruto (1953) alongside the critically lauded Los olvidados and Nazarín is an effort to bridge the gap between the commercial and the independent films. He draws on genre theory to argue that Buñuel achieves a subversion of commercial cinema in the most genre-driven of his films. His re-envisaging of certain of the director’s Mexican works hinges on the socio-historical context of the films’ production and viewers’ reception of them and his argument is important in its focus on a variety of Mexican films. Writing a year after Lillo, Peter Evans (1995) begins to transcend the rigid commercial-auteurist dyad of Buñuel’s Mexican cinema. He acknowledges the fruitful results of examining Buñuel’s work through an auteurist lens, though without discounting the structures and constraints to which Buñuel was subjected. Indeed, Evans believes that ‘the two Buñuels, commercial and auteurist, cannot be so simplistically polarized’ (1995: 36). Evans’s focus on relationships between male and female characters considered through sexual and psychoanalytical theory problematises the restrictive triad of Catholicism, surrealism and Spanish nationality, as it explodes the privileging of the masculine implicit in, for example, Edwards’s framework through a consideration of female desire in films such as Belle de Jour opposite the manipulation of male desire that we see in Ensayo de un crimen (1955).

Víctor Fuentes’s book in Spanish, Buñuel en México [Buñuel in Mexico], lays claim to be the first monograph-length study solely dedicated to the Mexican films of Buñuel (1993: 15). Fuentes recasts the work of this period in a new light, giving consideration to the generic conventions within which Buñuel often worked and the ways in which he went about subverting these, as well as suggesting new and fruitful pathways for investigation in a more philosophical vein. For instance, using Gilles Deleuze’s writing on cinema, and in particular Buñuel’s cinema, Fuentes highlights the fetish objects in the director’s cinema that give rise to the impulse-image, a reading that I develop in chapter three of this book in relation to Simón del desierto (1993: 65–70; 73; 148). In addition, Fuentes draws upon the biographical details of the circumstances around Buñuel’s arrival in Mexico in an attempt to consider the dynamics of exile – a theme he has subsequently developed – and the ways in which Buñuel’s state as a Spaniard living and working in Mexico problematises a nationalist (specifically Mexican) reading of his films, which bear ‘the hallmark of this dual nationality’ (1993: 21).⁷

Catherine Dey (1999) highlights the salient trend towards a reconsideration and reappraisal of Buñuel’s Mexican period, as she points out that criticism throughout the 1990s had begun to unlock a rich spring of Buñueliana through the incorporation of certain Mexican works into the Buñuel canon. Her study came as the surprisingly saccharine alternative ending to Los olvidados was discovered serendipitously in the film archives of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) [National Autonomous University of Mexico], and which I consider in chapter five of this book. Dey draws on a philosophy of ethics and beg...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Re-locating Buñuel’s Mexican Cinema
• 2. The Island Heterotopias of Robinson Crusoe and The Young One
• 3. Betwixt and Between: Liminal Space in La Mort en ce jardin and Simón del desierto
• 4. The Body-self in Place: The Place-worlds of Los olvidados and Nazarín
• 5. Questions of Belonging: The (Im)possibility of a Home-place
• Conclusion
• References
• Index