‘Spectacle Every Day – The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema’ is a Mexican retrospective that comes to the Locarno Festival full of diversity, history and joy.
The richness of Mexican cinema in the decades – the 1940’s through the 1960’s – is amazingly on display in the retrospective mounted by the 2023 Locarno Festival, but the show’s most striking, even overwhelming characteristic is its diversity. Cinema genius Luis Buñuel and respected Mexican directors Julio Bracho and Alejandro Galindo appear mixed with kitsch cult films like Santo contra las mujeres vampiro and La mujer murciélago. This selection of 36 films brings together divas like María Félix, dancers like Tongolele and Ninón Sevilla; established actors and actresses such as Silvia Pinal, Isabella Corona, Pedro Armendáriz and the Soler brothers; popular idols like Pedro Infante and Jorge Negrete.
The retrospective called Spectacle Every Day – The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema includes a part of the so-called golden age –when the Mexican film industry was the center of Spanish-language cinema in the world – until the early 1960s when the audience’s taste changed and production declined. Regarding the variety of genres, Mexican historian Juan Carlos Vargas comments, “The cycle stands out for the inclusion of classics from film noir and ‘chili westerns’, as well as for presenting films of authentically Mexican genres such as ranchero melodramas, wrestling films, and filmmakers such as Roberto Gavaldón, Emilio Fernández, Alejandro Galindo and Ismael Rodríguez.”
Everything is laid out like a smörgåsbord – or maybe a taco spread – with a flavor for every taste.
The retrospective, curated by programmer Olaf Möller in collaboration with critic Roberto Turigliatto, shows, along with an exquisite knowledge of cinema, a European eye amazed by daily life and Mexican attitude. The curatorship has ironic overtones. too, such as including El Rio y la muerte, which Luis Buñuel took to the Venice Film Festival in 1954, where his name was applauded but the plot was laughed at, in spite of ten deaths in the screenplay.
Over these three decades there were few documentaries produced in Mexico, but the retrospective presents two of them. Olimpiada en México (1969) was directed by Alberto Issac, who in addition to being a director was an Olympic swimmer nicknamed La flecha de Colima. The other documentary, which is mixed with fiction, something very original in 1957, is Torero by Carlos Velo. In sober black and white, Luis Procuna, a handsome matador with an elegant figure, thinks about his fear of bullfighting and wonders about the factors, especially the wind, that would allow him to get out alive and perform a good faena (the final series of passes with his cape before the kill.)
Some films have curious details. El gran campeón directed by Chano Urueta in 1959 has the boxer Kid Azteca acting out his own life, with fictional melodramatic details to spice up the story. Mujeres de uniforme, directed by Alfredo B. Crevenna in 1951, the first Mexican film with an LGBTQ+ interest, is based on a play of the same name for which its author Christa Winsloe and the actresses who participated in the staging had to escape from Nazi Germany.
Among the comedies shown, there are the first – and probably the best – films of two historic comedians of Mexican cinema: El gendarme desconocido with actor Mario Moreno (stage name Cantinflas), directed by Miguel M. Delgado in 1941, and El rey del barrio with actor Germán Valdés (a.k.a. Tin Tan), directed by Gilberto Martínez Solares in 1949. In these key works the actors play various characters, with different nationalities and accents, and both comedians exhibit the self-confidence, freshness and improvisation that are later lost in the many sequels and variations they made with the same directors, trying to reproduce the success of their early films.
El esqueleto de la señora Morales, directed by Rogelio A. González in 1959, stands out as a film noir with an excellent script by Luis Alcoriza, one of Buñuel’s co-writers. The film addresses the relative nature of morality and plays with a crime very close to being perfect.
Most of the films are part of the collection of the UNAM Film Library, which organized the retrospective in collaboration with the Mexican Institute of Cinematography, IMCINE, the Cineteca Nacional and the Morelia International Film Festival, among other Mexican institutions.
