04 · 26 · 21

The Strangeness of Panic-Esoteric Cinema

Rafael Aviña

El mayor impacto cultural de un año como 1968 fue el estreno en la XI Reseña del cine Roble y en la otrora célebre Reseña de Acapulco, de Fando y Lis (1967) de Alejandro Jodorowsky, protagonizada por Sergio Kleiner y la joven cantante y actriz Diana Mariscal, cinta producida, entre otros, por Roberto Viskin y Juan López Moctezuma, que representaba la antítesis del cine mexicano de ese momento. Un extravagante, excesivo, perturbador y antisolemne relato, inspirado en una pieza teatral de Fernando Arrabal, con imágenes bellísimas en blanco y negro a cargo de Antonio Reynoso y Rafael Corkidi.

Silva would, in turn, go on to make his own esoteric-panic film Pubertinaje in 1971, based on a novel by Pablo Leder. This unfinished, mutilated film includes three episodes: Una cena de Navidad (Leder); Juego de espejos (Alcaraz) and Tetraedro (Luís Urías), but that was released in 1978 with just the first two in-tact. Then came Jodorowsky´s La montaña sagrada, which had a troubled shoot, irritated the Catholic Church and ended up being censored until 1975.

Corkidi´s confronting images speak for themselves: naked boys and girls accompanied by a mutilated man; a group of Grenadiers at La Merced with the corpses of skinned dogs on their rifles, instead of bayonets; toads dressed as Aztecs and others as Spaniards staging the conquest of Mexico, or hundreds of plaster models of Christ with their genitals covered. Without a doubt, panic and esoteric cinema was a moment of inward-looking and extreme experimentation, whose peak was found in the counter-culturalism of the sixties and seventies.