10 · 04 · 08

México Imaginario starts

Clara Sánchez/Translated by Caroline MacKinnon

Mexico’s culture and traditions have been portrayed, reinvented and at the same time distorted by international cinema. The México Imaginario program tries to show that Mexico we imagine that sometimes bothers us, is sometimes absurd, implausible and even ridiculous.

Steve Said, who heads this project, tells us about how that the idea came up and the how the films are selected for this program that begins today.

How do you define Imaginary México?   
The inspiration behind this sidebar is French director Bertrand Tavernier. At the 2007 Festival, Tavernier remarked to Daniela Michel that Mexico had long held a special place in the imagination for not just those of the Western Hemisphere, but for Europeans as well. Imaginary Mexico is an attempt to explore that fascination through cinema. For some, Mexico stands as an exotic representation of past empire, a colonial vestige. For others, Mexico signifies a sort of unruly place, a place of anarchy and darkness. A classic trope would be the American fugitive fleeing across the border to blend into this lawless landscape. Think Peckinpah or Sergio Leone. If you add Eisenstein, John Huston, and others to this mix, you get the sense that there are as many imaginary Mexicos as there are French cheeses. Please excuse the metaphor.

How do you select the films?   
Because this sidebar is so new, it seemed most appropriate to start with the more distant past, films from earlier periods of cinema history. What is often astonishing with earlier films is their cultural clumsiness. Hollywood, in particular, was masterful at its use of stereotypes which serve as dramatic shorthand while at the same time doing culture and its multitude of ethnicities no particular favor. Tangentially, there is the benefit of getting to re-introduce films, overlooked or long forgotten, that stand as singular objects for appreciation, and with the historical distance they afford, you can often revel in their spectacular cultural blunders and misrepresentations.

Can you talk to us about Capitán de Castile?   
In the mid-Forties, the U.S. film industry was beginning to discover Mexico not just as an exotic and imaginary place, but as a great industrial location for film production. In 1946/47, John Ford made The Fugitive and John Huston made Treasure of the Sierra Madre, both shot in Mexico. In between those two films, 20th Century Fox sent director Henry King to Mexico to adapt Captain from Castile, the incredibly popular novel by Samuel Shellabarger about Cortez' conquest. The Studio decided this would be a Technicolor spectacle filled with romance and conquest in the New World. It would also be a vehicle to re-introduce Tyrone Power who had been in the Army for three years. The novel was an epic, involved, and tangled story that began during Spain's Inquisition and then followed Captain Vargas to Mexico as he joined Cortez's expedition. To make the story more manageable, the screenwriters reduced the martial aspects, the great clashes between the Conquistadors and the indigenous armies, to minor occurrences, stressing instead the romance and revelation of colonial discovery. Of course, the biggest discovery was Jean Peters who appears in her debut role as Tyrone Power's peasant paramour. Born of Cuban parents, Cesar Romero plays Cortez in what many consider to be his most bravado filled role.

The other great discovery within Captain from Castile is the locations: your very own town of Morelia, along with Uruapan and Acapulco. Paricutin, which was still erupting at the time, can be seen belching in the background. The earliest scenes in this lush period adventure, all representing Spain in 1518, are rendered in the environs of Morelia. Most notably, haciendas, churches, and a stand-in for an Inquisitional dungeon all draw on the architecture of Morelia as it stood in 1946. Swashbucklers in a neighborhood near you!

And how did you find the tourist shorts? What are the most attractive issues of those films?   
The Pacific Film Archive was given the tourist films many years ago by a San Francisco resident who had worked in Mexico in the forties and fifties as a mining engineer. He adored Mexico and began collecting films about the culture. Rumor was that he had a trunk filled with nitrate prints of bullfighters, but those he didn't give us. The collection of 16mm tourist films was originally sponsored by a U.S. governmental agency, the Office for Inter-American Affairs. The goal of this agency was to strengthen the cultural exchanges between the U.S. and Mexico. The films were intended for an American audience and directed by a Mexican director, Gregorio Castillo, with the narration performed by a handful of Hollywood stars, including Orson Welles and Tyrone Power. There is a quaint beauty to these films. They stress the simple pleasures of the place, the sense of antiquity, the languid pace of the culture, the hospitable nature of the people--in other words, a list of amenities for leisure time. Tourism, as we know, is often the by-product of colonial enterprise. These great short tourist films from the late forties are steeped in the colors of kodachrome and capital.