Pedro Páramo

A strange and mesmerizing story that explores the destructive relationship between those with power and those without, Juan Rulfo’s 1955 novel Pedro Páramo is considered one of the greatest texts in any language by Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel García Márquez credits the book with breaking him free from his writer’s block and inspiring his own masterpiece, One Hundred Years of Solitude. Carlos Velo’s 1967 film adaptation, rarely seen, doesn’t attempt to outshine or reinvent Rulfo’s story of a young man searching for his father but instead commits to translating the written word to cinematic form. The film opens as Juan Preciado (Carlos Fernández) listens to his dying mother. She tells him to go to the village of Comala to collect what is owed to him and to find his estranged father, Pedro Páramo. When he gets there, Juan Preciado finds a desolate and unnerving place filled with sullen, ghost-like people. Those he encounters in the dark, dimly lit buildings tell him about his unscrupulous father. Páramo is played by Hollywood actor John Gavin, whose mother was Mexican. According to Gavin, the story is “the journey of a young man in search of his father but, as an allegory, it is a man in search of himself.” Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa brings the eerie mood of Rulfo’s text to life through the use of shadow and light to transition from the present to the past and beyond, visually conveying the unique relationship between space and time in the source material. Accompanying Figueroa’s images, Velo deftly uses sound—putting reverb on a distant music track, letting the wind howl—to create a discordant sense of place that underscores not only Preciado’s journey, but issues of land ownership, corruption, and violence, as well. Carlos Velo started out making short documentaries in the 1930s in his native Spain but would soon find himself exiled to Mexico where he spent the rest of his career. Like his fellow exiled countryman Luis Buñuel, Velo was part of the creative boom in Mexican cinema. His 1956 documentary Torero! was nominated in the Documentary (Feature) category at the 1958 Academy Awards. With his first narrative film, Pedro Páramo, Velo brought to life a beloved novel that is one of Mexico’s most important cultural contributions.