The Classical Mexican Cinema by Charles Ramírez Berg

Author:Charles Ramírez Berg [Berg, Charles Ramírez]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2015-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Luis Buñuel in Mexico

THE LAST FILMS of the Classical Mexican Cinema were directed by Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) during the 1950s and early 1960s. Interestingly, however, though the literature on Buñuel and his films is extensive, his Mexican motion pictures have received relatively little attention or recognition. An even more mystifying gap in the Buñuel literature is the lack of neoformalist analysis of either his Mexican or his European films. Let me elaborate on this situation and how this chapter seeks to rectify it.

Luis Buñuel’s directing career can be divided into three discrete stages: the early avant-garde experiments, 1929–1933; the Mexican films, 1946–1965; and his mature European phase, 1964–1977. For decades many historians and critics overlooked Luis Buñuel’s Mexican films, focusing instead on the better-known European works that bookended his cinematic career. They concentrated on his two pioneering surrealist masterpieces, Un chien andalou (The Andalusian Dog, 1929) and L’age d’or (The Golden Age, 1930), which introduced him to the world as cinema’s leading avant-garde provocateur, and perhaps the short documentary he made shortly afterward, Las Hurdes: Tierra sin pan (Las Hurdes: Land without Bread, 1933). Or they skipped ahead to the seven highly esteemed surrealist films of his second European period, which began with Le journal d’une femme de chamber (Diary of a Chambermaid, 1964) and included Belle de jour (1967), Le voie lactée (The Milky Way, 1969), Tristana (1970), Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 1972), Le fantôme de la liberté (The Phantom of Liberty, 1974), and Cet obscure objet de désir (That Obscure Object of Desire, 1977). When his Mexican films were mentioned at all, it was usually to acknowledge Los olvidados (1950), which won Buñuel a best director award at Cannes and returned him to the first rank of international auteurs, and possibly Viridiana (1962), a Mexican-Spanish coproduction that won a Cannes Palme d’Or and is popularly understood as the springboard to his late European masterworks.

This selective focus on the pictures made in Europe disregards the fact that the majority of the films that Buñuel directed, twenty-three out of thirty-two, were made from 1946 to 1965, a time when he lived and worked in Mexico and became a Mexican citizen. It ignores two decades’ worth of work that was crucial to Buñuel’s development as a director and that formed the link between his early surrealist shorts and his later critically acclaimed films. It discounts the fact that he learned how to make feature-length films by working within the bustling Mexican studio system. As Buñuel himself said of his years as a director in Mexico when interviewed in 1963, “Until I came here, I made a film the way a writer makes a book, and on my friends’ money at that. Here in Mexico I have become a professional in the film world.”1

And, finally, it overlooks the many splendid films he made in Mexico, which, except for two made outside the country (Le journal d’une femme de chamber and Cela s’appelle l’aurore [That Is the Dawn], 1956), are exemplary of the Classical Mexican Cinema.

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