[Better Know a Movement] Film Noir, Week Something: Mexico. Brilliance in Darkness.

###Flaunting an American femme fatale. Flaunting a Mexican one.

(Ironically, Ninon Sevilla was Cuban. And Rita Hayworth was Spanish-American. But you get the point)

####Screening Notes:

There’s no way to introduce even just Mexican noir with only two movies. So, we’ll forego diversity (for now) to highlight quality. Hopefully, that will generate some interest in this virtually untalked-about treasure trove. We’ll see visual despair lower than anything the states would have been allowed to produce, and thematic hopefulness, something the states (at the time) would not have wanted to produce. Mexican noir is a whole new ball game. Crepusculo offers world class photography and performances, and a nuanced political and moral stance not usually found in studio flicks, no matter the country. Victimas offers a combination of the two kinds of women portrayed in Mexico during its Golden Age, the asexual mother and the whore. Here, Sevilla plays a hypersexualized mother, as well as an asexual whore, all at the same time. The Mexican view of women during this period is a very strange mix that I’m still wrapping my head around, but it’s certainly nowhere close to what the U.S. was portraying. I highly recommend both of these movies as great noir, great Mexican movies, and great movies in general. These are top tier flicks, and instant favorites of mine.

A ton of the literature on Mexican cinema dismisses their pre-1960’s canon as soulless Hollywood imitators, half a century relegated to the “Introduction” sections of text books as if to get this uninteresting chunk of Mexican movie history out of the way so we can finally get to the real auteurs: well, blow me. I wanted to do a section on Latin American noir in general, but there’s just too much to talk about. Mexico alone has so many world class noirs, I decided to just stick with this one country as an introduction. Yeah, they definitely modeled their industry from top to bottom after Hollywood, but they made the noir mentality so personal, and in some ways better than the North American expression! We’ve looked at German Expressionism and French Poetic realism as they relate to movies from another country that hadn’t even been released yet, which can be a bit unfair to everyone involved. So this time, let’s discard the American-indigenous concept of noir (especially since Mexico was prefiguring classical American noir by a decade, just like France and the U.S. itself had done) and instead center the concept around Mexico, and see where the U.S. does and doesn’t line up with it. We could do the same for Japanese noir, German, other Latin American countries, French, Scandinavian… just about anywhere.

Mexican movies found the noir mentality most at home in the cabareteras subgenre of the rumberas, movies that were kind of musicals, but mostly melodramas centered around prostitute/dancers. You see a dance floor, you’re really seeing a brothel. Already, we’re in a completely different world. Mexicans thought of “melodrama” the way people in the U.S. do today, as opposed to how it was used from the silent era until the 40’s-50’s. We thought of a melodrama back then as something like a masculine-oriented drama, something that predates the action movie. No explosions or fight scenes, but certainly fights, fires, chasing… action with a lower-case “a.” These rumberas and cabareteras poked their heads in during the 30’s, just after Eisenstein helped usher in an artistic bent to the Mexican film industry. The going rate was for women to be either mothers or whore villains, and they played on the Mexican comedias rancheras concept, a loose equivalent to the American Western. “Comedias” = melodrama, not “comedy.” These rancheras featured rural settings, popular folk songs, and were set during pre-revolutionary times.

By the mid-late 40’s, Mexico was rebuilding its infrastructure, and borrowing from Italian neorealism in their movies to portray it. A ton of these cabareteras showed off the modern Mexican cityscape, now complete with immoral nightclubs and illegal activities. Wet cobblestone streets surrounded by who-knows-how-old buildings with sleazy neon lights freshly bolted on in a failing attempt to update the city’s soul. Instead of seeing grizzled veterans coping with a now-foreign homeland, we see women struggling to break out of their traditional roles by using them for personal gain. One example, Salon Mexico, features a prosti - ah, dancer - who sells her vagi - that is, dances - to support her sister’s education. She gets the shit beat out of her by her pimps, fired, imprisoned, and finally, meets her demise. But she was always struggling to do the right thing, to rise up in the face of a new world playing by the old rules. Femme fatales are plentiful, too, but they’re usually the main character fighting against the machismo ideals (think Brienne of Tarth spliced with Rita Hayworth, if Henry Armstrong was her short tempered pimp). A refreshing counterweight to the American Protestant (and Jewish) fear of women being people, too.

If we were to make a ven diagram of Mexican and American noir, we’d see some (not so?) surprising overlaps and gaps. Mexicans had little need for a detective. They had little attraction to national paranoia. They had a fundamental emphasis on the femme fatale though. So fundamental, in fact, that she was the protagonist, and it was womanhood, not manhood, that was most commonly and thoroughly explored. There was also a huge connection to horror. I’ll be digging deeper into classic Mexican horror, but the parallels are blatant right off the bat (and we’ll be showing their version of Dracula, arguably better than the Lugosi rendition, at some later date), which seem to have a knack for expressionist lighting. In fact, one of the earliest Mexican talkies was an expressionist riff called Dos Monjes, a “different perspective” story that reeks of Rashomon, which would come out almost twenty years later. They were in on the ground the floor all along. But nah, let’s keep thinking Mexico never did anything cool until Bunuel flew in.

As opposed to Argentina, who I’d say ironically modeled their noirs more faithfully after the U.S. despite its strained relationship with them (fascism works in mysterious ways), Mexico had more of a knack for blending the neorealist sentiment with the studio execution: the cityscape was a nightmare, the acting style was bold, bold, bold, and the soundtracks seemed straight out of a symphony in Valhalla. Specific tropes, like the doppleganger, were strangely rehashed and put at the fore (as in La Otra, a very cool straight melodrama). New influences, like Bunuel in the 50’s, sparked a more political fire in the new wave of Mexican directors, and by the 60’s, seemingly every fucking guy in Central and South America with a camera had their own “revolutionary” philosophy on cinema. But the Epoca de oro from the 30’s to the 50’s was, despite/because of their own financial constraints and exploitation, just as personal and exciting a cinema as Hollywood was, or Bollywood is, or Hong Kong was/is. They created and owned an entire World of Noir.

####Essential Movies:

Crepusculo, Aventurera, En la palma de tu mano, La otra, Distinto amanecer, La noche avanza, La mujer del puerto, Sensualidad, Salon Mexico

####Key Figures:

• Directors: Emilio Fernandez, Roberto Gavaldon, Alberto Gout, Julio Bracho, Luis Bunuel, Juan Orol

• Actors: (the five Queens of the Tropic) Maria Antonia Pons, Meche Barba, Amalia Aguilar, Ninon Sevilla (one of the tippy top tier soap opera style actresses, and a good dancer/choreographer), Rosa Carmina; Pedro Armendariz (Turkish president in From Russia, With Love, and an all around badass), Dolores del Rio (a stone cold fox), Arturo de Cordova (an all-time great, up there with Lancaster, Hayden, Ryan, Gabin and Bogey).

• Cinematographers: Gabriel Figueroa

Keep in mind, this list would be the equivalent of showing someone a list of some great Japanese filmmakers and actors for the first time. These are all huge names of vast talent that simply don’t have global name recognition yet, so dive in head-first, wherever. Personally, I found the cabareteras an easier segue than the straight melodramas, not because of how similar they are to American classical noir, but because of how viscerally thrilling they are. They are not only easy to enjoy, but at their best, are also daunting, challenging morality pieces and gender explorations. Classic melodramas like Crepusculo are fantastic as well, some of my all time favorites. If you’re unfamiliar with the soap operaesque over-the-top Mexican acting style, it may be a little much at first, but only takes a minute or two to get used to. I started Crepusculo a little confused, and left it drooling.