 |
|||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||
 |
|||||||||
 |
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
|||||
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||
"María Candelaria" (1943) launched the Mexican cinema into the international arena in 1946 at the Cannes Film Festival, sharing the prize for best film. The eminent French film critic Georges Sadoul in his influential Histoire Général du Cinema (1954), praised "Maria Candelaria" for its "authentic" portrayal of rural Mexico, not limiting itself to the picturesque, but also positing a critique on race relations.1 Notwithstanding its status as the representative film of the classic Mexican cinema, "María Candelaria" is in fact a controversial film among Mexican film critics and scholars.
In Mexico, "Maria Candelaria" has alternately been pegged for its exotic and primitive excesses, and aesthetic representation of indigenous populations. It has also been hailed as "the highest triumph of Mexican plastic arts on celluloid" and "a titanic promise for strictly patriotic cinema."2
When considering "María Candelaria's" impact and its foundational status in the history of Mexican cinema, it is important to situate the film within an historical context. The year of its production, was a crucial time in the formation of Mexican national art cinema, with concerted efforts to make films that could successfully compete with Hollywood, and draw from established cultural heritage (in this case, the indigenismo and mestizophilia of such intellectuals as Andrés Molina Enríquez, Manuel Gamio, and especially the early writings of José Vasconcelos, particularly his concepts of mexicanos en potencia and the cosmic race. Vasconcelos, Mexico's first Minister of Education (1921-24) sought to redeem the "barbarous Indian" through recruitment into the national modernization and a unification project of education, biological and ethnic assimilation (mestizaje).
The film's cinematographer, the late Gabriel Figueroa (1907-1997), is considered the leader in imaging the modern, post-revolutionary Mexican national consciousness.3 The community Figueroa imagined through his use of cinematographic and photographic technologies, shaped the collective national imagery like no other filmmaker. His contributions to world cinema through his innovations in film photography, encompass the areas of lenses, filters, lab processing, lighting apparatus and different ways of using the technologies, all of which are internationally recognized but under-researched.
With over 200 films in his filmography, spanning across genres and five decades, Figueroa is credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic. "María Candelaria" is the second of a total of twenty-four collaborate films Figueroa photographed between 1942 and 1956 with director Emilio "el Indio" Fernández (1904-1986). Their collaborative films have become synonymous with mexicanidad and its valorization of mestizaje (mixed race identity) and pre-Columbian cultures. The Fernández-Figueroa team (also including novelist and screen-writer Mauricio Magdaleno and editor Gloria Schoeman), internationalized Mexican cinema. They are the most important filmmakers of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema (1943-46).
Until Fernández's decline, in the early 1950s with the rise of Luis Buñuel, the Mexican art cinema was internationally identified with the films of the Fernández-Figueroa team. Their collaborative projects provided Mexican audiences with a source of collective identification, and shaped how audiences viewed Mexico, its history and themselves. Fernández called his films "autos sacramentales (passion plays) of mexicanidad." From his messianic position, Fernández desired to Mexicanize Mexicans, whose exposure to Hollywood films he felt, was Americanizing audiences. Figueroa has reiterated that between Fernández and himself, they invented a rural Mexico that didn't exist. Figueroa's unparalleled atmospheric, high-contrast representations of Mexican landscapes, fauna, people and regional cultural traditions, solidified a nationalist visual vernacular that the muralist movement, under patronage of Vasconcelos, had initiated. Figueroa is referred to as the fourth of the three most important Mexican muralists (Orozco, Rivera, Siqueiros).
The Golden Age of Mexican cinema emerged during a period of rapid industrialization and affluence for the relative few. At this time, the Mexican film industry became the largest producer of Spanish- language films, significantly challenging Hollywood's exhibition hegemony throughout the Americas. The 1940s witnessed a three- fold increase in film production in comparison to the 1930s. The nationalist films of the 1940s were produced during a conservative and often repressive political administration. During the World War II period, the Mexican film industry benefited enormously from increasing business and diplomatic partnership with the U.S. Mexico's major competitors were Spain and Argentina, and their governments were aligned with European fascism. The consolidation of the Mexican film industry was also a product of a star system whose actresses and actors are still internationally recognized.
"María Candelaria", also titled "Xochimilco", is the product of this star system and the strategic efforts to internationalize cultural products through highly exportable images of stars playing innocent natives in a beleaguered paradise. The film was written as a star vehicle for actress Dolores del Río, whose successful twenty-year career in Hollywood began to dwindle with the introduction of sound. A tragic story of epic proportions, "María Candelaria" is set in 1909, before the dawn of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. Spatially located in Xochimilco, site of the famous floating gardens outside Mexico City, it represents the final remnants of a pre-Columbian eco-system of man-made islands called chinampas. This entirely constructed garden is considered a masterpiece of pre-Columbian technology and hydraulic engineering. Xochimilco occupies a privileged space in the national imagery, and as part of the Aztec empire, it provided Tenochtitlán many of its horticultural products, notably flowers. Under dictator Porfirio Díaz, Xochimilco's waters were siphoned into Mexico City via an aqueduct, while the constructed paradise, in turn, received the capital city's treated black waters. Since then, Xochimilco, no longer a hidden paradise, has become endangered.
María Candelaria (del Río) bears the burdens of her mother's past. She is ostrasized from her community because her mother was a prostitute. Beset by tragedies, María is also burdened by her debt at the local store managed by the sadistic and racist cacique, don Damián (Miguel Inclán). Because her community of resentful and puritanical Indians refuse to allow her to sell the flowers she grows in Xochimilco, María and her loyal fiancee, Lorenzo Rafael (Pedro Armendáriz), try their luck at a market in a nearby town. There a criollo Painter (Alberto Galán) spots the beautiful María and proposes she model for him, a move the protective Lorenzo doesn't tolerate. A spiralling series of tragedies beset the couple, forcing María to seek the Painter's intervention, a move that seals her martyred fate.
Despite the film's conservative lynch mob denouement, taken directly from the classic indigenista film "Janitzio" (Carlos Navarro 1934), it is important to ask how "María Candelaria" strategically synthesized aspects of Mexican national identity at a moment when the national film industry was undergoing a process of expansion and consolidation. To focus exclusively on the film's romanticized and touristic view of the native, is to overlook how the film is historically informed by the violent struggles to secularize the Mexican state, with the break in church-state relations initiated by the 1910 Revolution. The most powerful, enduring and unifying component in the formation of the Mexican national consciousness is the cult to Our Lady of Guadalupe, a banner for various political struggles including the wars of Independence and the Cristero wars. How then is "María Candelaria" informed by this history?
Space does not permit me to explore these questions at length, so I will close with a hagiographic anecdote that enriches our understanding of how deeply embedded Fernández's oeuvre is in the role Mariology has played in the formation of Mexican nationalism.4 In 1712, the Spanish Crown's army defeated a pan-Indian insurrection in the Chiapas area. The insurrection called for a complete break with the Spanish Crown, self-determination and recuperation of their lands. The legitimacy to the rebel leaders' proclamation rested on their claim that the Virgin Mary had appeared to a prepubescent Tzotzil girl named María de la Candelaria, and that it was she who spoke through the Joan of Arc-like figure.5 The history of the cult of the Virgin Mary can provide an important account for the immense pan- American popularity of the classic Mexican cinema, especially the films of its leading proponents: the Fernández-Figueroa team.
This article was originally published in the 1998 festival program of the San Diego Latino Film Festival.
Note: Sergio de la Mora, is an independent curator who writes and teaches on Mexican, Latin American, and Chicano film, literature and cultural studies. He is completing his doctoral dissertation at the University of California, Santa Cruz on the construction of a national cinema in Mexico.
1. Cited in Emilio García Riera, Emilio Fernández, 1904-1986 (Guadalajara: Universidad de Guadalajara, Centro de Investigaciones y Enseñanza Cinematográficas/Cineteca Nacional, 1987): 56.
3. For an extended elaboration of Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities in relation to the role visual images have played in the development of oppositional nationalisms see Maylei Blackwell, "Retrofitted Memory: History as a Site of Identity Formation and Struggle for Chicana Feminist Articulations." Chicano/Latino Research Center News 6, Fall 1995 (Santa Cruz: Chicano/Latino Research Center, University of California): 6-7.
4. For a rich approximation to the phenomenon of Guadalupismo in the films of Emilio Fernández see Elena Feder Tuchschneider, "Dying to Be Born: The Vicissitudes of Birth in Life and Culture." Ph.D. dissertation. Stanford University, 1997.
5. This event is recounted by the historian Juan Pedro Viqueira Albán, María de la Candelaria, India Natural de Cancuc (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993).
For more information regarding these articles and/or to submit an article yourself,
please contact Ethan van Thillo at sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com
San Diego Latino Film Festival,
c/o Media Arts Center San Diego,
2039 29th Street,
San Diego, CA 92104
TEL: 619.230.1938, FAX: 619.234.9722,
sdlff@sdlatinofilm.com, www.sdlatinofilm.com
Home || Advertise || Arte Latino || Awards || Call for Entries || Cine Cubano! || |
||