Buñuel in Mexico: Part 1

He was shaped, in almost equal measure, by Spain, France, Mexico and his outright rejection in the United States. At this year’s 3rd Timeless Film Festival Warsaw, we begin a retrospective of selected Mexican films by the master, which we will continue in the years to come.

“Does this film disturb you? Deeply offend you? Wonderful! That’s exactly what I wanted!” Luis Buñuel

Buñuel arrived in Mexico in 1946 after several years in the United States, where he had unsuccessfully tried to continue his directing career. He worked in the film department of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and later dubbing films in Hollywood. He never managed to find common ground with American producers, who viewed with suspicion the aura surrounding him as an avant-garde filmmaker. Only in Mexico was he finally given the opportunity to make films for a wide audience. Although he quickly found his place within the cosmopolitan bohemia of European émigrés who settled in Mexico City after the Second World War, his early collaboration with the thriving Mexican studio system was far from easy.

Buñuel’s first decade in Mexico was, above all, a difficult process of finding his footing within commercial filmmaking. He had little creative control and therefore had to fight on set for even a measure of artistic freedom. Another basic principle of the system was strict adherence to genre, which in Buñuel’s case proved a remarkably fruitful challenge. He showed himself to be a master of perversely bending convention through his sense of humour, his flair for exaggeration, his gift for creating controversial characters and his taste for shocking twists. Equally important was the fact that, despite living in Mexico, Buñuel never fully assimilated or embraced traditional local values. To the very end, he remained a cosmopolitan and an individualist, keeping his distance and looking at Mexico, in a sense, from the outside; that perspective marks all his films from this period. In a country that was both sanctimonious and anti-clerical, Buñuel – the brilliant former star pupil of a Jesuit college in Zaragoza – found ideal conditions for expressing the deep contradictions of a personality shaped in his native Aragon. Not all of his Mexican productions can be considered successful, yet over time even those that initially failed began to attract the attention of audiences and critics. In some, one finds only traces of his personality and mastery, but most remain fascinating for admirers of Buñuel’s work, as evidence of his relentless struggle with humanist and artistic conventions in every film he made.

Gran Casino, the first film Buñuel signed since Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes, tierra sin pan) in 1932, was a spectacular flop in 1947 despite the presence of two major stars: the Argentine Libertad Lamarque and the Mexican Jorge Negrete. The story of Gran Casino is a chronicle of disaster foretold, one already being reported in film magazines before the premiere. On set, Buñuel seemed like a stranger: dressed differently from everyone else, lost, irritated with himself and with the enormous crew, who failed to understand his intentions. The same could be said of the two great stars of Latin American musical comedy, both searching for new screen personae, which he – the legendary avant-gardist – was expected to create for them.

Buñuel had to wait three years for another chance – a very long time in an era when successful directors made several films a year. Hardened by earlier failures and fully aware of the unpredictability of a filmmaker’s career, he kept developing his own projects so as to be ready the moment an opportunity arose. He followed the rise of neorealism in Europe, a movement of which, as the maker of Land Without Bread, he himself had been one of the pioneers. He was preparing a story about abandoned children in the Mexican capital. To secure the chance to make it, he struck a pact with producer Óscar Dancigers. He directed The Great Madcap (El gran calavera) for him in order to prove that he could handle purely commercial cinema with ease. As befits a genius, Buñuel had by then also learned how to work within the studio system. He chose the project carefully, selecting one that would allow him to put his talent and obsessions to use without betraying himself. The story of a wastrel and drunkard who absurdly loses, and then regains, his fortune enabled him to smuggle in his sense of humour while also showing the stark contrast between the lives of the rich and the poor – all with romantic love and a wedding interrupted at the altar in the background. The film was a spectacular success in 1949, and in return the producer gave Buñuel considerable freedom to make Los Olvidados, a drama that went on to enter film history and remains widely seen to this day. Even so, the director was unable to realise several surrealist scenes he had planned, and the film’s realism is to a large extent the result of compromise with the producer. Its commercial and artistic success, crowned by the Best Director prize at Cannes in 1951, made Buñuel the most sought-after director in Mexico.

After Susana, released at the beginning of 1951, he made three more films that same year: Daughter of Deceit (La hija del engaño), A Woman Without Love (Una mujer sin amor), and Mexican Bus Ride (Subida al cielo). Susana can be seen as a deconstruction of the ranchera comedy, the most popular genre in Mexican cinema. Here Buñuel ruthlessly dismantles two sacred institutions of his adopted country: the idyllic ranch as the perfect home, and the traditional “holy” family. The desire aroused by the liberated heroine exposes the repressed emotions simmering beneath the surface of a conventional household, including the sadism of the family matriarch – something that shocked audiences accustomed to the idealised image of the Mexican mother. Mexican Bus Ride had a similar effect, with its mother figure cast as an anti-heroine: capricious and destructive, as in the scene where she interrupts her son’s wedding night to dictate her will.

In 1952, Buñuel made The Brute (El bruto) and The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, his first film in English and in colour, which premiered in 1954. He was hardly off set in 1953 either, when he directed Él, Wuthering Heights (Abismos de pasión), and Illusion Travels by Streetcar (La ilusión viaja en tranvía). In the drama Él, actor Arturo de Córdova was cast against type, overturning his established image as a composed, charming and self-assured man. As the plot unfolds, the director reveals increasingly compromising obsessions and actions lurking beneath the façade of the “ideal gentleman”, leading finally to his complete collapse. Él was one of Buñuel’s own favourite films, and his wife admitted that the jealousy scenes he staged in real life were not so very different from those shown on screen. In the next two years he made “only” one film per year: The River and Death (El río y la muerte) in 1954 and The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz (Ensayo de un crimen) in 1955. The latter may well represent the high point of the Aragonese master’s symbiosis with the studio system. A popular entertainment film in which it becomes difficult to separate the protagonist’s real world from his fantasies, it is both funny and perverse. Buñuel insisted that it was not the result of compromises with censorship or the producer, but entirely his own creation. He wanted to make an absurdly cheerful story, which he described as a scherzo. Into this light narrative he managed to weave many of his signature elements, including surrealism, eroticism and obsession.

The impressive body of work Buñuel built during his first ten years in Mexico – and above all the enthusiastic reception of the last one, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz – opened the doors of French cinema to him. He returned to Europe in 1955 to make This is Called Dawn (Cela s’appelle l’aurore) and, for the first time in years, to see his mother and family again.

TBC.

Piotr Kobus

The festival is co-financed by the City of Warsaw, the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage, and the Polish Film Institute.

The festival’s main partners are the National Film Archive – Audiovisual Institute (FINA), the Gutek Film, and the New Horizons Association.

The festival is co-organized by the Documentary and Feature Film Studios (WFDiF) and the Mazovia Institute of Culture.