Ernesto R. Acevedo-Munoz,
Bunuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0520239520
202pp
US$60.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by the University of California Press)
If there is a layman’s version of the life and work of Luis Bunuel, it generally follows a variation of the prodigal son story: a young subversive shocks western world with silent surrealist masterpieces, then disappears into obscurity in Mexico, only to return to Europe three decades later to become a leading figure in the European art cinema of the 1960’s and 1970’s. As in the Christian parable, Bunuel’s developments as an artist in exile are routinely ignored by this version of events, superimposed by the success and celebrations of his return to the first world. Perhaps influenced by Bunuel’s own comments in his autobiography, My Last Sigh, many detailed studies of the director’s career have maintained this ignorance toward his Mexican period. For example, in her book, Luis Bunuel, Virginia Higginbotham argues that “Many of the films made Mexico are inconsequential. Only five of the nineteen films of this period can be considered memorable.” (Higginbotham, V., Luis Bunuel [New York: Twayne, 1979] p.63).
It is in opposition to this compromised and partially deceitful historical perspective that Ernesto Acevedo-Mundoz has written his new book, Bunuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema.
Acevedo-Mundoz seeks to release Bunuel studies from the “historical vacuum” (8) of auterist considerations of specifically “Bunuelian” elements. By explaining Bunuel’s Mexican career between 1945 and 1955 as a participation in and critique of Mexican classical cinema and the socio-economic politics surrounding this institution, Acevedo-Mundoz not only draws attention to this critically neglected group of films, but also establishes their important connection to the industrial conditions supplanting their productions. In this, Bunuel and Mexico, provides an interesting example of an “industrial auter criticism” (13) that seeks to understand the development of an individual filmmaker in explicit relation to the local historical context of their career.
The films directed by Bunuel that Acevedo-Mudoz discusses in detail are all entirely Mexican domestic productions: Gran Casino (1946-47), El gran calavera (1949), Los olivados (1950), Susana (1951), La hija del engano (1951), Una mujer sin amor (1951), Subsida al cielo (1951), El bruto (1952), El (1952), La illusion viaja en tranvia (1953), El rio y la muerta (1954) and Ensayo de un crimen (1955). Acevedo-Mudoz establishes his understanding of these twelve films in terms of Bunuel’s participation “within the currents of revisionism of the themes and genres of Mexican cinema.”( 29) He argues that Bunuel’s Mexican period should be understood as a parodic relationship with the national symbols and narrative strategies that served as the cornerstones for Mexican cinema’s generic conventions. The most prominent of these Mexican symbols discussed by Acevedo-Mudoz are malinchismo, machismo and the official revisionist imagery of Mexican post-revolutionary society.
In the fourth chapter of Bunuel and Mexico, Acevedo-Mundoz discusses the relationship of Susana and La hija del engano with the general patriarchal Mexican attitude towards women in the 1950’s. This attitude is explained in terms of malinchismo, the national idea that Mexican society’s origins lie in the adulterous relationship and mestizo (mongrel) offspring of Hernando Cortes and La Malinche, the conquistador’s Native American mistress. This idea of the “Indian whore mother” counteracts the nation’s Catholic preoccupation with virgin mother to create a paradoxical sense of national origin that, in the words of Mexican novelist Octavio Paz, “is the centre of our anxiety and anguish.” (100) Acevedo-Mundoz explains Susana and La hija del engano as attempts on Bunuel’s behalf to incorporate this national imagery into a subtle and potentially invisible parodic narrative, one that simultaneously criticises the Mexican projection of male sexual violence onto women and the arbitrary association of motherhood with virginal purity while maintaining generic character standards of classical Mexican cinema.
Similarly, in chapter six, Acevedo-Mundoz investigates the relationship of El Bruto, El and Ensayo de un crimen to the idea of male machismo. Machismo can be understood simply as male “macho”, the depressingly international tendency of males to associate their gender identity with violence. However, in terms of Mexico, machismo has become interrelated with a certain revolutionary state identity. Charles Ramirez Berg treats this relationship as a rule of thumb: “To speak of the male image in Mexico is to speak of the nation’s self-image and ultimately to speak of the state itself.” (125) El Bruto, El and Ensayo de un crimen are discussed by Acevedo-Mundoz as evidence of Bunuel’s “inclination to treat Mexican issues metaphorically as personal traumas.” (136) In this, the brutes in Bunuel’s Mexican films function simultaneously as both critiques of personal male idiocy and as imaginary signifiers, provoking a connection between this idiocy and the socio-political identity of post-revolutionary Mexico.
By far the most successful chapter of Bunuel and Mexico is Acevedo-Mundoz’s discussion ofLos olivados , Bunuel’s most celebrated Mexican film, for which he won the best director award at Cannes. “In Los olivados ,” Acevedo-Mundoz argues,
Bunuel directly addressed his expressed dislike for official folklore, for the image of Mexico as dictated by the visual style of classical cinema and revolutionary art, and of the social and political transition to modernisation. (59)
Like Octavio Paz’s influential cultural essay El laberinto de la soledad , Los olivados treats the “crisis” (industrial, cultural, psychological) of Mexico’s rapid industrial development. Dealing with the street life of extremely impoverished and violent youths, Bunuel’s film channelled national attention toward the foul bi-products of the free-market values prioritised by Mexico’s revolutionary government. However, more than a social statement, Los olivados stands as Bunuel’s most, and perhaps only, successful attempt to direct his film according to the aesthetic of ethnographic surrealism, which he pioneered with the still widely exhibited Las Hurdes (1932). It is on this point, Bunuel’s unique observational approach to film narrative as an explicit alternative to classical revisionist forms, that Acevedo-Mundoz makes his strongest argument for the importance of Bunuel’s Mexican period.
However, despite his excellent discussion of Los olivados as a work of ethnographic surrealism, Acevedo-Mundoz finds apparent difficulty in relating the strong points of his argument to the concerns established by his methodological insistence toward “industrial auter” criticism. This fault sheds light on a particularly disappointing wider flaw in the book. While Acevedo-Mundoz is clearly a film scholar of considerable depth and insight, his discussion consistently diverts itself away from matters of importance because of the insistence it places on avoiding the placement of Bunuel’s cinema inside a historical vacuum. While I can appreciate the need in detailed film studies for a more rigorous understanding of a filmmaker’s social and historical context, this quality should not be introduced at the expense of detailed discussions of a film’s form. Unfortunately, Acevedo-Mundoz’s study of Bunuel fails somewhat in this regard and many of his discussions teeter on the edge of relevance as a result. Despite this, Bunuel and Mexico: The Crisis of a National Cinema is an accomplished work, one that succeeds in stimulating an interest in a generally ignored period in the career of a very important filmmaker.
Tom Redwood,
Flinders University, South Australia.
Created on: Tuesday, 7 December 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Nov-04