Subversive humor: Cantinflas musketeer

On Wednesday, June 20, 2012, at 8pm, the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles  will screen       Los Tres Mosqueteros (The Three Musketeers, 1942), directed by Miguel M. Delgado, with Cantinflas  (139 minutes).  As part of the L.A. Conservancy series "Last Remaining Seats", the film will be shown at the magnificently restored Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

Below are the program notes I wrote for the event.

Los Tres Mosqueteros spoofs the beloved historical novel by Alexander Dumas.  Comic legend Mario Moreno, “Cantinflas”, stars as the street savvy Mexican proletarian emerging in a dream as the dashing d’Artagnan in17th century France. 

Like Germán Valdez, “Tin Tan”, and Niní Marshall, “Catita”, Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” belongs to the pantheon of great Latin American comedians of the forties and fifties who brought a unique comic persona to the screen.  Their humor blends slapstick and linguistic mannerisms, thrives on parody and excels in the sharp portrait of popular characters.  They use film as a vehicle for amiable social satire, a mirror that reflects shared national traits, anchored in the perspective of the common people.

Born in the working-class neighborhood of Tepito, Mexico City, in 1911, Mario Moreno honed his comic persona performing in ‘carpa’, or tent, vaudeville shows. He combined physical comedy with a knack for verbal improvisation, and a studied nonchalance when his sentimentalized low-life characters had to face the powerful, the rich, the bureaucrats.

Mario Moreno once defined “Cantinflas” as ‘the prototype of the humble people from the urban barrio … superficially educated and practically non-existent socially, but with a highly developed ingenuity (a Mexican characteristic), a formidable astuteness – and a large and open heart”.  In fifty films over forty years Moreno offers variations on this prototype: the little man who is perennially broke, a ‘pelado’ (literally, without hair, stripped clean) pushed by poverty to be a jack-of-all-trades, resilient and witty facing the catastrophes of life. His pants hang off his hips, he sports a pencil-thin moustache, a raggedy hat and has no sense of style.

A trademark of “Cantinflas” is his unique type of nonsense speech, mixing double-talk, alliterations, malapropisms, highfalutin affectation and pantomime delivered at breakneck speed and incomprehensible.  The Real Academia Española de la Lengua incorporated “cantinflada” as a noun in its venerable dictionary.

Intellectuals and academic have examined the popularity of “Cantinflas” and his endearing qualities in studies that discuss him as a metaphor for the chaos of Mexican modernity in the 20^th century.  In the words of cultural historian Ilan Stavans “Cantinflas” is an example of the “delightful if tortuous relationship between a Europeanized elite and the hybrid masses in a continent … imprisoned in the labyrinth of identity”. 

Audiences, then and today, may sense these social dislocations when they see a “Cantinflas” film – a staple of Spanish-language television - but what they will most experience is a breath of fresh air and the impulse to laugh heartily at the adventures of an unforgettable character. 

All this will be nicely evident in The Three Musketeers, an affectionate parody not only of a beloved literary classic but of the lavish costume dramas favored by Hollywood in the 1940s, with the Spanish theater of the Golden Age thrown in the mix.  The adaptation excels in the hilarious treatment of speech, a systematic counterpoint between a Siglo de Oro parsimonious delivery– as if the actors were performing in a play by Calderón o Lope de Vega – and the Mexican slang of “Cantinflas” spitted out at breakneck speed.  In one funny scene, the devious cardinal Richeliu is carefully modulating a speech on love and d’Artagnan interrupts him with a pun on love and car mufflers, untranslatable in English: “que el amor puro … que el amor diáfano … que el amor …amortiguador … qué pasa con el amor?”

The plotline is simple: in a working class cabaret “Cantinflas” retrieves the necklace stolen from a beautiful actress, who invites him to the studio where she stars in a costume drama.  Mistaken for an extra, the unruly “Cantinflas” creates havoc on the set.  Quarantined in the star’s dressing room, he falls asleep and dreams he is d’Artagnan.  The story follows the main events of the novel: the young swordsman from Gascogne meets the seasoned musketeers of the King’s guard, and very soon – “one for all, all for one” – gets commissioned by the Queen to retrieve a missing necklace from England.   The mission is fulfilled on time for “Cantinflas” to wake up, late at night; the only ones left are his three faithful friends, true musketeers with whom he goes off in search of new adventures.  They are as materially deprived as in the beginning, but immensely enriched by a life of dreams and imagination.

This clever linguistic contrast between speech cadence and delivery styles, and the clash of old-fashioned and modern (even invented) Spanish grammatical forms were ratcheted up a notch in the comedian’s following film, Romeo y Julieta (1943).  In this spoof, a tragedy is given a comedic twist, and the dialogue of the play inside the film is written in verse.  

Another source of comedy is the recurrent use of the antiquated personal pronoun ‘Vos’ (Thou) and its corresponding verbal conjugation (ending in ‘áis’ or ‘éis’) made to rime with the modern day ‘Tú’ (You) and, to top it, an invented  conjugation.   Anachronism is further milked for comic effect with the use of the ‘ranchera’ songs.

With this screening of Los Tres Mosqueteros the Latin American Cinemateca wants to toast Mario Moreno “Cantinflas” on his centennial, and celebrate once more a comedic genius who embodies the exuberant sentimentality of life in Latin America. 

Essential filmography

Ahí está el detalle (1940)

Ni sangre ni arena (1941)

Los Tres Mosqueteros (1942)

Romeo y Julieta (1943)

Gran hotel (1944)

Un día con el diablo (1945)

El siete machos (1950)

Si yo fuera diputado (1951)

Abajo el telón (1954)

El bolero de Raquel (1956)

Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)

Pepe (1960)

El extra (1962)

Don Quijote sin mancha (1969)

El patrullero 777 (1978)

                                                  Some books on “Cantinflas”

Carl Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society 1896-1980 (1982)

Jeffrey Pilcher, Cantinflas and the Chaos of Mexican Modernity (2001)

Ilan Stavans, The Riddle of Cantinflas: Essays on Hispanic Popular Culture (1998)

The Sacred and the Profane: Nanni Moretti's Habemus Papam (2011)

The Holy Week is a time of mystery and wonder: the Passion, Death and Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ are tangibly re-presented to the faithful during three sacred days, the Triduum Sacrum. Holy Thursday commemorates Christ’s last Seder with his friends; this Jewish central act of remembrance became His gift of the Mass. Good Friday is His death on the cross, the most ignominious form of capital punishment in Roman times – and Easter Sunday celebrates the Lord’s Resurrection, cornerstone of the Christian faith. In the Lord’s Death and Resurrection lies our redemption.

To quote Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, founder of First Things magazine, in the memoir chronicling his illness Death on a Friday Afternoon: “Everything that is and ever was and ever will be, the macro and the micro, the galaxies beyond number and the microbes beyond notice - everything is mysteriously entangled with what happened, with what happens, in these three days”.

Habemus Papam, a dramatic comedy written, directed and produced last year by Italian auteur Nanni Moretti about a cardinal elected to the papacy as the successor of John Paul II, paralyzed by anxiety and fear, opens during the Easter season. A case of the sacred and the profane tangled to no end, for some the film is a wolf in sheep skin, for others a non-believer’s tragicomic exploration of our broken humanity. There is ample room in between to talk about esthetic and religious aspects since this film brings many Catholic issues to the forefront.

If we approach Habemus Papam from the context of the director’s other work, some characteristics are readily evident. Emblematic of an Italian cultural left, shaken by the collapse of communism in the 1990s but without an ideology to replace it, Moretti is a satirist whose subject is the political situation in postwar Italy. He has addressed its chaotic complexity, including the frustrations of the left,by becoming the protagonist of his films; the director mixes the personal, the political and the filmic in an idiosyncratic way, an Italian equivalent of Woody Allen, funny, narcissistic and attentive to the nuances of his country’s intellectual and cultural landscape. La messa è finita, Palombella rosa, Caro diario,Aprile and Il Caimano are emblematic features. Moretti’s Palme d’Or winner La stanza del figlio marked an incursion into more psychological territory, as well as the reworking of some key themes.

Habemus Papam – it seems to me – follows the steps of La stanza, exploring the unmooring of an individual who happens to be a cardinal instead of a politician (perhaps the same thing from the director’s perspective). Moretti replaces broad stroke political satire by a gentle form of farce in the depiction of the College of Cardinals,with a Joseph Ratzinger look-alike, playing the haughty humorless German cardinal Brummer, receiving the brunt of the caricature.

The film locates the story firmly in historical territory: it opens in April 2005 with television footage from John Paul II’s funeral; in a seamless visual transition it cuts to the College of Cardinals entering the Sistine Chapel for the conclave, where the election of the new Pontiff will take place,behind locked doors (the etymological meaning of cum clave, room with key). It is a lavishly staged pageantry, and a feat of casting since some one hundred extras really look the part. The solemn procession into the Sistine Chapel, magnificently reproduced in Cinecittà, is quickly followed by an electrical failure, real and symbolic, foreshadowing the tragicomic dynamics of a clueless assembly.

Michel Piccoli plays Cardinal Melville (a filmic nod perhaps to Jean-Pierre Melville), with Moretti taking full advantage of the wonderfully creased face of the 85-year-old actor, whose eyes look simultaneously pained,perplexed and childish. Piccoli carries the weight of the film’s dramatic strand, and turns it to tragedy in the final scene. Paradoxically, the elected Pope’s incognito journey through Rome in three symbolic days, where he encounters a cross section of humanity, free from the Vatican handlers, brings no insight into his character. It is a triumph of performance over substance, with a glimpse or two of tender Catholic behavior, such as the sermon preached by a young parish priest about the need for the Church to change. This motif is explicitly picked by the Argentine singer Mercedes Sosa’s song heard in the Pope’s apartment and carried non-diegetically to Saint Peter’s Square, where crowds patiently wait for the white fumata. (Unfortunately, the song is not translated in the English-subtitled version).

The second narrative strand is made up of the farcical events unfolding in the conclave, technically still in function since the new Pope has not been publicly announced urbi et orbi, to Rome and to the world. The scenes are a collection of comic skits,slapstick and verbal repartees, held together by Moretti himself as the psychoanalyst secretly brought in by the Vatican press secretary (the Polish actor Jerzy Stuhr) to ‘unblock’ the Pontiff. A secular humanist at odds with this assortment of infantile and unruly clerics, the doctor attempts a psychoanalytic examination of the Pope’s paralyzing fear. It is a witty stand-alone piece. The basketball matches the doctor organizes to keep morale while the locked cardinals wait for the Pope to recover are funny and silly.

This second thread has no dramatic arc, since it is there to provide extended comic relief to the tragedy of the reluctant successor to the chair of Peter. (In contrast, ferocious critiques of clericalism abound in Buñuel’s work; Nazarín, Viridiana, Tristana and their precursor L’âge d’or come to mind. Fellini contributes a solid share in 8 1/2 and,among other examples, the cardinals’ fashion show in Fellini's Roma).

The overall portrayal of a conclave is problematic from a Catholic perspective. Even though the broad strokes used to depict the cardinals can humanize them as a bunch of fussy, pampered old clerics, it should be noted that they are never shown as men of prayer, wisdom or intelligence. Or to put it in Catholic terms, the work of the Holy Spirit is nowhere in sight. Moretti offers a non-believer’s take on a crisis of leadership – along the same lines of Il Caimano , a critique of Silvio Berlusconi before his downfall. The spiritual dynamics of a conclave – its key feature - remain untapped. (Recent and classic films exploring questions of faith and vocation offer an antidote to this lightweight approach, notably Of Gods and Men and Diary of a Country Priest, and even the overtly political take of The Shoes of the Fisherman).

This politely atheistic view of the Catholic Church is clearly conveyed with a pictorial strategy that uses recurrent shots of empty palatial windows framed by fluttering curtains, at the center of which is a void. Occasionally an overweight Swiss Guard moves behind curtains like an exposed Wizard of Oz, to maintain the illusion. Reading Habemus Papam with the eyes of faith, the loss of a sense of transcendence is difficult to miss.

From this secular perspective, the imagery of emptiness is complemented by a carefully designed showcase of ancient rituals and symbols of the Church. In Habemus Papam they are reduced to pure pageantry, locked in a sensorial level where colors, gestures and words are devoid of meaning or context.

Ironically, Moretti is quite obviously in love with the theatricality and sumptuousness of the Vatican traditions, to the point that the majesty of the papal investiture shines through in unexpected moments, most prominently in the film’s tragic climax. The last image shows the empty window overlooking Saint Peter's Square – non habemus Papam – to the crescendo of Miserere, a call to God to have mercy on us, by Arvo Pärt, the Estonian composer of sacred music. The visual emptiness clashes with the transcendent, and the music infuses the metaphor of the void with its stunning opposite meaning. It is a paradoxical ending, one perhaps far removed from the film’s original intention. Tout est grâce …

The last papal conclave met seven years ago this April,electing Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the chair of Saint Peter. An account of this conclave very worth reading is chapter four of George Weigel’s God’s Choice. Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, published in 2005. It would make a fascinating documentary about the mysterious mingling of the sacred and the profane, about the Papacy and the Church, which are ultimately in the hands of God.

Enchanting Journey: The Story of Film - An Odyssey (2011)

This year’s tour de force at the Berlinale was the 15-hour-long The Story of Film, screened over two consecutive days. (Hard to imagine checking in a theater at noon and emerging, still wonderfully intoxicated, at nine in the evening … craving for more).

British film critic and historian Mark Cousins directed with flair what can be aptly described as a compendium of cinema’s still short history. But there is nothing stale or clichéd in his passionate handling of the sprawling subject or in his take on accepted historiographical conventions. An ebullient personality, and physically reminiscent of Eisenstein, Cousins introduced the screenings and had a lively Q&A with the film buffs in attendance, mostly young Germans (a variation of the Comi Con nerds, minus the costumes).

Made as a TV series presented by the British Film Institute, the documentary is divided in 15 one-hour episodes, not entirely stand alone, spanning 900 minutes. It consists mostly of film clips, sparingly used talking heads and extensive views of cities relevant to film history, from Lyon, France, and West Orange, New Jersey - the cradles of cinema - to New York, Los Angeles, Paris, London, Bombay, Moscow, Tokyo, Cairo and Dakar. What holds together this unwieldy historical and geographical information is the director himself as a narrator (mercifully not a first person). With epigrammatic sentences, a wry sense of humor and a knack for distilling the essence of things in a verse cadence, Cousins is an enthusiastic tour guide through this place of wonder.

The delivery and content of the narration are one of the documentary’s guilty pleasures. It’s lovely to see how he nails a filmmaker with quick brush stroke: “Buñuel comes, guns blazing”; “Wajda disguises meaning by encoding meaning … but he is a shrinking violet compared to Polanski”. His visual statements are bold and funny, and always eloquent, such as the recurring red glass bubble hanging against the Hollywood sign, an image of self-contained fragile dreams, or the gorilla leitmotif made to symbolize sparking new ideas in film grammar or style.

Like Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinéma and other documentaries on film history, such as the Brownlow-Gill’s Hollywood of the 1980s and the recent TCM Moguls and Movie Stars, Cousins uses the medium of film to tell the story. But he places his work squarely between the idiosyncratic modernist epic of Godard, and the formally conventional narratives about Hollywood, structured around clips, interviews and archival materials. In The Story of Film the relation between narrator and visuals is not always a congruent match: often image and sound go their separate ways, while keeping congruity at another level, in a playful nod to modernist strategies.

The goal of The Story of Film is laid out in the first episode and sparingly reiterated throughout the rest of the series: to show the artistic innovations that have moved film forward and continue to push it. (Asked if he had to add a new film along these line, Cousin said he would include Malik’s The Tree of Life). In this vein and moving assuredly across the decades, Cousins discusses for example, the invention of editing before Griffith (“over remembered”), the camera work in Ozu, and the genre experiments Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Consistently, the film makes the point that American cinema is not the only motor driving innovation. However, Cousins does not have an adversarial relationship with Hollywood, but he
does want to open up the game. Backed by a clip from the classic Mother India, he argues that Hindi cinema in the 1950s provides interesting innovations, as valid on political grounds as the subversions embedded in the Douglas Sirk melodramas of the same decade.

With degrees in history, art history and philosophy, Cousins noted in his conversation with the audience that the model for the documentary was The Story of Art, British historian Ernst Gombrich’s comprehensive account of how the visual arts developed across the centuries. This approach is already at work in the films history book of the same title Cousins published in 2004. Both Gombrich and Cousins offer a unified view of their fields, making connections across time. Granted that film history is merely a little over a hundred years old, and connections are more obvious, it is exhilarating to see the links, say, between Bresson, Tarkovski and Malik, or Antonioni, Angelopoulos and Bela Tarr , or Tarkovski and Sokurov in Russian matters.

The delight of The Story of Film is that the narrator explains the visual or sound connections while showing the examples – the end of Bresson’s Pickpocket alongside Schrader’s literal copies at the end of American Gigolo and Light Sleeper. The use of sound in the 1930s also offers a
wealth of clips and insightful observations to make the case of how innovation fosters creativity. An enlightened analysis of documentaries from Nanook of the North to Zidane (2006) shows that divisions between fiction and documentary cinema have no particular relevance – except to
point out that documentaries are always co-directed, as Cousins noted, by the director and reality – a useful reminder to young filmmakers.

For a film professor – always in search of clips to enliven lectures, and ideas to enrich
conversations – this documentary is a mother lode and a great pedagogical aid. Most of the clips from about 1,000 films, listed in the film’s website, came from DVDs, and were used invoking the educational clause in copyright legislation.

Above all, what The Story of Film brings to the table is an immense love of cinema, and an intelligent examination of a wide range of ideas. The film has been brought by the US distributor Music Box. And it will be worth every penny.

The Red Dream Factory, Meschrabpom-Film, 1921-1936

The 2012 Berlinale retrospective The Red Dream Factory about the Russian-German Meschrabpom studios is a gift to film teachers, linking lesson plans on Weimar and Soviet cinemas in one intriguing unit. A commercial/artistic venue founded in 1921 by Moisei Aleinikov, a Russian producer of the tsarist era, and Willi Münzenberg, an enthusiastic German Communist with an eye for business, the company was called Workers International Relief, and known as Meschrabpom, its shortened name.

Seeking to capitalize on the political and artistic momentum of the new cinematic narratives coming from Russia, this production and distribution company blended an ideological mission with commerce. The marriage lasted 14 years and succumbed to the winds of history - the Nazis first and the Stalinist cultural commissars later. The studio made more than 600 films, including some of the classics I teach, such as Pudovkin’s The End of St Petersburg (1927) and Storm over Asia (1928), and others I just allude to, like the science fiction Aelita (1924).

Operating from Moscow, the company’s headquarters were in Berlin, with a division of labor that put the Germans charge of the hardware, leaving content to the Russians. Straddling two countries and an unusual business set up, the company was not fully controlled by the Soviet propaganda system, even though it shared ideological objectives.

Meschrabpom shows this film history teacher – always in a rush to get through Soviet and German film in the 1920s in a meager two 4-hour slots – that we can link both national cinemas through a study of distribution and exhibition. The business side comes a distant third to Expressionism and Montage. But we can use it to explain how the radical visual style developed and written about by Eisenstein, Vertov, Pudovkin and Kuleshow was successfully marketed in Europe, impacting the avant-garde in France and the documentary movement in Britain.

The output of Meschrabpom - features, documentaries, animation, assorted agit prop and the first Russian sound film, The Road to Life (1931) - helps us understand a project that joined an uncompromising ideology with mass entertainment. Its financial success led to the opening a production company in Berlin, Prometheus, providing an alternative to purely ommercial fare. And here is the second link connecting Weimar and Moscow: German classics of the Weimar such as Mutter Krause’s Journey to Happiness (1929) and Kuhle Wampe (1932) were Prometheus productions. Their depictions of the working class through a leftist lens accomplished the company’s goals.

The students can easily see that the writing was on the wall for Meschrabpom in the polarized 1930s: the studio’s political/ideological enterprise ran counter to the totalitarian views held by both Nazis and Soviets: too ‘commercial’ for hardline Stalinists, and outside of the ‘politically correct’ views west of the Elbe river. The point can also be driven home by discussing the emblematic case of Dmitri Shostakovich: after being officially denounced in Pravda as a 'formalist' composer he drastically changed his style.

After watching some of these films at the Berlinale retrospective (and understanding why the likes of Keaton and Chaplin could not emerge from Russia), I see how enriching it can be to address the 1920s also in terms of contrasting studio systems. By examining the fundamental economic and cultural differences between the Hollywood dream factory and the Soviet system, we can present the times in a sharp light.

The Retrospective is organized by the Deutsche Kinemathek, with many films from the Russian archives traveling abroad for the first time. Each film is meticulously introduced; a pianist provides music for the silent titles, and a collective volume has just been edited. The icing on the cake was talking to a very elegant Russian lady before a screening of The Road to Life (an exalted piece of Socialist Realism about, what else, workers building a railway ). Ekaterina Khokhlova is the granddaughter of Lev Kuleshov - a staple of any lecture on Soviet cinema. Six degrees of separation with the Russian masters of montage. Died and went to heaven ...