Psychological horror and the faux-documentary make a splash in Andrés Kaiser's debut feature "Feral" (2018)

“Aquí es alguien que busca a Dios y se le aparecen estos niños salvajes, cómo abre puertas oscuras, desatando demonios”. 

(Here is someone who is looking for God; these wild children appear; dark doors are open, unleashing demons)

Andrés Kaiser, El Universal (Mexico City), September  26, 2020

 

A remarkable debut film by Andrés Kaiser, Feral is a self-assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style. And as such it is a befitting choice for the new series at the Latin American Cinemateca, Cine Nepantla - Celebrating liminal spaces in film, music and poetry. Taking its name from the language of the Aztecs in the 16th century, ‘nepantla’ describes the state of living in-between different cultures, reflecting the encounter of the Hispanic and indigenous worlds. By extension, this new screening series presents titles that open up a rich dialogue about style, substance and context, from multiple perspectives.

Feral was the film selected for Cine Nepantla in 2020. It would have been screened last March at the Downtown Independent – the site of the Azteca theater in the thirties and forties, a venue in downtown Los Angeles showing Spanish-language cinema. The screening was cancelled, and also the Q&A with director Andrés Kaiser, due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The unruly virus also impacted the film’s release, after a successful run in festivals in Mexico and internationally in 2019.  

Born in San Luis Potosí in 1984, and studying directing and screenwriting in Madrid, Andrés Kaiser brought to this film his experience as an editor – among his credits, episodes of the TV prison series Capadocia (2012) and Drunk History: El lado borroso de la Historia (2016, 2017). He wrote several drafts of Feral in the workshop of renowned Mexican journalist and screenwriter, Vicente Leñero, an important member of the 1970s New Mexican cinema, together with Arturo Ripstein, Felipe Cazals and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo.  From conception to screen, the project took seven years.

 Built as a television news investigative report set the present time, Feral tells the story of Juan Felipe de Jesús González (Héctor Illañes), a former Benedictine monk who became a psychoanalyst living as a hermit in the Oaxacan mountains. He left the Church but not the faith, and in the process of trying to re-educate three feral children, recorded on dozens of videotape, destroyed himself and them. Twenty years after the fire that killed them, a television crew revisits the location and interviews the villagers nearby, to piece together what truly happened. 

The plot is built as a documentary reconstruction of these tragic events – à la Citizen Kane (1941) - remembered from multiple perspectives over this twenty-year gap. It includes interviews, news footage and a cache of the fateful experiment’s videotapes.  The multilayered narrative combines intersecting threads that shed light on a troubled individual’s psychological unravelling. The first one is the ex-monk and friend, José Ángel García playing himself, based on the true story of a monastery in disarray after the Second Vatican Council.  It provides the historical context of the film, and a vehicle for its political critique. The second set of stories involve those Oaxacans who befriended the hermit, especially Eustaquio (José Luis González Sánchez, a non-professional actor), providing a human glimpse of a man who meant well. In this second narrative thread, Feral takes several cues from Canoa: A Shameful Memory, the 1976 landmark political film by Felipe Cazals, a fictionalization of a true event shot as a television reportage, about superstitious peasants and a local priest involved in the massacre of university employees alleged to be communists. Feral shares its story structure, the ominous setting, the suspense and the horror.

 The use of “discovered” footage provides Feral its strong narrative spine, since it increasingly reveals the pieces of the puzzle.  Even though the viewer knows from the beginning the fate of the protagonist and his wards, the suspense is skillfully built, like the classic Sunset Boulevard (1950), Canoa and television procedurals. In this case it is done through the carefully crafted ominous musical score and sound effects, and the geographical setting (the mountains of Cuernavaca standing for Oaxaca, in exquisite crane shots). The found footage follows the technique of The Blair Witch Project (1999) by making the black-and-white video images look and sound old and scratchy, revealing and concealing simultaneously.

 The casting process resulted in an interesting set of performances – from non-professional actors, including the three children, the Indian woman speaking Mixe, and Eustaquio; to academics playing themselves as historians, like John Mraz, a Latin American film and literature expert; to professional actors. The director noted that he worked over one year with Farid Escalante, Juan Galicia Reséndiz and Kari Ramu - the boys and girl he selected from over 150 - to achieve the movements of children raised in the wild.  Kaiser has mentioned François Truffaut’s L’enfant sauvage (1970), based on a true medical case, and William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, as references.

Feral also sinks a few roots in the cinema of Luis Buñuel, showing the family and the Catholic Church as repressive institutions par excellence. The use of family photos focused on a castrating mother, and the shots of the beautiful baroque church as an impenetrable fortress function as visual explanations on how the protagonist – and his brother (José Concepción Macías), in a surprising narrative twist - became monsters. Taking a thematic cue from Canoa, evil is shown as intangible and embodied in those that claim to represent God. The director himself has made observations in interviews about faith and family as the locus of horror (1).   

 If these religious overtones, made explicit in the final montage, do not stay at the forefront of  the film, it is because Feral is conscious of its own techniques to the extent that one may say that the faux-documentary style is Feral’s real subject. It makes for great genre pyrotechnics, and perhaps, once the pandemic allows it, Feral may still make a splash, like the bold arrivals of Guillermo del Toro’s Cronos and Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, coming out of left field, did in 1993 and 2000.

Notes

(1) Alessandra Rangel, “Andrés Kaiser – el cine mexicano de género está más vivo que nunca”, October 6, 2020.https://www.palomitademaiz.net/andres-kaiser-el-cine-mexicano-de-genero-esta-mas-vivo-que-nunca/

 

List of Sources

 

Film at Lincoln Center - Scary Movies series. New York, September 3, 2019. https://www.filmlinc.org/films/feral/. Post-screening interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yERVl-w2fkY

"La historia de un religioso que halla a tres niños busca un Ariel". El Universal, September 26, 2020.

https://www.eluniversal.com.mx/espectaculos/la-historia-de-un-religioso-que-halla-tres-ninos-busca-un-ariel

Lang, Jamie, “Los Cabos Best Mexican Film ‘Feral’ Picked up by One Eyed Films”. Variety, November 30, 2018. https://variety.com/2018/film/global/feral-sales-rights-one-eyed-films-1203066298/

 

Ortiz García, Eric, “Fantastic Fest 2018 Review: Feral, Andrés Kaiser's Worthy Debut Feature”.

Screen Anarchy website, October 4, 2018.  https://screenanarchy.com/2018/10/fantastic-fest-2018-review-feral.html

 

Podcast: Filmmaker Andres Kaiser talks the faux Mexican doc "Feral" at Fantastic Fest [2018]

https://soundcloud.com/horror-happensrs/filmmaker-andres-kaiser-talks-feral

 

Thomas, David. Review of Feral. Sounds and Colours website, September 16, 2019. https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/mexico/feral-47704/

Verbena Trágica (1939), digital preservation presented by the Latin American Cinemateca and the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive. May 13, 2021.

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles teamed with the U.C.L.A. Film and Television to screen Verbena trágica, a Spanish-language film released in 1939 – the year of Gone with the Wind and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The Archive made a digital preservation of a Library of Congress 35mm print.

Verbena trágica was the second film made by Cantabria Films, the company founded by one-time producer Jaime del Amo, a businessman descendant from an old Californio family, with one of the 18^th century Spanish land grants in the South Bay. 

 

Filmed between May and June 1938, this tight melodrama, distributed by Columbia Pictures, may look like many low-budget productions of the 1930s, but it stands out for several reasons. The Library of Congress included it in the National Film Registry for its cultural and esthetic values, and the U.C.L.A Film and Television Archive included it as one of the thirty-plus films it presented in the 2017 series “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960”, of which I was one of the curators.  This extensive program was part of the Getty-funded Pacific Standard Time: Latin America in Los Angeles.

Unfolding during a few hours in New York (Harlem?), on Día de la Raza, or Columbus Day, an immigrant Spanish family is destroyed by the same atavistic forces that poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, Italian operas and mafia movie plots, see at play in the Mediterranean world: sullied family honor and the relentless pursuit of revenge. The traditional “verbena”, a popular form of holiday celebration in Spain, functions here merely as the background of a tragic story surprisingly devoid of picturesque touches, even linguistic ones, but with assorted peninsular, Caribbean and South American supporting characters spending leisure time in a typically Spanish café. 

 

The film has a solid cast of Spanish actors: Luana Alcañiz, Pilar Arcos and Juan Torena.  They had been steadily employed during the decade-long blossoming of Spanish-language versions made by Hollywood studios like MGM, Paramount and Fox first, and then independent companies like Cantabria Films – del Amo’s short-lived foray into moviemaking. 

 

Renowned Mexican actor Fernando Soler came briefly to Los Angeles to star in the film as Mateo Vargas, the larger-than-life neighborhood boxer who returns from a brief stay in prison, to discover that his wife Blanca (Luana Alcañiz) has betrayed him with his protegé Claudio (Juan Torena). Mediating the unravelling of the marriage is Blanca’s mother, Mamita (Pilar Arcos), who shares with Blanca the final scene, a triumph of matriarchal resilience.  

 

Spanish journalist and writer Miguel de Zárraga, who had settled in Los Angeles by the late 1920s, and was a key figure in the Spanish film colony of Los Angeles, provided the Spanish dialogue to the original English-language screenplay written by Jean Bart.  It must have struck de Zárraga odd that the characters talk about returning to Spain as if no Civil War was raging between 1936 and 1939.  As head of foreign publicity at Columbia Pictures since 1936, de Zárraga surely wore more than one hat, as he did in so many of the Spanish versions of the studios.  Prolific filmmaker Charles Lamont – known before and after Verbena trágica for his comedy shorts and features - Charley Chase and Three Three Stooges for Columbia, and later Abbott and Costello vehicles – showed his flair for comedic touches, especially in the recurring gag of Mamita slapping her teenage son Pepito (Jorge Mari) for no good reason.  Song numbers by Pilar Arcos, a renowned singer and wife of Fortunio Bonanova, of Citizen Kane opera singing fame, and Sergio de Karlo soften the tragedy but stop short of turning it into the Mexican-style melodrama it could have been expected.

 

Verbena trágica was the second and last production of Cantabria Films, the venture started by Jaime del Amo. Made in 1938, as reported by trade publications, it opened at the Teatro Hispano in Harlem, and was briefly reviewed by the New York Times. “While the film is well done, its only novelty consists in the ending, something quite different from the usual “cliché” wrote H.T.S. on March 13, 1929. It seems to have done well at the Spanish-language film market in the U.S. Distribution by Columbia Pictures assured exhibition in South America.  But neither Vida bohemia – Cantabria’s first picture, released in 1938, also somewhat of an oddity – nor Verbena trágica could compete against the super popular Mexican productions released in the U.S. nor the constraints of Columbia’s distribution contract.

 

Verbena trágica is emblematic of how original Spanish-language filmmaking in Los Angeles fared in a business that had developed the technology of dubbing and subtitling Hollywood films by the mid-1930s.  Once Mexico and Argentina developed solid film industries in the sound era, early in the 1930s, Verbena trágica was the ultimate oddity, neither an American studio film, nor a melodrama with musical numbers from Mexico or Argentina. And yet, it’s a picture that captures a moment in time … and remains a pleasure to watch.

Verbena Trágica was streamed on May 13, 2021.

https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2021/05/13/verbena-tragica 

 

List of sources

 

A note on recent books on Spanish-language films made in the U.S.  Besides the U.C.L.A. Archive series of 2017, the PST LA/LA project included a couple of relevant books about this time period, spearheaded by Jan-Christopher Horak, then director of the Archive.

 

Hollywood Goes Latin. Spanish-Language Cinema in Los Angeles (2019), edited by María Elena de las Carreras and Jan-Christopher Horak. 

 

In 2017, the International Federation of Film Archives organized a symposium on the making of Spanish-language films in the U.S., which brought together scholars and film archivists from all of Latin America, Spain and the United Sates to discuss the many issues surrounding the creation of Hollywood’s “Cine Hispano”. The papers presented in this two-day symposium were collected and revised for this joint publication of the U.C.L.A. Film and Television Archive and FIAF. 

Cinema between Latin America and Los Angeles (2019), edited by Colin Gunckel, Jan-Christopher Horak and Lisa Jarvinen.

 

This collection describes Spanish-language film culture in the U.S., viewing Los Angeles as a crossroads for the distribution and exhibition of Latin American – especially Mexican - cinema.

 

The bilingual catalogue of the film series “Recuerdos de un cine en español” can be accessed through the Archive’s website: https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/latinamericanfilm

Specific sources for Verbena trágica can be found in:

 

Daniel Egan, America’s Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry. Bloomsbury Academic & Professional, 2009, 284-286.

 

Library of Congress online catalogue, https://www.loc.gov/item/mbrs00008355/, accessed May1, 2021.

 

Carl J. Mora, Verbena trágica. Excerpted from Mexican Cinema. Reflections of a Society, 1896-2004. 3^rd edition, McFarland, 2005.  https://www.loc.gov/static/programs/national-film-preservation-board/documents/verbena_tragica.pdf, accessed May 1, 2021.