Alberto Isaac's "En este pueblo no hay ladrones (1965): Announcing the New Mexican cinema". Program notes for the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles screening, July 13, 2024

 

In 1964, a newspaper cartoonist who had been a swimmer in the 1948 and 1952 Mexican Olympic teams, entered his debut film in the First Contest of Experimental Cinema, sponsored by the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica, STPC, the union of the hierarchical film industry seeking to attract new talent to a fossilized field.  Winner of the second prize, En este pueblo no hay ladrones, which premiered in Mexico City in September 1965, would be the first of the 13 features Alberto Isaac, el “Güero” as he was affectionally called, directed until his death in the late 1990s (1).

Alberto Isaac

Two recent books published in Mexico celebrate the life and work of Alberto Isaac (1923-1998), firmly perceived to be a reference of Mexican culture in the 20^th century (2). A versatile artist, whose work includes cartoons, paintings and ceramics, Isaac took the pulse of Mexican popular culture, viewed from his native state of Colima and Mexico City, as his professional life developed in the 1960s around a group of intellectuals and artists proposing a renovation of Mexican cinema. Besides Isaac, names like Carlos Monsiváis, José de la Colina, Rafael Corkidis, Salvador Elizondo, Paul Leduc and Emilio García Riera would become the Mexican intelligentsia in cultural matters, and specifically film, for the next two decades. They proposed a new approach to Mexican film, one that favored realism and a space for political and social critique. They were influenced by European cinema – Italian neorealism and the French New Wave – as well as the vigorous anti-Hollywood examples of the New Latin American cinema of Brazil and Cuba. They formed the group Nuevo Cine, issued a manifesto and founded a journal (3). Their fervor and advocacy led to the creation of film preservation – the Cineteca Nacional - and cinema programs at the university level, like the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos at the Universidad Autónoma, UNAM, with a Filmoteca attached, and the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (4).

 

It is not by chance, then, that Isaac’s En este pueblo no hay ladrones is emblematic of the call for renewal gripping Mexican cinema in the 1960s and the ensuing changes that unfolded when a new generation of filmmakers entered the scene in the following years: Arturo Ripstein, Paul Leduc, Felipe Cazals, Jaime Hermosillo and Jorge Fons (5). 
 

En este pueblo no hay ladrones was shot in 35 mm, in less than a month in Mexico City and the town of Cuautla in the state of Morelos. Critic and future film historian Emilio García Riera adapted with Isaac the short story by Guillermo García Márquez, included in the compilation Los funerales de Mamá Grande, published in 1962.  The jump to international literary fame of the Colombian 1982 Nobel prize winner would come three years later, in 1967, with the publication of Cien años de soledad. 

Gabriel García Márquez, left

The names of other collaborators in the project, playing cameos, makes for a fun film reference, since it is a collection of the names that would shape the Mexican cultural establishment of the next two decades: none other than Luis Buñuel, as a hell-fire-and-brimstone priest; the writer Juan Rulfo, the other key name of the Latin America literary boom, two of whose stories Isaac would adapt in his 1972 film El rincón de las vírgenes), filmmaker Artur Ripstein; painter Leonora Carrington; artist Luis Cuevas; critic Carlos Monsiváis and García Márquez himself, as the ticket taker in the town cinema. 
 
For those familiar with the narrative, genres and stars of Mexican cinema of the Golden Age – beautifully celebrated this month by the Academy Museum series “Damas de la pantalla: The Women of Mexico’s Época de Oro” – the contrast between these classics of the 1940s and 50s, spectacularly rendered in a Hollywood style, and En este pueblo no hay ladrones, with its realistic simplicity, could not be more glaring.  The aspirations of Nuevo Cine are captured in such a way that Isaac’s film has reached the status of a classic. And for students of cinema, a tangible example of how the golden age was giving way to a new artistic sensibility in the 1960s. is in front on their eyes.
 

Julio Pastor and Rocío Sagaón

The tropical setting of García Márquez’ Colombia is now Mexico, but the contours of the story, its characters and the idiosyncrasies of an isolated town are faithfully rendered in this journey from the word to the screen.  Dámaso, played by Julio Pastor (with a wink to the dapper bon vivant persona of Pedro Infante), has no job and relies on the work of his pregnant wife Ana (Rocío Sagaón), who washes and irons to subsist. He spends his days at the local pool parlor and bar, the only entertainment in town, until one day, at night, he steals the billiard balls, mostly out of boredom and thoughtlessness. An escalation of gossip, violence and xenophobia quickly leads to the apprehension of a passing stranger. Damaso’s involvement with a local prostitute, and a failed attempt to return the balls lead to a tragic fate.  

 

The film proceeds leisurely, more concentrated in the minute depiction of the characters thancreating drama and suspense. What is foregrounded, notes Carl J. Mora, is “the social examination of a small, poverty-stricken town where nothing ever happens.  Dámaso is seemingly the only resident who dreams of better things but is finally overcome by the stultifying inactivity of the town” (6).

 

Luis Buñuel as the town priest

What is interesting to note of how Isaac – with cinematographers J. Carlos Carbajal and Rafael Corkidi (uncredited), editor Carlos Savage and production designer José G. Jara - captures on location the provincial world that García Márquez was already building in his pre-One Hundred Years of Solitude. This unnamed town functions like Macondo, both a real and a mythical place.  The realistic setting of the film version is used as a jumping point to lay a second layer of meaning, as the town becomes emblematic of a place that is inescapable and circular, and where dreams are squashed.  In this space, between the real and the symbolic, En este pueblo no hay ladrones lays out its compassionate critique.  Even the blunt homily of Buñuel from the pulpit -which in his own films would be a merciless anti-clerical speech – is deflated by the stoic demeanor of the parishioners attending mass.
 

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles has programmed this beautiful digital restoration of a pivotal film in the history of Mexican cinema (7). If one makes a list of all the titles shown by the Cinemateca over the years – and certainly since 2004 when I started writing the program notes - one realizes how this institution, essential to preserve the film memory of Los Angeles, has passionately celebrated the history of Hispanic cinema in the Americas. 
 

Notes

(1)  David de Wilt. Profile of Alberto Isaac. https://www.grace.umd.edu/~dwilt/isaac.htm, accessed July 4, 2024.
 
(2)  Alberto Argüello Grunstein, “Alberto Isaac. El fluir d ela imagen en la práctica artística transmedial”. Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes y Literatura / Centro Nacional de Investigación. Documentación e Información de Artes Plásticas, 2023. Online:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MWDwmo34KOjjr-YidgKq3-Ud4MvZ2-6W/view
Fernández Reyes, Amaury, comp. Alberto Isaac. A 100 años de su nacimiento (2024).
 
(3)  Carl. J. Mora, “Motion Pictures: 1960-1996”, in Michael Werner, Concise Encyclopedia of Mexico, Taylor & Francis Group, 2001, pp.509-512.
 
(4)  John King, Magical Reels. A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990), pp.132-133.
 
(5)  Isaac was the first director of the Instituto Mexicano de Cine, IMCINE, founded in 1983. For an assessment of the era, see Charles Ramírez Berg, Cinema of Solitude. A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983 (1992), pp.46-47.
 
(6)  Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema. Reflections of a Society, 1896-1988. Revised edition, 1989, p.109.
 
(7)  This copy of En este pueblo no hay ladrones was made by the Digital Restoration Lab of the Cineteca Nacional, from a 35 mm acetate negative.  The film belongs to the collection of the Fundación Televisa.  The restoration is part of the preservation program of Mexican cinema, a joint effort of the Cineteca Nacional, the Filmoteca UNAM and the Fundación Televisa.
 

Additional sources

 
Joanne Hershfield, David Maciel, ed., Mexico’s Cinema. A Century of Film and Filmmakers (1999).
 
“Manifesto of the New Cinema Group (1961)”, and “Manifesto of the National Front of Cinematographers (1975)”, in Scott MacKenzie, Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology (2014).

Beatriz Reyes Nevares, The Mexican Cinema. Interviews with Thirteen Directors (1976).
 
Ronald Schwartz, Latin American Films, 1932-1994: A Critical Filmography (2005).

Alberto Isaac – Filmography as a director

  

1964    En este pueblo no hay ladrones 

1967    Las visitaciones del diablo

1968    Olimpiada en México, documentary  

1970    Fútbol México 70, semi-documentary

1971    Los días del amor

1972    El rincón de las vírgenes

1974    Tivoli

1976    Cuartelazo 

1977    Las noches de Paloma                       

1981    Tiempo de lobos 

1986    Mariana, Mariana

1988    Maten a Chinto! 

1994    Mujeres insumisas