"Death of a bureaucrat" (1966) at the Palace Theatre, downtown LA

Every year, the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles has a slot in the series Last Remaining Seats, organized by the LA Conservancy.  On June 14,  it will be La muerte de un burócrata/Death of a Bureaucrat (Cuba, 1966), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

I'm always honored that Michael E. Díaz, its founder and director, asks me to write the program notes.

“Had Kafka been a Cuban, instead of being a writer of the absurd, he world have been a writer of customs and manners” – Virgilio Piñera

The cinema of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea cannot be properly understood without grasping a historical event - the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – with its ideological roots and political objectives.  The success of the Revolution, fought in the rugged Sierra Maestra of southeast Cuba for several years, brought to power a small and audacious group of guerrilla fighters, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, after toppling the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and enjoying popular support.

Like the Russian Revolution of 1917 fifty years earlier, this call to replace the social, political and economic order of the former Spanish colony and a de facto American protectorate, appealed to many in Cuba, especially young intellectuals and artists.  Successfully exported to Latin America, and elsewhere, as a leftist ideological paradigm and a praxis to take over power, the fascination the Cuban Revolution still exerts could be felt in November of last year when most reactions to the death of 90-year Fidel Castro, in power for forty years, unelected, glossed over the brutal price exacted by the communist leader and his regime on the Caribbean nation.

This is the context in which Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996), the most significant of Cuban directors, has to be placed to examine his film career.  Known as “Titón”, and born to a family of means and progressive ideas, Gutiérrez Alea studied law in Cuba and then filmmaking at the renowned Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, in the early 1950s.  He observed first hand the punch Neorealism – then at its heyday – packed when portraying the social and political struggles of post-WWII Italy.  Back in Cuba he directed a documentary about coal workers,  El Mégano (1955), with Julio García Espinosa.

Fervent supporters of the Revolution, they joined forces with others from the cine club circles of La Habana to found the Instituto de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficos, or ICAIC.  It was set up as a state-sponsored institution designed to manage the Cuban film industry, under the ideological and financial aegis of the new regime that soon declared itself a one-party socialist state under communist rule and the patronage of the Soviet Union.  “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing”, proclaimed Castro in June 1961, considering cinema a weapon of choice to educate and proselytize.

Gutiérrez Alea never wavered in his support of the Revolution, but good director that he was his pictures never toe an overt propaganda line.  They are aligned with the tenets of the regime but at the level of form, they are an artist’s creative take on the medium.  La muerte de un burócrata is a case in point, both in content and style.  Fifty years after it was made, La muerte is still a refreshing, almost post-modern, satire on the plague of bureaucracy … under any type of government and organization.

In La muerte de un burócrata, Alea develops a skill we’ll see at play in his later work, especially in his best films, Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), La Última Cena (1976), Fresa y chocolate (1993) and Guantanamera (1995): a sharp eye “for identifying and then dramatizing the historical and cultural legacies that stand in the way of turning Cuba into a truly socialist society” as Paul Schroeder wrote in his doctoral thesis for Stanford University in 2000.

La muerte de un burócrata uses the conventions of the satire to blast the bureaucratic mindset that reduces life to a succession of absurdities, with witty homages to films and directors, in the guise of scenes filmed a variety of comedic styles: the assembly line of Chaplin’s Modern Times, the clock from which Harold Lloyd hangs in Safety Last, Dracula’s fangs, the pie fights of Laurel and Hardy, a scattered and curvaceous Cuban Marilyn Monroe, and surrealist dreams like those of Buñuel. The potpourri works very well, and gets hearty laughs from the audience.  

The film is centered on the predicament of a hapless nephew (Salvador Wood) to retrieve the ID of his recently deceased uncle, a model worker and inventor. His widow (Silvia Planas) placed it in the coffin, but now needs it, admonished by a bureaucrat that she will not get a pension without this piece of identification.  But the bureaucrat in the cemetery tells him no exhumation is possible without a court order.  A clandestine operation yields the coffin, but the nephew has to wheel it back to their home when the police unexpectedly show up.  (Imagine the depredations of the Caribbean heat on an unrefrigerated cadaver). The farce escalates, the lampooning of recognizable government employees gets more ridiculous, and some sacred cows are turned upside down – like socialist realist art, and the fact that everybody is equal but some are more equal than others.   

The film opens with a typewriter typing out the first page of an “expediente”, or administrative file, listing the credits of the film, while Chopin’s funeral march is heard in the background. After finishing typing the film acknowledgments, the document is stamped with a “Nihil Obstat”, alluding to the Church official’s seal of approval – not objectionable on doctrinal grounds.

Shot on location in central Havana, in black-and-white, the film quite unexpectedly becomes a portrait of what the bustling city looked like in the sixties (those American cars!) before the benign neglect of the ensuing decades.  The viewer gets to see what Cuban life was like then, under the lens of a black comedy that gets progressively blacker. In the mayhem and slapstick of the final scene – punctuated by expressionistic sound effects – the nephew has a nervous breakdown and kills the bureaucrat of the title, who couldn't approve a re-burial without a proper certificate of exhumation. A Chinese national looks at the camera and says something unintelligible to the Spanish speakers, in the melée on screen or the spectators viewing the film. La muerte de un burócrata ends where it began, in the cemetery, with a view from up high that becomes an eloquent comment on the folly of men adhering to rules which defy common sense.

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)

Zoot Suit - agitprop esthetics thirty years later

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Zoot Suit, the seminal film written and directed by Luis Valdez about the Mexican American experience in Los Angeles, the Latin American Cinemateca has teamed with the Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Last Remaining Seats” series for a special screening of this picture at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles, on Wednesday June 22, 2011. Created in 1987 by the Los Angeles Conservancy to showcase historic movie palaces, “The Last Remaining Seats” offers a window into a vanished era, glimpsed through the faded splendor of impressive theaters built in the teens and twenties, some of which have been beautifully restored.

Below are the program notes I wrote for this screening.

In 1979, the Mexican American theater collective Teatro Campesino, founded by actor/playwright/activist Luis Valdez in 1965 to support the farm workers union’s Delano grape strike organized by César Chávez, staged a bilingual musical play about the experience of Mexican Americans in the United States in the 1940s: Zoot Suit. It had a very successful run in Los Angeles and later moved to Broadway, the first Chicano play to open in New York.

Imaginatively mixing Brechtian agitprop techniques with melodrama, allegorical dialogue, Aztec myth and song and dance numbers, Zoot Suit hinged on El Pachuco, a narrator/chorus and alter ego of the protagonist, used to explore issues of ethnic, cultural and political identity. Zoot Suit tells the story of the racially-charged trial of a group of Mexican-Americans sentenced for a murder in Baldwin Park in 1942, and the related riots of the following year. For the Chicano Movement of the 1960s both episodes were landmarks in the oppositional narrative developed to critique the Anglo treatment of Hispanics. In this sense Zoot Suit offers a counter version of the events that became known as The Sleepy Lagoon Murder case and its aftermath, the Zoot Suit Riots.

Looking to break into the Hispanic market, Universal Studios struck a deal with Luis Valdez for a film version of the play. Shot in less than two weeks, with a budget of 2.5 million, and using the same non conventional narrative structure, and preserving the politics of contestation at the heart of the play, Zoot Suit was released in 1981 – 30 years ago – and became the first Chicano feature film made by a Hollywood studio. It paved the way for subsequent more mainstream Mexican American productions such as El Norte (1983), La Bamba (1987), Born in East L.A. (1987), Stand and Deliver (1988), American Me (1992) and Mi familia (1995).

Edward James Olmos plays the pivotal role of El Pachuco, an unconventional character and emblem of the urban Mexican American youth of the 1940s, clad in a flashy “zoot suit” - baggy pants, oversize jacket, chain, cross and big black hat. (The zoot suit is still with us, morphed into the attention-grabbing attire of today, low-cut jeans, ample t-shirts, baseball caps, chains and crosses).

El Pachuco is in charge of making the story move forward, literally at the snap of his fingers. A sassy, street-savvy truth-teller, he can be seen only by the protagonist Henry “Hank” Reyna (played by the director’s brother Daniel, and based on Henry Leyva, one of the original Zoot suiters jailed and later released for lack of evidence) and the audience. In the heated conversations between El Pachuco and Reyna, Valdez passionately explores what it means to be a Mexican American immigrant in the U.S., an ethnic community that suffers discrimination and racism. In the film’s climax, a mythical Aztec is used to symbolize the Chicano experience – an Indian in a loincloth, in a fetal position savagely beaten up by white men. The anger cannot get more explicit than that.

Seen 30 years after its release, this cri de coeur has not abated, but the context to understand the play and the film has seismically changed, as has the Latino-immigrant experience in the U.S. Films that explore it in mainstream Hollywood cinema are: Maid in Manhattan (2002), Spanglish (2004) and Under the Same Moon (2007). The world has moved on: none of these films would even remotely qualify as Chicano cinema today, following the parameters set by the first films to voice a radical, anti-establishment perspective - The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez (1982) is a case in point. None of them, either, pack the brutal punch of American Me (1992), Edward James Olmos' unflinching look at Latino gangs and incarceration.

Zoot Suit offers the audience the pleasure of listening to composer Lalo Guerrero’s wonderful boogie-woogie-influenced songs. The striking images of ace cinematographer David Myers give this combination of ideology, melodrama and music a sharp flavor.

For those wishing to further explore this film, U.C. Santa Cruz professor Rosa Linda Fregoso offers an intelligent and accessible analysis of the play and the film, in The Bronze Screen (1993). It is an indispensable text to understand not only the beginnings of Chicano cinema but also the role played by Luis Valdez and Edward James Olmos in cementing a Hispanic film culture open to mainstream audiences, blending activism and art.

Flor silvestre - The Hollywood style in Revolutionary Mexico

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, a cultural organization sponsoring the screening of classic and contemporary Latin American cinema since the late 1990s, will be doing one of their programs as part of the Los Angeles Conservancy long-standing series “Last Remaining Seats”. On June 23, 2010, it will screen Flor silvestre (Wild Flower, 1943) in the lovingly restored Million Dollar Theatre.

This is the deluxe theater where Sid Grauman launched his Los Angeles operations in 1918. Designed by Albert C. Martin and adorned with sculptures by Joseph Mora, the building’s ornamentation is Churrigueresque, Spain’s idiosyncratic rendition of the Baroque style. The theater’s pièce de résistence is the auditorium designed by William Woollett, with a beautiful coffered dome and ornate organ grilles. From 1950 until the late 1980s, the theater presented Spanish-language films and variety performances, or “variedades”, imported from Mexico. After renovations and upgrades, the theater reopened in 2008.

I have been writing some of Cinemateca bilingual program notes for these events since 2005. Michael Díaz, the founder and motor behind this lovely institution, asked me to prepare some comments on their summer screening, Flor silvestre.

I transcribe below the short text I wrote – more academic than conversational, as a blog would require. It is, however, a good point of entry to ponder the influence of the Hollywood visual and directing style on a team that formed the style and content of Mexican cinema, national and patriotic, for over two decades.

A period melodrama set during the 1910 Revolution, Flor silvestre is considered a classic work of Mexico’s Golden Era. This intimate yet universal love story fatefully shaped by the turmoil of social and political change resonates today.

The plot is anchored in the class and ideological divisions boiling under the surface of the iron stability brought by the Porfirio Díaz regime: A young peasant, Esperanza (Dolores del Río), marries José Luis Castro (Pedro Armendáriz), the son of the region’s powerful landowner. His parents coldly reject Esmeralda: “We all occupy a place in life, and those at the bottom (“los de abajo”), no matter how much they dream, will always remain below”, warns his mother. Soon the winds of the Revolution – in which José Luis participates – sweep over the valley, a tumultuous mix of idealists, reformers, opportunists and thieves. The murder of the patriarch by bandits pretending to be revolutionaries forces José Luis – now the father of a newborn – to honor an ancestral code of revenge, with tragic results. The story unfolds as a flashback, recounted by Esperanza to her now adult son, reflecting that modern Mexico has been built on its past, the land and the dead.

Flor silvestre made beautiful Dolores del Río a star of the Mexican cinema. She was already in her late thirties, and this was her first Spanish-language production. Her Hollywood career in the 20s and 30s playing exotic women had petered out. Paradoxically, the opportunity offered by Emilio Fernández, a director working in the classic studio style, to play a young naive character (the reverse of her Hollywood persona) became the first of their many notable collaborations, most famously María Candelaria (1944).

It also marked the first time Gabriel Figueroa, a cinematographer trained by Gregg Toland in ground-breaking photographic techniques and powerfully influenced by the Mexican muralists, European painting and Sergei Eisenstein, worked with Fernández. Screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno was brought on board, for the first also of many projects together. Established star Pedro Armendáriz would be paired again with Dolores del Río in María Candelaria and other Mexican classics.

In Flor silvestre Fernández and Figueroa began to develop a highly pictorial visual style, including a type of narrative and characters that defined Mexican cinema and “Mexicanness” in the 1940s. These films were lyrical and patriotic, and they celebrated not only the country’s geographical beauty but also idealized its indigenous population, showcasing them as archetypal figures steeped in tragedy and fatalism. Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz are the first of many ill-fated couples: in Flor silvestre they embody the tragedy of lovers destroyed by social prejudice and incomprehension.

The film is a visual delight. The audience will appreciate the beautiful way Figueroa’s camera sculpts the human figures and a landscape of clouds and maguey using chiaroscuro techniques and curvilinear perspective with expressionistic effects. Many scenes come to mind: the murdered father’s wake, staged like the painting El requiem by Orozco; the singers on horseback playing their guitars, their song commenting on the story; the agitated crows in the climax of the film.

The handling of Dolores del Río is also very interesting: while her delicate features are enhanced by classic Hollywood lighting, the director guides her performance in a way that keeps her sensuality but obliterates the exoticism of her American career. The strong inner beauty the actress showed in Flor silvestre would become part of her screen persona from then on. (A case in point, Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960), where the actress is the feminine and resilient Kiowa mother of a brown-skinned Elvis Presley).