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

 

 

  

Los tallos amargos (1956) at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles

Los tallos amargos (1956), directed by Fernando Ayala

Los tallos amargos was hiding in plain sight in a private collector’s home in Buenos Aires, when Fernando Martín Peña, an Argentine film historian and curator at MALBA – Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires – arranged with Eddie Muller of the Film Noir Foundation to have it restored. With the foundation providing the funds and the UCLA Film & Television Archive doing the lab work, the film got an unexpected new life in 2016, when, among other U.S. screenings, it became part of a six-film series at the Museum of Modern Art: “Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”.   It should be noted, too, that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association also contributed to its restoration. Los tallos amargos is a knockout film, and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles is proud to show it as part of the 2019 Last Remaining Seats program of the LA Conservancy. The film screens on Saturday, June 8, at 2pm, at the Million Dollar Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

 

In 1954, journalist Adolfo Jasca submitted his novel “Los tallos amargos” [The Bitter Stems] to the prestigious literary contest of the publishing house Emecé, which gave it the first prize and recommended its publication.  The novel captured the atmosphere of the newspaper world in the Buenos Aires of the 1950s as the background for a story involving a reporter, Alfredo Gasper; a Lithuanian refugee, Paar Liudas; and the journalism school by mail they concoct that leads to a seemingly perfect crime. The novel unfolded as a porteño update of Crime and Punishment. The essentials of the story were transferred to the film version of the same title, two years later, even though Liudas became a Hungarian exile.  The film was a box-office success and earned top prizes from the Argentine critics association, for best film and best direction, in 1957. 

Fernando Ayala

Made as an independent production, and released through Artistas Argentinos Asociados, it was the second picture directed by Fernando Ayala (1920-1997), a filmmaker whose long career began at the end of the classic studio system and became emblematic of the new Argentine auteur cinema in the 1960s.  With Héctor Olivera, Ayala founded Aries Cinematográfica, a production and distribution company relevant until the late 1990s, which combined commercial fare with titles that provided an astute critique of social and political issues, grounded in real-life situations recognizable by Argentine audiences.  Always engaging, Ayala’s filmography is a road map to understand modern Argentina’s permanent state of turmoil, with its cycles of boom and bust, and its impact on the middle class. Among his most renowned titles are: El jefe (1958), Paula cautiva (1963), La fiaca (1969), La guita (1970), Plata dulce (1982) and El arreglo (1983).

Los tallos amargos belongs to the visual style we now call noir– a term coined by French critics to describe the style and content of American crime films made in the forties and fifties.  Interestingly, U.S. and European filmmakers like John Huston, Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Max Ophuls, Otto Preminger, Billy Wilder and Orson Welles, among others, working in the Hollywood system, did not describe their work using this term. Films like The Maltese Falcon, Phantom Lady, The Woman in the Window, Caught,Laura, Double Indemnity and The Lady from Shanghai reflected a sensibility, a mood, a visual flair, that showcased psychological narratives where the action “however violent or fast-paced was less significant than faces, gestures, words, than the truth of the characters”, as New Yorker critic Richard Brody noted when reviewing two noir retrospectives in 2014. French critics had observed this prevalence of psychological narrative over action, and borrowed the term noir– black –from the title of a collection crime fiction to describe these stylish Hollywood black and white dramas of the forties and fifties.

Ensayo de un crimen (1955) by Luis Buñuel

Even if it is problematic to think of noir as a well-defined genre – like westerns, comedies or musicals – since it is primarily a visual style, determined by particular circumstances and heavily rooted in German Expressionism and a pessimistic worldview, the term has gained purchase, albeit as a “peculiar genre”, in Brody’s words. It has become a standard shortcut to group crime titles, in a large or narrow sense, where character studies are the focus of the films. In the case of Mexican cinema, Luis Buñuel’s Él (1953) and Ensayo de un crimen(1955) fit the description.  When proposing an evaluation of Latin American crime cinema, MOMA entitled its two landmark retrospectives in 2015 and 2016,  “Mexico at Midnight: Film Noir from Mexican Cinema’s Golden Age” and  “Death is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. 

If Buñuel did not think of his psychological studies of perverted masculinities in terms of a homegrown form of noir, neither did a young Fernando Ayala when he transferred the postwar paranoia of the literary original to Buenos Aires locations and studio sets rendered in the noir palette.  He was an avid moviegoer well versed in genre conventions, and European and American styles; and he had finished his first film film, Ayer fue primavera(1955), a romantic drama reconstructed from flashbacks.

Carlos Cores

Los tallos amargos showcases the increasing paranoia of the protagonist Alfredo Gasper (starring Carlos Cores, 1923-2000, a major star since the 1940s), the Argentine-born son of a German WWI military, with a tormented personality, while portraying Liudas, the Hungarian refugee (Vassili Lambrinos, 1926-2017, a dancer and choreographer born in Egypt) in ambiguous terms, thanks to the clever use of interlocking flashbacks. He is seen as refracted by the protagonist, and later as remembered by his son Jarvis (Pablo Moret). 

In staging the story as an atmospheric crime film, or “policial”, Ayala was ably supported by cinematographer Ricardo Younis (1918-2011), who also had a long and distinguished career in the Argentine film industry.  The reviews of this restored version of Los tallos amargos note that in a 2000 survey the American Cinematographer lists the picture as one the Best Shot Films between 1950 and 1997.  (Beware of the substandard copies of the film found in YouTube!). 

The dream sequence at the beginning of the film is an excellent instance of cinematography and mise-en-scène rendering the protagonist’s fragile ego; it is a visual forecast of Gasper’s unraveling, which unfolds like clockwork as a result of a fateful decision. The budding romance of Gasper’s sister Esther (Gilda Lousek, an upcoming actress with a long career in film and television) and Liuda’s son Jarvis serves as a counterpoint: it restores the moral order at the end of the film, not without irony.   The seeds that have germinated – the “stems” of the original Spanish title -  bring new life, but they carry the weight (“bitter”) of the past.

Rooted in a time and place, Los tallos amargos is a gripping film shaped by the noir conventions of the time. To better grasp what it brought to Argentine cinema in the 1950s, I would like to suggest an analogy with the stunning Argentine neo-noir Relatos salvajes(2014), directed by Daniel Szifrón, sixty years after the Ayala film. Its style and subject matter embody the Argentine zeitgeist of today.

List of sources

Brody, Richard, “Film Noir: The Elusive Genre”. The New Yorker, July 23, 2014. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064

“Death Is My Dance Partner: Film Noir in Postwar Argentina”. Program Notes, Museum of Modern Art, February 10-16, 2016. https://www.moma.org/calendar/film/1616

Green Quintana, Roberto, “El vampire negro/Los tallos amargos”. Program Notes, “Recuerdos de un cine en español: Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960”. UCLA Film and Television Archive series, Fall 2017. https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2017/10/28/vampiro-negro-tallos-amargos

Krieger, Clara and Alejandra Portela, Eds, Cine Latinoamericano I: Diccionario de realizadores. Buenos Aires, Ediciones del Jilguero, 1997.

Lerman, Gabriel, “La HFPA ayuda a restaurar una obra maestra del cine latinoamericano”. Hollywood Foreign Press Association, February 10, 2016. https://www.goldenglobes.com/articles/la-hfpa-ayuda-restaurar-una-obra-maestra-del-cine-latinoamericano

Manrupe, Raúl, and María Alejandra Portela, Un diccionario de filmes argentinos. Buenos Aires, Corregidor, 1995.

Nick Pinkerton, “Dead Can Dance”.  Artforum, February 10, 2016. https://www.artforum.com/film/id=58064