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 ...

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.

Deutsche Geschichte - German stories in film

Documentary and fiction films dealing with an aspect, an era, or historical figures in German history are staples of the Berlinale. They allow a critic to gauge how a domestic audience interacts with controversial or complicated subjects.

The crowd-pleaser Goethe!, directed by Philipp Stolzl and starring Alexander Fehling, a fresh face and rising Teuton star, will have an international distribution under the title Goethe in Love. Unabashedly modern in sensibility and narrative structure, the film is out to emulate the international art-house sucess of Shakespeare in Love. Beautiful people in period costumes (although fashionably dishevelled), the story closely follows the emotional and creative process leading to Goethe's first success, the novella "Werther" about a young writer whose passionate first love is doomed by the lack of economic prospect. Even though no scandalous new ground is broken about this beloved literary figure, the film manges to remain engaging through its Masterpiece Theater approach. (If you are riveted by Downton Abbey recently shown on PBS, Goethe! will be your cup of tea).

The success of Inglourious Basterds was obviously responsible for the green light given to My Best Enemy, an Austrian Nazi-era revenge fantasy, based on a novel by an Holocaust survivor, about a Jewish gallery owner in Vienna who beats the Nazis at their game. Lavishly produced, starring the ubiquitous Moritz Bleibtreu as a dashing Viennese who gets the last laugh, the film does not have the hysterical absurdities and unbearable suspense of the Tarantino opus, but packs a punch or two, especially among those familiar with the 'degenerate art' topic, which gets a funny twist. The caricature of German military efficiency gone awry has its roots in Chaplin, even though here it borders on the cliche.

The origins of the Baader-Meinhoff terrorist group of the 1960s and 70s is approached by filmmaker Andres Veiel from a fresh angle - very different from sound and fury of the 2008 The Baader-Meinhoof Complex. Based on a non-fiction book about the romantic and intellectual entanglements of Gudrun Esslin - one of the founders of the Red Army - with left-wing writer Bernward Vesper, the son of a Nazi writer, If Not Us, Who probes in the personal aspects of their no-strings-attached love affair, leaving the ideological as a looming background. Like the recent French biopic Carlos, by Olivier Assayas, the film is not about left-wing terrorism emerging in a materialistic post-war Europe, as much as a probe into a complicated couple's interpersonal dynamics as they become radicalized and part ways. By concentrating in the early 1960s the film dissects the roots of youthful discontent leading to the revolts later in the decade. Unsentimental and unflinching, If Not Us, Who eschews the hagiography relished by Motorcycle Diaries as well as the frantic pace of Carlos, to place the life of these emblematic self-destructive rebels in light and shadow, without an editorial comment.

The DDR, the acronym for the Communist German Democratic Republic, is the subject of the intriguing and aptly title The Price, directed by Elke Hauck. The story alternates between the present tense and the last days of the DDR, with the sympathy on the side of the characters that understand, and also miss, a country that no longer exists. The Price distills the Ossie perspective, that is the East German view of life and historical experience, minus the virulent ideological component. A subdued drama about three friends in the last year of high school and the different paths they take (one tragic) when Communism imploded, the picture assesses the results of the political changes without the hilarity of Good-bye, Lenin, although inserting a good dose of old-fashioned realism and a touch of irony. The "Preis" of the German title can mean both 'price' and 'prize'. Made twenty years after the German reunification, the film can be taken as a piece of fiction documenting an East German perspective with a distinctive voice.

Such is the case, also, of the fascinating documentary Vaterlandsverrater (Traitor to the Motherland, translated as Enemy of the State), directed by Annekristin Hendel - like Elke Hauck, a filmmaker born and raised in the former DDR. It is centered on a 75-year-old writer, Paul Gratzik, who was a Stasi informer. A fervent Communist and a womanizer with a flair for words, the protagonist puts on a show for the viewer, with the filmmaker probing the armor for weak spots and not findng many. From the onset, asked about how he feels about his decision to inform on colleagues in East Berlin's cultural scene, Gratzik turns the table on the director by aserting with dith-Piaf-defiance that he doesn't regret anything. Without archival footage, and relying solely on interviews, and some exquisite drawings illustrating people and events, the director builds the portrait of a complicated man, and by extension offers a layered view about the symbiotic relationship between the DDR surveillance system and its informers (An excellent complement to this documetary is "The File", the autobiographical account by Timothy Garton Ash about his own Stasi file and those who informed on him in the early 1980s).

In this context, one should argue that The Enemy of the State can be placed squarely opposite The Life of Others (2006), a fictionalized account of a Stasi informer's job by a West German director. Filmmakers from East Germany, like Annekristin Hendel (with whom I had a very interesting one-hour talk, together with my friend and colleague Silvia Kratzer, who filled in my German lacunae), argue that by virtue of having lived the horrors and absurdities of the system, they are in a position to show it in a more accurate and realistic way. These Ossie directors don't favor the polished looks and narratives of the Hollywood-style of cinema (think Run, Lola, Run) but a more truthful look at how life is. This is an ongoing subject of debate, and one to which contribute the many East German filmmakers in the Berlinale every year.

The last film shown in the competition was Unknown, a German-British-French thriller set in present day Berlin about an American, Liam Neeson, who loses his identity as a result of an accident, and wakes up from a coma to discover that he is pursued by ruthless killers. A Hitchcock rip-off (Torn Curtain with a twist) and with a Bourne Identity complex, the film is nevertheless quite entertaining (the Berlin locations are fun to spot). Bruno Ganz steals the show in a few scenes as a man who has had to reinvent himself: formerly a Stasi officer, he is now a detective impeccably positioned to unlock Neeson's dark past. Ganz played the role with over the top gusto, and his last scene had the public roaring with laughter, with its tragicomic overtones.

German history ... always good stuff to work from ...

The Berlinale at 61

There is no better place to meet old friends and make new ones - filmically speaking - than the terrific Berlin film festival. I came here for the first time in 1985, and except for a handful of times, I have been a regular visitor ever since.
For a film professor it's the most efficient - and fun - way to get a grip on the world scene and pursue guilty pleasures that Netflix or VOD services like Mubi cannot fulfill. The electronic library of Alexandria does not exist yet in one virtual place.

The Berlinale - and of course the same holds true for any well-put together festival - opens vistas on the old and the new, and thus becomes a necessary tool to perfect an understanding of the status of cinema and how to teach it better. In the Berlinale I first became acquainted with the Fifth Generation of Chinese filmmakers; with the works of a then unknown Polish director of television and documentaries, Krzystof Kieslowski; here I first enjoyed the hyperkinetic Hong Kong cinema - Johnnie To being one of its most exciting representatives - and learned to appreciate the Bollywood baroque. The imaginative Latin American cinema, whether magical realist, purely political or minimalist always finds a home in Berlin. Attuned to the political, the Berlinale winked a serious eye to filmmakers in the Soviet sphere and featured the cinema of Glasnost - Marina Goldovskaya's ground-breaking documentary Solovki Power, and a flood of works undermining Soviet ideological rigidity were generously showcased by the Berlinale. Often at the Berlinale I see the birth of a critical reputation, or the recognition of a long trajectory in a national cinema - like the fiercely independent Israeli Eran Riklis (Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree)and Hayao Miyazaki.

The wares have been so far a delight, a basket of very funny comedies about cultural and linguistic clashes (the French Les femmes du 6eme etage and the German Almanya, where traditional assumptions about host countries are turned upside down by sharp immigrants), mixed with a powerful contemporary reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus and the role of warriors outside of the battlefield, directing debut of Ralph Fiennes; and tightly woven thrillers of sorts about meltdowns - the Chernobyl reactor in 1986, the Ukranian A Saturday, and Wall Street in 2008, Margin Call, first film by an NYU graduate. How will the jury graciously presided by Isabella Rossellini decide on a winner is anybody's guess. The stars may smile on an Iranian film coming from left field, Nader and Simin, A Separation, the multilayered probe into a couple's impending divorce in present day Tehran, based on a screenplay worth dissection in film school.


Sunday was a day devoted to 3D, as used for the first time by two longtime German auteurs - my 'friends' of so many years and teaching staples in many classes: Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog. Courtesy of a German newspaper, I post a lovely photo of Wenders and German president Angela Merkel watching in the Berlinale Palast the Pina, the knockout documentary Wenders devoted to the work of German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch. By analogy, Wenders uses the 3D camera - elegantly, unobstrusively - the way Bausch created her muscular, soul-baring performances, Wenders noted in the press conference that he wanted to show "what the soul tells through our body" (a recurrent Wenders theme, beautifully rendered in Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire). The director does not 'film' the company's numbers, he stages them for the camera,in theaters, parks, factories, even public transportation in Wuppertal, where the company is based, exploring the esthetic possibilities allowed by the new technology. Editing and music, combined with finely stylized interviews with dancers and footage of Bausch, who died unexpectedly in 2009 (and forced Wenders to rethink the project) create a fascinating spectacle. Warner Bros will distribute the film in the US; in the meantime, its trailer is available online to give a taste of the riches to come.

Werner Herzog seems to have had the same enthusiasm of Wenders, even though his nature documentary "The Cave of Forgotten Dreams" has the limitations of works commissioned by television channels. The subject matter is intriguing: a cave discovered in Southern France n 1994 contains stunning paleolithic paintings. What begins as a run-of-the-mill Discovery Channel type of film interspersing talking heads with scenes dimly lit by flashlight, very quickly becomes something else. As narrated by Herzog, it is not only the record of himself in the filming process (with the 3D technology featured prominently)but also a probe into what makes us human; as one of the anthropologists notes, the link with the Cromagnon man and us, Homo Sapiens, throught history and memory. This is a variation of a recurring Herzog theme, since his features like Aguirre, the Wrath of God to the disturbing documentary Grizzly Man: the relationship between man and nature, and man's proneness to stumble into the abyss pushed by his own folly. The abyss, in this Berlinale offering, is made explicit in the final scene. Not far from the cave, and as a side-effect of a nuclear plant, a man-made cooling swamp is teeming with albino aligators. An extreme close up of an aligator's bloated eye is superimposed on a gracefully painted hand in the cave. Film esthetics is used to capture a collective descent into madness.

There are many other friends waiting for us in the dark - echoes of Norma Desmond - in these next days. First and foremost, a gentleman from Sweden, for whom the Deutsche Kinematek has organized a very complete retrospective. It is supplemented by an exhibit in the adjoining Film Museum. The poster movingly embodies what this gentleman thought of theater and film - his love and his mistresses, as he once famously quipped: a world of enchantment, refected in the eyes of a boy, looking up, outside of the frame. The exhibition is called "Bergman, truth and lies".