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

 

 

  

Picture of an exhibition: "Carlos Gardel's 'El día que me quieras' (1935), in "¡Hablada en español!: the Legacy of Hollywood's Spanish-Language Cinema (1929-1930)"

Presented by the Instituto Cervantes, the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Preservation Society and the city of Los Angeles, this installation celebrating the films made in Spanish by the Hollywood studios between 1929 and 1939 was curated by film archivist Alejandra Espasande-Bouza, using the ground floor of the Pico House, a National Historic Landmark part of the Los Angeles Plaza Historic District.  The exhibit spans the month of June. 
 

The visit will bring to scintillating life not only an aspect of film history local to Los Angeles, but also celebrate how movies, the greatest contribution of the US to the art of the 20^th century, worked on a larger scale, in this case, reaching out to the Hispanic market worldwide.

Besides a comprehensive photo exhibit – culled from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library, studio archives and private collectors – “Hablada en español” screens two features and one documentary, emblematic of the decade: Drácula (1931), the Spanish-version of the English-language original directed by James Whale; El día que me quieras (1935), the tango musical starring Carlos Gardel, an original version capitalizing on the stardom of the Argentine singer; and the excellent documentary The Spanish Dancer (2017), made by the Spanish director Mar Díaz Martínez, about Antonio Moreno, the star of the silent era active into the late 1950s (Moreno has a short but memorable role as a gallant Mexican crossing paths with vengeful Ethan Edwards (John Wayne) in Ford’s The Searchers).
 
What follows are the notes I prepared for a short talk introducing El día que me quieras, on June 22. They are intended as a record of the event and a succinct bibliography on the exhibition’s subject. 
 

After being introduced by Alejandra Espasande, my former student at UCLA, I wanted to acknowledge the work that led to carving out a field to study the making of over 130 films Spanish-language films, versions and originals:  Robert Dickson and Juan Heinink’s seminal study, Cita en Hollywood (1990) opened the door to the examination of Spanish-language versions, including Lisa Jarvinen’s The Rise of the Spanish-Language Filmmaking (2012). The territory was further mapped out by the symposium on this cinema organized by the UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in April 2017, during the annual gathering of the International Federation of Film Archives in Hollywood.  This resulted in the book Hollywood Goes Latin (2019), gathering several presentations, and the series “Recuerdos de un cine en español. Latin American Cinema in Los Angeles, 1930-1960” at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, organized by Jan-Christopher Horak, with Alejandra and me as co-curators, September-December 2017.  The current exhibition preserves an expansive photo and poster record of the filmmakers, actors, writers, studio executives and other people involved in these productions. A documentary covering the topic becomes an indispensable next step – all the necessary materials have been gathered by Alejandra Espasande and her team.
 

Carlos Gardel (1890-1935), the epitome of porteño culture and emblematic of Argentina, a spot he now shares with soccer player Lionel Messi, and some decades back with Armando Maradona, does not need much presentation. The Encyclopedia Britannica entry is concise yet pithy for the purpose of these notes: 

"Gardel’s huge popularity as an interpreter of the melancholy ballads of the tango was confirmed in the 1920s and ’30s in nightclubs and motion pictures. One early picture, Luces de Buenos Aires (1931), was filmed in Paris, but later ones were made by Paramount Pictures for the Spanish-speaking market. They include Espérame (1933), La casa es seria (1933), Melodía de arrabal (1933), Cuesta abajo (1934), El tango en Broadway (1934), Tango Bar (1935), El día que me quieras (1935) and The Big Broadcast of 1936 / Cazadores de estrellas (1935).

   Gardel died in a plane crash while on tour. In Buenos Aires his funeral and funeral procession in a horse-drawn carriage were witnessed by tens of thousands of Argentines. Like Rudolf Valentino’s, his tomb became an object of popular pilgrimage." (1)

An immensely popular live and radio performer, a prolific composer of tangos and popular music who sold thousands of records, Gardel understood that sound film was a cutting-edge technology to enhance his career. He must have looked at the path of Al Jolson and Bing Crosby, and not surprisingly, he must have assessed his next move was to make films in Hollywood (2). He first made ten sound shorts in Buenos Aires in 1930, featuring his well-known repertory. Its compilation, the charming Así cantaba Gardel (1936), directed by Eduardo Morera, capitalizing on the nostalgia brought by his death, has been preserved by the Fundación Cinemateca Argentina. The rest of his films – seven features, a short and a sketch in the revue The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935) - were made for Paramount Pictures, in their Joinville, Paris, and Astoria, New York, studios. Three of these features and the short La casa es seria were shot in Joinville, between 1931 and 1934: Las luces de Buenos Aires, Melodía de arrabal and Espérame. At Paramount’s Astoria facility in Queens, New York, between December 1934 and February 1935, a few months before the tragic accident in Colombia, he made the last four and the sketch: Cuesta abajo, El tango en Broadway, El día que me quieras and Tango Bar (3). The Cinemateca Argentina has done beautiful digital restorations of these Astoria Studios films. The last contract he signed with Paramount gave Gardel unusual creative control (4).
 

When you view these seven features in no particular order you can easily see how Gardel projects an image that is really his persona – a dapper, fun-loving bon viveur with a warm heart. Seen in chronological order, however, the viewer will appreciate how the persona is being constructed, by trial and error. It was a smart collaboration between Gardel, Alfredo Le Pera (1900-1935), his lyricist and screenwriter of all seven features, who also died in the plane accident, and filmmaker John Reinhardt, who directed Gardel’s last two films, including El día que me quieras. This is Gardel for the ages – the one that “cada día canta mejor”, as the Argentine saying goes, “Gardel sings better every day”.
 

Gardel and co-star Rosita Moreno

It has been noted that these Gardel films reflect, in the portrait of the protagonists and the melodramatic circumstances of the plots, themes dear to tango music and lyrics: frustrated love, betrayal, poverty and longing for one’s place of origin.  Specific to these Paramount films are “melodramatic fantasies of romance, fame, international travel and upward social mobility” (5).

Two questions arise concerning the place of these seven films: do they belong to the history of Argentine cinema? Or are they a somewhat forgotten footnote in the development of Hollywood cinema in a decade capture where its hold of the international market was severely tested by a disruptive technology? Argentine film historians make the case that these films are an example of a national cinema with peculiar circumstances of production.  A similar argument can be advanced today for Iranian filmmakers working abroad, outside of the constrictions of the Islamic autocracy – the last films of the late Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi and the young Iranians born or raised in Europe after the Iranian revolution.

 

Regardless of the response, it is clear Gardel’s films, mixing comedy and melodrama, loaded with song and dance, backstage musicals of the 1930s, were made to be crowd-pleasers, and this impulse – a popular cinema - helped usher the Argentine golden age of the Hollywood-patterned studio system for three decades.  Besides Gardel, one should remember the creatives and technicians that learned their craft in Los Angeles and brought it to Argentina – the cases of Carlos Borcosque and Tito Davison - or those Americans working in Hollywood that shared their know-how and experience in Argentina, such as John Alton.

Reinhardt, center, between 
Gardel and Rosita Moreno

The case of John Reinhardt, the Austrian-born actor/director hired by Fox studios to direct Spanish-language originals is of particular relevance.  After directing top talent in musicals and comedies in 1933 and 1934 for this studio – Yo, tú y ella, Granaderos del amor, Un capitán de cosacos and Dos más uno, dos – Gardel hired him for what ended being his last two Paramount projects: Tango Bar and El día que me quieras.  Rosita Moreno, the Spanish-born singer and dancer, whom Reinhardt had directed at Fox, became the female co-star, and gives memorable dual performances as a mother and daughter in El día que me quieras, and as a reformed con artist in Tango Bar. In 1941, Reinhardt traveled to Argentina for several months, and directed the crime film Último refugio (“Last Refuge”) and the romantic comedy Una novia en apuros (“A Bride in Distress), both for Baires studios. I would like to argue that in all these Spanish-language project, Reinhardt brough versatility and a sense of story that would serve him well in the low-budget noirs he directed in 1947, High Tide and The Guilty, which have been recently restored by the Film Noir Foundation.  Reinhardt has a fun cameo in El día que me quieras, as a film director wrapping up the shoot the Gardel character is doing, where else but in Hollywood.

Astor Piazzolla, left, age 13, an
extra in "El día que me quieras"

What would Gardel have done if he had not died in June 1935?  He still had two more films to make under the Paramount deal, but he had projects in the works with Lumiton studios, in Buenos Aires, and there was talk about going independent.  

We can only imagine the challenges of a Hollywood career, à la Maurice Chevalier. He had not broken into the American market, spoke limited English, but certainly appreciated its fame and appeal.
 
It's all speculation, of course. But viewing El día que me quieras, the wonderfully sentimental story of a singer, the woman he loved and lost, and their child who becomes a fine singer, and listening to the three beautiful songs of the film, “El día que me quieras”, “Sus ojos se cerraron” and “Volver”, one senses Gardel could have been a contender.

NOTES

1)  Encyclopedia Britannica online, accessed June 15, 2024.

2)  For Gardel and cinema, see the works listed in the bibliography below.

3)  For a complete filmography, see list below.

4)  See César Fratantoni's article "Carlos Gardel's Exito Productions, Inc.  A case of Hispanic 

     autonomy?, in Hollywood Goes Latin (2019).

5)  Rielle Navitski, "The Tango on Broadway: Carlos Gardel's International Stardom an the 

    Transition to Sound in Argentina", in Cinema Journal, Fall 2011, p.47.

THE FILMS OF CARLOS GARDEL

Carlos Gardel, historia de un ídolo (1964) - archival compilation directed by Solly Schroder.
 

Así cantaba Gardel (1936) – Compilation of the 1930 shorts directed by Eduardo Morera.

 The Big Broadcast of 1936 (1935) Dir. Norman Taurog. Gardel sketch written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by Leo Tover. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios. Only in the Spanish version, cut from the English-language version owing to Gardel’s death, prior to the film’s release in the US in September 1935.
 

Tango Bar (1935) Dir. John Reinhardt. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by William Miller. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York.
 
El día que me quieras (1935) Dir. John Reinhardt. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by William Miller. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York.
 
El tango en Broadway (1934) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by William Miller. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York. 
 
Cuesta abajo (1934) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by George Webber. Exito Productions. Paramount Pictures, Astoria studios, New York.
 

La casa es seria (1933) Short. Dir. Lucien Jaquelux. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios, Paris.
 
Melodía de arrabal (1933) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios.
 
Esperáme (1933) Dir. Louis J. Gasnier. Written Alfredo Le Pera. Cinematography by Harry Stradling. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios, Paris.
 
Las luces de Buenos Aires (1931) Dir. Adelqui Millar. Written Luis Bayón Herrera, Manuel Romero. Cinematography by Ted Pahle. Paramount Pictures, Joinville studios, Paris.
 
Ten shorts directed by Eduardo Morera, produced by Federico Valle, with cinematography by Roberto Schmidt. Titles are those of the songs.

Yira, yira (1931) 

¡Leguisamo solo! (1930)

El quinielero (1930) 

Viejo smoking (1930) 

El inquilino (1930) 

Tengo miedo (1930)

Padrino pelao (1930) 

Mano a mano (1930) 

Enfundá la mandolina (1930) 

El carretero (1930) 

Canchero (1930) 

Añoranzas (1930) 

Rosa de otoño (1930) 

 
La loba (1916-1919) Dir. Francisco Defilippis Novoa. Lost film, details uncertain.
 
Flor de durazno (1917) Dir. Francisco Defilippis Novoa. Prod. Federico Valle. Adapted from Hugo Wast’s novel Flor de durazno.
 

Sources: IMDb, Cine Nacional and Simon Collier (“Carlos Gardel and the Cinema”, in Garden of Forking Paths, 1988)

LIST OF SOURCES

 
Collier, Simon, “Gardel and the Cinema”.  In The Garden of Forking Paths (1988)
 
Di Nubila, Historia del cine argentino: La época de oro (1998)
 
Finkielman, Jorge, The Film Industry in Argentina. An Illustrated Cultura History (2004)
 
Jarvinen, Jarvinen, The Rise of Spanish-Language Filmmaking (2012)
 
King, John, Magical Reels. A History of Cinema in Latin America. 2^nd ed. (2002)
 
Navitski, Rielle, “The Tango on Broadway: Carlos Gardel's International Stardom and the Transition to Sound in Argentina”. Cinema Journal, vol.51, no.1, Fall 2011, pp.26-49
 
Peña, Fernado M., Cien años de cine argentino (2012)
 
Smith, Steven C., John Reinhardt, Director Without Borders (2022) Documentary short
 
Waldman, Harry, Paramount in Paris. 300 Films Produced at the Joinville Studios, 1930-1933, with Credits and Biographies (1998)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Lourdes Portillo, dear friend. Notes for a conversation on her films.

I had the privilege in Los Angeles to become friends with two of the great documentary professors at UCLA from the 1990s to the early 2000s: Jorge Preloran (1933-2009) and Marina Goldovskaya (1941-2022). They formed several generations of filmmakers at UCLA, and taught film studies professors like me a way to approach the teaching and appreciation of the non-fiction film.  If we think – paraphrasing Ken Burns – that the feature film is governed by a formula and laws of plot that make it the narrow band in the spectrum, it is the documentary that has so many glorious possibilities.
 

An indispensable third documentary director in my professional life has been Lourdes Portillo (b.1943), who died on April 20, at age 80, in San Francisco. The Hollywood Reporter published a succinct obituary, that captures in a few broad strokes her life and work (1).
 

I met Lourdes Portillo in 2014, when the Visual History Program of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences – a mouthful - hired me to be her researcher. She was co-organizing a program of Latin American and Hispanic American filmmakers in the context of the Getty program Pacific Standard Time: Latin America in Los Angeles, to open in 2017. This resulted in a series of oral histories Lourdes conducted with Latin American and Hispanic directors, screenwriters, producers and actors over three years. These filmed interviews, beautifully produced, are available at the VHP website, and worth every minute of the viewer’s time (2). The conversations are insightful, probing the life and times of over twenty filmmakers from Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and the U.S., including Lucrecia Martel, María Novaro, Alfonso Cuarón, Gregory Nava and Edward James Olmos. The program comprises an earlier oral history with Lourdes herself that puts the Getty project in cultural and linguistic perspectives (3).
 

I last talked to Lourdes in February.  She knew she would not be able to continue with the project for which I was providing research. I had been her “sounding board”, she graciously said … She faced what was coming with courage, and a sense of urgency to leave her work in order.  
 
The news of her death reminded me of La Ofrenda, a beautiful documentary that shows, as she noted, that “in Mexican culture death is accepted as a part of life and not seen as something foreign that happens to other people” (4).
 
A subject to explore, and one that I brought up with her preparing for the Academy conversation last year, was the role of the Catholic faith in her worldview.  Lourdes’s work viewed as a whole is in tune with Pope Francis’ gospel message to take care of those at the margins.
 

What follows are the notes I prepared for a conversation with Lourdes in May 2022 when the Academy Museum organized a retrospective of her documentaries, “Lourdes Portillo: Una vida de directora”, to accompany the Stories of Cinema exhibition recently opened in the new museum (5).
 
I. The oral history she did in 2015 presents a very complete portrait of her life and work until that date. Some of the topics she discusses are invaluable to understand her career: the role of the artist in the greater society; the art of storytelling to uncover and share truths; and the esthetics of storytelling and political themes embedded in her films. Her method and style combine humor, tenacity and love, which she got from her parents, as she noted in VHP interview.
 
II. Documentary and truth are front and center in her film practice: “In documentary you have to be rooted in the facts, so you have to construct around the truth or what you perceive to be the truth.” “In narrative you can control almost everything whereas in documentary you can barely keep any control; you are driven by the facts.” Interestingly, the two qualities that undergird Portillo’s documentaries – love and compassion – are not usually associated with political documentaries.
 
III. Lourdes has a special talent for visually telling political stories, from a confined angle like that provided by families and tight communities. New Yorker critic Richard Brody wrote that her documentaries are “small-scale masterworks of intimate baroque … a controlled concentration of ordinary life, in all its extraordinariness (6). Her work needs to be seen in a continuum, intriguing blending of the personal, the political, the cultural – certainly from a point of view that is never a hammer on your face. 
 
IV. 

In 40 plus years in the filmmaking trenches, her first and last films Después del terremoto (1979) and State of Grace(2020) encapsulate her approach to cinema and most importantly, life. Lourdes’work is rooted in the artistic, cultural and political experience of Hispanics / Latinos in the US – in this order, I believe. 

 
Her subject: people in their cultural specificities. Her p.o.v: showing us the humanity of what society views or considers the underdogs. Her interest, however, is not on partisan, divisive politics, but in the complexities of people, families, ethnic groups, writ large.
 

Her films of the 1980 show specific situations and groups:  Después del terremoto (1979), Nicaraguans of the Somoza era living in San Francisco; La Madres (1986), an Argentine group of mothers caught in the Argentine civil war of the 1970s; La Ofrenda (1988), celebrating the dear dead in Oaxaca and San Francisco. In the 1990s – 2000s, she makes a mark with bold yet subtle documentaries experimenting with genres and film construction: The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), the portrait of her family that tells a larger social, anthropological and political picture, exploring Mexicanness (selected in 2020 for preservation in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"); Corpus: A Home Movie about Selena (1999) and its companion piece: A Conversation withAcademics about Selena (1999), an investigation of the Tejano pop star; Señorita extraviada (2001), another investigation, this time about the killings of young women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez.                  
 
V. Filmography
Lourdes Portillo’s over seventeen films include Después del terremoto (1979), Las Madres: The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo (1986, Academy award nomination), La Ofrenda: The Days of the Dead (1988), Columbus on Trial (1992), Mirrors of the Heart (1993), The Devil Never Sleeps (1994), Sometimes My Feet Go Numb (1997), Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena (1999), Señorita extraviada (2001), My McQueen (2004), Al Más Allá (2008), and the short animated film State of Grace (2020).
 

NOTES

 
(1) “Lourdes Portillo, Oscar-Nominated Las Madres — The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo Director, Dies at 80”. Obit by Zoe G. Phillips. The Hollywood Reporter, April 21, 2024.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/lourdes-portillo-dead-las-madres-the-mothers-of-the-plaza-de-mayo-1235878534/#recipient_hashed=12b29d8b5159fd057154e0bcb430581acfa89e6616a5e5f83cbd9e0ae424237b&recipient_salt=d798f7b01776f9545886dc9fc280537585d96e5519cf25844bcb3f8d070904ea
 
(2) The PST LA/LA website: https://pstlala.oscars.org.
 
(3) The VHP interview with Lourdes Portillo was made in 2015: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHhAtUDLQg
 
(4) Zan Dubin, “Documentary Takes Bicultural Look at Day of the Dead”. Los Angeles Times, October 28, 1992.
 
(5) https://www.academymuseum.org/en/programs/series/lourdes-portillo-una-vida-de-directora
 
(6) Richard Brody, “The Devil Never Sleeps: A Mexican-American Documentarian’s Rare Classic.”. New Yorker, June 12, 2019.