Passion, Fate, Memory: 10 Latin American & Spanish Films From The Last 100 Years

Highest kudos are due to David Bowie and Cinema Tropical's Co-Founding Director, Carlos Gutierrez, for having presented such cinematic magnificence in their Latin American and Spanish retrospective film series at the Quad Cinema, within the recent, larger H&M High Line Festival in New York for which Mr. Bowie served as overall guest curator.

While cultural aficionados of Latin American and Spanish music, art, architecture, literature and poetry and delicious cuisines are worldwide and multitudinous, the retrospective signaled an unusual and stunning discovery (for the uninitiated) of the highly sophisticated film medium as art form and its monumental history, mainly Latin American.

Each film in the series represented a brilliant, unified synthesis of the innumerable aspects of great movie-making - cinematography, acting, drama, plot, suspense, directorial vision and technical mastery of the craft.

How consistently disquieting and riveting it was though, to experience the mysteriousness of each film within the context of the others. The series explored complex themes - passion and true love, tragic fatality, and the indelible power of memory - with interrelated sub-themes of childhood naiveté, awakening adolescent sexuality, race and class, the overwhelming forces of political conditions, and the eternal struggle between church and state.

Carlos Gutierrez observes:

For over one hundred years Latin American and Spanish filmmakers have used cinema as a tool in their political struggle but also, cinema has been an invaluable element in the shaping of local and regional cultural identities. Throughout these years, the region has produced an extraordinary body of work that remains on the cutting edge of world cinema, but unfortunately has not yet been fully recognized. It is until now that some Latin American filmmakers are in the spotlight but behind them there's a very rich and diverse film tradition. Part of the idea behind the programming of the High Line Film Series was precisely to pay homage to that great tradition and make more people aware of it.

Here are some notes and impressions about the screenings:

El Automóvil Gris (The Grey Automobile, Enrique Rosas Priego, Mexico, 1919)

A wildly popular silent, black and white classic in Mexico during the early period of filmmaking, originally very serious in storyline, the film was a cinematic reenactment of a notorious gang of villains, who terrorized and robbed many wealthy homes. They made their getaways from robbery scenes in a grey automobile. The plot is a crime-doesn't-pay morality story, in which good eventually prevails over evil. Contemporary Mexican director, Claudio Valdés Kuri with his Teatro de Cierto Habitantes (Certain Inhabitants' Theater) based in Mexico, gives the film a totally different, hilariously entertaining and avant-garde spin by theatrical interventions in Japanese Benshi style with live actors and dancers, and a pianist on stage. The Benshi tradition from Japan's silent film era consisted of live narrators who commented upon and dramatized silent film action. However, Kuri's treatment of the film not only blurs boundaries between cinema and theater, but also underscores cultural differences in language and interpretations, lost in translation. The film has, indeed, an unintended slapstick comedic visual quality and pace, which Teatro's actors, dancers and pianist so keenly skewed during the opening night of the retrospective.


Aventurera (Adventuress, Alberto Gout, Mexico, 1949)

One of the most captivating love stories ever, Aventurera traces the tragic woes of an innocent young woman who becomes a cabaret heroine played by Cuban-born actress, Ninón Sevilla. This film can rival any of Bollywood's greatest music and dance films from the same period - in a rags to riches plot, a fallen woman eventually empowers herself through revenge and wile, spit and fire. The soundtrack carries beautiful classic boleros, son, and a samba, as Sevilla dances her way into the hearts of her cabaret admirers. Perverted sin and the redemptive power of love battle for the soul of the protagonist with melodramatic twists, terrific role-casting and suspenseful film noir treatment.


Dos Monjes (Two Monks, Juan Bustillo Oro, Mexico, 1934)

Although the current film print has no English subtitles, such was the mastery of the director and cinematographer with splendid casting that the story of a terrible rivalry between two men for a woman and its dire consequences is relatively easy to get a grip on. German Expressionism was much admired by Oro and how deftly he incorporates warped camera angles, brooding chiaroscuro light and shadow, and romantically-driven violence in his dramatic treatment. The theme song, a sweet love song, transforms into grotesquely haunted organ music as one of the heroes falls into tragic delirium. This is an ironic O'Henry-esque horror story about passion and the ambiguities of love - whose truth resides only in the eye of the beholder as ultimate judge.


Robinson Crusoe (Luis Buñuel, Mexico, 1954)

A less-frequently screened film in the Spanish Surrealist master's repertoire, this was Buñuel's first color work shot in glorious Pathecolor, while exiled in Mexico. Crusoe, played by Dan O'Herlihy was nominated for an Academy Award for his role in this rendering of Defoe's novel, but was passed over for Marlon Brando's "On the Waterfront" - no small distinction. Hallucinatory passages reflective of the director's surreal style; deep philosophical questions about God and fate preoccupy the desolate hero within Buñuel's own radical atheist ethic; and racial issues between slave-trader Crusoe and the "savage" Friday are obliterated as practicalities of survival force camaraderie and equality of sorts between the two, however briefly. Class pecking order is restored as the two are "rescued" by an England-bound ship.


Memorias de Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Cuba, 1968)

As the privileged middle-class continued to exit Cuba during the early days of Castro's regime, a resigned, would-be journalist living off of family real estate holdings remains on the island only to become trapped by Communist ideology. Sergio is plagued by memories of his status-preoccupied wife who has deserted him for Miami. Symbolic of the dead-end of the regime's complete rejection of consumer society, the ambiguities of a failed marriage turn the protagonist into a bored, decadent skirt-chaser. This subtle, cinematic critique of the Cuban revolution still remains today a wonderful black and white print. A walk through Hemingway's former home in Havana with all manner of the author's collections of bric-a-brac and guns is well worth the entire film's stretch.


Los Amantes del Circulo Polar (Lovers from the Arctic Circle, Julio Medem, Spain, France, 1998)

Women left the theater in tears following the screening. Victims of failed marriages, two lonely children in Spain are coincidentally drawn to each other, grow up and inevitably fall in love as adolescents. Family tragedy and emotional pain drive the two apart. Coincidence and fate continuously flirt and collide with each other throughout the movie as the lovers' stories enfold over the years, until interiorized childhood illusions and disillusions are brought to a final end in Finland. An intricate drama and circular plot, the film echoes elements of Greco-Roman tragic theater that underlie many of the films in the whole series.


Machuca (Andrés Wood, Chile/Spain/UK/France, 2004)

Worthy of the sweep and drama of Charles Dickens' or Naguib Mahfouz's novels about children and individuals who are subject to political conditions and eras, this is a heart-rending story about an unlikely friendship between a sensitive, elite 12 year-old and his counterpart, Machuca, an impoverished Indian who meet at a private school in Santiago. Church and State, during the period between Allende's idealistic rule and Pinochet's brutal regime, fight for supremacy, while issues of class and race mirror deeply ingrained prejudices and the need for the ruling class to dominate and exploit the shanty-town wretchedly poor. The film's portrayal of inhumanities, so carefully and thoughtfully weighed, is representative of the explosive socio-economic conditions throughout Latin America today whose images U.S. mainstream news and media so assiduously avoid. The soundtrack is thrilling with a contemporary feel through snippets of hip-hop and even Dominican bachata. Wood's film is a visual prayer for hope in the region.


El Espiritu de la Colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive, Victor Erice, Spain, 1973)

Disparities between the interior lives of adults and children are sharply contrasted in Erice's story about six-year old Ana who becomes bewitched and possessed by watching "Frankenstein" in a Spanish village cinema during the end of Franco's regime. Woven into the script, Ana's older sister, Isabel, unwittingly (in playful cruelty?) terrorizes her sister's naiveté and fears through unspoken sibling rivalry. The indelible power of cinematic memory over children is a fascinating study here. Only hints of the period's paranoid political era seep through with character casting in a devastating sub-plot. Little Ana eventually asserts herself as heroine. In a semi sleep-walking, dream-like state in moonlight, she intones "Soy Ana, soy Ana...." It's an unforgettable moment, wondrous, a small epiphany.


El Prisionero Trece (Fernando de Fuentes, Mexico, 1933)

Irony and fate are the moral fibers woven into this tale of corruption during the Mexican revolution. A dissolute colonel, swigging tequila and abusing his wife with infant son is doomed from the start of the film. Retribution for engineering a cynical bribery for his own pockets unfolds inexorably, as he becomes powerless to save a young prisoner to be executed at dawn. Time and justice become one. The causes of the revolution are revealed through cast characterizations, sometimes edging on the comical, but pathetically authentic.


Oriana (Fina Torres, Venezuela/France, 1985)

Having inherited her aunt Oriana's seaside hacienda in the lush jungles of Venezuela, Marie returns from France with her husband to dispose of the dark, musty home filled with dust and the relics she secretively explored during her childhood vacations. As she wanders through the eerie house, memories of bizarre instances entwined with flash-back images of Oriana's painful adolescence and a forbidden love affair create unbearable suspense and mystery. As the film draws to conclusion, Marie gazes through a sunlit window in a darkened room and then suddenly runs to a secluded, small house in the hacienda's garden that was always locked, shuttered, impenetrable, during her early visits. The abode now unlocked, she discovers a small living quarter and the key to her aunt's heart. The film skims over deeper psychologies of incest, patricide and racial divisions, but love triumphs over all.