Mexican Films

This was not an easy course to structure. The reason for this is that the films and texts studied needed to fulfill conditions that I found more difficult to meet than I expected. I needed to find films that had subtitles based on texts that had been translated. While I think we'll be watching significant films based on important and representative Latin American, to be more exact, Spanish American, texts. The authors we are reading-Cortázar, Borges, Vargas Llosa, Piglia, Puig-are among the most important writers in Latin America and, I would argue, the world in the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, Antonioni, Bertolucci, and Gutiérrez Alea are also major filmmakers and the films we are seeing among their masterpieces. However, the fact is that there are several significant omissions. The most important among these is the lack of a Mexican film or text among those we are studying.

It is difficult to overestimate the importance of Mexican films in Latin American culture. For approximately 25 years-from the early 1930s to the late 1950s-they rivaled in popularity those from the US. The major Mexican stars-María Félix, Pedro Infante, the comedian Cantinflas, to name a few-were as popular, if not more, than comparable Hollywood stars. Moreover, Mexican films, as those made in the US and elsewhere, frequently have as their source novels and short stories. Furthermore, Mexican literature and the country's publishing industry is, together with those from Argentina, the most important in Latin America. In fact, many major Mexican and Latin American writers have worked in Mexico's film industry. Manuel Puig, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, just to mention some of the best-known, have written screenplays that were made into movies. However, we are not watching any Mexican films.

Again the problem I found is the impossibility of finding subtitled films adapted from novels or short stories that were translated. For instance, in the case of the 1943 version of Doña Bárbara, directed by Fernando de Fuentes and adapted by Rómulo Gallegos, from his novel of the same name, is not available for purchase. However, there are several dvds of the movie without subtitles. Perhaps the popularity of the film and the existence of a large enough Mexican and Latin American market make the expenses associated with adding subtitles less appealing. However, I also found cases where the movies were subtitled but the texts were not translated or out of print. In the case of The Place without Limits, a 1977 adaptation of a José Donoso novella, directed by Arturo Ripstein from a Puig screenplay, the novella is out of print. I could give many more examples.

However, apart from the omission of Mexican movies and novels, I believe the films we are watching and the texts we are reading provide a reasonably thorough look into the evolution of both film and narrative of Spanish America; from the parallel rise of modernist art film-influenced by European filmmakers such as Antonioni and Bertolucci-and literature in the 1960s and 1970s, to contemporary more pop-oriented literature and film represented by both the novel and film Rosario Tijeras (2005) .

* Image is of María Félix as Doña Bárbara