Portrait of Maria

If he did not already exist, it would be necessary to invent Emilio “El Indio” Fernández. His manneristic visual style, his folkloric themes and characters, and his distinctively Indian physiognomy made him an integral element of Mexico’s culture of nationalism, as well as the nation’s best-known director. Fleeing Mexico after the defeat of his faction in the rebellion of 1923, Fernández ended up digging ditches in Hollywood. As has been the case with so many Latin American artists and intellectuals, Fernández discovered his fatherland by leaving it: “I understood that it was possible to create a Mexican cinema, with our own actors and our own stories. . . . From then on the cinema became a passion with me, and I began to dream of Mexican films.” Making Mexican cinema became Fernández’s obsession and, as is so often true of cultural nationalism, a short-term gain was to turn into a long-term dead end.

Perhaps that which most distinguishes Fernández’s films is their strikingly beautiful visual style. Fernández and Gabriel Figueroa, the cinematographer, created the classical visual form of Mexican cinema. Ironically, their expressive cinematic patriotism was significantly inspired by foreign models—the most important of which was that of Sergei Eisenstein and his cameraman Eduard Tisse. Fernández evidently saw Qué Viva Mexico! in Hollywood, and he later played the lead in Janitzio , a film influenced by Eisenstein and the documentaries of Robert Flaherty and Willard Van Dyke. He even went on to “re-make” Qué Viva Mexico! twice with Maria Candelaria and Maclovia. Another important antecedent was Paul Strand’s photography in Redes , which must itself have reflected Eisenstein’s examples as well as Strand’s experiences in the Film and Photo League.

Foreign models were prominent at a formal level, but nationalism was presumably communicated in the content of the visual images. The films of Fernández and Figueroa are a celebration of Mexico’s natural beauty: stony Indian faces set off by dark rebozos and white shirts, charros and their stallions riding through majestic cactus formations, fishermen and their nets reflected in the swirling ocean tides, flower vendors in Xochimilco’s canals moving past long lines of tall poplar trees; and over it all, the monumentally statuesque masses of rolling clouds made impossibly luminous by photographic filters.

In the earlier films, the incredible beauty of the visual structures functioned as a protagonist, providing context for the story and resonating with the characters’ emotions. However, Fernández and Figueroa apparently became victims of their own myths, for their later films manifest a coldness and immobility which indicate an emphasis on visual form at the expense of other cinematic concerns. The dangers inherent in their “tourist” images of Mexico were ever-present, of course; but they became increasingly obvious with the petrification of the style.

Fernández’s stories have been summed up by Carlos Monsivais, a leading Mexican critic, as “monothematic tragedies: the couple is destroyed by the fate of social incomprehension, Nature is the essence of the Motherland, beauty survives crime, those who sacrifice themselves for others understand the world.” One is tempted to add: the Indian is a cretin, the charro a blustering macho , women are long-suffering and self-denying saints—and the revolution a confused tangle of meaningless atrocities. —John Mraz