[Mexican Cinema] [The Golden Age]

By: Arsaib

— The introduction of sound and the ensuing development of well-equipped film production studios in the 1930s (bankrolled by private investment, government loans, and US money) fostered the Golden Age of the Mexican film industry. In 1929 and 1930, a total of approximately ten feature films along with numerous shorts and newsreels accompanied by some form of synchronized sound were released. The ultimate success of the industry was made possible with the support of President Lázaro Cárdenas (served 1934–1940). Cárdenas established a protectionist policy that included tax exemptions for domestic film production, and his administration created the Financiadora de Películas, a state institution charged with finding private financing. He also instituted a system of loans for the establishment of modern film studios.

Two major types of films emerged during this period: first, a state-supported cinema that promoted the ambitions of Cárdenas and projected a nationalistic aesthetic and ideology exemplified by films such as Redes (The Waves, 1936) and Vamanos con Pancho Villa! (Let’s Go with Pancho Villa, 1936), and second, films produced primarily for commercial reasons that resembled Hollywood films in terms of narrative strategies, cinematic aesthetics, and modes of production but drew on Mexican literature, theatrical traditions, and contemporary Mexican themes. Measured in terms of box-office receipts, it was the commercial cinema that proved to be the most popular among Mexican audiences in the 1930s. In 1936 the wildly successful film by Fernando de Fuentes (1894–1958), Allá en el Rancho Grande, was filmed in Mexico City. Allá en el Rancho Grande introduced one of the most popular genres in Mexican film history, the comedia ranchera , a Mexican version of a cowboy musical that incorporated elements of comedy, tragedy, popular music, and folkloric or nationalistic themes. While the comedia ranchera became the most popular genre (in 1937 over half of the thirty-eight films released were modeled on de Fuentes’s film), other Mexican genres also enjoyed relative success, including the historical epic, the family melodrama, the urban melodrama, and the comedies of Tin Tan (1915–1973) and Cantinflas (1911–1993).

Despite foreign control of exhibition, domestic film production managed to increase from forty-one films in 1941 to seventy films in 1943. What is more important, Mexico’s share of its own domestic market grew from 6.2 percent in 1941 to 18.4 percent in 1945. This period was marked by the emergence of an auteurist cinema practice represented by directors such as Emilio Fernández (1903–1986), whose films included Flor silvestre (Wild Flower , 1943), a revolutionary melodrama, and Salón México (1948), an example of the cabaretera or dancehall film set in the poor urban barrios (neighborhoods) of Mexico City. Another auteur was Luis Buñuel (1900–1983), who made over twenty films in Mexico, including Los olvidados (1950), Abismos de passion ( Wuthering Heights , 1954), and Susana (1951).

In 1948 the most popular Mexican film of the Golden Age was released. Nosotros los pobres ( We the Poor ), directed by Ismael Rodríguez (1917–2004), starred Pedro Infante (1917–1957) as Pepe el Toro, a widowed carpenter raising his sister’s daughter, Chachita, as his own, and caring for his invalid mother in the poor, sprawling neighborhoods of Mexico City. Incorporating elements of comedy and tragedy as well as popular music, Rodriguez’s film romanticizes the position of the urban underclass at the same time that it reveals many of the adverse conditions they encounter on a daily basis: prostitution, alcoholism and drug addiction, violence, and disease.

Under Miguel Alemán (1946–1952), Cinematográfica Mexicano (CCM) was established, whose purpose was to help finance the nation’s largest film producers. The CCM quickly moved into production and distribution, buying up studios and movie theaters, challenging the exhibition monopoly held by the American financier William O. Jenkins (1878–1963). The government also instituted a number of protectionist measures that nationalized the Banco Cinematográfico and the CCM and exempted the industry from paying state taxes. In addition, it supported the establishment of state distribution with the institutionalization of Películas Nacionales, S.A., in 1947.

These actions were not enough, however, to prevent the subsequent decline of Mexican cinema in the early 1950s, both in terms of quality and quantity. It became very difficult after World War II for small countries like Mexico to enforce import quotas on foreign films. Hollywood’s European markets reopened and the United States withdrew its wartime support of the Mexican film industry. Because all sectors of the industry were either owned or capitalized by foreign investors, this removal of support had an immediate, although temporary, effect on Mexican cinema. Film production dropped from seventy-two films in 1946 to fifty-seven in 1947 while, at the same time, producers turned to tried-and-true formula pictures to draw audiences and ensure profits.

The Banco Cinematográfico became fully nationalized by the 1960s and was responsible for generating most of the financing for feature film production in Mexico. Financing was restricted to those producers who could turn the highest profits, and thus low-budget “quickies” became the films of choice in the industry. Producers who were businessmen rather than filmmakers restricted their product to genres such as soft porn, rancheros , and the masked wrestler films that appealed to a largely urban, lower-class audience. In the end, the government’s measures did nothing to further the lished the Cre development of Mexican cinema. Jenkins’s monopoly ultimately bought out new distributors and the import quotas were never carried out. Out of 4,346 films screened in Mexico between 1950 and 1959, over half were North American and only 894 were Mexican. This situation continued through the 1960s. —Joanne Hershfield

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— In his introduction to Cine Mexicano: Posters From the Golden Age 1936 – 1956 by Rogelio Agrasánchez, Jr., Dr. Charles Ramírez Berg posits the beginning of the Golden Age of Mexican cinema with the release of Allá en el Rancho Grande in 1936, the first comedia ranchera (Agrasánchez 10). Though this beginning point is little disputed, of more interest is Dr. Ramirez Berg’s observation on the coalescing of the Mexican national mode of production: “Along with ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (Let’s Go with Pancho Villa) – which, though made before Allá en el Rancho Grande, was released afterwards – it established the modern Mexican mode of film production, including state involvement through guaranteed funding, a burgeoning star system, and a developing distribution and exhibition network. Finally, the profits from this first Spanish-language blockbuster gave Mexican cinema something that it hadn’t had since the documentary era: financial stability. With all of this in place, Mexican cinema became a streamlined, well-organized industry. Its film production would jump from 25 in 1936 to 38 in the following year (more than half the movies adhering to the comedia ranchera [rural comedy] formula of Allá en el Rancho Grande.) As an industry, Mexican cinema was established and financially stable; as an art form, filmmaking was entering an unprecedented classical era” (Agrasánchez 10).

This concept of what André Bazin referred to as “the genius of the system,” and its subsequent stability would ultimately prove the undoing of the very system it nurtured, as the industrial production process became ossified and incapable of innovation. As the mode of production became moribund, established producers, directors, actors, writers and cinematographers were loath to relinquish power and allow new players into the tightly controlled guild, stifling young, creative talent and their projects and promoting hackneyed and formulaic movies. The system of financing favored this old boy’s club and made it virtually impossible for independents to secure credit or distribution, and the profits themselves were not reinvested into maintaining and modernizing the studios. Due to these factors, Mexican Cinema basically collapsed. However, for several decades the system created a mechanism for creativity that managed to ascend an unrivaled pinnacle in the Spanish-speaking world until this decline during the mid-1950’s. What the Mexican film industry exhibited was that art and Mammon could both be served. It is critical to note that we must view the term of comedia ranchera with the gimlet eye we use in our perception of Broadway “musical comedy.” These were not all comedies in any sense of the word, and at the unlikely juncture of sentimental nostalgia and revolutionary discourse, as expressed in many films based on the corrido or Mexican popular ballad, the result could be very dark indeed. These are films that I would call representative of the corrido/ranchera genre. They were based on corridos but contain the nostalgic aura of the comedia ranchera. It was here that disillusionment with the promises of the Revolution and the reality of Mexican life was often expressed. In many of these films, we observe most clearly the clash of the diverse factions of Mexican society riven by centuries of unresolved cultural, class and gender disconnects and intersections — indigenous vs. Spanish, peasant farmer vs. landowner, factory worker vs. capitalist, religious vs. secular, folkloric vs. commercial — these elements all collided and simmered in the rich social heritage of indigenous and Spanish society that created Mexico. —Mike McKinley

—Beginning in the early 1930s and continuing for a quarter-century, Mexico was home to one of the world’s most colorful and diverse film cultures: not many other countries could claim a comparable range of production, diversity of genres and number of master filmmakers. The excellence of Mexican cinema was founded on its commercial strength – Mexico supplied all of the Spanish-speaking markets in Central and South America, and delivered several box-office successes in the United States as well. During the thirties, the country also became an important refuge for European exiles. Numerous filmmakers and craftsmen had their own (usually semi-secret) Mexican Period, and German-born Alfredo B. Crevenna became Mexico’s most prolific director. In the 1940s, few other film cultures were quite as potent.

The arrival of the talkies was a blessing for Mexico: finally, filmmakers could emancipate themselves from Hollywood and make films that were easily understood by the native – and often illiterate – audience. The joy of having one’s own cinema aligned with the government of Lázaro Cardenas, which strove for a nationalization of the arts. This program supported numerous projects dedicated to the traditions of the indigenous peoples and their contributions to the development of a nation-specific aesthetic. These include many of Fernández’ major works, especially María Candelaria (1944; his nickname, ‘El Indio,’ was no accident). In the mid-1930s, the government began to massively subsidize film production; it co-financed the CLASA-Studios and also participated in several experiments, one of which, initiated by the Ministry of Education, was Fred Zinnemann’s and Emilio Gómez Muriel’s Redes (1934-36).

The most artistically vital impulse, however, came from the outside – from the Soviet Union, in the form of Sergei Eisenstein, whose unfinished Qué viva México! (1930-32) influenced a great deal of the era’s cinema. Mexico’s outstanding cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa, worked on Eisenstein’s film as a young man and soon became a principal contributor to the films of the Golden Age. Emilio Fernández’ extremely plastic and geometric compositions can also be traced back to Eisenstein – who, in turn, was inspired by the indigenous arts of Mexico. Some have commented that Eisenstein “reintroduced” the country to its own aesthetic.

["Scholars point to the influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s quasi-historical epic, Qué viva México! on both Redes and Janitzio. In fact, Eisenstein’s visit to Mexico in 1932 and his film are credited with having an impact on both the style and content of the Indianist cinema, as exemplified by Emilio Fernández. Despite the Soviet director’s undeniable influence on director’s such as Fernández, there is substantial evidence that Eisenstein’s film and the Indianist genre as a whole were inspired by postrevolutionary Mexican theater (tandas and carpas) and art and the intellectual promotion of indigenismo during the 1920s and 1930s. Artists such as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siquieros were intent on creating a revolutionary Mexican art through an expression of mexicanidad grounded in the ideology of indigenismo. Their work and discourse repudiated European influences (although many of these artists were trained in France or Spain) and celebrated the Indian peasant, Mexican folklore, and Mexico’s landscape, drawing inspiration from pre-Columbian art and contemporary Indian clothing and handicrafts. However, their paintings reinforce stereotypical representations of racial and ethnic divisions that marked Mexican society since the Spanish conquistadors first mated with Indian women in the fifteenth century. Indians in this “national art” were portrayed as pure and simple, like children who had to be led to social (and revolutionary) consciousness by the intellectual mestizo elite. The Indianist films of the Golden Age reproduced these stereotypes" (Joanne Hershfield, Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers).]

Another Russian influence was Arcady Boytler, whose La mujer del Puerto (1934) is among the era’s key films. Like Jean Grémillon in France or Werner Hochbaum in Germany, Boytler dedicated himself to a kind of poetic realism which acknowledged the “dirt” of the real. Mexican cinema continued to oscillate between these two poles, the statuesque stylizations of Eisenstein and Boytler’s porous realism, never really showing a definite preference for either one – except perhaps in the case of Fernández, whose films always tended towards the archaic and the “essential”, in his films about the revolution (Enamorada, 1946) as well as in his melodramas.

For the artistically ambitious cinema of the era, melodrama was the dominant genre. All major directors – from Fernández (Flor silvestre, 1943) and De Fuentes (La Mujer sin alma, 1943) to Julio Bracho (Distinto amanecer, 1943) and Roberto Gavaldón (La diosa arrodillada, 1947) – excelled in this form, sometimes leaning towards surrealism (like Buñuel), in other cases towards a sober tone of urban disenchantment, as in Alejandro Galindo’s socially critical masterpiece, Campeón sin corona (1946). These filmmakers could also draw upon a system of stars who often achieved notoriety far beyond Mexico. María Félix, known as “La Doña”, Dolores del Rio, Pedro Armendáriz and Arturo de Córdova were icons of popular mythology, fully comparable to the classic movie stars of Hollywood.

In the 1950s Mexican film production reached its peak – while at the same moment ceasing to function as a viable industry: the state monopoly system collapsed and television finished the job. What remains today are the films themselves, the best evidence of a completely independent and effective film culture that has few equals in the history of cinema. —The Austrian Film Museum

Further reading:

Hershfield, Joanne. “Mexico.” In The International Movie Industry , edited by Gorham Kindem, 273–291. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000.

Hershfield, Joanne, and David R. Maciel, eds. Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers . Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Books, 1999.

Mora, Carl J. Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society, 1896–1988 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Parangú, Paulo Antonio. Mexican Cinema . Translated by Ana Paranaguápez. London: British Film Institute, 1995.

Ramirez Berg, Charles. Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967–1983 . Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.