Llévame en tus brazos (Julio Bracho, 1954).
When the Locarno Film Festival announced that its 2023 Retrospective section would survey Mexican popular cinema between the 1940s and 1960s, it meant not only that the canon of Mexican film history would also necessarily be the subject of major revision—or, at least, debate—but also that a considerable amount of resources would be expended on the digitization and restoration of films long omitted from official histories. The 36-film program, “Spectacle Every Day—The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema,” precipitated new digital versions of many varied genre movies produced between 1941 and 1966, some well-known today, but the majority rescued from obscurity.
Unlike previous retrospectives put on by the Locarno Film Festival, and reflecting recent shifts in the accessibility and quality of scanning and restoration technologies, this year’s series primarily featured digital copies of the films with only a few notable celluloid exceptions. When I first perused the festival program, this was a shock, particularly because the Retrospective’s current curator, Olaf Möller, is well-known for his insistence on screening 35mm materials wherever possible. Beyond his involvement, Locarno’s Retrospective program has itself long been a celluloid bastion, drawing on the bountiful archives at the Swiss and other European cinematheques to create a 35mm fortress seldom pierced by the arrows of digital bandits.
However, many movies in “The Many Seasons of Mexican Popular Cinema” would not be shown at all if not digitally; these versions are the fruit of affectionate scanning and restoration labs across Mexico, reanimating films that often cannot be screened from celluloid prints—including some popular cinema that's forgotten even in Mexico. My knee-jerk distrust for DCPs of films from the classical era was also, it became clear, based on somewhat outdated prejudices, an instinctual resistance that originated in an era of much shittier digital scans and projection. Add that to the fact that Latin America is, of course, quite distinct from, say, Germany, where archives are more robust and less scattershot (Argentina, for instance, does not even have a national cinema archive). In 2016, it was from the Deutsche Kinemathek and the DEFA Film Library’s bountiful celluloid archive that Möller drew when assembling a majority-35mm retrospective of German filmmaking after the war (1949-62), Locarno’s previous rewriting of the received wisdom surrounding a national cinema. In that case, it was the spurious but widespread notion that German filmmaking in the two decades after the collapse of the Third Reich was moribund and exhausted, a pale shadow of its Weimar glories, that needed refutation. In the Mexican retrospective, it was evident that the few films that were presented on 35mm prints were the ones that were, at least at one point, screened and distributed in Europe. Thus, these prints were plucked from European archives: Los hermanos del Hierro (Ismael Rodríguez, 1961) and Sensualidad (Alberto Gout, 1951), both of which only screened with lasered French subtitles, being two significant examples.
Llévame en tus brazos (Julio Bracho, 1954).
The Locarno program featured digital restorations and scans from a variety of institutions, some state and some private. Notably, Julio Bracho’s Llévame en tus brazos (in English, Take Me in Your Arms, 1954), which was restored by Permenencia Voluntaria and the Cinema Preservation Alliance, with support from the Academy Film Archive and some financial backing from IMCINE (the Mexican Film Institute). The CPA, spearheaded by Peter Conheim, is somewhat more familiar outside of Mexico, at least among aficionados of cult cinema: Conheim has restored numerous exploitation films for Nicolas Winding Refn’s website, including several that have shown on MUBI, such as Joseph L. Anderson’s Spring Night Summer Night (1967) or Ron Ormond’s evangelical exploitation non-classic If Footmen Tire You, What Will Horses Do? (1971).
Permanencia Voluntaria, on the other hand, is the heroic work of documentary filmmaker Viviana García-Besné, a scion of the Mexican genre studio Cinematográfica Calderón, whose films were a pivotal part of the Locarno program; in Mexico, they have long been considered disreputable genre fare and not part of the official canon. Her great-uncle, Guillermo, had stored many materials for the films he produced with his brother Pedro in a home that, by 2011, was scheduled for demolition. Upon arranging for their removal, García-Besné realized what a cinematic wealth was contained in that place: production notes, memorabilia, negative elements, nitrate prints. Thus she unwittingly, over several years, became a restorer of these films; Llévame en tus brazos is the tenth such project undertaken with the Cinema Preservation Alliance. Others, not incidentally, include such masterworks as Aventurera (Alberto Gout, 1950) and Victims of Sin (Víctimas del pecado, Emilio Fernández, 1951)1, campy genre films like The Batwoman (La mujer murciélago, René Cardona, 1966) or The Panther Women (Las mujeres panteras, René Cardona, 1967), as well as films starring the masked luchador El Santo, such as Santo vs. the Evil Brain (Santo contra el cerebro del mal, Joselito Rodríguez, 1961) or Santo vs. the Riders of Terror (Santo contra los jinetes del terror, René Cardona, 1970).2
The Calderón home archive had degenerated over the years into an abysmal condition, rendering García-Besné and Conheim’s subsequent work greatly more challenging. Many of the films had been knocked onto the floor during a recent earthquake and left to soak in water leaking from a burst pipe. “These were films that were never preserved, taken care of,” García-Besné emphasized to me when we spoke over Zoom. “They were never in professional hands. You open a can and out pops insects, dust, mold.” Huge swathes of film had decayed, were ruined, or went missing, as was the case with the now-shimmeringly gorgeous Llévame en tus brazos, which had to be composited from an original negative and, for the three minutes that had been lost to decomposition, a duplicate 16mm print. “The films that my family made were always despised,” added García-Besné. “So nobody cared enough to take [care] of them.”
Once García-Besné and Conheim received notice that the curators wanted Bracho’s 1954 film for the Locarno retrospective, they had to immediately set about restoring it from this startlingly miserable state, while also providing, simultaneously, a fresh scan and brush up of Stronger Than Love (Más fuerte que el amor, Tulio Demicheli, 1955), which also showed at the festival. All of this took around five months, from the moment they received the go-ahead from Locarno to their ultimate delivery of a subtitled 4K DCP for the premiere.
“Olaf [Möller] came looking for some films for the retrospective; I gave him a list of possibilities, and once he chose [Llévame en tus brazos], we set to work immediately,” García-Besné said. “This was in December. I didn’t know if we’d have the money. First, I made sure all the film elements got to Los Angeles. There the people from the Academy Film Archive prepared the elements for us, and we scanned the print in the beginning of April.” Then, Conheim added, “We had a month to do the whole thing.”
I had called them to ask about this daunting workflow and timeline process, and as Conheim spoke, I could see a modest studio setup—computer, speakers, and two monitors—visible behind him. With the crucial help of a professional colorist, Andrew Drapkin, Conheim evidently did the work a larger restoration team would ordinarily do: not only digitally combining material elements from the 16mm duplicate print and the rolls of camera and sound negative, but also scrubbing and correcting each individual frame of Bracho’s film, while trying to maintain a certain grainy particularity to the visual texture of the image and paying due respect to the soft light of Gabriel Figueroa’s cinematography. García-Besné, meanwhile, had to quickly raise a budget for their work even as the process was very much underway, contacting public archives in Mexico and the United States to drum up material support for the restoration. “We actually committed to [Llévame en tus brazos] without really knowing what the negative condition was like,” Conheim told me. “And as expected, it was in pretty bad shape. Actually, this one was extraordinarily bad. And in general, if the funding isn’t there, usually we can’t commit to films that are in this kind of condition.”
I go into detail here because perhaps few know about what goes into this kind of work. Amusingly, this process resembles that undertaken by a contemporary film crew, once they’re selected by a festival like Locarno: the months-long rush after receiving an acceptance letter during which the creative team must piece together a final version of the film to meet a deadline that’s often mere weeks before the festival premiere. Except, in this case, this is Llévame en tus brazos’s second premiere: the first had technically taken place on another continent, 69 years before the film would be projected anew on the giant screen at the majestic GranRex in Locarno.
The 35mm negative from the restoration process.
***
A flock of birds flaps over rows of breaking waves. A man rides a horse down the length of a beach in Veracruz, strumming his guitar and singing an upbeat song. Rita, played by the Cuban-born rumbera dancer and star Ninón Sevilla, and her sister, played by Rosenda Monteros, run out of their beachside shack to help a group of men haul in a hammerhead shark flailing in a fishing net. As they tug on the net in unison, Rita exchanges glances with José, a union leader played by Armando Silvestre. Titles flash up on the screen, the orchestral score swells, and Llévame en tus brazos begins in earnest. I described this moment in speaking with Conheim and García-Besné, and Conheim excitedly jumped in: “Watching them haul in that net for the first time, with the titles flashing up over it and the score swelling—that’s when I knew this was a special film.”
Julio Bracho, one of the most important and idiosyncratic studio filmmakers in Mexican cinema history, was represented by three highly atypical films in the Locarno program (though typical, at least, of Möller’s tastes): Forgotten Faces (Rostros olvidados, 1952), the only bad movie I saw in the entire retrospective; the meta-farce The Pharaoh’s Court (La corte de Faraón, 1944); and Llévame en tus brazos, which is something close to a masterpiece. From this odd, unbalanced selection, it would be easy to underestimate Bracho’s significance as a filmmaker, attributing much of the power of the latter film to its star and to a uniquely Mexican admixture of melodramatic tones and genres. And yet Bracho’s presence on the project, as well as that of the eminent cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, was not incidental but indeed pivotal to its inception and the material consequences that occurred after its production.
It was Ninón Sevilla who pushed Pedro Calderón to hire Bracho, a high-minded social artist type reluctant to work for a popular studio, to direct a film in which she would star, knowing full well what he and Figueroa had done for other female stars of Mexican cinema. She had been in a romantic relationship with Calderón virtually from the moment they met, shortly after her arrival in Mexico; a relationship looked down upon by the family, who would, over the next decades, refuse to allow Calderón to marry Sevilla. It was Sevilla who convinced Bracho—through his sister, the actress Andrea Palma—to make a film at Cinematográphica Calderón. And it was Sevilla who, in time, made up the rest of the film’s financing with her own savings.
Relations between the brothers Pedro and Guillermo Caulderón had already strained from the expensive prestige production Untouched (Sombra Verde, Roberto Gavaldón, 1954) earlier in the year, another attempt to display their seriousness as producers. Pedro’s drive to please Sevilla at any expense, without what his brother felt was proper consultation, led to an abrupt parting of ways before Llévame en tus brazos was completed. It would be the final film the brothers produced together and a lifelong source of animosity between them and within the Calderón family, for which Sevilla was blamed. By the final days of the production, it was Sevilla who was paying everybody’s wages, dragging it over the finish line.
Llévame en tus brazos (Julio Bracho, 1954).
Indeed, with these extra details in mind, it is difficult not to see Sevilla’s creative presence—not only as an actress but, effectively, as a producer of Llévame en tus brazos—reflected in the particular contours and textures of Bracho’s powerful and often beguiling melodrama. At the outset, Rita departs from her village near the Papaloapan River in Veracruz in a cloud of shame, with the townsfolk under the mistaken impression that she had pimped herself out to the baron of the sugar plantation to pay her father’s debts. She ends up, as in many melodramas, a star—in this case, at a movie studio in Mexico City, where she gets embroiled in a political corruption scandal involving a candidate for governor. This corrupt politician relies on the support of the unions, which are, naturally, headed up by her old flame José, who had also cast her aside for her perceived sexual transgression. The film features several energetic, contractually mandated dance numbers, though, at Bracho and Sevilla’s insistence, they were reduced in number and were more subdued than in the other rumbera films for which Sevilla is famous.
Upon its release in 1954, the film was at least somewhat known in Europe, where it largely attracted attention (as today) thanks to Ninón Sevilla, who was known as a highly distinctive performer known for her exotic dancing in popular rumbera films. On the occasion of a program of Mexican cinema screening in Paris, for instance, Cahiers du cinéma wrote about the film twice: once in an overview of “Films Released Exclusively in Paris Cinemas, June 1-21, 1955” (which Wikipedia, in a very bad translation, credits, without proper attribution, to François Truffaut), and then more extensively in a piece by Cahiers cofounder Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. While “Truffaut” is evidently captivated by Sevilla, Lo Duca, in his “Letter from Latin America,” is more troubled by the film’s confinement to studio sets, which he says is “intolerable after the Italian streets and Mexican flowers and beaches” of Italian neorealist films and Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), as well as the “excessive authority of the trade unions,” to which he attributes stylistic and narrative influence.
Lo Duca’s paternalistic commentary gets at what today seems so rich about Llévame en tus brazos, as well as the specific aspects of Mexican popular cinema of the ’40 and ’50s that were in such desperate need of reclaiming in 2023. It’s precisely those qualities of artifice in contrast to natural settings, song-and-dance in contrast to high drama, that make it such a unique object. The musical numbers are of a different register to those in other Sevilla films, and they are integrated—however flimsily—into the narrative, alternately in the village itself and, later, when her character has become first a cabaret dancer and then a movie star. Indeed, the “Let’s Call the Wind” musical number takes place directly on a movie set, featuring technicians moving lights and camera into position before she parades through an artificial set singing a surprisingly morose, even wistful song. It is in moments like these that Llévame en tus brazos feels like it could open out in any direction, a familiar rise-and-fall melodrama that nevertheless encompasses so many variegated styles and moods. At its core, it is a film that exists through the act of watching, thinking, meditating on the next possible step to take. In a later sequence, the Sevilla character must wait with José, her lover, in a room for more than four hours, as part of a ploy to keep him away from some important political business. We wait with José and Rita as the minutes pass painfully by, in near silence. This prolonged passage of stillness and longing is unlike any moment I have ever seen in a Mexican studio film, and closer to something that might be more characteristic of a style in vogue decades later.
After the restoration’s Locarno premiere, Tomás Guarnaccia, the Argentinian critic, wrote about a double teardrop that rolls down Ninón Sevilla’s face in Llévame en tus brazos. It’s in a tragic scene at a public dance, just as her character realizes that José intends to shun her for what he perceives as her infidelity and low morals. Those early sequences are some of the film’s most purely beautiful. Set against an ordered backdrop of communal celebration and dancing, one character after another exchanges long, meaningful glances, as if connected by forces greater than those visible to us. In his response to the film, Guarnaccia wrote about one particular shot/reverse shot. In the first, a tear, sparkling under the studio lights, streaks down Rita’s cheek. After a reverse shot of José, we go back to Sevilla and the tear is gone. Then, as if by a miracle, it rolls down her cheek again—a continuity error that becomes, in this intense moment, an emotional suspension, like time trapped in a loop. I confess that I did not notice this moment when I first saw the film, and only spotted it when I revisited Llévame en tus brazos on a private link to write this article. Nevertheless, it is certainly these moments, woven almost imperceptibly into the fabric of a studio-produced film, riven and morphed by so many competing influences and production clashes, that make the maintenance, the revival, and the distribution of classical-era works like this one so essential. In them, each viewer can live their own film.
Thanks to Viviana García-Besné and Peter Conheim for their time, generosity, and assistance.
1. The Fernández film showed in New York in September, along with Llévame en tus brazos, as part of a tribute to Ninón Sevilla. This was the first time the latter restoration had been shown outside of Locarno, and the most recent screening at the time of this writing.
2. And yet, in a sign of the complexity of this retrospective's sources, the Santo film that showed in Locarno,Santo vs. the Vampire Women (Santo vs. las mujeres vampiro, Alfonso Corona Blake, 1961), showed on an unrestored 2K DCP from Filmoteca UNAM.