A SHOUT GLUED TO A WALL

At one point in the essay that introduces ¡Mas! Cine Mexicano, Sensational Mexican Movie Posters 1957-1990, author Rogelio Agrasánchez, Jr. quotes philosopher and art critic Eugenio d’Ors, who called movie posters "a shout glued to a wall."

As someone who works in advertising, it’s an appealing metaphor. As a film fan, even more so. And after reading ¡Mas! Cine Mexicano, a handsome new coffee table book released here in Canada by Raincoast Books, I’m convinced it’s also pretty accurate - at least when it comes to Mexican cinema.

Now, I watch a lot of movies. The last year I kept track, I clocked 207. But I’ve only been watching for thirty-odd years, and filmmakers have been doing their thing for 113 years and counting, all over the world.

Which is why I gravitate toward books like ¡Mas! Cine Mexicano. They remind me how many movies I haven’t seen, and how much I still have to learn. And they give me a phrasebook - a Berlitz crash course - I can use when exploring these new frontiers of cinema.

The book’s opening essay, presented in a bilingual Spanish/English format, moves swiftly through over three decades of production and promotion in the Mexican film industry. And author Agrasánchez knows whereof he speaks. He lets drop, casually, the fact that “[i]n 1970, my father acquired a film production company that had gone bankrupt, and almost immediately he started churning out adventure movies. The masked wrestlers Santo, Blue Demon and Mil Máscaras were brought to my backyard to battle mummies, rat people and the occasional mad scientist.”

Okay, wow. That’s a childhood.

The wrestling-horror genre is the Mexican cinema with which I’m most familiar, but despite evident fondness for the heroes of the lucha libre, Agrasánchez doesn’t spend much time on it; the wrestling-horror film posters take up less than eight pages in the book. (But even within those eight pages there are surprises: I knew about Santo and the Blue Demon, but I’d never even heard of Neutron, El Enmascarado Negro (Neutron, The Man in the Black Mask)).

With Neutron introduced, Agrasánchez plunges into a description of his family’s pioneering of the mojado (“wetback”) genre. Dealing with “issues typical of the border region - undocumented immigrants, minor mafias, crime” and “[d]enouncing the mistreatment of illegal aliens and delving into their personal sorrows, the stories [of the mojado genre] had wide appeal for spectators.”

Starting with Mojados (Wetbacks), the genre went on to spawn such films as Las Braceras (Wetback Women), Gringo Mojado (Wetback Gringo) and Maura el Mojado (Mauro the Wetback), which promises “¡Hazañas de violencia sin limites, de un ilegal indomable!” (“Feats of unlimited violence by an indomitable illegal!”). To be clear, I haven’t seen any of these films. But after drinking in Agrasánchez’s careful selection of garish, gorgeous, painted posters, I want to see them all.

And ¡Mas! Cine Mexicano is full of discoveries like that. Agrasánchez takes us on a tour of Mexican crime films such as El Caín del Bajío (Cain of the Lowlands) and .357 Magnum (no translation necessary); juvenile delinquent movies like Juventud sin Ley (Lawless Youth), and Ratas del Asfalto (Asphalt Rats); and cine de cabaretas, or “nightclub girl” pictures, which include such titles as Zona Rosa (Red Zone) and the blunt Han Violado a una Mujer (A Woman was Raped).

More surprises lie in store in the section devoted to Mexican comedies. I knew about Mario “Cantinflas” Moreno (Passepartout in Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)), but personalities like the comedy duo of Viruta and Capulina? La India Maria? Chespirito? All news to me. So I’m especially grateful that Agrasánchez devotes considerable attention to the comedy genre and the contributions of the moneros, or “monkey makers”, caricaturists who specialized in “transforming the familiar faces of actors and actresses into expressive cartoons”. Artists such as Juan Manuel Guillén, who designed all the posers for Cantinflas’ films, were world-class cartoonists who would have been right at home in the pages of vintage Mad Magazine. (According to Agrasánchez, Mad was in fact an influence on this group, in particular Héctor Valdés, whose poster for Las Cenizas Del Diputado (The Congressman’s Ashes) looks like it could have been drawn by Jack Davis.)

¡Mas! Cine Mexicano is an incredibly refreshing read in this era of “big face” posters, when even films as complex as There Will Be Blood or as hyped as Michael Clayton are sold with nothing more than a big picture of the star’s face. Granted, given the subject matter of either of those films, the approach might be defensible, but it’s still not very interesting to look at. When I walk through my local cineplex, these posters come at me sotto voce.

Give me a shout glued to a wall any day.

Command+s.

Ian Driscoll de vuelto con sudor, dolor, amor y coñazos galore.

Tags: art , Blue Demon , book review , Cantinflas , lucha libre , Mexican cinema , Mexico , mojado , posters , Raincoast , Santo