A SHOUT GLUED TO A WALL
by Ian Driscoll
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: Blue Demon , book review , Cantinflas , Mexican cinema , Mexico , mojado , posters , Raincoast , Santo
i'd kill to see any of the mojado pictures you mention.
(and not to focus too much on lucha libre, but george eastman house just had a lucha libre exhibition. there's an associated podcast. while the exhibition director's trending towards dickish, the pictures are neat).
—Carol Borden
There's obviously a lot I don't know about Mexican movies, but I actually keep pondering the revelation that there's a genre of mexican movies called "mojado" and the english translation of that term.
I'm trying to think of an equivalent genre - maybe blaxploitation? But it doesn't quite seem parallel. I think part of the strangeness for me is that they have taken an offensive english term and, in reclaiming it, have also translated it into spanish. Maybe it's like if people in Quebec made a genre of movie called "grenouille" (frog)?
—Mr.Dave
Around the 5th time I read my nephew The Cat in the Hat, I started thinking. Sure, I might have been overthinking my thinker and overpuzzling my puzzler reading the book 15 times in half an hour and cutting it with The Cat in the Hat Comes Back!, but I think the Cat in the Hat is the Devil.
So you've written a book that fits the current vogue perfectly - let's say it's a grimy cyberpunk novel in the mid-1980s - does that mean you've guaranteed long-lasting fame for yourself? Probably not. But don't worry, a lot of your compatriots are suffering the same fate.
I once heard a reader dismiss a particular romance novel - and, in fact, the author’s entire writing career - because she felt the writer had no grasp of history. Her complaint? In the book, a character used a zipper several weeks before it was invented in real life. Now, I’m aware that historical errors can be very distracting, but it’s also possible to pay too much attention to the nicities of historical detail at the expense of the actual story. More important, and thus more damaging when done wrong, is historical anachronism pertaining to character.