Project overview

 

As part of the “Mapping the Megalopolis” collaborative research project and GLCA granting initiative, I propose to locate, describe and map important locations from some of the most important films set in Mexico City.  Taking as my inspiration, Rebecca Solnit’s map of movie locations from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Eadweard Muybridge’s early silent films in San Francisco, I propose to identify, document and photograph locations from two key midcentury Mexican films (Solnit 23-30). This information will allow me to build a map that identifies locations important in the political imagination and consciousness of Mexico at Midcentury.

 

The first film is Salón México (1948) by director Emilio Fernández. Although (“El Indio”) Fernández is better known for his films that idealize rural Mexican landscapes (films like María Candelaria [1943] and Río Escondido [1947]), Salón México explores urban locations throughout Mexico City. Named for a famous dance hall that inspired Aaron Copeland’s symphonic composition by the same name, the film is a melodrama that details the tragic fate of a dancer and cocktail waitress named Mercedes who lives, and eventually dies, in an effort to save her younger sister. The film alternates between seedy dance hall locations and monumental post-revolutionary architecture and spaces.  The film also uses locations that reimagine Mexico’s pre-colonial past, including el Museo Nacional and even a curious reference to the Templo Mayor.

 

Emilio Fernández was famously direct and unambiguous when describing his work and its place in the canon of Mexican cine. As Julia Tunón reminds us in her landmark study:  His [Emilio Fernández’] most famous line is now well known: “¡El cine mexicano soy yo!” [“I am Mexican cinema!”] He presumes to combine the latest advances in film-making with the nationalistic ideals of his time. It is important, therefore, to examine both of these aspects. (Tunon 159)

 

For Tunón, Fernández is an enthusiastic creator of nationalistic images and rhetoric in his early films, and a somewhat reluctant critic of institutional and political culture in later films. Salón México, I argue, falls somewhere between these two poles. Unsurprisingly, the geography of the film exhibits the same unstable rhetorical position alternating between inspiring views of a private colegio de señoritas, the Centro Histórico, and the Museo Nacional on the one hand, and Mexico City’s bajos fondos on the other.

 

The second film I’ll document is Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (1950), perhaps the most iconic 20th century, cinematic representation of Mexico City as an urban space. Buñuel’s film is certainly his most well-known project completed while in exile after the Spanish Civil War. Los Olvidados is set in locations throughout Mexico City’s industrial districts and poorer neighborhoods. Like Salón México, Buñuel’s film imagines institutional authority as potentially valuable and constructive, but ultimately impotent and inadequate to address the deep social and educational inequities that marginalize the city’s urban poor. The film’s locations alternate between wretched slums on the periphery and industrial building sites in the city center. The one bright moment in the film occurs, somewhat ironically, when Pepe, one of the young gang members who move freely from the periphery toward the center (without ever truly occupying it), is arrested and sent to the escuela granja, a kind of school for juvenile delinquents premised on the romantic notion that all they are missing is true and authentic contact with Mexico’s rural spaces. The film’s geography follows the emotional trajectory of the narrative and describes a kind of symbolic landscape of misery, momentary hopefulness, and tragic conclusion.

 

Although the two films are quite different in subject matter and tone, both were filmed by Mexico’s preeminent cinematographer, Gabriel Figueroa.  And in both, Figueroa presents images of the city that function as signifiers that explore and question post-revolutionary ideological motifs. As I map the important locations from these two films from Mexico’s Golden age, I’ll be able to explore changes in the city’s landscape and architecture along two different lines of inquiry. First, as I locate and photograph important locations and landmarks, I will build a map that shows the symbolic geography and potential correspondences between the two films. The project will also allow me to document geographic changes over time as the city has grown, expanded, built, demolished, and overbuilt itself from the 1940s to the present. As importantly, my project will also map changes in the way the geographic spaces in both films represent Mexico City in symbolic terms.

 

Film is, in some important sense, a concatenation of the body and geography. In 1896, Auguste Lumière’s (the French inventor of the cinematographe and moving pictures) Mexican protégé, Salvador Toscano Barragán, filmed and presented the very first moving pictures of Mexico City caught on camera in a short entitled, General Díaz Strollling through Chapultepec Park (1896).  The film shows a confident Porfirio Díaz and his family enjoying the bucolic wonders of the park, situated in the heart of the city. In other words, the first movie of Mexico City locates its eponymous head of state securely within a particular and well-known geography that fairly screams its symbolic importance in the political imagination.  As Stephen Barber, in his book Projected Cities writes:  "Film began with a scattering of gesturing ghosts, of human bodies walking city streets, within the encompassing outlines of bridges, hotels and warehouses, under polluted industrial skies. The first incendiary spark of the film image . . . propelled forward a history of the body that remains inescapably locked into the history of the city" (Barber 13-14).

 

Bodies, fixed by politics and interpolated by larger ideological forces, are in some sense the most fundamental constituent of film. And if Barber is right, they represent different ideological moments and articulations as they move through the geography of the city. Seen in this light, the map of the cinematic city represents a field of signification that may enable bodies to represent particular ideological nodes as they orient themselves in a given geographical location. In other words, cinematic geography articulates political and economic power as an expression of particular bodies in a very particular urban spaces.