Abstract
This essay discusses the feature films by Arturo Ripstein released from 1990 to the present. Traversing through works ranging from Principio y fin (1993) to Las razones del corazón (2013), the piece discusses the ways in which the changes in film production regimes brought by neoliberalism affected the work of an auteur like Ripstein. In addition, the piece discusses the ways in which elements such as melodrama, the difference between global and planetary cinema, transnationalism, and tremendism evolve through this period in Ripstein’s cinema.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, I cannot discuss Mexican film history in detail here, but readers may consult Carl J. Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society 1896–2004 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005); Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Mexican Cinema, trans. Ana M. López (London: British Film Institute/Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 1993); and Andrea Noble, Mexican National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2005), for an in-depth discussion of this periodization.
- 2.
More precisely, it seems that critics have more narrowly focused on Ripstein’s 1975 masterpiece El lugar sin límites. See particularly David William Foster, “Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites and the Hell of Heteronormativity,” in Violence and the Body: Race, Gender and the State, edited by Arturo J. Aldama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 375–387; Sergio de la Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006); and Catherine Grant, “La función de ‘los autores.’ La adaptación cinematográfica transnacional de El lugar sin límites,” Revista Iberoamericana 199 (2002): 253–268.
- 3.
For the most canonical discussion of this period, see Charles Ramírez Berg, Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film 1967–1983 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992). For a more specific discussion of these directors as a generation, see Leonardo García Tsao, “One Generation—Four Filmmakers: Cazals, Hermosillo, Leduc and Ripstein,” in Paranaguá, Mexican Cinema, 209–223.
- 4.
For an in-depth discussion of Buñuel’s role in Mexico and on his shaping of Mexican social cinema, see Ernesto R. Acevedo-Muñoz, Buñuel and Mexico: The Crisis of National Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Augusto M. Torres, Buñuel y sus discípulos (Madrid: Huerga y Fierro, 2005).
- 5.
I developed these ideas in my book. See Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema (1988–2012) (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014). However, existing scholarship has described some of these transformations. See Ana Rosas Mantecón, Ir al cine. Antropología de los públicos, la ciudad y la pantallas (Mexico: Gedisa/Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, 2017); and Lucila Hinojosa Córdova, El cine mexicano. De lo global a lo local (Mexico: Trillas, 2003), for a discussion on the changes in the exhibition of cinema, and Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society 1896–2004, 187–257 for a discussion of how this period works in relation to the history of Mexican cinema.
- 6.
Virginia Wright Wexman, ed., Film and Authorship (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 6.
- 7.
Isabel Castells, “Un espejo de lodo. Cine de Arturo Ripstein y Paz Alicia Garciadiego,” in Arturo Ripstein (Las Palmas/Santa Cruz de Tenerife: Cuadernos de la Filmoteca Canaria, 2002), 9. My translation.
- 8.
Paulo Antonio Paranaguá, Arturo Ripstein (Madrid: Cátedra/Filmoteca Española, 1997), 259. My translation.
- 9.
See Caryn Connelly, “Passionate Extremes: Revisions of Gender Types and Archetypes in the Films of Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego,” in Yvonne Fuentes and Margaret Parker, Leading Ladies. Mujeres en la literatura hispana y las artes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006a), 152–164.
- 10.
Carmelo Esterrich, “Para desbaratar a mamá. El último cine de Arturo Ripstein y Paz Alicia Garciadiego,” Objeto visual 11 (2005): 56. My translation.
- 11.
This question has also been raised regarding Ripstein’s previous movies. Catherine Grant (2002), for example, studies the idea of authorship embedded in the transnational collaboration between José Donoso, Ripstein, and Manuel Puig in the adaptation of El lugar sin límites.
- 12.
Brian Michael Goss, Global Auteurs: Politics in the Films of Almodóvar, von Trier and Winterbottom (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), 53.
- 13.
Marvin D’Lugo, “Transnational Film Authors and the State of Latin American Cinema,” in Wexman, 2003, 116.
- 14.
Ibid., 129.
- 15.
Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People and Power on the Global Screen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 127.
- 16.
Kenneth Turan, Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
- 17.
This information comes from Premios internacionales del cine mexicano 1938–2008 (Mexico: Cineteca Nacional, 2009).
- 18.
See Darlene J. Sadlier, Latin American Melodrama: Passion, Pathos and Entertainment (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009). I would contend that Ripstein’s work is in part constructed by undermining the traditions described by the authors in Sadlier’s book, rather than making melodramas himself. This is why I am not altogether convinced about the way in which authors like Connelly characterize Ripstein’s films as melodramas. See Caryn Connelly, “Passionate Extremes: The Melodramas of Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego,” PhD diss., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, 2006b.
- 19.
Vicente J. Benet, “Principio y fin/Beginning and End,” in The Cinema of Latin America, ed. Alberto Elena and Marían Díaz López (London: Wallflower, 2003), 206–209.
- 20.
Foster, “Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites and the Hell of Heteronormativity”; De la Mora, Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film, 187–257.
- 21.
Bashkar Sarkar, “Epic Melodrama, or Cine-Maps of the Global South,” in The Epic Film in World Culture, ed. Robert Burgoyne (London: Routledge, 2011), 264.
- 22.
I have worked on a further discussion on the comparison between these two films in the context of nationalism and Mexican cinema, see Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema (1988–2012), 42–50.
- 23.
Natalia Jacovkis, “An Epic of Losers: Arturo Ripstein’s Profundo Carmesí and the Deconstruction of Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary Discourses,” Confluencia 25, no. 2 (2010): 148.
- 24.
Roberto Schwarz, Misplaced Ideas: Essays on Brazilian Culture, ed. John Gledson (London: Verso, 1992).
- 25.
Further details of how this and other movies were made can be found in the interview with Ripstein and Garciadiego included in this book. Interestingly, this story was remade in 2006 by director Todd Robinson, under the title Lonely Hearts. Here, Jared Leto and Salma Hayek play the killers, in a casting that places the grotesque nature of the characters central to Kastle and Ripstein’s versions.
- 26.
Claudia Schaefer, “Crimes of Passion: Arturo Ripstein’s Profundo Carmesí and the Terrors of Melodrama,” Latin American Literary Review 57 (2001): 100–101.
- 27.
Jacovkis, “An Epic of Losers: Arturo Ripstein’s Profundo Carmesí and the Deconstruction of Mexico’s Post-Revolutionary Discourses,” 158.
- 28.
Estrada’s film focused on the mayor of a small town during the Alemán presidency to mount a devastating critique of the PRI. The film’s premise was constructed on the contrast between the discourses of modernity put forward by the post-revolutionary regime and the deep poverty of the small town, caused in great part by the corruption of the people chosen to govern it. The film’s choice of alemanismo was meant to be a critique of the same modernization discourses set forward by the PRI in the 1990s, which led to a failed attempt at censoring the film and, ultimately, to the film’s success with movie-going audiences. For a discussion of this film, see Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema (1988–2012), 144–154.
- 29.
Mora, Mexican Cinema: Reflections of a Society 1896–2004, 230.
- 30.
For the story of Sundance’s impact in American filmmaking, see James Mottram, The Sundance Kids: How the Mavericks Took Back Hollywood (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006); Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).
- 31.
Paranaguá, Arturo Ripstein, 275.
- 32.
Martin Rubin, “The Grayness of Darkness: The Honeymoon Killers and Its Impact on Psychokiller Cinema,” The Velvet Light Trap 30 (1992): 53.
- 33.
Victoria Ruétalo, “Border Crossings and Textual Gaps: A ‘Globalized’ Mode of Production in Profundo Carmesí and Terra Estrangeira,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 5, no. 1–2 (2008): 58.
- 34.
Tabea Linhard, “Unheard Confessions and Transatlantic Connections. Y tu mamá también and Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 5, no. 1–2 (2008): 44.
- 35.
The story is included in Max Aub, La verdadera historia de la muerte de Francisco Franco (Valencia: Segorbe, 2001).
- 36.
Gina Hermann, Written in Red: The Spanish Communist Memoir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 129.
- 37.
Pércio de Castro, “From Waiter to Anarchistic, Revolutionary Hero: Eroticism, Politics and Nostalgia with a Flavor of Sadomasochism in Arturo Ripstein’s The Virgin of Lust,” in The Image of the Hero II in Literature, Media and Society: Proceedings of 2010 Conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, ed. Will Wright and Steven Kaplan (Colorado Spring and Pueblo, CO: The Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery/Colorado State University-Pueblo, 2010), 240.
- 38.
Michael Wood, “The Human Comedy,” Booklet of Luis Buñuel, Viridiana (New York: The Criterion Collection, 2006), s.p.
- 39.
Gabriel García Márquez, No One Writes to the Colonel and Other Stories, trans. J.S. Bernstein (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005), 62.
- 40.
“Visión de lo viejo y de lo nuevo: El evangelio de las maravillas ,” in Jesús García, El cine de Arturo Ripstein. La seducción del bárbaro (Valencia: Ediciones de la Mirada, 1998), 15. My translation.
- 41.
According to the numbers compiled by the Web site Box Office Mojo, the film ranked 271 in domestic box-office sales for 2009. The top Mexican movie of the year, El estudiante, raised over three million dollars, while Ripstein’s film only raised more money than four of the 275 films released that year.
- 42.
María Soledad Rodríguez, “Du Choeur Antique aux Mariachis. Así es la vida (2000) d’Arturo Ripstein ou le modèle tragique au filtre du cinéma mexicain,” América. Cahiers du CRICCAL 34 (2004): 145.
- 43.
Francisco Javier Tovar Paz, “Medea de Séneca en Así es la vida (2000), filme de Arturo Ripstein,” Revista de Estudios Latinos 2 (2002): 195.
- 44.
Jorge Ayala Blanco, La grandeza del cine mexicano (Mexico: Océano, 2001), 26. Ayala Blanco invariably attacks Ripstein’s work. He famously characterized Profundo Carmesí as “dark Mexican curious” and Principio y fin as an inane melodrama. See, respectively, Jorge Ayala Blanco, La fugacidad del cine mexicano (Mexico: Oceano, 2001), 47 and 369. He also tore down La virgen de la lujuria, calling it misogynistic and repetitive in La herética del cine mexicano (Mexico: Océano, 2006), 55. Considering the fact that Ayala Blanco is widely recognized as the dean of Mexican film criticism, his clashes with Ripstein tend to be high profile and have even led Ripstein to pursue legal action against him. In any case, Ayala Blanco’s readings show the difficulties faced by Ripstein to find adequate readers of his films, caught between the leftist inclinations of critics like Ayala Blanco and audiences largely uninterested in the stories told by his cinema.
- 45.
Between the completion of the original version of this essay and the final edits, Ripstein released another film, La calle de la amargura (2015), of which I would highlight two salient features. First, it is a return to his deepest Buñuelian roots, as the film features two small persons who make a living as wrestlers, something that comes close to the urban tremendism of Buñuel’s Los olvidados. This return is significant because the film is in fact closer to Ripstein’s work in the 1970s than to his films from the 1990s and 2000s, due particularly to its play with urban melodrama. Second, the film benefitted from new structures of distribution. It got released in the online platform Filmin, the Mexican Film Institute’s response to Netflix, as well as Filmstruck, the now defunct joint venture between the Criterion Collection and TCM. It is clear that the brand of cinema favored by Ripstein is finding in new distribution venues some new opportunities, after the mainstream distribution channels in Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries are increasingly narrow for domestic production.
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Sánchez Prado, I.M. (2019). Arturo Ripstein: The Film Auteur in the Age of Neoliberal Production. In: Gutiérrez Silva, M., Duno Gottberg, L. (eds) The Films of Arturo Ripstein. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22956-6_12
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