The Films of Arturo Ripstein

Manuel Gutiérrez Silva · Luis Duno Gottberg Editors The Films of Arturo Ripstein

The Sinister Gaze of the World Editors Manuel Gutiérrez Silva Luis Duno Gottberg Department of Spanish, Portuguese, Professor of Caribbean and Film and Latin American Studies Studies, Chair Rice University Department of Spanish, Portuguese, Houston, TX, USA and Latin American Studies Rice University Houston, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-22955-9 ISBN 978-3-030-22956-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-22956-6

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The idea for this book began with a conversation that took place many years ago between Luis Duno Gottberg and myself regarding the flms of Arturo Ripstein. Upon discovering our shared enthusiasm for Ripstein’s cinematic gaze, we organized a retrospective of his flms at Rice University. Over the course of two consecutive weekends in the Fall of 2012, colleagues, students and the Houston community had the privilege of discussing Arturo Ripstein’s flms, with the director and with his long-time collaborator Paz Alicia Garciadiego. First and foremost, we wish to thank Arturo and Paz for their generous time, patience and for agreeing to sit down with us for an extensive interview. Our dialogue with them forms the backbone of this edited volume. Since that initial conversation with Arturo, Paz, Luis and myself, many friends and colleagues, from across the country and around the world, have joined us in this discussion about Ripstein’s extensive flmography. This book, the frst volume of essays dedicated to Arturo Ripstein’s flms in English, is the result of that exchange and of the work of all the col- laborators who graciously responded to our invitation to participate. To them, we extend our gratitude for their dedication and incisive contribu- tions. The book’s intellectual merit belongs to them. Luis Duno Gottberg’s interest in Arturo Ripstein’s flms began in Caracas, at Venezuela’s National Film Institute, where he discov- ered El castillo de la pureza. Later, he would study Latin American flm more thoroughly alongside his mentor John Beverly, at the University of Pittsburgh. My own long-standing interest in Arturo Ripstein’s gaze

vii viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS has its origins in courses on Latin American flm and literature taught by Julianne Burton and Norma Klahn, respectively, at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). My curiosity for Ripstein’s flms con- tinued at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where Professor Guillermo Hernández’s History of Mexican Film seminar fur- thered my understanding of Ripstein’s place in Mexican cinematic history. We are grateful to these mentors for their exposure to Ripstein’s cinematic universe. Their many insights inform this book. This collection of essays was made possible by the support of the School of Humanities and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, at Rice University. At different stages throughout this book’s long history, chair José Aranda, Beatriz González-Stephan and the Dean of Humanities Nicolas Shumway contributed funding and advice for its completion. We thank them for their collegiality and guidance. A special thanks to Rice Professor Emerita Robert Lane Kauffman for his friendship and support along the way. We would also like to thank the director of the Rice Film Program, Charles Dove, for his help locating and for screening several of Arturo Ripstein’s flms in their original format. And we thank Department Coordinator Beverly Konzem for her help with the early logistics of this project. We also wish to acknowledge independent scholar and outstanding editor Isis Sadek who motivated us to unearth this project from a long- dormant state. Though Isis was unable to continue as our co-editor, her intellectual support, friendship and help in editing the book’s proposal accelerated the manuscript’s completion. We thank Oihane Iglesias for her help in reviewing chapter bibliographies. We extend our appreciation to Palgrave and its staff for overseeing the publication of this book. The proposal was originally supported by Shaun Vigil, who enthusiastically encouraged us along the way. The book was later prepared for publication by Glen Ramirez, who has been an excellent and professional editor. We want to thank the two anony- mous readers of the manuscript for their suggestions. They have consid- erably improved the present shape of this book. Finally, a personal note. My deepest gratitude goes to Professor Jordi Aladro-Font (UCSC) and to his wife, Almut Wolf. Twenty years ago, they kindly welcomed me—a hungry and dishevelled undergraduate student— into their home and introduced me to their close friends, Arturo and Paz Alicia. Without their friendship, this book would have never been possible.

Manuel Gutiérrez Silva Contents

1 Introduction 1 Manuel Gutiérrez Silva

Part I Slicing the Nationalist Gaze: Arturo Ripstein in the History of Mexican Film

2 Fifty Years in Film I: Ripstein’s Early Years and His Place in Mexican Cinema 25 Luis Duno Gottberg and Manuel Gutiérrez Silva

3 Anachronism and Dislocation: Tiempo de morir (1965) Between the Nuevo Cine Mexicano and the Global Western 35 Rielle Navitski

4 El castillo de la pureza (1972): A Closed Market Represented by a Closed Home 65 Christina L. Sisk

5 Marranismo, Allegory, and the Unsayable in Arturo Ripstein’s El Santo Ofcio 83 Erin Graff Zivin

ix x CONTENTS

6 Becoming “Arturo Ripstein”? On Collaboration and the “Author Function” in the Transnational Film Adaptation of El lugar sin límites (1978) 107 Catherine Grant

Part II The Sinister Gaze: Pathos, Abjection, and Blood

7 Fifty Years of Film 2: Accomplices: Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego 133 Luis Duno Gottberg and Manuel Gutiérrez Silva

8 Deconstructing the Divas: Music in Arturo Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites and La reina de la noche 145 Catherine Leen

9 Mexican Abjection: Lucha Reyes and the Politics of Suffering in La reina de la noche (1994) 169 Sergio de la Mora

10 Profundo Carmesí: Blood Weddings in Contemporary Mexico 197 Javier Guerrero

Part III Undoing the Melodramatic Gaze

11 Fifty Years of Film 3: Melodrama in Ripstein’s Films and Garciadiego’s Screenplays 221 Luis Duno Gottberg and Manuel Gutiérrez Silva

12 Arturo Ripstein: The Film Auteur in the Age of Neoliberal Production 229 Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado

13 La perdición de los hombres (2000): Beyond Melodrama and Its Variations 257 Niamh Thornton CONTENTS xi

14 Mothers, Maidens and Machos: Demolishing the Myths of Mexican Melodrama in Principio y fn (1993) 277 Caryn Connelly

15 From La Manuela to La Princesa de Jade: Visual Spectacle and the Repetition Compulsion 305 Claudia Schaefer

Index 329 Notes on Contributors

Caryn Connelly is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Northern Kentucky University. She is currently serving as department chairperson. She teaches courses in Spanish language, Latin American literature and flm, and world cinema. She holds a Master’s degree in Spanish Linguistics from Arizona State University and a Ph.D. in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Languages, Literatures and Cultures from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Her research focuses primarily on Mexican flm, on which she has published and presented on a variety of topics, including Luis Bunuel’s Mexican melodramas, Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego’s sub- versive reworkings of classic Mexican melodramas, and flms that focus on the illegal immigrant experience in the USA. Sergio de la Mora teaches in the Chicana and Chicano Studies Department at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Cinemachismo: Masculinities and Sexuality in Mexican Film (2006). He has contributed essays to Miradas al cine mexicano (2017); Clásicos del cine mexicano: 31 películas emblemáticas del cine mexicano desde la época de oro hasta el presente (2016); and Latsploitation, Latin America, and Exploitation Cinema (2009). He has published in journals including: Feminist Formations, El ojo que piensa, Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, Archivos de la Filmoteca and Film Quarterly. His research is available on Academia.edu.

xiii xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Luis Duno Gottberg is Professor at Rice University. He taught at Universidad Simón Bolivar in Caracas and Florida Atlantic University. He specializes in Nineteenth-, Twentieth-, and Twenty-frst-Century Caribbean Culture, with emphasis on Visual Culture, Race and Ethnicity, Politics and Violence. His current research, Dangerous People: Hegemony, Representation and Culture in Contemporary Venezuela, explores the relationship between popular mobilization, radical politics and culture. He is the author of La humanidad como mercancía. La esclavitud moderna en América (2014), Solventar las diferencias: La ideología del mestizaje en Cuba (2003). He is the editor of Carceral Communities: Troubling Prison Worlds in 21st Century Latin America (with Chris Garces, Andres Antillano, Sacha Darke. University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming 2019). La Política Encarnada. Biopolítica y Cultura en la Venezuela Bolivariana (2015), Submerged. Sumergido. Alternative Cuban Cinema (2013), Haiti and the Americas (2013), Miradas al margen. Cine y Subalternidad en América Latina (2008), Imagen y Subalternidad. El Cine de Víctor Gaviria (2003) and Cultura e identidad racial en América Latina Revista de Estudios Culturales e Investigaciones Literarias (2002). Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern University Press, 2014, win- ner of the 2015 Award for Best Book, Latin American Jewish Studies Association)—translated into Spanish and published in 2017 by Ediciones La Cebra in Buenos Aires—and The Wandering Signifer: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2008). She is the editor of The Marrano Spirit: Derrida and Hispanism (Fordham University Press, 2017) and The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). Her most recent book, Anarchaeologies: Ethical and Political Thinking after Literature, will be published by Fordham University Press in 2019. Catherine Grant is Professor of Digital Media and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. She has published widely on the- ories and practices of flm authorship, adaptation and intertextuality, and has edited important collections of work on world cinema, Latin American cinema, digital flm and media studies, and the audiovisual essay. Catherin NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv

Grant was the founding editor of REFRAME, an open access, academic digital platform, launched in 2012, for the online practice, publication and curation of internationally produced research and scholarship. She has edited Screening World Cinema: A Screen Reader (2006) and edited or co-edited several important special issues of [in]Transition: Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies, and SEQUENCE. Javier Guerrero (Ph.D., NYU) is Associate Professor in Princeton University. His research focuses on the intersection between visual culture and sexuality in twentieth- and twenty-frst-century Latin America. He is the author of Tecnologías del cuerpo. Exhibicionismo y visualidad en América Latina (Iberoamericana/Vervuert, 2014) and editor of Relatos enfermos (Conaculta/Literal Publishing, 2015) and Vulgaridad Capital. Políticas de lo vulgar y desafíos del “buen gusto” en América Latina (Taller de Letras, 2015). He is the co-editor of Excesos de cuerpo: relatos de con- tagio y enfermedad en América Latina (Eterna Cadencia, 2009, reprinted 2012) and the two-volume dossier Cuerpos enfermos/Contagios culturales (Estudios, 2010, 2011). He is also the author of a book on the Venezuelan flmmaker Mauricio Walerstein (FCN, 2002) and the novel Balnearios de Etiopia (Eterna Cadencia, 2010). Guerrero is currently working on two new books, Synthetic Skin: On Dolls and Miniature Cultures and The Cinema of Cruelty. Manuel Gutiérrez Silva is a Visiting Scholar at Rice University. He has published in the Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, A Contracorriente and Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos. He is author of “La Mirada des- moderna: Roger Bartra y las artes visuales” published in Demorcracia, Otredad, Melancolía: Roger Bartra ante la critica (2015) edited by Mabel Moraña and Ignacio Sánchez Prado and “Aesthetic Rivalries: Art Writing in Post-Revolutionary Mexico” published in Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (2018) edited by Ignació Sánchez Prado. Manuel Gutiérrez Silva’s forthcoming book is Let Us Ignore Our Poets: Art Writing in Post-Revolutionary Mexico (1914–1969). He is also currently co-editing a volume of scholarly essays dedicated to the Revista Moderna 1898–1903. Dr. Catherine Leen is Senior Lecturer and Head of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland. Her teaching and research interests centre on Mexican and Chicanx literature and cinema and Latin American visual culture and literature. Her book International Perspectives on Chicana/o Culture: “This World is My Place”, (Routledge, xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

New York, 2014) explores the relevance of Chicana/o Studies outside the USA. She is currently completing a monograph on Latina/o flm- makers and Mexico. Rielle Navitski is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Georgia. Her research takes comparative perspectives on Latin American cinema and visual culture, with a focus on the intersections of flm and print and the international cir- culation of flm stars and genres. She is the author of Public Spectacles of Violence: Sensational Cinema and Journalism in Early Twentieth- Century (Duke UP, 2017) and coeditor (with Nicolas Poppe) of Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America, 1896–1960 (Indiana UP, 2017). Currently, she is at work on a book-length project tentatively titled Transatlantic Cinephilia: Film Culture Between Latin America and Europe, 1945–1965. Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado is Jarvis Thurston and Mona de Duyn Professor in Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on the relationship between aesthetics, ideology and cultural institutions in Mexico, with a particular focus on literature and cinema. He is the author of seven books, including Screening Neoliiberalism. Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988–2012 (2014), Strategic Occidentalism. On Mexican Fiction, the Neoliberal Book Market and the Question of World Literature (2018), and the forthcoming Intermitencias alfonsinas. Estudios y otros textos (2004–2018). He has edited thirteen scholarly collections, the most recent of which are A History of Mexican Literature (with Anna Nogar and José Ramón Ruisánchez, 2016), Mexican Literature in Theory (2018) and Pierre Bourdieu in Hispanic Literature and Culture (2018). He has published over eighty scholarly articles on Mexican literature, culture and flm, and on Latin American cultural theory. Claudia Schaefer is the Rush Rhees Chair and a professor of Spanish, comparative literature, flm and media studies at the University of Rochester. She is the author of seven books, including Bored to Distraction: Cinema of Excess in End-of-the-Century Mexico and Spain; Lens, Laboratory, Landscape: Observing Modern Spain; and the forthcoming The Supernatural Sublime: The Wondrous Ineffability of the NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Everyday in Films from Mexico and Spain, co-authored with Raúl Rodríguez-Hernández. Christina L. Sisk is an Associate Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston. Her areas of interest are US Latina/o Studies, US-Mexico Border Studies, Mexican Literary and Cultural Studies and Latin American Cinema. She is particularly inter- ested in bridging the gaps between Latin American and US Latina/o Studies. She is the author of Mexico, Nation in Transit: Contemporary Representations of Mexican Migration to the United States (University of Arizona Press, Fall 2011). This book explores the topic of migration from a transnational approach that includes analyses of Mexican border flm, la literatura de la frontera, Mexican rock music, migrant narratives, Hollywood flms made by Mexican directors, and texts written by the immigrant second and third generations. She has published articles in Revista Iberoamericana, Latinos Studies, Aztlán and A Contracorriente. Continuing with her interest in migration, she is currently working on a book project on the representations of segregation through immigration and drug policy. Niamh Thornton is Reader in Latin American Studies at the University of Liverpool. She is a specialist in Mexican Film, Literature and Digital Cultures with a particular focus on War Stories, Gendered Narratives, Star Studies, Cultures of Taste and Distributed Content. Her key research interest is in the multiple representations of confict in literature and flm. She has published extensively. Her books include: Women and the War Story in Mexico: La novela de la Revolución (2006); an analysis of the evolution of the War Story on flm, Revolution and Rebellion in Mexican Cinema (Bloomsbury, 2013); several co-edited books including, Revolucionarias: Gender and Revolution in Latin America (2007) and International Perspectives on Chicana/o Studies: This World is My Place (Routledge, 2013); and Memory and Trauma in Mexican Visual Culture (forthcoming 2019). She is also currently completing a monograph on Violence, Curation, and Memorialisation in Mexican Film, Tastemakers and Tastemaking: Mexico and Curated Screen Violence (SUNY, 2020).