A string of horror films reworked the tropes of the macabre genre that had been established in Weimar cinema of the 1920s and the contemporaneous Universal fright franchises. The informal trilogy (La Llorona (4/3); El Fantasma del Convento (4/10) ; Dos Monjes (4/17) owes a debt to these earlier films but also complicates their styles with narrative innovation and ambiguity, presenting parallel stories from multiple points of view. Like many other pictures of the period, each film deploys a panoply of the competing camera strategies (superimpositions, tracking shots, etc.) that flourished before the talkie became a codified form.

The German Expressionist influence could also be seen in La mujer del puerto (4/24), adapted from a Maupassant story and directed by the Russian expatriate Arcany Boytler but nevertheless cited as ‘the first singular Mexican film’ by Carlos Monsiváis. Andrea Palma’s portrayal of a fallen woman whose string of personal disasters leads her to prostitution and incest established a major archetype of the Mexican cinema. Boytler’s film moves along with an unresolved tension between melodrama flourishes and heavy, meandering atmosphere that is quite unlike anything else in the cinema of the period.

Fernando de Fuentes’s Vámonos con Pancho Villa (5/1) represented the apex of national filmmaking – a state-sponsored superproduction that worked through the unresolved traumas that the Revolution had sparked two decades earlier. De Fuentes was given access to a deluxe studio and the cooperation of the military, but his film was far from propaganda and his account of the Revolution was decidedly less than Glorious: the rural band of six leones who join VIlla’s army at the start of the film gradually shrinks as each member meets an increasingly grisly and absurd death.

In contrast, De Fuentes’s next major film, Allá en al Rancho Grande (5/8), was a light outing that engaged few but won an international audience. De Fuentes’s genial blend of songs, jokes, and romance at a cozy, patriarchal, pre-Revolutionary hacienda achieved what Hollywood had longed failed to do: develop an entertainment idiom – the comedia ranchera – that could captivate the Latin American market. After its runaway international success, Rancho Grande became a template for most subsequent commercial productions in Mexico. De Fuentes’s own attempt to replicate the success of Rancho Grande can be seen in the musical melodrama La Zandunga (5/22), for which he reappropriated the talents of Hollywood’s Latina star Lupe Vélez.

Other Mexican films received attention from an elite international audience rather than a popular Latin American one. Emilio “El Indio” Fernández’s Maria Candelaria (5/29) cultivated exotic interest and won the Grand Prize at Cannes. Fernández and his cameraman Gabriel Figueroa managed to wring exquisite cinematographic beauty from this delirious melodrama of degradation set amongst the Indians of Xochimilco. Julio Brancho’s urban labor thriller Distinto amanecer (6/5) garnered acclaim as an engaged response to the apolitical film noir then developing in Hollywood.

Censored, banned, and presumed completely lost until the mid-1990s, La mancha de sangre (5/15) attracted no comparable following. The film, which follows an innocent country boy who falls in love with the marquee whore of the Mancha de sangre nightlcub, superficially resembles others in the cabaret subgenre but director Adolfo Best-Maugard (who served as an assistant to Eisenstein on Que viva Mexico) offers delirious details (real-life pimps, full-frontal female nudity)that can be found nowhere else. KW close

***Schedule Change***La Mancha de Sangre
Adolfo Best-Maugard, 1937 - 70 min.

Censored, banned, and presumed completely lost until the mid-1990s, La mancha de sangre is probably the strangest and most sordid film to emerge from Mexico in the 1930s. The film, which follows an innocent country boy who falls in love with the marquee whore of the Mancha de sangre nightlcub, superficially resembles other cabaret films but director Best-Maugard (an assistant to Eisenstein on his ill-fated Que viva Mexico) offers delirious details (real-life pimps, full-frontal female nudity) found nowhere else. The only surviving copy has no sound for reel 4 and no picture for reel 9. Archival 35mm.

***Schedule Change*** Vámonos con Pancho Villa
Fernando de Fuentes, 1935 - 92 min.

During the mid-1930s Cárdenas sponsored efforts to elevate production standards of Mexican films: subsidizing a deluxe studio, giving filmmakers access to artillery, and investing one million pesos in the superproduction Vámonos con Pancho Villa. De Fuentes’s account of the Revolution is less than Glorious: the rural band of six leones who join Villa’s army gradually shrinks as each member meets an increasingly grisly and absurd death. Without any market outside Mexico, Vámonos con Pancho Villa tanked, though later it was judged the best and most serious film ever made in Mexico. In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

***Schedule Change*** Allá en el Rancho Grande
Fernando de Fuentes, 1936 - 95 min.

With Rancho Grande de Fuentes achieved what Hollywood had long failed to do: develop an entertainment idiom – the comedia ranchera – that could captivate the Latin America market. After its runaway international success, Rancho Grande became a template for most subsequent commercial productions in Mexico. De Fuentes’s genial blend of songs, jokes, and romance at a cozy, patriarchal, pre-Revolutionary hacienda was perhaps an ideological regression, but it was still an improvement upon Hollywood’s own frontier myths. Tito Guízar became a star as a singing, lovesick ranch hand. Note: in Spanish with French Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

La Mujer del Puerto
Arcany Boytler, 1933 - 76 min.

Widely cited as ‘the first singular Mexican film,’ La Mujer del Puerto was ironically directed by Arcany Boytler, a Russian expatriate who had trained under Eisenstein. Boytler synthesized the influence of German Expressionism cinema and French poetic realism to craft a germinal version of the fallen woman who would become a staple of the Mexican cinema. Andrea Palma plays Rosario, a woman from Veracruz who becomes a prostitute after her cheating fiancé kills her father and leaves her destitute. Boytler’s vision of Rosario’s lot is atmospheric and parallels Mizoguchi’s geisha films. Note: in Spanish with French Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

***Schedule Change***Distinto Amanecer
Julio Brancho, 1943 - 108 min.

Mexican films often played at neighborhood movie theaters in the US, but Distinto amanecer garnered additional plaudits from the art house crowd. Indeed, the special qualities of Brancho’s film are brought into relief by comparison to the early American film noirs to which it is contemporaneous but decidedly more political. Brancho’s urban thriller follows a labor leader (Pedro Armendáriz) being hunted by state gunmen; he finds refuge in the ladies’ room of a movie theater, where he reunites with an old flame married to an ex-diplomat who possesses a document that could prove charges of corruption. In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

***Schedule Change***Enamorada
Emilio Fernández, 1946 - 98 min.

From imdb.com: "In Mexican Revolution times, a guerrilla general (Armendáriz) and his troops take the conservative town of Cholula, near by Mexico City. As the revolutionaries mistreat the town's riches, Armendáriz falls for beautiful and wild Beatriz Peñafiel (María Félix), the daughter of one of the town's richest men." In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35mm.

***Schedule Change***La Perla
Emilio Fernández, 1947 - 85 min.

From imdb.com: "Quino is a Mexican diver that discovers a pearl at the bottom of the sea. He and his wife Juana, and their son have just taken possession of a pearl that is worth thousands. Everyday people try to get in on the cash, even Pearl Dealers try to rip them off. When Quino is attacked one day, he kills his attackers in self defence. His brother suggests their only hope is to leave the village. But on their journey to give their son an education they never had, someone may just do anything to prevent it." In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35 mm.

***Schedule Change***La Virgen que forjó una patria
Julio Brancho, 1942 - 110 min.

From the New York Times: "La Virgen que Forjó una patria (Saint That Forged a Country) is one of several Mexican films inspired by the 16th-century sighting of the Virgin Mary -- a phenomenon that abruptly ended hostilities between the Spanish Conquistadors and the Aztec Indians and spearheaded the spread of Catholicism throughout Latin America. Former romantic lead Ramon Novarro delivers a sincere, thoughtful performance as Juan Diego, the humble peasant who built the church on the hill where first he saw the Blessed Virgin. The film expansively covers the years 1531 to 1810, and features such prominent Mexican clerics as Brother Martin (played by Domingo Solar) and Father Hidalgo (Julio Villareal). Gloria Marin also appears as the Aztec slave girl who figured so importantly in the proceedings. Somewhat long and drawn out, the film nonetheless held Mexican audiences in thrall back in 1944." In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35 mm.

Maria Calendaria
Emilio Fernández, 1943 - 102 min.

The first Mexican film to attract critical attention in Europe was, fitfully, an exotic paean to Indian life in Xochimilco. Fernández drew the lyrical beauty of the film from the folkloric implications of Eisenstein’s images of the Mexican countryside. One-time Hollywood star Dolores del Río plays the flower girl whose dubious heritage arouses resentment. A merchant to whom she owes a small sum does everything to ruin her life: orchestrating the arrest of her fiancé and turning the village against her after finding a nude likeness of her on an artist’s canvas. In Spanish with no Subtitles. Archival 35mm. Presented by Visiting Professor Cecilia Sayad.

***Schedule Change***La Zandunga
Fernando de Fuentes, 1937 - 107 min.

Within a year of Allá en al Rancho Grande, the Mexican film industry devoted half of its output to churning out sentimental and folkloric variations upon the comedia ranchera calculated to appeal to the Spanish-speaking market. De Fuentes moved away from the political subject matter that had animated his earlier work and churned out musical melodramas like his compatriots. But this one is a cut above the rest, if only because this story of a proud woman in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec fighting off suitors stars Hollywood’s most famous Latina actress Lupe Vélez in her first Mexican film. In Spanish with English Subtitles. Archival 35mm.