The three amigos

The transnational filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón

Deborah Shaw

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781526112224
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the Mexican born directors Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón. The book examines the career trajectories of the directors and presents a detailed analysis of their most significant films.

PART I

Guillermo del Toro: the alchemist

1

Cronos: introducing Guillermo del Toro

Cronos is a film that has been given an afterlife with the subsequent global success of the director. The fact that a small Mexican film made in 1992 and released in 1993 is available in well known film outlets in modern urban centres and from online outlets throughout the world is entirely due to the auteurist status of the director. Cronos is an interesting film to explore, as it shows del Toro without big budgets. At the time, it was the most expensive Mexican film ever made, with a budget of $2 million, according to the Internet Movie Database (IMDB; uk.imdb.com); however, that is clearly miniscule in comparison with Hollywood and European art cinema productions. Del Toro has not made a film in Mexico since Cronos, and has escaped the limited funding possibilities that are encountered by most Mexican filmmakers. It is, then, fascinating to analyse his first feature, which was made without even the modest or medium-sized funds of his later films.

Most of the literature on Cronos has focused on the film’s relationships to national cinema and to the vampire genre (Davies, 2008; Kantaris, 1998; Kraniauskas, 1998; Stock, 1999). Kraniauskas (1998), for instance, sees the vampire as a symbol of post-colonial/neo-colonial transnational economic relations in Latin America. Stock follows a similar line and, as well as highlighting the power relations that the film calls attention to between the USA and Mexico, argues against trying to perceive the film purely as a vehicle of Mexicanness; Stock (1999: 277–278) calls for a revalorisation of the hybrid film, and argues that, in its transnational nature, it subverts the traditions of the vampire film. Ann Davies questions Stock and argues effectively that vampire films are transnational by nature, and thus places the film firmly within the vampire tradition. In her words: ‘most if not all vampire texts dissolve and cross boundaries and borders, that doing this in fact is one of the conventions of vampire texts’ (Davies, 2008: 396).

I do not want to rehash ideas from this high-quality work, but I will consider the film’s place within a national/transnational paradigm, with a clearer focus on the director himself and the production context as I argue that the approach to filmmaking taken in Cronos is central to understanding del Toro’s subsequent positioning between global auteur and blockbuster director. No critics have focused on the way that del Toro’s vision in his first film relates to his subsequent better-known texts. I read Cronos as a key film, in that it lays bare a personal vision which will be repeated and developed in subsequent films. While accepting financial realities and the importance of production contexts, I have found it more fruitful to seek out the authorial voice, which is large, ambitious, and always transnational, rather than categorising his films as straightforward examples of Mexican, Hollywood, or Spanish filmmaking.

In the analysis which follows I examine the way the film questions the fixity of borders while also making a political statement on US–Mexican relations. I consider the way in which the director alchemically utilises references from across cultural, mythical, and religious texts, from across continents and ages, to create a film which produces a personal and Mexican take on immortality, death, and morality. I explore the ways in which the writer-director applies his thesis on the importance of death to the horror genre, and examine how this subverts an understanding of death as the dark element to be feared. I go on to analyse how del Toro, through Cronos, establishes an auteurist identity, which will be developed with experience and access to larger budgets. I argue for the centrality of early horror filmmakers James Whale and Terence Fisher, and their interpretations of Dracula and Frankenstein. Finally, I consider traits which are common to del Toro’s approach to filmmaking and outline how his defining characteristics – genre crossings, the marrying of the fantastical and the realist, and his political vision – are first essayed in his only film made in Mexico before being implemented in his later films.

Cronos: a national/transnational film

Cronos was made before the new possibilities for Mexican directors ushered in by the privatised financial approaches taken in the making and marketing of Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000) and Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también (2001), and funding problems figure prominently in the narrative given by the director of the filmmaking process. Del Toro has spoken of the fact that, after much negotiation over three years, he eventually got funding from the Mexican Film Institute (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, IMCINE), but that IMCINE refused to take the finished product to international festivals as it was a horror film, and it provided only a tiny budget to allow him to take the film to Cannes (Wood, 2006: 38). In the DVD commentary that accompanies the 2006 release from Optimum, he has also spoken of the producers’ refusal to pay for the Cronos device, and the fact that he had to self-finance part of the project, resulting in crippling bank loans, with excessive interest rates and a debt that took four years to pay off. This was not helped by the very limited distribution given to the film when it was originally released – it was screened, for example, in only six theatres in Mexico City (Lázaro-Reboll, 2007: 44).

The roots of the source of contention between the director and IMCINE appear to lie in opposing visions of what cinema should be, with the national film institute endorsing social realist/art cinema forms rather than popular genre formats. Lázaro-Reboll summarises the attitude (at the time) of the official funding bodies well, with reference to Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también and del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone, 2001):

These Mexican–Spanish co-productions and the generic forms chosen by the directors – horror and road-movie – are not embraced by official culture as illustrations of local cultural concerns or as representatives of national artistic pride, suggesting an institutional preference for indigenous cultural products, which are ‘authentically Mexican’. (Lázaro-Reboll, 2007: 44)

Nevertheless, this is not the whole story, and many in Mexico welcomed this new direction in national filmmaking, signalled by the fact that it won nine Arieles, Mexico’s prestigious national film awards. Subsequently, del Toro’s international status has meant that within Mexico he has shifted from a being troublesome filmmaker who wanted money, but refused to fit into previously understood art cinema paradigms, to a star director who can influence national film policy, and who was the subject of a retrospective in the Mexican Cineteca nacional (Molina Ramírez, 2007). This is despite the fact that Cronos is the only film that del Toro has made in Mexico. It is thus ironic that the initial attitude from cinematic bodies and the lack of sustained financial support have led to his self-imposed exile from Mexico and success in the international market, and, following this, a canonised status in Mexico.

DVD and Blu-ray editions of the film were later released. For instance, Optimum Home Releasing brought out the film in the UK in 2006, and Criterion released the film on DVD and Blu-ray in 2010 with a number of special extra features. The transnational potential of the film was recognised by distribution companies due to: the reputation del Toro established with his subsequent films; the presence of internationally familiar performers such as Federico Luppi and Ron Perlman (who in large part owe their global status to their work with del Toro); and the nature of the film text itself. Cronos demonstrates that breaching borders separating horror and art cinema is a successful formula for global success, a formula del Toro would apply to later films such as El espinazo del diablo and El laberinto del fauno.

The plot of Cronos tells of Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), an unassuming owner of an antiques shop. He and his wife, Mercedes, look after their granddaughter Aurora (Tamara Shanath) after her parents die in a car accident. By chance, Jesús discovers a Cronos device hidden inside a statue of an angel delivered to his shop. The Cronos device was invented by an alchemist in the sixteenth century and grants its users immortality after feeding from their blood. The user can, in turn, feed only from blood, as Jesús discovers after becoming addicted to the device. Unbeknownst to Jesús, the device is being sought by the business tycoon Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), who sends his nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) on a mission to track it down. A battle between Jesús and the de la Guardias forms the action for the rest of the film. From this basic storyline, del Toro creates a rich cinematic world. The transnational dimensions of the film can be seen in multiple ways beyond the fact that the film is available in the global market: they are apparent through the way in which nations are conceived; through the characterisation of the protagonists; through the numerous filmic and literary intertextual references; through generic hybridity; and through the establishment of an individual authorial style that has secured the director global success. In this section I explore both national and transnational elements, and the ways in which they interact.

Del Toro’s transnational ambitions are apparent in Cronos from the planning to the conception of the project. The film was developed with US financing in mind. In the DVD commentary that accompanies the 2006 release, the director explains that he spent eight or nine years rewriting the script, originally written for his course thesis, following contact with an American film producer. He does not name the producer, but notes that the money never materialised. Nevertheless, this clearly affected the creative process, as he rewrites the script in English, then translates it back to Spanish, and it ‘becomes more American, with a first, second and third act’ (DVD commentary). This process reveals both a pragmatic and an auteurist approach to filmmaking: although del Toro rewrites the screenplay with an American producer in mind and, by implication, American/ international audiences, at the same time he subverts a number of conventions of American mainstream cinema. This is seen from the very opening of the film, with its grand historical introduction, narrating and providing graphic images of the alchemist’s arrival in Mexico and his eventual death, all voiced in English, like any other mainstream US feature. However, this is juxtaposed with a follow-up scene which appears to be from a different film; this is a dreary domestic shot, with a switch to Spanish dialogue that introduces Jesús and his family. This is quite deliberate and plays with expectations of Hollywood versus low-budget ‘national’ cinema. As del Toro tells Jason Wood:

I was actually more interested in opening the movie like a Hollywood movie. Open it as if you are about to see a super-extensive production but then this production only lasts three minutes. Then you go to meet the most boring guy on earth. (Wood, 2006: 34)

Another example of ‘Americanising’ the screenplay while critiquing US culture can be seen in the fact that in the original script the ‘Americans’ were Nazis in hiding in Mexico. Their nationalities were altered as the investor wanted an American actor (DVD commentary); however, the younger American character, Angel de la Guardia, is a cartoon villain, a parody of a Hollywood villain, which appeals to a specifically Latin American desire to redress the representational balance. He is a sadistic brute who is only interested in his uncle’s money; he is vain and obsessed with his nose, which suffers repeated blows. As has been noted by many critics (Berumen, 1995; Ramírez Berg, 1990, 2002; Richard, 1994; Shaw, 2007; Woll, 1980), Hollywood has long list of Mexican/Latin American stereotyped villains, which are constantly being reworked, and del Toro has stated that he liked the idea that he could gain some revenge with Cronos (DVD commentary).¹

This idea of redressing a balance is also seen in the way that the plot makes clear connections between vampirism and both Spanish colonialism and, more explicitly, US neo-colonialism, as other critics have noted (Davies, 2008; Kantaris, 1998; Kraniauskas, 1998; Stock, 1999). Thus, the Cronos device finds its way into Mexico via the alchemist, Humberto Fulcanelli, in 1536, and resurfaces in a post-NAFTA Mexico in 1997, when the film was set. Del Toro has commented that as a result of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexican culture suffered, as ‘we were raided and invaded by media companies and there was nothing to protect us’ (Wood, 2006: 41). Although the NAFTA laws were passed in 1994, after the film was made, the effects are pre-figured through the relationship between Jesús Gris and the de la Guardias. As Ann Davies has noted, vampirism is the perfect medium to represent the crossing of borders, a central characteristic of vampire stories from the earliest tales to the present day (Davies, 2008: 396), and while Cronos is not interested in setting up the idea of a closed mono-cultural society, the film does give a sense of a multinational Mexico preyed on by its powerful North American neighbour. Geoffrey Kantaris (1998) observes that Cronos

seems to encode, or at least play with, the anxiety produced in the pollution of frontiers. This, then, is an important example of the way in which post-national visual culture both reflects and partakes of dis-embedding processes.

However, the film problematises simplistic divisions between Mexico and the USA, and refutes unitary national identities, preferring to root the diegesis within sites of transnational complexities. The Mexico seen in Cronos is futuristically cosmopolitan (set in the then future of 1997), offering an interesting mix of past, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series editors
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I. Guillermo del Toro: the alchemist
• Part II. Alejandro González Iñárritu: independent filmmaker
• Part III. Alfonso Cuarón: a study of auteurism in flux
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index