Rethinking Juan Rulfo's Creative World

Prose, Photography, Film

Nuala Finnegan, Dylan Brennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317196051
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Though primarily known for his haunting, enigmatic novel Pedro Páramo and the unrelenting depictions of the failures of post-revolutionary Mexico in his short story collection, El Llano en llamas, Juan Rulfo also worked as scriptwriter on various collaborative film projects and his powerful interventions in the area of documentary photography ensure that he continues to inspire interest worldwide. Bringing together some of the most significant names in Rulfian scholarship, this anthology engages with the complexity and diversity of Rulfo's cultural production. The essays in the collection bring the Rulfian texts into dialogues with other cultural traditions and techniques including the Japanese Noh or "mask" plays and modernist experimentation in the Irish language. They also deploy diverse theoretical frameworks that range from Roland Barthes' work on studium and punctum in photography to Henri Lefebvre's ideas on space and spatiality and the postmodern insights of Jean Baudrillard on the nature of the simulacrum and the hyperreal. In this way, innovative approaches are brought to bear on the Rulfian texts as a way of illuminating the rich tensions and anxieties they evoke about Mexico, about history, about art and about the human condition.

CHAPTER 1

Paloma herida: Searching for Juan Rulfo in Emilio Fernández

Douglas J. Weatherford

In the later years of his life, Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández would travel to the Churubusco Studios in Coyoacân where he would sit for long hours at what some called his office. This workspace was, in reality, a favourite table in the back corner of the facility’s onsite restaurant. Fernández’s presence at this important centre of Mexican filmmaking was a testament to his desire to be available for any new directing opportunity that might present itself. It was also, however, a visible reminder of El Indio’s abandonment by a film industry that no longer saw the director as an innovative or profitable force. ‘Everyone who depended on me for a living,’ the once-in-demand cineaste bitterly claimed, ‘now flees from me.’¹ Fernández’s struggle to find directing jobs in Mexico had begun years before — certainly beginning in the early 1950s — as industry insiders and audiences seemed to sense, as many critics have suggested, that the director was simply repeating many of the storylines and stylistics that, although they had gained Fernández a national and international reputation, now seemed tired. Even Gabriel Figueroa, the cinematographer most associated with the visual excellence of many of Fernández’s best films, began avoiding the iconic director and the pair shot their last film together in 1956 (Una cita de amor) [A Date For Love]. About this same time, El Indio was seeking new alliances in an effort to strengthen his flagging career.

One of the more interesting partnerships that Fernández imagined in the mid-1950s was the one he hoped to develop with a young author named Juan Rulfo who recently had published the two works (El Llano en llamas in 1953 and Pedro Páramo in 1955) that would best define his career and place him at the pinnacle of twentieth-century Mexican letters. It was probably in 1956 that Rulfo began meeting with Fernández in an effort to develop ideas for the silver screen. Although it is likely that the pair considered more than one project, the single completed screenplay that came out of this relationship was titled Paloma herida.² Fernández would not film Paloma herida until December of 1962, a six-year delay that ended only when the director took the step of shooting in Guatemala rather than in Mexico.³ Despite the numerous problems that he faced, Fernández had high hopes for the project. The picture contained many of the visual and thematic elements that had made so many of his earlier works popular and it boasted Rulfo’s name in the opening credits.

Paloma herida premiered in Mexico City in October of 1963 at the Metropolitan Theatre.⁴ Although the movie enjoyed modest commercial success (it ran for five weeks), it would fail to salvage Fernández’s directorial career. Indeed, reviews of the film at its debut fully panned the director’s newest project. One uncredited critique in the newspaper Esto, for example, would declare: ‘We are very sorry, but it needs to be said: El Indio Fernández, insisting on making cinema in his old style, has managed not only to become stuck, but to take a step backwards. With Paloma herida he’s fallen into involuntary comedy.’⁵ The intervening years have not proven much better for this addition to Fernández’s filmic canon. Jorge Ayala Blanco, for example, has called the film ‘[a] dreadful crepuscular film by Emilio Fernández’.⁶ Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro would be even less kind when he declared Paloma herida ‘the most regrettable of Emilio Fernández’s movies’ and ‘an insufferable story about Guatemalan damsels violated by fierce caciques and that kind of thing’.⁷ Furthermore, the film is seldom shown, difficult to acquire, and generally ignored or only superficially included in contemporary studies dedicated to the work of Emilio Fernández. In 1963, the poor critical reception of Paloma herida only added to El Indio’s troubles finding work. To be sure, it would be four years until the cineaste was granted another opportunity to direct (Un dorado de Pancho Villa [A Faithful Soldier of Pancho Villa], 1966) and, although he would experience a rebirth of sorts as an actor over the next two decades, the once prolific director would oversee only five more films, with the last one appearing in 1978 (Erótica).

When it came time to evaluate the role that Juan Rulfo might have played in the creation of Paloma herida, Mexican film critics proved incredulous. In the presentation that he wrote for the 1980 publication of El gallo de oro y otros textos para cine, Jorge Ayala Blanco would declare that Rulfo ‘swears to have not collaborated in any role other than that of “a mere stenographer” ’.⁸ Ayala Blanco’s statement, especially with its wide circulation for those interested in Rulfo and film, would become the accepted narrative about the famous writer’s connection to Paloma herida and it has been quoted extensively. In important monographic studies dedicated to Fernández, Dolores Tierney, Emilio García Riera, and Paco Ignacio Taibo I would gloss over the subject, with the later critic suggesting that the partnership between Rulfo and Fernández was based more on a social (’frequent rendezvous with tequila’) rather than a creative foundation.⁹ Meanwhile, in her book-length examination of the place of Rulfo in film, Gabriela Yanes Gómez accepted so fully the argument that Rulfo had not worked in any significant way on Paloma herida that she mentions the film only briefly in an unimportant footnote and fails to include the title in her otherwise nearly exhaustive filmography of movies related to the author.¹⁰

Eduardo de la Vega Alfaro, on the other hand, would seem to admit the creative presence of Rulfo in some capacity in the film. He calls Rulfo’s declaration that he had worked with Fernández merely as a stenographer and Ayala Blanco’s acceptance of such a claim to be ‘really difficult to believe’.Like other observers, however, de la Vega Alfaro assumes that Rulfo played only a limited role in Paloma herida and that Fernández must ultimately have distorted his contributions. ‘Perhaps’, the critic suggests, ‘Rulfo contributed some ideas that El Indio later chose to omit when it came time to film’.Either way, de la Vega Alfaro is unequivocal in his belief that Rulfo’s appearance on the credits of Paloma herida ‘became a horrifying blot on his filmographic career’.¹¹

The reluctance of Mexican film critics to accept a Rulfian presence in Paloma herida is, of course, based as much on a reverence for the talent of Juan Rulfo as a writer as it is on scepticism for the talent of Emilio Fernández in the latter part of his career. Both approaches are understandable and perhaps fitting, although I might argue that the criticism of Fernández that is so common in Mexico often seems overdone. What has been absent from any discussion of the presence — or absence — of Juan Rulfo in Paloma herida is a serious and objective attempt to examine the evidence. As such, Paloma herida (both the script and the film) has been relegated — fairly or unfairly — to a form of erasure from the Rulfo canon. The present study is a first (and incomplete) attempt to search for Juan Rulfo in Emilio Fernández and to ask whether Paloma herida can or should be recovered as a Rulfo text.

Juan Rulfo and Emilio Fernández: An Unlikely Partnership

Emilio Fernández (1904–86) and Juan Rulfo (1917–86) were very different individuals. While the former was loud, demanding, and self-confident, Rulfo was quiet, reserved, and self-critical. An examination of their creative visions will only distinguish the two artists even further. El Indio was a quintessential proponent of the movement to identify through art an identity that would redeem the nation in the difficult decades following the Mexican Revolution. His nationalist vision was generally idealistic and mythic, machista, grandiose, and melodramatic. Although Fernández’s films often pointed to a better future, they were also suspicious of progress and found refuge in an idyllic past and an imagined reality. Rulfo, on the other hand, as both a writer and a photographer, would reject the tendency of Fernández and so many mid-century Mexican politicians and artists to view the nation with nostalgia. Despite the archetypal underpinnings of Pedro Páramo, that canonical novel along with Rulfo’s other fiction and photography capture an objective reality of a Mexican landscape and people still marked by the violence of war and the weight of poverty and injustice. Rulfo’s perspective is critical rather than idyllic and questions a national narrative at the mid-century point of progress and modernization. And yet, despite their differences, Rulfo and Fernández shared a passion for the telling of tales and for the visual image and it is this common ground that ultimately would bring the two together in the mid-1950s.¹²

Despite the very real personal and artistic differences that separated Rulfo and Fernández, the pair must have connected on some level both professionally and personally. The nature of that affiliation is difficult to discern with confidence. Neither Rulfo nor Fernández seems to have spoken in depth about their partnership and existing records do not offer a lot of information on the creative process that the team followed to write Paloma herida. Although Fernández worked with a number of scriptwriters throughout his career, the one most commonly associated with the director’s vision of Mexico is Mauricio Magdaleno. Magdaleno and Fernández would collaborate for the first time on Flor Silvestre (1943) [Wild Flower] and, during the next thirteen years, they would complete a total of twenty films, including the highly regarded María Candelaria (1943), Maclovia (1948), Río Escondido [Hidden River] (1947), and Víctimas del pecado [Victims of Sin] (1950). ‘The quality of a man of letters such as Mauricio Magdaleno at the service of a great director on so many films,’ as Mauricio Peña would claim, ‘has not been repeated in Mexican cinema in such a lasting manner […]’.¹³ By 1956, when Fernández teamed up with Rulfo, the Fernández-Magdaleno partnership had recently made what would be its penultimate film together, Una cita de amor [A Date for Love] (1956), followed by Pueblito [Little Village] (1961). It seems plausible that El Indio was looking to Rulfo as an author who could match not only Magdaleno’s creativity and talent but also his standing in the field of Mexican letters. Likewise, Rulfo might have seen Magdaleno’s success as a film writer — both artistic and financial — as an appealing model to emulate. Magdaleno, who began his writing career in film with the influential El compadre Mendo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Studies
• studies in hispanic and lusophone cultures
• Original Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Notes on the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Paloma herida: Searching for Juan Rulfo in Emilio Fernández
• 2 Fixing the Boundaries: Juan Rulfo — Writer and Photographer
• 3 A Journey through Juan Rulfo's Photography
• 4 Patterns of Place and Space in the Work of Juan Rulfo
• 5 Studium and Punctum in Juan Rulfo's 'Puerta del cementerio de Janitzio'
• 6 Visions of Place: Yeats, Rulfo and the Noh Play
• 7 The Mexican Revolution: As Photographed by Juan Rulfo
• 8 Voice, Authority and the Destruction of Community in Cré na Cille (The Dirty Dust) by Máirtín Ó Cadhain and Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo
• 9 The Reception of Juan Rulfo's El gallo de oro and its Cinematic Adaptations
• Bibliography
• Index