SUNY series in Latin American Cinema

Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film

Ilana Dann Luna

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781438468280
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Adapting Gender offers a cogent introduction to Mexico's film industry, the history of women's filmmaking in Mexico, a new approach to adaptation as a potential feminist strategy, and a cultural history of generational changes in Mexico. Ilana Dann Luna examines how adapted films have the potential to subvert not only the intentions of the source text, but how they can also interrupt the hegemony of gender stereotypes in a broader socio-political context. Luna follows the industrial shifts that began with Salinas de Gortari's presidency, which made the long 1990s the precise moment in which subversive filmmakers, particularly women, were able to participate more fully in the industry and portrayed the lived experiences of women and non-gender-conforming men. The analysis focuses on Busi Cortés's El secreto de Romelia (1988), an adaptation of Rosario Castellanos's short novel El viudo Román (1964); Sabina Berman and Isabelle Tardán's Entre Pancho Villa y una mujer desnuda (1996), an adaptation of Berman's own play, Entre Villa y una mujer desnuda (1992); Guita Schyfter's Novia que te vea (1993), an adaptation of Rosa Nissán's eponymous novel (1992); and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo's De noche vienes, Esmeralda (1997), an adaptation of Elena Poniatowska's short story "De noche vienes" (1979). These adapted texts established a significant alternative to monolithic notions of national (gendered) identity, while critiquing, updating, and even queering, notions of feminism in the Mexican context.

1

Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film

Si todos somos los hijos de la Malinche, hasta las mujeres, ¿cómo pueden ellas (podemos nosotras) compartir o discernir su (nuestra) porción de culpa y hasta de cuerpo?

If we are all sons of the Malinche, even women, how can they (we women) share or even identify their (our) portion of guilt, or our own bodies?

—Margo Glantz, “Las hijas de la Malinche”

This book examines several film adaptations from the so-called “Decade of change”1 in Mexico that dialogue with feminist literature, through overt acts of citation and intertextuality, in a conscious, if personal, attempt to supplant or subvert the prevailing gendered discourse of national film. The subsequent chapters of this book address several film adaptations produced during the final stretch of single-party rule at the close of an era—the Salinas de Gortari presidency (1988–94) and shortly thereafter under Ernesto Zedillo (1994–2000). This is a moment of meaningful intersections: Mexico is on the cusp of its romance with neoliberalism, and the subsequent privatization of national industries would open up new spaces for previously excluded (female) filmmakers to produce and disseminate their work outside rigid union-based financial and production models. At the same time, there is ever more institutional awareness of women as political and social actors at the tail end of the United Nation’s International Decade of the Woman.

Lauro Zavala signals the importance of this period both thematically and formally in terms of industrial production, tying the shift toward self-reflective metafiction and identity exploration to the creation, in 1988, of the Centro de Capatación Cinematográfica (Center for Cinematic Capacitation) (CCC), and, in 1999, of the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (University Center for Cinematic Studies) (CUEC)—of “opera prima” programs to actively financially support the production and dissemination of debut feature films (“Tendencias” 1). I argue that the films herein analyzed overtly utilized feminist (or women-centered) literary works as the basis of their filmic adaptations to combat the gender-limiting imaginations of the medium. They reiterated, expanded, recontextualized, critiqued and personalized feminist discourse through intertextual dialogue, and particularly direct adaptation, to mount an oppositional force to the dominant mode of discourse prevalent in public imaginings of gender and nation from within a shifting Mexico.2 In this chapter, I set the scene for such rebellious reiterations.

As Judith Butler and others have posited, gender regulations are established precisely through repetition. Through performativity—the construction of identity through reiterated enactments of normative behaviors (policed by self and others)—individuals are both constituted and assigned value within the society that they inhabit.3 In this way, the reiteration of tropes, scripts, and discourse works to construct social regulations that are not only imposed by an external body, but also embedded in the individual subject’s self-conception. I argue that national identity is intimately linked with such gender roles (as well as those of race and class) and is formulated in much the same way; however, it is disseminated across a large body through cultural production. While popular culture may be only one piece of the puzzle, it is of considerable import particularly because in Mexico, the “lettered city” of the literate cultural elite has historically been limited in its scope, while mass visual media (e.g., murals, film, television) has been disseminated over a much larger body—often by design. In this way, film adaptation can act to translate cultural content of less-consumed media (e.g., literature, theater) to a much wider audience at the same time that it reiterates, not without inserting its own temporal and genre-specific flourish, across both space and time.

Carlos Monsiváis has recognized that a culture’s “formation,” the texts that are read and reread in schools and the academy, must be thoughtfully reexamined if there is to be substantive cultural change. He noted that in the 1970s national canon, there was a patent lack of active women either as writers or characters. “A la mujer, en nuestra literatura, le corresponde asumir un papel fundamental: el de paisaje. El hombre es, siempre, el centro, la razón de ser. … Puede ser la madre (que todo lo sufre), la esposa (que todo lo perdona) o la prostituta (que todo lo degrada)” (“Woman, in our literature, is expected to assume a fundamental role: that of scenery. Man is, always, the center, the reason for being. … She can be the mother [who suffers everything], the wife [who forgives everything] or the prostitute [who degrades everything]”; Misógino 26).4

For women to be recentered in narrative fiction—literature or film—it stands to reason that a degree of subversion was and still is required and that this subversion must take place over time, and repeatedly, to push back against the weight of “universal” (sexist) culture. In the recapitulation of moments of interruption, in which women were neither landscape nor abnegated, such film adaptation was able to renew interest in and build depth and difference for complex female characters, thus destabilizing the stagnated national imaginary with respect to gender.

Norma Klahn notes the ways in which the proliferation of Latin American women’s writing in the 1980s and its subsequent translation was often a “feminist project of alliance” (52). Such a subversive project of gender could be undermined by male writers who ignored the constructed nature of gender in their translational acts. Film adaptations, like translations that expanded audiences from the very regional to a national and even transnational scope, may also embody this feminist alliance. Either through their commercial theater run or in their afterlife via home video distribution circuits, they can pose major interruptions to stereotypical notions of gender.

In this book, I proffer the notion of film adaptation as a feminist strategy, one that will change the shape of its sources, but not their thrust, in order to translate their meaning for new audiences sometimes decades later. In fact, de Lima Costa suggests that “we need to understand feminism itself as a process of translation (in the sense of faithless translation) signaling the mutability of words and concepts, connoting not only distorted repetition but movement in space and time as well” (137, my emphasis). It is precisely because the cultural industry of cinema has, since its inception, been intimately linked to political agendas—the representation of gender-normative behaviors aimed at controlling the body politic through establishing roles within the family, as within the nation—that feminist distortions and subaltern inversions of genre can be powerful in the construction of alternate political subjects and may affect the lived experiences of the marginalized.

From Literature to Film

The practice of film adaptation is as old as the practice of filmmaking itself, and, in fact, the mixing of media, linguistic, and visual codes, as Kamilla Elliot notes, can be traced to the earliest films, which were, in turn, direct inheritors of the Victorian novel, which relied heavily on captioned illustrations, thus linking them to the foundational fictions of that era.5 The field of adaptation studies has historically resided in the North American and European academy and was not critically established as a legitimate field of study in its own right until the mid-twentieth century. Many of the key arguments have revolved specifically around the Hollywood industry, which has often been accused of cannibalizing all other forms of cultural production, and its adaptations of literary classics (often European) vis-à-vis notions of fidelity, authorship, and the ability to capitalize on already successful cultural products. George Bluestone’s foundational 1957 study Novels into Film established the parameters for the field of adaptations studies, offering major contributions to film studies as well as attempting to reconcile the study of literature with that of the newer media. He noted the “preference for films derived from novels” (3) within the Hollywood industry at mid-century, tracing the industrial practices and critiquing the pervasive criteria of “fidelity” to an original text, which still persists today. In defining the limits of both media, a key distinction that Bluestone highlights is that the linguistic codes in the written novel provide conceptual images through discourse, whereas the visual and audio elements of film create perceptual images through presentation. Indeed, film itself would change over the course of the last half-century as technological advances permitted different narrative modes, but he noted at that time that “[t]he film, by arranging external signs for our visual perception, or by presenting us with dialogue, can lead us to infer thought. But it cannot show us thought directly. It can show us characters thinking, feeling, and speaking, but it cannot show us their thoughts and feelings. A film is not thought; it is perceived” (48).

Nevertheless, as Mireia Aragay and others note, despite Bluestone’s innovative theoretical reframing of the literature / film divide, which was innovative for his era, and his attempt to distance himself from privileging the written text over the filmic one, his studies tended to invoke the fidelity criterion, shifting the literary text from being a “point of departure” to becoming a “model” on which to judge the film’s successful adherence (14). Aragay describes the transformations in critical thought around both film and literature in the 1980s that espoused the poststructuralist Barthian concept of the “Death of the Author.” She notes:

[T]he notion that meaning is produced by an actively participating reader also had an impact on adaptation studies—the literary source need no longer be conceived as a work / original holding within itself a timeless essence which the adaptation / copy must faithfully reproduce, but as a text to be endlessly (re)read and appropriated in different contexts. (21–22)

Brian McFarlane, in Novel to Film (1996), discusses the limited utility of the fidelity criterion, proposing that, rather than ignore the obvious intertextuality that extends beyond the bounds of the source text of adapted film and its effect on the viewer—rather than simply concede the primacy of the printed text—one must carefully examine the elements that have been retained and likewise interpret the original elements exclusive to the film (23). He distinguishes between “transfer,” or that which can be transported more or less directly into the film (i.e., certain dialogue, characters, plot points and “adaptation proper” representing the elements that, because of the different media signifying codes and expositional modes, require more complex processes, such as spatial representation; the confluence of visual, aural, and verbal signifiers; and temporality and duration (23–29). Robert Leitch, in Film Adaptation and Its Discontents (2007), makes the argument for an interesting approach to the study of adaptation vis-à-vis cultural literacy. He suggests that such questions of “fidelity” and “original vs. derivative” are less important than the actual activity of adaptation. He sees reading, or rereading, as only half of the solution to “cultural literacy” and proposes that only through adaptation—through active writing—can cultural literacy be fully enacted. This suggests that the act of adaptation itself, the process or activity as well as the mass distribution of the adapted work alongside the original, can offer sociopolitical gains not previously considered within a purely economic model.

Linda Hutcheon’s A Theory of Adaptation (2006) succinctly outlines the basic criteria for assigning the label of adaptation to a work. Her notion of adaptation is extended well beyond the bounds of a linear text-to-film relationship and examines the ways in which music, poetry, graphic novels, fine arts, and other sources can be adapted in multiple directions. She states that “adaptation can be described as the following: An acknowledged transposition of a recognizable other work or works / A creative and interpretative act of appropriation / salvaging / An extended intertextual engagement with the adapted work” (8). Perhaps most useful for this particular study is her concept of adaptation as both a process and a product. She writes: “As a product, an adaptation can be given a formal definition, but as a process—of creation and of reception—other aspects have to be considered” (16). It is precisely these aspects that I endeavor to address in the subsequent chapters.

If, as she suggests, “[m]ultiple versions exist laterally, not vertically” (xiii), then the “reading” and reception of adapted texts can be examined and used far beyond the scope of whether a film does “justice” to a source text, focusing rather on what different readings, at different historical moments, can offer to the public. In a similar vein, Robert Stam notes that to assess the value of film adaptations, one must focus on “specific dialogic responses, to ‘readings’ and ‘critiques’ and ‘interpretations’ and ‘rewritings’ of source novels, in analyses which always take into account the inevitable gaps and transformations in the passage across very different media and materials of expression” (Literature through Film 5). It is in this light that I propose to examine these particular adaptations. Through dialogue, the filmmakers are able to critique and expand the initial messages of the source texts’ feminist thrust.

Hollywood films, or at least films released and distributed throughout US and global marketing circuits, have been the subject of the vast majority of literature generated in English-language adaptation studies, and all other national-cultural industries throughout the world are determined, to an extent, by how they align or diverge from the Hollywood model,6 Mexico has had a historically strong and well-regulated industry, with its own star system and corporate financing schema, and has, in fact, shared certain characteristics with Hollywood, not the least of which is a healthy practice of film adaptation and a penchant for melodrama.

Yet, in the case of Mexico, there have been relatively few studies that meditate on adaptation in the Mexican setting—that is, on Mexican authors being adapted by Mexican filmmakers or even on the practice of adaptation in Mexico or by Mexican filmmakers. This can perhaps be ascribed to the general character of low prestige assigned to film adaptations by Mexican film critics. Such an example can be noted, as film critic Leonardo García Tsao explains to a Mexican cinephile public—not without a healthy dose of jocund sarcasm—ten ways to immediately recognize a “churro” or a patently terrible film. The very first “unequivocal sign” of a bad film is that it relies on adaptation. He writes: “Toda adaptación de alguna obra literaria de prestigio debe tomarse con reservas. Salvo honrosas excepciones, las versiones cinematográficas de grandes novelas sólo confirman que los valores literarios por lo general se traducen a la pantalla como presunción o aburrimiento” (“Any adaptation of a prestigious literary work must be viewed with reservations. Save for honorable exceptions, the cinematic versions of great novels only confirm that literary value generally translates to the screen as presumptuousness or boredom”; 37).

While not limiting his disdain specifically to Mexican filmic adaptation, this attitude toward adaptation, if humorous, generally speaks to the long-standing rivalry in which one art form is granted hegemony over the other. Originally published in January 1954 in Cahiers du Cinéma, Truffaut’s scathing critique of “certain tendencies” of adaptation in the classical French cinema undoubtedly would have had repercussions in the Mexican academy as well because of the close relationship with the Nouvelle Vague that film schools and the critical apparatus in Mexico espoused. This may well have translated into the observable dearth of scholarship on the topic from within Mexico.

A notable exception to this critical silence is Adriana Sandoval’s 2005 book-length study De la literatura al cine: versiones fílmicas de novelas mexicanas. It focuses in its entirety on early Mexican cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s, which was based heavily on story lines from canonical texts from the previous century. In this study, she notes the twofold benefit of filmic adaptations for the incipient film industry in that mass media allowed a message to be spread across a wide swath of the population—particularly in a society that was still largely illiterate or at least not inclined to leisure reading—while simultaneously justifying the cultural value of the new art form. Sandoval notes that in Mexico’s Golden Age, adaptations were primarily used for the recognition value—as well as the prestige associated with—written genres over the newer technology, which was seen among the lettered elite as frivolous and a passing fad (11). The opinion that literature “elevates” cinema and that cinema acts as a means to reach a larger audience than literature alone is certainly still a topic of debate and not necessarily limited to the Mexican setting. In 2009, the UNAM published Florencia Talavera’s translation of Robert Stam’s work on adaptation, which includes studies of some adaptations from Latin America, as Teoría y práctica de la adaptación.7

Nevertheless, the relative absence of academic production, beyond particular case studies, in or about Mexico relating to adaptation of recent national film does not in any way signal a lack of adaptation practice in the contemporary Mexican film industry. The radical shifts beginning in the late 1980s in the Mexican film industry d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Adapting Gender: An Introduction
• Chapter 1 Mexican Feminisms from Literature to Film
• Chapter 2 Rebellious Daughters in El secreto de Romelia
• Chapter 3 Revolutionary Variations Entre (Pancho) Villa y una mujer desnuda
• Chapter 4 Wedding the “Other” in Novia que te vea
• Chapter 5 Sexual Tensions: Queering Feminism in De noche vienes, Esmeralda
• Collusions and Conclusions
• Appendix Filmography of Mexican Films with LGBTQ Content
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover