irwin, robert mckee - mexican golden age cinema in tito’s yugoslavia

Mexican Golden Age Cinema in Tito's Yugoslavia

Robert McKee Irwin

The Global South, Volume 4, Number 1, Spring 2010, pp. 151-166 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

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151Vol. 4:1

Mexican Golden Age Cinema in Tito’s Yugoslavia

Robert McKee Irwin

AbstRAct

This article recounts the astonishing success of Mexican Golden Age film in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s through a case study of the re-ception of Emilio “el Indio” Fernández’s Un día de vida, noting that globalization’s most unexpected south-to-south flows have been in place since the earliest years of the cultural industries’ establishment in the Global South, in many ways laying the groundwork for the greater triumphs of the contemporary telenovela industries through-out the Global South. Yugoslavians’ embrace of Mexican melodrama and mariachis goes unnoticed in the world at large because it reflects a kind of cultural impact that bypasses the metropolis. It is neither an act of imperialism nor colonization, nor homogenization, nor cultural submission. It is instead an example of an unexpected south-south affinity, an improvised “politics of interculturality” (García Canclini): the importation in a moment of great political tensions of cultural forms that were utterly unthreatening as they were distantly removed from the reality of cold war Yugoslavia in both space and time. Yugo-slavians, living in the shadow of the Soviet Union, enjoyed having a good cry alongside the Mexicans, about whom they knew little except that they had experienced a splendid but painful revolution while themselves living in the shadow of the United States.

While recent studies have marveled at the worldwide success of Latin America’s telenovela industries as if it reflected a new phenomenon, 1 Latin America’s culture industries have long impacted global markets. Indeed, despite its popularity throughout the region, Latin America’s vast film pro-duction during its “Golden Age” (1930s-50s) has been studied largely in two

152 Vol 4:1 The Global south

national contexts: Mexican cinema’s role in Mexican national culture,2 and Argentine film’s importance for Argentine national culture;3 i.e., scholarship has focused on the national production and consumption of cinema for the only two Spanish American countries boasting movie making infrastructure and the only ones with significant film production during the Golden Age. However, the reception of Mexican and Argentine Golden Age film has rarely been studied in the context of the many foreign national markets (e.g., those of Cuba, Peru, Chile, Venezuela, Colombia, etc.) that relied almost exclusively on Mexican and Argentine imports for Spanish language film product.

In the case of Mexico, the larger of these two industries, for almost all of the period from the release of the first sound pictures, its films were popular abroad, especially in the Spanish speaking Caribbean, Central America, and northern South America.4 The international success of Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936) in 1937 famously consolidated the Mexican film industry’s role as the principle supplier of Spanish language product for much of the hemisphere (García Riera). If some critics are at least conscious that Mexican film did have an inevitable impact in the many Spanish-speaking countries that lacked their own homegrown film industries and depended upon a Mexican product for cinema with which locals could identify, few studies have taken up analyzing the reception of Mexican Golden Age film in other parts of the Americas.5

However, most are not even aware of the exuberant triumph of Mexican Golden Age film in Yugoslavia in the early 1950s or of the lasting impact it made on the region’s popular culture. This article recounts the story of Mexi-can Golden Age cinema’s importation into tierras lejanas [far off lands], namely Tito’s Yugoslavia, focusing especially on the case of Un día de vida (1950), a film that has been largely omitted from Mexican film history and has never been released commercially on video or DVD and is long forgotten in Mexico – yet is remembered as one of the great classic films of all times in world cin-ema for ex-Yugoslavians who saw it during its long and repeated runs in Bel-grade and other cities in the 1950s or in its many revivals or screenings on Yugoslavian television in subsequent decades. The film, and the ranchera music it and other Mexican films of the era featured, gave rise to what Slovenian writer Miha Mazzini has called the “Yu Mex” craze, which would have an astounding and lasting impact on Yugoslavian culture.

This article recounts the astonishing success of Mexican Golden Age film in Yugoslavia, noting that globalization’s most unexpected south to south flows have been in place since the earliest years of the cultural industries’ es-tablishment in the Global South, in many ways laying the groundwork for the greater triumphs of the contemporary telenovela industries throughout the Global South. Yugoslavians’ embrace of Mexican melodrama and mariachis goes unnoticed in the world at large because it reflects a kind of cultural im-pact that bypasses the metropolis. It is neither an act of imperialism nor colo-

153Mexican Golden Age cinema in tito’s Yugoslavia / Robert McKee Irwin Vol. 4:1

nization, nor homogenization, nor cultural submission; it is instead an example of an unexpected south-south affinity, an improvised “politics of intercultural-ity” (García Canclini): the importation in a moment of great political tensions of cultural forms that were utterly unthreatening as they were distantly re-moved from the reality of cold war Yugoslavia in both space and time. Yugo-slavians, living in the shadow of the Soviet Union, enjoyed having a good cry alongside the Mexicans, about whom they knew little except that they had experienced a splendid but painful revolution while themselves living in the shadow of the United States.

GlobAlIzAtIon: not A MoMent, but A GeneAloGY

There is a marked tendency among scholars to apply the term “globalization” somewhat reductively in thinking of it as a merely recent phenomenon. As one recent definition of the term notes, “since the decade of the 1980s, globalization has become a popularized term used to describe the increased velocity with which experience of the local changes, as well as the multiplication of points of transnational contact in the fields of economics, politics, and culture” (Biron 120). While there is no arguing about the marked increase in intensity of glo-balizing processes as a major catalyst for many of the most notable cultural transformations of the past few decades, the flows and effects of globalization in Latin America “are necessarily defined by five hundred years of exploitation, dependence, and inequality” (121). In other words, globalization is viewed by many critics less as a historical moment than as a centuries-long process: “The fifteenth century marked the historical beginning of globalization as a practice by permitting the types of navigation and commerce that would link human communities in spite of vast geographic distances and cultural differences. The European ‘discovery’ of Amerindia in 1492 in particular made possible the web of connections among all the world’s continents that we see today” (119).

In his classic study of Latin American media industries De los medios a las mediaciones (1987), Latin American media critic Jesús Martín Barbero6 histo-ricizes the massification of culture in Latin America through the rise of com-munications media and marks the 1930s-50s as a key moment in this process. This period saw several important trends: 1) an intensified migration from rural to urban areas that brought a new visibility to urban masses in Latin America’s largest cities; 2) a new political populism that responded to this re-vised demographic in many countries, including the region’s most populous states: Mexico (Lázaro Cárdenas), Brazil (Getúlio Vargas) and Argentina (Juan Perón); and 3) a rise of the mass media, especially film and radio, as a major source of cultural production. While many of Martín Barbero’s obser-vations and conclusions on the era in question focus on the massification of national cultures, at a few moments, he notes that the industrialization of


cultural production beginning in the 1930s was by no means limited to closed national contexts: “Cinema and radio would become [...] the promoters of a Latin American musical integration based upon both the popularity of certain rhythms – bolero, ranchera, tango – and the mythification of various musical idols” (268, translation mine). Mexican film in particular was, according to Martín Barbero, “the expression most clearly identifiable as nationalist and at the same time the most deeply popular-massive expression of Latin Ameri-canness” (226, translation mine) of the era.

Following the work of Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, Martín Barbero, whose study draws attention away from production to the cultural processes – “mediations” – realized through audience reception (from media to mediations, as his book’s title signals), focuses on processes of recognition and interpellation that assured the incorporation of cinematic (and musical) con-structions of popular culture into the mainstream of the Mexican national (and implicitly a transnational Latin American) imaginary through not merely the production of, but also the popular reception of, Mexican Golden Age film and the demand it generated for popular themed Mexican movies. Thus, the bur-geoning industry of 1936 that produced 25 films became the undisputed mar-ket leader by 1943 (70 Mexican productions versus only 34 Argentine films), with output rising as high as 124 films in 1950 (Peredo Castro 477) and with over fifty, sometimes as many as one hundred, Mexican films a year reaching its major markets such as Puerto Rico, Ecuador, Chile, and Venezuela (Ivers and Aaronson, 1948:931, 941; Aaronson, 1953: 941; Aaronson, 1954:954). In-deed, during the latter years of World War II, with movie studios largely dor-mant in Europe, Mexico, whose industry was booming thanks especially to support from Hollywood (Pereda Castro), became the third largest production center of commercial films in the world after the United States and India.

However, in his discussion of massification and mediatization of Latin American culture during the 1930s-50s, Martín Barbero maintains his focus on national contexts (Mexican film, Argentine radio theater, Brazilian popular music, Chilean popular press), only occasionally hinting at the transnational cultural configurations that begin taking shape during the era. As a handful of critics have noted, Mexican film’s scope of influence was much greater. Venezu-elan film historian Antonio Soto Ávila has noted that “it is the cinema that appeals to us,” that “our peoples […] saw themselves somehow reflected in Mexican popular film,” and that Mexican movies “helped to cement a spirit of fraternity in Latin American communities” (9, translation mine). Colombian critic Hernando Salcedo Silva adds that despite Colombian filmmakers’ at-tempts to produce “a faithful copy of Mexican movies,” it was never possible for a Colombian film industry to get off the ground, faced as it was with “an impla-cable public raised on a high tech foreign cinema, who would not tolerate the systematic flaws in Colombian sound films,” a public that would “devour”


Mexican films, enjoying their promotion of “various general Latin American characteristics” (192–93, translation mine). Mexican film achieved significant market shares in many Latin American countries during its Golden Age. While it did not by any means displace Hollywood from its dominant market position, it was particularly successful among the less educated, who were unable or un-willing to read subtitles, and left a deep imprint of its music, its archetypes, its customs, and its idiom on the rest of Spanish America.7

FRoM lAtIn AMeRIcA to the WoRld

While it is clear that Mexican Golden Age cinema’s impact across Latin Amer-ica was profound, its dissemination and influence beyond the Spanish language markets in which it thrived are practically unknown. In 1946, the Mexican film María Candelaria (1944) was awarded the Palme D’Or at the Cannes festival, drawing international attention to what until that time had been an industry whose international ambitions were limited to Latin America and Spain. Eu-ropeans were impressed with the uniquely Mexican aesthetic of this film and others like it produced by a team that came to become known as the “Mexican cinema school”: director Emilio “el Indio” Fernández, cinematographer Ga-briel Figueroa, screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno, and editor Gloria Schoe-mann. These professionals had begun a string of critical and box office hits in the early 1940s, bringing to the screen a nationalistic vision of Mexican culture inspired in the rhetoric of the Revolution and the visual aesthetic of Mexican muralism in major films, including Flor Silvestre (1943), Enamorada (1946), La perla (1947), Río Escondido (1948), Salón México (1949), and La malquerida (1949), movies starring Mexico’s greatest film actors, including Dolores del Río, Pedro Armendáriz, María Félix, Marga López, Roberto Cañedo, and Columba Domínguez, among others.8

Mexican studios moved quickly to cultivate potential new markets for their best films. As early as 1947, Mexican films were being exhibited in Czechoslovakia (Ivers and Aaronson, 1948: 930), and soon multiple films were being distributed in such countries as France (Ivers and Aaronson, 1949: 694), Greece, and Italy, the latter of which imported 14 Mexican films in 1949 (Ivers and Aaronson, 1950: 729, 732). Little is known about the cultural impact provoked by Mexican cinema’s tentative incursion into European markets; however, as I will make clear below, the case of Yugoslavia shows that these films did leave at least some imprint, and furthermore, there is at least one major precedent for the success of the Latin American telenovela from an ear-lier phase of globalization.

Thus, the tendency for media scholars to see the rise of the telenovela as a major indicator of what has been called the new “globalization with Latin flavor” (Medina and Gutiérrez Rentería) without taking into account the an-


tecedent of Mexican Golden Age cinema is short sighted – as can be seen, for example, in Kate Baldwin’s fascinating case study on the success of the Mexi-can telenovela Los ricos también lloran in Russia, or Bianca Lippert’s analysis of Yo soy Betty la fea’s phenomenal success all over the world.9 While Martín Bar-bero does not flesh it all out – indeed, it would seem that he, like just about everyone outside of the Balkans, remains unaware of Golden Age Mexican film’s incursions into far off places such as Yugoslavia – his historical approach to the massification of Latin American culture in De los medios a las mediaciones is the right one. Martín Barbero indeed finds a common thread in melodrama, a genre that marks Latin American popular cultural production from 19th century newspaper serials to Golden Age cinema to popular comics to con-temporary telenovelas. It is precisely the “tears and desire” (López) of Mexican melodrama that appealed to Yugoslavian film viewers in the 1950s and gave rise to an early manifestation of south-south cultural bonding.

A dAY In the lIFe

Un día de vida was produced in 1950, pretty much at the tail end of the series of major critical successes for Emilio Fernández and his production team. Follow-ing María Candelaria’s Cannes prize in 1946, Fernández would see his films nominated annually for Mexico’s Ariel award for best picture for five straight years (nominations in 1946 for Las abandonadas and 1950 for Pueblerina, and a triumvirate of wins in 1947, 1948 and 1949 for Enamorada, La perla, and Río Escondido, respectively) and parallel success in the best director category (nomi-nations all five years, and wins 1947–49 for the same films). By the time Un día de vida was released in late 1950, Fernández’s films were no longer achieving the acclaim that they had during the apex of his team’s success, and none would be nominated for an Ariel for best film or best director for nearly 25 years.

Un día de vida featured a first rate crew, including Fernández, Figueroa, Magdaleno and Schoemann, and a talented cast, including that year’s Ariel winner for best actor, Roberto Cañedo (for Pueblerina), 1949’s best supporting actress (and Fernández’s wife) Columba Domínguez (for the Fernández film Maclovia), future Ariel winner Rosaura Revueltas (for Roberto Gavaldón’s Rebozo de Soledad in 1952), and Fernando Fernández (Emilio Fernández’s brother, an accomplished popular crooner). While Revueltas, in the role of Mamá Juanita, would be nominated for an Ariel in 1951,10 this would be the film’s only nomination and it would pass quickly from view, garnering only minimal attention in Mexico, and even less in Latin American export mar-kets. The film quickly passed into oblivion in Mexico and is rarely mentioned in Mexican film histories.

Un día de vida might be described as a melodramatization of the Mexican Revolution. Its protagonist is Belén Martí (Domínguez), a Cuban journalist


who travels alone to Revolution era Mexico with the goal of “writing about its great matters, and getting to know the Revolution and its men” (Fernández and Magdaleno 3).11 It would seem that she identifies with an idea of a revolu-tionary spirit and wishes to approach a world that she idealizes. As a foreigner, her role is always that of outside observer and admirer, and maybe it is for this reason that a non-Mexican public might identify with it more than would a national audience. It might also explain why Yugoslavians fell in love, as we shall see later, not with Revueltas, whose performance is the only one in the film to earn an award nomination in Mexico, or leading man Roberto Cañedo, the revolutionary hero, but Columba Domínguez.

The popularity of el Indio Fernández’s films is a product not so much of their ability to represent Mexican reality as their tendency toward its idealiza-tion – aligned as it were with the expectations of international critics of pres-tige cinema (that is, European art film – as opposed to the commercial movies of Hollywood). The cinematography of Gabriel Figueroa, influenced undoubt-edly by the vision of the great Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein, who like Belén Martí came to Mexico in search of revolutionary fervor, portrays a Mexico of ancient processions, solitary agaves, majestic palms, grave Indians, exotic rites, and citizens who are both humble and proud (Artes de México 2). Especially striking in Un día de vida are the broad skyscapes that serve as backdrops to geometrically positioned actors, which together form composi-tions representing Mexico in highly dramatic and esthetically polished terms: clean lines, marked contrasts of dark and light shades, and extreme angles.

The film’s protagonist evokes the memory of José Martí and all he sym-bolizes: Latin American unity, the “natural man,” and the spirit of anti-impe-rialism.12 As is typical in Fernández films, this one is awash in national symbols. One of the first scenes takes places at Hotel Iturbide, a name and site that evoke historical class conflict in Mexico,13 a theme that is underlined in the dialogue between Martí and the hotel manager, who explains to her with great pride that Iturbide is a “hotel of lineage” (3); later she visits la Villa de Guadalupe in order to see the famous image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, for her the mother not only of all Mexicans but “of all those who speak the same language in America” (7); finally, much of the action of the film takes place in a small town located in view of the pyramids of Teotihuacan, symbol of the glory of the ancient inhabitants of the region and the profundity and complex-ity of the culture of the nation and of the entire hemisphere.

Upon arriving in Mexico, Martí hears the news that an officer in the revo-lutionary army, Coronel Lucio Reyes, has been sentenced to death by firing squad for treason for having led an armed protest against the assassination of Emiliano Zapata in 1919 by forces supported by President Venustiano Car-ranza, a revolutionary leader who had broken in 1914 with the more radical (and charismatically popular) Pancho Villa and Zapata. To Martí, Reyes is an


authentic hero of the Revolution, and is poised to become, like Zapata, one of its martyrs. She tells herself, “I must see him, because whoever dies in that way, for an ideal, holds the secret of his people” (12). She attempts to visit him at the barracks where he is being held prisoner, but she is not granted entry. However, they do allow her to send the prisoner the gift of a box of Cuban cigars. Upon receiving them, Coronel Reyes, played by Roberto Cañedo (who, in a later Fernández film, La rosa blanca, would play the role of José Martí himself), waxes nostalgic, recalling the great affection that has always existed between Cuba and Mexico, and calls up a pair of great icons of Mexican-Cu-ban fraternity. He speaks of the Cuban poet José María Heredia, who “was governor of Mexico State and died here in the capital” (16), and of José Martí, who lived “his best years” in Mexico where he dedicated verses to Rosario (the great muse of 19th century Mexican poetry14), married in Mexico, and whose sister at one time had been courted by Venustiano Carranza, the man who had pronounced Reyes’s death sentence (16).

If Zapata represents a first moment of revolutionary idealism that is as-sociated with Heredia and Martí, Carranza belongs to a second more complex epoch in which the Revolution is put into practice, but not necessarily accord-ing to the ideals of those who launched it and who fought most ardently for it. The idealist Reyes will not live to see the post-Revolution, but his best friend, General Felipe Gómez (Fernando Fernández), will. The pragmatic Gómez receives the order to execute the death sentence of his boyhood friend.

Still from Un día de vida


Belén Martí, fascinated by the figure of Reyes, tries once more to get to know him, not directly, but now by seeking out an interview with his mother, who is known as Mamá Juanita (Rosaura Revueltas). She travels to the village of Cieneguilla, located near the Teotihuacan pyramids; there she meets Mamá Juanita, who invites her to spend the night at her house because she is con-vinced that her son will return the following day, as is his custom for his mother’s saint’s day. It turns out that the whole town has conspired to hide from Juanita the news that her son is to be put to death. Martí, who is made quite uncomfortable by the fact that she knows Reyes’s fate, prefers not to stay, but Juanita, who has taken to the young reporter, insists: “How often I have dreamed that Lucio would bring home such a fiancée or wife… intelligent and lovely, like you!” (31).

As is evident, the film is a melodrama, a genre, as Martín Barbero has shown, that is fundamental to Mexican Golden Age cinema and popular cul-ture in general for its long standing mass appeal. The film’s characters and events evoke notions of patriotism, sacrifice, and family bonds on the one hand and ambition (in the case of Gómez) on the other hand, in addition to inspir-ing pronounced emotional reactions. Through the curiosity of Belén Martí, the friendship of Reyes and Gómez, and the maternal devotion of Mamá Juanita, the revolutionary war becomes a personal drama, and the audience – especially an audience predisposed to enjoy melodrama, as was the case with Mexican and Latin American audiences of the era – suffers the same anxiety felt by Martí at being confronted with the situation of this mother who at some moment will have to learn of the imminent death of her beloved son.

The following day, a band plays “Las mañanitas” while the whole village prepares for the party. But, Lucio has not arrived, and Belén can barely hide the apprehension she feels for Juanita, to whom someone will soon have to reveal the truth. Mamá Juanita, with a grave expression, says to Belén: “I still have not lost hope that he will come” (38). “Las mañanitas,” traditionally a song of celebration, is resignified in this context as a lugubrious ballad. But suddenly, everything changes: Lucio Reyes arrives unexpectedly at his moth-er’s house, accompanied by Felipe Gómez, who of course knew of the family rite of the annual visit and was unable to deny this final moment of pleasure to his friend or to his friend’s mother, whom he has loved as well since he was a boy. So “Las mañanitas” is sung yet again, and according to the tradition, Felipe is the one who sings it. The party turns festive, but Belén’s anguish only intensifies; she refuses to eat and leaves the scene so that she can cry out of Mamá Juanita’s sight.

Lucio, fascinated with her and obsessed with the image of José Martí that her name evokes, appears to be falling in love with her – and she with him, her martyr hero of the revolutionary cause she so admires. As the party goes on, Belén begs both Felipe and Lucio to come up with some plan of escape, but


Lucio fears implicating the townspeople as accomplices and is resigned to as-sume his role as martyr. And while Mamá Juanita enjoys her saint’s day party as she would any other year, Belén cannot help thinking of what will happen the next day.

But when the party is over, Juanita reveals to Felipe that despite all his efforts, she knows the truth: “I found out as soon as he was sentenced to death” (58). The film ends with the inevitable execution of Reyes at the orders of Gómez, with Martí present as witness along with other admirers. In the final scene, Mamá Juanita appears to claim the body of her son: “Over this portrait of mater dolorosa with her son in her arms – while the other two [Belén, Felipe] approach, appears the word: END, followed by a final fade out” (65).

MexIcAn MovIes In YuGoslAvIA

According to Slovenian writer and filmmaker Miha Mazzini, the triumph of this film in Yugoslavia – greater than that of others by the same team, all of which had obtained much greater critical and popular success in their principle markets of Mexico and Latin America – can be attributed to the historical mo-ment. The late 1940s and early 1950s was a time of great tension between the governments of Tito and Stalin. The ensuing anti-Soviet propaganda dissemi-nated throughout Yugoslavia turned the public away from Soviet cinema: “Yu-goslav authorities had to look somewhere else for film entertainment. They found a suitable country in Mexico: it was far away, the chances of Mexican tanks appearing on Yugoslav borders were slight and, best of all, in Mexican films they always talked about revolution in the highest terms” (Mazzini).15 One of the first Mexican film hits in Yugoslavia was Un día de vida, which ar-rived in Yugoslav cinemas towards the end of 1952, two years after its premier in Mexico. “Never before had a film provoked so many tears,” declared Yugo-slav writer Aleksandar Vučo in a review.16 The film became an all-time classic in film history for Yugoslavs, and according to a 1997 article by Vladimir Lazarević from the Serbian journal Politika Ekspres, Un día de vida is “the most watched film in Yugoslavia in the last fifty years,” a claim that has been re-peated in various sources. Mazzini asserts, “Emilio Fernández’s Un día de vida became so immensely popular that the old people in the former republics of Yugoslavia even today regard it as surely one of the most well known films in the world ever made; although, in truth, it is probably unknown in every other country.”

Yugoslav distributors renewed the rights for the film three times, and it was relaunched every two or three years for two decades. A faded poster ad-vertising the film is on display even today in an old Sarajevo movie house. The success of Un día de vida had repercussions that went beyond that of the mov-ies (and afterwards the television, where the film often continued to be shown


for many years). Mexican music, especially of the ranchera genre, became quite popular – not through the importation of Mexican albums, but through the formation of Yugoslavian mariachi bands and Mexican style trios. The classic song of the genre is “Mama Huanita” (better known in Mexico as “Las ma-ñanitas”), “a song every mother loved to hear on the radio for her birthday” (Mazzini), evoking the emotional final encounter between mother and son in the movie. Mazzini describes the panorama of “Yu-Mex” artists: “The most charming Mexicans were Nikola Karović and Slavko Perović; while the most determined was Ljubomir Milić. Ana Milosavljević was the queen and the dark voice of Nevenka Arsova her first companion.”

Mazzini has a website that serves as, in his words, “a small homage to hundreds of performers who covered themselves with sombreros to become Slavic Mexicans” and where one can listen to various examples of these songs, including Arsova’s version of the classic “Paloma negra” and Trío Tividi’s “Ay Jalisco” [known in Mexico as “Ay Jalisco, no te rajes”]. While occasionally these groups retained Mexican lyrics, more often they translated them into Serbo-Croatian; thus, “Cielito lindo” becomes “Vedro nebo.” Tito himself was seduced by the craze, as can be seen in several photos of celebrations in which he sports Mexican sombreros.

If Tito17 resented Soviet political or military interventions, Yugoslavians, who adored him, saw Soviet cultural production as an unwanted imposition but, following Tito’s politics, were not willing to simply substitute new cul-tural alliances with the US by importing more Hollywood film.18 Mexican

Announcements for “Jedan dan života” [Un día de vida] in Sarajevo, 2008. (photo courtesy of Jasna Novakov)


culture, well known as “revolutionary,” but closely allied neither with the So-viet Union nor the United States in cold war politics, provided a unique point of identification for Yugoslavia, a cinematic product that represented a per-spective located outside the overbearing context of the cold war. Mexico, in-deed, like Yugoslavia, smaller and poorer than the imperial giants of the era, asserted its cultural autonomy from the shadows of cold war empire. While Yugoslavia’s cultural and political contacts with Mexico were minimal, it is not difficult to imagine the two nations sharing a certain cultural empathy.

For countries lacking their own powerful media industries, national rela-tions with international media conglomerates are often thought of in terms of local or national struggles against cultural imperialism, with “cultural indi-genization” seen as the best strategy of resistance (Sreberny). Néstor García Canclini, in a study that seeks out means to “interrupt” hegemonic trends of globalization, suggests a strategy of “cultural movements and non-govern-mental social groupings that aim for the convergence of those excluded or marginalized by… global markets” (203, translation mine). García Canclini advocates a “politics of interculturality” in which artists, cultural administra-tors, arts funding agencies, industry leaders, and cultural critics seek out cre-ative strategies not to defeat globalization, but to enter its flows in ways that complicate its homogenizing effects. While the “Yu-Mex” phenomenon by no means came about as a formal alliance between Mexicans and Yugoslavs, sup-porting players in the global drama of the cold war and of international media markets, it does represent the potential for the strength of such an alliance, a trend enjoyed by Yugoslavs, inspired by Mexicans, and utterly off the radar of Soviet and US institutions, whether political or cultural.

“Yu-Mex” album covers (Mazzini)


lonG teRM IMpAct

While the popularity of Mexican films (Un día de vida, with its frequent rere-leases, excepted) waned after only a few years, the popularity of their music continued well on into the 1960s, and the generation of Yugoslavs who enjoyed their foray into the Balkans maintained a nostalgic affection for Un día de vida and other beloved films of the era. This Mexicanist fervor was renewed in 1997 when actress Columba Domínguez, who continued receiving letters from Yu-goslav admirers for decades (Sužnjević), was invited to Belgrade. There she at-tended a gala screening of Un día de vida at the Yugoslav Film Archive that was preceded by a live performance of “Mama Huanita” by Slavko Perović, whose popularity continues to this day, as is evidenced by his release of a new CD of his Mexican (and Greek) hits in 2007, inevitably titled Jedan dan života [Un día de vida or A Day in the Life]. The Yugoslavs also staged a grand reception in her honor at the Serbian Ministry of Culture and a lavish dinner attended by crown prince Tomislav Karadjordjević. Domínguez was treated as if she were one of the greatest stars of national cinema.

Nostalgia for the Mexican craze of the fifties lives on. The same year as Columba Domínguez’s grand homage, across the border in Croatia, a new mariachi band, Los Caballeros, formed, garnering enough critical success to be invited twice (in 2000 and 2002) to perform at the annual International and Charrería Festival in Guadalajara (“Los Caballeros”); and the influence of Mexican melodrama that was seen as early as the 1950s in Yugoslavian film19 would continue to have echoes decades later, for example in the 1986 film Srećna nova ’49 (Stole Popov), which features a scene with a young boy singing “La Malagueña.”

Mexican cinema’s appeal to Yugoslavians was likely multifaceted: it of-fered a visual representation of an exotic, picturesque and fundamentally revo-lutionary culture, along with the exaltation of universal values (patriotism, motherly love, and international fraternity). Likewise, its stylistic conventions (melodrama, as well as the prominent role it assigned to music) were appar-ently in synch with Yugoslavians’ own cultural idiosyncrasies – indeed con-temporary telenovelas, another melodramatic Latin American genre, have been

Tito in mariachi garb


immensely popular in ex-Yugoslavia.20 As I have argued, due to an improvised south-south affinity felt by Yugoslavs for Mexican cultural production in the face of more powerful imperialistic cultural forces, Un día de vida not only received the acclaim that María Candelaria had experienced in France and other European countries a few years before, but also exercised an astounding cultural influence in Yugoslavia, where “Yu-Mex” music continued to be pop-ular throughout the 1950s and 60s. Although this phenomenon remains un-known in Mexico, it is an emblematic example of the anti-hegemonic possibilities of globalization seen in the worldwide telenovela boom – but oc-curring decades earlier.

Notes

1. See Kate Baldwin’s “Montezuma’s Revenge: Reading Los ricos también lloran in Russia” and Ana M. López’s “Our Welcomed Guests: Telenovelas in Latin America” in Robert C. Allen’s (ed.) To Be Continued…: Soap Operas Around the World (1995). See also Nora Mazziotti’s La industria de la telenovela: la producción de ficción en América Latina (1996) and Daniel Mato’s “Telenovelas: transnacionalización de la industria y transformaciones del género” in Néstor García Canclini and Carlos Juan Moneta’s (eds.) Industrias culturales e integración latinoamericana (1999).

2. See Aurelio de los Reyes’ Medio siglo de cine mexicano (1896–1947) (1987), Carlos Monsiváis and Carlos Bonfil’s A través del espejo: El cine mexicano y su público (1994), Paulo Antonio Paranaguá’s (ed.) Mexican Cinema (1995), and Andrea Noble’s Mexican National Cinema (2005).

3. See Domingo Di Núbila’s La época de oro: Historia del cine argentino I (1998), Jorge Schnitman’s The Argentine Film Industry: A Contextual Study (1979), Claudio España’s Cine argentino: industria y clasicismo, 1933–1956 (2000), and Jorge Miguel Couselo’s Historia del cine argentino (1984).

4. Indeed there is evidence of some exportation of silent films to Spanish speaking markets in the United States in the 1920s; see Rogelio Agrasánchez’s Mexican Movies in the United States: A History of the Films, Theaters and Audiences, 1920–1960 (2006).

Columba Domínguez, then and now


5. Exceptions include Soto Ávila, Salcedo Silva, Agrasánchez, and Laura Podalsky’s “Guajiras, mulatas y puros cubanos: identidades nacionales en el cine pre-revolucionario” in Archivos de la Filmoteca (1999).

6. Martín Barbero is actually Spanish by birth, but has worked in Latin America, mainly in Colombia, since 1963.

7. While this impact is well known, and has been documented locally by critics such as Soto Ávila and Salcedo Silva, it has never been studied as a hemispheric phenomenon. For this reason, with funding from a Chancellor’s Fellowship from the University of California, Davis, a team of researchers (including Principal Investigators Maricruz Castro Ricalde of Tecnológico de Monterrey, Toluca and myself, along with Inmaculada Álvarez of the University Studies Abroad Consortium and the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Mónica Szurmuk of Instituto Mora in Mexico City, and independent scholar Dubravka Sužnjević) has undertaken the project “‘El cine mexicano se impone’: The International Reception of Mexican Golden Age Film.” This article represents a part of our research findings.

8. See Julia Tuñón’s “Emilio Fernández: A Look Behind the Bars” in Paulo Antonio Paranaguá’s Mexican Cinema (1995).

9. See Bianca Lippert’s “The ‘Bettyer’ Way to Success” in Critical Studies in Television (2008); see also Daniël Biltereyst and Philippe Meers’s “The International Telenovela Debate and the Contra-Flow Argument: A Reappraisal” in Media, Culture and Society (2000).

10. An interesting aside: After winning her first Ariel in 1953, Revueltas’s brilliant career would be cut short in 1954 when she starred in The Salt of the Earth, a notorious and highly acclaimed independent film made by a group of professionals who had been blacklisted in Hollywood for associations with communism during the era of McCarthyism. Revueltas was deported from the United States during filming, and she herself was blacklisted not only in the US, but also in Mexico; she would not make another film until 1976.

11. Quotes from the film are taken from the script; note that all translations of the script text are mine.

12. See especially “Nuestra América;” “el hombre natural” [natural man] is a figure whose knowledge is based upon a deep connection to his land and in some ways resembles a Gramscian organic intellectual.

13. Agustín de Iturbide was the conservative leader who led Mexico to its ultimate independence from Spain in 1821, but with the objective of ensuring the continuation of monarchy rule. He was named Mexico’s first emperor. Hotel Iturbide had, in fact, been Emperor Agustín I’s royal palace.

14. Rosario de la Peña, frequent hostess of literary salons in Mexico City, was admired by many poets of her generation, including, most famously, Martí’s good friend Manuel Acuña, author of one of the best remembered Mexican poems of the era, “Nocturno a Rosario.” This unrequited love is said to have been the reason for Acuña’s suicide at age 24, and evidence suggests that Martí had been smitten as well. Martí lived in Mexico intermittently from 1875 to 1878, and it is in Mexico where he met and married Carmen Zayas Bazán.

15. Mazzini’s site is bilingual in Slovenian and English.

16. Research in Belgrade and translations from Serbo-Croation were realized by Dubravka Sužnjević.

17. Josip Broz, better known as “Tito,” served as Prime Minister of Yugoslavia from 1945 to 1963 and as President from 1953 to his death in 1980.

18. Indeed, a major point of conflict between Tito and Stalin had to do with Yugoslav aggression in the Trieste region on the Adriatic coast that included attacks on US fighter planes.


19. See Jurica Pavičić’s“‘Lemons in Siberia’: A New Approach to the Study of the Yugoslav Cinema of the 1950s” in New Review of Film and Television Studies (2008).

20. See Lejla Panjeta’s “Telenovelas in Bosnia and Herzegovina,” a paper presented at the First World Summit on Telenovela Industry in 2003.

Works Cited

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Mazzini, Miha. Yu-Mex. Web. 24 Sept. 2009 <http://www.mihamazzini.com/ovitki/default.html>.Medina, Mercedes and María Elena Gutiérrez Rentería. “Globalization with a Latin Flavor.” Journal

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1952. Print.

irwin, robert mckee - mexican golden age cinema in tito’s yugoslavia

Documents

mexican golden age cinema

argentine golden age

mexican national culture

mexican melodrama

reception of mexican

mexican film industrys

south flows

mexican cinemas role