Little documentary about Arturo Ripstein

I thought I'd post yet another YouTube video in relation to the Mexican film director Arturo Ripstein. It's a great little documentary made in homage to him and his partner, the screenwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego, for a conference in their honour that the two attended at the Universidad de CI in Mexico in May, 2003. Sadly (for non-hispanohablantes, at least), it's only in Spanish with no subtitles, but it's a very compact retelling of Ripstein's career, from his entry into the Mexican film industry working alongside his father, the producer Alfredo Ripstein, through his early apprenticeship working alongside Luis Buñuel on El ángel exterminador/Exterminating Angel (1962) and other films,up to his most recent work. There are some nice clips from his films which show how varied they have been.

For those interested, there's some useful and interesting information (in English and Spanish) about Ripstein's biography and filmography to be found at his own website: http://www.arturoripstein.com/ and even more to be found at the New York Times site: http://movies.nytimes.com/person/108338/Arturo-Ripstein.

'La leyenda del beso', or 'The Legend of the Kiss'

El lugar sin límites (Place Without Limits, Arturo Ripstein, Mexico 1977)

Roberto Cobo as 'La Manuela’ dances to the intermedio from the Spanish zarzuela (operetta) La leyenda del beso (The Legend of the Kiss, Soutullo/Vert, 1924), as Pancho (Gonzalo Vega) watches. Then they dance together to the pasodoble 'El relicario'

Apologies for the lack of subtitles, but I still thought it worth posting this clip of the most wonderful sequence from El lugar sin límites. The very beginning of the 7 minute long dance segment is missing from this clip, but below I've given a synopsis of this section of the film, from the sequence before the one posted here up to several sequences later with the tragic ending of the film as a whole. So, many spoilers follow:

Octavio and a scared Pancho go to Don Alejo’s ranch to settle Pancho's debt and to establish the young man’s independence once and for all from his former patron. Invigorated by the experience, Pancho and Octavio ignore Don Alejo’s prohibition on visiting the brothel. When they arrive, Pancho (the younger, dark haired man) asks for La Manuela (in the red flamenco dress), but s/he hides. Japonesita (the youngest of the women, and La Manuela's daughter) entertains the men, while Manuela spies through the window. When Octavio goes off with another prostitute, Pancho and Japonesita continue their earlier sexual encounter. Pancho becomes violent, however, and again demands Manuela’s presence. Finally (the section in the clip posted here), s/he makes a dramatic appearance in her red flamenco dress, dancing for him and acting out a story set to music.

The story La Manuela tells in his/her dance (his/her own invented ‘legend of the kiss,’ only very tangentially connected to the original zarzuela plot) involves dramatic action: s/he attempts to makes Pancho perform the role of the man in the legend who is kissed by a mysterious woman in a bewitched wood, against his will at first; Pancho's will is worn down in inverse proportion to his physical and affective involvement in the spectacle.

As Octavio, Pancho's macho friend, returns, Manuela and Pancho dance together, amid much laughter. But then they kiss on the lips. Octavio sees the kiss and confronts Pancho, who denies everything, and turns his humiliation into rage against Manuela. S/he runs away from the brothel, hampered by tight clothes, poor roads, and sheer terror. The two men follow him/her in Pancho’s truck to the outskirts of the town, just past Don Alejo’s ranch. He and his foreman are alerted by the noise and follow the truck to where Pancho and Octavio finally catch up with Manuela. Don Alejo decides not to go to Manuela’s aid, and watches as Pancho beats him/her to death and then flees in his truck with Octavio. Don Alejo approaches Manuela’s corpse and promises that the two men will be brought to justice, and that they won’t defy him again. As the truck passes by the brothel on its way out of the small town of El Olivo, Japonesita muses that her father will return, battered and bruised by his/her exploits as always. She goes to the bed they shared and puts out the oil lamp.

The 'Author Function' in Transnational Film Adaptation

I am resurfacing after a bit of a break; it's been the examination and grading season in recent weeks, though it's also true that my other blog has been a little more active...

Anyway, I wanted to post a link to a newly online, English-language version of an article of mine previously only published in Spanish: 'La función de "los autores": la adaptación cinematográfica transnacional de El lugar sin límites', Revista Iberoamericana, Vol. LXVIII, Núm, 199, Abril-Junio 2002, pp. 253-268. The new version is entitled 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation: The case of El lugar sin límites / Place Without Limits / Hell Has No Limits (Arturo Ripstein, Manuel Puig, José Donoso)' and is available as an .html download HERE.

Here's the first paragraph as an inducement:

Despite being the most distinctive film auteur in Latin America since the late 1960s, Mexican director Arturo Ripstein has almost exclusively chosen to adapt existing, and usually well-known, literary works by writers from that continent and beyond.[[2]] Before he teamed up with his current scriptwriter Paz Alicia Garciadiego in 1986 for an adaptation of Juan Rulfo's El imperio de la fortuna, he also frequently co-authored his scripts with a number of highly distinguished Latin American writers. In 1978, Ripstein released his film adaptation of Chilean writer José Donoso's 1966 short novel El lugar sin límites (‘The Place without Limits’, aka ‘Hell Has No Limits’ ’). Set in a decrepit bordello cum nightclub, this queer family melodrama, which culminates in the homophobic murder of its drag-artist protagonist, had an extraordinary international impact.[[3]] The film eclipsed the success of Donoso’s novella, at the same time as reawakening an interest in his text that had earlier circulated internationally as part of the Latin American literary ‘Boom.’[[4]] While Ripstein took the only screenwriting credit for El lugar sin límites, he worked on the script with Donoso (whose novel is, of course, credited as the film’s ‘source’), with the Argentine novelist, playwright and screenwriter Manuel Puig, as well as with a number of other, uncredited Mexican writers including José Emilio Pacheco, Cristina Pacheco and Carlos Castañón. Puig and Ripstein famously fell out over Puig’s contribution and his name does not appear in the credits. While each of Ripstein’s films prompts interesting questions about collaborative authorship, few of them do so as compellingly as El lugar sin límites.

The article is on 1970s auteurist filmmaking, so not exactly 'contemporary world cinema, which is supposed to be the main focus of 'Directing Cinema'. I will return to that focus very soon, I promise. 'The "Author Function" in Transnational Film Adaptation' does, however, deal, in detail, with an aspect of auteurism which has always interested me, and about which I have written before: namely issues of collaboration and 'multiple authorship' in so-called auteurist cinema.

It also looks in great detail at a very much under-explored aspect of Arturo Ripstein's filmmaking, notably the use in his films of popular, and popular-classical, Latin-American and Spanish music, so if you like boleros, mambos; ranchera culture and norteña music, and also zarzuela (all the later terrain of some of Almodóvar's aesthetic choices), you should check it out.

Note: My other relevant work on collaboration and multiple authorship is as follows:

• Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist "Free" Adaptation', Screen Vol. 43, No. 1, 2002, pp. 57-73 - available online HERE;
• 'Home Movies: The Curious Cinematic Collaboration of Anne-Marie Miéville and Jean-Luc Godard', in For Ever Godard (eds) Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog Press, 2004), pp. 100-117. For Ever Godard is a wonderful collection that all cinephiles should explore.
  
  

Re. 'www.auteur.com'

Just a note to introduce the copy of an old article of mine I've posted below in a Google docs format. You can also click HERE for a pdf version which is much more legible.

The article was originally published in the millennial issue of the UK based film and media studies journal Screen (vol. 41, no. 1, Spring 2000). I thought I'd try posting it here as I'm thinking about what I wrote back then, and will write some more about the matters it raises shortly. I've also had some requests for copies of it from people who don't have access to Screen through university libraries.

While much of Screen is available online now (e.g. http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ - and also accessible to Athens subscribers), its full-text archive doesn't yet go back this far. [Hopefully, I am not breaking any big rules by posting it here as the author, but, if so, I'll be very happy to correct my mistake].

I think 'www.auteur.com' is still useful, in part, for its summary and definitions of film auteurism, as well as for some of the comments it makes about what were, then, newly emerging forms of directors' fan culture. But, it sorely needs some updating, too...

'www.auteur.com'

Auteurism: a definition

A lot of what I'll be writing about in this blog will concern film directing and the concept of auteurism. Some of what I will write will be a little (too) 'academic'; some of it a lot less so. But, in any case, it probably makes sense for this first post to set out what I mean by the term 'auteurism'.

Here's a definition that begins a book chapter I've written called 'Auteur Machines: Auteurism and the DVD'. The chapter will be published shortly in a great book called Film and Television After DVD, edited by James Bennett and Tom Brown, for Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies series:

Auteurism, like many other features of cinema, is a matter of supply and demand. It is a way of both making and experiencing films, and increasingly of selling them, in which the largest part of the control of the intellectual and creative work involved in the filmmaking process, or of the responsibility and credit for this, is actively taken up by or ascribed to the film’s director. Contemporary auteurism comprises a complex series of interrelated film production, marketing, and reception practices and discourses which are all underpinned by a shared belief in the specific capability of an individual agent – the director – to marshal and synthesize the multiple, and usually collective, elements of filmmaking for the purposes of individual expression, or to convey in some way a personal or, at least, “personalized” vision.

A much longer exploration of contemporary auteurist film culture will be appearing in the book I intend finally to be finishing over the summer. That's when I will voluntarily cease, for a while, to be a well-paid Film Studies lecturer, after eighteen long but good years in academia (at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, then at the University of Kent, Canterbury), and will hopefully get to spend some more time writing about film.

This book, to be called Directing Cinema: The New Auteurism, is one I've been working on for Manchester University Press for the last few years. It attempts an in-depth investigation of the ways in which contemporary film directors, their discourse, and discourse about them act in the contemporary global practices of film production, distribution and exhibition, and in contemporary film cultures more widely. Commercial developments in film production and marketing, especially since the 1970s (Neale 1981; Caughie 1981; Corrigan 1991), and geo-cultural, technological and structural developments since the 1990s have meant that a much larger number and a wider variety of directors than ever before acquire a public prominence that was once the preserve of established “auteurs” (Grant, 2000).

I consider film directors as agents, or subjects, who have direct, intentional and reflexive, if obviously not completely all determining, relationships to the cultural products they help to produce, as well as to their reception (Grant 2001). Following Judith Butler, I see agency as a “reiterative or re-articulatory practice, immanent to power and not as a relation of external opposition to power” (Butler 1993: 15). This means that, for me, while directors (as agents) make or direct films, by choosing, doing and saying (sometimes) original things, as individuals what they cannot make or “direct” is the discursive or conceptual framework of “directing” itself. In order to be seen as directors (and as particular kinds of directors), they can therefore only “re-make” or “re-direct,” or, cite or repeatedly perform, the kind of work that is socially constructed as being that of a “director,” the kind of work that we, the audience, want from directors (see also Grant 2002, for further theorizations of contemporary auteurism).

Circular, huh? It is, sort of, but it will hopefully also be productive and a take which may help to get discussions of film directing out of all sorts of historical, problematic, Film-Studies' impasses.

Anyway... I aim to unpack and unpick a lot of the above in future posts as I get to grips with finishing the book. But I will also be jotting down other less dense thoughts (!) about what film directors, nowadays, do and say.

© 2008 Catherine Grant

References:

• Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter, London and New York: Routledge.
• Caughie, J. (ed) (1981) Theories of Authorship, London: British Film Institute.
• Corrigan, T. (1991) A Cinema Without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
• Grant, C. (2000) ‘www.auteur.com?’, Screen, Vol. 41:1: 101-108
  _______(2001) ‘Secret Agents: Feminist Theories of Women’s Film Authorship’, Feminist Theory 2:1: 113-130.
  _______(2002) ‘Recognizing Billy Budd in Beau Travail: Epistemology and Hermeneutics of an Auteurist “Free” Adaptation’, Screen 43:1: 57-73.