One can be a spectator of history or a participant in it, depending on the lot one receives at birth. The filmmaker Fernando de Fuentes, born in 1894, lived through the outbreak of the last great social movement in our country: the Mexican Revolution. Although he never became involved with the cause—in the way that Salvador Toscano, the Alva brothers or Enrique Rosas did, who immortalized transcendent battles and events of the struggle on celluloid—the scars still open from a long and bloody war left him They allowed us to understand the virtues and disadvantages of the conflict to bring them to the cinema like few others. Get to know his films of the Mexican Revolution.
The prisoner thirteen (1933) The friend Mendoza (1933) and ¡Let’s go with Pancho Villa! (1935) “show the image of the Revolution as something overwhelming, as a terrain of cruelty,” says academic Julia Tuñón Pablos in the book light and war, a literary work by Conaculta about the most notable films of the Mexican Revolution. “De Fuentes has observed the war since the 1930s, with a perspective sufficiently distant to be able to criticize it, but also close enough to still grieve.”
Three looks from director Fernando de Fuentes
The importance of his films about the Mexican Revolution lies in the way in which he built three independent stories around what happened between 1910 and 1917, which are plagued by all those things that, over time, continue to hurt Mexico: corruption , betrayal, lack of ideals, excess of power and the misinformation of a people.
“In these tapes,” wrote Federico Dávalos Orozco in Dawn of Mexican cinema, “De Fuentes, as a distant observer and alien to the revolutionary movement, questions the meaning of the war and tries to relive or understand the environment and extreme situations of that period, which lead his characters to stupid death by searching in vain. glory or satisfy the ambitions of a leader. Fernando was the owner of a technique that assimilated the absence of stereotypes and dramatic conventions in the new sound cinema, which he took advantage of to develop stories to his liking in which he tried to leave a moral lesson.
In 2010, on the occasion of the centenary of the Mexican Revolution, the UNAM Film Library launched a special collection of this digitally restored film trilogy. The institution took around 130 thousand frames per tape to immortalize them with a quality worthy of a pioneering man in our industry: De Fuentes had a fundamental participation in Santa (Dir. Antonio Moreno), the first Mexican sound film; with There in the big ranch (1936) inaugurated the Golden Age and triggered the rise of ranchera comedy; his film This is what they want in Mexico (1942) became the first color film in our country and, thanks to Jalisco sings in Seville (1948), the filmmaker made Mexico’s first international co-production together with Spain.
“To mention Fernando de Fuentes is to refer to the filmmaker of greatest importance for the history of the seventh art in Mexico,” wrote Felipe Cazals in light and war. “Recognizing in him the first dissident filmmaker is not only a satisfactory compliment. His revolutionary trilogy turns out to be the most eloquent example of what should be the direction of a national cinema that still continues to wonder whether or not there is an inalienable commitment between the filmmaker and his time.
Where to watch the trilogy of films about the Mexican Revolution by Fernando Fuentes?
The three most important films of the Mexican Revolution are available online through FilminLatino.
Arturo Magaña Arce Passionate about watching, writing, reading, researching and talking about cinema in all its forms. I’m a Star Wars fan, I know all the episodes of Friends by heart and if you ask me about Mexican cinema, no one can shut me up. Editor at Cine PREMIERE.