Frida, Still Life. All images courtesy of Doclisboa
Working from the late 1960s to the early 2000s, Mexican director Paul Leduc (1942–2020) built a multifaceted oeuvre, ranging from agitprop pamphlets to unconventional biopics of Frida Kahlo and John Reed; from self-funded militant documentaries to sumptuous period pieces; and from monumental ethnographies to computer animations. Leduc remains very little known outside Latin America, though his films were selected for Cannes and Berlinale several times.
In October, in partnership with Cinemateca Portuguesa, Doclisboa organized a huge retrospective of his work. The Portuguese international documentary film festival showed 25 films, including shorts and features, from half-hour TV shows in video to majestic musicals in rarely seen, lavish 35mm prints, assembled from several archives. Curated by Boris Nelepo, it was the most comprehensive retrospective of the Mexican director outside his home country to date.
For this text, I borrow an idea from Leduc’s Ethnocide: Notes on the Mezquital (1976), a monumental work in which the alphabet is taken as a structural method, organizing—or ironically, disorganizing—the documentary material. In the following notes, I try to map some motifs throughout Leduc’s work, in order to go deep into his filmography and create some aesthetic bridges with other filmmakers. In his text for the Doclisboa catalog, Nelepo insightfully inserts Leduc in the tradition of stylized modernists such as Manoel de Oliveira, Werner Schroeter, and Raúl Ruiz. My approach builds on a different perspective based on a Latin American version of modern cinema. As you will notice, some letters are missing, similarly to Ethnocide. Paul Leduc’s alphabet wouldn’t be accurate unless it embraces incompleteness.
A—Action
In the last sequence of Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1972), Paul Leduc’s first feature—a 16mm biopic of journalist John Reed’s contact with the Mexican Revolution—the protagonist is on a sidewalk, watching a successful attack on a town, facing a dilemma. How should he continue to observe and report, while his fellow men are risking their lives to engage in a just struggle? After spending the entire film observing, John (or Juancito, as his comrades call him) suddenly breaks a shop window to loot a camera.
In an unexpected change of perspective, Leduc places the camera inside the shop right before the punch, so when Reed crashes the glass, he’s also disrupting our placid expectations of the images. He’s shattering our immobility as viewers, too. The cinema of Paul Leduc is a call to action. Unlike other filmmakers who also seek to rearrange the world, Leduc understands that cinema should first dismantle itself.
B—Biopic
Paul Leduc approaches every genre with a disruptive energy. In Frida, Still Life (1984), what could be an anecdotal account of Frida Kahlo’s life becomes a flamboyant cinematic voyage with very little dialogue, powered by the artist’s visual world. Her fractured style is reflected in the film’s structure, a nonlinear evocation of disjointed memories. Kahlo’s obsession with self-portraiture becomes the visual motif of a labyrinth of mirrors, constantly stalking the protagonist; her symbolically loaded visual language opens space for increasingly surreal images; and the passion that emanates from her brushstrokes spreads throughout the film, reaching moments of ecstatic intensity. Like Frida Kahlo, Paul Leduc is a militant artist. They both passionately believe in the political powers of instinct and composition.
C—Collectiveness
Leduc’s first films are signed collectively, fully in tune with the spirit of militant cinema in Latin America in 1968. In the credits of Religión en México: Chiapas (1968) and Reed, his name is listed among others who worked on the film, without hierarchy or designated crew functions. Many of them would become frequent collaborators: producer Bertha Navarro, cinematographer Alexis Grivas, editor Rafael Castanedo, and others. Leduc also co-founded the collective Cine 70 with some of the major directors of Mexican modern cinema, including Felipe Cazals and Arturo Ripstein.
In Communicqués 1, 2 and 4 from the National Strike Council (1968), collectiveness effaces all authorship. Those counter-information shorts, composed in the spirit of “4-minute cinema” (an urgent form of agitprop filmmaking proposed by Mario Handler in Uruguay and practiced by Carlos Álvarez and Julia Sabogal in Colombia), remained anonymous at the time for security reasons. In addition, individualistic endeavors seemed superfluous to militant filmmakers like Leduc working in 1968, when thousands of students and workers were marching in the streets of Mexico City, risking their lives every day in the massive strikes that would end tragically in the Tlatelolco Massacre. Though many of his works establish Paul Leduc as an author, with a distinct style, his efforts toward the collective should also be acknowledged as an intrinsic part of his work.
D—Dance
Curator Boris Nelepo named the retrospective after a painting by Nicolas Poussin, A Dance to the Music of Time. The title speaks to Leduc’s choreography of bodies, his nonlinear uses of time, and his effort to find a cinematic language that could grasp the singular rhythms of Latin America. This path would lead him to create a genre of his own, in the trilogy formed by Barroco (1989), Latino Bar (1991), and Dollar Mambo (1993). Those films are musicals without any dialogue, where the story is told through a choreography of gazes, objects, gestures, and songs.
Outside the genre of musicals, Leduc remains a choreographer. His camera is always moving, creating a visual ballet between spaces and bodies. In Monjas coronadas (1978), what could have been a straightforward commissioned short documentary about an exhibition of baroque paintings becomes a loaded dance of lights, a surreal evocation of colonial times, and a delightful sonic tapestry, all powered by the poems of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.
E—Entranced
Leduc’s filmography is full of moments when the characters seem transfixed, as if carried by a force beyond themselves. These moments can happen in the most disparate places, from the rituals of Indigenous peoples to the constant intoxication of a group of urban drunkards; from intense musical performances to the artistic ecstasies of Frida Kahlo and Sor Juana; and from the heavy eroticism between Dolores Pedro and Roberto Sosa to the tumultuous times of the Revolution. Instinct and sensuality often take over, to a point where reasoning makes absolutely no sense. From beginning to end, Leduc has searched for an entranced cinema, one that could embody the energies of convulsiveness and transformation that emerge from Latin American history.
G—Gaze-camera
French film criticism has a term for the encounter between the gaze of a filmed character with the optical axis of the camera: regard-caméra. That “gaze-camera,” although trivialized by overuse on television and social media, still retains its powers of self-reflexivity and disruption in Leduc’s cinema. There are numerous moments when the camera ceases to observe and plunges into confrontation, seeking a returning gaze that could trouble the relationship between who films, who is filmed, and who is watching.
In Religión en México, what seems to be an ethnographic account of religious practices becomes a tour-de-force between the camera and the subjects, as it often happens in the work of Brazilian filmmaker Aloysio Raulino. For Leduc, observing is never an innocent gesture. The gaze-camera reaches paroxysm in Sur sureste: 2604 (1973), an experimental adaptation of a Ray Bradbury short story, in which a couple is chased by several stalkers, all armed with cameras. The very act of filming is constantly challenged throughout Leduc’s oeuvre, in the most fascinating ways.
H—History
In Ethnocide, when the intertitle “History” appears on screen, we may expect an accurate chronological account of the subjects the film is addressing. What follows, instead, is a series of sliding shots through silent surfaces, with no words whatsoever. To the sound of a Beethoven string quartet, we glide through fragments of pre-Colombian architecture, skulls in an altar, Catholic paintings, a tractor that says “Works, U.S.A,” some dates (1891, 1910, 1929), piles of accumulated paper, ruins that remain uncertain. In the last three shots, a brief dialectical theorem: (1) a museum with recent sculptures representing the Otomi people, (2) a pile of brand-new coffins, and (3) an Indigenous woman holding a child and gazing right into the axis of the camera. Paul Leduc’s historical imagination is not an accumulation of facts, nor a chronology. Throughout his filmography, history is a clash of living emblems, a spiral dance between undead specters, and a stratified surface where different temporalities can coexist.
I—Irony
What Do You Think? (1986) ends with a dedication: “This movie is dedicated to the International Monetary Fund.” The gesture reminds us of another milestone of Mexican cinema, The Secret Formula (Rubén Gámez, 1965), where the ending credits are a long list of names of powerful companies from imperialist nations, as if Siemens, Disney, and British Petroleum were cast and crew.
J—Juxtaposition
In the opening sequence of Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb (1980), we see glimpses of lush vegetation while listening to a letter being read from the conqueror Don Pedro de Alvarado to his boss Hernán Cortés, describing the restless resistance of the Indigenous people from the region in 1524. In the next sequence, we are suddenly dragged into a staged demonstration of armed guerrilla warfare on the streets of a neighborhood in El Salvador in the late seventies. Immediately juxtaposed, one temporality resonates with the other, and the evocation of colonial times is both cinematically and politically stronger than traditional documentary approaches would be.
L—Latinoamérica
The filmmakers who successfully adopted a fully Pan-Latin American perspective, in the sense of comprising the whole region in their artistic projects, could be counted on one hand: Glauber Rocha, Helena Solberg, Santiago Álvarez, and very few others. Paul Leduc is one of them. Outside Mexico, he filmed in Venezuela (Latino Bar), Cuba (Barroco), Panama (Dollar Mambo), El Salvador (Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb), and Argentina and Brazil (Cobrador: In God We Trust, 2006).
In its best efforts, this desire to find similarities throughout a vast territory creates unexpected bridges through solidarity. Ethnocide is an impressive mosaic of systemic oppression and singular struggles for liberation, rooted in the Mezquital but expandable to the whole region, in an effort comparable to Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces (1968). In its most anodyne strategies, Leduc’s cinema tries to encompass Latinoamérica as an ahistorical emblem, where differences are suppressed for the sake of legibility. In Barroco, the leap between the Cuban War of Independence and the Spanish Civil War creates a feeble parallelism, as if such abysmal historical differences could be glued through the sign of oppression. That film is similar to the less stimulating parts of Solanas’s filmography, as in the harmless allegories of The Journey (1992).
M—Metacinema
In many Leduc films, cinematic procedures are dismantled to expose the inner workings of language. He embraces what Cuban filmmakers such as Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea would call “decolonization.” Even in a seemingly straightforward militant documentary like Forbidden Tales of Tom Thumb, an interview with a historian is intercalated with title cards that read “long shot” and “approaching.” This creates an interplay between film language and historical analysis (in Spanish, plano general and acercamiento apply in both film and history). Later in that film, an intertitle reads: “Silent Cinema and Interview.” What follows is a series of silent shots of subjugated people, with their hands tied and their heads on the ground, watched over by army men.
What seems to be a portrait of defeat is suddenly broken by a stunning image. A man is on the floor, upside down. The camera has to contort itself to approach his face. The microphone almost touches the ground. He cannot lift his head. Yet he talks about the reasons for the workers’ strike as a brave leader, head up and arms raised. The expressions silent cinema and interview will never be the same.
N—Noise
All Paul Leduc films should be played loudly. In a sense, they are all musicals.
R—Roughness
In its strongest moments, Paul Leduc’s cinema is resolutely unpolished. In Crónica de un reventón (1985), an episode for a TV show, the use of direct, untreated sound to portray a rock concert, together with the wild lights of analog video, pays a ruffled tribute to punk crudity. As in the most radical tradition of Latin American modern cinema from Fernando Birri to García Espinosa, Leduc turns precariousness into a source of formal invention, while creating a cinematic experience that retains a visceral roughness. Like that unforgettable song by Cecília Toussaint that plays in several of Leduc’s films: “Maybe this tune sounds transistorized to you / Sung by the laryngitis of the exhaust / But that's how it sounds in the head when you go to La Merced.”
S—Smoothness
In its weakest moments, Paul Leduc’s cinema is refined, overpolished, and polite. In the trilogy formed by Barroco, Latino Bar, and Dollar Mambo, there is an overall smoothness and tranquil pace. In those films, history seems detained, entirely available for the contemplation of impeccable tracking shots moving through delicately constructed spaces where flawless art direction screams more than time. Fortunately, the trilogy ends with a scene (in Dollar Mambo) in which Dolores Pedro performs cabaret for some soldiers during the occupation of Panama by the U.S. Army. They harass her and she continues dancing, with her exposed breasts seeming irrevocably sexualized. But then, all of a sudden, she opens up her chest and shows them (and us) her bloody entrails. The camera pans through the room to find a television set playing an archive of a news report of an actual rape-murder of a cabaret dancer by U.S. soldiers. Tranquility is dismantled.
T—Turmoil
Despite being a director of “mathematical precision,” as Nelepo puts it, Leduc is inevitably attracted to chaos. A musical with Mexican eighties rock bands, What Do You Think? is shattered by fragmented scenes of marginality and urban disarray. Extravagant artificiality and raw realism are inseparable; surrealist imagery and the crude textures of slum architecture are components of the same cinematic turmoil. What Do You Think? anticipates the strident energy of Rodrigo D: no futuro (Víctor Gaviria, 1990), a Colombian punk masterpiece.
In the documentary The Calm After the Storm (Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, 2020), filmmaker and writer Víctor Gaviria says,
| You cannot go to a neighborhood where everyone’s life is a complete mess, where you don’t know if you’re awake or asleep, if it’s day or night, because poverty has messed with your reason and fucked it up, where your whole life is madness and anguish… You can’t go there as a scientist; you have to go there as a drunkard. You have to participate in that inconsistency. In that same loss of reason. You can’t go there unless you’re drugged. Why? To say: We cannot stand this. |
Paul Leduc lived that belief even before it was formulated by Gaviria.
U—Urgency
Leduc was a producer, assistant, and car driver for Raymundo Gleyzer’s Mexico: The Frozen Revolution (1970), a critical diagnosis of the institutionalization of the 1910s insurgency in Mexican contemporary politics. But if the Revolution seemed stagnant, Leduc’s film Reed finds a renewed urgency for a rebellion that happened half a century ago, reclaiming a cinematic energy to defrost it. Reed is historical fiction, but the agile takes in 16mm, together with sync sound, create a documentary texture. That also happens in Manuel Octavio Gómez’s The First Charge of the Machete (1969), which portrays events of the 19th century in Cuba in the style of an urgent documentary. For both of them, history is what is happening right now. After being transferred from black-and-white 16mm footage to a 35mm colored print, the film gained a sepia tone, which could suggest a museum-like antique. And yet, it doesn’t feel like that. At Doclisboa, we watched a print from the mid-1970s that belonged to the Portuguese Cinematheque—in 1974, the Carnation Revolution overcame censorship and liberated screening spaces for those films to circulate in Portugal. To watch that print is to realize how several layers of historicity and liberation energy are now sediments in that narrow piece of celluloid. It’s our task to unleash it.
V—Viewer
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, in The Viewer’s Dialectic (1984), tries to find a productive tension between Eisenstein’s pathos and Brecht’s distancing effect, “a dialectic of reason and passion,” as the basis for a renewed spectacle/spectator relation. The cinema of Paul Leduc embraces the friction of that polarity to the fullest. Can an oeuvre be overtly self-reflexive, and yet full of emotional pathos? To build a feeble bridge or to create a compromise solution would betray the complexity of Leduc’s filmography. In regarding his work, we should keep those contradictions wide open.
Victor Guimarães is a film critic, programmer, and teacher based in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. He is currently a columnist at Con Los Ojos Abiertos (Argentina). His work has appeared in publications such as Cinética, Senses of Cinema, Kinoscope, Desistfilm, La Vida Útil, La Furia Umana, and Cahiers du Cinéma.