Family Romances: Buñuel’s Mexican Melodramas

Abstract

Abstract Buñnuel’s Mexican films fall into two categories: those like Gran Casino, El gran calavera (1949), Susana, La hija del engaño (1951), Subida al cielo (1951), El bruto, Abismos de pasión, and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (1953) belonging to a cine de consumo largely obeying the generic laws of the popular ranchera, musical, or melodramatic films of the commercial Mexican cinema; others, like Los olvidados, El, Ensayo de un crimen, Nazarín, breaking free of commercial constraints, reflecting the more personal interests and obsessions of the Surrealist auteur. Yet the two Buiiuels, commercial and auteurist, cannot be so simplistically polarized, their schizophrenia not so much, like Borges’s relationship with his other self, a genuine paradox of artistic or personal identity, as a categorization forced upon his work by viewers and critics (Borges 1979). Admittedly, Buiiuel has himself often encouraged this schizophrenia, sometimes even dismissing whole films as unworthy of anyone’s serious attention.