Arturo Ripstein Research Articles

A Fantastic Woman (2017) by Sebastián Lelio: A Transnational Portrait of Transgender Experience

A Fantastic Woman (2017) by Sebastián Lelio: A Transnational Portrait of Transgender Experience Sandra Ortiz-València “Cuando te veo, no sé, no sé lo que veo. Una quimera, eso” (Lelio). This is one of the multiple verbal and physical assaults that Marina, as a trans woman, has to endure while she grieves the recent death of her lover, Orlando. After spending a romantic night together, both rush to the hospital because he has had a heart attack. Unfortunately, he passes away that night. In the days after his sudden death, Marina is forced to confront his family’s objection to their relationship. Before dating Marina, Orlando was married and had a family, and she is seen as a disruptive presence —not just for dating Orlando, but also because she is trans. She is aggressively harassed by Bruno, Orlando’s youngest brother, prevented from attending the funeral, and questioned by the police. No one can comprehend, much less condone, Marina’s existence in Orlando’s life: the fact that she is trans presents challenges to the heteronormative, cis-gendered Chilean society. In rejecting the relationship between Marina and Orlando, society is attempting to deny her the right to grieve the loss of her lover. However, Marina is undeterred. She fights back against the collective rejection in order to reclaim that right. A Fantastic Woman (2017) adds the complexities of transgender experience to a story of loss and grief. The director, Sebastián Lelio —undoubtedly influenced by masters of the classical melodrama, such a Nicolas Ray and Douglas Sirk— constructs a dazzlingly beautiful piece on Marina’s journey that exposes the experiences and struggles transgender individuals encounter on a daily basis. In fact, A Fantastic Woman is part of a trans-national trend in popular culture that has voiced the concerns that affect transgender people and other members of the LGTBIQ+ community. This phenomenon is particularly striking in Latin America, whose cultural production presents a long-lasting literary and cinematic tradition in the representation of non-normative subjects. Two of the most canonical examples would be: El beso de la mujer araña (1976), written by Manuel Puig and adapted to the screen in 1985 by Hector Babencho, and El lugar sin límites (1966) by José Donoso and adapted by Arturo Ripstein in 1978. Of late, Latin American [End Page 33] cultural production has been characterized by an increase in works revolving around LGTBIQ+ issues, as the filmography of Lucía Puenzo, Marco Berger, Diego Lerman, or Lorenzo Vigas illustrates. A Fantastic Woman is a new addition to this cultural trend, one that reached an extraordinary international success, especially after being recognized as the Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards. As Patricia Gherovici puts it: “the word transgender has experienced a ‘meteoric rise’ and [. . .] has become an everyday term” (1). Pieces such as Lelio’s film that deal with transgender issues may seem odd or perverse to some mainstream audiences, given that these works aim to negotiate their conceptualizations of sex, gender, and sexuality within a heterosexual visual framework (Fuchs and Holmlund 4). They row against the tide, but they “unravel identity as a construction,” forcing viewers “to reconsider how we think about other forms of difference” (Ghrerovici 3). Transgender experience pushes forward fluidity as an essential element in identity and “highlight[s] the plasticity, contingency, and arbitrariness of categories like race or gender” (Ghrerovici 5). This is precisely what Lelio’s film does: dismantle traditional heterosexist ideological determinations and pave the way to transform society into a more inclusive and accepting place. By proving that gender identity is a construction, the film lays bare the multiple possibilities for categorizations of sex, gender and sexuality, and calls for an immediate change in social values to protect and respect the multifaceted nature of individual identity. Despite this increasing visibility and presence in the public arena, transgender individuals have little control over their representation, which tends to be instrumentalized and rendered through a voyeuristic lens, rather than one focused on the genuine experiences of these individuals (Gherovici 16). Interestingly, A Fantastic Woman subverts this trend by presenting a story that effectively equates transgender and cisgender heterosexual experiences...

Inquisitorial process in Arturo Ripstein’s film: “El Santo Oficio”

Despite the great influence that the Black Legend of Spain has had on the cinema in the representation of the Holy Office in audiovisual content, it is possible to rescue some works with great historical rigor. One of them is The Holy Office of Arturo Ripstein. In this Mexican film, the story of the Carvajal family is narrated, which will be processed twice by this court.

El castillo de la pureza: A love story?

The movie El castillo de la pureza, by Arturo Ripstein (1972), is based on a real event that took place in Mexico City in 1959. The objective of the article is to describe the context of the event, inscribed in the police annals of the Mexican Capital and how such a sordid story (according to our perspective) could be adapted to the screen as a “love story”, highlighting the work of the screenwriter Jose Emilio Pacheco (JEP). A first reading of the film shows us the confinement of a family (forced by the father) and that the isolation from the outside world is accepted by the wife as an almost divine plan of the one who loves and respects blindly. Our intention is to deepen this view by offering an analysis of the information from the press of the time,from excerpts from the script, as well as scenes from the film and the frames corresponding to the chosen sequence that I have named “Preamble to the crisis. The tranquility in the castle begins to crack”.

Un boceto original de Manuel Fontanals

Manuel Fontanals fue el escenógrafo más importante del cine mexicano del periodo clásico. Llegó a México en 1937 a raíz de la Guerra Civil española, luego de una brillante trayectoria como escenógrafo teatral, diseñador de vestuario, decorador, ilustrador y diseñador editorial, desarrollada en su país natal y Europa. Debutó en el cine mexicano como escenógrafo de la película María (Chano Urueta, 1938), a partir de entonces y hasta los años setenta filmó más de doscientas películas, con directores tan importantes como Emilio Fernández, Roberto Gavaldón y Arturo Ripstein, con quien realizó El castillo de la pureza, su última película.

Les mélotragédies d’Arturo Ripstein. Analyse de Así es la vida

Asi es la vida (Such is Life, 2000), made by Mexican director Arturo Ripstein can be defined, in many respects, as a reinvention. First of all because it is a filmic transposition of Medea, the Latin tragedy of Seneca. But the film-maker, as usual, also exercises his talents regarding the subversion of melodrama, in particular by borrowing some codes or elements peculiar to tragedy. In this contemporary melotragedy, Medea and Jason seem to have passed through the filter of Valle Inclan’s Esperpento, and find themselves, behind the concave mirror that Ripstein’s cameraconstitutes, thrown into a degraded universe, and confronted with the very commonplace situation of desamour (falling out of love).

Arturo Ripstein’s and Paz Alicia Garciadiego’s Lucha Reyes and the aesthetics of Mexican abjection

Abstract This article explores questions of representation and reception of Arturo Ripstein’s biopic La reina de la noche/The Queen of the Night (1994), loosely based on the life of the pioneer Mexican ranchera music performer Lucha Reyes (1906–1944). Reyes created the sound of ranchera singing as we understand it today: simultaneously aggressive, pained, festive. Her troubled and controversial career is examined in light of the film’s mixed reception, notably the unfavourable reception in Mexico due to the irreverent treatment of this national icon. The divisive representation of Reyes’s alcoholism, mental illness and bisexual lifestyle opens a window into exploring how Reyes’s non-conformist agency rubbed uneasily against dominant society. Yet, despite this critical edge, the focus on Reyes as a tragic and abject victim and her rendering as a queer icon register the multiple layers of ambiguity that made the film so problematic for audiences and critics.

DVD Reviews

A Christmas Tale/Un Conte de Nol, (2009) France Director Arnaud Desplechin Screenplay Arnaud Desplechin Adaptation by Arnaud Desplechin and Emmanuel Bourdieu Producer Pascal Caucheteux Cinematographer Eric Gaultier Editor Laurence Briaud Music Grgoire Hetzel With Catherine Deneuve (Junon), Jean-Paul Rousillion (Abel), Mathieu Almaric (Henri), Anne Cosigny (Elizabeth), Melvil Poupaud (Ivan), Emmanuelle Devos (Faunia) and Chiara Mastroianni (Sylvia). Runtime 152 minutes DVD USA, 2009 Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (Region 1) Aspect Ratio 2.35:1 Sound Mix Surround Sound Colour Language French with English subtitles Extras New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Arnaud Desplechin. L'Aimee, Desplechin's 2007 documentary about the sale of his family home. Arnaud's Tale, a new 35-minute documentary featuring interviews with Desplechin and actors Mathieu Almaric and Catherine Deneuve. Original theatrical trailers. A booklet featuring an essay by critic Philope Lopate. The Exterminating Angel/El ngel exterminador, (1962) Mexico Director Luis Buuel Screenplay Luis Buuel Original story by Luis Alcoriza and Luis Buuel Producer Gustavo Alatriste Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa With Silvia Pinal (Leticia La Valkiria), Enrique Rambal (Edmundo Nobile), Lucy Gallardo (Luca de Nobile), Claudio Brook (Julio, the steward), Augusto Benedico (Carlos Conde, the doctor), Jos Baviera (Leandro Gomez) Runtime 93 minutes DVD USA, 2008 Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect Ratio 1.33:1 Sound Mix Dolby Digital 1.0 mono Extras New, restored high-definition transfer. Theatrical trailer. New and improved English subtitle translation. The Last Script: Remembering Luis Buuel (2008), a 90-minute documentary featuring screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrire and Buuel's son, director Juan Luis Buuel. Interviews with actress Silvia Pinal and filmmaker Arturo Ripstein. A 36-page booklet featuring a new essay by film scholar Marsha Kinder and an interview with Buuel from the 1970s. Soul Power, (2008) USA Director Jeffrey Levy-Hinte Producers Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, Leon Gast, David Sonenberg Cinematographers Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles, Roderick Young Editor David A. Smith Sound Design John Moros With The Spinners, OK Jazz feat, Franco, Bill Withers, Miriam Makeba, Pembe Dance Troupe, The Crusaders, Fania All-Stars, Big Black, Afrisa feat, Tabu Ley Rochereaux, James Brown and The Mighty J.B.'s, Muhammad Ali, Don King, Yomo Toro, Celia Cruz, Trio Madjesi, George Plimpton, Sister Sledge and The Crusaders. Runtime 93 minutes DVD USA 2009 Produced and Distributed by Eureka Entertainment as part of the Masters of Cinema series Aspect Ratio 1.85:1 Sound Mix Dolby Digital Extras Extra scenes. Extra performances by James Brown, Sister Sledge, Abeti, Pointer Sisters and Pembe Dance Troupe. Interview with director. UK theatrical trailer.

The Latin American Queer Aesthetics of El Bolereo

This article assembles a queer interpretive apparatus facilitating our examination of the non-heteronormative politics of various late 20th-century cultural products indebted to the Hispanic Caribbean musical genre of the Bolero. It provides a critical analysis of the history of the Bolero in order to argue that this musical genre is supported by an underlying queer aesthetic that exposes gendered and sexual identities as constructed. The essay proposes that naming this rhetorical tool Bolereo highlights its presence in musical, literary, and filmic discourses that may not otherwise be perceived as resisting compulsory heteropatriarchy. The essay foments the view that Bolereo functions as a systemic anti-hegemonic aesthetic movement through a hermeneutic analysis of songs performed by Eydie Gormé, Toña La Negra, and Chavela Vargas; novels by José Donoso and Manuel Puig; and movies by Pedro Almodóvar and Arturo Ripstein. Not unlike the way in which many of the Bolero's most famous vocalists have utilized the tropes of this musical genre to open up a space for sexual deviance within a predominantly heterosexual discourse, Donoso and Puig's queer characters—La Manuela and Molina—are presented as reinterpreting the Bolero in order to make the heterosexual discursive world they inhabit more livable for them. As such, Bolereo is a distinctive feature of Latin American queer subjectivities that destabilizes heteronormativity and recentres these marginal subjectivities by exposing desire as socially constructed and deploying the theme of tragedy to protest heteropatriarchal violence.

Interview with Arturo Ripstein: No Contest

I like survivors. Marginal characters. Events and scenes where my characters are at the end of their rope. And they keep on and on and on. That is only the beginning of Deep Crimson's filmmaking notes by Arturo Ripstein, which were published in 1996 by the Spanish film magazine Nosferatu . The renowned film director creates a flash self-portrait, without wanting to. He is a survivor of a long history of film making almost four decades and forty movies so far and for the past few years he has been marginalized above all from the so called Renaissance of the Mexican Film. With only two or three movies monopolizing the attention of the media, just a few mention the prolific rhythm with which Ripstein has filmed since 1966. From the filmmaker's outline of his favorite creatures, the trait he doesn't agree with is to define them as weak. The interview that follows took place in San Sebastian, location of the film festival where Ripstein alternates between being a

A Poet's Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets (review)

Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 253 The book, organized in one introduction and four chapters, provides a wide survey of fourteen films: De eso no se habk, El lugar sin lÃ-mites, Aqueles dois, Convivencia, Conducta impropia, The Disappearance of GarcÃ-a Lorca, Doña Herlinda y su hijo, No se lo digas a nadie, En el paraÃ-so no existe el dolor, A intrusa, Pkta quemada, Afrodita, and Fresa y Chocolate. The analysis centers around the key concept of "Queerness." According to Alexander Doty, quoted in Foster's book, queer is an umbrella concept for: anything that challenges or subverts the straight, the compulsory heterosexual , through either an ironizing of its limited view of human potential or through the overt defiance of its conventions. (92) Following Doty's proposed definition, the films analyzed in Foster's book aim, in one way or another, at subverting heterosexual compulsion and defying the conventions of patriarchal culture . It follows that not all the films deal explicitly with the gay issue, and that the film directors are not necessarily gay themselves. One of the best discussions in the book is the one on MarÃ-a Luisa Bemberg's De eso no se habk. Although the movie does not feature gay characters or deal with the gay issue per se, Charlotte , the protagonist, is marked as other by her dwarfism. Her phallic mother, Leonor, tries by all means, to conceal her daughter's differentness , to compel the community to overlook her daughter's markedness, and to fit her compulsively into the patriarchal culture. The queerness of this film resides in its defiance of the conventions of patriarchal culture. Another key concept in the book is homophobia , understood as "the irrational fear of homosexuals/lesbigays/queers" (x). For the author , homophobia "is a complex dynamic that functions to enforce the principles of heteronormativity and that any irrational fear associated with it is what homophobia as an instrument of heteronormativity is all about" (x). The film El lugar sin lÃ-mites by Arturo Ripstein, based on José Donoso's novel of the same title, constitutes a clear example of homophobia: Manuela, a cross-dressed gay, is murdered by a prototypical macho, Pancho, in an effort to deny his homoerotic desires, and to prove to his brother-in-law that he is not gay. David William Foster's fourth book on Latin American cinema, Queer Issues in Contemporary Lain American Cinema, provides a radical critique of homophobia and anti-gay stereotypes in Latin America. At only one year of its publication in 2003, this book is already shaping out to be an obligatory reading in the fields of Latin American Cinema and Gay Srudies because of the excellent research that supports the analysis and the originality of its contribution . Although there is an extensive bibliography on both Latin American cinema and Latin American Gay Studies, this is the first volume that is exclusively dedicated to examine queer Latin American cinema. Most definitely , this book widens the area of analytical reflection on gender issues in Latin America. Fernando Valerio-Holguin Colorado State University A Poet's Truth: Conversations with Latino! Latina Poets The University of Arizona Press, 2003 By Bruce Allen Dick A true labor of love, A Poet's Truth: Conversations with Latino/Latina Poets compiles fifteen interviews by Bruce Allen Dick with Latino/Latina poets. Their responses were artained through the usual number of possible procedures: via phone, internet, or through a personal entrevista. All of the poets are published authors, although the number of publications varies with each of them. Each interview is prefaced by a short bio on each poet that features information on accomplishments and a suggested reading list. The interviews were conducted entirely in English with: Miguel AlgarÃ-n, MartÃ-n Espada, Sandra Maria Esteves, 254 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies VÃ-ctor Hernández Cruz, Carolina Hospital, Carlos Medina, Demerria Martinez, Pat Mora, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Ricardo Pau-Llosa, Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Leroy Quintana, Aleida RodrÃ-guez , Luis RodrÃ-guez, BenjamÃ-n Alire Sáenz, and Virgil Suárez. Each of the Latino poets has a story to tell, and A Poet's Truth has a very foreboding...

Arturo Ripstein et la subversion du mélodrame

ABSTRACT- While in France for a long time we had known Mexican cinema only through the movies from Emilio Fernandez, « the Indian », and those from Luis Buñuel, Arturo Ripstein stood out in 1994 with the release of three long- length films in a short time : The Castle of Purity (1972), This Place without limits (1977) and The Empire of Wealth (1985), as well as his selection at the Cannes's Festival for his fourth movie, The Queen of the night (1994), coproduced by Mexico, the USA and France. In all his movies, and especially the latest ones, Deep Crimson (1996) and No Letter for the Colonel (1999), written with the scriptwriter Paz Alicia Garcíadiego, Arturo Ripstein while adapting melodrama emphasizes its darkness and confines its neurotic and delirious characters within a world where any hope is excluded.

El idiota superviviente: Artes y letras españolas frente a la "muerte del hombre," 1969-1990 (review)

262 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Acevedo-Muñoz presenrs a complex and nuanced account of Bufiuel's relations with and role wirhin rhe Mexican film industry of the period. Bunuel immersed himself in rhe modes of production and concomitant narrative and rhematic strategies of popular genre cinema, a process which, the book argues, allowed him to consolidate his earlier artistic foundations in surrealist aesthetics and ethnographic interests (most apparent in his 1932 documenrary Las hurdes) into a new hybrid, "popular surrealism ," that would transcend the Eurocentric elitism of the original French surrealists (2). Chapter three, devoted to Los olvidados, explores the convergence of specific national, transnational and biographical factors that led to the creation of perhaps the signal expression ofthat vision. Acevedo-Mufioz's reading oÃ- Los olvidados considers rhe film in tandem with Octavio Paz's The Labyrinth of Solitude, published the same year as the film's release (1950). At the time of the film's premier Paz proved one of its strongest defenders against Mexican critics who lashed out against what diey saw as an outsider's pitiless portrayal of urban squalor and social decay. Looking beyond mere historical coincidence for the sources of rheir shared critical vision of post-Revolutionary Mexican society, Acevedo-Muñoz locates the roots of the affinities between Paz and Buñuel in their cosmopolitan intellectual backgrounds and similar interactions with the European surrealisr group. Both men develop the perspective necessary to formulate their critique of Mexican society and character, he argues, through the deployment of a form of "ethnographic surrealism" that would put familiar national realities under the microscope of a distancing aesthetic-analytic vision (64). Buñuel and México is particularly welcome for the attention it devotes to the majority of the director's Mexican films that were nor so overtly critical and that but for their illustrious parentage would have (and indeed have) been passed nearly undetected as one more family drama, melodrama, or comedy. AcevedoMu ñoz is careful not to make excessive claims for rhe subversive intent of films such as Susana, Una mujer sin amor or El rÃ-o y k muerte. As he notes with regards to Susana, many apparent signs of aesthetic or ideological dissidence, "the film's over-the-top flamboyance and aesthetics of excess [...] exemplified by [the protagonist's] willingness to frame herself as specracle," were in fact more the norm than the exception and "perfectly acceptable in contemporary Mexican melodrama" (89). What the author does claim for Bufiuel's films is a kind of prescient role in revealing the incipient crisis in rhe Mexican classic cinema model and the exhaustion of its narrative and thematic formula as well as its inadequacy in responding to a larger political and cultural crisis. He draws support for that position as well as for his overall argument regarding the fundamenral place of Buñuel within the history of Mexican cinema from the embrace of Buñuel by the "Nuevo Cine" generation of filmmakers and intellectuals in the 1960s. Acevedo-Muñoz finds powerful evidence Bufiuel's legacy in Mexico in the writings published in rhe short-lived journal of rhe same name by figures such as Paz, Carlos Monsiváis, Carlos Fuentes and Emilio GarcÃ-a Riera and later in rhe works of "New Cinema" filmmakers, Alberto Isaac, Felipe Cazáis, Paul Leduc, Arturo Ripstein and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo. Kathleen M. Vernon State University of New York at Stony Brook El idiota superviviente: Artes y htras españolas frente a k "muerte del hombre, " 1969-1990 Ediciones Libertarias, 2003 Por Eugenia Afinoguénova En un libro de extraordinaria intensidad y reflexión, Eugenia Afinoguénova nos invira a pensar los lÃ-mites de la subjetividad contempor ánea y nos guÃ-a a través de una propuesta alternativa que las artes y las letras españolas produjeron desde finales de los sesenta hasta principio de los novenra. El tÃ-tulo traza la tensión Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 263 entre los dos conceptos centrales del libro: el idiota y la muerte del hombre. Según la autora, frente a la defunción del sujeto filosófico anunciada por el estrucruralismo franc...

“The Future is Digital Cinema”: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego

(2003). “The Future is Digital Cinema”: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego. Quarterly Review of Film and Video: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 39-51.

A Career in Perspective: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein

n April 1997 Arturo Ripstein, Mexico's most renowned film director, confronted Eresto Zedillo in the Mexican president's first meeting with the statesupported film community since he took office in December 1994. On behalf of IMCINE (the state-funded Mexican Film Institute created in 1983) and its primary beneficiaries and administrators, Ripstein appealed to the president: A country without film is a sad country. This less than positive view of Mexico today is also held by other major players in that country's artfilm world, who are convinced, as is Ripstein, that without state subsidies the national art cinema would not

A Career in Perspective: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein

A Career in Perspective: An Interview with Arturo Ripstein