Borderline

The Mexican avant-garde sizzles

by Peter Keough

"MEXPERIMENTAL CINEMA: 60 YEARS OF AVANT-GARDE MEDIA ARTS FROM MEXICO" At the Harvard Film Archive, January 21 through 30.

"The Devil is in the desert" is a repeated warning in Luis Buñuel's Mexican-made mini-masterpiece Simon of the Desert (1962, screens in Program 2, January 22 at 7 p.m. and January 23 at 9 p.m.) Which is probably why people go there, since the Devil is a saucy, disco-loving babe who wants to lure the column-sitting ascetic to a Manhattan nightclub. Buñuel's is one of the few familiar names in "Mexperimental Cinema: 60 Years of Avant-Garde Media Arts from Mexico," which plays this week in six programs at the Harvard Film Archive, but the themes resounding in Simon -- fear of corruption, the specter of exploitation, the persistence of poverty, the intermingling of pagan and Catholic iconography, and the quest for purity and identity -- resonate through this diverse, spirited, uneven collection of shorts and features.

There's no mistaking the Devil in Rubén Gámez's seminal La fórmula secreta/Coca-Cola en la sangre ("The Secret Formula/Coca-Cola in the Blood," 1965; Program 2) -- the opening image is of a transfusion from a Coke bottle, and throughout these films Mexico's big northern neighbor looms as a temptation and a threat. In this feisty, essayistic collage, Gámez evokes the Jean-Luc Godard of the "children of Marx and Coca-Cola" era, not to mention Sergei Eisenstein (whose Mexican-shot fragment "[[exclamdown]]Que viva, México!" would have been a useful addition to the series) and the inevitable Buñuel; but he also achieves a poetry of his own in such sequences as the butchering of a steer (its dying face in close-up rivals the Michelangelo's Pietà), whose truncated carcass its peasant slayer then carries, like Christ en route to Golgotha, through the city streets.

A similar burden is carried in Antonio Reynoso's "El despojo" ("The Dispossession," 1958-'60; Program 1, January 21 at 7 p.m.), in which a father and mother pursued by a different kind of Devil flee across the desert bearing their ailing son. It's a deceptively straightforward narrative of a pre-El Mariachi guitar-toting peasant seeking revenge against the landowner who stole his land, wife, and son, and though drawing from Ambrose Bierce's An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, it predates the famed 1962 Robert Enrico adaptation of that story. Nearly four decades later, the motif of cross bearing persists in the glibly satiric and wryly postmodernist "Víctimas del pecado neo-liberal" ("Victims of Neo-Liberal Sin," 1995; Program 6, January 30 at 6 p.m.), in which a clownish bureaucrat takes up the rood of his social guilt in a cartoonish version of the stations of the cross.

If you can't beat it, enjoy it, is one response to Mexico's inveterate problems and promise. The crushing burdens of social oppression, cultural deprivation, and material want are embraced in Gregorio Rocha's down-and-out documentary "Sábado de mierda" ("Shitty Saturday," 1985-'87; Program 3, January 23 at 6 p.m.). Its punked-out slum kids, tricked out in leather, dyed hair, and eye make-up and looking like a cross between Sid Vicious and Mercedes McCambridge in Touch of Evil, cavort in nihilistic joy amid the alleys and garbage dumps of Mexico City; the film is reminiscent of a cinéma-vérité Scorpio Rising.

Escape, though, is a more common response to such hardship. In Fernando Sampietro's Untitled (Quiero ser un actor) ("I Want To Be an Actor," 1970s; Program 1), a self-proclaimed atheist dons beret and sunglasses, steps before mostly American movie icons, and declares his wish to become an actor because "it's an illusion, like mathematics." In Silvia Gruner's "El vuelo" ("The Flight," 1989; Program 3, January 23 at 6 p.m.), a white-dressed dancer tries various ways -- symbolic, surreal, literal -- to take wing; the film evokes a politicized Maya Deren.

Although the aspiration of most of these filmmakers might be the flight of a bird, the reality seems to be a dog's life. That's the case in Miguel Calderón's "Un nahual veracru' " (1994; Program 3). Combining Kafka with Buñuel (the title is a play on Un chien andalou), the film traces what lies ahead for a man metamorphosed into man's best friend. The ultimate escape and metamorphosis, however, seems to be absorption by the mass media. Although derivative and haphazard, Roberto López's flashy collage of talk-show segments, personal ads, and abiding anomie "Retrato de la generación en crisis" ("Portrait of the Crisis Generation," 1998; Program 1) affords an apt counterpart to Buñuel's Simon. Thirty years later, Mexico has long since succumbed to the Devil and now finds itself in a desert of a different kind.