Category: Film

Gone with the Wind

I have already written on several occasions about this 1939 film, the third on my list of 50, and here I would just like to copy and paste what I have said in past years.

Above, we can see the image of the carpetbagger scene in Gone with the Wind, a war that freed the Negroes and occurred at a time when there were no Jewish-owned mass media and even before mass Jewish immigration began. (Oh, Judeo-reductionist racialists who don’t want to see that, in addition to the JQ, we have a Christian problem…!)

In a couple of those opera-type theatres, I saw Gone with the Wind as a kid and then as a teenager. Many scenes of Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) with Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) made a deep impression on my youthful mind:

– Throughout the film, from the opening scenes in Georgia, women’s outfits duly concealed the sexual appeal of their bodies, especially the dresses of the Southern beauties; and I don’t just mean Scarlett and the feminine elements of her family, but Ashley’s fiancée and the other society women. Melanie Hamilton, who eventually married Ashley, is the perfect model of how women should behave again in the future ethnostate! (the actress who played Melanie died three years ago at the age of 104!).

– At the Twelve Oaks party, before the barbecue is interrupted by the declaration of war, all the women are taking the obligatory nap (except Scarlett, who escapes to the upstairs bedroom) while the men discuss serious matters. It was unthinkable that a woman would have a say in such matters.

– Even after she is widowed, Scarlett is called ‘Mrs Charles Hamilton’, in the sense that her reputation remains in the shadow of a man who died in uniform.

– Similarly, following the Entr’acte Frank (Scarlett’s second husband), Ashley, Rhett and several other accomplices carry out a night-time raid on a shanty town after Scarlett, driving alone, is attacked by Negroes resulting in Frank’s death. Needless to say, on this night the wives of these brave men stayed at home sewing and reading decent literature.

– Once married to Rhett Butler, ‘Captain Butler’ was always greeted first by pedestrians in the street as he strolled with Scarlett. She, faithfully at her husband’s side on these street strolls, was only mentioned after pedestrians greeted Rhett.

– Let us never forget Scarlett’s marital rape when Rhett lifted her in his arms and said, ‘This is the one night you’re not going to throw me out’.

In those luxurious cinemas of yesteryear, when I was young, the film depicted wholesome Western mores, before values were corrupted and completely reversed in our darkest hour. I even remember that my mother, who wasn’t racist at all, felt compassion for the Southerners in the scene where the carpetbagger we see in the image above appears, and we both resented the presence of the black singer who took advantage of the situation. That must have happened about forty-five years ago in one of those theatres.

Christendom Christian art Film

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Post author By C .T.
Post date November 19, 2023
7 Comments on The Hunchback of Notre Dame

Notre-Dame de Paris is a novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831, that focuses on the unhappy story of Quasimodo, the gipsy Esmeralda and the archdeacon Claude Frollo in 15th-century Paris. Its elements—medieval setting, impossible loves, and marginalised characters—make the novel a model for the literary themes of Romanticism.

Hugo’s book opens with a popular celebration of the Epiphany of 1482 at the Palais de Justice. The play introduces us to Esmeralda, a gipsy dancer, Quasimodo, a deformed young hunchback who is in charge of the bells of Notre Dame Cathedral, and the archdeacon Claude Frollo, the bell-ringer’s foster father.

Esmeralda, thanks to her great physical beauty, attracts the poet-student Pierre Gringoire and Captain Febo de Châteaupers, but also Claude Frollo, who decides to kidnap her. Frollo then orders his protégé Quasimodo to kidnap her.

The intervention of Captain Phoebus de Chateaupers prevents the kidnapping from taking place and leads Quasimodo to be condemned to public torture. The hunchback is flogged in the square and receives all the hatred and insults of the people, who cruelly despise him for his ugliness. Quasimodo asks for water and Esmeralda climbs the scaffold to quench his thirst.

I don’t want to tell the whole story but I do want to point out that at midnight I modified the post about my 50 recommended films, reversing the order of the first two, for reasons I am about to explain.

Since the films on my list are arranged in order of their release, before the midnight change, I had The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) as #2, and Frankenstein (1931) as #1. But yesterday, when I started watching the 1939 film after half a century of not seeing it, I detected some terrible messages from its opening.

It didn’t take me long to discover that the director was born into a German family of Ashkenazi Jews and that he even returned to Germany after the Allied dogs won the war!

Fifty years ago I had seen this 1939 film in black and white with my family on television, and both my sisters and I loved it (some of Hugo’s high culture is reflected in this adulterated version of the novel).

Since then I had not seen it again: I only remember that as a child I was impressed by the story. But yesterday when I started watching it again, after so long, I realised, as I just said, that the movie starts with bad messages.

In Paris, there is a new order preventing the passage of gipsies. True, the director cast mudblood actors to play them, but typically in Hollywood (and we’re talking about 1939!) he artfully chose an Aryan actress to play the gipsy Esmeralda, and has the King of France say ‘Who cares about her race, she’s pretty’.

This 1939 film has scenes too burlesque for my taste today (how I have changed since I saw it fifty years ago!) and the Christian piety in Notre Dame couldn’t be missing: ‘Please, help my people’ says the Nordic actress playing Esmeralda when referring to the mudblood gipsies while the French ask Providence for riches in their prayers. Surrealism reaches the viewer when the movie’s bad guy, Claude Frollo, says ‘You come from an evil race’ to the Aryan actress posing as a gipsy.

I stopped watching the film at that point and started watching the original film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. I mean the one from 1923: a film that, this year, has just turned 100 years old!

Now this is the one that is at #1 on my list not because it is very good, but because it has historical value for connoisseurs of cinematic art. This 1923 film is silent, although they added some music to it and it can now be seen, complete, in a colourised version on YouTube.

Although Esmeralda, in this century-old film, isn’t as Aryan as the other, in this version it is explained at the outset that her whiteness is due to the fact that she was born in a high cradle and, as a child, had been abducted by gipsies.

Naturally, being a hundred years old, the film is closer to theatre or operatic scenes than to the cinema that followed, once the human voice was technically synchronised with the soundtrack. That would revolutionise the Seventh Art.

I don’t want to get too much into the film from the point of view of the sacred words. That would mean messing directly with Victor Hugo—and that would mean another entry: an entry of literary criticism rather than cinematic criticism. Suffice it to say that baby Quasimodo wouldn’t have been allowed to live in Sparta, and that Hugo is right that Notre Dame reflects the soul of France which, unlike the teen I was half a century ago, is no longer the soul that interests me. (My surname, ‘Tort’, comes from France and Catalonia and my ancestors were devoted to Notre Dame of Lourdes.)

Art Film

Frankenstein

As far as the Seventh Art is concerned, my life is divided into two great crises.

The first occurred in the early 1970s. As I recounted in ‘Beneath Ridley Scott’s Planet’, as a child I realised that the film industry didn’t always coincide with art, but could betray it badly.

The second crisis occurred more recently when I realised that even artistic films that are not solely driven by economic interests, but where the creator may be a genuine artist, often contain bad messages for the 14 words (as I showed this Monday with my brief review of The Godfather).

So today’s mature César not only demands of cinema that it be genuine Seventh Art. Even more important is that the film industry doesn’t betray the sacred words (and nowadays almost all of the industry betrays it).

This day I will start my series of fifty movie reviews with Frankenstein (1931 film): the second one to appear in my entry ‘50 films during the quarantine’.

It is important to bear in mind when reading my movie reviews that my confessed crisis in ‘Beneath Ridley Scott’s Planet’ represented an early awakening to the colossal crap that Hollywood makes just for profit, without the slightest concern for true art. From this point of view, when I saw on YouTube the black-and-white film of the 1931 horror movie produced by Universal Pictures and directed by James Whale—the adaptation of Mary Shelley’s novel, starring Boris Karloff and Colin Clive—I was very impressed by its artistic value.

The first thing that came to my mind was that it was unbelievable that, in the consumer society where I live, I had to watch this classic on YouTube because I had never seen it advertised for theatres, not even in art cinemas! I was also struck by the fact that the colour films about Frankenstein that can now be seen on TV lack artistic value when compared to this old black-and-white film.

Of course, both Shelley’s novel and the 1931 adaptation don’t promote our sacred words, so I won’t include it in a new list of my National Socialist must-see films. But at least, from an artistic point of view, it passes the test of my tastes: something that cannot be said of the sequels, remakes or parodies that have been made since that year to date.

Film

The Godfather

Marlon Brando (right) and Al Pacino as Don Vito and Michael Corleone.

It could be said that in recent times I have taken my vows as a priest of the sacred words, in the sense that being an NS ideologue after 1945 implies constant activity for the cause, and never allowing myself to burn out, and I plan to live like that until death parts me from this world.

But more than an act of will, when one begins the lifestyle of a true NS (which to distinguish it from the pre-1945 Germans I call the priesthood of the sacred words, after the priestess Savitri Devi) the mind begins to metamorphose.

I have often said that when I was younger I wanted to be a film director. And indeed, I have seen a lot of cinema over the decades. But when I heard about the West’s darkest hour, in the sense that it occurred to the Aryan to commit ethnic suicide because of what I said about the new Sacrificial Lamb at midnight, my taste for the Seventh Art began to change. Films I had loved I began to see as containers of very bad messages: part of the brainwashing process to convince the Aryan to immolate himself.

When I took my vows, so to speak, I began to realise not only that I was beginning to detect those bad messages, but that I could no longer enjoy almost any film in my DVD collection, to the extent that I recently gave my nephew my big TV, where I used to watch films. I did this because a lot of times it occurred to me to go through the titles of my DVD collection and, to my surprise, I didn’t feel like watching almost any film again.

At the time of the COVID-19 epidemic, a European asked me what my favourite films were at the time, and I made a list of fifty of them. A few years later I can no longer watch most of them! It’s amazing how taking vows gradually, but forcefully, changes a priest’s tastes.

But given my past fondness for cinema, and that I spent so much time watching films and thinking about them, it occurs to me that I could start writing short reviews of each film on my list of fifty. But I’d like to start with one that doesn’t appear on the list, The Godfather.

______ 卐 ______

Once upon a time in the US the Western was the favourite film genre for family consumption, but with time it was replaced by the mob story as the central epic of America. The Godfather is considered the best film of this genre. Some fans of American cinema even consider it the best film made in that country, even ahead of Citizen Kane. Well, below we see a brief review from the point of view of National Socialism, or rather, the POV of the priest of the sacred words.

Taking into account what we say in this post about transvaluation (‘L’art pour l’art’ values must be transvalued to Art practised in conformity with the cultural task), the message of The Godfather couldn’t be more wrong. Michael Corleone is the antithesis of what the hero of an Aryan lad who goes to the movies to have fun should be. In fact, the fictional Michael Corleone is an enemy of the sacred words. There is a scene in which the capo Clemenza teaches Michael how to shoot and casually tells him that Hitler should have been stopped before the time when the Allies finally stopped him. Remember that the film opens in 1945, when Michael is dressed in a soldier’s uniform at his sister’s wedding because, decorated, he had just returned from fighting the Germans!

That alone would be enough to ban The Godfather in an ethnostate emerging in North America. But it doesn’t end there. Francis Ford Coppola, the director, is Italian-American and his film represents the interests of his ethnic group, not those of the Anglo-Germans who originally conquered and populated the US (see e.g., what I wrote ten years ago about The Godfather Part II). In an ethnostate that imitated the Third Reich only the Nordics, or fans of the Nordics (say, like me), would be allowed to practice art in conformity with the NS task. It is absurd that someone who represents the interests of another ethnic group should have cinematic power over the youth of Nordic stock, and this is even more so in the case of the Jewry that dominates Hollywood.

As you can see, from this angle the reviews that I could write about American cult films are the antithesis of what Trevor Lynch (Greg Johnson) does in Counter-Currents. But as we have said many times, from the NS POV white nationalism (WN) is intellectual quackery for people stuck in the middle of what we call the psychological Rubicon (cf. my featured post, ‘The River Nymph’).

There are many other things I could say about the Godfather trilogy. For example, Moe Greene, who is shot in the eye by Michael’s triggerman at the end of the first film while being massaged, in Mario Puzo’s novel is a Jewish gangster. So in the sequel Michael’s rival, the Jew Hyman Roth, wants to avenge him. In other words, for political correctness in the Godfather trilogy the tension between the Italian-American mafia and the Jewish-American mafia is more or less disguised.

I was also annoyed, but this is natural since the director is Italian-American, that the viewpoint of the family of Kay Adams Corleone, Michael’s second wife, a pure Aryan, was one hundred per cent absent. If one compares her with the Sicilian Apollonia Vitelli Corleone, Michael’s first wife, one can see the difference between a Mediterranean and a Nordic.

Keep in mind that when the SS invaded the USSR, the commanders were careful that the young soldiers didn’t marry mudblood women (remember: when we were young we thought with our cocks, not with our heads!). That distinction between Meds and Norsemen has been lost on many contemporary racialists because, I reiterate, WN is virtually intellectual quackery.

These brief words give an idea of what, in forthcoming posts, I will do with most of the 50 films I used to recommend a few years ago. When the priest fulfills the revaluation of art (‘L’art pour l’art’ values must be transvalued to Art practised in conformity with the cultural task) there is very little art to rescue—and much art to repudiate!

Tags Genuine spirituality

Film Philosophy

Taylor’s soliloquy

People of the new generations cannot have an accurate idea of the incredible level of degeneration that the last generations have experienced. True, the boomers behaved like traitors, but for non-traitor boomers like us, the culture shock we experience when talking to those of later generations is brutal.

As I tell in Whispering Leaves, one of the most beautiful experiences I had as a child was going to the best cinema with my dad. One of the films that made the biggest impression on me at the age of ten was the first Planet of the Apes (the sequels are endless crap that should be destroyed in their entirety in the ethnostate).

But even in the pure mind of a child, it struck me when I saw it on the big screen in 1968 that it was odd that one of the astronauts was black. It is amazing how a child untainted by the surrounding culture sees things exactly as they are!

The coloured astronaut aside, several lines in that film reflect the depth of the science-fiction novel on which the film was based. Nothing stupid or childish like the next decade would see with the Star Wars trilogy. On the contrary: Taylor’s soliloquies, played by Charlton Heston, and I am referring to the opening lines, could very well come in the literary genre of philosophical autobiography that I want to inaugurate:

George Taylor: And that completes my final report until we reach touchdown. We’re now on full automatic, in the hands of the computers. I have tucked my crew in for the long sleep and I’ll be joining them soon. In less than an hour, we’ll finish our sixth month out of Cape Kennedy. Six months in deep space—by our time, that is. According to Dr. Haslein’s theory of time, in a vehicle travelling nearly the speed of light, the Earth has aged nearly 700 years since we left it, while we’ve aged hardly at all. Maybe so. This much is probably true—the men who sent us on this journey are long since dead and gone. You who are reading me now are a different breed—I hope a better one. I leave the 20th century with no regrets. But one more thing—if anybody’s listening, that is. Nothing scientific. It’s purely personal. Seen from out here, everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely…

Emphasis added and YouTube clip here. Of course, later there are some fascinating dialogues from a philosophical point of view, such as Taylor having fled from human civilisation because he could no longer stand it, as we see when he argues with Landon in the desert crossing. Not to mention the wise words of Zaius at the end of the film.

What I would give to be in that world and see the Statue of Liberty in ruins and half buried between the sea and the rocks… If we remember Savitri’s quotable quote, that is the world to which we should aspire.

Film

Holmes updated

I’ve finished watching the TV series I referred to in my previous post, and also the various feature films where the same actor, Jeremy Brett, played Sherlock Holmes.

The last films, filmed in the 1990s not long before Brett died, are a real disgrace. Although the screenwriters used the titles of some of Arthur Conan Doyle’s short stories, they significantly distanced themselves from the prose of the famous detective’s creator: which contrasts with the television programmes, especially those filmed in the 1980s. It seems that, in the darkest hour of the West, the leaders of the cultural media cannot resist the urge to desecrate the work of their artists.

And in this century the situation is much worse.

Film Kali Yuga

Sherlock Holmes

In my previous post I mentioned My Fair Lady, in which the actor Jeremy Brett sings ‘On the Street Where You Live’ which made waves among female boomers. But I was unaware that, in later years, Brett had starred in an English television series that takes up the Sherlock Holmes stories from the pen of Arthur Conan Doyle. In these times, when the ethno-treason and ethno-suicidal psychosis of white people has reached its final metastasis, it is refreshing to have a little escapism with a series of programmes that transport us back to 19th-century England, before the treachery that the West is currently suffering.

I must say that the movies that have recently come out about Sherlock Holmes have nothing to do with Doyle’s stories. They are films whose screenplays were made already in the darkest hour of the West. Even a 1979 film like Murder by Decree with stars like Christopher Plummer and James Mason already contains subtle messages of cultural self-loathing.

When I was twelve I bought Doyle’s complete works on the most famous detective of all time but never read them; just an illustrated Sherlock Holmes story for children my age. But nowadays children no longer have access to such illustrated stories; only to the most recent ‘Sherlock Holmes’ movies, which are not even loosely based on Doyle’s prose: they are inventions of our dark age. I don’t even want to mention the titles of those recent movies that betray Doyle’s stories.

I am attracted to the figure of Holmes because I have become a sort of detective looking for psycho-historical clues to understand the dark hour. Or rather: I have taken advice from the best historical detectives to understand the present, and I am referring to the literature I recommend in the featured post. From this angle, I would rather be a Dr Watson who took the trouble to narrate the adventures of his mentor. Although Dr Watson’s work is not original (Holmes is the original investigator) in the featured post it is more than clear why whites, contemporary Englishmen included, are hating themselves in our century to the point of wanting to commit ethnic suicide.

I have been to England several times in my life, in the 1980s and 1990s, but it was only in 2014 that I spoke to a group of racialists, at the London Forum. At a round table at The Victory Service Club, located at 79 Seymour Street, near Edgware Road, one of the members of that forum remarked to me that he had liked my excerpts from Pierce’s Who We Are and that he had sent the links to another of the London Forum members. What a strange thing that, having been born in an underdeveloped country whose majority is so inferior to the stock of the native English, I have more detective insight than these educated London racialists…

A perfectly legal way to start rebelling against the ethnocidal System is to repudiate the degenerate clothing that has become fashionable in recent decades and start dressing as the English dressed before they began to hate themselves. For the time being, I’ll finish watching the rest of the episodes of the series featuring Jeremy Brett. Now that my mother has died I’ve cancelled my Cable subscription, which was in my name but only she watched it. From the point of view of the fourteen words, everything that can now be seen on TV is ethno-treason, and only by watching old films from the previous century that recreate the 19th-century West is it possible to detect something of the pre-Kali Yuga zeitgeist.

Child abuse Film

Movie revisited

I would like to say one more thing about Sound of Freedom, which I already mentioned on Thursday. Since it continues to be a box-office hit in the US, and since my speciality is an independent study of child abuse, I would like to add this postscript.

I think it was only yesterday that I detected why the hegemonic media hates the film. Since they’re self-righteous they are convinced that they, they alone and no one else but them are the holders of the new tablets of the law (equality of race, gender and sexual identity). In that tunnel vision, only transgressions against the new trinity are considered sinful.

Movies like Sound of Freedom, filmed by traditional Catholics including the Mexican producer and lead actor Jim Caviezel, which denounce a form of sin completely outside that trinity, amount to nothing less than a contest over who defines morality. This is why they’re attacking the movie: it’s the competition.

Christian factions in the past, and neo-Christian factions in the present, are so exorbitantly intolerant that they won’t tolerate the slightest dogmatic distance between them.(*) And nowadays the average Westerner has to worship exclusively the new egalitarian trinity. (Once, according to the progressive vanguard, society accepts trans kids their next planned step is to push for the ‘rights’ of paedophiles.)

The other point I wanted to make is that, as Benjamin has rightly pointed out to me, there are far more serious ways of injuring the inner self of a child than what a paedophile, who is a stranger to the family, does. And those more serious ways of destroying a child’s soul are completely outside the field of vision of the conservatives who are acclaiming Sound of Freedom.

If you are familiar with my work, you know that the victims of a paedophile—say, the two surviving siblings of the film—can keep their ego from crumbling because, after all, their father didn’t betray them. Quite the contrary: he loves them like a father loves his children in many other movies that are nothing more than prolefeed for the proles.

In real life, when the parent himself is the perpetrator—and we are talking about forms of abuse immeasurably more devastating than sexual abuse coming from a foreign—the child’s mind goes haywire, and he or she is no longer able to recover. Read the middle part (pages 31 to 191) of my book Day of Wrath to see what we mean.

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(*) Christians have always been going for the jugular of other Christians ever since Constantine empowered them. ‘Wokism’ is but a secularised faction of Christian morality. If you are a new visitor, see also the book Neo-Christianity clicking on the pinned post.

Child abuse Film

Sound of freedom

I don’t go to the cinema any more, and the film won’t arrive in the country where I live until the last day of next month anyway. But considering that long ago I wanted to be a film director; that the producer of this movie is Mexican, and that this film with a minimal budget beat the latest Indiana Jones monstrosity, I would like to say something.

In the first place, I’d never have added a post about this film but it struck me that the System was so bothered by it—I didn’t understand why.

After a brief investigation, I remembered that Hollywood had promised that by 2024 only films promoting the LGBT+ agenda would be considered for the Oscars. As the Woke vanguard finds itself at the moment, the ‘T’ in the acronym above is no longer the spearhead in their ongoing Cultural Revolution but rather the ‘+’ which includes the sexualisation of children. Recall, for example, how Netflix released a film that sexualised eleven-year-old girls.

A film like Sound of Freedom, which denounces child sex trafficking, makes a lot of noise on this agenda. It is as if the System wants, after normalising the ‘T’ of transgender adults, to take the next leap forward which already started with trans children and the mutilations of girls’ breasts and boys’ genitals that are still unbanned in most of the West. Sound of Freedom simply sheds light on another of the darkest forms of child sexualisation: child trafficking.

On this site, I have mentioned Agustín Laje, the Latin American equivalent of the American Matt Walsh. In this interview just uploaded today, he appears not only with the Mexican producer of Sound of Freedom but with Jim Caviezel, the lead actor (the same one who played Jesus in Mel Gibson’s famous film).

Although it is laughable that Jim Caviezel talks so piously about the Virgin of Guadalupe, and the Judeo-Christian god in the Spanish/English interview linked above, the film contributes to denouncing one form of unpardonable child abuse.

Film

Pancho Sánchez

Before continuing the routine of Deschner’s series on the criminal history of Christianity, I would like to say a few things about what I said yesterday in the last instalment of the book Calígula. I refer to the film Advise & Consent which, by the way, I watched again yesterday after many years since I saw it for the first time.

In my peripatetic walk today it occurred to me that the best way to criticise American cinema is to first critique Mexican cinema and then look at the parallels. The only book by an author I know personally who has inscribed a few words on the first page for me* is Luz en la Oscuridad: Crónica del Cine Méxicano (Light in the Dark: A Chronicle of Mexican Cinema).

Francisco (‘Pancho’) Sánchez, a film critic and screenwriter, gave it to me in his own home in front of his wife. I met Pancho, who died ten years ago, at a gathering of film critics that met on Saturdays and that I used to go. Pancho’s book, a man with a good sense of humour by the way, reviews Mexican films from the 1930s to 2002, the year it was published. Well into the book, on page 112, Pancho writes: ‘In 1968 private production was still cloistered in its outdated but successful formulas, of imaginary and chaste young people, charritos [Mexican horse riders with traditional dress] and simplistic comedies’ (the translations are mine).

I hardly ever watch Mexican cinema, but the very little I have seen betrays a world that is completely unreal compared to Mexican reality. My maternal grandmother loved to listen to intimacies told by service people, who were generally indigenous, and it was more than obvious that the family dynamics from which those families came were extremely abusive. (This is not to say that white family dynamics in Western countries aren’t abusive, as Gaedhal tells us in his commentary on this site today.) But what Pancho says is true. Except for Luis Buñuel’s films, the idyllic way in which old Mexican films presented Mexican culture had nothing to do with the reality of the country.

Fifty pages later Pancho writes: ‘In 1975, the penultimate year of [President Luis Echeverría’s] six-year term in office, films of a high realist level such as Canoa were already being made, in a country where until then the divorce between cinema and reality had been almost absolute.’ Ten pages later Pancho adds about that same film, which I have not yet seen:

Indeed, Canoa does not present a bucolic rural reality, with charritos dressed as mariachis, nor an indigenous reality of immobile faces against a backdrop of nopales and pyramids. Its Catholic priest is neither Domingo Soler nor Cantinflas nor the Arturo de Córdova of La Ciudad de los Niños. He is not a canonizable priest. He is simply a scoundrel who manipulates religious fanaticism to his own advantage.

Almost ninety pages later, and already talking about Mexican films made in this century, Pancho writes about a film I did get to see:

Although it doesn’t help digestion, as they say, the film soon grabs the attention of its viewers because its dramatic weight is based on a good question: Do we parents know what are the real problems that affect our children? This question, already asked so many times by the archaic conventional cinema (that of Sara García and Marga López), a world of lies in which the answer was invariably an edifying moral, is now proposed from that possibility of realism which is total crudeness… Comfortable solutions and optimistic endings are out. Here we are treading—forgive the long journey back in time—the circumspect territories of Bicycle Thieves.

What Pancho says about Mexican cinema applies to the cinema of the neighbouring country to the north (Pancho, by the way, in one of those get-togethers we used to go to, said he liked Spielberg’s Jaws). When I was a kid I used to imagine, watching Hollywood films from the 1950s and 60s, that Americans were so proud of their race that I once told a friend that the US was like ‘a big Germany’ in a territorial sense. Little did I know that Hollywood had always been in enemy hands, or that the positive messages I saw in those films, some still in black and white, were divorced from American reality.

There were moments when 1962’s Advise & Consent, which I re-watched yesterday after a couple of decades, reminded me of the 1939 film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington which also takes place on Capitol Hill. Watching this American cinema, which predates the cinema of patently subversive visual messages of our days, provides a false impression on a child’s mentality: I was programmed with the idea that the US was a country of noble principles and the noblest Constitution (as one of the actors in Advise & Consent fervently puts it).

In reality, the child and adolescent that I was never suspected that the cinema I then saw in elegant theatres that looked like opera houses was as unreal as those films of Mexican charros in fancy clothes singing their way into small towns to woo young mestizas: the films that my grandmothers and perhaps my mother watched long ago. On page 76 of his book Pancho writes, when talking about Mexican cinema: ‘Golden age of cinema? Pure age of churritos!’ (churro, not to be confused with charro above, is a bad film of very little artistic value).

Advise & Consent may have some artistic value, like the novel that inspired it, but it is a churro in another sense of the word: churro dough is easy to produce and fry on an open fire, like the thousands of movies in the film industry on both sides of the Rio Grande.

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(*) “Para César Tort, con la amistad de Francisco Sánchez. 14 Nov 2003, Culhuacán, D.F.” (‘For César Tort, with the friendship of Francisco Sánchez. 14 November 2003, Culhuacán, Mexico City’).

Tags Mexico