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o single work of literature—perhaps no single work of art—perme-
ates the Mexican imagination like Pedro Páramo. While Juan Rulfo’s first
and only novel did not make an immediate splash upon its publication
in 1955, within a handful of years its reputation burgeoned, aided in part
by its profound influence on a generation of writers from across Latin
America, Gabriel García Márquez among them, who would collectively
be credited with the development of magic realism. It also received plaudits from lumi-
naries such as Jorge Luis Borges, whose stories, along with those of fellow Argentine
authors Adolfo Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, could be regarded as precedents of the
style. Pedro Páramo is both universal in its core themes and, in its particulars, a mirror to
its native culture. Following a wayfarer named Juan Preciado, who travels to Comala, an
arid village teeming with apparitions, to meet the infamous father who abandoned his
mother long ago, Rulfo’s fable-like narrative looms over a national identity pierced by
myriad forms of forsakenness, corruption, and fraught masculine codes. Pedro Páramois
as entangled in the Mexican mythos as The Great Gatsby is in the American.
Yet it is the beguiling fusion of clean, sculpted sen-
tences, hallucinatory flow, and aural density that dis-
tinguishes Pedro Páramoas something far more artful
and idiosyncratic than allegory. This slim, angular
novel is characterized by sudden shifts in narration, as
past and present blur, continuity collapses into a sin-
gle panoramic mural, and multiple voices intrude on
what only begins as a first-person chronicle. Pedro
Páramois a listening experience. Even after multiple
readings, one could comb through their impressions to
find that almost everything in there that isn’t voice is
sound: damp drumming of horses’ hooves, scraping
feet, gurgling drainpipes, creaking boards, and distant
cries that seem to penetrate a room like refracted light.
Reading Pedro Páramo, it’s easy to imagine a radio play,
yet this seemingly unfilmable novel has prompted sev-
eral cinematic adaptations—the first of which remains
a flawed, fascinating, and deeply strange work.20 |FILMCOMMENT| July-August 2019OFF THE PAGE The art of getting from book to screen
Raising the Dead
The Mexican classic Pedro Páramolooms over the country’s
movies and literature with its ghostly and carnal forceBY JOSÉ TEODORO
L
ike luis buñuel, carlos velo was
born in early 20th-century Spain
but developed his directorial chops
in Mexican cinema’s golden age.
Unlike Buñuel, Velo was no great innova-
tor, no mischief-maker, and bore only a
faint directorial signature. He’d directed
many documentaries, including the
Oscar-nominated To r e r o (1956), before
making his debut fiction feature with
Pedro Páramo in 1967. Velo developed the
script with his To r e r o collaborator Manuel
Barbachano Ponce, a prolific producer
whose credits include Buñuel’s Nazarín,
and novelist Carlos Fuentes, who’d
already established himself as a major
voice in Mexican letters with Aura and
The Death of Artemio Cruz, as well as a
screenwriter (teaming up with García
Márquez on the script for Arturo Rip-
stein’s 1966 debut, Time to Die). The
film’s narrative hews surprisingly close to
that of the novel, straying significantly
only at its dramatic climax, while gener-
ating along the way a substantial degree
of suspense—not a quality one associates
with Rulfo’s coolly hypnotic prose and
ambient phantasmagoria.
This tonal discrepancy is strangely in
keeping with Rulfo’s use of temporal slip-
page. Cinematic modernism would appear
to have elided Velo, whose handling of
elements such as musical scoring, sound