Carlos Velo’s Pedro Páramo accentuates its source material’s woozy,
suspended liminality by cultivating an air of chronological confusion.
effects, exposition, and emphatic reaction
shots feel more aligned with the stylistic
norms of the 1930s than those of the
post–New Wave 1960s, while the film’s
sexual frankness and disarming deploy-
ment of hard cuts (by editor Gloria
Schoemann) instead of dreamy dissolves
place it firmly at the forefront of contem-
poraneous cultural ruptures. While the
effect is surely not intentional, Velo’s
Pedro Páramo accentuates its source
material’s woozy, suspended liminality
by fostering an air of chronological con-
fusion. You’d be hard-pressed to guess
the film’s vintage were you to watch it
without knowing its release date or rec-
ognizing its stars.
Those stars include the great Ignacio
López Tarso, who has also appeared in
Nazarín, The Paper Man, and the Oscar-
nominated—and similarly ghost-addled—
Macario; Pilar Pellicer, who would later
inhabit the title role in Emilio Fernández’s
La choca; and, as Señor Páramo, John
Gavin, born Juan Vincent Apablasa to a
Mexican mother, in case you wince at the
notion of a handsome mid-level American
star being cast in this most Mexican of
Mexican tales. Rather the opposite of the
ineffectual hardware-hawking hunk he
portrayed in Psycho, Gavin’s Páramo is a
single-minded tyrant with bracing sex
appeal, resolute in his determination to
monopolize local mining operations, bend
the church to his will, dominate every
woman who stimulates his considerable
appetites, and even co-opt a revolution.
Gavin’s performance accrues texture as the
film progresses and Páramo’s ambitions
and desires begin to surpass his ability to
fulfill them, often via López Tarso’s Fulgor
Sedano, Páramo’s chief enforcer. Pellicer
plays Susana San Juan, a victim of incest
whose fatally wounded allure is part of a
mosaic of elements collectively stoking
Páramo’s rapacity.
The most enduring star in Pedro
Páramo’s credits, however, at least for
cinephiles, is Gabriel Figueroa, the leg-
endary cinematographer whose dizzying
filmography includes The Pearl, Under the
Volcano, Los olvidados, and The Extermi-
nating Angel—his contribution to Pedro
Páramo marks another incidental connec-
tion between Velo and Buñuel. While
the clumsy handling of sound in Pedro
Páramo, with its frequent, corny use of
reverb, feels like a missed opportunity, the
film’s monochromatic imagery, fusing the
traits of the Western with film noir, con-
stitutes a sophisticated interpretation of
Rulfo’s spectral landscapes. Figueroa’s
obsessive attention to cloud forms, his
eerie day-for-night shots, his visions of
rolling fog seeping into doorways, his
penchant for sleeping figures in the throes
of some oneiric torment, combined with
certain straightforwardly lit exterior
scenes of barbarity, elegantly adhere to
the sense of Pedro Páramo as an extended
fever dream in which the sins of the
father engulf the son.
The juxtaposition of hard and soft
light is key to Pedro Páramo’s spell: it’s no
great spoiler to note that most, perhaps
all, of the inhabitants of Comala encoun-
tered by Juan Preciado (Carlos Fernán-
dez) are phantoms—this is quite literally
a ghost town—but what makes their pres-
ence so poignant is the fact that while
their bodies may be immaterial, their
anxieties are uniformly concerned with
matters of flesh and earth: sexual lust,
corporeal violence, natural resources, and
punishing labor. Thus the bridge that
links the comparatively pedestrian Pedro
Páramo to the mid-period Mexican work
of Buñuel—those many films on which
Figueroa collaborated—is built on a deep
understanding of the unique visual tropes
of Mexican melodrama, a vast, fertile,
playfully hysterical province that Velo,
Buñuel, and countless others tread en
route to their disparate destinations.
While Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo has, to my
knowledge, never been out of print either
in its original Spanish or in its English
translation—the Grove edition, translated
by Margaret Sayers Peden, features a
short, informative foreword by Susan
Sontag—Velo’s Pedro Páramo has receded
into relative obscurity, as though it too
were a sort of fading phantom echo. The
Mexican DVD in my possession is ser-
viceable but features a soft, smudgy image
and muffled soundtrack. Like the vast
majority of important works from Mex-
ico’s cinematic history, it is in dire need of
restoration. One can only hope that the
great acclaim directed at today’s most cel-
ebrated Mexican filmmakers might some-
how lead to a little nurturing of the
country’s singular legacy. José Teodoro is a freelance critic and
playwright.July-August 2019| FILMCOMMENT| 21DIG INTO THE
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