Mexico was his Monument Valley
MEXICO CITY JOURNAL
Like Ford, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, at the center of a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, painted landscapes in iconography.
MEXICO CITY — MANY photo artists take pictures of countries. But only a few, like Gabriel Figueroa, get to invent countries, visually, with the images they create.
During his prolific 50-year career, which began as a still photographer and included a brief Hollywood sojourn, Figueroa forged a film iconography that was as elaborately crafted with calculated symbolism as a baroque altarpiece. In classic films such as "Enamorada," "Los Olvidados," "La Perla," "Night of the Iguana," "Pedro Páramo" and "Vámonos con Pancho Villa," Mexico's most famous cinematographer conjured an emblematic vision of his country's landscapes, people and history.
That legacy is the subject of one of the largest-ever retrospectives of his life and work, "Gabriel Figueroa: Cinefotógrafo," which opened here last month at the Palacio de Bellas Artes. The exhibition, which comprises more than 300 photos, drawings and other artifacts, including numerous film clips being looped on television screens, will be shown here through May 4. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is considering bringing the show to L.A. in 2010.
For the show's organizers, the problem wasn't to make the case for Figueroa's cultural significance, but to keep his reputation from being further embalmed in hero worship, as it has been since his death at 89 in 1997.
"In Mexico we have this little problem. Of some figures, we bury them in mountains of marble," says Alfonso Morales, the show's curator. "I prefer this more as a retrospective, and not as an homage."
For decades, Figueroa's artistry has been what much of the world pictures when it thinks of Mexico: Men on horseback, galloping furiously in the distance, framed by close-up shots of cactus plants and sculptural maguey. Shadowy montages of Indian faces, as stylized as masks. A slain revolutionary poetically draped across a machine gun. Dramatic black-and-white panoramas of postwar Mexico City, where rising office towers cast shadows over squalid slums.
Altogether, Figueroa served as photography director on more than 200 movies, earning him a virtual auteur status. During a brief stay in Hollywood in the 1930s he became friends with legendary cinematographer Gregg Toland ("Citizen Kane"), who recommended Figueroa to director John Ford for "The Fugitive." When Toland died unexpectedly in 1948, Samuel Goldwyn invited Figueroa to work in Hollywood, but Figueroa preferred to remain in Mexico, where he had become a creative linchpin in the country's government-run film industry.
