Mexico was his Monument Valley

Mexico's government regarded movies and the visual arts as useful tools to help cauterize the nation's wounds after the Revolution of 1910-1920. From 1932, when he started as a movie still photographer, to his final feature film project, working with director John Huston on "Under the Volcano" in 1984, Figueroa had as great an influence in shaping modern Mexican identity as the muralists Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros and photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo, whose images deeply influenced him. He also drew on the idealized landscapes of painter Jose Maria Velasco and the satiric drawings of master caricaturist Jose Guadalupe Posada.

Figueroa grew up in Mexico City, where he later studied painting, took up photography and eventually broke into the movie business. His talent was recognized immediately, and his vast circle of friends and colleagues turned into a who's who of Mexico's midcentury intelligentsia and artistic elites.

Working with Mexico's A-list directors (including a career-making partnership with Emilio "Indio" Fernandez) as well as Huston, Luis Bunuel and other foreigners, Figueroa made comedies, tragedies, melodramas, historical epics and telenovelas.

The constant was his extravagant artifice, his method of using infrared filters and other technical manipulation to make artificial light appear natural. And just as Ford used the backdrop of Monument Valley to define the classic American Western, Figueroa invested Mexican landmarks with operatic grandeur.

That monumentalizing tendency, yoked to an autocratic government-run industry, has exposed Figueroa to charges that he was as much of a propagandist as an artist. Several prominent Mexican intellectuals and film scholars have criticized Figueroa's approach as overly stylized and inflexible, which they equate with the rigid, government-sanctioned messages of the movies themselves.

"The famous Figueroa style I believe is a form of petrification, of authoritarianism, of imposing on reality a vision, not of taking a vision from reality," says Jorge Ayala Blanco, a historian and film critic. Figueroa, he says, helped enshrine "a false aesthetic of Mexican-ness."

But Mauricio Maille, director of visual arts for Fundacion Televisa, which is backed by Mexico's giant entertainment company that supplied most of the show's materials, says that Figueroa's meticulously staged imagery makes him a forerunner of such contemporary artists as Cindy Sherman and Jeff Wall, who revel in cinema's blatant falseness.

Such controversies, in any case, are nothing new for Figueroa, who is now undergoing his "third turn of appraisal," Morales says. "The visual power of his images endures. The biography of Figueroa is the biography of the Mexican cinema industry."

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reed.johnson@latimes.com