About Me
Emilio "El Indio" Fernández Romo, who was born on March 26, 1904 in the state of Coahuila, Mexico, is the most famous person in the history of Mexican movies. For an era, he symbolized Mexico due to his violent machismo, rooted in the Revolution of 1910-17, and because of his staunch commitment to Mexican cultural nationalism. Sired by an ethnic Caucuasian father and born to an Indian mother, Emilio was himself a "mestizaje" (mestizo) that his films would later glorify.
Such was the cauldron of violence and nationalism in which the young Fernandez came into his manhood. He received a 20-year prison sentence for his participation in the rebellion on the losing side.
Escaping prison by following de la Heurta into exile in Los Angeles, Fernández absorbed the rudiments of filmmaking as a bit player and extra working in Hollywood in the 1920s and early ..30s. With the election of Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1934, the Heurista rebels were granted an amnesty. (General de la Heurta was recalled from exile by Cárdenas in 1935 and served in several posts, including Inspector General of Foreign Consulates and Director General of Civil Pensions.) Fernándezk returned to Mexico in 1934 and began working in the Mexican movie industry as a screenwriter and actor. His Indian looks, which gave him his nickname "El Indio," also brought him his first lead role, playing an Indian in Janitzio (1935). Due to his physicality and Indian countenance, El Indio was cast as bandits, charros (cowboys), and revolutionaries.
Fernández made his motion picture debut as an actor in Chano Urueta's Destino, El (1928), but his early work in movies was in American westerns churned out by Monogram director Joseph P. McCarthy, including the Bob Steele programmers Oklahoma Cyclone (1930), The Land of Missing Men (1930), Headin' North (1930) Sunrise Trail (1931), and the Tim McCoy hoss opera The Western Code (1932). After playing a supporting player in Enrico Caruso, Jr.'s Buenaventura, La (1934)_, he made his return to Mexican pictures in 1934, starring in "Corazón bandolero" (1934) and director ..Fernando de Fuentes' Cruz Diablo (1934).Fernández's first film as a director was "La Isla de la Pasion" (1942), in 1941, which he also wrote and played a bit part in. The movie starred "Pedro Armendáriz', who El Indio would cast in many of his films.
Another favorite collaborator was his wife ..Columba Dominguez'.
El Indio rapidly gained a reputation as Mexico's premier director making populist dramas. His film MarÃa Candelaria (1944) put Mexican film on the map when it won Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1946. The film has been variously praised as "the highest triumph of Mexican plastic arts ..uloid" and as "a titanic promise for strictly patriotic [Mexican] cinema." French film critic Georges Sadoul, in his 1954 book "Histoire Général du Cinema," praised the film for its "authentic" portrayal of rural Mexican life and for addressing race relations.The film remains controversial in Mexico over El Indio's aesthetic choices, which emphasized the exotic and primitive, and his representation of Mexican Indians, which some critics believed was inauthentic or "touristy." The nationalistic Fernández wanted to articulate an idea of what it meant to be Mexican that was uniquely Mexican, and not influenced by Hollywood, whose films he felt were Americanizing Mexican cinema audiences. Terming his films "autos sacramentales (passion plays) of mexicanidad," the director Fernández wanted to create a Mexican cinema that Mexicanized Mexicans. The film stars ..Dolores del Rio', the Hollywood movie star who had returned to Mexico after becoming disillusioned with the American movie industry, as the daughter of a prostitute trying to survive just before the Revolution.
Set in the floating gardens of Xochimilco in Mexico City, del Rio's character is shunned by the locals, who are indigenous people. Her great desire is to marry her lover, played by Pedro Armendáriz, but their romance proves to be star-crossed. Fernández's direction was flawless, and Figeuroa's black-and-white cinematography was masterful. The collaborators created one of the classics of not just Mexican movies but of world cinema. When El Indio and Figueroa were making "MarÃa Candelaria," they were part of a movement in which Mexican filmmakers were consciously attempting to create an indigenous art cinema that could compete with Hollywood product while simultaneously articulating a vision of Mexicans that was rooted in the "indigenismo" and "mestizophilia" of Mexican intellectuals. José Vasconcelos, the Minister of Education during the Obregón administration, was particularly influential due to his concepts of "mexicanos en potencia" and the cosmic race.In Vasconcelos philosophy, the "barbarous" Indian was redeemed by a modernization program based on education, and by the assimilation of the Indians with the Caucausian Europeans into "la raza" of mestizos ("mestizaje").
Gabriel Figueroa was conscious of the fact that he and Fernández, a creative team that became known as "Epoca de Oro," invented an idea of rural Mexico that did not actually exist. Figueroa established himself as the leader in imagining a new, post-revolutionary Mexican consciousness though the vehicle of the visual image. A "painter in light," Figueroa learned his craft from ..Gregg Toland' and ..Edward Tisse', Eisenstein's cinematographer. Figueroa is credited with creating the classic Mexican film aesthetic in collaboration with El Indio and other film directors. In over 200 movies, he developed the classic imagery and aesthetic of Mexican cinema, which also influenced and was influenced by contemporary Mexican artists. Figuerora pioneered an indigenous visual vernacular that affected the muralist movement, and he has been referred to as the fourth of the most important Mexican muralist after Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Siqueiros. Siqueiros himself called Figueroa's cinematography "murals that travel."
In their 25 films together between 1942 and 1958, El Indio and Figueroa created the idea of "mexicanidad" cinema while elevating the mestizaje (mixed race) identity, as well as the status of the pre-Columbian culture. The epic visual style they developed was indebted to Eisenstein's unfinished "Que viva Mexico." Their style fetishized the Mexican landscape through beautiful, carefully composed, stationary long shots. For two decades, Mexican art cinema was identified with the films resulting from the Fernández-Figueroa collaboration. Their films not only affected Mexican audiences' collective identity, but they affected how their audiences, both domestic and global, viewed Mexico and its history.The climax of "MarÃa Candelaria" was a homage to Carlos Navarro's classic "indigenista" movie Janitzio (1935). The movie is evocative of the anti-clerical struggles engendered by the Revolution. The secularization of the Mexican state was begun with the 1910 Revolution, continued with the 1917 Constitution, and reached a violent apotheosis in the Cristero Rebellion of 1926-29, when President tried to crack down on the Roman Catholic faith. However, the anti-clericalism of the revolutionaries had to coexist with the cult of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the symbol that has proved the most powerful and enduring in creating a Mexican national consciousness. Our Lady has served as a symbol for political struggles from the 19th century wars of Independence to the Cristero wars. On one level, "MarÃa Candelaria" is a paean to the cult of the Virgin Mary, a phenomenon which is present in much of the classical Mexican cinema, which likely is one of the reasons the films Fernández and Figueroa and others of the 1940s and ..50s proved so popular all over Latin America.In 1946, Fernández's filmed an adaptation of John Steinbeck's novella "The Pearl," in Spanish- and English-language versions. Shot by Figueroa and starring El Indio's favorite actor, Pedro Armendariz, Perla, La (1947) won El Indio a nomination for Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, further solidifying Fernandez's notoriety as a director and publicizing the Mexican movie industry. The film also won him the Golden Ariel for Best Picture at the 1948 Ariel Awards (the Mexican equivalent of the Oscars), and Fernández, Figueroa, Armendáriz and Juan GarcÃa won Silver Ariels for Best Direction, Cinematography, Actor and Supporting Actor, respectively. Figueroa won a Golden Globe for Best Cinematography in 1949 from the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.
In 1948, his film Salón México (1949) was released, written and directed by Fernández, with cinematography by Figueroa. An urban melodrama, the film was ground-breaking in that it helped usher in a new genre, the "cabaretera" (or cabaret) film, racier and just as commercial as the familiar genre of rancheras, which was then fading in popularity. The movie recreates the atmosphere of the famous Mexico City dance hall and won Marga López an Ariel Award, Mexico's equivalent of the Oscar, for her role as the taxi dancer Mercedes. The movie featured a sensual soundtrack performed by the Afro-Cuban music group El Son Clave de Oro By the end of the 1940s, Emilio Fernández was the most famous and prestigious director in all of Latin America. He would continue his reign as Mexico's premier director into the mid-..50s, when his powers began to decline and Spanish émigré ..Luis Buñuel' took over the title. As the most famous directors and biggest stars aged or died, Mexican cinema began to decline commercially, and the Golden Age of Mexican cinema came to an end. (Ironically, Buñuel's Mexican oeuvre strengthened as the national cinema went into decline and L'age d'or went into eclipse.)
El Indio continued directing films until 1979, but when his collaboration with Figueroa ended in 1958, his reputation suffered as the artistry of his pictures declined. He began acting more, though he directed a picture every few years. Gradually, the notoriety of his life began overtaking his reputation as a filmmaker. El Indio lived out the fantasy of perhaps every director when he shot a critic who had dissed one of his movies in the testicles. A violent man, he shot and killed a farm laborer, which he claimed was in self-defense. Convicted of manslaughter in 1976, he served six months of a four-and-a-half year sentence. By the 1960s, Fernandez's off-screen reputation as a violent man had led to his typecasting as brutal villains in many Mexican and American films. As an actor, Emiliana Fernandez appeared with his brother, the singer/actor Fernando Fernandez, in ..John Ford''s _Fugitive, The' (1947)_, on which he also served as associate producer. Other American films he appeared in were John Huston's The Unforgiven (1960) (on which he also served as second unit director) and The Night of the Iguana (1964), the John Wayne pictures The War Wagon (1967) and Chisum (1970) (on which he also served as second unit director), Sidney J. Furie's "The Appaloosa" in support of ..Marlon Brando', and Burt Kennedy's Return of the Seven (1966)_. After assaying the Mexican General Mapache in director ..Sam Peckinpah''s classic The Wild Bunch (1969), Fernandez appeared in two other Peckinpah films, as Paco in _Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973)_ and as El Jeffe, who gives the order Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). He was reunited with John Huston in Under the Volcano (1984) and appeared in Roman Polanski's Pirates (1986).El Indio's last two films as a writer- director were México Norte (1979)_ and Erótica (1979), which he also starred in. In all, El Indio directed 43 pictures from 1942 to 1979. He was the credited screenwriter on 40 pictures, starting with Cielito lindo (1936) in 1936. He also served as second unit director, both credited and uncredited, on such American pictures shot in Mexico as The Magnificent Seven (1960), in which he was attached to the American crew by te Mexican film industry to ensure that the depictions of Mexicans were not racist or demeaning.Fernandez died in Mexico City on August 6, 1986.
