The ranch that forged an industry, a feat by Fernando de Fuentes

A mesh wraps the landscapes / subtly fleeting, and in a failure / of brilliance, a star on the screen /
burns like a glass of devotion.

This verse from the poem La Tarde written by a young Fernando de Fuentes (1894-1958), published in El Universal Ilustrado on October 12, 1917, could well refer to the phantasmagories of cinema.

Born in Veracruz, he spent his childhood in Monterrey, Nuevo León, and moved to the United States to study Engineering, and Philosophy and Letters.

He was a bank employee, assistant secretary of Venustiano Carranza, occasional journalist and manager of a cinema chain, the Circuito Máximo -where he implemented film subtitling for the first time at the dawn of talkies.

This was the first of many contributions to the national film industry. There are no traces of his first experience as a director, El anónimo (1932), beyond a few press releases and a few stills.

But it was the following year when he recorded his name in the history of Mexican cinema by filming the first classic about the Revolution, El prisionero 13.

The dramatic ending of this film was censored by the Cardenista government, forcing it to insert a last scene in which everything is resolved like an alcoholic nightmare of the protagonist.

De Fuentes returned to the subject with El compadre Mendoza, also filmed in 1933, in which he once again proposed a crude story, as the fratricidal war had been.

“We believe the Latin public is sufficiently cultured and prepared to endure all the cruelty and harshness of reality” (Anonymous interview in El Universal, April 6, 1934).

“[…] Mexican cinema must be a faithful reflection of our austere and tragic way of being, if we intend to give it truly our own character and not make it a poor imitation of what comes to us from Hollywood” (Anonymous interview in El Universal, 6 April 1934).

In his third and last approach to the subject, De Fuentes filmed the great anti-epic of the Revolution: Vámonos con Pancho Villa (1935). Despite being supported by the government with a railway, troops, cavalry, uniforms and artillery pieces, the end was again mutilated.

In any case, Vámonos con Pancho Villa remains, to this day, the best film about the Revolution. The period from the beginning of sound cinema to the so-called Golden Age could well be called the Fernando de Fuentes Era of Mexican cinema.

In addition to laying the foundations of the Revolution as a genre, setting and character, it successfully incorporated and explored other themes such as swashbuckler film (Cruz Diablo, 1934), horror (El fantasma del convento, 1934) or family melodrama (La familia Dressel, 1935).

But, above all, it promoted the development of a growing industry: “With a little help from the government and trust from capital, in a very short time we can turn cinema into one of the most important export industries,” he declared in 1933.

A year later, he was already clear about the direction that national cinema should follow: “My ambition is that we create a type of film that, when presented on world screens, will stand out vigorously as Mexican” (Anonymous interview in El Universal, April 6, 1934).

“And it is and will be my opinion, as long as the facts do not prove otherwise, that the world will be more interested in those typically Mexican films than in other international, of indefinite flavor […]” (Anonymous interview in El Universal, April 6, 1934).

Allá en el Rancho Grande (1936) was the film with which De Fuentes proved his point: 

International markets opened, Mexico won its first international award, Best Photography, at the 1938 Venice Film Festival, and the producers began to invest with certainty.

However, much of the subsequent production was aimed at imitating (if not openly plagiarizing) the characters and traditional environments proposed by De Fuentes.

In the following two decades, there were many bully Charros, dancing horses, gunshots at the slightest provocation, serenades on balconies, cockfights, jaripeos and cantinas as distinctive features of our cinema.

As a director, De Fuentes followed the trend imposed by him and remained in the comfort zone provided by the Golden Age and the national star system (he worked with Jorge Negrete, Dolores del Río, María Félix, Arturo de Córdova, Pedro Armendáriz and Pedro Infante, among others).

However, he never stopped innovating in favor of a cinema that could compete internationally: in 1940 he introduced high-fidelity RCA devices for musical backgrounds and in 1942 he filmed the first Spanish-speaking color film.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the emergence of the Golden Age is largely due to him, whose decline coincides to some extent with the death of the director, which occurred on July 4, 1958.