(Newsbook)
“Roma” and Alfonso Cuarón won big at the Oscars on Sunday: Cuarón won best director and best cinematography, and the movie was the best foreign language film. If you remain curious about Mexican cinema, here are books that explore the industry’s golden age and offer a deep dive into two directors’ brains.
“Cabinet of CuriositiesMy Notebooks, Collections and Other Obsessions"By Guillermo del Toro256 pages. Harper Design (2013).
Del Toro is one of the most popular Mexican directors of recent years, and in this book, he delivers an experience “akin to bouncing around inside his hallucinatory brain,” John Williams wrote in The Times. There are dense illustrations from notebooks for “Hellboy” and “Pan’s Labyrinth,” as well as pictures of del Toro’s Bleak House, where he works. The director said that his intention in releasing the book was to “open my process a little bit more” and inspire aspiring filmmakers to “embrace your passions wholeheartedly, obsessively, and enshrine images, collect them and study them as a code.”
“The Classical Mexican CinemaThe Poetics of the Exceptional Golden Age Films"By Charles Ramírez Berg254 pages. University of Texas Press (2015).
This book covers the golden age of Mexican cinema, which lasted from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s and included the work of directors like the surrealist Luis Buñuel (who was a Spaniard, but spent much of his adult life in Mexico) and Enrique Rosas, who made the classic silent film “El Automóvil Gris.” Ramírez Berg explores the roots of the industry and explains how filmmakers of the time crafted a style that was distinctly Mexican.
“Objects of DesireConversations With Luis Buñuel” By Jose de la Colina and Tomas Perez TurrentEdited and translated by Paul Lenti262 pages. Marsilio (1993).
In the series of interviews between two Mexican critics and Buñuel transcribed in this book, the director discusses his artistic vision. “In discussing his 32 movies, Buñuel (1900-83) is charmingly temperamental in his refusal to be cornered by the exegeses of his interrogators,” wrote our reviewer. In one of the conversations, Buñuel says, “For me, surrealism was not an aesthetic, just another avant-garde movement; it was something to which I committed myself in a spiritual and oral way.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.