Gabriel Figueroa at El Museo del Barrio: More Cinematographer Retrospectives, Please

I have a new favorite subject for museum shows: the work of cinematographers. While I had only minimal expectations for "Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa --Art and Film," on view at El Museo del Barrior through June 27, the exhibition is without a doubt one of my favorites of the first half of the year,

Images are stills from Figueroa films, unless otherwise noted.

It had never occurred to me how aptly suited a cinematographer's art is for a museum to explore in depth--and how enjoyable/rapturous a well-executed show would be. It's the exact opposite, in fact, of the worst topic for museums (but an incredibly popular choice, nevertheless): architecture exhibitions.

When showing architecture, the best a curator can do is display a facsimile of the real thing--a photo, a model, a film of the building/design in question. And explain and attempt to replicate the architect's work with words, lots and and lots and lots of words. The object is always mediated through another observer's perspective--the photographer, the filmmaker, the earnest students who are inevitably recruited to create new models (in absence of ones from the architect's office). And endless wall texts. Hours of reading always have to be prepared for when seeing an architecture show at MOMA or the Museum of the City of New York.

It's a deeply unsatisfying experience, so far removed from the thrill of actually seeing/experiencing the built work.

But cinematography? Rather than showing a replica of a work, you can not only screen the art itself, but you have the opportunity to distill it to its essence. You don't need to project the whole work, as you would with an exhibition on a director. You can just select the choicest bits--scenes with the most dramatic lighting or innovative composition or sweeping camera movements. Nothing but highlight reels--it's like ESPN, but with art cinema instead of sports.

While I'm now convinced most any cinematography show would be worthwhile, the Figueroa retrospective demonstrates how important exhibition design and, especially, editing are in creating something exceptional.

From the second I entered the first gallery room, I knew this was going to be something special, About 10 large screens surround you, and the images flow in a carefully constructed rhythm: galloping horses giving way to dancing feet to intense close ups of beautiful faces and teary eyes to choreographed battle scenes to executions to dramatically lit landscapes and seascapes. It's a 10-minute presentation, and it floored me. I gave up any other plans for the rest of the afternoon: I was going to give this show the attention it clearly deserved.

Figueroa, whose mother died delivering him in 1907 and whose father basically checked out after that, got his start as a portrait photographer in the 1920s of Mexico's early cinema stars. He parlayed this role into an on-set taker of promotional and "making of" stills. The exhibition's second room -- a nice minor key counterpoint to the visual bravura of the first -- explores this facet of his career with dozens of black-and-white photos of screen sirens in sultry shadows.

The next room sets out the show's two main thematic points: 1) that Figueroa's movie images played an important role in establishing modern Mexico's visual identity of itself; and that his image-making both influenced, and was influenced by, Mexico's other great contemporaneous visual artists.

This argument is hammered home to dazzling effect in the exhibition's showpiece gallery: a long room with half-a-dozen individual screens mounted on one wall wall; vitrines in the middle; and a single painting hanging opposite each screen.

Each screen tackles a specific theme, and does so at a just-about-perfect length: four-minute edited clips from various movies to show how Figueroa depicted the city, religious rituals and, memorably, the all-important Mexican Revolution that began in 1910.

In the accompanying lithographs, drawings and paintings, you can see how Figueroa borrowed from and exchanged ideas with masters like Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco (one of my 20th-century favorites) and David Siqueiros (and, in the preceding gallery, from photographers like Edward Steichen and Tina Modotti). You also get clips of one of Figueroa's less-successful partnerships: with Luis Bunuel, whose surrealist sensibility wasn't a great fit with Figueroa's visual style.

The penultimate gallery gives you Figueroa's efforts in color and on TV. On these much tighter screens -- and with the constrained interior settings of soap operas -- these efforts pale next to his black-and-white epics--but they do show that Figueroa remained relevant well into the 1980s (and you get a little bit of gratuitous nudity, a surprise for Mexican media).

For those like me who fell hopelessly in love, a screening room shows longer clips (8-10 minutes) organized around themes like the night and Mexico's singing, swinging charros. This extended viewing time (combined, these clips run about 45 minutes) gave me room to reflect on this question: Are these movies (there are clips from dozens of the more than 200 films he shot) actually any good?

The beauty of a show on cinematography -- and just one reason why there should be many more -- is that the answer is: It really doesn't matter. The whole could be sappy or didactic or dull, but who cares, when you're getting strung-together seconds of utter ravishment? Some of these scenes -- and this amazing show -- are going to stay in my mind's eye for a long, long time.

And a closing note on the exhibition's ending: This near-perfect show ends on a near-perfect note:The final scenes, of course, from some  Figueroa films.

FIN

Read More »