Director, choreographer and actor Seki Sano translated L’Internationale to Japanese. In 1926, he was the first to bring the Soviet play to the stage in his country. He was studying Vsevolod Meyerhold’s method and was at the forefront of the left wing avant-garde. Obviously, he had to leave Japan in 1930 for his first exile. A few years later, he found himself in the Soviet Union assisting his teacher, Meyerhold, and Konstantin Stanislavsky from 1932 to 1937. Seki Sano was lucky enough to escape Stalinism in time and to find final refuge in Mexico, where he became “a father of contemporary theatre”.
He founded Teatro de las Artes and Teatro de la Reforma, and together with Waldeen von Falkenstein staged the first Mexican modern dance, La coronela, composed by Silvestre Revueltas. “The revolutionary epic in modern dance presented the heroine, la coronela, symbol of the Revolution, with folk patterns”, according to the scholar Michiko Tanaka. No wonder that Paul Leduc studied theatre with him.
The fascinating, almost unimaginable cultural exchange between different parts of the world, in the wake of colossal historical tumult, is an essential part of Paul Leduc’s thinking about history and art, which is reflected in his works, from Barroco to the educational animation diptych Bartolo, where Bach’s music—one of the central figures of the director’s universe—is shown inseparable from the early art experiments of the original people of Mexico.
This early formative experience of Leduc, studying theatre before the discovery of cinema, also allows for a better understanding of his eternal quest for the film form. Different kinds of theatrical aesthetics, from baroque theatre to dance and even cabaret, constantly reappear in his cinema. Even the 3D animation Los animales begins and ends with a theatre curtain. Though coming from a different place and context, his search for the language was pursued in parallel with the stylised works of such modernist filmmakers as Manoel de Oliveira, Werner Schroeter or Raúl Ruiz (the latter was also a left-wing director from Latin America, but he somehow found his unique place in the lineage of French surrealism… which is in turn matched by the irony of history with Mexico—think of André Breton visiting Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or a late period of Luis Buñuel).
Despite its hard production conditions, ¿Cómo ves? could be Paul Leduc’s first film, the one where he found the alchemic formula of his cinema. The scholar Oscar René González López, in his article for the essential book Nueve miradas a la obra de Paul Leduc (edited by Aleksandra Jablonska and José Axel García Ancira), calls it a filmic anagram. The film comprises a series of scenes, mirroring each other. It opens with a prologue, where a couple (of narrators, commentators, witnesses, survivors?), in an almost post-apocalyptic background, introduces the audience to the desperate atmosphere of the film.
Dollar Mambo has a very similar opening, but this time the dialogue is performed by a lonely ventriloquist and his dummy (therefore becoming a monologue), while the other actors wander around in silence. These kinds of introductions are not far away from classical Indian theatre, where they were called āmukha and prastāvanā. The difference, though, is that Leduc ends both films with almost identical scenes, turning the prologues into epilogues. He discovered this circular composition already in Frida and stayed loyal to it. Barroco employs the same technique, but without any words. This circular structure is important to the director, defining his approach to time, which is non-linear in his films. This is a political idea in the centre of Barroco, putting forward a different understanding of the development of history and culture.
Theatre is based on the close sense of the collective. And Paul Leduc entered cinema as part of a film collective, Cine 70, which still hasn’t been studied and shown enough. Only in 2022 did Nicole Brenez and Paul Grivas presented the first retrospective of this movement at the French cinematheque, calling it Ciné 70, groupe insurgé, Mexique 1967-1970 [Cine 70, Rebellious Group, Mexico 1967-1970]. Sometimes it isn’t easy to attribute authorship to the collective’s early documentaries, because the credits only mention the names of the workers, not ascribing roles (which is also the case in Markku Lehmuskallio’s early works, the protagonist of Doclisboa’s last year’s retrospective).
As far as his individual path as a filmmaker goes, Leduc’s oeuvre still kept this idea of togetherness. For instance, the cinematographer Ángel Goded, whose circular panoramas so fit the composition of the films, worked with Leduc for more than forty years. Only later did Josep M. Civit, the cinematographer of Monte Hellman’s Iguana (1988) and Road to Nowhere (2010), joined their team. The journalist José Joaquín Blanco was Leduc’s screenwriter in the four features, while Cecilia Toussaint and Jaime López were partly responsible for his musical world. Finally, a famous actor, Robert Sosa, has a very special place in Leduc’s universe, bringing the innocence of his gaze to ¿Cómo ves?, Barroco, Latino Bar and Dollar Mambo.
As time went by, the ballet of glances in Paul Leduc’s cinema replaced the dialogues, and the songs took the place of the spoken words. Curiously enough, for most of his visual works the director drew inspiration from literary works, most often novels. Books by writers such as Alejo Carpentier, Roque Dalton, Carlos Fuentes, Federico Gamboa, Rubem Fonseca and José Revueltas became the source of inspiration for his films.
Among the dozens of unfinished projects—sadly, Leduc managed to complete much fewer films than the ideas he had developed—, are three unsuccessful attempts (in 1974, 1994 and 2014) to adapt Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, The Monk, by Matthew Gregory Lewis, as well as other books by Carpentier and Revueltas. The pantheon of his biographical films could have included the ones about photographer and revolutionary Tina Modotti, musician Tom Zé and Nicaraguan guerrilla Augusto César Sandino.
Hardly any of his films, however, could be called adaptations, since he always engages in a live dialogue with the texts, sometimes altering them beyond recognition. The way Leduc works with the music is special too, because the selection of the songs creates a new ‘text’ for the film, parallel to the plot, adding a time and space layer, which is a method also employed in modern theatre.
What took centuries in Barroco and Bartolo became very fast with the arrival of the 20th century. Unsurprisingly, the second instalment of Bartolo is dedicated only to the art of this century. While in Reed, México insurgente Leduc mimics the documentary approach of the nineteen-sixties, capturing the Mexican Revolution, the protagonists of his further works are themselves fascinated by the moving images and the way in which the arrival of cinema, radio and television brings the simultaneous feeling of history.
Since Sur sureste: 2604 and Extensión cultural, the cameras, cinema screens, radio receivers and television sets populate Leduc’s films. He cuts through spaces and time, showing us different characters listening to the same song. Frida Kahlo comes to the theatre and watches the newsreels about Adolf Hitler’s rise to power to a round of applause from the spectators next to her. In Dollar Mambo, the screen duly informs about the murder of a cabaret dancer. Cobrador deals with the new kinds of images, including the digital and surveillance ones, but ends with the September 11 attacks destroying the Twin Towers. In Paul Leduc’s cinema and in this retrospective all these events are happening simultaneously.
Boris Nelepo