A Dance To The Music Of Time - Paul Leduc Retrospective
¿De dónde son los cantantes?
Born into a communist family in Mexico City, Paul Leduc (1942-2020) studied architecture and theatre before going to France to the Institute for Advanced Cinematographic Studies (IDHEC), where he discovered the work of Jean Rouch. After returning home, he actively participated in the film club movement, wrote critiques, and co-founded—together with Alexis Grivas, Rafael Castanedo, and Felipe Cazals—the collective Cine 70.
His first feature, Reed: México insurgente (1970), based on John Reed’s account on the Mexican Revolution, is among the key films of the New Mexican Cinema. Curator Amos Vogel called it “a notable, oblique work of great subtlety” and included it in his seminal book Film as Subversive Art. Vogel summarises Leduc’s militant approach: “Reed—who had planned to ‘cover an event’ he sympathized with—realises that he must turn participant; at the end he throws a solitary rock at a store window, and becomes a revolutionist”.
Leduc’s path, which brought him to the refusal of words, was dedicated to the search of a new form and the right film language to depict Latin American culture. Glauber Rocha was an important accomplice in these discussions. Leduc explained: “Mexico was more about what emerged from a creator such as Juan Rulfo, who writes about silence, the desert, the dry valleys. The rhythm is rather different in the countries where there were indigenous civilisations; music shows it”.
His films were shown three times in Cannes (Reed in the Director’s Fortnight, Etnocidio. Notas sobre la región del Mezquital in the Critic’s Week, Barroco in Un Certain Regard) and twice at the Berlinale (Frida in Forum and Latino Bar in Panorama), and Cobrador participated in the Horizons section in Venice. For many years, however, it was hard to watch them due to the lack of copies. Doclisboa, in collaboration with Cinemateca Portuguesa, presents the first European extensive retrospective of the Mexican master, following in the footsteps of previous programmes dedicated to Latin America (For an Impossible Cinema: Documentary Film and Avant-Garde in Cuba in 2016, Luis Ospina in 2018, Carlos Reichenbach in 2022).
The cartography of Leduc’s oeuvre includes Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina and Panama. His last feature, Cobrador. In God We Trust (2006), was largely shot in Brazil, inspired by the stories of Rubem Fonseca and the songs of Tom Zé. While his documentaries are treatises on such topics as the exploitation of the Otomi indigenous people (Etnocidio. Notas sobre la región del Mezquital, 1976) or the civil war in El Salvador (Historias prohibidas de Pulgarcito, 1980), his fictional work deals with Mesoamerican colonisation in the form of experimental musicals: Barroco (1989), Latino Bar (1990) and Dollar Mambo (1993).
Mathematical precision, choreography of human gazes, lack of dialogue, dance and political irreconcilability became the essential parts of the language Leduc was looking for all his life.
This programme is possible thanks to the collaboration of FICUNAM International Film Festival, the help of the Embassy of Mexico in Portugal, the Paul Leduc Archive and Valentina Leduc. Special thanks to Paula Astorga, who had the idea for this retrospective. Thanks also to Cinematograph-Filmverleih and the Innsbruck Film Festival for providing a 35mm print of Dollar Mambo, and to Olaf Möller, Laura Alderete, Ekaterina Kalinina, Dana Kovalchik, Jurij Meden and Ed Mayén for their help and support. The book Nueve miradas a la obra de Paul Leduc (2021), coordinated by Aleksandra Jablonska and José Axel García Ancira, was used as as an indispensable source of information for research, as well as the website of Acervo Paul Leduc.
Boris Nelepo
Curator of the retrospective
