by Alonso Aguilar
‘Baroque’ as an adjective tends to be associated with its Eurocentric styling, that of extravagant, ornate, and occasionally convoluted aesthetics; the quintessential pictorial and aural representation of largesse and excess. Historically, this understanding has almost exclusively made the baroque a synonym of aristocracy and the eccentricity only available to the so-called upper echelons of social hegemony. However, it can become something more akin to a freeform impulse when recontextualized.
Synthesizing the baroque ethos to that of a celebration of irregularity and the heterogenous makes it a concept at odds with the hierarchical structures that at one point in time used to rejoice in its maximalism. The stridency, the sensory collision, the unpredictability from frame to frame, brush to brush, sound to sound… The abrasive potential of the baroque becomes a tool for disruption. In film, this tends to be channeled through decadent affectations within classicism, particularly regarding fragmentation in montage, narrative structure, and character psychology, as it has been tirelessly discussed with late film noir as a case study. An ontological embrace of baroqueness, however, is rare in the medium. It positions something beyond a rearrangement of the classical: a jarring contradiction, a realm of pure and constant tension. The kind of space inhabited by the oeuvre of Mexican filmmaker Paul Leduc.
Throughout his polarizing career, Leduc explored myriad audiovisual registers and formats, all guided, simultaneously, by his uncompromising political militancy and playful expansion of cinematic conventions in Latin American film. The duality of his work meant existing in a kind of aesthetic purgatory, neglected by criticisms of being both too abstract, leaning too hard into his bourgeois formal contraptions, and too blunt and naive with the placing of political dialectic. Despite being a seminal figure in establishing dialogues with the New Latin American Cinemas of the 1970s from Mexico, his name is still a contentious subject within the regional canons of both “arthouse” and social cinema.
At 2024’s FICUNAM, his whole body of work was presented in an organized fashion and given the kind of spotlight that rarely happened during Leduc’s life. Some of the restorations were shown for the first time in public screenings, like Barroco (1989) and Latino Bar (1991), while the presented versions of some of these films were virtually unseen, as was the case with the 130-minute Las Historias Prohibidas de Pulgarcito (1980). The fact that multiple decades had to pass before Leduc was presented with a retrospective showcases the complicated relationship his work has had within cinephile circles, even in his own country.
A full immersion into Leduc’s filmography immediately attests to the daunting task of grouping and framing together his eclectic and ever-changing cinematic urges. Going by the comfortable and well-trodden route of auteurism, for example, does a disservice to the material and contextual specificity of his lifelong audiovisual project. His filmmaking singularity transcends a cohesive, signature style. His formal approach was shaped by collaborations and circumstances, as seen in his work with El Salvador’s Frente de Acción Popular (FAPU), Mexico’s Consejo Nacional de Huelga (CNH), and the Cine Difusión department of the Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP). Nevertheless, Leduc wasn’t a purely pragmatic filmmaker. His work never has the academic distance of a metteur en scène, as his modernist leanings were always informed by an exploratory sense of play, in what feels like a real-time inquiry of how to properly depict not only what was in front of the camera, but also the sociopolitical background carried by these images.
With his unconstrained spirit as a creative torchbearer, the specter of the baroque manifests once again as the thrust of Leduc’s work. As its name might suggest, 1989’s Barroco could be seen as close to a declaration of authorial intent as the Mexican artist ever conveyed, coming at a crossroads in his career when his films came under critical scrutiny for their “obtuseness” and “abstraction”. Even if in a revisionist manner, it’s in this cryptic musical that the elusive common ethos between works like Etnocidio: Notas sobre el Mezquital (1977), Cobrador: In God We Trust (2007), and everything in between, might reside: history as image-making.
This idea isn’t fully original, however, being a recurring motif within certain strands of Latin American boom literature, particularly the works of Juan Rulfo and Alejo Carpentier. To fully create an intrinsically Latin American aesthetic, these writers considered the need to reconfigure expressive tools from the ground up, rethinking their relationship to language and how to evoke meaning through form. Carpentier was the one who conceived the “baroque as a spirit”1, raising its banner as the purest antithesis to literary academicism, just like Leduc did with reductive readings of how Latin American cinema ought to be. To these figures, the Latin American baroque is contradictory, heterogeneous, and transcultural. It creates feelings through tensions and collisions and sees time as a circular paradigm.
Leduc’s adaptation of Carpentier’s Concierto Barroco (1974) can be understood as a purer expression of the Cuban writer’s core tenet, as it can fully disregard the descriptive format of the written word, and delves into musicality through mise-en-scène, camera movement, and rhythmic montage. Free of any traditional narrative structure, Leduc’s Barroco engages with Mexican, Cuban, and Spanish histories of colonialism, musical culture, and political organization, all through pure juxtaposition. Iconic figures, stylistic developments, and renowned political milestones are taken indiscriminately from geographies and eras, and coalesced into this cultural melting pot. The Mexican filmmaker weaponizes cognitive dissonance and incongruity to shatter hegemonic readings and any remnants of the canonical, forcing a primal relationship to what’s on screen; something that can only be experienced through instincts: rhythm, song, and dance.
Latino Bar (1991) and Dollar Mambo (1993), the two films that followed Barroco, compose a kind of unofficial trilogy, expanding and repositioning the aesthetics and core concepts of the latter film through different scenarios. In Latino Bar, for example, there’s also no dialogue between characters. We see two figures fall in love in this magical realist rendition of a cabaret, with every wishful glance and seductive motion put forward by the ceaseless flow of movement on screen. Bodies, camera, lighting… Nothing is static when the Afro-Antillano cadences are what guides the film’s ebb and flow.
Superficially, Latino Bar could be described as a more innocuous attempt from Leduc, a traditional love story merely conveyed in a non-conventional manner. Yet its intentionality shouldn’t be taken for granted, or depoliticized. Clearly it isn’t as blatant a sociopolitical inquiry as the films he made immediately before and after, yet its subversion could be even more effective as it exists purely within the realm of universal themes and popular signifiers.
Often the Mexican filmmaker described his concern with the “hollywoodization of Latin American film”, referring to the homogenous formulas of how the region’s audiovisual output were expected to look and feel. Latino Bar’s synopsis could work for the most saccharine of Hollywood romantic dramas, but its atemporal setting, carnivalesque aura, and spiraling structure are inherently within a tradition of Latin American art.
Dollar Mambo bookends Leduc’s musical phase with what can be seen as an encapsulation of his whole career up until that point. The cabaret ambiance of Latino Bar and Barroco is still present, perhaps as literal as it ever came to be. The setting this time is more grounded: a scrappy nightclub sits within a structure constructed from debris in the middle of the Panamanian jungle. There’s the specificity of place, with the lush tropical jungle and dreamy mangrove providing a tangible presence. Soon enough, a historical anchor is also revealed, when the camo-outfits and rambunctious shouts in American English fill the cabaret with anticipation for its “entertainment acts”.
As its adjoining pieces within Leduc’s filmography, Dollar Mambo is constructed via aggregation. Disconnected sequences of mambo dancing, exoticist “native rituals”, and erotic dances are all presented to the amusement of the feral, gas-masked US Army marines. Perhaps as a self-reflection on the idealistic proposal of transculturalism and hybridization as a force of resistance, Leduc now depicts the commodification of these eclectic styles for foreign consumption. The camera no longer dances off between rooms, freely snaking its way amidst the bodies on screen; it’s now almost static, from a distance and a set point of view that makes everything feel detached. The celebratory baroqueness rapidly give way to the doomladen. The eternal aesthetic cycle of vanguard and commodity once again leaning towards the latter.
Beyond this trilogy, the tendrils of baroqueness can be identified in the rest of Leduc’s oeuvre, albeit in a subtler manner. Despite the facade of a biopic, Frida, naturaleza viva (1986) is essentially a collection of impressionistic vignettes from all over the painter’s life, once again creating immersion through additive patterns and maximalist leanings that have nothing to do with “narrative”. Etnocidio: Notas sobre el Mezquital (1977) is perhaps the Mexican filmmaker’s most ambitious dialectic exercise, working with the structure of an alphabet in which each letter introduces a central concept to the struggle of socioeconomic and cultural struggles of the Otomí minority in the Mezquital Valley, and how they present a microcosm for the whole nation’s relationship with neocolonialism and exclusion. Las Historias Prohibidas de Pulgarcito (1980) leans into Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton’s lyrical dissection of his own country’s historical adversity to create an urgent and direct look into popular armed conflict against state repression. Even in his last film, Cobrador: In God We Trust (2007), Leduc worked with another cosmovision, exploring violence in contemporary Latin America through noirish sensibilities of Brazilian writer Rubem Fonseca.
What all these features share, in one way or another, is Leduc’s constant and life-long engrossment with contrasting aesthetics and sociopolitical relationships. It was never a matter of merely adapting, and “being respectful” to other visions. A Leduc film about any subject, inspired by any author, or in collaboration with any collective, always had a cumulative effect. Layers of meaning clashed against each other, always rethinking the official settings, iconographies, and styles with which they played or referenced. Leduc’s militancy and cinematic subversion might not have been ever fully coherent to the standard of what history books call an auteur, but precisely in its undiscriminating nature and mercurial enthusiasm, his work remains eternally and authentically rebellious.
Alonso Aguilar is a Costa Rican writer, critic and programmer. His writings have featured in Mubi Notebook, Bandcamp Daily, Hyperallergic, photogénie and Cinema Tropical, among other outlets.
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