American Cinematographer - September 2013 - 26

LACMA to Celebrate Figueroa
By Jean Oppenheimer

“Don Gabriel had the secret of the
universe in his hands,” declares Gabriel
Beristain, ASC, AMC, BSC. “He was a god
of cinematography.” Beristain is talking
about the iconic Mexican director of
photography Gabriel Figueroa Mateos,
whose collaborations with Luis Buñuel (The
Exterminating Angel, Los Olvidados), John
Huston (Night of the Iguana, Under the
Volcano), Emilio Fernández (María Candelaria, La Perla) and John Ford (The Fugitive)
deeply influenced the way the directors
presented their stories.
Figueroa is the subject of the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art exhibit
Under the Mexican Sky: Gabriel Figueroa,
Art and Film, which will open Sept. 22 and
remain on view until Feb. 2, 2014. Britt
Salvesen, curator of LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the
prints and drawings department, and one
of two curators overseeing the exhibit,
concedes, “It is a challenge to represent the
achievements and legacy of a cinematogra26

September 2013

pher in a museum context. Not only is the
cinematographer’s vision linked to that of
the directors with whom he or she collaborated, but the works of art are the
completed films as they were theatrically
presented, which we can’t do in the
galleries. Any such exhibition must have a
counterpart in a screening series.”
And Under the Mexican Sky most
certainly will. Bernardo Rondeau, LACMA’s
assistant curator of film programs, has organized an ambitious lineup that includes
Figueroa’s collaborations with Buñuel,
Huston and Ford; classic films from Mexican
cinema’s golden age; a focus on contemporary Mexican films; and a 2012 documentary devoted to Figueroa, Emilio Maillé’s
Miradas Múltiples (La Máquina Loca), which
features an array of the world’s top cinematographers, including Darius Khondji,
ASC, AFC; Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC;
Luciano Tovoli, ASC, AIC; Anthony Dod
Mantle, ASC, BSC, DFF; Christopher Doyle,
HKSC; Philippe Rousselot, ASC, AFC; Shoji
Ueda, JSC, and Raoul Coutard.
Figueroa, who died in 1997, is credited with helping to shape post-revolutionAmerican Cinematographer

Photography by Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Tom Dey and Gabriel Figueroa. Photos and frame grabs courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and American Cinematographer archives.

Gabriel Figueroa reviews light tests for the film Sonatas (1959), directed by Juan Antonio Bardem.

ary Mexico’s sense of identity through his
visual presentation of the nation’s landscape, peoples and history. He also helped
establish a striking black-and-white
aesthetic through his use of deep focus and
infrared and other filters. “Figueroa created
a very heroic Mexico in his films,” asserts
Henner Hofmann, ASC, AMC, who directs
the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica in Mexico City. “His images convey a
very brave, very solid country.”
Rita Gonzalez, associate curator of
contemporary art at LACMA and co-curator of Under the Mexican Sky, concurs,
extolling “the sympathetic, even romanticized way the cameraman presented the
laboring classes.” She notes that similar
themes were being addressed in painting
and photography at that time, perhaps
most notably in the work of muralists Diego
Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Jose
Clemente Orozco, and the photos of
Manuel Alvarez Bravo. In addition to
befriending these artists, Figueroa was
influenced by them and, in turn, influenced
their work. In fact, the cinematographer
became known as the Fourth Muralist. “At
that time, art and film worked hand-inhand to address social issues, trying to
reach a public that [had] different levels of
education,” notes Gonzalez. “Images were
considered educational tools, whether
dramatizing historical content or presenting
moral lessons about being a good citizen.
All of these things were playing out in
Figueroa’s films, especially the ones he
made with Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández.”
Figueroa was born in 1907, three
years before the start of the Mexican Revolution. Orphaned at a young age, he grew
up in Mexico City, where he studied painting and the violin before entering the film
industry as a stills photographer. He picked
up his first movie camera in 1933, and his
first job was as one of several camera operators on Howard Hawks’ Viva Villa!, which
was shooting exteriors in Mexico under
James Wong Howe, ASC. Two years later,
in 1935, Figueroa received a Mexican
government scholarship to study for one
year in Hollywood, where Gregg Toland,
ASC took the young man under his wing.
Toland’s famous use of deep focus became
a major influence on Figueroa’s own work.
Returning to Mexico, Figueroa

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