Enamorada · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

She slaps him in the street. Not in a doorway, not behind a fan, but out in the open, in front of his own soldiers, with the domes of Cholula stacked up behind her. Gloria Schoemann cuts on the impact instead of after it, so the hit arrives before you've decided whether it's funny. Everything in this film happens in public, and the public is always composed.

There's a long argument about Enamorada: is it a taming, or is the general the one who gets conquered? The argument usually gets conducted at the level of plot, where it can't be won, because the plot is a borrowed Shrew and Shrews end how they end. Deleuze is useful here because he reads films by what their images are asked to do, not by what the story claims about itself. The images in this film vote early.

Deleuze's name for classical narrative cinema is the movement-image: someone perceives a situation, is affected by it, acts, and the situation changes. Its grandest version he calls the large form. A whole encompassing world presses on a character until he produces the act that transforms it. Situation, action, new situation. Enamorada sets this up in its first block. Reyes rides into Cholula, jails the notables, and the milieu is complete. Deleuze calls that encompassing milieu the synsign — the situation as one breathing thing rather than a backdrop. Figueroa gives it teeth by putting the camera on the ground. Low horizon, figures against sky, arcades and domes and the pyramid with its chapel on top, all held in deep focus so nothing is optional. Armendáriz on horseback reads as monument. The town isn't where the story happens. It's what the story is up against.

Now look at what happens indoors, and to Beatriz. Figueroa keeps putting her behind things: grilles, railings, window ironwork, the arches of a patio. Deleuze treats the frame as a closed set, a container deliberately packed with information about what's enclosed and how. Cholula's colonial architecture becomes a lattice, and she's inside it in nearly every shot before she leaves.

Over the lattice sits the sky. Figueroa got it with heavy red and orange filtration on panchromatic stock, which drops blue to near-black and leaves the cumulus burning white. It's the most imitated thing he ever did, and it's doing conceptual work. Deleuze, following Bergson, separates the closed set from the Open: the sense that a frame gives onto a larger whole that is changing. The grille is the closed set. That sky is the Open. Which of the two a body belongs to is the film's real question, and the compositions ask it long before anyone says it out loud.

He didn't invent the formula. Eduard Tisse shot it first for Eisenstein's abandoned ¡Que viva México!, whose stills circulated in Mexico as a usable grammar — faces and maguey from below, cloud banks polarized into sculpture. Paul Strand's Redes supplied the other half: the laborer's head low in frame against hard sky, held long enough to become portraiture. Figueroa fused a stills photographer's instinct with the deep-focus staging he picked up next to Gregg Toland in mid-1930s Hollywood, years before Citizen Kane made depth famous. Worth noticing what he does with it. Bazin praised depth of field for keeping the world ambiguous, for letting the viewer choose where to look. Figueroa uses it for the opposite purpose: so everyone's rank stays legible in a single plane, foreground and background at once, no cut needed to tell you who outranks whom.

The courtship runs as what Deleuze calls a binomial — force against force, the duel that organizes any large form. Except this duel is class warfare with slaps in it, and the accounting comes out backwards. In the large form the hero has to be marked by the milieu before he can change it; Deleuze calls this the imprint, the bond by which a situation and a character stamp each other. Reyes takes the town. The town's daughter takes him. He loses his temper, then his authority in front of his men, and finally his ability to speak.

That last loss produces the film's strangest scene and its best. The serenade under her window is a stock unit of Mexican cinema; Allá en el Rancho Grande had codified it a decade earlier, singer and window and listening crowd blocked in depth. Deleuze would call that a mark: an object that means by habit, so that when you see the balcony you know what follows. Fernández keeps the shape and pulls out the middle. The general can't say it, so he hires men to sing it, generally identified as "Malagueña salerosa." The voice is real and the feeling is real, and neither belongs to the body standing in the street. Deleuze's term for a mark that breaks its own chain and has to be interpreted is a demark. Here it's an entire man of action reduced to commissioning his own declaration.

Against him, the face. Félix gets a photographic treatment nothing else in the film receives: high hard key, sculptural, held past the point the scene needs. In the church procession the candles source the frame and Figueroa lifts her face out of the crowd. Deleuze splits the film face in two. There's the intensive face, micro-movements building toward a threshold, which is her face in the slaps. And there's the reflexive face, immobile, holding one quality, which is her face in the candlelight. The reflexive one is where the movement-image stalls: affect registered, nothing discharged, no action available. The crowd around her is what Deleuze calls a dividual, a collective rendered as one affective unit — the chorus Fernández choreographs out of townspeople, soldiers and soldaderas. One face gets cut out of that mass and given time the plot doesn't require. The surplus attention is the film's actual opinion.

The ending is built rather than cut. Schoemann accumulates movement across the frame, the column retreating, and Beatriz's decision arrives as a single change of direction. No climax of editing. Deleuze describes the large form breathing between two scales, the vast milieu-space and the taut line of the action, and calls it respiration-space. Here the breath ends on a posture. General on horseback. Landowner's daughter on foot in the dust, the American fiancé abandoned somewhere behind her. Deleuze's word for a posture that states a social relation rather than illustrating one is the gest. Whole political settlements can sit in the attitude of a body, and this one does: the revolution mounted, the oligarchy walking beside it, the priest who brokered the deal back in town. Miguel Alemán took office in December 1946, the first civilian president since the Revolution, and began ratifying exactly this arrangement.

What the film did is mostly Figueroa's doing and mostly durable. It welded a national look — low sky, monumentalized body, architecture as class diagram — onto a popular romance, and proved the two could carry a political argument without a speech. It also made the woman and the landscape the same order of icon, photographed with identical reverence, which is where the images get their power and why feminist critics have been arguing with them ever since. Fernández made La perla the following year. Benito Alazraki, here on the writing and production side, went on to Raíces. The film itself nearly went down with the rest of Mexico's nitrate before the recent restoration, with Mexican archives, Fundación Televisa and Scorsese's World Cinema Project, put it back in circulation.

Watch it once for the story. Watch it again counting the shots that put Beatriz behind ironwork, and notice where the sky is when she finally walks out from under it. The script says she was tamed. The photography has been saying something else the whole time, and it never needed a line of dialogue to say it.