![]() His indictment of the ubiquity of the U.S. Gámez’s images are blunt and his messages clear. universities), greedily gnaw the hot dogs. These archetypal technocrats (Mexican politicians educated in the neoliberal economics programs of U.S. ![]() Here, the man wields the bundle of sausages like a lasso and fishes out three men in suits from beneath the lake. He chases the porky pipe across the country as Gámez cuts different images into the background-skyscrapers, a woman making tortillas, a Mercedes-Benz, marching men, a television, a peon’s foot, a picture of the galaxy-until he arrives at a lake. La Fórmula Secreta is a direct riposte to a Golden Age of fakery, pulling back the curtains on Mexico’s myth-making stage to reveal the bitter reality of the nation as it became subject to the neocolonial influence of the U.S.Įarly in the film, a Mexican man begins following a seemingly infinite string of hot dogs. Released in 1965, the film was coming on the heels of Mexico’s decades-long project of extolling national icons in its cinema, to create a cohesive national imaginary and to bury the factionalism left behind by the Revolution. “It is an X-ray, not of Mexico, but of what it means to be Mexican,” said Alfonso Cuarón when introducing La Fórmula Secreta at the Morelia International Film Festival in 2017. (The film is also known as Coca-Cola en la sangre, or “Coca-Cola in the Blood.”) Though Rulfo’s explanation contextualizes the shape-shifting form of the featurette, Gámez’s symbolist tendencies produce sequences bent on eluding comprehension by appealing to the illogical propensity of audiences’ hearts and souls. Juana Suárez, that La Fórmula Secreta began to find its way back into public discourse, Mexico’s national film canon, and the oft-unchronicled history of experimental Latin American cinema.Īlthough Gámez refused for his entire life to explain what his film was about, Rulfo described it best in a lecture he conducted at the Central University of Venezuela in 1974: La Fórmula Secreta is about a man who experiences a series of nightmares after he is injected with Coca-Cola instead of saline. It was not until the film was found by a curious worker amidst stacks of discarded celluloid at the legendary Estudios Churubusco, according to the film scholar Dr. Despite having won the top prize in Mexico’s first national Experimental Film Contest in 1965, with a script by famous author Juan Rulfo and narration by award-winning Chiapanecan poet Jaime Sabines, the film receded from view as the years went by. ![]() Those who had actually seen it spoke of Gámez in whispers, as though they were still questioning the existence of what they’d witnessed. ![]() Prior to its restoration in 2017, the film largely circulated as a samizdat VHS rip. La Fórmula Secreta’s (1965) history is a fabled one. ![]() Though most directors have failed and a few filmmakers have distinguished themselves in their attempts to capture Mexico’s changing character, only one has triumphed: Rubén Gámez. Examples include the fetishistic formalism of Eisenstein, the subtle character studies by contemporary talents like Maria Novaro and Alonso Ruizpalacios, and the despotic pilfering of cultural icons carried out by Alejandro González Iñárritu in Bardo (2022). Many filmmakers have tried to define Mexico’s character, with varying degrees of success. ![]()
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