{"id":1820,"date":"2020-08-23T23:21:32","date_gmt":"2020-08-24T03:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=1820"},"modified":"2020-08-23T23:21:37","modified_gmt":"2020-08-24T03:21:37","slug":"redes-lives-the-iconic-film-of-the-mexican-revolution-and-what-it-says-to-us-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2020\/08\/redes-lives-the-iconic-film-of-the-mexican-revolution-and-what-it-says-to-us-today.html","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Redes&#8221; Lives! &#8212; The Iconic Film of the Mexican Revolution and what it says to us today"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<span class=\"embed-youtube\" style=\"text-align:center; display: block;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" class=\"youtube-player\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1gnQakMpj4g?version=3&#038;rel=1&#038;showsearch=0&#038;showinfo=1&#038;iv_load_policy=1&#038;fs=1&#038;hl=en-US&#038;autohide=2&#038;wmode=transparent\" allowfullscreen=\"true\" style=\"border:0;\" sandbox=\"allow-scripts allow-same-origin allow-popups allow-presentation allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox\"><\/iframe><\/span>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>In his most important speech about the place of culture in the national experience, delivered at Amherst College mere weeks before his death, President John F. Kennedy said:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cIn free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not \u2018engineers of the soul.\u2019 It may be different elsewhere. But democratic society &#8212; in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is that necessarily how artists best serve the nation? Truly, it is \u201cdifferent elsewhere.\u201d Outside the US, artists may successfully aspire to become \u2013 in Stalin\u2019s phrase \u2013 influential \u201cengineers of the soul.\u201d In our hemisphere, the first names to come to mind may be Mexican: Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, powerful and impactful muralists on the left, defining and espousing Mexican identity, agitating with their art for social and economic reform.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>It\u2019s a pity that Silvestre Revueltas is not at least as well known as Rivera. I would unhesitatingly call him the supreme political composer of concert and film music produced in the Americas.&nbsp;&nbsp;His music combines ideology with personal understanding. This is what Octavio Paz meant when he wrote extolling Revueltas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cAll his music seems preceded by something that is not simply joy and exhilaration, or satire and irony. That element is his profound empathy with his surroundings. He occupies a place in our hearts above that of the grandiose Mexican murals, that seem to know all except pity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Revueltas\u2019s peak achievements include his singularly arresting score for the film&nbsp;<em>Redes<\/em> (1936), in which impoverished Mexican fisherman unite to storm the bastions of power. That this film isn\u2019t as celebrated as it deserves to be is partly because until recently it seemed impossible to obtain a decent print. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.postclassical.com\">PostClassical Ensemble\u2019<\/a>s Naxos DVD&nbsp;<em>Redes<\/em> not only features a pristine print, courtesy of Martin Scorsese\u2019s World Cinema Project; it also features a newly recorded soundtrack by PCE (and its inimitable principal trumpet, Chris Gekker) led by Angel Gil-Ordonez. The impact of Revueltas\u2019s score, in combination with Paul Strand\u2019s lyrical cinematography, is fully realized for the first time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>PostClassical Ensemble\u2019s latest <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/postclassical.com\/performances\/postclassical-more-than-music\/\">More than Music<\/a><\/strong> film (you can screen it above), remarkably embellished by Peter Bogdanoff&#8217;s visual presentation, explores the significance of&nbsp;<em>Redes<\/em> and Revueltas today; we call it \u201c<em>Redes<\/em> Lives!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The distinguished Mexican composer Ana Lara beautifully sums it all up by saying (at 1:01:38): \u201cIt\u2019s unique in film music, that you can have his very revolutionary music \u2013 wonderfully written, wonderfully orchestrated \u2013 and at the same time it&nbsp;<em>throws<\/em> you into the deepest feeling of the human being.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To which Angel Gil-Ordonez adds (at 1:00:40) that, because Revueltas combines political militancy with empathy (\u201calways on the side of those who are suffering\u201d), he bears comparison with Shostakovich.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why did Aaron Copland&nbsp;say: \u201cWhen I was in Mexico I was a little envious of the opportunity composers have to serve their country\u201d?&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Why did the Mexican government decide to back a film espousing revolutionary change? (The historian John Tutino has the answer at 51:09.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>What impelled the Mexican music historian Roberto Kolb to deny that Mexican composers \u201cwere running around in loin cloths\u201d? (46:42)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Is&nbsp;<em>Redes<\/em> today a call for action? Yes, affirms Lorenzo Candelaria, a leading Hispanic educator and dean of Vanderbilt\u2019s Blair School of Music (58:35).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Midway through&nbsp;<em>Redes<\/em>, Strand admires the pride and resilience of challenged fishermen, hauling their nets in unison, bringing in the catch. His camera feasts on the elemental grandeur of Mexican sky and water \u2013 and discovers, in the veins of the fishermen\u2019s muscled arms, a visual metaphor for their rope nets, themselves a metaphor for entrapment. Revueltas does not accompany this sequence; he comments upon it with a chorale. I cannot think of a film clip that more memorably marries music with the moving image&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Reviewing our Naxos DVD, Spain\u2019s pre-eminent contemporary novelist, Antonio Munoz Molina, wrote in&nbsp;<em>El Pais<\/em>: \u201cThe beauty of image and&nbsp;&nbsp;of sound register as never before. . . . It is like experiencing a masterpiece of painting cleaned of centuries of grime. The exhausted and disillusioned Silvestre Revueltas of his final years would never have imagined such a posthumous tribute.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em><strong>A follow-up zoom chat &#8212; \u201cThe Artist and the State: Political Art in Mexico and the US\u201d \u2013 will include a terrific presentation by Gregorio <a href=\"https:\/\/www.gregorioluke.com\/\">Luke<\/a> on the Mexican muralists.<\/strong> Also Ana Lara, Roberto Kolb, John Tutino, Lorenzo Candelaria, and Ix-Nic Iruegas Peon of the Mexican Cultural Institute. To register, click <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/us02web.zoom.us\/meeting\/register\/tZYoce-gqTsiGtOjBE_xLV54YP2OMLGJSIDp\">here.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>For more on &#8220;More than Music,&#8221; click <strong><a href=\"https:\/\/postclassical.com\/performances\/postclassical-more-than-music\/\">here.<\/a><\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>Coming in September: a More than Music film on Dvorak\u2019s \u201cNew World\u201d Symphony as a lens on the American experience of race.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his most important speech about the place of culture in the national experience, delivered at Amherst College mere weeks before his death, President John F. Kennedy said: \u201cIn free society art is not a weapon and it does not belong to the spheres of polemic and ideology. Artists are not \u2018engineers of the soul.\u2019 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1820","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-tm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1820"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1828,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1820\/revisions\/1828"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}