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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > March > 30 > Entry
Exhibit, films celebrate Manuel Alvarez Bravo
Mexico’s contributions to the development and history of the art of photography are profound. And perhaps no one led the charge as much Manuel Alvarez Bravo whose stunning black-and-white images rightfully hold their place in the canon with his contemporaries such as muralist Diego Rivera.
As Mexico shifted from revolutionary times into modernity, Alvarez Bravo was there with his camera, artistically documenting ordinary scenes, political turmoil and folk traditions and rituals. Through his lens, Mexico appeared both surrealistic and timeless — a place pursuing modernization and while also developing a national identity that proudly reflected its pre-Columbian past.
Culled from UT’s Blanton Museum of Art and Ransom Center, the exhibit “Manuel Alvarez Bravo and his Contemporaries” explores the work of the Mexican master and his peers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothea Lange and Edward Weston.
And in conjunction with the exhibit, the Blanton has put together a film series of three rare movies on which Alvarez Bravo served as a cameraman.
The series starts Sunday with a screening of “¡Que Viva Mexico!”
Like many intellectuals of his time, Russian avant-garde film director Sergei Eisenstein found immense fascination in Mexico. In 1930, financed by author Upton Sinclair (among others), Eisenstein set out to a film an epic about Mexico’s history from pre-Columbian times to the present.
But though he shot an estimated 200,000 feet of film, and after Stalin called him back to the USSR, Eisenstein never completed the project. A subsequent edit in 1979 by one of Eisenstein’s collaborators resulted in a 90-minute version of “¡Que Viva Mexico!”
Screening of “¡Que Viva Mexico!” 3 p.m. Sunday in the Blanton Museum auditorium. Tickets are $3-$5 (museum admission not required).
‘Los Olvidados’ (1950, directed by Luis Buñuel) screens April 11 at 3 p.m. and ‘La Diosa Arrodillada’ (1947, directed by Roberto Gavaldon ) on April 25 at 3 p.m.
‘Manuel Álvarez Bravo and his Contemporaries’ continues through Aug. 1. www.blantonmuseum.org
Image: “Cemetery Wall,” silver print, 1964. Manuel Alvarez Bravo. Blanton Museum of Art collection.
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