In El Angel Negro (The Black Angel), Juan Bustillo Oro takes his desire to experiment with lighting, shot sequencing, mise-en-scene, and camera angles in order to achieve expressionistic effects that represent hidden, chthonic places in the mind and the heart, and a psychological experience that explores perception and beingness, and asks what happens when you represent ontological uncertainty. He also creates what may be the most evil femme fatale in film noir with Cristina. (For a full plot summary and character analysis, click here).
In his earlier films, Dos Monjes (Two Monks) and Cada loco son su tema (Every Madman with His Theme), Bustillo Oro explores the deterioration of mental state due to guilt (Dos Monjes) and due to an excessive exposure to hyperbolic, sensational narrative, similar to the notion that young women could be negatively influenced by reading gothic novels or romances (Cada loco con su tema). In those cases, the audience’s gaze was directed to a particular character whose mental stability was the primary focus. However, in the case of El Angel Negro, the issue of mental illness is not in question; the person who is obsessive and potentially mentally ill has already arrived at that state. Instead, Bustillo Oro explores the kind of emotional impact that he can create within the world of the film; how a world becomes suffused with danger and menace because of a combination of past sinful criminality and a tacitly present sense of invasive, engulfing desire. Specifically, Bustillo Oro brings his expressionistic cinematography to show how the murderous obsession of a deranged, illegitimate half-sister and the murky worlds of possessive desire, echoes of past violation, and an unwholesome attachment spill out into the audience who perceives the way that the fabric of the daylight, polite world can be ripped asunder. The audience feels the vulnerability, not only to their person, but also to the potential of being classified as an outcast, or shunned due to one’s origins. In this case, the emotions are not created in order to feel compassion or empathy, but to intensify the sense of revulsion and menace. The danger is palpable; the assault on one’s values is recognizable. The audience feels relief when the evil woman kills herself and order is restored to the world. And thus it is that horror serves a normative purpose and could be viewed as a kind of “rhetoric of conservation.” Bustillo Oro’s excursion into the depths of depravity end as the holiest and most revered of religious figures, the beloved Virgin of Guadalupe, essentially breaks the evil spell and reunites the family, and re-illuminates the sin-darkened world.
In El Angel Negro (1942), Bustillo Oro creates a psychological drama that pushes the envelope on earlier films that established the horror genre, such as such classics as The Mummy or Frankenstein. It is the story of a failed attempt to protect an innocent new bride and her new baby from the jealous intentions of another woman. The fact that the woman was the half-sister of the new wife, and that the man’s previous wives had mysteriously died of poisoning, and that the half-sister lived with the burden of a shameful secret of origin (her mother was raped by a man working in the home) and an unwholesome love for her half-brother add not only a sense of the taboo, but also the experience of vicariously stepping outside the norms and order of the polite world.
In looking at Bustillo Oro’s oeuvre, while on the surface, El Angel Negro may seem rather simplistic, it represents an important aesthetic bridge between his Expressionistic works: the gothic Dos Monjes and the campy satire, Each Madman with His Theme, and the nostalgic, romantic world of ornate architecture, expansive growth of wealth for the upper class, and intricate social rituals of the time of President Porfirio Díaz (In the Time of Porfirio Diaz (1942) and My Memories of Mexico (1944)).
While a review of the relatively simple plot gives the impression that the movie is simply about the fact that truth prevails in the end, and justice is restored, the movie itself is much more than that. The non-narrative aspects of the film, namely the Expressionistic lighting and camera angles, and the visual narrative that contains shadowy evocations of evil, go far beyond the simple person of Cristina, and point to a world at least half-saturated with the forces of darkness, underworld, and the chthonic. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is suggested at times, and in visual allusions and the chiaroscuro with unusual camera angles, the idea of a world where order trembles on the brink of darkness and chaos is suggested. Femininity and womanhood are problematized by the presence of a woman (Cristina) who is aggressively antagonistic to the social and cultural ideas of a “nice” woman. The power lies in the shadows and not in the light, which trembles and may be blown out or otherwise extinguished at any time.
Bustillo Oro has created film that revels in its triumph of the fertile, chaotic, procreative darkness over the light, and which suggests that the horror genre relies on the interplay of order and symmetry, over its ghastly, infernal counterpart. In such a world, Cristina and Elisa are in fact both the one true mother of the son, but as a fused doppelganger, the order containing its own disorder.
PRIMARY CHARACTERS
Jorge
Llorente Wealthy member of the elites; a widower who marries Elisa
Elisa Innocent and
beautiful young woman who marries Jorge
Cristina Jorge’s
half-sister
Don
Luciano Elisa’s father, a
prosperous but rather silly man
Doña
Meche Mother of three
marriageable daughters
Doctor Bustamente Don Luciano’s doctor
SYNOPSIS
Set
in the 1860s, El Angel Negro begins
as a story about the “season” for young women of Mexico’s elite class in the
mid 19th century who attend elegant balls and soirees in an attempt
to attract a wealthy suitor. Elisa, the daughter of a doting (if rather silly)
and indulgent father, seems to have the best of all possible chances; at least
that is certainly the assessment of the mother of three daughters who will
compete in the same pool of men. Elisa,
who is as innocent and good as she is beautiful, is ineluctably drawn to the
wealthy, but potentially dangerous widower loner, Jorge Llorente, whose
previous two (or possibly more) wives died young by sudden illnesses that look
a lot like poisoning. Elisa and Jorge
are magnetically drawn to each other and their intense connection is palpable. However, when Elisa entered Jorge’s massive,
gloomy mansion, things start to become quite strange. Jorge’s half-sister, Cristina, is the
housekeeper, and although she tries to conceal it at first, she is intensely
jealous of any attention toward Jorge.
Jorge does little or nothing to stop the behavior; in fact, he
exacerbates the problem by keeping a life-size portrait of her in a main hall,
and by letting her have access to Elisa.
When Elisa gives birth to a baby boy, Jorge is delighted and relieved. Almost immediately, Cristina positions
herself as the primary caregiver, to the point that it seems that she does not
want to release the baby to Elisa or Jorge.
Eventually, Cristina’s possessiveness and erratic behavior become quite
obvious to Elisa, and she complains to Jorge.
In the meantime, Cristina catches Jorge’s ear as she whispers to him
that Elisa had an affair with a male friend, and that Jorge is not even the
father of Elisa’s son. As a result, Elisa is forced to move away and the baby
is raised as Cristina’s son. Years
pass. Elisa and Jorge reunite, and they
decide to tell Jorge who his real mother is. Cristina tries her best to block
the news, but is unsuccessful. Jorge rejects the information, but Cristina
believes it is just a matter of time, so she gives herself a lethal dose of
poison. Jorge remains unconvinced until
a religious medal containing the Virgin of Guadalupe triggers his memory. The
movie ends as the three embrace – a family reunited.
For the full article by Susan Smith Nash and her analysis of themes, character, and illustrative scenes, please visit Humanities Institute: El Angel Negro
Jorge
Llorente arrives at the ball in a top hat. Elisa is wearing a blindfold, which
is both physically and metaphorically indicative of her ability to see what she
was getting herself into.
The otherworldly beauty of the life-size painting of Cristina which hangs on the wall in the gloomy mansion / castle where Jorge lives.
Cristina
holds the baby possessively, and the camera angles make the baby blend into her
own body, giving the impression that they are a single being.
Cristina, the camera angle and lighting emphasizing the wildness in her eyes, tells Jorge she will never give up “her” son.
