Sensuality
Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema
July 26 - August 8, 2024
Alberto Gout, perhaps the master of the Rumberas film, reached the genre’s apex of depravity with Sensuality: a deliriously kitsch-smitten melodrama of sexual subjugation and perverse pleasures starring Ninón Sevilla.
Introduction by Naief Yehya on August 6. Yehya is a writer, journalist and cultural critic, and his latest book is The Planet of the Mushrooms, Editorial Anagrama, 2024.
The Rumberas film was a popular and uniquely Mexican Golden Age genre that drew from Hollywood film noir and injected it with a dose of social criticism, and its protagonists were Afro-Caribbean dancers-cum-femmes fatales who unapologetically subverted social mores. Alberto Gout, synonymous with the Rumberas film, reached the genre’s apex of depravity with Sensuality, a deliriously kitsch-smitten melodrama of sexual subjugation and perverse pleasures. The rumbera here is the compassionless Aurora (an incandescent Ninón Sevilla, Take Me in Your Arms), who wreaks vengeance on the judge who put her and her pimp in jail. Sevilla, who dedicated her life to cinema and died at the age of 94, was described by François Truffaut as a challenge to bourgeois patterns—the eroticized world of the rumberas, the melodramatic halo of her characters, and singular musicality were attractive to a stereotypical European gaze.
Courtesy of Filmoteca UNAM’s collection.
El “cine de rumberas” es un subgénero que abreva del cine noir de Hollywood pero incorpora elementos de crítica social, porque es mexicano. Sus protagonistas son bailarinas, mujeres fatales que seducen y pelean contra toda moralidad. Sensualidad, dirigida por Alberto Gout es una de las grandes películas de este género estrenada en 1951. La mujer, la rumbera, es Aurora, una incandescente Ninón Sevilla (Llévame en tus brazos), que lleva adelante una impiadosa venganza, contra un hombre, pero también contra el poder. Aurora arrasa con el hombre que la humilló. En un juego sensual, con astucia y cínica vulgaridad lo provoca sexualmente hasta tenerlo rendido a sus pies. No hay compasión alguna en su camino. Ninón Sevilla murió a los 94 años, su vida entera estuvo dedicada al cine, François Truffaut afirmó de ella que su figura representa un desafío a los patrones burgueses. Es que el mundo erotizado de las rumberas, el halo melodramático de sus personajes y la música caribeña fueron atractivos para una mirada europea estereotipada.
Cortesía del acervo de la Filmoteca de la UNAM.
Naief Yehya biography:
(born Mexico City, 1963) Industrial engineer, journalist, writer, and cultural critic, has lived in Brooklyn since 1992. He writes for the culture section of La Razón (Mexico), and for the magazines Literal, CTXT and Zócalo among others publications. He has published four novels, two short stories collections, and eight book long essays. Yehya’s work deals mainly with the impact of technology, mass media, propaganda and pornography in culture and society. His lates book is The Planet of the Mushrooms.
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