Hugo Armando Arciniegas

Screenplays by Elvira de la Mora: Melodrama in the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema

Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

This presentation is part of the research project Escritoras pioneras del cine sonoro en México (Pioneering female writers of sound cinema in Mexico), carried out at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), which aims to rescue the works of the first female screenwriters in this country, during the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema. In particular, I analyze two scripts in which Elvira de la Mora (1902-1990) participated, Más allá del amor (1949) and Dos huerfanitas (1950), the last of which is an adaptation of the renowned work Deux orphelines, by Adolphe Philippe D’Ennery and Eugène Cormon. In theoretical and methodological terms, I investigate how De la Mora treats the melodramatic matrix in its transition to cinema. That is, how the traditional confrontations between good-evil, villain-victim, or poverty-wealth are represented in these scripts, in the Mexican context of the mid-twentieth century. My hypothesis is that these scripts account for a tension between variants and invariants common to the melodrama genre, now in dialogue with the predominant values in the Mexican cinema of the time and materialized in subgenres such as the so-called Ranchera comedy.

Hugo Armando Arciniegas is a PhD student in Literature at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is working on his thesis on the screenplay and film adaptation of Before Night Falls, by Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas. He is part of the project Pioneering female writers of sound cinema in Mexico (UNAM), where he studies the scripts by Mexican writer Elvira de la Mora. His most recent publications include the research papers “Revisión bibliográfica sobre Antes que anochezca de Reinaldo Arenas y sus reescrituras (1993-2022)” (Lingüística y Literatura, 2023) and “Entre locas y bugarrones: género, régimen político y traducción en Reinaldo Arenas” (LTHC, 2024). He has edited two volumes of critical essays on Latin American literature: La palabra ajena (Ediciones UIS, 2020, 2023). In 2023 he obtained the honorable mention in the 13th Concurso de Crítica Cinematográfica Alfonso Reyes “Fósforo”, as part of Festival Internacional de Cine UNAM 2023.