Charles Ramírez Berg, Professor Paradiso
 |
 |
|
In the 1950s, cotton fields, cattle ranches, and oil and copper refineries dotted the dusty landscape around El Paso, Texas. But for young Charles Ramírez Berg, it was a world of cowboys and Indians, murder mysteries, and love stories. Exotic characters and far-off places featured on the big screen captured his imagination and his heart, and what began as a childhood escape became a calling. Now, Ramírez Berg's love for film is rivaled only by his dedication to studying and teaching it. Repeatedly voted one of The University of Texas's best teachers in student polls, Ramírez Berg (MA '75, PhD '87) also has enjoyed recognition from his peers. He was inducted into the UT Academy of Distinguished Teachers in 1996, received the William David Blunk Memorial Professorship, the College of Communication Teaching Excellence Award, and was one of the first recipients of the Texas Exes (Ex-Students' Association)'s Texas Excellence Teaching Award. The author of volumes of scholarly articles and papers, Ramírez Berg also writes poetry, fiction, and screenplays and has written one children's book. He is a devoted student of Mexican cinema and has published Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983 (University of Texas Press, 1992) and Poster Art from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema, 1936-1957 (University of Guadalajara Press/University of Texas Press, 1997). Approachable, easygoing, even humble, he speaks animatedly about being a kid in El Paso and discovering movies at a young age. Not surprisingly, he uses a movie to describe what that was like: "Do you know the movie Cinema Paradiso?" he asks. "It's an Italian movie about a little altar boy growing up in Sicily, in this very dry and isolated area. At night they turn the church into a theater, and he becomes the assistant projectionist. And as he watches all the movies, he tries to make sense of the world based on the movies. I really identified with that character. It didn't come out until about eight or nine years ago. When I saw it, I realized that was how I used movies. I used them to take me to places that I couldn't get to. It was the way I got to New York and the way I got to Paris. You know, the way we all do. . . ." Was there one movie in particular that began your love affair with movies? 
No. They would come and go. You know, Steven Spielberg has The Ten Commandments playing on a TV in the background of one scene in Close Encounters because for our generation, that was a really big movie when we were kids. I remember going to see the first Saturday showing and thinking it was the best movie ever. There couldn't be a better movie than The Ten Commandments. Later on it was Ben Hur. There couldn't be a better movie than Ben Hur. Then The Guns of Navarrone. It was one film after another. Luckily, I grew up in an area called Sunset Heights, just west of downtown, and in those days, downtown was where all the theaters were, so it was within walking distance. I can remember on some days doing my homework at school, walking home, getting 25 cents or 50 cents or whatever the admission price was, and going to the 4 o'clock show by myself. So, as a consequence, I grew up watching a lot of movies. When I was about nine I went with my friends down to see Vertigo at the Plaza Theater during the summer, and although it wasn't a big hit with "the guys," I went back the next day and the next day and the next day. It only played a week or so, but I went every day. What did you find so interesting about Vertigo at the age of nine? I don't know. At the time, I was just fascinated by this movie that was so mysterious that I couldn't figure it out and I didn't know what was going to happen next. Is that why you kept going back? I guess I was just spellbound by this film. Then I didn't see it for a while, because it went out of distribution. Alfred Hitchcock had a couple of films that he controlled and he pulled them out of distribution. Rear Window was one. Vertigo was one. And then they were re-released in about 1983. Did they come back to the theaters? Yes, they came back to the Varsity [on the Drag in Austin]. So I went to see Vertigo and I was thinking, "Okay, now I will finally figure out what it was all those years ago that fascinated me." I thought there was going to be one scene where I would say, "Ah-hah!" but that never happened. And as I watched it, it was really even more mysterious. I thought, "What would a nine-year-old kid find fascinating about this movie?" I just remember thinking it was so different and so strange. I felt the same thing about The Leopard, an Italian film also set in Sicily starring Burt Lancaster. It was like a window into the potential of cinema. It seemed so dense, so rich. It seems many Americans, though they love movies, don't always like ones that they can't figure out, or ones that are very different, like foreign films, for example. And they are different. But it's the same with the film history class I teach, RTF 314, so many of the students are in the same exact place. They don't want to see a black and white movie, they don't want to see a foreign movie, they don't want to see a silent movie. But that is the challenge of that course--to see if I can get my students to a point where they are willing to entertain something different. You were pretty young when you fell in love with cinema. When did you know you wanted to teach? Graham Greene says that there is some experience in your very early childhood that opens a door and your whole future is on the other side. And in my case it was the window, or the frame, of the movies. But that didn't seem like a career. It didn't seem like a future. The job I have now didn't exist back then. So in college I was a pre-med major and I got accepted to medical school at Galveston [The University of Texas Medical Branch]. I was on my way to Galveston and I got as far as San Antonio and changed my mind. I just decided "I can't do this." What did you do then? I just did odd jobs for a year and caught up on all the stuff I hadn't done, because I was so busy being a pre-med major--in labs all the time with beakers and Bunsen burners. I learned to play the guitar and I read The Brothers Karamozov. I wanted a job and I thought teaching might be a good idea. Then I taught high school biology and chemistry. But I didn't like high school teaching because I found that I had to be a disciplinarian rather than a teacher. The message I got was teaching was not for me. So I came here to get a master's in RTF [Radio-Television-Film]. You finally got to study movies. Well, yes, but in those days it was not specific. You could just come and get a master's. Now, you have to declare a specific area: film studies, or screenplay, or production. What was great about those days was that I took everything. I took all the production courses. I took all the screenwriting courses. I took all the history and theory and criticism. And that is when I caught up on all my film history. Some people find that a formal study of something they love begins to make it less interesting. But I loved it. And for me that was the signal, you know--when you're working all the time and you don't notice you're working. To me, that is a signal that you are really doing something you want to do. Even now, when I get ready to teach a class, I am still excited. How do you remember all of these movies in order to teach and write? Part of it is that I started so young that I have this big database because I have just watched a lot of movies. The other thing is I take notes. When I am working on an article I take notes and I keep them together hoping that if I need something from that film, I won't have to go watch it again. And what is great about video now is that you can pull it off the shelf or you can go to Vulcan Video and watch the scene again and find out, "What exactly did he say?" There is what the character said, and this is what Meryl Streep answered. Do you think the blockbuster movies of this generation are the best movies that are out at the time? It depends on what you mean by best. Well, for example, Jerry McGuire was a good movie, but was it as good as all of the publicity it got and as good as all the money that it made? There can be great blockbusters, and there have been, that are just great films. They made a lot of money and they are great movies. We can all probably think of examples of those, such as Jaws, Close Encounters, Star Wars, The Godfather, The Godfather II. Those movies made a lot of money. But there are also movies that make a lot of money that aren't so good, but have something else--have Tom Cruise, for example. Your view of history can become skewed if you are not careful. You think, "Well, back then they were all good. They made The Grapes of Wrath and Citizen Kane and look what we have now." I tell my students, "If you feel that way, go back and look at old newspaper ads for movies. You are going to see for every Citizen Kane, dozens of titles of movies that you probably don't recognize." So what does that mean? It means those are all the ones we forgot about. So what has changed about movies? Some people say they are targeted to the lowest common denominator or that they are too visceral and not intellectual enough. Here again, I think it is easy to say that and it is easy for each age to say, "Well, today's aren't as good as earlier ones." I think we are always saying, "Our leaders aren't as good or our speeches aren't as good or our novels aren't as good." And with each change there has been complaint. With the advent of sound, people lamented the loss of the silent movies. They said the essence was the images and now we are going to be distracted by sounds and dialogue. Black and white to color, which is fairly recent, was the same way. People said we are losing something. And I think that you do lose something with each step. It isn't just nostalgia? No. Now we can hear people talking but what you lost was the expressivity of the actor because the actor was called on to do a lot more with whatever he or she had. So each change is kind of a two-way street. But spectacle has always been part of the show. The movies have always been about chases and explosions and gunfights. I show The Great Train Robbery from 1903 and there is a big battle at the end with guns going off and smoke and people falling over. I think that is part of the package. Chase scenes and rescues. I think what people are objecting to or complaining about is that it is all spectacle and that there is nothing in between. Particularly with movies like the last couple of Batmans. It's like getting inside a pinball machine for two hours. There is not as much of a story line and there is not as much character development as we used to have. Do you think movies help shape our culture, or do they reflect it? It's probably both. I think there are things that are up on the screen that affect us, but then again, we go to see certain films and we don't go to see others, therefore we contribute to certain patterns. People wouldn't be making blockbuster movies if lots of people didn't go see them. On the other hand, I think you can look at movies to see what the culture is up to. Movies aren't real life, but there are some values up there that are being endorsed that society is agreeing to. How do you feel about the Texas Union closing its movie theater? Well, of course I'm against it. For decades that facility has been the film center for the entire UT campus. I can't imagine a top-flight university like ours not having a campus-wide film theater. It's true, the Union Theater can't compete with movies screened at local theaters, and available at video stores and on cable. But, really, it shouldn't have to. I'd propose revamping the theater into a media center that can screen not only film but video and computer-generated animation, graphics, and art. Besides screening films, it could be screening classic TV programs and video documentaries as well as serving as a venue to exhibit works by faculty and staff in departments such as mine (RTF), but also in architecture, fine arts, journalism, and computer sciences, and probably some others we're not even aware of now, like education, engineering, geography. Austin is an arts, music, and computer center. Why not invite local artists, filmmakers, and software designers to show their work in that space? It would be a great way to establish ties with local professionals. It's a theater with a lot of UT history and tradition, and a space with a lot of multi-media potential, and I'd hate to lose it. When did you become interested in Mexican cinema? That probably goes back about 20 years. I was living in El Paso and I was managing editor for a weekly newspaper called The El Paso Journal. I was writing film criticism and wondering, "What can I do in film criticism that the large, daily paper isn't doing?" They were doing, of course, the Hollywood thing, and it occurred to me, what I could do is cover Mexican cinema. I thought, "We are right here on the border, and nobody knows anything about it." So I started going across to Juárez and watching films. I was very lucky because the first film that I just kind of stumbled in to watch was a terrific film called Canoa, which was an international award winner. I think I probably wrote the first review of a Mexican film in an English-language El Paso newspaper. I started doing research in film journals and magazines because I needed more background information and came to discover there was very little published or written about Mexican film. Then I thought, "Hey, here is an area that needs to be researched," so when I came back to UT to get the PhD in 1983, I had that in mind. You also have a new book out, a "coffee table" book as you have called it, Poster Art from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. What was this Golden Age? In Mexican cinema it was from about 1935 or '36 to about 1959. The '40s are the really strong period in Mexican cinema. I lucked out in finding an archive of Mexican cinema, which belongs to the son of a Mexican film producer who lives in Harlingen, Texas. He has the rights to hundreds of these movies, so it is relatively easy for me to go see them. It's easier, in fact, for me to see some classic Mexican films than it is for me to see the latest Mexican films. Because in the U.S. we don't show Mexican films, even if Mexico shows ours? Yes, and that is important to realize because when the rest of the world goes to the movies, they mainly go to see American movies. Isn't that strange? Oh yes, it is strange, because you would think that every country would have its own cinema, and many of them do, but they just can't compete on the level that Hollywood can. They just don't have budgets like that. Even England and France are struggling. So Mexico had a very strong, healthy industry in the '40s and '50s with studios, a star system, many films being produced, and lots of profits. That hit a wall in the '60s and it has been struggling ever since. Why? Part of it was that they did not put the money back into the industry. They just took profits and they didn't reinvest. Another thing was they had kind of a closed-door operation so that younger directors couldn't get in. Therefore, when the directors of the Golden Age got old, in the '60s, there was nobody really to step up who had been trained. It ended up falling to whomever was around, and people without training made bad movies and the industry fell on hard times. Another thing was economics; it was just harder and harder to keep up with Hollywood. One of the things that we don't think about is that if the rest of the world is going to American movies, that sets up an expectation of what movies are, and that goes back 80 or 90 years. If you live in Mexico, say, would you rather go see Batman or Titanic, with that budget, or the movie Mexicans were able to make here for a fraction of that budget? Well, most Mexicans and most people in most countries are answering, "We'd rather go see Titanic." So the fact that you can't keep up the production values means that you lose audience and as you lose audience, that means you have less money to keep up with production values, and it is a downward spiral. So it's no wonder most Americans haven't seen Mexican movies. Sure. In the spring of 1996, I taught the history of Mexican cinema as an undergraduate course. It was the first time that the topic had ever been offered as an undergraduate course at The University of Texas. And where is Mexico in relation to Texas? To me, that says a lot. I mean if you look at the course catalog, we teach movies in Swedish cinema, Italian cinema, Japanese cinema. Why is that? My own answer is that, for culture, we tend to go east and west rather than north and south. We tend to say, "Well, if it's good in Paris or London, then it must be good." As opposed to, "If it's good in Mexico City, or Rio, or Latin America." And it is too bad because I got the students excited about Mexican cinema, I think, by the end of the semester. So, that is my crusade. The more I can teach a course like that, the more I can spread the word, because there is an exciting cinema there. What are some similarities between American films and Mexican films? Especially during the Golden Age--our Golden Age kind of had the same endpoint--there were a lot of similarities. They were big, profitable industries. There were big stars. The kind of storytelling that you would find in those movies was very similar. To the point that, some critics in Mexico say that they were too similar, that Mexican cinema was imitating Hollywood cinema. Do you think that was true? I don't know. And that, to me, is one of the big questions. One view is, the reason that so many international cinemas look so familiar is that they are copying Hollywood cinema. In Mexico the most popular movies in 1910 or 1920 were foreign movies, and that is still the case. If you go to Mexico City and you look at what is at the movies, Batman is at the movies. One school of thought says that because of that domination, Hollywood defined what a movie was. So most elements of movies are the same regardless of which country makes them? Up to a point. What is interesting to me, culturally, is that some of the genres are not the same, or if they are the same, they don't mean the same thing. For example, a western for us is about taming the land and winning the west and heroism and making a nation and rugged individualism. In Mexico, the western is about the Revolution of 1910. That genre, that whole group of films about that revolution is different from the story of our revolution--we beat the British and established the 13 colonies, which is a great story and a triumphant story. In the Mexican case, what happened was their revolution did not change things for the better. They stayed pretty much the way they were. Hundreds of thousands of people died during the revolution and yet nothing significantly changed. And they still made a lot of movies about it? Yes. The thing that is fascinating to me is that those movies are about a moment. They had this moment to make things better, to change things, to become better, and they didn't do it. So here are two very similar genres, you know, horses and gunfights and shootouts that seem to be similar, and yet they mean such different, different things. The Mexican revolutionary movie is a very sad movie that at heart is asking, "Where did we go wrong? Is there something wrong with us as Mexicans that we can't get it right?" Because the revolution, in fact, did go sour and the ideals were corrupted and the early revolutionary leaders were retired or were killed. A common perception of Mexican entertainment, especially television, is that it is less sophisticated than American entertainment, although it is sometimes pretty similar. One of the reasons that we look at those shows or acts and say they don't quite have it right is because it really doesn't come out of their culture, it comes out of our culture. So how can they get it right? They are not Americans. And to me, what I see is the power of the American media and the power of American movies, to make Mexicans or Japanese entertainers want to get up on a stage and dress like us and sing rap songs. Is that why the issue of stereotypes and representation of minorities by Hollywood concerns you? Let me tell you this story. In the summer at UT they used to have orientation for the Fulbright Scholars who came to the U.S. to study. The orientation would try to show what a college campus and courses are like, and they would have guest lecturers, and then these foreign graduate students would go on to whatever college they were going to attend. A couple of summers I gave talks about stereotypes. I was getting ready to describe the six Mexican stereotypes beginning with El Bandido, because I figured this is an audience of foreign students, what are they going to know about El Bandido? Something stopped me and I said, "Let's see if you can describe El Bandido . . . " And they did, very accurately, down to details. Then I asked them where that came from. Hollywood doesn't even make that many westerns anymore. I never referred to a movie or a character or an actor. Then I started thinking about the power of the stereotype. Here they are, students from Europe, Africa, Asia, all over the world, not an American in the group, and they had that stereotype in their minds. I started thinking about the global dissemination of the stereotype. If you have never known a Mexican, that might be your only point of reference. But do Mexican films stereotype certain members of Mexican culture? Yes, they do. Of their native Indians, they have stereotypes. Of Spaniards, they have stereotypes. So yes, sure. I think every group has stereotypes. But in American films, we don't just stereotype minorities, we stereotype Anglos too. To begin with, women are stereotyped--there is half the population. Nerds, dumb jocks, sexy blondes, you can go on and on. And to me that is fascinating. Why does the dominant group stereotype itself? Why do you think that it does? It seems to me that what is going on with stereotyping in movies is you set up this ideal and then you set up all the variations that get you farther and farther from that ideal. And if you are black you are pretty far from that ideal, and if you are Chinese, and if you are Mexican. But the more you look like Tom Cruise or Demi Moore, the closer you are going to get to the ideal. The problem is, how many of us look like Tom Cruise or Demi Moore? Well, not very many. So think of all the groups that leaves out, and all the groups that get stereotyped. Children get stereotyped and old people get stereotyped, the mentally ill, the obese, people with this affliction or that. The stereotypes are endless. When you start realizing that the number of people who could fit in that center becomes small: Demi Moore, Harrison Ford, Tom Cruise, Arnold Schwarzenegger. That whole dynamic is what the book I am working on is about. Dolly Parton once said that she didn't mind dumb blond jokes because, as she put it, "I know I am not dumb. I also know that I am not blond." If you don't believe the stereotype and you don't necessarily feel discriminated against because of it, are you better off than someone who does? Yes, that is sometimes the case. But part of the problem with some stereotypes is that they are the only image of a certain group that is out there. If you can see a stereotype of yourself but also know that in these other instances you have seen a blond character that wasn't dumb or helpless, that is one thing. But if the negative stereotype stands alone and is a single, consistent representation, or misrepresentation, rather, of a group, then that is when it becomes dangerous. But even then, it's not that simple. You can choose to accept a stereotype or you can choose to reject it because you know that it's wrong. Obviously, these are topics you cover in your classes. What is it that you want your students to walk away with? There is a lot that goes into that. The longer I teach, the more I realize the answer is more than I thought it was. Initially, I thought it was just the material. I wanted them to have a sense of film, major films, major movements, major national cinemas, directors, and those kinds of things. A friend of mine, on the day that I defended my dissertation, asked me, "Did you defend?" "Yes," I said. "I assume successfully?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "So you are a professor?" Of course I was beaming, and I answered "Yes." And he said, "Well, so what do you profess?" Although it was a joke, I thought it was a great question. Because, that is the question--What do you profess? If you are a professor, you must profess something. And the first answer, as I said, was the material. The second answer that I came to was that I wanted my students to have an open mind, to be able to come up with their own ideas, to be able to express those ideas, and to be able to have confidence in those ideas. Then I started thinking that I was really using film and film history as a means to do that. Do you feel you achieve that? I hope so. But then I thought, it seems there still should be something more that I work at in my teaching. My wife is a bilingual speech therapist and sometimes works at nursing homes. She once had a patient walk up to her and say, "Where am I supposed to be?" And before my wife could say anything, the woman said, "And what am I supposed to be doing?" It is just a heartbreaking story, but at the same time it is very profound because, as I told my wife, those are the questions. Those are the key questions that all of us want to know the answers to. "Where am I supposed to be? And what am I supposed to be doing?" It seemed to me that maybe there was something there, you know, about my teaching. And now, I realize that that may be the most important thing I can show my students. That is, I can show them the fact that this is where I am supposed to be, and this is what I am supposed to be doing. Maybe if that is all they take away with them, that is a lot, because it is a way of saying, this is what you need to look for in your life, where you can fit in and make a difference. I believe that each one of us has that place, and the object of the game is to find it. That is where you will be the most creative, the most productive, the most original, and the most useful in society. I profess to show what it looks like when you love what you are doing. By Rachael Shaw Jones,
|
||
 |
 |