The Films of José Rodríguez Soltero: Cuir/Queer Latinx

In scheduling the first and last conserved films of Rodríguez Soltero, this session casts light on the film-maker’s concerns, which move from an oneiric queer aesthetic with Jerovi to a political commitment aligned with Latin American Third Cinema in Dialogue with Che. Both resonate in other films made by Rodríguez Soltero which have disappeared, for instance his debut work The Original Sin (1964), a surreal short film expounding his attitude towards virginity, sex, love, marriage, religion and the status quo in his country of origin; and in his final works, film bulletins for the Puerto Rican social movement Young Lords or in the political videos for the UN’s Committee on Decolonisation in the early 1970s.     

Jerovi is a masturbatory fantasy rooted in the myth of Narcissus, and influenced by Jean Cocteau and Gregory Markopoulos. In the film, the young Jeroví Sansón Carrasco, who commissioned, funded and starred in the film, sensually frolics in a Caribbean, Orientalist Garden. Dialogue with Che, meanwhile, offers a change of tone and shows, on two screens, a militant Che Guevara, played by Rolando Peña, speaking about the future and what Latin America is. Shot shortly after the announcement of Che’s death, the film is an invocation impelled by Bertolt Brecht’s distancing effect techniques and the political films of Glauber Rocha, Fernando Pino Solanas and Jean-Luc Godard.

Carmen Miranda, Dolores del Río, María Montez and Lupe Vélez — a trail followed by Spanish actress Sara Montiel — are all stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood and were part of the emotional education of film-makers such as Rodríguez Soltero, Andy Warhol and Jack Smith, mesmerising them in childhood. These figures were steeped in femininity and were either foreigners or displaced, both by language and geography, turning them into an obsession for this generation of queer film-makers and artists, of which Rodríguez Soltero was part.

Renamed by Jack Smith as Mario Montez, in honour of the aforementioned actress María Montez, René Rivera, the actor par excellence in the New York underground, is the protagonist in the second session’s film: Lupe. Rodríguez Soltero’s experimental biopic is devoted to actress Lupe Vélez — also the subject of Warhol’s own version. In the work, the film-maker, possibly influenced by the camp, tabloid-esque review Kenneth Anger wrote in the book Hollywood Babylon (1959), presents, in non-linear sequences, the life of the Mexican actress, from brothel to stardom, with a soundtrack taking in boleros, flamenco and pasodoble — a bona fide Latin mixtape — together with The Supremes and Vivaldi. Vélez, who died tragically, is redeemed from her murky past as a virgin who ascends to the heavens.

In this second screening of Lupe, Rodríguez Soltero’s work is preceded by a film starring the actress in order for the audience to gain an idea, first hand, of the traits that so fascinated the film-maker: the early use of Spanglish, the mix of humour and tragedy, overstated femininity; an example of how the queer underground is inseparable from Hollywood cinema. Given her tragic suicide, Vélez represents the joining together of sparkle and darkness in Hollywood’s most glamorous side, a theme that fascinated Rodríguez Soltero and his contemporaries. As Kenneth Anger narrates, diluting reality and fiction: a pregnant Vélez dressed up and had dinner with two friends and took a lethal dose of barbiturate drugs — later, lying on her bed, the drugs forced her to rush to the bathroom to vomit, where she met with her death as she fell head-first into the toilet.