The Films of José Rodríguez Soltero: Cuir/Queer Latinx

Film Series

Film and Video

José Rodríguez-Soltero. Vida, muerte y asunción de Lupe Vélez, película, 1966 — José Rodríguez-Soltero. *Lupe*, film, 1966

Held on 07, 08, 14, 17 mar 2024

José Rodríguez Soltero (Santurce, 1943 – New York, 2009) was an experimental film-maker whose productions were made across the 1960s and 1970s. His audiovisual work stands at the intersection of the avant-garde, queer representations and Latin culture from that era (specifically, Nuyoricans: Puerto Ricans living in New York). Despite being a pivotal figure of Caribbean diaspora and underground film-making, his name didn’t begin to reverberate until recently owing to the restoration of his only three conserved films: Jerovi (1965), Lupe (1966) and Dialogue with Che (1968). This film series screens all three and features presentations by Juan A. Suárez, a specialist in North American underground cinema, Rolando Peña, a Venezuelan artist and protagonist in Dialogue with Che, and MM Serra, a film-maker, curator and film archivist who oversaw the restoration of the three works.

The films of Rodríguez Soltero, who studied at the University of Puerto Rico, Sorbonne University, San Francisco State College and the Film Institute at the College of New York, were screened among the coteries of New York’s avant-garde scene, as well as at the Cannes, Berlin, Munich, Rome and Spoleto film festivals and the Cinémathèque française of Henri Langlois. Nevertheless, by the early 1970s the Puerto Rican film-maker relinquished his practice and spent the rest of his life working for social services at New York City Hall.

Rodríguez Soltero belongs to the same generation and social context as Jack Smith, a pioneering director in North America’s underground, and Andy Warhol, sharing with both different aspects and approaches: an attraction to Hollywood B-movies and the unbridled femininity of the great Latin divas; making films with the same cast of amateur actors, such as residents from the countercultural bohemia of the Lower East Side, most notable among them the non-binary Puerto Rican actor Mario Montez (1935–2013); and the same conception of cinema: no script and rooted in improvisation and edited with disruptive strategies such as superimpositions, chromatic saturation and non-narrative sound. The three film-makers were united by a passion for lives on the edge and the fusion of parody and drama, yet Rodríguez Soltero is undoubtedly the most baroque of the three, and the one who manifestly brought the issue of race into queer debates from the New York art scene.

This activity is part of a special programme the Museo has organised around ARCOmadrid 2024 and its theme this year: The Shore, the Tide, the Current: An Oceanic Caribbean.

Curator

Chema González

Organised by

Museo Reina Sofía

Inside the framework of

ARCOmadrid

Programme

Caribbean Connection

Programme

Thursday, 7 March 2024 – 8pm / Second session: Thursday, 14 March 2024 – 8pm Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200

Session 1. The Myth of Narcissus and Che

José Rodríguez Soltero. Jerovi
USA, 1965, colour, original version without dialogue, DA, 11’
José Rodríguez Soltero. Dialogue with Che
USA, 1968, b/w, original version in Spanish and English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 53’
— With a presentation in the first session by Rolando Peña, a Venezuelan artist and the protagonist of Dialogue with Che
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.

Tickets
Friday, 8 March 2024 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200

Session 2. The Myth of Lupe Vélez I

José Rodríguez Soltero. Lupe
USA, 1966, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 49’
—Presentation and talk by Juan A. Suárez, a historian specialised in North American underground cinema and author of the article “The Puerto Rican Lower East Side and the Queer Underground” (Grey Room, 2008) and the book Bike Boys, Drag Queens and Superstars: Avant-Garde, Mass Culture and Gay Identities in the 1960s Underground Cinema (Indiana University Press, 1996)
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.

Tickets
Sunday, 17 March 2024 / Second session: Saturday, 23 March 2024 Nouvel Building, Auditorium 200

Session 3. The Myth of Lupe Vélez II

Leslie Goodwins. The Mexican Spitfire
USA, 1940, b/w, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 67’
José Rodríguez Soltero. Vida, muerte y asunción de Lupe Vélez
USA, 1966, colour, original version in English with Spanish subtitles, DA, 49’
—With a video presentation in both sessions by MM Serra, a film-maker, curator and film archivist who oversaw the restoration of José Rodríguez Soltero’s films
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.

Tickets