Mexican Films Emerge From Northern Shadows : * Movies: ‘It’s time to show Mexicans as seen from their side for a change,’ says the co-organizer of a UCLA Film Archive retrospective that begins Friday.

Despite the large number of people of Mexican descent living in Los Angeles, the Mexican cinema remains one of the least known to critics as well as to foreign-film fans. Even the most commercial Mexican movies, a staple of downtown theaters for decades, have been all but edged out by Hollywood pictures with Spanish subtitles.

Yet at a time when “Freddy’s Dead” or “Terminator 2” en espanol is emblazoned across the Million Dollar Theater’s marquee, an unprecedented number of major Mexican films--some recent but mostly vintage--are to be shown in the city when “Mexican Film and the Literary Tradition,” a series of 29 films presented by the UCLA Film Archive, opens Friday at UCLA Melnitz Theater.

The retrospective will be launched tonight with a tribute to renowned cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In attendance will be a delegation of 20 Mexican film industry officials and artists, including Ignacio Duran, director-general of IMCINE, Mexico’s film institute and co-presenter of the series. Tribute hosts are top Mexican film star Pedro Armendariz Jr. and actor-director Edward James Olmos.

The series, continuing through Dec. 14, is keyed to the current citywide Artes de Mexico and Mexico: A Work of Art projects and has have been assembled by Michael Donnelly and UCLA Film Archive programmer Geoffrey Gilmore. Having grown up in Mexico, the bilingual 43-year-old Donnelly, who has his own motion picture marketing and production company in Sherman Oaks, has long been involved in promoting quality Mexican films.

“Mexicans and all Latinos have always been seen through the eyes of our cinema,” remarked Donnelly in a recent interview. “The Mexico of the John Huston and Sam Peckinpah films is a place where you can get away with anything.

“It’s time for a balance to be struck, to show Mexicans as seen from their side for a change. Peckinpah’s ‘Wild Bunch’ is a wonderful movie, and it has Emilio Fernandez as as drunken general surrounded by women. But there’s the other Emilio Fernandez, the director of “Maria Candelaria” and “La Perla” (based on a John Steinbeck story), films of sensitivity and concern with Mexican folklore.”

Among other noted authors represented in “Mexican Film and the Literary Tradition” are Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, B. Traven, Juan Rulfo and Jose Donoso.

The UCLA series had as its genesis in Donnelly’s involvement in the 1985 tribute to the colorful Fernandez at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater and also that year at the Telluride Film Festival. (Fernandez died the following year at 82.)

At that time, Donnelly had been working as a consultant to a Mexican film distribution company, developing a non-theatrical division to show their classics.

“There’s a wealth of Mexican cinema that’s utterly unknown outside of Mexico,” said Donnelly. “I was aware of some of it, and started to discover more of it.

“I put together a clip show for Emilio. He was a brilliant monster, a folklore hero who shot a film critic once, wounding him superficially, and he actually went to prison briefly for shooting a man, apparently in self-defense, while scouting film locations in 1976.

“Geoff, who hired me, felt as I did that we wanted to do much more on the Mexican cinema. ‘Mexican Film and the Literary Tradition’ is actually the second project for us.

“We first put together a series of Arturo Ripstein and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo films for the L.A. Festival, and then it toured the U.S. There will be three more series. We want to show films from the Mexican cinema’s golden age in the ‘40s and ‘50s and films that deal with social issues.”

(The five-part, multiyear series--called the Mexican Cinema Project--is expected to cost in excess of $500,000 and is supported by grants from the California Arts Council Challenge Program, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, and by gifts from Carolco Pictures, LIVE Home Video and Foto-Kem/Foto-Tronics.)

“One of the main problems has been the unavailability of subtitled films for those who would champion them abroad or render any critical appraisal of them.

“Up until very recently the Mexicans themselves have paid very little attention to their film heritage; for the government, trying to get the country out of debt and feeding the people have obviously been more important.

“UCLA has really decided to establish a permanent collection of Mexican cinema since no coherent type of collection exists, and has made a major commitment to do so in connection with IMCINE, the Mexico’s government film agency,” said Donnelly.

The Mexican National Film Archive burned to the ground in 1982, taking with it not only its film collection but other irreplaceable memorabilia of a motion picture industry dating back to 1898.

The Mexican Cinema Project will be composed of about 100 features, 30 of which will become part of UCLA Film Archive’s permanent collection.

Donnelly is especially enthused by the tribute to the world-renowned Gabriel Figueroa, now 84 and retired since shooting the 1984 “Under the Volcano” for Huston.

“He worked for all the top Mexican directors and for John Ford as well as Huston,” Donnelly said. “When Gregg Toland wasn’t available for ‘The Fugitive,’ he told Ford that he knew a guy who was as good or superior to him--Figueroa.

“He did seven films with Luis Bunuel, and they were completely different from the films he did with Fernandez, who had a baroque style. For example, there’s a spare, almost documentary look to ‘Los Olvidados.’

“Figueroa did ‘Two Mules for Sister Sara’ with Don Siegel and Hall Bartlett’s film of Oscar Lewis’ ‘Children of Sanchez.’ He refused to do ‘Viva Zapata!’ because he thought the screenplay was overblown. Gabriel helped a lot of blacklisted Hollywood people--Robert Rossen and Albert Maltz among them--not so much out of political sympathies but simple human decency.”

According to Donnelly, Figueroa also gave shelter to one of the most mysterious literary figures of the 20th Century, the reclusive, secretive B. Traven, best known as the author of “Treasure of the Sierra Madre.”

Donnelly said at least nine of the films he has found are based on works by Traven.

The Lens of Gabriel Figueroa

All six of the opening weekend films were shot by Gabriel Figueroa and all will screen at UCLA’s Melnitz Theater, (213) 206-FILM:

* Friday 7:30 p.m.: “The Pearl” (“La Perla”), written by John Steinbeck and directed by Emilio Fernandez, this 1945 film tells of a poor young Indian couple whose lives are transformed when they find an immensely valuable pearl. Second feature: “The White Rose” (“La Rosa Blanca”), a B. Traven story about Mexico’s exploitation by multinational oil companies, directed by Roberto Gavaldon in 1961.

* Saturday 7:30 p.m.: “Woman in Love” (“Enamorada”), a 1946 adaptation of “The Taming of the Shrew” starring Pedro Armendariz and Maria Felix, directed by Emilio Fernandez. Second feature: “Macario,” a 1959 adaptation of a B. Traven fable about a poor woodcutter, adapted from a Grimm fairy tale and starring Ignacio Lopez Tarso.

* Sunday 2 p.m.: Two by Luis Bunuel--”Nazarin” (1958), a tale of a quixotic priest (Francisco Rabal), and “The Young One” (“La Joven”), an indictment of U.S. racism, shot in English.

* For more information about “Mexican Film and the Literary Tradition”: (213) 206-FILM, (213) 206-8013.