The three movies that showed Guillermo del Toro the importance of cinema
Mythological fantasy meeting anti-fascism motives and themes of Catholicism in the films of Guillermo del Toro has left a deep impression on cinema fans. From Cronos and Pan’s Labyrinth to Hellboy and the recent Pinocchio, the Mexican auteur has always inspired the deepest dreams to come to life on screen.
Del Toro has his own impressions of the great impact of cinema. He once said of his first time at the theatre: “It was really very shocking and very thrilling. Back then, movies were almost a religious experience. They were a transcendental, enormous form of culture and narrative. So they were a big deal. Seeing a movie makes you feel part of a group at an anthropological level that has no equal.”
The director once remembered his own early experiences with the cinematic medium and picked out three movies that first showed him not only the aesthetic beauty of the art form but also the way they can be socially and culturally significant works too. They’re three vital additions to film history that show that the medium can go far beyond the confines of mere entertainment.
“I remember three films clearly,” the director told FilmStruck. “2001, I was just moved and understood that it was just a conceptual medium. I was very young, my uncle and I used to go to the cinema together. I was about 10 when I saw 2001, and I said, ‘It’s about evolution’. I understood there was a concept; it was not just a story.”
2001: A Space Odyssey is, of course, Stanley Kubrick’s incredible 1968 science fiction epic, which details the course of humankind from prehistoric apes to space-faring technologically advanced beings, guiding somehow much a mysterious monolithic structure.
The uncle that went to the cinema with del Toro to see 2001 also took the future filmmaker to see another work that would have a lasting impression, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. “I understood that it was a socially-important, cultural artefact, instinctively,” he commented.
Taxi Driver is Scorsese’s 1976 thriller movie, written by Paul Schrader and starring Robert De Niro in one of his most famous roles. The iconic actor plays a Vietnam War veteran who, in the throes of severe PTSD, takes a job as a night-shift taxi driver in an immoral and decaying New York City.
The final feature that showed del Toro the cultural importance of movies is The Young and The Damned by Luis Buñuel. “I saw it projected on a sheet in a cinema club and understood that you could make movies in my language, in my city, in my country,” del Toro said, “And they were incredibly important, not just folkloric.”
The film’s Spanish title is Los olvidados which means The Forgotten Ones. It’s Buñuel’s teen crime movie from 1950 which contains the themes of social realism but with the director’s usual surrealist outlook, telling of a group of destitute children from Mexico City.
Check out the trailer below.
