Background
FIGUEROA, Gabriel was born on April 24, 1907 in Mexico City, Mexico.
FIGUEROA, Gabriel was born on April 24, 1907 in Mexico City, Mexico.
Educated at Escuela Nacional Preparatoria, Escuela de Bellas Artes (2 years), Conservatorio Nacional de Música (4 years).
That is Elia Kazan, who was introduced to Figueroa bv John Steinbeck prior to working on Vivo Zapata! and quickly reached the conclusion that he didn't want the prestigious “Gaby” or his way of sentimentalizing the working class. It’s a fair point, and one notes that Luis Buñuel (who used Figueroa often) had to curb the photographer’s pictorialism—having to prove that he knew as much as Figueroa about classical painting before he could get Gabv to do a decent job of recording images or trust the implicit dream for, say, Los Olvidados (50), El (52), and The Exterminating Angel (62). The florid Figueroa was also too evident in The Pearl (48, Emilio Fernández), taken from Steinbeck’s story, and the quite ghastly The Fugitive (47, John Ford), for which Ford seems to have been a complacent onlooker.
He began in the late thirties, but became celebrated with Flor Silvestre (43, Fernández); the exquisite use of Dolores del Rio in Maria Candelaria (43, Fernández); Las Abandonadas (44, Fernández); glorifying María Félix in Enamorada (46, Fernández) and Rio Escondido (47, Fernández); Tarzan and the Mermaids (48, Robert Florey); Malcovia (48. Fernández); Salón Mexico (48, Fernández); La Malquerida (49, Fernández); Duelo en las Montañas (49, Fernández); the English- language film The Torch (50, Fernández); Víctimas del Pecado (50, Fernández); Nazarin (59, Bunuel); La Fièvre Monte à El Pao (59. Buñuel); The Young One (61, Buñuel); The Night of the Iguana (64, John Huston); Simon of the Desert (65, Buñuel); The Big Cube (69, Tito Davison); Two Mules for Sister Sara (70. Don Siegel); Kelly's Heroes (70, Brian G. Hutton); Interval (73, Daniel Mann); Under the Volcano (86, Huston). Sad to say, the American films he shot look very ordinary. As others have observed, the light alters south of the border—but more than the light.
Figueroa was a small, macho man with terrifie personality and a great reputation. He was “artistic,” a man who had been trained in painting and still photography, and who then went to Hollywood to be Gregg Tolands student. He had pronounced ideas of beauty and the rather glamorous portrayal of poverty.
Quotes from others about the person
“His work was full of filtered clouds and peasant madonnas, their heads covered with rebozos There was sure to be a scene in each of his films where fifty of those creatures would be standing in a clump, holding burning candles.”