Background

Matilde Landeta was born on September 20, 1910, in Mexico City, Mexico. She was the daughter of Gregorio Soto Conde and Matilde Landeta Dávalos. Born into the same year that the Mexican revolution broke out, Landeta was orphaned early in life, and she and her brother Eduardo were reunited in the family's grand ancestral home in San Luis Potosí by their maternal grandmother.

Education

Matilde Landeta studied at Colegio de las Damas del Sagrado Corazón.

Career

Matilde Landeta was the only woman to have broken into the male-dominated Mexican film industry during its "golden age" of 1930 through the 1950s. She directed three successful movies before being forced to give up her career because of male bias. Estranged from filmmaking for forty years, Landeta was rediscovered as a pioneer woman filmmaker in the 1970s and 1980s and finally received national tributes and many international acknowledgments at festivals in such locations as Havana, London, Tokyo, Barcelona, Créteil, Buenos Aires, and San Francisco.

Matilde Landeta, although still a student, decided that she also wanted a career in the movies. Despite her family's protests, she became a "script girl" (continuity person) and went on to work with some of the Mexican cinema's greatest directors and stars. In 1932, Miguel Zacarias, a Mexican film director, decided to give Matilde a chance as script supervisor. So, she worked for several film producers in Mexico, including Clasa Films Mundiales, from 1933 to 1945.

After working on more than seventy-five feature films, Matilde Landeta fought her way through the professional hierarchy of the Mexican film-workers union to become an assistant director, working on fourteen films. She served to film directors, including Emilio Fernández, Mauricio Magdaleno, Julio Bracho, and Alfredo Crevena, in 1945-1948. Landeta eventually succeeded in becoming the first recognized woman director in the Mexican film industry. Also, she became the first female in Latin America to direct within a studio-based production system, though she had to attend a union meeting dressed as a man to get the promotion.

Working in a highly competitive industrial system, Matilde Landeta co-scripted, produced, and directed three feature films before hostile producers and distributors blocked her from the industry. All of her three films adopt a clear woman-centered perspective and simultaneously work within and against the predominant genres of the Mexican industry at the time. Each film invokes a distinct moment in Mexican history, the Spanish colony in Lola Casanova, the Mexican revolution in La negra Augustias, and modern urbanization in Trotacalles, with narratives centered upon a conflicted heroine who assumes a conflictive social position.

In Lola Casanova, for example, a tale of Creole gentry captured by Indians, the captured heroine does not attempt to either civilize the Indians or escape, choosing instead to remain with them and adapt to their ways. In the revolutionary melodrama, La negra Angustias, the mulatta Angustias, an outcast in her own village, redefines the role of women in the Mexican revolution, not as a camp follower, but as a strong leader of men in battle. The film addresses not only questions of gender but also the tensions produced by racial and class differences. Trotacalles works within the fichera, or prostitute, melodrama subgenre. The narrative focuses on the parallel stories of two sisters, María, a prostitute who is exploited and abused by her pimp, Rodolfo, and Elena, the pampered wife of a wealthy older businessman who begins an affair with Rodolfo, unaware of his relationship with her sister. In an apparent reversal of the prevailing bourgeois morals, Landeta positions the married woman as the real prostitute, both within and outside her marriage.

In the 1950s, Matilde Landeta had the fourth film in the works, a script she had long nurtured titled Tribunal de menores. However, a duplicitous producer tricked her into ceding him the rights to the scenario, and it was filmed by Alfonso Corona Blake as Los caminos de la vida. Landeta had to sue to get her name included in the credits, and the Ariel prize she won for the script was a bittersweet triumph. As a consequence, she was effectively barred from the industry. From the 1950s through the 1970s, she also taught screenwriting, wrote scripts, ran a movie theater, worked as a government liaison on foreign films shot in Mexico, and worked in television, including as a director of children's television programs. Additionally, Landeta was a contributor of articles to periodicals, including World Press Reviews.

Although eagerly awaited, Matilde Landeta's 1990s comeback films Islas Revillagigedo and Noctoruno a Rosario were not as well received by critics as her earlier work. The evocation of end-of-the-nineteenth-century romanticism through the unfortunate love affair between a poet and a powerful and seductive older woman in Noctoruno a Rosario failed to impress even Landeta's most ardent supporters. Matilde Landeta died on January 26, 1999.

Achievements

• Matilde Landeta was known as one of the first woman filmmakers in Mexico. For her work, she earned several awards and honors, including the Ariel Award for best screenplay for Los caminos de la vida, from the Mexican Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1957, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Mexican Film Institute in 1992. Besides, in 2005 the Asociación Cultural Matilde Landeta was created, which gives an annual award to the best screenplay written by a woman.

Works

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  • Aguila o Sol 1937
  • Jesusita en Chihuahua 1942
  • Distinto Amanecer 1943
  • La Guerra de los Pasteles 1943
  • Maria Candelaria 1943
  • La Herencia De La Llorona 1946

Views

Matilde Landeta believed that directing demanded a sense of authority, so the natural progression step towards directing was to become an assistant director.

Connections

Matilde Landeta married Martín Toscano Rodríguez in 1933, but they divorced ten years later. They had one child who died three days later after birth.

Father:

Gregorio Soto Conde

Mother:

Matilde Landeta Dávalos

Ex-husband:

Martín Toscano Rodríguez

Matilde Landeta and Martín Toscano Rodríguez divorced in 1944.

Brother:

Eduardo Landeta

colleague:

Miguel Zacarías Nogaim

Miguel Zacarías was a producer and director, known for El dolor de los hijos, Soledad, and Juana Gallo.

colleague:

Emilio Fernández

Emilio Fernández, known to generations of Mexican filmgoers as "El Indio," was the most celebrated filmmaker to emerge from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema.

colleague:

Mauricio Magdaleno Cardona

Mauricio Magdaleno was a writer and director, known for Río Escondido, Pueblerina, and Las tres perfectas casadas.

colleague:

Julio Bracho Gavilán

Julio Bracho was a director and writer, known for Crepúsculo, La ausente, and Rosenda.

colleague:

Alfredo B. Crevenna

Alfredo Crevenna was a director and screenwriter. From 1945 to 1995, he directed 151 films.