A Strange Procedural

In New York City for the last week or so, a movie theater at Lincoln Center has been having a festival called Spectacle Every Day: Mexican Popular Cinema. The films showing were made in Mexico from the 1940 through the 1960s, and they've covered everything, as the program description says, from film noir to comedy to melodrama to luchador-vampire horror to a tongue in cheek superhero film. This was a period in Mexico when cinema was booming, and it's rare that you get a chance to see these films now in the US, especially on a big screen. I was able to catch an odd one last week, and though it may not be easy to find now, keep an eye out for it because it's an oddball but memorable movie to be sure, a crime film not quite like any I've seen.

Made in 1961, the film is called The Mind and the Crime (La mente y el crimen), and its director was Alejandro Galindo, a man who made films from the late 1930s well into the 1980s. (For a look at the titles of a lot of his films, you can go to Letterboxed: https://letterboxd.com/director/alejandro-galindo/). The Mind and the Crime dates from 1961, by which time Galindo had established himself, according to what I've read, with straightforward dramas inspired by real-life people and events. As it happens, The Mind and the Crime is supposedly derived from a real murder, a case in which the mutilated corpse of a woman was fished out of a Mexico City canal. With this discovery, the movie kicks off, and what proceeds from there is both extremely grave in tone yet also decidedly odd.

At heart, the film is a procedural, but it's a procedural delivered at a remove. For the entire movie, in something like documentary fashion, as actors act and do their usual thing, a narrator guides us through the story, delivering all sorts of theories about crime, urban life, psychology, human sexuality and primal urges such as aggression. It is also a kind of bizarre primer on forensic technique, as it then existed, and criminology. A deadpan voice makes peculiar claims about how serial killers think, and as one writer, Nicolas Pedrero-Setzer, puts it, accurately: "the film's use of life-like miniatures and models, alongside some bizarre tableaux, to recreate scenes from a grizzly crime place it in a wavelength of its own. The film’s visions of flying skulls and beautiful close-ups of fingerprints, all of which coalesce into a psychedelic painting in motion, are almost enough to distract you from its message: that the urge to kill is a primal instinct tied to devil worship and most common among the morally depraved denizens of big cities."

Did I take the film's message, such as it is, seriously? Can't say I did. But that doesn't matter in the slightest. This is a film that lays out a homicide investigation in a sui generis fashion, a true "whatsit", as the Lincoln Center Film Society program notes describe it. I watched it simultaneously gripped, amused, slightly puzzled, and entertained. If you happen to come across The Mind and the Crime and want to see something very unusual, almost surreal at times, watch it.