La Rosa Blanca sobre el féretro de un suicida

• Main Author: Humberto Ortega-Villaseñor
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Prof. Dr. Vittoria Borsò, Prof. Dr. Frank Leinen, Jun.-Prof. Dr. Yasmin Temelli, Prof. Dr. Guido Rings 2021-03-01
• Series: iMex. México Interdisciplinario/Interdisciplinary Mexico
• Subjects: intermediality; symbolism; historical memory; oil
• Online Access: https://www.imex-revista.com/articulos-imex-ed1_1-rosa-blanca/

Main components of form and background of the Mexican film La Rosa Blanca directed by Roberto Gavaldón in 1961 are reviewed in this research. The article seeks to explore the nature and identity of its intermedial argument, and determine how such a simple and remote realization in time (the story is located in 1937), can help us make analogies and collect important events for today’s Mexico. It is a work of well-integrated Mexican cinematography, of high symbolic and polysemic value, whose anticipatory weight seems remarkable to us: a genuine asset for historical memory and for making objective and pertinent correspondences. On the one hand, it reveals plausible transnational strategies put into play for the seizure of a resource such as oil; on the other, it allows us to infer the collusion of economic and political interests that derive from bribery, conflict of interests and the derogatory and submissive role of the country’s natural resources by the current political class. From La Rosa Blanca it is possible to find regrettable parallelisms and to evaluate the very serious historical regression that privatization of oil in Mexico meant, under the mortuary mantle of the so-called energy reform.