Cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa (Mexico City, 1907-1997) has been granted a glorified status in the Mexican film industry, since his lens composed a chiaroscuro language that defined the idealized image of Mexico providing substance to our memory and identity.
It is said that Diego Rivera named him “the fourth muralist”, because he managed to find on the screen a new media from which “traveling murals” merged their perspective with inspirations taken from the work of José Guadalupe Posada, Leopoldo Méndez, José Clemente Orozco, Tina Modotti, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and other great painters and photographers of the time, representatives of the Taller de Gráfica Popular and of the movement concerned with constructing a nationalistic view through artistic activity.
The first film that credited Figueroa as a co-cinematographer was ¡Que Viva México! (1932), by Sergei Eisenstein, in which he worked with Eduard Tisse, one of his greatest influences.
His filmography includes 210 titles in a career of just over fifty years, during which he collaborated with directors such as “El Indio” Fernández, Luis Buñuel and Roberto Gavaldón, in films that continue to be a reference like María Candelaria (1943), Enamorada (1946), The Young and the Damned (1950), Soledad’s Shawl (1952) and Macario (1960).
