User:Douglassanchez

 Douglas Sánchez 

Douglas Sánchez (born September 30, 1952, in San Juan, Puerto Rico) is a Puerto Rican film director and screenwriter.

In 1980, Sánchez wrote, produced and directed a feature-length film titled Cualquier cosa (Anything), which merited him a Special Achievement Award from the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences.

Education
Sánchez graduated with Honors in Comparative Literature from Brown University in 1974.

His thesis, supervised by professors Arnold Weinstein and Michael Silverman, analysed the Jorge Luis Borges short story, The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero, and the film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci based on the same, The Spider’s Stratagem, and explored the themes of the politics of spectacle and the spectacle of politics.

While at Brown, Sánchez completed Film Production courses at Rhode Island School of Design and later at New York University, where he studied with Martin Scorsese’s mentor Haig P. Manoogian and where he produced one of his earliest films, Superman on the West Side (1973).

Around that time, Sánchez found and acquired Jorge Ayala Blanco’s first book, La aventura del cine mexicano (The Adventure of the Mexican Cinema), and various volumes of Emilio García Riera’s Mexican Film Encyclopedia. These acquisitions re-awakened an interest in Mexican film — an integral part of Sánchez’ childhood in San Juan —­ and upon graduating from Brown he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study the history and aesthetics of this important cinema.

Sánchez spent the next year doing research and screening films at the now-disappeared Mexican Cinemateque, which venture culminated with his meeting film director idol Jean-Luc Godard.

In 1975, Godard was invited to Mexico to present a film project to the Cinematography Directory. Sánchez attended the press reception for the Swiss director at the Mexico City airport and witnessed Godard's fruitless attempts to talk about his project (to star Marí—a Félix), while the press badgered him with questions about his presumed relationship with Brigitte Bardot during the filming of Le Mépris.

This incident became the start-off point of Sánchez’ later films: Fotonovela (Photo-Novel) (1977) and Cualquier cosa (Anything) (1980).

Sánchez later pursued graduate studies in Hispanic-American Literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM for its initials in Spanish) —­ where he studied with Puerto Rican writer José Luis González, Spanish theorist Adolfo Sánchez Vázquez, and Mexican surrealism scholar Margo Glantz ­— before entering the Center for Cinematographic Studies (CUEC), also part of the UNAM.

The CUEC/UNAM
At the CUEC/UNAM, Sánchez worked ­— most often in close collaboration with fellow classmates José Iván Santiago and Daniel daSilveira —­ in fourteen films as director, writer, editor, producer, cinematographer, sound recordist, and/or actor.

For his first project, Sánchez wrote and directed a 20-minute film titled Fotonovela (Photo-Novel) (1978) which won the Best Film Award and the Best Actor Award (for José Iván Santiago) at the annual Mexican National Actors Association contest.

For his second project, Sánchez again wrote and directed a 20-minute film titled La flor de la canela (The Cinammon Flower) (1979) based on an episode from the memories of Giacomo Casanova translated and published by Margo Glantz, which episode Glantz considered exhibited the narrator’s “outrageous narcissism” and related and compared to Balzac’s Sarrasine, in turn the basis for Roland Barthes’ literary treatise S/Z.

For his final project, Sánchez wrote and directed the feature-length film titled Cualquier cosa (Anything) (1980), which re-worked and amplified the earlier Fotonovela (Photo-Novel).

Upon graduation, Sánchez, Santiago and daSilveira, along with Adriana Contreras, Antonio Saborit and other 1980 classmates, were hailed by CUEC History of Film Language professor and film critic Jorge Ayala Blanco as “the most brilliant promotion of CUEC students in its [then] 18 years of existence”.

Cualquier cosa (Anything)
Cualquier cosa tells the story of Gualberto Rodríguez, an actor from the provinces, a photo-novel star —­ played by real-life film, soap-opera and photo-novel actor Jaime Garza —­ who arrives in Mexico City with dreams of success. Partly through sincerity and partly prompted by an uneasy conscience, he wants to revolutionize the traditional photo-novel, using his popularity as a vehicle to bring in new content, “bring social conscience to the masses,” linking the medium to social reality and political struggles. The “revolutionary” ends up being used, manipulated, his laughably ingenuous project fails, and in counterpoint there appear television images of the Revolution in Nicaragua.

The film had a great impact on the Mexican film scene and was favorably reviewed by every major critic in Mexico:

— In La cultura en México, the cultural weekly edited by Carlos Monsiváis, Jorge Ayala Blanco called it “a masterpiece of the signifying game” and later dedicated to the film a chapter of his book, La condición del cine mexicano (The Condition of Mexican Cinema), highlighting it as “a totally outstanding film”;

— In the Uno más uno newspaper's cultural magazine Sábado, Gustavo García hailed it as “the most vital Mexican film in decades” and “a classic of the independent cinema”; and

— In the El Heraldo newspaper, Tomás Pérez Turrent termed the appearance of the film “an event”, considered it “a totally audacious film”, and later chose it as one of four Mexican films featured in Peter Cowie’s International Film Guide for 1982.

— In the International Film Guide, Pérez Turrent wrote that: “Anything reveals great aesthetic coherence and control over the film medium. Sánchez uses all sorts of material-news reports, video, notices, old films, monochrome tints and all sorts of film tones, permitting him a real textual diversification. The narration is structured with a rejection of conventional causal or psychological dramatic articulations. The construction acts like a series of mirrors, reflecting each other, thus losing all linear notion [of narration]... The narration gives an impression of being unpremeditated and haphazard. The actors are left free to develop their instinct, their intelligence, and their capacities for improvisation. It is an audacious and intelligent film, subverting the dominant modes of film-making by way of negation and a reflection on this negation, fragmenting and pluralizing its own dramatic statement, accumulating digressions and redundancies until the hypothetical conducting line is reduced to a minimum, breaking with the determinist logic of the discourse which all narration implies. Anything demonstrates once more that it is in independent film-making, free from the imperatives of the industry, that the future of Mexican cinema lies.”

Cualquier cosa had a sold-out run at the Salón Rojo (Red Room) of the Mexican Cinematheque and was shown extensively in many film-clubs in Mexico City and elsewhere in Mexico.

Later, the film was chosen as only one of eight Mexican films exhibited at the Georges Pompidou Museum in Paris as part of a 1980 Mexican Culture Festival.

Last but not least, as the culmination of the film’s career, the Mexican Academy of Cinematographic Arts and Sciences recognized Sánchez with a Special Achievement Award in its Arieles ceremony (the Mexican Oscars), in September of 1981.

Professional Work in Mexico
Upon graduating from film school, Sánchez wrote, directed and edited 28 documentaries for the Channel 11 TV series Tiempo de acción (Time for Action), depicting the various scientific and cultural activities of the Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City.

Thereafter, Sánchez assisted Arturo Ripstein and other Mexican directors at Churubusco Studios in the production and editing of 44 episodes of the fiction educational TV series Aprendiendo a Jugar (Learning to Play), sponsored by the Mexican Public Education Department.

While working with Ripstein, Sánchez met Hispanic film master Luis Buñuel. In a brief aside, Buñuel coincided with Sánchez in that Él (1953), starring Arturo de Córdova, and Susana (Carne y demonio) (1951), starring Rosita Quintana, were probably his best films.

Other Professional Work
Back in San Juan, Sánchez worked as a copywriter, TV producer and executive in advertising and public relations for several years.

He studied law at the University of Puerto Rico, obtained a Juris Doctor degree in 1992, was admitted to the bar in 1993, and has been involved in the private practice of law since then.

Projects
In the past few years, Sánchez has written two feature-film scripts: Sol de medianoche (Midnight Sun), based on the detective novel with the same title by Puerto Rican author Edgardo Rodríguez Juliá, and Anacobero (The Last Tour of Daniel Santos), based on the chronicle-novel Vengo a decirle adiós a los muchachos by also Puerto Rican author Josean Ramos, the latter script being presently in development.