Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (Studies of the Americas)

STUDIES OF THE A MERICAS edited by James Dunkerley Titles in this series are multi-disciplinary studies of aspects of...

Author: Miriam Haddu | Joanna Page

43 downloads 1050 Views 3MB Size Report

This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form

DOWNLOAD PDF

STUDIES OF THE A MERICAS edited by

James Dunkerley

Titles in this series are multi-disciplinary studies of aspects of the societies of the hemisphere, particularly in the areas of politics, economics, history, anthropology, sociology, and the environment. The series covers a comparative perspective across the Americas, including Canada and the Caribbean as well as the United States and Latin America. Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan: Cuba’s Military 1990–2005: Revolutionary Soldiers during Counter-Revolutionary Times By Hal Klepak The Judicialization of Politics in Latin America Edited by Rachel Sieder, Line Schjolden, and Alan Angell Latin America: A New Interpretation By Laurence Whitehead Appropriation as Practice: Art and Identity in Argentina By Arnd Schneider America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism Edited by Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill Vargas and Brazil: New Perspectives Edited by Jens R. Hentschke When Was Latin America Modern? Edited by Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart Debating Cuban Exceptionalism Edited by Bert Hoffman and Laurence Whitehead Caribbean Land and Development Revisited Edited by Jean Besson and Janet Momsen Cultures of the Lusophone Black Atlantic Edited by Nancy Priscilla Naro, Roger Sansi-Roca, and David H. Treece Democratization, Development, and Legality: Chile, 1831–1973 By Julio Faundez The Hispanic World and American Intellectual Life, 1820–1880 By Iván Jaksic´

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Institute for the Study of the Americas University of London School of Advanced Study

The Role of Mexico’s Plural in Latin American Literary and Political Culture: From Tlatelolco to the “Philanthropic Ogre” By John King Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico Edited by Matthew Butler Reinventing Modernity in Latin America: Intellectuals Imagine the Future, 1900–1930 By Nicola Miller

10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

The Republican Party and Immigration Politics: From Proposition 187 to George W. Bush By Andrew Wroe The Political Economy of Hemispheric Integration: Responding to Globalization in the Americas Edited by Diego Sánchez-Ancochea and Kenneth C. Shadlen

Wellbeing and Development in Peru: Local and Universal Views Confronted Edited by James Copestake The Federal Nation: Perspectives on American Federalism Edited by Iwan W. Morgan and Philip J. Davies Base Colonies in the Western Hemisphere, 1940–1967 By Steven High Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America? Societies and Politics at the Crossroads Edited by John Burdick, Philip Oxhorn, and Kenneth M. Roberts Cuban Medical Internationalism: Origins, Evolution, and Goals By John M. Kirk and H. Michael Erisman Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


Ronald Reagan and the 1980s: Perceptions, Policies, Legacies Edited by Cheryl Hudson and Gareth Davies


Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America


vISUAL SYNERGIES IN FICTION AND DOCUMENTARY FILM FROM LATIN AMERICA

Copyright © Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page, 2009. All rights reserved.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–60638–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Visual synergies in fiction and documentary film from Latin America / edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page. p. cm.—(Studies of the americas) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–60638–8 1. Documentary-style films—Latin America—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Latin America—History and criticism. 3. Motion pictures—Social aspects—Latin America. I. Haddu, Miriam, 1971– II. Page, Joanna, 1974– PN1995.9.D62V57 2009 791.430982—dc22

2008049762

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: June 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.


List of Figures

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix xiii

Acknowledgments

Part I Latin American Perspectives 1 Introduction: Fiction, Documentary, and Cultural Change in Latin America Joanna Page 2 The Space between Fiction and Documentary in Latin American Cinema: Notes toward a Genealogy Michael Chanan

Part II

3

15

Revolution and Its Specters

3 On the Margins of Reality: Fiction, Documentary, and Marginal Subjectivity in Three Early Cuban Revolutionary Films Dylon Robbins 4 Cuban Documentary: Synergy and Its Discontents Alexandra Anderson 5 O sertão nao virou mar: Images of Violence and the Position of the Spectator in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema Edgardo Dieleke

27 49

67


Contents

Part III Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres 6 Cofralandes: A Formative Space for Chilean Identity Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi 7 Aunt Juana’s Shop, or Reality as Metaphor, in María Novaro’s El jardín del Edén Maximiliano Maza Pérez

87

105


vi

CONT ENT S

8 Mockumentary as Post-nationalism: National Identity in A Day without a Mexican by Sergio Arau Armida De la Garza

119

9 Between Image and Word: Minority Discourses and Community Construction in Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentaries Mariana A. C. da Cunha

133

10 Characters and Conflict: Dramatic Structure in Three Mexican Documentaries Cristina Cervantes

151

11 Whodunnit?: In Search of the Real/Reel (and Imagined) Aro Tolbukhin in Aro Tolbukhin: En la mente del asesino Miriam Haddu

163

Part V

Questions of Reference

12 Filming Psychoanalysis: The Documentation of Paranoia and the “Paranoid Gaze” in Luis Buñuel’s Él Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla

179

13 Digital Mimicry and Visual Tropes: Some Images from Argentina 197 Joanna Page 14 Dereferencing the Real: Documentary Mediascapes in the Films of Carlos Marcovich (¿Quién diablos es Juliette? and Cuatro labios) Geoffrey Kantaris

219

15 Documenting Urban Fictions in Contemporary Argentine Film: Notes on Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense James Cisneros

237

Index

251


Part IV Performance and Reflexivity in the Contemporary Documentary


3.1 The mirror above the bar in P.M. 3.2 Moncada headlines seen while Memorias soundtrack is heard in Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar 3.3 The director as blind sequence in Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar 5.1 Rocket in City of God finds himself trapped between the traffickers and the police 5.2 At the start of the film, Madame Satã is presented to the spectator from the police officer’s perspective 5.3 Offstage, Madame Satã performs to an imaginary audience 6.1 Folklore as ruin. Raúl Ruiz directs Isabel Parra during the filming of the fourth part of Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002) 6.2 The ludic capacity. Ruiz coordinates a game of “Luzifer Matches” during the filming of the fourth part of Cofralandes 9.1 Boca de lixo 9.2 Babilônia 2000 9.3 Cabra marcado para morrer 13.1 El árbol recalls earlier visual technologies by experimenting with backlighting and projection 13.2 Superimposition in La orilla que se abisma creates thick textures and flashes of light, mimicking the grainy, flickering, decayed images of old film 13.3 The skyline of Buenos Aires in La sonámbula contains a collage of identifiable city landmarks 14.1 Yuliet cleans the screen: Mock transparency in ¿Quién diablos es Juliette? 14.2 What counts as “Nature?” OV7 spelled out in flowers floating on water 14.3 Visual dereferencing: Fabiola “an inch away from the real thing” in ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?

32 40 41 74 78 79

93

94 135 141 145 202

208 211


Figures

223 227 230



This page intentionally left blank


Alexandra Anderson is Associate Professor of Documentary Production and History at the School of Image Arts, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada. Areas of interest include Latin American film, documentary in the margins, and film preservation. Cristina Cervantes is Professor of Scriptwriting at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico. With Maximiliano Maza Pérez she has written the Guión para medios audiovisuales, a textbook on scripting for audiovisual media. At present she is a doctoral candidate in Humanities, and is working on a dissertation regarding the translation/ adaptation of literary texts into film scripts. Michael Chanan is a documentary filmmaker, author of books on both film and music, and Professor of Film and Video at Roehampton University, London. He has written a history of cinema in Cuba, of which the second edition came out in 2004 under the title Cuban Cinema (University of Minnesota Press), and his latest book is The Politics of Documentary (BFI, 2008). In the 1970s he made a couple of films on music for BBC, and in the 1980s, a number of films shot in Cuba and Latin America, most of them for Channel Four. His last film was Detroit: Ruin of a City (2005) and he is currently at work on a film called The American Who Electrified Russia. James Cisneros is Assistant Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at the Université de Montréal, where he teaches courses on Latin American Film, Literature, and Cultural Studies. His current research focuses on literary and filmic representations of Latin America’s megacities. He has published articles in Nuevo texto crítico, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Hispanic Issues, and Intermédialités.


Notes on Contributors

Mariana A. C. da Cunha teaches Brazilian Portuguese Language and Culture at Queen Mary, University of London. She has an MA in Cultural and Critical Studies from Birkbeck College, University of London, and is now developing a PhD thesis at the same institution, specializing in the representation of migration and landscape in contemporary Brazilian cinema. She is also a freelance Film Programmer for the Discovering Latin America Film Festival in London. 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

x

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Armida De la Garza is a Lecturer in International Communication at the University of Nottingham, currently teaching film at the campus in Ningbo, China. In 2007 she was awarded a University of Nottingham Research Grant to pursue the project entitled Transnational Cinema in Globalising Societies: Asia and Latin America with partners in Mexico and China. Her book entitled Mexico on Film: National Identity and International Relations was published in December 2006. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla is a Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Film at Newcastle University. His research interests are in Spanish and Latin American cinema, gender studies, and psychoanalysis. Recent publications have appeared in the Hispanic Research Journal and in Angelaki: A Journal of the Theoretical Humanities. His book, Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema, has recently been published with I. B. Tauris. Miriam Haddu is a Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is an active researcher in the field of Mexican Visual Cultures and author of Contemporary Mexican Cinema (1989–1999): History, Space and Identity, published by Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. She has published articles on Mexican cinema and photography in journals and edited volumes. Her current book project focuses on analyzing recent Mexican filmic outputs. Geoffrey Kantaris is Director of the Centre of Latin American Studies in the University of Cambridge and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese. His current research is on contemporary urban cinema from Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico, and he has published several articles and essays in this area. He has also worked extensively on women’s writing and dictatorship in Argentina and Uruguay. Maximiliano Maza Pérez is Professor of Mexican Cinema and Media Culture at the Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey, Mexico, where he is Director of the Department of Communication and Journalism. He is the author of Más de cien años de cine mexicano, a Spanish language Internet resource on Mexican Cinema. In 2001 he joined the Jury of the Guadalajara Film Festival. He has published a number of articles on Mexican film history.


Edgardo Dieleke is a PhD candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Princeton University. For his dissertation he is working on current representations of violence in Argentine and Brazilian literature and cinema. He has published several essays on Latin American cinema. He is also the editor, with Claudia Soria and Paola Cortés-Rocca, of the forthcoming Políticas del sentimiento: El peronismo y la construcción de la Argentina moderna (1946–2006).

Joanna Page holds a lectureship in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Cambridge. Her research interests lie in the field of contemporary Argentine literature and film, and she has published a number of articles 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

xi

Dylon Robbins is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at Boston University. His research examines problems of media and citizenship in Brazil and the Caribbean, with particular concern for the roles of film and popular music in shaping the public sphere and marginal political practices. His other interests include race, nationalism, and intellectual and cultural histories. Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi is a cultural researcher, educationalist, and filmmaker affiliated with the New Social Art School collective. Her PhD— “The Arts as Means of Cultural Integration: A Chilean Case Study” (Robert Gordon, 2007)—entailed a comparative analysis based principally on indepth interviews with exile and non-exile artists. She currently researches the poetic, (trans)formative potential of the audiovisual, with particular emphasis on work by filmmakers such as Ruiz, Marker, and Tarkovsky.


in this area. She is the author of Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2009) and is currently working on science fiction in Argentina.





E

arly versions of the essays collated in this volume were presented as papers at a conference with the same title, held in June 2006 in London and Cambridge. Our thanks goes to all those who participated in the event, and to the institutions that hosted it and assisted with funding: the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London; the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge; and Robinson College, Cambridge. We would like to express our gratitude to our contributors, whose enthusiasm and commitment have spurred us on through the process of compiling and editing. We are also thankful for the assistance of Mariama Ifode in preparing the translation of three articles, by Cristina Cervantes, Edgardo Dieleke, and Maximiliano Maza Pérez. Our final thanks is perhaps due to Ryanair, for a delayed flight from Shannon to London Stansted in October 2003 that allowed this project to be conceived over lukewarm coffee from paper cups in the airport lounge.


Acknowledgments





Latin American Perspectives


Part I





Introduction: Fiction, Documentary, and Cultural Change in Latin America Joanna Page

. . . the most intense and productive life of culture takes place on the boundaries of its individual areas and not in places where these areas have become enclosed in their own specificity. Mikhail Bakhtin1

T

here has been a rising interest in recent years in theorizing the similarities and differences between fiction and documentary film, fuelled in part by the growing stature of documentary within academic film criticism. Precisely what it is that divides documentary from fiction, if anything, is a matter of some disagreement. Like most categories and genres, in practice these terms resist definitions, becoming—as Bill Nichols suggests—“a little like our everyday, but unrigorous, distinction between fruits and vegetables.”2 It is nonetheless clear that this distinction, however slippery, has become a significant fulcrum for contemporary controversy over the nature of the relationship between the cinematic sign and its referent. The most heated debates have centered on the nature of referentiality in fiction and documentary cinema. Nichols maintains that fiction and documentary operate “with reference to a ‘reality’ that is a construct, the product of signifying systems,” and must therefore be subjected to equal scrutiny, as “the notion of any privileged access to a reality that exists ‘out there,’ beyond us, is an ideological effect.”3 Michael Renov, keen to establish the significance of documentary for a broader enquiry into representation in general, also emphasizes its common characteristics with fiction, arguing that it “shares the status of all discursive forms with regard to its tropic or figurative character,” employing many of the methods and devices of its fictional counterpart.”4 Many theorists have drawn in a similar manner on postmodern historiography (and particularly on the work of Hayden White on the narrativity of history) to illuminate the common ground between fiction and documentary. Other theorists have chosen to focus on the distinctive qualities of the documentary, variously identified in relation to its social agency or a privileged


Chapter 1


J O A N N A PAG E

relationship with the real. Carl Plantinga harangues “the Post-Structuralist Story” that posits the nonfiction film as deceptively concealing a raft of rhetorical devices behind a claim to transparency and objectivity, claiming that the post-structuralist agenda has obscured our understanding of “the legitimate use of moving photographs as both icons and indices of the profilmic scene.”5 Likewise, Noël Carroll mounts a derisive attack on the work undertaken by Renov and Nichols, claiming that “the distinction between nonfiction and fiction was never really based on formal technique in the first place.”6 Reading post-structuralist thought rather narrowly (and contentiously) as an attempt to suggest that the real does not exist beyond its construction in discourse, Carroll distances himself from an “overly facile skepticism about the possibility of making motion pictures that are genuinely in the service of knowledge.”7 The sincerity of documentary, theorists such as Carroll would suggest, should not be overlooked in our rush to deconstruct the insincerity implied by its (mediated) form. Stella Bruzzi refuses, likewise, to posit any claim of objectivity on the part of documentary which it would be theory’s job to undermine, arguing that the assessment of documentaries against an ideal of objectivity marks them automatically for failure; she prefers to understand documentary as “predicated upon a dialectical relationship” between the pursuit of authenticity and the impossibility of this aim, tensions that she considers to be embedded in “the pact between documentary, reality and spectator.”8 At stake in many of these debates are opposing views, not over whether documentary can be differentiated from fiction through its provision of an “objective” account of reality (none of the theorists mentioned above would support this claim), but over the nature of the real itself, how this is caught up in regimes of representation associated with fiction and/or documentary film, and the discourses constructed by film theory in its effort to deconstruct the discourses of its object. Latin American Perspectives Many of the contributors to this volume draw on the theoretical and analytical insights developed by these theorists, among other key referents in contemporary debates on cinematic representation. However, no book to date has been dedicated to exploring these ideas in the Latin American context. Visual Synergies was conceived as an attempt to highlight the significance of Latin American film for the study of the boundaries between fiction and documentary. It would do this in two ways: first, by identifying some of the important contributions made by Latin American filmmakers to cross-genre experimentation of this kind, and second, by bringing to the fore the implications of these experiments, and of the theoretical paradigms developed by Latin American(ist)s working on film, for continued debates concerning the nature of the cinematic image and its relationship with the real. As I outline here—and our contributors demonstrate in much more depth—the particularities of the Latin American context bring sharply into focus some of the


4


5

most pressing questions of representation raised by theorists and critics of cinema in many areas of the world. It would be inaccurate to presume that this recent theoretical interest in the relationship between documentary and fiction is principally or solely inspired by a burgeoning of cross-genre experiments in the contemporary period. While such experiments are certainly taking place, and are undoubtedly enriching both the praxis of filmmaking and our understanding of cinematic “language,” it is clearly the case that the reflexivity, performativity, and hybridity that are commonly associated with contemporary productions were also characteristic of many early films. One thinks of the extraordinary virtuosity of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera (1929), for example, or the questions of performance famously raised by early ethnographic films such as Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922). Michael Chanan’s chapter refutes two important misconceptions about the relationship between fiction and documentary techniques: first, that such experimentation is largely a feature of the more contemporary period, and second, that Latin American cinema has simply drawn on experiments already being carried out in European and North American film. Chanan takes us, instead, on a tour of some “forgotten” films that, ignoring the generic boundaries that have characterized mainstream cinema since the rise of Hollywood, created complex representational regimes that cannot be categorized as either fiction or documentary. He concludes that, in the history of world cinema, “Latin America is quite as fertile a site of experiment as the countries of the metropolis,” its aesthetic departures often occurring at the same time, or even prior to, similar innovations elsewhere. Revolution and Its Specters The next group of chapters addresses a significant factor in the hybridization of fictional and documentary techniques in Latin America since the 1960s: the overwhelming impact of the Cuban Revolution and left-wing militancy in other parts of the continent, and the corresponding formulation of new aesthetic strategies in film. Interestingly, recourse to documentary modes of filmmaking, or the incursion of “documentary” techniques into fiction, has accompanied both the rise and the demise of socialism in Latin America. If the projects of revolutionary filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s often combined fiction and documentary techniques (many harking back to Italian neorealism) in their efforts to raise consciousness in the spectator, a decline in the revolutionary imaginary since that period has also sent directors in search of practices associated with the documentary, albeit of a markedly less didactic sort. The tightly organized narratives of mainstream fiction films and the authoritative voice of the more conventional documentary are replaced with minimalist, observational techniques that convey something of the messy, inconsequential quality of everyday life in an era that lacks conviction of the possibility of radical political change.


INTRODUCTION


J O A N N A PAG E

Many of the aesthetic innovations of the 1960s and 1970s were conceived by militant filmmakers with the aim of provoking disaffection with the status quo and effecting revolution across the continent. Key referents here would be the open text of La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, 1968), inviting dialogue and debate; the films of the neorealist-inspired Fernando Birri; and the heterogeneous styles of Cinema Novo in Brazil. However, formal experimentation in cinema was equally intense from “inside” the Revolution in Cuba, here at the service of representing the experience of social and cultural change, and particularly of articulating the ambiguities of the role of the intellectual at this time. In the first chapter of this part, Dylon Robbins presents an analysis of three key films of the early Revolutionary period in Cuba, demonstrating how the tensions between fiction and documentary may be mapped onto a more profound set of tensions in evidence at the time between the intellectual and the marginalized, and between elite and popular cultures. In P.M., camera angles, editing and mise-en-scène operate “in an effort to see, but not be seen” and to dissolve differences between viewer and viewed, constituting a formal expression of the film’s “attempted erasure of its locus of enunciation” as that of the elite intellectual. The ambiguities of the intellectual’s position are more cautiously traced in Memorias del subdesarrollo, Robbins argues, and particularly with regard to its inclusion of a (staged?) performance by a local musician (Pello el Afrokán) in a sequence that brings into focus the questions of cultural authority and legitimacy arising from the cultural transformations of the period. In Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar, Robbins finds that tensions between fiction and documentary techniques are used in particularly innovative ways to articulate the film’s critique of dominant Revolutionary discourses as well as the difficulty of articulating that critique. Alexandra Anderson’s chapter looks back from a present debate in Cuba over the demise of the documentary—an exception to what has often been seen as a global boom—to the early Revolutionary films, before discussing two contemporary productions that offer hope of a new revitalization of the genre. Anderson pays particular attention to the positions adopted by young and “veteran” directors in interviews conducted by the author, as well as a roundtable discussion convened in Havana in 1996 to debate the “crisis” in Cuban documentary. She argues that the decline in documentary can paradoxically be attributed to its prominence in the early Revolutionary period, and the support it received from ICAIC, the state film institute. Although early films demonstrated synergies between fiction and documentary in their search for a new aesthetic to convey Revolutionary realities, the sustained dialogue between these two modes of representation did not succeed in reinvigorating documentary practice. ICAIC’s formal conservatism could not accept influences from direct cinema and free cinema—which elsewhere, Anderson notes, led to a regeneration of documentary—as Revolutionary films could not “prioritize the evidentiary power of the images over the rhetorical construction” in the


6


7

same way. Documentary went into a decline after the 1960s, becoming “fictionalized” in its recourse to sentimentality and nostalgia. By contrast, Anderson presents two contemporary videos that adopt a playful attitude toward the tradition from which they have emerged, suggesting that “if their work is indicative of a trend, the future of Cuban documentary does not rest with ICAIC, the state film institution, just as documentary around the world has freed itself from the protective support of governments and national and public broadcasters.” Moving from Cuba to Brazil, Edgardo Dieleke’s chapter focuses primarily on a range of recent films that have drawn substantially on real stories of violence and poverty. While he notes the chasm between the imaginary of these contemporary films—“marked by disillusionment and a political horizon beset by intractable difficulties”—and that of Glauber Rocha’s revolutionary films, he goes on to take issue with current critical perspectives that set up simplistic contrasts between Cinema Novo and the contemporary period, such that the present always appears deficient in relation to the past. Rather than assessing contemporary films on the basis of whether they match, or fail to live up to, our political or aesthetic expectations, Dieleke invites us to take a more in-depth approach to analyzing the extent to which films naturalize or denaturalize violence, reduce it, or alternatively render it in its full complexity. In order to explore these ideas, he develops a comparison between City of God and Madame Satã. The identification encouraged through formal devices between the spectator and the protagonist in City of God is not repeated in Madame Satã, which presents us with a complex character with whom the audience is not permitted to identify. Its aesthetic makes much greater use of ellipsis and the off-screen, thereby avoiding a too-easy association of fiction with the reality of violence Brazilian audiences see around them and on television screens every day. Refreshingly, Dieleke’s approach encourages a metacritical perspective on the politics of film criticism as well as the politics of the films themselves, asking what is revealed by the continued reference to Cinema Novo by contemporary critics working in a very different political and economic context. Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres Cross-generic forays between fiction and documentary have become a privileged form of expressing a more general hybridization of culture in Latin America. The next group of chapters focuses on the formal and generic experiments with boundaries that have been used in Latin American film to articulate experiences of migration, (post-)nationalism and exile. As Hamid Naficy suggests, “border consciousness” moves away from binaristic representations and toward “a third optique, which is multiperspectival and tolerant of ambiguity, ambivalence, and chaos.” 9 Although the films studied explore trends of cultural plurivocality and testify to the erosion of borders under globalization, they often acknowledge, along with Naficy, the enduring


INTRODUCTION


J O A N N A PAG E

fact that “physical borders are real and extremely dangerous, particularly for those who have to cross them.”10 The avant-garde experiments of Raúl Ruiz, whose filmmaking career bridges Chile and France, and is characterized by a constant search for new forms of cinematic expression, provide an ideal starting-point for such reflections. As Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi shows, Ruiz’s interest in the “double vision” afforded by “shamanic filmmaking” is expressive of the hybrid perspectives afforded by living between cultures. In an extended analysis of Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody, she explores Ruiz’s attempt to defamiliarize Chilean society by means of a variety of associations, ruptures and collages, designed to “provide alternative fields of understanding which could allow us to make better sense of the world’s plurality.” RodríguezRemedi draws attention to the pedagogical aspects of the film, which aims to provoke reflection on national identity and to reeducate its viewers, conditioned by the industrial cinema of the West to understand films in a “formulaic” manner. The next two chapters analyze films centered on the thorny problem of Mexican emigration across its northern border, one located within Mexico and the other in the United States. Maximiliano Maza Pérez traces a history of the rather stereotyped representations in film of the borderlands separating the two countries, before contrasting these with more recent films from the 1990s, which focus less on the geopolitical fact of the frontier and more on themes of cultural encounter and exchange, including “the deterritorialization of migrant cultures, the porous and shifting nature of the frontiers, and the redefinition of identities and cultural practices.” Maza Pérez highlights the anthropological leaning evident in María Novaro’s fiction film El jardín del Edén, finding echoes in it of some of the ideas and approaches presented in Néstor García Canclini’s study of Tijuana, published in Culturas híbridas. He also examines the particular attention Novaro pays in her film to documenting the physical environment surrounding her characters, which—as the camera captures different gazes, multilingual signs, and the undivided sea lapping the divided beach at the border—functions as a visual commentary on the cultural, social and geographical complexity of the border city. Armida De la Garza explores the significance of migration in the construction of a postnational imaginary in the media via an analysis of Sergio Arau’s A Day without a Mexican, a mockumentary that posits the sudden and unexplained disappearance of all Latino immigrants from the state of California, bringing the economy to a standstill. As “a paradigmatic postmodern and hybrid form,” De la Garza finds mockumentary to be an ideal form for a discussion of national identity in the context of globalization, examining the film’s parodic borrowings of the aesthetics of televized news reports and the investigative documentary. The film reworks the documentary, a genre first associated with modernity and the nation-state, into mockumentary, a genre more fitted to postmodernist skepticism and “a time of itinerant media and identities, of translocalities and transnationalism.”


8


INTRODUCTION

9

Many Latin American directors have chosen to parody the formulaic narratives of Hollywood/industrial cinema, or to insert their work in the margins between genres, as a form of oppositional cultural politics. The following section extends our investigation into hybrid genres, placing particular emphasis on how questions of performance have been addressed reflexively in contemporary documentaries. Mariana A. C. da Cunha prefaces her discussion of two works by Eduardo Coutinho with an account of a crucial aesthetic shift evident in his earlier Cabra marcado para morrer. The film, started in the 1960s and initially shot in the form of a fictional narrative based on the assassination of a peasant leader, demanded a thorough revision before it could be released in 1984, after years of military dictatorship. The new aesthetic Coutinho develops, based on a series of filmed encounters with his actors, introduces a level of reflexivity and an acknowledgement of the performativity of documentary, elements that have become hallmarks of his filmmaking career. Da Cunha analyzes the dialogues established in two later documentaries by Coutinho, Boca de lixo and Babilônia 2000, between the films’ images and their characters’ awareness of the stereotyped images of poverty and community peddled by the media, also emphasizing the performative nature of their interaction with the director. Coutinho’s work, which has done much to bring documentary into the limelight usually enjoyed by fiction in mainstream exhibition circuits, represents a sophisticated exploration of the impossibility of accessing a pre-mediatized, “pure” reality that has not already been discursively constructed. Moving to Mexico, Cristina Cervantes examines the incursions of fiction into three recent documentaries. In addition to the observations of early film theorists such as D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, Cervantes draws on Dwight V. Swain’s practical manual on scriptwriting to outline documentary’s borrowings from the dramatic structure of fiction film. Using this framework, developed from the perspective of the filmmaker setting out to direct a project rather than the finished text itself, she compares the approaches taken in three documentaries. The first two, El abuelo Cheno y otras historias and Los últimos zapatistas, explore issues of memory, often making use of performative elements (including reconstructions) in their approach to narrating the past. Cervantes’ third film for analysis, De nadie, tells the story of a Honduran woman, driven—like many others in Central America—to attempt another border crossing, but this time into Mexico, via its southern frontier, as a first step toward entering the United States. The film’s presentation of its material is complicated and refracted by the presence of the filmmaker, who intervenes directly in the story he is telling. Cervantes highlights the importance of dramatic structure to these films, which have the purpose of raising their audiences’ consciousness of pressing social issues.


Performance and Reflexivity in the Contemporary Documentary


J O A N N A PAG E

Miriam Haddu’s analysis of Aro Tolbukhin: En la mente del asesino finds that the film’s innovative oscillations between fiction and documentary are ultimately set up in order to explore a psychodynamic hypothesis, linking the repressed experiences of the child with the criminal actions of the adult. The film tells the story of Aro Tolbukhin, found guilty of serial murder in the 1980s, but whose conviction has since been called into question. Haddu examines the complex aesthetic and narrative maneuvers that bridge fiction and reality, performance, imagination and memory, fantasy and testimony in the film, in an attempt to explore not just the “real” Tolbukhin but also an imaginary world and an invented character that constantly invade reality. Yet this mixing of genres can also be read in the context of a psychodynamic methodology that seeks to explain the source of Tolbukhin’s psychosis, linking past trauma with present action by reconstructing and replaying childhood events while employing a range of cinematic techniques to suggest the associations of memory and the unconscious. In this way fiction is placed at the service of advancing a hypothesis to explain the real man behind the stories, memories and images both he and others have created. Questions of Reference If, as suggested above, the recent critical focus on synergies between fiction and documentary cannot simply be attributed to changes in cinematic praxis, it might be more accurately accounted for with regard to shifts in our interest in marginalities and marginal forms, and in our understanding of the nature of the image and of cinema’s particular mode of signifying. These questions have been present throughout the analyses offered by contributors in previous sections, but the last part of Visual Synergies brings together chapters that are more explicitly framed as interventions in contemporary critical and theoretical debates concerning cinema’s regimes of signification, and the material and discursive construction of the image. Specific contributions made by Latin American cinema to these debates are suggested in the chapters by Joanna Page, Geoffrey Kantaris, and James Cisneros, which find links between the palimpsestic, simulated, or specular nature of the images they analyze and the rapid processes of modernization, mediatization and globalization that have brought profound change to Latin American cities in recent decades. As well as marking physical urban space and transforming social relationships, these processes have also promoted the development of specific visual regimes as a critical response to a resulting crisis of representation. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla’s complex study of the paranoid gaze in Él, one of Luis Buñuel’s Mexican productions, challenges received notions of the cinematic gaze forged by film theorists drawing on Lacanian thought. He links the film’s blurring of the conventional dichotomies of fiction/ non-fiction, realism/fantasy, and true/false, with its critique of normative—patriarchal and heterosexual—forms of subjectivity. Although Él is a fiction film, Gutiérrez-Albilla argues that, like documentary, it makes visible the ways in


10


11

which we grasp aspects of the real through the various representational regimes that govern our perception and cognition. The film can be understood to function as a documentation of paranoia that provides alternatives to hegemonic models of subjectivity. Gutiérrez-Albilla suggests that the reflexive devices employed in Él’s cinematography ultimately challenge “the conventional association of the specular with the notions of voyeurism and fetishism,” demonstrating instead that the film remains more faithful to Lacan’s concept of the gaze—contrary to that promulgated by many film theorists—as one that “implies a refusal of visual control or mastery, thereby challenging a narrow view of masculine subjectivity that has been associated with the distanced control of vision.” A different debate in film theory, this time the relationship between digital and analogue images, becomes the focus for Joanna Page’s exploration of temporality and indexicality in four films from Argentina. Extending the work of Hayden White and Roland Barthes on the discursive and rhetorical nature of historical writing, and Paul Ricoeur on the narrative construction of temporality, Page analyzes a set of visual, rather than linguistic, tropes that may be used to construct a reflexive idea of temporality. The hybrid aesthetics of the productions she studies, drawing on (or citing) different forms of visual technology (photography, slide projection, early methods of animation, black-and-white, analogue and digital images) demonstrate the interplay of old and new, past and present, complicating any linear model of the evolution of cinema. The specularity of these images and techniques of superimposition create a reflexive meditation on ways in which cinema creates meaning by reference, not so much to reality, as to previous visual codes and technologies. The complex relationships that emerge in these films between different forms of the image serve to challenge associations commonly made between the analogue and the indexical, and the digital and the non-indexical. They emphasize instead the continued (perhaps heightened) reliance of digital on the indexical, and the constraint of verisimilitude that governs both artifice and indexicality in the cinematic image, in the same way as it underpins (pace Ricoeur) both fictional and historical narratives. Geoffrey Kantaris also proposes a theoretical framework that takes us outside of “the dominant (linguistic) referential paradigm” in conceptualizing referentiality in the documentary film form. He develops this theory through the analysis of two films (Mexican and Cuban-Mexican) by Carlos Marcovich, in which he discovers “a complex visual meta-discourse on the nature of documentary reference.” Although a critical consensus has emerged around the idea of the “performative documentary,” Kantaris suggests that performance “fails to provide a close enough analogue for the radical unmaking of referentiality” taking place in Marcovich’s highly reflexive documentaries. Borrowing a term from the field of computer programming, Kantaris argues that “dereferencing” may be a more accurate concept to describe the way in which the referent in these films continually slips away from beneath representation. “Dereferencing” is the process of


INTRODUCTION


J O A N N A PAG E

accessing the archive or list to which a reference points, which in turn contains identifiers, each of which refers to another data structure. In documentary, we are confronted with the impossibility of dereferencing the real, which will always reveal either the dead end of a “dangling pointer” or “run into the infinite loop of a recursive data structure, one that contains itself.” One of the important advantages of this concept is that it does not posit a simple hierarchy or division between representation and the film’s subjects, but reveals the extent to which these are already inscribed within existing, and unequal, representational regimes. As such, it is able to account for processes of representation at work in documentaries in which the referent itself is also a medium, and to analyze “the disembedding of signifiers” characteristic of these works: “the loosening of the anchors which tie structures of meaning to identities and places.” James Cisneros also pays close attention to the material qualities of the image and its capacity to “figure” complex changes in both the fabric and the imaginary of urban space. Like Kantaris, he also searches for figures that evade the simplistic opposition of sign and referent, accounting for the always already mediatized quality of the “simil-city.” Rapid change effected in the spheres of politics and urban space by the neoliberal 1990s in Buenos Aires, Cisneros suggests, have “destabilized the very ‘grounding’ of urban memory,” with the result that these transformations are most accurately documented by “figures that privilege the superficial space of representation over the stable referential ground.” The two figures focused on here are the simulacrum and the palimpsest. Although divergent in the ways that they represent urban memory, both figures propose that “representation precedes or otherwise overdetermines the model to which it refers,” thereby rendering referential functions unstable and questioning the possibility of “ground.” In a close reading of a specific sequence in El bonaerense, Cisneros studies various kinds of layering at work in the film that—aside from the strata of different narratives and genres—include a more properly cinematic layering of light and movement. If the media are implicated in the degradation of the public sphere, Cisneros finds in several recent Argentine films a reflexive critique, superimposing fiction and documentary traditions “as the structuring principle for a layered narrative where urban space emerges only as and through images.” These last chapters engage with deconstructive and post-structuralist approaches, remaining skeptical of a notion of the “real” that is separable from our images of it, but they combine these with a sense of the intrusion of reality into regimes of representation, in the form of the materiality of the image, distinctively fashioned and indelibly scored by the historical, economic and political contexts of its production. Rapid social change, the explosion of mass media and the erosion of place-bound identity, public space, cultural authenticity, and national sovereignty are processes common to many parts of the world under globalization, but have been experienced in particularly dramatic ways in Latin America. Forays across the boundaries between fiction and documentary have taken on specific resonances here, in


12


13

dialogue with official state discourses or revolutionary models for cinema; at physical frontiers and in networks of cultural exchange; to represent the gaps and contradictions of post-Revolution or post-dictatorship memory; to acknowledge the already-mediatized nature of the reality of poverty and violence; or in a critique of the illusions of modernity. The reflexivity and playfulness of many of the films studied in this volume do not necessarily detract from the urgency and sincerity with which they bear witness to these realities; they simply include cinema itself as a protagonist in the history they narrate of marginality, underdevelopment, hybridization, resistance, and innovation. Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 2. Nichols, Representing Reality, 6. Ibid., 107. Renov, “Introduction,” 3. Plantinga, “Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction,” 320. Carroll, “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism,” 286. Ibid., 285. Bruzzi, New Documentary, 4. Naficy, An Accented Cinema, 31. Ibid.

Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Edited by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Translated by Vern W. McGhee. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Carroll, Noël. “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 283–306. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Naficy, Hamid. An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Plantinga, Carl. “Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction: Two Approaches.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 307–324. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Renov, Michael. “Introduction: The Truth about Non-fiction.” In Theorizing Documentary, edited by Michael Renov, 1–11. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.


INTRODUCTION





The Space between Fiction and Documentary in Latin American Cinema: Notes toward a Genealogy Michael Chanan

I

T

here is a long-standing recognition in Latin American film studies of the great diversity of progressive cinema across the continent since the 1950s and 1960s, when the movement known as el nuevo cine latinoamericano (“New Latin American Cinema”) emerged. This movement had several cardinal characteristics, one of them being precisely its aesthetic and stylistic multiplicity, and another, the alliance of aesthetics and politics. Some of its tendencies survived beyond the 1980s, when the movement began to lose its identity and gradually dissipated. Primary among these proclivities is the documentary-like quality found in much of the best fiction cinema. From the first features of Nelson Pereira dos Santos in the 1950s (Rio cuarenta graus [Rio 40º, 1955], and Rio Zona Norte [Rio Northern Zone, 1957]), which are very close to Italian neorealism, to the films, for example, of Víctor Gaviria in Colombia in the 1990s (Rodrigo D: No Future, 1990, and La vendedora de rosas/The Rose Seller, 1998), we find the same strongly realist mise-en-scène, and the incorporation of non-professional actors into narratives taken from their own everyday lifeworld. A caution is needed here about the ambiguity of the term neorealism— which over the years has been made to cover a multitude of sins—and especially the slippage between neorealism as style, neorealism as method or technique, and neorealism as a form of cultural politics. When neorealism first emerged in Italy at the end of World War II it was, of course, all three, removing the camera from the studio to the streets and pursuing the quotidian in repudiation of the artificiality of the “white telephone” films of cinema under Fascism. It has subsequently remained a fluid mix of all these elements: a method guided by a philosophy with political undertones, and certain stylistic implications. But these factors have altered over time, especially the last; they have a history that, without being reducible to technological determination,


Chapter 2


MICH A EL CH ANAN

correlates with the technical development of the means of production (camera and sound gear, laboratories, dubbing theatre, etc.), in the manner that T. W. Adorno once described, in another context, as analogical affinity. The technology has changed, so that recent examples of films shot on digital video with non-professional actors telling contemporary stories look and sound very different from those early black-and-white films by the Italians, or a few years later in Brazil, by Pereira dos Santos. What they seem to share, nonetheless, is a commitment to the portrayal of contemporary everyday reality over and against the contrivance of the superficial worlds created for the screen by industrial cinema. The same commitment is found in films from every continent. Looking at it from our early twenty-first-century perspective, the pull of neorealism is not just one of the central currents of Latin American cinema but of world cinema. Recent examples have come from China as well as Argentina, and the 1990s brought us, if the term is allowable, the neo-neorealism of cinemas such as that of Iran, and in Britain, the persistence of an aesthetic among directors Ken Loach, Mike Leigh, or from a younger generation, Michael Winterbottom, which remains close to neorealism. In this context, the example of Abbas Kiarostami in particular presents us with another crucial and shared predilection: an experimental approach to cinema, both fiction and documentary, and the way that they mix and cross over. Orthodox film histories generally perceive experimentalism as a marginal, avant-garde affair, the concern of an intellectual and artistic elite. What this misses is the historical experience of the unique artistic form that is cinema. Fredric Jameson has observed that the history of cinema recapitulated in less than a century the stages of cultural development corresponding to the evolution of capitalism over hundreds of years, from cottage industry to global corporation.1 By the same token, it also recapitulated an aesthetic trajectory of even longer duration, from crude and cursory beginnings to sustained and complex forms, which in the case of every previous artistic medium is lost in the fogs of history. In other words, for the first time in recorded history, we find ourselves able to trace the creation of a new art form from gestation to maturity. Such rapid evolution depended on a marriage of convenience between capital and aesthetic experiment. The medium demanded it. The condition for the evolution of film language from its simple origins to its capacity for sustained narrative was that filmmaking should become a problem-solving activity, where in the course of the inevitable process of trial and error, successful innovations are incorporated into the mainstream. This is what happened with Italian neorealism. But beyond the aesthetically narrow confines of industrial cinema, this is still going on, and Kiarostami is one of its exemplary figures. On this reading, industrial cinema—what Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino famously called “first cinema”—partly consists in taming and commodifying the experimental approach, fixing it within genres and by means of the star system.2 (There is of course plenty of first cinema in Latin


16


17

America—it is the bread and butter of the three big industries of Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina.) Second cinema follows suit, except that being geared toward a more bourgeois audience, better educated in modern artistic traditions, a measure of experimentalism that challenges audience expectations is always an option. (Here, for example, one can situate a director like Argentina’s Eliseo Subiela.) Third cinema, in this perspective, that is, political cinema, had a positive experimentalist bent, strongly linked to the search for a new and more urgent relationship with its audiences. In many cases this resulted in films that belonged simultaneously to two avant-gardes—political and aesthetic, as Robert Stam has pointed out in relation to Solanas and Getino’s La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968). But times have changed, and the question prompts itself, does third cinema still exist? To be sure, the old militancy, Marxist or Peronist, is out: the political context has altered (and is shifting again, with powerful new forms of populist leftism emerging). One can also question whether we can still speak of an avant-garde, since by all accounts we have moved beyond the ethos of modernism in which it operated; in the era of postmodernism, everyone is allowed to do everything. Meanwhile, however, the search for a new relationship with the audience has been renewed through the medium of video. Important examples include the indigenous video movements that began in Brazil in the late 1980s, and more recently the cine piquetero movement in Argentina, in which Solanas himself has seen the rebirth of third cinema.3 There is one proviso to be made: not to fall back on schematicism. Better to remember Teshome Gabriel’s reflections on his own account of third cinema, that the really good and interesting films tend to be those that fall between and across the categories.4 This brings us back to documentary, which is a complex and paradoxical terrain, because documentary is what Joris Ivens once called “a creative noman’s land, an interloper in the genre system.”5 Since the genre system was the creation of industrial cinema, the majors steered clear of it, because by definition documentary escapes the control of the studio. This is not to deny that documentary settles into its own characteristic genres. But these are not perhaps as stable as they appear, and outside television, documentary enjoys great freedom to challenge conventions and assumptions about audience susceptibilities, indeed more so in the last few years than ever. The cost, of course, is giving up the old claims of privileged access to the real, and having to face the charge that documentary is not as objective as people used to think, but deeply imbued with the filmmaker’s subjectivity. On the other hand, there is a tradition going back to Dziga Vertov, Joris Ivens, and John Grierson, which casts documentary as the antinomy of fiction, and orthodox film histories continue to consider it in this way. In this tradition, documentary is perceived as fiction’s other and fiction is repudiated in the name of the real. Vertov even criticized Sergei Eisenstein’s historical reconstructions, while as Bill Nichols observed, the British documentarists of the 1930s—Grierson, Paul Rotha, Humphrey Jennings, and Basil Wright—“drew harsh and unflattering comparisons” between the “escapist,


F I C T I O N & D O C U M EN TA R Y I N L AT I N A M E R I C A


MICH A EL CH ANAN

meretricious spectacles” of the fiction film industry and the aesthetic potential and social purpose of documentary.6 The industry—distributors and exhibitors—responded by marginalizing it, relegating it to independents and art houses. As a result, documentary had suffered similar misjudgement in orthodox film histories to experimentalism, and despite its recent come-back on the big screen, has been generally considered a subsidiary form within the wider film culture, whose history is relegated to the archives from which it is now selectively beginning to emerge onto DVD. But what one discovers on going back to these forgotten films is a very different history: a history of possibilities, the history of a cinema in a process of becoming, in which, at the very center, you find an experimental approach that often pulls toward documentary realism. In particular, one finds a small number of films that ignore the norms of existing genres, and especially the antinomy with fiction, and thereby create a novel form of representational space, a cross-over space between fiction and documentary that is both and neither. And this, it turns out, begins surprisingly early. One of the first examples is the Mexican film Redes (Nets), dating from 1934. II Redes was shot on location in a fishing village on the Gulf of Mexico with non-professional actors enacting a story taken from contemporary life: the struggle of the fishermen against exploitation. Sadoul called it a semidocumentary.7 It was a one-off enterprise, a film produced for the state, officially to demonstrate the potential for Mexican sound cinema. The script was written by a progressive politician of the day called Velásquez Chávez, who was in charge of public education under President Lázaro Cardenas, and who invited an international team to come and make it. The New York photographer Paul Strand was both producer and cinematographer, and the director was Fred Zinneman, a refugee from Nazi Germany working his way to Hollywood, assisted by the Mexican Emilio Gómez Muriel. The film was shot mute, with post-synchronized dialogue and a wonderful orchestral score by Silvestre Revueltas, recorded and mixed in Mexico City. Zinneman brought to the project his experience as assistant director on the landmark German film Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday) of 1929, which called itself “a film without actors”: to wit, an experimental blend of documentary and fiction in which a group of Berliners—a taxi driver, a wine salesman, a music shop assistant, a film extra and a model— play themselves in the portrayal of a typical weekend. In swapping the Berlin petite bourgeoisie for Mexican fishermen, Redes articulates a radical political critique that may have been just a little much even for a progressive government; at any rate the film was never followed up. Strand, in order to represent the reality of the location with documentary accuracy, first undertook a photographic study of the village, which he used to construct a visual elaboration of Velásquez Chávez’s script. The cinematography discovers an epic quality in its visual discourse that resonates with


18


19

Eisenstein and his cinematographer Edouard Tissé, and chimes with other films that celebrated the dignity of labor, such as Grierson’s famous film about fishermen, the much less political Drifters (1929). It also presents us with an aesthetic paradox, a film that at the same time is both experimental in its iconoclasm and, in its visual idiom, perfectly classical. Curiously, in the dialogue sequences, the film slows down somewhat, and the acting errs on the side of understated naturalism; this is largely due to the exigencies of post-synchronization. In literary terms, the script is a highly intelligent synthesis of popular political discourse and cultural symbolism. In a very idiosyncratically Mexican way, the narrative is enclosed between two deaths: that of a child at the beginning, and his father at the end. But the drama is also unified by a metaphor about the fishermen and the fish, which is visually articulated in the montage, and then later comes up again in verbal form, translated into the dialogue: “El tiburón siempre le pega al róbalo” (“the shark always gets the fish”). The “message” here, to put it crudely, is very Brechtian. In sum, Redes constitutes an extraordinary piece of neorealism avant la lettre, and a precursor of what will later become a major tendency of politically committed filmmaking in every corner of Latin America; it is one of those films, such as Kuhle Wampe by Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht (1932), or Jean Renoir’s Toni (1934), which impress themselves on the film historian’s imagination as spectres of a different kind of cinema that might have been, where the simple opposition between fiction and documentary is transcended. III The experiments of the 1930s were curtailed by wartime cinema. Mexican cinema in particular bloomed in the space created by Hollywood’s preoccupation with Europe, but precisely by adopting the methods of the genre movie; Argentine cinema, on the other hand, languished because the United States, to punish Argentina for allying with the German enemy, cut off its supplies of film stock. Postwar recovery was slow, offering little opportunity for independent production, with the result that my second example comes thirty years later. Kukuli, the first film to be spoken in Quechua, dates from 1961, and comes from the margins of the margins; namely, the ancient Inca city of Cuzco, where a film club was set up in 1955 whose members produced a number of short documentaries on ethnographic and sociocultural themes before this more ambitious piece of work. Made by a group of aficionados who were practiced documentary photographers, shot on location with a mute 16mm wind-up Bolex, using post-dubbed dialogue, commentary and music, Kukuli is another “semi-documentary.” Its narrative enacts an indigenous legend in a style that combines the new model of the postwar ethnographic documentary and the now established model of neorealism.




MICH A EL CH ANAN

The legend tells of a confrontation between a campesino and an ukulu—a mythological bear—over their love for the same woman, which in this version reaches its tragic climax at a boisterous fiesta where the bear is one of the masked dancers. The narrative is simple: the eponymous Kukuli, a shepherdess, sets out to celebrate a fiesta in the town of Paucartambo. On her journey she meets and falls for Alako, a laborer. They reach Paucartambo in time for the fiesta, where Alako is sent by the parish priest to ring the bells for the procession while Kukuli is abducted by one of the masked dancers, who turns out to be a bear. The priest leads a posse of townsfolk in pursuit, but Kukuli perishes before the bear is finally overcome. There is a subtext here about religious syncretism, and the powers that have to be accommodated to each other. We can see the struggle between these powers in the fiesta, with its masked dancers representing both the pre-Columbian gods and the white-faced conquistadores. As allowed by the former, Alako and Kukuli propose a trial marriage, of which the parish priest disapproves, almost as if it is the priest’s disapproval that summons the ukulu. But I leave the interpretation of these elements to the anthropologists. The film is remarkable for both its visuals and its soundtrack: the beauty of its color cinematography that makes the most of the spectacular Andean landscape, and then takes us right into the heart of the music and dance of the fiesta. I doubt that either has been rendered any more vividly on screen despite all the improvements in film technology. But at the same time, we are presented with a conundrum about the nature of the lived reality through the way the film moves us back and forth between fiction and documentary. Here is Kukuli near the start of her journey. At first, the orchestral music suggests a fictional framework while the commentary suggests documentary, but then the commentary adds narrative comment, and soon the orchestral score gives way to the indigenous music of the place itself, which pulls us back into a documentary frame of reference. This shift of register into the mode of ethnographic observation also has the effect of altering the temporal discourse. The narrative law of one-thing-after-another is suspended, and we observe everyday life unencumbered by diegetic significance. This scheme turns more on the soundtrack than the visuals, because miseen-scène and style of acting are both impeccably naturalistic, thus preserving continuity with the documentary mode, whereas the soundtrack juggles with voice and music in different combinations. There are two types of voicing: synchronous dialogue in Quechua, and commentary in Spanish. The fictional narrative is thus framed by a voiceover commentary in the style of the ethnographic documentary, not dissimilar to the style of Jean Rouch in the 1950s, which positions the filmmaker as mediator and the viewer as outsider. Likewise, there are two types of music: orchestral music based on Andean themes, and the original music of the region itself. The interchange between these elements signals moments of exchange between the fiction of the legend and the stance of ethnographic objectivity of vision, but the result is not a clear, clean-cut distinction between different realms of representation,


20


21

more of a sliding in and out of shifting perspectives. The fiesta in Paucartambo, where the protagonists of the legend are filmed in the setting of the event, is where ethnography and legend become fused. Here, amid the kaleidoscope of the dances that enact the cultural figures of the indigenous world, the camera witnesses the moment when the dancing bear finds his prey, and from this moment on we are inside a world that until that moment has been foreign and inaccessible to us. The world we enter along with Kukuli is not an illusory phantasy made possible by special effects, such as crossing the hidden threshold to Platform 9¾. It remains palpably the same world she was occupying before the dancing bear appeared. And this is precisely the puzzle of the strange and paradoxical representational space that this film creates. IV A few years later, Cuba in the 1960s, the first decade of the Revolution, became the privileged site of filmic experimentalism, laying down an exhilarating and infectious challenge to the hegemony of Hollywood. Fiction cinema evolved rapidly from the initial adoption of neorealism to the open and exploratory films that García Espinosa would conceptualize at the end of the decade as “imperfect cinema.” Newsreel and documentary began to develop new ways of grappling with the fast-changing reality, and by the end of the decade, Cuba was probably the only country in the Western world where cinemas screened feature-length documentaries as part of the staple fare. Inevitably the cross-over space between fiction and documentary became one of the targets of narrative experimentation, in films such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968) and Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera (One Way or Another, 1974). Gutiérrez Alea, in the former, initiates the process of bringing real people into the film alongside and interacting with fictional characters, a device that is further elaborated in De cierta manera. There are also two less well-known examples which employ other strategies but are equally typical of Cuba’s cinema of Revolution. La primera carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete, Manuel Octavio Gómez, 1969) commemorates the centenary of the first war of independence against Spain by reconstructing its opening battle as if it were a contemporaneous documentary. The conceit is sustained through the use of high-contrast black-andwhite cinematography to give the suggestion of early cinema. The hand-held camera technique, on the other hand, and direct location sound recording, are as modern and up-to-date as you could get, along with the figure of the wandering nueva trova singer Pablo Milanés, who contributes a musical commentary. The effect of these elements and techniques is to deconstruct the conventional historical movie, which aims to separate the past from the present in the interests of ideological cleansing. This film, on the contrary, is ideologically potent precisely because it undermines such complacent historiography, and was celebrated by Latin American film critics of the day for




MICH A EL CH ANAN

doing so. The film is an exercise in what these critics called cine rescate, the recovery of history, which it combines with cine encuesta, or investigative documentary; the effect is to insert the contemporary viewer into the problematic of the past, at the same time as inserting the heritage of the past into the problematic of the present. However, this is not just a matter of retelling the history from a properly Cuban perspective, which had never been done before, but also the shock of its aesthetic means. (Again, we find the confluence of the two avant-gardes, the political and the aesthetic.) In fact, early cinema never looked like this: the early camera was always on a tripod, and the film stock was panchromatic. But the result of the swirling high-contrast camera image in the midst of battle is to render an effect of visual disruption, a kind of expressionist abstraction of the film image, visually aggressive, which makes the battle a much more vivid and frightening experience for the viewer than the conventional ballet of violence of the generic war movie. Finally, Girón (Bay of Pigs, Manuel Herrera, 1972) takes on the escapist illusions of Hollywood cinema directly, adopting the wide-screen format of the conventional war movie to construct an anti-heroic account of the Invasion of the Bay of Pigs. The narrative mode is that of film testimonial, deployed to build up an account of the events through the recollections, not of experts, analysts and political leaders, but of ordinary people who made their contributions on the day and then returned to their regular lives. Their testimonies are filmed in the real locations of the events recounted, and the film reconstructs their stories around them as they speak. One of these is a member of the film crew, and his introduction into the story allows one of several moments of selfreflexivity in the film. Another such moment occurs when a woman relates how she imitated the movies: walking along a beach with a message from her militia unit to headquarters, she hears suspicious noises, which she fears might be the invading mercenaries. To be sure they will not get the message if they capture her, she decides she had better eat it. It was harder to chew, she says, than she expected. In another such sequence, a member of the militia at the time of the invasion remembers the moment when he had to throw a hand grenade for the first time, and discovered it wasn’t like it appeared on the screen: “I tried to pull the pin out with my teeth, because I thought I would try and copy what they did in the cinema, but that way I’d only have broken my jawbone. I realized that using your teeth is strictly for the movies . . .” What emerges from these examples is a different and unaccustomed version of film history. In this version, Latin American cinema is not just a regional strand within world cinema, with its own idiosyncratic cultural predilections. Nor does it correspond very well to the widely held picture of underdevelopment as a condition in which the countries of the periphery are held back to a greater or lesser degree by their various experiences of colonialism and neoimperialism, and their cinema is therefore always trying to catch up. On the contrary, considering all the other strands that are beyond the scope of these notes, it turns out that Latin America is quite as fertile a site of experiment as the countries of the metropolis. Moreover, because film culture is after all global in its reach, and thus the same currents and preoccupations recur among


22


23

distant observers, similar experiments crop up in widely separated places at the same times, made by filmmakers with little or no knowledge of each other, but who adopt the same methods and strategies. Thus, Redes follows the models of Eisenstein and the Soviets and Menschen am Sonntag, but the result is a kind of politicized version of Robert Flaherty’s Man of Aran, which appeared in the same year. Three decades later, the 1960s brought the coincidence of two films that re-create battles of the past as if they were the subjects of contemporary documentaries, Peter Watkins’ Culloden of 1964, and La primera carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete) four years later. In this case I was able to ask the director of the latter if he knew of the first, and he did not. This pattern continues. In the early 1990s, there is the Chilean film Sueños de hielo by Ignacio Agüero (1993), and a year later, Patrick Keiller’s London, which, while treating very different subjects, both use the same form of construction: a visual band which is authentic documentary is combined with a soundtrack that tells a fictional story. These examples only raise more questions. Are they merely coincidence, or is the coincidence a telling one? Why the need to realign the opposition between fiction and documentary? What is at stake in the deliberate confusion of what are normally two distinct modes of representational space? The history that had been sketched out here suggests that such films are not quite the aberrations they might seem to be, but first of all powerful reminders that neither the conventions associated with fictional screen space nor the assumptions made about documentary should be taken for granted. What then is the need that fiction fails to fulfill? And what is it about the real world—the world of everyday social realities—that escapes the documentary camera? Perhaps these questions are misleading, and the issue is not the antinomy between fiction and documentary, but between a cinema of escapism and a cinema of conscience. Notes 1. Jameson, Signatures of the Visible, 156–157. 2. On the differences between first, second, and third cinema, see Solanas and Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema.” 3. Personal communication from Guillermo De Carli. 4. Gabriel, “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films,” 35. 5. Ivens, The Camera and I, 37. 6. Nichols, Representing Reality, 4. 7. See the appropriate entry in Sadoul, Dictionary of Films.



Works Cited Gabriel, Teshome. “Towards a Critical Theory of Third World Films.” In Questions of Third Cinema, edited by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, 30–52. London: BFI, 1989. Ivens, Joris. The Camera and I. Berlin: Seven Seas, 1969. Jameson, Fredric. Signatures of the Visible. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.


MICH A EL CH ANAN

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Sadoul, Georges. Dictionary of Films. Translated and edited by P. Morris. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. Solanas, Fernando and Octavio Getino. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World.” In New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Michael T. Martin, 33–58. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997.


24


Revolution and Its Specters


Part II





On the Margins of Reality: Fiction, Documentary, and Marginal Subjectivity in Three Early Cuban Revolutionary Films Dylon Robbins

La nuestra es una realidad rica, constante, en movimiento, vivimos en un país en Revolución y hacemos cine documental: una generación de realizadores que se forma en una industria surgida de la Revolución. (Ours is a rich reality, constant, in movement; we live in a country in Revolution and we make documentary film: a generation of filmmakers that are shaped by an industry emerging from the Revolution.) Nicolás Guillén Landrián1 What is opposed to fiction is not the real; it is not the truth which is always that of the masters or colonizers; it is the story-telling function of the poor, in so far as it gives the false the power which makes it into a memory, a legend, a monster. Gilles Deleuze2 What the documentarist cannot fully control is his or her basic subject: history. Bill Nichols3

T

his chapter examines the tension between fictional and documentary registers in three works of early Revolutionary cinema in Cuba. It explores the coincidence of this formal tension with concrete historical tensions borne of the transformations that shape early Revolutionary cultural production. Of particular concern, here, are those moments when this formal tension corresponds to the emergence of marginal subjectivities that often contradicted dominant Revolutionary discourse and that, likewise, disrupted and complicated efforts to represent it. This discussion will consider three emblematic works of the period, chosen for their characteristic display of this tension and its relationship to a marginal subjectivity. Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal’s P.M. (1961) sets up an elite culture’s view upon marginal subjects, which employs a creative mise-en-scène in an attempt to erase its own locus of enunciation.


Chapter 3


DY L O N R O B B I N S

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s seminal Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968) follows P.M. as the film suggests an attempt to pick apart the locus of enunciation that was partially erased in P.M. and exhibits a tension between fiction and documentary that, I argue, formally embodies changing roles for elite intellectuals as the cultural field is transformed. Finally, Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar (From Havana. 1969! Remember, ca. 1969) is a cinematic attempt to represent the dissolution of the divisions between elite and marginal cultures suggested by the first two films as it calls upon the first scenes from Memorias in a collage of footage that questions their putative marginality with respect to the dominant discourse of Revolutionary history. In addressing the fiction-documentary tension in Latin American film, Ana M. López has suggested that the “parodic hybridization” of these genres works on the spectator to “generate new modes of consciousness” as well as to “offer a critical revision of the principal modes of cinematic representation.”4 Although her examination reveals the centrality of the fiction-documentary tension in shaping a film’s reception, and thus its eventual transformation of regional or national imaginaries, I wish to consider here instances in the Cuban context when this formal tension attests to the conditions of a film’s production.5 It is important to foreground the particularity of Cuban cinema in its complex context and how its regional and global subalterity frequently carried within it a local marginalization that complicated official Revolutionary discourse, arguably corresponding to moments in which multilayered tensions between documentary and fiction, history and reality, would engender cinematic aporias embedded formally in these works. My attention here thus focuses on the irregular and shifting interface between elite and marginal cultures as rendered from within Revolutionary cinema, while examining how the fiction-documentary tension accompanies it. In this regard, this discussion brings to its analysis a series of concerns similar to those guiding contemporary discussions of the central problematics of written testimonio, a contemporaneous genre characterized by analogous formal tensions as well as an elite engagement with marginality.6 At stake, then, is the question of a marginal agency in systems of representation that are structured by elite, albeit Revolutionary, cultural institutions. As the appearance of marginality is the focus here, I wish to propose a rereading of these three works in an effort to reexamine their referencing of violence and revolution, disorderly and orderly crowds, monstrousness, and legitimacy and illegitimacy.7 In addition, particular concern is reserved for those moments when the fictiondocumentary tension arises principally through fictional techniques involving the alteration of the historical.8 Thus, this chapter attempts to acknowledge these works as significant and innovative gestures toward a decolonization of national and regional imaginaries, while examining their occasional dependence upon a problematic engagement with locally marginalized cultures, which were seen through the lens of a longstanding elite intellectual tradition. Here, an attempt is made to relate this problematic engagement to the formal characteristics of three central films.


28


E A R LY C U B A N R E V O L U T I O N A R Y C I N E M A

29

A whistled five-note pickup interrupts indistinct guiro sounds and bar banter before cutting to a close-up of a lone conguero accompanying his minimalist rendition of the decades-old danzón “Pepita.” Resonant thumps mark the contours of the embellished melodic line. His checkered shirt and black hands move in time as we cut to high-angle shots of bar patrons, mainly black, others white and mulatto, their jackets and ties, their rumpled felt and twill hats, their cigarettes. A bartender with sunglasses and a sweaty chest talks with another. A cut takes us to a shot of the mirror above the bar, the edge of the Hatuey logo barely visible. Through it, the camera takes a long steady look at the patrons gathered in front of the bar. The camera’s position is not revealed in the reflection, but instead the dozen or so patrons, talking, listening, moving to the music. Some appear to look toward their reflection in the mirror. (To see the camera that sees them? Or to see themselves?) Next, a series of low-angle shots among the patrons, glasses of beer, money changing hands, cigar stubs. The camera centers on a black man in a grey suit just as the whistled intro gives way to the vocalist’s entrance. “Ay, Pepita, no me dejes . . .” The man in the grey suit stops his conversation to dance in place, topping off a few steps with a graceful, half-time turn, arm flexed over head. Patrons wander in front of the camera. The guiro appears. Leaning against the bar, an off-duty cook in a stained white shirt looks on as he exhales smoke through his nose. The moving arms of the man in the grey suit return. Two men converse at the bar, their faces inches apart. “Pues si tú no me quieres, yo me voy . . .” 9 A man claps along enthusiastically as the conguero executes a thunderous roll. Another converses intensely with an uninterested woman. An older woman eats a sandwich and appears to point at the camera right before a quick cut takes us to another patron. A young black man and white woman sit together at a table. The man blissfully pours a beer, while, as the woman drinks, she looks slyly at the camera from over the rim of her glass. She slowly looks away. More shots of the guiro player, stepping feet, and then a woman with long hair and a white dress gestures angrily next to the bar. Shouts erupt, others follow. The music stops. Cuts to patrons speaking animatedly, a hint of drunken swagger. A thin black man is pushed. Others intervene to calm him. The conguero starts up again. This three-minute segment of the documentary P.M. (Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal, 1961) suggests that it is a film about culture and difference, authority and representation. As a documentary, its fictional character is obscured and contentious. The period polemic sparked by this film’s prohibition, for example, called attention to its partiality in representing a popular, marginal space engaged in play and not reflecting the recent efforts of Revolutionary policies, such as social and military mobilization or campaigns to transform an urban, leisure-industry economy into one of sustained material production.10 P.M. bent the truth for its detractors. The fiction of this film, thus, was its omission of these aforementioned aspects of how this space was changing under the guidance of Revolutionary policy. And yet the film’s visual vocabulary and its mise-en-scène reveal a camera


P.M.



point-of-view that is always trying to cover its tracks, in an effort to see, but not be seen. Indeed, it would appear that P.M. sets out to represent a space as if the camera were not there, only to have that attempt challenged and disrupted by the subjects it sets out to capture on film. This other fictional dimension of P.M., that is, the attempted erasure of its locus of enunciation, reveals a film that reflects and responds to period preoccupations with the elite intellectual’s relationship to popular culture and the social space with which it was associated. Here, we shall examine this particular aspect of the fictional character of P.M. in an effort to assess how it embodies the complexities of elite intellectual identification with the popular and the ambiguities of efforts to represent it. In a span of thirteen minutes, the film hastily hops from one bar to another, roving from the Cuatro Caminos area up to the seaside bars of Marianao. In a free-cinema style, a flurry of what would appear to be surreptitiously captured, low-angle shots of popular bar patrons—“workers, loafers, dancers of all sexes and races”—move through the progressive stages of an evening’s diversion.11 The film is visually stifled by patrons wandering in front of the camera and violent contrasts of light. Sound is corrupted conspicuously by a jostled and saturated microphone. The film’s formal imperfections, its active pursuit of a voyeuristic perspective, and the lack of a prevailing, exegetical narrative presence attest to the pretenses of its subgenre to document an “un-mediated” reality. Its formal character, furthermore, suggests a film that seeks dialogue with a cinematic avant-garde, fashioning a text directed toward an elite intellectual public. Except for a final jukebox cameo, each bar sequence features a different popular musician or group ranging from a quartet playing a bolero-guaracha to the inventive percussionist El Chori (Silvano Chueg Echevarría). The foregrounding of music in the film makes audible conversations largely incomprehensible. Tones and their timbres suppress words, fashioning a representation of the popular that is essentialized through the predominance of music. Yet, conversely, music forms a barrier that limits the camera’s inquiry into this space as conversations are shielded from prying ears by the overriding musical presence that dominates in P.M. Music, thus, functions equivocally here: it is both a reductive marker of a space and its protective barrier. Certainly, P.M. renders spaces cast by the logic and currents of leisurely consumption, yet these spaces also intersect a localized social order that favors the popular musician as creator, commentator, and agent of the cultural, instead of the elite intellectual and the type of cultural forms and uses that he or she may promote and defend. Thus, P.M. may provide a view upon marginal cultural institutions with their own corresponding notions of authority. Néstor Almendros’s contemporary critique of the film likewise situates it within a context informed by questions of the intellectual’s capacity to represent this space and to synthesize cultural strata across social boundaries.12 Commenting on P.M.’s intimate proximity with its subjects, he suggests that it demonstrates “un gran amor por el ser humano, por el hombre humilde, por el hombre anónimo y [que] hay amor hasta para el


30


31

pobre borracho desorientado” (“a great love for human beings, for the humble man, for the anonymous man and there is love even for the poor, disoriented drunk”).13 He also notes that P.M. brings together “la música de algunos [heroicos] artistas anónimos del pueblo” who “no pierden nunca el contacto con la raíz popular . . . porque son pueblo ellos mismos” (“the music of a few [heroic and] anonymous artists of the pueblo who never loose touch with [their] popular roots . . . because they themselves are pueblo”).14 His reading of P.M. reveals the ambivalent symbolic currency of the popular musician and his or her workplace during the period. Accordingly it suggests how his or her presence may concurrently evoke associations with the troublesome cabaret reality commonly cited as the impetus for the film’s suppression, and conversely, with the competition an elite intellectual may sense with a popular musician in his or her campaign to act on behalf of the pueblo. In view of this context, the interaction between camera and subject implied by the various cuts and the staging of scenes described above both responds to and attempts to overcome these preoccupations. On one level, it is evident that the use of the camera attempts to insinuate an invisible vantage point from which its subjects are examined. This comes across from the short-duration, low-angle shots and the way the camera attempts to avoid engaging its subjects in sustained eye-to-eye contemplation. The standard critiques of voyeurism’s power disequilibrium certainly apply here.15 This structuring, furthermore, revives while modifying a recurrent paradigm in Cuban intellectual history, namely that of the presumably learned chronicler who renders a marginal, often black, reality for his or her reader.16 In this sense, P.M.’s implicit authority over its subjects rearticulates formally a cultural and historical divide, but by suppressing any explicit commentary or interpretation it works against this same divide and challenges the traditional notion of the intellectual’s engagement with the marginal. In this sense, as well, the hidden vantage point represented in P.M. may also imply a desire to dissolve the difference between viewer and viewed. Singularly emblematic of this ambivalence is the use of the mirror in the segment described above (see figure 3.1), a device that, on one level, functions to hide the camera’s point of view from its subjects, and that, on another, suggests a desire to see and represent oneself as other.17 And yet, it would seem that both of these attempts are complicated and disrupted by subjects that resist representation, as patrons respond to the camera with gestures ranging from an equaled curiosity, defiance or rejection, and a generally indifferent recognition. The patrons make it clear that the presumably elite intellectual viewer is out of place here. Beyond its choice of subjects, the massaging of P.M.’s point of view through editing and mise-en-scène reveals an important fictional dimension of its attempt to document its historical context. The resulting formal tension embodies the concerns of elite intellectuals in their pursuit to represent—both politically and symbolically—the marginal in spaces carefully omitted from dominant discourses on Revolutionary reality.





Figure 3.1 The mirror above the bar in P.M.

Memorias del subdesarrollo A burst of congas and a choral refrain “¿Dónde está Teresa?” 18 accompanies a transition from the visual equivalent of silence to a close-up of a jubilant conguero, his nodding sweaty brow, his blurred hands. A cut takes us to another in the foreground, whose similar movements frame two dancers in the background, facing a public that is blurry but for a few sharply seen pergas of beer, their hips, skirts, and carefully poised hands cyclically marking the pulse of a Mozambique performed by the rhythm’s originator, Pello el Afrokán. Another cut takes us from the stage to the audience, where low-angle and extreme closeups prevent us from orienting ourselves: suits and dresses, arms, the back of a head, now a face, blacks, mulattoes, a few whites. A space opens; a woman with a white hat makes eye contact with us and shows a half-smile. More faces, smiles, bouncing shoulders, then three gunshots. A high-angle shot of the crowd dispersing while the chorus and percussion continue, “Teresa, Teresa.” More faces, more congas. A cadaver lies in blood. The back of a man weaves through the crowd as onlookers contemplate the corpse. Soldiers hoist the victim over their heads and carry him out. Heads, hands, moving arms. Trumpets answer the vocals. Discernible pergas, smiles missing teeth; the festivities continue. We come again upon the woman we saw earlier, only now her half-smile is gone. She challenges us with a defiant stare. A four-second freeze-frame on her face suspends this segment’s closure. Is she our mirror image? Or is she another? Are we part of the crowd? Or are we out of place? These opening shots of Memorias del subdesarrollo (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968) reveal one possible fictionalization of the space rendered in


32


33

P.M. And yet as a fictionalization it calls heavily upon a documentary style, flexing the boundaries between the two tendencies in the film.19 The multiple angles, their editing, and the apparently staged murder depicted, evoke fiction. The event exudes, however, a certain authenticity that suggests documentary. Little suggests, in fact, that that this is not an actual performance by Pello el Afrokán (Pedro Izquierdo). A comparison with some of the documentaries of the period featuring performances by the artist corroborates this interpretation, revealing a similar public, responding with a similar enthusiasm to the charismatic performer and his music.20 The crux of this tension between fictional and documentary registers here rests upon the participation of non-professional actors—not only the public, but also Pello el Afrokán, whose prominence in the period complicates his insertion into this film’s narrative. Gutiérrez Alea has described his experiences working with non-professional actors, citing that, unlike professional actors, their lack of a self-generated artistic vision made it easier for him to have them fulfill his designs.21 It is interesting how this scene, in fact, suggests a critique of that assumption, or how the camera’s gaze falls upon a type of marginal or popular subjectivity that may challenge the premises guiding their representation. Here, we shall revisit Memorias del subdesarrollo, paying particular attention to this scene’s formal ambivalence between fiction and documentary and how this parallels tensions in the period between competing notions of cultural authority and legitimacy. In this regard, Memorias del subdesarrollo calls upon Pello el Afrokán and his crowd as a depoliticized and violent monstrosity to meet the demands of its fictional narrative, while the possibility of their fulfilling that end is complicated by the type of vanguard that they may represent—a vanguard largely imperceptible when evaluated from within the limits of the film. Memorias depicts the transformation of Sergio, a dilettantish intellectual of the high Havana bourgeoisie who is generally dissatisfied with the tendencies of his own class while feeling an ambivalent sense of attraction and repulsion for anything popular. The film follows his moments of reminiscence and his fling with Elena, a young mulatto woman with her own artistic aspirations. All is recounted against a backdrop depicting the strains and shifts within Cuban Revolutionary society, largely introduced through documentary segments and a narration drawn from Sergio’s inner monologue. The film’s open-ended and subtle treatment of its themes generates multiple and often contradictory readings as it disassembles the place of the elite intellectual, a scenario one may generalize from the possibility of the camera in P.M. peering into the mirror to find itself looking back. Pertinent to this discussion is the film’s attention to the tensions between high and low cultures, the role of the elite intellectual at this juncture—issuing critiques, judgments of quality, and prescriptions for cultural legitimacy—and how the Revolution paralleled a crisis of this position as intellectuals of this bent shuffled to redefine themselves in the service of popular classes for whom writers, filmmakers, composers, and the like were arguably of negligible importance. The opening scene of the film sets up this theme from the very





beginning. Moreover, this same scene’s reappearance toward the end of the film—only now with a dissonant composition by Leo Brouwer and with Sergio plainly visible among the dancers viewing the corpse—works to refocus his encounter with Elena in an allegorical mode, as well as to suggest answers to the questions the initial scene posits. Within the fictional world the film represents, we may understand this scene as a view upon a marginal, popular space, premised upon assumptions regarding the popular held by Sergio, specifically its status as retrograde, critically unreflective, and even monstrous and violent. One of the more remarkable aspects to the film is the ambiguity of Sergio’s relation to the social milieu from which it comes. The film’s director and the author of the novel on which it was based, in fact, appear as themselves in the film and, in one case, as a friend of the protagonist, opening themselves up to many of the criticisms the film directs at Sergio. Indeed, the film suggests that its critiques of Sergio’s assumptions regarding the superiority of elite culture to popular culture, and the type of “underdeveloped” mentality the latter reveals, may also apply to the artists behind it. It is this type of aporetic, double bind that makes the film so productive for reflection on the problems it depicts. For this reason, furthermore, we shall recall another essay further on by Gutiérrez Alea to flesh out some of the unspoken context of this scene, in an effort to examine the specificity of using a Pello el Afrokán concert and not another event, and how this character complicates its function in the fictional narrative that contains it. As revealed in polemics of the period, Pello el Afrokán’s detractors felt that his popularity was manufactured and sustained by an organized government media initiative that sought to displace non-Cuban music on the airwaves, creating a local response to Beatlemania.22 As one supporter remarked at the time: “Sus ingredientes nada tienen que ver con expresiones foráneas como el twist, el jazz o el rock. Es cuero a pulso, donde la melodía encuentra lugar . . . ¡y cubano!” (“Its ingredients have nothing to do with those foreign styles like the twist, jazz or rock. It’s pulsating skin, where the melody finds its place . . . and Cuban!”).23 Clear here is a key opposition at work in the national cultural imaginary: a home-grown, popular artist and his percussion-heavy music is seen as the response to the infusion of foreign musics and the diversionismo ideológico that they entailed for certain dominant facets of Revolutionary discourse. The counterpart of this view of popular music was a type of intellectual paternalism that felt that “autochthonous” music and musicians should be protected from the corrupting influences transmitted through these foreign musics, and that elite intellectuals had an obligation to steer this music and the public in the right direction.24 Under these criteria, “national” begins to coincide with “revolutionary,” without much explicit critical reflection on the tensions between these two notions, owing to the fact that the national paradigm at play frequently exhibited the qualities of an ideologically white, patrician republicanism embedded in Cuba’s intellectual tradition since well before the Revolution, which, in turn, conflicted with Revolutionary policies


34


35

attempting to affirm the political agency of populations inherently marginalized by that Republican model.25 In an essay of 1969, Gutiérrez Alea critiques the status of popular music in Cuba and proposes a radically different posture for the Cuban intelligentsia, finishing with what arguably must be an oblique reference to Pello el Afrokán. His intervention revives the tension between these two models—the national and Revolutionary—while seeking to overcome it through culture: A partir del momento en que algunos descubrieron connotaciones imperialistas o contrarrevolucionarias en la música extranjera, particularmente la de procedencia anglosajona, se empezó a poner en práctica el autobloqueo. Nos vimos privados entonces de poder discernir cuáles devenían las posiciones más novedosas, modernas y consecuentes, las tendencias transformadoras más auténticas, las que iban a constituir la vanguardia en el campo musical. Por esas y otras circunstancias coincidentes, nuestra música fue atravesando una fase de desnutrición, anemia y estancamiento que la ha dejado muy mal parada. Cuando se pretendió poner fin a tan estricto autobloqueo, se vio que nuestra música ya no podía colocarse en el mismo nivel que esa otra música que, mientras nosotros no la escuchábamos, había alcanzado un alto grado de desarrollo. A la nuestra, en cambio, le había sucedido lo mismo que a esas familias que viven en lugares recónditos, sin contacto con el resto del país y cuya descendencia monstruosa es el producto de uniones entre padres e hijos, hermanos y hermanas, primos, tíos, etcétera. Nuestra música había sufrido una lamentable involución. Ante ese hecho, esa confrontación [entre la vanguardia política y la artística], se volvió a tener (ahora quizás con justificaciones reales) la trascendencia que podía tener en el espíritu y la conciencia de nuestro pueblo.26 From the moment in which some discovered imperialist or counterrevolutionary connotations in foreign music, particularly that of Anglo-Saxon origin, a self-blockade was put into practice. We then began to see ourselves deprived of the ability to discern which kinds of music were becoming the most novel, modern, and coherent, or the most authentic transformative tendencies, those that would constitute the vanguard in music. For those and other coincidental circumstances, our music went through a period of malnourishment, anemia, and stagnation that has left it in a very sorry state. When an attempt was made to put an end to such a strict self-blockade, it was noted that our music could no longer be placed at the same level as that other music that, while we had not been listening to it, had attained a high level of development. Our music, on the other hand, turned out like those families that live in remote areas, without contact with the rest of the country and whose monstrous descendents are the products of unions between parents and children, brothers and sisters, cousins, aunts and uncles, etc. Our music had suffered a lamentable regression. Faced with this fact, this confrontation [between the political and artistic vanguard], came to have once again (now possibly with real justification) the transcendence that it could have in the spirit and consciousness of our pueblo.



In spite of resorting to a troublesome, naturalist imaginary to describe inaccurately contemporary popular music in Cuba, Gutiérrez Alea, in fact, is 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


proposing a radical departure from the type of paternalistic attitude that sought to “protect” popular music from external forces. By proposing a non-interventionist cultural policy regarding popular music and musicians, Gutiérrez Alea affirms the subjectivity of cultural agents that were traditionally marginalized by elite culture to a supportive role of lending national particularity to works of high culture. Thus, his position is characterized by an interesting ambivalence: on the one hand, popular musicians should be treated as subjects of their own respective discourses, free to dialogue as they wish with a variety of traditions, and yet their present status, according to him, the result of heavy-handed and ill-conceived elite intellectual and political intervention, is monstrous and underdeveloped, a retrograde dimension of national culture out of step with the forward advance of the “true” vanguard tendencies in popular music represented by British or American Rock. A short and unambiguous chain of associations connects the monstrous popular music in Gutiérrez Alea’s essay with that of Pello el Afrokán featured in Memorias del subdesarrollo.27 Arguably, Pello el Afrokán represents a type of cultural vanguard in Revolutionary Cuba that Gutiérrez Alea had difficulty perceiving. Pello el Afrokán was a bold challenge to elite culture as a transparent and robust affirmation of blackness in a public space long governed by laws that sought to restrict and control it or cultural paradigms that sought to mitigate it through a conciliatory transculturation.28 He also posited dance and diversion as revolutionary—and not the folkloristic and institutionally bridled variety, but the disorderly and defiant kind.29 His music complemented a space that challenged both elite culture sensibilities as well as the political vanguard’s designs for an organized and militarized society, and in spite of this he enjoyed considerable visibility and institutional support.30 Similar in scope to the cosmopolitanism of Afro-Antilleanism, yet more explicitly pan-African, anti-Colonial, and Third Worldist, his music represented, furthermore, a challenge in the cultural realm to more Eurocentric notions of cosmopolitism characterized by identifications with either Western or Eastern/Soviet-Bloc traditions. Thus, we may perceive how this scene functions ambivalently both as a fictionalized representation of Sergio’s tinted view on underdevelopment as violent and unpredictable, and as a document of historical tensions contemporary to the film’s production, for it revives and reveals the questions of cultural authority and legitimacy underpinning the period’s cultural transformations, tensions manifest in this film’s formal vacillation between fiction and documentary.


36

Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar The camera zooms in on a poster reading “100 años de lucha,”31 the inner circles of the zeroes traversed by wavy black lines suggesting the cowry shells used by Santeros to look beyond the present. An extreme close-up on the black of the zeroes fades to a montage of details from a panorama of portraits depicting key 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

37

historical figures: Martí, Maceo, Máximo Gómez, Frank País, Jesús Menéndez, Camilo Cienfuegos, El Ché, Toussaint Louverture, Bolívar, San Martín . . . A flash of the dates 1868 and 1968, sounds of applause, the treads of armored vehicles, a gathering of flags and banners in the street, a poster with busts of Marx, Lenin, Fidel, more footage of a military parade, posters commemorating the Cuban victory at Playa Girón, high-angle shots of a massive crowd, and in the background, an aural collage of Fidel’s voice: “qué año nuevo y vida nueva . . .” 32 White screen titles on a black background: “PARA. RECORDAR. 1969.” A photo of Fidel and white doves. Another screen title: “¿VOY BIEN, CAMILO?” 33 More crowds waving hands and banners. A title screen, black on white: “UNA FLOR PARA CAMILO.” 34 The camera zooms in on an image of a white rose as a child’s voice intones: “Una flor para Camilo.” A cut to footage of Fidel’s speech of January 2, 1968: “el más justo nombre de este año, por su característica y por su espíritu, y como tributo de profunda veneración y recuerdo y cariño hacia el heroico comandante Ernesto Guevara, y hacia los heroicos combatientes que con él cayeron . . .” 35 A scene of wreathes marked “A Camilo” 36 passing through the streets toward the sea, young girls with flowers, somber orchestral music accompanies a cut to a wreath floating in the water with sounds of cheers. Another cut takes us to the opening scene of Memorias del subdesarrollo, its familiar congueros, lighting, crowds. It proceeds uninterrupted and verbatim until the title screen: “Memorias del subdesarrollo.” While the image cuts away, the original sound continues: “Teresa, ¿Dónde está Teresa?” 37 Seen in its place, however, is a montage of newspaper headlines: “ASALTADO,” “MONCADA, 48 MUERTOS,” “MAS DE 80 MUERTOS,” 38 images of a younger Fidel. The sound of gunshots from the original scene in Memorias overlaps as the film cuts to another title screen: “CONDENAME, NO IMPORTA, LA HISTORIA ME ABSOLVERA.” 39 The Mozambique refrains: “Te-RE-sa, Te-RE-sa.” Another title screen white on black: “LA HISTORIA.” 40 Thus proceeds a two-minute segment from Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s short documentary Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar (ca. 1969).41 The film critiques the celebration of the “Cien años de lucha” (“One Hundred Years of Struggle”), comprising a century of Cuban history since the grito de Yara of October 10, 1868. As first described in Fidel Castro’s speech commemorating the anniversary, this period advances chronologically with a teleological certainty toward the Revolutionary present, exhibiting a familiar ebb and flow of class antagonisms and vanguard leadership that suggests a reworking of a classical Marxist periodization according to local demands.42 Guillén Landrián’s film, however, questions how this history is rendered by dominant facets of Revolutionary discourse and disrupts its movement with a dizzying formal and thematic complexity. Of primary interest here is the film’s use of fictional segments in complementing its exceptionally dense collage of archival images and sounds. In Desde la Habana, fiction materializes within documentary to create tensions that serve to challenge documentary’s chokehold on the representation of reality and with it the dominant Revolutionary discourse that was its historical analogue.43 As such, Desde la Habana embodies a view from the margins of Revolutionary reality, for





Guillén Landrián ventures into an extra-discursive thematic realm from which he articulates sophisticated critiques of overriding Revolutionary discourse and its notion of History, without resorting to the premises of a freefor-all liberal subjectivity. Here, we shall examine key aspects of this critique and how the fiction-documentary tension facilitates its articulation. Desde la Habana commences with a poignant reflection on the ambivalences of Progress and Modernity that serves to premise this film’s examination of the “Cien años de lucha.” Images of an atomic mushroom cloud’s billowing dispersion initiate the Beatles’ melancholic “Mother Nature’s Son.” What follows is a characteristically syncopated montage of images and intertitles referencing war’s fatalities, the Holocaust, the artificial heart, Girón, Vietnam, space exploration, the moon landing, the KKK, black protestors, a New Orleans parade, and poverty. Images of the mushroom cloud return to close the segment and suggest that History’s march “forward” is anything but self-evident. The montage insinuates, rather, History’s movements both toward and against humanity, as if in the shadow of total annihilation humankind explores and preserves, exterminates and oppresses, suffers, resists and creates. And yet Guillén’s selection of images historicizes these ambivalences by suggesting a context formed from tensions along imperial, national, racial, and social lines. His reflection in this sequence is both universal and particular. Furthermore, as a premise to what follows in the film, it aims to sustain judgment over the teleological certainty of the “Cien años de lucha” announced by Fidel Castro by suggesting that History’s movements are ambiguous.44 In a similar manner to the original speech of 1968, the film invokes the Revolution as a point of departure for a backward glance toward a series of struggles comprising a chronological review of Cuban history. Yet Guillén’s film implies a critique of this historical narrative through the incorporation of themes largely absent from Castro’s speech. Beginning with the proclamation of the Republic in 1902, intertitles announce the years as images come and go in an irregular flow: photos, political cartoons, and magazine and newspaper pages overlaid with radio broadcasts, music, and interviews. Themes within this archival flux are stated and then varied. Images and references to violent political struggle—Mella and Machado, Echeverría and Batista—telegraph the film’s Revolutionary present and serve to signpost the narrative already present in the original speech. The theme of blackness appears, as well, nestled within the cycle of years and decades. Whereas, in Fidel Castro’s notion of the period, Afro-Cubans as a bloc disappear from his narrative after the abolition of slavery, Guillén’s treatment places them as central protagonists in an ongoing process of Cuban becoming giving rise to the Revolution. This is apparent from the opening images onward. Revealing of Guillén’s implicit critique of Fidel Castro’s narrative is the segment entitled “Entrevista con fulana de tal, profesora de La Escuela ‘María Luisa Dols’ para Señoritas” (“Interview with Ms. So-and-so, teacher at the ‘María Luisa Dols’ Girls’ School”), which uses deteriorated images of school children to accompany the voice of an elderly woman: “¿En la escuela? ¿Negrita?


38


39

Ninguna. Que yo sepa. Que yo recuerde. No había ninguna.” (“At school? A black girl? Not one. That I know of. That I recall. There wasn’t a single one”). Meanwhile, punctuated by the trumpet lines lifted from the Memorias segment’s soundtrack, intertitles interrupt: “¿Eh? ¿Y la Guerrita del 12?” (“Huh? And the Little War of 1912?”). This reference to one of the most significant and violent uses of state authority to suppress Afro-Cuban political organization and representation is placed in the film so as to appear to respond to the reflections of the elderly woman recalling the absence of black students in her school as a child.45 Yet they more precisely refer to the absence of this and similar events in the periodization of Cuban history officially forwarded as the “Cien años de lucha” and its trajectory of violent, vanguarddriven political struggle. As such, the questions serve to reveal this film’s critical relationship to that dominant narrative. The segment described at the beginning of this discussion of Desde la Habana is of interest here for it generates a series of questions regarding the nature of this critique, which is further complemented by the use of fictional fragments. In this segment, Guillén Landrián uses images of a pantheon of historical protagonists—Martí, Maceo, Máximo Gómez—to establish the dominant discourse that he sets out to complicate. The transition to the film’s Revolutionary present is marked by images of military parades and references to Camilo Cienfuegos that appear against a sonic backdrop fashioned from fragments of Fidel Castro’s speeches, most prominently that declaring the Year of the Guerrillero Heróico in honor of Che Guevara. Beyond reviving the popular and largely oral history of Fidel Castro’s perceived betrayal of these two, this series of images invokes the notion of the militarized vanguard, which figures centrally in Fidel Castro’s own narration of Cuban history and national consolidation: “Un pueblo integrado, unido, dirigido por un partido revolucionario, partido que es vanguardia militante” (“An integrated, united pueblo directed by a revolutionary party that is a military vanguard”).46 Yet Guillén’s narration in this segment, although thematically coherent until this point, takes an unexpected turn as the opening scenes from Memorias abruptly interrupt the frantic movement of Revolutionary iconography. Bearded, uniformed bodies, weaponry, Fidel Castro’s voice, massive crowds and waving flags gathered in daylight are replaced by the nocturnal scene of festive disorder and anonymous violence initiating Gutiérrez Alea’s film. Most provocative, however, is Guillén’s synchronization of the original scene’s sound of gunshots with archival images of newspaper headlines referencing the failed attack on the Moncada barracks that inaugurated rebel military activity (see figure 3.2). These documentary-like scenes from a fictional film find themselves inserted into a documentary—a documentary within fiction within a documentary. The ambiguities of this fragment’s relationship to the rest of the film multiply uncontrollably and complicate any definitive answers regarding their function, prompting instead only questions: do these scenes from Memorias here serve as a document, another element of an elaborate collage, invoking by association Cuban cinema in general as the cultural analogue of the Revolutionary





Figure 3.2 Moncada headlines seen while Memorias soundtrack is heard in Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar

iconography with which it appears in Guillén’s narrative? Or is it placed to provoke an association between two different spaces, one representing History’s protagonists and another representing its margins? Is it an attempt to equate the anonymous and putatively inexplicable violence of the scene from Memorias with the directed and politically motivated violence that marked the first events of the Revolution? A suggestion that the space represented in Gutiérrez Alea’s film is a constitutive force somehow overlooked in Fidel Castro’s narrative? Or is it just happenstance, a red herring, or a bit of carnivalesque disruption amidst the solemn military march of History? The obliqueness of Guillén’s gesture in inserting the Memorias scenes within a collage of military iconography is redoubled by the film’s explicit stance toward its own ability to see and represent the world around it, a representational authority that is actively undermined by other uses of fictional segments within this documentary. Here this tension works to create a space from which Guillén may articulate critiques while having them muffled by layer upon layer of formal complexity and by calling into question the validity of his own vision from within the limits of the film. Central to undoing the filmmaker’s own authority in this documentary is a humorous photonovel sequence inserted as one of the many tangents within the visual churn of dates and photos. The sequence is comprised of a series of still photos depicting a recorded conversation in which a man relates an anecdote to a woman:


40

“Ves la puerta de la casa de Milagros. Entonces Milagros está parada en la puerta de la casa y ve a un ciego que viene con su bastón. Se dice cuando lo ve: pobrecito. Entonces el ciego, con una sonrisa irónica le dice: ‘Milagros, no hay peor ciego que aquel que no quiere ver.’ Y los dos se ríen: Ja ja ja.”


41

Figure 3.3 The director as blind sequence in Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar

“You see Milagros’ door. So Milagros is standing in the doorway and sees a blind man coming along with his cane. When she sees him she says to herself: poor guy. Then the blind man, with an ironic smile tells her: ‘Milagros, no one is blinder than he who wishes not to see.’ And the two laugh: Ha ha ha.”

Noteworthy are the photos of a bespectacled Guillén Landrián as the blind man that accompany this recorded anecdote (see figure 3.3). Thus, as in Memorias del subdesarrollo, the filmmaker inserts himself into the documentary. In the case of Desde la Habana, however, his presence calls into question his own capacity to see, yet without discarding that possibility entirely, for the photos show him removing his dark glasses as he cracks a knowing smile. Guillén Landrián’s self-positioning between seeing and blindness, documentary and fiction, attempts to embody cinematically the difficulty of his critique’s position, teetering between the mongering of categorical truth on the one hand, and the passive solipsisms of an ultimately narcissistic subjective selfreflection on the other. This formal tension between documentary and fiction here arguably manifests the precarious position of a filmmaker who sets out from the halls of state-sanctioned cultural production to articulate a delicate critique of dominant Revolutionary discourse and its cinematic analogues.



Conclusion The formal encounter of documentary and fictional registers in early Revolutionary film has served to materialize concrete historical circumstances characterizing the period. In P.M., this tension was minimized in an effort to underscore the film’s documentary character. Its presence in the 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

42

film, however slight, becomes a formal embodiment of the transformations in elite intellectual authority and its project to represent the socially marginalized. The attempted erasure of self in P.M. becomes an allegory for the maneuvering of elite intellectual practice in a cultural atmosphere charged with a burgeoning anti-intellectualism. In Memorias, this tension, although a central feature of the film, does not upset documentary’s reign of truth in that it calls upon documentary in an effort to bolster and complement its fictional narrative, while undermining that same possibility through the selection of an authenticity-lending figure such as Pello el Afrokán who acts to subvert his use as a constitutive element of underdevelopment. Guillén Landrián’s treatment, however, appears to question documentary’s dominant role within Revolutionary cinema, offering a daring attempt to unseat its truth value, while challenging as well the place of the marginal in Revolutionary discourse. Notes Many of the ideas discussed here grew from my conversations with Dean Luis Reyes of the EICTV, to whom I am particularly indebted for his openness and enthusiasm for dialogue, culture, and politics. I am also grateful for his generosity in sharing many of the materials consulted in developing these ideas. Many thanks, as well, to Rafael Rojas for his guidance with the Guillén Landrián film I discuss here. Duanel Díaz, Rachel Galvin, and Luis Othoniel Rosa provided insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. Archival research at ICAIC and the EICTV in June–July 2005 and June 2006 was supported by Princeton Latin American Studies and Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies. I would also like to thank Alicia García García for her generous assistance in consulting materials at the Cinemateca at ICAIC. It is important to clarify from the beginning the differences between the term “marginal” in English, and thus my use here, and its implications in Spanish and Portuguese, for that matter. While “marginal” in Spanish and Portuguese becomes synonymous with “criminal” in many cases, in English, this association is not as automatic, generally favoring its implying “not dominant” or of “low qualification,” in short, “not hegemonic.” 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

“Diálogo con Guillén Landrián.” Time-Image, 150. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, 14. López, “At the Limits of Documentary,” 409. My concern here with the conditions of state-sponsored film production takes cues from work on apparatus theory. Although elaborated for a significantly different political context, the notion of the cinematic apparatus is useful here for understanding the centrality of film in subject formation and the reproduction of the conditions of production, which during the early years of the Revolution were arguably an irregular amalgam of pre and postrevolutionary conditions. See, e.g., Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” 6. A diversity of works are included under the banner of testimonio, yet I refer specifically here to those that arise from the encounter of a member of an elite,




7.

8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

43

lettered culture and an other, often marginal subject whose generally oral self-descriptions are incorporated into a written format by a varying series of alterations and arrangements. The best representative of this tendency in the Cuban context is Miguel Barnet’s Biografía de un cimarrón (1966). Central features of this genre include a first-person narration and an erasure or suppression of the writer’s own narrative presence. Hasty criticisms may conclude that the marginal subject is divested of agency in this process, yet careful examination of these works frequently reveal ripples or strains in their textual fabric suggesting how, in fact, these texts operate as the textual embodiment of a contentious and negotiated collaboration between the writer and his or her informant. In this regard, a longer version of this chapter would address the documentary projects of Sara Gómez, Julio García Espinosa’s Tercer mundo, tercera guerra mundial, and Bernabé Hernández’s Sobre Luis Gómez, Superstición, and En provincia, in addition to others by Nicolás Guillén Landrián, for their innovative approaches to the central problems forming the types of cinematic encounters between center and margin that concern me here and that echo the central problematics of written testimonio. For more on testimonio, see Beverley, Against Literature and Subalternity and Representation. In citing these themes I am clearly taking cues from the work of Ranajit Guha while taking into consideration the particularities of these ideas in the Cuban intellectual tradition; indeed, these filmmakers are not forwarding a pro-colonialist venture as are the historians he analyzes, yet they are, in many cases, agents of elite culture seeking to move beyond their bounds through a complex engagement with the marginal and frequently from within an intellectual tradition that had exceptionally ambivalent relationships with the marginal. For more on Guha’s treatment see, e.g., his essay “The Prose of Counter-insurgency.” Furthermore, a concern with questions of marginality within the Revolution demands careful consideration of Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera, which for questions of space limitations has to be omitted from consideration here. Indeed, this problem deserves more attention than I may give it here. For two differing yet central perspectives regarding the role of the filmmaker in shaping a cinematic reality from the raw material of history, see Gutiérrez Alea, “El free cinema y la objetividad” and Guevara, “El único camino culto es el camino de lo real.” For a comprehensive review of the key points of documentary film production, the particularities of how these problems were addressed in the Cuban context, as well as the place of written testimonio in this context, see Chapter 9 (“The Documentary in the Revolution”) in Chanan, Cuban Cinema. “If you don’t love me, I’m going . . .” Although an actual analysis of the film is largely absent from the related bibliography, several scholars offer varying perspectives on the conflict surrounding it, which I will refrain from summarizing here. For more, see: Chanan, Cuban Cinema, 132–136; Luis, “Exhuming Lunes de Revolucion,” 253–283 and Lunes de Revolución; Cancio Isla, “Las revoluciones no son paseos de riviera,” 2–6; Villaça, “O Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos.” Cabrera Infante, “Bites from the Bearded Crocodile,” 5. Almendros, “P.M.” Ibid., 172.





14. Ibid., 173. 15. See, e.g., Laura Mulvey’s use of Freud’s notion of voyeurism and scopophilia in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” 16–19. 16. See, e.g., Julio Ramos’s discussion of Anselmo Suárez y Romero’s chronicle “Ingenios” in “Cuerpo, Lengua, Sujetividad,” 27–29. 17. The mirror scene in P.M., indeed, serves as a cipher for the complex relationship between author and subject in testimonio, when the writer, e.g., attempts to render his or her subject in a first person that belies the actual relationship between the two. Interesting, as well, is how this scene functions as an object through which to explore the limitations of cinematic apparatus theory in the Cuban context and its relationship to ideology, for it is comprised of many of its essential elements: the mirror as an interrupted moment of interpellation, and this film’s provenance as a product of a state-funded, albeit contentious and non-representative, cultural institution. 18. “Where is Teresa?” 19. Consider, e.g., Walter Salles and Eduardo Coutinho’s telling disagreement when commenting on this segment. Salles initially remarks on its documentary-like air. Eduardo Coutinho is quick to counter him, insisting on its clear fictional intentionality. Coutinho, Salles, and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, “Faixa comentada,” Memórias do subdesenvolvimento, DVD, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1968; Rio de Janeiro: Coleção Videofilmes, 2006). These scenes also warrant comparison with Carnaval (1960) that similarly calls upon a street festivities as the backdrop for the tensions between two lovers. 20. See, e.g., Los del baile, directed by Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Havana: ICAIC, 1965). 21. Gutiérrez Alea, “Rebeldes actores de Rebeldes,” 61–62. 22. See the discussion in Orejuela Martínez, El son no se fue de Cuba, 259–261. 23. Cited in ibid., 260. Originally from Bohemia 56 no. 23 (July 5, 1964), n.p. 24. Toward the end of the 1960s, however, with figures such as Leo Brouwer, this perspective would be challenged from within elite culture and, furthermore, from within ICAIC. Yet early in the decade, composer and cultural bureaucrat José Ardévol would argue, e.g., that the role of the intellectual was to “[l]uchar incansablemente contra la adulteración desnaturalizadora de nuestra música popular, rescatando y divulgando los géneros y formas más legítimos de nuestra tradición, sin perjuicio de que también se conozcan y cultiven las más nuevas expresiones que se produzcan en este campo” (“fight without respite the denaturalizing adulteration of our popular music, rescuing and divulging the most legitimate genres and forms of our tradition, without jeopardizing the recognition or the cultivation of the newest expressions in this field”). Ardévol, “La música y su orientación en el presente cubano,” 128. For more on Brouwer’s role and thought, see especially Brouwer, “La música en el cine cubano, un año de experimentación,” 105–111. 25. Rafael Rojas puts it succinctly: “[E]l nacionalismo revolucionario, efectiva mezcla de mitos (el de la «revolución inconclusa»), ideologemas (el de la «justicia social»), símbolos (el de Martí, el de Fidel), no es una invención del castrismo, sino al revés: es un imaginario político, fuertemente impregnado en la cultura colonial y republicana, que facilita el ananke de la Revolución en 1959 y el establecimiento del régimen comunista en 1961” (“Revolutionary


44


26. 27.

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

45

nationalism, effectively a mix of myths (those of the ‘ongoing Revolution’), ideolegems (those of ‘social justice’), symbols (those of Martí, or Fidel), is not an invention of castrismo, but the opposite: it is a political imaginary, intensely steeped in Colonial and Republican culture, which facilitates the Revolution’s ananke in 1959 and the establishment of the communist regime in 1961”). Isla sin fin, 10. For more on the relationship between Cuban intellectual history, Republicanism and the Revolution see especially 188–229. Gutiérrez Alea, “Respuesta a Cine Cubano,” 24. Echoing this association is the photo layout accompanying Gutiérrez Alea’s essay as it originally appeared in Cine cubano, dedicating a page to photos of Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, “Pello,” El Afrocán [sic], and the album cover of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” “Respuesta a Cine cubano,” 25. Some significant work on the question of blackness in Cuba and its relationship to state policy and culture informs my observation regarding the roles of law and transculturation. For more on this question see Helg, Our Rightful Share; Fuente, A Nation for All; and Hagedorn, Divine Utterances, specifically Chapter 6: “Sacred Crimes: Criminalizing the Sacred in Historical Perspective.” Also see Moore, Nationalizing Blackness, especially Chapter 3: “Comparasas and Carnival in the New Republic: Four Decades of Cultural Controversy.” Especially revealing of his posturing as a type of revolutionary musical vanguard was his suggestion to lead an organization of university students down the steps of the university as had others who had struggled to “cambiar . . . el sistema de Cuba” (“change . . . the system in Cuba”). See A. Costa, “Eleggua a nivel de jazz. Afrokán=Mozambique,” Revolución (June 12, 1964), cited in Orejuela Martínez, El son no se fue de Cuba, 254. See Moore, Music and Revolution, 180–185 and Orejuela Martínez, El son no se fue de Cuba, 246, 253–262. “100 years of struggle.” “What new year and new life . . . ” “HOW AM I DOING, CAMILO?” “A FLOWER FOR CAMILO.” “The most important name this year, for his personality and for his spirit, and as a tribute of profound veneration, remembrance, and affection for the heroic comandante Ernesto Guevara, and for the heroic combatants who lost their lives with him . . . ” “To Camilo.” “Teresa, where is Teresa?” “ATTACK,” “MONCADA, 48 DEAD,” “MORE THAN 80 DEAD.” “CONDEMN ME, IT DOESN’T MATTER, HISTORY WILL ABSOLVE ME.” “HISTORY.” For more on Guillén Landrián’s work see the forthcoming Exorcismo del demonio: Para inscribir a Nicolás Guillén Landrián en la genealogía del cine cubano by Dean Luis Reyes. See Castro, “En la velada conmemorativa de los cine años de lucha,” 59–97. In his critique of contemporary Cuban documentary, Reyes cites Santiago Álvarez, Nicolás Guillén Landrián, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea as exceptions to a greater production of documentaries—past and present—characterized by a





problematically unreflexive approach to representing reality (7–19). Comparing Guillén Landrián’s treatment of the “Cien años de lucha” in Desde la Habana . . . with Bernabé Hernández’s comparatively more expository and linear treatment underscores the irreverence of Guillén Landrián’s film. 44. See particularly Castro, “En la velada conmemorativa de los cien años de lucha,” 89. 45. La guerrita del doce commonly refers to the island-wide racially polarized violence of the summer of 1912 in which thousands of Afro-Cubans were summarily executed by government forces and rural militias. The nationwide violence was a response to the mobilization of the Partido Independiente de Color in an effort to attain official recognition for their party. The party resorted to armed protest initially directed toward foreign held properties in the Island. The state response targeted Afro-Cubans en masse, regardless of political affiliation, and was exacerbated by the threat of renewed U.S. occupation. For more on el doce see Helg, Our Rightful Share (“The Racist Massacre of 1912”) and Fuente, A Nation for All, 66–78. Regarding its aftermath see Robaina, El negro en Cuba (“¿Disminuyó realmente la discriminación racial después de 1912?”). 46. Castro, “En la velada conmemorativa de los cien años de lucha,” 90.

Works Cited 1868–1968. Directed by Bernabé Hernández. Havana: ICAIC, 1970. Almendros, Nestor. “P.M.” In Cinemania, by Nestor Almendros, 172–173. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1992. Originally published in Bohemia 53 no. 21 (May 21, 1961). Ardévol, José. “La música y su orientación en el presente cubano.” In Música y revolución, by José Ardévol, 125–128. Havana: Ediciones Unión, 1966. Originally published in Verde olivo 1 no. 1 (March 17, 1960). Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus” [1970]. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader, edited by Philip Rosen, 286–298. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Beverley, John. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. ———. Subalternity and Representation. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Brouwer, Leo. “La música en el cine cubano, un año de experimentación,” Pensamiento crítico, 42 (July 1970): 105–111. Cabrera Infante, Guillermo. “Bites from the Bearded Crocodile,” London Review of Books 3 no. 10 (June 4–17, 1981): 3–8. Cancio Isla, Wilfredo. “Las revoluciones no son paseos de riviera” (Conversation with Alfredo Guevara), La gaceta de Cuba (July–August 1993): 2–6. Carnaval. Directed by Fausto Canel and José Massot. Havana: ICAIC, 1960. Castro, Fidel. “En la velada conmemorativa de los cien años de lucha.” In Discursos: Tomo I, by Fidel Castro, 59–97. Havana: Editorial de Cinecias Sociales, Instituto Cubano del Libro, 1976. Also available in “Discursos e intervenciones del Comandante en Jefe Fidel Castro Ruz, Presidente del Consejo de Estado de la República de Cuba.” http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/. Accessed January 16, 2009. Chanan, Michael. Cuban Cinema. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles. Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.


46


47

Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar. Directed by Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Havana: ICAIC, 1969. “Diálogo con Guillén Landrián,” Bohemia 58 no. 25 (June 24, 1966): 27. En provincia. Directed by Bernabé Hernández. Havana: ICAIC, 1964. En un barrio viejo. Directed by Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Havana: ICAIC, 1963. Fernández Robaina, Tomás. El negro en Cuba: 1902–1958. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1995. Fuente, Alejandro de la. A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in TwentiethCentury Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Guevara, Alfredo. “El único camino culto es el camino de lo real.” In Tiempo de fundación, edited by Camilo Pérez Casal, 90–101. Madrid: Iberautor Promociones Culturales, 2003. Transcription of a recorded commentary made in 1961. Guha, Ranajit. “The Prose of Counter-insurgency.” In Selected Subaltern Studies, edited by Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 45–84. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás. “El free cinema y la objetividad.” In Alea, una retrospectiva crítica, edited by Ambrosio Fornet, 277–83. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 1987, Originally published in Cine Cubano 4 (1961). ———. “Rebeldes actores de Rebeldes,” Lunes de revolución 94 (February 6, 1961): 61–62. ———. “Respuesta a Cine Cubano,” Cine cubano 54–55 (1969): 22–27. Hagedorn, Katherine J. Divine Utterances: the Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. Helg, Aline. Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. López, Ana M. “At the Limits of Documentary: Hypertextual Transformation and the New Latin American Cinema.” In The Social Documentary in Latin America, edited by Julianne Burton, 403–432. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990. Los del baile. Directed by Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Havana: ICAIC, 1965. Luis, William “Exhuming Lunes de Revolucion,” CR: The New Centennial Review 2 no. 2 (Summer 2002): 253–283. ———. Lunes de Revolución: Literatura y cultura en los primeros años de la Revolución Cubana. Madrid: Editoriale Verbum, 2003. Memorias del subdesarrollo. Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. Havana: ICAIC, 1968. Moore, Robin. Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” [1973/1975]. In Visual and Other Pleasures, by Laura Mulvey, 14–26. London: Macmillan, 1989. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. Orejuela Martínez, Adriana. El son no se fue de Cuba: Claves para una historia 1959–1973. Havana: Letras Cubanas, 2006. P.M. Directed by Sabá Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal. Havana: ICAIC, 1961. Ramos, Julio. “Cuerpo, lengua, subjetividad.” In Paradojas de la letra, by Julio Ramos, 23–35. Caracas: Ediciones eXcultura, 1996. Reyes, Dean Luis. Contra el documento. Pinar del Río: Ediciones al Margen, 2004.





Reyes, Dean Luis. Exorcismo del demonio: Para inscribir a Nicolás Guillén Landrián en la genealogía del cine cubano. Forthcoming, author’s manuscript. Rojas, Rafael. Isla sin fin: Contribución a la crítica del nacionalismo cubano. Miami, FL: Ediciones Universal, 1998. Sobre Luis Gómez. Directed by Bernabé Hernández. Havana: ICAIC, 1965. Superstición. Directed by Bernabé Hernández. Havana: ICAIC, 1964. Tercer mundo, tercera guerra mundial. Directed by Julio García Espinosa. Havana: ICAIC, 1970. Villaça, Mariana Martins. “O Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) e a política cultural em Cuba (1959–1991)” PhD diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2006.


48


Cuban Documentary: Synergy and Its Discontents Alexandra Anderson

T

he documentary boom that has swept over so many parts of the world has offered us an interesting opportunity to consider documentary’s specific formal and theoretical development. Concurrent with documentary’s growing popularity, or intrinsic to it, has been a noticeable shift in the philosophical parameters of the genre. Central to this shift has been a questioning of the nature of documentary’s “truth claims.”1 As an interpretive, image-based form, documentary’s relationship to what it films is mediated. Yet it is documentary’s “truth claims” that separate it from fiction. For theorists, how these truth claims work has been the focus of most of their writing on documentary.2 A postmodern skepticism that challenges the very notion of the “real” has encouraged new modes of expression and the exploration of new themes. Synergies between documentary and fiction have caught the imagination of practitioners and the attention of critics. Writing about new documentary, Linda Williams argues that “documentary is not fiction and should not be conflated as such. But documentary can and should use all the strategies of fiction construction to get at truths.”3 The examples she uses, films such as The Thin Blue Line (1988), Roger and Me (1989) and Capturing the Friedmans (2003), have won audiences around the world and intrigued critics at the same time. For its part, the audience has become alert to the mediated nature of representation in the genre and has begun to challenge the claims documentary makes to a discrete epistemological terrain. As Williams writes, “it has become an axiom of the new documentary that films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing truths—the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events.”4 Cuba is an interesting case in reverse, as it has not experienced such a boom in documentary. In fact, critics and filmmakers have spoken for years of a crisis in Cuban documentary.5 To understand the factors—both material and political—that have led to this anomalous state of affairs, I will be considering the views of Cuban filmmakers gathered from interviews I have


Chapter 4


ALE X ANDR A AND ERSON

conducted, and from a round-table discussion held in Havana in March 2006, convened specifically to discuss this “crisis” in Cuban documentary. From a scholarly point of view, the relative decline of Cuban documentary is of interest because, since its earliest days, the Instituto Cubano de Arte y Industria Cinematográfica (The Cuban Institute for Art and Cinema, ICAIC) has encouraged formal innovation and synergies between documentary and fiction: exactly the factors that in other parts of the world have been credited with fuelling this documentary boom. I will suggest that this decline in Cuban documentary can be traced back to the theoretical positioning of documentary within the main frame of Revolutionary cinema. However, beyond a general sense of institutional failure, one can detect a flowering of independent documentary and, at the end of the chapter, I will be considering two representative videos: Humberto Padrón’s Los zapaticos me aprietan (1999) and Haori Chiong’s Re-jau-la (2006). One aspect of the crisis in documentary has been economic: during the “special period” of the early 1990s, the stockpile of East German raw, blackand-white, 35-mm film that had been used to shoot the weekly newsreel, the institutional backbone of documentary production, was finally depleted and no foreign currency was available to purchase more. Refitting the infrastructure of the newsreels to enable video production was seen as too expensive. Also, working on video could be seen to encroach or overlap the newsgathering and documentary efforts of Cuban television. (Historically, ICAIC had managed to maintain an arms-length relationship with Cuban television, while the latter has aligned itself more closely with a party-specific agenda.) However significant, these practical, economic factors were never raised during the round table discussion convened during ICAIC’s 5ta Muestra de Nuevos Realizadores (Fifth Annual Symposium of Young Filmmakers) held in Havana in March 2006, and chaired by critic and theorist Joel Del Río. Instead, the discussion, which included veteran filmmakers Rebeca Chávez, Daniel Diez and Jorge Luis Sánchez, centered on the institutional and political obstacles impeding young documentary filmmakers. ICAIC’s role in promoting and supporting documentary came under critical scrutiny. The centrality of ICAIC’s role in documentary production has deep historical roots. In the intellectual ferment that surrounded the founding of ICAIC, documentary and fiction were both expected to apply new thinking and to experiment with revolutionary aesthetics, engaging the audience in a way that reflected the new social order. Santiago Álvarez described cinema as “not an extension of revolutionary action. Cinema must be revolutionary action itself.”6 The writer and poet Pedro Sarduy called film “the art medium of revolution and action.” He saw filmmaking as “the most faithful expression of culture of the twentieth century—best suited to record the continual development of a radically changing social process.”7 In their efforts to invent a cinematic language that would support and advance the Revolution, Cuban filmmakers had to engage with a process of deconstruction and recombination. As Julianne Burton described it, prior to the Revolution, Cuban cinema screens had been used “as a vehicle of historical falsification” through a steady


50


51

flow of American or Americanized films.8 After the Revolution, film was given the transformative task of undoing this process of alienation created by years of colonization and underdevelopment. Experiments with form and content emerged in an organic fashion as filmmakers searched for a new cinematic language that would adequately reflect the Revolutionary reality. Some key examples of these experiments would include Julio García Espinosa’s Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin (The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin, 1967), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias de subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), Manuel Octavio Gómez’s La primera carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete, 1969), and Una pelea cubana contra los demonios (A Cuban Fight against Demons, 1971), again directed by Gutiérrez Alea. The expectation was clearly that both documentary and fiction would develop apace and at the outset documentary seemed to be leading the way. Filmmakers were drawn to the immediacy of documentary simply as a means to record the dramatic events and daily social upheavals that were part of the establishment of the Revolution. Documentary was also more economically viable and more ideologically suitable. In a society based on Marxist-Leninist principles, it was seen as appropriate for film to engage in a confrontation with material reality.9 This engagement with reality included the production of a weekly newsreel. Although many of the newsreels were straightforward documents of official events, some, particularly those made by Álvarez himself, transcended the temporal limits of the genre to stand on their own as audacious and innovative examples of the documentary form. Others captured the historical moment elegantly and evocatively, bearing witness to the day-to-day struggles of building socialism.10 The newsreels not only served to create an audience for non-fiction film, but the subjects addressed, and the artistry with which some were made, galvanized ICAIC’s engagement with reality-based images and kept documentary front and center of ICAIC’s output. The weight of this history sits heavily on the shoulders of the postrevolutionary generation of filmmakers, gathered in Havana for the round-table discussion. Jorge Luis Sánchez described it in this way: Yo pienso que para hablar del documental en Cuba no se pueden idealizar los contextos e indudablemente el ICAIC marcó muchísimo la manera de hacer documentales en Cuba y esas épocas gloriosas que constantemente estamos mencionando, tienen su especificidad, a partir de lo que el contexto le fue aportando a la realidad cubana, sin embargo, obviamente que se hicieron muy buenos documentales en esas épocas, pero yo creo que estas búsquedas se fueron agotando.11


C U B A N D O C U M E N TA R Y

I think that when talking about documentary in Cuba, the context cannot be idealized. Undoubtedly, ICAIC defined the way of making documentaries and the glorious eras that we are constantly referring back to had their specific characteristics and these were made in a particular context. And while many very good documentaries were made in these times, linked to a particular reality, that route has now been exhausted.


52


no pocos documentales que se hacen en la década de 1980, desde mi punto de vista, realmente fueron documentales hechos desde un gran mimetismo, copiándose muchas veces dentro de ellos y al final desde mi punto de vista y como esto es una discusión, me gusta provocar, bajo el denominador de documentales bastante tontos; yo estaba trabajando en el ICAIC en un departamento fundamental para los documentales y recuerdo que se hacían alrededor de 56 documentales, estoy hablando de mediados de la década de los 1980, antes del proceso de rectificación, que fue en el 1986, y estos documentales que se hacían sobre artistas plásticos, sobre la música, todos estaban hechos con la misma formula, y hoy en la actualidad, sí tienen un valor, es el valor del testimonio de una figura, pero son documentales donde el conflicto no existe, todo el mundo tocaba bien el piano, todo el mundo cantaba bien, todo el mundo pintaba bien, no había conflicto.12 Not just a few documentaries filmed in the 1980s were made with a large dose of mimicry, copying each other and—as this is a debate, I’m going to be provocative—to the point were standards were lowered to a silly level. I was working in a department in the ICAIC and I remember we made around fifty-six documentaries. I’m talking about the mid-1980s, before the process of rectification which took place in 1986, and those documentaries that were made about plastic artists, about musicians, were all made with the same formula. And if they have any value today it is the value of the account given of a particular figure, but they were documentaries where everyone played the piano well, everyone sang well, everyone painted well, and there was no conflict.

The 1980s was a critical decade for Cuban documentary. Enrique Colina, film critic, teacher and documentary maker, described the trajectory in these terms: Documentary film in the 60s until about the mid-70s is well known because there was a lucky sense of identity among the filmmakers and the process that was happening. . . . Since the 70s when the Revolutionary project was no longer a dream, but a factual reality; when the process of critical analysis was initiated; then we addressed the issues that weren’t working well. Films that later pass to another level, where the individual plays a more important role were in the 80s. In the 90s there is a critical situation that affects the productive base of Cuban film. Documentary film practically disappears.13

In regard to the lack of conflict or argument as raised by Sánchez, Colina says:


Sánchez also implied that a critique of this glorious past is long overdue:

The official pretension regarding the image of reality is that it wants to be complicated and not superficial. That is an aspiration that might allow for internal criticism of the things that happen . . . There are definitely many problems but what is wanted is to show a critical reality but complex and with problem solving . . . but you have to keep your feet on the ground . . . I also think it has to do with self-censorship because every society knows what it can and can’t talk about, even if there aren’t any written rules or laws. It is the same here as in the rest of the world.14


53

The Cuban context has its own particularities, however. Michael Chanan writes: “Politics in Cuban cinema is not a subtext that either the filmmaker or the critic can include or leave out; it is the inevitable and ever present intertext of the aesthetic, and its constant dialogue with the political.”15 This dialogue was informed by key theoretical texts. Julio García Espinosa, one of the founding filmmakers of ICAIC and most recently, the director of the international film school in San Antonio de los Baños in Havana Province, began formulating the ideas expressed in his seminal essay “For An Imperfect Cinema” at a time when the country was swept up in an ideological fervor in an effort to reach the production target, set by Castro, of 10 million tons of sugar cane by 1970. He wrote: imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of self-sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which “beautifully illustrates” ideas or concepts which we already possess.16

The essay is written in a polemical spirit; García Espinosa was addressing revolutionary filmmakers everywhere but specifically his own filmmaking community, arguing that in order for film to be transformative it had to include the process of transformation in the film itself and in the viewing experience (even if this included challenging official discourses). He made no distinction between documentary and fiction, as “Imperfect Cinema can make use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both. These questions are indifferent to it.”17 This theoretical indifference to the distinction between fiction and documentary was reflected institutionally within ICAIC. Though documentary was housed in a separate unit, filmmakers were expected to cross over between documentary and fiction throughout their careers. In practice, documentary became a stepping-stone to fiction filmmaking. This institutional relegation of documentary was mentioned by several participants at the round table. Rigoberto Jiménez spoke for many of the young filmmakers when he said: yo llegué a la realización del documental un poquito después, ¿no?, que Rebeca, que Jorge Luis, y no llegué aquí precisamente a través del ICAIC . . . pero yo parto, entre una de las cosas que están afectando la realización del documental, es esa misma confusión que se creó desde no sé cuándo, de que el documental era un paso para el realizador para hacer ficción, o sea, la mayoría de edad del realizador se tenía en cuenta a partir de que estaba preparado, después de haber hecho tantos y tantos documentales, para hacer una ficción.



I came to documentary a little later than Rebeca and Jorge Luis, and not exactly via the ICAIC, but I share—among other things that are affecting documentary filmmaking—the same confusion which began I-don’t-knowwhen, that documentary is simply a passage to fiction and a filmmaker would be ready to make a fiction film after making lots and lots of documentaries.



The newsreel division, specifically, served as a training ground for fiction filmmaking. Internationally acclaimed fiction filmmakers, such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Pastor Vega and Fernando Pérez, all began their careers making documentary newsreels. This encouraged a synergy between documentary and fiction that is evident in many of the early films. Manuel Octavio Gómez’s Historia de una batalla (Story of a Battle, 1961) is a wonderful example of a fiction eye on a documentary subject. Gutiérrez Alea’s films Hasta cierto punto (Up to a Certain Point, 1982) and Memorias de subdesarrollo combine documentary images and vérité aesthetics within a fictional narrative. Gutiérrez Alea often talked about the relationship between the two forms. In an interview he gave Zuzana Pick in 1979, he described it in this way: we find in the integration of the two styles a way of approaching reality. It has therefore become a very natural and organic fact of Cuban revolutionary cinema. One can play with various levels of approaching reality with the same film. And the confrontation between those levels, the relationship between them is very productive and throws much light on the analysis one wishes to do. We think this cannot be treated as a formula, nor as a style, but simply as an attitude.18

Though I am not attempting an exhaustive study of Cuban documentary here, a survey of the documentary output after the Revolutionary effervescence of the 1960s had waned suggests that fiction benefited to a much greater extent from this “integration of the two styles” than did documentary. Apart from Santiago Álvarez, very few notable stylists of the documentary form emerged and if they did, filmmakers such as Manuel Octavio Gómez, Pastor Vega (Hombres de cañaveral, 1965), and Octavio Cortázar (Por primera vez/For the First Time, 1967) went on to establish their reputations as fiction filmmakers. Very few filmmakers found their creative home in the non-fiction mode and those who did, filmmakers such as Rebeca Chávez and Mayra Velasís, often expressed an overtly sentimental and overly dramatized view of documentary.19 Gutiérrez Alea published his own theoretical prescription for Revolutionary cinema in an essay titled “The Viewer’s Dialectic,” the publication of which, in 1982, preceded his most documentary-like film, Hasta cierto punto. In his treatise, Gutiérrez Alea calls on film to “push spectators into the path of truth, into coming to what can be called a dialectical consciousness about reality.”20 At this point it is interesting to speculate to what extent this treatise is actually addressed to the forces of reaction and censure in Cuba. The script for Hasta cierto punto had not flowed smoothly through ICAIC’s approval’s process, as it was a much looser document than was usually allowed. During the period in which Gutiérrez Alea was pursuing approval, ICAIC’s level of production had been severely cut back with only ten fiction films produced between 1976 and 1982.21 Gutiérrez Alea’s own career, while celebrated internationally, had many fallow periods and one such period resulted in the publication of this treatise. His theoretical arguments, together with those of García Espinosa and the films that sprang from these ideas, established a legitimacy for the


54


55

notion of a dialectical relationship between text and context, and form and content, which—on one hand—prevented the worst excesses of Stalinist socialist realism and—on the other—allowed for a political and social critique to be embedded within the films produced. Both Gutiérrez Alea and García Espinosa were delineating the political role of film, not as a crude tool of propaganda, but as an agent to promote social and political consciousness. Both saw the intrinsic, essential nature of film as working politically but remaining independent of the day-to-day politics of postrevolutionary Cuba. While García Espinosa included documentary in his prescription, Gutiérrez Alea’s treatise, written twenty years later, contained an implied critique of documentary: The images of the Revolution have become ordinary, familiar. . . . [W]e find it no longer sufficient just to take the cameras out to the street and capture fragments of that reality. If filmmakers want to express their world coherently, and at the same time respond to the demands their world places on them, they should not go out armed with just a camera and their sensibility but also with solid theoretical judgement. They need to be able to interpret and transmit richly and authentically reality’s image.22

But “transmitting richly and authentically reality’s image” was much more problematic for documentary than for fiction. Around the world, documentary has had a more confrontational relationship with “the official version” than fiction has and Cuba is no exception. Indeed, control of information has been a marked feature of the regime and dissension has generally not been tolerated. Juan (Pepé) Padrón, a newsreel producer and documentary filmmaker, described the engagement with state censorship in this way: The mechanism was that in the first week the newsreels were shown in all of Havana’s theatres. At the time, in all of Cuba there were 500 or more theatres and in Havana, well there were lots. Sixty copies of the newsreel were made. By the eighties it was down to twenty. So those copies circulated first in the theatres in the capital and then through the rest of the country in a time period of two or three months. Some of these newsreels were pulled after three days. Others they left in order not to create a problem. They left them to finish the cycle in the theatres in the capital but then they didn’t circulate them through the farmland of the country.23



There was no official state censor in Cuba but a newsreel could upset a factory manager or party official and a film would be pulled. Padrón recounted how at a congress of journalists his particular investigative approach was challenged by a print journalist. According to Padrón, Fidel refused to condone a blanket censure. Referring to specific newsreels made by Padrón and pulled by state officials, Fidel reputedly commented: I had to agree with the decision to remove from the screen those newsreels that you are talking about, but if there is something I should say here in public


56


it is that you can’t silence a journalist because a journalist is telling the truth. The only observation and critique that I would say to the journalist is that they tell the truth about reality with great crudity. But the people speak the way he shows it. So you can’t silence him.24

There was a documentary newsreel that tried to reflect and experience what the 1970 harvest was going to be. It begins in a very interesting way. With a hidden camera, they film the anger in the line-up for bread. So the police arrive and there is a cameraman who is arrested and all of this was filmed with the hidden camera. That was extremely interesting. At the time, this was unheard of. But what happens is that while the film satisfies reality, text is then superimposed that says, “No hay . . . No hay” (“There is none, there is none”). So the people said, “Wow, they finally showed it,” but it also said there wasn’t prostitution, there wasn’t unemployment. So then the contradictory dialogue was telling them, you guys are protesting because there isn’t any bread but at the same time there isn’t unemployment. Which is another truth, because our reality is very complex.25

The issue of censorship, particularly in the earliest days of ICAIC, must be understood in the context of redefining the role of the artist within Revolutionary society. One film, “confiscated” by ICAIC in 1961, emphasizes this point dramatically. It became a cause célèbre for opponents of the regime but I discuss it here because the events surrounding this film have had profound ramifications for Cuban documentary up to the present day. The film was Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s P.M., a fifteen-minute documentary shot in a free-cinema style. The film depicted life around the Havana harbor under the cover of darkness. Made independently, P.M. was shown on television in early 1961. The filmmakers approached ICAIC for a license to show it in movie theatres, but ICAIC, surprised that the film had been made at all, refused the license and “confiscated” the film. As Chanan argues, the treatment of this short, “amateurish” film has more to do with the political realignment of a young Revolution than a systematic attempt to censor criticism or opposition.26 The film’s supporters were a group of disgruntled intellectuals aligned with the magazine Lunes. The producers took their protest all the way to the government’s Cultural Council and a meeting was convened, with Fidel Castro in attendance. It was at this meeting that Castro delivered what became known as “Las Palabras a los Intelectuales” (“Words to the Intellectuals”), ending his speech with the oft-quoted diktat, “dentro la Revolución todo; contra, nada” (“within the Revolution everything, against it, nothing”).27 Castro’s words must be interpreted as an endorsement of ICAIC’s vision of Revolutionary cinema (while appeasing the right-wing elements already present in the political leadership). This interpretation is reinforced when one considers that, since then, state censorship has been overt only on very


Padrón described a colleague’s newsreel that he felt addressed Fidel’s prescription in practice:


57

rare occasions. But at what cost did this endorsement come? Ostensibly, the content of P.M. was the source of controversy but, in fact, the legitimacy of the form of the film, made as it was in a free-cinema or direct-cinema style, was also challenged by the film’s confiscation. Elsewhere, the emergence of direct cinema and free cinema reinvigorated documentary. Free cinema in Britain and cinéma direct in French Canada were seen as a reaction to the model set up by John Grierson. Direct cinema, as it became known in the United States, presented alternatives to the formal prescriptions imposed by Grierson, such as the voice-of-God narration, the need for epic themes and the centrality of the rhetorical construction. Most significantly, it challenged Grierson’s notion of documentary “truth” as absolute: truth was no longer in the argument of a documentary; it was now in the evidence. At the same time, the formlessness of direct cinema tended to keep it away from overtly political themes to focus on the observation of human behavior. With regard to P.M., the political climate in Cuba at the time did not allow for the challenge to documentary’s truth claims that direct cinema presented. Alfredo Guevara, the director of ICAIC at the time, spoke of the heightened political atmosphere following the sabotage of the Belgian tanker in the Havana Harbor in June of 1961. He told Chanan, “We knew through our intelligence services that we were going to be invaded. So there were the mobilizations of the people, the creation of the militia, there appeared a film that did not reflect any of this.”28 But even without these contextual circumstances, one can see why direct cinema techniques might not fit with the notion of Revolutionary cinema. Gutiérrez Alea had critiqued the free cinema movement in an article in Cine Cubano, prior to the P.M. affair. In that article, he wrote: “all attempts to portray reality while avoiding judgment on it, are dud. Sometimes this leads to half-truths, which can be more immoral than a complete lie.”29 Direct cinema’s naïve claim to present “objective,” unauthored truth contradicted the notion of imperfect cinema and the expressed role of film in the deconstruction and recombination of Cuban history. In a second essay entitled “Meditations on Imperfect Cinema . . . Fifteen Years Later,” García Espinosa clarified his position in regard to pure expression in cinema, something to which direct cinema practitioners aspired. He wrote: “art is essentially a disinterested activity, but if we’re in a phase when we have to express interests, then let’s do it openly and not continue to camouflage it.”30 For García Espinosa, documentaries at the service of a political agenda were imperfect, but essential, for Cuban Revolutionary cinema. The self-effacing nature of direct cinema did not fit this model. Jesús Díaz’s 55 hermanos (1978) is a good example of a Cuban documentary that does use observational techniques. The documentary follows the first visit to Cuba of the Brigada Antonio Maceo, a group made up of men and women who, as children, had been taken out of Cuba by their parents at the beginning of the Revolution. Enrique Pineda Barnet’s David (1967), about Frank País, incorporated cinéma vérité techniques and the dramatic structure of direct cinema, according to Chanan, was used in an attempt to





avoid the hagiographic tones of a hero’s biography; a review in Cine Cubano, however, criticized the passivity of its structure.31 Yet neither of these films prioritize the evidentiary power of the images over the rhetorical construction, a key characteristic of direct cinema but one that Revolutionary cinema could not adopt. The ideologues at ICAIC had been successful in negotiating a critical space for fiction filmmaking; they drew documentary into a general conception of Revolutionary cinema, in part to protect the form from state interference. But ICAIC’s institutional umbrella seemed to require of documentary a formal conservatism that celebrated the universality of (Revolutionary) film language, that in turn, drew documentary more and more toward fiction until it became itself fictionalized. By this I mean almost the opposite of synergy. The term synergy implies a dialectical engagement of two discrete forms, ideas, etcetera, to produce a new cinematic form. But fictionalized documentary in the Cuban context relied heavily on an appeal to sentiment, to nostalgia, itself already rose-tinted, through the use of music or reenactments that served to erode if not elide the evidentiary and indexical force of documentary. In fact, this type of Cuban documentary lost its indexical relationship to reality completely by its inability to acknowledge the reality of its audience. This was achieved by favoring documentary subjects that celebrated exceptional Cubans (all those who played the piano well, to echo the words of Jorge Luis Sánchez) or by looking back to a distant, often prerevolutionary past. The documentaries of Rebeca Chávez, the sole female filmmaker within the ICAIC “establishment,” fall into this category. But at the 5ta Muestra de Nuevos Realizadores, she offered her personal perspective: cuando desaparece el noticiero y empiezan a hacerse cada vez menos documentales y sobrevienen los años ‘90 . . . , se produce el crack, n[o] se siguen haciendo documentales en cine y por otra parte tampoco se aborda la realidad, deja de abordarse, . . . nos inclinamos hacia los documentales culturales, los documentales sin conflicto o con conflictos menores. When the newsreel disappears and fewer and fewer documentaries are being made, and the ‘90s happen . . . , there’s the break, documentaries aren’t produced for cinema anymore, and at the same time reality isn’t tackled, it stops being tackled, . . . we start leaning toward cultural documentaries, documentaries without conflict or with insignificant kinds of conflict.


58

In contrast, Sánchez, a filmmaker from the generation that came after Chávez, defended those filmmakers who took on difficult realities: en medio de un país donde la prensa es tan mojigata, es cierto que a veces el documental se enrolla, se pierde tratando de expresar las manchas de la sociedad que al final eso también son ejercicios para hacer un buen documental. In a country where the press is so sanctimonious, at times documentary gets into a knot, gets lost trying to show the black marks of society because this is, after all, a part of the practice of making documentaries.



59

Joel del Río parsed out the particularly Cuban contradiction within the Cuban documentary stance in this way:

There are those who exercise a certain thematic opportunism, saturating and overloading their work with “hot” topics such as relations between homosexuals, mentally imbalanced street people, the homeless or the inertia of the rural communities, all of which become familiar themes during these festivals.

Further on in the discussion he stated: Hay una diferencia entre el compromiso con la realidad y el compromiso con el pasaporte, son dos cosas distintas y con el festival internacional, que me va a dar un aplauso, o un premio, porque toqué un puntico tremendo. There is a difference between the commitment to reality and a commitment to a passport. Those are two different things, and a commitment toward making films for international festivals where I get applause or a prize, because I’ve touched upon a poignant topic.

The dichotomy inherent in this “thematic opportunism” can be understood as an aspect of the postcolonial experience throughout Latin America. In the Cuban case, however, there is an added layer of conflict whereby the Revolution, embodied by the State, is genuinely both the other and the self. The choice for documentary makers in Cuba is to identify with the Revolution as the oppressed or as the oppressor. No one at the round table suggested there was an easy answer. During the discussion, the phrase icaicentrismo was used several times. The phrase referred not simply to a house style but a house attitude akin to a provincialism that, I argue, has contained documentary’s formal and political development. Ian Montaña, a filmmaker from Camaguey, in the south-eastern part of the country, offered this definition: “a mí me parece que estamos hablando en términos de socialización de la institución y de cómo esta institución de alguna manera se reconcentra en sí misma” (“I think that what we’re talking about is the socialization of the institution and about how this institution focuses in on itself”). Montaña described what he saw as a reaction to icaicentrismo: “muchos de nosotros aunque estamos formados por el ISA [Instituto Superior de Arte] o otras instituciones, hacemos los trabajos de una manera independiente porque quizás preferimos no molestar o tener un control más absoluto de lo que estamos haciendo” (“many of us, although we trained in the Higher Institute of Art or other institutions, work independently because perhaps we prefer not to


Igualmente ocurre con quienes intentan garantizar la validez de su obra a partir del oportunismo temático y entonces, abundan y saturan los temas “calientes” como la relación entre los homosexuales y la sociedad, los locos callejeros, los vagabundos, la inercia de las comunidades rurales—todo lo cual nos resulta muy familiar en estas muestras.



cause problems or to have a greater degree of control over what we are doing”). Marina Ochoa offered this distinction: “el documental crítico ha pasado a ser patrimonio de los jóvenes realizadores y el documental complaciente, el documental cultural ha ido a pasar a ser patrimonio de las instituciones” (“the critical documentary has become the preserve of young filmmakers and the indulgent documentary, the cultural documentary, has become the preserve of the institutions”). Another young filmmaker, Alejandro Ramírez, told his audience: “yo creo que los jóvenes documentalistas cubanos tenemos que pensar en una palabra a la cual muchas veces le tenemos miedo y es que ante todo tenemos que ser documentalistas revolucionarios” (“I think that young Cuban documentalists need to think about a word which often makes us afraid, and that is that, before anything else, we are Revolutionary filmmakers”). Two young filmmakers who represent what Ramirez is calling for are Humberto Padrón and Hoari Chiong Muñoz. Padrón’s Los zapaticos me aprietan (1999) preceded his Video de familia (2001), for which he won the Coral for best short fiction at the Havana Festival of New Latin American Cinema that year. Made while still a student at the ISA and only six minutes long, Los zapaticos is a series of speeded-up images of people’s feet: walking, dancing, and standing in a variety of footwear. The images are inter-cut with the boots of soldiers marching. A pattern is established with this inter-cutting, with text added to what becomes the repeated image of the slowed-down step of one soldier’s boot. The rhythm of this cine-poem is supported in the sound track by a modern jazz rendition of the March of the 26th of July Movement. With the variety of footwear depicted, from shiny patent leather high heels, to American-style trainers and broken down sandals, Padrón is pointing to the social stratification of modern-day Cuba. The narrative arc of the film travels from a celebration of life in all its variety to a more aggressive, demanding tone with young people bouncing in a Cuban mosh pit, to end in shoeless poverty and inactivity. The boots of the soldiers contain and dominate the social and physical movement of the population. Padrón intercuts these images with politically loaded intertitles that add to the poetic effect and raise the film beyond simply an expression of youthful rebellion. The use of the text is reminiscent of Álvarez’s style, as is the syncopation of music and image, but the voice of the film—its sharp, political critique delivered with black humor and a demonstrable affection for Cuban life—is resonant of Gutiérrez Alea. For example, after the phrase “Gobernantes indeseables,” Padrón cuts to a series of people on bicycles, but the images have been reversed so everyone is pedaling backward. Within the irony of the text there is a glimmer of hope for the possibility of change, though this is challenged by the sounds of a crowd chanting “Cuba Sí, Yanqui No” in the closing minutes of the film. The final image, held longer than the rest, is of the Havana skyline: a short wall in the foreground, as an army boot enters and dominates the final frame. A thunderstorm drowns out the chanting.


60


61

What is interesting for our purposes is that Padrón clearly positions his art-school contribution to Cuban cinema in dialogue with the output of the state film institution. He opens his video with a quote from Alfredo Guevara, founder and long-time director of ICAIC, “No hay vida adulta sin herejia sistemática” (“There is no adult life without systematic heresy”), reminding his elders of the Revolutionary tradition of which he considers himself part. He follows that with a quote of his own: “Those at the front go far if those at the back do not have good shoes.” On the surface, this serves as an introduction to the social critique that follows but it could also be interpreted as a comment on the privileged position and reactionary effect of the ICAIC establishment. Since the making of this video, Padrón has continued to work outside the walls of ICAIC and continued with his guerrilla filmmaking aesthetic. His most recent film, Frutas en el café (2005) was the first independent feature made in Cuba and the first full-length feature shot on mini-dv, an amateur gauge digital video format. Hoari Chiong Muñoz’s Re-jau-la (2006) is a less cryptic work and lighter in tone, though it too delivers its own critique of Cuban cinema within a wider political commentary. Like Padrón, a graduate of ISA, Chiong begins his video with a clip from what appears to be an old documentary, shot in black-and-white and made in the best didactic tradition: a presenter beseeches “those who walk in Havana to guard the memory and preserve the beauty of the architecture.” The video then launches into an animated titled sequence where dancing text provides an explanation for the title: Re-jau-la is an amalgam of reja (bars) and jaula (cage). The sound track, taken from interviews on the street, provides definitions and purposes for cages and bars. The pacing and style of the documentary is in the best video clip tradition, as established by Santiago Álvarez. The opening music is a Latin rendition of “Hava Nagila,” a direct reference to Álvarez, who used the song in his film Now (1965). While the music encourages a fast pace, the rhythm of the film is carried by the voices of the people on the street. They speak quickly, sometimes in a street code, using humor to make their points. One segment filmed in a central marketplace, where animal cages are built and sold, is subtitled as even a native Cuban audience might not understand a man saying “ay mi madre/nos an cogio a nosotros/pa estos . . ./nos vamoa volver aquy,”32 referring both to what people are saying and the fact that the film is depicting people making and selling bird cages illegally. A man speaks over the title sequence explaining “eso uso para rejar . . . para no los entran la casa y la jaula e’ para no se vaya de la jaula”: a direct reference to the restrictions on travel abroad imposed by the regime. A blacksmith is featured: we see him working while he describes the use of decorative and protective ironwork in Havana. Since the 1980s he has noticed a growing demand for his services. People on the street confirm the need for greater security, not just for their pets and chickens but for their belongings. A humorous sequence pokes fun at the recent fencing of a downtown park, making the entrance very difficult to find. The film changes tone and direct comparisons are made through the use of superimpositions between birds in cages and habaneros walking the





streets of their city. The filmmaker’s critique is unequivocal. A man in the central square puts words to this when he says: “unos de los animales no pueden estar enjaulados, por ejemplo, una paloma . . . y ser humano, no puede estar enjaulado también, ¿ comprendes?” (“Some animals cannot be caged, a pigeon for example . . . and humans cannot be caged either, do you understand?”). An onlooker smiles at the filmmaker in agreement. At the end, the film returns to the didactic form we have seen at the beginning. This time, the camera pulls out to reveal the blacksmith from the opening section of the film, sitting in front of the television, asleep, with his dog by his side. With the closing shot, Chiong seems to be winking at the audience, striking the same ironic pose that Williams notices in the new wave of documentary makers who engage with “a newer, more contingent, relative, postmodern truth—a truth which, far from being abandoned, still operates powerfully as the receding horizon of the documentary tradition.”33 Both Chiong and Padrón deliver a sharp political critique that is not often found in films made about Cuba by ICAIC, though both filmmakers overtly draw on the Cuban documentary tradition. At six and eleven minutes, respectively, both films fit into the newsreel format and both are principally rhetorical constructions. The use of text and music reflects the style of the newsreels. What sets them apart from the “indulgent” institutional documentaries is their commitment to exposing the complexity of Cuban reality from the vantage point of those without advantages: the youth, the street vendors, the poor. This is not the “thematic opportunism” described by Joel del Río; these are the voices of emerging filmmakers turning a compassionate but ironic eye on Cuban reality. The two videos display a playful attitude toward traditional forms, leaning more toward the video clip, using music, text and animation to set itself apart, while acknowledging that tradition from which they have emerged. If their work is indicative of a trend, the future of Cuban documentary does not rest with ICAIC, the state film institution, just as documentary around the world has freed itself from the protective support of governments and national and public broadcasters. In fact, as I have attempted to show, ICAIC’s support constrained documentary’s development. The thoughtful and passionate voices around the table in Havana discussing the state of Cuban documentary offer hope for the independent development of the nonfiction form. Around the world, free cinema, direct cinema, and cinema vérité provided an opportunity for documentary to engage in a dialogue with itself. Cuban documentary within the state-supported practice at least, was limited to a dialogue with fiction. Outside of Cuba, just such a dialogue has led to this current documentary boom. Within Cuba, however, the relationship between the two forms served to fictionalize documentary. Fiction filmmakers won the right to make “critical” films but, in doing so, they forfeited documentary’s claim to a genre-specific “truth” and instead documentary withdrew into fiction’s warm embrace.34 What the Cuban experience suggests is that documentary—both in practice and theoretically—needs to situate itself


62



63

outside fiction, at times in opposition or in response to fiction. This does not negate the possibility of synergies across genres, but enables it.

1. The term was first used by Jerry Kuehl in his article on drama-documentary, “Truth Claims.” 2. Two key articles are Carroll’s “Nonfiction Film and Post-modern Skepticism” and Plantinga’s “Moving Images and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction Film.” 3. Williams, “Mirrors without Memories,” 20. 4. Ibid., 13. Brian Winston also suggests that “a growing sophistication has begun to question the very basis on which the idea of documentary rests.” “Documentary,” 21. 5. Personal conversations with Alfredo Guevara in 2003 and Julio García Espinosa in 2005. At the 5ta Muestra de Nuevos Realizadores, Havana, March 2006, Joel del Río stated, “En los últimos diez años—y esta es la primera verdad de Pero Grullo—el documental es el género que más se he desarrollado en Europa y E.U., sobre todo a partir de la pequeña pantalla, la expansión democratizadora de las nuevas tecnologías y del éxito fulminante, alcanzado por Michael Moore, entre muchos otros. Cuba vuelve a ser la excepción de la regla” (“In the past ten years—and this is an obvious truth— the documentary is the genre which has developed most in Europe and the E.U., particularly on the small screen, and because of the expansion of new and democratic technologies, and the spectacular success enjoyed by Michael Moore among many others. Cuba is the exception to this rule”). 6. Quoted in Chanan, The Cuban Image, 184. 7. Quoted in Del Luca, “Creativity and Revolution,” 108. 8. Burton, “Film and Revolution in Cuba,” 183. 9. Ibid., 182. 10. I use the word socialism rather than socialist state to suggest a more organic and tentative process on the level of human relationships and ways of living, of which the filmmakers were cognizant. 11. Transcript provided and quoted from with kind permission from Joel del Río. 12. See above. 13. Interview with the author, Havana, December 12, 2001. 14. Ibid. 15. Chanan, Cuban Cinema, 12. 16. García Espinosa, “For An Imperfect Cinema,” 88. 17. Ibid., 81. 18. Pick, “Towards a Renewal of Cuban Revolutionary Cinema,” 26. 19. Chávez’s Che Trilogy and Con Todo mi amor, Rita and Velasís’s He vuelto para andar and Cuerdas en mi ciudad are examples of what I am suggesting here. 20. Gutíerrez Alea, “The Viewer’s Dialectic,” 129. 21. Zuzana Pick suggests a relationship between the production of the film, the publication of “The Viewer’s Dialectic” and the restructuring at ICAIC in her article “Spectacles of Daily Life: Up to a Point (Cuba 1983, Tomás Gutierrez Alea).”


Notes


64 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

Gutíerrez Alea, “The Viewer’s Dialectic,” 109–110. Interview with the author in Havana, December 14, 2001. Ibid. Ibid. Chanan, The Cuban Image, 102. Chanan, Cuban Cinema, 133–140. Ibid., 133. Gutíerrez Alea, “Free Cinema,” quoted in Chanan, Cuban Cinema, 188. García Espinosa, “Meditations on Imperfect Cinema . . . Fifteen Years Later,” 84. Chanan, Cuban Cinema, 250–251. Spelling and spacing taken directly from the video. (/) denotes a screen change. 33. Williams, “Mirrors without Memories,” 11. 34. Winston discusses the “hierarchy of truth whereby documentary stands higher than fiction.” “Documentary,” 22.

Works Cited Burton, Julianne. “Film and Revolution in Cuba: The First Twenty-five Years.” In Cuba: Twenty-five Years of Revolution 1959–1984, edited by S. Halbesky and J. M. Kirk, 181–192. New York: Praeger, 1985. Carroll, Noël. “Non-fiction Film and Post-modern Skepticism.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 283–306. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Chanan, Michael. The Cuban Image. London: British Film Institute (BFI), 1985. ———. Cuban Cinema. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. Del Luca, G. “ ‘Creativity and Revolution’: Cultural Dimensions of the New Cuba.” In Cuba, Castro and Revolution, edited by J. Suchlikci, 106–120. Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1972. García Espinosa, Julio. “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Translated by Julianne Burton. In New Latin American Cinema, Volume 1: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Michael T. Martin, 71–82. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. ———. “Meditations on Imperfect Cinema . . . Fifteen Years Later.” Translated by Michael Chanan. In New Latin American Cinema, Volume 1: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Michael T. Martin, 83–85. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás. “The Viewer’s Dialectic.” Translated by Julia Lesage. In New Latin American Cinema, Volume 1: Theory, Practices, and Transcontinental Articulations, edited by Michael T. Martin, 108–131. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Kuehl, Jerry. “Truth Claims.” In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal, 103–108. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Pick, Zuzana. “Spectacles of Daily Life: Up to a Point (Cuba 1983, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea),” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 2 no. 1 (1992): 31–42. ———. “Towards a Renewal of Cuban Revolutionary Cinema: A Discussion of Cuban Cinema Today,” Ciné-Tracts 2 nos 3 and 4 (Summer and Fall 1979): 21–31.




65

Plantinga, Carl. “Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Non-fiction Film: Two Approaches.” In Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, edited by David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, 307–324. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996. Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History and the New Documentary,” Film Quarterly 46 no. 3 (Spring 1993): 9–21. Winston, Brian. “Documentary: I Think We Are in Trouble.” In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal, 21–33. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.







O sertão nao virou mar: Images of Violence and the Position of the Spectator in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema Edgardo Dieleke

Let us imagine the following real scene: we are inside the latest modern

cinema, in a well-to-do Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. On the screen, they are showing a recent film by José Padilha, Elite Squad (2007), winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008. This film, a work of fiction, narrates in the first person the daily vicissitudes of Captain Nascimento, a member of BOPE, the special squad of Rio’s military police with responsibility for tackling the city’s narcotics trade. The protagonist is played by Wagner Moura, a much loved actor in Brazil, and the film portrays the difficulties of his job. Although the film presents a fictional narrative, its proximity to reality is undeniable,1 since similar events occur every day in Rio de Janeiro, even just a few meters away from this same cinema. Indeed, the film has a quasidocumentary origin: the detailed facts about BOPE and its operations are taken from the book Elite da tropa, which was written by sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares and two former captains of the special force.2 As the story unfolds, the film takes the point of view of captain Nascimento, revealing in explicit detail the cruelty with which this military body operates in heart of the city, as well as the cruelty of the drug traffickers. The violence resulting from the confrontations between these two groups invades the screen. However, although this is a work of fiction, something strange is happening in this cinema: some of the audience members identify themselves with the actor and narrator of the film, and they openly applaud the actions of BOPE, including the use of torture as a method. Although this is a fictional film, the response of certain members of the audience is a response to reality, and a demand for more action. In the same way, perhaps, it is easy to imagine that in many favelas (shanty towns) of Rio de Janeiro, where the film is seen not on the screens of an exclusive, comfortable cinema but through the distribution of pirated copies,3 many people would react in a different manner.


Chapter 5


EDGA RDO DIELEK E

The two faces of this real scene demonstrate, in an extreme way, several key aspects of the representation of violence in recent Brazilian cinema that will constitute the focus of this chapter. First, the language used in the representation of violence in Brazil takes many films to the limits of fiction, creating a realistic effect that causes the spectator to view the film as if he/ she were watching a documentary. In the same way, the cinematographic uses of violence do not only force a re-thinking of the categories of analysis for these films, but also reveal a drastic change in the position that popular violence occupies in the imaginary of contemporary cinema. The use of popular (originating from the working class) and urban violence already has a long tradition in the sphere of Brazilian culture, both in cinema and in literature. The representation of violence in recent Brazilian cinema, as well as the position of the spectator in respect of the violence carried out on the screen by marginalized subjects and subalterns, can serve not only to track changes with regards to the past, but also, as we will see, to inform critical discourse about the relationship between politics and cinema. O sertão nao virou mar and the Ambivalences of Criticism The phrase from which this article draws its title is well known within Brazilian cinema and film criticism. It is taken from the music from Glauber Rocha’s film Black God, White Devil (Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 1964). The phrase is part of a song that is repeated throughout the film, much in the manner of a prophetic hymn, which announces the end of oppression in the sertão (an area of northeastern Brazil, and the poorest and driest region in the country). There, all that had been sertão would become the sea, bringing injustices to an end. This repetitive formula accompanies the final scene of the film, which shows the flight of Manoel (the peasant farmer who has decided to take up arms) through the sertão, until we view the final shot of the sea. This ending, within the complex allegory that the film explores, has been read by many critics as a revolutionary challenge.4 This same scene, one could say, crystallizes the program of social and aesthetic revolution of a generation of directors (of Cinema Novo and the New Latin America Cinema) wherein cinema is seen as a medium for revolutionizing not only aesthetics, but also the world itself. In the same way, the scene reveals a concept of popular violence as a necessary prior condition to revolution. From the surmounting of the cycle of violence of the rural bandits such as Lampião and Corisco, as well as the allegory that is personified by Antonio das Mortes and the peasant farmer Manoel, one could hope for the social change that would bring an end to the injustices of the sertão.5 In our own time, confidence in a revolutionary and utopian cinema has undoubtedly been undermined by, amongst other things, the defeat of the leftist projects of those years, and by the years of dictatorship. In the same way, between this earlier period and the present, the neoliberal wave brought with it the eventual collapse and the subsequent reconfiguration of the film industry in Brazil.6 From the mid-1990s, the cinema of the Retomada has


68


69

redefined and reformulated the relations between cinema and politics, altering representational imaginaries to a significant extent.7 In turn, this brought appropriately novel conceptions of popular violence and a new language with which to represent it. In broader terms, much criticism, under different rubrics, seems to concur that the imaginary of recent Brazilian cinema is marked by disillusionment and a political horizon beset by intractable difficulties,8 an imaginary that extends to many parts of Latin America. This phenomenon, which has given rise to an important collection of what we might call “dysphoric narratives,” is particularly revealing as an object of study. This is because it reveals—beyond the films themselves—a form of ambivalence on the part of criticism, where analytical tools as well as critical positions become perhaps more significant than the actual films under discussion. In a sense, the discussion centered on the absence of utopias in the predominant narratives of the films of the Retomada (as in the recent Brazil on Screen, by Lúcia Nagib), says more perhaps about the present itself in relation to a lost past, and about the discomfort of critics in relation to this fact, than it does about the issues raised by the films themselves. Taking all this into account, it seems to me that the analysis of the representation of popular violence and the implied violence of representation, that is, the mediation and the modes through which cinema makes these new forms of violence visible, can help to reveal the ambivalent attitudes of criticism with respect to the present. In order to analyze this in the Brazilian context, a key text for discussion is City of God (Cidade de Deus, Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2002), since, as we will see later, the film modifies the form by which the spectator gains access to this violence. In the same way, the emergence of a great number of documentaries focused on violence, as well as the tensions between the genres of documentary and fiction, provides crucial evidence of the rule of violence in cinema and its relation to the cinematographic construction of the real. In contemporary film criticism, especially in the exploration of themes such as the relation between politics and representation, as well as the representation of violence and poverty, it has become a cliché to draw comparisons with Cinema Novo, and in particular, with the cinema of Glauber Rocha and the imaginaries centered around the sertão.9 In fact, this comparison may be foundational to any discussion of the imaginaries of contemporary cinema. In addition, there is a consensus in the criticism about the dysphoric imaginaries in contemporary cinema.10 However, it is interesting to note the form these approaches take, partly because they bear witness to the weight of the real, or to put it an extreme way, to the urgency of violence, in a reading that leaves no room for utopian solutions. But before this, let us return briefly to Glauber Rocha’s original sertão, since it is there that a particular treatment of violence emerges, along with some of the ambiguities that characterize approaches to contemporary cinema. Beyond the fact that Black God, White Devil is part of an aesthetic project linked to political revolutionary change, the revolutionary aspect of the film, and that of its director, is to be found not simply in its content, but also in its


CONT EMPOR A RY BR A ZILIAN CINEMA


EDGA RDO DIELEK E

form. Glauber’s aesthetic stamp, moving from the “aesthetic of hunger” to the “aesthetic of the dream,” clearly differs from that of other cinematographers linked to the leftist projects of the 1970s. Unlike contemporaries such as Fernando Solanas in Argentina or Santiago Álvarez in Cuba, for Glauber Rocha the aesthetic challenge exceeds the testimonial or the documentary. This is because even when his films operate within an allegorical imaginary (see Xavier’s Allegories of Underdevelopment)—and for this reason maintain a particular relationship with the real—the use of cinematic language prohibits the spectator from taking the images to be a reflection of the real. In this sense, the films constantly denaturalizes the act of spectatorship, disrupting the spectator’s gaze by means of a Brechtian distancing.11 In the same way, as Ivana Bentes states, his representation of violence is never realistic, but rather always compels a reflection on violence, not as mere content, but precisely as an element to revolutionize form.12 Glauber himself perceived the way in which violence is directly associated with the reaction of the spectator: Quando a violência é mostrada de forma descritiva, ela agrada ao público, porque estimula seus instintos sadomasoquistas; mas o que eu queria mostrar era idéia de violência, e as vezes mesmo uma certa frustração da violência. Devemos refletir sobre a violência e nao fazer um espetáculo com ela.13 When violence is shown in a descriptive way, it pleases the public, because it stimulates their sadomasochist instincts; but what I wanted to show was an idea of violence, and sometimes even a certain frustration of violence. We must reflect on violence and not construct a spectacle with it.

Undoubtedly, these aesthetic choices, as well as the place of violence within the challenge mounted by the “primitive rebels,” that is, by the popular violence that could cause a questioning of the status quo, are radically modified in the present. However, it is precisely because of this that there cannot be a call for this “aesthetic of hunger” to characterize contemporary films. In this sense, it seems a mistake—and to a certain extent anachronistic—to write off representations of violence in the present as falling short in some way, in comparison with past representations. Following this thinking, for example, Bentes has categorized contemporary cinema (and in particular City of God) as a cinema that employs a “cosmetic of hunger,” betraying Glauber’s propositions.14 Undoubtedly, there is accuracy in her analysis since, as she indicates, images of poverty and of violence have almost exclusively been turned into dubious objects of consumption. However, the analysis becomes perhaps excessively critical and uses a set of tools for the interpretation of texts that demand to be read differently. It is not sufficient to suggest that they employ an aesthetic that is deficient when compared with cinematographic modernism and the work of Cinema Novo directors such as Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Ruy Guerra, or Carlos Diegues. Contemporary films should be viewed in their own context, and should not be associated with other points of time, at which the spectator was searching


70


for very different images. To a certain extent, we need to consider the fact that Glauber Rocha’s allegorical style can no longer function in a context in which the weight of the real has gained such centrality. In analyzing the position of the spectator we can re-work modes of reading the aesthetic choices of City of God, among other those of other contemporary films. Glauber Rocha’s famous quotation, and the acceptance that the sertão was not, after all, transformed into the sea, is the starting point for Lúcia Nagib’s interesting book, Brazil on Screen. Her reading of the imaginaries of contemporary Brazilian Cinema is grounded in aesthetic theories of postmodernism, and particularly in the version developed by Fredric Jameson. Within this perspective, then, the well-known films of Walter Salles, to take the most paradigmatic case (and perhaps all of his films can be read in this way), propose narratives that only work as collages or as citations of Cinema Novo’s sertão.15 In this way, the predominant imaginaries of the Retomada, and in particular those that refer to popular violence or the representation of subaltern figures, are expressed through the creation of a post-utopian horizon. In the same way, although working with a different theoretical apparatus, José Carlos Avellar’s brilliant analyses (see, in particular, his “Padre, país, madre, patria”), highlight a common tendency in the cinema of the Retomada: a cinematography that reveals a search for identity, symbolized in the repeated narratives in which the protagonists appear as orphans, in search of an absent father, and to suggest the experience of living in a country that has metaphorically abandoned its children. In imagistic terms, if in 1964 the peasant farmer fled toward the sea, in a projection of change, now—as in Foreign Land (Terra estrangeira, Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, 1996) for example—those marginalized from the system observe in the sea the image of a shipwreck that testifies to the absence of solutions: an image in which the call to violence can now no longer work in the same way. The City of God Effect and the Space of the Spectator Toward contemporary violence, we are everywhere conditioned to be voyeurs. We peek at violence. Arthur Redding16

Without a doubt, City of God has generated the most media attention and debate of all recent Brazilian films, in part for two noteworthy reasons. First, it introduced into Brazilian productions a level of credibility and a quality that had never before been attained.17 The representation of marginalized sectors of society, with the widespread use of non-professional actors, as well as the inclusion of slang and authentic locations, constructed a new model for Brazilian cinema. In addition, the quality of the acting as well as the excellent script was met with rare acclaim and success. The ensuing debate also opened up discussion on the representation of violence and the consumption of its images. In fact, in spite of objections to its de-contextualized use of violence,18 City of God has managed to bring debates about urban


71



EDGA RDO DIELEK E

violence to the fore, and not only in cinematographic terms. In this sense, the “City of God effect” is twofold: it imposed a new regime of representation of the real (as something that is always constructed, and that should not be taken for granted), and it established the idea of an uncontrollable violence, from which no escape was possible. However, this apparent neo-naturalism that City of God imposes is not exempt from the effects of a new visual arsenal. From the rapid montage of the first sequence to the elaborate use of different cameras and shots, City of God proposes a new form of perceiving the real. It presents a masterful manipulation of today’s audiovisual language, no longer viewed as artificial, since the society of spectacle has already provided the spectator with the necessary visual grammar. For proof of this, it is sufficient to note the way in which City of God has been reviewed in many places beyond Brazil. Although it is based on real facts (as clarified in the film itself), this is a fictional film and one that deliberately, through its aesthetic, side-steps a straightforward testimonial intention. However, it is true that the scenes of violence, despite the visual speed at which they are narrated, can be viewed in a “documentary” mode because the average spectator witnesses scenes like these, on the television, on a daily basis. As I attempt to analyze further on, it is not so much the language that gives it a sense of realism, but the space given to the spectator, or rather, how the spectator perceives what is represented. In analyses of the representation of violence in the City of God, one of the aspects of the film that has attracted most criticism is the use of a postmodern aesthetic similar to that of the video-clip, with rapid montage and large doses of visual frenzy, with which to treat issues as complex as popular violence. Thus the serious and urgent problem of violence is converted into a object of rapid consumption, without the mediation or aesthetic complexity needed. However, it seems to me a mistake to brandish this kind of argument in an oversimplistic manner, as it allows only for a particular kind of commiseration in respect of poverty and demands an exclusive piety in the representation of marginal subjects. To put it another way: is the use of a contemporary cinematographic language prohibited for the representation of violence? Should we insist that images of poverty employ costumbrista or somber modes in their representation of the other? On the other hand, it is noted that one of the film’s merits lies in the inclusion of a majority of nonprofessional actors, although their performance is clearly guided by the director’s script. João Cezar de Castro Rocha intervenes in a debate that appeared to be closed in on itself. He asserts that films such as City of God must be analyzed not so much with respect to anachronistic or modernist theories, but with reference to a new model, in order to understand the violence in contemporary Brazilian culture.19 In his discussion of the film, Castro Rocha rightly points out that the problem resides in the point of view. The film, which narrates the history of the “City of God” favela from the point of view of the young Rocket, proposes, from the beginning, an identification with this character, who manages to escape from the violence that the traffickers wreak


72



73

In the movie, he [the main character, Rocket] seems to have two main problems: losing his virginity and escaping the shantytown thanks to possible employment as a photographer. This extraordinary simplification of the plot has several objectives: making terror easier to swallow by injecting a dose of comedy; misplacing the idea of the genre of the coming-of-age narrative; and granting the spectator’s wish to gain distance from the actual shantytown in the form of the boy’s desire to leave the City of God behind.20

As Castro Rocha remarks, the narrative focus placed on the character of Rocket, who attempts to overcome poverty and the circle of violence following the logic of work and of acceptance, makes possible a comfortable identification on the part of the average spectator. According to Castro Rocha, the success of the film would have been impossible if the point of view had been centered, for example, on the trafficker Little Zé, who is presented as a sort of incarnation of pure evil. This understanding allows us to enter into the place where the gaze of the spectator is positioned, moving beyond mere point of view. In the opening scenes of City of God, the first impression we receive is the sound of a knife being filed quickly, announcing the violence that will follow. Then, with extreme close-ups, the hand-held camera accompanies the movements of a hen, about to be slaughtered by a group of shantytown dwellers, of whom we see only their hands. To the rhythm of the samba, with fast cuts and shots of quick duration, the hen succeeds in escaping and is then chased, with gun shots, by the gang led by the fearsome trafficker, Little Zé. The pursuit ends when the hen finds itself with Rocket, both of them trapped between the police and Little Zé’s gang, from which Rocket is on the run throughout the film (see figure 5.1). The initial operation, and one that will be sustained for the length of the film, is that of the identification of the spectator first with the hen, and then with Rocket, one of the few characters in the film who is presented with the opportunity to leave the favela. This choice appears problematic as from the first sequences, and almost without time for reflection, the spectator is directed to equate the violence carried out by the police with popular violence. What is more, even when the film criticizes the actions of the police, in these first sequences violence comes exclusively from the trafficker and his gang. In this sense, the film reduces the complexity of the violence present in society since, from the onset, it places the protagonist (and bearer of the spectator’s point of view) between two groups that are equally repellent according to the logic of the narrative: the police and the terrible drug traffickers. In this way the violence is naturalized, and the only space possible for the average shantytown dweller is defined as this place without escape, threatened by the terrible traffickers and without support


on the inhabitants and, in particular, Little Zé. What is debatable about this point of view is, as Castro Rocha observes, that it leads the spectator to identify with the narrative of a character who reduces the problem of violence, placing the spectator in a comfortable place:


EDGA RDO DIELEK E

Figure 5.1 Rocket, the protagonist and narrator of City of God, finds himself trapped between the traffickers and the police. From this position he starts to narrate his story and that of the City of God more broadly

from the corrupt police force. In a sense, this positioning eludes the political component, which is located in the state police force. As Redding points out in the epigraph to this section, with regard to forms of contemporary violence, as spectators we are destined to be voyeurs. This is in part because, on observing a phenomenon as complex as violence, we tend to search for a space of absolution, where that violence does not reach us. In this sense, it seems to me that in analyzing the space of the spectator, the way in which the violence is perceived by the spectator, we may avoid the attempt (one that we also make as critics) to absolve our own practice.21 There is an additional, crucial, aspect to the representation of violence in cinema in general, and in City of God more specifically. Martin Jay explores the position of the spectator in the cinema under the assumption that, of all forms of popular entertainment, cinema is one that exploits visual frenzy to the most significant degree. From a genealogy of the figure of the shipwreck in Western philosophy, Jay moves on to analyze the film Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Following his argument, the famous shipwreck in the cinema is revealed as a symptom of the conversion of disasters into spectacle, and the problematic relationship between the comfortable spectator and the representation of violence against others in cinema in general. He asks:


74

But what of the spectator who watches the spectacle from afar? What of the witness who sees the foolhardy sailors go under from the safe haven of dry land?22

The idea, this time no longer located in the cold waters of the Atlantic but rather in the “City of God,” could be, despite the differences, analogous. 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

75

There is a central tension here, if we want to analyze the uses of popular violence in contemporary cinema, that resides in the problematic role that we have as spectators, safe from that violence, or—to put it another way—spectators who are safe from the “shipwreck” of a number of favela characters. Although different experiences are clearly implicated in going to see a film for a Brazilian spectator or for a foreigner, even in the case of a “native” spectator the audience may be clearly divided into those who are inside and those who are outside of the favelas. Despite the identification with, and comprehension of, marginalized subjects that are promoted in films such as City of God, and even with the inclusion of subalterns in these performances, these narratives not only reveal the chaos of the existing system, but are also unable to propose a collective narrative of salvation. The protagonists’ always temporary escapes fail to herald any kind of collective improvement of the situation. The problem of the spectator who, at the end of the film, can distance himself from what he has seen, must not be separated from the choices of the director. If the comfortable spectator can digest these images, this brings with it a double symptom. On one hand, City of God makes the favela a “shipwreck” that is universally comprehensible, successfully mixing elements of a Bildungsroman on the theme of poverty with a universal cinematographic language. On the other hand, however, thanks to its great verisimilitude, it complicates the debate on violence. This is because the spectator, in spite of the visual frenzy created in the film and, precisely because cases like these happen every day in certain parts of Brazil, comes to perceive this same violence as real and it therefore becomes, in a certain sense, naturalized. The Limits of Fiction and the Untamable Gaze To return to the scene sketched out at the beginning of this article, and to emphasize the positioning of the spectator, we need to identify a series of elements that mark the urgency of the real in recent Brazilian cinema, and to examine how these create an effect of the real in the spectator. First, we should point out an erasure of the limits between fiction and the documentary. We are witnessing a notorious infiltration of the real into fictional cinema as well as the inverse, the invasion of the documentary by the imaginary. Although the contamination of the real and of the imaginary is in some ways characteristic of the language of cinema, this dissolution of the border between the genres is demonstrated very clearly in several recent Brazilian films. In the case of fiction, this is evident—the complex visual arsenal of mega-productions notwithstanding—in the extensive use of non-professional actors and natural locations in the treatment of social themes such as the different forms of urban violence. Examples here would include City of God, City of Men (Cidade dos Homens, Paulo Morelli, 2007), Central Station (Central do Brasil, Walter Salles, 1998) and Midnight (O primeiro dia, Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, 1998), among many others. These films also work to achieve a greater verisimilitude with the use of slang in the speech of the popular classes as well as the hand-held camera to lend a greater sense of




EDGA RDO DIELEK E

naturalism to the action (here City of God is again paradigmatic23). In any case, although many films create an aesthetic that differs from the neonaturalism of the fiction films most devoted to the real, a “production of the present” is also evident in many recent fictional narratives. This aspect also brings the narratives subtly closer to the documentary, to the register of the real, despite the fact that the spectator does not adopt the performative position characteristic of the documentary.24 The adaptation of real stories is an additional aspect that, although seemingly a minor detail, also takes into account a demand for a veridical approach, coming close to that of the documentary. With this in mind, one can analyze not only City of God (which deliberately ends with images of real traffickers from the favelas, obtained from television archives), but also other films that have attracted large audiences, such as Carandiru (Héctor Babenco, 2003), Madame Satã (Karim Aïnouz, 2002) and the more recent Elite Squad. This element, in one sense simply the starting-point for the script, must be seen in another way, as it is linked to aspects of the social such as urban violence or drug trafficking. As I indicated at the beginning of this chapter, this combination of factors puts the position of the spectator under strain, as verisimilitude, in tandem with the real origin of the fictional narrative, ends up forming narratives that are partially accepted as “real” on the part of the spectator. The demand for the real is also apparent in the increasing production of documentaries that (and not by coincidence) formulate different approaches to urban violence and drug trafficking in Brazil. This is the case of News from a Personal War (Notícias de uma guerra particular, João Moreira Salles, 1999), Bus 174 (Ônibus 174, José Padilha and Felipe Lacerda, 2002) and The Prisoner of the Iron Bars (O prisioneiro da grade de ferro, Paulo Sacramento, 2004), to mention the most relevant. Tensions in the documentary genre become apparent in these films, associated with the growing centrality of subjectivity in the documentary as well as the employment of certain formal devices.25 These are particularly obvious in Bus 174, a key documentary on urban violence in Rio de Janeiro. In Bus 174 the central focus is on a questioning of the role of the media in the representation of urban violence, and within this, the way in which the average spectator views these “violent subjects.” Sandro is the protagonist of the documentary, a former street child and survivor of the Candelaria massacre, who takes an entire bus hostage and is surrounded by the police. Images of the kidnapping are transmitted across the world in real time. As Esther Hamburger indicates, Sandro becomes an actor at certain stages in the narrative, allowing for the intrusion of aspects of fiction into the documentary.26 The negotiations with the police end in tragedy, however, and a woman dies as a result of negligence in the operation, while a policeman tries to shoot at Sandro. Once on the way to the police station, the police decide to execute the delinquent. The documentary embarks on a search into Sandro’s past, later revisiting his capture of the bus. In this sense, the documentary is explicit in its eagerness to reconstruct and contextualize this


76


77

symptom of urban violence in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the perception of, and discrimination toward, the marginalized. The images of violence that Padilha presents, like those of Moreira Salles and Sacramento in their documentaries about contemporary violence, construct an ever more sobering scene, with overpopulated prisons and delinquents who are younger and younger. These documentaries create an uncomfortable place for the subaltern subjects they represent. This is because, at the same time that they attempt to contextualize and understand the violent actions of these subjects, they inevitably return them to their condition of non-subjects, outside of society and of the demand for equality. In this sense, despite the good intentions and the great achievements of these documentaries, at points the spectator appears to return home with a reaffirmation of their perception of the danger presented by otherness: in the context of irremediable violence, it is better to be suspicious, since violence may explode at any moment, in any bus in the city. It seems to me that confronted with these operations, we need to search for an “untamable” gaze that does not lead the spectator to a comfortable identification with a character, nor simply provoke a reaction of pity. Madame Satã condenses questions of the representation of violence and the position of the spectator in new ways, as well as redefining the space of fiction and its proximity to the documentary. It intervenes, I would argue, by establishing a reading of the present that is forcefully anachronistic. The violence in this case is exerted on a marginalized figure from the past, but it is clear that the practices of the police have not changed much between then and the present; neither have perceptions of the other. As in other feature-length films already discussed, Madame Satã also maintains a relationship with truth. Based on the real story of João Francisco, later better known as Madame Satã, famous carnival transvestite of the 1940s, the film narrates the most marginal period of his life, and in a sense, his least digestible performance for the audience. From the onset, Madame Satã places an eccentric and uncomfortable event before the gaze of the spectator. After the credits sequence, with letters made of sequins on a black curtain, an almost documentary-like scene interrupts, emphasizing the violence exercised on the character by state and society. In a frontal close-up shot, comparable to that of a criminal record file, within the space of the police station, we see João Francisco’s face, disfigured by the blows he has received. The character, like the present-day marginalized figure, is denied the opportunity to speak, and it is the only the police commissioner’s voice we hear (played by documentary filmmaker, Eduardo Coutinho) who presents the state’s discourse (see figure 5.2). Immediately after this, the camera moves to follow the main character, disarming the state’s version of the truth. In contrast to a frontal, supposedly neutral shot, representing the vision of the police and the state, the subsequent shots capture the truth of the character. There we can already glimpse Madame Satã and the complexity that the film proposes: behind the stage, while a white woman is acting in a cabaret, João Francisco repeats the lines of the actress’s song, imagining




EDGA RDO DIELEK E

Figure 5.2 At the start of the film, Madame Satã is presented to the spectator from the police officer’s perspective

an audience, for whom he is invisible (see figure 5.3). This sequence, which takes us from the destroyed face in the police station to a performance without an audience, demonstrates an alternative form of representing violence, with a greater use of the off-screen and ellipsis, thus avoiding the frenzy that erases perhaps the most violent of distances between that which is represented and the spectator. In a certain sense, the initial sequence of the film operates in an opposing way to that of City of God, despite the fact that both are made with an undeniable technical mastery. With reference to the representation of violence, to the use of point of view, and to the position given to the spectator, the films generate opposing effects. While in Meirelles’ film the spectator is led to identify with the narrator, in Madame Satã this identification is consistently rejected. The first sequence, instead of simplifying the protagonist, presents a multiple character. He is presented first as a criminal, and this is what the spectator sees, placing the spectator in the uncomfortable position of the police force and thus sharing their gaze. In this sense, from the beginning, instead of aiming for an easy incorporation into a narrative, the first shots actively interrogate the gaze. In this way the position granted to the spectator in Madame Satã becomes central in disarticulating debatable representations of violence. 27 Thus the construction of the central character follows a logic that constantly avoids comfortable identification on the part of the spectator. This is a complex character who continues to suffer police excesses as well as racial


78


Figure 5.3

79

Offstage, Madame Satã performs to an imaginary audience

and sexual discrimination. However, instead of pigeonholing the character into one of these roles, the script constructs him as a subject who is not ready to compromise or give in. As the director of the film suggests: In the case of Madame Satã . . . I wanted to talk about rage, about a position that was not that of cordiality but reactive, violent; nothing that could come close to a cordial and educated manner.28

I would suggest that it is in the construction of this character who contests the gaze of the spectator from the beginning of the film, and continually makes identification with him impossible—as well as in this kind of logic that avoids submission to violence against the subject—that the film’s challenge to contemporary representations of violence is located. In spite of its focus on the story of a marginalized figure from the 1930s, which represents a turning-away from the excessive “urgency for the real” of the present, the film suggests that attitudes toward those who are perceived as “dangerous” have not changed that much in Brazil. This discussion about the uses and representation of violence becomes political not because it uses the postmodern language of MTV or because it rejects an explanatory discourse. We should focus instead on the role given to the marginalized subjects represented. In the opening scene of City of God, the violence seems to come from a simple meeting of people, at the point of cooking a hen. The way in which the narrator is introduced is also problematic because it only allows us to identify with him, while it is difficult




EDGA RDO DIELEK E

then to understand a more complex character. Madame Satã operates in the opposite way. Instead of fixing the protagonist, the film shows the ambiguities that govern his character and the moments at which he manages, in a manner that is optimistic but never euphoric, to exploit the tricks of the weak. Taking all this into account, if with Cinema Novo and the New Latin American Cinema in general the sertão could be transformed into the sea, today we seem to have run aground, without any other option but to watch how the boat sinks. One way to bear witness to the shipwreck and to the burden of the real is undoubtedly made worthy by the debate it has generated; however, it seems to tame the violence that it exploits. Interpreted correctly, City of God is a Bildungsroman that, at its core, proposes nothing more than a reformist state. A second option, alternatively, succeeds in effecting an aesthetic, and therefore political, renewal. This choice privileges the off-screen, the out of focus, and background shots. It is not simply a question of language: these operations manage at the same time to avoid clichés of violence, thus illuminating less visible zones. However, beyond the various aesthetic choices possible, what is certain is that examining the omnipresence of narratives centered on different contemporary forms of violence confirms a double phenomenon. On the one hand, these types of cinematographic choices, combined with the documentary character of many fictional productions, reveal an urgency for the real in its most crude and explicit form. Second, in the light of the fact the these narratives generally present horizons without escape, in which the violence does not seem to have any resolution, it is necessary to examine their modes of representation. Analyzing the position and point of view of the spectator allows us to pursue a deeper investigation into the relationship between cinema and politics, in the sense that it takes as its starting point the contemporary spectator, and not a spectator versed in other languages and discourses. We must ref lect on the way in which representations of violence are denaturalized and complicated within contemporary contexts, and on how to avoid a simple condemnation of a film’s content because of its exploitation of violent images. In a certain sense, it is not about assessing how these films, created with a commercial market in mind, fail to match our political and aesthetic expectations. Rather, it is about exploring the way in which films tame and reduce contemporary violence. To a certain extent therefore, these films force us to rethink the present and the politics of representation. At a time when the real invades the screen, and when genres merge together, perhaps one has to search for an aesthetic that attempts to take on the difficult task of representing the ambiguities of the present, without trying to reduce these, even though it might not propose to resolve them. In the same way, perhaps we can think with a different perspective, taking advantage of the spectator’s discomfort and the gaze that interrogates us, on violence, and on in the sea hidden behind the sertão.


80



81

1. In fact the film narrates the way in which BOPE prepared for the visit of Pope John Paul II to Rio de Janeiro in 1997, and how a favela near the then Pope’s accommodation was “cleaned up” ahead of the visit. To see how the film joined in the daily lives of the inhabitants of Rio a month before its release, see Burckhardt and Cavalheiro, “Tropa de élite.” 2. The two retired captains and co-authors of the book are André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel. The latter is one of the key characters in the pioneering documentary about drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro, News from a Personal War (Notícias de uma guerra particular, João Moreira Salles and Kátia Lund, 1999). 3. In fact the film began to be circulated and purchased through the distribution of pirated copies months before its first commercial screening. This made the producers bring forward its release. Despite the sale of pirated copies, the film became one of the biggest box office hits. 4. See Avellar, A ponte clandestina and Xavier, Sertão mar. 5. This has been the reading developed by many critics of the allegory proposed in Glauber Rocha’s film, especially Xavier in Allegories of Underdevelopment, and in the chapter entitled “Sertão mar: Glauber Rocha e a estética da fome” dedicated to an analysis of this film. One of the lines delivered by the character Antonio das Martes, toward the end of the film, allows for this type of reading: “One day there will be a big war in this sertão, a great war, without the blindness of God or the devil. And for it to start quickly, I am going to kill Corisco.” Here, in an archetypal way, God represents the blindness of religion, and the devil, the rural bandits. In the film, it is necessary for the town to overcome these oppositions in order to bring about true revolution. This type of allegory is simultaneous and coincides with Eric Hobsbawm’s 1959 study on rural bandits or “primitive rebels” (further expanded later in his book Bandits). Here he explores the figure of the rural bandit, or primitive rebel, tracking this figure in different regions throughout history, and including, of course, the cangaceiros of northeast Brazil. 6. On these changes, and on the renaissance in the film industry in the middle of the 1990s, see Moisés, “A New Policy for Brazilian Cinema.” 7. There are numerous articles analyzing the different aspects of this problem. Lúcia Nagib’s compilation on the Retomada outlines many of these in general terms. One of the most interesting essays in this book is Xavier’s “Brazilian Cinema in the 1990s: The Unexpected Encounter and the Resentful Character,” which postulates as its central hypothesis the violent disagreement between social classes and the erratic nature of the characters that figure in the predominant narratives of the films of the Retomada. In the same volume, see also Luiz Zanin Oricchio’s essay “The Sertão in the Brazilian Imaginary at the End of the Millennium,” which examines recent images of the sertão. 8. This type of movement has occurred in a similar way in other parts of the continent. In fact, the trajectory followed by these imaginaries is comparable, especially in the case of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. See Ruffinelli, “El imaginario del milenio,” which explores exactly this confluence of narratives with characters in flight and without any way out when confronted with a present that appears to consume them. 9. See in particular Bentes, “The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian Film,” as well as Debs, “Brésil,” and Oricchio, “The Sertão in the Brazilian


Notes


82

10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

Imaginary.” In these articles, which focus on a variety of texts, the discussion centers on the ways in which the sertão reappears allegorically in various films at the end of the 1990s and at the beginning of this century. See also Maria Rosário Caetano, Cangaço: o nordestern no cinema brasileiro, a compilation dedicated exclusively to the sertão in cinema. In this sense, João Luiz Vieira’s article about the film Chronically Unfeasible (Sérgio Bianchi, 2000) is paradigmatic, taking as the focus of its discussion the position of politics in a depoliticized country or world. Likewise, the aforementioned article by Xavier comes to similar conclusions. In the same way, in a discussion about Brazilian cinema, the critic Carlos Alberto Mattos states, “There is no country. There are no movements. There are no shared enemies to defeat at this tour. There is not any utopia to build. There is a search for results. There is a search for commercial and artistic results. For all these reasons a search for a national identity is less visible today than in the sixties and seventies.” Mattos, Bentes, and Vieira, “Da chanchada à orfandade, passando pelo Cinema Novo,” 113. See especially Robert Stam’s analysis of Land in Anguish (Glauber Rocha, 1967). Bentes, “O Copyright da miséria e os discursos da exclusão,” 191. Rocha, A revolução do Cinema Novo, 92. Bentes establishes the opposition between Glauber Rocha’s “aesthetic of hunger” and “the cosmetic of hunger” in more recent films. “The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian Film,” 121–137. See Oricchio, “The Sertão in the Brazilian Imaginary” and Debs, “Brésil.” Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence, 14. See, in particular, Xavier’s review, “Angels with Dirty Faces.” See, in particular, Bentes, “O Copyright da miséria e os discursos da exclusão,” 189–201 and Ribeiro, “Cidade de Deus na zona de contato,” 125–139. A detailed discussion of Castro Rocha’s hypothesis is beyond the scope of this chapter. Essentially, however, what he proposes is a substitution of the so-called dialectic of malandroism with the dialectic of marginality. In his words, “Let me then reiterate my hypothesis: the ‘dialectic of malandroism’ is being partially replaced or, to say the least, directly challenged by a “dialectic of marginality,” which is mainly grounded in the principle of overcoming of social inequalities through confrontation instead of reconciliation, and through the exposure of violence instead of its concealment. In other words, I am interested in identifying cultural and symbolic representations of this conflict; therefore, I am not primarily concerned with empirical researches on the actual levels of violence and criminality in contemporary Brazilian society.” “The ‘Dialectic of Marginality’: Preliminary Notes on Brazilian Contemporary Culture,” 15. Ibid., 22. “Toward contemporary violence, moreover, we are everywhere conditioned to be voyeurs. We peek at violence. It excites our prurience provoking a reflexive response to all that we need to catch enough of a glimpse of to condemn. But in that act of formal condemnation we strive to absolve our own immaculate and wholesome bodies.” Redding, Raids on Human Consciousness, 14. Jay, Refractions of Violence, 104. It is interesting to note that the DVD of City of God was released with the documentary News from a Personal War, in which the director, João Moreira


EDGA RDO DIELEK E


24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

83

Salles, investigates drug trafficking in Rio de Janeiro. This supplement to the fictional film adds, in part, a certain realism to it, such that what the film shows, the documentary proposes to explain. Here I am referring to the position that audiences watching a documentary usually adopt, that is, the acceptance of the facts and images that they are seeing as truth. See Dieleke and Fernandez Bravo, “Documentales argentinos y brasileños,” which provides a review of the growing subjectivity in recent documentaries, as well as the incursions of fiction into the documentary genre. Hamburger, “Políticas da representação,” 204. There is an excellent documentary that consistently makes use of this type of operation, On the Fringes of São Paulo: Homeless (A margem da imagem, Evaldo Mocarzel, 2003), in which a group of people who live on the streets of São Paulo are interviewed. The way in which images of poverty become just another item of merchandise is crucial here. In fact, one of the participants explicitly questions the ethical value of Sebastião Salgado’s photography. Feldman and Cléber, “A política do corpo e o corpo político,” 14.

Works Cited Avellar, José Carlos. “ImagiNation.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 245–259. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. ———. “Padre, país, madre, patria.” In Hacer cine: Producción audiovisual en América Latina, edited by Eduardo Russo, 117–150. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2008. ——— A ponte clandestina: Teorias de cinema na América Latina. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34, 1995. Bentes, Ivana. “O Copyright da miséria e os discursos da exclusão,” Cinemais 33 (2003): 189–201. ———. “The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian Film.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 121–137. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Bernardet, Jean-Claude. “Documentários de busca: 33 e Passaporte húngaro.” In O cinema do real, edited by Amir Labaki and Maria Dora Mourão, 142–156. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005. Burckhardt, Eduardo, and Rodrigo Cavalheiro. “ ‘Tropa de élite,’ o de cómo un torturador se convierte en héroe,” El País, Cultura, July 28, 2008. http://www. elpais.com. Accessed October 2008. Caetano, Maria do Rosário, ed. Cangaço: o nordestern no cinema brasileiro. Brasília: Avathar Soluções Gráficas, 2005. Castro Rocha, João Cezar de. “The ‘Dialectic of Marginality’: Preliminary Notes on Brazilian Contemporary Culture.” Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford: Working Paper 62 (2005): 1–39. Debs, Sylvie. “Brésil: Le nordeste revisité 30 ans aprés le Cinéma Novo,” Cinémas d’Amerique Latine 7 (1999): 103–112. Dieleke, Edgardo, and Álvaro Fernández Bravo. “Documentales argentinos y brasileños: Un mapa en fragmentos,” Grumo 6 no. 1 (2007): 12–19. Feldman, Ilana, and Eduardo Cléber. “A política do corpo e o corpo político—o cinema de Karim Aïnouz. Entrevista com Karim Ainouz,” Revista Cinetica, http://www. revistacinetica.com.br/cep/entrevistas.html. Accessed December 2008.




EDGA RDO DIELEK E

Hamburger, Esther. “Políticas da representação: ficção e documentário em Ônibus 174.” In O cinema do real, edited by Amir Labaki and Maria Dora Mourão, 196–215. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005. Hobsbawm, Eric. Bandits. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000. ———. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959. Jay, Martin. Refractions of Violence. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. Mattos, Carlos Alberto, Ivana Bentes, and João Luiz Vieira. “Da chanchada à orfandade, passando pelo Cinema Novo,” Cinemais 33 (January–March 2003): 87–113. Moisés, José Álvaro. “A New Policy for Brazilian Cinema.” In Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 3–22. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007. Moreira Salles, João. “Imagens em conflito.” In O cinema do real, edited by Amir Labaki and Maria Dora Mourão, 82–95. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2005. Nagib, Lúcia, ed. Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2007. ———, ed. The New Brazilian Cinema. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Oricchio, Luiz Zanin. Cinema de novo: Um balanço crítico da retomada. São Paulo: Estação Liberdade, 2003. ———. “The Sertão in the Brazilian Imaginary at the End of the Millenium.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 139–155. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Redding, Arthur. Raids on Human Consciousness: Writing, Anarchism, and Violence. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1998. Ribeiro, Paulo Jorge. “Cidade de Deus na zona de contato—alguns impasses de crítica cultural contemporânea,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana 29 no. 57 (2003): 125–139. Rocha, Glauber. A revolução do Cinema Novo. Rio de Janeiro: Alhambra/Embrafilme, 1981. Ruffinelli, Jorge. “El imaginario del milenio,” Cinemais 33 (2003): 123–165. Stam, Robert. “Land in Anguish.” In Brazilian Cinema, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, 149–162. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Süssekind, Flora. “Deterritorialization and Literary Form: Brazilian Contemporary Literature and Urban Experience.” Centre for Brazilian Studies, University of Oxford: Working Paper 34 (2002). http://www.brazil.ox.ac.uk/papers.html. Accessed June 2008. Vieira, João Luiz. “Chronically Unfeasible: The Political Film in a Depoliticized World.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 85–96. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Xavier, Ismail. Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. ———. “Angels with Dirty Faces,” Sight and Sound (January 2003): 28–30. ———. Brazilian Cinema in the 1990s: The Unexpected Encounter and the Resentful Character.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 39–64. London: I. B. Tauris, 2003. ———. Sertão mar: Glauber Rocha e a estética da fome. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1983.


84


Crossing Borders, Crossing Genres


Part III





Cofralandes: A Formative Space for Chilean Identity Alejandra Rodríguez-Remedi

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. Jacques Rancière1

T

he first four parts of writer-director Raúl Ruiz’s unfinished Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002, alternative subtitle: Impressions of Chile) radically breach the frontiers between artist, researcher, and educator in the generation of a profoundly poetic (trans)formative space for Chilean identity. In order to address this multifaceted work, which was awarded the Glauber Rocha Award for Best Latin American Film and the International Press Award (FIPRESCI) at the 2002 Montreal World Film Festival, I shall discuss Ruiz’s reflections on cinema and his dialogue with avant-garde theories and practices, the construction of the social, and the (trans)formative potential of the audiovisual arts. In what might best be described as film-essays (cine ensayo) or documentary fictions, Ruiz subverts form and content in his reflections on national and personal identity. He attempts to provoke meaningful dialogue and reflection on historically traumatic, self-contradictory Chilean society and, through its universality, encourage other societies to engage. I argue that Ruiz’s nominally documentary projects in particular, and especially those that reach for and reflect on the reconstruction of Chile’s collective memory, possess a unique socio-historical value.2 I should preface this article by saying that I harbor no desire to draw a strict dividing line between Ruizian “fiction” and Ruizian “documentary” or to segregate Cofralandes from Ruiz’s other work, which possesses the congruence of cultural investigation and traffic of symbols that, propelled by the desire to understand and engage with culture, are tied together by the unifying thread of poetry.


Chapter 6

Shamanic Approximations of the Audiovisual Firstly, the images that together make up a film determine what type of narration will structure the film and not the contrary. Secondly, a film is not made


88

A L E J A N D R A R O D R Í G U E Z- R E M E D I

Ruiz emerged in the late 1960s as the most radical Chilean filmmaker of New Latin American Cinema. He was a prominent member of that generation that, with the benefit of more portable, sensitive camera and sound equipment—and informed by Italian neorealism, cinéma vérité, the French New Wave, the Free Cinema Group, New American Cinema and Direct Cinema—was keen to explore revolutionary avenues in form and content. In particular, debates about politics and aesthetics in film emanating from Argentina, Brazil and Cuba encouraged Ruiz to develop his hypothesis that cinema, by using anti-Hollywood narratives, could discover Chile; that cinema is essentially analytic and documentary as it holds a “deforming mirror” up to normally elusive behavior. Long before October 1973, when he fled Chile, Ruiz was arguing that his work was “investigative cinema,” drawing on the ethnographic research tools of observation and dialogue. He saw himself as a contributor to a “culture of resistance”: experimental cineastes exploring ways of converting and creating Chile, making it artistic, by contesting “predatory” Western film industry norms.4 As is well known, Ruiz was alienated from the Chilean exile community in Paris in the wake of his magisterial, micro-budget Dialogues of Exiles (1974) and he embarked upon a series of projects for the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in the late 1970s and in collaboration with Portuguese producer Paulo Branco in the 1980s. Ruiz endeavored to make European films that draw on Chilean culture—most obviously, On Top of the Whale (1982), Three Crowns of the Sailor (1983), City of Pirates (1985), Life Is a Dream (1986) and, more recently, The Lost Domain (2005)—and, toward the end of the dictatorial era, began working sporadically in Chile again, directing A TV Dante (Cantos 9–14) (1989), La novela errante (1990) and Basta la palabra (1991). Despite his best efforts, however, Chilean funding was not forthcoming for another decade. The first two volumes of his Poetics of Cinema (published in English translations in 1995 and 2007 respectively) help us to appraise how Ruiz’s methods and approximations have advanced. For him, as noted in the quotation above, narrative springs from image, image being a film’s “point of departure.” By encouraging semi-allegorical, semi-enigmatic “germinal images,” or “instant fictions,” “to give birth to an unheard-of form of cinematographic narration,” he strives to harness a Neruda- or Nicanor Parralike “poetic force” to convey the indiscernible ambiguities of the world: a force stemming from uncertainty and mystery.5 Elsewhere he has described cinema as “the totality of all the arts connected by poetry,”6 characterized by a Picassoan spirit of artisan bricolage (“tinkering” or “pottering”). Extending the “investigative cinema” parallel, Ruiz’s cinema-as-bricolage


up or composed of a number of shots, rather it is de-composed by the shots; when we see a film of 500 shots, we also see 500 films. Thirdly, a film is valid, aesthetically valid, insofar as the film views the spectator as much as the spectator views the film. Raúl Ruiz3


89

research methods find a parallel with Norman Denzin and Yvonna Lincoln’s concept of the researcher-as-bricoleur-theorist: “The product of the bricoleur’s labor is a bricolage, a complex, dense, reflexive, collage-like creation that represents the researcher’s images, understandings, and interpretations of the world or phenomenon under analysis.”7 Much has been made of Ruiz’s denunciation of “central conflict theory” in film8 and tentative annunciation9 of “shamanic filmmaking,”10 the latter entailing the juxtaposition of our “real” memories with internalized sequences that we have not personally experienced. He argues that these “resonances” are film-like fragments of forgotten memories, dreams dormant within us and triggered into life when a film takes us beyond a given “hypnotic point,”11 beyond the reception of spectacle produced by the culture industry. In his aversion to “films about . . .,”12 Ruiz is ceaselessly modifying space and time and internal logics of diegesis in order to combine distinct ways of seeing and understanding. To try to give some sense to the oceanic realities about us, he interacts with diverse areas of knowledge with a polymath’s love for interdisciplinary play at the confluences of Eastern and Western traditions of art and science; figures such as Ramon Llull, Yuanji Shitao, Alfred North Whitehead, Pavel Florensky, Roger Caillois, and Jaakko Hintikka are special favorites. For Ruiz, it is vital that each film have its own combinatory system, its own logic.13 He is interested in films of monstrous, enigmatic “uniqueness,” often produced by miracles and sacred accidents, films which can produce “useful ennui” (i.e., films that give us time for formative introspection and thereby develop creativity) and whose “flaws” may generate intense poetry.14 His is a voyage between worlds of contemplation and action through living, vertiginous moving images: the flux of attention, fascination and detachment through “mobile narrative points.”15 For Ruiz, each shamanic film contains a “secret film,” its shots constituting secret plans (“plans secrets”16), which can be viewed “obliquely” with “double vision,” a gift we all innately possess that, rather than favoring the sequences of the apparent narrative, reveals the symbolic evocative and invocatory potential of “visual polysemia” isolated from that apparent narrative.17 Here we may call to mind Chicana feminist Gloria Anzaldúa’s approach to introspection in the context of her work on the mestizo condition: “Living between cultures results in ‘seeing double,’ first from the perspective of one culture, then from the perspective of another. Seeing from two or more perspectives simultaneously renders those cultures transparent.”18 Ruiz’s singular, ongoing approximations of shamanic activity in cinema, of a “double mosaic model” of structure and construction,19 of six functions of the shot, 20 and his burgeoning interest in how the watching of film impacts on the brain, indicate that he is continuing to broaden the range and eclecticism of his “recipes” (Ruiz’s own term). Ruiz has “narrativized”—like him, I hesitate to use the word “theorized”—his practice not simply to reflect on it, to make it transparent and evaluate it critically, but also to extend his bridges of exchange and expand the possibilities for dialogue and struggle. His reflections leave us with a language with


C O F RA L AN D ES


90


which to develop our own understandings and explorations of the humanizing potential of the audiovisual arts. The Democratic Reverie of the Art of Memory

For Ruiz, this “edifice of memories” is already a ruin, much like folklore, myth, and film itself. Situated in a cultural landscape molded by economic globalization, Ruiz’s films are reconstructions of ruins. His project entails a multiplicity of possibilities because of the mysteries and resonances of art and the changes of perception and empowerment it can generate. Memory contains fragments of life that provide meaningful materials to articulate histories and “autohistorias,” Anzaldúa’s term to describe “the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized autobiography or memoir.”22 Memory, then, consists of a plurality of contents captured by our senses, giving it an aesthetic dimension charged with symbolic meanings and potential: the poetry where the resources to understand life reside. If the reconstitution of memory has to do with reanchoring societies so they can think and transform themselves, the audiovisual arts evidently possess a substantial humanizing possibility. In a homogenized world, however, societies are drained of material and symbolic referents that anchor those collective memories that, Norbert Lechner claims, “establecen una mediación entre el tiempo del orden y el tiempo de la experiencia cotidiana, entre historia y biografía” (“establish a mediation between the time of order and the time of everyday experience, between history and biography”).23 The loss of unique referential coordinates has generated an exilic condition of disillusion. Ruiz has said that “Exile is a theme in most of my films, but it’s different kinds of exile. I could never have predicted that exile would become a central issue for all people in the world. We are all exiles. One of the major effects of globalization has been to turn everyone into exiles, because of the breakdown of the social ecosystems, to put it succinctly.”24 The diasporic discourse that emanates from his post-exilicity and cuts through his work has become more universal than ever. Ruiz has recently completed several projects in the run-up to Chile’s Bicentenary (2010): the series for National Television of Chile (TVN)25 La Recta Provincia (2007), and Litoral, cuentos del mar (2008); the international productions Días de campo (2004) and Nucingen Haus (2008); Benjamín Galemiri’s play Infamante Electra (2006); and the radio programme “Los cinco sentidos” (2007). In addition, there have been rumors of Gabriela Mistral and Violeta Parra biopics, a second radio program and a new opera by Jorge Arriagada based on The Three Crowns of the Sailor. Like Cofralandes, these works often take direct or indirect inspiration from the


Proust also spoke of raising “a vast edifice of memories,” and that seems to me to be what cinema is called to do. Andrey Tarkovsky21


91

work of writers Alberto Blest Gana, Mariano Latorre and, as in the case of Días de campo, Federico Gana.26 Their theme is the formation of Chilean national identity; the poetic intention, the union of Chile past and present. In this regard, Armand Mattelart has called for the mass media to transcend mercantile, utilitarian criteria and position themselves as a source of creative experimentation capable of developing audiences’ sense of political agency.27 Social actors can only become protagonists of social construction when they appropriate the media, a process Mattelart denominates “ciudadanización” (“citizenization”). Another former exile (and a champion of popular education), Gabriel Salazar, laments that Chilean television today does not draw upon human relations and is instead dedicated to the pharmakon of trying to make viewers forget their realities. More specifically, he has criticized the makers of recent Bicentennial biopics for failing to “educar a la ciudadanía en un mayor sentido democrático y de participación” (“educate citizens in a more democratic, participative way”) or make programmes relevant to social actors who are striving to educate themselves.28 Ruiz’s return to the Chilean mainstream—for him, the closing of the cycle—could assist in setting the grounds for the codes of interpretation and signification that Chileans need in order to share experiences with others and generate meaning; in Lechner’s terms: “narrar un ‘cuento de Chile’—un relato que ayude a la gente a visualizar su biografía personal como parte de una trayectoria histórica” (“to narrate a ‘tale of Chile’—a narration to help people visualize their personal biography as part of a historical trajectory”).29 Ruiz’s approach to the vicissitudes of history should come as no surprise, for he claims that his films change as the realities around him change.30 However, throughout his career he has maintained an interpretative logic that draws on a profound understanding of film as cultural formation: “The cinema reveals a series of mechanisms of behaviour which usually get eliminated or forgotten”; it “formalises behaviour,” gestures and language that are rarely if ever looked at.31 Ruiz’s pre-1973 films, for example, attempt to depict the linguistic incongruence and behavioral imbalance of an alienated society and these approximations were informed and expanded through the experience of exile. In 1983, the first of his many fleeting trips to Chile brought a new realization: “the military government was like the logical outcome desired by all Chileans,”32 what Salazar calls the “traditionalist consecration of order,” to the extent that authoritarianism, arbitrariness and repression of human rights come to be celebrated as patriotic values.33 The work I now wish to concentrate on is located in Chile following more than a decade of transitional (and neoliberal) redemocratization. In Cofralandes, Ruiz is testing out his ideas concerning narrative and image, playing with “connections, games of combinatory permutation of a kind that are less evident in cinema.”34 In addition, we may infer from the film’s title the musical derivation of its structure, the rhapsody being notable for a freeform, spontaneous sense of improvisation, and its episodic yet integrated range of contrasting moods and tones, often expressive of national


C O F RA L AN D ES



temperament. The four completed feature-length parts (of a proposed ten), shot low-budget on digital video35 in Chile in 2002 and given a very limited release there in 2003, offered the possibility of a multi-narrative formation intended to permit as great a multiplicity of potential memory reconstructions to “flow” as viewers’ subjectivities can engage. Ruiz has described Cofralandes as a “spiritual autobiography” or “great almanac” that only Chileans can understand and has said that the films originally sprang from three typically oneiric germinal images witnessed in the street in Santiago de Chile.36 “The theme is Chile. What is strange, funny, and curious about Chile. The purpose is to provoke conversation. I try to show Chile at its most anodyne and grey.”37 He aims to address and harness what he sees as the country’s “metamorphous” culture and aesthetic potential (not excluding its ugliness, ungainliness and frivolity) as well as his countrymen’s “ludic capacity” and propensity for cringing at others’ behavior (“vergüenza ajena”).38 An open vision designed to generate curiosity about Chile, Cofralandes follows a loose picaresque narrative arc and observes four characters’ perceptions about life in the country. In the first part, a French writer (Bernard Pautrat) and an unseen narrator (voiced by Ruiz) arrive in Chile.39 Three one-on-one conversations about the national character and landscape take place between the Frenchman and a German artist (Rainer Krause) and an English journalist (Malcolm Coad) both resident in Chile. The second part (subtitled Rostros y Rincones, “Faces and Corners”), as the Frenchman and the Chilean head south, is an unlikely collage of Georges Simenon, Cecilia Bolocco and Chilean faces, paintings (particularly landscapes and portraits), traditional folksingers (cantores or poetas populares), beauty queens, newspaper clippings and comic books. In the third part (Museos y Clubes en la región antártica, “Museums and Clubs in the Antarctic”), the travellers head north and then return to Santiago as news arrives of Pinochet’s arrest in London. In the fourth part (Evocaciones y valses, “Evocations and Waltzes”), the three foreigners have disappeared and we are left with the Chilean narrator’s reverie about his schooldays and three dramatic scenes evoking Chilean literature, history and folklore. Ruiz inverts series of shots from film to film, mixing sounds and images with music by his regular collaborator, Jorge Arriagada, and that of Alfonso Leng, René Amengual and Violeta Parra, and quotations from Pier Paolo Pasolini, G. E. Moore and Jorge Carrera Andrade. The heterogeneous images interlaced with this nominal narrative are charged with multitudinous contents and referents from memory and dream, and therefore rarely correspond to linear reason. Examples include militaristic Father Christmases and blind men evoking the 1973 military coup in the height of summer (in the first part), a sleeping dog’s political dream (second part), the Museum of the Sandwich (third part) and a diabolical hen (fourth part). In figure 6.1, we see Ruiz directing the folk singer Isabel Parra in the role of Death and in figure 6.2 the director filming a playful scene featuring an outsized pack of “Luzifer Matches.” Cofralandes raises issues related to the recognition of the diversity of popular culture, racial mestization (mestizaje), landscapes, human noise


92


93

Figure 6.1 Folklore as ruin. Raúl Ruiz directs Isabel Parra during the filming of the fourth part of Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody (2002)


C O F RA L AN D ES

and all the other constituent ruins of folklore, the Ruizian foundation of society. It is an exercise that reconstitutes the reference points, meeting places, ecosystems and daily rituals necessary for the reinvention of postdictatorial Chilean society. Cofralandes explores the processes of forgetting the cultural referents that anchor memory and the implication of this forgetfulness for identity construction.40 It attempts to rescue these referents, contributing to the ongoing process of (re)construction and (re) invention. 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


Figure 6.2 The ludic capacity. Ruiz coordinates a game of “Luzifer Matches” during the filming of the fourth part of Cofralandes

A mí ya se me está olvidando el castellano. Ya no sé ni cómo se dice “piure.” ¿Cómo era que se dice “macha”? Misterio. A mí se me olvidó hasta persignarme en castellano. Cuando quiero decir algo, se me borran las palabras. Quiero decir algo. Nada. Se me borran las palabras. Ayer quería decir “edificio.” Nada. Antes se decía “perro” en castellano. Ahora parece que no. Se dice como “gato.” No, se dice “león.” O se dice “espuela.” Y entonces ¿cómo se dice “espuela”? Misterio. Así, así. Así, así. Todo se olvida. Menos la esperanza. Pero ahora está por ver: ¿cómo se dice “esperanza” en castellano? “Esperanza” no existe en castellano. Es un chilenismo. Ayer quería decir “durazno” y me salió “melocotón.” Y yo que quería decir “Chile” y me salió . . . ¿quién sabe qué? Es que todo se olvida. Es que todo se olvida. “Y lo último que se olvida es la esperanza.” Pero ¿qué quiere decir “esperanza”? Vamos viendo. “Esperanza” quiere decir “sandía.” No, “sandía” quiere decir “pera.” Y ¿cómo era que se decía “cariño”? Se dice, “¡Espérate!” A ver, contemos. Eso es en francés. Porque cuando yo hablo en francés, digo “poire.” O digo “chili.” (Ruiz’s narrator in Cofralandes, third part) I’m forgetting Spanish. I already don’t know how to say “piure.” How do you say “macha”? Mystery. I’ve even forgotten how to cross myself in Spanish. When I want to say something, the words are erased. I want to say something. Nothing. The words are erased. Yesterday I wanted to say “building.” Nothing. Before you said “dog” in Spanish. Now it seems you don’t. You say something like “cat.” No, you say “lion.” Or you say “spur.” And so how do you say “spur”? Mystery. So it goes, so it goes. So it goes, so it goes. You forget everything. Except hope. But there’s the problem: how do you say “hope” in Spanish? “Hope” doesn’t exist in Spanish. It’s a Chileanism. Yesterday I wanted to say “peach (durazno)” and I came out with “peach (melocotón).” And I who wanted to say “Chile” and I came out with . . . who-knows-what? You forget everything. It’s because you forget everything. “Hope is the last thing you forget.” But what does “hope” mean? We’re finding out. “Hope” means “watermelon.” No, “watermelon” means “pear.” And how do you say “affection” again? You say, “You wait!” Let’s see, hold on a moment. That’s French. Because when I speak in French, I say “poire.” Or I say “chili.”


94


95

Lechner writes that, “A falta de palabras y símbolos para dar cuenta del pasado, [la gente] opta por el silencio” (“Lacking words and symbols with which to refer to the past, [people] opt for silence”).41 He calls for the resignification of language, especially the language of democracy, for, as it no longer expresses society’s symbolic representations, social actors have difficulty recognizing themselves within democracy. It can be no surprise that language becomes an essential tool in Cofralandes, a movement toward the (re)construction and (re)invention of Chilean society by transmitting and keeping memory alive through language. The above quotation, a stream of consciousness intoned by Ruiz over a melancholic, crepuscular montage of shadows and curtains, illustrates how he uses the syntactical fracturing and repetition typical of Chilean Spanish, perhaps to convey the effects of the lingual modifications brought about by the censorious Pinochet regime, the free-market Concertación coalition governments and the exigencies of cultural dependency. Toward Critical (Trans)Formation Poetry does not offer us empirical or documentary truth, but it enables us to “know” in unique ways. Maxine Greene42

Greene writes that experiences with art objects “have the capacity to defamiliarize everyday reality: to begin with the overly familiar and transfigure it into something different enough to make those who are awakened hear and see.”43 Cofralandes defamiliarizes, through a broad combinatory range of connections and juxtapositions, distinct elements of life in the hope that Chileans will discover and reappropriate these in order to construct a more unified sense of themselves. The four protagonists’ gazes, which apparently bind the four parts together, constitute a pedagogical resource; Ruiz provides us with an external vision, an invitation to engage with the challenge of seeing ourselves through the eyes of others, seeing ourselves from the outside. For this inversion of the subject/object configuration of cultural dependency to take place, however, it must first be imagined; Anzaldúa writes that, “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.”44 Cofralandes, while clearly not a didactic narrative, can thus be seen as an attempt to provide spectators with useful contents:


C O F RA L AN D ES

there will be a way of creating a cinema which allows greater participation, a cinema endowed with a greater possibility of analysis, more open to daily life, a cinema that truly tries to transform our reality. Which obviously doesn’t mean making films which incite strikes, but films which help us to know the reality it wants to change. (Ruiz in interview, pre-September 1973)45

More recently Ruiz has written of cinema “as a machine for travel through space and time”46 that can disrupt pre-existing naturalized concepts and generate new formative experiences for intervening in the social order; an 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


awareness of the world that can provide us with contents of life to sustain our identities. Cinema, for Alain Badiou, offers “una real posibilidad política” (“a real political possibility”) for suggesting “una imagen del mundo totalmente nueva,” (“a totally new image of the world”) as it introduces ruptures rather than the conformity of repetition.47 In his discussion of critical pedagogy as cultural practice and cultural work as pedagogical practice, Henry Giroux has argued for the use of films “as legitimate objects of social knowledge” and “also as pedagogical texts that play a formative role in shaping” social identity.48 Few filmmakers explicitly address the critical-pedagogical dimension of their work, Peter Watkins being a notable exception in designing alternative strategies for vocational educators to work with his films in order to combat what he calls a “pedagogy of fear”: “the wide-spread use throughout the secondary and tertiary sectors of methods which teach students to enter the mass media as compliant professionals to perpetuate the Hollywood narrative structure, with its hierarchical relationship to the audience.”49 Elsewhere, Ousmane Sembène, who strove to create the culture that Africa needs for development, spoke of cinema as a “movie school” reflecting the real struggles of Africans, a “mirror—so my people can take responsibility and solve their own problems.”50 Ruiz has stated that he envisages Cofralandes as an anthology or compilation of miscellanea, poetic texts and lessons (aprendizajes) about Chilean history, stories, culture, language, landscapes and national identity. The fact that the Chilean Ministry of Education actually funded Cofralandes 51 makes explicit its pedagogical aspect, giving a specific orientation to the form in which Ruiz chooses to realize his pedagogical intentions (what we might call a “modular” facilitating a “rhapsodic structure”). Ruiz has stipulated that Cofralandes is not suited to commercial television and recommended it be exhibited to audiences of no more than twenty people at a time and in an atmosphere of absolute calm,52 which is to say, reflective classroom conditions. To date, Cofralandes has mainly been shown in cultural centers and at festivals, though the Ministry of Education has also made the first four parts available for download online53 and there has been talk of a Bicentennial television broadcast. An example of the multiple formative possibilities of Cofralandes can be found in the second, third and fourth parts as images and sounds of Chile are contrasted with the “Chile” presented in newspaper headlines. This may remind us of Salazar’s distinction between two parallel worlds of formation: “Culturaobjeto” (school textbooks and other specifically didactic materials) and “el autocultivo del ser humano” (fulfilment of life projects and identity development outside formal education); Salazar goes on to assert that in modern Chile, “está formándose una cultura social muy significativa, particularmente entre los jóvenes. Hay que potenciar ese movimiento, de educar al ciudadano en todo el sentido de la palabra” (“a very significant social culture is taking shape, particularly among young people. It is necessary to empower that movement, to educate the citizen in all senses of the word”).54 It is hardly surprising that Ruiz too tends to feel affinity with younger,


96


97

emerging Chilean filmmakers attempting to escape the industrialization of art imposed by market-oriented government cultural policies, “el abuelo que conspira con el nieto contra el padre” (“the grandparent who conspires with the grandchild against the parent”).55 In his films, Ruiz tries to (re)create the “incertidumbre del espacio” (“uncertainty of space”) which characterizes fiction; writers, he asserts, only “Te dan tres o cuatro elementos” (“give you three or four elements”), thus conveying an uncanny, gap-filled space that is not normally (re)presented in conventional filmmaking.56 Ruiz’s treatment of literary references in Cofralandes is therefore playful, giving the opportunity to different characters to interact and come up with their own stories. In the fourth part, a character from an archetypal Ruizian tableau vivant recreation of Blest Gana’s fiction begins to dream: Un sueño político. Soñaba con Chile del futuro en que había enseñanza gratuita, seguridad social, igualdad antes las leyes. Y, como nosotros vivíamos más o menos en ese sueño, a “Don Marat,” como le decían el profesor, se le había ocurrido que para aprender de verdad, había que dormir mucho. Nosotros teníamos siesta obligatoria y soñábamos con Martín Rivas o con la Aritmética del amor, cosas así. Era raro porque soñábamos con unos personajes que, parece que soñaban con nosotros. “Don Marat,” como le decíamos al profesor, era un soñador. Se dormía en clase. Decía que soñaba con la Revolución Francesa. Pero nosotros no. Nosotros soñábamos con Martín Rivas. (Ruiz’s narrator in Cofralandes, fourth part) A political dream. He dreamt about a future Chile in which there was free education, social security, equality before the law. And, as we lived more or less in that dream, it had occurred to “Mr. Marat,” as the teacher was known, that in order to learn truly, one had to sleep a lot. We had obligatory siestas and we dreamt about Martín Rivas or about Arithmetic of Love, things like that. It was weird because we dreamt about characters who, it seems, were dreaming about us. “Mr Marat,” as we called the teacher, was a dreamer. He slept in class. He said he dreamt about the French Revolution. But not us. We dreamt about Martín Rivas.

In addition, former fireman Mr. Marat, a character echoing Ruiz’s “progressive” music teacher in Palomita Blanca (1973), teaches primary school children (Ruiz’s narrator among them) in Quilpué in rural Chile in the 1950s about Nicholas Saunderson and James Joyce and writes “social novels” that surrealistically come to fruition. If “writing history and writing stories come under the same regime of truth,” as Rancière asserts in his discussion of Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992),57 the Ruizian discourse on education (seemingly more directly influenced by Mistral than, say, Paulo Freire) is that a good primary, secondary or tertiary teacher (or filmmaker or researcher) must first and foremost be a good (folkloric) storyteller, permitting students (or audiences) to engage in learning (history and stories) and travel across space and time (and disciplinary boundaries). Ruiz has spoken of Aleksandr Sokurov’s technique in Russian Ark (2002) as “una forma de


C O F RA L AN D ES



trabajar el espacio, es decir, de entender que todo el tiempo coexiste, y que la cámara lo liga con un simple movimiento” (“a way of working space, which is to say, of understanding that all time coexists, and that the camera links it with a simple movement”).58 For Ruiz, films are living organisms that travel to audiences and that the spectator must also travel toward: “Films are like human beings: you look at them and they look back at you.”59 Interestingly, he tries to generate (trans)formation among the members of his crews as well as audiences. On set, he has been known to devise logistical challenges for technicians and write short creative texts to stimulate his actors’ imaginations, thus opening additional spaces for introspection. He has also reflected on a list of considerations for the teaching of cinema, emphasizing teachers’ understanding of cinema as a phenomenon, with its own mystery and potential (“the nature of cinema”), and their awareness of the subjective nature of the knowledge construction that takes place during teaching/learning processes—in theoretical and practical dimensions—especially during the students’ encounter with, and understanding of, film production (“the learning of cinema”).60 Conclusion In the so-called era of images and communications sophistication, one has to think with acute obstinacy about why we lack trustworthy, plural images of our neighbours, for they are not the already discarded stereotypes of the school playground. Diamela Eltit61

The audiovisual arts have the potential to generate critical learning experiences that may help to raise awareness of the fact that we all participate in the imagining and making of society, a first step toward overcoming what Lechner calls “la naturalización de lo social” (“the naturalization of the social”), the belief that society obeys certain natural laws that people can know but never modify.62 Ruiz, believing that “shamanic cinema” can provide alternative fields of understanding that could allow us to make better sense of the world’s plurality, denounces how the hegemony of Western industrial paradigms installs in audiences a formulaic way of understanding films (and by implication the world at large). Films reflect societies’ thought processes, he is at pains to remind us. Like Eltit, Ruiz is a natural ethnographer.63 With Cofralandes—one of his most radical, unconstrained research outputs—he seeks to conduct us further toward the “heart of Chileanness” (chilenidad), a landscape of fragmented identity and memory haunted, José Bengoa argues, by the insecurities of compulsive modernization and nostalgia for lost community.64 In this context, Cofralandes presents us with rich (trans)formative possibilities: the evocation of aesthetic emotion through the bricolage of research and poetry. Cofralandes—the “land of plenty” that Ruiz is (re)discovering and


98


C O F RA L AN D ES

99

(re)creating—is a fertile terrain filled with times, spaces and in-between spaces waiting to be inhabited and appropriated.

This chapter incorporates certain lines of thinking that I have developed in my doctoral dissertation, “The Arts as Means of Cultural Integration: A Chilean Case Study” (Robert Gordon University, 2007). In addition, I wish to state my indebtedness to Inti Briones for providing me with the two accompanying images and also to Lindsay Hodgson for bringing to my attention several research materials that I have used extensively. Any inaccuracies are my own. 1. The Politics of Aesthetics, 38. Indeed, Ruiz has commented that, “En esta pulsión que crea esa especie de dicotomía entre el documental y el cine argumenta yo siempre escogí más bien la parte documental, es decir, el poder jugar con las irrupciones de la ficción, de muchas ficciones, dentro de una especie de mar de imágenes, de continuos de imágenes” (“In the impulse that creates this dichotomy of sorts between documentary and fiction film, I’ve always sided with documentary, which is to say, to be able to play with the irruptions of fiction, of many fictions, in a sort of sea of images, of continuums of images”). See Román, “ ‘El guión lo hago al final’,” 37; my translation. 2. Werner Herzog too refutes the official fiction/documentary split in his call for filmmakers to work toward “poetic, ecstatic truth” rather than “the truth of accountants.” See Cronin, Herzog on Herzog, 238–243 and 301–302. Brief accounts of Ruiz’s relationship with documentary can be found in Richardson, Surrealism and Cinema, 152–153 and Pick, “Chilean Cinema in Exile, 1973–1986,” 438. 3. Poetics of Cinema 2, 10. 4. Bolzoni, “Interview with Raul Ruiz,” 30–36. It is interesting to note that, similarly, Frederick Wiseman is motivated by the notion that the United States remains an “unexplored” and “undiscovered country.” See Aftab and Weltz, “Fred Wiseman.” 5. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 107–121. He had previously described how “obsesiones, ideas generales y diálogos” (“obsessions, general ideas and dialogues”) lurked behind the images he captured, which he later edited into unforeseen situations. See Román, “ ‘El guión lo hago al final’,” 41. 6. James, “Mexico Rising: Interview.” George Steiner has also admitted that one of his greatest regrets was: “No haber comprendido que la gran poética de la segunda mitad del siglo XX sería la del cine.” See L’Yvonnet, “Imposible negociar las pasiones.” 7. Denzin and Lincoln, Handbook of Qualitative Research, 3. Claude LéviStrauss’s metaphorical use of the term bricolage in the 1960s has also influenced recent theories of teaching and learning, most famously being appropriated by Seymour Papert to refer to pupils’ playful, unstructured learning styles. 8. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 9–23. The phrase refers to John Howard Lawson’s writings of the 1930s and 1940s. Ruiz does not avail himself of the terms “classical Hollywood cinema” or “classic narrative system” in vogue in Englishlanguage Film Studies since the 1980s.


Notes



9. I borrow the terms “denunciation” and “annunciation” from Paulo Freire who, in his discussion of utopian pedagogy, defines them as critical moments in the project of the conscientization of the poor (Freire, The Politics of Education, 57–59). 10. Ibid., 73–90. 11. Ibid., 117–119. 12. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 46. 13. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 112–113. 14. Ibid., 13, 85. As far as “boredom” is concerned, Ruiz’s films may at times recall those of Jean Cocteau, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Marguerite Duras (and certain more recent work by Peter Greenaway and Francis Ford Coppola) but are also distinguished by an arch, absurdist Chilean logician’s humor at times reminiscent of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Douglas Sirk-inspired work in the mid-1970s. Cofralandes itself puts us in mind of the twilit playfulness of the Orson Welles of The Immortal Story (1968) and F for Fake (1974) and Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), Tonino Guerra and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Tempo di viaggio (1983), Sokurov’s Russian Ark and the freeform radicalism of Jonas Mekas or John Cassavetes. Moreover, Ruiz is also quick to highlight his debt to and nostalgia for the Hollywood B movie and, though not given to remakes or sequels, I am tempted to muse on what he would do with enigmatic films made by two other favorite émigrés, Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat (1934) and Karl Freund’s Mad Love (1935). 15. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 41. Also see Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 90, 105. 16. The English word “plan” (taken from Brian Holmes’ translation of Poetics of Cinema 1) does not express the ambiguity of the French word plan that may mean both “plan” and “shot.” 17. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 109–116. 18. Anzaldúa and Keating, This Bridge We Call Home, 549. 19. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 45. 20. See Buci-Glucksmann et al., Conversaciones con Raúl Ruiz, 29–31, and Martin and Ruiz, Raúl Ruiz, 73–83. 21. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema, 59. 22. Anzaldúa and Keating, This Bridge We Call Home, 578. 23. Las sombras del mañana, 82; emphasis in original, my translation. 24. Ruiz interviewed by Jérôme Prieur in the “Un voyage fantastique” extra. Three Crowns of the Sailor. DVD. Directed by Raoul Ruiz. 1983; Paris, France: Blaq Out, 2006. 25. Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Vicente Sabatini, TVN’s current director of programming. 26. For Ruiz, these authors unveil the historical conformation of the Chilean mindset (for example, Blest Gana and the late-nineteenth-century oligarchy). It has been suggested that each of Ruiz’s films constitutes the footnotes of the books he reads during production. Another instance of his hermeneutic approach: research on Klimt (2006) involved reading Arthur Schnitzler, Alfred Polgar, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth to attempt to arrive at the essence of fin-de-siècle Vienna, most particularly from a Jewish perspective. Moreover, much dialogue in the café scenes of this recent film is inspired by bohemian Santiago in the 1960s, another city on the verge of turmoil. 27. “Diversidad, Cultura y Medios de Comunicación.” The importance of this is evident as the National Council for Culture and the Arts’ first Survey of


100


28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

101

Cultural Consumption and Use of Free Time (2004) found that television and radio are most Chileans’ main form of cultural consumption. See Cárcamo, “Un referente del movimiento de la historia social chilena,” my translation. Lechner, “Los desafíos políticos del cambio cultural,” my translation. Bolzoni, “Interview with Raúl Ruiz,” 40. Ibid., 31. Cerpa Orellana, “Raúl Ruiz,” my translation. See Somarriva Q., “La formación del Estado chileno.” James, “Mexico Rising: Interview.” Digital is becoming the format of choice in Chile. It offers Ruiz great freedom to realize his shamanic approximations: “One day I can have something that I’ve never had before in film—like 100 extras. And then the next day, I’m myself alone, making pick-ups.” See James, “Mexico Rising: Interview.” As related in Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 21–22 and James, “Mexico Rising: Interview.” Two of the images are re–created in the first part of Cofralandes. James, “Mexico Rising: Interview.” Román, “ ‘El guión lo hago al final’,” 37–38; Ruiz, “Ma présidente.” In addition, several unidentified voiceovers intermittently recite assorted miscellanea, including droll “to-do” lists and excerpts from poetry by Gabriela Mistral, Diego Dublé Urrutia, and Carlos Pezoa Véliz. Cerpa Orellana, “Raúl Ruiz.” The consequences of the dynamic of forgetting have been discussed and analyzed most publicly in the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report, We, the Chileans: A Cultural Challenge (2002). Lechner, Las sombras del mañana, 70, my translation. The Dialectic of Freedom, 131. Ibid., 128–129. Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul, 385. Bolzoni, “Interview with Raul Ruiz,” 40. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 1, 7. Goldenberg, “Entrevista a Alain Badiou,” my translation. Giroux, “Doing Cultural Studies.” Watkins, “How to Show and Work with the Film?” Greer, “Guardian/NFT Interview: Ousmane Sembène.” Thanks in no small part to the efforts of Claudio Di Girólamo, head of the Ministry’s Cultural Division at the time. See Kairuz, “El hombre que no duerme.” At http://www.cinechileno.org/ and http://es.arcoiris.tv/. Cárcamo, “Un referente del movimiento de la historia social chilena.” Cáceres, “Entrevista a Raúl Ruiz.” Also see Buci-Glucksmann et al., Conversaciones con Raúl Ruiz, 36–37. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 38. Buci-Glucksmann et al., Conversaciones con Raúl Ruiz, 135. Ruiz, Poetics of Cinema 2, 106. Ruiz, Poética del cine, 139–157. “El fluir de la palabra,” my translation. Eltit is in fact here referring to modern-day Chilean-Bolivian relations. See Lechner, Las sombras del mañana, 15–22.


C O F RA L AN D ES


102


63. In this regard, Eltit’s collaboration with Paz Errázuriz, El infarto del alma (1994), is highly recommended. Interestingly, Ruiz has claimed that he felt like Victor Segalen exploring Chile during the making of Cofralandes. See Ruiz, “Ma présidente.” 64. Bengoa, La comunidad reclamada, 55–58.

Aftab, Kaleem and Alexandra Weltz. “Fred Wiseman,” 2000, http://www.iol. ie/~galfilm/filmwest/40wiseman.htm. Accessed May 19, 2008. Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul. Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Foundation Press, 1990. Anzaldúa, Gloria E. and Analouise Keating, eds. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Bengoa, José. La comunidad reclamada: Identidades, utopías y memorias en la sociedad Chilena actual. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Catalonia, 2006. Bolzoni, Francesco. “Interview with Raul Ruiz.” In Chilean Cinema, edited by Michael Chanan, 27–40. London: British Film Institute (BFI), 1976. Buci-Glucksmann, Christine, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Abdelwahab Meddeb, Benoît Peeters, and José Román. Conversaciones con Raúl Ruiz, edited by Eduardo Sabrovsky. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2003. Cáceres, Yenny. “Entrevista a Raúl Ruiz: ‘Chile me duele menos que un lumbago,’ ” 2005, http://www.mabuse.cl/1448/article-70708.html. Accessed June 30, 2007. Cárcamo, Ricardo. “Un referente del movimiento de la historia social chilena,” 2007, http://www.elsur.cl/edicion_hoy/secciones/articulo.php?id=92317&dia=1180584000. Accessed May 19, 2008. Cerpa Orellana, Luis. “Raúl Ruiz: Chile es un país de llorones,” 2005, http://www. racontto.cl/12/04-entrevistas/ruiz.htm. Accessed January 15, 2006. Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes CNCA. Encuesta sobre Consumo Cultural yUsodelTiempoLibre. 2004. http://www.ine.cl/canales/sala_prensa/noticias/2004/ nov/not251104.php. Accessed May 19, 2008. Cronin, Paul, ed. Herzog on Herzog. London: Faber and Faber, 2002. Denzin, Norman K. and Yvonna S. Lincoln, eds. Handbook of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994. Eltit, Diamela. “El fluir de la palabra,” 2004, http://166.114.28.115/fondo_ negro?20040321/art01.htm. Accessed March 21, 2004. Eltit, Diamela and Paz Errázuriz. El infarto del alma. Santiago de Chile: Francisco Zegers, 1994. Freire, Paulo. The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation. Granby, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985. Giroux, Henry A. “Doing Cultural Studies: Youth and the Challenge of Pedagogy,” 1994, http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/courses/ed253a/Giroux/Giroux1.html. Accessed May 19, 2008. Goldenberg, Julia. “Entrevista a Alain Badiou,” 2003, http://www.lacan.com/ jgbadiou.htm. Accessed May 19, 2008. Greene, Maxine. The Dialectic of Freedom. New York: Teachers College Press, 1988.


Works Cited


103

Greer, Bonnie. “Guardian/NFT interview: Ousmane Sembène,” 2005, http://film. guardian.co.uk/print/0,,5210285–101730,00.html. Accessed May 19, 2008. James, Nick. “Mexico Rising: Interview,” 2006, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/ feature/49250. Accessed May 19, 2008. Kairuz, Mariano. “El hombre que no duerme,” 2004, http://www.pagina12.com. ar/diario/suplementos/radar/subnotas/1352–216-2004–04-12.html. Accessed May 19, 2008. Lechner, Norbert. “Los desafíos políticos del cambio cultural,” 2002, http://www. antroposmoderno.com/antro-articulo.php?id_articulo=641. Accessed May 19, 2008. ———. Las sombras del mañana: La dimensión subjetiva de la política. Santiago de Chile: LOM ediciones, 2002. L’Yvonnet, François. “Imposible negociar las pasiones: Entrevista con George Steiner,” 2006, http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/graficos/confabulario/1-julio06. htm. Accessed May 19, 2008. Martin, Adrian and Raúl Ruiz. Raúl Ruiz: Sublimes obsesiones. Buenos Aires: Altamira, 2004. Mattelart, Armand. “Diversidad, cultura y medios de comunicación.” Discussion held at Diversidad Cultural: El valor de la diferencia international Symposium, Santiago de Chile, June 28–29, 2005. Pick, Zuzana M. “Chilean Cinema in Exile, 1973–1986.” In New Latin American Cinema, Volume Two: Studies of National Cinemas, edited by Michael T. Martin, 423–440. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997. Rancière, Jacques. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London and New York: Continuum, 2004. Richardson, Michael. Surrealism and Cinema. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2006. Román, José. “ ‘El guión lo hago al final’: Declaraciones de Raúl Ruiz a José Román,” Enfoque 7 (1986), 37–41. Ruiz, Raúl. Poética del cine. Translated by Waldo Rojas. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Sudamericana Chilena, 2000. ———. Poetics of Cinema 1: Miscellanies. Translated by Brian Holmes. Paris: Dis Voir, 1995. ———. Poetics of Cinema 2. Translated by Carlos Morreo. Paris: Dis Voir, 2007. ———. “Ma présidente,” 2006, http://hebdo.nouvelobs.com/hebdo/parution/ p2151/articles/a293133-ma_presidente.html. Accessed May 19, 2008) Somarriva Q., Marcelo. “La formación del Estado chileno: Demoliendo héroes,” 2006, http://aqguv.blogspot.com/search?q=demoliendo. Accessed June 30, 2007. Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), 2002. Human Development in Chile: We the Chileans, A Cultural Challenge. CD-ROM. Watkins, Peter. “How to Show and Work with the Film? Teaching & Discussion Notes for ‘La Commune,’ ” 2001, http://www.lerebond.org/show.htm. Accessed September 12, 2006.


C O F RA L AN D ES





Aunt Juana’s Shop, or Reality as Metaphor, in María Novaro’s El jardín del Edén Maximiliano Maza Pérez

The experience of daily life . . . a place so complex, so fertile, so full of questions and images about our identity as Mexicans, about the many Mexicos there could be . . . María Novaro1

F

or María Novaro, director of El jardín del Edén (The Garden of Eden, 1994), the border between Mexico and the United States carries such a weight of complex significations that the protagonist of her film is not any of the actors and actresses who star in it. It is, rather, the feeling of a suspended identity that emanates from each of the film’s images, mapping boundaries of emotion onto a geographical frontier. From this perspective, this chapter proposes to analyze the ways in which the director succeeds in integrating the stories of the characters in that transitory space, through a suggestive combination of narrative techniques taken from the documentary genre that are interwoven with devices more typical of fiction film and placed within a traditional dramatic structure. Despite the fact that the northern border has been present in Mexican fiction cinema almost since its beginnings, visions of the frontier have abounded in stereotypes and simplifications. Since 1922, when the director Miguel Contreras Torres filmed El hombre sin patria on location in Los Angeles and San Diego, California, more than 300 Mexican films2 have tried to capture on celluloid the complex realities of life on the border between Mexico and the United States. Very few films have achieved this, and it has only been in recent years that it has been possible to identify examples of what Norma Iglesias calls “border cinema,” whose definition “is as complex as the meaning of the term ‘border’.”3 What explanation could there be for such neglect? The reasons are complex and are rooted in the development of the Mexican film industry itself. During its industrial stage, between the 1930s and 1970s, the centralization of the Mexican film industry discouraged the shooting of films


Chapter 7


MA XIMILIANO MA Z A PÉREZ

beyond the confines of Mexico City, limiting the representation of the northern border—together with a large part of the rest of the country—to a few verbal references or, at the very best, to some picturesque set designs and stock shots.4 With these very limited resources for expression, the Mexican film industry turned the border with the United States into an artificial space that symbolized the most questionable values of national identity. From the 1970s, the decline in the Mexican film industry forced its producers out of film studios, which were becoming more and more scarce. The western, a genre of open spaces, became the most convenient option for those producers trying to reduce the cost of filming as much as possible. By setting their stories in the northern part of the country and in the border area, westerns such as El terror de la frontera (Zacarías Gómez Urquiza, 1961), La frontera sin ley (Jaime Salvador, 1964), El Texano (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1963) and Sangre en Río Bravo (Roberto Rodríguez, 1965) added elements of adventure and a confrontation with destiny to the cinematic imaginary of the frontier. A positive aspect of this first stage of decentralization in the Mexican film industry can be noted in the fact that the films produced from the 1960s onward began to show the real rural and urban landscapes of the border area between Mexico and the United States. However, neither the inhabitants, nor the increasingly numerous emigrants who were added to the region’s demography, were given a fair representation that moved beyond simple stereotypes. For Mexican cinema, the border between Mexico and the United States was an area inhabited by prejudiced Anglo-Saxons and indifferent Mexican Americans, through which Mexican emigrants had to travel toward a destiny that stripped them, inevitably, of their Mexican souls and converted them into “pochos.”5 These “pochos,” as is evident from the way in which they are depicted in films such as La Güera Xóchitl (Rogelio A. González, 1966) or El pocho (Eulalio González, 1969), represented a synthesis of the most negative aspects of both cultures.6 At the turn of the decade, increasing migration to the United States and a growth in movements promoting the civil rights of Chicanos coincided with the rise to power in Mexico of Luis Echeverría. Under his mandate, Mexican foreign policy gave special attention to issues concerning Mexican immigrant populations in the United States, at the same time as the film industry, submerged in a deep and prolonged crisis, was experiencing what E. García R iera calls “una virtual estatización, algo único en un país no socialista” (“a virtual process of nationalization, a unique phenomenon in a non-socialist country.”)7 This combination of new cultural policies and state interventionism in film production did not lose sight of a reality that was becoming more and more evident in those years: the accelerated increase in the number of citizens of Mexican origin in the United States. In relation to this issue, David Maciel points out that during Echeverría’s government, the Mexican media, both public and private,


106


EL JAR D Í N D EL ED ÉN

107

began to see the market potential in the United States for Mexican products and services. The film industry wasted no time in seizing on the Chicano theme, in an attempt to combine the nationalistic ideology of the regime with the market potential for those movies both in Mexico and in the external market of the United States.

The first years of the 1970s were also significant in establishing the aesthetic approach that Mexican films on a border theme would adopt in the next thirty years. In his analysis of the term cine pobre (“poor cinema”), in vogue at that time and employed to refer to the majority of the films made in Latin America, Michael Chanan reflects on the cinematographic use of real social space, filmed with natural lighting and direct sound, which in the beginning was motivated by the need to keep the costs of production low, and had the result that “the places and spaces where the film unfolds behave not like backdrops, but as characters in the drama.” 9 This documentary treatment of fictional space—which has its most important antecedents in the Italian neorealist films of the end of the 1940s—signified, according to Chanan, a commitment to authenticity by filmmakers in relation to their audience:10 In other words, not to hide the poverty of means with which the film is made, and not to try and imitate the production values or the ideology of the superproductions of the North. But this, I believe, remains a strong stylistic imperative of today’s popular art cinema in Latin America, with all its diversity. It is a cinema which insists on the difference of its look from that of Hollywood.11

This commitment to authenticity is visible in the border films of the 1980s, which were not only shot on location in the region’s urban and rural spaces, with modest production resources, but were also produced by businessmen who, by basing themselves in some of the major cities on both sides of the border, caused the second and most important wave of decentralization witnessed in the history of Mexican cinema. In this border cinema, featuring stories of drug traffickers and illegal immigrants in numerous productions of poor quality, we can locate some of the first signs of a genuine representation of the frontier in Mexican cinema.12 In these films, so underrated by some critics, the populations of the border areas, the Bravo River and the arid lands on both sides of the border were transformed (such as Tijuana in El jardín del Edén) into an absorbing reality that participates in, defines and conditions the behavior and the destinies of their stories’ characters.


comenzaron a percibir el potencial del mercado en Estados Unidos para productos y servicios mexicanos. El cine no perdió tiempo para sacar a la luz el tema de los chicanos, en un intento por combinar la ideología nacionalista del régimen con el potencial comercial de esas películas en México y en el mercado externo de Estados Unidos.8


108


Acknowledging the ever-greater importance of cultural studies on the border between Mexico and the United States, Iglesias points out that

Iglesias’ affirmation makes it clear that, from the 1990s, the representation of the border between Mexico and the United States in Mexican cinema began to include themes that had previously been ignored: themes such as the deterritorialization of migrant cultures, the porous and shifting nature of the frontiers, and the redefinition of identities and cultural practices. These ideas are present in a number of Mexican films of recent years, including Hasta morir (’Til Death, Fernando Sariñana, 1994), Bajo California, el límite del tiempo (Under California, The Limit of Time, Carlos Bolado, 1998), Santitos (Little Saints, Alejandro Springall, 1998), De ida y vuelta (To and From, Salvador Aguirre, 2000) Puños rosas (Pink Punch, Beto Gómez, 2004) or the previously mentioned El jardín del Edén. The plots of these films refer, partially or totally, to the problems caused by the confrontation between Mexican and North American cultures.14 According to Miriam Haddu: The location of a narrative in Mexican cinema has consistently held important symbolic qualities that assign to a particular film its very generic, moral and to a certain extent, ethical framework. It is for this reason that an investigation into such fundamental cinematic models is crucial for an understanding of how these same locations have been re-visited and, to some extent, re-invented in contemporary Mexican cinema.15

In this sense, it is interesting to analyze the ways in which a film like El jardín del Edén, which revisits and redefines a territory very much traveled by Mexican cinema, contributes to a reformulation of the symbolic space of the border region between Mexico and the United States, bestowing it with new attributes. The idea for El jardín del Edén, María Novaro’s third feature-length film, came to the director after attending a symposium for Mexican and Chicana Women Filmmakers and Video Artists in Tijuana at the end of 1990.16 The film tells the story of a group of characters who arrive in Tijuana looking for a better destiny. Felipe (Bruno Bichir) is a peasant determined to cross the border into the United States, while Serena (Gabriela Roel) is a widow who arrives with her children, after the death of her husband, to live with her Aunt Juana (Ana Ofelia Murguía). Jane (Renée Coleman) is another main character in the film: a gringa fascinated with “lo mexicano” (“everything Mexican”) who hopes to become a writer. Jane arrives in Tijuana to visit Elizabeth (Rosario Sagrav), a Chicana who is in the city to present an exhibition of Chicano art.17 The cast is completed by Frank (Joseph Culp), Jane’s


The most recent kind of border cinema is characterized by a crisis of cultural identity in which the characters confront an encounter of two national cultures. . . . In this new kind of film, the border functions as a symbol or cultural barrier rather than a geopolitical line.13


109

hermit-like brother, who lives in the coastal area listening to and recording the sounds of whales, and Lupita (Denisse Bravo), Elizabeth’s little daughter who has stopped speaking English and has yet to learn Spanish. The stories of the characters in El jardín del Edén are interwoven in a narrative marked by different gazes and records, and by territory: gazes that grant different identities to the city of Tijuana and to the area that extends from the Pacific Ocean to several kilometers north of the zigzagging border between Mexico and the United States; visual, written and sound records that underline the importance of memory and memories, of capturing forever what has been lived; and territory that, like Aunt Juana’s eclectic and colorful shop, turns into an enveloping reality that evokes multiple meanings and that defines and conditions the behavior, and even the destinies, of the characters. At first glance, the fact that the majority of the characters in The Garden of Eden are women might make viewers suppose that they are being presented with another one of Novaro’s films exploring the world of the Mexican female at the end of the twentieth century. However, a more indepth examination reveals the important roles played by the male characters in the film, an unusual focus for this director.18 In El jardín del Edén, the male characters fulfill the function of capturing, with their gaze, the reality that surrounds them. In this process of the symbolic appropriation of space, the male protagonists “take possession” of the space through which they travel.19 The film begins and ends with Felipe’s gaze, directed toward the wide strip of land belonging to the United States that stretches beyond the dividing line between the two countries. Felipe’s gazes longingly, his eyes always fixed on the future20 and on the almost infinite extension of land or sea that is before him. It is significant that the last image of the film, showing a group of dolphins freely crossing the maritime zone of the border, corresponds to the point of view of Felipe, who will probably attempt to cross the border again, this time accompanied by his younger brother. For his part, the gaze of Julián (Alan Ciangheroti), the oldest of Serena’s children, captures, with the help of his new camera, the life and the spaces of Tijuana and its outskirts, selecting in an almost anthropological way what he considers to be representative of life in Tijuana. This emphasis on showing those aspects of reality that are captured by the gaze of the male protagonists, and the constant use of the camera with an intention of documenting 21 the reality that surrounds the characters in the film, appear to reproduce elements of the investigation conducted in Tijuana by Néstor García Canclini, which led to the publication in 1989 of Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad.22 In his investigation, García Canclini and his team interviewed students, artists and cultural promoters from different socioeconomic backgrounds about life at the frontier and contact between cultures. When asked to name the most representative places of the region, many mentioned places that connected Tijuana with the other side of the border: Revolución Avenue, the





neighborhoods near the flimsy fence separating the two countries, the tomb of Juan Soldado, the “señor de los emigrantes” (“lord of the emigrants”), and the stridency of street signs written in Spanish, English, and Spanglish. Some passages from the book and several of the photographs that illustrate it 23 appear to form part of the plot and the images filmed by María Novaro in El jardín del Edén. For example, in his description of the coast where the dividing line between Mexican and United States territories ends, García Canclini comments: Al llegar a la playa “la línea” se cae y deja una zona de tránsito, usada a veces por los migrantes indocumentados. Todos los domingos las familias fragmentadas a ambos lados de la frontera se encuentran en los picnics.24 In arriving at the beach “the line” falls and leaves a transit zone, used at times by undocumented migrants. Every Sunday the fragmented families on both sides of the border gather for picnics.25

In the film, Felipe takes Jane to the beach where the weak metallic fence, which serves as the dividing line between both countries, ends abruptly, several meters before reaching the seashore. The spacious sandy area that stretches between the end of “the line” and the Pacific Ocean freely penetrates into both national territories, without finding any obstacle in its way. On the Mexican side of the beach, several people are gathered around, conversing and playing music in a seemingly relaxed, jovial atmosphere. The scene intrigues Jane, who asks Felipe what those people are doing. “They are waiting,” he says, “for their moment to arrive . . . the same as me.” A small group advances farther into North American territory following a “pollero” (trafficker of illegal immigrants). A few moments later, a border patrol helicopter flies over the site. At the end of the film, Felipe and his younger brother watch, from the same beach, the dolphins that cross freely from one country to another. If in Novaro’s films the masculine gaze captures reality, the feminine gaze possesses the gift of transforming it. Like the character of Julia (María Rojo) in Danzón (1991) who watches, captivated, the enormous ships with whimsical names that surround her as she strolls along the quay of the port of Veracruz, Jane in El jardín del Edén walks through the nooks and crannies of Tijuana, “beautifying” everything upon which her gaze falls. The images that Jane’s gaze reproduces are the most elaborate in the film, in photographic terms. The lighting creates a halo effect around the people and objects on which Jane rests her gaze, underlining the feeling of “falling in love” that the young girl experiences before the sculpted beauty of the indigenous Oaxacan women in the kitchen, or the sexual appeal that seems to emanate from the peasant Felipe when he appears on the highway. The most intense of these “transformative gazes” occurs at the bus station, when Jane “falls in love” again with indigenous beauty as she watches the young “pajarera” (bird-seller) wander along the platform. Meanwhile, Elizabeth’s gaze fixes itself on the television screen as if she were in front of a mirror casting back a painful reflection of her fragmented


110


111

identity, through the images of the videos that she watches in silence. Between these two women, literally and metaphorically, the gaze of Frida Kahlo becomes the bridge that connects the space between them.26 In contradiction to her name, Serena’s gaze is filled with anxiety and denial in respect of her new condition as a widow in a Tijuana that she perceives to be vulgar, dirty and piled high like the clothes and the mountain of junk in Aunt Juana’s shop. Despite her training as a photographer, Serena cannot find beauty in the reality that surrounds her, although her words testify to the contrary.27 The gaze of Aunt Juana, always attentive to detail, is the only one with the capacity to penetrate the surface of the reality that surrounds the characters, and to plumb the depths of the contradictory nature of life at the frontier. As well as gazes, visual, sound, and written records are also fundamental elements in the plot of El jardín del Edén. In the film, almost all of the characters employ different kinds of records, with the aim of not forgetting the past or of perpetuating the experience of the present. In the face of the constant redefinition of their identities and of the changing territory that surrounds them, these records turn into methods of not forgetting. In addition to the photographs that Julián takes and the ones that Serena produces in her photographic studio, the presence of photographic images in the film is abundant and significant. In his house, Frank has photographs of himself and Jane when they were both children, which indicate the close relationship that the two siblings have. Serena places the portrait of her dead husband on the chair he used to occupy in the dining room. Jane shows Elizabeth a book of photographs of Oaxacan women, while a young man makes a video recording of a tattooed man who poses proudly with his two daughters and his decorated car. The video recordings that Elizabeth watches (in which a Chicana woman speaks about the sense of alienation that she feels in relation to her Mexican ancestry) force her to face her hybrid cultural identity, while the sounds of the whales that Frank records reveal the personality of this man who was once a writer (another type of recording), and who has abandoned that profession in an attempt to turn his back on the past. Jane also wants to be a writer, so that she can record the reality that surrounds her in that new Paradise in which she dreams about becoming Eve.28 Finally, a third element crucial to the plot of El jardín del Edén is the territory of the city of Tijuana itself, and its surroundings. The film contains a great number of images that suggest an attempt by the director to turn Tijuana into the real protagonist of the film. The cinematographic use of real social space by Novaro in her films is based on the lighting and soundcapture techniques mentioned by Chanan 29 and on a practice that has turned into a hallmark of the director’s style, which consists of moving away from the dramatic action by means of slow traveling shots that emphasize the geography surrounding the characters.30 Through an insistent use of this kind of image, showing multiple versions of the frontier, from the solid to the invisible, Novaro incorporates the landscape into the plot and allows it to act as a determining factor in the behavior and destinies of her characters.31





In addition to the traveling shots in El jardín del Edén, Novaro’s camerawork consistently captures images of signs, monuments, streets, spaces and people from both sides of the border. These images act as visual commentaries on the complex geographical, social and cultural fabric of the self-proclaimed “most visited city in the world.” Referring to the complexity of meaning and the structure of frontiers, the writer Sergio Gómez Montero defines them as regions “en donde el límite no marca diferencias, sino que crea su propia, característica zona de influencia” (“in which the line does not mark differences, but creates its own characteristic zone of influence”).32 This zone, which the author calls “ecotono,” is a region in which the exchanges produced in it generate, in turn, a new zone, different from the original one. With specific reference to the Tijuana border, Gómez Montero states: La frontera de que aquí hablamos, es una zona de ecotono que se extiende hacia el norte de Estados Unidos (¿Los Ángeles no son acaso frontera?) y hacia el sur en el caso de México (La Paz y Los Cabos, así, serían también frontera). Esto nos lleva a calificar esta zona de ecotono como una zona sagrada que genera su propia vida diferenciada de la cotidiana.33 The border that we are talking about here is an “ecotone” zone that extends towards the north of the United States (Is Los Angeles not a border?) and towards the south in the case of Mexico (La Paz and Los Cabos, thus, would also be borders). This leads us to describe the ecotone zone as a sacred zone,34 which generates its own life which is different from everyday life.

In that “sacred zone” so charged with questions about our identity, geographical and emotional frontiers lose their rigidity and pile on top of each other like the pieces of a kaleidoscope, waiting for someone to order them as best they see fit. In that “Aunt Juana”35 so difficult to capture in all of her essence, in that “Garden of Eden” that is transformed at the will or caprice of whoever looks at it, Novaro has achieved a marvelous portrait of a reality that is perhaps difficult for some politicians to comprehend: a reality, which like the dolphins and whales that move freely about the ocean, knows not of borders or walls, and is not defeated by distances.


112

Notes 1. Bustos, “María Novaro, un clavado en la frontera,” 25. 2. David Maciel mentions “more than one hundred narrative films with the theme of emigration to the United States” (El bandolero, el pocho y la raza, 94). Norma Iglesias carries out a more detailed inventory, locating 275 films with border themes filmed between 1938 and 1989 (Entre yerba, polvo y plomo, 19). 3. Iglesias, “Reconstructing the Border,” 234.


4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

113

On that frontier made of words and film sets, Mexicans faced exile (La china Hilaria, 1938; Adiós mi chaparrita, 1939) as well as moral downfall (Aventurera, 1949; Frontera norte, 1953) and, sooner or later, after suffering discrimination and ill-treatment as a result of their condition as Espaldas mojadas (“Wet Backs,” 1953), they returned convinced that ¡Como México no hay dos! (“There’s No Place Like Mexico!” 1942). Maciel explains that the term “pocho” was coined in the early decades of the twentieth century in the context of increasing migration from Mexico to the United States: “el término ‘pocho’ se aplicó a las personas de origen mexicano que radicaban en Estados Unidos, sin importar su nacionalidad oficial y, más aún, se adjudicó a algunos mexicanos que habían permanecido allende el Bravo por algún tiempo y luego regresaron a su nación. El elemento común a todos ellos era que se les atribuía el deseo de asimilarse a la sociedad estadounidense—a costa de negar sus raíces mexicanas—y un sentimiento de superioridad respecto a la población de su país de origen” (“The term ‘pocho’ is used for people of Mexican origin who settled in the United States, whose official nationality mattered little to them, and was also applied to Mexicans who had stayed beyond the Bravo for some time and later returned to their country. The common element to all of them was the desire to assimilate with American society—at the cost of denying their Mexican roots—and a sense of superiority with regard to the immigrant population of their country of origin”). El bandolero, el pocho y la raza, 84. On El Pocho, a film written, directed, produced, and acted in by Eulalio González “Piporro,” native to Monterrey, Iglesias comments: “Esta película buscaba—según dice el actor—la dignificación y comprensión del pocho sólo con ‘barnices de buen humor.’ Sin embargo, y a pesar de las buenas intenciones, la película, como varias organizaciones chicanas lo manifestaron a la opinión pública mexicana, resultó insultante y estúpida, y contribuyó a la discriminación de los chicanos. En nombre del humor, que ya había caracterizado al actor en sus anteriores películas, se desvirtuaba la problemática tanto de los chicanos, como de los trabajadores migrantes” (“This film attempted, according to the actor, to dignify and understand the ‘pocho,’ but with a ‘light touch of humour.’ However, despite good intentions, it was denounced to the Mexican public by various Chicano organisations as insulting and stupid, and contributed to discrimination against Chicanos. In the name of humour, for which the actor was already known in his other films, the film distorted the problems facing both Chicanos and migrant workers”). Entre yerba, polvo y plomo, 35. García Riera, Historia del cine mexicano, 285. Maciel, El bandolero, el pocho y la raza, 119. Chanan, “Latin American Cinema in the 90s.” In this respect, Chanan explains: “First of all, Julio García Espinosa’s idea of an imperfect cinema was never intended as an apologia for badly made films. It was an argument for low-budget film-making which didn’t waste resources on trying to imitate the commercial values of Hollywood. It was also a statement about the film-maker’s need of the audience and the audience’s need of films of a kind that mobilised their intelligence instead of dulling it” (“Latin American Cinema in the 90s”). This last statement could be questioned in the case of Mexican border films from the 1980s, although studies conducted by




11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17.


Iglesias on the reception of these films in the city of Tijuana and San Diego indicate that the public went to see these films, in part, “por la necesidad de encontrarse con personas, que en la vida real o cinematográfica, viven situaciones semejantes a las de él” (“out of a need to encounter people, whether in real life or on screen, who live through experiences similar to their own”). Entre yerba, polvo y plomo, 134. Chanan, “Latin American Cinema in the 90s.” It is interesting to note that in several of these films, the space of the border area between Mexico and the United States extends from the north of California to the states of the central-north of the Mexican Republic (Sinaloa, Durango, Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí). In addition, the frontier between the two nations extends, for the first time on screen, from Tijuana to Matamoros. Some representative examples of this treatment of frontier space would include Contrabando humano (La muerte del pollero) (José Luis Urquieta, 1981), Lola la trailera (Raúl Fernández, 1983), Matanza en Matamoros (José Luis Urquieta, 1984), Arizona (Masacre sangrienta o El valle de la muerte) (Fernando Durán, 1985), and Ni de aquí, ni de allá (María Elena Velasco, “La india María,” 1987). Iglesias, “Reconstructing the Border,” 234. These themes also began to be explored in films from the United States, with the release of Fiebre latina (Zoot Suit, Luis Valdez, 1981) and, in more recent years, films with a Chicana theme such as Selena (Gregory Nava, 1997), Tortilla Soup (María Ripoll, 2001), and Quinceañera (Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland, 2006). To this new treatment of border themes it is important to add the multiculturalism of contemporary films, which allows an American production such as Babel (2006) to be filmed in three continents, with a script in six languages, a multinational cast, and a Mexican director. Haddu, Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 149–150. In the proceedings of the meeting, published in 1998, the director ends her speech with the announcement that “Ahora estamos trabajando en un nuevo guión sobre la frontera y las cuestiones de la identidad. Esta inquietud se derivó del Encuentro de Mujeres Cineastas y Videoastas Chicanas y Mexicanas. Quiero ir a conocer más de cerca la problemática. Voy a ir a Tijuana. Quiero trabajar con el personaje de una chicana, una mexicana, un gringo; en fin, mucho sobre identidad. Yo creo que el rollo de la identidad y de la ruptura de identidad de las chicanas nos puede ayudar a entender y resolver nuestras propias broncas. La experiencia con las chicanas para mí fue vital” (“We are working now on a new script about the border and questions of identity. This interest came to me from the Symposium of Mexican and Chicana Women Filmmakers and Video Artists. I want to find out more about the problema. I am going to Tijuana. I want to work with Chicana, Mexican, and gringo characters; in short, there is a lot about identity. I think that this issue of identity, of the ruptures in Chicana identity can help us to understand and resolve our own difficulties. My experience with the Chicanas was vital”). Novaro, “Orígenes, gustos y razones,” 261. While they are having lunch in a restaurant called “El pescado mojado” (“The Wet Fish”), Felipe asks Jane and Elizabeth if they are in Mexico as tourists. Jane says that she is an “escritoria” (meaning “feminine desk” instead of “woman writer”)—provoking laughter from Felipe—and that “ella es la mamá de ella”


114


18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

115

(“she’s the mother of her”), pointing to Elizabeth and to Lupita. Elizabeth interjects, saying that she is here “haciendo una exposición en lo tocante al arte chicano y sus videos alternativos” (“to set up an exhibition of Chicano art and its alternative videos”). This explanation makes little sense to Felipe. From the films she made as student—Lavaderos (1981), De encaje y azúcar (1981), 7 a. m. (1982), Querida Carmen (1983), Una isla rodeada de agua (1984), Pervertida, 1985)—to the short and feature-length films she has made as a professional—Azul celeste (1988), Lola (1989), Danzón (1991), Otoñal (1992), Sin dejar huella (2000)—Novaro’s filmic world has been exclusively peopled by female protagonists. El jardín del Edén constitutes the exception, as the leading roles are shared between female and male characters. Frank is the only male character in El jardín del Edén who does not use his gaze to capture reality. For reasons not explained in the film, Frank has decided to turn his back on the world that surrounds him in order to live immersed in a world of incomprehensible sounds. Felipe is the only character in the film who looks toward the future through a day-dream. When he meets Julián, at the border where he is taking photographs, Felipe asks him to take him a picture with the United States in the background, “que salga todo el dese . . .” (“so it shows all that . . .”). Julián has a walkman that captures Felipe’s attention. At the moment when the flash goes off, Felipe imagines his younger brother leaning against a big rock, listening to classical music on a walkman like Julián’s. The camera pans rapidly to the left, where there are several cows and a woman (his mother?) hanging out some clothes. The woman is also wearing a walkman. Finally, the scene reveals that each one of the cows is wearing its own walkman. The camera returns to Felipe’s face lost in his dream: he has just seen his future. Immediately afterward, Felipe “adopts” Julián, asking a nearby man to take their picture to send to his younger brother: “lo que pasa es que se la quiero mandar a mi carnalillo . . . es así como de tu vuelo . . .” (“It’s because I want to send it to my little brother . . . he looks a bit like you . . .”). I use the term “documenting” here in its original sense used by John Grierson in referring to Moana (Robert Flaherty, 1926) as a documentary: “La capacidad del cine para observar y seleccionar fragmentos de la vida misma, puede explotarse de una forma artística nueva y vital. Las películas realizadas en estudio durante mucho tiempo han pasado por alto la posibilidad de abrir la pantalla al mundo real. Más bien se avocan a fotografiar historias que se representan en ambientes artificiales. Por su parte, el documental fotografía historias verdaderas con escenas en vivo” (“The capacity of film to observe and select fragments of life itself, can explode into a new and vital artistic form. Studio films have long overlooked the possibility of opening the screen onto the real world. Rather, they photograph stories played out in artificial settings. The documentary, on the other hand, photographs true stories with live scenes”). Edmonds, Grierson, and Meran-Barsam, Principios del cine documental, 69. Between 1985 and 1988 Néstor García Canclini and a group of anthropologists carried out an investigation into cultural conflict on the Mexican side of the border, in Tijuana. The results were presented in several publications, among them the well-known Culturas híbridas: Cómo entrar y salir de la modernidad, which has become obligatory reading for researchers working in Mexican cultural studies.





23. With regard to the photographic study that accompanied Culturas híbridas, García Canclini explains: “Lo que hicimos con Lourdes Grobet, una fotógrafa profesional (de las mejores que hay en México), fue tomar 425 fotos con base en la información que habíamos recogido en la investigación con referencia a lugares que los propios habitantes de Tijuana identificaban (distintos sectores: económicos, socioculturales, educativos) como los más representativos de la vida y la cultura de Tijuana. . . . [A los entrevistados] les propusimos una selección de 50 de esas fotos; poco después les pedimos que seleccionaran diez, aquellas que les parecían más representativas de Tijuana. . . . El resultado final es el libro “Tijuana: la casa de toda la gente,” que fue publicado en coedición por el INAH-ENAH, el Programa Cultural de las Fronteras y el CONACULTA en 1989” (“What we did with Lourdes Grobet, a professional photographer (one of Mexico’s best), was to take 425 photos on the basis of the information we had collected in the investigation, relating to places that the inhabitants of Tijuana had identified (different sectors: economical, sociocultural and educational) as the most representative of the life and culture of Tijuana. . . . We asked [the interviewees] to select 50 of these photos; a little while later we asked them to select ten, those that seemed to them to be the most representative of Tijuana. . . . The final result became the book Tijuana: La casa de toda la gente (“Tijuana: Everyone’s Home”), which was jointly published by INAH-ENAH, the Border Cultural Programme and CONACULTA in 1989”). “Escenas sin territorio,” 192. Although public mention has never been made of the fact, it seems clear that the results of this study and the photographs taken by Grobet influenced the selection that María Novaro made for El jardín del Edén of the most representative places of Tijuana and the border region. 24. García Canclini, Culturas híbridas, 301. 25. García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures, 236. 26. In her analysis of the reinterpretations and reappropriations carried out by the Chicano community of certain female figures from Mexican culture— including the Virgin of Guadalupe, Malinche, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Frida Kahlo—Haddu demonstrates that in El jardín del Edén, the figure of Frida Kahlo is associated with the character of Elizabeth: “During one of the earlier scenes, when Elisabeth [sic] is preparing the exhibition, there is a large portrait of Kahlo’s eyes positioned directly behind her on the wall. In this scene, when Jane arrives to greet Elisabeth, the two women stand facing one another other with the portrait of Kahlo’s eyes located perpendicularly behind them. The camera then frames this image so as to make it appear that Kahlo’s eyes constitute the connecting point between the two characters; bridging the space in between Jane and Elisabeth.” Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 170–171. This association is affirmed later in the film when Elizabeth acts out the painting of Las dos Fridas, together with the indigenous woman Margarita Luna (Ángeles Cruz). 27. When she arrives with her children in Tijuana, Serena looks worriedly through the window of the taxi taking them to their new home. Her daughter Paloma (Lucero Sánchez) asks her: “¿Aquí vamos a vivir?” (“Are we going to live here?”). Serena turns to see her and in responds firmly: “La casa debe estar muy bonita mi amor . . . dice tu tía Juana que tiene mucha luz” (“The house must be very beautiful, my love . . . your Aunt Juana says that it’s very light”) while she tries (and fails) to smile at Sergio (Jerónimo Berruecos), her


116


28.

29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

117

other child. In a previous scene, Serena gets out of the car to look for Julián who has left the house. On her journey, a stereotypical Tijuana, with its bars, canteens, and street taco bars, appears before her eyes. On the desk at which Jane writes her records, there is a copy of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which narrates the reasons for the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. In the same scene, Jane finds the definition of “paradise” in a dictionary: “Transliteration of the old Persian word for a walled garden,”—walled like the border between Tijuana and the United States. “This is not a question of style, which remains a matter of the accomplishments of the individual cinematographer, but it has a lot to do with the widespread practice of location shooting with available light and direct sound wherever possible, which draws out the grain of the locations where the film is shot without attempting to gloss either image or sound.” Chanan, “Latin American Cinema in the 90s.” Traveling shots drawing attention to the geography of places in Novaro’s films can be easily be spotted in Lola (1989), Danzón (1991), and in the short Otoñal (1993). One of the most important and perhaps the most beautiful of the traveling shots in El jardín del Edén appears around halfway through the film, when Felipe leaves his hotel heading for the border and arrives at a café (called “The Illegal”) next to the metallic fence. The camera leaves him as it passes slowly over the landscapes and the people who populate this space, hoping to cross over to the other side. Gómez Montero, Tiempos de cultura, tiempos de frontera, 163. Ibid. Gómez Montero señala que “lo sagrado sería, en sentido laxo, lo no cotidiano, cuya textura alterna o cuya función extraña generaría un producto, un territorio, una zona prohibida o limitada (mágica en sentido estricto), ritual, ceremonial, distinta” (“the sacred means, loosely, that which is separate from everyday life, whose different texture and strange function would generate a product, a territory, a prohibited or restricted zone [magical in the strict sense], ritual, ceremonial, different”). Ibid., 167. Tijuana’s name originates from the contraction of the words “tía” (aunt) and “Juana” (Jane), and refers to the name of workers’ quarters, “La Tía Juana,” which existed in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Works Cited Bustos, V. “María Novaro, un clavado en la frontera” [interview with María Novaro], Dicine 65 (January–February 1996): 25. Chanan, M. “Latin American Cinema in the 90s: Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema,” Estudios interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 9, no. 1 (January–June 1998). http://www.tau.ac.il/eial/IX_1/chanan. html. Accessed August 2, 2007. Edmonds, R., J. Grierson, and R. Meran-Barsam. Principios del cine documental. Mexico: UNAM-CUEC, 1990. García Canclini, N. Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la modernidad. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1990. ———. “Escenas sin territorio: Cultura de los migrantes e identidades en transición.” In Decadencia y auge de las identidades: Cultura nacional, identidad cultural y





modernización, coordinated by José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, 119–131. Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and Plaza y Valdés, 2000. García Canclini, N. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Translated by Christopher L. Chiappari and Silvia L. López. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. García Riera, E. Historia del cine mexicano. Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1986. Gómez Montero, S. Tiempos de cultura, tiempos de frontera. Mexico: Fondo Regional para la Cultura y las Artes, 2003. Haddu, M. Contemporary Mexican Cinema, 1989–1999: History, Space and Identity. London: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. Iglesias, N. Entre yerba, polvo y plomo: Lo fronterizo visto por el cine mexicano. Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte, 1991. ———. “Reconstructing the Border: Mexican Border Cinema and Its Relationship to Its Audience.” In Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers, edited by Joanne Hershfield and David R. Maciel, 233–248. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 1999. Maciel, D. R. El bandolero, el pocho y la raza: Imágenes cinematográficas del chicano. Mexico: Siglo veintiuno, 2000. Novaro, M. El jardín del Edén. Produced by J. Sánchez. Distributed in the United States by Vanguard Cinema. 1994. ———. “Orígenes, gustos y razones: Semblanzas de realizadoras, María Novaro.” In Miradas de mujer: Encuentro de cineastas y videoastas mexicana y chicanas, edited by Norma Iglesias and Rosa Linda Fregoso, 223–272. Tijuana, Mexico: El Colegio de la Frontera Norte and Chicana/Latina Research Center, University of California, 1998.


118


Mockumentary as Post-nationalism: National Identity in A Day without a Mexican by Sergio Arau Armida De la Garza

As the nation-state enters a terminal crisis—if my prognostications prove to be correct—we can certainly expect that the materials for a post-national imaginary must be around us already. Here, I think we need to pay special attention to the relation between mass mediation and migration, the two facts that underpin my sense of the cultural politics of the global modern. In particular, we need to look closely at the variety of what have emerged as diasporic public spheres. Arjun Appadurai1

P

redictions concerning the end of the nation state may have been too hasty: in-between the global and the local, the national continues to be surprisingly resilient. I believe, however, that Appadurai is in essence correct about mass mediation and migration constituting the materials for a possible post-national imaginary, coexisting with, if not necessarily replacing, forms of national belonging. It is this imaginary and its relationship to mockumentary as a form of representation that is the main concern of this chapter, in the specific case of Mexican—but yet, post-national—identity in A Day without a Mexican by Sergio Arau. Both the short (1998) and the feature film (2004) versions of this mockumentary are constructed around a simple but effective plot: the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all Latino immigrants from the state of California. This disappearance brings the economic and social life of the region to a standstill and the consequences are explored in the mockumentary. Set within the context of a growing Chicano population in the United States and the high level of migration from Mexico across the border, the stated aim of A Day is to advance a social agenda, arguing the case for immigrant labor and for the Mexican presence in the United States more generally.2 In this respect, the seriousness of a documentary would seem to have been a better fit than the excess and parody of mockumentary. However, as I intend to show, in Arau’s A Day without a Mexican, form and content match thoroughly. In the


Chapter 8


ARMIDA DE L A GARZ A

light of the relationship between cinema and modernity, and cinema’s function as an alternative public sphere for the nation—both points that I explore in more detail below—this chapter analyzes the implications of choosing mockumentary, taken to be a paradigmatic postmodern and hybrid form, to discuss national identity under globalization. We shall begin by exploring the links between modernity, cinema and nation. Although an often-contested term in academic discourse, modernity is here to be understood mainly as “the network of large-scale social, economic, technological and philosophical changes wrought by the Enlightenment,” the industrial revolution and concomitant processes of urbanization, and in this sense it is a term closely bound to the nation-state.3 Indeed, if we are to believe the “modernist” theorists of the nation, such as Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, or Benedict Anderson, the so-called nationstates we presently inhabit are themselves the polities that have resulted from modernization, entailing the development of capitalism, the formation of vernacular languages, the downward spreading of a “high” culture and vice versa, and the various elites and intelligentsias engaging in nation and statebuilding through a variety of institutions. These included, of course, the media, which had a crucial role, especially as regards newspapers, novels, and more recently, cinema.4 In fact, the specificity of cinema as a distinctively modern medium, and thus one closely bound to the nation-state, has been well documented in the literature. Of particular relevance for us here are the technological dimensions of cinema and its features as a visual narrative device. As regards the former, with its mechanical reproduction of images, cinema was itself a product of the industrial revolution, and movie theatres accompanied urbanization processes, which were central to the development of nation-states. Urbanization in turn also allowed for a conceptualization of modernity as a specific form of perception, as theorized by, for example, Siegfried Kracauer and, famously, Walter Benjamin. As Benjamin Singer puts it, “[a]mid the unprecedented turbulence of the big city’s traffic, noise, billboards, street signs, jostling crowds, window displays and advertisements . . . modernity [was experienced as] shocks and jolts”5 in a manner not dissimilar to cinema’s means of expression, in the form of editing techniques and montage. Further, the industrial features of cinema contributed to the cultural homogenization of its mass audience—often comprising either internal or external migrants—in a variety of ways. These ranged from the progressive standardization of the mode of reception in the search for efficiency and economic return, to the creation of an alternative public sphere. In order to bring respectability to their establishments, as Miriam Hansen’s argument goes, theatre owners encouraged more self-disciplined, restrained, even passive behavior in contrast to the high audience participation that was a feature of the vaudeville. This eventually led to movie theatres being deemed “safe” for women and welcoming for the working classes. The result was more (initial) inclusiveness of class and gender difference than had been the case in other earlier forms of leisure.6


120


121

Although not quite feudal during the Porfirio Díaz regime (1876–1880 and 1884–1911), there is broad agreement that by the time cinema first came to the country on August 6, 1896, Mexico was certainly modernizing in the sense described above.7 Its mostly rural population of about ten million was beginning to migrate to urban centers where movie theatres eventually sprawled and became leisure centers that cut across class and gender.8 Images of the Revolution that began in 1910 also gave birth to a documentary tradition that captured much of the action as it happened. Among the filmmakers who recorded these images were the Alva brothers, who followed Madero, Jesus H. Habitia, who traveled with the División del Norte, and Salvador Toscano, Enrique Rosas, and the Stahl brothers. In a way, a distinctively modern project such as a revolution, with its aims of achieving social justice and emancipation, found its cultural and visual expression in the documentary form, the main aims of which were often also to raise awareness of social problems and to propose possible solutions.9 As regards cinematic forms of narration, cinema did inherit the narrative features of the nineteenth-century novel that Anderson found to be crucial for the formation of national identity. These were the rendering of homogeneous, empty time through parallel editing, which conveyed the idea of simultaneity, and the chronotope, which bound time and place together in artistic representation. In addition, cinema allowed the illiterate masses to participate in the imaginary of the national community as this was rendered in images. Thus, in films such as the ones made by Emilio Fernández or Fernando de Fuentes, between the years 1930s and the 1940s, a host of fishing villages, haciendas, and ranches became representative of “Mexico,” whilst urban settings featured in the later films by Luis Buñuel and Alejandro Galindo.10 Fernández and Rodríguez also helped to create and consolidate a national star system, indicating the development of a consumer culture that is characteristic of modernization.11 In discursive terms, it was cinema’s narrative capabilities that made it truly fundamental to the fostering of national identifications: if national identities are discourses of belonging to which large numbers of people subscribe, or in other words, a “we” that is only tenable as long as some “they” remain outside, what better way of putting forward and disseminating representations of such a “we” than on film? In this respect cinema quickly became a key arena for the contestation and negotiation of identity, and both in documentary and in fiction film, realism became the preferred mode of representation to convey a supposedly national reality. However, if cinema was instrumental to nation building processes for the most part of the twentieth century, it has been equally central to their challenging and interrogation since the onset of what David Harvey has termed the stage of “flexible accumulation” of capital.12 In his argument, technical, financial, and institutional innovations have led from mass industrial production to globalized regimes of flexible accumulation. New sectors of production have emerged, including new ways of providing financial services, intensified rates of commercial, technological and organizational innovation,


M O C K U M E N TA R Y A S P O S T- N AT I O N A L I S M



and above all, new markets that are no longer national in scope. Indeed, in cinema, co-productions and films with narratives seeking to address an international audience while marketed as “national” have become more common, since an enlarged market share has become in many cases the only alternative for a national film production to survive. Successful attempts at this kind of filmmaking occurring at a regional level such as with the European Union or even in the Nordic region have led some critics to conclude that “we are witnessing . . . the emergence of a genuinely transnational communicative space” in those areas.13 In Mexico, this phase that Harvey terms the “flexible accumulation” of capital has been experienced, above all, in the form of a regional economic integration with the United States and Canada. Therefore, the Revolutionary nationalism discourse that constructed national identity on the basis of mestizaje, Catholicism and a Mexican version of the Spanish language, a discourse that had more-or-less successfully answered the question “who are we?” since the Revolution, began to lose ground in the 1980s.14 This discourse was replaced by a discourse that sought to find a new meaning for the identity in a supranational arrangement, the North American Free Trade Area, a discourse that I have termed, following Derrida, of supplementarity.15 The new discourse involved the reframing of all key issues in this very complex bilateral relationship; namely the external debt, drug trafficking and crucially migration, into narratives of partnership and complementarity. Thus dependence for trade on the United States, formerly narrated as an obstacle to be overcome in order to achieve development, was instead presented as a means of access to the American market. Migration was also recast from a problem in which the United States was a passive victim, into the result of push-pull factors in the world economy that drew the labor force to where jobs were available, for the mutual benefit of both countries and ultimately the world, a situation that would otherwise correct itself as the Mexican economy improved.16 In short, if, as Foucault observed, “the successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing [the] rules” to “invert their meaning,”17 the regrafting of some of the key signifiers that had under the Revolutionary nationalism discourse given meaning to Mexicanity into new discourses of supplementarity was indeed a success of the younger generation of the political and business elite of the period. They recast “dependence” as “opportunity,” “development” as “integration,” and allowed for national identity to be understood as Mexican even beyond the territorial borders of the nation.18 And again, the discourse of supplementarity found expression on film, especially after the large-scale privatization that took place during the Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo administrations (1988–1994 and 1995–2000 respectively), in what is now called the “New Mexican Cinema.” It was of course Alfonso Arau’s highly successful Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992) that inaugurated the trend, a film that sought, in the manner described above, to broaden its market share by appealing to an audience beyond domestic spectatorship, while still marketed as “Mexican.” And in 1997 it


122


123

would be Arau’s son Sergio who would put the new version of migration on film, in a twenty-five-minute mockumentary called A Day without a Mexican, and in a (less accomplished) false documentary feature in 2004. Since the film’s aim is to deal explicitly with a political subject while encouraging, like many documentaries, action from its audience, A Day could be classified as belonging to the second “degree” of mock-documentary in Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight’s typology of the genre, namely the critical mockumentary.19 The idea, the director Sergio Arau said, came from “A Day without Art” held in 1994, when museums and galleries in New York were closed for a day to pay homage to artists who had died as victims of AIDS. In his words, he was trying to “turn into something visible that which is invisible by removing it,”20 that is, to call attention to it by putting it, again after Derrida, under erasure. Although both the short and feature films share the anecdote, it is mainly the former that I discuss in this essay. The first point to note is that it is precisely a news program that is parodied, for the news is inherently about reality. As John Fiske argues, through strategies of representation, news programs “construct the real” and struggle to have these versions of reality accepted as such even by those whose interests might not necessarily be directly served by such versions.21 Among these strategies, there is the establishment of a hierarchy of voices, ranging from the anchor in the studio, through the less authoritative one of the reporter “out there,” to the witness whose voice is recruited to the effort but mediated, even interpreted, by the reporter and the anchor. Interestingly, in what might have been an effort to appear, as it were, heteroglossic, A Day does have an anchor and witnesses, but not an interviewing reporter, whom characters address but is never heard nor shown on screen. As mentioned in the introduction, the plot revolves around the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of all immigrants—for whom the term “Mexicans” stands metonymically—from the state of California, and the damaging consequences this has on the economy and society of the state. The very design of the title construes Mexicanity as inherently migrant and peripheral to the United States: a man on the go is placed as the “i” completing the word “Mexican,” and as he is shown in the act of departure, with his back toward the audience, the audience is thus placed in the United States, the origin and center whence he is departing. The DVD material continues this theme and expands it to women and children, who are shown in the act of crossing, in a sign entitled “Caution” placed along a highway depicted as background in the interactive menu for the short. The menu itself eschews the narrative of partnership according to which the choice of language would have been placed horizontally, with “English” alongside “Spanish,” and instead places “English” vertically as the top choice, while “Spanish” is located at the bottom. Using a docu-soap style as a basis for the mockumentary, voice is given to a number of American characters who comment on the situation and sometimes put forward theories on what might have caused the disappearance. Although a number of interviewees are shown more than once, there is little cross-cutting





and the mockumentary avoids a linear narration, opting instead for short sequences that are loosely structured around intertitles such as “The Facts,” “Opportunities,” “Insights,” and so on. In this way, “Americans” become a diverse collection of people, ranging from the good-natured to the cynical or to plain bigots, and “the Mexicans” they conjure up in their interventions also vary accordingly. Close-ups and medium shots comprise nearly the whole of the mockumentary, which in this way avoids visually anchoring the story in a specific context: “California” is made to stand for anywhere in the United States where there is a Mexican or Chicano population. Tellingly, comprising cities such as New York, Mexico City, Los Angeles and Guadalajara among others, the exhibition pattern for the feature film fits Appadurai’s notion of translocality,22 that is, a network of cities that are strongly interconnected by global economic processes across national boundaries, sometimes even more intensely than they are connected with other cities in their national contexts.23 Among the good-natured Americans represented are a working-class mother and daughter, shown in the opening scene longing for respect from their employers (thus equating the plight of the white working class with that of the Mexican immigrants), the wife of a Mexican musician who has also vanished, a television presenter, a baseball coach, a scientist, and the driver of a wealthy Hispanic investor. Significantly, among these goodnatured Americans there are also other second- or third-generation immigrants, including a University of California professor with an Arabic name, an actor who identifies himself as Israeli, and an Asian shopkeeper, all of whom appear just as “American” as the Anglo-Saxon Americans in the film. It is mostly this group that calls attention to the absence of those citizens of Hispanic origin who belong to the liberal professions, such as television presenters, university lecturers, scientists, sportsmen, doctors, politicians, and businessmen. A UFO expert also reminds the audience of the historical claim Mexicans have to California, since, as he says, the land “used to be Mexico.” Whenever they intervene, these Americans emphasize the broad nature of the immigrants’ contribution to their host society, and underscore their human values and qualities, describing them as trusted colleagues, loyal employees, and family members. When offering explanations as to why they may have disappeared, one of the ideas put forward is that their governments sought to stop the brain drain and wanted their investment back. These Mexicans, however, were gone from the feature film, which might indicate that they were no longer regarded as a potential audience by the time this was made, or perhaps that production constraints sought to homogenize the diversity of the “Mexicans” in the original mock to put the argument in the starkest possible terms. The next group is comprised by those interviewees who are cynical about their reasons for missing the Mexicans, which are purely economic, even exploitative. They are those directly related with economic activities that depend on cheap labor such as crop-growers, workshop owners, and people in the service sector (restaurants, car wash businesses, petrol stations, etc.), all of whom were enthusiastic supporters of NAFTA when it was being


124


125

negotiated. The upper classes, who rely on the work of gardeners, cooks, nannies, and maids for child and home care, also bemoan the loss of the Mexicans, since, as put by a character who presents herself as the anonymous wife of an anti-immigration politician, “if you want family values, you hire a housekeeper.” The Mexicans missing in this segment of the mockumentary are the vast majority of those currently living in the United States, including the six million illegal immigrants, namely peasants, mechanics, technicians and cleaners, and what is constantly emphasized in this case is their vital role in perpetuating the American dream, or in other words, the extent to which these immigrants are already part of North America. Fun is also poked at those who look for ways to exploit the disaster: in an instance of self-reflexivity, characteristic of the subversive nature of the genre, a couple of Hollywood producers plan to make a film in which “Independence Day meets Like Water for Chocolate” and a salesman plans the “Disappearance Day Sale.” Finally, the outright bigots are a decided minority, found in a secretary, an actress and the wife of a plastic surgeon, all of whom react with glee to the news. The film ends with a plea from a number of people for Mexicans to come back, including the Border Patrol, afraid of losing their jobs, and a thank-you note to Governor Pete Wilson, whose sponsoring of Proposition 187 is credited with inspiring the mockumentary.24 Many regard the main reason for both this film and the longer version to have been made into false documentaries to be simply an extremely tight budget. They attribute the choice of theme to the ad-hoc nature of the project, aiming quite simply at making money out of the Chicano market. This market now comprises approximately 28 million U.S. citizens of Mexican ancestry and 11 million Mexican citizens living there. In fact, former Mexican ambassador to the United Nations, the late Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, described the longer film as the “immigrants’ fantasy,”25 and scriptwriter Yareli Arizmendi stated that one of her aims had been “to bequeath a touch of identity [sic] to those Mexicans who were born on this side,” although she also said the mockumentary was chosen in order not to alienate a possible Anglo-American audience, who would presumably think it a joke.26 Other interpretations attribute the mockumentary format to an honest desire to intervene in the current debate on migration, the parody being a necessary means to challenge and critique. Indeed, critics such as Rey Chow view the sort of realism documentary strives for as inherently suspicious, in that when it comes to “documenting” the Other, it has often been employed in a colonialist fashion.27 In a similar vein, critics such as Roscoe and Hight celebrate the supposedly inherently liberatory potential of the mockumentary mode, given its reflexivity.28 That mockumentary presents itself as the obvious choice for filmmakers on a tight budget is not viewed negatively either, as it is regarded as part of the “democratization” of access to the media of representation that digital imaging allows. Amidst the current generalized loss of trust in institutions, mockumentaries lend themselves well to grassroots activism. Moreover, mockumentary, as Roscoe and Hight argue, speaks to a “knowing audience,” since it requires the recognition of the





original being parodied or satirized to make sense and thus relies on constructing a highly active role for the viewer.29 In this way, qua mock, A Day would be contributing to the fostering of (sub)group—and post-national— membership in the same way that the media foster a sense of community belonging. It was in fact the case that in many cinemas where the mockumentary was shown, audiences in attendance were reported to be highly participatory, in ways reminiscent of the early cinema period described by theorists of cinema as an alternative public sphere, and the film was also quoted—not necessarily approvingly—in debates on migration in the quality press in Mexico.30 Without denying that these interpretations may well be accurate, I would like to propose here an alternative version as to why in A Day without a Mexican form and content match perfectly. It is not only the fact that to represent hybridity or the remaking of a hybrid (Mexican/American) identity, a hybrid form of fiction film was chosen. Nor is it simply the fact that the border-crossing of national boundaries depicted in this film mirrors the border-crossing between genres that the mockumentary implies. It is also, I argue, to be found in its reworking of the documentary, a genre that was born in the modern times in which the nation-state belongs, amidst the Enlightenment ethos prevalent then, into a mockumentary, a postmodern genre born in a time of itinerant media and identities, of translocalities and transnationalism. And above all, a genre that was born, as Lyotard would describe it, at a time of disbelief. Whereas traditional documentary, with its aim of representing reality in order to intervene in social debate and its faith in the possibility of emancipation and human progress, was the cinematic form of expression in Mexico during and shortly after the Revolution, it can be argued that mockumentary, with its irreverence, pastiche, parody and drive to trivialization, is the equivalent form of cinematic expression during the conservative Mexican administrations of the twenty-first century.31 Nevertheless, if Bertolt Brecht was right to argue that a successful, even original adaptation is that which “refunctions form and content of its source text so as to critically address the changed cultural and political circumstances of its own time,”32 in its refunctioning of documentary into mockumentary A Day without a Mexican can be regarded as a qualified achievement. Notes 1. Modernity at Large, 21. 2. Mexican migration to the United States is a complex phenomenon with a long history, but it has generally intensified since the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA. In the period between 2000 and 2005, 7.9 million immigrants entered the United States, and 59% of thesewere Mexican. Israel Rodríguez, “México, Campeón de la Migración: Once Millones de Expulsados a Estados Unidos,” 1. 3. Smith, “Modernism and the Avant-gardes,” 397. 4. See Anderson, Imagined Communities; Gellner, Nations and Nationalism; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780.


126


127

5. Singer, Melodrama and Modernity, 35. 6. Hansen, “Chameleon and Catalyst,” 394. 7. Cosío Villegas, Historia moderna de México; Silva-Herzog, Breve historia de la revolución mexicana. 8. Bonfil, “El patrimonio fílmico,” 130, and Reyes, “El gobierno mexicano y las películas denigrantes 1920–1931,” 91. 9. Although Andrea Noble has argued, following Bill Nichols, that since “an emphasis on the rhetoric of social persuasion” is missing during this period— and in fact absent until the 1920s—filmed footage of the revolution cannot be regarded as documentary proper, I contend that inasmuch as it was filmed and exhibited in the context of the Revolutionary war it was ideologically part of it, and indeed seeking to persuade. (Nichols quoted in Noble, Mexican National Cinema, 60). As Aurelio de los Reyes has noted, filmed footage of the Revolution “en más de una ocasión provocó el estallido de la violencia en los cines e inició ruidosas manifestaciones en pro o en contra de los caudillos” (“more than once provoked outbursts of violence in cinemas and sparked demonstrations for or against the Revolutionary leaders” (Reyes quoted in Bonfil “El patrimonio fílmico,” 133, my translation). 10. Among the former, Allá en el Rancho Grande (Fernando de Fuentes, 1936), La Perla (Emilio Fernández, 1945) and Pueblerina (Fernández, 1948) are some of the better known, while Los olvidados (Luis Buñuel, 1950), Campeón sin corona (Alejandro Galindo, 1945) and La ilusión viaja en tranvía (Buñuel, 1953) are examples of the latter films. 11. See, for instance, Paraguaná, Mexican Cinema; Hershfield and Maciel, Mexico’s Cinema; Ramírez-Berg, A Cinema of Solitude. 12. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity, 9–10. 13. Hjort, “From Epiphanic Culture to Circulation,” 193. 14. The product of mestizaje or racial mixing, mestizos are taken to be the descendents of the Spanish conquerors and the Indians, hybridity thus being the very essence of Mexicanity. This is of course a discursive construction, since a notion of “hybridity” already existed prior to the Conquest, furthermore, it was at the heart of the assumed racial homogeneity of the “Spaniards,” which was composed of Iberians, Celts, Basques, and Muslims from North Africa among others. Furthermore, the “Indians” themselves came from a diversity of ethnic backgrounds, taken from a number of Mesoamerican racial communities which populated Mesoamerica by the time the conquerors arrived. 15. The supplement is, discursively, at the same time external to and part of a unit which it helps to complete. Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” 112–139. 16. Calavita, “The Immigration Policy Debate,” 151–177. 17. Foucault, “Nietzche, Genealogy, History,” 86. 18. Among the changes in legislation that accompanied the signing of NAFTA, dual nationality was allowed for the first time in 1995, and a law was also passed to create two permanent positions in Congress for representatives of migrants or binational citizens in some of the main sending states, such as Zacatecas. De la Garza, Mexico on Film, 130. 19. The first degree in their typology is “parody,” which includes those mockumentaries that appropriate documentary aesthetics without highlighting the reflexivity involved, often denoting nostalgia and ultimately reinforcing those cultural aspects they originally set out to parody; the third and last degree is represented by openly deconstructive mocks. Roscoe and Hight, Faking It, 73.





20. Sergio Arau in Coll, “El día sin mexicanos también se sufre en Nueva York,” my translation. 21. Fiske, Reading the Popular, 177. 22. Appadurai, “Sovereignty without Territoriality,” 337–349. 23. The film premiered simultaneously in New York and Mexico City on September 13, 2004, two days before celebrations of the Mexican Independence, and then on September 17 it was shown simultaneously in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Antonio, Austin, Miami, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Houston, Dallas, El Paso, and other cities in Mexico, where it was the highest grossing national film that year. Brooks and Cason, “ ‘Un día sin mexicanos’ busca un diálogo bi-nacional: Sergio Arau.” 24. Proposition 187 sought to deny education, healthcare, and other basic services to illegal immigrants and their children in 1994. It was eventually pronounced unconstitutional and not passed. 25. Adolfo Aguilar Zinser and Yareli Arizmendi in Olivares, “ ‘Un día sin mexicanos’.” 26. “[T]ratamos de obsequiar con un toque de identidad a los mexicanos que nacieron acá, de este lado, porque sí. Su acta de nacimiento podrá decir que son estadounidenses, pero gracias a la herencia de su cultura, su corazón es mexicano” (“We tried to bequeath a bit of identity to those Mexicans who were born on this side, by chance. Their birth certificate may say they are American, but their heart is Mexican thanks to their cultural heritage,” my translation). Yareli Arizmendi in Cortés, “Impresionante respuesta.” 27. Chow, Sentimental Fabulations, 150. 28. See Roscoe and Hight, Faking It. 29. Ibid., 67. 30. See Garza Galindo, “Un día sin mexicanos,” and Hernández Haddad, “Un día sin mexicanos.” 31. Adding to the postmodernity of the experience is the fact that on May 1, 2006 “reality” became a performance of the film, since a number of Latino organizations took the idea of the film as a banner and staged A Day without a Mexican, calling for immigrants to boycott economic activities in places where they worked in order to draw attention to the value of their labor. It is estimated that nearly 500,000 attended the demonstrations in Chicago (many more were held elsewhere) and five million people participated in the boycott. Losses were calculated at USD$250 million in Los Angeles alone. Carreño, Hernández, and Torres, “Millones se suman al boicot,” and Arturo Cruz Bárcenas, “Apoyaremos a los inmigrantes hasta el final.” 32. Bertolt Brecht quoted in Brooker, “Postmodern Adaptation,” 114.


128

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1991. Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996. ———. “Sovereignty without Territoriality: Notes for a Postnational Geography.” In The Anthropology of Space and Place, edited by Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence Zúñiga, 337–349. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Bonfil, Carlos. “El patrimonio fílmico.” In El patrimonio nacional de Mexico, Vol. II, edited by Enrique Florescano, 130–143. Mexico: Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997. 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

129

Brooker, Peter. “Postmodern Adaptation: Pastiche, Intertextuality and Re-functioning.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, edited by Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, 107–120. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Brooks, David and Jim Cason. “ ‘Un día sin mexicanos’ busca un diálogo bi-nacional: Sergio Arau,” La Jornada, September 13, 2004, Espectáculos. Calavita, Kitty. “The Immigration Policy Debate: Critical Analysis and Future Options.” In Mexican Migration to the United States: Origins, Consequences and Policy Options, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius and Jorge A. Bustamante, 151–177. La Jolla, CA: Centre for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California San Diego, 1989. Carreño, José, Jaime J. Hernández, and Alejandro Torres. “Millones se suman al boicot,” El Universal, May 2, 2006, El Mundo. Chow, Rey. Sentimental Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Coll, Elizabeth. “El día sin mexicanos también se sufre en Nueva York,” La Jornada, July 4, 2004. Cortés, Ana Lilia. “Impresionante respuesta a ‘Un día sin mexicanos’ en California,” La Jornada, May 27, 2004, Show Business. Cosío Villegas, Daniel. Historia moderna de México: El Porfiriato; Vida social. Mexico: Hermes, 1972. Cruz Bárcenas, Arturo. “Apoyaremos a los inmigrantes hasta el final: Los tigres del norte,” La Jornada, May 8, 2006, Show Business. De La Garza, Armida. Mexico on Film: National Identity and International Relations. Bury St. Edmunds, UK: Arena, 2007. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. ———. “Plato’s Pharmacy.” In A Derrida Reader between the Blinds, edited by Peggy Kamuf, 112–139. Columbia: Columbia University Press, 1991. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzche, Genealogy, History.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, 76–100. London: Penguin, 1991. Fiske, John. Reading the Popular. London: Routledge, 1989. García-Canclini, Néstor. Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Garza Galindo, Laura Alicia. “Un día sin mexicanos,” La Jornada, April 23, 2006, Politics. Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1983. Hansen, Miriam. “Chameleon and Catalyst: the Cinema as an Alternative Public Sphere.” In The Film Cultures Reader, edited by Graeme Turner, 390–419. London: Routledge, 2002. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Hernández Haddad, Humberto. “Un día sin mexicanos,” El Universal, April 13, 2006. Hershfield, Joanne and David Maciel, eds. Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers. Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resource Books, 1999. Hjort, Mette. “From Epiphanic Culture to Circulation: the Dynamics of Globalisation in Nordic Cinema.” In Transnational Cinema in a Global North, edited by Andrew Nestingen and Trevor G. Elkington, 191–218. Detroit, MI: Wayne University Press, 2005. Hobsbawm, Eric. J. Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.





Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Post-modern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Maciel, David. “Pochos and Other Extremes in Mexican Cinema, or El cine mexicano se va de bracero, 1922–1963.” In Chicanos and Film, Representation and Resistance, edited by Chon Noriega, 94–113. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992. Noble, Andrea. Mexican National Cinema. London: Routledge, 2005. Olivares, Juan José. “ ‘Un Día sin Mexicanos’ tiene una intención social y política: Arau,” La Jornada, August 5, 2004. Paraguaná, Paulo Antonio. Mexican Cinema. London: British Film Institute (BFI), 1995. Ramírez-Berg, Charles. Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Films, 1967–1983. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992. Reyes, Aurelio de los. “El Gobierno Mexicano y las Peliculas Denigrantes 1920–1931.” In Mexico-Estados Unidos: Encuentros y desencuentros en el cine, edited by Ignacio Duran Loera, Ivan Trujillo, and Monica Verea, 23–35. Mexico: UNAM/IMCINE/ CISAN, 1996. Rodríguez, Israel. “México, campeón de la migración: Once millones de expulsados a Estados Unidos,” La Jornada, February 13, 2007, Front Page. Roscoe, Jane and Craig Hight. Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Silva-Herzog, Jesús. Breve historia de la revolución mexicana. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1960. Singer, Benjamin. Melodrama and Modernity. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001. Smith, Murray. “Modernism and the Avant-gardes.” In The Oxford Guide to Film Studies, edited by John Hill and Pamela Church-Gibson, 395–412. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Stam, Robert and Toby Miller. Film and Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000.


130


Performance and Reflexivity in the Contemporary Documentary


Part IV





Between Image and Word: Minority Discourses and Community Construction in Eduardo Coutinho’s Documentaries Mariana A. C. da Cunha

Introduction

A

t a time when Brazilian film has attained international recognition, Eduardo Coutinho’s work has become a reference not only in documentary filmmaking but also in the broader panorama of Brazilian cinema. This chapter analyzes two of Coutinho’s documentaries: Boca de lixo (The Scavengers, 1992) and Babilônia 2000 (Babylon 2000, 2001). It aims to investigate how the marginalized communities captured in both films are represented and to observe the processes involved in the construction of an identity through the representation of spaces of poverty in Brazil. Both documentaries, separated by almost ten years, are constructed through a dialogue between the characters and the director. Exploring different themes and set in different locations, Boca de lixo and Babilônia 2000 both bring issues of performance, image production and documentary practice to the fore. In order to understand the relationship between theatre and documentary that is investigated in these two films, it is crucial to revisit Coutinho’s seminal work, the documentary Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked to Die, 1984), which established the director as a major documentary filmmaker. Having been conceived in the 1960s, the initial idea behind the documentary suffered a major metamorphosis when interrupted by the Brazilian military coup in 1964. Almost twenty years later, the film became a document of repression during the country’s dictatorship. Coutinho began to rework the 1960s footage and film again between 1981 and 1984. After a gap of seventeen years, however, Coutinho could not follow through with his initial idea, a film about the assassination of a peasant leader, combining juxtaposed real-life footage with acted events. Not only had some of the material been confiscated by the military when they took power, but there was also a difficulty over the validity of making


Chapter 9


MARIANA A . C. DA CUNHA

a fiction film based on a peasant leader’s assassination after the years of military rule. With the fragmented material in his possession, Coutinho decided to look for the peasant leader’s family and gather the actors who had participated in the 1962 filming. The process of making Cabra marcado para morrer defined Coutinho’s documentary filmmaking practice. As Consuelo Lins indicates, meeting some of the characters from the 1964 film again and witnessing their transformations almost twenty years later was central to the documentary, and the idea of encounter became one of the essential aspects of his later works.1 Since the 1984 film, most of Coutinho’s documentaries have two main characteristics: they are shot in a defined location and are constructed through a spontaneous dialogue between the director and the characters. The analysis of Boca de lixo and Babilônia 2000 that follows focuses on the relationship between the filmed image and the multi-layered discourses that compose the films, which unravels to reveal heterogeneous places and identities. In the many dialogues that compose the documentaries, there is a relevant aspect that is explored in both films: the construction of a performance through the discourses of the characters, or “an exclusive dramatic form,” as critic Ismail Xavier defines it.2 On Resistance: Boca de lixo Boca de lixo was filmed in a single location, a rubbish dump in São Gonçalo, 40 km from the city of Rio de Janeiro, with the intention of registering the everyday life of a group of scavengers. As Lins argues, O tema desse documentário não poderia ser mais difícil, porque lida com o clichê da pobreza brasileira: restos da civilização industrial do Ocidente, periferia da periferia dos países ricos, quinto mundo, fim do mundo.3 The theme of this documentary could not be more difficult, because it deals with the cliché of Brazilian poverty: remains of the Western industrial civilization, periphery of the periphery of the rich countries, fifth world, the end of the world.

The documentary shows the brutal scenario of the struggle for food. The initial sequence of the film begins with a shot of the rubbish-dump landscape, known as “Boca de lixo” (mouth of garbage). In this opening scene, the spectator is confronted with pigs sifting through the remains, a scrawny dog looking for leftovers, and vultures flying overhead. Notably, as illustrated in this scene, space is conceived within a larger panorama: purposely framed in the background is the silhouette of Rio de Janeiro with the Corcovado Mountain and the open-armed Christ statue, the quintessential Brazilian postcard, as depicted in figure 9.1. It is a disconcerting introduction, which worsens moments later, when a rubbish truck arrives. A group of scavengers appears on the scene, running to follow the truck until it stops. The camera frames them jostling to get the


134


Figure 9.1

135

Boca de lixo

best pickings, revealing their degraded condition as scavengers. Coutinho’s film represents a world that is far from the old idealist archetypes: no mythical landscapes or characters, but a scenario of environmental and social disaster, which presents the reverse of an ideal national image. In a study of the representation of the favela (shanty town) in contemporary cinema, Ivana Bentes states: The favelas in the films of the 1950s and [19]60s were totally different. They were always the site for idealized dreams of a beautiful and dignified poverty. The clichés of the “noble savage” were applied to the “noble poor.”4

In her investigation into Brazilian fiction films from the 1990s, on the other hand, Bentes criticizes the vulgarization of images of poverty.5 Drawing on examples such as Como nascem os anjos (How Angels Are Born, Murilo Salles, 1996), Um céu de estrelas (A starry Sky, Tata Amaral, 1996), and Cidade de Deus (City of God, Kátia Lund and Fernando Meirelles, 2002), Bentes argues that Glauber Rocha’s famous 1965 manifesto Uma estética da fome (An Aesthetics of Hunger), which proposed an ethic and an aesthetic dimension to the representation of the intolerable, has been displaced in contemporary films. Images of poverty that Cinema Novo directors portrayed in the 1960s have become in the 1990s a “cosmetic of hunger.”6 Bentes’s thesis suggests that the stylization and glamorization of poverty reinforce the stereotypes of poverty in Brazil.


ED UA R D O C O U T I N H O ’ S D O C U M EN TA R I E S



The initial scenes of Boca de lixo seem to conform to the idea presented by Bentes of a stereotypical image of poverty. It will be argued, however, that an ethical dimension is presented in the development of the film’s narrative. The first characters framed by the camera in Boca de lixo are reluctant to be filmed, hiding their faces, running away from the cameras and making hand gestures for the crew to go away, or asking them the purpose of their being there, making clear they are not welcome. It is evident that the first tensions between the crew and the characters demonstrate the scavengers’ awareness of the negative image the media portrays of them, which focuses solely on their social condition of poverty. Reluctant to participate in the constant construction of the stereotype, their first reactions reveal a lack of cooperation in the filming process. Faced with this difficulty, Coutinho makes incessant efforts on screen to get around the situation by acknowledging each individual in turn. In order to approach the scavengers and to gain their confidence, the director brings to the group a series of photographs of themselves, photocopied prints taken from the images Coutinho shot on his first visit to the refuse dump. In contrast to the popular media image of the scavengers, these pictures are a series of close-ups, which afford them an individuality that is lost in the images the public are used to seeing. The resulting figures are not, by any means, simply victims of the social invisibility usually suffered by the marginalized: they are neither forgotten nor totally excluded, nor caricatured or stereotyped. The scavengers have the pleasure of seeing themselves reproduced in the photographs. This technique generates the first dialogues in the film. According to Lins, the negotiation of the image portrayed is an aspect of many of Coutinho’s films: Filmar e ser filmado, a imagem de si e a imagem do outro, as imagens da mídia, estas são questões que irão atravessar muitos filmes de Coutinho dali por diante. Boca de lixo mostra que, mesmo pessoas totalmente desprovidas de uma educação formal, têm consciência do que se pensa e diz sobre elas. Seis anos depois, em Babilônia 2000, é novamente uma tensão entre imagens que Coutinho irá filmar: as imagens que os moradores do morro têm de quem mora “lá embaixo”; as que eles fazem sobre a equipe e sobre o que quer o cineasta; as que eles sabem ou acham que a equipe e a sociedade têm deles; as do universo da favela, que a mídia faz circular.7 Filming and being filmed, the image of oneself and the image of the other, images from the media, these are questions that will run through many of Coutinho’s films from that point onwards. Boca de lixo shows that even people who have not received a formal education are conscious of what is thought and said about them. Six years later, in Babilônia 2000, there is a tension again between the images that Coutinho will film: the images the favela dwellers have of those who live “down there”; the ones they have of the crew and of what the filmmaker wants; the ones they know or think the crew and the society have of them; the ones from the world of the favela, that the media circulates.


136


137

The film presents conversations between Coutinho and five characters, Nirinha, Lúcia, Cícera, Enock and Jurema, one at a time. With one exception, Coutinho begins the conversation in the dump and continues in the character’s own home. This shift of background and context is important because at home, each becomes a person in flesh and blood, deconstructing the stereotype of the scavenger. Jurema is the last character interviewed by Coutinho and the one with the most significant part in the film. At Coutinho’s first attempts to approach her, she is reluctant to appear and to talk: “Não tenho nada para conversar” (“I don’t have anything to say”), she states. After many efforts, she talks to Coutinho and affirms with total conviction: “A gente não cata essas coisas aqui no lixo pra a gente comer, não! Vocês botam no jornal, aí quem vê pensa que é pra a gente comer. Mas não é. Isso não pode acontecer. . . . Eu estou revoltada com isso, com o cesto do pai dela cheio de legumes e eles filmando. Quem vê isso lá fora vai pensar: ‘é aquilo ali que eles comem’ ” (“We don’t pick this trash to eat! You write in your papers and people think we eat this. But we don’t. That can’t be. . . . I’m angry with this: filming her father’s basket of vegetables is disgusting. People see and think: ‘that’s what they eat’ ”). Jurema’s first attempt to communicate her opinion to the director reinforces the argument that the scavengers are not willing to be part of the construction of the stereotypical image circulated by the media. At this point, the spectator is presented with another image-play in the montage of the documentary. The film shows, just before Jurema’s speech, scenes of different people eating food from the rubbish. Again, what is at stake here is the relationship between discourse and image. They are not presented in a continuous and linear way. Here we witness the intervention of the filmmaker, who inserts these scenes that contradict the character’s discourse. This is not, however, a way of denying or undervaluing Jurema’s arguments, but a strategy to place a clear emphasis on the conflictive nature of minority discourses. Homi Bhabha suggests that minority discourses are constructed in “inbetween” spaces that he characterizes as antagonistic, which challenge the supposed homogeneity of a nation and its people.8 He affirms that the discourse of minorities is a complex construction, a performance. This antagonism that exists between the performative and the pedagogical is represented by the conflicts that arise in Jurema’s discourse throughout the film and by her relationship with the camera and the director. The encounter between the marginalized community of scavengers and the cinema, a system that has a supposed supremacy and power, bring about sophisticated and complex discourses, perspectives that transcend clichés about poverty and the marginalized in Brazil. As Jurema’s participation in the documentary is the most lengthy, the complexity of her discourse becomes gradually more visible as the film’s narrative develops. If in the beginning the character was emphatically resistant to talking, her attitude changes during the process of shooting the film. The director’s style, which consists in having spontaneous conversations





with the characters, creates an involvement, which in turn helps the characters feel more comfortable in the presence of the crew. The director makes a conscious decision, in the editing of the film, to show the awkward and uncomfortable initial conversations, and as a result, contradictions in the characters’ discourses become apparent. In the case of Jurema, two aspects are relevant to understand the changes in her discourse: time, as the more she understand Coutinho, the more comfortable she feels; and space, as if moving from the rubbish dump to her house gives another dimension to the reasons she is being filmed. After talking openly about her children and family (she gives her opinion on having seven children, on the subject of abortion, and talks about how she and her husband met), Jurema moves on to discuss her work, which she was initially so reluctant to do. She says: Muitas coisas que a gente encontra ali a gente aproveita. O carro das Sendas . . . , aquele carro de legumes, a gente aproveita. É uma fruta, ou um legume. É muita coisa boa que vem ali. . . . Mas não precisa ficar falando pra Deus e o mundo que a gente vive dali. . . . Ninguém vai me ajudar, duvido. A lot of things that we find there we can eat. You know the supermarket truck that brings vegetables we can eat. There are fruits, vegetables, a lot of good things. . . . But why tell everybody that? . . . Nobody’s going to help, I doubt it.

Jurema refutes what she had said moments before in the dump. This is a peculiar characteristic of the discourse of the scavengers. Full of conviction, they provide the spectator with the impression that what they are saying is really what they believe. It is important to recognize that their statements demonstrate that the space in the documentary is dense, full of nuances, heterogeneous and hybrid. From this perspective, the final part of Boca de lixo reinforces the unstable balance between the scavengers’ resistance to being typified and stereotyped and an affirmation of the intolerable, as Lins puts it.9 The end of the film consists of a sequence of the scavengers watching the footage of the documentary. This practice of showing parts of the film to the characters before the final stages of editing, and the insertion of the scene where they watch themselves, was previously adopted in Cabra marcado para morrer.10 This posture reveals an ethical preoccupation with the scavengers, and provides the protagonists with a return for the trust they placed in Coutinho and a guarantee that the images are not being misappropriated. The characters gaze fixedly at the television and their reactions to the experience of seeing themselves are as diverse as their discourses: constraint, embarrassment, discomfort. However, some of them also smile and even laugh at seeing themselves on the television screen. Throughout the documentary, the spectator witnesses a deconstruction of images that suggest the scavengers’ lives to be characterized by a complete absence of social and personal relationships. The documentary shows that scavengers are people who have homes, relationships and like talking about themselves; they enjoy leisure time as well as working, as shown in one of the scenes, a break from work when the men play football.


138


139

The identities of the scavengers are not fixed, but multifaceted according to the many social activities they perform, such as working, playing, or parenting. These multifaceted identities are also suggested by the performance of the characters, that is, by the way they choose to act in front of the camera. At times, the shifts between their awareness and unawareness of the camera result in contradictory images and discourses, which may be understood with reference to Bhabha’s notion of the in-between. Boca de lixo is an example of a fluid and hybrid spatiality, where minorities’ identities are constantly being constructed. Comparing the composition of characters in classic and modern fiction cinema, Xavier explains that, if the former is constructed with principles of coherence, the latter can be more erratic, giving space for incoherencies, discontinuity, surprises, which, for Xavier, are also present in the conversations between Coutinho and his characters.11 The critic affirms that the “dramatic form” of Coutinho’s films is constructed by the framing of the character and the director with the camera: Dentro de diferentes tons e estilos, cada conversa se dá dentro daquela moldura que produz a mistura da espontaneidade e do teatro, de autenticidade e de exibicionismo, de um fazer-se imagem e ser verdadeiro.12 In different tones and styles, each conversation is framed to produce a blend of spontaneity and theatre, authenticity and exhibitionism, of becoming image and being truthful.

Boca de lixo’s final sequence depicts a boy going through the detritus in the middle of the dump. The director chooses to end the film in the same way as it started: showing the cruel reality of such a place. There is a metaphorical meaning to this montage, which is explored by Robert Stam in his analysis of Boca de lixo. Here Stam observes: Garbage is hybrid . . . as the diasporized, heterotopic site of the promiscuous mingling of rich and poor, center and periphery, the industrial and the artisanal, the domestic and the public, the durable and the transient, the organic and the inorganic, the national and the international. . . . As the lower stratum of the socius, the symbolic “bottom” or cloaca maxima of the body politic, garbage signals the return of the repressed; it is the place where used condoms, bloody tampons, infected needles, and unwanted babies are left, the ultimate resting place of all that society both produces and represses, secretes and makes secret.13



Stam argues that Coutinho’s scavengers “incorporate” the country as a whole. They have, in their peripheral positions, “absorbed and processed the same media representations as everyone else.”14 The characters of Boca de lixo refuse to accept the position of marginality that is shown mainly on television, and in this sense, they construct their discourses in response to that stereotype. In Coutinho’s documentary, it is clear that the process of representation owes much to the characters’ awareness of the importance of 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

140


image in society. Their position in front of the camera is influenced by their determination to avoid being stereotyped or represented against their will.

Almost ten years and several documentaries later, Coutinho made Babilônia 2000. The film focuses on two neighboring favelas, Chapéu Mangueira and Babilônia, located on Babilônia Hill, Rio de Janeiro. According to Lins, this seemed the ideal location, because the hill overlooks the famous Copacabana beach, site of the most well-known New Year’s Eve firework show.15 The documentary depicts the final day of the millennium, December 31, 1999. Due to the constraints of shooting a whole film in one day, Coutinho decided to divide the crew into five different teams, each with a borrowed digital video camera, filming at different locations on the hill.16 With Babilônia 2000 Coutinho aims to convey an image of the favela from an insider’s perspective. During the course of the day, the documentary shows fixed shots of Copacabana beach from the hill, at different times and with very little difference in terms of their framing. These shots contribute to the structure of the documentary, showing not only temporal succession but, most importantly, working as a constant reminder of the position from which the image is being constructed. In general, the interviews start by enquiring about the inhabitants’ expectations of the new millennium. Inevitably, the characters also discuss topics that are relevant to the lives of the favela inhabitants, such as violence, poverty, racism, drug trafficking and murders, although these are not the focus of the conversations, and attract few interventions from the director and interviewers. In a similar manner to Boca de lixo, there is constant attention paid in Babilônia 2000 to how the community is portrayed and especially to how the inhabitants present themselves. The characters are always reflecting on how they look before the camera and are especially worried about what they say. Fatima, a hippie widow of a drug dealer, says: “Não é porque a gente é pobre que tem que ser relaxado” (“It’s not because we’re poor that we are sloppy”). She asks the crew: “O coroa falou alguma coisa? Gostou?” (“What did the ‘old timer’ say? Did he like it?”), here referring to Coutinho. One of the interviewees who also appears worried about how she looks in front of the camera is Roseli, pictured in figure 9.2, a very charismatic woman who talks about being part of the community. When the crew approaches her, sitting on the terrace of her house, introducing her to the documentary, she says: “Ah, é mesmo? Então pode ser atriz? Ah, mas descascando batatas? . . . Mas vai aparecer aonde? Vai ser nos Estados Unidos? Espere aí, tenho que me arrumar!” (“Is it so? Can I be an actress? But I’m peeling potatoes! If it’s in the U.S., I’ve got to look good!”) “Não, não, está bom” (“No, no, it’s fine”), says the interviewer. She replies laughing: “Você quer pobreza mesmo?” (“Oh, do you want poverty?”), and the interviewer responds: “Isso não é pobreza” (“This isn’t poverty”). She replies: “É ‘comunidade’, né?”


On Cordiality: Babilônia 2000


Figure 9.2

141

Babilônia 2000

(“It’s ‘community’, isn’t it?”). Roseli conveys this last sentence with conviction and more than a pinch of irony. She is aware of politically-correct language, proving that she is also aware of the images that circulate in society about the favelas. Later in the conversation Roseli tells the crew why Babilônia Hill is a good place to live: Nós fomos criadas aqui, nós nascemos aqui. Nós não somos mais produtos do meio, mas fomos criadas no meio e não esquecemos o meio. We were raised here, we were born here. We’re not products of the milieu, but we were raised in the milieu and we don’t forget the milieu.

The intonation and repetition of the word meio illustrate that Roseli is aware of the sociological vocabulary often used to refer to communities such as this one. She uses words and expressions such as “perspective,” “unemployment,” “globalization,” “economy,” and “the inflation is disguised,” to show that she is conscious of the social problems that surround her, not only in the favela, but also in big cities like Rio de Janeiro, where issues of violence, segregation, and social injustice are a growing concern. The uneasiness with the preconceived image produced of the favela dwellers is also a concern for many of the interviewees. As in the case of the scavengers in Boca de lixo, the inhabitants of the favela in Babilônia 2000 will perform against the stereotypical image of the favelados. Historically, favelas have been associated with the negative aspects of urban life, such as criminality, indecency, prostitution, and lack of health. In an investigation




142


of Rio de Janeiro’s public health campaign of the beginning of the twentieth century, Teresa Meade affirms:

In an ambitious attempt to renovate and beautify the then capital of Brazil, the government implemented a campaign that concentrated on the infrastructure (building railroads, new docks, warehouses, business buildings, and banks) and on the sanitation of the city. Civilization was the way to modernity. Meade’s study reveals that much of the modernization of Rio had to do with the prospect of foreign investment, and therefore the city’s lack of health and sanitation, inadequate housing and disorganized transportation could not remain visible to foreign eyes and to the Brazilian elites alike. One of the government’s measures was the city’s population inoculation against smallpox, which caused a riot in 1904 and resulted in many injuries and deaths. Meade argues that the exaggerated reaction against vaccination was a combination of skepticism and fury toward the government’s intention. If, on the one hand, the authorities promised to build new social houses, which never materialized, on the other, one of the policies was to condemn and demolish what they considered to be “unsafe and unsanitary houses.”18 Many of the condemned houses were cortiços, “ramshackle structures or beehives.”19 As Meade explains: There in dark, damp, and poorly ventilated rooms crowded Rio’s laboring poor—quarry workers, day laborers on the dock, construction and municipal service workers, prostitutes, pimps, beggars, petty thieves, and others who worked downtown. . . . Health officials called for the destruction of the tenements because of the high disease and mortality rates recorded there.20

The 1904 riot represents the resistance of the urban poor against a larger political agenda to remove the working class from the city center without, however, providing adequate alternative housing and transportation. The event was also heavily reported in newspapers, where the rioters, mainly the poor, were portrayed as unhealthy, pernicious elements. With the destruction of the cortiços and the removal of their inhabitants to the outskirts of the capital, a new social and demographic space with its origins in the turn of the nineteenth century starts to proliferate on the hillsides of the city center, southern and northern zones of Rio, the favelas. In her study of the origin of the favela, Licia Valladares explains that these habitation forms were also part of the same sanitary and health campaign of the beginning of the twentieth century.21 Valladares explains that one particular favela (the “morro da Favella”) was the first to receive media attention, as it is linked to a major historical event, the battle of Canudos in the Northeast of Brazil. 22 According


In the specific case of Rio de Janeiro, a separation of poverty from wealth and concurrent segregation of the poor far from city services were planned and even carried out in the name of “civilized” urban development and public health policy.17



143

to the author, in 1900, the Jornal do Brasil reported that the hill was full of vagabonds and criminals. As Valladares affirms:

The favela moves definitively to the foreground when intervening in, thinking, or discussing the city and/or the country as a whole, when planning its present or its future. The medical-hygienist discourse that condemned the unhygienic habitations before now falls upon the favela; the vision that its inhabitants are responsible for their own fate and also for the evils of the city is transferred to the favela.

The discovery of the favela by the authorities, public health professionals, engineers and intellectuals in general was made possible by a more careful scrutiny, due to a growing interest in this new form of habitation. Visits were carried out and reactions were a mixture of astonishment and fright, for the favela represented a space of extreme poverty and resistance against the domination of the authorities.24 Soon, the favela would be recognized as a problem to be solved, not only in terms of health and infrastructure, but also in terms of the city’s aesthetics. The final dialogue of Babilônia 2000, between one of the interviewers and two characters, is one of several moments in the film when the concern about the image of the favela is explicitly voiced: Você me dá licença de eu falar uma palavrinha? Eu convido a sociedade lá de baixo pra curtir um ano novo tão maravilhoso como a gente ‘tá passando aqui. Aqui, o morro ‘tá aberto pra eles fazerem uma ceia de natal com a gente. Eles fazem mal juízo da gente. Não é nada disso que eles pensam lá embaixo. . . . Eles pensam que o morro só cria bandido, não é isso. Isso aqui é uma casa de amigo. Aqui é uma família. Eles se quiserem vir aqui, a gente faz uma ceia especial pra eles. Will you excuse me? May I say something? I invite society from down there to come and have a New Year as wonderful as the one we’re having. The favela is open to them to come and have a Christmas dinner with us. They think badly of us but we’re not what they think. . . . They think we’re bandits. It’s not like that. This is a friend’s house. We’re a family. If they want to come up here, we’ll have a special dinner.


Definitivamente, a favela vai passando para o primeiro plano quando se intervém, pensa, ou discute a cidade e/ou o país, quando se planeja seu presente ou seu futuro. Sobre ela recai agora o discurso médico-higienista que antes condenava as habitações anti-higiênicas; para ela se transfere a visão de que seus moradores são responsáveis pela sua própria sorte e também pelos males da cidade.23

The opposing down there and up here reinforces the social split between the marginalized poor and the rest of society. Discussing the origins of the vision of favela as problem, Valladares affirms: A dualidade cidade/favela tem sua gênese nesse período fundador, quando a favela é vista como território máximo da precariedade tanto física quanto social que se opõe ao restante da cidade, à sua ordem e à sua população.25


144


The duality city/favela has its origins in this founding period, when the favela is seen as the major territory of physical and social precariousness that opposes itself to the rest of the city, its order and its population.

O morro detém uma posição estratégica. Localizado sobre a cidade, que fica embaixo, goza de uma situação privilegiada em termos de logística. Isolado, oculta de quem olha de baixo o que se passa em cima. Todos que o alcançam . . . experimentam a sensação do espanto, misturado ao deslumbramento.26 The hill provides a strategic position. Located above the city that is below, it enjoys a privileged situation in terms of logistics. Isolated, it hides from those watching from below what happens above. All those who reach it . . . feel a sense of fright, mixed with astonishment.

Babilônia 2000 confirms what was perceived in Boca de lixo: the documentaries do not set out to be a representation of reality or a search for the truth. The films reveal that the truth is multifaceted and that reality is a construct. Furthermore, the idea that runs through both documentaries is that the images and the stories recounted by the characters are part of the composition of different performances that take place in the context of the film. The construction of the characters involves a deconstruction of stereotypical images and discourses produced by society, especially the media, which stigmatize the favela dwellers and associate them with criminality and disorder. The last testimony given by one of the characters at the end of Babilônia 2000, when the credits are being shown, illustrates precisely the fictitious construction of the favela inhabitant’s reality: Nós estamos aqui, nós somos uma semente da terra. Amanhã e depois nós vamos ser semeados na própria terra. E vem outros, mais jovens, para sempre contar as mesmas histórias que vai ver escrito, ou que não tem escrito, vão imaginar a história. Os próprios cientistas nossos, eles imaginam muita coisa que eles não sabem real, e faz a imaginação que supõe que aquilo foi assim.


Despite this negative vision and its repercussions during the twentieth century, the favela dwellers appropriate the marginal location of the favela as a place for the performance of a counter-discourse. The geographic location on the hills of Rio de Janeiro is considered a strategic position, as Valladares argues:

We’re here, we’re seeds on Earth. One day we’ll be sown. And younger ones will come to tell the same stories that are written or not, and they will imagine some others. Our scientists imagine many things that they don’t really know. The imagination supposes things are the way they are.

This final speech works as a metaphor for the documentary. It is a suggestion that the characters are responsible for the composition of their own narratives, sometimes imagined. Curiously, it is pertinent to acknowledge the mention of the “scientist” because it refers to the origins of the favela,



145

when the medical-hygienist discourse heavily inf luenced the construction of a negative image. Truth, here, even the scientific truth, can be a supposition.

Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer begins with a voiceover narration that explains the process of filming the documentary. In the voiceover, the director emphasizes the tendency, in 1960s Brazilian cinema, to show poverty contrasted with images of imperialism. The narration, which contextualizes the documentary, is illustrated by black-and-white sequences Coutinho captured in the 1960s. Combining images that emphasize the contrast between the poor landscape of the Northeast of Brazil and the logos of the gas stations Esso and Texaco, as seen in figure 9.3, the documentary exposes the problematic of imperialism. The director also states: Como integrante do CPC e responsável por estas filmagens, também paguei meu tributo ao nacionalismo da época, indo filmar em Alagoas, num campo de petróleo que a Petrobrás começava a explorar. As a member of the CPC [the Student Union’s Popular Culture Centre] and responsible for filming these images, I too paid my tribute to the nationalism of that time, when I decided to go film in Alagoas, 27 in a petroleum field that Petrobrás28 was beginning to explore.

Figure 9.3


Conclusion

Cabra marcado para morrer



This type of discourse, a self-criticism inserted into the construction of the documentary, illustrates perfectly a change in the idea of nationalism, which in the 1960s was based on a movement against imperialism and exploitation. This idea changed during the decades that were to follow and Coutinho’s more recent documentaries bear witness to this shift. Reflecting on this passage, a question arises: what has changed between the 1960s and the 1980s, when Cabra marcado para morrer finally ended? It could be argued that, with the passing of time, a simple denunciation of imperialism would not be sufficient in explaining the nation’s social problems. What is fundamental here is the change in Coutinho’s practice such that, in the place of an old-fashioned, standardized left-wing discourse, he explores and exposes a multiplicity of discourses by Brazilian people in his films, by proposing a dialogue with common people. The voiceover technique is substituted by conversations between the director and the characters. In a sense, one can see a relationship here with Michel de Certeau’s theories on the everyday life. In The Practice of Everyday Life’s dedicatory, de Certeau writes: To the ordinary man. To a common hero, a ubiquitous character, walking in countless thousands on the streets. . . . This anonymous hero is very ancient. He is the murmuring voice of societies. In all ages, he comes before texts. He does not expect representations.29

Coutinho reassembles fragments of discourses and narratives of common people, where, as Lins suggests, what is at stake is “um retorno à invenção e ao prazer de falar” (“a return to invention and to the pleasure of speaking”).30 It is common to agree with Benedict Anderson’s definition of “nation” as an imagined community with a sense of belonging, “map[ped] . . . on to a carefully demarcated geo-political space,”31 as Andrew Higson states in his study of national cinema. However, this understanding is broadened by Bhabha’s account of “nation” as a fragmented space, which is also reflected in the split national subject. As Higson defines it: Modern cultural formations are invariably hybrid and impure. They constantly mix together different “indigeneities” and are thus always re-fashioning themselves, as opposed to exhibiting an already fully formed identity.32


146

Although Bhabha’s argument is generally projected from a racial point of view, it could be argued that the peculiarity of the spaces of poverty in Brazil, as represented in Coutinho’s documentaries, where social and racial issues are interlaced, could be better understood if we consider these spaces’ hybrid and heterogeneous condition from the perspective Bhabha affords us. Higson’s notion of “re-fashioning” is present in both Boca de lixo and Babilônia 2000, where characters occupying marginal spaces are permanently reinventing themselves. Boca de lixo and Babilônia 2000 suggest that, for


147

Coutinho, the most appropriate way of representing a nation is by gathering these narratives, diverse and hybrid, and often contradictory. The concepts of nation fluctuate in the voices of the various characters. An analysis of these documentaries also reveals another dimension of the people represented and the nation. The characters’ representation is undoubtedly a collaborative construction between the artists and the people. In Coutinho, the characters do not allow a passive representation of themselves. They are determined to show familiarity with the technique. In different ways, the characters are able to articulate an ideology and to construct an image that goes against stereotype. As Xavier argues, the character is aware of the camera, and “shows off,” in a theatrical way, concentrating on those who are physically there—director, researchers—who are acting as if the camera did not exist.33 In these documentaries, the question of the appropriation of the image is at the fore because the characters, through the cinema apparatus, are given the opportunity and being asked to speak. Referring to minority groups, amongst them the underclasses, Bhabha affirms: It’s never adequate to say their voices must be heard as voices, because none of their voices are just innocent voices, their voices are mediated through the dialogue they have with the questioner, through their own sense of what it means to represent themselves, through their own ideologies, so they are also framed voices, if you like, and produced voices.34

Despite the many representations of marginal communities in Brazilian film, especially the favelas, it is very rarely with their own voices that the image is conveyed.35 It is important to recognize that, if, on the one hand, Eduardo Coutinho’s technique has opened up the possibility of making the communities represented in his films visible, on the other, these voices cannot escape mediation.36 What this chapter has argued for is an understanding of Coutinho’s documentary practice as a medium that allows minority communities a performance with which to disseminate their voices, where their representations become the reality of the documentary. * * * After directing several documentaries that have enjoyed success with the public and with critics, Eduardo Coutinho released Jogo de cena (Playing) in 2007. The director invited women to tell stories of their lives, by posting a newspaper ad. The film is set on the stage of a theater, where the director dialogues with “real” women and actresses (most of them famous in Brazil). The women, as in most of Coutinho’s documentaries, tell the director stories of their lives. The actresses, in turn, play the part of one of the “real” women. In a mixture of theatre and documentary, there is a constant play. The “real” women and the actresses play their part, Coutinho plays with the performances, and the spectator is constantly being surprised by the unexpected,




148


which questions the idea that a documentary is going to bring us the truth. It is a film that explores the threshold between documentary and fiction, truth and lie, being a character and being a person, between reality and representation, and that clearly resonates with the concerns of his earlier Boca de lixo and Babilônia 2000.

1. Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho, 39, 45. 2. Xavier, “Indagações em Torno de Eduardo Coutinho,” 51. 3. Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho, 87. All translations are my own. 4. Bentes, “The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian Film,” 129. 5. Bentes, “Da Estética à Cosmética da Fome,” 1–4. 6. Ibid. 7. Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho, 89. 8. Bhabha, The Location of Culture, 157. 9. Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho, 96. 10. This practice was adopted by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin in Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961), where after filming the everyday life of Parisians during the Algerian war of Independence, the directors showed the footages to the people who participated in the filming. 11. Xavier, Indagações em Torno de Eduardo Coutinho, 54. 12. Ibid., 52. 13. Stam, “Palimpsestic Aesthetics,” 68–69. 14. Ibid., 73. 15. Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho, 121. 16. This division of the crew into different groups raises the question of authorship. In previous films, Coutinho decentralized the author by means of expressing himself through his characters’ expressions and discourses, as opposed to using voiceover as a narrative strategy, a technique used in documentaries made for television (such as those produced by Globo television in Brazil). In Babilônia 2000, this decentralization occurs on both sides of the camera: from the perspective of the discourses of the characters and from that of the multiple directors/interviewers of the film. 17. Meade, “Civilizing Rio de Janeiro,” 302. 18. Ibid., 307. 19. Ibid., 306. 20. Ibid. 21. Valladares, “A Gênese da Favela Carioca,” 7. 22. Narrated in Euclides da Cunha’s epic Os Sertões (Rebellion in the Backlands, 1902), the battle of Canudos is directly associated with the favelas. The name for this type of habitation is said to have come from the kind of vegetation existing in the town of Canudos, in the Brazilian Northeast. The soldiers that fought in Canudos came back to Rio to find the same kind of vegetation on the hill of Providência, favela, that would later be known as “morro da Favella,” which gave its name to this new category of housing. Valladares, A Gênese da Favela Carioca, 9.


Notes


23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36.

149

Ibid., 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 11. One of the Federal States of Brazil and one of the poorest in the Northeast region. Brazil’s largest company specializing in exploration and distribution of petrol. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, dedicatory. Lins, O Documentário de Eduardo Coutinho, 135. Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” 64. Ibid., 67. Xavier, Indagações em Torno de Eduardo Coutinho, 56. Bhabha interviewed by Paul Thompson, “Between Identities,” 199. Take, for instance, the recent documentary Ônibus 174 (Bus 174, 2002), directed by José Padilha. The film narrates the heavily mediatized kidnapping of a bus in R io de Janeiro, which resulted in the deaths of the kidnapper and one of the passengers. The film’s central focus is the reconstruction of the character of the kidnapper, Sandro do Nascimento, through the discourses of different people that were somehow related to him, including a social worker, the passengers of the bus, the policemen who were sent to the location where the bus was stopped during hours, among others. The contrast between this documentary and Coutinho’s is that, in Ônibus 174, the different aspects of Sandro do Nascimento are related by others. Coutinho’s mediation, although always present through the cinema apparatus and by his own presence in the set, is minimal. The director’s interventions, as pointed out, are brief because the importance is given to the characters’ narratives. In his analysis of the documentary Viramundo (Geraldo Sarno, 1965), Jean-Claude Bernadet suggests that, even in the context of left-wing thought, there is a distance between the voice of the people and that of the director of the film. He affirms that the interviewers only speak when they are asked to do so, and the questions revolve around the characters’ work and life conditions. The interviewer, on the other hand, seldom appears. The mediation in Viramundo, therefore, differs considerably from that in Coutinho’s films. Bernadet, Cineastas e Imagens do Povo, 15–16.

Works Cited Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Bentes, Ivana. “Da Estética à Cosmética da Fome,” Jornal do Brasil, Caderno B, July 8, 2001. ———. “The Sertão and the Favela in Contemporary Brazilian Film.” In The New Brazilian Cinema, edited by Lúcia Nagib, 121–137. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. Bernardet, Jean-Claude. Cineastas e Imagens do Povo. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003. Bhabha, Homi K. “Between Identities.” Interview by Paul Thompson. In International Yearbook of Oral History and Life Stories, edited by Rina Benmayor





and Andor Skotnes, Vol. 3: Migration and Identity, 183–199. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. ———. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1984. Higson, Andrew. “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema.” In Cinema and Nation, edited by Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie, 63–74. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Lins, Consuelo. O Documentario de Eduardo Coutinho: Televisao, Cinema e Video. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editor, 2004. Meade, Teresa. “Civilizing Rio de Janeiro: The Public Health Campaign and the Riot of 1904,” Journal of Social History 20 (Winter 1986): 301–322. Stam, Robert. “Palimpsestic Aesthetics: A Meditation on Hybridity and Garbage.” In Performing Hybridity, edited by May Joseph and Jennifer Natalya Fink, 59–77. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Valladares, Licia. “A Gênese da Favela Carioca: A Produção Anterior às Ciências Sociais,” Revista Brasileira de Ciências Sociais 44 no. 15 (October 2000): 5–34. Xavier, Ismail. “Indagações em Torno de Eduardo Coutinho e seu diálogo com a Tradição Moderna.” In Diretores Brasileiros: Eduardo Coutinho, Cinema do Encontro, edited by Cláudia Mesquita and Leandro Saraiva, 51–59. São Paulo: Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, 2003.


150


Characters and Conflict: Dramatic Structure in Three Mexican Documentaries Cristina Cervantes

T

he documentary tradition in Mexico began with the Frenchmen Gabriel Veyre and Claude Ferdinand Bon Bernard, who were sent by the Lumière brothers to Mexico City, arriving before Edison’s company from the United States. Like all the emissaries sent by the Lumière brothers, who encountered prominent people in the countries through which they traveled, equipped with the new invention of the era, Veyre and Bon Bernard turned Porfirio Díaz into the first star of Mexican cinema with their El presidente de la República paseando a caballo en el Castillo de Chapultepec (1896).1 From this point onward, many personalities from Mexican political life would appear in films, especially during the Revolution. For example, Francisco Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Venustiano Carranza, Álvaro Obregón, and Plutarco Elías Calles all left marks of their importance in Mexican life in photographs, cartoons, or films. These first productions influenced the first Mexican documentary filmmaker, Salvador Toscano, who traveled around the country capturing scenes of national life and the breathtaking landscapes of Mexico, sequences featured in a recompilation of his work carried out by his daughter Carmen in her production Memorias de un mexicano (1950).2 For pioneers such as Sergei Eisenstein and D. W. Griffith, initial concerns centered on the search for a cinematographic language. Both understood the fact that films told stories, and that the theoretical basis for audiovisual narrative was to be found in the theatre and later in the novel. However, their most important search focused on the specific language of their medium, principally in relation to mise-en-scène and montage; in this way they contributed to an understanding of how cinema may engage the audience’s emotions and thereby convey an ideology. Both Eisenstein3 and Griffith,4 in a similar manner to Georges Méliès, searched the literature for principles of reference and methodologies to explain and conceptualize the way in which cinema narrates stories. In this sense, documentary, in the same way as fiction film, constitutes a narrative form that has sprung from a literary platform, and this can been


Chapter 10


C R I S T I N A C E R VA N T E S

seen in the case of both genres through the transposition to cinematographic language, which is eminently audiovisual, of elements belonging to literature. This chapter will explore the use of a dramatic structure in three recent Mexican documentaries, drawing on the contributions of film theorists as well as pedagogical material developed for the teaching of filmmaking, in order to suggest significant overlaps between the construction of narratives in fiction and documentary film. As will become evident, the three documentaries chosen for analysis make use of the conflict-resolution structure common to fiction film (although they may deliberately frustrate the expectations this structure creates), in addition to a wide range of elements that might be described as “performative.” One of the most generally accepted ways to define the difference between documentary and fiction relates to the film’s relationship with reality. In the first, the search is for the most faithful approach possible in relation to the observed event, and the purpose is the provision of information and the conveying of a certain perspective on this information. In fiction, on the other hand, the internal logic of the story is more important than the representation of a tangible reality. This does not imply that the documentary restricts itself to an exploration of the objective, however, with fiction reserved for subjective themes. For Marceline Loridan, “the cinema . . . implies a subjective relationship with reality, and the portion of reality that is selected depends on the sensibility, on the emotions, on the thoughts, that is, of our inner selves.”5 It is from this perspective suggested by Loridan, of a subjective relationship with reality, that the documentary is able to establish its models of representation, turning drama and montage into a creative form for narrating an event. The themes of a documentary, in the words of Joris Ivens, cannot be separated from those of drama: If the drama is ignored, the film will lack colour and a more tragic conviction; if it moves to distance itself deliberately from the drama, it is heading for formalism and mysticism, damaging the work of each one of the team members; only to the extent that the idea of the film remains faithfully connected to dramatic reality, can the film be a good documentary.6

Dramatic structure and its constitutive elements (character, action, place, and time), which are primarily used to narrate fictional stories, can be considered as one of the first pillars within both creative and analytical approaches to film. In the development of the documentary filmmaker’s project, these elements must be adapted for a nonfictional model in which, for example, a character could be a witness to an event, or the victim of an incident. The action will be determined by the events that the filmmaker would like to capture. The conflict will be established through techniques such as interviews, a retelling of events, or even a reconstruction through dramatization. The differences between fiction and nonfiction imply that in documentary, the space and setting of the film ought to preserve a relationship with the nature of the event, or with the nature of the information


152


153

conveyed. Time in the documentary takes on similar roles as it does in fiction, referring to (a) the period in which the event occurs; (b) the timeframe of the event; and (c) the time of narration, or the time available in which to recount those events. The documentary differs from a fictional film in presenting, at times in an explicit way, the objective of the documentary filmmaker. The creative arrangement of information corresponds to a personal interest in “moving” the audience toward a point of view corresponding with the director’s own vision. This element would include the presentation of the causes or “voluntary and involuntary actions that caused the event” and the circumstances or “the conditions under which the event takes place.”7 The structuring of these elements, which constitute the sources of information of a documentary, is carried out by means of what Dwight V. Swain calls the “information line,” according to which the filmmaker will have to determine the film’s topic and point of view, its “core assertion,” subassertions, and visual proofs for each of these points.8 Once the information line has been specified, Swain recommends that the “line of interest” be defined, which involves the development of a character or creative element in order to capture the attention of the audience and focus their attention on the conflict through empathy.9 This character could be a person who is part of the event or a witness to the event, an external voice, or the voice of the documentary filmmaker. The last process in ordering the content of the documentary is implemented through the “presentation structure,” the purpose of which is to ensure that all the material developed for the “information line” and the “interest line” is narrated in the most effective way possible, with the specific audience in mind.10 This may involve the creation of a chronological or linear sequence; alternatively, it may take a different form according to the type of information being conveyed, including the problem-solution, from the simple to the complex, cause-effect, and so forth. Many of these structures are versions of the conflict-resolution structure of conventional fiction drama. In the introduction, the first of the three main constitutive parts of a visual presentation structure, the aim is to capture the attention of the audience from an emotional point of view, by presenting a character who will seek to involve the audience subjectively in the theme. In the second section, the development stage, the character will present the evidence through the blocks or sequences, of two types: continuity sequences or compilation sequences. Continuity sequences “present a unity of action that continues, with a beginning, middle and end” (as can be seen in interviews, dramatizations, or in the appearance of the presenter in front of the camera). Compilation sequences “present a series of images grouped together, which share a conceptual unit, ideological or thematic. These sequences do not present action, but rather a series of ideas grouped under a specific theme,” which manifests itself sometimes through a narration.11 The conclusion reiterates the project’s purpose from an emotional perspective, underlining


CHAR AC T ERS AND CONFLIC T



the importance what has been seen and its relationship with the audience’s interests.12 Although these guidelines—on the information line, the interest line and the presentation structure—were developed in order to teach filmmakers how to produce documentaries, they can also serve an analytical purpose. They will provide a framework here for the analysis and comparison of three documentaries by young Mexican directors: El abuelo Cheno y otras historias (Grandfather Cheno and Other Stories, Juan Carlos Rulfo, 1994), Los últimos Zapatistas, héroes olvidados (The Last Zapatistas, Forgotten Heroes, Francesco Taboada, 2002), and De nadie (Héctor Cadena “Tin Dirdamal,” 2005). These directors take a critical perspective on social themes, choosing participants and witnesses as their main sources for the information line and the interest line. For all three directors, the purpose and the point of view are focused on guiding the audience toward an awareness of a particular conflict or problem. In El abuelo Cheno y otras historias, Rulfo undertakes a journey to an old Mexican ranch in the south of Jalisco, the region in which his grandfather lived. The memories of the elderly people who were still to be found there, and who knew his family, start to interweave in order to unravel the motives behind the murder of grandfather Cheno. What is more, without actively seeking it, the memories of the elderly people with whom Rulfo converses do not simply reconstruct his grandfather’s story, but also the story of the place itself. The stories focus particularly on the ranch and the Cristero War.13 In a fantasmal, desolate place of ruins, Rulfo appears to undertake—as in Pedro Páramo—the promised journey to Comala to see his father.14 The initial aerial views are striking, giving a sense of the vastness of the place, while the journeys made inside the rundown ranch and the ruined town contrast with the imposing landscape. The camera travels over the landscapes and gradually zooms in on the ranch, or over the terraces and houses in order to introduce the participants and witnesses, whose role it will be to address the camera or one another, relating their tales of Cheno and how he was killed. Gradually they begin to reflect on life at the ranch, and on the proximity of death.15 The line of interest here also includes the director of the documentary, who becomes the first-person narrator, reflecting on his father’s stories about his grandfather and on the place itself. In the first sequence of the documentary, we see images of the ranch in Jalisco and, off-screen, Rulfo’s voice remembers:


154

Todo esto, y todavía más allá, era del abuelo. Mi padre nunca nos contó del abuelo. Pero alguna vez, cuando niños, mi padre nos contaba un cuento: En el año del quién sabe cuántos, una gris oscuridad bajaba sobre el mundo, fue cuando el mal cayó sobre todas las cosas y las cubrió de tal forma que después ya nada fue igual. All this, and even beyond, belonged to my grandfather. My father never told us about grandfather. But once, when we were children, my father told us a story: In the year of who-knows-when, a grey darkness fell upon the earth.



155

The documentary begins to reconstruct some of the events in a dramatic manner, taking us for example to “La Agüita,” where Cheno was killed, to a bar where a killing is duly remembered and dramatized, or even to the grandmother’s ranch where Cheno used to come and visit her. Music is present: not incidentally, nor simply acting as background accompaniment, but in the form of songs from that era, thus engaging with a collective memory. One of the witnesses, an elderly gentleman who was a boy when Cheno was alive, acts as a guide to the grandson-narrator and to the camera, and shares his own memories with the spectator, adding to the collective narrative concerning the murder. For example, in the first scene, the elderly gentleman appears, walking painfully, so much so that we can hear the sound of his breathing. He stops in front of a mound with a cross on top of it and turns to the camera, responding to the questions that someone (we later find out that it is the filmmaker Rulfo) is asking him, concerning the place and what happened there when Guadalupe Nava cornered Cheno and “took advantage of him” (killed him). “And why did he kill him?” the narrator asks, to which the elderly man replies: “I don’t know.” Later on, when the man is recalling his own life story, he has the opportunity to return to the bar that seems abandoned, in which one of his friends committed a murder; together with him, in front of the camera, they reconstruct the way in which it all happened. As the memories of the elderly gentleman are translated almost into fiction, the initial question (Who killed Cheno and why?) is gradually left aside. This question receives a similar answer in each testimony: Cheno was killed by an act of betrayal, on horseback, by Guadalupe Nava, and apparently because of a dispute over cattle. However, this initial line of questioning, which led the narrator to return to the ranch, starts to pale in comparison with the memories and the reflections of the elderly people in the town. With few answers and many memories, the camera pulls away from the location. In the last sequence we see one of the inhabitants seated on a mule, receding further and further away from the camera. Meanwhile, off screen, one of the elderly women who was interviewed can be heard commenting on what she prefers to remember the most, which happens to be the arrival of Don Porfirio Díaz16 when she was a child, before starting a rendition of the national anthem, learnt during her early years. In the following scene, in which we see the sun setting, we continue with the offscreen voice of the elderly woman: “han cambiado tanto tanto tanto los tiempos, ¡qué horror! Porque mientras uno vive está viendo tanta cosa, y dice uno ¿pero será posible todo esto?” (“times have changed so, so, so much, how awful! Because while one is alive, one sees so many things and one says, but is all this possible?”) And against a black backdrop the voice concludes: “y es posible” (“and it is possible”). The documentary draws to a close permeated by the flavor of the old people’s memories, with a reflection on the changing times.


That was when evil fell on everything, and covered it in such a way that afterward nothing was the same.



In Los últimos Zapatistas, the twelve characters who form part of the narrative are situated in Morelos, Mexico. Here, they remember Emiliano Zapata:17 what he was like, how they were recruited by him, how he was assassinated, and they share their thoughts on the effects and results of the Mexican Revolution, given from the perspective of those who fought in its battles. Testimonies, well-known songs such as the corridos,18 and even sequences inserted from films of the Revolutionary period, combine to present us with a fragment of Mexican history, and above all, with a view on the terrible neglect currently demonstrated to these twelve veterans of the Revolution. If Swain’s “interest line” suggests the identification of “characters” even for documentary film, here we can see that each one of the interviewees genuinely becomes a character for the film in a way that is more akin to the performative elements associated with fiction. Each wants to tell their story, relishing the opportunity to wear their uniforms once more, to board a train, to act the part of a soldier, to sing, or invite us to their humble homes in order to tell us their stories and give us their views on the present day. Fully aware of their status as protagonists, these men also realize that their stories contrast with their current reality. They succeed, at the same time, in talking about their past and in confronting us with their present: the neglect they suffer, and from which their only means of escape is death. The narrators’ relationship with death is not only linked to their current situation (they are old, poor, and with little resources to see to their health needs), but also to their memories, mainly focused on the Revolutionary period in which, as they recall, those on the government side took the young, attacked women, and stole from houses. The men recall how one had to hide in order to avoid death, and how, during the Revolution, in order to guarantee survival it was best to join the forces of Zapata, and thus die for the insurgents’ ideals, rather than fight and die for the government. Compared with the threats faced in the past, the present inspires no fear, since, if one has survived the Revolution, then there is no reason to fear anymore. However, this does not deter the veterans from keeping weapons, which they display with pride in front of the camera, reenacting their use with precision. When discussing the betrayal and the death of Zapata, they all remember him as the defender of the land and of the peasants. One of the most dramatic sequences of the film takes place when Manuel Carranza Corona, last captain of the “Ejército Libertador del Sur” (Liberator’s Army of the South), gives his testimony and dies in front of the camera. Coincidence and luck both play their part in the narrative and the virtue of the documentary filmmaker in this case consisted in knowing when and how to take advantage of occurrences. The witness dies of old age during filming, and shortly after his own reflections on the notion of death a few sequences before. In the film, we witness the funeral and we follow the funeral cortège in an act of farewell, leaving him at the point of being buried. Without making explicit the reason why it was decided to use scenes of the death and burial of Captain Carranza in this way, one can guess that it was a family decision to allow the camera to enter the home at such an intensely private


156


157

moment. All present at the family home are accepting of the camera, and seemingly unperturbed by its presence. As in the case of El abuelo Cheno, the initial narrative drive, intent on narrating the story of Zapata, begins to dissipate in order to present the audience with the central conflict of the documentary. This relates to the legacies of the Mexican Revolution, as witnessed by its true heroes, none of whom managed to obtain what the Revolutionary conflict had promised: land, work, and better living conditions. In contrast to the two documentaries discussed above, De nadie presents a social problem with much younger participants and witnesses. María, the central character, is a Honduran woman who leaves her sick husband and their small children in search of work in the United States. For the “information line,” María narrates her terrible experiences, common to thousands of Central Americans who are forced to travel through Mexico on their way to the United States. During that transit, they are harassed by gang members infamously known as the maras, who make robbery and murder of the vulnerable a way of life. The Central American workers are stowaways on cargo trains traveling across Mexico and their quest is to search for a way to get closer to the northern border in order to attempt an illegal crossing over to the United States. These trains are regularly attacked by the maras, and the documentary demonstrates how Mexican police officers also participate in the robbing of these trains. The only compassion shown to these illegal migrants is revealed in the acts of kindness carried out by the residents of a little town on the edges of the train tracks in the south of the state of Veracruz, known as La Patrona. Here a group of women work daily preparing food, which is thrown onto the moving train in a selfless effort to help the migrant workers traveling in the freight cars. The places selected for María’s account and for the testimonies of her other companions on the train are a migrant’s house located in the aforementioned town of La Patrona, which symbolizes a place of hope for the stowaways in the train. However, the location loses its meaning in the face of the heartbreaking testimonies given by the witnesses. At the beginning they all shared the same sense of hope, but encountered a problem in the attempt to cross Mexico and had to take a decision over whether to continue forth, leaving behind the cruelties suffered en route, or whether to remain in Mexico and attempt to find work, albeit illegally. However, they all share a determination not to return home empty-handed and defeated. María, faced with this decision herself, gradually begins to feel more secure, as she is comforted by the filmmaker’s promise to visit her family in Honduras, and relay the message that she is well. Here the “principle of nonintervention” of the traditional documentary is challenged by the decision of the “participating observer” who, in this case, is the filmmaker. We hear the filmmaker directly asking questions and we also hear his presence off screen. He interacts with his main character, thus creating a parallel interest line that relates the central conflict and the central character to a possible destiny (to give information to María’s family so that she can calmly make her decision to continue on).





However, we learn that María is facing a serious dilemma. At the beginning of the film she appears unwilling to confide in the camera, and reveal her tragic secret. However, as she begins to gain confidence, she shares her past experiences with the audience, exposing a harrowing ordeal experienced during her journey that included rape at the hands of the maras. It is the constant presence of the director’s voice that acts as a medium for bridging the gap between the spectators and the testimonies being heard on the screen. As we witness during the episode when the director promises María that he will visit her family in Honduras to reassure them of her safety and wellbeing, there is a constant intervention on behalf of the filmmaker as a means of exploring and exposing further testimonies. During these narrative ruptures, the filmmaker adopts the role of the receiver of information, intervening from the point of view of a hypothetical spectator, interested in the accounts. Unlike the previous documentaries discussed above, the role of the narrator changes here to that of a member of the audience who has the opportunity to step into the situation and ask the subjects questions. In a similar manner to the other documentaries examined, the music constitutes an important element in De nadie as it accompanies the migrants on different occasions, highlighting in particular the images of the train, which becomes a witness-in-motion to each story. While we see and listen to the testimonies, the sequence is intercut with fragments of information in the form of short texts appearing on the screen. The most striking sequences are those which capture the moments at which the migrants board the train, accompanied by an original score by Alfonso M. Ruibal. Two particular pieces are used here, one containing percussion, and the other with lyrics referring to the los nadies (“the nobodies”), from Eduardo Galeano’s text. The filmic examples examined in this chapter demonstrate how conflict, at the core of the dramatic structure, is also essential to the structure of the documentary, despite its concern with the conveying of information. The characters—witnesses and victims—of the films take on some of the performative functions usually associated with fictional characters, acting for the camera in their attempt to show us their points of view or tell us their stories. The conflict is contained within them, or in their memories. Thus in El abuelo Cheno, Rulfo and Jesús Ramírez (“El Motilón”) become characters themselves, not only leading the spectator to the location where the murder occurred, but also introducing us to the other characters who narrate their stories and that of Cheno’s life, and even taking us to the ruins of an old bar where a murder is reenacted for us. In Los últimos zapatistas, the proud zapatista veterans remember their General Zapata and his murder. They reveal through their testimonies the continued failure of society to uphold the ideals of the Mexican Revolution for which these veterans fought. The documentary empathically highlights the neglect in which these soldiers find themselves; relegated to the margins of society, living in poverty, but with their dignity and courage intact, captured along with their memories by the camera. If in the first documentary films in Mexican film history only


158


159

important dignitaries featured on the screen, in Los últimos zapatistas we are presented with a different set of characters from the same historical period, only now receiving the attention they should always have been given. De nadie invites the spectator to witness the human suffering experienced by the migrant worker. In its attempt to highlight the problems of the border zone, which is not limited to the much-debated and better known problematic of the U.S.-Mexico border, the testimonies in the documentary present the social drama of the Central American migrants in Mexico and in the southern border area. By doing so, De nadie acts in contrast to other films of a similar subject matter and theme, but reflecting similar discourses to those associated with the U.S.-Mexico border. The result of this narrative focus delivers a devastating blow to the constructed image of a country that has sought to highlight the prejudice faced by many Mexicans who fall prey to violence and injustice at the hands of their northern neighbors when attempting to cross over illegally. The documentary’s ideological framework questions Mexico’s position as a recipient rather than a source of illegal migration. The film reveals an omission of the same values and demands for justice articulated in relation to the U.S.-Mexico border crisis. In the case of these documentaries, a significant element of performativity is lent to both the information line and the interest line by the films’ relationship with autobiographical material. Each director has close personal ties with the subject matter or topic of their narrative: Juan Carlos Rulfo is Cheno’s grandson; Francesco Taboada is a native of the Zapatista state; and Héctor Cadena (Tin Dirdamal) is an active collaborator in the defense of migrants in Mexico. These positions adopted by the filmmaker provide a platform from which to address notions of subjectivity and reality. Their own personal experiences keep the directors in contact with the reality that they are attempting to address and problematize. In a similar vein, the information conveyed in the documentary relates to their own need to provide answers to their questions, and these act as a motivational force behind the desire to film, and to capture their findings on camera. All three directors whose work has been examined in this chapter thus propose a conflict as the core of the narrative structure (the murder of grandfather Cheno in El abuelo Cheno, the failure of zapatismo in Los últimos Zapatistas, and the problem of migrants who pass through Mexico in De nadie), and seek out the locations, witnesses, participants, and even the right backdrops and props to support their narratives. Perhaps the most significant difference between these documented stories and the conventional dramatic structure of fiction films is that here, the ending is not necessarily one in which conflict is resolved or happiness achieved.



Notes 1. Maza, Más de cien años de cine mexicano. 2. The term documentary was first used in relation to cinema in 1932, when John Grierson employs the term, describing it as “a clumsy description” but


160

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

with possibilities for development. In his analysis of Moana (1926), Robert Flaherty observes that the documentary is based on facts and real people, and this allows him to mark a difference with fictional film (Edmons et al., Principios de cine documental, 9). Early cinema was not constrained by such categories, however, experimenting both with the filming of everyday events, extraordinary happenings, personalities, and places of interest, and with ways of taking drama to the screen. Sergei M. Eisenstein, with considerable experience in theatre and the study of art, linguistics, philosophy, and psychology, stated that the peculiarities of film had to be found in its relationship with other art forms. He believed that storytelling in the cinema should establish a relationship with literature, particularly in terms of narrative or plot: “I consider that besides mastering the elements of filmic diction, the technique of the frame, and the theory of montage, we have another credit to list—the value of profound ties with the traditions and methodology of literature.” “Through Theatre to Cinema,” 17. D. W. Griffith, writer and stage actor, is considered by many to be the father of cinematography, given his significant contributions to experimentation with mise-en-scène, camera placement and montage. He decided: (a) that the cinema—as had Méliès understood, and before him Lumière, at least since L’arroseur arrosé (1896)—served as a medium for telling stories, and (b) that the model for such storytelling was to be found, not in theatre (as had been the case with Méliès’s assimilation of the space of the stage into the visual frame of the camera), but in the literary expression that Griffith considered to be the most well-developed form of narration: the nineteenth-century novel. Pere Gimferrer, Cine y literatura, 13. In this respect, Eisenstein, in his essay on “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” suggests that “the first shoots of American film esthetic” come “from Dickens, from the Victorian novel,” both “forever linked with the name of David Wark Griffith.” “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” 195. In Casas, Documental, 11. Ibid., 14. Maza and Cervantes, Guión para medios audiovisuales, 265–266. Swain, Film Scriptwriting, 26. Ibid., 30. Ibid., 26–38. Maza and Cervantes, Guión para medios audiovisuales, 324–325. Swain, Film Scriptwriting, 35. The Cristero War (1926–1929, also known as the Cristiada) was an uprising by Catholic militants protesting against the anticlerical policies of the Mexican government. Throughout the documentary, the voice of the narrator (Juan Carlos Rulfo) articulates ideas and phrases that make clear intertextual references to his father’s novel, Pedro Páramo (1955). The only “young” character appearing in the documentary is the greatgrandson of Cheno’s murderer, Guadalupe Nava. General Porfirio Díaz, president of Mexico for thirty years toward the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. He was overthrown at the start of the Mexican Revolution that broke out in 1910. Emiliano Zapata, military leader in the Mexican Revolution of 1910. He led the army in the south of the country, recruiting peasants to form part of what





161

Works Cited Ciuk, Perla. Diccionario de directores del cine mexicano. Mexico: CONACULTA, 2000. Dirdamal, Tin. De nadie. DVD. Mexico: Producciones Tranvía, 2005. Casas, Armando. Documental. Cuadernos de Estudios cinematográficos. Mexico: UNAM, 2006. Edmons, Robert, John Grierson, and Richard Meran-Barsam. Principios de cine documental. 2nd edition. Mexico: UNAM-CUEC, 1990. Eisenstein, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today.” In Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 195–255. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949. ———. “Through Theatre to Cinema.” In Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, edited and translated by Jay Leyda, 3–17. London: Dennis Dobson, 1949. Gimferrer, Pere. Cine y literatura. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1999. Maza, Maximiliano. Más de cien años de cine mexicano. http://cinemexicano.mty. itesm.mx. Accessed April 28, 2006. Maza, Maximiliano and Cristina Cervantes. Guión para medios audiovisuales: Cine, radio y televisión. Mexico: Pearson, 1994. Rulfo, Juan. El abuelo Cheno y otras historias. DVD. Produced by Gustavo Montiel. Mexico: El Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica and CONACULTA, 1994. Swain, Dwight V. Film Scriptwriting: A Practical Manual. 2nd edition. London and Boston: Focal Press, 1988. Taboada, Francesco. Los últimos zapatistas, héroes olvidados. DVD. Produced by Manuel Peñafiel. Mexico: Tabone, 2002.


would come to be known as the Zapatista movement that sought to guarantee tenancy for those who worked the land. He was betrayed and murdered by the supporters of the then president of Mexico, Venustiano Carranza, in 1917. 18. A Mexican corrido is an anonymous popular song, which is performed as part of an oral tradition, its lyrics adapting to the social context in which it is sung. The most famous are the corridos from the Mexican Revolution, the words of which exalt the feats of the protagonists of the Revolution.





Whodunnit? In Search of the Real/Reel (and Imagined) Aro Tolbukhin in Aro Tolbukhin: En la mente del asesino Miriam Haddu

Nos interesaba sobre todo jugar con las posibilidades que ofrece el cine. Materiales, estilos, formatos, géneros . . . todo para dar carta de existencia a una realidad inventada o mejor dicho para transformar en verdadero un material falso. (We were interested in the possibilities that cinema has to offer. Materials, styles, forms, genres . . . anything that could give credence to an invented reality, or better said, to transform false material into reality.)1 Agustín Villaronga 2

E

n la mente del asesino (Aro Tolbukhin: In the Mind of a Killer, 2002), a Spanish-Mexican co-production with three directors (Isaac-Pierre Racine, Agustín Villaronga, and Lydia Zimmerman), tells the story of Aro Tolbukhin, a Hungarian merchant mariner who in the early 1980s was found guilty of causing the deaths of seven people in an infirmary in Guatemala. Although Tolbukhin confessed to these and a further seventeen other murders, since his trial and subsequent death, his culpability has been called into question because of evidential and testimonial accounts that have since emerged. The film deliberately plays with concepts of fiction and reality and the parallels between these in order to pave the way for an exploration of an invented world. The film incorporates a multiplicity of cinematic techniques and styles in order to unearth the origins of the protagonist’s psychosis. The film seeks to expose the “real” Aro Tolbukhin, through the use of a varied cinematic format that integrates both the fictional and factual accounts of the man, his life, and his (possible) mental demons. Furthermore, the film aims to examine the probable reason(s) behind Tolbukhin’s crimes, filling the visual voids with borrowed memories that are then re-created. During these moments the narrative framework provides interviews that are juxtaposed with fictionalized episodes, which in turn are intertwined with voiceover


Chapter 11


MIRIAM HADDU

commentary, musical motifs, and selected footage from documentary reels. Despite these narrative attempts (and perhaps deliberately so), what the spectator is left with is an additional questioning of who Tolbukhin really was. The result is an even more mystified and obscured vision of Tolbukhin that questions his very existence. This chapter will address the methods of the film’s constructed narratives that appear to rely on psychoanalytical tools for interpreting the human psyche and work within a multi- and intergeneric framework. In addition, the analysis will address some of the issues raised through the film’s intentional blurring of fiction with reality. This chapter proposes that the filmic methodology employed in En la mente corresponds with psychoanalytical practices associated with the field of psychodynamics, and by doing so provides new forms of addressing the biopic. The film is divided into three main sections that are entwined and combine to provide a picture of Tolbukhin, piecing together information drawn from testimonies, eyewitness accounts, and interviews with the killer himself alongside fictional re-creations. These constructions work on the principle that each filmic piece provides a contribution toward a larger-scale project that aims to delve into the mind of a killer. What is more, the ambiguity surrounding Tolbukhin’s real identity underpins the narrative questionings in the film and seeks to expose the reasons for the crimes committed. Thus En la mente del asesino sets out to dissect the possible motives for the killings by representing a protagonist who swings between fiction and reality, both in terms of the construction of his (filmic) persona, as well as in terms of the content of his stories in the film. The methodology weaves together a multigeneric filmic tapestry that contains fictional scenes combined with documentary footage capturing the “real” Aro Tolbukhin, intertemporal interviews3 that are linked through the use of memory and subject matter, and a haunting short film, El vestido deshabitado (The Uninhabited Dress), that takes as its narrative basis the reconstruction of Tolbukhin’s childhood experiences and is shot in black-and-white format. Despite the film’s seemingly fragmentary structure, an account is composed that pieces together the image of a man who is tormented by his past, and guilt-ridden over the loss of his twin sister Selma, only to be driven to cruelty and apparent insanity in later life. Narrative Structure


164

From the opening sequences, spectators are drawn to the self-reflexive and self-conscious process of filmmaking. The scenes show one of En la mente’s directors, Lydia Zimmerman, who is also the great niece of Lise August, a documentary filmmaker whose footage forms part of En la mente’s narrative. Zimmerman is shown arriving at the TSR Studios in Paris, accompanied by Yve Keetman, a producer with whom August had worked whilst filming about the penal system in Central America. Zimmerman is guided by Keetman down the TSR corridors, and into the basement archives, where the reels that document Aro Tolbukhin’s final days on death row are being held. Here 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

165

attention is paid to the notion of authorship and copyright issues via the discussions taking place between Keetman and Zimmerman: a point of interest given the fact that En la mente constitutes a multi-directed film. Subsequently, through Keetman’s examination of the reels, spectators are transported to another format (16mm color film) and time, whereby the first glimpses of the real Aro Tolbukhin are caught in a segment of August and Keetman’s documentary footage from the 1980s. At this point in the narrative, whilst an imprisoned Tolbukhin is in view, Zimmerman’s voice-over commentary provides an explanation for the idea behind En la mente, a project that aimed to fill the void left by August and Keetman’s unfinished work. As Zimmerman recalls, it is August’s footage and the camera’s fascination with Tolbukhin that incited the three directors of En la mente to delve further into this character and re-create (his)story.4 This hermeneutic approach favors a wide-ranging interpretation and representation of the same subject. As film critic Rosalía Servín Magaña notes: El film se introduce en un “arriesgado ejercicio cinematográfico,” que no solo mezcla la ficción con el documental, sino que además emplea diversos formatos que permiten la narración de la historia, de manera que lo mismo se puede ver una imagen en blanco y negro que una escena muda con subtítulos.5 The film ventures on a “risky cinematic exercise” that not only merges fiction with documentary, but also employs different formats that allow for the narration of the story in such a way that it is possible to view an image in black-andwhite followed by a silent scene with subtitles.

In En la mente we have interviews juxtaposed with fictional pieces, combined with documentary excerpts and coverage from television and newspaper reports. In addition to the three main sections of the film, there is a further segment that acts as a subtext to the main narrative as a whole, seen in the form of August and Keetman’s documentary. All parts of the film, although different in form and content, penetrate one another’s visual space in order to reaffirm the uniform yet multiangled interpretation of Tolbukhin. Therefore, Zimmerman’s contribution to En la mente continues her relative’s working method in the form of interviews with those who knew Tolbukhin. Here, Zimmerman’s interviews, conducted in the 1990s using 35mm blackand-white film, run parallel with August’s footage shot during the 1980s in 16mm color format. Also in the film, Villaronga’s creation forms the crux of the fictional dimension to the narrative and his direction of the actors, Daniel Giménez Cacho and Carmen Beato, who play Tolbukhin and Sister Carmen respectively, aims to interpret within a fictional framework the intense relationship between these two characters, which took place during the protagonist’s time at the Mission in Guatemala. Finally, in the last section of En la mente, Racine’s contribution takes the spectator on a nostalgic journey back in time to the time of Aro’s childhood, seen in El vestido deshabitado. Together, the interviews, fictional pieces, and documentary footage present the spectator with an overall vision of Aro Tolbukhin as both an imaginary


T H E R E A L / R E E L (& I M AG I N E D ) A R O T O L B U K H I N


MIRIAM HADDU

creation and as a “real” historical character. However, the film’s structure avoids falling into fragmentary inconsistencies through the careful handling of fiction with reality and the constant paralleling of insights into the character of Tolbukhin, achieved through the re-created scenes, and the personal testimonies given. In addition, all narrative sections within the film are held together by the same quest theme that aims to uncover the “real” Aro Tolbukhin through the medium of the reel, the use of collective and individual memory, fantasy, and commentary. As Fernando Cerlin observes, “[a] partir de este material, la película intenta profundizar en el personaje y en las causas de su comportamiento” (“this material forms a filmic basis from which to explore the causes of the character’s behavior”).6 In relation to the film’s narrative structure and content, the employment of multiple textures and formats constitutes something of an innovation in mainstream cinema in Mexico. In the words of Tomás Pérez Turrent, [En la mente es] una cinta completamente distinta, que juega el juego del falso documental y la falsa ficción; algo que se ha hecho mucho en el cine de los últimos años y rara vez se ha intentado en México.7 [In the Mind of a Killer is] a completely different film that plays the game of false documentary and false fiction—something that has been carried out a great deal in recent cinema, but rarely attempted in Mexico.

It is precisely this synergy of formats and styles that characterizes En la mente whereby not only is there a generic cross-over, but an overlap of roles that sees the intervention of the creators within the film itself. The filmmakers at times take on the role of interviewers, as we see with August, and on other occasions step in to provide commentary, as witnessed in the case of Zimmerman, who also acts as an interviewer. Therefore the synthesizing of fiction and reality serves to fuel the speculation surrounding who Aro Tolbukhin really was by raising doubts on his own identity, as will be explored later in this chapter. As we shall see, the deliberate mixing of genres serves to articulate the blurring of fiction and reality both in terms of Tolbukhin’s case, and also in relation to the role of memory in the process of narration. Memory and Cinematic Representation


166

In En la mente del asesino, the multilayered whisperings and commentaries guide the spectator into a world that is both tormented and multiple, deliberately framing the narration with elements of fantasy and desire. This technique is noticeable during the interview episodes conducted by Zimmerman, which in turn give way to the fictional re-creations directed by Villaronga. The directors’ interplay between fiction and reality aims to raise questions regarding notions of “truth” and “authenticity” within the discourse of documentary, and sets out to blur the generic boundaries of documentary and fiction filmmaking.8 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

167

Interestingly, Zimmerman is told during a conversation with Keetman that August’s audio recording of an interview with an imprisoned Tolbukhin was deliberately withheld from the final version of their documentary, because of the apparently false nature of Tolbukhin’s account.9 Therefore it appears that the contents of a compelling and intimate interview provided by the real Tolbukhin were classified as “fabricated” by his interviewer, and were subsequently removed from the final cut. Much later on, Villaronga and his co-directors realized the importance of this interview as a means for exposing Tolbukhin’s inner conflicts, and seized on its contents in order to portray their own interpretations of a reality set within a fictional context. Fully aware of the truth/fiction binaries within narration, and of the possible non-truths contained within Tolbukhin’s testimony, both Villaronga and Racine set about providing a space in which to re-present these suppressed stories. The result is the recycling of Tolbukhin’s memories, presented in the form of a fictionalized re-creation played by Giménez Cacho. Here Giménez Cacho arrives at the scene of the interview in a wheelchair. His attitude is calm, and his own description of his childhood is detached and unemotional. Within this scene, as the fictional Tolbukhin begins to recall his childhood experiences, spectators are offered a glimpse into the killer’s tormented mind through the fictional re-creation that follows, named El vestido deshabitado, the contents of which are discussed further on in this chapter. It appears that the “fantasy” element to the abovementioned interview, therefore, granted Racine and Villaronga free reins with which to interpret the roots of Tolbukhin’s apparent insanity in a filmic way, and thus visually represent his childhood and the possible drives that led to his future crimes. The creative license awarded through the categorization of fiction within a “real” context, or in other words, the (possible) fictional account of his life given by Tolbukhin to August in an audio-recorded interview, provides the directors of En la mente with a blank canvas on which to depict an interpretation of the subject’s character and inner world. Significantly, this desire to map out and explore the character’s internal spaces forms one of the fundamental aims of the film as a whole and reveals the existence of what the directors termed an “inner garden.”10 In addition, the act of structuring the narration of Tolbukhin’s interview within a fictional framework further legitimizes its contents since the process frees up the possibilities of representation, as spectators never fully hear the interview in its entirety, and the re-creation is presented as deliberately self-conscious. There are, however, indications that this fiction could possibly be “true” through the juxtaposition of Giménez Cacho’s prison scene (and thus the contents of El vestido deshabitado) with the testimony given by Tolbukhin’s nanny, a real character interviewed by Zimmerman. Through an interpreter, the now elderly Slamár Yulané recalls her experiences in the Tolbukhin household, where she had worked as a nanny for several decades, and had acted as a surrogate mother figure to the young children under her care. Yulané first came into contact with the very young Aro Tolbukhin after she arrived to tend to him and his twin sister Selma, following the untimely




MIRIAM HADDU

death of their mother. She remained in the Tolbukhin household as the twins grew, calming their childhood anxieties, and gradually, with time, witnessing the children’s increasingly insular relationship. The interview with the nanny, combined with the fictional re-creation of the abovementioned withdrawn interview with Tolbukhin, then unfold into what become the narrative contents of El vestido deshabitado, the black-and-white re-creation of Tolbukhin’s childhood that forms the final part of En la mente del asesino. Furthermore, Yulané’s memories provide the spectator with testimonial evidence of Tolbukhin’s early experiences, and serve to offer an insight into his formative years. This technique also proves critical when attempting to examine the killer’s past motives for his crimes. In El vestido deshabitado the main characters are played by actors, and consist of Aro and Selma, the children’s father, and the nanny. The story is seen through the eyes of a young Aro, since part of the narrative is based on Tolbukhin’s testimonies given during his interview with August. There are episodes, however, that allude to Yulané’s testimonial input, and in particular the scene involving the siblings’ incestuous encounter, which in the film is represented as being witnessed from afar by the nanny herself. El vestido deshabitado The title of the short film El vestido deshabitado is symbolic of the absent maternal figure in the narrative, and refers to the dress belonging to the children’s mother, which lies unworn on the empty bed. Here the mother figure constitutes an enigma, and at first it is suggested that she is confined to her bedroom due to her ailing condition. Furthermore, the children hold onto this belief in the hope that one day their mother will emerge from her quarters. The children witness their father’s daily visits to their mother’s room, seemingly at first to take food and to offer companionship. However, it is later discovered (by the children themselves) that in fact these visits provide the father with an opportunity to grieve his loss in private. During these scenes, spectators observe how a simple white dress lies on the bed, in place of Aro and Selma’s mother, and serves as a focal point for the twins’ realization of her physical absence. The image of their grief-stricken father, weeping over the white dress, constitutes a turning point for Aro and Selma, as they struggle to cope with, and comprehend, the concept of death. This emotional journey further unites the siblings, whose love for one another will lead them toward an incestuous relationship in their early teenage years. The result of their liaison is an unborn child, which will perish due to an accidental fire that also claims Selma’s life. These tragedies will mark Aro for the rest of his life, and in the film are portrayed as the defining traumas that will dictate the protagonist’s actions as an adult, a conclusion that is crucial to the psychoanalytical examinations taking place, as will be observed later in this chapter.11 In addition to attempting to delve into the psychological impetus that may have led to Tolbukhin’s instability, El vestido deshabitado exemplifies the directors’ methodological choice of endeavoring to find the killer’s


168



169

“inner garden,” and hence humanize the subject, whilst steering clear of trying to provide definitive answers. As Villaronga points out,

This film is an attempt to explore and expose this man’s psychology, without however, aiming to make a psychological film. We try not to make judgments, our sole aim was to try and understand this character.

Racine supports Villaronga’s view when he states that the El vestido deshabitado “es un viaje atrás en el tiempo, no para justificar, pero sí para entender” (“is a journey back in time, not with the aim of justifying but rather with understanding [the killer’s actions]”).13 This narrative drive, intent on unraveling the root causes of the protagonist’s criminal actions, does, however, take on a psychoanalytical quality by its very nature. As mentioned above, the fact that the directors allude to the notion that childhood experiences may provide answers to adult conduct, points toward a practice within psychoanalysis that is known as psychodynamics. Fundamental to psychodynamics is the notion that repressed childhood experiences act as motivational forces for adult behavior. Psychodynamics In order to scrutinize En la mente’s investigative methodology, which filters into the realms of psychoanalysis, my analysis here will turn to address the meaning of the term psychodynamics, and will provide a brief overview of its practice and significance to a reading of the film. Freud’s theory of psychodynamics was initially referred to in his essay “The Ego and the Id” (1923), which built on the pioneering work of German scientists, Ernst von Brucke and Hermann von Helmohltz. In basic terms, Freud’s prototype relied upon the principles of the first law of thermodynamics, the central premise of which concludes that the total amount of matter and energy in a given system undergoing any transformation or process is conserved and not destroyed.14 When this law of physics is theoretically relocated to a psychological context, the psychodynamic hypothesis determines that experiences, and more specifically, early childhood experiences, are stored in the unconscious:


Este film es un intento de exponer y tratar de entender la psicología de este hombre, aunque sin querer hacer una película psicológica. No queremos juzgar, sólo intentamos entender a este personaje.12

The psychodynamic approach to psychology emphasizes the importance of emotion, the continuity between childhood experiences and the adult personality, the particular importance of early relationships and the psychological significance of subjective experience and unconscious mental processes.15

What is crucial here, and adds to our understanding of the imperatives behind the inclusion of El vestido deshabitado in the overall cinematic piece, 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

MIRIAM HADDU

is the psychodynamic recognition of childhood experiences shaping adult character traits and behavior, which is fundamental to a reading of En la mente and its main protagonist. The contents of El vestido deshabitado further exemplify this notion. In his study of the unconscious, Freud recognized a similarity in the way the mind dealt with distressing experiences, and determined that if these were to become suppressed, the same process would result in the eventual re-surfacing of such traumas to the conscious level. Furthermore, unconscious drives impel conscious actions and form the crux of instinctive behavior: the nature of the unconscious mind varies considerably in alternative theories but all psychodynamic approaches share the assumption that we are influenced in some way by mental processes of which we are not normally aware. The Freudian version of the unconscious mind is dominated by instincts and repressed memories that constantly influence cognition and behaviour.16

In a pathological setting, one of the possible effects of repressed childhood traumas is seen in the development of the conditions of psychosis and neurosis in adult life, a notion that is explored in the film when we view Tolbukhin unable to cope with the death of a child whilst living at the Mission in Guatemala. Moreover, the root cause of Tolbukhin’s psychotic behavior in adult life, it is suggested, lies in his childhood experiences, and in particular in those relating to the deaths of his mother and sister, compounded by the presence of an emotionally unavailable father. The theoretical terrain of the unconscious is an expansive one, and an examination of its variations lies beyond the confines of this chapter. However, for the benefit of my filmic analysis, I will briefly observe Freud’s outlining of characteristic factors applied to the unconscious in order to illustrate how these assist toward a reading of the on-screen Tolbukhin. Matt Jarvis gives the sense of Freud’s term “das Unbewusste,” or “unconscious,” as varying depending on the contexts in which it is set.17 Borrowing from Matthew Hugh Erdelyi’s insights into the characterizations of the unconscious, Jarvis provides three main ramifications to the term. These include what is conceived of as the “descriptive unconscious” and incorporates “any memories or mental processes that are not subject to conscious awareness.” Secondly, the “dynamic unconscious” provides reference to “material that is inaccessible to the unconscious mind either because it has been repressed from consciousness or because it is inherently inaccessible to consciousness.” Jarvis goes on to stress that the “dynamic unconscious” does, however, “interact with and constantly impact upon the conscious mind.” Thirdly, the “systemic unconscious” constitutes the basis of Freud’s notion of “what later became known as the it or id, the deepest layer of the unconscious mind, instinctive and illogical.” A psychodynamic reading of Tolbukhin’s depiction in the film demonstrates the directors’ interrogation of the childhood factors that, due to the influential events of Tolbukhin’s


170


171

past, set in motion the future killer’s irrational behavior as an adult. The realization of his mother’s death, and the subsequent sense of abandonment felt by both him and his sister, alongside the feelings of solitude and eventual heartache caused by the loss of Selma, all provide emotions that are painful, conflicting, and that remain unresolved and are stored in Tolbukhin’s unconscious. These later resurface when Tolbukhin’s life is struck by yet another tragic event. These same unresolved emotions are thus contained within the protagonist’s “descriptive unconscious” and do not find expression until later on in the narrative. As will be explored below, when Tolbukhin is placed at the Mission in Guatemala, the contents of both his “dynamic” and “systemic” unconscious begin to reveal themselves, at first governing his desires for Sister Carmen, then later dictating his acts of cruelty upon his victims. Furthermore, in En la mente we also see how Tolbukhin’s mental stability deteriorates during the course of his time at the Mission. Psychodynamic in nature, the film’s methodology points to the possible source of Tolbukhin’s psychosis as being located within his childhood experiences, and exhibits these findings in the film El vestido deshabitado. The following section of this chapter will observe how the principles of psychodynamics are employed in En la mente, both in terms of the film’s methodology and in its narrative contents. Psychodynamics on the Screen It is suggested in the film that the defining trigger that sets in motion the process of Tolbukhin’s mental deterioration is his first encounter with Sister Carmen that occurs at the Mission in Guatemala toward the beginning of the fictional re-creation. During this section of the film, spectators observe a very ill Tolbukhin being rescued by members of the Mission, who find him wandering alone in the jungle. He is subsequently nursed back to health by Sister Carmen, and when he finally awakens from a fever, Tolbukhin’s first word to Sister Carmen is the name “Selma.” Because of the state of delirium in which Tolbukhin finds himself, his utterance “Selma” points toward the drives at play that are contained within his descriptive unconscious, and alludes to the attachment he maintains to the memory of his sibling. Later on the film, the notion that Sister Carmen reminds Tolbukhin of his own twin is confirmed through their activities together, and it is this unconscious connection that will fuel the protagonist’s desire for the nun. Furthermore, both the fictionally re-created characters of Selma and Sister Carmen are linked cinematically through the use of a musical motif that accompanies the visual image of each character when in the frame. These non-diegetic musical links serve to engage the spectator with the psychological connections taking place within Tolbukhin’s unconscious. Thus the feelings that are aroused in the adult Tolbukhin through his encounter with Sister Carmen act as reminders of his past passion for his twin sister. As his health improves, and their relationship intensifies, Sister Carmen and Tolbukhin (or Hans Witz, the name under which Tolbukhin is known




MIRIAM HADDU

at the Mission) become closer. Eventually, with the arrival of an orphaned baby, Sister Carmen and Witz/Tolbukhin form a pseudo (imaginary) family. The birth of baby Kuti, and his informal “adoption” by Sister Carmen and Tolbukhin, provide the protagonist with the fulfillment of his repressed fatherly desires (kept within his dynamic unconscious), and allows the protagonist to act out the fantasy that was denied him through the abrupt death of his sister and their unborn child. It is also significant that the orphaned child is given the name “Kuti,” which, as Carmen explains in an interview, means “he who was saved from the fire.” The baby’s name indicates the symbolic role this child plays in Tolbukhin’s imaginary, since the element of fire becomes a signifying device linking the protagonist’s present actions with his past traumas, once more pointing toward the psychodynamic hypothesis at work. As spectators we view images shot in Super 8 format of the real Sister Carmen and Tolbukhin/Witz, walking together with a baby in Sister Carmen’s arms. Carmen and Zimmerman are then heard in conversation, linking back to an interview being conducted by Zimmerman with Carmen in the 1990s. This commentary between the two women affords a platform from which to observe the relationship between Tolbukhin/Witz and Carmen, and constitutes a narrative method that also provides spectators with the former nun’s insights into the significance of Kuti’s presence. Moreover, Carmen’s observations offer the spectator a glimpse into her view of the past events, and fills in possible voids by providing testimonial material that is then fictionally re-created and directed by Villaronga. Our gaze at this stage in the film is drawn to the image of a younger, smiling Sister Carmen and Tolbukhin/Witz, standing side by side outside the infirmary at the Mission. In the fictional re-creation directed by Villaronga however, Kuti presents Sister Carmen with a context in which to realize the latter’s own, until then, repressed maternal instincts, which are contained within her systemic unconscious. Spectators view examples of this notion in the fictional scene where Sister Carmen is shown to be simulating the act of nursing Kuti, whilst contemplating her framed reflection in the mirror positioned opposite her. Eventually Sister Carmen’s suppressed (maternal and sexual) desires will form the catalyst for her abandonment of the habit. The real Carmen herself supports this view, when, during her interview with Zimmerman, she acknowledges that she and Hans Witz had formed a “little family,” much to the growing disapproval of the other members of the community. Rumors of a liaison between Tolbukhin/Witz and Sister Carmen circulated amongst community members at the time, as several interviewees confirm. Carmen is also aware of how her relationship with Tolbukhin/Witz might have appeared to others, and recognizes the possible temptations to which she may have fallen prey. An abrupt ending to the idyllic “family unit” comes about with the tragic death of the infant, an event that spells out the beginning of the end for the repressed desires between Tolbukhin/Witz and Sister Carmen, and sets in motion the rapid demise of the main protagonist’s mental state. In En la mente this is shown after Tolbukhin/Witz’s frustrated


172


173

sexual attack on Sister Carmen, which plunges the former into a deep depression that eventually leads him into a state of delusion. The same event forces Sister Carmen to leave the Mission on a transfer elsewhere, and Tolbukhin/ Witz’s downfall concludes with his first act of killing. A psychodynamic reading would suggest that it is at this point in the narrative that the subject’s repressed emotions find their way to the conscious level, leading to his mental breakdown. As Tolbukhin struggles to cope with the events in his life, his mental stability deteriorates, pushing him further into a state of psychosis. At this stage in the narrative, Tolbukhin’s previously repressed desires begin to unfold, surfacing onto his conscious level and governing his actions, recalling Freud’s insights into the re-emergence of suppressed emotions in the form of behavioral drives. From this point onward in the narrative Tolbukhin becomes obsessed with pregnant women, which provides an indication of the systemic unconscious imperatives that have begun to dictate his behavior. It is from this moment onward, the film suggests, that Tolbukhin sets out on his murder spree, culminating with his killing of the infirmary patients. What is more, it is not coincidental that Tolbukhin’s chosen victims are expectant women, since they unconsciously refer him back to Selma’s condition upon her death. Thus Tolbukhin repeats the method by which Selma died, and reenacts the trauma by subjecting his victims to death by incineration.18 It seems therefore, that the film’s psychodynamic methodology, which relies upon the use of memory, the re-visiting of past events and the examination of childhood trauma (conducted cinematically), all provide the directors with an opportunity for visually exploring the psychodynamic hypothesis on the screen. The Reel/Real Aro Tolbukhin As observed above, the narrative of En la mente del asesino, therefore, constitutes an exploration of the killer’s mind using a cinematic framework organized around the principles of psychodynamic analysis. As a starting point for this exploration, the directors take August’s reels as evidence of a distorted mind. Crucial to this perspective are the scenes that demonstrate an imprisoned Tolbukhin, directly addressing the interviewer and responding, albeit vaguely, to the questions posed to him. One of these questions concerns his motives for the killing of innocent people. Tolbukhin’s response is nonchalant, and devalues the lives of those he killed: “¿Por qué iba a seguir cuidándolos, por qué?” (“Why should I have continued to care for them, what for?”). When asked about the doubts shed on the validity of his claims that he committed all of the murders, Tolbukhin becomes agitated: “¿Qué quiere decir, que soy loco? No soy loco” (“What are you trying to say—that I am a madman? I’m not a madman”). The “real” Tolbukhin’s denouncement of his own insanity, his lawyer’s affirmation of the inconsistencies within the defendant’s statements, and subsequent evidence that was refused entry to the courts by Tolbukhin himself, are




MIRIAM HADDU

inserted into En la mente as a means for questioning both Tolbukhin’s full culpability for his admitted crimes (which extend beyond those committed on the infirmary victims), and as a way of exposing the tensions between fiction and reality. This notion is further heightened when Tolbukhin’s lawyer, Lic. Alberto Márquez, reveals to Zimmerman that there were doubts concerning his client’s real identity. As spectators are aware from the interviewees captured by August’s camera, Tolbukhin was known amongst the Mission community as Hans Witz, yet his signed confession records his name as Aro Tolbukhin. When investigating the registration of a named Aro Tolbukhin at the Mexican consulate, Márquez reveals there to have been discrepancies in the data. In an interview conducted with Zimmerman, Márquez highlights that there appeared to have been a significant lack of correspondence between the date of birth, parental names, and other personal information provided by Tolbukhin/Witz, with those recorded at the consulate for a person under the name of Aro Tolbukhin. A question mark over who Tolbukhin/Witz really was, and indeed if the person caught on camera really was who he claimed to be, further exposes what appears to take the form of a web of untruths, and the possible fantasies that frame the case of Tolbukhin. Had Witz taken on another identity upon his arrest, and thereby increased the number of crimes committed due to his own self-destructive desires? And if so, who was the real Aro Tolbukhin? What could have been the motives behind such self-condemnation and ultimate death? These are some of the questionings that lead the directors of En la mente del asesino to piece together fractions of a fragmented life story, a possibly invented identity, and the defining factors behind what constitutes an ongoing mystery, within a work that incorporates footage of the “real,” alongside fictional depictions of the man perhaps erroneously known as Aro Tolbukhin. Notes 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s own. 2. Anon., “Entrevista con Villaronga, Zimmerman y Racine.” 3. These interviews have been conducted over different stages, and with different interviewees and interviewers. Those conducted during the 1980s were overseen by Lise August, and the interviews recorded during the 1990s were conducted by Lydia Zimmerman. Both sets of interviews work in correlation with one another, each feeding the other with fragments of information that work toward providing an insight into the character of Aro Tolbukhin. 4. See Anon., “Entrevista con Villaronga, Zimmerman y Racine,” where Villaronga supports this claim. 5. Servín Magaña, “En la mente del asesino, Aro Tolbukhin.” 6. Cerlin, “Documental y ficción.” 7. Pérez Turrent, “Explora ‘Aro Tolbukhin’ nuevo concepto de cine.” 8. Racine, Aro Tolbukhin, 38. 9. In the film, Keetman tells Zimmerman that the contents of the interview with Tolbukhin appeared to be “demasiado fantasioso” (“too fictitious”).


174


175

10. In an interview, Villaronga states: “Recuerdo que al principio cuando escribíamos el guión, hablamos con la abogada criminalista para sacar datos. Y nos contó que en todos los homicidas y asesinos con los que había tratado había descubierto en ellos un jardín interior. Aro Tolbukhin-película lo que quiere es mostrarnos ese jardín interior” (“I remember that at the beginning, when we were writing the script, we talked to the criminal lawyer to get information. And she told us that in every murderer she had dealt with, she had found an inner garden. The film Aro Tolbukhin seeks to show us that inner garden”). Anon., “Entrevista con Villaronga, Zimmerman y Racine.” 11. Ibid. 12. Servín Magaña, “En la mente del asesino, Aro Tolbukhin.” 13. See Anon., “Entrevista con Villaronga, Zimmerman y Racine.” 14. Jarvis, Psychodynamic Psychology, 2. 15. Ibid., 8. 16. Ibid., 3. 17. Ibid., 23. 18. There are echoes here of Freud’s work on reenacting trauma in his essay “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.”

Works Cited Anon. “Entrevista con Villaronga, Zimmerman y Racine,” Reforma (September 25, 2002): 34. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, edited by Michael Holquist and translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Carro, Nelson. “Aro Tolbukhin, en la mente del asesino,” Tiempo Libre (December 20, 2002): 2. Cerlin, Fernando. “Documental y ficción,” Novedades (December 29, 2002): 8. Erdelyi, Matthew Hugh. Pyschoanalysis: Freud’s Cognitive Psychology. New York: Freeman, 1985. Freud, Sigmund. The Ego and the Id. New York: W.W. Norton, 1923. ———. “Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, translated by J. Strachey, vol. 12, 147–156. London: Hogarth Press, 1958. Jarvis, Matt. Psychodynamic Psychology: Classical Theory and Contemporary Research. London: Thomson, 2004. Pérez Turrent, Tomás. “Explora ‘Aro Tolbukhin’ nuevo concepto de cine,” El Universal (December 26, 2002): 5. Racine, Issac-Pierre, Agustín Villaronga, and Lydia Zimmerman. Aro Tolbukhin: En la mente del asesino (Press Book). 2002. Servín Magaña, Rosalía. “En la mente del asesino, Aro Tolbukhin,” El Financiero (December 5, 2002): 63.







Questions of Reference


Part V





Filming Psychoanalysis: The Documentation of Paranoia and the “Paranoid Gaze” in Luis Buñuel’s Él Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla

Luis Buñuel’s Él (This Strange Passion, 1952) is based on an autobiographical,

hybrid novel, entitled Pensamientos (1926), by Mercedes Pinto. In this novel, the female protagonist denounces the persecution that she suffered at the hands of her paranoid husband in the Spanish bourgeois society of the 1920s. Pinto adds essays written by doctors, psychiatrists, and lawyers in the form of prologues and appendices to the fictional novel, thereby combining historical contextualization with individual subjectivity and challenging the arbitrariness of the conventional distinctions between documentary and fictional modes. In so doing, she attempts to justify a woman’s right to divorce, which was unacceptable to the conservative Spanish society of the 1920s. French film critics acclaimed Él, in spite of its commercial failure in Mexico, and its initial, negative reception at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953.1 In order to rescue the film from this negative commercial and critical reception, Positif, one of France’s most prestigious film magazines, dedicated a special dossier to Buñuel’s films from his Mexican period in 1954. In an auteurist fashion, some critics, such as Claude Baylie, reinterpreted Él as one of Buñuel’s masterpieces that allegedly epitomizes the director’s own personal mythology, which is conventionally associated with surrealism and Catholicism, and allows total access to the mentality and subjectivity of the Buñuelian hero.2 Ontological and epistemological questions regarding film as a means of knowledge are not addressed in Baylie’s auteurist and rather mythologized account of the film. Paraphrasing Freud, I suggest that the paranoid subject, suffering from the repression and distortion of homosexual desire, projects a persecuting double. In his analysis of the themes of fetishism and paranoia in the film, Peter Evans suggests that Él could initially be seen as a direct documentation of Freud’s classic association of paranoia with the repression of homosexual desire in a homophobic society that requires the repression of all “abnormal”


Chapter 12


J U L I Á N D A N I E L G U T I É R R E Z- A L B I L L A

desires.3 Following a close textual analysis of the film, this chapter will contend that Buñuel’s Él, despite using the fictional devices of narrative films, functions as a documentation of the psycho-pathology of paranoia as a way of exploring the complex relationship between this psycho-pathological disease and repressed homosexuality. In addition, I will argue that the film’s focus on paranoia offers, paradoxically, a critique of the symbolic realm, thereby counteracting normative modes of subjectivity and, ultimately, cognition. Defining paranoia as a tautology of human knowledge, Jacques Lacan states that: I have demonstrated in a monograph that the persecutors were identical with the images of the ideal ego in the case studied. But, conversely, in studying “paranoiac knowledge,” I was led to consider the mechanism of paranoiac alienation of the ego as one of the preconditions of human knowledge.4

Lacan, who gave an authoritative scientific voice to Salvador Dalí’s paranoiac critical method, is reported to have screened Él in his classes in order to document the logic of paranoid psychosis.5 According to Jared Green, “documentary’s salient truth is that it can en-vision the very means by which the human perceptual-cognitive apparatus grasps aspects of the real through its manifold apparatuses (mechanical, linguistic, symbolic) of representation.”6 Thus, based on Green’s premise, although Buñuel’s film conforms to the fictional status of its representations, it can also function as a documentation of psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses, thereby constructing, in the same way as documentary films, a discourse of representation that may allow us to glimpse the “truth” of any particular event, whether external (social) or internal (psychic) events.7 In addition, I will suggest that, if Buñuel’s film functions as a documentation of paranoia in order to re-formulate or to escape from hegemonic explanations and representations of subjectivity, this is articulated less through the film’s explicit focus on the theme of paranoia than through its self-conscious cinematic language. This chapter thus attempts to detect some instances in the film of mise-en-abîme in relation to the theorization of specularity and interspecularity within psychoanalytic film theory. Drawing on Lacan’s much-discussed concept of the gaze and on subsequent psychoanalytic readings of this concept, I propose that Él articulates Lacan’s concept and challenges the conventional association of the specular with the notions of voyeurism and fetishism by arguing that Lacan’s concept of the gaze implies a refusal of visual control or mastery, thereby challenging a narrow view of masculine subjectivity that has been associated with the distanced control of vision. Finally, I contend that Él makes visible the mechanisms of projection, thus opening up an epistemological gap that uncovers a “fear of abjection that is intimately associated with questions of visibility and the place of the visual in the articulation of sexuality.”8


180


F I L M I N G P S YC H O A N A LY S I S

181

In the first sequence of Él, which represents the celebration of the “Mandatum” in a church, we see three priests who are about to wash the altar boys’ feet. The camera moves in on a boy’s bare feet that are about to be kissed by a priest. This is followed by a close-up of the boy looking down at someone who is out of shot, whom we assume to be the priest. A pan from left to right showing a line of altar boys’ feet is followed by a medium shot of Francisco looking off screen. A subjective shot from Francisco’s point of view shows the priest kissing the boy’s feet. As we shall see, this scene has a pronounced homoerotic connotation. The camera cuts back to Francisco looking out of shot toward the other side of the frame. Another subjective shot, from Francisco’s point of view, pans from left to right along a row of feet belonging to the congregation, thereby echoing the previous pan showing the altar boys’ feet. A further pan from right to left stops at an unknown woman’s feet. The camera, still maintaining Francisco’s viewpoint, tilts up to frame the beautiful body and face of Gloria. This is followed by a close-up of Francisco looking left out of frame. We assume that he is looking at Gloria. The camera cuts again to a close-up of Gloria closing her eyelids. From this description of the first sequence, I suggest that subjective camera movements and the use of parallel editing reinforce Francisco’s search for and obsession with his objects of desire, who are Gloria and the altar boy. The on-screen looks within the sequence provide, then, an explanation for the camera’s fixation on the characters. During this religious scene, Buñuel uses diegetic sacred music to emphasize and interconnect religious piety and sexual attraction. Evans suggests that the camera offers a formal parallel to the way that “Francisco’s route towards the female is only accessible through the male” 9 by moving from Francisco’s gaze at Father Velasco kissing the altar boy’s feet to the shoes of a feminine figure. Gloria and her shoes become Francisco’s fetish objects, thereby pointing to the paradoxical process of disavowal of lack and castration and the projection of disturbed fantasies and desires that, according to Freud, is at the core of the internal logic of fetishism.10 This paradoxical process generates sexual arousal in the fetishist. In Freud’s theory of fetishism, the sexual arousal that is experienced by the fetishist cannot reach a genitalized sexual relationship. Instead, his perverse, libidinal instincts lead to a kind of sadomasochistic pleasure or pain that can be translated into violent acts upon the fetishized object or upon the self. In the case of Él, the fetishist Francisco disavows castration by investing in the veneration of objects, such as Gloria’s shoes, which stand metonymically for Gloria. The latter is identified as the fetishized Other. On the other hand, the fetishized object, which is associated with a detachable phallus, ultimately reminds the fetishist of that unconscious sense of lack and of castration. Hence, the fetishized object, as a denigrated, substitute object, ends up generating hostility in the fetishist, which is ultimately directed toward the fetishized Other. Francisco constantly punishes Gloria so that he can identify with his castrating father,


Documenting Paranoia



who introduces a precarious triangulation due to what Marsha Kinder has described as Francisco’s problem with patrilineage.11 From this perspective, Buñuel seems to illustrate the self-engendering fantasy in which the subject thinks that he has reengendered himself as a self-sufficient and autonomous being. Through a fantasy about a “particular filiation,” the subject will be able to palliate the disastrous effects of a self-engendering fantasy. We could read Francisco’s delirium of filiation12 as an escape from that self-engendering fantasy, which would lead him to a psychotic psychic disintegration.13 The figure of Gloria, as the fetishized Other, thus highlights “the film’s interest in male power”14 and male masterful agency. Gloria could also be identified as Francisco’s symptom, pointing less to male power than to a kind of fear of losing power. Slavoj Žižek argues that: The symptom is the way we—the subjects—“avoid madness,” the way we choose something (the symptom-formation) instead of nothing (radical psychotic autism, the destruction of the symbolic universe) through the binding of our enjoyment to a certain signifying, symbolic formation which assures a minimum of consistency to our being-in-the-world . . . This, then, is a symptom: a particular, “pathological,” signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it.15

Following this quotation from Žižek, I suggest that the symptomatic dimension that is attributed to the representation of Gloria reveals Francisco’s regression to the proto-genitality of the anal-sadistic phase. According to Freud: The faecal mass or “stick” foreshadows the genital penis, the production of stools becomes a prototype of childbirth (the infantile sexual theory of giving birth through the anus), the daily separation from the faeces is a precursor of castration, and excrement in the rectum anticipates genital coitus.16

Thus the fetishization of Gloria involves Francisco’s disavowal of his symbolic castration and can be reconceptualized as symptomatic of Francisco’s repressed narcissistic desire for fusion with the lost mother in that protogenitality of the anal-sadistic phase that Freud associates with anal childbirth. This may imply that Gloria becomes a symptom of Francisco’s own regressive identification with her. This regression, which could suggest a psychotic disintegration, is often accompanied by megalomaniac fantasies in the film. For instance, in the sequence showing Francisco and Gloria in the belfrytower, Buñuel reinforces Francisco’s omnipotent fantasies by cinematic means, using overhead long shots of the crowd from Francisco’s point of view while we hear the diegetic sound of the bells. Francisco tells Gloria: “Ahí tienes a tu gente. Desde aquí se ve claramente lo que son, gusanos arrastrándose por el suelo. Me dan ganas de aplastarlos con el pie . . . Yo


182


183

desprecio a los hombres. Si fuera Dios no los perdonaría nunca” (“There you have your people. From here one sees clearly what they are, worms crawling on the ground. I wish I could squash them with my foot . . . I despise humans. If I were God, I would never forgive them”). This sequence anticipates the bell tower in the Spanish mission in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). In this regression to primary narcissism, Francisco also experiences desire through projection onto Gloria, which destabilizes the distinctions between subject and object, between the self and the other.17 This recapturing of the bisexual identifications of the pre-Oedipal position counterbalances the Oedipal position of mutual exclusivity in which we can only be like the one or the other. This recuperation of earlier bisexuality in the post-Oedipal complementarity challenges the apparent immutability of the polarities activity and passivity, masculinity and femininity.18

If fetishistic representation could be associated here with heterosexual desire, because it neglects the bi-textual disruption of the symbolic order, our reading of the film moves beyond a concentration on fetishistic representation by focusing on the way that the subject of the unconscious and non-heterosexual subjectivities act as a counter-text to the manifest level of the film. In addition, Francisco’s homosexual excitation, provoked by his attraction to the altar boy, is disguised as an apparent heterosexuality through his fetishistic attachment to Gloria’s shoes, thereby activating his system of paranoia. Through close-ups of his face and his attractive thick lips, the camera treats the male beauty of the altar boy voyeuristically. Although there are slight variations in relation to the Freudian text, the activation of paranoia in the film documents Freud’s main thesis in his 1915 essay, “A Case of Paranoia Running Counter to the Psychoanalytic Theory of the Disease.” In this paper, Freud explained that the delirium of persecution in one of his female patients was provoked by an apparently heterosexual excitation. Freud argued that this delirium of persecution was the translation or displacement of a homosexual fixation in his female patient toward the mother. Freud emphasized how, in the system of paranoia, the fantasy of the primal scene, which entails an element of bisexuality and of penetration from behind, is structured outside the voyeuristic position. The latter functions to deploy the urethro-genital context in which any trace of anal desire would be effaced.19 In Él, Buñuel also makes references to a fantasy of the primal scene in which the voyeuristic position is absent. This absence is further emphasized by the fact that Francisco gets lost in his identification with Gloria, thus reawakening an anal-erotic desire for penetration. During their honeymoon in Guanajuato, thinking that someone must be voyeuristically looking at them from the other side of the hotel room, Francisco inserts a knitting needle into the keyhole of the hotel’s door. This image in the film reminds us that the subjectivity of vision implies a painful experience. As we shall see later, in our discussion of the gaze, the experience of vision implies that the “organism is no longer the origin of the coordinates,





but one point among others: it is dispossessed of its privilege and, in the strongest sense of the term, no longer knows where to put itself.”20 Unlike in the Freudian text, Francisco, who will later suffer from the delirium of persecution, 21 becomes the implacable persecutor of Gloria, which is paradoxically symptomatic of the way in which his subjectivity is constituted through identification with her. In addition, Francisco reinterprets any impediment to his pretensions from a delusional perspective, which is associated with the foreclosure of the symbolic, thus, a return of the foreclosure in the Real. Francisco reveals this delusional reinterpretation by rejecting those obstacles that perturb his attempt to reinvest reality with a different kind of meaning. For instance, he throws out one of his maids because she represents a threatening rival who might perturb his latent homosexual relationship with his valet, Pablo. The latter is a highly hypocritical character who always finds the appropriate moment to praise his master. Francisco and his valet establish a kind of intimate communication through physical contact, which emphasizes the homoerotic relationship between the two men. The latent homosexual relation between Francisco and his valet replicates the previously mentioned homoerotic relationship between Francisco and the altar boy. Freud argued that “delusional jealousy had its roots in repressed desires for infidelity, but the object is of the same sex as the subject.”22 Francisco’s manifestation of delusional jealousy toward Gloria could thus be read as a displacement of a homosexual/homoerotic relationship between Francisco and Raúl. The latter, who represents the rational order, becomes the eroticized, paranoid double of Francisco, who in turn represents the irrational order. This homoerotic relationship, which implies the threat that slipperiness of identity poses for the male subject in the homosocial order, involves rivalry and betrayal between the two men in relation to the appropriation of Gloria. During the dinner party, Francisco manifests his desire to appropriate Gloria through his defense of a love relationship, which is first experienced in early infancy and is anchored to infantile relationships. Francisco’s idea of loving, which is associated with l’amour fou, can be understood as Buñuel’s surrealist celebration of a subversive and liberatory passion. This surrealist notion of love is associated with one’s desire to become more than oneself, to become exchangeable, or to become oriented toward an expanding interiority.23 These latent, aggressive homosexual/homoerotic relationships in Él seem to document the parallel history of paranoia and homosexuality in classical psychoanalysis. In his 1911 essay, “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides),” Freud focused on the particular case history of Paul Schreber and wrote his most comprehensive account of paranoia. Schreber was a Dresden judge whose autobiographical account of his visits to several mental institutions details his delusions of persecution. Schreber’s paranoid delusion involved an elaborate narrative about his transvestite desire to become a woman and to


184



185

be penetrated by the rays of God, so that he could be impregnated in order to save the human race. Schreber writes:

According to Freud, Schreber, who became the most famous paranoiac in the annals of psychoanalysis, took up a feminine attitude toward God and thought of himself as God’s wife. Freud interprets Schreber’s paranoid delusions as a defense against homosexuality and claims that the cause of his mental illness was triggered by an outburst of homosexual libido. Freud thus conflates the feminine subject position held by Schreber, his desire for emasculation and feminization, with that of homosexuality. To sum up, Buñuel’s fictional film functions as a documentation of Francisco’s paranoid delusion, in particular, and of paranoia, in general, in order to define this “disease” as a pathological defense against homosexual desire. Such a defense points symptomatically and paradoxically to the failure of the traditional heteronormative structures to account for all the vicissitudes of human desire. As well as functioning as a fictional narrative, Él thus provides a documentation of how Francisco, in particular, or the paranoid subject, in general, encapsulates a paranoid pain in submission, thereby exceeding control or the illusion of possession. If we think of paranoid psychosis in terms of a theory of linguistic structure, paranoid psychosis could be associated with the semiotic, threatening the social overdetermination of oedipalization and phallocentrism by introducing “enigmatic” disorders and alternations in the system of symbolic signification. More important in the context of this discussion, Él allows us to move beyond conventional dichotomies, such as fiction and nonfiction, realism and fantasy, or true or false, and criticizes the structures of patriarchal and heterosexual forms of subjectivity. Robert Stam suggests that: Buñuel radicalizes his critique of Mexican machismo by making his protagonist to all appearances a model husband, the quintessence of social charm and grace, and by having him played by the prototypical Mexican “gallant,” Arturo de Córdova.25


The month of November, 1895, marks an important time in the history of my life and in particular in my own ideas of the possible shaping of my future . . . During that time the signs of transformation into a woman became so marked on my body, that I could no longer ignore the imminent goal at which the whole of my development was aiming.24

At this point, in order to think about the way that the film may document paranoia to an even greater extent through its self-conscious cinematic language than through the explicit theme of the film, I focus on the problem of the relation of (paranoid) knowledge to vision in the constitution of subjectivity. As Lacan has argued, the formation of the subject’s ego is conditioned by an alienation of the subject from itself that constitutes the phenomenology of consciousness.26 As is well known, patriarchal structures of thought 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


in Western cultures have privileged regimes of visibility in which a selfassured male gaze is in control of vision and knowledge. In contrast to this view, I argue that Buñuel’s film articulates the failure of the gaze to secure this structure of identity by reconsidering how the gaze works against the effects of sublimation in the film. Finally, I explore how Buñuel makes visible the mechanisms of projection in Él, thereby associating paranoia with the mechanisms that are involved in cinematic representation, in particular, and Lacan’s own association of paranoia with human knowledge, in general. Lacan’s Gaze I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.27

During the 1970s, the paradigmatic theoretical framework within the field of film studies was apparatus film theory, which drew primarily on Althusser’s definition of the apparatus as an ideological institution and on Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly on “The Mirror Stage.” Apparatus film theory rethought Lacan’s category of the imaginary as a part of the process of the historical construction of the subject 28 and explored the relationship between primary identification (which was considered to be the necessary preliminary to other identificatory relations) and the filmic apparatus. Apparatus film theory conceptualized the gaze as analogous to that geometrical point that is conceived in the perspectival laws that have constituted the Western norm of vision since the Renaissance. From the Renaissance onward, the visual field has been defined, to a significant degree, by the rules and ideology of monocular perspective.29 From this locus of epistemological mastery, the spectacle becomes fully visible and intelligible, thereby reinforcing the notion of transcendental vision. Apparatus theorists were aware of the specular mediations, such as suture, which the viewer needs to sustain in order to identify with the camera. However, Joan Copjec criticizes the proposition of apparatus film theory that there is always a smooth and successful meshing of the spectator with the apparatus, which allows the gaze to be associated with a point at which the subject comes into being by identifying with the signified of the image. From this perspective, the cinematic apparatus can be defined as an instrument that perpetuates the idealist illusion of a transcendental spectator who maintains a certain distance between his/her position and the spectacle by looking from a vantage point at an illusionist three-dimensional space. Feminist film theorists such as Laura Mulvey have drawn on apparatus film theory in order to construct discourses of representation and cinematic spectatorship. Feminist film theories explored at length the way in which, within the structural features of the classic narrative cinema—such as the point of view, the shot/reverse shot, or the depth conveyed by cinematic space—the notion of a transcendent vision was more available to certain spectators than to others. For Mulvey, classic narrative cinema organized vision in relation to both spectacle and truth, so as to perpetuate a conventional


186


187

account of the male subject. The latter was able to keep a safe voyeuristic and fetishistic distance from the image, as if the field of vision was clear rather than ambiguous and treacherous.30 Voyeurism and fetishism are, then, treated as the sexual equivalent of the masculine control of vision.31 From this perspective, the feminine subject32 carries the burden of specularity, so that the voyeuristic look of her male counterpart can be aligned with the camera in order to have control over the visual field and to regain his lost humanist heritage.33 Feminists have contended that the classic cinematic text thus fetishized the spectacle of the female subject and vision itself in order to reassert the integrity of perception in relation to gender and sexual difference. From this perspective, the masterful male gaze is associated with the vertical axis, thereby repressing what is outside this privileged plane. However, Mulvey’s view assigned too much masterful agency to the position of the male, thereby presenting a narrow view of masculinity as structured primarily around voyeurism and fetishism. If male subjectivity is associated with visual mastery, Mulvey does not discuss how the subject is outside the gaze in Lacan. As I shall discuss shortly, the gaze, which is the threshold of the visible world, constitutes the subject whose own visibility is determined by the gaze. In addition, Mulvey does not take into account the fact that, in Lacan, the gaze is defined as a kind of failure to control the visual field, thereby proving masculine castration. If the subject of vision is barred by the system of symbolic representation, the subject is not the master of his gaze and could consequently feel threatened. Hence, for Lacan, the gaze itself is an example of a “lack” that undermines the mastery of the visual field. Furthermore, Lacan argues that: In our relation to things, in so far as this relation is constituted by the way of vision, and ordered in the figures of representation, something slips, passes, is transmitted, from stage to stage, and is always to some degree eluded in it—that is what we call the gaze.34

As I shall explore shortly, in Él there are some meta-cinematic or self-reflexive sequences that re-formulate a position of visual and representational nonmastery by destabilizing the cinematic specularity and perception that is propounded by apparatus film theory with regard to the classic cinematic text. Él could thus be seen as undercutting the very logic by which vision is privileged in Western culture as the site of knowledge. Let us now understand the Lacanian concept of the gaze as decentering the subject. This deconstruction and subversion of the position of the spectator as controller of the field of vision allows us to stress the permeability of the boundary between the spectator and the spectacle. According to Kaja Silverman,35 in Being and Nothingness, Jean Paul Sartre tells the story of a voyeur who peers through the keyhole of a door, which is reminiscent of the hotel scene in Él. The voyeur looks from an unchallenged center of the visual field. From this absolute center of a lived horizon, the





field of vision unfolds before him. The voyeur is so absorbed in the act of looking that his very “being” escapes him. However, this “nothingness” is associated with a certain transcendence of spectacle. Suddenly, the voyeur hears the sound of approaching footsteps. The voyeur is caught by another look that thwarts his desire to see. The self-enclosure of the watcher is fractured when he becomes aware of the intrusion of another center. The watcher realizes that he can never see himself from the point of view of the one who sees him. The watcher is the object of another look, as well as being in the field of the other. Sight is then structured for the watcher, which implies that he does not control the syntax of seeing or is less at the center of visual experience than within an engulfing void. The intruder, who is associated with the vanishing point where the viewer is not, challenges his previous plenitude, thereby provoking a castrating and threatening effect on the subject from without. The subject now feels powerless, because his freedom is limited by facticity, which is linked to one’s relationship to the other. Facticity is considered the contingent condition of an individual human life. In the existentialism of Sartre, facticity includes the prospect of death against which human freedom is to be exercised. For Sartre, the subject’s beingfor-another thus implies that the other pushes against and circumscribes his freedom. The other, who could help the subject to establish his freedom, also destroys it. Thus being-for-itself and being-for-another implies that they shatter each other, thereby haunting the very existence of the subject. As Norman Bryson explains, “the self-possession of the viewing subject has built into it, therefore, the principle of its own abolition: annihilation of the subject as centre is a condition of the very moment of the look.”36 Sartre thus criticizes the Cartesian philosophical tradition of the self-enclosure of the unseen seer or cogito. This tradition conceives the subject as a universal center, surrounded by a stable plenitude in the mode of unidirectional contemplation.37 Bryson has criticized the way that the Sartrean je ultimately reemerges from its encounter with annihilation. For Bryson, Sartre still deals with the question of the ontology of the subject and object from within the perspective of the subject. The subject needs to accept its decentered condition of existence in a field of radical emptiness. In this context, if the threatened remains of the cogito were thrown out, how could we welcome instead of resisting this decentering? From this perspective, we may not regard the gaze as threatening. The Lacanian formulation of the gaze seems to follow on from that of Sartre. Like Sartre, Lacan conceives the viewing subject as not standing at the center of a perceptual horizon, thereby rejecting the notion of a unitary, coherent subject. Against the reification of the cogito, Lacan contends that the subject cannot control or master the chains and series of signifiers that pass across the visual field. Lacan’s account is therefore as pessimistic as that of Sartre, as it implies that the desire within the scopic field is necessarily grounded in castration.38 Lacan also gives an account of vision that implies a paranoid dimension to the gaze. Unlike Sartre, Lacan associates the gaze


188


189

with the metaphor of the camera. The camera is characterized as an apparatus that has the function of picturing us. Moreover, Lacan reconceptualizes the Sartrean field of vision by desubjectivizing the gaze. For Lacan, the gaze that the subject encounters is not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by the subject in the field of the other and it is inscribed into the phenomenology of consciousness. Lacan thinks of the gaze less as an imaginary rival than as a symbolic third term, the other. The gaze, in its capacity as one’s fantasy of the gaze of the other, polices the border of in-or-out-of-placeness. The subject, who is trapped by the gaze, is, as we shall see in Él, reduced from transcendence to visibility. Lacan superimposes on the usual cone of vision, which emanates from the subject, another cone that emanates from the object. The subject is thus located in a double position. Lacan suggests that “on the right-hand line is situated, then, the apex of the first triangle, the point of the geometral subject, and it is on that line that I, too, turn myself into a picture under the gaze, which is inscribed at the apex of the second triangle.”39 In the traditional Renaissance model of perspective, the phenomenal world or the object beheld by the subject is apprehended from its geometrical point of view. In the Lacanian paradigm, the object looks at the subject who is photographed by the light of the object and therefore pictured by its gaze. For Lacan, the two cones are superimposed, so that the object is at the point of the light, which is the gaze, and the subject is also at the point of the picture. Lacan goes on to explain that “it is through the gaze that I enter light and it is from the gaze that I receive its effects. Hence it comes about that the gaze is the instrument through which light is embodied and through which, in a fragmented form, I am photo-graphed.”40 Furthermore, the image is in line with the screen, which, as Silverman suggests, “gives shape and significance to how the subject is seen by others as such, how the subject is defined and interacts with the agency to which he/she attributes his/her visibility, and how he/she perceives the world.”41 The screen tames the gaze because, if the subject saw without the screen, he would be blinded by the gaze or touched by the Real. Lacan thus demonstrates that the gaze is less embodied in the subject than it is in the external world, thereby preexisting and enveloping the subject from all sides. Hence, to be looked at by another is associated with the failure of the affirmation of certainty, as the subject is only rendered visible by way of the gaze. The subject is, therefore, blended with space, thereby occupying a position in the picture that could be defined as a mere stain.42 This implies an experience of being dispersed; in other words, we are subject to a picture in which the point of view of an inapprehensible gaze is fragmented. Moreover, if the gaze occupies an unlocatable point, it becomes a form of what Žižek defines as the object (a) without a specular image, thereby marking the absence of a signified. The subject cannot, then, be located at the point of the gaze, as the latter marks a point of annihilation. The subject is thus cut off from the gaze of the other, which has become a blind eye. The gaze of the blind other is lethal, which means that the subject operates under the sign of death.43




190


Drawing on this investigation into the Sartrean and Lacanian theorization of the gaze, I shall explore how some of the sequences in Él document what I define as the “paranoid gaze” in order to re-conceptualize the filmic apparatus, and how this allows us to rethink certain theoretical discourses on cinematic specularity and interspecularity. I will argue that the film dislocates the self-assured (male) gaze, thereby subverting the hegemonic mode of representation and vision that is fundamental to the masculine sense of the self. At the beginning of the film, when Francisco starts chasing Gloria, after the sequence of the celebration of the “Mandatum” previously described, we see an apparently objective shot of Gloria and Raúl talking inside a restaurant, but we are unable to hear their conversation. The interruption of sound in this sequence marks a disjunction between diegetic sound and image in the film.44 Instead of hearing the conversation of Gloria and Raúl, we hear the street noises from outside the restaurant.45 When the camera pulls back, capturing the gaze of the viewer, by forcing him/her to look again at the scene of the restaurant, the spectator realizes that the camera is placed outside the window of the restaurant looking inside. The viewer also notes that Francisco shares the filmic space with the camera, as Francisco is seen on the right hand side of the frame. Francisco is looking through the windows of the restaurant at the two other characters inside the restaurant.46 This subjective shot is, therefore, only readable retrospectively. The “retroactive” shot of Francisco being shown as a voyeur uncovers and problematizes the implicit voyeurism that is at stake in the cinematic medium. Buñuel discloses and foregrounds the implicit voyeuristic position in the cinematic medium from which spectators derive visual pleasure. Hence, the film apprehends the “otherness” of both the gaze and the constituted image by foregrounding, rather than disavowing, the signifiers through which they sometimes mark their presence within the field of vision. Near the end of the film, Francisco is haunted by a paranoid delirium. Gloria has abandoned Francisco forever. She thus represents Francisco’s failed attempt to establish an object relationship in which Francisco has always interpreted the position of a third person as threatening and persecutory. Francisco is running desperately through the streets searching for Gloria. He stops in front of a window to see if Gloria is inside. This action reminds us of that disclosed “voyeuristic” scene previously described. Buñuel mobilizes the conventional structures of film vision by challenging the logic of continuity editing and the principle of eye-line matching. Our gaze does not merge with Francisco’s act of looking from his point of view through the window at the scene inside. Instead, by means of a sudden, illogical, or mismatched transition, Buñuel forces the spectator to look from inside at Francisco in the act of looking through the window from outside. The film’s challenge to the principle of suture allows Buñuel to overtly specularize and externalize our look and that of the other. In the context of avant-garde art,


Documenting the "Paranoid Gaze” and the Mise-en-abîme of Interspecularity in Él


191

“to be looked at from the other side of the glass, turns the act of looking into a viewing through.”47 The film now positions Francisco’s eye more as the object than as the agent of vision. From this perspective, the eye is defined less as “seeing” than as “seen.” The spectator, then, looks at Francisco from the point of view of Francisco’s own projections. Moreover, to be looked at from the other side implies that we are also constituted as objects rather than as subjects of the gaze. If, as Robert Samuels has argued, “the menace of losing control over vision may cause subjects to seek out more oppressive and obvious forms of mastery,”48 this example of the mise-en-abîme of interspecularity in the film makes the spectator, by contrast, enjoy being startled by this vertiginous glimpse. The impossibility of fixing the boundaries between one’s single point of view and that of the other foreshortens the required distance for the articulation of voyeurism. This spectatorial disabling in Él implies an ethical inversion of the intentional cogito, which prioritizes thought over perception and seeing over being seen.49 The final sequence that we will discuss is when Francisco, who is still searching for Gloria all over Mexico City, enters the same church that was shown at the beginning of the film. Francisco is convinced that he has seen Gloria and Raúl entering this sacred space, which functions in the film as a “theatre of displacement” of paranoid anxieties and homosexual and fetishist desires.50 Moreover, although this anonymous couple look like Gloria and Raúl, we are not sure if it is actually they who enter the church. The spectator himself/herself thus fails to discern whether the two characters entering the church actually are Gloria and Raúl. This implies that signification in Él is subject to doubt and to the anxiety of retroactive interpretation. Buñuel challenges the conventional association of the spectatorial position with a locus of epistemological confidence and mastery, thereby “foregrounding the potential splitting of the totality associated with the spectator’s subsumption.”51 Francisco begins projecting his psychic fears, which entail a psychotic disassociated anxiety, onto the external world. As Samuels puts it, to place the subject in a psychotic structure allows the spectator to see his/ her own “horror of the Real unconscious desires,”52 thereby making him/ her utterly transparent and vulnerable to the gaze from the outside. Suddenly, when an old man begins coughing near Francisco, we notice that Francisco begins transforming his regressions into external images, thereby becoming a subject of the unconscious that finds itself lacking in relation to the dominant symbolic order.53 Freddy Buache has described the succession of delusions that Francisco suffers in the church. Buache explains that:



The couple in the first row is not of course Raúl and Gloria but two people who look like them. A meditating woman guffaws, and then abruptly resumes her serious expression. Father Velasco conducting the service suddenly makes a grimace in between two perfectly normal movements. The choirboy cocks snooks at him, and then imperturbably follows the service.54

In this sequence, Buñuel analyzes the theoretical and dramatic qualities of purposive juxtaposition through editing. As Charles Tesson suggests, Buñuel 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page


“oppose deux régimes d’images. La perception d’une réalité extérieure conforme à l’univers offert par la fiction (les gens en train de prier), est perturbée par la perception mentale du personnage” (“Buñuel opposes two regimes of images. The perception of an external reality shaped by the universe offered by the fiction [people praying], is disturbed by the mental perception of the character”).55 Moreover, Buñuel overlaps the sound of one shot of the congregation hysterically laughing at Francisco with another one of the congregation praying, thus exploring the lack of synchronization of sound and image. The fact that the shots alternate while the soundtrack remains the same means that these unanchored or disembodied sounds, which are caused by the dissociation between image and sound, mark the disintegration of the unity of the cinematic sign. In Él, Buñuel documents what I have described as the “paranoid gaze” by self-reflecting on the way that regressions are transformed or projected onto images and by fusing the camera itself with the delirium of persecution. Víctor Fuentes suggests that “Buñuel nos ofrece unas secuencias extraordinarias de la visión paranoica de la realidad, que, en su vertiente de meta-cine, también podemos interpretar como subversión total del placer de la mirada masculina potenciada por el cine de Hollywood” (“Buñuel offers us some extraordinary sequences of the paranoid vision of reality. As metacinematic sequences, we can also interpret them as a total subversion of the pleasure of the masculine gaze promoted by Hollywood’s cinema”).56 Buñuel thus foregrounds and documents, in cinematic terms, the epistemology that is associated with paranoid speculation and the systematicity of delusions. Sabrina Barton contends that paranoia is comparable to the cinematic, which sends “out to the external world an image of something that exists in us in an unconscious way.”57 Thus Buñuel externalizes the latent paranoia that is at the core of the cinematic. Lacan describes the formation of the subject’s ego as being aggressively constituted from an image at a distance, an image of another. In addition, Lacan associates subjective identification with a paranoid structure of human knowledge. Through what I define as the “mise-en-abîme of interspecularity,” I propose that Él releases an aggressive identification and alienation of the subject from itself that has been considered as an act of knowledge in psychoanalysis.58 The film thus documents the “paranoid gaze” by destabilizing the symbolic positions that constitute the self-cohesion of the subject in the imaginary. This deconstruction of the mechanisms of projection in Él points to the instability and dissolution of the spectator’s own process of identification with the language of cinema.


192

Conclusion I will conclude this chapter by suggesting that the documentation of the “paranoid gaze” in Él implies a rethinking of cinema as not giving us the illusion of mastery; it thus subverts an order of visual perception that is associated with the foundational, patriarchal and heterosexual logic on which hegemonic 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

193

knowledge depends. Such logic makes visible a non-contradictory symbolic regime of linguistically and visually articulated identities and the establishment of the security of hierarchized fixed subject positions. Through the “mise-en-abîme of interspecularity,” Buñuel’s Mexican film destabilizes the symbolic coherence of visual law and rearticulates punctual details that can be seen as ruptures, or pointing to the fissures between the Real and the representational. These ruptures, these fissures, can be read as a kind of counterlogic in the visual field that acknowledges the dislocating effects of visual texts, thereby allowing us to affirm our non-antagonistic attitude toward alterity, even if we know that this can only be provisional and temporary.

Notes I would like to express my sincere thanks to Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page for their helpful suggestions. A version of this chapter was originally published in Queering Buñuel: Sexual Dissidence and Psychoanalysis in his Mexican and Spanish Cinema, I. B. Tauris, 2008. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

Sánchez Vidal, Luis Buñuel, 168. See Positif 2 no. 10 (1954). Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, 111–124. Lacan, “Some Reflections on the Ego,” 12. Aranda, Luis Buñuel, 159. Green, “This Reality Which Is Not One,” 72. In this article, I am less interested in associating Buñuel’s Él with the genre of documentary than in thinking of the potentiality of fictional films to become a documentation of external or internal (psychic) realities without disguising the forms and devices of fictional narratives. It is important to note that, although Buñuel was artistically nurtured in surrealism, which is often associated less with social realism than with that which is located beyond reality, he had also produced documentary films, such as Las Hurdes (1933), or fictional films that represented a documentary view of current social, economic and political events, such as Los olvidados (1950). Thus, the dichotomies between fiction and documentary or surrealism and realism are problematic and difficult to sustain in Buñuel’s cinematic oeuvre. Edelman, “Tea-rooms and Sympathy,” 569. Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, 120. It is important to note that fetishism saves the subject from becoming a homosexual by endowing women with the attribute that makes them acceptable as sexual objects. Kinder, Blood Cinema, 309. In Freud’s notion of inversion, homosexuality is the boy’s failure to disidentify with the mother and identify with the father. I am indebted to José Luis Gallego Llorente who provides a fine psychoanalytic reading of the film in “La mirada de Luis Buñuel sobre la paranoia.” Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, 112. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 75. “On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism,” 131.





17. This argument is inspired by Ellis Hanson’s discussion of Pedro Almodóvar’s La ley del deseo (1986). See Hanson, “Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice,” 137–161. 18. Benjamin, Shadow of the Other, XVII. 19. For an excellent discussion of these issues, see Edelman, “Piss Elegant,” 149–177. 20. Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” 78. 21. For a fine discussion of Lacan’s theory of paranoia, see Vilaseca, The Apocryphal Subject. 22. In Evans, The Films of Luis Buñuel, 118. 23. See Berlant, “Love, A Queer Feeling,” 443. 24. Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, 147–148. 25. Stam, “Hitchcock and Buñuel,” 144. 26. See Lacan, Écrits. 27. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 72. 28. Copjec, Read My Desire, 21. 29. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 125. 30. Copjec, Read My Desire, 34. 31. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, 109. 32. The terms “masculine” and “feminine” denote a performative state of activity and passivity, control and being controlled. Mulvey’s binary opposition does not take into account more hybridized forms of sexuality and identification. 33. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 140–142. 34. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 73. 35. I am indebted to Silverman’s reading of Sartre’s story in The Threshold of the Visible World. Hence, my analysis of Sartre is highly informed by Silverman’s own analysis of Sartre. 36. Bryson, “The Gaze in the Expanded Field,” 91. 37. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 74. 38. Ibid., 88–89. 39. Ibid., 105–106. 40. Ibid., 106. 41. Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World, 174. 42. Lacan draws on Roger Caillois’s essay on animal mimicry, which had an extraordinary resonance within the psychoanalytic circle that developed in Paris in the 1930s. 43. See Žižek, “Looking Awry,” 31–56. 44. Kinder, Blood Cinema, 309. 45. Buache, Luis Buñuel, 62. 46. This insistence on windows and on looking through them will be the central theme in Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954). Once again, we can detect the kind of intertextual dialogue that was established by these two filmmakers. For a fine discussion of the gaze in Rear Window, see Robert Samuels’ book on Hitchcock. 47. Turim, Abstraction in Avant-garde Films, 53. 48. Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-Textuality, 75. 49. Ibid., 116. 50. Kinder, Blood Cinema, 305. 51. Rose, “Paranoia and the Film System,” 145.


194



Samuels, Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality, 5. Ibid., 121. Buache, The Cinema of Luis Buñuel, 66–67. Él, Luis Buñuel: Étude critique, 92. Fuentes, Los mundos de Buñuel, 93. Barton, “Crisscross,” 245. Rose, “Paranoia and the Film System,” 152.

Works Cited Aranda, Francisco. Luis Buñuel: A Critical Biography. Edited by David Robinson. London: Secker and Warburg, 1975. Barton, Sabrina. “Crisscross: Paranoia and Projection in Strangers on a Train.” In Male Trouble, edited by Constance Penley and Sharon Willis, 235–261. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993. Benjamin, Jessica. Shadow of the Other: Intersubjectivity and Gender in Psychoanalysis. New York and London: Routledge, 1998. Berlant, Lauren. “Love, A Queer Feeling.” In Homosexuality & Psychoanalysis, edited by Tim Dean and Christopher Lane, 432–451. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Bryson, Norman. “The Gaze in the Expanded Field.” In Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster, 86–108. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1988. Buache, Freddy. The Cinema of Luis Buñuel. Translated by Peter Graham. London: The Tantivy Press, 1973. ———. Luis Buñuel. Lausanne, Switzerland: L’Age d’homme, 1975. Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995. Edelman, Lee. “Piss Elegant: Freud, Hitchcock, and the Micturating Penis,” GLQ 2 (1995): 149–177. ———. “Tea-rooms and Sympathy, or, The Epistemology of the Water Closet.” In The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, edited by Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin, 553–574. New York and London: Routledge, 1993. Evans, Peter. The Films of Luis Buñuel: Subjectivity and Desire. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. “On Transformations of Instinct as Exemplified in Anal Eroticism.” In The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey, vol. 17, 127–133. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–1974 [1917]. Fuentes, Víctor. Los mundos de Buñuel. Madrid: Ediciones Akal, 2000. Gallego Llorente, José Luis. “La mirada de Luis Buñuel sobre la paranoia,” Revista de la Sociedad de Psiquiatría de la Comunidad Valenciana 5 (2001), http://www. red-farmamedica.com/spcv/revista/colaboraciones/col_44.htm. Green, Jared. “This Reality Which Is Not One: Flaherty, Buñuel and the Irrealism of Documentary Cinema.” In Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, edited by Gary Rhodes and John Springer, 64–87. North Carolina: Mcfarland, 2006. Hanson, Ellis. “Technology, Paranoia, and the Queer Voice,” Screen 4 (1993): 137–161. Kinder, Marsha. Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of National Identity in Spain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.


52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

195



Krauss, Rosalind. “Corpus Delicti.” In L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism, 56–112. New York: Abbeville Press, 1985. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1977. ———. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: W. W. Norton, 1978. ———. “Some Reflections on the Ego,” The International Journal of Psychoanalysis 34 (1953): 11–17. Rose, Jacqueline. “Paranoia and the Film System.” In Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley, 141–158. New York: Routledge, 1988. Samuels, Robert. Hitchcock’s Bi-textuality: Lacan, Feminisms and Queer Theory. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. Sánchez Vidal, Agustín. Luis Buñuel: Obra cinematográfica. Madrid: Ediciones JC, 1984. Schreber, Daniel Paul. Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Translated by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1988. Silverman, Kaja. The Threshold of the Visible World. London: Routledge, 1996. Stam, Robert. “Hitchcock and Buñuel: Authority, Desire, and the Absurd.” In Hitchcock’s Re-released Films from Rope to Vertigo, edited by Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick, 116–146. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1991. Tesson, Charles. Él, Luis Buñuel: Étude critique. Paris: Nathan, 1995. Turim, Maureen. Abstraction in Avant-garde Films. Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1985. Vilaseca, David. The Apocryphal Subject: Masochism, Identification, and Paranoia. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Žižek, Slavoj. “Looking Awry,” October 50 (1989): 31–56. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Routledge, 1989.


196


Digital Mimicry and Visual Tropes: Some Images from Argentina Joanna Page

Introduction

T

he accounts of historiography published by Roland Barthes and Hayden White in the 1960s and 1970s exposed the linguistic devices that underlay historiography’s representations and discourses.1 Both embedded in narrative structures, history and fiction were found to resemble one another, as “whatever the differences between their immediate contents (real events and imaginary events, respectively), their ultimate content is the same: the structures of human time.”2 This chapter aims to extend—and at some points, revise—the groundwork laid by Barthes and White in order to focus on specifically visual, rather than linguistic, tropes that may be used to construct a reflexive idea of temporality in films.3 I have taken particular inspiration from Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of the intrinsically reflexive nature of narration and of the mutual borrowings between fictional and historical narratives, adapting his theorizations to embrace film, a medium to which Ricoeur rarely refers in his work. This development is a natural one, given cinema’s emergence at the turn of the century—to borrow Mary Ann Doane’s description—as “a privileged machine for the representation of temporality,” as a result of its “ability to inscribe movement through time.”4 In a study of four films, all recent productions from Argentina, I focus on how they deploy, or cite, past forms of visual technology in order to construct a narrative that moves from the old to the new, and the past to the present. The oversimplistic linearity of this sequencing is, however, effectively deconstructed in the hybrid aesthetics of these productions, which are often at pains to demonstrate the interplay and overlap of old and new, or past and present. The intriguing relationships that emerge here between digital and analogue images, in particular, serve to complicate any schematic model that might presume to link the analogue with the indexical and thus to a representation of reality, with the digital more associated with the unfettered freedom of fiction. These assumptions concerning the difference


Chapter 13


J O A N N A PAG E

between analogue and digital photography have their root, as recent theorists have been at pains to point out, in certain (attractive or longstanding) discourses rather than in a real understanding of the technology of imageproduction in each case.5 As Philip Rosen has shown, proponents of the “digital utopia” have emphasized the manipulability of the image and the severing of its relationship with profilmic reality, trumpeting the radical novelty of the digital; these claims are not, however, grounded in an accurate account of digital’s relationship with the indexical.6 The influence of Barthes’s study of the indexicality of (analogue) photography, in which the photograph and its referent are “glued together,”7 has lent credibility to models seeking to define the relationship between analogue and digital as one of rupture and difference rather than continuity. The films I study in this chapter experiment with different regimes of representation as part of a reflexive exploration of issues of temporality, history, and modernity in the Latin American context, and within cinema itself; they also represent particularly interesting cases for an examination of the intersecting regimes of the analogue and the digital in contemporary film. My corpus is an eclectic one. It comprises two films with a strong autobiographical element, bridging fiction and documentary, one rather purist in its faithful depiction of the present and the other contentious in its playful approach to the representation of history; an experimental piece on the work of a poet that rejects narrative altogether; and a science fiction film set in the near future. These texts have been chosen because they share a key characteristic, the reflexive foregrounding of relationships between different forms of visual technology associated with different eras: old photographs, analogue filmmaking, early forms of animation, 8mm black-and-white footage, through to digital imaging. Similarities and contrasts between different kinds of image-production are established by the use of different technologies within the same film, but these are then overlaid in my examples by a further series of relationships formed by the citation of one medium within another (often digital mimicking the analogue, in different ways). I will trace the ways in which these uses and citations become tropes for diegetic enquiries into the experience of temporality, as well as examining their reflexive use in figuring the evolution of cinema over time. Time and Narrative in El árbol


198

Light casts dappled shadows of branches and leaves onto the patio, the walls of the house, and the ground. The rhythms of days and seasons mark out the time remaining to a husband and wife, their existence narrowed to the unhurried, painstaking execution of domestic chores and broadened to receive the impressions and memories of a lifetime. A tree on the verge outside—planted the day a son was born—is dead, but the man cannot bring himself to have it cut down. The woman recites names of relatives (still alive or gone before them?) and places flowers by a bust on the mantelpiece, caressing it quietly (to mark an anniversary?). In one sequence, the 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

D I G I TA L M I M I C R Y A N D V I S UA L T R O P E S

199

* * * In Gustavo Fontán’s El árbol (The Tree, 2006), shot in digital video, reference to past forms of visual technology becomes a rhetorical strategy to highlight the passage of time. Images and narratives of temporal progression abound in the film: the reminiscences of the old couple, the transition of objects from use to obsolescence, and of bodies and plants from growth to decay. These are all played out against the changing seasons, as the tree unfurls its spring-green leaves, shades the patio from the summer heat, is lashed by autumn storms, and stripped bare for winter. As Tonya Blowers suggests, drawing on Ricoeur’s analysis of “historical time” as that which mediates between “ ‘Universal time’ (the sun rising, the leaves changing colour, the rings of a tree)” and the more subjective experience of “lived time,”8 The invention of historical time allows us to measure time and to speak about it, from which we are able to place ourselves on a continuum and compare our lives with those who went before us, even to an extent immortalize ourselves by looking back to our “forefathers” in one direction and towards our children (and our relatives’ children) in another.9

Such concerns take on added relevance once we discover that the protagonists of the film are the director’s own parents, and the location his family home. The “refiguration of time” that, as Ricoeur argues, is an effect common to both historical and fictional narratives,10 is partially achieved in El árbol through the use of old photographs. Real photographs of real people, they point to the existence of a past, a referent, that predates the act of filmmaking. It reminds us that the old couple are not actors but members of a family: the photographs are genuine articles, not mock-ups for a film set. What Barthes would call the “index” of a photograph, Ricoeur refers to in a more general sense as the “trace,” which “indicates ‘here’ (in space) and ‘now’ (in the present), the past passage of living beings.”11 The presence of these photographs is also tied to the film’s reflexive exploration of narrated time. There is a “before” that precedes filming (the time at which the old photographs were taken, for example), and there is an “after,” which further divides into the time of filming and the time of viewing. Our attention is drawn to the gap between these two by means of an intertitle at the start of the film: “Banfield, Primavera de 2004.” It is now no


man tries on old pairs of spectacles, found in the dresser drawer, and studies a botany book with the further aid of a magnifying glass. The leaves on the page enlarge, blur, move in and out of focus. Later, the couple look at cherished slides of family members, projected onto a wardrobe door. The fuzzy images are difficult to identify. The magnification exposes the lower resolution of an old camera and the decay of photographic material over time; the figures are also scored and punctured by the edges and handle of the wardrobe door, and bleached by the reflection of the projector bulb.


J O A N N A PAG E

longer Spring of 2004: we are looking back to a previous time, just as the protagonists do within the film’s diegesis as they review the family album. To this gap between the taking of a photograph (or the shooting of a film) and the viewing of it another disjuncture is added: the difference between narrated time and the time of narration. In film this difference is more marked than in literary narrative given the contrast between the timespan of the diegesis (up to a year in this case) and the fixed duration of the film itself (sixty-five minutes). For Ricoeur, one of the defining characteristics of narrative—whether historical or fictional—is its inclusion of “utterance” (énonciation) and “statement” (enoncé), marking out the difference between “the time of the act of narrating” and “the time of the things narrated.”12 Narrative’s ability to split off from itself in this way—“to narrate a story is already to ‘reflect upon’ the event narrated”—is what Ricoeur refers to as its “reflexivity.”13 In El árbol, another kind of time is also apparent: the time of shooting the film, which takes place over a year at least, as evidenced by the visible changing of the seasons on screen, but which is different from the edited shots which compose the final version of the film, in which four seasons are condensed into a little over an hour.14 The emphasis placed on different structures of time in El árbol reminds us that the camera does not simply display the past for our viewing in the present: an act of narration and of reconstruction is taking place. It counters Barthes’s argument that “the distinction between film and photograph is not a simple difference of degree but a radical opposition. Film can no longer be seen as animated photographs: the having-been-there gives way before a being-there of the thing.”15 El árbol does not simply make the past present to us, but encodes a series of temporal disjunctures, between filming, editing and viewing, and between all of these and the world depicted. If we are to agree with Ricoeur that narrative always involves this kind of reflexivity, then we must acknowledge that the embedding of photography into the cinematic narrative also involves the difference between the “here-now” and “there-then”16 that Barthes wants to limit to the viewing of a photograph. Ricoeur maintains that the use of verbal tenses in narrative signals the difference between the time of the text and the time of the narrated world, between “utterance” and “statement,” marking points of retrospection and looking ahead: Language has signals that warn us of the coincidence of, or the lag between, the Aktzeit and the Textzeit. Among the tenses of commentary, the compound past indicates retrospection, the future looking ahead, and the present itself is unmarked. Among the tenses of narrative, the pluperfect and the anterior past indicate retrospection, the conditional looking ahead, the preterite and imperfect the zero degree of the narrated world.17


200

Film rarely makes use of the recourses of language in this respect, with the exception of the voiceover or the intertitle to introduce a flashback. We could understand the layering of different kinds of time in relation to the images of


201

a film, however—especially a film such as El árbol that consciously explores these ideas—as analogous to the signals Ricoeur identifies in the language of narration. The time of narration (the digitally captured images we are watching at home or in the cinema) is overlaid by means of point-of-view shots toward images produced by older devices (we struggle to focus on the botany book through a magnifying glass, or view fuzzy slides projected onto the wall). We become aware that the image does not simply belong to the present of narration, but encodes within it a past, or narrated time. This double-coding of the image is emphasized in El árbol, as I will suggest below, through the film’s experimentation with the aesthetics of historical modes of image-capture and projection. The marked difference between narrative time and narrated time in El árbol is related to another series of reflections that the film inspires in the viewer: the question of the extent to which a narrative has been imposed on profilmic reality. This issue arises with particular acuteness given the strongly autobiographical nature of El árbol, and the fact that the film hovers unclassifiably between fiction and documentary. The autobiographical aspect of its material is never alluded to within the film itself, and the subjects do not interact with the director or cameraman on screen. We do not know whether the sequences shown are directed by Fontán (“sit on this chair here, look at this book”) or constitute “genuine” actions simply observed by the camera. While directorial interventions are evident at the level of editing (the combination of shots, superimposition of frames, the addition of a voiceover of one of the protagonists), we might suspect that the filming methods used were of the observational kind more associated with the documentary. Indeed, Fontán recognizes this peculiar blend of techniques when he claims that although “la referencia es real . . . la mirada es ficcional” (“the referent is real . . . the gaze is fictional”).18 If the profilmic material lends itself more comfortably to a documentary, its treatment is at points more naturally aligned with fiction: the film’s minimalist, observational style is interrupted on occasion with sequences using montage and superimposition, accompanied by muted whisperings on the soundtrack, to convey the sense of an indeterminate realm between reality, dream and memory. This hybridity is extended on a formal level to a play with digital and analogue images. The nostalgia of the characters’ reflections on the past is matched by an attempt to recapture some of the qualities associated with earlier photographic techniques. The film’s aesthetic is constructed selfreflexively around the use of magnifying lenses and the projection of shadows onto a screen through backlighting, technologies that belong to an earlier era of photography and analogue filmmaking (see figure 13.1). The diegetic prominence given to the mechanics of older visual technology in El árbol stands in contrast to the fact that, shot in digital video, it does not need to make use of the apparatus traditionally associated with filmmaking and cinematic projection. Laura U. Marks suggests that “Many digital video works seem to be in disavowal of the lost analogue body and attempt melancholically to recuperate it.”19 Here this desire appears to have shaped




J O A N N A PAG E

Figure 13.1 El árbol recalls earlier visual technologies by experimenting with backlighting and projection

the filming process, which lasted a year and a half, and deliberately took no shortcuts in the construction of shots: the director describes waiting for the light to fall naturally on the patio in the way he wanted, rather than creating effects by artificial means. 20 In addition to exploiting the “unnatural” resources available to it, Marks describes ways in which digital video is also “asserting its particular embodiment through a nostalgia for the analog,” and claims that “Through their particular styles of embodiment, these works also reflect on the state of human bodies in analog and digital worlds.”21 Themes of preservation and decay, presence and absence, nature and artifice, reality and representation link El árbol’s self-reflexive exploration of the relationship between analogue and digital photography with its study of the embodied experience of ageing and death. The frailty of the human body and the vagaries of memory are given metaphoric treatment in the decaying photographic record and the fuzzy, imprecise, shadowy images of the film. Thus, although El árbol initially appears to construct a sense of temporality as linear progression, from young to old, new to obsolete, the nostalgia with which its digital images mimic the qualities of analogue film suggests a different kind of relationship. In particular, it insists on the indexicality of the image—the “having been there,” the passage of real time during filming, and the use of non-actors—in a way which proposes a continuity, rather than a difference, between the analogue and the digital.


202



203

On 16mm color film, the actress playing the director interviews the friends and neighbors of her militant parents. Black-and-white digital video shows us the technical crew carrying booms and tripods, and the repeated takes needed to hone the actress’s performance to the director’s wishes. Shots of family photographs take us back to childhood, the moment at which the parents were “disappeared” by the military regime in 1977. The camera moves over a collage of photographs pinned onto a board, most images of the parents deliberately obscured by another, overlapping photo, leaving visible just an arm holding a baby, or pairs of truncated adult legs behind a child on a beach. The time of childhood is also evoked in the stop-motion animation of plastic Playmobil figurines moving around a house and its garden. * * * The embedding of earlier visual techniques within a digital production to engage specifically with issues of temporality is also apparent in a much more widely commented example in contemporary Argentine cinema, Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (The Blonds, 2003), the focus of heated critical debate concerning the relationship between history and fiction, objectivity and subjectivity, in post-dictatorship memory.22 In a film that mistrusts any claim to unmediated historical truth, the most obviously fictive and constructed sequences—the Playmobil ones—take on perhaps the greatest truth-value, representing the candid imagination of a child. Both the association with childhood (with children’s television shows) and the materiality of image-making are enhanced by the use of clunky, outdated stop-motion animation, 23 a technique made obsolete by computer-generated imaging and digital animation. Showing the “seams” between frames—as stop-motion animation so clearly does—becomes the keystone of Carri’s aesthetic in Los rubios. Interestingly, a similar technique of graphic animation is used in her more recent La rabia (Anger, 2008) to articulate the anger and distress of a child, whose drawings are animated to pulse and bulge with a vibrant urgency before our eyes, expressing what the mute child cannot. The citation of outdated or obsolete forms of image-production that do not flow with the same verisimilitude as analogue or digital film is used to mark the difference between childhood and adulthood in Los rubios, but also to draw attention to the constructed nature of film in general and to voice a suspicion of the smoothness and verisimilitude with which memory fills in the gaps left by history. One of the most serious criticisms leveled at the director of Los rubios relates to her decision not to carry out any sustained on-screen investigation into the lives of her parents, and particularly into the political significance of their militancy and disappearance during the dictatorship. The documents around which Los rubios might have reconstructed the past—photographs, testimonies, texts—are most frequently displaced, their credibility or significance as documents undermined but nothing advanced to take their


Los rubios: Death and Photography Revisited


J O A N N A PAG E

place. Photographs appear as “traces” in the film, but they are not used as evidence to reconstruct a historical narrative. It is for this reason that figures of the parents are rarely to be seen among the many photographs shown, and when they do appear, they are not identified as such. Poignantly, the actress playing Albertina cuts out an image of a young girl in a photograph but includes the shadow of the person holding the camera: the trace of someone having-been-there who remains nothing more than a shadow in the past. The real story is the absence of a story, the discontinuity between past and present. Photographs of people whose lives were prematurely cut off: these would seem to respond directly to Barthes’s notion of the “punctum,” which he equates with “Time, the lacerating emphasis of the noeme (‘that-has-been’), its pure representation.”24 As an example to explain this “unexpected flash” which cuts across our apprisal of a photograph’s subject, Barthes introduces a photograph of Lewis Payne, a young man who attempted to assassinate a Secretary of State, taken in his cell as he was waiting to be hanged: The photograph is handsome, as is the boy: that is the studium. But the punctum is: he is going to die. I read at the same time: This will be and this has been; I observe with horror an anterior future of which death is the stake. By giving me the absolute past of the pose (aorist), the photograph tells me death in the future. What pricks me is the discovery of this equivalence.25

Los rubios, which deliberately interrupts any effect of catharsis in the viewing experience, does not permit us to engage emotionally in this way with the fate of the disappeared parents, to feel Barthes’s “horror.” Carri is uncompromising: if her parents were absent from her life, they will also be absent from the screen. To apprehend the convergence of the “this will be” and “this has been” would be to forge a coherent relationship between the past (the parents’ life) with an anterior future (the death of the parents), and the past (a complete family) with the present (the continuing absence of the parents). Carri is not interested in creating such a narrative, preferring instead to emphasize the difficulty of knowing anything about the past, of sifting through the false memories and the fictions that attempt to fill what she calls the “agujero negro” (“black hole”) of absence.26 Oddly, perhaps, it is Carri’s refusal to use the fictionalizing devices of history-writing that has caused the most offence to those viewers who demanded a more serious treatment of the political aims of her parents and the significance of their death. As Ricoeur argues, “historical intentionality only becomes effective by incorporating into its intended object the resources of fictionalization stemming from the narrative form of imagination.”27 Using the example of Auschwitz, he observes that “Fiction gives eyes to the horrified narrator. Eyes to see and to weep”28 by carrying history back, through a sense of the uniqueness and importance of certain past events, to a kind of “negative epic” that “preserves the memory of suffering.”29 “Horror attaches to events that must never be forgotten,” he claims, 30 and


204


205

here it is clear that “horror”—as in the citation from Barthes above—is conveyed and grasped in narrative form, and that this is achieved by means of the resources of fiction, “placed in the service of the unforgettable.”31 In this way fiction lends an ethical dimension to the explanation of historical events. This narrative of horror is entirely absent from Los rubios, and this has led some critics to question the film’s ethics in relation to post-dictatorship memory. Carri is not behaving as a historian “should,” but particularly in her eschewal of history’s borrowings from fictional modes of narration. For Ricoeur, both history and fiction fulfil an important “debt.” In the case of history, this is “a debt to the past, a debt of recognition to the dead”32 and in fiction it is to “the vision of the world that inspires the artist.”33 What has scandalized some viewers of Los rubios is that Carri expresses no such debt to the memory of her parents: their political and ideological beliefs and actions play no part in her film. But behind the multiplication of fictive devices in Los rubios—the layers of artifice, displacement and ludic experimentation—is the same commitment to verisimilitude that Ricoeur argues to inspire all narratives, literary or historical:34 in this case the world depicted with accuracy is a chaotic and fragmented one. Los rubios does fulfill a “debt,” but to Carri’s vision, not to that of her parents; to the present, not to the past; to the present experience of not being able to construct a coherent narrative of the past. Where their use in El árbol was more suggestive of continuity, the superseded technologies of the past—photography, stop-motion animation—are used in Los rubios to figure the aesthetic of rupture governing the film as a whole. Digital in Disguise: La orilla que se abisma The camera pans gently across the lush, riverine landscape of Entre Ríos. Trees move out of focus, and the screen fills with a collage of green patches and soft brown verticals. The soundtrack—the occasional birdsong, the light buzzing of insects, wind through the trees and the gentle lapping of waves against the river bank—is muted and sparse, sustaining the impression of lethargy. The few people who enter the frames stand observing, or move silently and somnolently across the screen. The superimposition of moving images creates ever more complex textures, as defined forms become lost in abstract patternings of light and shadow, surfaces teeming and pulsating with the movements belonging to other images. When the first 8mm shots appear, we understand that the film’s aesthetic has been designed expressly to prepare us for the texture of these images. The grainy quality of the old, black-andwhite documentary sequences makes objects appear “busy” in the same way, flickering as the film moves perceptibly from one frame to the next. It is sometimes difficult to make out the shape of the elderly poet as he sips mate or reads a book. Finally, these sequences are superimposed onto the director’s own, creating vivid, aleatory textures of a rare and mesmerizing beauty.



* * * 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

J O A N N A PAG E

Fontán’s La orilla que se abisma (2008) includes sequences from a 1976 documentary on the Argentine poet Juan L. Ortiz (Juan José Gorasurreta, La intemperie sin fin), but it is not itself a documentary. Indeed, its rejection of narrative would make it impossible to categorize as either fiction or documentary. Fontán did not conceive the film as a reconstruction of, or reflection on, Ortiz’s life (1896–1978) and works, but as an attempt to render in the language of cinema something of the aesthetics of his poetry: to re-create a certain kind of gaze.35 Surprisingly, therefore, a film that is a meditation on literature contains almost no words, with the exception of two intertitles containing a few lines from Ortiz’s poems, and the recorded voice of the poet accompanying the final few minutes of the film with a recitation from his “Villaguay.” How can film commemorate a poet and capture something of his vision without lapsing into documenting his life and work? “Mi corazón está en todo” (“My heart is in everything”), intones Ortiz, and Fontán searches for the essence of his poetry in the fluvial landscapes and mists of Entre Ríos so closely associated by Ortiz with his childhood and so prominent in his verses. And yet everything about the film’s poetics is calculated to draw our attention away from the simple fact of the object perceived (a tree, the river) and toward the camera as instrument of that perception, and toward the materiality of film. The different modes of visuality adopted in the film provide clear examples of “digital mimicry,” Rosen’s term to refer to digital’s capacity to imitate “preexisting compositional forms of imagery,” such as photography or analogue film.36 La orilla exploits analogue film’s paradoxical nature as both surface and transparency, a skin that is variably translucent, something to be looked through as well as looked at. These qualities are evoked through a series of techniques. The markedly shallow focus of the opening sequences makes us aware of the mediation of the camera’s lens, bringing either the foreground or the background into sharp focus while relegating the other to a hazy indistinctness. These sequences quickly give way to others in which the entire visual field is deliberately taken out of focus. As the camera’s aperture is widened, the out-of-focus light takes on the shape of the aperture, creating hexagons of light in the background blur. The “bokeh” effect, as this is known in photography, is generally used to minimize distractions in the background in an aesthetically pleasing manner, while emphasizing the subject in the foreground, which remains in focus.37 Here, however, there is no subject in the foreground. As we stop trying to perceive and identify individual forms, we become aware of the image as surface, as an abstract collage of light and shade.38 And yet film is not an opaque surface. In the superimposed sequences we see Fontán’s digital film harking back—in a similar fashion to El árbol—to analogue filmmaking. The digital image is composed of pixels and does not exist in a material form unless printed, for example, on photographic paper. By contrast, celluloid film has physical properties of materiality and transparency, and the superimposition of sequences is achieved by means of the literal cutting


206


207

and overlaying of frames. The superimposed sequences of La orilla encourage us to see through one set of images to another laid underneath, emphasizing the transparency that is a property of analogue, not digital, film. And yet, once again, the cognitive confusion that results from the complex, shifting textures created takes us back to the surface of film. We no longer simply see through the lens, but become aware of its capacity to refract and transform reality, to create a poetic image from the raw material of nature. The play of light in La orilla and its bright colors are often evocative of impressionist landscapes. In the first shots of trees, the spreading formlessness gives photography the imprecision of impressionism, evoking the rich hues of Cézanne’s “Forest Path” (c. 1892), or “Pines and Rocks” (1897). At points, shot composition suggests the direct citation of well-known impressionist works. A man rows in silhouette across the grey-blue and orange hues of a river at sunset in a shot that replicates many of the compositional features of Claude Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” (1872), while a starkly beautiful shot of the riverbank bathed in grey-blue light, the shape of the trees roughly reflected in the water and the sky tinged with orange, is highly suggestive of his “Vétheuil in the Fog” (1879). Perhaps most obviously, the play of reflections and superimpositions that overlay a bed of green leaves with rippling blue water cannot fail to bring to mind Monet’s iconic “Water Lilies” (1916). The highly animated streaks of the storm sequence, in which orange is the dominant color, recall the broad-brush textures used to create the iridescent vapor of Turner’s “Rain, Steam, and Speed—The Great Western Railway” (1844), often considered an important precursor to the impressionist movement. If impressionism developed at least in part as a response to the new medium of photography, placing weight on the subjective experience of seeing rather than the object captured, we begin to glimpse the relevance of impressionist techniques for La orilla’s emphasis on perception and the gaze rather than on the object, and its excursions away from photographic realism. “Juanele”—as Ortiz is popularly known—reflects on the place of his birth in a way that was to provide the inspiration for Fontán’s film: Al amanecer, cuando el sol estaba rasante, iluminaba parte de la vaca y parte de mi madre agachada ordeñando. A mí me impresionaba mucho porque se levantaba en ese tambo mucho vapor. Entonces todo se irisaba, se hacía un mundo de color muy tenue, hermoso: las vacas parecían una niebla.



Se trata de cierto sentido brumoso que disuelve el contorno de las cosas para hacer sentir la unidad viviente.39 At dawn, when the sun was low, it lit up part of the cow and part of my mother, crouching down to milk her. The sight struck me, because a lot of steam was rising from the yard. Then everything became iridescent, became a world of pale colors, beautiful: the cows looked like a fog. There is a kind of mistiness which dissolves the outlines of things so that the living unity of them can be sensed.


J O A N N A PAG E

La orilla’s aesthetic matches the glistening, evanescent hues and the vapor of this riverine landscape, by dissolving the outlines of objects through a series of very slow fades and the superimposition of different sequences, techniques that constituted virtually the only post-production work carried out for the film.40 While these effects are clearly intended to render in the medium of film something of the poet’s vision as revealed in his writing, they also have another role, which is to blur distinctions between Fontán’s digital video production and the older documentary footage inserted into it. The stark contrast that might have been produced between the clean, precise image of digital filmmaking and the deteriorated, grainy 8mm film is effectively dissolved. The varying levels of light in the old film between one frame and the next, denoting an earlier technology of imagecapture and the decay of the material film over the years, are paralleled in the flashes and dapples that interfere with images in the superimposed sequences. The blotches and scratches that hinder and distract our viewing of the black-and-white shots are prefigured in the pronounced bokeh effects, and the vibrant ripples and f leeting shapes that, as a result of superimposition, are stripped of any meaning and become simply visual disturbances on the screen (see figure 13.2). If El árbol’s digital images draw heavily on the indexical, often associated exclusively with analogue rather than digital images, La orilla performs a similar act of reappropriation: this time of the materiality of analogue film, which—unlike digital—is subject to decay. The digital image here rejects


208

Figure 13.2 Superimposition in La orilla que se abisma creates thick textures and flashes of light, mimicking the grainy, flickering, decayed images of old film


209

pixilated precision and carefully simulates the fuzziness of the analogue and its propensity to degrade. To return to Juanele, and to another aphorism cited by Fontán, “El arte no da cuenta del mundo para hacerlo comprensible, sino para devolverle su sagrado misterio” (“Art does not give an account of the world to make it comprehensible, but to give it back its sacred mystery”).41 If both fiction and documentary are engaged in an attempt to make the world “comprehensible” by structuring human time, La orilla departs from both, eschewing narrative in favor of poetry. This move is signaled by the dissolving of boundaries between historical and contemporary visual technologies, which has the effect of folding past and present into a similar aesthetic. It is ironic, of course, that the nostalgia of the film’s vision—the intent to reanimate the past, the citation of childhood reminiscences, the evocation of a timeless rural landscape, the embrace of analogue imprecision—reinscribes it within another narrative, that of a nostalgic admiration of the rural, primitive technologies and subjective experience from the perspective of the urban, contemporary and technologically “precise” era of digitization. Reflexivity and Retrofuturism in La sonámbula The film opens with an adagio clarinet motif, establishing the rural serenity of a traditional country house at dawn before giving way to the consciously contemporary velocity of the credits sequence. Synthesized sounds and furious percussion beats complement fast traveling shots through a metro tunnel; accelerated shots of lights flashing by accompany the words of the credits, which are themselves subject to distortions and barely remain still enough to read. Fleeting, blurred insert shots of landscapes, with the sound of a man panting, evoke the terror of a fugitive on the run. As the music climaxes, the rapid montage cuts without preparation to a silent, static shot of Eva lying dwarfed by a huge sculpture, the whiteness of her skin against the black stone highlighting the sudden move into black-and-white film. She wakes as church bells chime the hour, and enters the high-vaulted, expansive space of a cathedral; we hear the ethereal strains of Tavener’s “The Lamb.” * * * Fredric Jameson observes that “in postmodern film, the credits have become an inconspicuous yet crucial space in which the desired perceptual habits of a viewer are, as in the old musical modes, generically cued toward either techno- or deco-graphics.”42 The credits in Fernando Spiner’s La sonámbula (Sleepwalker, 1998) perform this key function, but—significantly— they do not orientate the spectator toward a single style or period. Instead, the sequence establishes a series of contrasting spaces, sound-worlds, temporalities and speeds that introduce the viewer to the dense exchanges and complex layerings of past and future that will characterize the film as a whole. Spiner’s science fiction, we realize, is less a vision of the future than a




J O A N N A PAG E

series of citations from an archive of past futuristic visions. The film’s narrative structure encourages us, as well as the characters, to engage in a search for links between past, present and future, an exercise that—as in Los rubios—is ultimately set up for failure. Again, the citation of previous forms of optical technology and visual codes are instrumental in La sonámbula’s particular construction of temporality, as well as its critique of present-day modernity in Buenos Aires. The use of black-and-white for the majority of the film, including those shots that are clearly intended to depict a futuristic Buenos Aires, establishes science fiction more as a “retro” or “classic” genre than a vision of the future. No attempt is made to make the shots of a futuristic Buenos Aires skyline look realistic; indeed, the black-and-white images of the “vertical city,” criss-crossed with multi-level expressways, are conscious citations from earlier films such as Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). Spiner readily acknowledges the influence of North American and European science fiction films,43 and the mixture of retro and futuristic styles in Brazil (Terry Gilliam, 1985) appears to have provided a particular inspiration for La sonámbula’s cityscapes. The pastiche created from these precursors is given a local referent, however: one of the first shots of the futuristic Buenos Aires (see figure 13.3) includes a number of recognizable buildings in the collage: on the right, the Art Deco Kavanagh building (1934), the first skyscraper in Latin America; in the center, the Usina Puerto Nuevo (1929–1932); and between them, the more recent Torres Catalinas. In a later shot, the curved façade (also Art Deco) of Mercado del Abasto (1931–1934) looms unmistakably in the background. In fact, the predominance of Art Deco styles in many of the mocked-up external shots of Buenos Aires, as well as the use of certain motifs such as the mad scientist’s laboratory, places the film’s visual aesthetic within the “Raygun Gothic” style often associated with retrofuturistic science fiction.44 This is not so much a future we would imagine today, as an “old future,” one imagined in the past. This play with temporality opens up a space for a critique of the present, which corresponds, or fails to correspond, to past projections. La sonámbula is set in the near future, in 2010, at the bicentenary of the Revolución de Mayo that inaugurated the independence of Argentina. The totalitarian vision of La sonámbula, one that is central to much dystopian science fiction, acquires a specific and local referent in the most recent military dictatorship (1976–1983). Some of the analogies established include the state’s merciless pursuit of dissidents (labeled “terroristas”), the vast number of people left without knowing who they were and to which family they belonged (recalling the plight of many children of the disappeared under the military regime), and the state’s interest in reprogramming their memories. Even the urban expressways that feature conspicuously in every shot of the city may carry a local meaning: the construction of expressways was part of the extensive plans for urban modernization created—and partially completed—by the military regime, and that include the prominent 25 de Mayo highway, a flyover bisecting the present-day city.


210


211

Figure 13.3 The skyline of Buenos Aires in La sonámbula contains a collage of identifiable city landmarks. Its obvious citation of previous science-fiction films establishes a retrofuturistic aesthetic for the film

In a more innovative fashion, however, La sonámbula articulates a critique of the role of the state in Argentine modernization by means of the reflexive treatment of technological difference. Unlike the obviously simulated exterior shots of the city, many of the film’s most fantastical sequences, which a spectator may assume to have been digitally produced or enhanced, are actually shot in real locations without the benefit of postproduction effects. As Kluge searches the dockyard for the ship he has seen in Eva’s recorded dreams, he passes the decaying frames of boats that can still be seen strewn along the old docks in La Boca, simply left to rust when the city’s business moved to the new dockyards to the north. “Real” filmed images with a content that might be described as “documentary” are inserted into a sequence that contains shots that are obviously artificially created. In another example, the devastated town Kluge and Eva pass through—an oneiric vision of tree skeletons and ruined houses emerging from the floods—was shot on a real location in Epecuén, and needed no post-production work.45 It is as if the fabric of the futuristic Buenos Aires is continually punctured by the failures of modernization, or strewn with the refuse of abandoned projects and obsolete technology. The futuristic fiction cannot fully be sustained, as images documenting the reality of the present break through its simulations. The uneven modernization evident in La sonámbula, its mixture of styles from different periods, becomes more than the usual juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar environments characteristic of the science fiction genre. It comments on the specific experience of modernity at the periphery, as a process




J O A N N A PAG E

of spectacular leaps, abandoned enterprise, state negligence and economic volatility, rather than a coherent, unidirectional process of evolution. La sonámbula emphasizes the inassimilable burden of the past and the ruptures and discontinuities that impede entry into a possible future, both for individuals and for the nation as a whole, rendering those visions an exercise in anachronism: quite literally, in its citation of past futures. The predominantly black-and-white filmstock used in La sonámbula is interrupted on occasion with sequences in color, corresponding to Eva’s dreams. The black-and-white sequences of the main narrative thread were originally shot using 16mm color film, transferred to black-and-white digital video, and then to 35mm.46 As well as providing a more economical way of working with special effects, the resulting loss of quality was designed to mark a deliberate difference with Eva’s dream sequences, which are shown in high definition and color. Yet the precise relationship between these two narrative strands, so clearly marked aesthetically, is extremely difficult to determine. The spectator initially assumes that Eva’s dreams take place in the past; however, we discover that many of her dreams are predictive. This is, of course, a device that has been repeatedly used in science fiction films such as Twelve Monkeys (Gilliam, 1995). In contrast to Gilliam’s film, however, in which the flashforwards and flashbacks eventually cohere into a comprehensible narrative, no such consistent timeframe can be reconstructed in La sonámbula. The film’s ending is particularly ambiguous: the railway station Eva knows she needs to find appears to act as a portal into a parallel universe, perhaps in the past, in the future, or in an alternative temporality. As the sequence is in color, Kluge may have entered a world projected by Eva, who represents a kind of anti-Ève-future: not a passive figure of male creation but one who—in a classic Borgesian twist—may actually be the source of her male creators’ and pursuers’ own existence. This ontological uncertainty is suggested very effectively by the film’s visual reflexivity. Insistent close-ups of camera lenses are interspersed throughout the narrative, representing—as in many science fiction films— the all-seeing eye of the regime. But in many of these shots, the seeing eye (human or machine) becomes a mirror, a screen onto which other images are reflected. By means of superimpositions and special effects, the reflection of Eva dreaming appears in the lens of the camera filming her, the city’s skyscrapers cast shadows over Eva’s pupils, and the green grass Eva moves across in one of her dreams is superimposed on the iris of Dr Gazzar’s eye. This inversion of the conventional relationship between subject (perceiving) and object (perceived) in the cinematic gaze is highly significant in the context of the film’s hesitation between alternative worlds and narrative interpretations. Who is perceiving whom? Who is dreaming whom? Whose narrative—Eva’s or Gauna/Dr. Gazzar’s—contains whose? Such visual effects, together with a consistent switching between different camera positions, create a kind of Aleph in which images of the world contain images of those images of the world, and so on. This specular relationship between images can also be read, as I will suggest below, as part of a reflexive meditation on the way


212



213

cinema’s images—their content, but also their form—constitute themselves by means of reference to previous codes and technologies.

To the extent to which these films meditate reflexively on a contrasting set of images and formats—analogue/digital, documentary/fictional, indexical/ simulated—they also engage in another temporal narrative: the historicity and development of cinema. They do so, however, in a way that complicates any simple oppositions between the old and new in visual technologies or codes, more often than not emphasizing a continuity between them. Fontán’s use of digital video, in particular, does not suggest that digital technology represents a definitive break in the way that images record reality. That digital imaging heralds a radical change in the history of image production is a position often held by new-media theorists; in his discussion of the relationship between image and reality, Bill Nichols also drives a wedge between analogue and digital images in this respect: whereas photographic images “exhibit a distinctive bond between image and object,” he discounts digital techniques, which “destroy this claim.”47 Fontán’s films would, instead, appear to lend support to Rosen’s more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which digital images may have indexical origins, or mimic indexicality, such that “the regime of the digital is intertwined with the indexical rather than excluding it,”48 and “the digital interpenetrates and is interpenetrated by the very genres and regimes of imaging that it defines as the old.”49 As he argues, however, “The idea of the hybridity of historical temporality does not obliterate the temporal sequence, but rather can only be conceived in dialectical relation with it.” This hybridity “is grounded in and embodies the unavoidable interplay of present with pastness” that for Rosen is central both to “modern historicity” and “the idea of modernity itself.”50 This idea of modernity holds a particular relevance in the Latin American context. The mingling of different temporalities and image codes in La sonámbula aptly expresses something of the hybrid experience of modernity in Argentina, in which underdevelopment and innovation cannot be mapped onto a linear sequence. In both La sonámbula and Los rubios, a hybrid aesthetic announces the uneasy compenetration or antagonism—rather than the assimilation suggested in Fontán’s films—of the old and the new. We cannot view the future except through past visions of that future (La sonámbula), which are also interrupted by the failings of the past and present, and we cannot view the past at all (Los rubios) except through the distorted, fragmented images that have survived in present memories. The coexistence of digital and analogue regimes is abundantly clear in the production processes of all the films examined here, which may transfer from digital video to analogue film for the purposes of exhibition (El árbol, Los rubios), or digitize analogue film for the purposes of manipulating the image (La orilla, La sonámbula) before transferring it back to an analogue format. In the context


Conclusion


J O A N N A PAG E

of contemporary Argentina, such choices are rarely made on purely aesthetic grounds: the decision to experiment with new technology in the form of digital video, for example, is often one of economic exigency. The films I have chosen to focus on may be contemporary ones, but there is nothing contemporary about cinema’s fascination with visual technologies that predate it (photography, paintings, optical instruments of various kinds), nor are the opportunities offered by digital for image-manipulation radically different in nature, rather than degree, than those that were already available in analogue filmmaking. Perhaps it should not surprise us that, rather than representing a break with the past, digital imagery more often harks back to it, with numerous software tools now used to create effects of fuzziness or decay in a simulation of the properties of analogue film. Such operations testify to the heightened urgency of questions of authenticity and indexicality in an age in which technology has seemed to take us beyond a reliance on preexisting reality in the construction of images. Rosen goes as far as to suggest that the digital is defined by its relationship to analogue filmmaking, and that in practice, “digital imagery is often . . . constituted by being propped onto certain culturally powerful image codes that preexisted it, and in this regard photography and film may be especially important examples.”51 Other theorists concur with Rosen on this point. Mary Ann Doane demonstrates the “persistence and strength of an indexical imaginary” in digital photography, such that “in a sense, the digital has not annihilated the logic of the photochemical, but incorporated it,”52 while Stephen Prince claims that “Digital imaging exposes the enduring dichotomy in film theory as a false boundary. It is not as if cinema either indexically records the world or stylistically transfigures it. Cinema does both.”53 It is “the constraint of verisimilitude” that, for Ricoeur, ultimately underpins both the representation of the “quasi-past” in fictional narratives, and the real past in historical ones.54 A similar constraint governs both artifice and indexicality in the cinematic image, and their mutual borrowings bind them together in a specular relationship, analogous to the mutual borrowings of rhetorical and discursive strategies linking fiction and historiography.

Notes 1. See, e.g., Barthes, “The Discourse of History”; White, Metahistory. 2. White, The Content of the Form, 180. 3. Our reliance on terms such as “rhetoric,” “discourse,” “language,” and “poetics” in the analysis of film reveals the extent to which theories of the visual continue to draw on concepts originally developed with reference to linguistics and structuralist thought. 4. Doane, “Screening Time,” 138. 5. See, e.g., Marks, “How Electrons Remember” (in Touch, 161–175), which questions claims of the loss of indexicality and of materiality in the digital image. 6. See Rosen, Change Mummified, 301–349 for a comprehensive rebuttal of the claims of “the discourse of the digital utopia.” 7. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 6.


214


8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

215

Blowers, “The Textual Contract,” 107. Ibid., 108. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 101. Ibid., 120. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 2, 5. Ibid., 61. Again, this difference is more easily calculable and more obvious in film than in literature, in which the time of writing (as opposed to the time of narration, or narrated time) does not usually present itself as a separate timescale; in film, the time of shooting is often partly calculated with reference to the number of hours of raw material captured by the camera. Barthes, Image Music Text, 45. Doane makes a similar argument in relation to Barthes’s opposition of photography and cinema, maintaining that “there are always at least two temporalities at work in film,” combining the present tense of viewing and the past tense of production. “Screening Time,” 140. Doane, “Screening Time,” 44. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 2, 70. Broderson, “Es un film sobre el paso del tiempo.” Marks, Touch, 147. Borland, “Para mi el arte es experimentación.” Marks, Touch, 147–148. For an overview of these debates, see the relevant chapter in Page, Crisis and Capitalism. Stop-motion animation involves the moving of an object by small amounts and photographing each stage in order to create the illusion of the object moving on its own. Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. Ibid. García, “Albertina Carri.” Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 101. Ibid., 188. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 187. Ibid., 189. Ibid., 143. Ibid., 177. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 2, 13–14. Fontán explains that his project began with a question: “¿será posible mirar el paisaje de Entre Ríos partiendo de algunos principios estéticos del poeta, de modo que la película sea testigo de este diálogo con Ortiz?” (“Will it be possible to view the landscape of Entre Ríos by embracing some of the poet’s own aesthetic principles, such that the film becomes a witness of this dialogue with Ortiz?”). The film was therefore designed as “un acercamiento cinematográfico a su poética” (“a cinematographic approach to his poetics”). See http://gustavo-fontan.blogspot.com, February 10, 2008. Rosen, Change Mummified, 309. Emphasis in the original. See Ang, Dictionary of Photography and Digital Imaging, 45, and http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bokeh. La orilla brings us very close to Marks’s description of haptic perception, which she analyzes in relation to video production in particular: “Haptic looking tends to rest on the surface of its object rather than to plunge into




39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54.

J O A N N A PAG E

depth, not to distinguish form so much as to discern texture. It is a labile, plastic sort of look, more inclined to move than to focus.” Touch, 8. Cited by Fontán at http://gustavo-fontan.blogspot.com, February 10, 2008. Personal correspondence with the director, August 5, 2008. Cited by Fontán at http://gustavo-fontan.blogspot.com, February 10, 2008. Jameson, The Geopolitical Aesthetic, 13. Félix-Didier and Peña, “La sonámbula,” 2. The first use of this term was by William Gibson in his short story “The Gernsback Continuum” (from Burning Chrome) to describe a film with the working title The Airstream Futuropolis: The Tomorrow that Never Was. García, “La sonámbula.” Ibid. and Félix-Didier and Peña, “La sonámbula,” 2–3. Nichols, Representing Reality, 5. Rosen, Change Mummified, 308. Ibid., 325. Ibid., 355. Ibid., 314. Doane, “Indexicality,” 5. Prince, “True Lies,” 35. Ricoeur, Time and Narrative 3, 192.

Works Cited Ang, Tom. Dictionary of Photography and Digital Imaging. London: Argentum, 2001. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated by Richard Howard. London: Vintage, 2000. ———. “The Discourse of History” [1967]. In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 127–140. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. ———. Image Music Text. Translated by Stephen Heath. London: Fontana, 1977. Blowers, Tonya. “The Textual Contract: Distinguishing Autobiography from the Novel.” In Representing Lives: Women and Auto/biography, edited by Alison Donnell and Pauline Polkey, 105–116. London: Macmillan, 2000. Broderson, Diego. “Es un film sobre el paso del tiempo,” Página/12, Espectáculos, January 30, 2007, http://www.pagina12.com.ar. Accessed August 20, 2008. Carvajal Borland, Lucía. “Para mi el arte es experimentación, con riesgo al fracaso,” Mabuse: Revista de cine, January 21, 2008, http://www.mabuse.cl/1448/ article-80576.html. Accessed August 20, 2008. Doane, Mary Ann. “Indexicality: Trace and Sign: Introduction,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 18 no. 1 (Spring 2007): 1–6. ———. “Screening Time.” In Language Machines: Technologies of Literary and Cultural Production, edited by Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass and Nancy Vickers, 137–159. London and New York: Routledge, 1997. Félix-Didier, Paula and Fernando Martín Peña. “La sonámbula” [Interview with Fernando Spiner]. Cineclub Núcleo, Pre-release Screening Program, August 11, 1998. García, José Luis. “La sonámbula,” Revista ADF 2 no. 2, http://www.adfcine.com. ar. Accessed June 16, 2005.


216


217

García, Lorena. “Albertina Carri: ‘La ausencia es un agujero negro’,” La Nación: Espectáculos, April 23, 2003, http://www.lanacion.com.ar. Accessed August 20, 2008. Jameson, Fredric. The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. Marks, Laura U. Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991. Page, Joanna. Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Prince, Stephen. “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 49 no. 3 (Spring 1996): 27–37. Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative, vol. 2. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. ———. Time and Narrative, vol. 3. Translated by Kathleen Blarney and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory. London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. ———. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. ———. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.







Dereferencing the Real: Documentary Mediascapes in the Films of Carlos Marcovich (¿Quién diablos es Juliette? and Cuatro labios) Geoffrey Kantaris

T

his chapter aims to present a novel theoretical framework for conceptualizing referentiality in the documentary film form. This theory is elaborated through an examination of the unstable frontiers between fiction and documentary as evinced in two contemporary Mexican (in one case, Cuban-Mexican) films. Both films produce something akin to a complex visual meta-discourse on the nature of documentary reference, so that the framework presented here is merely an attempt to formulate discursively a set of visual processes that have perhaps become endemic at least in reflexive and performative modes of documentary filmmaking. Even looking back to its earliest roots, however, the documentary film form has always been haunted by the specter of reference.1 From Vertov’s Kino-Pravda or truth-cinema to North American “Direct Cinema,” passing through cinéma vérité, theorists and practitioners have worked within a fundamental episteme that assumes that at some level the desire to re-fer, literally to bring again something prior to itself, is what differentiates documentary filmmaking from fiction. That a priori thing of which documentary film is a re-presentation has various names that have always been the subject of hot debate, from truth and authenticity, to society and everyday reality. Although the more reflexive modes of documentary and its theorization have engaged complex debate about the referential processes at its heart, about the degree of authenticity of the different techniques it can employ, and indeed about what counts as “real” in the first place, the idea of reference to some reality, or actuality, remains as the constitutive building block underlying the formal procedures by which documentary defines itself as a “genre.” Yet there has always also been a slippage between documentation and fiction, between reference and fabulation, at the heart of documentary debate and practice. As one of the films here suggests, the actual is inevitably caught in the act; the here and now, John Grierson’s famous definition of documentary as


Chapter 14


G E O F F R E Y K A N TA R I S

“the creative treatment of actuality,”2 is bound to the actorial, the staging of the actual. This controversy, usually in the name of disputed authenticity, has been a specter haunting documentary from the earliest newsreel reenactment of battles for the camera onward. The fact that most of the battle footage from the turn of the twentieth century was staged, including fake footage of key events in the Spanish-American War of 1898 (enhanced by off-camera cigar smoke) and the staging of battles by fully equipped mock armies during the Boer War of 1899–1902, is almost inevitable in hindsight.3 As is well known, in Mexico much has been made of the inference that the exigencies of the camera influenced the course of historical events. Francisco Villa is purported to have signed a contract for US$25,000 with the Mutual Film Corporation in 1914 to film the battle of Ojinaga, in which he granted exclusive film rights, allegedly promised to fight whenever possible only during daylight hours, and, according to the New York Times’ report of the contract on January 8, 1914, delayed fighting for the arrival of the cameramen.4 In addition, the report stated that “If no good motion pictures are made during the present battle [i.e., Ojinaga] Villa has agree[d] to stage a battle for the benefit of the company.”5 In the documentary form, which developed out of such reportage, the manipulation of documentary subjects to produce reality effects is in many ways constitutive of the form’s generic conventions. The oft-cited example here is the fact that in the first feature-length documentary, Robert Flaherty’s 1922 ethnographic film about the Inuit, Nanook of the North, “a story of life and love in the actual Arctic” as the film’s tag-line put it, much of the action was staged to make it conform to preconceived notions of an “authentic” Inuit way of life.6 Recent theorization of documentary has charted the rise of a new type under the guise of the “performative mode,” a term that extends Bill Nichols’ original category of “reflexive” documentary, the latter being a mode that exposes the work of the camera and the intervention of the documentarists rather than effacing the signs of filmic enunciation, and that has been an available mode of documentary at least since Dziga Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera of 1929.7 The performative mode establishes a tension, Nichols suggests, “between performance and document, between the personal and the typical, the embodied and the disembodied, between, in short, history and science.”8 He continues, Performative documentary suspends realist representation. Performative documentary puts the referential aspect of the message in brackets, under suspension. Realism finds itself deferred, dispersed, interrupted, and postponed. . . . Performative documentary does not hide its signifieds in the guise of a referent it effortlessly pulls from a hat. These films stress their tone and expressive qualities while also retaining a referential claim to the historical. They address the challenge of giving meaning to historical events through the evocations they provide for them.9


220

The films examined here clearly fall within this performative mode, the ramifications of which I shall be examining further below. However, the concept of performance, even if understood within the postmodern frame of


221

performative identities,10 fails to provide a close enough analogue for the radical unmaking of referentiality that is emerging in these films, and it is symptomatic of this that in the passage above Nichols feels the urge to assert, in almost contradictory fashion, that the performative mode “also retain[s] a referential claim to the historical” (my emphasis). If, as I have argued, the slippage between the actual and the acted, between the immediate and the mediated, is endemic to the documentary form, then I posit that this is but one effect of a semantic process I term dereferencing. The term is adopted from the field of computer programming, and the “dereferential mode,” I argue, provides an alternative to the alethic logic of referentiality that pervades the documentary form. But first, I shall introduce the films through which I want to engage this concept. Visual Reference Carlos Marcovich, of Argentine origin but living in Mexico since the age of 13 (1976), is credited in the Mexican film press with having made the most locally and internationally successful Mexican documentary to date—in terms of ticket sales and distribution—with ¿Quién diablos es Juliette? (Who the Hell Is Juliette?, 1997), filmed in Cuba, Mexico, and the United States, and flamboyantly cutting across national territories and mediatic genres in a way that defies easy categorization.11 His second feature-length film, Cuatro labios (Four Lips, 2006), concerns the dissolution of the Mexican pop group OV7 and presents itself as a behind-the-scenes “making-of” documentary about the staging of the group’s final goodbye tour in 2003. The film appeared in preliminary form at the Morelia festival in 2004, with a final cut released in 2006 transferred from digital video to 35mm with the sponsorship of IMCINE, and incorporating some extra footage from 2005.12 These films have in common a highly performative focus on mediatic processes through which each film both revels in and reveals its complicity with the shuffling of identities, whether personal or national, impelled by mass media representations. Both films actively interrogate the generic boundaries between documentary and fiction, just as they inhabit unstable spatial coordinates, existing more in the space of media flows than in any localizable framework of empirical reference. They insert themselves very specifically in this space of flows, which in the first case calls into question the ties between culture and territory, even as it emphasizes the uneven power relationships involved in the commodification of cultures through the mass media (and indeed of bodies since its protagonist works informally in the Cuban sex-tourism trade), and in the second, reveals the processes at work in the construction and mediation of Mexican teen pop-idols within a hyperreal logic of consumption. Both flirt overtly with documentary forms, featuring “real-life” characters with whose life stories the films acquaint us. Yet both stage the unstable mode of reference at the heart of documentary practice that was suggested above, through a specifically self-conscious focus on fictive objects and a


D E R E F E R EN C I N G T H E R E A L



foregrounding of filmic complicity with the illusions of montage. The performative dimension of these films is reinforced by a focus on lives constructed by and within mediatic flows, which include the film itself as medium. ¿Quién diablos es Juliette? follows the parallel lives (although the parallels are self-reflexively constructed within the film) between a Cuban teenager, Yuliet Ortega, living in a marginal district of La Habana, and a Mexican model who spends time in New York, Fabiola Quiroz. The director and Fabiola had first met Yuliet on a video shoot for a commissioned music video, Benny Ibarra’s hit single “Tonto corazón” (“Foolish Heart”),13 in La Habana in 1993, and the film interweaves the story of the two women’s lives, as told through interviews with friends and family as well as the protagonists, with a highly playful and self-reflexive visual style that highlights the mediation of the characters’ apparently fortuitous encounters and parallels, engaging a bewildering array of forms of visual culture. The story is largely constructed through flamboyant editing, with the characters often appearing to be in “dialogue” (literally responding to each others’ statements) across impossibly vast territorial distances and time frames. The film, in its DVD release, does not package itself as a documentary, but it does use, and subvert, many of the recognizable formats of documentary, principally the first-person interview mode. A couple of introductory sequences can be taken as representative in this regard. Beginning with an establishing shot of a section of the Havana skyline viewed from across the bay followed by an intertitle indicating the place and time (“La Habana, 1995, 1996, 1997”), the film would seem to be tying itself to a conventional mode of empirical spatio-temporal reference from the outset. After a fade to black, there appears a close-up shot of the malecón wall with the swell of a rough sea crashing over it, spattering the protective screen of the camera lens with spray. A further intertitle fades to reveal a girl standing behind the rampart. She turns to the camera as the title music fades, wipes the screen/lens clean with a cloth, and introduces herself to us with a fast and rather breathless autobiographical recitation: “Soy Yuliet. Tengo 16 años. Vivo en Ciudad Habana, en Cuba, en San Miguel del Padrón. Tengo un papá que vive en los Estados Unidos . . . Y un director acá muy bueno” (“I’m Yuliet. I’m 16. I live in Havana City, in Cuba, in San Miguel del Padrón. I’ve got a dad who lives in the United States . . . And a real good film director here”). The act of wiping the “screen” (see figure 14.1) seems to parody transparent referentiality at the very moment that the film installs it as the basis of the documentary form it is here (re-)citing, while the mention in the same breath of her “bad” (absentee) father and the “good” film director sets up a theme of confused ethical boundaries in which the film takes on a surrogate parental role in relation to its semi-orphaned subject. As more waves crash over the rampart, the screen fades to black, over which appears the title: “¿Quién diablos es Juliette?” (“Who the hell is Juliette?”). This title now cross-fades to an offended-looking Yuliet who exclaims (twice): “Mi nombre


222


Figure 14.1

223

Yuliet cleans the screen: Mock transparency in ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?

se escribe con ye, con u, con ele, con i, con e y con te” (“My name is written with a Y, a U, an L, an I, an E and a T”). At this point, the screen freezes and appears to “rewind” like a video (with reversed audio) back to the film title. Letters are rearranged on-screen to read “¿Quién diablos es Yuliet?” (“Who the hell is Yuliet?”) followed by “¿Yuliet?” in large writing. When the sequence cuts back to Yuliet, she is dodging yet more waves, claiming that the film is a crazy joke made up by the director, not by her. The film thus simultaneously installs and frustrates a documentary discourse predicated on the knowability of the other: that power-knowledge system inherited from colonial anthropology and ethnography that investigates the lives of some remote other(s) for the edification of a civilized spectatorship. From the outset, the slipperiness of the signifying systems within which that other is caught quite literally frames the film’s mode of reference. Deborah Martin, in a careful reading of the film’s intersection of categories of gender, power and performance, describes the correction of the film’s title by its protagonist-subject as “a strategy of resistance to hegemonic structures”14 whereby the European spelling of the romantic cultural icon (Juliette) is displaced by the popular, hybridized, Cuban spelling (Yuliet), and suggests that such slippage, together with many other such examples of linguistic and visual punning in the film, “discourages any spectatorial equation between visibility and truth.”15 This is clearly also the case with the film’s focus on the construction of the parallels between its two female subjects, the Cuban Yuliet and Mexican model Fabiola, through montage. After a few subsequent sequences placing Yuliet in her local surroundings and presenting some preliminary interviews with her family, the film recapitulates the story of her involvement with the Mexican film crew as the conscious telling of a




224


“story” in the third person:

Yuliet: This is the story of a Cuban girl, whose mum died and whose dad went abroad, who lives in San Miguel del Padrón, with her grandma, her brother and her aunt. And who one fine day went to Havana . . .

While Yuliet recites this story on the audio track, the visual track “reconstructs” the bus journey to Havana and the spot where Yuliet met the Mexicans as a prelude to showing a clip from the original music video. The video clip cuts to a shot of Yuliet sitting in front of a large agave plant, now returning to first-person interview mode, but with a twist: “Soy Fabiola. Nací en Morelia, Bichoacán [sic] . . . ¡Me confundí, me confundí! Está mal. ¡Corten!” (“I’m Fabiola. I was born in Morelia, Bichoacán [sic] . . . Oh no, I got mixed up! That’s wrong. Cut!”). Duly, the film cuts abruptly to a close-up of an eye shot in black-and-white. This zooms out to show Fabiola sitting on a hillside overlooking a rural Mexican landscape (all in black-andwhite) reciting her own biography while the camera pans over the countryside. The sequence continues in this vein, transitioning back and forth between the music video and equivocal biographical snippets from both women’s lives. The second film, Cuatro labios, was largely filmed during the goodbye tour of one of Mexico’s most well known pop groups, OV7. This group had begun in 1989 as a made-for-TV children’s mock-rock group known as Onda Vaselina (based on the musical Grease) when the group of children were about eleven years old (one or two members came in and out of the group subsequently). They were managed by television actress and producer Julissa Herrera, who became a kind of substitute mother for the group, some of whom spent more time with her than with their families. However, after ten years of working together and several successful albums playing to the teeny-bopper market, the seven young adults, whose fans had grown up with them, decided to make their own way under the rebranded name OV7. They rejected Julissa, with a very public spat in the fanzines, and subsequently brought out a best-selling album with pop hits “Enloquéceme” (“Send me crazy”) “Shabadaba” and “Más que amor” (“More than love”) followed by some other, less successful, albums.16 At this point, the group consisted of: Kalimba, Ari, Lidia, Óscar, Érika, Mariana, and M’balia. However, in 2003 the group announced their pending dissolution and had a very public goodbye that included a large concert in the Zócalo attended by up to 150,000 fans.17 Attracted by the huge publicity surrounding them, Marcovich became the group’s cameraman half-way through the final tour with the apparent aim of portraying the people behind the fanzine stories, although this is not in fact the principal interest in the film.


Yuliet: Ésta es la historia de una niña cubana, cuya mamá se murió y cuyo papá se fue pa’ fuera, que vive en San Miguel del Padrón, con su abuela, su hermano y su tía. Y que una vez fue a la Habana . . .


225

Nor is the music, which is almost entirely teen pop, as much of the fizzy as the musical variety. What is far more interesting is the way the film delves into the mediatic processes that have virtually constructed the lives of these youngsters and of their fans while avowing its own complicity in the creation of a fictive object with no inherent meaning, an object that, for now, I shall simply call “Shabadaba.” In typical Marcovich style, the documentary includes highly playful manipulation of narrative through montage (as in ¿Quién diablos?, anecdotes and stories are often told through the swift editing together of a myriad of different accounts across large temporal and spatial breaches) and, in particular, the use of verbal-visual analogues that are often experienced as semantic slippage and cross-contamination between the visual and verbal fields. An example of this would be the verbal/visual punning sequence discussing the significance of “las papas de Lidia” (Lidia’s paps/potatoes).18 The highly edited sequence begins with Kalimba saying that although he does not know what the film is about, he knows what it is not about: Lidia. The noun lidia also means a bullfight and, in Mexican vernacular, is often used to mean “trouble” or “nuisance.” Kalimba repeats that the film is not about Lidia/lidia, on which the camera cuts to a shot of Ari and Lidia eating jacket potatoes (papas). Lidia explains that there are places where fighting bulls are reared, toros de lidia, and that there are places where potatoes are “reared,” which would then be called papas de lidia. This is followed by snippets of interviews with various people, including the group’s security guard, regarding the meaning of las papas de lidia/Lidia, usually with a half-eaten potato in frame: “¿por qué papas de lidia? es lo que no he podido entender” (“why Lidian potatoes? That’s what I don’t get”). “Bueno, las papas de Lidia muy sabritas las tiene” (“well, she has nice juicy pap(s), does our Lidia”) and “a los hombres nos gustan las papas de lidia porque nos recuerdan a las papas de Lidia” (“we men like Lidian potatoes because they remind us of Lidia’s pap(s)”). Two shots framing Lidia’s (covered) breasts make clear the semi-sexual pun on papas as paps. On one level this is merely filmic sexual banter, but its framing as the “non-subject” of the film creates both a void and an excess of libidinal nonsense that folds out of the film’s oddly duplicated title: four lips. Indeed, “why four?” is the subject of an extended sequence of interviews with the film’s subjects, some of the answers to which are heavily insinuating: “¿no vamos a (es)coger? . . . no . . . no voy a decir” (“Aren’t we going to ch(m)ooze? No . . . I won’t say it!”). One highly self-referential sequence touches particularly closely on the “dereferential mode” to be theorized below. This sequence gives the reactions of various members of the group to questions about the style of video they want made, with replies represented by short snippets rapidly cut between different characters in distinct locations and time frames:



Ari [wearing a suit with loose collar]: Yo creo que tiene que ser un video muy natural.



Mariana [sitting on her bed]: ¿A eso lo llamas natural? . . . Kalimba [in hospital bed]: No queremos la metáfora de que se me rompió el brazo en siete pedazos, porque sería . . . ¿qué? N’daye [M’balia’s little sister, sitting on a swing]: Este video es aburridísimo. . . . Mariana [showing hair style]: ¿Así estoy natural? Óscar [at the gym in a tracksuit]: Por eso yo digo que encueres a Lidia, porque . . . esté al natural. Ari [swimming in a pool]: Hombre, ninguna de las cuatro estaría mal. Pero ninguna de las cuatro se te va a encuerar. Lidia [on a sofa]: ¿Encuerada? . . . Érika [in bikini on the beach, nodding head knowingly]: Un video natural . . . Mariana: ¿Qué es natural? Óscar: ¿Con peluche? . . . Na, peluches ne. . . . Bueno, peluches, sí . . . ¡pero no de peluche! [Shot of Mariana singing a sentimental song to a stuffed animal . . . ] N’daye [in children’s park]: Este video está mejorando . . . Mariana [pointing at a cat walking across the floor]: Eso, es natural . . . Ari [in office corridor]: ¿Por qué no dejamos que fluya este video? Óscar: ¿OV7 escrito con flores? Érika [on the beach]: No, por favor . . . Óscar: Lidia encuerada, sí. OV7 escrito con flores, ne. Ari [wearing a suit with loose collar]: I think it needs to be a very natural video. Mariana [sitting on her bed]: Would you call this natural? . . . Kalimba [in hospital bed]: We don’t want the metaphor of my arm being broken in seven bits, because that would be . . . what? N’daye [M’balia’s little sister, sitting on a swing]: This video is really boring. . . . Mariana [showing hair style]: Am I natural like this? Óscar [at the gym in a tracksuit]: That’s why I say you should show Lidia nude, so that . . . she can be more natural. Ari [swimming in a pool]: Well, any one of the four wouldn’t be bad. But you won’t get any of them to go nude. Lidia [on a sofa]: Nude? . . . Érika [in bikini on the beach, nodding head knowingly]: A natural video . . . Mariana: What is natural? Óscar: With a stuffed puss? . . . No, no pussies. . . . Well, pussies yes . . . but not stuffed! [Shot of Mariana singing a sentimental song to a stuffed animal . . . ] N’daye [in children’s park]: This video is getting better . . . Mariana [pointing at a cat walking across the floor]: That . . . is natural . . . Ari [in office corridor]: Why can’t we just let this video flow? Óscar: OV7 spelled out in flowers? Érika [on the beach]: No, please . . . Óscar: Lidia in the nude, yes. OV7 spelled in flowers, niet.


226

What precisely counts as “nature” in the injunction to make “un video muy natural,” to let it flow seamlessly even as the film indulges in a dizzying cascade of highly edited shots that defy spatial and temporal continuity? Is a stuffed


Figure 14.2

227

What counts as “nature?” OV7 spelt out in flowers floating on water

animal less or more natural than a manicured cat? If nature is the name of the pop group spelt out in flowers floating on water (or in some virtual CGI space, see figure 14.2)—shown in an animated shot directly after this sequence—then natur(al)ism, the film suggests, is hopelessly sucked into its illusory simulation, a floating referent that vanishes into artifice at the very moment that it takes on mediatic form. Dereferencing the Real The sequences discussed above are not only engaging self-referentially with the films’ mode of construction as narrative device but, more importantly, are playing on an unstable boundary between representation and simulation. In each case, the representational system of the film generates meanings not from the telling of a story, but from the slippage of the referent beneath that metonymic chain of signifiers that we usually call editing or montage. In ¿Quién diablos?, the catachresis by which Yuliet’s name has been Europeanized in the film’s title, only to be painstakingly corrected by its subject, signals from the outset a slippage that cannot be separated from the wielding of representation as a form of power. Moreover, unlike referential documentary modes operating under a prime directive that mandates the separation of subject and the representational apparatus, ¿Quién diablos? exposes its subjects as always already subject to and inscribed within unequal regimes of representation. The story of Yuliet is the story of her mediatization, constructed as double or twin of the Mexican Fabiola initially through the Benny Ibarra music video, and now through a film that will engineer a re-encounter with her father who had left Cuba when she was little, get her a visa, and set her up with a Mexican modeling agency after having given her enough feminist awareness—by taking her to see Salma Hayek in El callejón de los milagros (Midaq Alley)19 —so that she can decide whether or not to insert herself within the representational systems of the fashion industry.





Needless to say, this blatant interventionism in the girl’s life breaks most of the ethical, as well as aesthetic, boundaries usually drawn within documentary filmmaking; or, to put it another way, the film does not disavow the interventionism that is inherent in the unequal power relationships at the heart of ethnographic-derived documentary. In Cuatro labios, not only is the camera so close to its subjects that it touches their noses at several points in the film, but as in the sequences referred to above, the film, in thematizing its subjects’ effervescence, largely ends up being about the non-sense, which is to say the intentional and unintentional veiling of meaning (“Shabadaba”), which both its mediatized characters and its narrative processes keep generating. What does it mean that the subject of the film is not so much the lives of its characters as their speculations on a title, “cuatro labios” (“four lips”) whose meaning is slippery, vaguely sexual, an empty hole or void, a supplemental doubling of the folds needed to produce speech, both lack and slippery doubleness? Just as in ¿Quién diablos?, several of the characters hint that their words, the repeated puns and visual/verbal games, are not their own, but scripted for them (“Yo tampoco lo entendí, él me dijo que lo dijera,” “I didn’t get it either—he told me to say it”), while at other times they use the power of metaphor as the equivocal process by which meaning is generated through a fundamental masking: “Como tiene que contar una historia que no se puede contar, entonces utilizo metáforas . . . y chistes” (“Since you have to tell a story which can’t be told, I’m using metaphors . . . and jokes”) says Mariana toward the end of the film. The film’s final referent, “una historia que no se puede contar” (“a story which can’t be told”) is doubly veiled as a hidden truth and as an artifact of the film’s chain of signification. This suspension of a floating referent, its tendency to slip away the moment that it gets tied to “real life” or grounded in “nature,” is the process that I wish to encapsulate through my use of the term “dereferencing.” This word does not yet appear in mainstream lexicography, although it is well known in the field of computer programming, a field that codifies semantic processes not in terms of signification but in terms of the translation (“processing”) of information from one semantic field to another. In various contemporary programming languages (known as “object-oriented” languages), “to dereference” is the action of finding the specific semantic that is referenced by an identifier, to access the data structure (which may be another reference) to which your reference points. If I were to dereference an identifier for a specific archive, I would need to access a list of all the items available in that archive. If I were to dereference one of those list items (each of which is itself an identifier), I would in turn need to access all the data contained in the archived object. A simple analogy for this might be the process of retrieving the information in a book referenced in a library catalogue. The catalogue entry, or electronic record, does not contain the information in the book, but is a pointer that identifies the book in various ways: by subject classification, by author’s name, by size (perhaps), and by physical location in the library. Physically fetching the book from the shelves is one


228


229

way of dereferencing the catalogue record. On accessing the book, however, I will probably realize that the “real” object (the book) is itself a data structure containing further identifiers. I may choose to dereference a subset of those identifiers, say, a few index entries at the back of the book, which will lead me to more data sets, or I may decide to borrow the book. This last action is itself a codified procedure that creates a new pointer (to the location of the book outside the archive) in the associated catalogue record. In low-level, or what we might call deictic, computing languages, a reference is in fact synonymous with a pointer—although it is still important to note that such deixis points not to a thing, but to an address in memory. In object-oriented languages, however, references are meta-deictic, which is to say that they are “pointers of pointers of referred data,”20 much like our library catalogue. In various languages, the dereferencing operation is written as – >[n].21 An attempt to dereference “the Real” using these languages would be written Real– >[0], meaning “access the zero-indexed item in the object for which the Real is a reference.” However, since the underlying data structure of “the Real” (as reference) is unpredictably modified in real time, any such attempt is highly likely to discover that “the Real” is little more than a “dangling pointer,” which is to say a reference that points to an object that has arbitrarily been deallocated in memory.22 It is as if, instead of borrowing the book from the library, I were to purloin it (pace Dupin), leaving an orphaned entry somewhere in the Catalogue of Catalogues. 23 Obviously, my use of the dereferencing analogy is somewhat more metaphorical than its programmatic usage, although thinking through that usage helps us to step outside of the dominant (linguistic) referential paradigm as we approach the impending convergence between (tele)visual and digital information technologies. It is important to note that in this schema, the real is not a field of objects; the real is no more and no less than a complex set of meta-deictic pointers. It should also be clear that dereferencing is not the same as making reference to something, nor is it an act of decoding in any simple sense. I am particularly interested in the ambiguous suspension of reference in the very act of fixing the data it represents, which this term suggests at least in this metaphorical usage. It is in this sense that I wish to talk of documentary as a perhaps impossible attempt to dereference the real, an operation that, at some level, will always hit a paradox. Much like Borges’ Aleph, any such attempt to dereference the real, even by an Argentine Dante, will reveal only a dangling pointer, or else run into the infinite loop of a recursive data structure, one that contains itself.24 I can perhaps make the point more clearly by referring to a couple of sequences from ¿Quién diablos? in which the usually distinct layers of documentary reference are confounded. The film here dereferences the real as an inevitable effect of representation, which is a way of saying that it reveals the referencing systems and processes that allow certain visual signifiers in the film to count as real or, conversely, as fake. In a voiceover, Fabiola describes how the crew had to do a take of her walking through a snow-covered park





in New York; but, she says, since it has not snowed for two weeks (here the voiceover cuts to Fabiola addressing the camera directly), they are trying to use artificial snow to provide the right ambience. The camera swings round to reveal a large snow-covered scene, while Fabiola points to someone collecting snow for a snowball and shouts out “Eh, eh, ponle ahí junto al arbolito . . . El arbolito que ya no tiene” (“Hey, you, put some next to the little tree . . . The tree hasn’t got any”). Cut to Cuba, and Yuliet proclaiming that they were going to shoot a scene with her walking sadly along the beach (shot of her running with a jaunty smile against the sea), but that unfortunately the sea was too far away, so they had to use artificial water. The camera swings round to show two men on the shoreline trying to splash water from the sea into some rock pools with their hands: “Estos mexicanos no saben hacer na’a. ¡Echen má’ agua ahí, que el sol se va!” (“These Mexicans can’t do nuffin right. ‘Urry up and put some more water there, ‘cos the light’s going!”) This skit on the (impossible) construction of nature (in documentary, or in film more broadly)—on film as the production of layered simulacra—, is complemented by the subsequent interview, in New York, with the Italian painter Francisco Clemente in his studio (following on directly from the above): Well, in a city like New York, you have all these people who are, like, an inch away from the real thing, with the imagination to . . . [phone rings loudly, Clemente smiles sheepishly and goes over to turn it off; brief shot of sound boom] enough imagination to dream, but not enough to . . . to make the dream happen.

Then, in a moment that could serve as a canonical visual icon for the dereferencing process at work in this film, he holds up his larger-than-life painting of Fabiola next to the “real model” who, accordingly, strikes a pose for


230

Figure 14.3 Visual dereferencing: Fabiola “an inch away from the real thing” in ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?


231

the camera (see figure 14.3). Cut to a prolonged, uncomfortable close-up of Fabiola crying, heavily lit from above to accentuate her features in similar vein to the semi-expressionist painting. I posit that the “inch,” which according to Francisco Clemente separates New Yorkers from “the real thing,” is the dereferential gap or fissure that both of these films are exploring. The “real thing,” as it is dereferenced, will always slip beneath the medium, whether a telephone, a painting or a screen, and the act of filming the real, the attempt to dereference it, renders a set of meta-deictic pointers to a mediatic surface, whether in human or prosthetic memory. Conclusion: Documentary Mediascapes The notion of documentary mediascapes is aimed at expanding precisely the representational paradoxes at work in the documentary process of dereferencing where the referent is itself a mediation, since it is clear that both of these films are generated in a composite space of media flows. Colombian communications theorist Jesús Martín-Barbero sums up well some of the complicities at work here: los medios masivos, cooptados por la televisión, se han convertido en poderosos agentes de una cultura-mundo que se configura hoy de la manera más explícita en la percepción de los jóvenes, y en la emergencia de culturas sin memoria territorial, ligadas a la expansión del mercado de la televisión, del disco o del vídeo. . . . Esas nuevas sensibilidades conectan con los movimientos de la globalización tecnológica que están disminuyendo la importancia de lo territorial y de los referentes tradicionales de identidad. 25 The mass media, co-opted by television, have become powerful agents of a global culture which is taking shape today most explicitly in the sensory world of young people, and in the emergence of cultures without territorial memory, linked to the expansion of audiovisual markets. . . . This new sensorium is linked to the spread of technological globalization which is reducing the importance of territory and of traditional identitarian frames of reference.

Although ¿Quién diablos? purports to be about the parallel lives of Yuliet and Fabiola, it is also a film about the construction/invention of those cultural parallels within the artificial space of contemporary televisual culture. That is to say that the film foregrounds, self-reflexively, the suturing of personal, local or national identities to the “culturas sin memoria territorial” (“cultures without territorial memory”) mentioned by Martín-Barbero. It does so by tying the construction of these cultural parallels to the very editing processes fundamental to the illusion of narrative continuity in film. Combined with insistent self-reflexivity in both films, and comment by the characters on the process of filming and its complicity with the packaging of their lives for consumption, these films document the processes by which new transcultural hybridities emerge, in Anthony Giddens’ terms, as reflexive constructs within “radicalized modernity.”26





Self-referentiality in film can of course have many different meanings, from a narrow fetishization of the processes and vagaries of film production, including obsession with celebrity personalities and their relationships, to meditation on the ethics of filmic representation, the social role of visual culture, or, as in these films, the integrative or disintegrative role that the audiovisual industries play in mediating the individual’s relationship to imagined televisual/transnational/globalized communities. Giddens argues that such reflexivity is in fact constitutive of modern life, of the way in which knowledge about life is constructed reflexively, particularly through the media, for modern subjects, “the emergence of internally referential systems of knowledge and power.”27 But what happens when, as reflected in Cuatro labios, the internal referentiality of the system becomes its predominant characteristic, a closed circuit in which the media reflexively generate structures of identity and belonging wholly dedicated to the social expansion of the media’s field of reference? One answer is “Reality” television and Big Brother (the logo of which appears at several points in the film), in which the fundamental referent is the reflexivity of the medium, its ability to create simulacra of identity and belonging and just as quickly dissolve them. In this context, what is dereferenced in the prototype fictive object “Shabadaba” is no more and no less than the referentiality of the mediatic system itself: Óscar: Dos meses después de que se terminó el grupo, tenemos una junta para decidir qué significa “Shabadaba.” [ . . . Closes sliding doors in front of the camera] ¿Qué significa “Shabadaba”? [The song strikes up on the audio track. Hand-held camera follows the “re-union” of various members of the group.] Ari: Vamos a averiguar qué dice “Shabadabada.” [Refrain: “Shabadabada, Shabadabada, en el centro del planeta . . .”] Lidia: “Shabadabada” no significa nada. Óscar: “Shabadaba” no significa nada. Nada . . . Nada. Óscar: Two months after the group split-up, we’re holding a meeting to decide the meaning of “Shabadaba.” [Closes sliding doors in front of the camera] What does “Shabadaba” mean? [The song strikes up on the audio track. Hand-held camera follows the “re-union” of various members of the group.] Ari: We’re going to find out what “Shabadabada” means. [Refrain: “Shabadabada, Shabadabada, in the center of the planet . . .”] Lidia: “Shabadabada” doesn’t mean anything. Óscar: “Shabadaba” doesn’t mean anything. Nothing . . . Nothing.


232

Both of these films, then, could be said to be explorations of the meaning of “Shabadaba,” which is to say an exploration of the slippage of reference beneath the reflexively constructed medium, the disembedding of signifiers, the loosening of the anchors that tie structures of meaning to identities and places. In their focus on the referencing and dereferencing processes at work in documentary, they both situate themselves playfully in the gap between the illusion of immediacy, the actual or here-and-now


233

that haunts documentary, and actuar (acting), the primacy of performance, the artificial construction of reality effects. Enigmatically throughout ¿Quién diablos? the protagonist is filmed trying to say “actuar,” but almost always pronouncing it (with her Cuban accent) as “actual.” One of the characters, Don Pepe, whose role seems to be to create narrative nonsequitors throughout the film, says to her “no, actual es ahora. Yo digo actuar de exposición” (“no, actual means the here and now. I’m saying actorial, to do with performance”). The slippage of the signifier, the slippage between actual and actuar, or the superfluity of the documentary that carries on compulsively filming “empty” spaces even after everyone has left to go and make soaps in Miami (as the final sequence of Cuatro labios implies), suggest that the real is left as little more than a dangling pointer to an empty memory trace. We might ask ourselves whether documentary can any longer appeal to a process of documentation, or whether the logic of its dereferencing processes must always now hesitate over referentiality, sending it through the mass-media processing of the real, or else locating the real as that which has been suspended between an empty here and an absent elsewhere. Notes 1. I shall use the term “documentary film form,” rather than “genre” throughout this piece, since my argument hinges on the formal (as opposed to empirical) nature of these generic distinctions. 2. Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, 35. The tension is already present in the term “creative treatment of actuality,” which Grierson introduced precisely to nuance the presentation of the actual and emphasize the need for creativity in its depiction. 3. Culbert and Suid, “War and the Military in Film.” 4. “Admits He’s a ‘Movie’ Star,” January 8, 1914. 5. Ibid., 2. The contract is, ironically, shrouded in legend, since only an unsigned copy of what may have been a preliminary contract has been found, and this does not have any clauses concerning re-enactments or the timing of battles and does not mention the payment of $25,000 (Rocha, “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (Review),” 145). See also Reyes, Cine y sociedad en México, 1896–1930. 6. E.g., in the director’s insistence that the Inuit use spears in their filmed hunts rather than their usual guns and the construction of a fake, idealized family unit. For an interesting discussion of the film’s role in legitimating anthropological knowledge as a “regime of truth,” see Rony, “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography,” 99–128. 7. The original four modes (expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive) are set out in Nichols, Representing Reality, 32–33. The emergence of the performative mode, a special case of the reflexive mode, is discussed in his Blurred Boundaries. Nichols also added a “poetic mode” in Introduction to Documentary, covering modernist and avant-garde documentary. 8. Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, 97. 9. Ibid., 97–98.





10. I.e., the Butler-inf luenced reading of the performative mode given by Bruzzi, “The Performative Documentary,” 153–180, whereby it is characterized either by its focus on performative subjects (e.g., Jennie Livingstone’s 1990 documentary Paris is Burning) or by the intrusive presence of the filmmaker à la Michael Moore. This arguably misreads the meaning of performance in Butler’s Gender Trouble, since for Butler identity is constitutively performative and compelled within modern power/knowledge systems. 11. Firobri, “0V7 ahora con un final inesperado.” 12. Ibid. 13. A new video based on a live-concert performance of the song (with different instrumentation) was released on the 2006 music-DVD Estoy (see “Benny Ibarra,” Wikipedia). 14. Martin, “Spectatorship, Performance, Resistance,” 348. 15. Ibid., 342. 16. Rivera, “Historia OV7.” 17. Adonis, “OV7 se despidió en el zócalo capitalino.” The film shows shots of the crowd and informs us, via a subtitle, that the number was 137,000. 18. The word “paps” means breasts/nipples, probably from Latin papilla. Papa (literally potato) is also the Spanish equivalent of “pap,” i.e., mashed-up infant food. Papas was also used (as was the English “paps”) to name twin peaks that are reminiscent of a pair of breasts. 19. This is a landmark Mexican urban film of 1995, starring a relatively unknown Salma Hayak in the role of Alma, directed by Jorge Fons and based on the novel Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz. Marcovich was the film’s cinematographer and clips from the film are shown in ¿Quién diablos? 20. “Reference (Computer Science),” Wikipedia. 21. Typically, those based on C, such as C++ and Perl. Perl is a particularly interesting example, since the language’s designer, Larry Walls, was trained as a linguist and its design is informed by linguistic principles (“Perl,” Wikipedia). 22. This situation throws a “null pointer exception,” with unpredictable consequences (“Dangling Pointer,” Wikipedia). 23. For an overview of the role played by Poe’s story of the “Purloined Letter” (recovered by amateur detective Dupin) in psychoanalytic and post–structuralist debates on the nature of signification, see Muller and Richardson, The Purloined Poe. 24. “[V]i en el Aleph la tierra, y en la tierra otra vez el Aleph y en el Aleph la tierra” (“I saw in the Aleph the Earth, and in the Earth once more the Aleph, and in the Aleph the Earth”). Borges, “El Aleph,” 625. The ironic Argentine Dante is the mediocre poet Carlos Argentino Daneri who attempts to transcribe the infinite Aleph in this story. 25. Martín-Barbero and Rey, Los ejercicios del ver, 31–32. 26. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 150. 27. Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 144.


234

Works Cited “Admits He’s a ‘Movie’ Star; Villa Delays Ojinaga Attack for Operators’ Arrival.” The New York Times, January 8, 1914.


235

Adonis. “OV7 se despidio en el zócalo capitalino.” Agencia de noticias sobre diversidad sexual, June 16, 2003. http://www.anodis.com/nota/1428.asp. Accessed February 21, 2008. “Benny Ibarra.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, December 24, 2007. http://en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Ibarra. Borges, Jorge Luis. “El Aleph.” In Obras completas, 617–627. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge, 2000. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge, 1990. Culbert, David and Lawrence Suid. “War and the Military in Film.” In The Oxford Companion to American Military History, edited by John Whiteclay Chambers II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Oxford Reference Online. www.oxfordreference.com. “Dangling Pointer.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, February 4, 2008. http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dangling_pointer. Accessed February 4, 2008. Firobri. “0V7 ahora con un final inesperado.” La crónica de hoy, February 4, 2006, sec. Culturas. http://www.cronica.com.mx/nota.php?id_nota=224359. Accessed October 18, 2007. Giddens, Anthony. The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. ———. Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity, 1991. Grierson, John. Grierson on Documentary. Abridged edition. London: Faber, 1979. Marcovich, Carlos. Cuatro labios. El Error de Diciembre and IMCINE, 2006. ———. ¿Quién diablos es Juliette? El Error de Diciembre, Alameda Films, Kino International, 1997. ———. Tonto corazón. México: Warner Music, 1993. Martin, Deborah. “Spectatorship, Performance, Resistance: Carlos Marcovich’s ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies: Travesia 15 no. 3 (December 2006): 341–353. Martín-Barbero, Jesús, and Germán Rey. Los ejercicios del ver. Barcelona: Gedisa, 1999. Muller, John P. and William J. Richardson, eds. The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. ———. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. ———. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991. “Perl.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, February 24, 2008. http://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Perl. Accessed February 24, 2008. “Reference (Computer Science).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia, February 20, 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reference_(computer_science). Accessed February 20, 2008. Reyes, Aurelio de los. Cine y sociedad en México, 1896–1930. Mexico: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, 1993. Robledo Rivera, Katrina. “Historia OV7.” En directo con OV7, 2003. http:// endirectoconov7.iespana.es/paginahistoriaov7.htm. Accessed February 21, 2008.




236



Rocha, Gregorio. “And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself (Review),” The Moving Image 6 no. 1 (2006): 142–145. Rony, Fatimah Tobing. “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North.” In The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle, 300. London and Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996.


Documenting Urban Fictions in Contemporary Argentine Film: Notes on Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense James Cisneros

B

uenos Aires holds a privileged place in contemporary Argentine film. Its protagonists roam the city streets under the sign of discovery or survival, evoking the capital’s monumental past and the smooth spaces of a new global presence. These cityscapes are constitutive of narrative meaning, chronotopes that open sites where fortunes change and paths intersect, making accessible a city whose recent transformations have been sudden and remain indecipherable. The characters decode the city as they move across it, interpreting its signs as they search or wander, translating the urban landscape that conditions their possible movements and encounters. Films as different as Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense (2002), Alejandro Agresti’s Buenos Aires viceversa (1996) and Daniel Burak’s Bar “El Chino” (2003) open historic and affective trajectories through urban space, attempting to figure out the city, to figure the city, to find a figure that will make Buenos Aires legible after the multiple physical and civic changes arising with neo-liberalism. The city’s legibility or “figurability,” as Hubert Damisch calls it,1 has been a persistent question since its inhabitants lost the sense of its scale and limits with the industrial urbanization of the mid-nineteenth century. More recently, the problem of figuring urban space has arisen with assertions that we can no longer project “an image of the city,”2 doubts as to the possibility to finding any unitary definition of multicultural megacities such as Buenos Aires or Mexico City,3 and analyses of global city functions whose virtual networks remain unassimilated to local urban space.4 Indeed, it surfaces whenever political forces transform the city’s physical or imaginary dimensions, altering the system of signs that has always been a constitutive part of the polis. The figure of the city serves as an index of political discourse, grounding it with a referential cartography that persists despite urban erasures and rewritings, a memory map with which we orient ourselves in times of historical change.


Chapter 15


JA MES CISNEROS

Since the 1990s, changes to Buenos Aires have destabilized the very “grounding” of urban memory, a transformation best documented by figures that privilege the superficial space of representation over the stable referential ground. Contemporary urbanists such as Adrián Gorelik and Zaida Muxí therefore focus on the simulacrum that simultaneously emerges in the political sphere, the urban fabric, and the media landscape: on the “similcity” of enclave communities that have withdrawn from the urban tissue of public space, tradition, and memory. In response to these trends in the Argentine capital and other global cities, urbanists and cultural theorists such as David Harvey, Andreas Huyssen and others have used the palimpsest to recover memories of past urban practices whose imprints remain legible after accelerated change. Each of these two figures of superficial space—the simulacrum and the palimpsest—posits that representation precedes or otherwise overdetermines the model to which it refers, hence questioning the idea of “ground” that, in both architecture and philosophy, has long secured referential stability. If the idea of ground has in fact been the basis for a series of oppositions that have guided thought in these and related disciplines, as John Rajchman argues, then circumventing it would allow us to think of the city’s history as an “accumulation of superimposed layers” where “a kind of fiction” intervenes into the workings of its “partially visible memory.”5 If both the simulacrum and the palimpsest evade oppositions of sign and referent, they diverge sharply in how to conceive of urban memory. Indeed, placing these figures into dialogue opens a critical dimension within the “ungrounded” conflicts of representation that invites us to consider how several contemporary Argentine films6 respond to the simulacrum’s smooth space and seamless circuitry with the palimpsest’s superimposed layers of memory. Of interest here are those films that use a narrative, generic and formal layering to point out the city’s partially visible traces and to thus resist the hypervisible glare of the ubiquitous media. We will focus in particular on the strategy of combining conventional traits of documentary and fiction film, stratifying their gazes to problematize the image’s referential value. A reading of Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense will allow us, in closing, to analyze this value in terms of the surface quality that the film medium—the film as film, as a superficial pellicle—shares with our two privileged figures. Simulacra of Public Space


238

Efforts to figure Buenos Aires during the 1990s confront the institutional crisis of a political discourse that has become increasingly distanced from its traditional topos: Menem’s forgotten campaign promises, his stunning reversal on the Peronist view of the State’s role in assuring social justice, the amnesty to military leaders responsible for the desaparecidos (the disappeared), the attempt to efface the Escuela de la Mecánica Armada (the School of Naval Mechanics, known as ESMA) and other reminders of State terror; on the economic front, the overture to foreign investment, the accelerated pace of privatization and deregulation, the importation of global visual culture; and 10.1057/9780230622159 - Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America, Edited by Miriam Haddu and Joanna Page

239

later, the corruption scandals and elaborate cover-ups, dramatic violence and notoriously inefficient police inquiries. Through the 1990s the style of governance would slowly dissociate discourse from action while filling the gaps with what Juan E. Corradi terms, not without irony, the “ribald vaudeville” of South America’s “first postmodern president” and the “theatre” of a “colourful one-man show.”7 Similarly, Beatriz Sarlo ties Menem’s “aesthetics of domination” to “the rise of television as a political medium” and a theatre of power with “urban set pieces” where the president makes public appearances flanked by military brass and international dignitaries. For Sarlo, audiovisual media have imposed a “political simulacrum” over the culture of political debate, instilling a perpetual present “built on top of oblivion.”8 If the spectacle has irreversibly transformed political argumentation into its mediated simulation, it also has altered the physical and symbolic dimensions of the city, long an ideologeme of the political. New laws of State reform, deregulation and privatization have revived a flagging construction industry with frenzied activity that has fragmented the urban landscape into areas of concentrated wealth and areas of uncharted poverty.9 Local and foreign direct investment in downtown and suburban residential enclaves, shopping centers, smart buildings, and luxury hotels—all linked by a highway network begun during the last military dictatorship and extended in the 1990s—has created an “archipelago” of prosperous nodal points in the city’s circuitry.10 In a new autarchy, walled communities with private security, services, and shopping areas have withdrawn from the urban fabric into downtown torres-country, some of which enclose an entire city block, or suburban islands such as Nordelta, while large-scale projects such as Puerto Madero and the Tren de la Costa have furthered the (semi-)privatization of urban space. As Gorelik points out, these “dispositivos enclaustrados” (“cloistered apparatuses”) express social polarization, “activando la decadencia de las redes públicas de la ciudad” (“activating the decadence of the city’s urban networks”) and creating deep striations in urban culture.11 The unheralded consequence of these islands of prosperity is the “sea”: the decay of extensive inner urban stretches and growing villas miseria on the city outskirts. The cultural upshot of these changes is a simulacrum of public space. In Puerto Madero and especially Palermo, where the enclave imaginary is strongest, Gorelik finds that urban culture compensates for the fragmentation with an exaggerated insistence on the “quality of living” offered by new restaurants and bars, fashion and furniture stores, design studios, architectural firms. This superficial postcard confirms the replacement of traditional urban values with an “espectro de espacio público” (“spectre of public space”) and “un simulacro de alta cualidad urbana” (“a simulacrum of high quality urban living”) that enhances the city’s edge in attracting fresh foreign investment. At the very moment of its disappearance, the richness of city life resurfaces in a “phantom space” that facilitates the continued privatized transformation of the city’s territorial market.12 This simulacrum of public space derives primarily from the social polarization of the urban habitat and its past; in Gorelik’s words, the neoliberal


U R B A N F I C T I O N S I N A R G EN T I N E F I L M


JA MES CISNEROS

city “privatiza la memoria y el futuro” (“privatizes memory and the future”).13 In a close reading of the planning and marketing stages of residential enclaves, Zaida Muxí shows how they homogenize the local social imaginary with an urban ideal modelled on New England towns or Disney’s Celebration. Analyzing the advertisement for one torre-country that airbrushes over the adjacent ESMA, a contentious site in the struggle over the memory of State terrorism, she argues that this imaginary isolates the barrio cerrado (gated community) from the history and memory of the urban fabric.14 The resulting urban landscape is a “simil-city” that represents situations or symbols of “algo que puede imaginarse que fue, que en la memoria colectiva se representa como imágenes de la ciudad” (“something that could be imagined as having been, and that in collective memory represents images of the city”).15 In the neoliberal urban imaginary, these images are cleansed of social and historical forms of alterity and their potential for physical and ideological conflict. To explain the transformation of memory into nostalgia, Muxí cites the following phrase from Jean Baudrillard: “When the real is no longer the real, nostalgia assumes its full meaning . . . There is an escalation of the true, of the lived experience; a resurrection of the figurative where the object and substance have disappeared.”16 This nostalgia—including the nostalgia for something that never was—is a kind of referential anxiety that derives from the loss of an order of signification and the very ground upon which it stood. In the age of simulation, Baudrillard explains, the code cannibalizes the real and annuls the referent’s contradistinction to the reference.17 The code passes through media that eclipse the image’s difference from the model, media whose logic of reproducibility and indeterminacy signals the exhaustion of such polar oppositions. Referential depth, which posits an original or “natural” reference behind the sign, a ground, gives way to the “flatness” of exterior surfaces that phase indistinctively into one another like a Moebius strip, a continuous surface whose circuit overrides differences of inside and outside, above and below. The proliferation of electronic media contributes to this “political economy of the sign,” where all that remains is “nostalgia” and “the phantasmal parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials.”18 In brief, urban memory in Buenos Aires has succumbed to a circuit of simulation that links the political sphere to audiovisual media and the concrete cityscape. Where the crisis of referentiality makes political opposition a simulation19 or, as Sarlo argues in the case of Menem, an imposition of opinion polls and marketing over the culture of political debate, public space has become a nostalgic phantom zone relating to private space in a Moebius circuit: a continuous feed where public space grows out of private businesses that sell “life quality” to enhance competitiveness for further private investment. Yet if the media are implicated in the public sphere’s degradation, certain examples of contemporary film have arguably succeeded in using them to forge a public critique. In the context of this referential anxiety, several recent films take from both fiction and documentary traditions, using a critical


240


241

mixture of generic conventions as the structuring principle for a layered narrative where urban space emerges only as and through images. An urban narrative unfolds around the filmmaking act, showing the camera’s procedures of reproduction as it records images of the city. In Agresti’s Buenos Aires viceversa, for instance, an invented narrative unfolds in the apartment of an elderly couple that hires a young woman to shoot documentary footage of the city streets, which they watch from the safety of their home, the fictional story’s hermetic space. Burak’s Bar “El Chino” interweaves the invented love affair of two filmmakers with images of a documentary they are making about a historic tango bar in Buenos Aires, combining an inner fictional space where the love relationship develops, documentary interviews, news footage of the popular protests of December 2001, and excerpts from a film one of the characters is making: a promotional video for a fictional Spanish company investing in Argentina’s highway infrastructure. These films selfconsciously mix generic conventions in their construction of urban space, “reflexively” signaling the layering of images that determines its historic or physical distance and defines its political or affective horizon. This operation problematizes the referential value of the image in the “simil-city.” By convention, we understand fiction film to use actors to interpret an invented story, while documentary film uses images taken from daily life and the archives to recount a series of events that are supposed to have occurred. Underlying this distinction is an epistemological premise concerning the image’s relation to its referent. Fiction tells stories without the necessary pretence of any concrete historical reference, while documentary derives legitimacy from its proximity to the source, using contemporaneous footage, revisiting the site where the events transpired, or interviewing eyewitnesses who were present. Mixing the two traditions confuses their respective gazes, showing a constructive manipulation that distances documentary from the sources legitimating it and introducing historical references that breach fiction’s closed space. In the dialogue of generic forms, urban space takes shape in a layering of images that either “document” or “dramatize” an event; as each layer frames the other, these multiple and superimposed pellicles shroud any ultimate referent that may lie beyond them. These films document urban fictions through a superposition of generic conventions, indicating that the ground—of reference, of the city—has become a network of images and surfaces.



Urban Palimpsests and Memory The figure of the urban palimpsest has surfaced in several recent theoretical studies of urban culture, analyses of neoliberalism’s uneven geographical development, and theories on film’s relation to urban space. A figure of superficial memory, a surface that retains traces despite repeated erasures, the palimpsest is perhaps the most apposite theoretical response to the simulacrum’s amnesia. Its surface of memory resists superficial forgetting.


JA MES CISNEROS

The palimpsest serves as a theoretical recourse for thinking the invisible urban remains after new urban construction. David Harvey shows how each cycle of capitalist accumulation includes a “spatial fix” that effaces formerly existing urban fabrics of historically accrued spatial practices. Using the palimpsest for this long historical view, Harvey sees the city as “distinctive layers accumulated at different phases in the hurly burly of chaotic urban growth,” adding that this understanding of the past, often invisible, is “important precisely because it is a locus of collective memory, of political identity, and of powerful symbolic meanings at the same time as it constitutes a bundle of resources constituting possibilities as well as barriers in the built environment for creative social change.”20 If the cultural shifts of globalization, the latest capitalist cycle to seek a spatial fix, 21 have given new urgency to saving local memories, they have also contributed to a memory discourse that is global in scope. Andreas Huyssen argues that certain affinities align distinct national efforts to protect memory, despite the different ways they are integrated into local political contexts and traditions. Focusing on cities, “palimpsests of history,” he studies how the dialogue between a global memory discourse and national specificities echoes in each local site’s visible heritage with its effaced pasts. Turning to Buenos Aires, Huyssen uses the palimpsest to interpret the original plans for the “Memory Park” dedicated to the disappeared of the last military dictatorship. Located along the Río de la Plata a short distance from the ESMA— the contested memory site that Muxí shows to be effaced from the enclave imaginary—the park includes a wall engraved with the desaparecidos’ names that visitors follow as they move toward the river. The park’s topography and aesthetics encode a political dimension in a form of reading appropriate to the desaparecidos’ invisibility: “It is a space for reading—reading the names on the walls and reading the past. Only when a visitor approaches the river will legibility end while the sense of disappearance takes over.”22 As the figure of the palimpsest suggests, this dialogue of legibility and disappearance is a layering, a superposition of two mutually constitutive visual codes that inform one another within an order of (in)visibility. If reading always depends on the ability to see, here the limits of legibility are defined by an effacement that informs the material history of what is read: the page’s surface, continuously erased by the amnesia of an emergent visual culture. A similar questioning informs a recent film that takes memory as its explicit object, Albertina Carri’s Los rubios (The Blonds, 2003), where we find a combination of documentary and fictional reading codes. The filmmaker documents her search for traces of her parents, who disappeared before she was of age to shape strong memories of her own, in a quest that soon becomes confused with a meditation on memory’s vagaries and lacunae: the title comes from a witness who erroneously remembers the parents and children as the blond family, “los rubios.” Carri acknowledges the inescapable referential distance by fictionalizing the documentary process, hiring an actress, Analía Couceyro, to play the part of Carri herself as she follows clues from the city to a small country town. In a close analysis, Gabriela Nouzeilles notes that the


242


243

“the passage between the fictional and non-fictional Albertinas” becomes hazy, “given the frequent slipping from one level into another.”23 With these multiple layers, the object of the memory quest gets lost in “the veils of representation” through a dual operation that contests the simulacrum from the same surface of representation instead of trying to accede to some unsullied referential ground that lies beneath it. Questioning the source’s purity, acknowledging the impossibility of returning to some pristine reference, of uncovering some unaltered ground, this practice invites us to consider defining memory as a fiction. Not fiction in the sense of a falsehood designed to hoodwink or embellish, opposing a reality it attempts to replace, but rather fiction as a kind of making, shaping, putting together. Jacques Rancière reminds us that the word “fiction” originally comes from fingere, which does not primarily mean to feign, but to forge, to assemble a series of malleable exterior elements.24 Fiction, for Rancière, is a formal procedure that combines a narrative to elements arising from the apparatus’ mechanical recording: a ray of light, a sudden camera movement, a slow dolly shot, an unexpected gesture, the grain of a voice, everything referring to what he calls le sensible, meaning both that which is intelligible and that which relates to sense perception, to aesthetic in its etymological sense. An example of this forging is the combination of documentary-style images, with their distinctive lighting and sound, and an acted narrative, with its hermetic space and distant gaze. Through a formal structure that underlines its own mediation, this practice turns away from the notion of fiction as false or untrue, and emphasizes instead the truth content of the peculiar social narratives it constructs. This forging emerges only through the narrative’s interface with the medium’s aesthetic specificity, which is, in the case at hand, pivotal to the films’ critique of the simulacrum. As such, it oversteps an explicit thematic focus on the question of memory, emerging in the layering of conventional procedures from documentary and fiction film. It also leads back to the question of how to figure the city, for the word “figure” also derives from fingere, and the figure of the city must also be forged, put together, assembled from the heterogeneous elements that constitute it. The figure of the palimpsest, in particular, seems to hold a further affinity to film’s modalities of reproduction. Jean-Louis Comolli, for whom “the city is a palimpsest,” argues that film’s constant shifts between on- and off-screen spaces allow us to think the relations of (in)visibility: “A mix of presence and absence, of opened and closed, of apparent and hidden. Chinese boxes, double bottoms, stratifications—fictions. All that ambiguity lies at the heart of the city, and provides it with its energy.”25 In a reading of urban memory, John Rajchman also finds a kind of fiction that precedes narrative continuities, emerging where “superpositions and odd connections among different strata of time can be established much as in cinema montage,” in a “time out of joint” which is “the time of the city and nothing else.”26 Now, the particularity of a certain strain of contemporary Argentine cinema is to use this forging at a formal level and, moreover, to thematize this forging within its master narratives, whose sense pivots on a second-degree




JA MES CISNEROS

fiction that comments on the real consequence of social deceptions. This narrative layering shows a fiction being put together or assembled through a formal procedure that directs our attention to the process of mediation. As we have seen, this stratification is an operative element in several films, from Los rubios, which deals explicitly with the memory question, to the affective horizon in Buenos Aires viceversa and the political commentary in Bar “El Chino.” Other examples include Buena Vida Delivery (Leonardo di Cesare, 2004), where what at first seems to be an idyllic love relation is later shown to be a scheme by which the reluctant Pato convinces enamored men to shelter her homeless family, and Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, Fabián Bielinsky, 2000), where the final scene reveals the failed sting operation to be the veil for a second, successful scam. In Pablo Trapero’s El bonaerense, an urban palimpsest emerges when the layering of documentary and fiction narratives converges with a layering in the formal dimension. As the use of the palimpsest, a writerly trope, for a study of film should account for the medium’s “fundamental materiality and formal traditions,”27 our reading focuses on the layering of light and movement that have long been considered the cinematograph’s basic material elements. We ask how this formal, aesthetic dimension intertwines with the narrative and generic strata to forge an oblique memory of the 1990s’ political simulacrum and the neoliberal city’s corrupt duplicity. El bonaerense El bonaerense tells the story of small-town locksmith Zapa, who moves to the city after being arrested for theft. His uncle, a former police officer, gets the charges dropped and finds him work with the police in Buenos Aires. The uncle’s legal sleight of hand anticipates Zapa’s own slide into corruption once he becomes an officer in the capital, a slide that culminates in a murder, a gunshot wound to his leg, a cover-up that makes him a hero, a promotion, and his transfer back to the countryside. The final scene shows him in his uniform, limping through the fields on his way to work at his hometown precinct. Significantly, the film’s most important use of documentary footage corresponds to Zapa’s arrival to urban space, showing him roam the city streets, disoriented and searching, as he makes his way to his new job. Imperfect lighting, jostling camera movements, rushed framing and focusing, pedestrians who look directly into the camera: these conventional documentary procedures emerge forcefully at the moment Zapa tries to figure out the urban environment, reading its traffic signs, moving between vehicles, weaving through crowds. The documentary images mark Zapa’s first exposure to the city, decisively altering his fictional course. The long documentary sequence holds the acted story in abeyance, bracketing off a dead time between a first narrative moment that raises questions and a second that resolves them. In the first narrative moment, immediately preceding the documentary footage, the uncle’s friend in the city tells Zapa that he will “fix things.” Pellegrino also promises to “get him in,” but does


244


245

not explain where, and further mentions that there is a problem with Zapa’s age, but offers no indication of what that might be. Only after the documentary footage does the second narrative moment clarify both questions, when Pellegrino falsely enlists Zapa as a twenty-eight year old at the urban police precinct. These questions hence become a pivot for two distinct narrative registers. While they structure a moment of suspense in the film’s master narrative, they simultaneously launch Zapa into a fiction that will forge him a new identity, making him four years younger and transforming him from a country boy into a city cop (despite obvious displays of incompetence). In the dialogue between these two strata, El bonaerense shows “corruption” as a forging, as a social fiction made dense with real consequence. The documentary interlude, which bridges Zapa’s life in the country to his nascent urban social identity, is a pivotal moment in the film’s documenting of an urban fiction. The layering of documentary and fiction dovetails with a second-degree “fiction” (in Rancière’s sense) through two formal elements that define the cinematograph’s formal specificity: movement and light, which emerge in strata that further emphasize the narrative and generic layering discussed above. In the documentary footage, multiple, heterogeneous, and superimposed movements show Zapa crossing the urban landscape while the city flows at its own rhythm, oblivious to the camera and the film’s protagonist. We see Zapa repeatedly traverse the screen from right to left and back again, zigzagging through the cityscape, asking for directions and looking for his way. We follow him as he moves through a multitude marching in the streets, banging drums and carrying banners, as he cuts through traffic jams, between cars and buses moving in every direction, and as he watches trains and motorcycles. Where is he going? He is trying, we assume, to find the place where Pellegrino will “get him in,” the interior space of fiction that will forge him a new identity. We do not yet know where that space is, and follow him through the city as we wait for the main storyline to resume, watching a single narrative thread weave its way through multiple possible plots. Zapa, now a figure of fiction in potentia, a shape to be formed, can follow any of the infinite directions that open as he cuts through the street crowd: each of the traffic signs shows another viable story; each means of transportation presents a distinct narrative speed. This infinite tissue of movements is constitutive of the city space that Zapa shares with the anonymous mass in these documentary scenes. The city is made of multiple fictions that emerge from this unidentified collective’s myriad trajectories and meanings: its plural sentidos, understanding this word as both direction and signification. Zapa’s movement is merely the legible layer of its differential swarm, a single visible strain of the urban text that extends off screen in every sense, with every face that momentarily traverses the frame. We, the spectators, continue to read one movement, Zapa’s, while the others are effaced as they drift beyond our visual scope. The sequence that shows urban space as a layering of movement also shows it as a layering of light. When Zapa first meets Pellegrino in a social club, the light divides the room into a private space in the foreground, where a soft




JA MES CISNEROS

yellow glow creates an intimate area appropriate to Pellegrino’s promise to “get Zapa in,” and an open area in the background, where several televisions broadcasting the horse races cast a bright radiance over the off-track bettors. This lighting arrangement continues into the following shot, where Zapa wakes up on a sidewalk bench under a yellow light that separates him from the white city behind. The repeated theatrical lighting effect crowns Zapa with a soft halo: with the radiance of a nascent identity that will soon separate him from other possible paths. Before acceding to that inside space, however, Zapa errs in the city’s inhospitable brightness, a speck of fiction haunting about in the overexposed glare of the mediated simil-city. The parallel lighting arrangement ties the television transmission of the horse races to the city space that will be shown in the documentary footage: in both cases the mediated public space is marked off from an inner fictional space. Like the televisions’ shine, the light in the documentary footage marks an instance of mediation that is coherent with gazes at the camera, its jolting movements, and its improvised framing. Shot in the same harsh light, the individuals he crosses in the protest rally are marked by the same “ontological tenor”28 as the protagonist—it endows them with the same potential, making each individual who crosses the frame leave a visible trace of a fiction that continues unseen while El bonaerense enters the differentiated light of the invented story’s inner space. Arising as Zapa wanders into public space, the light’s aesthetic effect reminds the spectator of the city’s constant mediation. When Pellegrino “gets Zapa in,” then, he gets him into a specific urban imaginary, a utopian fiction that shuts off mediation of, and with, the city: a fiction, because it forges him an identity; utopian, because it does not admit of any exterior alterity. Once his new identity is forged, there is no egress. The assassination and cover-up get him a promotion as a heroic officer, thus enhancing the fiction that continues to mark his body even as he gets transferred back to his home town. The final image of officer Zapa limping across the open fields on his way to work reaffirms his urban identity, and shows that this urban fiction now colonizes the country, not as the dominant pole in a dialectic, but as a radiating simulacrum that pulses ever outward. His limp is a memory trace, a bodily sign that simultaneously refers to the “fiction” of urban corruption and to his inability to learn the codes that would allow him to fully adapt to it. The limp signals his ungrounding from both city and country. El bonaerense meshes documentary and narrative images to comment on the mediations that shape social identities in contemporary urban space. In the face of the “political simulacrum,” the film turns its gaze to its own modalities of image-production, showing its acted narrative as one of the myriad possible fictions that its form allows. If, in the singular sequence of Zapa’s arrival to the city, the film’s formal structure echoes its thematic focus on the shaping of identity, it does so by indicating its own forging of specific material elements and inscribing the memory of its own making into the film’s “fiction.” El bonaerense documents its own fictions, presenting a figure of the city through its own mediation.


246


247

El bonaerense’s dual narrative resembles an urban palimpsest, superimposing strata of movement and light within the frame and layers of generic conventions taken from of documentary and fiction film. This leads to two concluding observations. First, in the case of El bonaerense, the palimpsest allows us to see that the political simulacrum is not a “false” fiction (here understood in a general sense) that grafts itself onto the stable urban ground, but a forging that arises amid the multiple mediations that have superseded the referential ground. It shows that, if the fiction of Zapa’s corruption is a legible strand of the urban text, then the page is the crowd’s constant swarm and the innumerable invisible fictions that constantly mediate the city: the march, the television, and especially the white light that affects our sense perception, exposing us to the apparatus’ properly aesthetic dimension and making us squint as we search for the narrative thread. This light lies at the base of photographic and cinematographic technology, just as the white page provides the material basis for writing’s palimpsest. Second, by its very nature, film holds the physical residue of vanishing scenes of gestures and motion. Film, as a film—as a continuous surface that bears the physical imprint of reflected light, as a pellicle covering a luminous body—holds the marks of a singular instance when the city shone through its translucent skin. It offers an indeterminate singularity, a stratified corpus made of bodies moving in light. If the city is a palimpsest, film not only produces an upper layer of writing, but also shows that the urban slate will shortly replace it with another text of illuminated gestures and motion: it writes its own imminent erasure. In a dual movement that conserves the vestiges of a moment as it passes into the future, the film image records a memory that remains to be seen. Notes 1. Damisch, Skyline, 31. 2. See Jameson’s reading of Kevin Lynch in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Condition of Late Capitalism,” 89–90. 3. Canclini, Imaginarios urbanos, 69–78. 4. Sassen, The Global City. Sassen broaches relations of spatial dispersion and partial integration in the first part of her book (17–84), defining the global city by the information network that ties it to other sites of financial centralization; as she says in the preface, there “is no such entity as a single global city” (xxi). 5. Rajchman, Constructions, 81. This passage belongs to a discussion of how Peter Eisenman’s notion of “artificial cities” rethinks the idea of ground. Although Rajchman does not use the term “palimpsest,” his thinking clearly resonates with the theories of Harvey, Huyssen, and Comolli that we follow below. 6. Trapero’s El bonaerense has been associated with the “Nuevo Cine Argentino.” For an interpretation of this rubric, including the difficulties in defining it, see Aguilar, Otros mundos. 7. Corradi, “The Argentina of Carlos Saúl Menem,” 83–84. 8. Sarlo, “Aesthetics of Domination,” 33–35.




JA MES CISNEROS

9. See Zaida Muxí, La arquitectura de la ciudad global, 35–36. “La ciudad espasmódica se apoyó en la reestructuración económica que partió de la Ley de Reforma del Estado y de Emergencia Económica en 1989 y la Ley de Convertibilidad en 1991, con un gran costo social pero muy útil para los inversores financieros . . . La coincidencia del aumento de f lujo de capital con el proceso de privatización de empresas y suelo público generaron un auge de la construcción e hicieron que Buenos Aires se convirtiera en la década de 1990 en un perfecto espacio para un urbanismo del fragmento.” 10. Ciccolella and Mignaqui, “Buenos Aires,” 320. The authors give a statistical breakdown, in dollars and square footage, of this targeted investment; on page 324, note 7, they list the determinate laws and other factors in the State’s withdrawal from city planning. They argue that privatization and the state’s withdrawal from “explicit territorial policy making” have produced a network of enclaves or “islands” to the detriment of the former urban identity. Following Saskia Sassen, they find that Buenos Aires has adopted global city functions that connect to the city’s social “dualization.” See also Guano, “Spectacles of Modernity.” 11. Gorelik, “Modelo para armar,” 35. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 12. Ibid., 37. Gorelik further points out that these superficial transformations neglect ground maintenance: large investors in urban development have not been required to contribute to the renewal of local transportation or sewage networks, as in North America and Europe, despite the strain they add to an already aging infrastructure. 13. Gorelik, Miradas sobre Buenos Aires, 203. 14. Muxí, La arquitectura de la ciudad global, 83–84. 15. Ibid., 67. 16. Ibid., 45; I have cited the text from the English translation, “The Precession of Simulacra,” Baudrillard, Simulations, 12. 17. Baudrillard, Simulations, 1–13, 103–115. 18. Ibid., 72. 19. Ibid., 133. 20. Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference, 417. Elsewhere Harvey is critical of postmodern theory’s use of the palimpsest; see The Condition of Postmodernity, 66. 21. In Spaces of Hope, Harvey tackles the discourse of globalization, demonstrating its continuity with previous high-water marks of capitalist accumulation. 22. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 107. The Baudizzone, Lestard, Varas Studio won the 1998 design competition for the “Parque de la Memoria”; ground was broken in 2001. Several of the fourteen planned sculptures have been set in place, but the “Monumento a las Víctimas del Terror de Estado” that Huyssen discusses has yet to be completed. Huyssen finds echoes of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veteran’s memorial in Washington, DC, and Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust Museum in Berlin. In terms of his overall argument, Huyssen finds that these resonances belong to a “cross-national memory discourse” for which the model is the Holocaust as it circulates in academic literature and the media. 23. Nouzeilles, “Postmemory Cinema,” 268–269. Following Huyssen’s Present Pasts (263), this article discusses the memory debate in Argentina through a


248


24.

25.

26.

27.

28.

249

close analysis of Carri’s film; it includes a comprehensive bibliography of the most important contributions to the debate. Sarlo, in Tiempo pasado, also reads Los rubios in terms of postmemory, but reaches fundamentally different conclusions: she interprets Carri’s use of a “fictional” and nonfictional Albertinas as a double affirmation of subjective identity rather than a critical questioning of it. La fable cinématographique, 201–202. Rancière develops these ideas in a text on Chris Marker’s documentary film about Soviet filmmaker Alexandre Medvedkine; see also Arrêt sur l’histoire. Comolli, Regards sur la ville, 38–39. The original reads as follows: “un mélange de présence et d’absence, d’ouvert et de fermé, d’apparent et de caché. Des emboîtements, du double fond, des stratifications—des fictions. Toute cette ambiguïté est au cœur de la ville, elle en est le ressort.” Rajchman, Constructions, 81. Rajchman reminds us that Gilles Deleuze first introduces the phrase, “time out of joint,” into a philosophical context through a reading of Kant and the time of the city (p. 136, n. 4). This phrase from Hamlet provides the hinge for Jacques Derrida’s reading of Marx; see Spectres de Marx. Huyssen, Present Pasts, 7. This critical point distinguishes the uses of the urban palimpsest I am following from those that do not account for material, technological and traditional specificities of the media; see for instance Resina, “The Concept of After-Image.” Rancière, Arrêt sur l’histoire, 51.

Works Cited Aguilar, Gonzalo. Otros mundos: Un ensayo sobre el nuevo cine argentino. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos, 2006. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. Ciccolella, Pablo and Iliana Mignaqui. “Buenos Aires: Sociospatial Impacts of the Development of Global City Functions.” In Global Networks, Linked Cities, edited by Saskia Sassen, 309–326. London: Routledge, 2002. Comolli, Jean-Louis. Regards sur la ville. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1994. Corradi, Juan E. “The Argentina of Carlos Saúl Menem,” Current History 91 no. 562 (February 1992): 83–87. Damisch, Hubert. Skyline: La ville Narcisse. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1993. García Canclini, Néstor. Imaginarios urbanos. Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1999. Gorelik, Adrián. “Modelo para armar: Buenos Aires, de la crisis al boom,” Punto de vista 84 (April 2006): 33–39. ———. Miradas sobre Buenos Aires: Historia cultural y crítica urbana. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2004. Guano, Emanuela. “Spectacles of Modernity: Transnational Imagination and Local Hegemonies in Neoliberal Buenos Aires,” Cultural Anthropology 17 no. 2 (2002): 181–209. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Harvey, David. Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference. Malden, MA, and Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.




JA MES CISNEROS

Harvey, David. Spaces of Hope. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000. Huyssen, Andreas. Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Condition of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (July/August 1984): 53–92. Muxí, Zaida. La arquitectura de la ciudad global. Barcelona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 2004. Nouzeilles, Gabriela. “Postmemory Cinema and the Future of the Past in Albertina Carri’s Los rubios,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14 no. 3 (December 2005): 263–278. Rajchman, John. Constructions. Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press, 1998. Rancière, Jacques. Arrêt sur l’histoire. Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1996. Rancière, Jacques. La fable cinématographique. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001. Resina, Joan Ramón. “The Concept of After-Image and the Scopic Apprehension of the City.” In After-Images of the City, edited by Joan Ramón Resina and Dieter Ingenschay, 1–22. Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Sarlo, Beatriz. “Aesthetics of Domination,” NACLA Report on the Americas 28 no. 2 (September/October 1994): 33–37. Sarlo, Beatriz. Tiempo pasado: Cultura de la memoria y giro subjetivo; Una discusión. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2005. Sassen, Saskia. The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 2001.


250


1960s and 1970s film-making in Latin America, 5–7, 9, 15, 17, 19–23, 27–46, 51, 54–8, 68–71, 80, 88, 106, 133–5, 145–6, 149 55 hermanos, 57 abuelo Cheno y otras historias, El, 9, 154–8, 160 Adorno, T. W., 16 Aesthetics of Hunger, An, 135 Agresti, Alejandro Buenos Aires viceversa, 237, 241, 244 Agüero, Ignacio Sueños de hielo, 23 Aïnouz, Karim Madame Satã, 7, 76–80 Almendros, Néstor, 30–1 Althusser, Louis, 186 Álvarez, Santiago, 50, 54, 61, 70, 45 Anderson, Benedict, 120, 146 Andrade, Joaquim Pedro de, 70 Anger, 203 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 89, 90, 95 Appadurai, Arjun, 119, 124 Arau, Alfonso Como agua para chocolate, 122 Arau, Sergio A Day Without a Mexican, 8, 119, 123–8 árbol, El, 198–202, 205–6, 208, 213 Aro Tolbukhin: En la mente del asesino, 10, 163–75 Aro Tolbukhin: In the Mind of a Killer, 10, 163–75 August, Lise, 164–8, 173–4 autobiography in film, 90, 92, 159, 199, 201, 203, 222–4

avant-garde film-making, 8, 16–17, 22, 30, 87–99, 190–1 Babenco, Héctor Carandiru, 76 Babilônia 2000, 9, 133–4, 136, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 148 Babylon 2000, 9, 133–4, 136, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 148 Badiou, Alain, 96 Bar “El Chino”, 237, 241 Barthes, Roland, 11, 197–200, 204–5, 215 Baudrillard, Jean, 240 Baylie, Claude, 179 Benjamin, Walter, 120 Bentes, Ivana, 70, 81, 82, 135–6 Bhabha, Homi, 137, 139, 146–7, 149 Birri, Fernando, 6 Black God, White Devil, 68, 69–70, 81 Blade Runner, 210 Blonds, The, 203–5, 213, 242–3, 248–9 Boca de lixo, 9, 133–6, 138–41, 144, 146, 148 bonaerense, El, 12, 237, 238, 244–7 borders, see national borders Brazil, 210 Brecht, Bertolt, 19, 70, 126 Bruck, Ernst von, 169 Bruzzi, Stella, 4, 13, 234 Bryson, Norman, 188 Buache, Freddy, 191 Buenos Aires viceversa, 237, 241, 244 Buñuel, Luis, 121 Él, 10, 179–87, 189, 190–3 La ilusión viaja en tranvía, 127 Los olvidados, 127, 192


Index


INDEX

Burak, Daniel Bar “El Chino”, 237, 241 Burton, Julianne, 50 Bus 174, 76–7, 149 Cabra marcado para morrer, 9, 133–4, 138, 145–6 Cabrera Infante, Sabá P.M., 6, 27–31, 33, 41–2, 43, 44, 56–7 Cadena, Héctor, see Tin Dirdamal callejón de los milagros, El, 227 Cameron, James Titanic, 74 Cannes Film Festival, 179 capitalism, 16, 120, 121–2, 242, 248 Capturing the Friedmans, 49 Carandiru, 76 Carri, Albertina Los rubios, 203–5, 213, 242–3, 248–9 La rabia, 203 Carroll, Noël, 4, 13, 63 castration, 181–2, 187–8 Castro Rocha, João Cezar, 72–3, 82 Central do Brasil, 75 Central Station, 75 Certeau, Michel de, 146 Chanan, Michael, 53, 56, 57, 107, 111, 113, 117 Chávez, Rebeca, 50, 54, 57, 58 Chiang, Haori Re-jau-la, 50, 61–2 Chicano identity, 89, 106–8, 111, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 124, 125 Chow, Rey, 125 Cidade de Deus, 69, 70, 71–6, 78–80, 82, 135 Cinema Novo, 6, 7, 68, 69–71, 80, 135 cinéma vérité, 54, 57, 62, 88, 219 cine piquetero, 17 City of God, 69, 70, 71–6, 78–80, 82, 135 City of Men, 75 Clemente, Francisco, 230–1 Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody, 8, 87, 89–99, 100, 101, 102 Colina, Enrique, 52 colonialism, 22, 51, 125, 145–6, 223 Como agua para chocolate, 122

Comolli, Jean-Louis, 243, 247 Contreras Torres, Miguel El hombre sin patria, 105 Copjec, Joan, 186 Corradi, Juan E., 239 Cortázar, Octavio Por primera vez, 54 Coutinho, Eduardo, 9, 44, 77, 149 Babilônia 2000, 9, 133–4, 136, 140–1, 143–4, 146, 148 Boca de lixo, 9, 133–6, 138–41, 144, 146, 148 Cabra marcado para morrer, 9, 133–4, 138, 145–6 Jogo de cena, 147–8 Cuatro labios, 219, 221, 224–7, 228, 232–3, 234 Cuban Fight Against Demons, A, 51 Cuban Revolution, 5–6, 21, 27–45, 50, 53–61 Culloden, 23 cultural hybridity, see under hybridity Danzón, 110, 115, 117 David, 57 Day Without a Mexican, A, 8, 119, 123–8 De cierta manera, 21 Del Río, Joel, 50, 59, 62, 63 De nadie, 9, 154, 157–9 Denzin, Norman, 89 “dereferencing,” 11, 221, 225, 228–33 Derrida, Jacques, 122, 123 Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar, 6, 28, 36–41 Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 68, 69–70, 81 dictatorship Argentine (1976–1983), 203–5, 210, 238–9, 242 Brazilian (1964–1985), 68, 133 Chilean (1973–1990), 88 Díaz, Jesús 55 hermanos, 57 Diegues, Carlos, 70 Diez, Daniel, 50 digital film-making vs. analogue film-making, 11, 197–9, 201–3, 206–9, 212–14


252


INDEX

early cinema, 5, 17–18, 19, 21–2, 126, 151, 159–60, 220 Eisenstein, Sergei, 9, 17, 19, 23, 151, 160 Él, 10, 179–87, 189, 190–3 Elite Squad, 67, 76, 81 Eltit, Diamela, 98 En la mente del asesino, 10, 163–75 ethnographic filmmaking, 5, 19–21, 88, 98, 220, 223, 228 Evans, Peter, 179, 181 exile, 7, 88, 90, 91, 113 favela, 67, 72–6, 81, 135–44, 147, 148 feminist film theory, 186–7 Fernández, Emilio, 121 fetishism, 11, 179–83, 187, 191, 193 First Charge of the Machete, The, 21, 23, 51 Fiske, John, 123 Flaherty, Robert Man of Aran, 23 Moana, 115, 160 Nanook of the North, 5, 220 Fontán, Gustavo El árbol, 198–202, 205–6, 208, 213 La orilla que se abisma, 205–9, 213, 215–16 Foreign Land, 71 For the First Time, 54 Foucault, Michel, 122 Four Lips, 219, 221, 224–7, 228, 232–3, 234 free cinema, 6, 30, 56, 57, 62, 88 Freud, Sigmund, 44, 169–71, 173, 175, 179–85, 193 From Havana. 1969! Remember, 6, 28, 36–41

frontiers, see national borders Fuentes, Fernando de, 121 Gabriel, Teshome, 17 Galindo, Alejandro, 121 García Canclini, Néstor, 8, 109–10, 115, 116, 247 García Espinosa, Julio, 51, 53, 54–5, 57, 113 García Riera, E., 106 Garden of Eden, The, 8, 105, 107, 108–12, 114–15, 116–17 Gaviria, Víctor Rodrigo D: No Futuro, 15 La vendedora de rosas, 15 gaze, the, 8, 10–11, 70, 73, 75, 77–80, 95, 109–11, 115, 179–93, 194, 206–7, 212, 238, 241, 243 Gellner, Ernest, 120 gender and sexuality, 10–11, 109–10, 115, 179–87, 190–4 Getino, Octavio, 16 La hora de los hornos, 6, 17 Giddens, Anthony, 231–2 Gilliam, Terry Brazil, 210 Twelve Monkeys, 212 Girón, 22 Giroux, Henry, 96 globalization, 7, 8, 10, 12, 16, 22, 90, 119–20, 121–2, 124, 231–2, 237–8, 242, 247, 248 Gómez, Manuel Octavio Historia de una batalla, 54 La primera carga al machete, 21, 23, 51 Gómez, Sara De cierta manera, 21 Gómez Montero, Sergio, 112, 117 Gorelik, Adrián, 238, 239, 248 Grandfather Cheno and Other Stories, 9, 154–8, 160 Green, Jared, 180 Greene, Maxine, 95 Grierson, John, 17, 57, 115, 159, 219, 233 Drifters, 19 Griffith, D. W., 9, 151 Guerra, Ruy, 70


new possibilities arising from, 61, 92, 101, 125, 140, 214 Dirdamal, Tin De nadie, 9, 154, 157–9 direct cinema, 6, 57–8, 62, 88, 219 Doane, Mary Ann, 197, 214, 215 Drifters, 19 drug trafficking, 67, 72–3, 76, 82–3, 107, 122, 140 Dudow, Slatan Kuhle Wampe, 19

253


INDEX

Guillén Landrián, Nicolás Desde la Habana ¡1969! recordar, 6, 28, 36–41 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 43, 46, 55, 57, 60 Hasta cierto punto, 54 Memorias del subdesarrollo, 6, 21, 28, 32–6, 37, 39–40, 41, 42 Una pelea cubana contra los demonios, 51

jardín del Edén, El, 8, 105, 107, 108–12, 114–15, 116–17 Jarvis, Matt, 170 Jay, Martin, 74 Jennings, Humphrey, 17 Jiménez, Rigoberto, 53 Jiménez Leal, Orlando P.M., 6, 27–32, 33, 41–2, 43, 44, 56–7 Jogo de cena, 147–8

Haddu, Miriam, 108, 116 Hamburger, Esther, 76 Hansen, Miriam, 120 Harvey, David, 121, 238, 242 Hasta cierto punto, 54 Helmohltz, Hermann von, 169 Herrera, Manuel Girón, 22 Hight, Craig, 123, 125 Higson, Andrew, 146 Historia de una batalla, 54 Hitchcock, Alfred Rear Window, 194 Vertigo, 183 Hobsbawm, Eric, 81, 120 Hollywood cinema, 5, 9, 19, 21, 22, 96, 100, 107, 113, 125, 192 Hombres de cañaveral, 54 hombre sin patria, El, 105 homosexuality, 59, 179–81, 183–5, 191, 193 hora de los hornos, La, 6, 17 Hour of the Furnaces, The, 6, 17 Huyssen, Andreas, 238, 242, 247, 248, 249 hybridity cultural, 8, 89–90, 108–12, 114, 115, 126, 128, 146 racial, see mestizaje; race

Keetman, Yve, 164–5, 167, 174 Keiller, Patrick London, 23 Kiarostami, Abbas, 16 Kinder, Marsha, 182 Kino Pravda, 219 Kracauer, Siegfried, 120 Kuhle Wampe, 19 Kukuli, 19–21

Iglesias, Norma, 105, 108, 112 imperfect cinema, 21, 53, 57, 113 imperialism, see colonialism indexicality, 11, 58, 197–200, 202, 204, 208, 211, 213–14 Ivens, Joris, 17, 152 Jameson, Fredric, 16, 71, 209

Lacan, Jacques, 10–11, 180, 185–90, 192, 194 Lang, Fritz Metropolis, 210 Last Bolshevik, The, 97, 249 Last Zapatistas, Forgotten Heroes, The, 9, 154, 156–7, 158–9, 160–1 Lechner, Norbert, 90, 91, 95, 98 Leigh, Mike, 16 Like Water for Chocolate, 122 Lincoln, Yvonna, 89 Lins, Consuelo, 134, 138 Loach, Ken, 16 Lola, 115, 117 London, 23 López, Ana M., 28 Loridan, Marceline, 152 Lund, Kátia Cidade de Deus, 69, 70, 71–6, 78–80, 82, 135


254

Maciel, David, 106, 112, 113 Madame Satã, 7, 76–80 Magaña, Servín, 165 Man Marked to Die, 9, 133–4, 138, 145–6 Man With a Movie Camera, 5, 17, 220


INDEX

Mulvey, Laura, 44, 186–7, 194 Muxí, Zaida, 238, 248 Naficy, Hamid, 7, 13 Nagib, Lúcia, 69, 71, 81 narcissism, 41, 182–3 national borders, 7–8, 9, 13, 105–12, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 125–6, 157, 159 national identity, 8, 10, 28, 34–6, 87, 91–6, 106, 108, 113, 119–20, 121–2, 124, 135, 137, 139, 146–7, 231, 242 nationalism, 7–8, 34–6, 44–5, 107, 122, 145–6 nation state, impact of globalization and migration on the, 12, 119, 121–2, 124 neoliberalism, 12, 68, 91, 122, 237–41, 244 neorealism, 5–6, 15–16, 19, 21, 88, 107 Nets, 18–19, 23 New Latin American Cinema, see 1960s and 1970s film-making in Latin America News from a Personal War, 76, 77 newsreels, 21, 50, 51, 54–6, 58, 62, 220 Nichols, Bill, 3–4, 13, 17, 23, 27, 127, 213, 216, 220–1, 233 Notícias de uma guerra particular, 76, 77 Novaro, María Danzón, 110, 115, 117 El jardín del Edén, 8, 105, 107, 108–12, 114–15, 116–17 Lola, 115, 117 Otoñal, 115, 117 Sin dejar huella, 115


Marcovich, Carlos, 11 Cuatro labios, 219, 221, 224–7, 228, 232–3, 234 ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?, 219, 221, 222–4, 225, 227–8, 229–31, 233 Marker, Chris The Last Bolshevik, 97, 249 Marks, Laura U., 201–2, 215 Martin, Deborah, 223 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 231 Marxism, 37, 51 see also socialism Mattelart, Armand, 91 Meade, Teresa, 142 Meirelles, Fernando Cidade de Deus, 69, 70, 71–6, 78–80, 82, 135 Memorias del subdesarrollo, 6, 21, 28, 32–6, 37, 39–40, 41, 42 Memories of Underdevelopment, 6, 21, 28, 32–6, 37, 39–40, 41, 42 memory, 9, 10, 12, 13, 61, 87, 90–3, 95, 98, 109, 111, 155, 164–74, 201–5, 210, 213, 229, 231, 233, 237–8, 240–4, 246–7, 248–9 mestizaje, 89, 92, 122, 127 see also race Metropolis, 210 Mexican Revolution, 121, 122, 126, 127, 151, 156–7, 158, 160–1, 220 Midaq Alley, 227 Midnight, 75 migration, 7–8, 9, 106–13, 119–20, 122–6, 127, 128, 157–8, 159 mockumentary, 8, 119, 123–6 modernism, 17, 70 modernity, 8, 13, 38, 120–1, 126, 146, 198, 210–11, 213, 231–2 relationship with cinema, 120–1, 197 modernization, 10, 98, 120–1, 142, 209–11 Montaña, Ian, 59 Moreira Salles, João Notícias de uma guerra particular, 76, 77 Morelia Festival, 221 Morelli, Paulo Cidade dos Homens, 75

255

Ochoa, Marina, 60 olvidados, Los, 127, 192 One Way or Another, 21 Ônibus 174, 76–7, 149 orilla que se abisma, La, 205–9, 213, 215–16 Otoñal, 115, 117


INDEX

Padilha, José Elite Squad, 67, 76, 81 Ônibus 174, 76–7, 149 Padrón, Humberto Los zapaticos me aprietan, 50, 60–2 palimpsest, 10, 12, 238, 241–4, 247, 248, 249 paranoia, 10–11, 179–80, 183–6, 188, 190–2 Pereira dos Santos, Nelson, 15, 16, 44, 70 pelea cubana contra los demonios, Una, 51 Rio 400, 15 Rio Zona Norte, 15 Pérez Turrent, Tomás, 166 Pineda Barnet, Enrique David, 57 Plantinga, Carl, 4, 13, 63 Playing, 147–8 P.M., 6, 27–31, 33, 41–2, 43, 44, 56–7 popular culture vs elite culture, 6, 27–8, 30–6 Por primera vez, 54 postmodernism, 3, 8, 17, 49, 62, 71, 72, 79, 126, 220–1, 239 postnationalism, 7–8, 12, 119–22, 126, 221, 232 poverty, 7, 9, 13, 38, 60, 69, 70, 72, 73, 75, 83, 133–47, 158, 239 Primera carga al machete, 21, 13, 51 Prince, Stephen, 214 Prisoner of the Iron Bars, The, 76 psychoanalysis, 10–11, 163–74, 179–93 psychodynamics, 169–73 public sphere, 12, 119, 120, 126, 240 ¿Quién diablos es Juliette?, 219, 221, 222–4, 225, 227–8, 229–31, 233 rabia, La, 203 race, 28, 39, 92, 122, 127 see also mestizaje Racine, Isaac-Pierre En la mente del asesino, 163–75 Rajchman, John, 238, 243, 247, 249 Ramírez, Alejandro, 60 Rancière, Jacques, 87, 97, 243, 245, 249 Real, the, 184, 189, 191, 193, 229

Rear Window, 194 Redding, Arthur, 71, 74 Redes, 18–19, 23 reflexivity, 5, 9, 11–12, 13, 22, 125, 136–41, 164–5, 187, 197–202, 211–14, 219–22, 225–32, 241 Re-jau-la, 50, 61–2 Renoir, Jean Toni, 19 Renov, Michael, 3–4, 13 Retomada, 68–9, 71, 81 revolution, see Cuban Revolution; Mexican Revolution Ricoeur, Paul, 11, 197, 199–201, 204–5, 214 Rio 400, 15 Rio Northern Zone, 15 Rio Zona Norte, 15 Rocha, Glauber, 7, 71 Deus e o diabo na terra do sol, 68, 69–70, 81 Uma estética da fome, 135 Rodrigo D. No Future, 15 Roger and Me, 49 Roscoe, Jane, 123, 125, 127 Rosen, Philip, 198, 213, 214 Rose Seller, The, 15 Rotha, Paul, 17 Rouch, Jean, 20, 148 rubios, Los, 203–5, 213, 242–3, 248–9 Ruiz, Raúl Cofralandes, Chilean Rhapsody, 8, 87, 89–99, 100, 101, 102 Rulfo, Juan Carlos El abuelo Cheno y otras historias, 9, 154–8, 160 Russian Ark, 97, 100 Sacramento, Paulo O prisioneiro da grade de ferro, 76 Salazar, Gabriel, 91, 96 Salles, Walter, 44 Central do Brasil, 75 O primeiro dia, 75 Terra estrangeira, 71 Samuels, Robert, 191 Sánchez, Jorge Luis, 50, 51, 58 Sarduy, Pedro, 50 Sarlo, Beatriz, 239–40, 249 Sartre, Jean Paul, 187–9, 190


256


INDEX

Taboada, Francesco Los últimos zapatistas, héroes olvidados, 9, 154, 156–7, 158–9, 160–1 television, 8, 50, 72, 76, 91, 96, 101, 123, 138, 148, 165, 203, 231–2, 239 temporality, 11, 20, 140, 197–215, 222, 225, 226 Terra estrangeira, 71 Tesson, Charles, 191 Thin Blue Line, The, 49 Thomas, Daniela Terra estrangeira, 71

Tissé, Edouard, 19 Titanic, 74 Toni, 19 transnationalism, see postnationalism Trapero, Pablo El bonaerense, 12, 237, 238, 244–7 Twelve Monkeys, 212 últimos zapatistas, héroes olvidados, Los, 9, 154, 156–7, 158–9, 160–1 Up to a Certain Point, 54 urbanization, 120–1, 237 urban space, 10, 12, 141–4, 210, 237–48 see also favela Valladares, Licia, 142–4 Vega, Pastor Hombres de cañaveral, 54 Velasís, Mayra, 63 vendedora de rosas, La, 15 Vertigo, 183 Vertov, Dziga Kino Pravda, 219 Man with a Movie Camera, 5, 17, 220 Villaronga, Agustín En la mente del asesino, 163–75 violence, 7, 13, 22, 34, 36, 38, 39–40, 46, 67–80, 81, 82, 127, 140, 141, 159, 181, 239 voyeurism, 11, 30, 31, 70, 71, 74, 82, 180, 183, 187–8, 190–1 Watkins, Peter Culloden, 23 White, Hayden, 3, 11, 197, 214 Who the Hell is Juliette?, 219, 221, 222–4, 225, 227–8, 229–31, 233 Williams, Linda, 49, 62 Winterbottom, Michael, 16 Wright, Basil, 17


Scavengers, The, 9, 133–6, 138–41, 144, 146, 148 science fiction, 209–12 Scott, Ridley Blade Runner, 210 sertão, 68–9, 71, 80, 81–2 Silverman, Kaja, 187 simulation, 10, 12, 209, 211, 214, 227, 230, 232, 238–41, 243–4, 246–7 Sin dejar huella, 115 Singer, Benjamin, 120 Sleepwalker, 209–13 socialism, 5, 17, 51, 55, 63 see also Marxism Sokurov, Aleksandr Russian Ark, 97, 100 Solanas, Fernando, 16, 70 La hora de los hornos, 6, 17 sonámbula, La, 209–13 spectator, position of the, 4, 5, 7, 54, 68–80, 88, 95–6, 98, 147–8, 158, 186–7, 190–1, 192, 211, 212, 223, 245 Spiner, Fernando La sonámbula, 209–13 Stam, Robert, 17, 139, 185 Story of a Battle, 54 Strange Passion, This, 10, 179–87, 189, 190–3 Subiela, Eliseo, 17 Sueños de hielo, 23 surrealism, 179, 184, 193 Swain, Dwight V., 9, 153, 156 symbolic realm, 180, 183, 184, 185, 187, 191, 192, 193

257

zapaticos me aprietan, Los, 50, 60–2 Zimmerman, Lydia En la mente del asesino, 163–75 Zinneman, Fred Redes, 18–19, 23 Žižek, Slavoj, 182, 189


Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (Studies of the Americas)

Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America (Studies of the Americas)

Documentary Screens: Non-Fiction Film and Television

Latin America: A New Interpretation (Studies of the Americas)

When Was Latin America Modern? (Studies of the Americas)

When Was Latin America Modern? (Studies of the Americas)

When Was Latin America Modern? (Studies of the Americas)

Classics in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Classics in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Belize's Independence and Decolonization in Latin America: Guatemala, Britain, and the UN (Studies of the Americas)

Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?: Societies and Politics at the Crossroads (Studies of the Americas)

Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Latin Fiction: The Latin Novel in Context

Economics in Film and Fiction

Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling

Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling

America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism (Studies of the Americas)

Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture

Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture

Latin Fiction

Archaeology in Latin America

Latin America In Crisis

Latin America in Crisis

AIDS in Latin America

Cyborgs in Latin America

The Cambridge History of Latin America: Colonial Latin America

The Politics of Exile in Latin America

Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Visible Evidence)

A New History of Documentary Film

Visual Synergies in Fiction and Documentary Film from Latin America (Studies of the Americas)

Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America (Studies of the Americas)

Documentary Screens: Non-Fiction Film and Television

Latin America: A New Interpretation (Studies of the Americas)

When Was Latin America Modern? (Studies of the Americas)

When Was Latin America Modern? (Studies of the Americas)

When Was Latin America Modern? (Studies of the Americas)

Classics in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Classics in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Belize's Independence and Decolonization in Latin America: Guatemala, Britain, and the UN (Studies of the Americas)

Beyond Neoliberalism in Latin America?: Societies and Politics at the Crossroads (Studies of the Americas)

Retrovisions: Reinventing the Past in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Latin Fiction: The Latin Novel in Context

Economics in Film and Fiction

Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Alien Identities: Exploring Differences in Film and Fiction (Film Fiction)

Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling

Make Believe in Film and Fiction: Visual vs. Verbal Storytelling

America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism (Studies of the Americas)

Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture

Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture

Latin Fiction

Archaeology in Latin America

Latin America In Crisis

Latin America in Crisis

AIDS in Latin America

Cyborgs in Latin America

The Cambridge History of Latin America: Colonial Latin America

The Politics of Exile in Latin America

Documentary Time: Film and Phenomenology (Visible Evidence)

A New History of Documentary Film

Recommend Documents