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Abstract
Two modes of transition are much discussed in contemporary film scholarship: geopolitical/affective (national to transnational) and technological (analogue to digital). While both movements are often taken as a given in film production and academic discourses, this article reads two recent Mexico-based independent productions that both embody and interrogate the digital transnationality of contemporary Latin American cinema from the interstices of the arthouse festival circuit and the online experimental or “expanded” audiovisual scene. Both Fogo (Yulene Olaizola, Mexico/Canada, 2012) and Placa madre (Bruno Varela, Mexico/Bolivia, 2016) are marked by a stark tension between their overtly transnational production contexts and the reverberations of locality that haunt and structure their image- and sound-tracks; both are marked as “Mexican” productions but “Mexico” is an absent referent or a distant echo. The disparate styles in which the two films explore these interplays between locality and globality are enabled by the digital technologies that underlie them (slow cinema in Fogo's case; digital manipulation and montage in Placa madre), even as both movies allude to the rhythms and textures of pre-digital times. The article will thus explore the cracks and contradictions of this seemingly irresistible digital, transnational moment.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Funding
This article has been written in the context of the Research Project “Transnational relations in Spanish-American digital cinema: the cases of Spain, Mexico and Argentina” (CSO2014-52750-P) funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and co-financed with the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
Figure 1. Frame grab from Fogo (Yulene Olaizola, 2012). Metaphor of confinement. © Yulene Olaizola.
Figure 2. Frame grab from Fogo (Yulene Olaizola, 2012). Metaphor of immutability. © Yulene Olaizola.
Figure 3. Frame grab from Placa madre (Bruno Varela, 2016). Subtitle: “This film is a journey to the city on the other side of the roaring stone”. © Bruno Varela.
Figure 4. Frame grab from Placa madre (Bruno Varela, 2016). Subtitle: “… fissured and open to speculation”. © Bruno Varela.
Figure 5. Frame grab from Placa madre (Bruno Varela, 2016). Subtitle: “This is the place where the roaring stone can be heard”. © Bruno Varela.
Figure 6. Frame grab from Placa madre (Bruno Varela, 2016). Subtitle: “Aymara is a similar language to that used in machine programming”. © Bruno Varela.
Notes
1 During the 1940s the output of the Mexican film industry soared from 38 fiction features produced in 1941 to 123 in 1950 (Noble Citation2005, 15).
2 This is not to say that Mexico no longer produces popular movies. The comedy blockbuster No se aceptan devoluciones (Eugenio Derbez, Mexico, 2013) is a recent example of the country’s continuing ability to produce generic pictures with mass local and international appeal, taking upwards of MX$600m at the Mexican box office with some 15 million tickets sold (Gutiérrez Citation2017a; Brunet Citation2013).
3 Misha MacLaird notes that during the second half of Vicente Fox’s presidential term (2000–2006), “several high-profile production houses sprang up […], including Lemon Films and Canana Films, both of which followed recent private-production models but were run by the industry’s youngest agents and with honed objectives regarding their contribution to the future of Mexico’s audiovisual culture” (Citation2013, 31).
4 For instance, Perpetuum Mobile (Nicolás Pereda, Mexico, 2009); En la estancia (Carlos Armella, Mexico, 2014); Alamar (Pedro González-Rubio, Mexico, 2009); Fogo (Yulene Olaizola, Mexico-Canada, 2012); Lake Tahoe (Fernando Eimbcke, Mexico, 2012); Año bisiesto (Michael Rowe, Mexico, 2010); Batalla en el cielo (Carlos Reygadas, Mexico, 2005); La Tirisia (Jorge Pérez Solano, Mexico, 2014).
5 This article was written and approved for publication before the onset of the so-called “Fourth Transformation” when Andrés Manuel López Obrador took power in December 2018: a project that has revived claims for presidential legitimacy in the revolutionary tradition and is discursively critical of neoliberalism.
6 This is eloquently expressed in Este es mi reino, Carlos Reygadas’s short film contained within the omnibus picture Revolución (Mexico, 2010), in which upper-class and working-class Mexicans commit a common act of senseless violence even as the two groups pointedly fail to interact: a “microcosm of Mexican society as heterogeneous and degrading”, in which the cohering national-popular mythology of the revolution “remains absent and meaningless” (Arroyo Citation2011, 385).
7 Nearly as many people went to see the children’s blockbuster Minions (Kyle Balda / Pierre Coffin, USA, 2015) that year – over 16 million spectators – as the combined audience for all Mexican films (17.5 million viewers).
8 These two apparently opposite movements partly coincide with Amanda Holmes’s mapping of the relationships between identity and geography in contemporary transnational Hispanic cinema, which oscillates between the two poles of “identity construction across regions” and “the introspective thrust towards understanding subjective and communitarian identities at the local level” (Citation2012, 1).
9 For instance, Deborah Shaw has defined 15 sub-categories of cinematic transnationality: “transnational modes of production, distribution, and exhibition; transnational modes of narration; cinema of globalisation; films with multiple locations; exilic and diasporic filmmaking; film and cultural exchange; transnational influences; transnational critical approaches; transnational viewing practices; transregional or transcommunity films; transnational stars; transnational directors; the ethics of transnationalism; transnational collaborative networks; and national films” (Citation2013, 10).
10 Fogo has been screened as a Mexican picture at festivals such as Morelia in 2012 and FICUNAM (the National Autonomous University of Mexico film festival) in 2013, and was nominated for Best Photography at the Ariel awards granted by the Mexican Film Academy.
11 On the transnational cross-fertilisations in both early and Golden Age cinema in Latin America see, for instance, López (Citation2000); Castro (Citation2010).
12 Quoted by Zhang Yingjin (Citation2009, 127).
13 Fogo is by no means an anomaly in this regard. Luz silenciosa, for instance, narrates the ordinary (and extraordinary) events of a Mennonite community in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua that pointedly departs from conventional imaginaries of Mexicanness in national cinema. The film adopts a sort of internally exotic gaze that is symptomatic of a hidden pluriculturality within the Mexican national framework.
14 By contrast Olaizola’s most recent film, Epitafio (2015, co-directed with Ruben Imaz), deals with a national-historical subject matter and draws on a national (although by no means nationalist) iconography.
15 The cinematic narrative mode known as slow cinema, associated with art cinema, is a minimalist, contemplative cinema of interludes. Its prolonged temporalities can both test the viewer’s patience and lead her to a higher state of reflection: as Choi remarks, citing Flaubert, "if we observe something for a long time it becomes strange” (Citation2013, 73). This experience of estrangement becomes an excess of attention that, in turn, triggers new interpretations.
16 Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE). http://www.imcine.gob.mx/imcine/el-instituto
17 On the operative, discursive, and aesthetic implications and imbalances of international co-production in Latin American cinema see, for instance, Villazana (Citation2008); Falicov (Citation2013).
18 The Morelia Film Festival, now in its fourteenth year, states its “commitment to being a unique showcase for the dissemination of Mexican cinema” (14 Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia Citation2016).
19 The most prominent documentary film festivals are Ambulante (now in its eleventh year), an itinerant festival that travels to eight Mexican states and soon to expand to El Salvador and Colombia; and DocsDF – recently renamed DOCSMX – which was founded in 2006. Both festivals, but particularly the experimental “Injerto” strand at Ambulante, provide sites of interconnection between mainstream documentary film and the kind of experimental media art discussed in the following section.
20 As Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado has pointed out: “Cinemex […] bankrolled its own festival, FICCO, which ran from 2004 to 2010” (2014, 197). One of its sections, “México Digital”, hosted films made on non-analogue formats. FICCO, directed by Paula Astorga (now head of the Cinema Uno platform), was central to the broadening of the arthouse cinema exhibition circuit in Mexico City, and served as a training ground for the likes of Eva Sangiorgi, former director of FICUNAM, and Juan Pablo Bastarrechea, programmer at the Mexico City arthouse venue Cine Tonalá.
21 Filminlatino.mx, for instance, came online in 2014 as an alliance between IMCINE and the Spanish company Filmin, and has a section titled GratisMX featuring Mexican shorts and features. Festivalscope.com offers a wide selection of films featured at festivals worldwide, while Mubi.com offers a highbrow collection selected by a transnational team located in London, San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Istanbul, Vancouver, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires.
22 Around 48% of Mexican homes have fixed broadband access, according to The Competitive Intelligence Unit (El Financiero Citation2016).
23 According to IMCINE, rising DVD piracy has coincided with a 60% drop in DVD release permits since 2012. This is related to the rise in digital streaming platforms and a fall in sales outlets for DVD and Blu-Ray (Gutiérrez Citation2017b).
24 Gabriela Vigil, interview with Yulene Olaizola, Mexico City, 9 October 2016.
25 Gilles Lipovetsky and Jean Serroy argue that due to technological advances, the impact of contemporary cinema is “not so much in what it tells but in the effects of its colours, its sounds, its forms, its rhythms [… and] in its desire to […] provoke direct and immediate sensations. The film is made up of excess-images” (Citation2009, 52). Authors’ translation from the published Spanish quotation.
26 Conversation between Bruno Varela, David Wood, Miguel Errazu, Julián Etienne, and Daniel Valdez, Cineteca Nacional, Mexico City, 24 April 2017.
27 Luisela Alvaray (Citation2013) holds that private companies in the USA, Europe, and Latin America use the inter-governmental policy of co-production to take advantage of the creativity and popularity of the current regional industry.
28 For a full biography, see Varela’s profile at his website anticuerpo, http://www.anticuerpo.org/bruno-varela.
30 The term “expanded cinema”, drawing on Gene Youngblood’s Citation1970 book Expanded Cinema (Youngblood 1970), has gained much currency in recent years to refer to moving-image screen practices beyond the space of the movie theatre, particularly the art museum, and is associated with the liberation of the spectator from the passivity imposed by the hegemonic apparatus of cinema. As Balsom notes, “The gallery provides an expanded field of formal possibilities […] and can also serve as an incubator for practices that might be unviable outside of it in a cultural climate with decreasing financial support for vanguard nonfiction practices […] artists are now making use of the formal and financial possibilities of the gallery to pioneer new nonfiction genres” (Citation2013, 22–23). Varela operates in what we might call an “expanded expanded” field, seeking innovative formal and performative possibilities (as we show here) in conventional arthouse and art museum spaces, but also in community video and archive circles, as well as online.
31 Paul Julian Smith (Citation2014) similarly proposes the term “Mexican screen fiction” to consider cinema and television as a sole medium rather than two separate forms.
32 Along similar lines, see García Canclini (Citation2008).
33 A more thorough study of Varela’s audiovisual praxis would entail a close analysis of his multiple and complex approaches to found footage; he has recently commented that he films less and less, preferring to find new connections and structures of meanings and feelings between previously existing materials (Varela Citation2017).
34 Here Varela plays on the double meaning of “memoria” in Mexican Spanish, which also refers to a USB stick: an allusion to the motif of technologically mediated memory that runs throughout the film. In the opening sequence, as we are being introduced to the exploration of the Ciudad de Piedra, an insert shot shows a USB stick placed alongside an 8mm film reel, a digital camera memory card, and a VHS tape.
35 The 2006 expedition was supposedly filmed by Patricio Luna: a CEFREC filmmaker who appears in Placa madre in a supporting role as the expedition’s cameraman.
36 The conflation of the Andean Aymara language and the Mixe, Zapotec, and Triqui tongues spoken in the Oaxaca region of Mexico – which likely passes unnoticed to non-speakers of those languages but is declared in the closing credits – is, of course, a further joke at the expense of ethnic rootedness. There is also a conflation between the two functions of the written subtitles that appear onscreen: some of them supposedly (in fact only roughly) translate the words spoken in voice-over in the aforementioned indigenous languages, while others constitute a poetic, extra-diegetic commentary; there is no visual differentiation between these two functions.
37 See, for instance, Jonathan Friedman’s critique of the “roots to routes” discourse of Arjun Appadurai and others, arguing as he does that such work tends to overemphasise the globally interconnected nature of contemporary cultural identities and expresses a “fascination as well as a desire for the hybrid” (2002, 24).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
David M. J. Wood
David M.J. Wood is a film scholar at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, author of El espectador pensante: el cine de Jorge Sanjinés y el Grupo Ukamau (2017), and co-editor of Cine mudo latinoamericano: inicios, nación, vanguardias y transición (2016). He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies.
Gabriela Vigil
Gabriela Vigil has published book chapters in Reflexiones sobre cine mexicano contemporáneo Ficción/Documental and Panorama del cine iberoamericano en un contexto global. She holds a PhD in Art History from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México with a dissertation on new realisms in contemporary Mexican cinema.