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NCJCF 9 (2+3) pp. 161–182 Intellect Limited 2011

New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film Volume 9 Numbers 2 & 3

© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ncin.9.2-3.161_1

Keywords

Mexican cinemasubjectivitymasculinitylandscapeDeleuzeauteur

Laura PodaLsKyOhio State University

Landscapes of subjectivity

in contemporary Mexican

cinema

abstract

This article examines the reconfiguration of masculinity in contemporary Mexican cinema, arguing that recent films are less interested in equating man and nation than in exploring male subjectivities. The article focuses on directors such as Carlos Bolado, Carlos Reygadas, Fernando Eimbcke and Julián Hernández, whose films feature male protagonists in liminal periods of their lives on the cusp of transforma-tive possibilities. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the analysis suggests how the films chart the becomings of male subjects through the exploration of rural and urban landscapes. Through formal experimentations with spatial and temporal markers, the films rewire the relationship between the viewer and pro-filmic events and, in the process, position the film-makers themselves as auteurs on the global art scene. While exploring such engagements with global trends, the article also insists on the films’ connections to larger socio-economic transformations that are reshaping the role of men in Mexican society.

Since the late 1990s, the New Argentine Cinema and New Brazilian Cinema have generated a great deal of interest among critics and scholars outside the region. Notwithstanding the ongoing public fascination with particular Mexican auteurs (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón,

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1. Miriam Haddu’s Contemporary Mexican Cinema (2007) focuses on the first ‘wave’ of New Mexican Cinema (1989–1999), while Chon Noriega and Steven Ricci’s The Mexican Cinema Project (1994), Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel’s Mexico’s Cinema (1999) and Andrea Noble’s Mexican National Cinema (2005) have a broader scope, moving from the 1930s to the mid-1990s. In comparison, there are several English-language books dedicated to the ‘new’ cinemas of Argentina and Brazil of the mid-1990s to the present (by Horacio Bernadés et al., Joanna Page, Gonzalo Aguilar (in translation), Jens Andermann, Lucia Nagib, and Caçilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha).

2. Mexico produced 50–80 films/year between 1983 and 1993. After that, production declined precipitously to a low of nine films in 1997 before beginning a slow, steady recovery to 64 films in 2006 and 70 films in 2007 (García Riera 1998: 304, 331, 356, 388; Elena 2008: 4). In comparison, Argentina produced thirteen to 30 films/year between 1983 and 1991; a low of nine films in 1992; and then a more uneven rise (39 films in 1996, 27 in 2001 and 70 in 2004).

3. For a particularly insightful overview of the contemporary Mexican film industry, see Alberto Elena, ‘La nueva era del cine mexicano’. Elena discusses the ‘truly’ independent film-makers and their financing methods on pages 4–5 and lists their awards on page 3. It is noteworthy that Reygadas’s production company Cadereyta (formerly Mantarraya) has helped finance

and, to some degree, Carlos Reygadas), the larger industrial and artistic trans-formations that have taken place in the Mexican film industry since the late 1990s have been much less explored in English-language scholarship.1 These changes include a particularly stark decrease (and subsequent increase) in annual production levels,2 as well as an analogous aesthetic renewal. Worthy of more extensive consideration, this aesthetic renovation has been evident in commercially oriented works aimed at mass audiences and backed by coordi-nated marketing campaigns (the films of Iñárritu and Cuarón and recent genre films by Rigoberto Castañeda and Fernando Sariñana) as well as in those with more limited distribution to international art circuits (the films of Reygadas, Fernando Eimbcke, Julián Hernández, Nicolás Pereda and Francisco Vargas, among others). As noted by Luisela Alvaray, the innovative moves of a ‘teen flick’ like Niñas mal/Bad Girls (Sariñana, 2007, Mexico) have to do with their savvy rearticulation of ‘foreign’ genres while simultaneously engaging local concerns – a recipe that has proven successful in the domestic market (n.d.: 1, 16–20). Meanwhile, often resonating with the stylistic trends of European art cinema, the formal experimentations of Reygadas, Eimbcke, Hernández and the others have won recognition at international film festivals.3

Without trying to minimize the many differences in these works, it is nonetheless useful to recognize shared thematic tendencies, most notably a preoccupation with masculinity and homosociality as evident in box-office hits like Amores perros (Iñárritu, 2000, Mexico), Todo el poder/Gimme Power (Fernando Sariñana, 2000, Mexico) and Y tu mamá también (Cuarón, 2001, Mexico) as well as in art-house films like El violín (Vargas, 2005, Mexico) and Alamar (Rubio, 2009, Mexico) and the more aesthetically experi-mental Japón (Reygadas, 2002) and Cielo dividido/Broken Sky (Hernández, 2006). As demonstrated in the following pages, such films articulate a new understanding of masculinity within the context of Mexico – one that is less interested in tying man to nation or in representing man as integral, impenetrable subject. Despite occasional nods to Mexican history, the films do not situate their protagonists as representative of particular genera-tions or as symbols of Mexican manhood in general, as did works from the so-called Golden Age of Mexican cinema such as Flor Silvestre (Fernández, 1943) starring stone-faced Pedro Armendáriz as the son of a wealthy land-owner who gives up a life of privilege to wed a beautiful peasant (Dolores del Río) and fight for the Revolution; or the Pepe ‘el Toro’ films (Nosotros los pobres/We, the Poor, 1947; Ustedes los ricos/You, the Rich, 1948; and Pepe el Toro, 1953) starring Pedro Infante as an honorable working-class carpen-ter and erstwhile boxer, heroically struggling to overcome his impover-ished circumstances to improve the lives of his family.4 In contrast to this earlier representational tradition, the recent films often blur (or jettison entirely) references to particular socio-historical contexts in order to bring into relief micro-tales of male subjectivities in transition. The narratives vary quite a bit, but frequently feature male protagonists in liminal periods of their lives, on the cusp of transformative possibilities. There are older men approaching the end of their lives as in Vera (Athié, 2003); middle-aged men confronting the implications of their own incapacities as in Bajo California, El Límite del Tiempo/Under California, the Limit of Time (Bolado, 1998, Mexico), Sariñana’s Todo el poder and Reygadas’s Japón; and young men on the verge of adulthood, experiencing incredible loss as in Iñárritu’s Amores perros, Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también, Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos/Duck Season (2004) and Hernández’s Cielo dividido.


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a number of genre films, including Viaje redondo/Round Trip (Tort, 2009) and De día y de noche/By Day and By Night (Molina, 2010) (Alvaray n.d.: 12, 14).

4. For more in-depth analysis of masculinity in Mexican cinema from the 1940s to the 1970s, see de la Mora (2006), Noble (2005: 95–115) and Ramírez Berg (1992).

5. This stands in contrast to films from the early 1990s like Solo con tu pareja/Only with Your Partner (Cuarón, 1991), La mujer de Benjamín/Benjamin’s Woman (Carrera, 1991) and El Jardín de Eden The Garden of Eden (Novaro, 1994) which, according to Miriam Haddu, reworked the portrayal of rural and urban spaces (and the relationship between the two) as part of an effort to reassert national identities in an era of globalization.

6. I am certainly not the first scholar to group together these film-makers (see Vargas 2005; David William Foster, as cited in Tompkins 2008: 156; Torres San Martín 2011: 117–18; Fernández 2011: 411–12).

Of these recent films, a notable subset reworks temporal and spatial mark-ers in fairly radical ways. In Vera, Bajo California, Japón, Temporada de patos and Cielo dividido, space does not function as a backdrop for the unfolding of dramatic conflicts or as an allegory delineating national identity.5 Instead, rural and urban landscapes function as the material register of male subjectivity.6 Time is not registered in terms of history, but rather through movement. As ruminations on death and love, these films are less interested in the strug-gles of their protagonists with their natural or social environments than in using the screen as a mobile canvas to trace the unfolding of subjectivities in time-space. To that end, the films exhibit a type of stylistic experimentation – sometimes flattening the pro-filmic space; sometimes preferring to shoot in deep space; frequently de-stabilizing temporal markers; and quite often play-ing with composition and texture – that distinguishes them from other films concerned with masculinity. This formal innovation allows the films to blur the boundaries of the male subject on-screen and also to rewire the relationship between the viewer and the pro-filmic events.

This article will offer an overview of some of the main characteristics of this budding tendency, before discussing the reasons for its emergence and its significance. Rather than definitive, my argument is preliminary and some-what speculative. It is my aim to challenge established critical parameters for analysing Mexican film by moving away from questions of identity, nation and representation, even while arguing for the ‘locatedness’ of the films under discussion. In arguing for this shift in approach, the article underscores the need to recognize how many contemporary Mexican-born directors are addressing audiences defined less by national affiliation than by filmic tastes (for contemporary art and/or ‘world’ cinema); and, at the same time, how their films nonetheless register sociocultural particularities that may or may not be understood by all audiences. In this effort to stake out a new critical frame, I test the potential of utilizing Gilles Deleuze, a theorist whose work on film is deeply informed by the historical and aesthetic trajectories of European and US cinema. Deleuze’s notion of the time–image has nonetheless proven useful to Latin Americanist scholars analysing contemporary Argentine cinema (Christian Gundermann and Hermann Herlinghaus), and, in the new work of Cynthia Tompkins, as a privileged lens to examine experimental aesthet-ics in recent films from around Latin America. While drawing on the French philosopher’s work on the cinema, the present study engages most closely with Deleuze and collaborator Félix Guatarri’s understanding of subjectivity in terms of ‘becomings’ as a particularly useful concept to understand films that eschew the issue of (national) identity in favour of exploring questions of subjectivity. At the same time, to temper Deleuze’s auteurist bent, the article concludes by turning to a more socio-historical analysis to situate the films in relation to the particular time–space in which they were produced.

death becoMes hiM: MaLe subjectivity in transition (i)

Whereas Francisco Athié’s first film Lolo (1992) examined the crisis of patriar-chal norms in a manner akin to the work of his compatriot Arturo Ripstein, the director’s third film Vera marks a more radical departure from the conventions of Mexican cinema. Made more than ten years after his opera prima, Vera traces the hallucinations of an old man who lays dying after his solitary mining activities lead to a cave-in. Rather than positioning the male protagonist as an agent whose actions further the narrative, Athié’s film presents Juan as


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7. As film scholar Patricia Torres San Martin commented in response to an earlier version of this article, Juan Carlos Rulfo’s documentaries El abuelo Cheno y otras historias/Grandfather Cheno and Other Stories (1994, Mexico) and the feature-length Del olvido al no me acuerdo/Juan, I forgot I don’t remember focusing on elderly men on the brink of death do not fit comfortably into the framework being developed here given their central preoccupation with the collective memory. Nonetheless, in staging their interviews with old men (and women) whose faint recollections of the film-maker’s father and grandfather lead to broader comments on earlier eras and social practices, the two documentaries demonstrate a similar interest in utilizing landscape in innovative ways to explore (collective) subjectivities. In El abuelo Cheno, low-angle travelling shots through an abandoned, hollowed-out church are overlaid with the sounds of wind, choral music and children’s voices in order to make manifest (for the viewer) what is no longer there, to acknowledge the ever-present absences that continue to dwell alongside the living. While allowing viewers access to another way of experiencing time–space (akin to that of the older men and women on-screen), Rulfo’s films demonstrate how memories ‘take place’.

a being propelled forward by violent winds and flooding waters. His death-journey is a series of transformational encounters in which Juan turns to the collective beliefs and rituals of the Maya to enhance his visionary potential. In a pivotal sequence, Juan prays to the four Winds as well as to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, before adding urine and blood from his cut penis to a bubbling cooking pot. As depicted in Pre-Colombian stella, such self-mutilation allows man to transcend the limitations of the material world and connect with the divine. In Athié’s film, this occurs through the mediation of a figurine that emerges from the cooking pot and whose eyes offer two scenes: an indigenous man reciting a religious chant and a nude couple making love. Over this coupling we hear a baby’s cry that becomes a soundbridge leading to the subsequent scene in which Juan encounters a sack from which is born a bluish creature (Vera), who quickly grows into adulthood and shepherds Juan through a series of visions (particularly of his granddaughter, Lupita) and along the final leg of his journey towards death.

As apparent in the above description, Vera is centrally concerned with metamorphosis. Juan is less an autonomous individual than a being under-going a transition, a letting-go (of his beloved Lupita), and a moving-on. In this dreamscape, the distinction between the animate and the inanimate is tenuous. Juan sees an image of the Virgin emerge from a rock and dissolve before his eyes. Long shots show Juan and Vera crawling up an enormous tree anchored to a rock face, their spider-like movements mirroring the tree’s gangly, exposed roots (Figure 1). A skeleton comes to life and dances with Vera. Given its interest in taking advantage of the possibilities of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and its fantastical mise-en-scène, Vera offers an extreme example of how contemporary films utilize landscape to explore male subjectivity. Nonetheless, by positioning Juan as a malleable, receptive entity and death as a journey of uncertain meaning, Athie’s Vera also points to how recent works depart from dominant understandings of masculinity in Mexico as well as from the conventions of its cinema.7

Figure 1: The unity of living beings in Vera.



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8. Despite its critique of misguided masculine bravura, ¡Vamonos con Pancho Villa! celebrated the men who faced death without blinking as a sign of the depth of their love for their fellow countrymen. For a more developed reading of La Cucaracha, see Hector Domínguez Ruvalcaba (2007: 91–92). As noted by Andrea Noble in the chapter of her book titled ‘Melodrama, masculinity and the politics of space’, this celebration of the tough, ‘closed’ male was present not only in films about Mexico’s revolutionary past, but also in those about its urban present such as Una familia de tantas/One Family of Many (Galindo, 1948). In critiquing traditional patriarchal figures as unsuited to the nation’s modernizing project, Una familia de tantas held up a young male character as a new, ‘more democratic’ model of masculinity. As Noble observes, the character’s ‘surname ‘del Hierro’ (iron) [… indicates that …] he represents a masculinity that is as hard, penetrating, and closed as that which he displaces’ (2005: 109)

9. In this sketchy outline, it is not my intention to offer a strict periodization or to ignore more complex characterizations. For example, in his book Cinemachismo, de la Mora argues compellingly that this ‘institutionalized deployment of a masculinized mexicanidad through the camera lens’ was nonetheless open to contradictions and allowed alternate readings (de la Mora 2006: 3, 5).

10. In his chapter on ‘Mexico’s Third Wave

As noted by numerous cultural critics, Mexico has promoted a cult of the male hero as a centrepiece of national identity since the first decades of the twentieth century. Evident in omnipresent public monuments to colonial warriors (Cuauhtémoc), independence fighters (Hidalgo, Morelos) and revolutionary figures (Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa), the veneration of spectacular masculinity was central to the post-revolutionary discourse that situated Mexico as a virile nation; in casting off the legacies of colonial domination, the revolutionary struggle was seen as the means by which the Mexican male ‘recovered’ his manhood and revitalized the nation (Domínguez Ruvalcaba 2007: 4; de la Mora 2006: 2, 5). The Mexican cinema has had a vital role in this post-revolutionary discourse and, as noted by film scholar Sergio de la Mora, ‘was instrumental in the invention of the Mexican macho …’ (2006: 7). In Golden Age cinema, male characters performed their masculinity through excess, whether in terms of singing, emoting, fighting or dying (de la Mora 2006: 12; Domínguez Ruvalcaba 2007: 81–82). Whether in the comedia ranchera or the revolutionary melo-drama, the hacienda and the larger countryside functioned as the proving ground of virile, heterosexual masculinities in their prime. Death was a plot device by which to reconfirm male valour and the macho’s hermetic exte-riority (in the words of Octavio Paz). Death was figured as a spectacular moment that proved one’s ability to stand up for and protect the nuclear or national family in classic films from ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa!/Let’s Go with Pancho Villa (de Fuentes, 1934) to Flor Silvestre and La Cucaracha/The Sons of Pancho Villa (Rodríguez, 1958).8

Starting in the late 1960s, even as some films (such as those featur-ing singer-actor Antonio Aguilar) attempted to reconfirm such conventions, others began to acknowledge changing social conditions and a ‘crisis in the macho power structure’ (Ramírez Berg 1992: 100–36).9 In this latter cate-gory, scholar Charles Ramírez Berg places the early films of Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (Matinée/Matinee, 1976; Doña Herlinda y su hijo/Doña Herlinda and Her Son, 1984) and Ripstein’s El lugar sin límites/Hell without Limits (1977), as well as the early films of singer-actor Vicente Fernández, which ‘redefined the role of the heterosexual Mexican male’ as strong, yet less authoritarian and more sensitive (Ramírez Berg 1992: 134–36). By the early 1990s, Alfonso Arau’s Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate (1991), set amidst the battles of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), could feature a fairly passive leading man and still enjoy widespread commercial success.10 Alex Saragoza and Graciela Berkovich have convincingly argued that films from that period frequently functioned as allegories about the crisis of the patriarchal state, just as the Partido Revolucionario Institucionalizado’s (Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI) ability to manage the economy and dominate national politics began to be less certain. In its depiction of the 1968 massacre of students in Tlatelolco Plaza by the military, Rojo amanecer/Red Dawn (Fons, 1990) featured an ineffectual father, unable to protect his family. In Lolo, the young protago-nist’s father is nowhere to be found and his sole role model is a cousin, a corrupt policeman. In sum, while the depictions of masculinity were chang-ing, they were still linked to questions of national identity.

In contrast, Athié’s Vera along with recent works by other directors are less inclined to position their male protagonists as representative of Mexican masculinity in general – a shift that might also be linked to the decline in state funding for film-making as well as the fall of the PRI (and with it, a form of virile cultural nationalism), as will be discussed in greater detail later in this


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cinema’, de la Mora’s discussion of the film includes a detailed analysis of the male characters (2006: 156–58). See also Vek Lewis (2009) for an examination of the representation of the male body in Arau’s later film Zapata, el sueño del héroe/Zapata, the Dream of a Hero (2004), featuring Vicente Fernández’s singer-son, Alejandro Fernández, in the title role. Lewis also analyses the public controversy surrounding the film’s depiction of the revolutionary hero.

article. In these films, death is less as an abrupt cessation or a turning point in the plot than a continuous presence. The narratives have become more personal, and film form, more experimental, as visible in both Carlos Bolado’s Bajo California and Carlos Reygadas’s Japón. The protagonists of both films are middle-aged artists for whom death becomes the impetus behind a jour-ney across the Mexican landscape. Bolado’s film revolves around the travels of Damián Arce, an LA-based installation artist who returns to Mexico after a tragic highway accident in which he unwittingly kills a pregnant immigrant crossing the road at night. In Japón, an unnamed man leaves Mexico City for the isolated countryside where he plans to commit suicide; his pronounced limp suggests that his life has already been marked by profound pain.

In many ways, Bolado’s film is a traditional tale of renewal in which Damián is reborn through his search for origins on a journey back to Mexico that retraces the steps of the first Arce, a Spanish military officer. Drawing on the familiar trope of life as a journey, the film maps its protagonist’s mental state onto the landscape. At one point, a series of high-angle subjective shots focusing on Damián’s feet brings into relief the parched feel of the terrain to symbolize his cracked, deadened spirit (Figure 2). On several occasions as he descends into the hellishly dry landscape of Baja, the film cuts away to black and white, home footage of the belly of his pregnant partner in which she expresses her joy at the immanent birth of their child. These cut-aways to the intimate geography of her body contrast sharply with Damián’s quasi-suicidal march through the desert to express his own penitence for having taken another life. In sum, Bajo California recurs to the established notion of life and death as part of a cycle, in which death performs a regenerative function – in this case, allowing Damián to grow as an artist and as a man by (re)discover-ing his connections with a familial past and ‘homeland’. This cyclical motif is made visible through the mise-en-scène in the tattoos Damián acquires on his forehead as well as in the installations he leaves behind – all of which feature concentric circles and spirals. Given the main character’s ancestral origins and his interest in visiting not only his grandmother’s tomb but also a cave with

Figure 2: The dry earth and the deadened spirit in Bajo California.



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11. Domínguez Ruvalcaba notes that Mexico’s ‘authoritarian modernity’ reproduced the colonial dependency model by sensualizing the male (indigenous) body in contrast to the dominant figures of the military man and the charro (2007: 3).

12. In discussing Reygadas’s oeuvre as an example of time–image cinema, Cynthia Tompkins notes that his films are not propelled by action. In the case of Japón, she cites Deleuze in noting that ‘the character has become a kind of a viewer […] He records rather than reacts […]’ (2008: 159, 161). And when the camera becomes unhinged from the protagonists, this recording forsakes a singular perspective.

13. It is also useful to examine the films’ racial politics, particularly as they intersect with gendered representations. Women’s bodies are racialized in Japón and Batalla en el cielo. However, whereas Japón might be critiqued for mining long-standing patterns of representation in Mexican cinema which position indigenous women as objects of desire, Batalla en el cielo offers a fairly provocative discussion of ‘whiteness’ through its representation of Ana.

pre-Colombian rock paintings, it is possible to read Bolado’s film as a tale of cultural appropriation wherein the modern (European-ized) subject is reborn through his encounter with the primitive other. And, it is tempting to see Bajo California as a corollary to Vera, which associates permeability with indige-nous man.11 Nonetheless, Bolado’s film takes advantage of the arid landscape to make manifest the vulnerability of a mestizo protagonist and in exposing a traumatized male subject in this way is quite unique.

The work of Carlos Reygadas goes even farther in remapping subjectivity and toys with the type of ‘becomings’ delineated by Deleuze and Guattari. In their work, the two theorists countered a psychoanalytically informed notion of the subject with another model stressing immanence. Whereas Freud, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault and others understood the subject in terms of society’s disciplining project ‘organiz[ing …] body parts into a function-ing whole’ that desires in particular ways, Deleuze and Guattari propose a model in which the human subject does not hold the promise of being either unitary or autonomous (Pile and Thrift 1995: 196). For them, ‘the human subject is always a full body to come; it endures without ever exist-ing as such. Being is Becoming. In other words, the subject endures through continually breaking down, but this is not a negative event’ (Doel 1995: 230; original emphasis).

Through Japón’s unconventional cinematography, Reygadas transforms a tale of one man’s coming apart into an exploration of the fluid dynamics of being–becoming. While including point-of-view shots and circumscribed compositions that restrict the viewer’s perspective to that of the protago-nist, the film also allows the camera to ‘detach’ itself from that (subject) position and take flight in literal and metaphoric ways.12 Destabilizing our/his visual mastery of all that w/he survey(s), such techniques encourage us to rediscover the male subject less as a privileged and unifying position than as a body in relation to other bodies, both animate and inanimate. While documenting the protagonist’s suicidal desires, Japón explores death as a ghastly, abject and yet seductive presence that surrounds and exceeds the protagonist, even after his spiritual rebirth. The film offers us numerous depictions of death materialized, from the headless bird shot down by the hunting party, to the off-screen squealing of a pig being slaughtered, to a dead horse, to the final long take of human bodies strewn along the rail-way. While clearly disturbing, these images and sounds are rendered with such precision and compositional complexity that they become aesthetic objects which invite us to peer at them a while longer, rather than looking away in horror.

To some degree, these images can be read as a register of the protago-nist’s psychological state. And it is certainly possible to see Japón as a tale of redemption and rebirth of the male subject through his encounter with nature and woman, particularly if juxtaposed to his subsequent work Batalla en el cielo/Battle in Heaven (Reygadas, 2005). Both films figure the female protago-nist (Ascención and Ana, respectively) as the Other whose presence serves to bolster (or fracture) the coherence of the male subject. As discussed more fully below, sexual encounters – real or imagined – with ‘woman’ serve as turn-ing points for the male protagonists and the films highlight the corporality of the female characters in notable ways (Ascención’s wrinkles, Ana’s dreadlocks and Marcos’s wife’s girth). In this light, feminist critiques of Reygadas’s work are warranted, as his films retain a high degree of continuity in their treatment of ‘woman’ with earlier trends in the Mexican film industry.13


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14. Tompkins cites from an interview with Reygadas in which the director says that his actors ‘know what they have to do, but […] they don’t know anything psychological, because I don’t want them to think about representation’ (2008: 165).

15. While much has been made of the film’s similarities to Juan Rulfo’s literary work (particularly Pedro Páramo), I think it equally important to comment on the way it resonates with his photographic work. As noted by Andrew Dempsey, a majority of Rulfo’s photographs depict buildings or aspects of buildings – the gutted ruins of old, colonial churches; pock-marked walls whose adobe face has eroded over time, etc. Rulfo’s photographic work can be seen as a more direct influence on the cinematic work of his son, Juan Carlos. Both El abuelo Cheno and Del olvido al no me acuerdo include breathtaking tracks through hollowed-out old buildings.

Nonetheless, while retaining certain conventions for representing the male subject, Japón utilizes its detached positioning of the camera, frequent toying with off-screen space and textured images to question the grounds upon which subjectivity unfolds. Space does not function as a ‘container’ through which the human subject moves; indeed, off-screen sounds often remind the viewer of the limits of the frame while the wandering camera points to vistas beyond the ken of the protagonist. In certain sequences, Japón’s preference for a flat-tened pro-filmic space and dense composition melds together the human body and the environment. In these moments, the film forsakes the notion of subjectivity as positionality, and the body as ‘a set of organs, blood, bones, and so on […] in opposition to mind and consciousness’ to materialize what Deleuze and Guattari call the ‘body without organs’ – in other words, the body (whether ‘animate, inanimate, human, inhuman’) as ‘nothing more than a set of valves, locks, floodgates, bowls, or communicating vessels …’ (Kennedy 2000: 98; Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 153). In the film, depth (understood in psychological and perspectival terms) gives way to surface while the animate and inanimate, the material and the existential, become co-terminous.14 In Reygadas’s films, male subjectivity unfolds when bodies touch other bodies; Japón, in particular, is concerned with the possibilities of coming into contact with the abject, with decay, ruin and decline. The frame functions as a mobile screen tracing the protagonist’s encounters with other bodies: with natural and built environments (rocky hillsides, the ruined church where he is stay-ing, alongside Ascen), as well as with animate beings (Figure 3).15

Figure 3: Somatic landscapes in Japón.



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Perhaps it is not surprising that the film depicts sexual contact with Ascen, the aged woman with whom he is staying, as the most transforma-tive experience. Their physical union is depicted as a spiritual, rather than an erotic encounter, as the scene presents Ascen as a Christ-like figure with arms spread wide (Velazco 2011). It is only after this corporeal merging that the protagonist becomes self-less, struggling to defend Ascen’s ruined home against family and community members who wish to dismantle it. Yet, his newly found sense of agency is ineffectual. The stones of Ascen’s home are taken apart and carted off for sale; Ascen herself dies en route. Leaving behind the male protagonist, the film ends with a five-minute sequence shot that clinically surveys the bodies scattered alongside the railway line.

In their preoccupation with old, physically frail and/or psychologically damaged men, Vera, Bajo California and Japón all explore masculinity as a permeable status, rather than as a fixed identity. Yet only Reygadas’s film toys with a more radical understanding of subjectivity by mapping the breakdown of the male subject without lamentations and without holding out the promise of ‘reterritorialization’ – Deleuze and Guattari’s term for the successful reinte-gration into the social body. Before developing this interpretation further, let us first turn to another group of films.

tiMescaPes: MaLe subjectivity in transition (ii)

Whereas Bolado and Reygadas favour older male protagonists, other film-makers such as Julián Hernández and Fernando Eimbcke are concerned with the unfolding of male subjectivities during adolescence and young adulthood. Their works are clearly quite different in subject matter and style. Hernández’s melancholic Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jamás acabarás de ser amor/A Thousand Peace Clouds Encircle the Sky (2003, Mexico) and Cielo dividido revolve around painful love affairs and are shot in a languid, highly poetic style. Film scholar Sergio de la Mora quite rightly calls the films ‘visual poems that … narrate simple stories … through carefully composed and startling [sic] beautiful images’ and points to their preference for ‘long takes of between four to five minutes …’ (2009). Much more light-hearted in tone, Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos is a day-in-the-life story of two teenage boys just hanging out one Sunday in an apartment. In a surprising move for a film with such a compressed story time, Temporada de patos is intensely episodic featuring, for example, a series of frontal shots of short duration of the boys sitting on a couch in the living room (Figure 4). Revealing little to no change in the position of their bodies and linked together through fades-to-black, the juxta-posed shots effectively transmit the boys’ sense of stasis and relative bore-dom. Despite their many differences, the films of Hernández and Eimbcke express a shared concern for mapping male subjectivities-in-formation. They are urban films about the ‘timescapes’ of young men on the cusp of adulthood that utilize built environments to make visible their protagonists’ becomings.

In Temporada de patos, the scale of this unfolding is quite small and contained. Unlike Hernández’s works, Eimbcke’s film is less interested in tectonic shifts of subjectivity, than in subtle realignments – in the possibility of developing a more secure sense of self through brief moments of solidar-ity. Opening with a number of still shots of lost and broken exterior spaces (separated by fades-to-black) (Figure 5), the film situates Flama’s apartment within a bleak urban landscape of highway underpasses, graffiti-covered walls, one-wheeled bicycle frames chained to light-posts; and tattered


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basketball hoops – all devoid of any sign of human presence. Yet, as revealed through the course of the film, the apartment is less a refuge from these urban no-spaces, than a battleground in the increasingly ugly fights between his divorcing parents. Placed in the Unidad Habitacional Nonoalco Tlatelolco, Edificio Niños Héroes, the setting slyly comments on the lost promises of the modern nation; once a sign of Mexico’s modernization, the apartment build-ings have become hollowed-out remains wherein the recent generation of youth is less heroic than pathetic.16

Yet, Temporada de patos is less interested in denouncing a particular socio-historical moment than in exploring Flama and Moko’s experience on a particular Sunday; their encounters with Flama’s neighbour Rita and, Ulíses, a pizza delivery man; and, more generally, the rhythms of their lives. As with some other recent youth films from Mexico and elsewhere, Temporada de patos examines what Jesús Martín Barbero and G. Rey have called

[la] cultura-mundo que se configura hoy de la manera más explícita en la percepción de los jóvenes, y en la emergencia de culturas sin memo-ria territorial, ligadas a la expansión del mercado de la televisión, del disco o del video. Culturas que se hallan ligadas a sensibilidades e identidades nuevas: de temporalidades menos ‘largas’, más precarias, dotadas de gran plasticidad para amalgamar ingredientes que provi-enen de mundos culturales muy diversos, y por lo tanto atravesadas por discontinuidades en las que conviven gestos atávicos, residuos

16. Built as an integrated living complex featuring apartments, stores and schools, the Unidad Habitacional Nonalco Tlatelolco was a sign of Mexico’s modernizing promise in the early 1960s. Shortly thereafter, the complex became the locus of controversy after the nearby massacre of students by government forces in October 1968. The 1985 earthquake signalled its definite decline, destroying and severely damaging several buildings. Eimbcke’s film further teases the viewer with the notion of Mexico’s decline by placing Flama’s apartment in the building named for the Niños Héroes, the boy-soldiers who died defending Chapultepec Castle from US troops in the Mexican–American War. As detailed later in the text, unlike that earlier generation of heroic youth, Flama and Moko play out their war fantasies through videogames.

Figure 4: The detached frontal shots of Temporada de patos.



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Figure 5: The bleak urban landscape in Temporada de patos.

modernistas y vacíos posmodernos/the culture-world that constitutes itself most explicitly in the perception[s] of young adults, and in the emergence of cultures without territorial memory, [that are] tied to the expansion of televisual, discographic, and videogame markets. Cultures that are linked to new sensibilities and identities [that feature] ‘shorter’ temporalities [and are] more precarious. [B]lessed with a great plasticity


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to allow for the amalgamation of ingredients coming from very diverse cultural worlds, [these new sensibilities and identities are consequently] crossed by discontinuities wherein atavistic gestures, modernist residues, and postmodern emptiness co-exist.

(cited in Kantaris 2006: 523)

In Eimbcke’s film, time is both short (a single Sunday afternoon) and long, as measured through the sensibilities of Flama and Moko, who pass the day playing X-Box (when not interrupted by frequent power outages) and plot-ting when to order pizza and coke. Time is both of intense concern and little interest to them. Flama times the delivery man and demands free pizza when Ulíses arrives eleven seconds too late – a situation that plays itself out in a tense stalemate wherein Flama refuses to pay and Ulíses refuses to leave. For his part, Moko repeatedly uses his watch to keep track of the time needed to bake Rita’s confections, although it always fails to do its job. Although the film begins and ends with temporal markers (Sunday, 11:30 a.m.; Sunday, 8:00 p.m.), Temporada de patos suggests that time does not pass in a linear fashion for these young people who are globally connected (their video game features a head-to-head battle between Bush and Bin Laden) and yet dis-connected from their surrounding urban environment. While the film uses the subplot involving the somewhat-older Ulíses (the only character to traverse exterior spaces) to comment on the de-humanizing future that awaits Flama and Moko, Eimbcke’s film is not a denunciation or lament about today’s ‘lost youth’, as much as a playful, and often humorous rumination on male subjectivities-in-formation – one that acknowledges the potential for multiple becomings. In this regard, the exploration of Moko and Flama’s amorphous sexuality is particularly important.

While much more melancholic in tone than Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos, Hernández’s films are similarly interested in rhythms and sensibilities. As noted by de la Mora, ‘Hernández’s films… are not narrative driven but rather are mood pieces that capture the textures of affective states and urban spaces …’ (2009). Indeed, in Cielo dividido, urban settings serve as the site of subjective unfolding. As in Temporada de patos, there are identifiable parts of the cityscape – most notably in this case, UNAM’s Centro Universitario. Yet, even these are shot in such a way as to transform them, at least partially, into what Deleuze would call ‘any spaces whatsoever’ (1989: xi). For example, UNAM’s library becomes the means by which to make manifest the ebb-and-flows of desire through tightly framed shots that track Gerardo and Jonás as they playfully chase each other though the book-lined aisles. Here and elsewhere, the film exhibits a preference for sparse geometric compositions – shooting down long corridors and exterior walkways; across highways; and along the bleachers lining the university’s swimming pool (Figure 6) – in order to frame, isolate and conjoin human figures in relation to each other. Such compositions are one of the most effective means by which Cielo dividido materializes the symmetries and asymmetries of homosexual desire, a thematic concern signalled early on as Gerardo listens to his professor recount Aristophanes’s tale of true love as the (re)encounter of two halves of a previous whole, separated by the gods.

By focusing on young adulthood – understood as an instance of supple subjectivities-in-formation, Eimbcke and Hernández can explore the processes by which subjectivities take on a certain shape. Shot in particular ways, the urban landscape makes visible the rhythms and textures of their experiences that are only beginning to now crystallize.



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a certain tendency in Mexican cineMa

Throughout this article, I have been offering a fairly auteurist analysis of this new film-making current. And, indeed, we might consider the tendency that I have been describing as the result of the emergence of a new group (genera-tion?) of Mexican-born film-makers. With the exception of Athié (b. 1956), all of the film-makers discussed up to now are relatively young, born in the mid-1960s or early 1970s.17 All perform multiple roles in the film-making process, frequently serving not only as writer-director, but also as producer of their own works. And they have emerged precisely at a time of dwindling state support for the film industry in the context of a more encompassing shift towards neo-liberal policies. Initiated in the late 1980s under the PRI, such reforms deepened after the 2000 elections that brought to power the right-wing administration of Vicente Fox, a member of the National Action Party (PAN or Partido Acción National).18 One of the most striking examples of this push towards privatization was the Fox administration’s 2004 call to dismantle state institutions promoting national cinema, such as IMCINE and the pres-tigious film school Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC). Although the initiative failed, it was a sign that the type of state support for a national cinema project that had been the norm for decades under PRI administrations could no longer be expected.19 While IMCINE still functions as a co-producer and few directors make do without some level of state support (including Reygadas, Hernández and Eimbcke),20 government rhetoric about the cine-ma’s particular importance to the nation rests primarily on stimulating private investment in the film industry through tax credits (Elena 2008: 3–4; Torres San Martín 2011: 99–102).

Given these larger political and institutional changes, it may be tempting to characterize the work of directors like Reygadas, Eimbcke and Hernández as the advanced guard of a newer, more independent cinema in Mexico – a cinema seemingly little concerned with issues of mexicanidad. Even leaving aside an auteurist approach in favour of one that addresses questions of authorship and marketplaces, this argument has some merit. Based on his two awards at Cannes and the complexity of his co-production arrangements, Reygadas, in particular, has functioned particularly well as an internationally recognized brand.21 And, indeed, without close ties to the state (and, more

17. Bolado was born in 1964, Eimbcke in 1970, Reygadas in 1971 and Hernández in 1972.

18. The PAN’s electoral victory in the 2000 presidential election marked the definitive ouster of the PRI, which had held that office and dominated national (and often state) politics since the late 1920s. The Fox administration (2000–2006) was followed by the presidency of another PAN member, Felipe Calderón (2006–2012).

19. This state support has taken many different forms over the decades, from direct investment, to the creation of the Banco Cinematográfico (established 1942) and the state-run distributor Películas Nacionales (established 1947); to more indirect co-production.

20. As detailed in endnote 3, Reygadas finances his films through his own production company Cadereyta, as well as through an increasing number of international investors. Hernández funded Mil nubes … by establishing Cooperativa Cinematográfica Morelos (which also helped finance Cielo dividido) whereas Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos was funded by small production companies, among them Cinepantera y Lulú Producciones (Elena 2008: 4–5). At the same time, even the films of these directors have garnered some level of state support from IMCINE or Fidecine, often to back their distribution and exhibition.

21. Japón won the Cámara de Oro at Cannes in 2002 and Luz silenciosa won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes in 2007 (Elena 2008: 1, 3).

Figure 6: The isolation of any-space-whatsoever in Cielo dividido.


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particularly, to the PRI’s brand of cultural nationalism), there may be less pressure to make films about national concerns, which often involve (as noted earlier) promoting particular notions of masculinity (as well as femininity).

Yet, this type of an explanation does not seem sufficient to account for the thematic and formal commonalities outlined in this article. Rather, we must trace their relation to the broader socio-historical context in which they have emerged. In other words, we must think about how these films’ depiction of male subjectivities relates to a larger shift in our contemporary experience of time–space, resulting from macro-economic processes like globalization, as well as from interrelated material changes like the spectacular growth and reconstitution of cities. In his lovely analysis of recent Mexican urban films such as Lolo and De la calle/Streeters (Tort, 2001), Geoffrey Kantaris has discussed the way in which they respond to ‘a powerful set of disruptive urban processes […] whereby the link between identity and place is splin-tered’; and in which the notion of citizenship ‘understood in terms of the right to the city granted as a badge of belonging’ has withered away.22 As noted most recently by Nestor García Canclini, Mexico City has become ‘unimagi-nable’ as totality and, as a consequence, inhabitants ‘surviv[e] by imagining small environments within their reach’ (2008: 85) and, as Kantaris notes, it is this sense of dis-placement that is captured in recent films about marginalized urban subjects.

To some extent, films like Temporada de patos and Cielo dividido speak of the ‘disarticulation of familial, social [and] cultural identities’, of ‘hybrid, volatile partial identifications’ and of the city ‘as a space of desencuentros [missed encounters]’ (Kantaris 2006: 520). Yet, if this new current of films ‘mark[s] the emergence of an economy of flows’, they also encourage us to understand those flows somewhat differently than does Kantaris. As much as these films are about de-centred subjectivities, about loss, about dis-placements, they also allow, through their aesthetic play, for a new understanding of subjectivity. And this is where I think Deleuze can be helpful.

In Cinema 2, Deleuze argues that that the time–image emerged in full force in the aftermath of World War II (in Europe) because ‘the post-war period has greatly increased the situations [to] which we no longer know how to react, in spaces which we no longer know how to describe’ (1989: xi). A clear anal-ogy can be established with the types of transformations that are taking place at the present moment and with certain cinematic currents that are bubbling to the surface in Mexico (and elsewhere). For Deleuze, the time–image does not anchor subjects (either the characters or the viewer) in place, as does the movement–image of the classical cinema, which stresses causality and linear-ity. Rather, we have a cinema that de-personalizes movement. Here we might think of the lengthy tracking shots in Reygadas’s and Hernández’s films that frequently detach themselves from the protagonist to wander rural or urban landscapes. What they reveal is not how the protagonists move or what they see, but rather an experience of longing or estrangement that is represented by, but not specific to, those characters. Despite their many differences, these films share an interest in depicting the permeability of male subjectivity not as deviance, but rather as a point of entry or departure to imagine new possibilities of existence.

While clearly related to the personal preoccupations of their male writer-directors, the films’ exploration of male (rather than female) subjectivity also responds to how the larger socio-economic shifts of the last several decades have destabilized the place of men in society in particular ways. Anthropologists

22. Kantaris (2006: 520), citing Anthony Giddens’ notion of ‘disembedding’ and Renato Ortiz’s notion of ‘desencaje’; as well as Jesús Martín Barbero’s notion of urbanías.



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23. For example, Escobar Latapí noted that younger men whose wives work outside the home are not as involved in child-rearing as might be assumed. His cross-regional study revealed that it is often the wife’s mother or parents (rather than the father) who are charged with taking care of young children when the mother is working outside the home (2003: 102).

24. There was some evidence in Carrillo’s study that the increased visibility of masculine homosexual men did not necessarily challenge the heterosexual community to express greater tolerance for homosexuality. For instance, some of the men that Carrillo interviewed acknowledged that their masculinity allowed them to maintain ‘two separate worlds’: one in which they were open about their homosexuality and one in which they were not (2003: 354). In his analysis of a 1999 telenovela that featured a gay man as a main character, Carrillo noted that despite its laudable efforts to acknowledge the complexities of gay male experience, La vida en el espejo (Televisión Azteca) also reconfirmed widely held beliefs by homosexuals and heterosexuals alike about the unacceptability of certain behaviours by men that ‘others might perceive as effeminate’ (2003: 366).

25. I would like to thank the anonymous review for this insightful observation.

and sociologists like Matthew Gutmann, Héctor Carrillo and Agustín Escobar Latapí have gone so far as to suggest that those changes have brought about a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in Mexico. Gutmann’s 1996 ethnographic study of men in the Santo Domingo neighbourhood of the capital city (The Meanings of Macho: Being a Man in Mexico City) was one of the first to discuss the impact of ‘economic transformations and crises, struggles for ethnic identities, and ecological catastrophes’ in the 1970s and 1980s on the ‘individual processes of identity construction’ among men (Viveros Vigoya 2003: 32). Subsequent studies by Escobar Latapí, Carrillo and others pointed to additional factors challenging traditional notions of male power and masculinity, including the increased presence of women in the job market as well as the growing public recognition of the distinction between gendered appearances and sexual practices (Escobar Latapí 2003: 84–85, 101; Carrillo 2003: 351–52). It is possi-ble to overestimate the impact of such changes on behaviours and attitudes. For example, Escobar Latapí’s cross-regional study suggests that the increased presence of women in the workplace has not generated a radical shift in gendered practices such as child-rearing or, thus, in male privilege.23 And Carrillo’s analysis of the increased visibility of ‘masculine homosexual men’ noted that public recognition at times did little to question traditional beliefs and, at times, reconfirmed gendered norms.24 Nonetheless, these scholars agree that over the last decades a more plural understanding of what it means to be a man has emerged in Mexico.

While their studies encourage us to understand the changing place of men in society in metaphoric terms, it will also be productive to do so in more literal terms. Among other factors, the rupturing of neighbourhood and workplace affiliations and the waning influence of the family and the Church have had a deleterious effect on male authority as constituted spatially as well as institutionally. Indeed, the films of Reygadas, Hernández and Eimbcke point us in this direction as they examine what happens when man no longer is situated in a position of mastery. In Temporada de patos, the subplot about Ulíses is particularly noteworthy in this regard. Although he is the only char-acter to transverse the exterior spaces of the city, the film suggests that he is lost in a labyrinth leading to nowhere. Numerous shots capture him on his motorbike rushing along the busy highway; weaving his way through the circuitous passageways of the Tlatelolco apartment complex; and climb-ing innumerable stairs to Flama’s upper-story apartment in order to make his delivery in the guaranteed 30 minutes – a task that he does not success-fully complete. Edited together without match-on-action cuts, the sequence does not emphasize the continuity of his actions, as much as his inability to dominate the spaces through which he moves. The recurrent use of long shots and extreme long shots further emphasizes Ulíses’s powerlessness by emphasizing ‘the “smallness” of man’s place’ in the contemporary urban landscape.25

Yet, even while noting the breakdown of man’s privileged place in Mexican society at times in explicit ways, the films I have been discussing are more concerned with opening up other means of understanding male subjectivity and, hence, turn towards an alternative aesthetics akin to Deleuze’s notion of the time–image. In their attention to bodies and spaces, the films of Reygadas, Hernández and Eimbcke can be understood as attempts to articulate a somatic experience of masculinity. As discussed in the two previous sections, their works move towards that goal by rethinking the space of the screen and treating it as something other than a frame offering seemingly unlimited access


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to another world. In so doing, they also rework the terms of spectatorship to invite viewers to establish a different relationship with the pro-filmic space.

On the one hand, the films rewire the dynamics of the gaze, which tradi-tionally have aligned the spectator with the heterosexual gaze of the male protagonist. This was discussed earlier in terms of the detached gaze in Reygadas’ Japón. Eimbcke’s Temporada de patos offers the spectator an even more unanchored viewing position. With the exception of the extended subjective flashback of Ulíses’s previous job at the dog pound, the film does not represent the pro-filmic events through the visual perspective of the char-acters. Instead, Temporada includes numerous frontal shots presenting the characters in a rather theatrical fashion, as if the apartment were a backdrop for their performance. Yet, there is very little drama on that stage. The fades-in and-out to subsequent shots in which the actors are in the same position as in the previous one suggests that nothing has happened and, little by little, leads us to understand that the pleasure of revelation will be denied. While clearly situating the films within the parameters of contemporary art cinema and its refusal of the type of formal transparency characteristic of classical, realist cinema, such devices are also related to the way in which the films promote a reconsideration of (male) subjectivity. In detaching the spectator’s gaze from that of the male protagonists and disregarding the traditional mechanisms of suture, Reygadas’s and Eimbcke’s films work to destabilize the spectator’s relationship to the screen. Indeed, they problematize the role of the gaze in consolidating the viewing subject as unitary and empowered by denying him or her (along with the male protagonists) visual and epistemological mastery over the diegetic world.

For their part, Hernández’s works do not jettison the voyeuristic gaze but rather foreground it as a mechanism of desire. Nonetheless, Mil nubes de paz … and Cielo dividido revise patriarchal, heteronormative looking rela-tions by positioning man as both the subject and the object of the gaze. Cielo dividido features numerous scenes of Gerardo looking at/for Jonás and, later, of Jonás looking at/for Gerardo. At the same time, both this film and the earlier Mil nubes de paz … complicate these dynamics by introducing a third (or fourth) male character who is both subject and object of the gaze. Moreover, as the camera does not always remain anchored to the characters, the films fail to align the spectator with a particular desiring gaze. This effect is amplified in Cielo dividido through the periodic inclusion of a voice-over that, in commenting somewhat coldly on the represented events, helps to detach them from psychological moorings. In sum, Hernández’s films figure desire as a diffuse force travelling along multiple trajectories.

On the other hand, while restructuring the gaze as the privileged channel through which to engage the subjectivity of the viewer, some films go further by ‘scratching’ the I/eye or proposing what Laura Marks has called ‘haptic visu-ality’ that forces the ‘eyes themselves [to] function like organs of touch’ (2000: 162). This more radical option is particularly evident in the films of Reygadas and Hernández. In their preoccupation with surfaces and textures, Japón, Batalla en el cielo, Mil nubes de paz … and Cielo dividido are concerned with trac-ing the outlines of subjectivities, instead of plotting the male subject according to his visual mastery. Both Mil nubes de paz … and Cielo dividido include slow, close-up pans along the chest, shoulders and face of the male protagonists as they lay in bed with each other. Given the framing, it is often initially difficult to identify the particular body being showcased in such a loving fashion. Instead of positioning a specific character as the object of desire, the tight framing



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encourages the viewer to appreciate the beauty of the skin and the contours of the male body. These long camera movements are not only reserved for the human form; they also travel leisurely over the textured surfaces of stuc-coed walls, a roughened counterpoint to the male characters’ smooth skin. Reygadas’s films betray a similar fascination with the uneven surfaces of wrin-kled or unshaven faces, the divets and cracks that line old walls, and, in Batalla en el cielo, the bulky pleats of Ana’s dreadlocks. The director’s concern for exte-riority becomes fully manifest in that second film in which the exploration of the volume and plasticity of the human form are absolutely central. While some analysts have characterized Reygadas as a director (unduly) fascinated with the grotesque (particularly as related to the female subject), it may be equally important to consider the way in which his attention to surface, texture and volume reveal an alternate understanding of the cinema. Perhaps for Reygadas, cinema is less about representation or about envisioning ‘internal’ psychological states through the portrayal of characters’ actions, than about promoting change in the perceptual habitus of the audience.

While recognizing the ground-breaking nature of the films discussed in this article, it will be helpful to conclude with a final comparison that acknowl-edges the larger social conditions and discursive traditions making their formal experimentations possible. Having discussed how Athié, Bolado, Reygadas, Hernández and Eimbcke address male subjectivity quite differently than previ-ous Mexican (male) film-makers, we should also distinguish their work from the exploration of female subjectivity by women directors such as Busi Cortés, María Novaro, Marysa Sistach and Guita Schyfter. Starting in the late 1980s, these female auteurs exploded onto the Mexican scene and remapped the cinematic figure of woman. As well documented by Isabel Arredondo, Elissa Rashkin, Patricia Torres San Martín, Andrea Noble, Miriam Haddu and others, their films acknowledged the immense diversity of women’s experiences. Lola (Novaro, 1989), El secreto de Romelia/Romelia’s Secret (Cortés, 1988), Novia que te vea/Like a Bride (Schyfter, 1992) and other films focused on women’s strug-gles in particular environments (work and home); their efforts to balance the multiple roles (mother, daughter, wife) to which they are socially assigned; and the relationships (with family members and female friends) that nurture and confine them. Noteworthy for their unconventional narratives and nuanced, intimate portrayals of women’s everyday lives, those works did not employ an alternative aesthetics of the time–image. In their concern for representing women as complex subjects (in mapping women as constitutive of the larger social landscape), these films were not interested in exploring the dissolution of the boundaries of the subject made possible by the type of aesthetic moves practiced by Reygadas, Hernández and Eimbcke. Thus, it may be that the formal experimentation of these contemporary directors presupposes a certain level of privilege that the time–image does little to destabilize.

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suggested citation

Podalsky, L. (2011), ‘Landscapes of subjectivity in contemporary Mexican cinema’, New Cinemas 9: 2+3, pp. 161–182, doi: 10.1386/ncin.9.2-3.161_1

contributor detaiLs

Laura Podalsky specializes in Latin American film and cultural studies. She has published essays on a wide variety of topics, including Mexican youth films, the work of Brazilian director Ana Carolina and classic melodrama in journals such as Studies of Hispanic Cinemas, Framework, Screen, Cinemais (Brazil) and


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Archivos de la Filmoteca (Spain). She is the author of Specular City: Transforming Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 1955–1973 (Temple University Press, 2004) on Argentine film and urban culture and The Politics of Affect and Emotion in the Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

Contact: 227 Hagerty Hall, 1775 College Road, Columbus, OH 43210, USA.E-mail: [email protected]

Laura Podalsky has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.


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