New Mexican Cinema

As I write these lines, the media is awash with news of the umpteenth capture of "El Chapo" Guzman, perhaps the greatest Mexican drug trafficker, head of the Sinaloa cartel and responsible for some of the most incredible escapes in history. As I write these lines, or rather as I let some recent Mexican films pass through my mind, we’ve been having discussions at home about the video of El Chapo’s latest capture, which we’ve been playing on loop: a fifteen-minute sequence shot in nearly a single take, filmed with a camera mounted on the helmet of one of the soldiers who arrested him. The video is entitled “Operation Black Swan” and has rapidly gone viral, gaining hundreds of thousands of views in just a few days. Moreover, it is already the subject of parodies that ridicule its cinematic qualities while sowing doubts whether conscious or unconscious about the veracity of these images and the entire police, government and media operation.

There is no doubt that the real is always an invention, and that cinematic staging is the perfect vehicle for propaganda. Whether the video is true or a new propaganda operation, the figure of El Chapo and everything that surrounds him has all the ingredients of the sort of generic Latin American productions eagerly sought by the most prestigious film festivals worldwide: violence, sex, fiery women, poverty, drugs, rural settings, semi-illiterate and impoverished extras (whom the critics refer to as “non-professional actors”) and the constant not so subtle hint that the Mexican state is a rotten and corrupt extension of the drug cartels. Or, to put it another way, it contains all the necessary elements for viewers with a superficial sense of awareness and a somewhat racist core to subconsciously reaffirm their post-colonialist worldview, while simultaneously satisfying what Mike Zryd has called the “documentary fantasy”: “the idea that we solve the problems in the world just by watching documentaries about them”.

This fantasy is particularly present in the viewer's relationship with more traditional documentary cinema and focuses on the issue in question and its severity, while serving to silence the guilty conscience of audiences in rich countries. Yet it can also be applied to the relationship we establish with feature films, especially those from poor or developing countries, which only reproduce our imagined stereotypes of the Global South. Argentinian critic Roger Koza has referred to such films as a “school of the sordid”: primitive, uncharted, violent societies, dominated by primary instincts at once exotic and dangerous, capable of awakening the desire for adventure, compassion and solidarity in us, together with a surface indignation that is immediate, innocuous and entirely interchangeable.

In some way, the circuit of festivals, critics, programmers, spectators and the media merely reproduces a vicious circle of what you might call poverty pornography in a seemingly infinite loop, a vicious circle denounced back in the seventies by Colombian filmmakers Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo: “Poverty became an important issue and therefore an easily saleable commodity, especially abroad, where poverty forms a counterpart to consumerist affluence. If poverty was able to serve independent film as an element of condemnation and analysis, commercial desires turned it into an escape valve for the very same system that generated it. This thirst for profit left no room for a method that might discover new premises according to which poverty could be analysed; on the contrary, it created demagogic blueprints that advanced to the status of a genre we could term miserabilist cinema or poverty pornography.” This cycle of poverty pornography, the buying and selling of images produced in the Global South to satisfy the industry and audiences of the northern hemisphere, images that are devoid of any critical and political discourse, has also taken on the more prestigious guise of auteur cinema. It is this brand of cinema which is the main guilty party in creating the sort of false self-portraits that certain filmmakers in emerging countries are creating about themselves and their countries of origin, portraits imposed upon them and directed by the First World.

This spectre of poverty pornography, the taste for the sordid and auteur cinema’s trade in the misfortune of others is one of the great debates facing the whole of contemporary Latin American filmmaking (if you can forgive the generalisation). It is necessitated by the major European festivals as a means of validating, legitimising and conferring the auteur status that grants entrance into the industry and the markets: a vicious circle of dependence and intellectual and economic domination. Cinema from this continent is at the same time struggling to find forms of self-representation that escape the poverty aficionado’s gaze which Europe imposes upon the impossible grouping that is Latin America.

Perhaps because of the strength of its production, its diversity, and its recent exponential growth, Mexican cinema provides one of the best examples of these tensions and contradictions: purely industrial filmmaking that looks enviously to Hollywood; name directors who play the exoticism card to penetrate the North American movie industry; an auteur cinema entirely dependent on the international festival circuit. For some years now and more or less in parallel with the explosion of digital technologies, Mexico has been undergoing a cinematic revolution that is confronting the definition and relationship of North-South dependency in clear, political fashion. This revolution also questions structures of centrality and marginality, whether through the work of filmmakers not resident in the country (such as Nicolás Pereda, who emigrated to Canada, or Pedro González Rubio, who emigrated to France), those working at a significant remove from the centres of power (such Pablo Chavarría or Diego Amando Moreno, two directors whose cinematic practice stems from the resounding solitude of the Chiapas jungle), or those who directly inhabit the anarchist spaces offered by networks, such as the Los ingrávidos collective. This question of centrifugal movement at a physical level, which imposes a distance from the centre of identity, blurring its borders and suggesting new images for this contested identity, is accompanied by a centripetal movement at a thematic level, which brings with it a rethink in terms of how such themes are presented: the further they are from the centre in all senses of the word, the more concerned these filmmakers seem to be with the development of their country and the search for ways of thinking about Mexico in political terms via cinema.

Take, for example, LAS LETRAS (2015), which premiered at CPH:DOX. This latest film by Pablo Chavarria, a biologist and self-taught filmmaker who reinvents himself with every work, was filmed in extended tracking shots that almost seem to float, like moments from a slumber punctuated by nightmares. It tells the story of Alberto Patishtán, an indigenous activist imprisoned without trial for thirteen years and later pardoned by the government, which acknowledged having violated his rights. The filmmaker avoids any temptation towards explanation or condemnation, opting instead to create a work bordering on the surreal to portray the country as a state of mind and to depict the struggle for civil rights as the conclusion of one of the long, hovering tracking shots that accompanies a group of children on their wanders through the forest. Filmed in a Tzotzil (Maya) community, the film does not translate the words spoken by its protagonists, thus renouncing the impossible task of explaining the country, making a sense of culture shock apparent and proposing a dialogue via cinematic form that permits an understanding of diversity and shows pride in challenging the futility of a cinema that aims to represent complex realities in unambiguous terms.

The work of the "Los ingrávidos" collective, which is made up of an indeterminate number of filmmaker-activists, is another of the more interesting and revealing elements of this “other” Mexican cinema. Their work equally avoids official forms and discourses in order to apply a critical gaze to reality and how it is presented and, where applicable, distributed. The collective’s films are always shown on the Internet, thus even questioning the validity of standard systems of cultural legitimisation and electing instead to present knowledge and have it acknowledged in a way that is both horizontal and decentralised. One of their latest short films TRIPTYCH (2015) suggests a link between three political figures from the history of the Mexican resistance: the "Soldadera", the "Zapatista", and the "Normalista", which coexist and overlap in the collective imagination and manifest themselves in the everyday life of a people silently resisting the war organised by those with the power. Eva Villaseñor’s MEMORIA OCULTA (2014) is the investigation of an episode of amnesia experienced by the director herself following a trauma and is another film that can be read in national terms. It comes across as a proposal for a necessary exercise in collective memory in order that empty spaces in the Mexican past and present can be revisited. Alongside these filmmakers, other names like Joshua Gil with LA MALDAD(2015) and Ricardo Silva with NAVAJAZO (2015) are also taking part in this collective rethinking of Mexican national cinema and its relationship to the landscapes of the violent and the sordid. LA MALDAD and NAVAJAZO are of particularly relevance here because their respective strategies of blurring the boundary between fiction and documentary do not dodge the debate on violence or marginalisation but rather confront it head on by portraying bodies at the edge of the possible, the real, the socially accepted, and the usually represented: pensioners, prostitutes, junkies. These protagonists are direct, human, perverse, and tender.

Such tensions also run through the three Mexican films showing at this year’s Berlinale Forum, with all three of them drawing on a range of different means to confront this debate on the representation and construction of the country and its national cinema. TALES OF TWO WHO DREAMT, the new work by Andrea Bussmann and Nicolás Pereda which was made entirely in Canada, is a depiction of a housing block mainly inhabited by Hungarian Roma immigrants that moves between the unreal, the dreamt and the imagined. Fleeing standard ethnography (or rather embracing a kind of experimental ethnography), Bussmann and Pereda invent stories with their protagonists, listen to those they tell or have them overlap with those they imagine; a film of layers, unfinished journeys and processes of transformation: metamorphosis (with Franz Kafka lurking in the distance).

Pereda has always worked with the idea of the foreign: the out of place, that which arrives, repeats itself, changes and remains. This collaboration with Bussman directly addresses the unreal state that is living abroad, waking up in a body and a place that is not yours, both being and ceasing to be at the same time. Joaquín del Paso’s MAQUINARIA PANAMERICANAdeals with a similar feeling of fragility in a very unique way, the feeling of always being on the verge of rupture, of fragmentation. By means of the fictional story of a machinery manufacturer governed by a paternalistic, patriarchal and omnipresent owner whose unexpected death plunge the company's employees into chaos, fear and madness, del Paso constructs a tragicomic and metaphorical fable at once surreal and hyper-real about an entire country unable to distinguish whether it is on the brink of madness or mired in it completely. And TEMPESTAD, the new work by Mexican-Guatemalan Tatiana Huezo, is the film that most directly addresses and confronts the construction of a sordid Mexico: the central thread of this seemingly de-dramatised road movie is the account of a woman accused, without evidence, of human trafficking. After a year in jail, she must cross the country to meet her young son.

The film is an example of how to portray impunity, fear and despair, of how to make political cinema – in short, how to avoid the traps of the obvious, the sordid and the poverty-stricken. The voice of the protagonist is accompanied by a variety of anonymous women who appear backlit. In the film’s revealing last shot, her voice is placed over footage of a journey through the sane everyday Mexico depicted by Los ingrávidos, Pablo Chavarría, Ricardo Silva, Joshua Gil and Diego Amando Moreno: workers, landscapes, exhausted men and women defeated by dreams, by the minimum wage, by impunity, injustice, violence; men, women, and children walking, resisting, building their lives from each day to the next. The same words echo through all the Mexican cinema that moves away from the sordid and the pornography of poverty and escapes from uncritical images of violence, the words the Zapatistas dedicated to the parents of the students killed in Ayotzinapa: “We don’t care about the bickering, the agreements and disagreements, among those above who will be in charge of the machine of destruction and death that the Mexican State has become. We care about your words. Your rage, your rebellion, your resistance." Your words, your images. Words and images, for everyone.