84937198

161
NCJCF 9 (2+3) pp. 161182 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 cinema
subjectivity
masculinity
landscape
Deleuze
auteur
Laura PodaLsKy
Ohio 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 Julin Hernndez, 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 Gonzlez Irritu, Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarn,
NC_9.2&3_Podalsky_161-182.indd 161 11/1/12 3:02:50 PM
Laura Podalsky
162
1. Miriam Haddus
Contemporary Mexican
Cinema (2007) focuses
on the first wave of
New Mexican Cinema
(19891999), while Chon
Noriega and Steven
Riccis The Mexican
Cinema Project (1994),
Joanne Hershfield
and David Maciels
Mexicos Cinema (1999)
and Andrea Nobles
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 Bernads et al.,
Joanna Page, Gonzalo
Aguilar (in translation),
Jens Andermann,
Lucia Nagib, and
Cailda Rgo and
Carolina Rocha).
2. Mexico produced 5080
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 (Garca
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 45 and lists
their awards on page
3. It is noteworthy that
Reygadass 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 Irritu and Cuarn and recent genre
films by Rigoberto Castaeda and Fernando Sariana) as well as in those with
more limited distribution to international art circuits (the films of Reygadas,
Fernando Eimbcke, Julin Hernndez, Nicols Pereda and Francisco Vargas,
among others). As noted by Luisela Alvaray, the innovative moves of a teen
flick like Nias mal/Bad Girls (Sariana, 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,
1620). Meanwhile, often resonating with the stylistic trends of European art
cinema, the formal experimentations of Reygadas, Eimbcke, Hernndez 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 (Irritu, 2000, Mexico), Todo el poder/Gimme Power
(Fernando Sariana, 2000, Mexico) and Y tu mam tambin (Cuarn, 2001,
Mexico) as well as in art-house films like El violn (Vargas, 2005, Mexico)
and Alamar (Rubio, 2009, Mexico) and the more aesthetically experi-
mental Japn (Reygadas, 2002) and Cielo dividido/Broken Sky (Hernndez,
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 (Fernndez,
1943) starring stone-faced Pedro Armendriz as the son of a wealthy land-
owner who gives up a life of privilege to wed a beautiful peasant (Dolores
del Ro) 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 (Athi, 2003); middle-
aged men confronting the implications of their own incapacities as in Bajo
California, El Lmite del Tiempo/Under California, the Limit of Time (Bolado,
1998, Mexico), Sarianas Todo el poder and Reygadass Japn; and young
men on the verge of adulthood, experiencing incredible loss as in Irritus
Amores perros, Cuarns Y tu mam tambin, Eimbckes Temporada de patos/
Duck Season (2004) and Hernndezs Cielo dividido.
Landscapes of subjectivity in contemporary Mexican cinema
163
a number of genre
films, including Viaje
redondo/Round Trip
(Tort, 2009) and De da 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:
95115) and Ramrez
Berg (1992).
5. This stands in contrast
to films from the early
1990s like Solo con
tu pareja/Only with
Your Partner (Cuarn,
1991), La mujer de
Benjamn/Benjamins
Woman (Carrera, 1991)
and El Jardn 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 Martn 2011:
11718; Fernndez 2011:
41112).
Of these recent films, a notable subset reworks temporal and spatial mark-
ers in fairly radical ways. In Vera, Bajo California, Japn, 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. Deleuzes notion of the timeimage 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
philosophers work on the cinema, the present study engages most closely
with Deleuze and collaborator Flix Guatarris 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 Deleuzes auteurist bent, the article
concludes by turning to a more socio-historical analysis to situate the films in
relation to the particular timespace in which they were produced.
death becoMes hiM: MaLe subjectivity in transition (i)
Whereas Francisco Athis first film Lolo (1992) examined the crisis of patriar-
chal norms in a manner akin to the work of his compatriot Arturo Ripstein, the
directors 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, Athis film presents Juan as
Laura Podalsky
164
7. As film scholar
Patricia Torres San
Martin commented
in response to an
earlier version of this
article, Juan Carlos
Rulfos 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 dont
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-makers 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 childrens
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
timespace (akin
to that of the older
men and women
on-screen), Rulfos
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 Athis 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 babys 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 trees
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-scne, 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, Athies 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.
165
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
Domnguez Ruvalcaba
(2007: 9192). 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 Mexicos
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
nations modernizing
project, Una familia de
tantas held up a young
male character as a
new, more democratic
model of masculinity.
As Noble observes, the
characters 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
Mexicos 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 (Cuauhtmoc), 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
(Domnguez 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; Domnguez Ruvalcaba
2007: 8182). 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 machos hermetic exte-
riority (in the words of Octavio Paz). Death was figured as a spectacular
moment that proved ones ability to stand up for and protect the nuclear or
national family in classic films from Vmonos con Pancho Villa!/Lets Go with
Pancho Villa (de Fuentes, 1934) to Flor Silvestre and La Cucaracha/The Sons
of Pancho Villa (Rodrguez, 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 (Ramrez Berg 1992: 10036).
9
In this latter cate-
gory, scholar Charles Ramrez Berg places the early films of Jaime Humberto
Hermosillo (Matine/Matinee, 1976; Doa Herlinda y su hijo/Doa Herlinda and
Her Son, 1984) and Ripsteins El lugar sin lmites/Hell without Limits (1977), as
well as the early films of singer-actor Vicente Fernndez, which redefined
the role of the heterosexual Mexican male as strong, yet less authoritarian
and more sensitive (Ramrez Berg 1992: 13436). By the early 1990s, Alfonso
Araus Como agua para chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate (1991), set amidst the
battles of the Mexican Revolution (19101920), 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 Institucionalizados (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-
nists 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, Athis 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
Laura Podalsky
166
cinema, de la Moras
discussion of the film
includes a detailed
analysis of the male
characters (2006:
15658). See also Vek
Lewis (2009) for an
examination of the
representation of the
male body in Araus
later film Zapata,
el sueo del hroe/
Zapata, the Dream
of a Hero (2004),
featuring Vicente
Fernndezs singer-son,
Alejandro Fernndez,
in the title role. Lewis
also analyses the
public controversy
surrounding the
films 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 Bolados
Bajo California and Carlos Reygadass Japn. The protagonists of both films
are middle-aged artists for whom death becomes the impetus behind a jour-
ney across the Mexican landscape. Bolados film revolves around the travels
of Damin 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 Japn, 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, Bolados film is a traditional tale of renewal in which
Damin 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 protagonists mental
state onto the landscape. At one point, a series of high-angle subjective shots
focusing on Damins 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 Damins 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 Damin 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-scne in the tattoos Damin acquires on his
forehead as well as in the installations he leaves behind all of which feature
concentric circles and spirals. Given the main characters ancestral origins and
his interest in visiting not only his grandmothers tomb but also a cave with
Figure 2: The dry earth and the deadened spirit in Bajo California.
167
11. Domnguez Ruvalcaba
notes that Mexicos
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
Reygadass oeuvre as
an example of time
image cinema, Cynthia
Tompkins notes that
his films are not
propelled by action. In
the case of Japn, 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.
Womens bodies are
racialized in Japn
and Batalla en el cielo.
However, whereas
Japn 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 Bolados 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, Bolados 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 societys 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 Japns unconventional cinematography, Reygadas transforms
a tale of one mans coming apart into an exploration of the fluid dynamics
of beingbecoming. While including point-of-view shots and circumscribed
compositions that restrict the viewers 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 protagonists suicidal desires, Japn 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-
nists psychological state. And it is certainly possible to see Japn 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 (Ascencin 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 (Ascencins wrinkles, Anas dreadlocks
and Marcoss wifes girth). In this light, feminist critiques of Reygadass 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

Laura Podalsky
168
14. Tompkins cites from
an interview with
Reygadas in which
the director says that
his actors know what
they have to do, but
[] they dont know
anything psychological,
because I dont want
them to think about
representation (2008:
165).
15. While much has been
made of the films
similarities to Juan
Rulfos literary work
(particularly Pedro
Pramo), I think it
equally important to
comment on the way
it resonates with his
photographic work.
As noted by Andrew
Dempsey, a majority
of Rulfos 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.
Rulfos 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, Japn 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, Japns 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
Reygadass films, male subjectivity unfolds when bodies touch other bodies;
Japn, 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 protagonists 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 Japn.
169
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 Ascens ruined home
against family and community members who wish to dismantle it. Yet, his
newly found sense of agency is ineffectual. The stones of Ascens 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 Japn all explore masculinity as a
permeable status, rather than as a fixed identity. Yet only Reygadass 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 Guattaris 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 Julin Hernndez 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. Hernndezs
melancholic Mil nubes de paz cercan el cielo, amor, jams acabars 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, Eimbckes
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 Hernndez 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 Hernndezs works, Eimbckes 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 Flamas apartment
within a bleak urban landscape of highway underpasses, graffiti-covered
walls, one-wheeled bicycle frames chained to light-posts; and tattered
Laura Podalsky
170
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 Nios Hroes, the setting slyly comments on the lost promises of the
modern nation; once a sign of Mexicos 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 Mokos experience on a
particular Sunday; their encounters with Flamas neighbour Rita and, Ulses,
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 Jess Martn Barbero and G. Rey have called
[la] cultura-mundo que se configura hoy de la manera ms explcita en
la percepcin de los jvenes, y en la emergencia de culturas sin memo-
ria territorial, ligadas a la expansin del mercado de la televisin, del
disco o del video. Culturas que se hallan ligadas a sensibilidades e
identidades nuevas: de temporalidades menos largas, ms 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 atvicos, residuos
16. Built as an integrated
living complex
featuring apartments,
stores and schools, the
Unidad Habitacional
Nonalco Tlatelolco
was a sign of Mexicos
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.
Eimbckes film further
teases the viewer with
the notion of Mexicos
decline by placing
Flamas apartment in
the building named
for the Nios Hroes,
the boy-soldiers
who died defending
Chapultepec Castle
from US troops in the
MexicanAmerican
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.
171
Figure 5: The bleak urban landscape in Temporada de patos.
modernistas y vacos 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
Laura Podalsky
172
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 Eimbckes 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
Ulses arrives eleven seconds too late a situation that plays itself out in a
tense stalemate wherein Flama refuses to pay and Ulses refuses to leave. For
his part, Moko repeatedly uses his watch to keep track of the time needed to
bake Ritas 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 Ulses (the only character to traverse
exterior spaces) to comment on the de-humanizing future that awaits Flama
and Moko, Eimbckes film is not a denunciation or lament about todays
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 Flamas amorphous
sexuality is particularly important.
While much more melancholic in tone than Eimbckes Temporada de patos,
Hernndezs films are similarly interested in rhythms and sensibilities. As noted
by de la Mora, Hernndezs 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, UNAMs 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, UNAMs library
becomes the means by which to make manifest the ebb-and-flows of desire
through tightly framed shots that track Gerardo and Jons 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 universitys 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 Aristophaness 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 Hernndez 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.
173
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 Athi (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 Accin National).
18
One of the most striking examples of this
push towards privatization was the Fox administrations 2004 call to dismantle
state institutions promoting national cinema, such as IMCINE and the pres-
tigious film school Centro de Capacitacin Cinematogrfica (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, Hernndez and Eimbcke),
20
government rhetoric about the cine-
mas particular importance to the nation rests primarily on stimulating private
investment in the film industry through tax credits (Elena 2008: 34; Torres
San Martn 2011: 99102).
Given these larger political and institutional changes, it may be tempting
to characterize the work of directors like Reygadas, Eimbcke and Hernndez
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
Hernndez in 1972.
18. The PANs 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
(20002006) was
followed by the
presidency of another
PAN member, Felipe
Caldern (20062012).
19. This state support has
taken many different
forms over the decades,
from direct investment,
to the creation of the
Banco Cinematogrfico
(established 1942)
and the state-run
distributor Pelculas
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.
Hernndez funded Mil
nubes by establishing
Cooperativa
Cinematogrfica
Morelos (which also
helped finance Cielo
dividido) whereas
Eimbckes Temporada
de patos was funded
by small production
companies, among
them Cinepantera y
Lul Producciones
(Elena 2008: 45). 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. Japn won the Cmara
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.
Laura Podalsky
174
particularly, to the PRIs 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
timespace, 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 Garca 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 timeimage 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 timeimage does
not anchor subjects (either the characters or the viewer) in place, as does the
movementimage 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 Reygadass and Hernndezs 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 Ortizs notion of
desencaje; as well as
Jess Martn Barberos
notion of urbanas.
175
23. For example, Escobar
Latap 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 wifes 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 Carrillos
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
(Televisin 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, Hctor Carrillo and Agustn Escobar
Latap have gone so far as to suggest that those changes have brought about a
crisis of masculinity in Mexico. Gutmanns 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 Latap, 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 Latap 2003: 8485, 101; Carrillo 2003: 35152). It is possi-
ble to overestimate the impact of such changes on behaviours and attitudes.
For example, Escobar Lataps 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
Carrillos 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, Hernndez 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
Ulses 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 Flamas 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 Ulsess powerlessness by
emphasizing the smallness of mans place in the contemporary urban
landscape.
25
Yet, even while noting the breakdown of mans 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 Deleuzes notion of
the timeimage. In their attention to bodies and spaces, the films of Reygadas,
Hernndez 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
Laura Podalsky
176
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 Japn. Eimbckes Temporada de patos offers the spectator an even
more unanchored viewing position. With the exception of the extended
subjective flashback of Ulsess 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 spectators gaze from
that of the male protagonists and disregarding the traditional mechanisms
of suture, Reygadass and Eimbckes films work to destabilize the spectators
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, Hernndezs 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 Jons and,
later, of Jons 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, Hernndezs 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 Hernndez. In their preoccupation with surfaces and textures, Japn,
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
177
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.
Reygadass 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 Anas dreadlocks. The directors 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 Athi, Bolado, Reygadas,
Hernndez 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 Corts,
Mara 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 Martn, Andrea Noble, Miriam Haddu and others,
their films acknowledged the immense diversity of womens experiences. Lola
(Novaro, 1989), El secreto de Romelia/Romelias Secret (Corts, 1988), Novia que
te vea/Like a Bride (Schyfter, 1992) and other films focused on womens 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 womens everyday lives, those works did not employ
an alternative aesthetics of the timeimage. 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, Hernndez and Eimbcke. Thus, it may be that the
formal experimentation of these contemporary directors presupposes a certain
level of privilege that the timeimage does little to destabilize.
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Podalsky, L. (2011), Landscapes of subjectivity in contemporary Mexican
cinema, New Cinemas 9: 2+3, pp. 161182, 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
Laura Podalsky
182
Archivos de la Filmoteca (Spain). She is the author of Specular City: Transforming
Culture, Consumption, and Space in Buenos Aires, 19551973 (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: podalsky.1@osu.edu
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.
Copyright of New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film is the property of Intellect Ltd. and its content may
not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written
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