the pic above is again (viz also CoMoPeru) from a film by Francis Alÿs.
this time it is called “Paradox of Praxis 1: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing” (made in Mexico City, 1997)
Francis Alÿs (born 1959, Antwerp) is a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist.
His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. In 1986, Alÿs left behind his profession as an architect and relocated to Mexico City, where he lives and works.
He has created a diverse body of artwork and performance art that explores urban tensions and geopolitics. Employing a broad range of media, from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action, and impotence. Alÿs commonly enacts paseos (walks) that resist the subjection of common space.
i love the film and “Paradox of Praxis: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing” can easily stand as a motto for the whole CoMo undertaking.
some other films made by Francis in Mexico...
Paradox of Praxis 5: Sometimes We Dream as We Live and Sometimes We Live as We Dream (2013)
If You Are A Typical Spectator, What You Are Really Doing Is Waiting For The Accident to Happen (1996)
Looking Up (2001)
plus, episodes (made in Mexico) from his “Children's Games” series...
after posting the 2018 poll ballot (viz another thread), i am reminded that ”The Proposal” (Jill Magid, 2018, 83m) should also be mentioned here (in the intro).
it's an interesting documentary about the Mexican architect Luis Barragán (1902-1988) and about the privatization of his legacy.
Barragán won the Pritzker Prize, the highest award in architecture, in 1980, and his personal home, the Luis Barragán House and Studio, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004.
An artist fights to make the archives of Mexico's most famous architect available to the public.
In this humorous short, Astrid Hadad, dressed in traditional folkloric costumes and religious garments, sings and performs to a Chilean love ballad before a painterly background of fantastic landscapes. Her hyperbolic posturings enact the song’s tale of a woman’s heartbreak. This satirical presentation of femininity references pathos and the role of the victim. Cuevas’s use of animation and video montage adds a playful tone to the heartfelt melodrama of love songs, familiar touchstones in all cultures.
Video artist Ximena Cuevas is the bomb! A poet of everyday life, she is a master of self-portraits, a perpetual explorer of lies under the layers of the performer's artifice. Cuevas is also the fairy godmother of a new melodrama, as excessive as that of the classic Mexican cinema but boldly defying taboo subjects with a lightness and a self-conscious sense of humor that is changing the shape of Mexican film and video history. She examines life's intimate quotidian pleasures and sorrows with a passion that distinguishes her from all of her contemporaries both inside and outside her native Mexico. With a unique childlike sense of curiosity and wonder, she invests magic in the familiar subjects that surround her. Her hyperlayered, exquisitely scored, and intensely personal videos are ferociously surprising and imaginative.
...
In the delirious CORAZÓN SANGRANTE (Bleeding Heart, 1993), a multi-award winning music video made in collaboration with the flamboyant postmodern performer Astrid Hadad, Cuevas parodies Mexican nationalist iconography with an intensity akin to religious reverence. Part kitsch, part syncretic baroque, BLEEDING HEART takes an irreverent perspective on the mythic masochism of Mexican womanhood in a hybrid melodramatic mix of boleros, rancheras, and tropical rhythms.
Memories of a Mexican (Carmen Toscano, Salvador Toscano, 1950) #CoMoMexico
a time capsule from 1897, when the filmmaker Salvador Toscano started filming with a Lumiere's camera. The oldest filmic documents of Mexico, they also cover the whole Revolution.
From 1942 to 1950, Carmen Toscano classified and copied the filmed material of her father, Salvador Toscano Barragán (1872-1947) filmmaker and travelling exhibitor from 1897 to the 1920s. With the images of the revolution commanded by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata, she edited "Memories of a Mexican" which narrates the life of a family during the Revolution and offers a first-hand experience of the creation of modern Mexico.
→ https://letterboxd.com/lencho_o_t_apes/ ... a-mexican/
the accompanying narration identifies all the persons, locations and events being depicted, but otherwise it's banal and superficial, held no interest for me whatsoever.
as Lencho suggests (viz the last quote above ↑), this compilation of early newsreels already suffers from the ailments of the nowadays mass media (excelling at channeling the attention of the audience to the “foam of the days”).
a poor viewer is increasingly stupefied by the endless stream of military parades and succession of presidents who stand out only by either missing an arm or having a glass eye (viz ↓↓ 1/ Obregón & 2/ Madero).
1/
During the battles with Villa, Obregón had his right arm blown off. The blast nearly killed him, and he attempted to put himself out of his misery and fired his pistol to accomplish that. The aide de camp who had cleaned his gun had neglected to put bullets in the weapon. In a wry story he told about himself, he joined in the search for his missing arm. "I was helping them myself, because it's not so easy to abandon such a necessary thing as an arm." The searchers had no luck. A comrade reached into his pocket and raised a gold coin. Obregón concluded the story, saying "And then everyone saw a miracle: the arm came forth from who knows where, and come skipping up to where the gold azteca [coin] was elevated; it reached up and grasped it in its fingers – lovingly – That was the only way to get my lost arm to appear." The arm was subsequently embalmed and then displayed in the monument to Obregón at the Parque de la Bombilla, on the site of where he was assassinated in 1928. Obregón always wore clothing tailored to show that he had lost his arm in battle, a visible sign of his sacrifice to Mexico.
President Obregón in a business suit, showing that he lost his right arm fighting Pancho Villa in 1915. It earned him the nickname of El Manco de Celaya ("the one-armed man of Celaya").
2/
Gustavo Adolfo Madero González was a participant in the Mexican Revolution against Porfirio Díaz along with other members of his wealthy family. He was also known as "Ojo Parado" ("staring eye") since he had one glass eye.
that night Gustavo was set upon and brutally murdered by a mob of over a hundred federal soldiers on the orders of Manuel Mondragón, the new government's secretary of war. The mob desecrated Madero's body, extracting his glass eye and passing it around.
tho, ultimately, i must admit that (despite all said above about the traditional banality & superficiality of the “foam of the days” news) when i witnessed Pancho Villa's heartfelt tears (shed over the fate of Madero) i got genuinely captivated and played the sequence several times.
A Telegram from Mexico (Louis H. Chrispijn, 1914) #CoMoMexico
Short film about a colonist who gets caught up in the revolution in Mexico.
Back at home, they anxiously wait for news.
A Telegram from Mexico is one of the short fictional films that Filmfabriek Hollandia produced before the First World War. The film, directed by Louis H. Chrispijn Sr., tells the story of Willem Vandoorn, a Dutch colonist in Mexico. When the revolution breaks out, the young man decides to go back to his homeland. He sends his parents a telegram announcing his planned return. When his journey is delayed by a rebel attack, his parents — already worried about the many dramatic newspaper articles — fear the worst. These nervous suspicions even lead the blind father to have a vision, in which he sees his son's execution.
sally wrote: ↑Sat Aug 06, 2022 6:04 pm
een telegram uit mexico - louis h. chrispijn (1914) #CoMoNetherlands
In the article 'Letters from afar', film historian Frank Kessler places A Telegram from Mexico within the political context of the day. Europe was on the eve of the First World War, and young men everywhere were being called upon to serve in the military. This drama portrays the uncertainty and powerlessness of the family that stayed behind, who waited for his letters and depended on newspaper articles.
mexico as proxy for the void
dependency on the news & miscommunication giving rise to monsters.
no English subs, watch & guess ↓↓
On the Oaxacan coast of Mexico, rumblings of previous times are never far from the surface. Tales of shapeshifting, telepathy, and dealings with the Devil are embedded in the colonization and enslavement of the Americas. Characters from the Faust legend mingle with the inhabitants, while attempting to colonize and control nature through a seemingly never-ending building project. Through literature, myth and local entanglements, the frontier between reality and fiction, and the seen and unseen, no longer apply.
an insightful write-up about the film can be found here ↓↓
Told largely through an omniscient voiceover recounting various myths, fables, and folk tales, it draws on Goethe’s themes to prod and challenge the Western link between vision and knowledge.
The shadowed border between human and non-human perception is one of Fausto’s sustained topics of interrogation.
Even the film’s production is connected to this endeavor to undermine clarity in vision. Bussmann shot Fausto on a digital camera often touted for its low-light functionality and then transferred the footage to 16mm, thus degrading the pristine HD and leaving the viewer with an image that, especially in the film’s nighttime shots, is liable to be variegated, underexposed, and generally more foreboding. The vertigo-like feeling that the weighty darkness induces is only heightened by the film’s penchant for stories about shadows that multiply or become free from their owners. Call it the autonomy of the shade.
besides all that said in the linked review, if you decide to watch Fausto notice the uncanny resemblance between El Manco de Celaya ("the one-armed man of Celaya") highlighted in the pre-previous post ↑↑ and the armless psychedelic entity called “zookeeper” mentioned in this film.
also, since the purpose of this whole CoMo is to focus on the blind spots, Fausto provides (in this regard) a valuable lesson.
Horses also have a blind spot.
It is about 4 feet in front of their face.
The exact measurement depends on the size of their head.
This is why you never approach a horse from the front.
last but not least, if you don't care about horses and blind spots but own a cat, know that you are just a one-step (a few clockwise strokes) from clairvoyance!
i rubbed the cat’s fur anti-clockwise and became more clairvoyant about the past...
now, i can see with sharp clarity that i merged two characters into one.
there is Francisco I. Madero, the 37th president of Mexico, over whose fate Pancho Villa is shedding tears.
and there is Gustavo A. Madero, Francisco's brother, whose glass eye got desecrated.
both murdered in February 1913.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francisco_I._Madero
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustavo_A._Madero
so, please, consider the part written in the past & re-quoted below to be just a delirious/erratic rambling of a person stupefied by the endless stream of newsreels who ultimately had to stroke a cat to escape this spell and see who is who!
movie tickets forger wrote: ↑Thu Dec 05, 2024 1:34 pm
a poor viewer is increasingly stupefied by the endless stream of military parades and succession of presidents who stand out only by either missing an arm or having a glass eye (viz ↓↓ 1/ Obregón & 2/ Madero).
2/
Gustavo Adolfo Madero González was a participant in the Mexican Revolution against Porfirio Díaz along with other members of his wealthy family. He was also known as "Ojo Parado" ("staring eye") since he had one glass eye.
that night Gustavo was set upon and brutally murdered by a mob of over a hundred federal soldiers on the orders of Manuel Mondragón, the new government's secretary of war. The mob desecrated Madero's body, extracting his glass eye and passing it around.
tho, ultimately, i must admit that (despite all said above about the traditional banality & superficiality of the “foam of the days” news) when i witnessed Pancho Villa's heartfelt tears (shed over the fate of Madero) i got genuinely captivated and played the sequence several times.
I heartily salute my forum compatriots...
to admit that i didn't gain more clarity about who is who (of the Mexican Revolution) by stroking a cat but by watching...
Mexico: The Frozen Revolution (Raymundo Gleyzer, 1973) #CoMoMexico
Echeverría is one of the most controversial and least popular presidents in the history of Mexico. Supporters have praised his populist policies such as a more enthusiastic application of land redistribution than his predecessor Díaz Ordaz, expansion of social security, and instigating Mexico's first environmental protection laws. Detractors have criticized institutional violence such as the Dirty War and Corpus Christi massacre, and his administration's economic mismanagement and response to the financial crisis of 1976. His suspected role in the Tlatelolco Massacre prior to his presidency has also damaged his reputation. Numerous opinion polls and analyses have ranked him as one of the worst presidents in the modern history of Mexico.
His presidency was also characterized by authoritarian methods including death flights, the 1971 Corpus Christi massacre against student protesters, the Dirty War against leftist dissent in the country (despite Echeverría adopting a left-populist rhetoric)
those massacres are echoed in several revolutionary songs (some of them being played & chanted in the film).
To make sure the glorious Olympics
were never forgotten
the government had 400 comrades killed.
Alas, Tlatelolco Square,
how your bullets hurt me!
400 hopes snatched away by treason!
What do the grenadiers do when they go home?
Do they love their women with bloodied hands?
Those stains don’t come off with soap and water.
I ask you, grenadier,
what will you use to wash them off?
Students walk with the truth in their eyes!
Nothing will stop them!
Neither flowers nor bullets!
They bring to their dead actions, not words!
So that this Mexican land is never forgotten.
The government had 400 comrades killed!
We won’t back down,
we’ll accept the challenge!
And to cut a long story short...
Cueto can go fuck himself!
That repression, so well known,
that even the corrupt press had to retract...
Because the student says, we won’t back down!
To tell the simple truth,
not meaning to bother...
anyone Díaz Ordaz wants to destroy...
science and culture.
however, the film also presents an advocate of the “controversial” politics of the death flights and student massacres (conducted by the “Institutional Revolutionary Party”).
surprisingly, he doesn't come from the conservative “National Action Party” that, heading up (to heaven), is not bothered by left or right...
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_ ... y_(Mexico)
The PAN has been linked to a conservative stance in Mexican politics since its inception, but the party does not consider itself a fundamentally conservative party. The party ideology, at least in principle, is that of "National Action" which rejects a fundamental adherence to left- or right-wing politics or policies, instead requiring the adoption of such policies as correspond to the problems faced by the nation at any given moment. Thus both right- and left-wing policies may be considered equally carefully in formulation of national policy.
... he comes from the Marx-Leninist “Popular Socialist Party”, tirelessly caring for the ideological purity of the grassroots social justice movement (while endorsing the ill-reputed Luis Echeverría).
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popular_S ... y_(Mexico)
It’s true that thousands of students took part.
But it was interesting to see the presence of, let’s say, pseudo revolutionary elements — in particular, militants of international trotskyism, spartacist and maoist groups — with ties to the US Embassy.
University classrooms were renamed.
Mao Tse-tung and Che Guevara.
Demonstrations were presided by pictures of Che Guevara, Ho Chi-min...
Just like they did in Paris.
To us, in any aspects, it was an extra logical copy.
yup, comrades, let’s stroke cats left-n-right & stay vigilant/clairvoyant!
the ”frozen” Mexican Revolution (of 1910-1920) gives us a lesson in revolution’s appropriation or revolution’s bourgeoisification.
On December 6, 1914, the forces of Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata occupied the capital.
Never was The Mexican Revolution more popular.
But this demonstration of the people will went nowhere. Spontaneity isn’t enough to consolidate power.
Now more than ever, the absence of a program influenced the outcome.
The Revolution was stillborn.
If the great masses do not have as their objective the transformation of society, they fail in the seizure of power.
The Bourgeoisie that does have an ideology, awaits its turn.
Raymundo Gleyzer (September 25, 1941 - missing since May 27, 1976) was an Argentine screenwriter and filmmaker. He specialized in documentaries and politically charged fiction films. Gleyzer was part of the left-wing faction of the Peronist political movement, and a staunch opponent of Argentina's last military dictatorship (1976-1983). In 1976 he was kidnapped, likely murdered and disappeared as part of the dictatorship's campaign of State-sponsored terrorism.
What made Gelyzer decide to go to Mexico to film The Frozen Revolution, and how was it able to be produced without tipping off PRI officials?
You sound so innocent asking this question! We did our work no matter what obstacles we could potentially face and had planned to make a film in each Latin American country. Raymundo would say that he is Argentine but also belonged to all of Latin America. Obviously, it did not come to fruition, he was captured when he 34 years old. We were in Mexico for two months researching with Bolivian filmmaker Humberto Ríos and his wife, she a historian and Humberto, being one of Raymundo's former professors, operated the camera. We were supposed to be shooting for German television, and that's how we were able to gain access to certain figures in the film.
We began shooting in Chiapas, and the idea was to film without asking permissions, we had everything we needed. The Mexican authorities told us that there were two ways to shoot a film there: either someone accompanies you and oversees the production, or you show them everything you filmed before leaving the country. We didn't have space in the car for another person, so we lied and said we would show the film before leaving. We drove throughout the country and it was a wonderful time. Paul Leduc joined us because we wanted a Mexican perspective and he shows up in the film as well. Back then, we didn't know if what we were shooting was any good and hauling that equipment in the Mexican sun was difficult. With the help of a flight attendant friend of ours we would transport the film to New York and hand it to Bill Sussman, who was vice president of a developing lab, that he would say did the best fucking job in the world. We would call him and he would tell us that we were getting good footage and should continue and in return he would send us new equipment with the same flight attendant.
Hordubal if it was Mexican and had homosexual tensions, so basically Hordubal if it was way better
because, if you are (as i am) ignorant of “Rashomon” but well-read in Karel Čapek, “Hordubal” (or the whole “noetic trilogy”) is a reference point that comes to your mind while watching this film.
Hordubal (1933) is a novel by Czech writer Karel Čapek. Based on a true account published in the newspaper Lidové noviny where the author was a regular contributor, the story is ultimately concerned with the essential unknowability of the inner lives of others, and the impossibility of true communication among men. It is the first in a trilogy of what are known as Čapek's "noetic novels," the other two being Meteor (1934) and An Ordinary Life (1934).
In Hordubal, perspective is a crucial element for how we understand the nature of justice on a moral plane. Based on a real-life crime, the novel traces the return home of a peasant laborer who is eventually murdered by his wife and the lover she took in his absence. Crucially, the novel is divided into three parts, each with a different perspective: the first part is from Hordubal’s own as he comes back to the village and tries to reconstitute the life he always wanted after his failure to make a fortune in America. The second is from the perspective of the police detectives investigating his murder. The third is from the courtroom as it reviews evidence and reaches its verdict.
The relationship between truth and justice is a staple of noir and it’s rarely been handled in such a sophisticated way as here. In the end, the jury seems to have come to the (mostly) right decision, but maybe not for the right reasons, and certainly not in a way that feels like they have a grasp of the fullness of the crime and the players involved. Not having the access to the “true story,” nor to Hordubal’s inner life that we, as readers, were granted in the first part, the courtroom feels like it will never fully understand what was really at stake.
btw. notice that Two Monks and Čapek's “noetic novels“ come from approximately the same time (1933-1934)!
the merit of this film may not dwell in itself but in the capability to take a (physically exhausted?!?) viewer on a silly ride through his/her subconscious.
Mexican Bus Ride AKA Ascent to Heaven (Luis Buñuel, 1952) #CoMoMexico
In his autobiography, "My Last Sigh", Luis Buñuel wrote that the screenplay was based on adventures that actually happened to his friend and producer of the film, Spanish poet Manuel Altolaguirre, while on a bus trip.
as opposed to the previous film (viz “Two Monks”), we are not taken on a slippery slope of intense emotions & exaltation of expressionism...
... but on a slippery slope of surrealist irony and sarcasm (unfortunately, only its very mild version).
thus, i can hardly say (in unison with the film’s main temptress)...
... (a temptress with an apple) that i got what i wanted.
but, considering all the dreaming inserted into watching this film, i might not forget it either.
"buñuelian sleep” is the sleep of the unjust after the failed demise.
The Society of the Exterminating Angel was a possibly apocryphal Catholic group in Spain that was created to kill Spanish liberals, founded in 1821.
in one interview Buñuel lamented that he had not pushed the savagery of the guests all the way to cannibalism
but anyway...
Buñuel sometimes showed contempt for those who tried to pin down the ‘meaning’ of his films.
A caption at the start of El ángel exterminador reads, ‘The best explanation of this film is that, from the standpoint of pure reason, there is no explanation’
and the film-maker declared, “This rage to understand, to fill in the blanks, only makes life more banal. If only we could find the courage to leave our destiny to chance, to accept the fundamental mystery of our lives, then we might be closer to the sort of happiness that comes with innocence”. ( My Last Sigh)
Wiederholungszwang is the delicious German mouthful for what Freud and later psychoanalysts call in English, the “repetition compulsion” or the “compulsion to repeat.”
Being one’s repetitive self is like being boxed in. You are in a cage, the cage of your character — or, in this film, a drawing-room you can’t get out of.
By becoming conscious of this trait in the safe environment of the consulting room, the patient can perhaps replace an unconscious compulsion to repeat with a conscious decision to repeat or not to repeat.
And the hope is that the patient can exercise this conscious control in life, not just with the therapist.
a mild surrealist blasphemy ↑ is the most suitable pedestal for a Marian apparition ↓
this thread would be empty without an appearance of Our Lady of Guadalupe
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Lady_of_Guadalupe
Mexico’s revolutionary constitution of 1917 incorporated progressive features regarding territorial organization, civil liberties, and democratic forms, as well as anticlerical and antimonopoly clauses. Tepeyac, made in the same year that constitution was written, goes out of its way to affiliate itself with both the revolutionary project and the mythology of Mexican Catholicism. The Revolution’s official dogma was that the church represented a malignant holdover from the time of the conquest and the Spanish Inquisition, but the military leadership also recognized that Mexico was overwhelmingly Catholic. The film’s discursive navigations, as we will see, must therefore be read in light of the ticklish relationship that the Revolution’s anti-church leadership, which had the power to suppress any film, was attempting to negotiate with the Catholicism of the populace. In this way, the film can be understood as a revisionist text containing an uneasy mix of discourses that reflects the Revolution’s strained efforts to find a middle ground
...
This political tightrope-walking begins in the first moments of the film. The title is followed immediately by three intertitles that give quotations (the second and third intertitles give a single quotation divided in two parts):
“The day that the Virgin of Tepeyac is no longer worshipped in this land, not only will our Mexican nationality have disappeared, but also all memory of those who now dwell in Mexico.” Ignacio M. Altamirano
“The Mexicans worship a Virgin of Common Consent: those who profess Catholic ideas, for reasons of religion; the liberals, in memory of the flag of ‘10; the Indians, because she is their only godess; the foreigners in order not to offend national pride; and all consider her a SYMBOL of the
essence of Mexico.” Ignacio M. Altamirano
These quotations identify the film as a work that sanctions the worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe (also referred to as the Virgin of Tepeyac, and of “Consuno,” meaning “common or universal consent”), a sanctioning that is against the official line of the Revolution. But the quotations also appear to identify the film as pro-revolutionary, ostensibly referring to the “Liberals” who ousted Porfirio Díaz, and to the “memory of the flag of ‘10,” which appears to be patriotic lingo for the revolutionary banner that was first unfurled in 1910 by Francisco Madero. It suggests that the Liberals worship the Virgin of Guadalupe precisely because of “the flag of ‘10”; i.e. they are grateful to the Virgin for granting the Revolution victory.
...
Ignacio Manuel Altamirano was in 1917 known as a distinguished novelist and poet whose words commanded respect. ... His quotation, unless it has been invented or altered by the filmmakers, must then refer to the memory of the flag of 1810, the year in which the priest Miguel Hidalgo rallied the “Liberals” of that era to a revolt against Spanish rule in the name of the Virgin of Guadalupe. That revolt eventually led to Mexican independence from Spain and, serendipitously for the filmmakers, took place precisely a century before the beginning of the Mexican Revolution.
Hidalgo, as the "father of Mexico", carrying his banner with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe (a 1905 painting by Antonio Fabrés)
Don Miguel Gregorio Antonio Ignacio Hidalgo y Costilla Gallaga Mandarte y Villaseñor (8 May 1753 – 30 July 1811), commonly known as Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla or Miguel Hidalgo, was a Catholic priest, leader of the Mexican War of Independence and recognized as the Father of the Nation.
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miguel_Hidalgo_y_Costilla
Banner with the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe carried by Hidalgo and his insurgent militia.
“this political tightrope-walking” of “attempting to negotiate with Catholicism” (i.e. with supremacist monotheism) always turns futile.
a viewer of this film (who is not politically disoriented) should not get fooled!
Virgin Mary is a jealous goddess who not only dislodged Aphrodite from the island of Cyprus and Tonantzin from the hill of Tepeyac
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonantzin
but also instigated a reactionary coup attempt known as the “Cristero War”
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cristero_War
The Cristero War, also known as the Cristero Rebellion or La cristiada, was a widespread struggle in central and western Mexico from 3 August 1926 to 21 June 1929 in response to the implementation of secularist and anticlerical articles of the 1917 Constitution. The rebellion was instigated as a response to an executive decree by Mexican President Plutarco Elías Calles to strictly enforce Article 130 of the Constitution, a decision known as the Calles Law. Calles sought to limit the power of the Catholic Church in Mexico, its affiliated organizations and to suppress popular religiosity.
her role as an instigator of violence in the Cristero War is not an exaggeration!
Beginning of violence
On 3 August, four days after the Calles Law came into force, in Guadalajara, Jalisco, some 400 armed Catholics shut themselves in the Church of Our Lady of Guadalupe ("Santuario de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe"). They exchanged gunfire with federal troops and surrendered when they ran out of ammunition. According to American consular sources, the battle resulted in 18 dead and 40 wounded.
thus, no sane progressivist (watching this visually alluring film) will be “grateful to the Virgin for granting the Revolution victory”.
among the sane people, who never fell prey to the ill-reputed imperialist Virgin and her deceptive apparitions, stand out Huichols (or Wixáritari).
→ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huichol
like Spain was born from Rome, Wixáritari (“the people”) were born from the Sun.
annually, Wixáritari go on a pilgrimage to Wirikuta...
... to collect and eat hikuri (peyote).
as any Wixáritari (or any acid communist comrade) knows, it’s not the wilted Marxism (not to speak of the rotting Catholicism) but the ever-fresh hikuri that unites people!
In the medieval era, the Church and its theology were the ‘place of dreams and visions’ into which the mystical entity inserted itself to most effectively make contact.
In the modern era, cinema dominates our formulation of the visionary, and the kinds of visual experience possible. (pp. 47-48)
Pop culture is above all entertaining, or at least taken as such by a wide swathe of consumers. We immerse ourselves in such pop-culture media, allowing ourselves to be taken in by the latest blockbuster movie. We live in the filmic world for the movie’s running time, and also drop our egological guard, suspending belief and investing ourselves in the filmic diegesis. This state actualizes, or liberates, moviegoers’ latent psychical powers. Paranormal apparitions are thus ‘a kind of spontaneous, unconscious projection of the psyches present’. (p. 49)
Moreover, cinematic spectatorship affords, at times, a (more or less) secular experience of visionary transcendence: an ‘agape-ic encounter’. This transcendent experience is functionally identical to the episodes of ecstasy which are the mainstay of medieval hagiography. This is not to say that all moviegoers are, actually, Catholic mystics, if only they knew it. Rather, I attest that our use, enjoyment, and conceptualization of cinema — and more recently, three-dimensional virtual environments online — reflect our enduring preoccupation with those topics which were previously the domain of religion, and thus hagiography. (p.11)
apparitional experience is a form of expanded cinema.
Marian apparition (content-wise: sensationalistic exploitation) can be classified as an extra-cinematic B-movie.
thus, i intend to leave (to the great relief of fellow cinephiles of Christian affiliation) the topic of Marian apparitions aside by watching...
Planet of the Female Invaders (Alfredo B. Crevenna, 1966) #CoMoMexico
The beautiful Alien women come to Earth and, disguising their spacecraft as an amusement park ride, lure several humans inside and take them to their homeworld. Tired of living underground because of the blinding light on their planet's surface, the aliens wish to relocate to Earth, but they need human lungs to adapt to our world's atmosphere.
The ladies do their deeds under the orders of an evil queen, but she has her own problems, a good identical twin who acts as a moral taunt. The Queen cannot bring herself to kill her sister, because of an old superstition that twins share the same soul, and if one is killed, the other will die. So Alburnia gets to be free, much to the annoyance of Queen Adastrea.
Part of the fun of El Planeta de las Mujeres Invasoras comes from the goal of the Space Ladies not being anything related to finding husbands or needing men to repopulate their all-female society. They just want some body parts so they can take over the planet. The men are barely an afterthought.
The Phantom of the Convent (Fernando de Fuentes, 1934) #CoMoMexico
Widely considered the first great Mexican horror*, this spine-chilling gothic tale revolves around a married couple and their best friend** who get lost in the woods before taking shelter in a mysterious monastery.*** Habitually compared to Carl Theodor Dreyer and his Vampyr, Fernando de Fuentes induces a protracted sense of dread in this dream-like fable of guilt and dark desires.
*one of the two first horror movies made in the country (the first one was “La Llorona” a year earlier)
** hello “Two Monks”!
*** the exteriors of the monastery are shots of Capilla Casa De Loreto in Tepotzotlan, Mexico
Fernando de Fuentes Carrau’s 1934 Mexican horror film ‘El fantasma del convento’ (‘The phantom of the convent’) displays extraordinary cinematic technique in the visual representation of a haunted place. The film’s production design is loyal to the depiction of a solitary and ruined religious building: the consistent use of soft lighting is enhanced by the presence of candlelight on stage, and the set design highlights the colonial convent as old and forgotten.
Fernando de Fuentes Carrau’s film emphasizes darkness and mystery. Accompanied by effective sound effects of lamenting off-screen voices and howling winds, it is clear that this setting suggests terrors the protagonists may need to unveil. Nevertheless, rather than discovering gruesome secrets from the monks who inhabit the convent, Eduardo, his wife Cristina, and their friend Alfonso end up revealing their treacherous love triangle.
Fernando de Fuentes Carrau’s film questions the sanity of its protagonists, who are trapped in a colonial, labyrinthine space where supernatural apparitions and events are far from ever being confirmed. Suggesting a terror that unveils horrifying subject desires, ‘El fantasma del convento’ is keen on adhering to an aesthetic that Fred Botting has determined to be “negative”. Fred Botting additionally defines Gothic fiction to be predominantly dark, that is, where “an absence of the light associated with sense, security and knowledge” eventually reveals “delusion, apparition, deception”.
Stealing the Art (Juan José Gurrola, 1972) #CoMoMexico
For Robarte el Arte AKA Stealing the Art (1972), Juan José Gurrola together with Gelsen Gas and Arnaldo Coen supposedly stole an artwork during Documenta 5 in 1972 and represented it with an asterisk of scotch tape on a rock in the Wilhelmshöhe Park.
Sequences of this performative action are montaged like in a silent movie with panels of cut-up newspaper text blocks, installation shots from the Documenta exhibition inside and outside Fridericianum, and scenes from a horror porn movie based on the story of the serial killer “Goyo” Cárdenas — his case became a sensation on Mexican media in the 1940s and inspired several copycat murderers imitating his crimes — and underscored with a dramatic soundtrack.
With Robarte el Arte, the artists satirically destabilize Documenta’s institutionalized role to chart the current art developments and thus setting the foundation for a so-called canon as Eurocentric.
It has no dialogue, just some intertitles in Spanish and German without subtitles and some other text in English.
considering that i am not fluent in Spanish, partly fluent in German, and texts in English looked mostly like this...
... this film remains (to a great deal) a mystery.
all, i can do for now is to start a (Eng.) subs pot on KG (everyone is cordially invited to contribute!).
i must admit i had an ulterior (Eurocentric) motive to watch it (despite the aforementioned language barrier).
because its playground is Documenta 5, this film extensively features an architectural project called “Oase No. 7” (by Haus-Rucker-Co) which i fancy seeing.
→ https://architectuul.com/architecture/oase-no-7
Oase No. 7 is a transparent sphere with a diameter of 8 metres, the sphere was placed in front of the main facade on the Friedericianum. A catwalk made of standard tubular steel sections projected through the window from the interior of the building into the transparent sphere. A tubular steel ring was fixed to this footbridge, at a slight distance from the facade. This ring formed the external support for a PVC foil shell that formed a sphere when inflated into shape by an air pump.
Ximena Cuevas' cinema education began at age thirteen when she viewed an average of four films a day for two years straight while cutting classes from junior high school in Paris. During this period she also perfected the technique of hiding in bathrooms during the interlude between film screenings. At sixteen, she had her first hands on contact with film, repairing old movies in the Cineteca Nacional in Mexico City. Two years later, she worked as art assistant on Missing by Costa Gavras and then studied film at both the New School for Social Research and Columbia University in New York City.
"When I was a child, my favorite game was to climb over fences, to hide under tables, and to listen to the everyday conversations of strangers. From that invisible perspective, I would reconstruct the lives of those people. The video camera continues to exert over me that fascination with secrets, and I wouldn’t change the private act of video for the big apparatus of film."
The 3 Deaths of Lupe (Ximena Cuevas, 1984, 5m) #CoMoMexico
In this antiqued period piece, the morbid star, Lupe Velez, travels to Hollywood, Guanajuato, and Barcelona, seeking her own death.
Half-Lies (Ximena Cuevas, 1995, 36m) #CoMoMexico
A video poem about the nature of social relations and mass media, Half Lies exposes the seemingly innocuous ways we distort the truth. Harmonious families, trade treaties, and current events are among the mediated realities that Cuevas interrogates. Half Lies makes the viewer question the half-truths we encounter daily. The video walks the haunting gray area between documentary and drama, creating a world that is both shockingly grotesque and startingly authentic. Using mass-mediated images, animation, image manipulation, and fantasy, Medias Mentiras interprets the chaotic landscape of politics, urban chaos, and everyday existence.
Bed (Ximena Cuevas, 1998, 2m) #CoMoMexico
"The life of objects intrigues me. Apparently, inanimate, they adopt the souls, actions, and lifestyles of their keepers. Here, a bed testifies to what goes on behind the closed door of a decent family's bedroom."
We’re Here to Serve You (Ximena Cuevas, 1999, 3m) #CoMoMexico
"I made this video after assisting at a conference where the artists acted like flies in a barnyard. They gathered tropical fruits to make it less disagreeable for themselves."
Contemporary Artist (Ximena Cuevas, 1999, 5m) #CoMoMexico
After working in solitude at the studio, the artist leaves, uncomfortable with the idea of having to put on a face for the art world, where they expect you to say something articulate in order to grab the curator's attention.
a long time ago, i made an account on a website aggregating academic papers.
despite my declared academic interests (on that website) being “herbarium management“, "herbarium research”, and alike, somehow they haven’t got fooled and just now (based on automatically aggregated data-stalking) they are randomly spamming my e-mail with the paper called “John Cage in Mexico”.
→ https://www.academia.edu/44790659/John_Cage_in_Mexico
after briefly looking into it (i need to go to sleep now), i see some names & tunes calling to be included in this thread...
Cage’s relations to Mexico date back to the 1940s, through his admiration for the work of composer Carlos Chávez. The latter’s book Toward a New Music — one of the first writings in history to address the potential of electronic music — was of particular influence. In 1942 Chávez completed the Toccata for Percussion Instruments, commissioned by Cage for his percussion ensemble. That same year, the American composer published an analysis of Chávez’s Indian Symphony. Both kept correspondence at least until the late sixties.
Of his six symphonies, the second, or Sinfonía india, which uses native Yaqui percussion instruments, is probably the most popular.
One of the figures that attracted Cage the most was Nancarrow. Practically unknown at the time, Nancarrow was a musician born in the United States, living in Mexico since 1940 and naturalized in 1956. His work was oriented towards the possibilities ofered by the player piano, particularly for serialist and polyrhythmic compositions accomplishing levels of complexity that would only be equaled with the use of computers.
Ximena Cuevas dissects an upper-class wedding in Mexico City where the guests fantasize about the exotic faraway dreamscape that is their “Hawai.”
Fate (Ximena Cuevas, 1999, 2m) #CoMoMexico
Erase the 1940s. The desire to better appearances. To try to record a love story. It's in this way that a facial can become the biggest remaining pleasure.
“This is a video of musical terror where I superficially — this is the beginning of a larger project — l look at one of the Mexican phenomena that horrifies me the most: internalized racism, being ashamed of one's own roots. The fantasy of waking up white.” (Ximena Cuevas)
Written by genre film legend Alfredo Salazar, LA BRUJA follows a witch who becomes a vehicle for revenge after being transformed into a seductive millionaire. A dark twist on the Pygmalion story, LA BRUJA is saturated with revenge, the toxic burden of beauty, and passionate quotes from Fritz Lang’s M. Emotional misery, issues of self-worth, and an organized underworld of outcasts drench the tainted heart of this gothic creepshow from Mexico.
besides all those (more obvious) references mentioned above (or elsewhere), certain scenes of this film also feel like Wundkanal (Thomas Harlan, 1984).
or whenever the underground "tribunal of the night” accuses “Gunther Strecker”, it echoes “Hanns Martin Schleyer”.
Chano Urueta deliciously crafts a sinister underworld of the poor, wretched and handicapped, a society lorded over by Paulesco, a sort of early and non-supernatural version of Coffin Joe. (Paulesco is played by the future "Dr. Krupp" of the Aztec Mummy films--Juan Aceves Castaneda, while the actor who played the Aztec Mummy, Angel Di Stefani, turns up as a beggar.) Along with the scenes featuring "la bruja" (whose look on the big screen must have been both shocking and riveting), it is these moments in the underground lair that resonate with atmosphere, artful camera positioning, and directorial flourishes. A black-robed trial of the "Tribunal of the Night" that takes place within leads one to surmise that Urueta is setting up a socialistic court date against the ruling class where the judges and jury are from the lower class, but we eventually realize that this society of outcasts is as to be feared, with its cruelty and baser passions, as the opulent and "respected" society above ground.
The night court?
Never heard of.
Who are you?
What’s your right? According to what law?
Can you condemn an honest citizen?
The court orders but does not condemn.
The ones who hold the power to forgive or to judge are those unfortunates who are demanding justice.
This great twisted family; these beggars, the urban poor toward whom the powerful, instead of pity, only have disgust and contempt.
The court ruled your death, Gunther Strecker.
Let’s see if these beings, abandoned by God and men, revoke or approve this judgment.
some recommendations come to fruition in three years...
thx, lencho!
Lencho of the Apes wrote: ↑Thu Nov 25, 2021 12:18 am
Gamez did a surrealesque featurette in 1966? that you would like, La Formula Secreta.
The Secret Formula (Rubén Gámez, 1965) #CoMoMexico
Mexico is in need of blood transfusion but Coca-Cola is injected in the veins like a serum, this induces a series of disjointed but interconnected nightmares that are as many acid and occasionally satirical portraits of what it means to be Mexican.
some frames come to fruition in Sally’s AI pictures
With his latest film, Lucifer, Gust Van den Berghe tackles 17th-century poet and playwright Joost van den Vondel’s world-renowned tragedy. The filmmaker prefers to call his work a ‘cinematographic translation’ rather than a film adaptation.
Lucifer (2014) is the closing piece of a film trilogy based on theatre classics. Little Baby Jesus of Flandr (2010) was inspired by Felix Timmermans’ En waar de sterre bleef stille staan, Blue Bird (2011) was based on Maurice Maeterlinck’s L’oiseau bleu. For each film the setting of the original text has been changed. In Lucifer, Van den Berghe replaces Vondel’s celestial realm with the Mexican hinterland. The film was shot in Angahuan, a small village at the foot of the Parícutin volcano.
Lucifer is the first circular feature film, shot in Tondoscope. A format developed especially for the film. Some scenes are shot in a 360° catadioptric mirror, to create a wide totaliaristic feeling, translating the concept of a closed paradise into a simple image.
And there are other advantages to the round frame: cinematographer Hans Bruch Jr. developed a concave mirroring instrument that transforms the landscape, representing it as a world globe turned inside out. It’s much more than a simple optical effect. This ‘tondoscopic’ visual strategy serves the cosmological eloquence of the film: in this panorama the characters are doomed to a closed perambulation from which there is no escape. The centre of the image, coinciding with the zenith, remains inaccessible and empty. The divine is absent and replaced by the optical eye of the camera.
The surprising image at the end of the film, bringing back the magic of the widescreen format and returning the medium to its profane comfort zone, suggests that such a ‘consacration’ of cinema would ultimately be untenable. Lucifer, carrier of light, has never had a more ideally suited accomplice than cinema, the art form that catches light, transforms it and intoxicates us with its illusions in order to, finally, cast us back into reality.
on this special occasion (of this phantasmagoric holiday), i dared to embark on my second John Ford movie (i.e. i’m still miles (of desert trail) away from becoming a John Ford connoisseur).
Siqueiros: Artist and Warrior (Hector Tajonar, 1996) #CoMoMexico
The life of Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueíros (1896-1974) was one of passion, political commitment and controversy, perilous adventure, and prolific artistic achievement.
originally called “Siqueiros, pasión, color de furia” and according to IMDb lasting 170 min, this documentary was also released as a DVD containing 2 versions (in Spanish with a duration of 90 min, in English with a duration of 60 min).
i watched the shortest one (which is a shame, considering the subject was such a monumentalist & megalomaniac).
When estranged siblings Luisa and Gabino visit their parents in an eerily deserted mining town in the north of Mexico, the presence of Luisa’s affable actor boyfriend, Paco gives rise to awkward scenarios. Their father’s seeming ambivalence toward his children is suddenly transformed by his fixation on Paco’s role in a famous narco-themed television series.
At first, the film starts out like a deadpan indie comedy heavy on the cringe
...
Pereda then deftly reorients the film by bringing to life the plot of a hard-boiled novel that Gabino is midway through reading. The actors from the first half of the film are recycled in this nested narrative, playing detective story archetypes involved in narco-adjacent intrigue ripped straight from the original characters’ dreams.
I haven't liked any of Pereda's films ("deadpan indie comedy heavy on the cringe" is just about exactly why), and I sorta can't stand the actor that plays Gabino, but this sounds halfway interesting.
