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Nation and post-nationalism: the contemporary modernist films of Carlos Reygadas

Joanne Hershfield

To cite this article: Joanne Hershfield (2014) Nation and post-nationalism: the contemporary modernist films of Carlos Reygadas, Transnational Cinemas, 5:1, 28-40, DOI: 10.1080/20403526.2014.891330

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Nation and post-nationalism: the contemporary modernist ﬁlms of Carlos Reygadas Joanne Hershﬁeld*

Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

Art cinema has been categorized as international in terms of its influences and reach. Set in opposition to Hollywood and to commercial cinema in general, art cinema simultaneously embodies the idea of the national and the international. It historically figures in discussions of high versus low art, commercial versus non-commercial, and international versus national cultural production. Recent scholarship on art cinema reconsiders the aesthetic, economic and geo-political assumptions of this category in response to its contemporary resurgence among filmmakers working in Taiwan, Iran, Mexico, Thailand, China, Japan and Hong Kong. This article considers two feature films of Mexican director Carlos Reygadas – Japón (2002) and Stellet Licht (2007) – as examples of contemporary art cinema, a category whose meaning is interrogated in relation to questions of nationalism and globalization as well as national histories of film aesthetics. Specifically, I ask how we might consider the relationship of modernist films to the concepts of the nation, national belonging and of national cinema in the context of post-nationalism through an analysis of Reygadas’ indebtedness to classical Mexican cinema. Keywords: Carlos Reygadas; Mexican film; post-national cinema; Japón; Silent Light; landscape and film

Post Tenebras Lux (After Darkness, Light, 2012), the most recent film by the Mexican director Carlos Reygadas, was widely panned at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2013, calling forth ‘belligerent boos and hooting at the press screening’, according to one reviewer.1 The reviewer, Dennis Lim of the New York Times, credits this criticism in part to ‘Mr. Reygadas’s taste for the awe and terror of the sublime [and] his confronta- tional streak’ (2013). But, according to Lim (2012), ‘the biggest provocations in the film are its aesthetic and narrative liberties. Shot with distorting lenses and edited with little Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 regard for chronology or traditional signposts, Post Tenebras Lux … resembles a docu- mentary at times and a dream at others. It can be hard to tell if certain incongruous sequences – a house party, a rugby match, an orgy at a sauna – are taking place in the past, the future or someone’s imagination’. Similar criticisms were levelled at the films of modernist directors from the 1950s to the 1970s, such as Jean Luc Godard, Glauber Rocha, Michelangelo Antonioni and Andrei Tarkovsky. The films of these directors were perceived as difficult to read not merely because of their use of highly formalized modernist techniques such as the long take and narrative ellipses, but because, according to Mark Betz, these techniques confront the viewer with ‘an array of spaces, architectures, character types and relations,

*Email: hershﬂ[email protected]

[and] interpersonal cadences’ that are unfamiliar. ‘I am made aware’, Betz writes, ‘of my bounded competency to understand … how the film’s form is functioning in concert with its story, which also remains largely inscrutable’ because of what he terms their ‘inscrutable foreignness’. This boundedness raises, for Betz, ‘important questions regard- ing the relation of the global to the local’ in recent modernist film practices (2010, 32). Betz argues that modernism did not end in the 1970s. He proposes that there are more than a handful of filmmakers and films – perhaps hundreds of films – that have been produced in the past 50 years that can be classified as modernist. I consider Betz’s con- tention by asking how we might situate contemporary modernist film in relation to questions of national cinema within the context of contemporary cinematic modernism. Historically, modernist cinema was marketed as ‘art film’ and differentiated by critics, scholars and filmmakers from Hollywood and other commercial cinemas because of its attention to form over narrative and a focus on stylistic authorial repetitions. Recent scholarship on modernist art cinema reconsiders the aesthetic, economic and geo-cultural assumptions that film theorists have traditionally made about the institutional and formal parameters of this film category. Mark Betz defines modernism not so much as an aesthetic phase or an epoch that has now been exhausted, but as a set of historical and theoretical reading protocols. He proposes ‘remappings that are at the same time institutional and political’ (2010, 39). In their recent anthology, Global Art Cinema, for example, Rosalind Galt and Karl Schoonover propose that we think of art cinema as ‘both an aesthetic category […] and a geopolitical category [that] provides an important lens through which to interrogate the consequences of globalization’ (2010, 20). This reconsideration emerges in response to the contemporary resurgence of art cinema practices among filmmakers working in different national contexts such as Taiwan, Iran, Thailand, China, Japan, Hong Kong and Mexico. To date, Reygadas has directed four feature-length films that have enjoyed relative success in the art cinema festival circuit: Japón (2002), Batalla en el cielo (Battle in Heaven, 2005), Stellet Licht (2007) and Post Tenebras Lux have screened and won prizes at major international film festivals including Cannes, Toronto, Havana, Sundance and Rotterdam. Reygadas’ films are produced through co-production and distribution arrangements between Mexican, French, German and Dutch companies and, as in the case of much of what has been classified as modernist art cinema, they find their audiences at international film festivals, in the few remaining art cinema venues around the world, and on DVD and streaming venues. Because of the context of their production and exhibition and the audiences they attract, the tendency is to situate these films as transnational or world cinema. Certainly, Reygadas’ four films do not fit neatly into con- Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 ventional or contemporary categories of Mexican national cinema, nor do they attract significant Mexican audiences. I argue, however, that Reygadas’ films are, in fact, ‘about’ Mexico, both in a geographic or territorial sense as well as in terms of cultural, historical and linguistic references. Specifically, I will discuss what I see as one of the central thematics of the film: the relationship between nature and culture, more specifically between landscape and the humans who inhabit it. In particular, I will situate this analysis within the context of a discussion of Mexican national cinema, moving from a purely aesthetic analysis to a geo-cultural interpretation. Although Reygadas’ films are often labelled transnational because of the economics of their production, distribution and reception, and because they are identified by their modernist or art cinema film strategies, the films must also be understood as national in their thematic and stylistic references. For example, in an article on Japón, Craig Epplin emphasizes ‘the centrality of rural property relations in Japón; the use of national 30 J. Hershfield

symbols, the Zócalo and the Virgin of Guadalupe in Batalla en el cielo; and the exami- nation of a culture peripheral to Mexico’s national imaginary in Stellet Licht’ (Epplin 2012, 289). While Epplin is concerned with the political implications of Reygadas’ themes and symbols, my interest is in Reygadas’ use of transnational modernist tactics to transform our understanding of national cinema. I begin by considering the category of national cinema through the lens of the post-national. Post-nationalisms are characterized by new economic, political, social and interpersonal formations that are ‘more diverse, more fluid, more ad hoc, more provisional, less coherent, less organized, and simply less implicated in the comparative advantages of the nation-state’ (Appadurai 1996, 167–168). Post-nationalism is not a geo-political for- mulation that comes after nationalism; indeed, both formulations can co-exist. Post- nationalism marks the destabilization of the idea of the nation state and the dissolution, destruction and transformation of borders in a globalizing, transnational world. One con- sequence has been the emergence of different geo-political relations to the nation state and consequently different understandings of what the nation is. Thomas Elsaesser defines these relations as a ‘hyphenated sense of belonging’ (2005, 118). He writes that there are those who are ‘hyphenated at supra-state level’. This segment of the population consists of the cosmopolitan or intellectual, political and cultural elites ‘who are globally mobile citizens of the world’. Others are hyphenated at the sub-nation level, cut off from the social fabric at large through lack of familiarity with either language or culture or both (118). Post-nationalism thus challenges the myth of the homogeneous nation and exposes ways in which notions of collective identity are being reformulated. It is a space of fragmentation where one cannot count on shared perspectives, beliefs or even language. The question of national cinema, long a topic of debate among scholars working on cinema traditions outside of the United States, is being rethought in relation to the economic and political realities of globalization and to the idea of the post-national. This formation is, perhaps, most visible at the economic level in strategies of co-production in which films are financed by shifting and temporary groups of national and corporate entities that come together to produce, market and distribute a single motion picture within the context of the global economy of media, an economy in which ideas, as well as products, circulate without regard for geographic, linguistic or cultural borders. Yet, to what extent does post-nationalism – and post-national cinema – address the divisions outlined in Elsaesser’s theorization? Post-national cinema speaks about and responds to social formations that articulate varied and sometimes conflicting senses of the ideological and physical limits of the Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 nation as well as the diverse relations of subjects to the nation. It is most profoundly articulated through thematic and narrative zones of conflict, especially those that address gender, race, national origin, regional affiliations and class. Post-national cinema is nec- essarily a hybrid cinema that draws on national as well as transnational cinematic styles, genres and narrative and aesthetic practices. I explore the question of post-national and the national in two of Reygadas’ films, Japón and Silent Light. In my discussion I ask how we might consider the relationship of modernist films to the concepts of the nation and of post-national cinema. I also challenge the all-encompassing idea of transnational cinema, at least when used to describe a new ‘world or global cinema’ shaped by the structures of global capitalism.2 While national cinema may be a contested term, I argue that it is necessary to consider what Mette Hjortt and Duncan Petrie refer to as the ‘inevitable persistence [of the nation] in film culture’ (2007,1). Transnational Cinemas 31

The narrative of Japón is simple: an unnamed middle-aged man (Alejandro Ferretis), crippled in body and soul, leaves the city and makes a long and difficult journey to reach an isolated village located in a stark and unforgiving landscape in the northern Mexican state of Hidalgo.3 More than half of Japón follows the unnamed protagonist as he wanders the terrain surrounding the village; we are made to observe the landscape and its relation to the bodies – both human and animal – that inhabit it. Moreover, for many Mexican audiences, the particular landscape is recognizably located in northern Mexico, known for its isolation and its inhospitableness. The man finds shelter in the home of an old woman named Ascen (Magdalena Flores) – a diminutive of Ascención, recalling Catholicism’s description of the Virgin Mary ascending to heaven – and tries to distance himself from the violent and brutal lives of the villagers and the wildness of the natural environment. Approximately 20 minutes into the film we discover that he has come to the village to kill himself, although we are never told why. A series of lengthy scenes that do little to move the narrative along record the everyday activities of Ascen – cooking and cleaning – and follow the man as he explores the surrounding countryside. A relationship of familiarity develops between the man and Ascen through the daily interactions of two people who live in close proximity. This familiarity results in a single intimate interaction that is, however, totally devoid of affection. Indeed, individual relationships are seemingly unimportant in Japón. What is instead central to the film is the man’s relationship with the isolated landscape, a point I will return to later. Reygadas employs a number of modernist stylistic strategies throughout the film, such as the long take and the recurring use of the 360 degree pan. One of the film’s most extraordinary scenes is four and a half minutes long and employs a series of these pans. There is no dialogue; instead, a haunting chorale, Bach’s ‘Passion According to Saint Matthew’, orchestrates the continuously revolving camera. The scene consists of eleven 360 degree pans that are connected by long dissolves. Scenes such as this one work to defer narrative momentum and are connected not through any kind of linear narrative strategy of cause and effect or character action but instead through stylistic strategies and a focus on painterly descriptions of the local landscape. For example, the end of one scene features the headlights of a car driving through a barely discernible night-time landscape. The headlights disappear in the distance and we are left with a completely black screen. After a few beats, the blackness is ‘pulled aside’ by a human hand, and we find ourselves inside the blackness, looking out onto an early morning, bright, blown-out scene of an isolated homestead. Moreover, in the final 10 seconds of what had been an almost silent scene, we hear a repeated inhuman shriek that carries Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 over into the daylight scene where we discover that we have been listening to the screaming of a pig being slaughtered. It is that scream that links the two scenes and moves the film – and the spectator – forward in time. And at the end of the film, a final, nearly five-minute shot that is composed of a continuous 360 degree shot reveals the detritus of the horrible train crash that has killed Ascen and a group of villagers – boxes, shoes, burning fires and dead bodies, choreographed to the haunting sound of ‘Miserere’, by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Another modernist aspect of Japón is that the central character may be described as the ‘abstract individual’ in the words of Bálint Kovács. In Jungian terms, this is an individual ‘whose past and inner drives are not determining factors of what happens to him’ (quoted in Kovács 2008, 65). He is radically estranged from other characters and from the diegetic world of the film. He exists physically in that he can be seen, he speaks and he interacts with other characters and with the cinematic environment, yet his 32 J. Hershfield

existence is disconnected from any conventional linear narrative logic of cause and effect (Kovács, 66–67).4 Reygadas’ man has no history and no future. He wanders the countryside with no purpose or direction. None of his actions or activities has any effect on the development of a story. Reygadas himself has said that, for him, ‘the essence of cinema … is observation’ (Le Cain 2006). We need only remember the influence of Tarkovsky on Reygadas’ filmmaking to understand this declaration. To quote Tarkovsky 1989, ‘the cinema image is essentially the observation of a phenomenon passing through time’ (62–67). Silent Light is a loose adaptation of Carl Theodor Dreyer’s 1955 film Ordet. Reyga- das’ debt to Dreyer can be seen in his stylistic choices as well as in certain narrative elements. Cynthia Tompkins notes, for example, his ‘incorporation of minimalism in mise-en-scene, plot, and movement of characters and camera’ as well as in dialogue (2013, 180). The film, also set in northern Mexico, is bracketed by a three-and-a half- minute long take opening scene of a sunrise and a final four-minute single take scene of a sunset. It presents another skeleton of a story of a man in the midst of an existential crisis. Johan (Cornelio Wall Fehr), a Mennonite and husband to Esther (Miriam Toews) and father of seven children, finds himself in the throes of desperate erotic love with another woman, Marianne (María Pankratz) and struggles with the moral conflict at the centre of these two attractions. When Esther dies of grief, Johan is forced to confront an unassailable guilt from which he is ultimately released when Esther appears to come back to life after being kissed in her coffin by Marianne. Like Japón, a minimalist narrative structures Silent Light and numerous scenes work to postpone the forward trajectory of the story. One eight-minute sequence observes a tender moment of family life. The family takes a morning off to bathe in a nearby pond. Esther and Johan wash the younger children, lovingly rubbing their bodies with soap and water while the older children practise swimming. The camera lingers on the beauty of the children and of the setting; nothing happens that contributes to the narrative of familial rupture. The scene functions merely as an exposition of ordinary, daily family life. This stylistic choice pays homage to the modernist film tradition of art cinema. Reygadas locates himself and his films within the tradition of art cinema, citing Robert Bresson, Carl Theodor Dreyer, Roberto Rossellini and Andrei Tarkovsky as significant cinematic influences. Critics concur. José Teodoro writes, for example, that ‘the allusions to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955), initially subtle, eventually explicit, are clearly intended not as bits of iconoclasm or fanboy borrowings, but as an urging to read Silent Light as a fresh contribution to a certain cinematic tradition’ (2009). Japón and Silent Light employ modernist filmic strategies that include the long take, an Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 emphasis on the long shot, minimalist narrative structure, multiple points of view in the same shot, the use of real locations, non-actors, an inexpressive acting style, an active, moving camera and an emphasis on sound and music in the evocation of meaning; as well as modernist thematic motifs such as the relationship between human subjects and the landscape, the tension between emptiness and spirituality, erotic and non-erotic sexu- ality, and characters who are enmeshed in spiritual and moral existential crises. One might say that the narrative structures of these two films are merely excuses for the visual and auditory sensual stimuli that are at the centre of each. Indeed, Reygadas admits that his screenplays ‘are not literary in the way that most screenplays are literary. Mine are images and sounds, and because of that, they’re closer to film – they’re not merely translating literature into drawings for a storyboard’ (quoted in Castillo 2010). At first glance, Reygadas’ refusal to ‘tell stories’ places his work in the tradition of parametric art cinema. David Bordwell distinguishes parametric narration from classical Transnational Cinemas 33

narration, writing that ‘stylistic patterns tend to be vehicles for the syuzhet’s process for cuing us to construct the fabula’ in classical narration, while parametric narration is ‘another sort of narration in which the film’s stylistic system creates patterns distinct from the syuzhet system’ (1985, 275). Style takes on the role of a major organizing principle in parametric narration so that narrative is subordinated to style or, in some films, style and narration may operate equally. While excessive style has come to mark many contemporary commercial films, Bordwell differentiates films that merely exhibit stylistic flourishes that exceed narrative demands from parametric narration, pointing out that ‘in parametric narration style is organized across the film according to distinct principles’ (1985, 281).5 Mark Betz reassesses Bordwell’s theorization of parametric narration. First, he questions Bordwell’s argument that parametric narration is a product of and limited to post- war European modernism and is limited to a few films and filmmakers. Betz recognizes ‘the continuing coexistence of modernist principles and production in postmodern cinematic culture’. He writes that ‘parametric narration has in fact settled in, and cinematic modernism extended over, the past two decades in such a way as to become not only widespread and perceivable, but also more recognizable, watchable and marketable’ than Bordwell would allow (Betz 2010,39–40). Second, Betz rejects Bordwell’s assertion that parametric films can only be analysed in terms of their stylistic strategies. Bordwell insists that parametric narration is ‘resis- tant’ to interpretation in ‘its preference for order over meaning’ (1985, 306).6 According to Betz, however, a purely formal analysis ‘provides only a partial picture’ of how formal operations work in general, and how they work ‘for certain, and potentially different audiences’ who read meaning according to cultural codes available to them. Betz therefore argues that the critic must pay particular attention to the geo-cultural context of the circulation and appropriation of art cinema; in other words, to local knowledges and histories (2010,40–41). One of the underlying issues that grounds Betz’s disagreement with Bordwell’s for- mulation has to do with the understanding of the relationship of cinema to modernity. Although there is not space here to fully address that disagreement, I do want to briefly outline Betz’s position. Betz argues that the modernism of art cinema is neither an ‘aesthetic phase’ nor a circumscribed period of historical time. Here he disagrees with András Bálint Kovács, who argues that by 1980 ‘modernism is over’ (2008, 59). Instead, Betz sees art cinema modernism as ‘a set of historical and theoretical reading protocols that have held art cinema in a holding pattern for Anglo-American film studies’ and global art film culture (2010, 39).7 Contrary to Bordwell’s historical circum- Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 scription of art cinema, Betz argues that we need to rethink cinematic modernism in relation to particular geo-political frameworks of global postmodernity and transnational circulations of production and reception. How else, he asks, can we talk about the very recent modernist films of geographically and culturally diverse filmmakers such as Wong Kar-Wai, Abbas Kiarostami, Chen Kaige, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Carlos Reygadas? It is easy to recognize the influence of earlier modernist directors of parametric films including Michelangelo Antonioni on Japón and Silent Light.8 To take an example often associated with neo-realists such as the early Antonioni or Luchino Visconti, we might examine Reygadas’ depictions of landscapes in terms of stylistic strategies such as the use of long takes, shallow depth of field, a lack of focal point, and the tendency of the landscape to overwhelm human figures in the frame. The purpose of these strategies, however, is not merely to showcase a series of stylistic tricks. De Luca, for example, analyses Reygadas’‘naturalist principles’, offering as an example the depiction of the 34 J. Hershfield

village of Ayacatzintla in Japón ‘in its poverty, ruthless environmental conditions and wildness, a depiction which thus encapsulates the notion of Nature not as a bucolic realm but, rather, in true naturalistic fashion, as an inhospitable setting’ (2010). Commenting on the meaning of the Po River countryside in Visconti’s Ossessione (1943), Giuliana Minghelli writes that this landscape works as a ‘symbolic screen’ that makes visible ‘a social and historical repression’ of Fascist mythology. Rather than an ‘atmosphere that simply reinforces the symbolic focus of the story’, Minghelli argues that landscape in Ossessione ‘becomes the protagonist of the action’ (2008, 177–179). It is the symbolic or metonymic significance of the ‘social and historical’ that I want to explore in Japón and Silent Light. Specifically, I am interested in the ways in which Reygadas employs modernist tactics to speak to the question of Mexican national identity in a postmodern, post-national world. Citing British filmmaking of the 1950s and 1960s, the ‘prominent Scottishness’ of Bill Forsyth’s feature films, and individual films such as Bicycle Thief (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), Harper and Rayner map out the many ways in which cinema has ‘contributed to the imagining and definition of national landscapes and communities [and] has been read by cinema audiences as one of the most conspicuous and eloquent elements’ of the nation (2010, 23–24). This is true whether or not the landscape represented is found or constructed. In her analysis of the development of landscape representations in Ameri- can art, Angela Miller writes that since the nineteenth century, ‘landscape art was more than a “reflection” of ideas about nationalism and national identity’. She argues that we need to look beyond form and content and consider landscape painting’s significance in relation to the institutions and ideas that contributed to and contested the development of an aesthetic practice that appeared to be ‘a fully natural development of an emergent nationalism’ (2–3). In classical cinema, according to Martin Lefebvre, ‘narrative and pictorial landscape often co-exist in a state of tension although the pictorial element is generally subordinated to the demand of the narrative’ (2011, 65). In non-classical, or any cinema that presents a ‘narrative looseness’, however, ‘the narrative function of setting may momen- tarily fade and the depiction of space acquires, in the spectator’s gaze, the kind of autonomy traditionally required by pictorial landscape imagery’. Lefebvre notes that modernist filmmakers such as Rossellini, Antonioni, Godard, Greenaway, Wenders, Tarkovsky and Sokurov have attempted in their work to ‘arrest’ landscape images from the classical flow of the narrative; in other words, to make landscape meaningful in its own sense outside of the bounds of the story; something that he calls ‘autonomous landscape … when views of nature have become “unhinged” from the narrative in such Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 a way as to exist in their consciousness’ (2011, 66, original emphasis). In an essay entitled ‘Landscapes of Deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert’, Matthew Gandy (2006) notes that the landscape of Italy has figured prominently in Italian cinema since the early 1900s and was appropriated by Italian neo-realist directors to symbolize ‘social and political struggle’. Red Desert, released in 1964, was shot on location in north-east Italy and explores, on one hand, the urbanization of a particular geographic area, and on the other hand, what Gandy describes as a ‘multi-faceted immersion in the experience of modernity’ (2003, 221). Red Desert is thus a film about a historical population encountering modernity in a particular geographic locale. Simi- larly, Reygadas’ presentation of landscape in Japón and Silent Light inscribes geographic locations of contemporary Mexican locales whose cultural and mythical traditions shape individual experiences of modernity. While the privileging of landscape images is familiar to art cinema audiences who are conversant with the history of Transnational Cinemas 35

modernist cinema, they function differently for Mexican audiences. These locales are familiar to Mexican audiences not merely because they are faithfully reproduced representations of places audiences are acquainted with, but rather they are cinematically recognizable because they literally and stylistically reference the representation of landscapes throughout the history of Mexican cinema. In a scene in Silent Light that occurs about midway through the film, Johan and his wife Esther are on their way to town in the midst of a heavy rainstorm. Esther feels sick and orders Johan to stop the car. When he does, she runs out into the rain and kneels down against a tree, sobbing. In terms of the narrative, we may read the rain as a meta- phor for her profound sorrow over Johan’s affair. Yet, at another level, the scene is about intense rain as a function of nature in a particular locale – the sound of it, the look of it and the feel of it. In fact, in an interview in Variety, Reygadas recounts that, ‘as a child I grew up in Mexico City, with lots of time in the countryside on a ranch with my family. I went on tractors like the one in the film. My favourite scene is the rain scene. The reason I have a rain scene is because we have intense rain like that in Mexico’ (Badt 2007). Historically, the Mexican landscape figured prominently in producing what Carlos Monsiváis calls the ‘mythologies’ of Mexican nationalism. These mythologies included the idyllic landscape of the countryside through ‘the increased idealization of the world of haciendas, ranches, and small towns’ (1995, 118). This idyllic landscape was not a replication of real places. It was a set of constructed aesthetic representations of geography, territory and spatiality that created what may be called a sense of national space. From the early cinema Reportajes of Salvador Toscano to Allá en el Rancho Grande (Fernando de Fuentes, 1936) produced in 1936, Maria Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, 1943) and Rio Escondido (Emilio Fernández, 1948) from the 1940s, Tarahu- mara (Luis Alcoriza, 1965) and Canoa (Felipe Cazals, 1976), to more recent explora- tions of Mexico as an idealized geographic space in the 2001 global hit, Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), landscape has been, according to scholars of Mexican cinema, one of the defining characteristics of Mexican national cinema. John King points to the early influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva México! on Mexican national cinema, writing that ‘the legacy for Mexican cinema was to be the assimilation of the “painterly” aspects of Eisenstein’s work’ in the ‘architecture of the landscape, the maguey plants, the extraordinary skies, the noble hieratic people’ that came to be understood as an ‘emblematic nationalism’ (1990, 44). Charles Ramírez Berg describes the inspiration of the Mexican landscape painter, Dr. Atl (Gerardo Murillo, 1876–1964) on the ‘cinematic invention of Mexico’ in the Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 Golden Age films of director Emilio Fernández and the cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa. Atl, an intellectual and fervent supporter of the Mexican revolution, promoted a cultural and artistic regeneration that would forcefully express the new Mexican nation and its people (see Lopez 2006). He favoured a specifically Mexican artistic practice that was anti-Europe, anti-bourgeois and anti-avant-gardism, an ‘authentic’ Mexican style that could express ‘a bold new Mexican aesthetic’ as well as a national culture (Ramírez Berg 1992, 30). Atl focused on the natural landscapes of Mexico, including its volcanoes, mountains and rivers that signified, for him, the ‘metaphorical representation of Mexico’s “national soul”’ (Sáenz 2012, 43). As Ramírez Berg notes, both Fernández and Figueroa ‘were in search of a visual style that would accurately depict the “national” experience’. They found this visual style in Dr. Atl’s landscapes, such as Nubes sobre el Valle de México (Clouds over the Valley of Mexico, 1933), which featured one of Dr. Atl’s major contributions to modern 36 J. Hershfield

Mexican painting, the introduction of a ‘curvilinear perspective’ (as opposed to the wes- tern tradition of linear perspective). Curvilinear perspective approximates the curved image that the eye sees because of its spherical shape. Figueroa relied on curvilinear or what he called oblique perspectives, combined with low camera angles and deep focus to achieve the unique composition of his exterior landscape shots that emphasized a curved, low horizon line and cloud-filled skies (Ramírez Berg 1992,24–25).9 Figueroa’s objective was to ‘realize a Mexican cinematography … [and] to succeed in gaining recognition for the Mexican landscape throughout the world’ (quoted in Ramírez Berg 1992, 24). One example of the influence of the Fernández/Figueroa style occurs at the begin- ning of Japón. The film begins with an extended scene of a car driving out of Mexico City. Eventually, the car arrives in the remote mountain region where the story takes place. The car emerges from a dark tunnel in the city into the blinding light of the sun in a desolate landscape. The cut implies no logical sequence of travel from one location to another. The car stops, a hand taps on the top of the car, and it drives off. The film cuts to the point of view of someone trudging over rocky terrain. The next shot reveals the first shot of the protagonist gazing out to the mountains in the distance. The sequence is constructed by long takes, point-of-view shots, and the use of wide-angle lenses. The scene concludes with a composition reminiscent of a Fernández/Figueroa composition: a low and curved horizon line, a cloud-filled sky and a barren rural landscape populated by an occasional tree and a single human dwarfed by nature. At four minutes into the film, nothing has been revealed that would suggest a story. Instead, we have been inserted into a certain geographic and filmic space that is defined by a national cinematic tradition and by the employment of stylistic strategies associated with the modernist film movement of the 1950s to the 1970s (Figure 1). Like earlier Mexican filmmakers, Reygadas locates his films in the landscapes and urban scapes of Mexico; his characters are Mexican; and his films explore the relationships between Mexican characters and the spaces they inhabit. His films also pay tribute to directors such as Fernández through his extensive use of the curvilinear horizon. Thus, although stylistically the films speak to art cinema viewers in Europe and the Uni- ted States, Reygadas’ focus on national images and landscapes speaks to Mexican audiences whose familiarity with the history of Mexican cinema supersedes modernist Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015

Figure 1. Snowy landscape. Transnational Cinemas 37

interpretations. Mette Hjort defines this kind of strategy as ‘opaque’, writing that ‘cinematic elements are opaque when they are so firmly rooted within a given national imaginary that international audiences cannot be expected to understand their meaning without the help of native informants’ (1996, 529). Despite A. O. Scott’s declaration that ‘the real setting of Japón is neither Japan nor Mexico but rather the land of allegory, where mighty abstractions – life, death, man, nature – are given concrete form’ (2003), I argue that Reygadas’ films are intentionally, visually and metaphorically set in Mexico. The painterly visions of nature are repeated in many of Reygadas’ exterior scenes. First of all, both films are shot in extra-wide- screen formats – Japón in 2.66:1 and Silent Light in 2.35:1 – and most of the exterior scenes are filmed with a wide-angle lens that gives a slight curvature to the horizon line (following in the footsteps of Dr. Atl). I estimate that 75 per cent of the scenes in both films feature landscapes. With the use of wide-angle lenses and panning camera movement, both films emphasize the horizontal dimension of the world that seems limited only by a distant horizon. The scenes are often desolate, empty of humans and animals. A wonderful scene from Silent Light features a snowy landscape. The scene starts in black; a barn door is slid open to reveal the snow-covered landscape and the curved horizon line where the blue sky meets the white snow. We hear Johan say, ‘Come, let’s go see the snow’, followed by the sound of boots crunching through the crisp snow cover. The camera dollies back as Johan and his father walk towards another outbuild- ing. It stops as the men do, then pans across the horizon from their point of view. While the men talk about Johan’s desire for Marianne, the camera continues to pan the landscape until it comes back to rest on the two men in a two shot. Given the compositions and camera movement, it is clear that the point of this scene is not to develop the story of Johan’s moral dilemma, but rather to describe and emphasize the particular environment in which the story unfolds (Figure 2). Conversely, Deborah Shaw’s analysis of the landscape in Japón concludes that it ‘is used to present a subjective view of identity, not to represent an allegorical view of the nation’. Shaw argues that the function of this landscape is to reveal ‘the individual man’, not the national, and that what is revealed is not ‘the Mexican landscape’ but rather a ‘transcendental’ or universalist portrait of ‘quiet village life’ (2002, 127). However, if we consider Reygadas’ landscapes within the context of the history of Mexican cinema, I argue that we arrive at a different conclusion. Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015

Figure 2. Japòn ﬁrst shot of man. 38 J. Hershﬁeld

What does my brief discussion of Japón and Silent Light suggest for continuing discussions about modernist film, national cinemas within the context of transnational geo-political and economic contexts of cinema, and the globalization of film? I suggest neither purely formalist analyses nor analyses concerned only with the institutional and economic parameters of film production and distribution are sufficient for determining what a film means to a particular audience. Instead, a reassessment of contemporary modernist film practices in relation to the geo-political and historical specificity of these practices will give us some tools that will help us to understand the films of contemporary modernist filmmakers such as Carlos Reygadas. Betz sees the films of directors mentioned above, such as Wong Kar-Wai, Abbas Kiarostami, Chen Kaige and Hou Hsiao-hsien, as ‘sharing aesthetic features that attest to the persistence of cinematic modernism with a difference’ defined by the ‘cultural or local references […] that draw attention to them- selves through the parametric stylistics of the film itself’ (2010, 32, original emphasis). My intention has been to interrogate the relation between contemporary modernism and national cinema in relation to Japón and Silent Light by paying particular attention to geo-cultural aspects of the film that are ‘unfamiliar’ or ‘opaque’ to those whose competency may allow them to analyse the parametric conventions of the film but who lack the capacity to make sense of cultural and local references. Despite the noted affinity of Reygadas’ films with art cinema, his films also call attention to another cinematic tradition through references associated with an 80-year history of Mexican filmmaking.

Notes 1. Despite the mixed reception, Reygadas was awarded the Prix de la mise en scène, the festival’s best director prize. 2. See, for example, Higbee and Lim (2010). 3. As Robert Efird notes in his article in this volume, Japón is a ‘loose adaptation of a story by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’. 4. Kovács lists Fellini and Antonioni’s middle-class intellectuals and industrialists, and artists in films by Tarkovsky, Malle and Wenders, for example. 5. In a recent blog post, Bordwell writes that, like Hollywood films, the art film tradition has its own tradition of conventions. These films ‘cultivate intrinsic norms, storytelling methods that are set up, almost like rules of a game, for the specific film … What the art film does, I think, is what ambitious Hollywood films try to do: It tries to freshen up its intrinsic norms. But it does this according to broader principles of the art-film tradition. In other words, an individual device might seem strange, even unique to this or that movie, but the function it fulfills is familiar to us from our knowledge of the tradition’s conventions. We figure out the device because we assume it has a familiar function’ (http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2012/08/26/

Downloaded by [University of Notre Dame] at 05:44 12 October 2015 how-to-watch-an-art-movie-reel-1/). 6. In his analysis of Bresson’s Pickpocket, for example, Bordwell focuses on ‘the interplay of syuzhet and style in the narrational activity of the film’ (1985, 289). He concludes that the spectator is engaged through ‘overall repetition of syuzhet modules, the combinations of rela- tively fixed character relations, and the narrow range of stylistic variation’ (304). 7. Similarly, in her essay ‘The Mass Production of the Senses: Classical Cinema as Vernacular Modernism’, Miriam Bratu Hansen takes note of the historical, social and geo-political locations of modernism, writing that it is ‘more than a reparatory of styles … [it] encompasses a whole range of cultural and artistic practices that register, respond to, and reflect upon pro- cesses of modernization and the experiences of modernity’ (2000, 333). 8. Interestingly, Antonioni produced a film in 1961 called L’Eclisse or Silent Light. I have not been able to find any references on the part of Reygadas to that film. 9. See also Keating (2010) for further discussion of Fernández and Figueroa’s collaboration, and Baugh (2004) for a history of the Nuevo cine movement. Grupo del Nuevo cine was a group of filmmakers and intellectuals that produced a series of experimental films and manifestos in the 1960s that claimed the position of artist for the filmmaker. Transnational Cinemas 39

Notes on contributor Joanne Hershﬁeld is Professor and Chair of the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. She is the author of Imagining la chica moderna: Women, Nation, and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1917–1936 (2006), The Invention of Dolores del Río (2000) and Mexican Cin- ema/Mexican Woman, 1940–50 (1996).

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