Tional Cinema: Spectacle, Ritual, and the Senses In
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Devo(ra)tional Cinema: Spectacle, Ritual, and the Senses in Cold War Latin American and Spanish Experimental Film by Laura Jaramillo Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Approved: ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh, Supervisor ___________________________ Markos Hadjioaunnou ___________________________ Anne Garréta ___________________________ Richard Rosa Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature Graduate School of Duke University 2019 i v ABSTRACT Devo(ra)tional Cinema: Spectacle, Ritual, and the Senses in Cold War Latin American and Spanish Experimental Film by Laura Jaramillo Graduate Program in Literature Duke University Approved: ___________________________ Negar Mottahedeh, Supervisor ___________________________ Markos Hadjioaunnou ___________________________ Anne Garréta ___________________________ Richard Rosa Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate Program in Literature Graduate School of Duke University 2019 Copyright by Laura Jaramillo 2019 Abstract This dissertation revisits a neglected archive of avant-garde Cold War-era Latin American and Spanish films which use baroque, excessive aesthetic strategies inspired by popular religious ritual: the experimental documentaries and expanded cinema inventions of Spanish filmmaker-mystic José Val del Omar; the Mexican psychedelic exploitation epics of Chilean polymath Alejandro JodoroWsky; and the Cuban revolutionary films of Manuel Octavio Gómez. This corpus of filmmakers grappled With the problem of cinema’s role Within the global system of capitalist media spectacle. DraWing on Guy Debord’s 1967 theorization of spectacle as the culmination of the West’s privileging of vision above all other senses, I contend that the ultimate end of capitalist spectacle’s offer of seemingly limitless pleasure is sensorial numbing. My project tracks a groWing recognition during the 1960s that the ubiquity of imported Western media images Within the global south doomed subjects to passive consumerism and Worse, to the extinction of older epistemologies based in the non-visual senses like touch, hearing, taste, and smell. The films I examine counter ocularcentric rationalism with the sensorial immersion of ecstatic experience. By contrast to the better-knoWn militant anti-colonial films of the period that depict armed struggle, these films experiment With forms of ritual in order to reconstitute the body’s senses as a major ground for decolonial epistemic resistance Where the rationality of political discourse iv fails. In doing so, these filmmakers reconstitute the cinema as a key site for immersive, collective experience. v Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iv Introduction ................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter Descriptions ........................................................................................................... 24 A Note on Method ................................................................................................................ 31 Chapter 1. José Val del Omar’s Tactile Cinema ...................................................................... 33 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 33 2. The Second Republic’s Pedagogical Missions and Val del Omar’s Kinesthetic Pedagogy ............................................................................................................................... 38 2.1 The projector and the Weight and heat of light in Estampas 1932 .......................... 44 3. Val del Omar’s Cinematic Inventions in Light of Spanish Autarky ......................... 47 4. Spain’s Residual Orality and Synesthetic Sense Perception ...................................... 53 4.1 Synesthetic Sense Experience and Islamic Mysticism in Grenadine Water Mirror 60 5. Tactility and OverfloW in Fire in Castille ...................................................................... 68 5.1 The Apanoramic OverfloW System: mystical fire, historical terror ........................ 73 5.1.1 TactílVision, the haptic image, and the optical unconscious .............................. 80 6. Conclusion ......................................................................................................................... 90 Chapter 2. Alejandro JodoroWsky’s Midnight Movies as Ritualized Spectacle ................ 93 1. Introduction ....................................................................................................................... 93 2. Performance, Flesh, and Gender in JodoroWsky’s Early Life and Works ................ 99 2.1 Melodrama Sacramental and Feminine Sacrifice ...................................................... 113 vi 3. Cult Spectatorship and Sensory Entrainment ............................................................ 118 3.1 El Topo as Nietzschian Ritual .................................................................................... 130 4. The Flesh as Allegory ..................................................................................................... 139 4.1 The Holy Mountain and Cold Allegories of the Flesh ............................................. 144 5. Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 151 3. Manual Octavio Gómez’s Syncretic Baroque Images of Cuban Popular Culture ....... 157 1. Introduction .............................................................................................................. 157 2. Bodily Performance, Cuban Popular Culture, and Minoritarian Transgression .. 162 2.1 Tulipa’s Ambivalent Dance ....................................................................................... 171 3. Los días del agua, Ritual Performance, and Imperfect Cinema .............................. 181 3.1 Ritual and Liminality in Los días del agua ................................................................ 200 4. Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 213 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................. 215 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 217 vii Introduction This dissertation investigates ritual as a key aesthetic mode in Latin American and Spanish experimental cinema of the Cold War, a corpus I term “devorational cinema.” I use the term devorational to describe hoW this corpus of experimental films devours the symbols of capitalism, religion, and colonialism, spitting them back out as rituals that incite the intense embodiment of liminal experience. The baroque, visually excessive corpus of films I examine by Alejandro JodoroWsky (Mexico), Manuel Octavio Gómez (Cuba), and José Val del Omar (Spain) figure liturgical performance from an array of magico-religious traditions. EscheWing normative codes of structuring narrative on film in favor of an initiatory structure, these films do not merely represent ritual on screen but are themselves rituals. Produced in the years before the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and the years immediately folloWing the brutal defeat of the 1968 Mexican student movement, the devorational corpus critique neocolonialism’s entanglement With capitalist media spectacle. As Guy Debord theorized in 1967, spectacle continually displaces lived political struggle With its representation in media images. By attending to an under-theorized aspect of spectacle—namely, its paradoxical intensification of sensory experience on one hand and its holloWing out of critical subjectivity. By contrast to the more famous militant tendency in Latin American cinema of the 60s and 70s, whose practitioners proposed to counter spectacle with authentic national culture, 1 devorational cinema challenged spectacle by generating more spectacular images that critique ontological nationalism. This project attends to the Ways that the devorational corpus theorizes the proper role of spectacle in cinema as an opportunity for sensorial immersion that maintains a space for critique. The filmmakers in my project understood ritual’s mediation on film as creating a sensory commons capable of fighting the atomizing drive of an ever-expanding, anesthetizing multi-national media apparatus. I began this dissertation in 2014 intending to Write a history of avant-garde Latin American and Spanish experimental cinema, a category which had not been excavated by film historians. As the project developed, hoWever, I realized that I did not have enough time or experience to navigate all the archives that such a project Would require. The important, arduous, and collaborative Work of finding and often restoring these films back to a Watchable state was only beginning to take shape in curatorial projects like Jesse Lerners’ massive 2017 “ISMO ISMO ISMO” program of experimental Latin American Cinema for Los Angeles’ Pacific Standard Time.1 The realization that the archival Work of the project I envisioned Was not possible ultimately