122 Scapegoat 6 Mexico DF / NAFTA 123 The Time After NAFTA: ... and in particular Daniel Magilow, Lara Nielsen the time after NAFTA within any other likely the introductory The Photography essay by Vincent of Crisis: The chronology of the Americas, and decidedly Lavoie, “Forensique, Photo Essays of refusing to concede ‘what’s done is done,’ representations et Weimar Germany regimes de vérité,” (Philadelphia: Penn. The Time the film rubs at the simultaneities of pasts Ciel Variable 93 State University and futures within the great fabric of creation (January 2013): 8–20. Press, 2012). itself, that original and inventive enterprise of 11 16 imagining the world ‘made flesh.’ Susie Linfield, The Carlos María Meza After NAFTA: Cruel Radiance: and Anasella Within and beyond Mexico, NAFTA Photography and Acosta, “Violencia economies have realigned capital flows and Political Violence & fotografía: (Chicago: University Publicar o no, he DF’s Border social relations between country and city, of Chicago Press, ahí el dilemma,” imploding old social contracts between 2011), 39. Cuartoscuro, 10 February 2011, urban, cosmopolitan elites and the persistent 12 http://cuartoscuro. coloniality of the local, still imagined as a Jean Franco, Cruel com.mx/2011/02/ Time (and Modernity (Durham violencia-fotografia- pastoral site for home and “help.” Yet in the and London: Duke publicar-o-no-he-ahi- time after NAFTA, narcocapitalism is the only University Press, el-dilema. 1 2012), 212. the Other) local factory that’s still hiring. Reygadas 17 examines the time after NAFTA in works that 13 Charles Bowden, Leonard Folgarait, Murder City: trace the elite, creative classes of Mexico Seeing Mexico Ciudad Juárez City’s privileged urban milieu as it comes Photographed: and the Global in Post The Work of Economy’s New into contact with those who have historically Horne, Casasola, Killing Fields been consigned to serve them. Each playing Modotti, and (New York: Nation Álvarez Bravo Books, 2011), 118. Tenebras distinctive parts in the post-NAFTA service (New Haven and economy (including its narcocapitalist London: Yale 18 University Press, John Gibler, To spectrum), the conflicts between them recall 2008), 12. Die in Mexico: the dynamics of Rancière’s reading of the Dispatches from Lux 14 Inside the Drug time after as “the time of pure material Lara Nielsen Mauricio Tenorio- War (San Francisco: I think we are living now in a moment of events, against which belief will be measured Trillo, I Speak of City Lights, 2011), 69. 2 the City: Mexico darkness. for as long as life will sustain it.” Rather than City at the Turn —Carlos Reygadas, 2013 simply oppose the culpability of the state and of the Twentieth Century (Chicago: markets as developmental stages in nation- The University of It would seem that Post Tenebras Lux making projects (and filmmaking ones, too, Chicago Press, 2011), 268. (2012), the fourth and most recent film as Rancière suggests), Reygadas wrestles by Carlos Reygadas, delivers a promise: with cinematic strategies of performing the 15 See, for one example after darkness, light. The title conjures the ethnographic present in a feature film, and with among many others, “wisdom book” of Job, where the passage the challenges of mediating the coevalness from darkness to light is one of temporal that was never only “before” or “after” NAFTA, and spiritual surrender in which recourse to but rather illuminates an intensification of the rationality and the body are insufficient (Job persistence of coloniality. The film takes place 28:28). To revisit the material impoverishments in the context of Mexico City’s “borderlands,” of fortune and flesh in Job is to consider anew 50 miles to the south. Aligning Mexico DF with the tests and transformations of modernity and other global cities, the film incorporates shots global inequality. But what, to invoke Jacques from the periphery of major metropolises in the Rancière, is the time after NAFTA? Of what UK, Spain, and Belgium. tests and judgments is this historical time In interviews, Reygadas has made it clear made? For Reygadas, the key to unpacking that although critics tend to view Post the post-NAFTA era is a cinematography of Tenebras Lux as his most personal film and presence approaching mysterious and refractive call it autobiographic, he is interested instead in temporalities. Resisting the urge to codify “fictionalizing with documentary.”3 Billed as “a

... DF’s Border Time (and the Other) in Post Tenebras Lux 124 Scapegoat 6 Mexico DF / NAFTA 125 The Time After NAFTA: ... documentary and a dream,” the film was made prescription, precisely because the fantasia from the sky into darkness. Everything on the makes audiences watch as his technology of in a rural area of Morelos, where Reygadas and of “action” takes precedence over the official screen (as well as our spectatorial senses) is seeing makes, distorts, and isolates its objects his wife Natalia built the house that appears takes of the camera, and “history” itself. For entirely consumed by thunder and rain and from their surrounding contexts. The 1:33 ratio in the film, and where they now live with their Reygadas, as well as for his colleague Béla shadow and earth and lightning and sky, the also produces a dizzying effect, as there is a two children. The film follows a Reygadas- Tarr, the time after presents the task of clamour of nature’s infinity conjuring a scale conflict between how the camera sees and like character named “Juan,” but Reygadas “rendering duration […] sensible, of having of immense contrast with the girl vulnerable how the spectator’s eye, or “I,” apprehends and Natalia are portrayed by actors. Post given it an autonomous existence.”6 The to man, dog, and sky alike—simultaneously and constitutes its object in the continuous Tenebras Lux premiered at the 2012 Cannes possibility of autonomy governs both Fabian’s studied and protected by the camera, somehow perspectival flow. By contrast, the omniscient film festival, where Reygadas won the festival’s critique of the ethnographic present and both sensitive and oblivious to the storm, digitized gaze, according to Reygadas, has Best Director Prize. An upper-crust family Reygadas’ treatment of affective temporalities, ostensibly safe, but promised the post become something monstrous, in that its drama, this is a film by and about Mexican as each seeks to disrupt official, bureaucratic tenebras lux. Again, the paternal presence technologies see “all” in a way no human eye elites, portraying the time after NAFTA in the conceptions of time in favour of more of the camera means she is not alone, but can, and his decision to counter this with a clash between what Reygadas calls “Western” rhizomatic dispensations of the real. Reygadas also watches her as a thing made more “realistic” if dissonant ratio is deliberate. Mexicans both near and far from “non-Western” Opening in the rainy season (and to be alone: with dogs and cows and rain and Inside the box there is sharp focus; at its Mexicans. According to Reygadas, it is a semi- reminiscent of Tarkovsky), the camera follows lightning and puddles—in other words, in the edges, a warping blur. Borders between the here autobiographical fictional film about “feelings, Rut, Reygadas’ real-life daughter, blonde and elements. Borders between the here and there and there do not produce “clarity” so much as memories, dreams, things I’ve hoped for, fears, maybe three years old, running around a do not produce “clarity” so much as stage stage the breathing, rhythmic swell of seeing, facts of my current life.” The film alternates patchy and puddled soccer pitch in the kind of the breathing, rhythmic swell of seeing, being being and time tied to and yet independent from between realist and other registers, in a kind colourfully sensible rain boots you might see and time tied to and yet independent from objects in the camera’s field of vision. When of cinematic autoethnography, a research and on affluent children anywhere—if not always objects in the camera’s field of vision. The Rut turns out not to be where the camera puts narrative method that questions the objective with attendant particular details like galloping fictional documentary filmmaker—like Fabian’s her, when she is outside the comfortable focus observer position, as well as the concept of the packs of dogs, lightning shattering the sky in ethnographer—has made its object, both of its gaze, when she is distorted by its “eye,” coherent self, and draws connections between the electrically darkening dusk, or the obvious located in and removed from time. As a creature Reygadas provokes the experience of nausea autobiographical, cultural, social, and political adjacency to Mexico City. Her brother Eleazar, of “nature,” Rut both mimics and eludes his through a dissonance between the body’s “texts.”4 This technique indexes the distortional slightly older, is also in the film. Reygadas making: she is the signature of paternalist sensory perception and its fallible efforts to effects of what Johannes Fabian has called the explains: “For the children to be there really reproduction framed as solitude, authenticity, map itself spatially. What Fabian describes as Lara Nielsen “ethnographic present,”5 towards a recognition powerfully, it had to be my children. Otherwise and whiteness. the epistemological mechanism of exclusion of the durational propinquities of the time they would be representations of children. It’s Reygadas draws attention to the transfigures objects of study into things that after NAFTA. difficult to explain, but so often when you are anachronistic activity of transcribing the are “outside” or prior to time, constituted by In the register of a persistent “now” that watching a film it’s like you’re seeing ideas present by using the boxy 1:33 aspect ratio, an their temporal exteriority; what edges out of deliberately projects the interplay of analepsis and not the things themselves.”7 The dogs old standard for silent films in the 1930s the camera’s focus also edges out of its spatio- and prolepsis, cutting forward and back, also belong to Reygadas, though audiences (in photography we usually see the 4:3 temporal synchrony. The 1:33 aspect ratio stages Post Tenebras Lux disambiguates the time can hardly guess this. Here the elements—rain, relationship, which describes the proportion and makes visible this relation with temporal after as a cutting and diachronic sense thunder, lightning, people, animals, landscape— between width and height). The tunnel-vision alterity, and hence with the DF borderlands’ of the precarious and uncanny present, are as constructed as they are real, as made as focus effect of the 1:33 aspect ratio materializes epistemologies after NAFTA, as the objects rendering the distance between narrative they are found. The opening operatic sequence the blur of vision as a domain of not-seeing: of the gaze push back against the “objective” and event as an ethical and political question presents the leashed and unleashed stormy things that could be in focus—dogs, puddles, time and technology of focus. The camera blurs for cinematography, thus formally blurring forces, the known and the unknown, the feature rain, mountains, the girl—are made to be not Rut and everything else around her, dogs and the boundaries between art and performative film and the autoethnographic documentary quite what they are in the beveled warp of nature shifting in and out of proximity, and the autoethnography. Reygadas transcribes the (a method for writing about self and other); the camera’s image. Indeed, when Rut strays antagonism between representational formats possibility of seeing and narrating the ineffable in short, it stages both performance and the from the centre of the frame, tottering in and takes on a performative dimension. Explains “now” by making palpable the violence of its vérité of life itself, querying the porous out of the square plane of focus, the anxiety Reygadas: “Why did I want that look? Because constructions, particularly in the cinematic boundary between art and life. of paternalistic access to the object of vision aesthetics are in the end a reinterpretation of the production of an ethnographic present that The presence of an authority holding the becomes tangible. We watch the camera select world.”8 The now and the then of temporality taunts the rendering of its subjects as absent camera is carefully acknowledged by the its object, a mimicry of the eye at work, looking deeply mark Reygadas’ interpretations of DF and “past.” Materializing the suspensions panting dogs, who never look at it (or him) at some things directly, and others indirectly; border spaces. between what has been and what will be, directly. Rut splashes after some cows mooing as things recede into a distance that is palpably Recording the antagonisms of contemporary Reygadas’ aesthetic deters, or refrains from in the near distance, as the light slowly fades manufactured by the seeing eye, Reygadas Mexican life, Reygadas both refutes and

... DF’s Border Time (and the Other) in Post Tenebras Lux 126 Scapegoat 6 Mexico DF / NAFTA 127 The Time After NAFTA: ... reiterates the position of authorial filmmaker our actual perception of life. Eleazar is alert to broken lives destroyed by drugs, the drug the destructions of nature and NAFTA thus by making visible the production of the the profound and material reality of satanic economy, and labour migrations al Norte. intertwined. The catastrophic falling of majestic ethnographic present in the context of DF’s presence, in the world and at home, and quietly Young and old, the men from Morelos recount trees is recapitulated by the loss of family, everyday exurban “borderlands.” Because watches as the devil opens the door to Juan joblessness, addiction, narcoviolencia: which is exactly what happens when El Siete’s Reygadas considers film “not an art of and Nathalia’s bedroom, goes in, and shuts the stories of families lost, the testimony of wife packs up their daughter and leaves representation, but an art of presence,”9 door behind him. Neither actor nor character, inconsolable futures, as if to suggest that scenes Morelos one last time. Juan, more prosperous, he necessarily reckons with Fabian’s fabled the son Eleazar is alert to the cut, or break, of affective annihilation continually recur, in appears to enjoy the privilege of maintaining critique: that the ethnographic present (its constituting the real. As Rancière suggests, the time after. Rather than see himself as a his family, but the antagonisms of coloniality museological present tense, which sets its “Less than ever, then, is it a matter of opposing subject of repentance and rehabilitation, Juan are inevitable. Later, El Siete robs Juan’s home, objects up for perpetual display by “official” the real to the illusion. It is a matter of inserting offers his noblesse oblige, which is both taking a flat screen TV and an Apple computer, timekeepers), is both rhetorical vehicle and a fantastic element into the heart of the real, indifference and denial. But he will not admit and accidentally shoots Juan when he returns enactment, yielding strategies meant “to keep which cuts it in two.”13 himself as a subject of rehabilitation, post unexpectedly in the middle of the mini-heist. the Other outside the Time of anthropology.”10 Leaving the audience to suspect that the tenebras lux. Juan shouldn’t have been there; he was on Traditionally, the ethnographic present yields trouble, whatever it is that troubles the After the realist family drama, Reygadas his way back to Mexico City and turned back; a kind of transcription based on a narrative Reygadas’ home, is sexual in nature (and returns to the 1:33 aspect ratio for El Siete’s nobody could have expected it; it’s nothing strategy of suspension, or one that suspends Reygadas’ critics are often misled by sexual visual baroque, again indexing the filmmaker’s personal. But it is exactly personal, this objects from its elite, narrative community; spectacle), the camera cuts to the next morning, autoethnographic act of appropriation. conflict—the denial of coevalness, the ways it is “a practice of giving accounts of others with the nuclear family at breakfast eating their relationship to each other has changed in the present tense.”11 In Post Tenebras strawberries and pancakes. We are now in over time. The only equivalency that stands is Lux, Reygadas rejects the ethnographer’s the genre of realist family melodrama, happy that of contemporaneity, an antagonism that shizogenic use of time.12 at first, and then inexorably sad, following does not see societies as passing t Reygadas cuts from nature to the still of the Tolstoy’s maxim. For this family, the scene hrough different developmental stages (of domestic indoors, a home in which a family is shifts when Juan leaves the breakfast table to modernity, of neoliberal political economies check on the dogs, with whom he congregates after NAFTA, of narcocapitalism), but as enthusiastically throughout the film. It is a “different societies facing each other at the plenitude of affection and nuzzlings between same Time.”14 Lara Nielsen man and his best friends; they are eager for Reygadas describes his double, Juan, as their feeding and he can deliver it. Juan’s joy “the typical, dissatisfied, Western male,”15 flips to rage, however, when he suddenly and in whose Mexico the racial division of labour violently starts beating one of his dogs, the repeats the theatre of tragedy, and then farce. one he says is his favourite, “the smartest Reygadas satirically records the romance of dog.” She has disobeyed, circumvented a rule, paternalistic tragedy, as Juan accepts death demonstrably begs for forgiveness, and cowers (from El Siete’s gunshot) to the tune of Neil and whimpers as he beats her: Juan holds her Young’s “It Was A Dream,” redolently played down, punches her in the ribs, and slams her by Nathalia on the family piano. With the head against the deck (the veterinarian, Juan fantasy of Juan’s death, there is no ritual of quietly sleeping; no one moves in the silence. knows, is “suspicious” about all the trauma this enlightenment without its corresponding As if to emphasize the fictional aspect of dog has suffered). backbone of coloniality. Seemingly far removed cinema, ethnography, and the documentary Remorseful and inarticulate, addicted to Reygadas shows the grandeur of the forest, from the usual spectacular violence of maquila feature alike (and to underscore again the his abusive behaviour, and chided by Nathalia magisterial and distorted by the seeing eye, and narco economies, there in the lugubrious parable of Job), the camera pans to an ordinary for it, Juan takes off from the house to attend the ominous rip of a chain saw echoing in hills south of the DF In Post Tenebras Lux, looking door, and stages an exuberantly other matters of property, following El Siete, the distance. The camera slowly closes in on Mexico City’s border time is at once furtively theatrical threshold. Then, in walks the devil— a local man in his service, through Juan’s El Siete through the bevelled, striating lens, and frantically sensed—in the manipulation and artifice itself, a glowing red, CGI cartoon figure, land to a rough shack in a wooded corner. El sawing down trees. Is it a desperate reach writing of seeing, fantasias real and unreal; in tall and thin like the Pink Panther, but crimson, Siete explains that it is being used without for the sale of natural resources, as El Siete’s the destruction of natural resources; consumer bearing horns and dangling genitalia, a modern- his permission and invites Juan to the shack service work counts for too little? When one culture; in the brutalization of animals and day satyr. Deadpan, Reygadas reflects that the to attend the AA meetings being held there, tree falls in the forest, it takes others down women, arguably interchangeable as service narrative comes not from information but from offering rehabilitation to men testifying to with it: an eerie ballet of man-made disaster, workers to men, whether as owners, fathers,

... DF’s Border Time (and the Other) in Post Tenebras Lux 128 Scapegoat 6 Mexico DF / NAFTA 129 The Time After NAFTA: ... husbands; in a realist or surrealist drama, safe the logics of governance and the enlightenment Notes 5 10 Johannes Fabian, Fabian, Time and and unsafe at home. subject as centre of the universe as it is Time and the the Other, xli. 1 Other: How As a postscript, the film closes with the written), and on the other, gesturing towards Ed Vulliamy and Anthropology 11 Saptarshi Ray, “David camera’s boxy tunnel vision, zooming in to the possibilities of affective autonomies—not Makes Its Object Ibid., 80. Simon, Creator of (New York: Columbia a prep-school scene of English schoolboys entirely circumscribed by linear writings in time, The Wire, Says New University Press, 12 US Drug Laws Help playing rugby; it’s Derbyshire, where Reygadas and yet eternally beholden to its conscriptions. 1983). Fabian argues Decades later, it is Only ‘White, Middle that while research clear that criticisms was schooled. The camera goes in close to In Post Tenebras Lux, it ends as it begins, at Class Kids,’” The practices are rooted of allochronic Guardian, 25 May the scrum and then wide to show the passes; another dusk, where, as Fabian observes, “the in the dynamics of habits accrue to 2013, http://www. intersubjectivity— every arts and the rhythmic sounds of boys traipsing over object’s present is founded in the writer’s past. theguardian.com/ contingent, humanities discipline world/2013/may/25/ the green, forward and back, as their panting In that sense, facticity itself, that cornerstone of and indeed reproducing the-wire-creator-us- 17 performative— the paradoxes becomes a primal chorus, is so detailed in scientific thought, is autobiographic.” drug-laws. ethnographic writing of narrative its running thumps and rhythms that it For Fabian, pretense to objective method works (as it is produced authorization. 2 and narrated in recalls the film’s first thunderous scene. While strictly as a condition of authorial precaution; Jacques Rancière, published research, 13 Béla Tarr, The huddling, one of the boys performs the role of it is an administrative agreement, “if only and the insider talk Rancière, Béla Tarr, Time After of professionalizing 54. the “captain,” offering a pep talk to his team for fear that their reports might otherwise (Minneapolis: salons) produces Univocal Publishing, in a keen display of the sheer propaganda of be disqualified as poetry, fiction, or political its objects of study 14 2013), 9. Rancière 18 by way of temporal Fabian, Time and the rational (Kantian) subject, manifest in the propaganda.” The film is not so much studies the failed distancing. Objects the Other, 155. political and heightened reality of its performance: by all technically concerned with the achromatic of study are made economic landscapes to be outside of 15 appearances an Anglo-Protestant English boy, or luminance as it is, says Reygadas, “like an of Tarr’s Hungary. scientific or scholarly Olsen, “Post Reygadas teaches at the captain exclaims: “They are nothing. They expressionist painting where you try to express time, and are defined Tenebras Lux.” Tarr’s Film Factory in by the principle of are individuals. We have a team. Go team!” At what you’re feeling through the painting Sarajevo. 19 their exteriority 16 that the boys rumble back to the game, barking rather than depict what something looks like.” to the rhetoric of Dennis Lim, “Cannes 3 pasts, presents, Film Festival: Loud team slogans, beholden to the unleashed logic Post Tenebras Lux counterposes cinematic Dennis Lim, “All and futures. After Boos Don’t Phase the Dreaminess of of the game. Reygadas explains: afterimages and perception, mediating Fabian, critics have Reygadas,” Arts Reality,” The New struggled with the Beat Blog, The New the boundaries between art and life, staging York Times, 26 question, “in what York Times, 12 May April 2013, http:// It’s a film about Juan, who lives, who the allochronic antagonisms. But the question tense does one write 2012 . www.nytimes. Lara Nielsen an ethnographic imagines, who remembers, and probably we remains: in what tense does one write the com/2013/04/28/ account?” (xxvi). 17 movies/post- see bits of his life. He could have been on time after? Fabian, Time and tenebras-lux-by- 6 the Other, 89. a rugby team when he was young. But the carlos-reygadas-at- Rancière, Béla Tarr, film-forum.html. rugby scene is also there at the end to mean 43. 18 Ibid, 33. that life goes on, we keep on playing and we 4 7 Deborah Reed- need to play, disregarding the fact that it’s Lim “All the 19 Danahay, Auto/ Dreaminess of Carlos Reygadas raining blood in Mexico and heads are being Ethnography: Reality.” Biography, Film Rewriting torn off. Rugby’s a good fit for the film: the Factory, http:// the Self and 8 filmfactory. physicality of it matches the violence of the the Social Mark Olsen, “Post ba/faculty/ (Explorations in land, of nature, of life, but at the same time Tenebras Lux’s’ CarlosReygadas.html. Anthropology) Carlos Reygadas is there’s love. I love what this English boy (New York: Berg Polarizing,” The Los Publishers, 1997), says at the end, which could be a statement Angeles Times, 2. Reed-Danahay 2 June 2013, http:// against bankers: they’re strong, they’re explains: “The term www.latimes.com/ has a double sense— terrible, but we are a team and we will not let entertainment/ referring either to movies/moviesnow/ them destroy us, so carry on, let’s go. It’s a the ethnography of la-et-mn-indie-focus- 16 one’s own group or rebellious film in that sense. post-tenebras- to autobiographical lux-20130602, writing that has 0,7254344.story. Like rugby, the film swerves between ethnographic interest. Thus, either a self- 9 moving forwards and backwards, in and out (auto-)ethnography or Ibid. of the ethnographic present, revealing on the an autobiographical auto-ethnography one hand the order of things as the provincial can be signalled by conceit of the international elite (reinstating ‘autoethnography.’”

... DF’s Border Time (and the Other) in Post Tenebras Lux