Dimensions of the Audiovisual Representation Competence in Film School

Nowadays, film schools perform an adequate task to incorporate their graduates into the Mexican film industry with professional practice programs in authentic contexts and facilitate public and private organizations. The construction of this work consists of identifying the characteristics of filmmaking skills and defining them as competencies, identification, elements of the competence, performance criteria, problems, and application range. The audiovisual representation competence helps guide filmmaking courses at the film school. This curricular competence makes up for the lack of description of a film director's work characteristics. Its main characteristic is the ability to translate an abstract story into representation in a two-dimensional spatiality, and it shows what is necessary to communicate through video and film.

“El Infierno”: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Narco Culture in a Mexican Film

The portrayal of narco culture in media has increased in recent years as a result of the War of Drugs in Latin America. This paper, based on critical discourse theory and Halliday’s (1978) Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), sheds light on the social and cultural impact of discourse found in a scene of the Mexican film “El Infierno” directed by Luis Estrada in 2010. Through the ideational and interpersonal processes, the dialogues of two speakers are analyzed. Additionally, the social impact of the discourse portrayed in the scene is discussed through Fairclough’s (1992) social theory of discourse. Findings suggest that social reality is reflected in the film through discourse as a means to develop critical thinking and reflection in the audience.

The Right to Tlatelolco: Space, State and Home in Rojo amanecer (1989), Directed by Jorge Fons

This article addresses the issue of spatiality in the Mexican film Rojo amanecer (Jorge Fons, 1989), which dramatizes the events surrounding the massacre of student demonstrators in the plaza de Tlatelolco, Mexico City, on 2nd October 1968. The film has received a good deal of critical attention and yet a detailed analysis of its rendering of narrative space remains to be done. With reference to the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre and Gaston Bachelard, I argue that the film’s innovative use of narrative space establishes a symbolic connection between the events in the public space of the Plaza de las Tres Culturas and the intimate space of the Mexican family home. The harrowing depiction of an invasion of state power into the space of the home serves to critique the Partido Revolutionario Institutional (PRI) regime’s core ideology and its modernist housing project in Tlatelolco.

Inquisitorial process in Arturo Ripstein’s film: “El Santo Oficio”

Despite the great influence that the Black Legend of Spain has had on the cinema in the representation of the Holy Office in audiovisual content, it is possible to rescue some works with great historical rigor. One of them is The Holy Office of Arturo Ripstein. In this Mexican film, the story of the Carvajal family is narrated, which will be processed twice by this court.

Framing indigeneity in early ethnographic Mexican film: An analysis of Peregrinación a Chalma/Pilgrimage to Chalma (Díaz Ordaz 1922)

This article approaches the exhibition of indigeneity in the early Mexican ethnographic film Peregrinación a Chalma / Pilgrimage to Chalma (Díaz Ordaz 1922) as a simultaneous display of criollo/mestizo hegemonic culture and institutions. As a product of the Mexican anthropological establishment at an early moment of the discipline’s investment in post-revolutionary indigenismo and mestizaje, the film participates in the endeavour to document and disseminate aspects of indigenous culture and the will to affirm the existence of a modern, non-indigenous Mexican identity. Through filmic analysis, the article illustrates how the film’s use of the stylistic conventions of the classical ethnographic mode creates a distanced rendering of Indigenous people that elevates the criollo/mestizo perspective and casts its representatives as the official curators of and modern foils to indigeneity. Furthermore, through its textual and stylistic conventions, Peregrinación a Chalma positions the spectator to view indigeneity from the position of hegemonic criollo/mestizo culture, aligning the spectator with the cultural perspective that presents itself as dominant and authoritative. The spectatorial positionality crafted by the film is in tune with the modernizing and homogenizing aims of indigenismo and mestizaje in the early post-revolutionary period.

Black Skin, White Tourists

Sand Dollars (Dólares de Arena) is a 2014 coproduction by Dominican film director Laura Amelia Guzmán and her husband, Mexican film director Israel Cárdenas. This film portrays two main characters: an older French woman, Anne, who is visiting the island as a tourist, and a young black Dominican woman, Noeli. The plot centers on the sexual and emotional relationship that arises between the two women. In this article, I explore the race and class relationship between the black bodies and the white bodies—taking as a point of departure the lesbian relationship—and the ways in which they are represented on screen. To do so, I enter into dialogue with Franz Fanon’s text, Black Skin, White Masks, offering a queer interpretation of this work, in which female bodies are a largely ancillary focus, and female homosexuality is ignored entirely. As such, this article will use Fanonian theory in order to highlight the intersectional nature of cultural taboos in contemporary Dominican Republic, such as sex tourism, blackness, lesbianism (and queernessin general), and to explore the way in which the film navigates these topics.

El Noticiario C.L.A.S.A., órgano de difusión gubernamental (1934‐52)

Mexican film was aligned with the state since its origins, but this union only generated continuous cinematographic production beginning in the 1930s, when the government of President Lázaro Cárdenas del Río (1934‐40) signed a contract with the production company that would go to become one of the most important producers of Mexican cinema of the Golden Age: la Cinematográfica Latinoamericana S.A. (CLASA). This article analyses the changes of discourse and narrative style used in these newsreels during three consecutive presidential terms and outlines the working dynamics and the cinematic discourse of each government, as well as how newsreel formats reflected the agenda of each head of state.