Alfredo Joskowicz: Corporeal abjection and counterculture in independent Mexican cinema after 1968

Abstract

This article examines three films by Mexican filmmaker Alfredo Joskowicz (1937–2012) in the context of the emergence of independent Mexican cinema. As a direct product of the 1968 Student Movement, this filmic corpus stood in direct opposition to the industrial, state-subsidized cinema that was perceived as an emissary of national discursive hegemony. My analysis foregrounds the representation of corporeal abjection as one of the main tropes through which these films enacted countercultural insurrection. I also aim to demonstrate how these three films represent shifts in Joskowicz’s ideological perspective, and how they correspond to the State’s intensifying repression and the concomitant radicalization of leftist opposition. I argue that Jokowicz’s initial representation of bodily abjection first stood as the emblem of an authentic dissidence predicated on biopolitical insurrection, and later acquired a negative, necropolitical valence that effectively delimited a great part of independent cinema’s political-ideological horizon.