From Utopia to Uchronia: After-images of revolutionary history in contemporary Mexican film

Abstract

Abstract Both still and moving images in recent Mexican films have been characterized by the displacement of the established post-Revolutionary cinematic utopian space to timeimages (uchronia). Cinematic techniques at the disposal of contemporary directors have contributed to the portrayal and experience of temporal expectation relocated in much darker, stormier and perplexing visual sequences, with elliptical looping taking the place of narrative chronology. In contrast to Golden Age Mexican cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, and to the muralist aesthetic of photographers and directors alike, the films of Carlos Reygadas and Rodrigo García embed inherited collective social dreams in inner worlds filled with battles, darkness and strife. Revolutionary utopian expectations for the sites of future political models are now made thick with temporal dislocation and a shift from movement-image to time-image.