Amores Perros Research Articles

Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu: director without borders

This article seeks to question and revise the boundaries of Mexican National Cinema, in order to make it possible to look at films made by Mexican directors in the United States and elsewhere as part of the project of the country's national cinema. The article looks specifically at Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu's trilogy (Amores perros, 21 Grams, Babel) exploring not only how these films, although made in different countries and political contexts, share many of the same visual, stylistic and narrative strategies, but also what this might suggest about the possibilities of a resistant and contestatory cinema, made in the United States but still broadly adherent to the concepts of a Third Worldist, and specifically Mexican, culture and ideology.

Amores perros and racialised masculinities in contemporary Mexico

This article explores the textualisation of masculinity and race in the Mexican film Amores perros. The central argument is that the film displays Mexican masculinities in both a transgressive and conventional fashion. Transgression is articulated with narratives about life in Mexico City that challenge traditional Mexican masculinities, particularly as these relate to brown masculinities. These traditional masculinities are proven obsolete and futureless. Masculinities that are more progressive are textualised through reference to symbolic elements of manliness codified through whiteness and wealth. These are deemed promising, capable of development and oriented toward the future. However, in representing brownness as obsolete and whiteness as progressive, the film reproduces conventional ideas about masculinities, which are often given value through class and race. The film lays bare race, class and gender tensions in the modern Mexican state, exposing the ways in which ideas of progress and modernity can too easily reconstitute racial and class disenfranchisement.

Amores Perros: Exotic Violence And Neoliberal Fear1

Let us imagine for a moment that we find ourselves in an affluent neighbourhood in Mexico City. Suddenly, a vagrant whose appearance is not-too-subtly reminiscent of Karl Marx fires two shots throu...

Death in el D.F.: Urban Fantasy in Aguilar Mora, Ramirez, Fuentes, and Blanco

Death in el D.F.:Urban Fantasy in Aguilar Mora, Ramírez, Fuentes, and Blanco1 Rebecca E. Biron (bio) Between 1979 and 1983, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramírez, Carlos Fuentes, and José Joaquín Blanco all published fictions that struggle between representing Mexico City as they see it and imagining Mexico City as they want it to be: Aguilar Mora's massive exploration of masks and forgetfulness in Si muero lejos de ti (If I Die Far from You 1979); Ramírez's poetic fantasy of underclass revenge in Violación en Polanco (Rape in Polcanco 1980); the bourgeois coming-of-age story "El día de las madres" ("Mothers Day") from Fuentes's Agua quemada (Burnt Water 1981); and Blanco's depiction of urban gay life in Las púberes canéforas (The Flower Girls 1983). These authors critically explore the multiple forms of violence that support Mexico City's modern aspirations. However, they also impose upon the city agrid of violent personal fantasy, manifesting strikingly common patterns in their attempts to appropriate the city as a viable home for Mexican male authorship. These literary texts employ many of the same representational strategies as internationally successful urban films produced some twenty years later like Amores perros (2000) and Y tu mamá también (2001). Such films have achieved a great deal of commercial success and recognition for their realist depiction of violence and social conflict in contemporary Mexico City. They graphically show [End Page 58] physical and / or psychological violence by including a number of documentary-style film techniques: showing the same scene from a variety of different camera angles; using anonymous voice-overs to "explain" historical events; making visual references to specific colonia in the city; placing clear temporal markers to establish historical context. The films' display of violence causes strong, immediate reactions in spectators by seeming to place us in the urban scene. One might assume that the films portray urban violence more forcefully than the written texts. After all, they are produced much later, in an era of increased social conflict, and their overt manipulation of visual and sound effects provides viewers with a visceral sense of the chaotic, threatening city. This apparent access to the real city, however, is not the exclusive domain of film. The earlier short stories and novels I examine here also portray urban brutality through realist conventions, using techniques proper to literature: detailed description, chronological narrative segments, verbal references to specific colonias, temporal markers, and slang. In addition, these literary texts rely on their narrators' carefully limited gaze to situate, contextualize, and frame our view of city spaces. Thus, like the later films, they employ specific focalization strategies to achieve the cinematic effect of placing us in the supposedly real city. While in this sense both groups of texts render Mexico City cinematographically, the stories they set in the city are markedly different. Curiously, the writers who attempted to show urban fragmentation and pain around 1980 designed plots that were far more violent than those of the graphic films twenty years later. In the films, the plots appear just as fragmented and disordered as the cityscape. In the same way that they visually resist readerly desire to connect disparate elements of Mexico City into one seamless image, the films also resist tying up loose ends of their plots into conventionally satisfying, totalizing conclusions. Maintaining this parallelism between city structure and story structure, the films offer plots fueled mostly by alienation and miscommunication rather than by physical violence. In contrast, vicious rapes and murders drive plot in the literary texts. The greater dependence on violence in the earlier works, I would like to argue, is motivated by a fundamental incommensurability between the city the authors were trying to describe and the urban authorial identity they wanted to embody. As the plots of their fictions reveal, Jorge Aguilar Mora, Armando Ramírez, Carlos Fuentes, and José Joaquín Blanco still saw themselves as privileged observers who should be able to consolidate urban fragmentation into cohesive stories. [End Page 59] Their inability to do so led them to express extremely violent, masculinist fantasies of mastery as they plotted their narratives. Blending cinematic...

Transatlantic Traffic in Recent Mexican Films

In this paper I treat the recent resurgence of Mexican cinema (praised from Kinetoscopio to The Economist) as a test case for Manuel Castells's theory of ‘the interaction between technology-induced globalization, the power of identity (gender, religious, national, ethnic, territorial, socio-biological), and the institutions of the state' (1997, p. 2). Focusing on relations between Mexico and Spain, I examine the various and overlapping regulatory regimes which still frame audiovisual production in Europe and Latin America; address the increasingly powerful commercial dimension by offering corporate studies of two innovative Mexican producers, Altavista and Anhelo; and, finally, give an account of the two best known films in the so-called renaissance: Amores perros and Y tu mamá también. While these two famous features are not technically co-productions (and indeed have been praised for their sense of locality) I argue that they participate in a newly intense economic and cultural exchange between Latin America and Europe through the transatlantic reach of their parent companies (Compañı´a Iberoamericana de Entretenimiento [CIE] and Omnilife, respectively) and their idiosyncratic casting of Spanish actresses in central roles.

Affecting legacies: historical memory and contemporary structures of feeling in Madagascar and Amores perrros

Journal Article Affecting legacies: historical memory and contemporary structures of feeling in Madagascar and Amores perros Get access Laura Podalsky Laura Podalsky Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 44, Issue 3, Autumn 2003, Pages 277–294, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/44.3.277 Published: 01 October 2003

'Not something destroyed but something that is still alive': Amores Perros at the intersection of rescue fantasies.

'Not something destroyed but something that is still alive': Amores Perros at the intersection of rescue fantasies.

'Mind the Gap'

'Mind the Gap'

Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940

Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940