CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE LEGACY OF MEXICO 1968 ON FILM IN
¿Y SI PLATICAMOS DE AGOSTO? (1981)
DIRECTED BY MAYRSE SISTACH AND
FRANCISCA, ¿DE QUÉ LADO ESTÁS? (2002)
DIRECTED BY EVA LÓPEZ SÁNCHEZ
NIAMH THORNTON
For many reasons, 1968 was a year with considerable transnational
resonance; it was also the year Mexico hosted the Olympic Games.
Internationally, the Games are best remembered for the infamous
Black Panther salute by two African American athletes, Tommie
Smith and John Carlos, an act which could be read as the
performance of what was generalised unrest by civil society
movements in many countries on a transnational stage. Often
forgotten outside of Mexico are the student protests against the
backdrop of the run up to the Games, which were inspired by the
international student protests in France, Berkeley, Prague, etc. In
Mexico, these protests culminated in the massacre of a still
undetermined number of students on 2 October 1968, ten days
before the Olympic opening ceremony. The deaths were subject to
censorship in the local press, and sparsely reported abroad. At the
time, the protests and the violent reaction of the army were well
documented by student filmmakers from the recently established
film school. However the first feature film on the subject to get local
distribution was not made until 1989. This film, Rojo amanecer
(1989) [Red Dawn] directed by Jorge Fons, while a powerful
evocation of the massacre, was subject to government controls, and
this, in turn, discouraged other filmmakers. However, there are two
films which are often overlooked by scholars when considering
representations of 1968 on film: the short film ¿Y si placticamos de
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agosto? (1980) [Can We Talk About August?] directed by Maryse
Sistach and Francisca, ¿De qué lado estás? (2002) [Francisca,
Which Side Are You On?] directed by Eva López Sánchez. The first
was the internally renowned director’s graduate project and centres
on a child’s experience of 1968, and the second is an international
co-production that represents the political legacy of 1968. I shall
consider the significance of these two films in the context of the
national imaginary of 1968.i In addition, I shall consider how both
films explore space, childhood, and the legacy of history, variously,
as local experience and transcultural themes.
Context
The conditions under which the student movement developed were
both local and part of a global youth movement, spurred on, in part,
by a number of factors. These include the apparent success of
socialism in Cuba as a potential example of a new direction for
change; a growing civil rights movement as witnessed in places as
disparate as the US and Northern Ireland; and international protests
against the US war in Vietnam as the increased globalisation of the
mass media brought images of war and its consequences to a
transnational audience. In addition, there were specific conditions in
Mexico which brought about general unrest and organised protest.
Brewster (2005, 35-6) explains,
In Mexico, student numbers increased from 76,000 in 1960 to
247,000 in 1970. There were insufficient jobs for graduates, and
universities became politicized as students demanded social justice,
employment, and improved living standards. A youth culture
developed, fostering a spirit of political activity that was not viable
in other parts of Mexican society. Although the protestors were
responding mainly to national issues, many showed awareness of
wider concerns.
Depicted in the media as an idle, burgeoning middle class, young
people garnered little sympathy from the larger working class across
the country. The tensions were underscored in popular culture where
young people were portrayed as dangerous and subversive in films
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such as Los Caifanes (1967) [The Outsiders] directed by Juan
Ibáñez. This association of young people with the events in 1968 to
the exclusion of other actors, de-politicised their demands and
reduced their protests to a product of youthful excess. In addition,
1968 has been memorialised as a student movement because most of
the filmmakers who recorded it were students. The most well known
documentary to emerge from 1968 is El grito (1968) [The Shout]
directed by Leobardo López Aretche. The footage they shot was of
fellow students printing, socialising, debating, and preparing for the
marches. Although in most of these films there are a few shots to
remind the viewer that it was also a movement which included
workers, the emphasis is on student participation.
As Brewster notes, the student movement was part of a
continuum which had begun ten years earlier with protests by
railway workers (1958-9), followed the next year with demands for
wage increases by teachers and oil workers. In 1962 there were
strikes by telephone operators and in 1965 by doctors. This next
year, 1966 saw the resignation of the university’s Rector, Ignacio
Chávez, following strikes and marches at the Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México (UNAM). This means that 1968, viewed in
isolation may look like youthful rebellion sparked by transcultural
fervour, whereas specific local issues were influenced by global
conditions.
In Historia de un documento (1971) [History of a Documentary]
directed by Óscar Menéndez, one of the documentaries released by
participants in the protests, Rodolfo Alcaraz says with some irony
that ‘todo empezó con un simple pleito entre estudiantes de dos
escuelas’ [it all began with a simple fight between the students from
two schools]. On 22 July, students from the Politécnico Nacional
and the UNAM clashed in the streets. A special police force, the
granaderos, was brought in to contain the student violence, using
extreme force to subdue the skirmishes. Over the summer months
student protests continued, so too did the police and army
crackdowns. In response, the students from all sides joined together
to put forward demands against the granaderos’ brutality. The result
was a movement united against a common enemy.
These protests culminated in the demonstration in Tlatelolco.
Tlatelolco is a highly symbolic space also called the Plaza de las
tres culturas [the square of the three cultures] because the central
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square is surrounded by three edifices: Aztec ruins, a colonial
church and modern government buildings. These, in turn, are
bounded by tall residential tower blocks. On the day of the protest,
some student leaders gave speeches from occupied floors of some of
these tower blocks, many of which are named after key dates or
leaders in the Revolution. Thousands of students gathered at the
square and were soon encircled by army tanks with low flying
helicopters overhead. Amongst the protestors was a secret battalion
of the army identifiable to one another by white gloves they wore on
one hand.
Events thereafter are highly contested. It has been suggested that the
presence of the undercover battalion was unknown to the rest of the
troops who were gathered in the square to maintain order. Much of
the testimony suggests that the secret group provoked the army
leading them to attack the students, most of whom attempted to flee.
The numbers killed has never been satisfactorily confirmed, and
figures vary from the official government number of forty-four to
more than 200. For some, the number could be as high as 400 as is
claimed in México, la Revolución congelada (1973) [Mexico, the
Frozen Revolution] directed by Raymundo Gleyzer, a film in which
the folk singer and civil rights campaigner, Óscar Chávez, sings
‘mandó matar el gobierno/ cuatrocientos camaradas’ [the
government ordered them to kill/ four hundred comrades].
Afterwards, over 2,000 were imprisoned for indefinite periods of
detention. Brewster (2005, 38) sums up the consequences in this
way, ‘the massacre brought an abrupt end to the student movement
and left a generation devastated by death imprisonment, exile and
terror.’
1968 on Screen
In the immediate aftermath documentaries by Leobardo López
Arretche, Menéndez and Gleyzer, amongst others, appeared.
However, the first feature film on the subject, Rojo amanecer, was
not released until 1989. Whereas Rojo amanecer has been
considered in detail by critics, little attention has been given to a
lesser known short film that appeared much earlier ¿Y si platicamos
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de agosto? (1980) directed by the well known filmmaker Maryse
Sistach.ii
Sistach is one of a generation of women directors in Mexico who
studied film at the Centro de Captación Cinematografica (CCC).
This was her final year student project and her first film. She
subsequently made her name with films such as Anoche soñé
contigo (1992) [I Dreamt About You Last Night], Nadie te oye:
Perfume de violetas (2001) [Violet Perfume: Nobody Hears You],
and La niña en la piedra (2006) [The Girl on the Stone] . iii Set in
1968, ¿Y si platicamos de agosto? is a short lasting thirty-five
minutes which tells the story of an adolescent boy and his
relationship with a teenage girl who comes to stay in the family
home. Their tentative love story is set against the increasing tension
in the city. The camera lingers on slogans painted on the walls of
buildings, television news reports of student demonstrations are to
be seen, radio reports heard, students are shown preparing and
painting banners, and teachers and parents discussing the students’
activities. All this happens in the background as the young boy
puzzles over how to negotiate an adult world through what is still a
child’s point of view.
As well as his excitement and fear of the unknown, there is a
build up of tension as the teenage girl gets involved in the student
protests. The relationship between the two blossoms into an
innocent story of first love as all the while the girl gets increasingly
caught up in the protests. The final scene shows the boy scrambling
across the rooftops in an attempt to follow the girl as she leaves the
city in disgrace having been found in bed with him. These images of
the boy chasing his innocent love are accompanied on the
soundtrack by the now infamous speech given by president Díaz
Ordaz on 1 October 1968, the eve of the massacre, saying, ‘hemos
sido tolerantes … pero todo tiene su limite’ [we have been tolerant
… but there is a limit to everything]. The message is clear, after 2
October 1968 Mexico lost its innocence.
This is a film which keeps away from representations of the
mass protests, but raises them through individual involvement in the
events. ¿Y si platicamos de agosto? is told from the young boy’s
point of view. That is, we witness the story as if accompanying him,
with many over the shoulder shots. iv Motivated by his crush and a
desire to belong among the older teenagers, he attempts to make
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sense of the political events and the activities. Not old enough to be
allowed out to rallies, he acts as witness to events behind the scenes,
and the happenings and shared stories he sees and hears in his
neighbourhood (as, for example, when we see him amongst a crowd
who are drawn into a piece of political theatre).v The time period is
confined to that of the run up to 2 October 1968. There is
considerable tension and a sense of foreboding in the final sequence:
the boy’s hopeless chase after his dream coupled with the
president’s ominous words.
The impact of Díaz Ordaz’s words heard over the visuals in this
way can be contrasted to how the speeches given by the students are
mixed with the visuals in El grito, mentioned earlier, and other
documentaries. In the documentaries any speeches by officials, such
as that given at the opening ceremony of the Olympics, are
contained within a designated space. At some times, this is because
the scene is taken from official footage, and at others, because the
scene is recorded from the television. Having Díaz Ordaz’s speech
audible to the audience while the child moves through a public
space gives the impression that his words form part of the urban
landscape and suggests that the president is omniscient. Where the
students’ speeches earlier suggested unity among the crowd, the
president’s speech works as a threat because it contrasts with the
wishes of the characters in the film and coincides with a moment of
loss for the boy.
¿Y si platicamos de agosto? more than any other film which
addresses the period leading up to the protests, gives an insight into
how the ‘1968 Tlatelolco massacre dramatically showed the
intolerant, autocratic character of the political system, and increased
income inequality undermined the notion of a perpetual Revolution
that brought ‘social justice’’ (Schmidt 2001, 27). The film is an
attempt to explore the effect of the massacre on the everyday life of
a family at the periphery of events, who mostly witness them at a
distance. Juxtaposing dramatic historical events and the routine of
family life rejects the myth that conflict and violence happen
elsewhere, away from home and contests the allegations that the
participants were outsiders. The narrative role of the family in the
film draws attention to what Michael Billig called ‘banal
nationalism’. He argues that ‘crises do not create nation states as
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nation-states’, by which he means crises such as war with other
nations or internal conflicts. Instead,
… daily, they are reproduced as nations and their citizenry as
nationals … For such daily reproduction to occur, one might
hypothesize that a whole complex of beliefs, assumptions, habits,
representations and practices must also be reproduced. Moreover,
this complex must be reproduced in a banally mundane way, for the
world of nations is the everyday world, the familiar terrain of
contemporary times. (Billig 1995, 6)
What could be more banal and mundane than the family, whilst also
being heavily weighted throughout history as a unit which
represents the nation in microcosm. The tension between the oft
repeated role of the family as representative of the nation and the
family in counterpoint to the events that take place is a compelling
element of ¿Y si platicamos de agosto?.
The manner in which the film is shot refuses the elision of
family and nation, and in this respect a comparison with Rojo
amanecer is useful. In Rojo amanecer there is an almost tick box
approach to showing an archetypal middle-class family, with the
stay-at-home mother, civil servant father, conservative grandfather,
radical university student sons, and two adolescent younger
children. All of the events take place in the one apartment,
underscoring the feeling that the family and the space it occupies are
co-terminous with the nation. According to Salvador Velazco, in
Rojo amanecer the apartment ‘es un microcosmos de la familia
mexicana de clase media de los sesenta’ [a microcosm of the
Mexican middle-class family of the 1970s], and ‘se vincula la atroz
massacre del 68 con la ‘sacrosanta familia’ de la que se dice baluarte
el Estado mexicano’ [the terrible massacre of 1968 is linked to the
‘sacrosanct family’ that is a cornerstone of the Mexican state]
(Velazco 2005, 71). By contrast, in ¿Y si platicamos de agosto?
because of the decision to adopt a point of view observing the events
witnessed by the boy from over his shoulder, we are not given any
real sense of who his family are apart from what they mean to him.
They are restricted to moving figures in what appears to be a stable
family environment, but of little interest to him. By having the
narrative and the camera follow the boy’s story the film moves away
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from the family as a unit of national struggle to emphasise the
personal and devastating consequences of state actions on individual
happiness.
As in Rojo amanecer, events in ¿Y si platicamos de agosto? take
place largely within the apartment, but there are also several scenes
of outside spaces to help establish locale. This locale is not defined
in terms of its historical importance. There are no major
monumental spaces or landmark features in the mise en scène. It is
an urban location, but an anonymous one. It is evident that the film
is set in Mexico City more through the girls’ discussions of their
involvement in the protests than through any easily identifiable
landmarks, as the film narrates the boy’s individual personal
experience of his first love, his relationship within a family and
community and the external influence of the state on their lives. The
all pervasiveness of Díaz Ordaz’s speech unifies the space aurally.
Meanwhile, the boy is connected to others through his interactions
with his family and his meanderings through his neighbourhood on
his bike, playing with friends, attending school, and going to local
shops. The juxtaposition of these worlds in the film places side by
side what Henri Lefebvre called the ‘near order’ and the ‘far order’.
He explains that the city
… is situated at an interface half-way between what is called the
near order (relations of individuals in groups of variable size, more
or less organized and structured and the relations of these groups
among themselves), and the far order, that of society, regulated by
large and powerful institutions (church and state), by a legal code
formalized or not, by a ‘culture’ and significant ensembles endowed
with powers, by which the far order projects itself at this ‘higher’
level and imposes itself. (italics in original, Lefebvre 2004, 101)
For Lefebvre the city exists as an imaginary projection of itself,
since no one can fully experience it all at once. This is particularly
true of the large megalopolis that is Mexico City, even if it was on a
smaller scale in the 1960s. The city therefore becomes a ‘mediation
among mediations’ (italics in original, Lefebvre 2004, 101). An
individual must negotiate their way through the near order, which, in
turn must mediate with the far order. The choice of a child as a
protagonist emphasises the lack of power of the individual when
faced with state brutality and adds a further layer of mediation. This
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is a child’s life rendered significant through his moment of sexual
awakening set against a grand historical backdrop in which the state
imposed terrible sanctions on those who transgressed the status quo.
In 2001 the then president of Mexico, Vicente Fox, signed into
law an Act to open up the archives of the case files on the events of
1968. Subsequently, many have claimed that there have been
considerable difficulties in accessing the complete files. However,
as a symbolic move this law represented a positive change (see
Doyle and Zavala nd) and was to help shed some light on what had
happened. In line with this greater access to the past a number of
television documentaries were made by Carlos Mendoza, including
Operación Galeana (2000) [Operation Galeana] and Tlatelolco, las
claves de la massacre (2002) [Tlatelolco, Keys to a Massacre]
which return to the events in 1968. A feature film from the same
period which deals with the aftermath of 1968 is Francisca, ¿De qué
lado estás? (2002) directed by Eva López Sánchez. vi In keeping
with contemporary trends in film production in Mexico, the film is a
Mexico/Spain/Germany co-production. Consequently, while dealing
with local concerns it does so using an international cast and crew. It
was shot in Mexico City and Veracruz with support from the
UNAM. Although set in 1971, the film opens with stills and moving
images from student protests in 1968 and, on the DVD extras of the
version released in Mexico, the director describes it as ‘una película
en el marco político del 68’ [a film set in the political context of
1968]. Other extras include a quotation from an historical account of
the events by Rubén Aréchiga Robles, Asalto al cielo: lo que no se
ha dicho del 68 [Assault on the sky, what has not been said about
1968]: ‘los estudiantes mexicanos del 68 fueron los primeros en
vivir su adolescencia y juventud en un país que ya no era
basicamente rural’ [the Mexican students of 1968 were the first
generation to grow up in a country that was no longer rural]. These
extras are there to establish that the historical context is Mexico in
transition. Interestingly, since in the international DVD release none
of these extras were included, the Mexican version provided an
historical context that was not available to a transnational audience.
This absence neutralises the political message and the specificity of
the historical backdrop to the story and feeds into an image of
Mexico as a violent country.
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The enemy in Francisca, ¿De qué lado estás? is the state as
represented by the Halcones [Falcons]. These were the secret police
force set up by a government paranoid about the possibility of
violent reaction to the events of 1968, and they spied upon,
interrogated and killed those they suspected of subversion. On 10
June 1971, popularly referred to as Jueves de Corpus [Corpus
Christi Thursday] when 80,000 students staged a demonstration at
the Monument of the Revolution it is estimated that thirty to fifty
people were killed by the Halcones. This incident was with the
subject of both El bulto (1992) [The Lump] directed by Gabriel
Retes and Jueves de Corpus/Corpus Christi Thursday (1998)
directed by Marcos Almado.
Jueves de Corpus, which has received little critical attention, is a
police drama. It presents events as the unfolding revenge story of a
man who witnessed his father’s murder at the hands of members of
the Halcones who have subsequently become powerful
businessmen, police officials and politicians. The story pointedly
alludes to corruption in 1990s Mexico and how the memory of the
tragic events have been covered up. In contrast, El bulto has
received more attention, although much of it quite negative. For
Miriam Haddu (2007, 23),
… in El bulto, the events of the past, such as the massacre at
Tlatelolco in 1968 and the 1971 Corpus Christi killings, aside from
their symbolic qualities, are revealed as having little significance for
present day Mexico.
El bulto is more celebratory of the present, seeing the 1990s as a
time of possibilities, market successes and the end of the 1960s
radicalism. The protagonist of El bulto, Lauro (Gabriel Retes), goes
into a coma after being brutally beaten at a march. He wakes up
twenty years later in a very changed Mexico. His old comrades are
now either rising high on the tide of the capitalist success that
Mexico briefly enjoyed in the early 1990s, or are part of the political
establishment. It is a bittersweet comedy that turns into a family
melodrama in the final third. There are many mood changes in the
film. It moves from the serious documentary-style footage at the
opening in which the police are shown attacking demonstrators, then
to the middle section when Lauro awakes and has to adjust to the
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changes in his life, until he gets angry and frustrated with his family
and friends. In the end, he reconciles with them and what he views
as the compromises they have had to make. It is a film that starts
with serious intent only to slide into silliness and excessive
sentimentality.
In contrast, Francisca, ¿De qué lado estás? is a thriller with a
very sombre mood throughout. The thriller story revolves around
Bruno (Ulrich Noethen), a Spanish-born, German national who was
a former communist party member, now reluctantly turned police
informant on his arrival in Mexico to take up a post as a lecturer at
the UNAM. The other characters are his politically engaged students
who are involved in a radical, direct action cell that he is charged
with spying on. Inevitably, he sympathises with their cause; he then
falls in love with one of them, Adela (Fabiola Campomanes),
becomes involved in their cause and is wrongly accused of murder.
As a consequence, he goes on the run and later into hiding in the
jungles of Veracruz with the aim of escaping with Adela to the US,
where they hope to reinvent themselves. The thriller and
melodramatic elements of the film serve to heighten the mood and
give considerable urgency to the narrative. However, these aspects
also undermine the seriousness of the subject matter. History
becomes primarily a tense, narrative backdrop after the obligatory
badge of authenticity in the opening. Notwithstanding this, there is a
welcome move away from a focus on family and on the domestic
(although the film retains elements of this) to a wider political and
social context.
The title comes from a scene in the film when Bruno is asked
‘¿De qué lado estás?’ [Which side are you on?] by José, one of the
students after the two watch El grito with other students at a secret
screening. Bruno’s reply is ‘Las cosas no son tan blanco y negro’
[Things aren’t so black and white]. The rest of the film explores this
taking of sides and, through Bruno and Adela’s relationship, it
portrays Bruno as someone who has become compromised by his
actions and is, therefore, unable to make any significant changes in
society. For the hero of a thriller, Bruno is strangely passive. He
reveals himself to be the product of international turmoil and
thereby, a tragic victim of world historical forces. Born during the
Spanish Civil War to German and Spanish communist parents, he
was sent to the USSR as an evacuee. After the war he was reunited
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with his mother in Berlin, where he studied history and joined the
communist party. He later entered the security services and spied on
behalf of the communists. This resulted in his best friend’s death.
Disillusioned with communism he fled to Paris, deciding thereafter
to reinvent himself and move to Mexico. This backstory, which he
recounts to Adela, signals him as a someone who has been both
subject and object of the drama of history and, on a narrative level,
explains why he is so reluctant to get involved in the armed struggle
that Adela and the other students feel they must embrace. As
protagonist, he bears the burden of imbuing some meaning into the
indecision over taking up arms. This is done through evocations of
his troubled past. Drawing on a transcultural historical context in
this way suggests that violence and conflict move in waves around
the world, but also that they have severe personal consequences on
individuals such as Bruno caught in their wake.
Contrasting Visions
In this film the configuration of space differs from that in ¿Y si
placticamos de agosto?. Where ¿Y si placticamos de agosto? is set
exclusively in the city, Francisca, ¿De qué lado estás? moves
between the city and the countryside. The city is controlled by an
all-seeing secret police force who are aware of Bruno’s movements
and monitor when he transgresses their agreed rules. As
representatives of the state, they are the far order who control the
rebel’s movements. They are also a constant, if more distant, threat
in the countryside. This is the difference between the city and the
countryside. The city is controlled absolutely by the far order,
whereas the countryside provides an opportunity to escape from
government and police control. However, in the absence of the far
order, there is another hierarchy which is corrupt and potentially
more oppressive. Bruno realises this when he finds that his only
source of income is trafficking illegal goods and he sees his boss
murder innocent poor people because he suspects them of robbery.
It is clear that he is taking out his anger on people who are
essentially his indentured slaves. The rural spaces are not
represented as a real alternative to the city, just another site of
repression and danger.
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Emily Hind has explored the representation of the countryside in
recent Mexican film. She uses the term provincia [province] to
describe ‘national landscapes outside of Mexico City’ (2004, 26).
For Hind, films such as Y tu mamá también (2001) directed by
Alfonso Cuarón, ‘conceive(s) of provincia as the obliging fulfilment
of Mexico City residents’ desires’ (2004, 41).vii Usually, the
provincia signifies a space where the characters can escape their
humdrum existence and the constraints of city life to be free to
indulge in sensory pleasures. In contrast, in Francisca, ¿De qué lado
estás? the countryside has similar constraints and limitations to the
city, which prove more terrifying because the rules are unknown to
the outsider.
Meanwhile for Bruno, the near order does not provide much
support. Adela chooses to leave him and he is killed by Gabriel, the
now teenage son of the man he was falsely accused of murdering.
Family is corrupted by conflict. Bruno’s own background was
marred by his parent’s involvement in violent struggle and now the
next generation is brutalised by a legacy of violence. In this
pessimistic ending, Gabriel is destined to continue the cycle of
violence, which Bruno’s life has demonstrated is negative. Violence
connects the man and boy across cultures and experiences. López
Sánchez portrays violence, irrespective of the context, as damaging
on an individual and a societal level. The message is that through
the end of childhood innocence, society is corrupted—an idea
explored in ¿Y si placticamos de agosto? also, albeit in different
ways.
Conclusion
Nineteen sixty-eight saw both the disruption of the grand narrative
of the Mexican nation and the notion of its government as safe and
democratic and, in the context of the Olympic Games, an end to the
government’s attempt to project the country internationally as a
peaceful and modern place. ¿Y si placticamos de agosto? explores
1968 from the perspective of a child. In her consideration of
‘crazyspace’—a positioning specific to what she terms ‘children’s
screen products’ or visual products made for and about children—
Máire Messinger Davies suggests that ‘there is a sense, as with
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fairytale, of the universality of the experiences of childhood’ (2005,
393). This is something underscored in the film through the use of
spaces that place the child in a large, urban landscape without
specifically pinpointing what city it is. Sistach appears to be
emphasising the universal elements of the story through the child’s
experiences, at the same time that, through the specificities of the
events, the film is set in a particularly Mexican historical moment.
Francisca, ¿De qué lado estás? is transcultural for a variety of
reasons: through its use of a transnational genre, the thriller; it is
funded and stars actors from outside of Mexico; the story involves
characters marked by their experiences in other countries; and, most
importantly, its implicit message is that conflict itself creates a
shared experience for individuals. We are to understand that
violence is damaging and has a lasting legacy. This may be a
problematically ahistorical conclusion, but one that seeks to create a
commonality of experience between European and Mexican
experiences of violence, moving away from the perception of
Mexico (and Latin America) as uniquely violent and unstable
places.
Space is important in both films. Elissa J Rashkin (2001, 101)
has written about Sistach as having ‘an appreciation of the city as
part of the subjective identity of its inhabitants’ and this is evident in
the film shot from the young boy’s point of view. The city in
Francisca, ¿De qué lado estás? is controlled by an authoritarian
police force, who can only be escaped through death. The attempts
by the characters to flee to the countryside result only in equally
brutal outcomes. Both films are careful to trace the particularities of
the events that they allude to and portray. Yet, both also have strong
transcultural themes and content which transcend the purely local
interest. They are films worthy of consideration for their attempts to
re-examine a tense moment in Mexican history, and to move it away
from the specificities evident in other films such as Rojo amanecer
and El bulto.
Works Cited
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Arredondo, I. (2001) Palabra de mujer: Historia oral de las
directoras de cine mexicanas (1988-1994), Madrid:
Iberoamericana.
Billig, M. (1995) Banal Nationalism, London: Sage.
Brewster, C. (2005) Responding to Crisis in Contemporary Mexico,
Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Doyle, K., Zavala, S., (2008) 2 DE OCTUBRE DE 1968—Verdad
Bajo Resguardo [online], Vancouver, The George Washing
University,
Available
from:
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Notes
i
For a testimonial account of the cinema of 1968 see Rodríguez Cruz
(2000).
ii See, for example, Maciel (1999), Haddu (2007) and Velazco (2005).
iii See Rashkin (2001).
iv For more on the particularities of a child’s point of view see, for example,
Messinger Davies (2005).
v This is an enactment of what Augusto Boal called ‘invisible theatre’,
where performers act out real-life scenarios in public spaces to inspire
people to react and create potential for debate and real change. For more on
this see International Theatre of the Oppressed Organisation.
vi For more on López Sánchez see Arredondo (2001).
vii Interestingly, this film was distributed internationally under its Spanish
title a literal translation of which is: And (I’ve had) your mother too.