The Stain of the Third Space in Mexican Cinema

• In Event: Cracks in the Screen: Theorizing a Third Space in Mexican Cinema

Abstract

While it is true that cinema and other modes of representation have been increasingly conscious of traditionally marginalized voices, it is also true that the apparatus and the ideological framework in which those representations have taken place have not been altered sufficiently to include them. The failure of Mexican cinema to include the “other” as other is due to its own desire to polish away the contentious stains that point to unsettling reminders of the ideological incapacity for inclusion. The desire for this inclusion is twofold. On the one hand, neoliberalism follows Fukuyama’s dictum that globalization has brought an end to the dialectic and, hence, an end to all antagonisms. Therefore cinema may reflect neoliberal ideology in its assertion of inclusive third spaces. In addition, for marketability’s sake, cinema cannot indulge in images that do not engage in some sort of Aristotelian catharsis. Leaving the viewer satisfied rather than antagonized is imperative within the market logic. Here I do not argue for representations or theories of inclusion but rather, through the analysis of contentious films by directors such as Luis Buñuel, Arturo Ripstein, María Novaro and Carlos Reygadas, I assert that there is a need for a totally different universal. Instead of a multiculturalist universal that assumes a conclusion to conflict within the frame created by neoliberal capitalism, I assert the value of antagonistic struggle without reserve as a starting point for the creation of a new frame and a different space both in and beyond the cinema.

Author

• John V Waldron, University of Vermont