Towards The Creation of a Cinematic Pre-Colombian Codex

• In Event: Cooptations: History’s Lesson in Sampling Visual Narratives

Abstract

Over the past half millennium, the pre-Hispanic and colonial-era pictographic tradition in Mesoamerica has been primarily assimilated into the Western category of the book. While film and digital media representations of Mesoamerican codices have the potential to reverse this flattening out of the performative dimensions of “writing in pictures,” there are relatively few examples of experimental work in this vein that explicitly re-conceptualize oral and written narratives in audiovisual terms. One noteworthy exception is the oeuvre of Mexican writer and director Juan Mora Catlett, whose 1991 feature In necuepalixtli in Aztlan [Return to Aztlan] was hailed by film critic José Felipe Coria as “the first Mexican film narrated from an indigenous viewpoint, using an indigenous aesthetic, as well as being acted and conceived in Náhuatl” (El vago de los cines. Cuadernos de El Financiero, 2007). Mora Catlett’s 2007 feature, Eréndira Ikikunari [Eréndira, the Indomable], takes this dynamic a step further, combining within the same frame live action by Purépecha-speaking actors with cartoon-like images of early 16th-century indigenous drawings. The soundtrack, for its part, combines ambient sounds and electronic effects with old-fashioned dialogue in P’urhépecha, Spanish, and Biblical Latin. The effect on the viewer is both postmodern and archaic, like “the reading of a codex with graphic and real elements” (Mora Catlett, The Making of ‘Eréndira Ikikunari (Eréndira Producciones, 2009).

Author

• Cynthia L Stone, College of the Holy Cross