Dante Cerano
Día dos: sexo, parentesco y video

de Jesse Lerner

La drástica reducción en el costo de los medios digitales y su consecuente accesibilidad han hecho de la imagen en movimiento una herramienta poderosamente expresiva y de proporciones inesperadas en las comunidades rurales indígenas de México que, si bien han sido radicalmente alteradas por la migración y las imponentes fuerzas de la globalización, todavía están inmersas en su propia cultura local. Las videocámaras de bajo costo, ligeras y fáciles de usar, han promovido un proceso de transformación en cuanto a la producción mediática indígena en México. En este ensayo me gustaría delinear brevemente los principios generales de este cuerpo emergente de obras y, luego, revisar con mayor detalle Día dos, un documental reciente de Dante Cerano, uno de los artistas mediáticos indígenas más destacados de México.
A pesar del hecho de que la población indígena ha tenido una presencia significativa en el cine mexicano desde sus inicios, el desarrollo de los medios audiovisuales en las comunidades indígenas del país ha sido lento. Entre los primeros registros de las condiciones de vida que se grabaron en México en los últimos años del siglo XIX hay escenas que destacan la diversidad cultural nacional, espectáculos etnográficos si se quiere, tales como Desayuno de indios (1896). El cine mexicano de la época muda escenifica una serie de mitos, héroes y culturas indígenas en películas de ficción como Tiempos mayas (Carlos Martínez Arredondo, 1914), Tepeyac (José Manuel Ramos, Carlos E. González y Fernando Sáyago, 1917), Tabaré (Luis Lezama, 1917), Cuauhtémoc (Manuel de la Bandera, 1919) De raza azteca (Guillermo Calles y Miguel Contreras Torres, 1921), El indio yaqui (Guillermo Calles, 1926) y otras. Por supuesto, estas primeras representaciones del México indígena, casi sin excepción, son obras hechas por gente de fuera de las comunidades indígenas. Las primeras voces indígenas en el cine mexicano fueron tardías, no llegaron sino hasta después de décadas de caricaturizaciones y representaciones equívocas en el cine comercial del país (como el Tizoc de Pedro Infante y la María Candelaria de Dolores del Río) y de la propaganda asimilacionista en los documentales (como Centro de educación indígena, Gregorio Castillo, 1938). Estas representaciones se convirtieron en estereotipos que resultaron bastante perdurables; Charles Ramírez Berg señala que a principios de la década de 1970, cuando el cine nacional estaba pasando por un periodo de revuelta y renovación ocasionado por la crisis, hubo serias revisiones tanto a las representaciones de las relaciones entre las clases sociales como a las de los roles de los géneros, pero la imagen de los indios en las películas comerciales permaneció como una imagen de

simplones rurales que dan un toque cómico o que fungen como sirvientes que cocinan, limpian y abren las puertas para los protagonistas de piel clara. (…) Se los reconoce por su actitud extremadamente sumisa, sus saltitos, su modo de andar a pasos cortos y su español con sonsonete y palabras mal pronunciadas.

Cuando las voces indígenas entraron por primera vez al cine, no lo hicieron como autores en control de sus representaciones, sino supeditados, en calidad de colaboradores, a la buena voluntad de documentalistas mexicanos trabajando en 16mm; realizadores como Nacho López (Todos somos mexicanos, 1958), Alfonso Muñoz (Él es Dios, 1965-66) y Paul Leduc (Etnocidio, notas sobre el mezquital, 1977).
Una generación después, la super-8 permitió lo que a veces se conoce como “transferencia de medios”, que abrió la posibilidad de que los amateurs, con un mínimo de capacitación técnica y ayuda (o interferencia) de los profesionales de los medios, antropólogos y burócratas pudieran representarse a sí mismos y a su cultura “desde dentro”. Estos profesionales introdujeron equipos pequeños de filmación a las comunidades indígenas, ofrecieron algo de información útil y luego permitieron, a quienes mostraban mayor interés en el medio, crear sus propias representaciones de sí mismos. Las experiencia previas que algunos de los participantes tuvieron en los proyectos de radio comunitaria sirvió como un precedente importante. Como resultado de la iniciativa de “transferencia de medios” surgieron algunos documentales notables, quizás el más conocido sea La vida de una familia Ikoods (Teófila Palafox, 1998) creado como parte del Taller de Cine Indígena de San Mateo del Mar en el Istmo de Tehuantepec, en Oaxaca; pero esta promesa no terminaría de cumplirse sino hasta la llegada de las videocámaras digitales de bajo costo y los sistemas de edición no lineal. Más o menos al mismo tiempo, algunas organizaciones de artes mediáticas, programas estatales ilustrados, grupos indígenas y activistas independientes de Australia, Canadá y los Estados Unidos emprendieron esfuerzos paralelos en sus respectivos países
En retrospectiva, ésta fue una etapa de transición que permitió, por fin, a los indígenas tener control sobre sus producciones, aunque todavía dependían de gente ajena a la comunidad para conseguir el equipo, el revelado y otros recursos indispensables. El enfoque anti-intervencionista prometido por la “transferencia de medios” ha podido realizarse a lo largo de la última década. Hace no tanto, los sistemas sofisticados de edición como AVID eran exclusivamente para quienes podían disponer de miles (si no es que de cientos de miles) de pesos para gastar en la renta semanal del mejor equipo de su línea. Actualmente, la edición no lineal, accesible por medio de software como iMovie, Adobe Premiere y Final Cut Pro, es el punto de partida para que comunidades indígenas de toda Latinoamérica, comunidades marginadas durante mucho tiempo por el idioma, la geografía, el prejuicio, la economía y un sinnúmero de otro tipo de barreras, puedan representarse a sí mismas con imágenes en movimiento. La emigración masiva de las comunidades a las ciudades de México y de los Estados Unidos ha permitido y acelerado este proceso, tanto por medio del equipo que se consigue y se lleva de regreso a la comunidad, como por la dependencia del video para mantener el contacto a lo largo de las enormes distancias de separación y de las fronteras internacionales. A pesar de que los historiadores de los medios vinculan las representaciones anteriores de lo indígena a un proyecto colonial de dominación y exterminio --quizás la postura más enérgica al respecto sea la de Fátima Tobing Rony en su estudio The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle --, la dinámica que vemos aquí es totalmente distinta. Las comunidades indígenas mexicanas han demostrado que son rápidas para capitalizar esta nueva disponibilidad y han creado verdaderos legados para sus comunidades, tradiciones y luchas en formas en las que nunca antes lo habían hecho. El contraste con representaciones anteriores realizadas por gente externa a las comunidades con el propósito de documentar sus culturas, da una idea clara tanto de los términos que han cambiado con la transferencia del control de la imagen, como de los puntos en donde ha habido continuidad.
Muchos de los intereses expresados en esta nueva producción digital se traslapan con los intereses de otros activistas y artistas documentales que basan sus obras en las comunidades de México: la destrucción de los recursos naturales por parte de las empresas multinacionales, las luchas políticas en el contexto de naciones que persistentemente han ignorado y marginado a estas comunidades, las transformaciones de las tradiciones culturales ante la fuerza del avance de la globalización y los cambios generados por la migración masiva a los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, me gustaría proponer que también hay mucho de nuevo. Quisiera ofrecer una lectura detallada del documental corto de Dante Cerano Día dos y considerar las formas en las que éste podría ser, si bien no representativo, por lo menos indicativo de las formas en que la producción audiovisual en las comunidades indígenas problematiza las normas de las representaciones etnográficas y de las categorías de los géneros. Beverly Singer escribió que los “términos que identifican a estas cintas como ‘vanguardistas’, ‘documentales’ o ‘etnográficas’ limitan la comprensión e información que contienen las películas o videos indígenas y, en nuestra experiencia, no son categorías naturales”. Si bien concuerdo en que Día dos de Cerano no encaja bien dentro de ninguno de los géneros existentes fuera de la ficción, también es cierto que participa en un juego altamente consciente con géneros reconocibles, en especial, los del cine etnográfico y los de videos de bodas, aunque sin ajustarse enteramente a las convenciones de estos géneros. El pastiche de géneros de Cerano se extiende más allá de estas dos referencias principales; una interjección, un montaje complejo con tomas cerradas de botellas de cerveza Corona siendo consumidas durante la celebración, acompañado por música de Vivaldi, es una parodia mordaz de un anuncio de cerveza. Esta secuencia, introducida por el intertítulo “la sonata de la cerveza” y un gráfico de una botella de cerveza, indica un tipo de intertextualidad más cercano al espíritu de Austin Powers que al de una antropología visual. Este jugar con los géneros es lo que ha contribuido al éxito internacional del documental. En este sentido, la película es distinta de otras cintas indígenas más conocidas que han “pasado del otro lado” y han alcanzado a las audiencias no indígenas (Atanarjuat: La leyenda del hombre veloz, Guerreros de antaño, Señales de humo, etc.) En realidad, Día dos no introduce a la audiencia no p’urépecha a otro mundo, más bien, va y viene entre un mundo p’urépecha poco conocido y el mundo de las imágenes mediáticas masivas (y antropológicas) más conocidas.
Día dos adopta un tema antropológico clave: el parentesco y su articulación por medio del ritual del matrimonio. Dada la importancia del parentesco en la teoría antropológica, no es sorprendente que el tema del matrimonio esté profusamente representado en el corpus del cine antropológico, tanto en las primeras narrativas romantizadas como The Wedding of Palo (Knud Rasmussen, 1937) como en las que son parte integral de las clases de antropología, Bride Service (Tim Asch y Napoleon Chagnon, 1975) y Tobelo Marriage (Dirk Nijland y Jos Platekamp, 1982). El documental de Cerano narra la forma en que la comunidad colma de regalos a los recién casados: ollas, sábanas, baldes, sartenes, un molcajete y utensilios de cocina que ellos y sus familiares cargan mientras bailan por las calles yendo de banquete en banquete. En su obra, Cerano adopta una unidad de tiempo, lugar y acción que admiraría incluso a los teóricos más conservadores del cine etnográfico, pues enmarca su tema dentro de un sólo día, un sólo lugar y una sola secuencia de acontecimientos en un ritual de matrimonio. El video muestra un día en la vida del novio y la continuación del ritual de matrimonio que comenzó el día anterior, el día uno, cuyos momentos principales se sintetizan en una serie de imágenes fijas durante los créditos iniciales del documental. Como película etnográfica, el video está claramente dirigido a quienes no pertenecen a la comunidad; la voz en off del director explica, con una narración dispersa e irreverente, partes del ritual que de otra manera resultarían incomprensibles, y sintetiza los movimientos y las relaciones sobre un beat electrónico, en un resumen gráfico que estéticamente es hijo de la era del videojuego de la década de los 80.
Aunque la música electrónica sea ajena al contexto de una boda p’urépecha tradicional, el hecho de hacer un resumen esquemático, un diagrama simplificado y animado que explica las relaciones sociales complejas, los movimientos y el intercambio, es una estrategia que, sin duda, tiene ya antecedentes en el cine etnográfico . Por las mismas razones que Cerano, el realizador etnográfico Timothy Asch, en colaboración con el antropólogo Napoleon Chagnon, explica, por ejemplo, comportamientos sociales multifacéticos y caóticos en The Ax Fight (1975) por medio de gráficas de parentesco, ofreciendo un tipo de descripción densa que los propios participantes no pueden dar. Así como las impresiones ópticas y las flechas sobrepuestas señalan y decodifican los comportamientos de los participantes clave en el canónico corto de Asch, Cerano identifica a los participantes principales con títulos sobrepuestos, ayudando a los espectadores a comprender las relaciones sociales conforme ocurren en la pantalla. Y como para subrayar la convicción del etnógrafo de que los propios participantes no pueden articular todas las complejidades de la realidad social en la que interactúan, Cerano censura, durante el proceso de edición, al “conductor” (talking head) del video, que está intoxicado hasta el grado de la incoherencia.
La música dance electrónica es sólo uno de los fragmentos musicales extra-diegéticos incluidos en la banda sonora; se escuchan también fragmentos que van desde el hip-hop hasta el barroco, pasando por un neo-lounge frívolo y un repetitivo riff de guitarra de Heart, la banda de rock de los 70. Aquí es muy clara la distancia que toma Cerano de un proyecto de cine etnográfico concebido de forma más tradicional, con una sensibilidad de pura observación y con pretensiones positivistas. La condena que hace el antropólogo Karl Heider es típica de la desaprobación reservada a este tipo de decisiones editoriales en las películas etnográficas: “la música es inevitablemente una distracción salvo por los momentos en los que se trata del sonido real de los acontecimientos que estaban siendo registrados”. Vale la pena señalar que el ejemplo que usa Heider respecto a la elección inapropiada de música (música folklórica irlandesa sobre imágenes de campesinos irlandeses recolectando las cosechas) es considerablemente menos incongruente que muchas de las elecciones de Cerano.
En el contexto del video de boda, sin embargo, este tipo de inserción de citas musicales extra-diegéticas que parecen fuera de lugar, con frecuencia incluídas con intención de producir un efecto cómico, no está, para nada, fuera de la norma. También hay otras indicaciones de que Día dos puede situarse productivamente en relación a este otro género, el video de boda, que es incluso más marginal que la película etnográfica. Los videos de boda están únicamente dirigidos a los integrantes, es decir, a los participantes y, en especial, a los protagonistas del acontecimiento y a su parentela, así como las películas antropológicas están dirigidas sólo a los externos a la comunidad. Como lo explica James Moran, el video de boda es un género que colapsa las oposiciones binarias clásicas de amateur/profesional, privado/público y artesanal/industrial. El texto que aparece en la pantalla al inicio del video y que va de lo trascendental a lo banal sitúa la obra de Cerano dentro de los lugares comunes del género de video de boda:


Un día especial
Dios
Amor
Confeti
Banda
Padrino
Cerveza
Vals
Pastel
Regalos
Alegría
Costumbre
Responsabilidad

Esta lista, que mezcla los clichés del ritual con lo que podrían ser los puntos a seguir en la rutina de filmación del camarógrafo de bodas, nos ubica claramente dentro del ámbito de lo formulaico. Esta cualidad prescrita del video de boda es precisamente la razón por la que este género sólo es del interés de los participantes.
Más allá del pastiche genérico y del humor irreverente del video, Día dos de Cerano articula una posición que es, a la vez, la de un integrante de la comunidad y la de alguien externo a ella, una posición que, yo diría, es emblemática de los realizadores indígenas. . El camarógrafo/narrador/director no oculta el hecho de que él es uno de los participantes en la celebración. Tomas en primera persona que muestran grandes acercamientos de un chile, de salsa roja mientras se sirve con cucharón sobre un platillo del banquete de la boda, y de un vaso de unicel con una bebida destilada no identificada, colocan a Cerano entre los parrandistas. Un familiar de la novia se lleva al documentalista a la pista de baile y entonces se introduce una secuencia de encuadre fragmentado. Así pues, Cerano se coloca como un participante (en contraposición a un auto lleno de mirones, al que identifica con el título: “fueron curiosos”), pero a la vez permanece lo suficientemente distanciado del acontecimiento como para ser capaz de traducirlo para los externos a la comunidad.
El momento en el que la postura de Cerano como participante/externo es más clara y problemática ocurre durante la secuencia dedicada a Las bellas de la fiesta. La imagen de las jóvenes purépecha bailando en cámara lenta se yuxtapone a imágenes del ideal de belleza femenina de Hollywood: Marilyn Monroe y Madonna, entre otras, aparecen flotando sobre la imagen como un cuadro dentro del cuadro. Otra de las selecciones musicales sumamente extrañas de Cerano —Puff Daddy (alias P. Diddy alias Sean Combs) rapeando sobre un fragmento del éxito de 1983 “Every Move you Make, I’ll be Watching You” de la banda del movimiento New Wave, The Police— y el trabajo de la cámara colocan la mirada masculina, tanto la de Cerano como la nuestra, al frente y al centro. ¿Pero quién exactamente está viendo a quién? Aquí, Cerano fusiona varias miradas: la mirada masculina sobre el ideal femenino cosificado, ya sea caucásico o p’urépecha, la mirada etnográfica del externo ante el espectáculo de la otredad y la mirada p’urépecha ante la idea inalcanzable de un estándar de belleza importado y ajeno. Desde luego, no se trata de que tomemos todas estas miradas como equivalentes dadas las circunstancias tan distintas y las dinámicas de poder que las enmarcan. ¿Cómo se puede leer la inclusión de Jennifer López, quien una vez fuera la querida de P. Diddy, en la secuencia? Que Cerano es el autor de esta exposición de belleza femenina, aunque sea limitada, y del ritual p’urépecha para nosotros, no p’urépechas e hispanohablantes, sugiere que una lectura políticamente correcta más familiar es inadecuada. El hecho de que Cerano sea miembro de uno de los grupos mostrados (los p’urépechas) y no del otro (las mujeres), de que algunas de las representaciones sean estáticas (las de las estrellas de Hollywood) mientras que otras (las de los p’urépechas) estén en movimiento, y de que los hombres que bailan no están yuxtapuestos a ningún ideal de belleza masculina, sugiere una política de representación que frustra las expectativas antropológicas y las prohibiciones de lo políticamente correcto.
Aunque declaré que no argumentaría que Día dos de Cerano es necesariamente representativa o típica de las artes mediáticas indígenas recientes en México, la he considerado aquí como un claro indicador de la forma en que esta producción se desvía de modelos más puramente documentales y trastoca los paradigmas establecidos del cine etnográfico. . Me parece que Día dos es ejemplar en cuanto a la forma en que las nuevas tecnologías digitales y el software de edición no lineal han permitido no sólo un nuevo tipo de practicantes, sino también nuevas representaciones del México indígena. Estas representaciones, así como la selección musical de Cerano y como mucho de lo que los externos ven y experimentan cuando pasan tiempo en las comunidades indígenas de México, resultan muchas veces sorprendentes e incluso, quizás, insondables. Lo que queda claro es que la producción audiovisual indígena está creciendo y madurando. Aunque todavía están comprometidos con el documental social, el cual ha sido la constante en la producción indígena, Pedro Daniel López y el proyecto Mundos inéditos de Chiapas se han embarcado en un plan ambicioso para hacer una academia de cine indígena que también fomente producciones de ficción y que culmine en 2012 con un largometraje. Estas nuevas iniciativas y producciones forman vínculos a través de fronteras internacionales por medio de las artes mediáticas, alejando la representación de las comunidades indígenas de México de las personificaciones vergonzosas del Tizoc de Infante y llevándola a un nuevo y emocionante ámbito de auto-definiciones.




OBRAS CITADAS

Heider, Karl G. Ethnographic Film. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976.

Ramírez, Gabriel. Crónica del cine mudo mexicano. Ciudad de México: Cineteca Nacional, 1989.

Ramirez Berg, Charles. Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.

Singer, Beverly. Wiping the War Paint off the Lens. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Tobing Rony, Fatima. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998

CHICHEN ITZA: RUINAS EN CONSTRUCCION

Con la designación el año pasado de Chichén Itzá como una de las siete “nuevas maravillas del mundo” por parte de la fundación New Open World, el turismo en el sitio arquelógico ha aumentado aproximadamente 75 porciento. Si el proceso de selección de las “siete maravillas”, a través de una elección popular internacional y campañas políticas nacionalistas, era bastante problemático en varios niveles, las consecuencias son aún más. Durante las semanas antes de la eleccíon, latas de Coca-Cola, anuncios en PEMEX y tarjetas telefónicas promovían al Castillo de Chichén Itzá como si fuera un candidato político. Sus rivales no representaban otras ideologías o partidos políticos, sino otros nacionalismos, en muchos casos representados por otros sitios arqueológicos, como los monolitos de la Isla de Pascua y la ciudad de Machu Pichu. Una batalla entre ruinas. Una competencia entre naciones, con sus ruinas arqueológicas tomando el papel que los equipos de fútbol o ejércitos miltares normalmente juegan. Si el éxito de Chichén representa un verdadero triunfo para el sitio no quedó muy claro. El aumento en turismo implica aún más presión para un sitio ya bastante saturado con visitantes. El INAH ha contemplado estratagias diversas, entre ellas, la extensión del horario para acomodar a la muchadumbre. Ya no hay accesso a algunas áreas del sitio, como el interior y la cumbre del Castillo, en parte por razones de preservación. Las cantidades de turistas en los meses recientes no tienen precedente, y representan un capítulo más actual de un largo proceso de construir un sitio turístico, didáctico y nacionalista por encima (y como representación) de la ciudad antigua. El dossier fotográfico Chichén Itzá: Ruinas en construcción es una revisión breve de algunos momentos claves en esa historia.
Mucho antes del espectáculo de Luciano Pavarotti cantando enfrente del Templo de los Guerreros (19 de abril de 1997) y las latas de Coke adornadas con el perfil del Castillo, el gobernador revolucionario Felipe Carrillo Puerto inauguró en 1922 una carretera de Dzitas a Chichén. Anteriormente, los trabajos de escritores, arqueólogos y fotógrafos habían despertado el interés del público en las ruinas, pero las ruinas en sí eran bastante inaccesibles. La inauguración del camino coincide con el inicio de los trabajos de excavación y reconstrucción de Carnegie Institution of Washington. Mientras que Sylvanus G. Morley y el equipo Carnegie trabajaba, los empleados del gobierno mexicano avanzaban en la restauración del Castillo, el Campo de Pelota y el Templo de los Jaguares.
Aunque los dos grupos trabajan de manera coordinada, los motivos de los involucrados eran distintos. Para Carrillo Puerto, el sitio funcionaría como fuente de orgullo para la población local, un potente símbolo de la grandeza Maya y antídoto contra siglos de opresión. Para la Institución Carnegie, los fines eran diplomáticos, estéticos e interdisciplinarios. En las palabras de Alfred Kidder, jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones Históricas del Carnegie:

El proyecto de Chichén Itzá ha sido diferente a la mayoría de las tareas arqueológicas en el sentido de que desde el principio el Doctor Morley ha luchado por tres objetivos definitivos en lugar de un sólo objetivo más común: la recuperación de objetos e información. En cambio, Morley ha trabajado de una manera calculada para crear confianza por parte del gobierno y pueblo mexicano en agencias científicas extranjeras, para manejar el sitio de una manera en que se volviera testimonio permanente de los logros artísticos de los Maya, y para desarollar a Chichén Itzá como punto focal para investigaciones relacionadas.


[The Chichen Itza project has differed from most archeological undertakings in the New World in that from its inception Dr. Morley has striven for three definite objectives over and above the usual one of recovering specimens and information. These may be stated as follows: to conduct the work in a manner calculated to create a feeling of confidence by the Mexican government and people in the good faith of foreign scientific agencies; to handle the site in such a way as to make it a permanent record of the artistic achievement of the Maya; and to develop Chichen Itza as a focal point for correlated researches.]


Aunque Kidder no lo menciona, la cuestión de confianza en arqueólogos extranjeros se volvió crítica cuando se descubrió que Edward H. Thompson, dueño del sitio, se habia llevado objetos de Chichén a Harvard como contrabando. El caso legal contra Thompson no fue resuelto hasta 1944, nueve años después de su muerte. La desconfianza creada por el caso Thompson implicaba que Carnegie tenía que demonstrar su honradez. El segundo fin, presentar a las ruinas como “permanent record of the artistic achievement of the Maya,” es enfocado no al gobierno o pueblo de México, sino al turista internacional. El turismo era visto como una manera de fortalecer la arqueología. Otra vez, las palabras de Alfred Kidder:

Si se puede mantener Chichén Itzá como lugar interesante y bello, va a volverse, sin duda, una Meca turística y un recurso valioso para la arqueología, que necesita, como cualquier otra ciencia, sus aparadores. No se puede anticipar que el público entenderá sus fines más rebuscados, pero hay que cultivar el interés del público--y eventualmente cultivar el entendimiento del público--si la arqueología va a avanzar, ya que es desde el público de donde viene, a final de cuentas, todo el apoyo, para los esfuerzos de ciencia.


[If Chichén Itzá can be kept both interesting and beautiful, it will without question become a Mecca of travel, and, incidentally, a most valuable asset for archeology which, like every other science, needs its “show-windows.” Its more recondite aims the public can not, in the beginning, be expected to grasp; but public interest must be aroused and eventual public understanding must be achieved if archeology is to go forward; for from the public comes, in the last analysis, all support for scientific endeavor.]


La presencia de turistas se vuelve una estrataegia para avanzar en los fines arqueológicos. Claro, los arqueólogos nunca anticiparon las cantidades de hoy, más de un millón de visitantes por año antes de la designación de “Maravilla del Mundo.” Eso es la consecuencia de factores no previstos, como la comercialización de vuelos internacionales y la creación de Cancún en lo que antes era una zona costera con poca población.
Sylvanus G. Morley, jefe del proyecto Chichén Itzá de Carnegie, funcionaba como científico, administrador y publicista. Muchas de sus ideas sobre la sociedad Maya ya estan fuera de moda en la comunidad arqueológica, pero su trabajo como promotor de los Maya en la imaginación del público sigue siendo relevante. No solo publicó textos academicos como The Inscriptions of Petén , sino tambien articulos para National Geographic y otras revistas populares. Consultaba para el deseño del Teatro Fisher en Detroit, un cine en el estilo neo-Maya con replicas arqueologicas (no solamente de Chichén Itza, sino de Copán, Palenque y Quirigua tambien), pericos vivos, arboles tropicales y pesces exóticos en el foyer. Dentro del cine, replicas de los atlantes de Chichén apoyaban las sillas. El fin de esos esfuerzos es los que propusó Kidder, “cultivar el interés del público.”
Las fotografías que forman ese dossier nos ofrecen vistas de Chichén en distintos momento durante casi un siglo. Las fotos, como imagenes estáticas de un proceso de cambio, fijan momentos especificos en un juego con el tiempo muy complejo. Cualquier ruina funciona como manifestación concreta de la entropía, en que el tiempo se presenta como agente de deterioro. Una gran parte de su encanto procede precisamente de eso. El proceso de restauración reversa eso, pero tiene que dejar visible el registro del tiempo, signos de deteriorización. Replicas de los edifiios antiguos, como la Villa Getty en Malibu, por ejemplo, pueden presentar las estructuras como si fueron nuevas porque no reclaman ninguna autenticidad como estructuras, pero las ruinas tienen que mantener signos del desgaste de los siglos. La clave en la restauración del sitio arqueológico es la balance entre presencia y ausencia, entre reconstrucción y ruina.
Desafortunadamente, las primeras fotos de Chichén Itzá, los daguerrotipos de Frederick Catherwood, desaparecieron hace más de un siglo y medio en un incendio en Nueva York. Poca gente vieron estas imágenes, pero su impacto a través de los grabados (basados en los daguerrotipos) que acompañaron el texto de su compañero de viaje, John Lloyd Stephens, es enorme. Antes de la época de turismo moderno, el texto de Stephens y las reproducciones de las fotos de Catherwood despertó el interés del público angloparlante. En la primera imagen de este dossier, fotografiada en 1860 por Claude Desiré Charnay, vemos al Castillo antes de tener alguna reconstrucción o excavación . Las imágenes que siguen documentan estos procesos. En ellas vemos andamios rústicos, camionetas y rieles, la infrastructura y los obreros para la creación de la meca turística prevista por Kidder. En el museo del sitio, maquetas, imágenes enmarcadas y artefactos se mezclan en una cornucopia Maya. Afuera, la acumulación de monolitos, serpientes y atlantes forman unos rompecabezas precolumbinos. Un escenario ideal para tantos discursos tan variados: de nacionalistas a los “New Age,” de los Mayistas a los “spring breakers.” El dossier cierra con un par de tarjetas postales, el medio más común para la circulación de imágenes de las ruinas en la época anterior a la foto digital. Las tarjetas llevan por correo a todas partes del mundo fotos de Chichén Itzá y sus bellas estructuras, impulsando aún más el turismo.

METAPHORS ON BLINDNESS

There is a strain within experimental filmmaking in the United States, the practice variously known as the Essential Cinema, the New American cinema, visionary film, expanded cinema or critical cinema1 that takes vision as one of its central topics. This grouping of films, now canonized due largely to the efforts of writers including P. Adams Sitney and Jonas Mekas (in his capacity as the Village Voice’s film critic) and venues such as Anthology Film Archive, a body of work updated annually by the New York Film Festival’s “Views from the Avant-Garde” sidebar, privileges vision as one of the medium’s primary topics. That Tran T. Kim-Trang’s video work (The Blindness Series, 1991-2006), which is often presented in the contexts of the festivals, micro-cinemas and museums that champion this filmic avant-garde, should take blindness as a theme suggests either a continuation or an inversion from this dominant thematic within experimental film. By reading Tran’s work through that of Stan Brakhage, arguably the Essential Cinema’s paradigmatic practitioner and most impassioned believer and spokesperson,2 both the shared and divergent agendas of these two projects comes more sharply into focus.
There is of course a broad range of themes associated with this North American avant-garde, ranging from low-rent poetics of Jack Smith’s ecstatic B-movie divas to Bruce Conner’s collaged atomic detournement and beyond, but the question of vision, typically framed in terms of the romantic quest of the male, modernist hero searching to recover the lost innocence of an unprejudiced sense of sight untainted by culture, achieved a centrality in the decade of the 1960s. Though structural film challenged this emotional pursuit with its cool rationalism, and subsequent tendencies have further complicated and expanded the overall picture, this remains a persistent and privileged concern. While Brakhage is closely associated with this project, he is by no means unique. Nathaniel Dorsky explains that the film medium itself can be understood as metaphoric of the process of seeing: “We view films in the context of darkness. We sit in darkness and watch an illuminated world, the world of the screen. This situation is a metaphor for the nature of our own vision.”3 The question of vision thus resonates beyond the cinematic work or theoretical discourse of any one individual practitioner, and speaks to the fundamental conditions and challenges of the reception of experimental media arts. At their best, these are films that invite (or dare) us to see differently, to look anew, more closely and more thoughtfully, and to rethink the familiar conventions of representation and perception. Nonetheless, the prevalence of the theme of vision is in no small part a reflection of the efforts, both as a filmmaker and as a writer, of one of the outstanding practitioners within “the Essential Cinema”—Stan Brakhage, who has been characterized, and not without reason, as “the preeminent figure in American avant-garde filmmaking.”4
Brakhage opens his Metaphors of Vision with an oft-quoted passage that not only evokes a sequence from his Anticipation of the Night (1958) but more importantly articulates the central theoretical project that informs so much of his work:

Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye that does not respond to the name of everything, but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of “Green”? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible gradations of color. Imagine a world before the “beginning was the word”.5

This quest for the unprejudiced, pre-linguistic vision of the “untutored eye” can be understood as Brakhage’s life-long project. For the sake of manageability, this essay will address neither the entirety of Tran’s blindness series nor the whole body of experimental films pertinent to the visual, but rather aims to read one tape from the series of videos, Ekleipsis (1998) through the discourse of vision and the visual articulated by Brakhage in his writings and through one (admittedly uncharacteristic yet highly relevant) example of his filmmaking, the first section of his two-part silent short, 23rd Psalm Branch (1966).
As Fred Camper has stated, Brakhage’s call for the pursuit of untutored, preverbal vision is not a naïve one; six lines down from the opening quoted above, there is a disclaimer: “… one can never go back, not even in imagination. After the loss of innocence, only the ultimate of knowledge can balance the wobbling pivot.”6 And yet, his recurrent project as a filmmaker might be characterized by what follows: “there is a pursuit of knowledge foreign to language and founded upon visual communication, demanding a development of the optical mind, and dependent upon perception in the original and deepest sense of the word.”7 There is, at the root of this, if not an antagonism between language and seeing, at least a primacy claimed for the visual. In contrast to language-based theories of film, which had yet to make their influence felt within the English-speaking academy at the time of Metaphors on Vision’s publication (1963), the visual is understood as functioning according to its own, more protean system of meaning. William C. Wees, in his perceptive reading of Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch, points out that any number of thinkers, from Aristotle to Rudolf Arnheim, concur with this assertion of the visual’s primacy.8 The voice-over narration of Tran’s Ekleipsis makes reference to one of these complementary positions, that of Freudian analysis with its emphasis on the process of verbalizing, of articulating the traumas within the context of the psychoanalytic therapy. Quoting Freud, one of the video’s narrators reads aloud:

Hysterical patients are generally of the 'visual' type. Once a picture has emerged from the patient's memory, we may hear him say that it becomes fragmentary and obscure in proportion as he proceeds with his description of it. The patient is, as it were, getting rid of it by turning it into words. When this work has been accomplished, the patient's field of vision is once more free and we can conjure up another picture.9

Translating images into words, psychoanalysis maintains, we can work through our traumas and rid ourselves of these troubling visuals. As we articulate the traumatic events of the past, these images fade and break apart. Again, the relationship is not so much antagonistic as it is one of language supplanting a certain type of disquieting image, in this case, through the talking cure. Elements of the psychoanalytic model are not at all alien to Brakhage, whose Film Biographies, David James has noted, recurrently relies on the narrative of canonic artists heroically prevailing over the enduring impact of early traumas, though the “cure” is achieved through image making, rather than speech.10 Though it never articulated explicitly, Brakhage suggests that traumas can be overcome by visualization rather than verbalization. These psychoanalytic concerns bear a particular relevance to the 23rd Psalm Branch, the second part of which ends with a kind of homage to Freud in the form of a pilgrimage, in the company of Peter Kubelka, to the Viennese home of the founder of psychoanalysis. Ekleipsis, in contrast, does not find many answers in psychoanalysis, and quickly moves on to explore other explanations for the prevalence of hysterical blindness.
In spite of Brakhage’s stated desire to pursue a pre-linguistic way of seeing the world, his engagement with language is in fact deep and complex. On the simplest level, this engagement is the basis of his role as teacher, author and advocate for media arts; of his generation of experimental filmmakers, it is probably his contribution as a writer and lecturer that is the most extensive and influential. But beyond this, language enters into the films themselves into any number of ways. Poetry served as an important model and point of reference for filmic structure, and throughout his life Robert Duncan, Kenneth Rexroth, Charles Olson, Michael McClure and Gertrude Stein all functioned as sources of inspiration and, with the exception of Stein, friends and comrades in arms. Poetry provides a model for a filmic structure that does not rely on narrative, causality and Aristotelian unities.11 For the most part the Brakhage films themselves however are entirely devoid of both written and spoken language; the vast majority are silent films, and eschew intertitles or any other text on the screen, with the exception of a characteristic hand-scratched signature and title. The use of the written word is only one of the features that makes the first part of Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch stand out as exceptional in his body of work. 23rd Psalm Branch makes extensive use of written text, deployed using a variety of strategies—words scratched directly onto the film’s emulsion, footage of the filmmaker’s own hand engaged in writing a letter to his wife, text shot off of a television screen and shots of fragments of printed pages, this last element extracted from a volume of poetry of Louis Zukofsky.12 Further, if his work generally embodies what Paul Arthur characterized as “an unspoken desire in American avant-garde film to exist outside of history, to operate in a realm of aesthetic expression that elided any recognition of a socially shared past,”13 then this particular short is atypical in its direct references to both the Second World War and the war that was at the time (1966) escalating in Southeast Asia. These two exceptional qualities of the film are not merely coincidental, but can be understood as causally linked: faced with a series of traumas—societal, world historical, and as the film makes clear, personal as well—the principle of the visual’s primacy fails, or at least falls short and must makes way for written language, a writing cure, to enter along side the images both as another graphic element on the screen and as a bearer of meaning.
The elements of texts that appear on the screen make it clear that Brakhage made this film in the midst of a period of despair and distress. “I can’t go on,” laments the maker, scratched in black leader, “I must stop.” The images and other sentence fragments and phrases point to the source of his anguish. Flashing frames reveal corpses, beautifully hand-colored yet nonetheless horrific. A lone word legible on the television screen, “Nagasaki,” evokes for the North American not so much a city as the nuclear bomb and the devastation it wrought. Another more revealing written fragment is more cryptic, but has been convincingly glossed by one of Brakhage’s interlocutors:

Take back
Beethoven’s 9th, then
he said

William Wees identifies this as a reference to Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, in which the central character, Adrian Leverkühn, enters into a personal crisis after witnessing the illness, suffering and death of a small child.14 If God permits this kind of torment, the character speculates, then He should revoke the beauty of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. The two cannot or should not co-exist. Brakhage’s text hints at a similar dilemma, modified for times of war: how do we understand, create or celebrate beauty when it coexists not simply with tragedy on an individual scale, but with the collective, mass brutality of battles, death camps and bombings? Might the horror of it all move us, like the women of Ekleipsis, to shut down all together and stop seeing?
The images of 23rd Psalm Branch reinforce this suggested reading. The endless succession of corpses, repeated explosions, emaciated prisoners from Nazi concentration camps, rows of marching soldiers and images of dictators all point to the origins of Brakhage’s trauma. His own anecdotal account of the film’s genesis sheds further light on this. In the Sixties, Brakhage moved with his young family to the remote cabin in the Rocky Mountains. Newspapers were not available in the area, he relates, and the family would rarely listen to the radio. But news of the outside world nonetheless insinuated its way into this insulated enclave by way of the television, and in United States of the late sixties, news from the world often meant news from Southeast Asia:

I found I couldn’t deal at all with Viet Nam. I’ve never been there; I haven’t seen any imagery that presents it in any way that’s as close to whatever Vietnam might be, as it is to Strindberg or Max Reinhart. But, all the same, when you have a machine that comes in the form that television does, where the image is carried by the light directly to the eyes, that is, not reflected, and where language is composed of moving dots and particles, such as is the case of American TV, the effect psychologically that I began to feel was like I was so close to memory recall, to when an image is remembered from a person’s own experience.15

The intrusion of the War into the Rocky Mountain log cabin retreat thus occasions a series of refusals and denials. The first of these pleads ignorance on the basis of a lack of direct knowledge of the matter. Without the lived experience of the Vietnam conflict, without being actual eyewitness to the horrible events of war, how might the filmmaker begin to address this? By means of displacement, the topic becomes “memory recall,” more specifically, his own childhood memories, not of war itself, but of viewing newsreels of World War II, the kinds of archival images he appropriates and intervenes within through painting and otherwise defacing the emulsion’s surface.16 Brakhage’s own children, present in this film fleetingly, and so often central in of the films from this period, become surrogates for his own youth, reliving the societal poisoning as witnesses, in spite of their father’s best efforts, to massive devastation carried out in their name. In moving from the content of the images to the subject of memory recall, an engagement with political life is rejected in favor of an interior exploration of private consciousness and of the visual mechanics of memory.
There is another blind spot here that is not solely Brakhage’s, but rather one shared by all of his compatriots. While the war in Vietnam raged on in Southeast Asia and on the Brakhage family television set, the conflict progressively drew in its neighbor Cambodia. If in the United States the conflict in Vietnam was characterized by public debate, popular dissent and the mass media’s constant dissemination of images of the vast destruction wrought, then the Cambodian conflict was, at least prior to April 1970, distinguished in contrast by secrecy and government concealment. Before Brakhage had finished this film, Cambodia had begun to allow North Vietnamese soldiers to use their country as a safe haven for attacks against the South. This in turn set the stage for the tragic series of events that unfolded: the U.S. secret bombing, the destruction of the nation’s agricultural base, the 1970 CIA-orchestrated coup d’état, and the eventual rise to power of Pol Pot and subsequent calamities of mass murder, forced labor and starvation. While the destruction of Vietnam was broadcast into the Brakhage home, causing domestic strife and private distress, the devastation of its neighbor remained unseen, witnessed by the Cambodian women of Ekleipsis but out of the sight of the North American public who funded it all.
As the quote above suggests, Brakhage’s discomfort with the larger social context and specific visual content of this work of his is directly linked to a prevalent, and by that time dominant, technology of the visual: television. He states:

I could make a film about anything in the house, it seemed, that touched me, except, I couldn’t deal with the television set. And it wasn’t just the object itself, but that it was our only specific connection to Society with a capital “S” or something we were expected to be responsible for … television, represented, was that something of the war was being presented to us and we were directly responsible for dealing with it.17

Rather to confronting that responsibility and wrestling with its implications, Brakhage turns his attention instead to the mechanics of the apparatus itself. Though the two technologies referenced produce moving images, they operate in significantly different ways: television set emits light that travels directly to the eye, while film is projected onto a white screen, which then reflects light to the eye of the viewer. If film is for Brakhage a metaphor of vision, and the Bolex an extension of the eye, then the cathode-ray tube of the Sixties era television monitor is here a metaphor for memory. Significantly, Ekleipsis also takes the process of visual memory as its subject matter. Again the dominant visual strategy is one of appropriation; the video uses found images, taken from television and from feature films like The Killing Fields (1984), conventionally (some would say “correctly”) focused, exposed and composed, and without the interference of overlaid coats of paint or ink, to suggest what might have been the last things seen “correctly” by the Cambodian survivors of Khmer Rouge brutality prior to the onset of hysterical blindness. Unlike the 23rd Psalm Branch, the memories are not in the first person, but rather in the third, the private reserve of a group of individuals the maker has herself never met or interviewed. The content is then necessarily speculative and tentative: what these women might have seen or might remember. The thrust of inquiry moves from the individual consciousness to the political crisis that is its context and on to a possible resolution, reversing the movement of Brakhage’s retreat from political crisis to interior contemplation.
Tran’s strategy is to fragment and isolate the archival images in repeated sequences interspersed with black. The result aims to replicate the visual memories of the Killing Fields survivors as the voices of the work’s soundtrack contemplate the root causes of their medical and psychic condition. The technique is strikingly similar to the 23rd Psalm Branch, which also makes extensive use of hypnotic, nearly stroboscopic fragmentation of the moving image through the interspersed sequences of black leader. Characteristically, the strategies that Brakhage deploys in order to make the archival images his own include applying paint and ink top on the emulsion, scratching the film—just a few the techniques associated with his signature style. As with his other hallmark techniques—superimpositions, over- or under-exposed footage, the placement of colored glass in front of the lens, the use of out-of-focus footage—Brakhage has claimed these are motivated by his own imperfect eyesight. His interest in vision springs from a physical deficiency, one that rendered “normal” vision impossible for him. In an interview with the avant-garde cinema’s most tireless scholar, we find this exchange:

Scott MacDonald: How bad were your eyes?
Brakhage: Pretty bad, actually. I had a bad astigmatism. I was walleyed: that is, my right eye was always adrift and didn’t focus well. I had to really struggle to come to focus. I couldn’t take focusing for granted. And much of what you and others have described as my experimentation is just a part of my scrambling to come to an understanding of how you achieve sight. Something that other people just have naturally, I had to earn. One time, an optician, on looking into my eyes, said: ‘Well, by your eyes, physically, you shouldn’t even be able to see that chart on the wall, let alone read it. But, on the other hand, I have never seen a human eye with more rapid saccadic movements. What you must be doing is rapidly scanning and putting this picture together in your head.’ In knowing poets, I was discovering that many of them stuttered, couldn’t speak easily at
all…18

This physical disability is then presented as the point of departure for the filmmaker’s challenge to traditional representation, making him acutely sensitive to vision, just as the poets’ stutters make them more attuned to the word. Rather than seeking to “correct” his vision to conform to a universally accepted norm, Brakhage suggests this defect informs and motivates his use of specific strategies—the use of superimpositions or out of focus images—and more generally to his approach to filmmaking, forcing him to struggling in order “to come to an understanding of how you achieve sight.”
Tran’s Ekleipsis takes as a point of departure a group of Cambodian refugees residing in Long Beach, California, women who are afflicted with what is called hysterically blindness. In other words, these are individuals who are physiologically capable of sight, but for whom the trauma of the Pol Pot atrocities has led to what has been characterized as a psychosomatic blindness, often only in one eye. The situation inverts the experience Brakhage describes: not faulty eyes making possible extraordinary vision, but rather normal eyes incapable of any vision whatsoever. Several film scholars have suggested that the encounter with Charles Olson’s thinking was formative influence in the maturation of Brakhage’s understanding of vision, and indeed, the frequent references to Olson both in Metaphors on Vision (which includes an extended extract from a letter to Jane Brakhage in which the filmmaker describes his first meeting with the poet) as well as elsewhere in his writings allow the reader to trace these connections. In an interview with Bruce Kawin, Brakhage states:

The poet Charles Olson taught me to accept the vision that’s been given to you, including your various aberrations. That was what he credited my heroics the most with, where he was praising me for heroics that I had, he felt, more than any other artist he knew had accepted the given limitations of my...not just my vision, but much else of my health, and so on.19

But the influence of Olson is more than the lesson in self-acceptance that Brakhage characterizes here, it is an intellectual debt that influenced the theoretical development of Brakhage’s thoughts on vision. In his prescriptive essay Projective Verse, Olson states that in poetry, “one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception,” in the ongoing contact between nature and consciousness.20 This conviction informs Brakhage’s theory of vision, and his claims to be a documentarian; his camera simply records his vision, his eye’s interactions with the world. “I document the act of seeing … I have added nothing.”21 The eye takes on a role comparable to that of breath for Olson, the embodied “biological imperative” that inescapably shapes this interaction.22
But the 23rd Psalm Branch in particular owes another, more specific debt to Olson. Brakhage’s is own hand is seen writing on paper: “”The war is as in thoughts patterns are—as endless as precise as eye’s hell is!”21 Again, Willian C. Wees’ gloss proves helpful; he identifies this line as a paraphrase (though with a significant shift of emphasis from words to sight) of Charles Olson’s poem “In Cold Hell, in Thicket,” which reads, in part:

precise as hell is, precise
as any words … 23

If, as Brakhage states, “war is as … thought patterns are,” then the effort to stop the war is ultimately a private act, one that must seek to reform the patterns of thought rather than the behavior of nation states. The concluding images of children playing war-like games with sparklers again suggests this aggression springs from deep-seated, destructive drives that are rooted in psychology and socially reinforced, not from any specific political circumstances. Using the theories of Bruno Bettelheim, Marjorie Keller’s close reading of Brakhage’s Murder Psalm (1980), a film that takes the violence of children as its central theme, suggests the same.24 Society perpetuates its culture of violence by indoctrinating each subsequent generation in its destructive values. If there is any hope for an alternative to this unending cycle of cruelty, it lies in our heads, not in diplomacy, activism, civil disobedience, or marching for peace. Brakhage regarded the peace demonstrations that were then engaging so many with particular suspicion, as he felt these replicated the same mass psychology of the wars that they ostensible opposed. But the alternative that Brakhage proposes is even less satisfactory.
In 1967, as the United States spread Agent Orange defoliants on Cambodia forests and the Kymer Rouge joined a peasant rebellion against the government, Brakhage stated, following a public screening of the 23rd Psalm Branch:

Jane and I are sure that the war is over, as far as we’re concerned, and I don’t mean that in any facile sense. I mean it deeply, like Allen said it. Eight months, ten months before me, he managed in Wichita, Allen Ginsberg, to say very deeply, ‘I, Allen Ginsberg, declare that the war is over.’ Now, the only difference between me and Allen is that I don’t declare it, I say, Jane and I have decided that the war is over. And she would probably say … Oh, I talk too much, the war is over and here are Songs 24 and 25.25

Alas, Brakhage’s statement has none of the power of what Austin called “performative speech.” It is, instead, a declaration of his intention to continue the evasion, to go on with his aesthetic project (Songs 24 and 25) at the price of social engagement. Unfortunately for the women on Ekleipsis, the war was just beginning, and no such evasion was possible.


notes

1 While referring to overlapping categories, each of these terms carries a different set of connotations that would be familiar to these films’ audiences. “The Essential Cinema” refers specifically to the permanent collection of Anthology Film Archives, where these films screen in ongoing rotation. The designation “New American cinema” is a markedly dated designation that appears in the writings from the Sixties by the likes of Ken Kelman and Gregory Battcock. The latter, in fact, used the label as the title for an edited anthology, The New American Cinema, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1967). The last three terms are associated with specific scholars who have written on this cinema, and whose books form part of an essential bibliography on the subject: P. Adams Sitney Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1943-1978, 2nd ed., (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) and Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970). Scott MacDonald has expanded the scope of this set of films considerably to be decidedly more international and inclusive with his outstanding series of interviews: A Critical Cinema: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California, 1988); Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California, 1992); Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 3: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California, 1998); Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California, 2005); Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). MacDonald’s reflections on the term “critical cinema,” especially in relation to “the Essential Cinema,” appear in the forth volume, and are particularly pertinent to this discussion (pp.2-3).

2 Along with Jonas Mekas, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka and Ken Kelman, Stan Brakhage formed part of the selection committee that sought to define “the Essential Cinema,” “the essential works of the art of cinema,” a collection that includes both European vanguards shorts from between the Wars and North American experimental films of their own generation (including works by all of the filmmakers who participated in the selection process: Mekas, Kubelka, Brakhage and Broughton) as well as seminal silent films by D. W. Griffith, Chaplin and Eisenstein. Deliberations were contentious, and Brakhage left the group before the end of the process. James Broughton joined the group midway through the curatorial discussions. For more on the selection process, see the introduction to P. Adams Sitney, ed., The Essential Cinema: Essays on the films in the collection of Anthology Film Archives, (New York: Anthology Film Archives/New York University Press, 1975). Audio recordings of the discussions are in the archives of Anthology, but have not as of this date been transcribed or studied.

3 Nathaniel Dorsky, Devotional Cinema, 2nd ed., Berkeley, CA: Tuumba Press, 2005 [2003]), p. 25.

4 “Stan Brakhage” in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), p. 36.

5 Metaphors on Vision was first printed as a special issue of Film Culture, ed. by P. Adams Sitney, no. 30 (1963), n.p.

6 ibid. Camper states this in his review, “Glimpses of Greatness: New Films by Stan Brakhage,” Chicago Reader (10 September 1999).

7 ibid.

8 “Words and Images in Stan Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch,” Cinema Journal, vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 1988), p. 40-41. Wees quotes both Aristotle’s assertion that “the soul never thinks without and image” and Arnheim’s claim that “vision is the primary medium of thought.”

9 This fragment of Ekleipsis’ voice-over is take from Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria, trans. and ed. by James Strachey, (New York: Basic Books, 1957).

10 (Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island/Netzahualcoyotl Historical Society, 1977). See David James, “The Film-Maker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, no. 3 (Spring 1982), p. 37.

11 Again, Brakhage is not at all exceptional in this regard. See, for example, the transcription (especially the comments of Maya Deren, who suggests that experimental film is to poetry as narrative film is to the novel) of the Cinema 16 panel from 1953, “Poetry and the Film: A Symposium with Maya Deren, Arthur Miller, Dylan Thomas Parker Tyler, Chairman, Willard Maas. Organized by Amos Vogel,” in P. Adams Sitney, ed., Film Culture Reader (New York: Praeger, 1970), pp., 171-187.

12 A

13 Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 61.

14 William C. Wees, “Words and Images in Stan Brakhage’s 23rd Psalm Branch,” Cinema Journal, vol. 27, no. 2 (Winter 1988), p. 43. The passage is from Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adiran Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), p. 478.

15 “Stan Brakhage Speaks on ‘23rd Psalm Branch’ at Film-Maker’s Cinematheque, April 22, 1967,” Film Culture, no. 67-68-69 (1979), p. 110.

16 In a question and answer session following a screening of the film, the filmmaker states that it was his wife Jane Brakhage who did the actual painting on the film, as well as using another technique involving “paper that make[s] impressions on the film when you streak it down.” Stan Brakhage himself “lost my patience entirely” after “the first two or three seconds.” Ibid., p. 113.

17 ibid., p. 109.

18 “Stan Brakhage” in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 4: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), pp. 46-47.

19 From part six of an extended interview, reprinted on-line at: http://www.criterionco.com/asp/in_focus_essay.asp?id=13&eid=308

20 Charles Olson, “Projective Verse,” in Robert Creeley, ed., Charles Olson: Selected Writings (New York: New Directions, 1960), p. 24.

21 Interview with Hollis Frampton, Artforum, January 1973, p. 79.

22 The phrase is taken from David James, “The Film-Maker as Romantic Poet: Brakhage and Olson,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 35, no. 3 (Spring 1982), p. 39.

23 Charles Olson, The Distances, (New York: Grove Press, 1950), p. 32.

24 Marjorie Keller, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell and Brakhage, (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1986), p. 226.

25 “Stan Brakhage Speaks on ‘23rd Psalm Branch’ at Film-Maker’s Cinematheque, April 22, 1967,” Film Culture, no. 67-68-69 (1979), p. 129. Apparently Brakhage would frequently quote this statement of Ginsberg’s approvingly.

EDWARD H. THOMPSON AT CHICHEN ITZA'S SACRED CENOTE

Edward Herbert Thompson, not to be confused with the Englishman, Sir Eric J., with whom he shares the same last name, has gone down, deservedly, in the chronicles of Maya archaeology as a problematic figure. He celebrated his own archeological exploits in the autobiographical People of the Serpent, and was championed by the eccentric battery fortune heir (and enthusiast for all things Maya) T.A. Willard in his popular treatment The City of the Sacred Well, but today his role is inevitably linked with the folly documented in this photograph of Pedro Guerra.1 Thompson is, in fact, emblematic of North American archeology’s (more openly) acquisitive age, where excavation went hand in hand with looting, spying, and imperialism. His is the archaeology of Manifest Destiny, where the scientist might function as scout for the military incursion that would follow, and where the aim of fieldwork is not knowledge so much as booty.
Like John Lloyd Stephens, Ephraim George Squier, Porter Bliss and Louis J. Aymé before him, Thompson’s used diplomacy as a vehicle to pursue his archeological interests. In 1885, at the age of 25, with the aid of Massachusetts Senator George Hoar and the encouragement of Stephen Salisbury III and Charles P. Bowditch, both of the American Antiquarian Society, President Grover Cleveland appointed him the US consul in the Yucatan. His young Yankee wife soon returned to New England, but he remained in Yucatan, studying the Maya. He took his self-defined archeological and anthropological duties much more seriously than his appointed diplomatic ones. He was initiated into a syncretic Maya religious sect, took a Maya wife and fathered a mestizo family. When charged by the Peabody Museum’s Frederick Putnam to provide exhibition materials for the 1893 Columbian Exposition, he exported plaster casts of ancient architectural highlights of Uxmal and Labna to the display on Chicago’s Midway. At Chichén Itzá however Thompson did not simply make casts and dig; he bought the site, pyramid, cenote, and all. The exhibition in Chicago had piqued the interest of heiress Allison Armour, who financed Thompson’s purchase of the ruins. There he lived for the next several decades.
Though the bulk of the Guerra archive consists of portraiture, there are also many photographs--typically straight-faced documents devoid of any editorial commentary--of some of the newsworthy events that took place on the peninsula during the period the studio was active. Of these events one of the more infamous is Edward Thompson’s dredging of the sacred cenote of Chichén Itzá, the activity that has subsequently come to define Thompson’s career as an archeologist. Thompson had read Diego de Landa’s account of sacrifices as the cenote in Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, a manuscript that had been rediscovered in a Spanish archive and reprinted by the Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg in 1883. Bishop de Landa’s account of human sacrifices at the cenote drew Thompson’s attention to the prospect of treasures lurking below the water’s surface. It was a site that provided many challenges to the prospective underwater archeologist so many years before the self-contained breathing apparatus. Though the cenote is not especially deep, the bottom is rich with centuries of silt. Many objects of archeological value, Thompson figured, would be mixed into that thick organic deposit at the well’s bottom. Thompson contemplated using windmills to pump the water out of the well, but abandoned this plan. To access the bottom he contracted a pair of Greek sponge divers, and dove himself into the low-visibility silt. He also brought in the winch and the two and a half cubic foot “orange-peel bucket” dredge represented here. The winch was used for repeated dredgings between 1904 and 1911.2 His technique was a simple one, relying on invasive force and industrial age technology, seemingly oblivious to the fragility of the artifacts sought from below:

I doubt if anybody can realize the thrill I felt when, with four men at the winch handles and one at the brake, the dredge, with its steel jaws agape, swung from the platform, hung poised for a brief moment in midair over the dark pit and then, with a long swift glide downward, entered the still, dark waters and sake smoothly on its quest. A few moments of waiting to allow the sharp-pointed teeth to bite into the deposit, and then the forms of the workmen bent over the winch handles and muscles under dark brown skin began to play like quicksilver as the steel cables tautened under the strain of the upcoming burden.3

Needless to say, the process could smash fragile ceramics and other artifacts. Thompson’s wrote: “most of the objects brought up were in fragments. Probably they were votive offerings broken before being thrown into the well, as a ritualistic act performed by the priests.”4 The human bones recovered during the dredging set his imagination in action. Of the female remains, Thompson told Willard that:

The sympathetic imagination without effort clothed the naked bones with flesh and substance, so that one saw instantly the graceful, lovely, high-bred maiden and the last solemn act that had stilled the poor girlish clad in all its finery and left to sink into the ooze at the bottom of this terrible pit.5

The male bones, he believed, revealed a different sort of breeding:

Some are relatively large, thick-walled, with protuberant surfaces, receding foreheads, and prognathic jaws. Evidently their possessors were ferocious, primitive, almost gorilla-like—not the same race that bred the girl-brides of the Rain God. Again this tallies with the tradition that the warriors sacrificed were captives.6

Much of the controversy surrounding Thompson’s career focuses on the fate of the masks, knives, bells and other objects that he recovered from the cenote. In spite of the 1823 law restricting the export of archeological objects, Thompson smuggled the objects to Massachusetts, where they joined the collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum. When, in 1923, Alma Reed published an account of this transgression in the New York Times, it created great indignation. The revelations threatened to jeopardize the on-going negotiations of the Carnegie Institute for permission to conduct excavations and restorations at the site by tarring the reputation of gringo archeologists with a reputation as untrustworthy and acquisitive. The Mexican government, valuing the objects at half a million 1926 dollars, pursued legal action against Thompson. Thompson was acquitted in the end, but the Peabody returned most of the smuggled artifacts in 1957.
Though Thompson is emblematic of the Nineteenth Century school of archeology which Curtis Hinsley has termed an “enterprise of imperial acquisition,”7 his career extended well beyond that era. His dredging of the cenote coincides with Sylvanus Morley’s first visit to the Yucatán in 1907, and Morley perhaps assisted with the surreptitious transport of objects back to Cambridge.8 But by the time Morley took the helm of the Carnegie excavations, another phase of Mexican archeology had begun, one based on binational collaborations rather than individual initiatives. In the later years of his life, Thompson cohabitated with that later generation of archeologists working at Chichén, but he never joined their ranks. His last years at Chichén were characterized by this awkward coexistence, and by several personal setbacks. In 1921, in the chaos of the peninsular Revolution, Thompson’s Casa principal burned by de la Huerta’s troops. The Carnegie financed the repairs, and paid him a US$1200 annual stipend for use of the property. When Thompson’s failure to pay real estate taxes again threatened the continuation of excavations, the Carnegie intervened and paid off his outstanding debt.
Thompson’s dredge was not the last of the heavy-handed archeological machinery to intrude on the god Chac’s sacred well. In 1960 the National Geographic Society and the Club de Exploradores y Desportes Acuáticos de México (CEDAM) collaborated on a project which sucked the water, mud and artifacts up from the bottom of the cenote into a massive archeological geyser, which then sprayed the deposits onto nets designed to catch the dislodged pieces. This gusher of Maya artifacts was proudly documented in National Geographic magazine and a television program entitled "Expedition: Into the Sacred Well".9 Concern for the damage inflicted on fragile artifacts halted this surreal approach. In 1967 CEDAM returned with plans first to drain, and when that proved unsuccessful, to chlorinate, the water in Chichén’s well.10 These are the later day heirs to Thompson’s project, archeologists who quite likely destroyed as much as they brought to light. Thompson plunged in the Maya past with equipment better suited for coal mining than the recovery of centuries-old, often brittle objects. He emerged with tale glorifying himself, to which Guerra’s photographs stands as a mute witness.



1. Edward Herbert Thompson People of the Serpent (New York: Capricorn Books, 1932); T. A. Willard, The City of the Sacred Well (London: William Heinimamm, 1926).

2. More information on this is provided by Luis Ramírez Aznar, El saqueo del cenote sagrado de Chichén Itzá (Mérida: Editorial Dante, 1990); Clemency Coggins and Orrin C. Shane III, Maya Treasures from the Sacred Well at Chichen Itza, (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1984); M. Robert Ewing, A History of Archaeological Activity at Chichen Itza, Yucatán, Mexico (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1972).

3. Thompson, ibid.

4. Thompson, ibid.

5. Willard, ibid., p. 115.

6. Willard, ibid., p. 115.

7. Curtis M. Hinsley, “In Search of the New World Classical,” in Collecting the Pre-Columbian Past, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, D.C.: Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), p. 118.

8. This is implied in Robert Brunhaus’s Sylvanus G. Morley and the World of the Ancient Mayas (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), p. 38.

9. Eusebio Dávalos Hurtado, “Into the Well of Sacrifice: Return to the Sacred Cenote,” National Geographic, vol. 120, no. 4 (October, 1961), 540-549; Bates Littlehales, “Into the Well of Sacrifice: Treasure Hunt in the Deep Past,” National Geographic, vol. 120, no. 4 (October, 1961), 550-561.

10. Donald Ediger, The Well of Sacrifice (New York: Doubleday, 1971).

Imported Nationalism

Jesse Lerner

Hovering somewhere between lithography and photography, between nationalism and Europhilia, between supernatural apparition and historical fact, the 19th-century carte-de-visite titled Our Lady of Guadalupe appearing to the Emperor and Empress in the Clouds above the Cerro de las Campanas, is a minor curiosity in the history of Mexican photography, a peculiar artifact of the French Intervention (1862–67). Much acclaim has been showered upon the modernist Mexican photography from the period of the post-Revolution cultural Renaissance—both the work done there by international visitors such as Edward Weston and Paul Strand as well as national artists. Their accomplishments are not at all diminished by the acknowledgement that much of the nationalistic iconography for which these Revolutionary artists are known was firmly in place by the end of the 19th century, developed by photographers who have received little praise. The earliest photography in Mexico reveals little that is distinctive. Practiced by and for Europeans, or elites of European descent, it is largely derivative of photography elsewhere, and virtually indistinguishable from the output of studios in Europe or the United States. For this reason, they might be understood not as "Mexican photography" so much as "photography done in Mexico." The carte-de-visite plays a critical role in the development of a distinctively national photography. Ironically it is the French Intervention, the failed and pathetic dream of reactionaries who imagined imported European royalty was the key to Mexico's prosperity, which did much to the definition of a uniquely Mexican style.

Though photography had been practiced in Mexico ever since the French made public Daguerre's invention in 1839,1 the carte-de-visite was the process that gave Mexican photography its first real mass distribution. The technique was invented by Louis Dodero in 1851, but it was André Adolphe Disdéri who patented the process in Paris in 1854, and went on to become its best-known practitioner. The carte-de-visite utilized a single wet plate negative to produce (typically) eight identical images. The resulting images were printed on light-sensitive paper, separated, and affixed to a slightly larger piece of cardboard. The albumen paper was made from egg whites mixed with salt and applied to the paper, which was then immersed in silver nitrate. The resultant chemical reaction produced light-sensitive silver chloride. The albumen negative, which employed glass plates treated with the identical mixture of egg whites and silver halide, was also used during the early 1850s, but the superior wet collodion process soon superseded this. Prices varied according to dimensions, which ranged from the standard size of about 2 1/2 by 4 inches to the larger "cabinet" (about 4 by 6 1/2 inches), "boudoir" (about 5 by 8 1/2 inches), or "imperial" (about 7 by 9 1/2 inches) sizes. While the earlier daguerreotypes and ambrotypes were accessible to few other than the small Europeanized elite (and foreign invaders, like the North American soldiers of occupation, who posed in front a painted cloth backdrop of the Castillo of Chapultepec in the Mexico City studios of Charles S. Betts and Antonio L. Cosmes de Cosío), the reduced price of the cartes-de-visite made photography accessible to the popular classes.

The uses of this technique were diverse. Portraiture was most important, produced in studios modeled on Matthew Brady's highly successful New York City gallery. Unlike the one-of-a-kind daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, the inexpensive cards could be distributed among friends and admirers as keepsakes. Francisco Javier Castaño's biography of the artist Jacobo Gálvez credits the painter with introducing photography to Guadalajara in 1853, when Gálvez returned from his studies in Europe with a "paper daguerreotype" camera. Shortly after this the itinerant photographer Amado Palma announced his presence in Guadalajara with fliers printed with the following text, which gives a good sense of his business:

Amado Palma has the honor of announcing to the respectable public that he has just returned from the United States, and that he has brought with him, for the practice of his profession, German, French and North American mechanisms, all the apparatuses necessary to make portraits or views, with colors or without, and offers—to those gentlemen who would like to try them—portraits which are better than those that they have seen and equal to the most successful ones made recently in Europe, and for the reasonable price of four pesos, with a standard frame.2

Later, in the 1860s, the city had permanent photo studios, the shops of Justo Ibarra and Octavio de la Mora. De la Mora, active in Guadalajara from 1865 to 1888, made remarkable wet collodion portraits set in an imaginary world created by painted backdrops and props. Fountains, gardens, waterfalls, and landscapes spotted with castles or temples suggested a simulacrum of distant elegance. Plaster columns and false balustrades supplemented the illusion. De la Mora is credited with introducing to Mexico the use of explosions of magnesium powder for illumination.3 He later relocated to Mexico City, where he ran a successful portrait studio and worked as a photographer for the National Museum. In addition to taking portraits of their customers, photographers sold to the public the likenesses of well-known individuals. These studio operators did not necessarily have to have access to these celebrities in order to sell their portraits, because cartes-de-visite could also be made by re-photographing an existing image, not necessarily a photograph, and then printing from this copy negative. In Mexico, one of the most popular carte-de-visite images was a portrait by Antioco Cruces and Luis Campa of the liberal president, Benito Juárez, that sold more than twenty thousand copies. His rival Maximilian appeared on similar cards. Collectors often assembled their cartes-de-visite in albums, in which they could place images of themselves, family, and friends alongside portraits of national or world leaders. In addition to individual images, studios offered sets of thematically related series of images. Examples of these include an early sequence of cards representing the already numerous succession of leaders of Mexico since independence. Since there were no photographs of many of these politicians, photographers shot copy negatives of lithographs and printed from these. Another genre produced for mass consumption by entrepreneurial photographers was the series known as tipos mexicanos, or Mexican types. These were representations of a variety of working-class tradesmen and Indian groups, and continued the conventions established by a number of earlier efforts in visual anthropology. In the years 1851–1855, Edouard Pingret, a French illustrator, produced a series of watercolors on the theme of tipos mexicanos. In contrast to portraiture, in these cases the basis for recording a person is not individuality but rather typicality, their representative quality.

The first photographer to market images of tipos mexicanos was probably François Aubert.4 Aubert was a Frenchman who had come to Mexico in 1854. He learned photography from Jules Amiel in Mexico City and bought Amiel's studio in 1864. In addition to his series of tipos mexicanos, he made the most complete photographic record of Maximilian's term in Mexico, as well as numerous studio portraits. He left Mexico shortly after the intervention in 1869. Several other studios offered cartes-de-visite of these folkloric archetypes, but by far the most successful, both artistically and commercially, were those of Antioco Cruces and Luis Campa. They created a series of depicting a variety of Mexican laborers: the water carrier, the baker, the candlestick maker, and so on. As with Pingret's illustrations, many of the "types" which Cruces and Campa selected (like the tlachiquero or pulque maker, who gathers the sap of the maguey plant to be fermented into a mild alcoholic beverage—later the object of Eisenstein's primitivist homoerotic gaze in his unedited footage from Hacienda Tetlapayac) emphasize the exotic nature of Mexico for foreign customers. Figures representing different types of peddlers posed with props in front of studio recreations of the settings appropriate to their work. The balance between the artifice of the studio and documentary concerns implicitly yields an elegant tension. Unlike Mexican studio portraits of the era, which typically evoke a world of wealth markers of bourgeois elegance—pilasters draped in cloth, a garden or flowery archway visible in the background—the accoutrements of the studio were used to add ersatz ethnographic authenticity. The images are suggestive of a collaborative process between the model and the photographer. The tipos mexicanos of Cruces and Campa formed part of the nation's official image of itself, and Mexico displayed these at their pavilion at the 1876 World's Exposition in Philadelphia.5 Significantly, they anticipate the folkloric types celebrated by the muralists more than half a century later.

A remarkably rich record of cartes-de-visite images documents the French Intervention in Mexico (1862–67), the unfortunate brainchild of the emperor Napoleon III. Mexico's economic hardships had led President Benito Juárez to suspend payments on foreign debts, and the creditor nations—Spain, France and England—moved on Veracruz in an effort to coerce repayment. Although his allies backed down, Napoleon III pushed on, coveting Mexico's natural wealth and hoping to prevent the United States from gaining sole control of New World resources. Despite a temporary setback in the battle of Cinco de Mayo (1862), the French forces took Puebla after a long siege. Juárez evacuated Mexico City in June of 1863 and General Bazaine took the capital city. With the support of Mexican conservatives, monarchy replaced republican government, and the Franco-Austrian alliance was secured. The Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, temporarily stateless after Austria ceded control of Lombardy, accepted the crown, and in May of 1864 arrived in Veracruz with his young wife Carlota. In June they entered Mexico City, and set up residence in Chapultepec Castle. Maximilian's soldiers managed to chase the Juarista forces far into the north and defeated Porfirio Díaz in Oaxaca, but they never fully controlled the entire country. Completed in March 1867, the withdrawal of the French troops, in deference to the supposed sovereignty of Maximilian's rule and motivated by events in Europe,6 marked the beginning of the emperor's end. The victory of Juárez's allies, the Union forces in the North American Civil War, threatened to bring a powerful new player onto the scene. Juarista forces drove the emperor out of Mexico City to Querétaro, where he was captured on 15 May 1867. A court martial sentenced him to death, and on 19 June, Maximilian, along with his two loyal generals, Tomás Mejía and Miguel Miramón, were executed on the Cerro de las Campanas overlooking the city.

The French intervention was extensively documented by photographers, both foreign and Mexican. The visiting North American Andrew Burgess created an important record of the war. Burgess had been part of Matthew Brady's team of photographers, working at the extremely successful New York studio and photographing the Civil War in the United States. Burgess had been in Guadalajara on 4 January 1864, when the French troops took the city from Juárez, and perhaps it was he who took the photograph from gates of the city of Guadalajara of the French troops entering the city. Burgess also took the emperor's portrait. The photographic studios, like those of Auguste Péraire, Valleto and Company, and Martínez and Co., produced hundreds of copies of a carte-de-visite of the Emperor. Maximilian also had his own court photographer, Julio María y Campo, who was housed in the emperor's Chapultepec castle. Politically inept, the emperor's central preoccupation was not waging war with soldiers, but rather with appearances. The carte-de-visite images of this era record a complex, reciprocal process, by which the Emperor and his wife try to become more Mexican, while at least some Mexicans look to the royal couple for cues on how to be more European. On one hand, one sees poses assumed by Carlota in front of the camera studiously replicated in the studio by her privileged female subjects. Conversely, the Imperial court made a conscious effort to surround itself with and to embrace distinctively local elements. Maximilian commissioned portraits of the heroes of Independence from Spain, thus positioning himself as heir to the struggles of 1812. The imperial couple hired Faustino Galicia Chimalpopoca to act as their Náhuatl (Aztec) translator, and Carlota visited the remote Mayan ruins of Uxmal. There are no photographs of Carlota's visit, but one carte-de-visite shows Francisco Boban, the court archeologist, surrounded by a cabinet of curiosities full of pre-Columbian artifacts, one of the first realizations in Mexico of the political efficacy of this particular invented tradition. The last photograph taken of Maximilian before his execution shows him sporting an oversized, broad brimmed hat like those favored by the Mexican cowboy. Hand-written on a copy of this carte-de-visite at the National History Museum is the caption that makes the symbolism explicit: Maximiliano (charro).7 It was the European royalty that discovered the nationalist potential later tapped by movie stars like Jorge Negrete and Tito Guízar.

By the 1860s the photographic documentation of world events had become a standard practice, and the tragic appeal of Maximilian and Carlota's ill-fated Empire made this an ideal subject for market-oriented vendors of cartes-de-visite. An unusually thorough documentation of the execution of Maximilian was photographed by François Aubert, and later widely distributed as cartes-de-visite by Disdéri, Auguste Péraire, the Viennese studios of Auguste Klein and von Jägermayer, Aubert himself, and other photographers. Aubert did not photograph the actual execution, and may not even have been present, but he did record portraits of the three victims, the adobe wall against which the three were shot, the emperor's clothing after the execution, the embalmed emperor in a glass-covered casket (his eyesockets stuffed with glass eyes borrowed from a statue of the Virgen de los Remedios), and at least two images of the execution squad, one at attention and one at ease.8

Aubert's images were rephotographed, printed and sold by other photographers as cartes-de-visite, but never as deliriously as in a constructed photograph produced from Aubert's images by Adrien Cordiglia. Using the photograph of the execution site as a background, he superimposed the firing squad, divided into two halves and placed in the lower corners, and the three victims. The images of the victims are themselves constructions, assembled from headshots placed on borrowed bodies. Beneath Maximilian his last words are written in by hand: "Mexicans, may my blood be the last that is shed and may it revive this unhappy country." The figure of the emperor appears larger than the two generals or the members of the firing squad, as if to emphasize his relative importance. In one sense, this unusual image seeks to construct the decisive photograph that Aubert never took, the actual execution itself, with the executioners and victims placed together at the site of the event. But more than simply attempting to reconstruct the execution scene, Cordiglia's composite draws on other pictorial traditions and hints at an unexplored potential of the medium. Other artists, especially lithographers, were free to invent their vision of this scene, and later Edouard Manet painted three versions, based on prints and on these photographs.9 Contemporary prints commemorating the same event combined several scenarios into a single image, such as an anonymous Italian lithograph of the same year that integrates a portrait of the Emperor with scenes of "the departure from Miramare," "the arrival in the capital city," and "the betrayal." Many of these circulated as cartes-de-visite reproductions.

Less than three decades after its introduction, Mexican photography was a surprisingly mature medium with distinctly national characteristics. Long before the modernists of the 1920s, photographers turned their attention to the indigenous faces and traditions, the characteristic landscapes, and the iconic national symbols in ways that sometimes anticipate the Post-Revolutionary Renaissance. Like the image of the apparition of the dark Virgin before the Austrian royalty, Mexican photographic practice in the 19th century was a mixture of imported and autochthonous elements. The juxtaposition of the imported archduke and Mexico's patron saint is not an inappropriate one. Maximilian had commissioned an oil of the Virgen de Guadelupe from Joaquín Ramírez, one of Mexico's leading academic painters. Though the Royal Guadalupana ascension is perhaps technically awkward, it embodies a series of revealing contradictions, and like many of the images of these early photographers, in all their hybrid complexities, achieves a rare beauty.



1 — On 3 December 1839, three and a half months after Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, Isidore Niépce, and François Arago gave the first public demonstration of the daguerreotype before the French Academy of Sciences, the printer Louis Prélier landed in Veracruz with two daguerreotype cameras that he had purchased in Paris. News of the daguerreotype had already arrived in Mexico. Prior to revealing the details of the photographic procedure in August 1839, Daguerre made public the news of his discovery, as early as January of the same year, and displayed sample images. A Mexico City newspaper, El Diario del Gobierno de la Republica Mexicana, gave the first account of the daguerreotype in Mexico on 5 June 1839.
2 — Quoted in El que mueve, no sale! Fotógrafos ambulantes (México D.F.: Museo nacional de culturas populares, 1989), pp. 32-33.
3 — La Bandera de Jalisco, vol. 1, no. 28 (6 June 1888), p. 4.
4 — Philippe Roussin, "Photographing the Second Discovery of America," in Mexico Through Foreign Eyes (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), p. 97.
5 — Olivier Debrosie, "Fotografía: verdad y belleza: notas sobre la historia de fotografía en México," México en el Arte, no. 23 (Fall 1989), p. 7.
6 — The Prussian defeat of Austria made Napoleon's alliance considerably less valuable, and the mounting cost of the entire effort made it unpopular in France.
7 — Mexican cowboy celebrated in the national cinema of the Golden Age.
8 — Even decades after the execution of Maximilian, the execution site continued to be a point of interest, and in the early 20th century photographers such as François Miret and C. B. Waite documented and sold views of the chapel later erected on the spot.
9 — Juliet Wilson-Bareau, Manet, the Execution of Maximilian: Painting, Politics and Censorship (London: National Gallery, 1992).

A HAPPY MADNESS

by Jesse Lerner

A floral curtain is pulled back to reveal a smartly dressed brunette from the 1930s reclining on a well-appointed bed. She stares mesmerized into space, seemingly transfixed by a point in space somewhere below and to the left of the camera's lens. In her hands is an opium pipe, held at an angle above an extinguished burner, on which the camera, but not the subject's gaze, is focused. Is this a cautionary image of moral decay, a celebration of the libertine and liberated pursuit of pleasure, or a frank, non-judgmental reportage documenting urban vices? The absence of any clear editorial voice, and the matter-of-factness with which this and other illicit and typically invisible acts are presented for the camera, lead the viewer to wonder just how to interpret the striking photographs of drug use in Mexico City in the twenties and thirties.
This and many other arresting pictures of high living in Tenochtitlan between the World Wars are images from the Casasola photo agency, perhaps the most important photojournalistic outfit in early 20th Century Mexico. Agustín Victor Casasola and his younger brother Miguel began their careers as press photographers around 1900 working for the El Imparcial, for whom they documented presidential travels and state ceremonies. The narrow limits on freedom of the press made them in effect the dictator Porfirio Díaz' propagandists during the latest year of his rule, although they also produced some photographs of the dictatorship's darker side--photo essays that could be interpreted as anti-government--of the poverty which was normally hidden from the camera behind the positivists' facade of rational order, marble monuments and scientific progress. They supplemented their work as journalists photographing weddings, first communions, public works projects and the like. When Díaz left for exile in Europe the Casasolas covered the story. The Revolution that followed changed photojournalism in Mexico definitively. When foreign journalists began to flood the country to report on the civil conflict that erupted in 1911, the brothers formed an agency with several colleagues to better contend with this new, more competitive environment. The Agencia Fotográfica Nacional, founded in 1912, grew into a wide-ranging archive of over half a million negatives, as the brothers began to acquired existing collections, beginning with the photo archives of their former employers, El Imparcial. The Casasola collection thus includes not only photographs taken by the two brothers, their children Agustín Jr. and Gustavo, and other Casasola family members, but also the work of over four hundred other photographers.1 Soon Miguel abandoned photography, at least temporarily, for a more active role as a combatant in the army of Alvaro Obregón.2 Agustín Victor didn't leave the capital often in pursuit of pictures, but in 1913 the conflict came to the streets of the city. While the Casasolas continued to photograph after the Revolution, producing images, like those of the drug users, for newspapers including El Universal, Excelsior, and El Demócrata, their business increasingly involved the marketing of their archive and the publication of visual histories that drew on their extensive holdings.3
Collectively the Casasola images, now housed in the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia's Fototeca in Pachuca, Hidalgo, offer a cross-section of (for the most part urban) society over the course of the first half of the Twentieth Century. The archive is still almost synonymous with its powerful images of the Revolution, any number of which have gained the status of icons: the "Adelita" leaning out of the train car, Pancho Villa looking quite comfortable in the presidential chair, with a more ambivalent Zapata at his side, and so on. These are photographs that, after having been reproduced countless times, are ingrained in the imagination as the defining visual record of the first social revolution of the past century.4 But given that the photographers whose work comprises the archive were active both before and after the armed conflict of the Revolution, and given the sheer size of the collection, it should not be surprising that the Casasola archive involves much more than these well-known images of civil war. What is startling is that segment of the archive contains the extensive record of drug use and abuse in the twenties and thirties. Some of the images seem clearly legible: policemen posing with quantities of confiscated contraband, the detailed record of the means and subterfuge involved in transporting drugs, and so on. But others present such a non-judgmental look at a topic that is typically absent from the photographic memory that one cannot but wonder: for whom were these images produced?
The images capture a moment in which drug use was in a process of dramatic and rapid changes. There were two broad patterns that defined drug use in Mexico in the period prior to this era. One of these was centuries old, and employed herbs, cacti and mushrooms as a means to access the supernatural. In Pre-Columbian society these were regulated and largely dominated by professional holy men, part of a variety of mechanisms that maintained the social order though controlling contact with the divine. Needless to say, with the Conquest the Church did what it could to eliminate these practices, but to a great extent failed to do so. Instead what frequently emerged after the arrival of the Spanish were syncretic practices that mixed and matched Catholic saints and iconography with the indigenous traditions of ritual hallucinogen usage. This is the yerbería mexicana that brought Artaud to the sierra Tarahumara and the hippies to Huautla de Jiménez. The conflation of the Eucharist with Pre-Cortesian peyote rites brought the Saints, the Virgin and Christ to life for believers under the influence.5 Though we know the sacred use of drugs was commonplace in a Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century Mexico, where the professed allegiance to Catholicism masked a vast diversity of religious practices, there is scant photographic documentation of this sort of use. The exception is the work of Karl Lumholtz, the Norwegian zoologist, ethnographer, photographer and botanist, images created over extensive periods of travel and fieldwork. In 1890, after securing support of the American Museum of Natural History, he traveled to the cliff dwellings of Arizona, and then Sonora and Chihuahua. He returned to Mexico in 1892-93 to study and photograph the Tarahumaras. After exhibiting his photographs at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, he undertook his longest expedition. Between 1894 and 1897, Lumholtz spent extended periods living with the Coras and Huicholes. In 1898 he traveled to the northwest region of Mexico with the anthropologist Ales Hrdlicka, once more to live with the Huicholes and the Tarahumaras, and he returned again in 1905 and 1909-1910. In his photographic archive there are glimpses of the peyote rites that brought visions of the divine to the faithful.6
The other broad category of drug use during the Díaz dictatorship was a more recent phenomena, and one less uniquely Mexican. As in many other parts of the world, decent, middle-class citizens in the late Nineteenth Century indulged in a range of over-the-counter "energizing" pills and powders, typically cocaine or morphine derivatives. According to the memoirs of Francisco Rivera Avila, entitled "When the Coca had no Cola," this marketing of these drugs through pharmacies continued well into the nineteen-twenties, in spite of the Revolutionary-era legislation aimed at eliminating the trade.7 Though evidence is scarce, there is every reason to believe this market was prospering at the turn of the Century. For the pre-Revolutionary society of the Porfiriato, the stance taken regarding drug use was defined by social class, both that of the user and that of the individual passing judgment. One contemporary newspaper made this distinction clear: "only in the spectacle of the drunk of the streets, half-naked, does alcohol terrify. The discreet drunk, well-dressed, passing in a car, is something else, respectable and decent."8 Marijuana was prevalent in Pre-Revolutionary society, but it was a proletarian vice, associated with prisons, the lumpen's vasilada [meaning to enjoy, especially when stoned], and off-duty hours of enlisted men, and thus largely the purview of the guardians of public morality. References to the popular appreciation of pot are found in song, and slang expressions.
The drug use portrayed in the Casasola archives is different from these other cases; it is neither the mushroom trip into an ecstatic religious haze as practiced by the indigenous shaman, nor the polite Porfirian señoras popping the cocaine-laced "Dr. Ross' Pills of Life" or some other ersatz medication. The Casasola archive seems to focus instead on the pastime of a new, cosmopolitan subject, testing the limits of freedom. It is again not in photography, but in popular songs, films, newspaper reports, poetry and literature that we find the context that allow us to understand the world in which these photographs were created. There is much evidence in these records of popular attitudes and manners to lead us to believe that recreational drug use was a part of an urban, bohemian underworld, an emergent, modern public space of altered sensation, accelerated rhythms and exaggerated emotions. Here playboys, poets, movie starlets, artists and flappers loitered in smart cafés and said to themselves, in the words of an anonymous writer in Revista de revistas, "From today on, when I am bored, very bored, very bored, so bored that neither Greig nor Chopin nor Beethoven nor Debussy can get me high enough, I take ether or 'coco'."9 Germán List Arzubide, in his chronicle of the Estridentista movement, the vanguardist bad-boys of Mexican arts and letters of the nineteen-twenties, reports on one wild party where "hygienic tobacco" was used, and a misogynistic new verse was first read:

That night, beyond all the almanacs, the squeaking doors of metropolitan horror opened. “A Woman Chopped in Pieces” surprised the sonnet-writers that could not triangulate and did not want to know about women, and the shout of the academic parrots added enough green so that the reporters stayed up until dawn on the rooftops of the new horizon. The general staff of Estridentismo, with Maples Arce, pointed their loudspeaker to the road and Huitzilopoxtli, waking up from centuries of Manuel Horta and Panchito Monterde, gave time a hand by looping the loop.10

[Aquella noche, fuera de todos los almanaques, abrió chirriando las puertas del espanto metropolitano. "Una Mujer Hecha Pedazos" asustó a los soneteros que no se trianulizan y no quieren saber de mujeres, y el grito de los loros académicos, puso la suficiente verdura para los reporteros que vieron amanecer desde las azoteas del nuevo horizonte. El Estado Mayor del Estridentismo, con Maples Arce, plantó su magnavoz hacia el camino y Huitzilopoxtli, desamorrándose los siglos de Manuel Horta y de Panchito Monterde, dió la mano al tiempo en looping the loop.]

A fiction film from Orizaba, Veracruz, from the same time as the Casasola images and the Estridentista text, also provides a context for understanding the photographs. Gabriel García Moreno's feature-length film drama El puño de hierro [The Fist of Iron, 1927], the story of a young man's experiment with heroin, avoids both List Arzurbide's euphoric rhetoric and the moralizing hysteria of contemporary journalistic accounts (or a later film like Marijuana: el monstro verde [Marijuana, the Green Monster, 1936]). Here we see the casual experimentation with needles and opiates in the backrooms of cafés, a provincial version of the bohemian atmosphere that pervades the Casasola images. While the main narrative line of El puño de hierro seems to fulfill prohibitionist expectations, the film undercuts its own message of temperance with a coda that suggests that all is well. The protagonist, coming to, and finding his friends frolicking at the beach, and not mired addiction and violence as he had dreamt, swears off further experiments with heroin. In dismissing the misadventures and tragedies depicted earlier in the film as a nothing more than a bad dream induced by drugs, the director García Moreno seems to suggest that junk is little more than the harmless, youthful folly of the overly curious.11
This permissive attitude taken towards recreational drugs in the beginning of the last century gave way to greater and greater efforts to prohibit and restrict. It has been argued that a gradual shrinking of the spaces of tolerance in Mexico over the first part of the Twentieth Century was one which in the end responded more to external interests, especially those of the North American agents of "moral hygiene," than to nation ones.12 While changing international attitudes did in fact stir the state and their police into a repressive mode, arguments for and against specific drugs also responded to internal political dynamics as well. The xenophobic violence targeting the Chinese immigrant community, a demagogic scapegoating cynically utilized as a political tool, found an ideal pretext for racial intolerance in opium.13 The Casasola images coincide with a watershed in international efforts to control the global flow of opium and its derivatives,14 in which the Mexicans participated, beginning with the national ban imposed by Venustiano Carranza at the end of 1915.
The present-day mores of narco-trafficers, with their powerful weapons and ostentatious lifestyles (the latter spawning what one architectural critic, Lawrence Herzog, calls "narchitecture," those palatial monuments to poor taste), and "wars" for and on drugs are distant from what is visible in the Casasola images. Instead, we see a world where current prohibitions were barely in the process of being articulated, in which retailers were able to openly market the certain chemicals and organic products with characterization such as "energizing," "medicinal," or "hygienic." At this time when experiments with opium or heroin were as likely to be understood as a badge of sophistication than a symptom of a disease or a criminal behavior, Casasola's photographers were able to create these arresting images of intoxication.


1 This calculation was made by Ignacio Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba, who was charged with cataloguing the Casasola collection for the in the Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia's Fototeca, in "A Fresh Look at the Casasola Archive, " History of Photography vol. 20, no 3 (Autumn 1996), p. 191.

2 Gustavo Casasola's role as a combatant in the Revolution is described in an interview with Gustavo and Mario Casasola by Adriana Malvido, La Jornada, November 21, 1991.

3 The Casasola family published several multi-volume sets of images from their archive, most notably Álbum Histórico Gráfico (1921), Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana (1942) and Seis Siglos de Historia Gráfica de México. (1978)

4 Images of the Mexican Revolution from the Casasola archive are reproduced in Jefes, heroes, y caudillos (Mexico City: Rio de la Luz, 1986); Gustavo Casasola, Historia gráfica de la Revolución Mexicana, (México, Ed. Gustavo Casasola, 1942); and David Elliott, ed., Tierra y Libertad!: Photographs of Mexico 1900-1935 from the Casasola Archive, (Oxford: St Martin's Press, 1986). A broader selection of photographs from the archive appears in Agustín V. Casasola (Paris: Photo Poche, 1992), The World of Agustín Víctor Casasola (Washington, D.C.: Fondo del Sol Visual Arts and Media Center, 1984), and David Maawad et. al., Los inicios del México contemporáneo (Mexico City: FONCA/CONACULTA/Casa de las Imagenes/INAH, 1997). A selection of images of drug use and abuse from the archive appears in Ricardo Pérez Monfort, Yerba, goma, y polvo (Mexico City: Ediciones Era/Instituto Nacional de Antrologogía e Historia, 1999).

5 Serge Gruzinski, Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner, 1492-2019 trans. Heather MacLean (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 170-172, and The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries trans. Eileen Corrigan (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993) pp. 220-221. See also Peter T. Furst, Alucinógenos y cultura (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1980).

6 See Lumholtz's books, which include reproductions of these images, Unknown Mexico (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1902); New Trails in Mexico (New York: Scribner, 1912); Symbolism of the Huichol Indians (New York: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 1900); and Decorative Art of the Huichol Indians (New York: Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, 1904).

7 An translatable pun--"cola" in Spanish means "tail," in Estampillas Jarochas, Veracruz: Instituto Veracruzano de Cultura, 1988).

8 Diario Ilustrado, 2 November, 1908, quoted in Ricardo Pérez Monfort, "Fragmentos de historia de las 'drogas' en México, 1870-1920, in Hábitos, normas y escándalo: Prensa, criminalidad y drogas durante el porfiriato tardío (Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés, 1997), p. 168.

9 Revista de revistas, 7 June, 1925.

10 Germán List Arzubide, El movimiento estridentista (Jalapa, Veracruz: Ediciones de Horizonte, 1927), p. 74.

11 The Filmoteca of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México recently completed a restoration of this film that involved a re-editing of the existing materials. To what extent the re-edited version has altered the moral message of the film remains open for further study. For more on this film and García Moreno, see Dante Octavio Hernández Guzmán, Imágenes en movimiento en Orizaba (Orizaba, Veracruz: Comunidad Morelos, 2001), pp. 30-34; Gabriel Ramírez, Crónica del cine mudo mexicano (Mexico City: Cineteca Nacional, 1989), pp. 234-235.

12 Ricardo Pérez Montfort, "De vicios populares, corruptelas y toxicomanías," in Juntos y medios revueltos: La ciudad de México durante el sexenio del General Cárdenas y otros ensayos, (Mexico City: Ediciones UníoS, 2000), p. 111-134.

13 Juan Puig, Entre el río perla y el Nazas: : la China decimonónica y sus braceros emigrantes, la colonia china de Torreón y la matanza de 1911, (Mexico City: CONACULTA, 1992), pp. 173 ff.; Jorge Gómez Izquierdo, El movimiento antichino en México, 1870-1934: Problemas del racismo y nacionalismo durante la Revolución Mexicana (Mexico City: Institúto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 1991).

14 David F. Musto, The American Disease, Origins of Narcotics Control. (New York: Yale University Press, 1973).