Full text loading...
The aesthetics of mestizaje is not a pure aesthetics. It is a negotiation between divergent poetics that superimposes a complex layering of sources and cultural traditions, creating a baroque form of realism that, by definition, is border-crossing. This reliance on mestizaje as an aesthetic principle is characterized by a fragmented style that, in the case of Carlos Reygadas’s cinema, is eminently experimental: it refers to a contradictory and complicated subjectivity that relies on liminality as a means of aesthetic expression. Taking Battle in Heaven as a case study, this article argues that the notion of mestizaje mobilizes a cinematic realism that is central to the notion of impurity. It stands as a contemporary realist style that privileges the quotidian, the evocative and the implausible, underlying mestizaje in terms of multiple negotiations and struggles between different regimes of power and people inhabiting different cultural codes and systems of knowledge. As a result, mestizo films can be characterized by an aesthetic approach that refuses to comply with prevailing modes of representation in order to work towards the construction of a hybrid visibility. Mestizaje is a category that unfolds from antagonizing worlds, and those who are called mestizos and mestizas are always its deformations, mestizando (‘weaving’) the traces of a cultural legacy into what Gilles Deleuze has called, next to Latin American’s Third Cinema, ‘a people to come’.