Skip to content
1981
New Perspectives in Film and Realism, Part 1
  • ISSN: 1474-2756
  • E-ISSN: 2040-0578

Abstract

The aesthetics of 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 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 as a case study, this article argues that the notion of 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 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, 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. is a category that unfolds from antagonizing worlds, and those who are called and are always its deformations, (‘weaving’) the traces of a cultural legacy into what Gilles Deleuze has called, next to Latin American’s Third Cinema, ‘a people to come’.

Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.1386/ncin_00051_1
2025-10-23
2026-04-17

Metrics

Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Althusser, Louis ([1970] 2008), On Ideology (trans. B. Brewster), London: Verso.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Anzaldúa, Gloria (1987), Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera, San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.
    [Google Scholar]
  3. Anzaldúa, Gloria and Keating, Ana Louise (2015), Light in the Dark = Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Baca, Damián (2008), Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
    [Google Scholar]
  5. Balibar, Étienne and Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice (2011), Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (trans. C. Turner), London: Verso.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Barthes, Roland (1974), S/Z (trans. R. Miller), New York: Hill and Wang.
    [Google Scholar]
  7. Bazin, André ([1967] 2005), What is Cinema?, vol. 1 (trans. H. Gray), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Bhabha, Homi (1990), Nation and Narration, Abingdon: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. Bourdieu, Pierre ([1979] 2010), Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (trans. R. Nice), Abingdon: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. Catelli, Laura (2017), ‘Mestizaje, hibridez y transmedialidad: Categorías en tensión en performances y prácticas fronterizas de Guillermo Gómez Peña y La Pocha Nostra’, Revista del Centro de Investigaciones Teórico-literarias, 4:6, pp. 17490, https://doi.org/10.1080/10609164.2022.2104050.
    [Google Scholar]
  11. Catelli, Laura (2020), Arqueología del Mestizaje: Colonialismo y Racialización, Temuco: Ediciones Universidad de la Frontera.
    [Google Scholar]
  12. Corro, Pablo (2012), Retóricas Del Cine Chileno: Ensayos Con El Realismo, Santiago: Editorial Cuarto Propio.
    [Google Scholar]
  13. Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera (2010), Violencias (re) encubiertas en Bolivia, La Paz: Piedra Rota.
    [Google Scholar]
  14. Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera (2012), ‘Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A reflection on the practices and discourses of decolonization’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 111:1, pp. 95109, https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-1472612.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Davalos, Karen Mary (2001), Exhibiting Mestizaje: Mexican (American) Museums in the Diaspora, Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  16. De Castro, Juan E. (2002), Mestizo Nations: Culture, Race, and Conformity in Latin American Literature, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  17. Deleuze, Gilles ([1985] 1989), Cinema 2: The Time-Image (trans. H. Tomlinson and R. Caleta), Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. De Luca, Tiago (2014), Realism of the Senses in World Cinema: The Experience of Physical Reality, London: I.B. Tauris.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. Echeverría, Bolivar (2005), La modernidad de lo barroco, Mexico City: Ediciones Era.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. Echeverría, Bolivar (2007), Mestizaje y Códigofagia: Entrevista con Bolívar Echeverría, Berlin: Freie Universität Berlin.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. Goddard, Michael (2013), The Cinema of Raúl Ruiz: Impossible Cartographies, New York: Wallflower Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  22. Hernández, Ellie and Anzaldúa, Gloria (1995), ‘Re-thinking margins and borders: An interview with Gloria Anzaldúa’, Discourse, 18:1–2, pp. 715.
    [Google Scholar]
  23. Knight, Alan (1990), ‘Racism, revolution, and Indigenismo: Mexico, 1910–1940’, in R. Graham (ed.), The Idea of Race in Latin America, 1870–1940, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 71113.
    [Google Scholar]
  24. Koehler, Robert and Reygadas, Carlos (2013), ‘The impossible becomes reality: An interview with Carlos Reygadas’, Cinéaste, 38:3, pp. 1015.
    [Google Scholar]
  25. Lahr-Vivaz, Elena (2016), Mexican Melodrama: Film and Nation from the Golden Age to the New Wave, Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Lugones, María (2003), Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
    [Google Scholar]
  27. Marks, Laura U. (2000), The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  28. Merchant, Paul (2017), ‘Rhetorics of Chilean cinema (Pablo Corro, 2014)’, Film Studies 16:1, pp. 94102, https://doi.org/10.7227/fs.16.0008.
    [Google Scholar]
  29. Moliner, María ([1966] 1990), Diccionario de uso del español, Madrid: Greidos.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. Morandé, Pedro ([1984] 2017), Cultura y modernización en América Latina: Ensayo sociológico acerca de la crisis del desarrollismo y de su superación, Santiago: Instituto de Estudios de la Sociedad.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Naficy, Hamid (2001), An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  32. Nagib, Lúcia and Jerslev, Anne (eds) (2019), Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film, London: I.B. Tauris.
    [Google Scholar]
  33. Nancy, Jean-Luc (1994), ‘Cut throat sun’, in A. Arteaga (ed.), An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, pp. 11323.
    [Google Scholar]
  34. North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA) (2002), ‘Racial politics, racial identities: Race and racism in the Americas, part III’, NACLA Report on the Americas, 35:6, p. 15, https://doi.org/10.1080/10714839.2002.11722520.
    [Google Scholar]
  35. Ordóñez, Samanta (2017), ‘Carlos Reygadas’ Batalla En El Cielo/Battle in Heaven (2005): Disarticulating the brown male body from myths of Mexican’, Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 14:1, pp. 7794, https://doi.org/10.1386/slac.14.1.77_1.
    [Google Scholar]
  36. Paz, Octavio (1961), ‘The sons of Malinche’, in The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Other Mexico (trans. L. Kemp), New York: Grove Press, pp. 6588.
    [Google Scholar]
  37. Pérez, Emma (1999), The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  38. Pérez-Torres, Rafael (1998), ‘Chicano ethnicity, cultural hybridity, and the Mestizo voice’, American Literature, 70:1, pp. 15376, https://doi.org/10.2307/2902459.
    [Google Scholar]
  39. Pérez-Torres, Rafael (2006), Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  40. Pratt, Mary Louise (1992), Imperial Eye: Travel Writing and Transculturation, Abingdon: Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  41. Rancière, Jacques (2010), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (trans. S. Corcoran), London: Continuum.
    [Google Scholar]
  42. Rancière, Jacques ([2011] 2013), Béla Tarr, the Time After (trans. E. Beranek), Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  43. Rancière, Jacques (2019), The Intervals of Cinema (trans. J. Howe), New York: Verso.
    [Google Scholar]
  44. Reygadas, Carlos (2005), Batalla en el cielo (Battle in Heaven).
    [Google Scholar]
  45. Reygadas, Carlos (2022), Presencia, Mexico City: Andante & Corriente Alterna.
    [Google Scholar]
  46. Rodriguez, Richard (2002), Brown: The Last Discovery of America, New York: Viking.
    [Google Scholar]
  47. Sandoval, Chela (1991), ‘U.S. third world feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world’, Genders, 10, pp. 124.
    [Google Scholar]
  48. Tarica, Estelle (2008), The Inner Life of Mestizo Nationalism, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  49. Vasconcelos, José ([1925] 1976), La raza cosmica: misión de la raza Iberoamericana, Mexico: Aguilar.
    [Google Scholar]
  50. Vattimo, Gianni and Rovatti, Pier Aldo (2006), El pensamiento débil, Madrid: Cátedra.
    [Google Scholar]
  51. Wood, Jason (2019), ‘Battle on earth and in heaven’, MUBI Notebook, 22 April, https://mubi.com/en/notebook/posts/battles-on-earth-and-in-heaven. Accessed 2 July 2025.
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.1386/ncin_00051_1
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was a success
Invalid data
An error occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error
Please enter a valid_number test