Amores perros
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IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
3. Primary Texts: Film
Alejandro
González Iñárritu. Amores
perros.
Key Terms (tags): puzzle film, mexico,
Supporting References:
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“Amores Perros ★★★
Love's a Bitch 2000 (R) A Mexico City car accident and
the fortunes of a dog bring together three stories of love, loss, and
redemption in director/producer Gonzalez Inarritu's impressive
feature debut. Octavio's love for his brother's wife leads him to
enter his dog, Cofi, in a dogfight for elopement money. When Cofi is
wounded, it leads to a car chase, and the central accident. A woman,
Valeria, is injured and permanently scarred in the accident. This
affects her beau, who has just left his family to be with her. A
homeless man, a former revolutionary turned hitman, witnesses the
crash and rescues the dog, who becomes a part of his search for his
estranged daughter. The plot structure invites comparisons to
Tarantino, but these characters inhabit a more
consequences-andmorality-oriented world than Q's characters ever did.
Film came under fire from animal rights activists for the dogfight
scenes, although it was made clear from the start that no animals
were actually harmed. 153m/C VHS, DVD, Wide. MX Vanessa
Bauche, Emilio Echeverria, Gael Garcia Bernal, Goya Toledo, Alvaro
Guerrero, Jorge Salinas, Marco Perez, Rodrigo Murray, Humberto Busto,
Gerardo Campbell, Rosa Maria Bianchi, Dunia Saldivar, Adriana
Barraza; D: Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu; W:
Guillermo Arriaga; C: Rodrigo Prieto; M:
Gustavo Santaolalla. British Acad. '01: Foreign Film; Natl. Bd. of
Review '01: Foreign Film.”
- Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. "Mexico, film in." A Dictionary of Film Studies. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2012. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
Mexico, film
in. Moving pictures were first seen in Mexico on 14 August 1896, at
an exhibition in the capital, Mexico City, of the Lumière
Cinematograph. By the following year, newsreels
and actualities
were being shot by local filmmakers, and by 1905 local entrepreneurs
were involved in film production and exhibition. The 1910 Mexican
Revolution attracted filmmakers from around the world, and its
leader, Pancho Villa, took the title role in US director Raoul
Walsh's first film, an early biopic
entitled The Life of General Villa (1914). Mexico has
been a magnet for foreign filmmakers ever since, from Sergei
Eisenstein (Que viva Mexico, 1931) and Fred Zinnemann
and Paul Strand (Redes/Nets, 1934) in the 1930s; to
Spanish director Luis Buñuel, most of whose films between 1946 and
1960 (including Los olvidados/The Young and the Damned,
1950) were made in Mexico; as well as blacklisted director Herbert
Biberman (Salt of the Earth, 1954) (see hollywood
blacklist), and Miguel Littín, exiled from
Chile,
who made a number of films in Mexico, including Actas de
Marusia/Letters from Marusia (1975).
Domestic production of fiction films
became firmly established after World War I, a key early feature
being El automóvil gris/The Grey Motor Car (Enrique
Rosas, 1919). The period of Mexico's transition to sound saw the rise
of a group of talented filmmakers, including director Emilio
Fernández (‘El Indio’) and cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa, who
went on to produce a distinguished body of work during the golden age
of the 1940s, when successes like Fernández's Enamorada/Woman
in Love (1946) conferred international credibility on
Mexican cinema. The 1930s and 1940s also saw the growth of a local
star
system and the establishment of popular film genres. The comedia
ranchera, for example, with its singing cowboys, offered a
distinctively Mexican take on the western,
as in Allá en el Rancho Grande/Over on the Rancho Grande
(Fernando des Fuentes, 1936). The Mexican film melodrama's
unique blend of music and dance ingredients drew on established
popular cultural forms and traditions, combining these with themes
around modernization, gender, family, and national identity. This
highly popular genre enjoyed its heyday in the 1940s with films such
as Fernández's much-loved classic María Candelaria
(1943)—and continues to appeal, as its revival in María Novaro's
Danzón (1991) suggests.
By the 1950s, the 150 or so feature
films produced annually in Mexico were enjoying wide distribution in
other Spanish-speaking countries: among the most popular of these was
the latsploitation
film—an enduring Latin American variant of the exploitation
film comprising sensational treatments of gangsters, drug-runners,
vampires, Aztec mummies, mad scientists, and the like. Alongside
this, a new independent national cinema was being created outside the
commercial mainstream, under the aegis of a film
society movement whose filmmaking members
favoured documentary
realism, as in Benito Alazraki's Raíces/Roots
(1953), shot on location among Mexico's indigenous people (who form
30 per cent of the country's population). By the 1960s, under
pressure of competition from television and from US imports, Mexico's
feature film industry fell into a decline which lasted until the
early 1980s. However, a brief revival in the quantity, if not the
quality, of domestically-produced commercial films took place after a
new government-backed initiative, IMCINE (Instituto Mexicao de
Cinematográfia), took on the task of overseeing cinema policy,
including distribution and exhibition as well as production of films.
By the early 1990s, the annual output of locally-made films had
fallen to its lowest since the 1930s, though these same years did see
a rise in the number of internationally acclaimed quality films made
with a mix of public, private, and foreign funding: successes from
this period include La mujer del puerto/The Woman of the Port
(Arturo Ripstein, 1991) and Como agua para chocolate/Like
Water for Chocolate (Alfonso Auro, 1992). A new generation
of Mexican directors is currently making a considerable impact on the
international scene—among them Alejandro González Iñárritu
(Amores perros/Love's a Bitch, 2000); Alfonso Cuarón
(Y tu mamá también/And Your Mother, Too, 2001); and
Guillermo del Toro (El labirinto del fauno/Pan's Labyrinth,
2006). However, the distribution and exhibition sides of the domestic
film industry continue to be dominated by block-booked Hollywood
productions, and these art-house films are not widely exhibited in
Mexico itself. See also chicano
cinema; indigenous
film; latin
america, film in.
- Kuhn, Annette, and Guy Westwell. "puzzle film." A Dictionary of Film Studies. : Oxford University Press, 2012. Oxford Reference. 2012. Date Accessed 3 Sep. 2013
puzzle film
(modular film, complex storytelling). A successful cycle
of films made since the 1990s that modify or
subvert classical storytelling techniques by means of variously
complex modes of plotting, narrative, and narration. Early films in
the cycle include Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, US,
1990) and Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, US, 1993),
with works of ever-increasing complexity appearing since the late
1990s. Directors and screenwriters associated with the puzzle film
include Alejandro Amenábar (Abre los ojos/Open Your Eyes,
Spain/France, Italy, 1997); Alejandro González Iñárritu (Love's
a Bitch/Amores perros, Mexico, 2000); and Spike Jonze and
Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, US, 2002). Forms of
complex storytelling may range from the interweaving of multiple
plotlines to forking-path narratives and network narratives,
with plots often involving failures or tricks of memory experienced
by a character that are narrated from that character's point
of view.
Since around 2005, there has been a
growing film studies literature on the puzzle film, much of it
devoted to pinpointing, in narratological terms, differing varieties
of complex storytelling (see narrative/narration).
Forking path narratives, for instance, explore multiple possible
futures for central characters: examples include Groundhog
Day; Lola Rennt/Run, Lola, Run (Tom Tykwer,
Germany, 1998); and Babel (Alejandro González
Iñárritu, US/Mexico, 2006). Anachronic narratives—which feature
flashbacks
and/or flashforwards in an intricate play of plot and story time—have
been identified as a very common variant of the puzzle film, with
examples including Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino,
US, 1994); Memento (Christopher Nolan, US, 2000);
Irréversible/Irreversible (Gaspar Noé, France,
2002); and 21 Grams (Alejandro González Iñárritu,
US/Germany, 2003). The anachronic Eternal Sunshine of the
Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, US, 2004), for example,
modifies the kinds of flashback structure fairly common in films made
since the 1940s by departing from the initial temporality of the
narrative and remaining in flashback for the majority of the film,
thus evoking uncertainty about the primacy of one narrative
temporality in relation to another (see filmic
time; plot/story).
The viewer's attempts to identify causal relations between story
events, and thus his or her narrative comprehension, are challenged
by puzzle films, and this has earned them the sobriquet mind-game
films; but their commercial success (as well as their popularity
as topics for student essays) suggests that many viewers relish the
challenge. In fact it can be argued that the films are deliberately
constructed in such a way as to encourage careful repeat viewing—an
exercise greatly facilitated by the availability of DVD
since the late 1990s. Since the puzzle film raises questions around
narrative comprehension and the sense-making aspect of film viewing,
it has chiefly attracted work in the areas of neoformalism
and cognitivism,
in which there has been some debate as to whether puzzle films
reject, subvert, or simply modify classical modes of filmic
narration.
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