Celia Dunne (Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge)
From Maps of Progress to Crime Maps (and Back Again?): The Plasticity of the Aerial Shot as Deployed in Mexican Urban Film
This paper examines two Mexican urban films - Ismael Rodríguez’s El hombre de papel (1963) and Fermín Gómez Lara’s Don de Dios (2005) - focusing on the short sequences of aerial shots interspersed with the main narrative action (shot ‘on-the-ground’). In El hombre de papel, these sequences are comprised of shots of iconic symbols of Mexico City’s newly-gained status as a modern metropolis (for example, the Torre Latinoamericano and modernist housing projects) and shots of the ciudades perdidas (shanty towns) that sprang up on desolate patches of land at the fringes of the city proper. The aerial shots establish a nexus between the two contrasting spaces, articulating a sense of the city as a whole; a totality which it is almost impossible to experience somatically. I will explore how this continuity contributes to El hombre’s overall ambivalence toward the epoch’s prevailing idiom of progress, even as it fails to acknowledge important disjunctures in Mexico City’s fabric, for instance, the existence of poor quality housing in the city centre.
It is precisely one such resolutely proletarian neighbourhood, Tepito, that functions as the locus of Don de dios’s plot. Here, the aerial shots are extracted from news footage of police raids on Tepito, which, I will argue, potentiates a preconditioned mode of viewing. Thus, the film interacts with other prevalent discourses, for example, crime statistics, to (re)assert Tepito’s criminality. Yet the culpable disavowal, both by the media and Lara, of a wider spectrum of tepiteño ways of life might be conceived of as a rededication of the aerial shot to the service of mapping progress, and this time without the ambiguity present in El hombre. I will consider how the emphasis on the ‘backwardness’ of a particular neighbourhood might work to validate Mexico City’s precarious (self-) definition as a global city.
It is precisely one such resolutely proletarian neighbourhood, Tepito, that functions as the locus of Don de dios’s plot. Here, the aerial shots are extracted from news footage of police raids on Tepito, which, I will argue, potentiates a preconditioned mode of viewing. Thus, the film interacts with other prevalent discourses, for example, crime statistics, to (re)assert Tepito’s criminality. Yet the culpable disavowal, both by the media and Lara, of a wider spectrum of tepiteño ways of life might be conceived of as a rededication of the aerial shot to the service of mapping progress, and this time without the ambiguity present in El hombre. I will consider how the emphasis on the ‘backwardness’ of a particular neighbourhood might work to validate Mexico City’s precarious (self-) definition as a global city.
