Contemporary realism,
and modernity in the northern

mexican border cinema.

Realismo contemporáneo y modernidad en el cine de la

frontera norte de México.

Abstract

Based on the review of the strategies of realism and modern cinema, and from the analysis of the film
La Paloma y el
Lobo (2019) directed by
Carlos Lenin, this essay seeks to investigate the role played by the cinema of Mexico's northern border in understanding both the current
contextual conditions of the region, as well as the historical
evolution to which
the
border has been subjected since the establishment of neoliberalism in the country.

Keywords:

Border cinema; mexican cinema; modern cinema; neoliberalism.

Resumen

Partiendo de la revisión de
las estrategias del realismo y del
cine moderno, y analizando la película La Paloma
y el Lobo (2019) dirigida
por Carlos Lenin, este ensayo
busca indagar en el papel
desempeñado por el cine de la frontera
norte de México en la comprensión tanto de las condiciones contextuales actuales de la región, como
del devenir histórico al que se ha sometido la franja fronteriza a partir de la instauración del neoliberalismo en el país.

Palabras claves:

Cine fronterizo; cine mexicano;
cine moderno; neoliberalismo.

Table of contents. 1. Introduction. 2. Recording and invention of the real. 3. Modern becomings and realism
as a strategy. 4. La Paloma y
El Lobo: realism and modernity. 5. Conclusions.

How to cite: Sánchez Baltazar, A. N. (2023). Contemporary realism and modernity in the northern mexican border cinema. Ñawi. Arte, Diseño, Comunicación, Vol. 7 Núm. 1, 275-293.

https://www.nawi.espol.edu.ec/ www.doi.org/10.37785/nw.v7n1.a14e

This work is under an
international license Creative
Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0.

1.
Introduction

Although
cinema is recognized for its potential as a medium for recording reality, it
still generates diverse points of view regarding the discussion and questioning of its commitment to representations and the idea of truth. With modern and postmodern trends in film production, the boundaries between genres and narratives, as well as the
influences of the avant-garde, cause the
rules established by classical cinema, attached to certain standards and a
certain linearity, to the clear delimitation between
genres and styles,
to be broken at different
levels or impacts.

The
documentary has gradually lost its exclusivity with the real and true, while
fiction has lost its exclusivity with the false
or the imaginative. Nowadays, it is much more common
to find proposals that
deviate from tradition and focus on the intersection of genres, temporal leaps
and breaks, the juxtaposition of styles, the invention of time, self-reference, the meta-cinematic,
hybridization, etc. The real and the fictional, the present and the past,
relate in different ways as part of the same plane, no longer as oppositions or
contradictions but as constitutive of one another.

In this
sense, it might be risky to venture
into the analysis of the social aspects of cinematic products, to enter the real from fiction, or to try to understand our present from the invention of history. But as Marc Auge describes it, stories are always “the fruit of memory
and forgetting, of a work of composition and recomposition that reflects
the tension exerted
by the expectation of the
future on the interpretation of the past” (1998, 47).

Thus, this paper — which is extracted from the
advances of the research for the postgraduate course in which I find myself and, therefore, which is conceived as a project still
under construction and reformulation,
in constant dialogue —through the review and analysis of the film La Paloma y el Lobo (Lenin, 2019), is interested in exploring the way in which cinema allows us to investigate, not only in the testimonies
and ruins of a distant past, nor in its contribution to the analysis of representations
or historical records, but rather, from some proposals of the most current
cinema in which the boundaries between
times and layers of reality
have blurred, we can approach
the findings of the present from “a kind of simultaneous reality
to ours, which allows us to figure and interpret the world in which we live, to approach it from other
perspectives, to adopt
a new perspective, to reconfigure the testimony and memory that they leave on the present” (Urrutia & Fernández, 2020).

In
short, we hope, through traces and vestiges
that remain in the images of the present, to enter into the historical future of regions
such as the northern border
of Mexico that is recorded in the most current
cinematography to allow us, then to know our own present, which would otherwise seem understandable only at a distance in time. For this, it explores the strategies this cinema has taken from realism in its attempt
to approach, understand, and interpret the reality
of these spaces.

2.
Recording and invention of the real in cinema

The
filmic and photographic images are developed as record documents and support
the research, initially in anthropology and sociology. The first forms of mechanical image recording were considered
“neutral” artifacts, a tool for visualizing and documenting events.
As stated by Baer and Schnettler
(2009, 151), the origins of audiovisual production, based on its research
possibilities, also derived from the technical process of recording light in
chemical emulsions. It reinforced the postulates of the positivist paradigm by
fitting with the scientific and objectivist notions of the nineteenth century.

These
notions or qualities attributed to media like film have changed with
technological improvements, mass production, and resource access. But the
evolution of film as a tool for approaching, preserving, and understanding
reality also has to do with changes in our own perception of that reality, the
relationship we have established over time with concepts like truth, the
imaginary, fiction, and of course, reality.

In this
sense, when transiting and experimenting with cinema understood as a tool for
the recording of the real to one understood as a tool for artistic
narrative expression, we can identify three moments —which are
all-encompassing and ultimately never fixed or immovable— in the way in which cinema can be defined
from its structures, forms, and language, which I will describe in broad strokes:
a classic Hollywood
cinema that spans the beginnings in the 1900s and
up to, more or less,
the 1950s; a post-war European
modern cinema, from 1940 until
the 1970s; and a postmodern
cinema from the 1960s onwards that develops as a product of massification and
global consumerism (Gutiérrez, 2014; Zavala, 2005).

Classic
cinema is identified with what Noël Burch has identified as a Mode of
Institutional Representation. It is characterized by well-defined and
differentiated forms, which we can “see” and “read”
because it is through which we have been educated cinematographically. As the
author explains, this is what we understand by Cinematic Language, the
language taught in schools and the language we have internationalized over the years
through our experiences with films (Burch, 1987, 17).

Classical
cinema intends to correspond to reality, not to distort it, conventions, and
aspirations; its handling of time is linear and sequential; its narrative is
close, that is, it leaves no room for speculation or alternate or open endings;
the stories told are “dreamlike where the
protagonists achieve their desired goals” (Gutiérrez, 2014, 6); it
poses character, likewise, well delimited and delineated under ethical and
moral standards we can accept and interpret.

With the cultural shift brought about by the postwar years, these
optimistic and well-directed stories no
longer fit with the way viewers viewed their daily lives; thus, modern cinema
developed as a break from classical cinema
and established conventions. Like all trends and avant-garde movements, it emerged as a response to its time, as a confrontation with the consequences of

industrialization and the
devastation left by the war. According to Martha Gutiérrez, modern
cinema developed under “[two] aesthetic and ideological mottos: to show
an objective reality of the human being, and there is nothing more objective
than the subject, its condition as a dissatisfied subject, since human beings do not always achieve the desired objective” (2014, 7). Through modern cinema, reality
is perceived through
small, individual stories
in everyday life, in
the day-to-day life of what remains when everything else is in crisis or
corroded.

The
second motto of the cinema, as Gutiérrez (2014, 7) explains, is the
concept of auteur cinema. It is positioned as part of the work and the reality
to which it tries to refer; modern cinema, in this sense, is a way to show the
particular vision of the world the author has. With the reflexive turn on social sciences, the objectivity and the neutrality of audiovisual images
are questioned, and authors
are understood as creators of realities and images as different forms of
objectivity and subjectivity, realism, and reflexivity (Baer & Schnettler,
2009, 155). So that the correspondence of cinema with representation is
relative, rather than trying to show or be a mirror of reality, its motive is to reconstruct reality and offer with all it faces,
from rupture with its structures and through
experimentation.

Postmodern cinema begins to develop in a sort of
juxtaposition between the aforementioned forms of cinema. This cinema, for its part, does
not seek to show reality to reconstruct it. It simply does not believe this is
possible. Rather, it seeks new ways of explaining “relativizing in
partial truths according to points of view” (Gutiérrez, 2014, 13), according to the subjectivities
of those who intervene and those who are presented
in the film. With the entry into crisis of the
concept of representation, the possibilities of knowing or “giving voice” to others is questioned,
which gives even greater importance to the figure
and positioning of the gaze as “deconstructive or reflexive that
places in the foreground the need to contextualize producer and text”
(Baer & Schnettler, 2009, 156), to the film and its creators.

Lauro
Zavala (2005) explains that postmodern cinema does not have a linear or
sequential structure; it does not necessarily respect
the characters or stories, but the way they are presented matters. As
cinema owns its time, reality is proposed in scales and levels, sometimes
labyrinthine, spirals and fragments
where one can navigate and get lost, as an uncertain entity in permanent questioning and from the
diversity of ways we can interpret the world and ourselves in it; as Gerard
Imbert (2010, 18) explains, starts from a distrust of absolute truths or grand
narratives, and find spaces and times and their characters in constant tension,
oscillating between extremes and defying limits.

Although we can find these qualities
clearly in some productions, and they can be associated with some particular ways of
thinking and particular moments in our historical and social evolution, it is
common that we account for all of them (and many more that escape this text) in the same production, in a hybridization of forms and proposals. And, of course, it refers to

how the real and the every
day are experienced today: from multiple places, from the virtual, the
referred, the infinite screens on which we express ourselves, and the infinite
forms and materialities in which we do so.

And in
these intersections and juxtapositions, much of today’s cinema is found,
including that made in the northern regions of Mexico. These are films that
view reality from their own individual perspectives but with concerns that
transcend the region and become part of global cinema, which Urrutia, through
Galt and Shoonover (2019, 100), defines as a cinema
situated between the most independent and experimental tendencies and those
oriented toward mass commercial consumption. Unafraid of subjectivity or breaking
with conventional structures, these films propose
more diverse visions
and, in many cases —especially through the use of realism as a narrative strategy,
explored later— also position themselves from ethically committed perspectives.

Today,
the idea of truth and reality, as opposed to fiction and the imaginary, is no
longer a determining factor in approaching the stories shown to us. Cinema
recognizes its relationship and its attachment to the contextual circumstances
in which it is produced; even classic or industrial Hollywood cinema maintains
its relevance through the exploration of current events or historical
revisionism and memory, which allows it, precisely, to be the most
industrialized cinema on the planet. The
more independent or experimental cinema —with all its attachment to the
figure of the author and experimentation— can also show a strong
relationship with its own production conditions: from the subjectivity of its
creators who intervene in the work, its condition as a cultural product
inserted in the market, but also, on some occasions, because of the political
commitments and self-representation that it may imply.

Since
the French New Wave and European cinema
verité, and other trends such as direct cinema in the United States, define the idea of no obvious intervention, in which events seem to be
captured “as they happened, without prior rehearsals and with
minimal editing,” in which free discourse is privileged in search of the motivations, attitudes and psychology of the participants to be revealed from their own
possibilities (Konigsberg, 2004, 99), from these trends, we said, which are
distinguished by their concern and commitment to approaching and understanding
reality, experimentation and the intersection of genres and positions regarding
the forms of recording and interacting with reality continue. Without a doubt,
globalizing processes are decisive, not only because of the demands
of integration into the market but also because of the
possibilities of knowing
other proposals of having access
to other technologies and other forms of narration that allow for more
diverse visions and positions.

Although
films continue to be produced based on the qualities determined by each genre,
it is increasingly common, and in some cases a desirable and pertinent
resource, to go beyond these boundaries. For example, some directors have combined documentary filmmaking with

animation, as in the 2021 documentary Flee, in which director
Jonas Poher Rasmussen uses this technique
to protect the identity of his protagonist, an Afghan refugee (as announced in
its synopsis); while in Waltz with Bashir
from 2008, Ari Folman—director and protagonist—allows himself
to explore dreamlike figures and discover his own memory of his participation
in a massacre of Palestinian refugees, drawing on the visual
possibilities offered by animation; Paola Ovalle and Alfonso Díaz
Tovar use stop motion to bring to life objects from the memories of people who disappeared due to violence
in northern Mexico in the short film Puntos Suspensivos1.

Likewise, cinema,
defined as “fiction,” also makes use of documentary resources. To mention a couple of examples of permanent
validity: the Cuban film Memories of
Underdevelopment (1968), by Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, resorts to the
documentary image (use of black and
white, hand-held camera, and testimonial narratives), as well as to the
superimposition of times to explore the Cuban
reality of the revolutionary years.
While some productions, such as the 2010
Chilean Post Mortem by Pablo
Larraín, resort to the construction of the historical past of his
country, but based not on history itself
but on “the illustration of certain media
events” that are part
of the memory of the viewers (Urrutia
& Fernández, 2020)
and to which he resorts
from the review of media and
archives to, in the case of this particular film, develop an individual story
from the collective memory of contextual historical events such as the 1973
coup d’état.

Thus, in
summary, from a classical cinema of defined forms and merely representational
function, in which it is assumed before
narration there pre-exists a reality that can be narrated,
there was a transition towards
a cinema that tried to be the opposite, the modern cinema,
that from the authorial, recognizes the ambiguity of reality and
questions the attempt to represent it; with this, the postmodern cinema tries
to relate narrative and technical aspects of both trends, recognizes the possibility of moving away from representational and trying to build more independent universes (Zavala,
2005); a cinema that allows itself to and assumes its role of reconstruction
and interpretation of realities instead of trying to reproduce them.

3.  Modern becomings and realism as a strategy

Although it is difficult
to explore the complexities of “the present” that remain current and unattainable only through the
passage of time, Urrutia and Fernández (2020) explain that certain films
connect in a critical way with the social and political events of the present;
they indicate that they are “transversal to urgent problems
of our society” that are installed as living
and current testimonies, as archives
that preserve and show our own time. The authors
conceive cinema as “an
archive of the present time” by organizing, recording, and depicting the panorama
of the present from the references that fill it from the media, for example, which propitiates the conformation of an index for the
reading of the contemporary.

1          Available at: https://vimeo.com/134689061

In this
sense, many proposals have explored historical events beyond labeling
themselves as “based on real
events” or reproducing specific events from stories of their contexts but
rather recognizing the particular realities of specific contexts manifested
through everyday life. These are productions that investigate the state of the
environment and the relationships and circumstances that develop within
it. Through alternative expressions, the exploration of space, and the relationships between
individuals, these projects
put on the table the current conditions under which we develop and
relate.

In
recent years, northern Mexican cinema has undergone significant changes in
technical quality and visual quality issues and its approach to everyday life, social dynamics, and processes. And, even though topics
such as violence
and crime are still part of the daily life of the northern
regions so many times taken up by cinema, its approach has diversified,
allowing us to explore deeper levels of its dynamics.

These
changes are due to several factors. Among the most evident are the processes of
globalization that allow the exchange of technologies and ways of approaching
narratives; in addition, the possibility of professionalization of creators is increasingly common in the country’s
border regions with new schools
and spaces for film production. But, in addition
to these factors, the concern of young filmmakers
for self-representation is what has generated stories that are much more committed to the social processes that each context
harbors, as the researchers and creators Norma Iglesias-Prieto, Itzel
Martinez, and Adriana Trujillo (2021) point out.

Border
cities —and just as occurs with others in what we could call the global
periphery— have been constituted from the exploration of the social
processes they harbor. As Edith Mora explains, these cities condense and
project the problematics derived from the “failure of the utopias of globalization” (2016, 122), so their organization,
the shifting boundaries of these urban
spaces, as she points out, propitiate multiple
discourses, texts, and approaches. The spaces that host border cities, besides framing a
certain relationship and state of affairs, are the vestige of the repercussions
of modernity.

In this
sense, much of the cinema from the north of the country finds in realism
technical and narrative strategies to explore and manifest these
conditions, to approach
in a more critical and self-reflective way the reality
to which they refer. According to Ángel Quintana (2003,
163), realist theories allow us to study contemporaneity itself; they
bring us closer to knowing the moment in which society, from the audiovisual,
relates to the physical world. In this sense, he points out the following:

This reality, which has served as a referent, can be shown in its raw state; it can be integrated into a documentary discourse that aims to establish a
reflection on the physical world, or it can end up giving rise to a strong presence
of truth effects
within fiction. In all these cases, realism
ceases to be a merely
formal aspect, and it ends up becoming
the reflection of an ethical
attitude towards reality
that awakens a feeling of adherence to an impossible ideal of truth. (Quintana, 2003, 107).

Beyond these qualities of realism as a form of expression of certain conditions of existence, it also
manifests through several
characteristics. For example,
for the use of long shots, that is, long takes that include by not including
cuts, allow the description, characterization, and definition of spaces, generally exteriors, extending
their referential power and, as Bazin, Konigsberg explains, open the image to the spectator and involve him or her deeply in its “reality” (2004, 425); the use
of direct sound, captured from the same recording of the film, which allows a fuller constitution
of the environment and a possible immersion in it; as well as the inclusion of
non-professional actors and actresses to play the characters (often members of
the community in which the film is
being shot), considered as an accessory of naturalness and humanity to the
image (Urrutia & Fernández, 2020).

In
addition to this list of qualities or tendencies of realism, we must not forget
that the author’s vision of
reality will be decisive. The
intentions and decisions they make regarding the narration—what they leave out of frame, the angles, heights, and
camera movements they favor, and so on—will define both the identification of the work as their
own and their
ethical concerns and
positioning in relation to what is being represented. In turn, this will shape
the spectator’s ability to situate themselves in relation to the work. As
Quintana (2003, 241) explains, in some productions,
the way of capturing reality reflects on the very act of capturing it, like a
concave mirror in which the image is enlarged or deepened. Thus, the film not only shows the
author’s vision but also allows us, as spectators, to see beyond, towards
the self-representations and positions that led to its production.

Regarding the themes to which
realism refers, Luz Horne (2011, 10-11) explains that in the current artistic trends (she focuses on
the literature), the representation of real is no longer pursued, but to include and point out reality through hints or
traces, while at the same time intervening
in the real, she explains that it is from this transformation in realist
strategies that its political
potentiality is allowed to be maintained. In today’s cinema, we can trace
the historical becoming anchored in
the present through the forms and strategies with which the narration is proposed.

Even
without having a basis in real facts, in the absence of testimonies, from
dreamlike figures, from fragmentations and tracks, and from fiction, the most
current cinema leaves out reminiscences of what Urrutia calls “state of
situation” of the contexts addressed, “build from the staging of certain relevant events that are
marking the various agendas” (2019, 106), and that
allows to frame the concerns from where each work is produced.

4.  La Paloma y el Lobo: realism and modernity

An
example of the application of realistic strategies to approach exploring the
state of affairs in Mexico’s northern border
regions is the 2019 production of La
Paloma y el Lobo by Carlos Lenin. The production was awarded the Swatch Art Peace Hotel Award at the 72nd edition of the

Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland in 2019 and the Mexico First Award and has been presented at festivals such as the Los
Cabos International Film Festival, Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine
Latinoamericano de La Habana and the Morelia International Film Festival
(FICUNAM, 2021). It is an innovative proposal for films made in these regions,
both in form and content; the film proposes a narrative anchored in local and
current events but with reminiscences of the
historical evolution of globalization disseminated, in the first instance, from the presence
of geopolitical borders such as the one shared by Mexico and the United
States.

In the director’s words, his debut feature, La Paloma y el Lobo, is

basically a love story. Our film is the
love story between Paloma [Paloma Petra] and Lobo [Armando Hernández], a
working-class couple in Monterrey, Nuevo
León, who are there in the middle
of the sea of violence
that is usually the country’s norm, trying
to continue loving each other (SENSACINE México, 2019).

Monterrey is the capital
of Nuevo León. It is located
in the northeast of Mexico
and is known for being an industrial and business city, like many of
the cities located in the country’s border region. Although Monterrey does not directly
border the United States, the state shares
a border with San Antonio, Texas. Thus, Paloma and Lobo have left their home in Linares
(a town located 130 km southeast of the state
capital), displaced by the violence, for Monterrey, where they will try to keep their relationship
afloat.

Lenin is
part of the new filmmakers who have
contributed to the changes in narratives and techniques in the cinema of
northern Mexico. As a professional filmmaker and as a native of Linares, he manifests the relevance of self-representation, not only for the treatment
of the story but explicitly pointed out when he states that

We are indeed looking for certain types of images, certain
types of visual constructions that genuinely
relate to me; I made them without
trying to please,
but rather to share my mood and the political
moment through the reality we are experiencing, but using the camera, light,
and sound, beyond
putting a character on screen to express what I think. In this genuine search,
I am trying to find images that relate to my reality,
my contradictions as a Mexican, and the social struggles I perceive
(Caballero, 2021).

The
context, form, and content that Lenin examines from fragments of Paloma and
Lobo’s everyday life contain aspects that refer directly to social
processes and the reconstruction of the memory of the border regions. Although
many of the social conditions and processes are shared with the rest of the
country, phenomena such as migration, the dichotomy generated by neighboring the United States,
labor as a way of life and as a detonator of chaotic mobilities, local and transnational
organized crime, are practically inherent to the border.

These
contextual conditions in which this film is produced inscribe it in a cinema
that has been increasingly recurrent in the north of the country in the last de
decade. They explore unrest that has simmered for several decades and that has
become more radicalized since the establishment of the neoliberal project in
the country in the 1980s under the administration of Miguel de la Madrid. This model would (officially) extend for more than three decades and six

presidential terms,
integrating the country into the modernizing capitalist processes prevailing
throughout the rest of the world.

In
cinema, the transformations deriving from the neoliberal project are
manifested, among some other topics, through narratives of violent themes
associated with the demand for commercial and political exchange between Mexico
and the United States, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado (2016, 11), points
out, despite the diverse aesthetics in cinema, the encounter “between capitalism and community,
between Mexico and modernity” can only be represented as an outbreak of
violence.

In
technical matters and broad strokes, the film presents certain characteristics
that distinguish its structure: very
long shots for certain circumstances that allow us to contemplate the space and the situations in which the characters are involved; its expressionist intention is reiterated through recurring still frames of faces and spaces that allow us to understand the emotions and sensations
that fill the environment; the voice-over—
equally loaded with expressions, both for the intonations and for what they
narrate— is proposed as the guide through
the images from one sequence to another; the incorporation of characteristic
contextual elements (very specific and
well-described locations, equally relevant social dynamics, regional
language, among others); the integration of actors and actresses from the
locality and, mostly, non-professionals; likewise, it is developed from fragmentation and temporal and spatial jumps.

For this
essay, it is impossible to explore every aspect, so we will limit ourselves to
four essential characteristics in the structure of La Paloma y El Lobo, those that manifest in a more determinant and
evident way, the conditions of the
time in which the characters are
immersed (from their working, environmental and security conditions) and that
account for the density of the
reality and the submission for it: as for the more technical aspects, we observe a camera movement called slow traveling of approaching depth and
with it, the subtle but effective presence of a type of sound identified as primordial
noise; while, from Gilles Deleuze,
two figures are explored
that also determine the structure of the film from a modern and realistic aesthetic and that allow us to understand
better its approach to reality: that of the seer
and that of the wanderer.

The slow
traveling of approaching depth is a stable camera movement that moves us as
spectators towards the front, towards a certain circumstance or image that,
slowly but in the case of this film, in a worrying
way, seems to take us towards something we do not want to see
but what we are irremediably approaching. Not only as spectators, it recurrently confronts both characters with situations of tension they cannot avoid,
putting them before the images they cannot look away from and which they must
approach without any option.

Likewise,
these camera movements are accompanied by a subtle but effective sound: the
primordial noise that refers to an enveloping sound that does not come from the environment

but corresponds to what
Žižek describes as a sinister noise “that arises when we
approach the real” (2015, 132) and that, moreover, is difficult to find in reality itself.
The philosopher explains that this
is conceived as constitutive of empty space itself before being
“occupied” by anything: “It
is not a noise in space, but a noise that keeps space open as
such” (Žižek, 2015, 133). This
generates a dense environment where the
characters must subsist, accounting for the acceleration and intensification of
the rhythms and times in which they develop their relationships, encounters,
and misencounters. Still, with it, the feeling of
impossibility of joining these rhythms and times is propitiated.

Both
resources of modern cinema are presented throughout the film to emphasize very
particular moments that the figures proposed by Deleuze complement. Thus, the figure of the seer becomes relevant, which arises from the breakdown of the characters’ sensorimotor system, a breakdown of the links between
individuals and the world. In this sense, Martin-Jones (2006, 22) explains that the individual no longer has power over the situations he faces; this breakdown or suspension renders him “incapable of reacting to influence his physical context.” And he quotes Deleuze when he explains
that “this is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent” (2006, 21).

The seer we are referring to in
this text is Lobo, who has lost his ability to act, a fact he explicitly expresses
through his inability
to communicate in a sequence
where Paloma confronts him: “No…we’re not okay…you look dead…you
don’t give a damn about anything”, and insists “come on…talk to me, dude”.
Meanwhile, Lobo, in a fixed shot of his face, seems trapped in a sustained impulse
to say something, but the only words that come out of him are: “What do you want
me to say if I don’t know how to speak if don’t know how to say anything?”

Let us remember that the couple
moved from Linares to Monterrey, displaced by the violence. However, Lobo is unable —he lacks the
ability— to tell Paloma what he has witnessed at some point in a past
that remains present and manifest in his nightmares, which make him wake up
crying and, in his memory, are the reason why he cannot return to Linares. It
is not until the final sequence that (in voice-over) Lobo can finally speak, share his testimony, and allow us to
understand his true motives and fears:

knew your dad, Chango; I saw him die. They mistook him for me, and I didn’t say anything…they were burning him
alive, and I broke free and ran, I ran, I ran Paloma…I left him there…Sometimes, I wake up at night, and there’s
Chango, looking at me without legs, without arms, with
his head to the side, with his stump, and a pile of burning stones…I don’t know…last night
I dreamed I was dead…”

The terrible
image that Lobo describes, between
sobs and remorse,
serves as the emotional
climax, ending with his
heartfelt crying and a final “I love you.” Paloma also, in voice-over, responds

I love you too…I
want to stay…I just wanted to say goodbye…but you never came…I found you, you were all alone, you
had a small hole in your forehead, there was no blood…you saw me, I feel like you saw me…Lobo…love…

The
immobility, then, is manifested in Lobo witnessing what would be his own
torture and murder, but that
happened to another
person in his place
before he could
do anything. In
several

situations, we see him
framed in fixed shots looking in front or towards the floor, static like a
photograph with ruined
and blurred backgrounds; he is unable
to change things,
even when he is finally able to speak and confess
his fear, Lobo’s fate reveals itself as inevitable in his death.

This
inability to act is emphasized through his journeys through spaces that appear
disconnected or abandoned by society, as we will see later,
and which are directly related
to the consequences of the confrontation with “the intolerable and
the unthinkable” (Bogue, 2003, 170), to which,
on several occasions, we are brought
closer by slow-zoom tracking shots accompanied by primordial noise. While Deleuze points out that this unthinkable does not necessarily involve horror scenes—even though
it may include bodies or blood—it refers
us to an image of violence
that is not present and is not explicit but manifests itself in the optical and the sonic (1989, 170).

Thus, at
some point we hear on the air (from a
technological but indistinguishable source, like the horn of a telephone that
we do not see but can identify) the audio of the subjugation and torture of the
man Lobo refers to in his description: we hear the screams of threat of the
perpetrator and those of pain of the victim more and more resonant and torn,
while again a tracking shot positions us dangerously before an image that is
densified by the presence of the primordial noise; this sound that refers us to
an image that is not seen, is heard over the figure against the light of a
squatting man (Lobo) in the middle of a kind of tunnel, who observes, in turn, an indeterminate and amorphous figure,
hanging and burning
in fire in the background, as the only source
of light. The rupture or break makes
the individual a “seer shaken
by something intolerable in the world, and confronted with something unthinkable in thought” (Deleuze,
1989, 169-170), makes the individual no longer able to think or think
himself in the world while it is irremediably imposed on him.

Although
these types of descriptions do not come from the actual testimony of those are
part of Nuevo León society—in the case of La Paloma y el Lobo—they do give an account of very
particular situations that both the local and national media have reported as
part of the border reality and that has come to account with greater emphasis
since the 1980s in which, Sassen explains, the form of capitalism took on new
forms around the globe, an advanced capitalism that “reinvented the
mechanisms of original accumulation” and continues to do so:

Después de treinta años de estos tipos
de desarrollo, enfrentamos economías en contracción en buena parte del mundo, la escalada
de la destrucción de la biósfera en todo el globo y el resurgimiento de formas extremas de pobreza y brutalización
donde pensábamos que habían sido eliminadas o estaban en
vías de desaparición (Sassen, 2015, 23).

Estas formas extremas que se manifiestan en la realidad y que vemos en
historias como la de Paloma y Lobo, este capitalismo avanzado de Sassen es lo que, por su parte, Sayak Valencia define como un capitalismo gore, una forma radicalizada y, en palabras
de la autora, el lado B del capitalismo que entiende como consecuencia de una
reinterpretación de los procesos económicos globales hegemónicos en los contextos
fronterizos que deriva en el

derramamiento de sangre explícito
e injustificado
(como precio a pagar por
el tercer
mundo que se aferra a
seguir las lógicas del
capitalismo, cada vez más exigentes), al altísimo porcentaje de
vísceras y desmembramientos, frecuentemente mezclados con el crimen
organizado, el género y los usos predatorios de los cuerpos,
todo esto por medio de la violencia
más explícita como herramienta de necroempoderamiento (Valencia, 2020, 25).

She explains
that this reinterpretation derives precisely from the imposition of the neoliberal discourse on regions such as
the northern border of Mexico, which cannot join the dynamics (times and speeds) demanded
by the first world. These demands generate
a series of conditions
that propitiate the incursions of the regions
into the market of violence,
and as Valencia explains, are
radicalized “with the advent of globalization, given that it is based on
predatory logics that, along with spectralization and
speculation in financial markets,
develop and execute
practices of radical
violence” (2020, 138).

Thus, organized
crime and all its practices
are also integrated into the commercial processes as an alternative way of accessing
the capitalist dynamics
on the globe: “They make the violence a way of life, work, socialization, and culture. They reconvert
the culture of work into a kind of dystopian Protestantism, where work
and life form a single unit” (Valencia, 2020, 103). As Valencia explains,
the new entrepreneurs who
participate in these alternative market practices make violence both a tool for work, empowerment, and capital acquisition and a commodity
to be directed to different market niches.

These
forms of advanced radical, gore, and
extreme capitalism have infiltrated all forms of reality, “subsumes and
consumes all previous stories” (Fisher, 2018, 25). It is what Mark Fisher
calls capitalist realism for
globalized societies, from which he explains capitalism as that “which remains standing
when beliefs collapse
at the level of ritual or symbolic
elaboration, leaving as a
remainder only the consumer-spectator who gropes among relics and ruins”
(2018, 26).

Capitalist
realism, as Fisher understands it, no longer sees citizens or political agents
but consumers and spectators; capitalism generates a
“post-political” order in which all social processes take place
with the same dynamics that commercial exchanges would demand (as Sassen and Valencia point out). And, in this sense, he points out, effects are propitiated on all our forms of coexistence - now equivalent to practices of consumption and hyper-consumption - but
which are blurred by a kind of naturalness by “erasing any sentimental
illusion” that lets us see the world as it is, and which is sustained
from an “all against all, every man for himself,
a system of perpetual
exploitation and generalized criminality” (Fisher, 2018, 33), as part of
the logics of capitalism. Realism is for current
capitalism a strategy
that allows it to naturalize the conditions of
exploitation, competitiveness, and individualism, including predatory practices
and extreme violence that have been integrated into business practices as a way
of joining the speeds and dynamics demanded by current global events and that
subsumes the possibilities of action or alternatives, as Fisher points out,
capitalist realism tells us that things can only be as they are.

Following these postulates, it is understood
that spaces, particularly those of the regions

located on the northern
border of Mexico, are equally subjected to the accelerated modernity that is imposed and to which it is not always
possible to respond.
Jungwon Park (2018)
explains that, as a consequence of this phenomenon, there is a spatial
reorganization from an uneven geographical development that favors uncontrolled
urbanization processes. The incursion of the maquiladora industry into these
regions, as much as it attempts to symbolize progress and development, also refers to “a scenario
of global ruins: factories, favelas,
and abandoned fields” (Park, 2018, 1119) and, in turn, generates
mobilities in the transits that go from the peripheries to
the work centers and that is manifested through visual effects
and symbolic forms
that refer, as developed by
Mora (2016, 122), to an aesthetic of ruin or garbage and waste that is complemented by a neo-baroque order, and that defines spaces as fractal,
labyrinthine, chaotic and overflowing.

In this
sense, Park explains that the phenomenon of migration, in recent decades, has
begun to propose spaces that are no longer just a passage
or transit, the establishment of urban
life through characters who try to adapt to the frontier from the peripheries
where industrial buildings are installed. Thus,
the maquila and other industrializing processes in the regions not only participate in the formation of fragmented and degraded geography but also the excessive
development of marginal peripheries that, following Park again (2018, 1119), has
an impact on the daily lives
of those who work in these spaces
and on their own bodies,
who are subjected to lack of services, insecurity and disciplinary processes practiced in their workplaces, in addition to the pollution and environmental
devastation that undoubtedly generates other problems in an endless list.

In this
way, besides the forced displacement by violence of which Paloma and Lobo are victims, other triggers for the discomfort in which
their daily lives are perceived: on the one hand, the lack of water,
which Paloma reports on more than one occasion as part of the ecological
crisis; the heat that is not said but is seen through
various elements present
as fans always on and the
sweat on their bodies even in a sequence we see the couple holding
an ice in their hands to
mitigate the heat, and she refers to lack of water as a factor for returning
to Linares, to mention
some examples.

On the
other hand, the working conditions of both also accentuate their difficulty in
being and existing in this environment: both Paloma and Lobo lose their jobs
due to violent events against other co-workers resulting from restrictive and
disinterested management; she in the maquila
and he in construction; at several moments, we see them in their workplaces,
interacting at various levels, but never satisfied and, although Paloma
maintains ties with her coworkers, Lobo seems always disconnected from the rest
of the world; we also witness the dismissal and rejection of a woman because of her age as an employee in the maquila,
we can perceive the degree
of concern that this implies
from her close-up
framing in which we witness
the decomposition of her
face that goes from a smile and kindness to a cry of anguish
and worry when she realizes
that she will not be hired for the position she applied for, and perhaps
for any position at all.

Through
these examples, it is possible to identify how the figure of the seer is
manifested through these repercussions on the space and the social, labor, and
mobility dynamics in the border regions imposed due to the transnational
industrialization, before which it is observed the break of the sensory-motor scheme in those characters that as Lobo were
constituted as pure seers, stunned, abandoned to something intolerable
that is now their own everyday life (Deleuze, 1989, 41).

Finally, through the technical resources already mentioned
and complementing the seer, the figure of the wanderer is also manifested. This is proposed
in some sequences for the exploration
of spaces that, through panning,
fixed shots, and contemplative cross-cuts, highlight a particular aesthetic: vandalized or fallen walls, abandoned factories, and dark places invaded by vegetation
and garbage.

Both characters make several
journeys, allowing us to see the landscape, which, as announced above, refers to the saturation, abandonment, and ruin and the vestiges of other times. What we see is what the industrialization
process has left behind, spaces taken now by nature itself and by other characters (for example, a group of high school teenagers who, apparently, spend their
afternoons in an abandoned factory,
frighten Paloma and Lobo so that they do not return to this
space), even the place where Paloma works seems that it has not been renovated and remains as it was built in the first moment but
with the years visible on its back.

This
wandering, although recurrent, does not allow us to describe the precise
cartography of Monterrey because the spaces are fragmented into unconnected
postcards and still images or long shots that prioritize contemplation.
However, in their constitution and configuration (with the sounds and the inherent
conditions of the space), they bring us closer to scenarios and sensations of uncertainty and
insecurity that also accompany the characters. In this sense, in modern and realistic productions such as La Paloma
y el Lobo, it is possible
to tour and describe
these ruins and vestiges of the past but, at the same time, to see the current
conditions of existence that are proposed and updated in the contemporary
future.

5.  Conclusions

Moral
Martin observes: “The current debate on the confrontation of our present
with the past places cinema as a privileged medium in the construction of our
memory and, therefore, points it out as a decisive instrument in the definition
of our contemporary identity” (2020, 206). Current cinema contains
elements in its narrative and technical resources
that allow us to
explore not only the past but also our own conditions of existence. We can visualize
this technical and narrative process through the example of La Paloma y el Lobo. Through
his cinematographic resources and the subject
matter he addresses, Lenin takes us from the everyday life of a couple,
from their memories and fictitious personal testimonies to the depths of the
reality of border life, to a historical and collective memory that is installed
in its spaces and dynamics in relation to the globalizing processes.

Some of
the proposals of border cinema from the last decade, through the strategies of
contemporary realism, do not refer to history itself, nor do they aim to
reconstruct events; on the contrary, they attempt to condense, in individual and everyday narratives, a state of affairs,
a reality in which we are all addressed, both at a national level and for those
who specifically inhabit the region explored through events that, although
found throughout the country —and others considered part of the global
periphery—, undoubtedly have a direct connection to the unique conditions of the border
strip between Mexico
and the United
States, which stems
from a long history of contradictions and confrontations. Thus, it is
not about being an archive or documentary cinema but rather a cinema about the
complexities of the moment in which it is produced.

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She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Communication Sciences from the Autonomous University of Baja California, Mexico. She also holds a Master’s degree in Sociocultural
Studies from the UABC and a Master’s degree in Education from the Center for University Studies of Baja
California. She is currently a professor at the UABC and a doctoral candidate in the Social Sciences and Humanities
program at the Autonomous Metropolitan University-Cuajimalpa. Her research
interests include discourse, power and representation, film, and literature.