Mexican Revolution on the World Stage, The by Adela Pineda Franco

Author:Adela Pineda Franco [Franco, Adela Pineda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Latin America, Mexico, Performing Arts, Film, General
ISBN: 9781438475622
Google: eqKkDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: SUNY Press
Published: 2019-07-23T00:47:19+00:00

Figure 3.2. Four atypical Mexican revolutionaries faced the firing squad, a still shot from Quien sabe? Directed by Damiano Damiani, Blue Underground, Inc., 2012.

Figure 3.3. Bill Tate upon arrival in Mexico, a still shot from Quien sabe? http://www.c1n3.org/d/damiani01d/Images/41.html.

On the other hand, Quien sabe? proposes more than just a reversal of structure. As noted, Solinas’s screenplays often resort to the strategy of unveiling, common to political filmmaking. In the case of Quien sabe, the process of unveiling short-circuits the identification of the colonized (Chuncho) with the apparently benign yet paternalistic colonizing authority of the settler (Tate). The plot weaves the western-style adventure around the Tate-Chuncho relationship, but also around Chuncho’s uncovering of important facts within the plot, initially inaccessible to him but not to the spectator, namely Tate’s dubious motives for joining his gang. In the last sequence of the film, Tate’s real intentions are finally revealed to Chuncho, who simultaneously undergoes a process of political awakening. Throughout the film, Chuncho appears as lacking commitment to the revolution. The film highlights his vacillating conduct and contrasts his bandit-like activities with the purposeful actions of General Elías and his revolutionaries. However, in the last sequence, Chuncho experiences the cathartic process of liberation in the act of killing Tate, and avenging Elías. Thus, Solinas links Aristotelian anagnorisis with an allegory of decolonization. More specifically, Solinas transfers the experience of anagnorisis to the Mexican character, disrupting conventional audience identification with the existential quest of the American cowboy character of the McCarthy and Vietnam eras.69 American westerns contemporary to Quien sabe?, such as The Professionals (Richard Brooks, United States, 1966) and The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah, United States, 1969), present the Mexican Revolution as a stage where the American cowboy undergoes a process of self-recognition. In revolutionary Mexico, the lost cowboy of Vietnam finds the ethical justification behind his violent actions.70 In The Wild Bunch, the American cowboys have grown absurdly decrepit. However, their final suicidal action provides them with the possibility of redemption, since their goal is to rescue Angel, the Mexican character of the film. Quien sabe? grants self-awareness and agency to the Mexican character instead, thus eliciting new forms of audience identification.

Cinematically, this process of self-awareness is connected to the politics of the gaze, which involves not only the way characters look at each other and how they make sense of the surrounding universe within the diegesis but also how the spectator reacts to mechanisms of identification. The manner in which spectators may circumvent primary identification (identification with the camera and a voyeuristic hegemonic gaze) was the subject of discussion in the writings of Fanon, which influenced Solinas’s views. Fanon considered postcolonial liberation a radical transformation in psychological terms, since the goal was to extirpate colonialism from the colonized mind, breaking identification with the paternalistic colonizing figure. For Fanon, writes Robert Stam, “The struggle between competing identifications and projections exists at the very core of the colonial encounter” (“Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema” 512). In Peau Noire, Masques Blancs (Black Skin, White

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