Mythic Time and Slow Time: The Construction of the Viewer in El violín

Francisco Vargas’s 2005 debut feature-length film El violín, the most internationally-awarded Mexican film to date, employs unconventional temporalities to engage the viewer in an ethical response to State violence. The film centers on an armed conflict between a national army and a peasant, primarily indigenous, guerrilla resistance. Three generations of the Hidalgo family—peasants, farmers, and musicians who struggle to defend their land—connect the past, present, and future of this historically disenfranchised people. In the film’s present, Genaro leads a guerrilla column that plans to participate in a coordinated attack. His ability to participate is hindered, however, because his village is raided and occupied, and he cannot return to obtain weapons and ammunition hidden in his cornfield. His wife and daughter, Genaro discovers, are killed in the raid, and only his son Lucio and his father Plutarco escape.

The use of black and white throughout the film creates a documentary effect, but unlike in documentary, the relative lack of temporal-spatial referents creates the sense that it could refer to any of many such conflicts throughout Latin America in the twentieth century.¹ Nevertheless, the film’s action presumably takes place during the Mexican Dirty War, one of the many that took place in Latin America in the context of the Cold War.² The names of the youngest two protagonists—Genaro and Lucio—allude to Genaro Vásquez Rojas and Lucio Cabañas, two historic teachers and leaders of the rebellion in Guerrero during the late 1960s and 1970s, the region subject to the strongest repressive action, including disappearances and other dirty war tactics, by the Mexican army in the twentieth century (Castellanos 20). Additionally, the film’s protagonist don Plutarco, an octogenarian violinist, evokes both the recent and a more distant past in which the peasants have been displaced from their ancestral lands. Though recent history is never explicitly mentioned, the fact that Plutarco would have been a young man at the beginning of the twentieth century conjures the specter of the Mexican Revolution of 1910, thus providing continuity between his and the next generation’s continued struggle for their land.³ Moreover, through oral storytelling he evokes the Mayan creation myth to insert the present struggle into a larger, cyclical history that begins with the colonial encounter between Mayans and Spaniards. Both generations will fail, however, and the burden of struggle will fall upon the young Lucio. The film ends with an image of Lucio, armed with a gun and a guitar, walking away from the camera to an uncertain future. Through this image the film alludes to the end of the twentieth century, when the next generation will continue the struggle.⁴

This article analyzes the use of unconventional temporalities (cyclical and slow) in El violín to position the viewer ethically with regard to this historic struggle and, by extension, to similar struggles past and present throughout Latin America. Through three generations of the Hidalgo family, the film addresses a century of Mexican history and establishes continuity between modern history and a mythic, cyclical conception of time. By temporally marking the conflict as part of the Mayan people’s postcolonial condition rather than reading it in the context of the Cold War, a subaltern interpretation is made possible. In contrast to State discourses in which the peasants are effaced, dehumanized subversives whose lives are expendable, here the peasants are “true” men, and their struggle against the military is just. Throughout this paper I argue that the film employs various temporal strategies to actively construct the ideal viewer of the film as one who would recognize the importance of the lives of these peasants and similarly disenfranchised groups in reality. I show how the deployment of a non-linear, non-Western temporality, which allows the viewer to construct an unofficial interpretation of the conflict, depends first upon certain visual and auditory frames that would allow the peasants to be recognized as grievable lives. As I demonstrate, the film achieves this framing through the markedly decelerated temporality of the slow...