Heterotemporal Mise-en-scène in the Films of Luis Estrada

Luis Estrada, one of Mexico’s most popular and polemical filmmakers, is a director of raucous political satires that depend as much on slapstick as they do on quick-paced witty dialogue. His film aesthetic tends toward a strong visual regime that subverts the semiotic value of prominently displayed political and historical symbols. Everything appears to be front and center, an unveiled attack on petty institutions and conniving bureaucrats. Even so he is a surprisingly subtle director who pays close attention to set construction, scene composition, and visual intertextualities in order to weave a sense of the historical into his films. But in order to appreciate this element of his work, spectators must pay attention to the devil in the details. Speaking of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), Slavoj Žižek stresses that, while viewers watching the film can appreciate its message by paying attention to what occurs in the foreground, an anamorphic view that takes into consideration seemingly insignificant background details reveals a much more complex appreciation of the ideological and social sterility of late capitalism. Of specific interest in Cuarón’s film are the billboards, graffiti-riddled signs, and the incoherent babblings of immigrants, all of which underscore the tensions that arise between the ostensibly positive nationalist message that “Only Britain soldiers on” and the landscape of social repression. While it might be argued that Žižek falls prey to intentional fallacy in his analysis, discovering within the indexicality of the cinematographic image an authorial intent where none may exist, directorial decisions to allow the camera to continue taking in these background details long after the primary subject of the sequence passes off screen also allow viewers the possibility of assigning them a symbolic value that transcends mere chance. This sort of distorting anamorphic view towards background elements is likewise key for reading the temporal implications of Luis Estrada’s film trilogy: La ley de Herodes (1999), Un mundo maravilloso (2006), and El infierno (2010).

What these three films demonstrate is that perception of temporality in film narrative is not solely the product of chronological setting or even editing, but also the ways in which the screen can function as a heterotopic space that brings together multiple historical periods. Foucault coined the term heterotopia to describe real places where incompatible sectors of the populace and incompatible times could be brought together into one geographic space. Within the walls of the cemetery one finds the remains of peoples from all walks of life as well as from a variety of historical moments sometimes spanning centuries just as libraries and museums house the accumulated knowledge of millennia. What would otherwise be impossible in life is rendered possible through the fabrication of a seemingly atemporal, not non-temporal, space. The heterochronicity of these places, the coexistence of multiple temporalities in the library or the museum, also invites us to imagine how film can do the same thing: the audience, inhabiting a real present moment, experiences a temporary suspension of time in order to participate in the temporality of film. But what happens when, embedded within the created time of the film narrative, we find other fragments of time, fragments that do not necessarily synch with either the film’s time or the real time of the viewer, gazing back at us? In this paper I argue that a key characteristic of Estrada’s film aesthetic is a mise-en-scène that heterotopically, or maybe more correctly heterotemporally, allows for the simultaneous coexistence of a variety of meaningfully organized historical periods within the confined visual space of the camera’s gaze. This heterotemporality creates a productive tension in which the illusion of temporal stability is interrupted and the audience can perceive thematic parallels between the past and the present. The esperpentic modality of his film language is complemented by the subtle construction of a mise-en-scène that activates episodes of national history within the context of the present, enabling what Dutch historian Eelco Runia has described as the “subliminal, mysterious, but uncommonly powerful living-on… of the...