Superocheros

During the first part of the nineteen-seventies, Mexican cinema rose from its deathbed. The period corresponding to the presidency of Luis Echeverría, 1970-76, saw the birth of the "new Mexican cinema." ¹ The early feature films of Jaime Humberto Hermosillo, ² Arturo Ripstein, ³ Paul Leduc, ⁴ and others represented a welcome and much-needed new energy after the steady decline of studio productions from the "Golden Age" of the forties and early fifties into the hackneyed and formulaic irrelevance of the sixties. But apart from the outstanding auteurs named above, Mexico saw during the seventies another "new cinema:" a band of small-gauge rebels who identified themselves with the film stock that was their medium: lossuperocheros, or "super-eighters."

Mexican super-8 filmmaking as a movement must be framed within an alternative youth culture that created and supported it. José Agustín, novelist, journalist, playwright, and chronicler of the underground, writes:

...where the counterculture grew openly was in the super-8 cinema, which young people were enthusiastic about during the first half of the seventies, thanks to its low cost and because it evaded censorship, and for this reason, through super-8 we saw a different Mexico, for better or for worse. Sergio García, Héctor Abadie, Gabriel Retes, Alfredo Gurrola and Rafael Montero made films that would be inexplicable without the counterculture of the sixties. ⁵

To that roster might be added artists like Ulises Carrión, Enrique Escalona, Felipe Tirado, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Carlos Martínez Suárez, María Eugenia Anaya, David Celestinos, Ofelia Medina, Manuel de Landa, Tina French, Alfredo Zamarripa, Eduardo Carrasco Zanini, and host of others. Yet in spite of Agustín's very valid characterization, Mexican super-8 cinema, both within a self-defined movement and in isolation, encompasses a highly diverse group of films. They range from the ambitious, highly polished professionalism of [Begin Page 5] Gabriel Retes' features to the one-shot punk simplicity of Fernando Sampietro's deadpan do-it-yourself amateurism; from the diasporic poetics of Teo Hernández to the engagé documentary of the Cooperatives. Any number of styles and genres and a broad range of thematic concerns are represented. Given the heterogeneity of the subject matter, then, as well as the inaccessibility of the films themselves (how many of these films are lost, or buried among the personal affects of the artists or their relatives?), what follows then is a necessarily biased, tentative, and partial approach to the subject, a point of departure for further study. Working from existing personal archives and private collections, ⁶ this contribution to Wide Angle's ongoing "Institutional Histories Project" aims to introduce to a broader audience a heretofore neglected piece of film history. ⁷ Given that the social and political context of the superocheros is one unfamiliar to most English-language readers (and to many Spanish-language readers as well), the documents gathered here need to be framed in a more general understanding of that Mexican counterculture of the seventies to which Agustín makes reference.

Scott MacDonald notes that until there has been little scholarly attention devoted to the institutions that sustain alternative film production and exhibition. ⁸ Wide Angle's "Institutional Histories Project" marks a sustained and continuing effort to redress this omission. At the same time, there are indications that some film scholars and exhibitors are slowly broadening their perspectives to include not simply "professional" gauge feature films, traditionally the most highly-valued object of study, but amateur and small-gauge production as well. ⁹ Though this recent criticism, research, and exhibition have focused on the United States, super-8 was very much an international phenomena, with cine-clubs, competitions, showcases, newsletters and champions all over the globe. ¹⁰ Parallel to this interest in small-gauge filmmaking, North American film scholars are increasingly abandoning the parochial vision that restricts their research to within the borders of the United States and a handful of other places in the world. Twenty years ago, a bookshelf containing the English-language...