Projections

Zorro-Disney Series (Season 2)

2018-08-10T00:04:00.000-07:00

Guy Williams is back in this second chapter of the Disney Zorro series. The first season was a total success. Disney commercialized the character creating a hero for the children of the 50's and 60's with costumes, toy swords, shows presenting Guy Williams himself (as Don Diego and as Zorro), and placing this Zorro production among the top places in the endless list of interpretations about Spanish-California and the masked fencer. Thus, the continuation of Zorro appears not only as a development of the series storyline, but it is also a response to an audience for which Zorro become nationally (and internationally) known.

Season one ended with the defeat of the Eagle and the uprising of the people to fight a civil war against the enemies of the Crown. Without the Eagle trying to take control of California, Zorro and his followers would turn their swords, their guns, and most importantly, their aristocratic influence to help the already decaying Spain. Thus we are taken to the southern coast of California, Monterey, a city which port welcomes ships from Spain bringing its people and war issues, and taking back California's resources to fund the waves of independence from the Crown resulting from the Napoleonic Wars.

Monterey is very different to Los Angeles. Its people, its culture and traditions have a lot of similarities with Mexico (Los Angeles, instead, resembles something really close to a Spanish village which is the principal attraction for Spanish to settle). In the central plaza, poor peons gather to sell tamales and ponchos, to sing mariachis and dance rancheras. And of course, Zorro will defend them from those powerful men that do not accept their Spanish-less appearance and personality. Theresa (Barbara Luna), a tamale peddler, is one of the characters that depicts the fascinating Mexican/Latino identity that in the film is proper of peons, poor, and indigenous and that Zorro apparently wants to protect and embrace. The debate about what kind of people belongs or doesn't to California is seen when a new governor is sent from Spain to Monterey. His first orders are to get rid of the peddlers' tents installed in the plaza because they distort the image of the colony that Spain expects to see. Diego de la Vega argues that the peons and peddlers deserve to be in the plaza because their families (and their properties) belonged to California even before the Spanish conquest. They are subjects of the Crown, but also Californian like everybody else. This argument is quite similar to the one made in favour of Mexican-Americans living in California nowadays, however in the film, it is clearly expressed that those peons are not Mexican.

Though the signifiers built since the beginning of the series are maintained consistently in this second part (for example same main characters, same Zorro with a romantic and courageous latino personality), there are unexpected changes that make this new story to continue on a path different to what we see in the first part, and in the Zorro tradition as a whole. The first difference is the location, but Bernardo, Alejandro de la Vega, and Sargent Garcia follow helping to keep the continuity of the plot. Zorro also finds Phantom, a new white horse faster than Tornado. Zorro, like Phantom, seems faster and stronger. He is even a better lover with more than one falling in love with him. Those changes are small and superficial, but before going back to Los Angeles, a very important change is made. Alejandro de la Vega reveals that he always knew his son is Zorro. How can Diego's father be the only one that noticed Zorro's secret? Perhaps everyone knows, but keep it secret. And perhaps that is also a part of what conforms the Californio identity, protecting Zorro at all cost and pretending to know nothing. The series does not account for this, but from then on, Alejandro de la Vega joins his son and Bernardo to plan Zorro's next appearances.

What else can be included to keep the interest in a long series like this one? How else can Disney satisfy its audience?

The director Norman Foster innovates this Zorro with a faster horse, but he also alludes to globalization depicting people arriving in California for more places than Europe or Russia as seen in the first season. We see South Americans, Chinese and an American. However, not all of them are seen in the same way. In the previous season, we saw people from Europe and Russia going to California to buy it or exploit it. The South Americans arrive as well to take advantage of California's richness. Spanish people even deeper in poverty and crisis arrive pretending to be powerful to settle in "the land of opportunity" where they can become hacienda and winery holders. This creates insecurity among Californians regarding foreigners but looks like Americans and Chinese are different. Neither of them looks for richness in California. The Chinese were kidnapped and taken into a ship that stopped in California. He is accused to be an assassin and robber, but in reality, he is a rich prince. The American, on the other hand, crossed the border by mistake in a day of work walking in the mountains.

The presence of the American in Los Angeles intrigues the people, especially women and those against foreigners getting in the state. Joe Crane (Jeff York) is an American mountain man that only wants to go back to work after resting some time. He is surprisingly strong, intelligent, and honest. "Americans are so different!" says Carlotta (Jean Wiles), the waitress of Los Angeles' pub referring to Joe when he peacefully leaves California back to the US after he recovers his belongings. This, however, is the only time we see something or hear about the United States.

In the first part of this series, McCulley's influence was evident with characters that were since the beginning part of his written stories, and of course in the construction of a plot that is intrinsically political (and colonial), but most of all, of Californian history. The second season maintains lots of commonalities with the first part. The most important characters like Zorro/Don Diego de la Vega, Bernardo, and Sargent Garcia, continue being part of every additional episode. However, Disney modifications of the story with of new characters and a new plot would gradually transform the traditional Zorro created by McCulley to something more similar to a modern superhero that fights delinquency, instead of fighting for social justice by protecting the poor and indigenous. The crime fight is simultaneously accompanying by the protection of the rising Californio identity that we saw coming in the previous season. The threats Zorro faces to protect California are not considered internal, but they all come with foreigners, from the Old Continent, and from South America. However, what comes from the North (the United States) and from the East (China) is different.

The Disney Zorro series brings lots of different elements to the traditional Zorro story. Though that in terms of scenography and characters it is close to McCulley's Zorro (he was directly involved in the filmmaking process), the development of the episodes, especially in the later ones, responds to an American audience and projects the climate lived in the 50's and 60's (after the Second World War) in California and in the world (from a Us perspective). What can be extracted from the series underlying messages is a California rising strong and as a sanctuary for the Mexican-American and Latin American community, but also sceptical about other foreigners (non-American Mexicans, the rest of Latin America, and the rest of the world, but the US); a Europe declining and constantly trying to put its hands on a place as lucrative and beautiful like California; a rising China moving towards the West; and a hero that gradually leaves the social fights behind to fight other crimes, like the current Hollywood superheroes.

Thirteen Days

2018-08-03T14:22:00.000-07:00

"Thirteen Days" (2000) is a historical and political thriller movie directed by Roger Donaldson. It recounts the situation lived within the White House in 1962 when the United States discovered Soviet missiles in Cuba starting what it is known in history as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Donaldson movie is named after Robert F. Kennedy's book about the crisis, but the plot is based in the book "The Kennedy Tapes" written by Ernest May and Philip Zelikow. Both sources provide this movie with the facts but in addition to the Kennedy brothers that are part of previous portrayals of this historical event, Donaldson includes Kenneth P. O'Donnell (Kevin Costner) as a new main character which brings out to the plot a family drama happening outside the government.

The movie goes over the political atmosphere and decisions made during JFK's presidency after the US aerial surveillance discovers USSR missiles installed in the Cuban island that could potentially reach most of the United States. The plot emphasizes the US-USSR relations to disarm Cuba. While John F. Kennedy (Bruce Greenwood), Robert F. Kennedy (Steven Culp), and O'Donnell try to negotiate the removal of the missiles through non-violent approaches rejecting any military attack, the USSR continues the occupation breaking every single agreement made with the US government to back off. Finally, JFK, RFK, and O'Donnell successfully mediate the end of what seemed like the beginning of Third World War by promising the withdrawal of the US troops in Turkey six months after their agreement.

Though the movie is all about the Cuban missile crisis, Donaldson clearly shows that Cuba and its politics were the least important aspect to deal with. The tensions of this event are between the United States and the USSR as any other matter during the Cold War, portraying the Latin American country as merely a puppet working for the USSR interests. During the film, very few times we see an opinion on behalf of the Cuban government, like the character of Raul Castro talking in a UN general meeting, or the people supporting Cuba, such as demonstrations outside the White House with posters asking for peace and freedom of Cuba. The most important scenes are when representatives of the USSR speak, and of course, when the US demonstrate that the threat is real.

"Thirteen Days" is produced almost thirty years after the missile crisis depicting the event highly threatening in which the United States was the closest to losing the Cold War. This movie is released during a period in which the anxieties experienced during the Cuban Missile Crisis are reawakened. The end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century are marked with a new wave of international tensions (mini-Cold Wars) and proxy wars in which the United States and Russia (former USSR) are directly or indirectly involved. Cuba like any other Latin American country becomes a problem for national security if its politics are manipulated against the United States. However, Donaldson portrays a United States with strong beliefs on non-violent intervention (which was not by the time this movie was made). Perhaps, this is a reminder that even in the worst case scenario the United States could ever face, a warlike response should be the last resource.

Altiplano

2018-07-28T13:08:00.000-07:00

Altiplano (2009) is a American-Belgian drama film directed by Peter Brosens and Jessica Woodworth. The movie recounts the realities of different people around the world (Europe, Middle East, and South America), but that redemption from their tragic lives at the small Quechua village called Turubamba of the Andean plateau. With dialogues in five languages (French, English, Persian and Quechua), Altiplano shows us a world divided, but that connects through feelings and travels with images.

The film begins with a devastating event that gives us to understand that the plot was based on the suspense and mixed feelings that arise from equally bittersweet moments. Grace (Jasmin Tabatabai) is a photographer who travels to Iraq where her guide and friend is murdered in front of her eyes and she is forced to photograph the scene. Despite the advice of his family to publish the photograph so that the world knows the story, the trauma caused by that death eats away at his conscience and leaves him in a state of desolation. Her partner travels to Turubamba on a medical mission but she remains in Belgium, unable to continue with the art of capturing painful realities in photographs.

Parallel to the situation of Grace, the young indigenous Saturnina (Magaly Solier) introduces us to know the small town called Turubamba (the location is fictional for this movie, but the name belongs to a village in Ecuador) and their own tragedies. Saturnina plans to get married, but a mercury spill from the gold mines around the area has left most of Turubamba's people blind or close to death which compromises Saturina's plans. Her story and the struggles of the Turubamba village are presented as the main plot of the movie. In a somewhat surreal and lyrical way, Brosens and Woodworth show us a Latin America in which the indigenous traditions and beliefs are blended with Catholicism creating a unique culture. For example, Saturnina is the guard of the figure of the Virgin Mary and like her, all the people from the village attend to church and worship the saints. But simultaneously to the traditions acquired during the colonial period, they continue adoring the Sun, the Moon, Mother Nature, having rituals with corn, and speaking their own language, Quechua.

Saturnina's fiancee dies due to mercury poisoning. This event is a breakdown not only for Saturnina but for everyone concerned with Turubamba such as the mining companies and the doctors of the mission. The problem of the mining spills becomes sounder and people start protesting. Max (Oliver Gourmet), Grace's husband who was trying to investigate the causes of the poisoning with the rest of the medical crew dies accidentally during one of those protests. Overwhelmed with both casualties (her friend in Iraq and her partner in Turubamba), Grace travels to understand the situation in which Max died which was not recorded or reported anywhere. She finds Max's camera which contained a video of Saturnina's suicide. In the video, Saturnina leaves messages explaining her decision and the situation of her village. "Without images, there is no history" and "the mother Earth will never forgive our deed" are some of the shocking phrases that will remain in Grace's mind to help her find redemption.

Towards the end of the movie, the scenes are presented in black and white accompanied with sad music and shots of the faces of the indigenous killed by the contamination and their grieving families as a way to emphasize their feelings. The change in colour makes those moments more dramatic than the rest of the movie. The story does not go on relating the result of the protests for the mining or missions around, indeed, by the end of the movie those factors disappear completely leaving us only the images that reflect the feelings, the tragedy, and the fantasy of indigenous beliefs. Again like in other movies depicting Latin America, ecological problems and the struggles faced by minority groups seem to be the least important matter in the film. They are part of the movie just to propose plots that appeal to the audience for its realism.

Like in Gibson's "Apocalypto", Elliot's "The Debt", or even in the Zorro movies, the Latin American "real" drama is called to the screen with elements such as the language (Spanish or a native tongue), exploitation or the memories of it (resentments from colonization), and the combination of these with actual history of the region or of its people, especially of indigenous people.

Apocalypto

2018-07-27T11:37:00.000-07:00

"Apocalypto" (2006) is an adventure and action movie directed by Mel Gibson which portrays the Mayan civilization myths and decline, and the oppressive rule it had over the surrounding indigenous communities. Gibson takes us to late pre-Columbian Mesoamerica where the Maya empire was located and anxiously waiting for the Apocalypto, a new era in their calendar that is marked with the arrival of the Spanish explorers. Thi movie shows us a different version of colonization which is imposed by the Mayas over smaller communities in Latin America, and which makes the European colonization seem nothing compared with the brutality of human sacrifices and manipulation practiced by the pre-Columbian empire.

The movie is filmed in is full-length in Mayan language and in the tropical jungle of Veracruz and Oaxaca, Mexico, where the community Zapotec developed before the Mayan conquest of their territories. Its plot is built up over myths and legends of the Zapotec culture and historical accounts of the Mayan civilization. The indigenous looking characters speaking ancestral languages, the historical plot, and the jungle and Mayan pyramid sets provide this movie with an extremely realistic atmosphere and a feeling that we are watching an "insider" point of view.

It all starts in the middle of the Mesoamerican rainforest in which a group of indigenous hunt the food for the whole village. With a couple of laughs arose from jokes about the marital life of one of the men, we know that Gibson tried to portray the "normal" life of an indigenous tribe of that time creating feelings of sympathy among the viewers. But then something strange and terrifying happens. Another tribe is migrating because its village has been destroyed. The encounter of the hunter with the tribe migrating in look for a "new beginning" (the meaning of the word Apocalypto) profoundly marks the life of Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) who fears the cause of the migration and the end of the world as he knows it. Then the action begins. Jaguar Paw's village is invaded and destroyed by warriors of the Mayan civilization who kill almost all the people and take prisoners the survivors, except for the children. In the middle of this tragic scene, the expressivity shown by the characters while praying to their Gods or accepting their destiny to connect with nature in the afterlife reinforces the imagination of a Latin America that suffers real struggles.

The plot is based on traditions, myths and prophesies of the Mayan culture. However, Gibson chooses only those controversial practices that will boost the drama and suspense of the movie. The most shocking scenes are the destruction of the villages to take war prisoners, the human sacrifice of men on the top of the pyramids, and the use of astrological knowledge by the leaders to manipulate people making them believe fearful of a false God, the sun. The anxieties of the people become stronger when a plague infests them and their crops which is understood by some as the beginning of the end (the Apocalypto), while for others it is just a call by the Gods to render more sacrifices. During one more of these sanguinary rituals, a solar eclipse takes place and it is translated by the shamans into the words of the God Sun that has heard the Mayan petitions after hundreds of sacrifices. This event saves Jaguar Paw to be the next sacrificed man. He manages to escape by getting into the jungle where no guns or fighting skills surpass ancestral knowledge of nature.

The persecuted Jaguar Paw comes back to the destroyed village where he hid his pregnant wife and son. The surviving Mayan soldiers that followed Jaguar to the coast are about to catch him, but the arrival of the Spanish ships steal their attention. Jaguar rescues his family and hides in the middle of the jungle to start "the new beginning".

Gibson portrays a part of Latin America that seems quite realistic. It is hard to think that the level of expressivity and historical accounts involve in this movie are not accurate. It is the same strategy Gibson used to screen the Passion of Christ. From the beginning, this movie divides indigenous into two groups: the good and the bad ones, the sanguinary Mayans and the peaceful jungle inhabitants. The division, however, projects more than the complex history of the Mayan civilization. The interpretation of indigenous culture and traditions portrayed in this movie supports the European colonization that aid by Catholicism, demonized practices such as human sacrifices to the Sun. By showing two different "types" of indigenous from what seems an insider point of view, this movie criticizes unacceptable traditions of a (un)civilized culture.

Apocalypto represents in the movie the end of the Mayan empire, but it is also the beginning of a new one when the Spanish arrived. In the last scene, we see the ships getting close to the Mesoamerican coast and it is when Jaguar Paw finally escapes and decides to hide in the jungle. Gibson finishes this adventure film with airs of a promising future, at least for those communities oppressed by the Mayans. The end is paternalistic towards the indigenous communities (Did they need help to survive the Mayan rule?) and reflects the coloniality of justifying in some extent the superiority of religion over indigenous beliefs and colonization itself. The depiction of indigenous practices as inhuman is implicitly contrasted to the imaginations of the audience when the Spanish ships appear on the screen. There is no need for a further development of the storyline that would include the establishment of colonies and overthrow of Empires in the Americas.

Latin America and its history (the myths, the culture, the traditions, and even the language) brings to the film industry the complexity and beauty necessary for creating a plot that is both realistic and fantastic at the same time. Apocalypto might convince its audience that the purpose is sharing the struggles lived by indigenous, even before the colonial period. And even though it does show events that are part of history, it only reaffirms imaginaries of implicit Western superiority that were once used to justify colonization.

The Tailor of Panama

2018-07-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

"The Tailor of Panama" (2001) is a British movie directed by John Boorman. Based on a spy novel written by John le Carre and filmed almost in its majority in Panama, this movie satirizes the secret intelligence operations set by England and the United States to protect their unilateral interest in controlling the Panama Canal. Boorman's movie portrays some of the motivations and consequences of surveillance and military intervention in developing countries such as Panama by the Great Powers. Ironically, both England and the United States are victims of their own anxieties which make them create and also believe in conspiracy theories when in reality there is no reason for such, rather ridiculous fears.

The movie starts with a long shot that shows the huge bridge crossing over the Panama Canal with written descriptions about its importance, especially its security and economic value for the United States. The bridge is the only connection by land between North and South America, and since its control was handed over to the Panamanian government, the United States has kept an eye out for any possible threat that would shift its jurisdiction back to their hands to control South to North mobility, and the commerce in the area with all the world. In these circumstances, a British spy, Osnar (Pierce Brosnan) is sent to Panama to investigate the government's future plans and negotiations over the Canal. Once in Panama, Osnar contacts an ex-convict British, Harry (Geoffrey Rush), that has hidden his shameful past from his wife and became a well-known tailor (a talent that learned in prison) who is not only famous for dressing high-rank officials like the President, but also for knowing their secrets.

Convinced that the tailor knows important information about the Canal, Osnar blackmails him to become a spy in exchange for money and keeping his dark past in secret. The tailor has a huge debt to pay for which he accepts the deal. However, he discovers that there is nothing threatening the Canal's security. But Osnar insists in finding at least a little piece of information. It is then that Harry creates a whole conspiracy story in which supposedly Panama is in negotiations to sell the Canal control to China, Japan and Russia, and the United States secret intelligence wants to interfere. Harry gets his money without presenting any other proof than his own word. Osnar communicates this to the United Kingdom who decide to also fight for the Canal's control, but first, they need official documents to back up this senseless (but expected) rivalry. Boorman's portrayal of the tensions about controlling the Canal resembles the anxieties of the Cold War of the previous decade.

Once Osnar is totally aware that Harry's statements are just lies, he continues pushing the United Kingdom to intervene, but once the United States discovers what the UK has been working on, it gets impossible to keep lying. A fictional "silent opposition" (another of Harry's lies) against the United States is the perfect excuse Osnar needed to finally convince the government to act. Funding them to destroy the little influence the US has over the Canal will give them the advantage over the other countries interested. Of course, this "threat to American security" (though everything nothing takes place in the US) increases the anxieties to its peak. Suddenly, we see a large part of the US airforce, marine corps and politicians go to Panama to regain the missing star from the flag.

By the end of the movie, Harry and his wife who is the secretary for the office of the Canal affairs talk to the Panamanian president and England's ambassador to explain everything and.

Boorman shows as a Latin America that is really important for developed countries, not because of its beauty, its people, or the social problems that need to be addressed, but instead, it becomes the centre of attention only when the politics of its countries signify a threat for national security (in the case of the United States), or to take advantage of its strategic geography/resources. Ironically, we see that in the movie those "threats" are originated from uncertainty, fear and lies that confirm the initial suspicions. But on top of all, there is ambition. Even after knowing that the Canal is totally secure, they will make up stories taking them up to levels that could result in armed conflicts just to calm their thirst for power. We also see the contrast between the local people and foreign visitors or settlers. While an overwhelming number of poor Panamanians have become street-sellers, or work to entertain the tourist, all the characters are British or American and for them, Panama is the place of huge banks, nightclubs, resorts and good music.

"The Tailor of Panama" might be also a left-wing criticism to the international military campaign led by the US and its allies in which the US national security rhetoric is used to justify attacks in developing countries, while at the same time taking control of their resources, and influencing their politics. In this movie, Latin America becomes the perfect scenario for one more of these campaigns. Though the poverty is shown in the film, any country that takes control there, whether it is militarily, politically, or economically (or all) would increase its power and become a threat for others looking. Boorman ridiculizes the secret intelligence agencies of the United Kingdom and of the United States. What intelligence is there in looking for biased information that confirms what you want to believe and disregards whatever contradicts it?

Zorro-Disney Series (Season 1)

2018-07-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

Zorro (1958) is a series created by the Walt Disney Company based on the stories of Johnson McCulley. Disney decides to continue the Zorro tradition that by the time has been going on for more than 30 years. Most of its direction is credited to Norman Foster, however, the series is a collaboration with other directors such as Lewis. R. Foster, Robert Stevenson, John Meredith Lucas, Charles Barton and Charles Lamont, who put together two seasons of about fifteen to twenty hours each, making this series the longest Zorro storyline in the tradition, and also the most popular one (at least before Bandera's interpretation of Zorro in 1998). Though of its popularity, this series continued to be cataloged among commercial B-movies, together with previous serial versions such as Republic Pictures' series. Though this series length requires creating more stories and additional characters which differ from the first Zorro movie, this incarnation of Zorro might be one of the most traditional ones and the closest to the original version since Johnston McCulley himself was involved in the development of the serial.

Norman Foster take us to the traditional time and location of McCulley's "The Curse of Capistrano". It is 1820 in the old Spanish California and Don Diego de la Vega (Guy Williams) has just arrived from his temporary stay in Spain to Los Angeles. Even before the ship gets to the pier, he and his mute assistant Bernardo (Gene Sheldon) are informed about the tyrannical government that Capitan Monastario has imposed to oppress the poor, the Indians, and the just blue-blooded aristocrats of the region. Don Diego believes that his duty as a loyal subject is to defeat all of the Crown's enemies, and to do so he will hide his intentions behind the mask of Zorro, while pretending to be a coward man interested only in literature and music in front of everyone else, even in front of his father Alejandro de la Vega (George J. Lewis). But he is not fighting alone. Bernardo who is also highly skilled at sword and whip fighting adopts a second identity to help his master (Bernardo pretends to be a silly deaf-mute instead of only mute but smart) and his fast and well-trained horse called Tornado will make of Zorro an invincible legend.

California is presented as a beautiful place to live in and to take advantage of for people around the world. Its location, resources, but also its instability as a colony of the Spanish empire after the Mexican emancipatory revolutions have attracted the most ambitious men who will try to use their influence to destroy anyone who steps on their way. Spanish occupying positions in the highest power hierarchies because of their names and appearance reflecting aristocratic or even royal ancestry become Don Diego/Zorro's nemeses. Don Diego, however, does not condemn the special privileges of being aristocrat or Spanish, neither he critiques colonialism. The problem arises when those are corrupted or lead to unacceptable treatment. What is acceptable or what is not is obviously determined by the elites, thus things like increasing taxes for the poor and the rich is considered unjust, but making indigenous work without any pay for the church's missions or as servants in the aristocrat's houses are seen as not only as just, but they are the necessary means to guide the Indians towards civilization.

A plot in support of European elitism is a characteristic of the traditional Zorro movies because of the period in which it takes place when Spain had legitimate control over California. However, in this series, the underlining "good" social constructions imposed on Californians by the Crown are challenged as the storyline goes on, and the elites (like the De la Vega family) will use their powerful influence to protect and differentiate their Californian from Spain.

Don Diego opposes the enemies of the Crown, but on top of it, as Zorro, he fights in the name of California, even if this means breaking the conventions of his aristocratic class and of his Spanish roots. During the first quarter of season one, Zorro fights the corrupted Captain Monasterio, but after defeating him, new threats appear to destroy the beauty and wealth of California, and the tranquillity of its people. These new enemies are each time people closer in the hierarchy to the Crown and those conflicting loyalties develop in Zorro and in all people of the village a stronger feeling of patriotism but not towards Spain, but towards California. The Californio identity rises as Zorro also become part of California's cultures through legends and songs. While children dress up like Zorro fighting with swords made out of wood, Zorro, the De la Vega family and many other Californian aristocrats get ready to go on a civil war against those trying to destabilize the peace of Los Angeles and the rest of California. Soon they will realize that the enemy is the appointees of the Crown themselves.

The last part of the first season tells us a lot about the construction of the Californio identity which becomes more visible because of the tensions of a possible civil war. The Californio identity and patriotism appear as the civil war creates a sense of "otherness" towards the foreigner. Interestingly, the dual identity of Don Diego/Zorro seems to fade away under these circumstances making Don Diego act as Zorro without the need of wearing the mask to cover his face. He starts to get more involved in the matters of California's governance, he tricks and fights his enemies, and he opposes injustice, whether this comes from criminals or if this part of the Spanish law. The Californio identity is also defined in relation to other identities. Though that in many aspects such as in culture and traditions California is a mix of Spain and Mexico, Californians consider themselves totally different from both. This is especially true after we start hearing about the Mexican independence war. From here Disney made clear that California is not part of those newly independent Mexican states mentioned in the series. And despite the fact that people know they are subjects of the Spanish King, the attempts to control and exploit the people and resources by every Spanish that arrives in Los Angeles will soon make all Californians remove the "Spanish" from Spanish Californio when referring to themselves. One thing can be clear, California might separate itself from the Mexicanidad, but it cannot escape its own Latin American essence.

One of the additions Norman Foster made to the original Zorro storyline is introducing the character of "The Eagle". Like Zorro, the Eagle has a second identity. During the day he is Jose Sebastian Varga, the new California's Magistrado, but at night he becomes the Eagle, a far-right wing Galindo that wants to re-built Spain's lost grandeur. For that, the Eagle will try to take control of California and sell it to other countries such as England, France, and Russia. England and France retire their offers when they realize that Varga lied about the state of California, but the Russian count retires only after he knows the people cannot be contained even with force.

This first part of the Disney Zorro portrays California in interesting ways. For the language and the culture, it perfectly fits under the Latin American umbrella, but at the same time, Californians have developed a totally different identity. Zorro is the personification of that identity and its evolution. We see that as the threats against California become sounder with the civil war, the courage and mobility characteristic of Zorro (performance of Latino personality) show up not only in the unmasked Don Diego but in all the patriotic people trying to defend California, from the richest to the poorest. California/Latin America is as well the scenario in which different countries expose their weaknesses and strengths. We see a Europe in decay trying to take control of California because of its gold, its haciendas, its wine, and everything that makes it seem like a paradise. We are also exposed to the idea of a growing Mexico approaching with its revolutionary ideas, the fear of the little left from Spain in California.

Like other Zorro incarnations, the plot of Disney Zorro implicitly projects events in history and its effect on Hollywood. Douglas Fairbanks' Zorro provided Latin America and California with a hero right after the Great War. This renewed Zorro appears after the Second World War after which European countries became dependant on The U.S wealth, just like it happens in this series, though California is not considered part of the United States yet.

Zorro: Generation Z

2018-07-12T09:57:00.000-07:00

Zorro: Generation Z (2006) is a short animated series directed by Chris Evans that recount the adventures of futuristic Zorro/Diego de la Vega. This incarnation introduces us to the Scarlet Whip/Maria Martinez, another hero inspired in Zorro (sharing a lot of similarities with the 1944 Black Whip). Both superheroes fight using high-technology weapons against Maria's father, the corrupt Mayor Martinez, who has no idea about her second identity. This animation is remade into the movie Zorro: Return to the Future one year later keeping the same characters, but adding to the plot an explanation of how this Don Diego becomes a hero, after finding out about previous Zorro generations in his family, which is not clarified in this series. Zorro now looks more like a modern superhero: his costume is bulletproof, fights to stop crime, and his fights are tracked and endorsed by the media.

In the fictional city called Pueblo Grande, Zorro and Black Whip fight with robots while trying to unveil each other's identity behind masks. But not only them have a second personality. Sometimes Bernardo (Diego's mute assistant) takes Zorro's mask, cape and motorcycle called Tornado (like the traditional black horse) and fights crime when Diego gets injured or when there is a threat of discovering Diego's secret. It seems that with technology there is no need to skill or swordfight practice to become Zorro. Bernardo has managed to even insert voice simulation into Zorro's costume to fake his identity. And thus Bernardo turns into a superhero as well.

If we look at the many different plots made about Zorro, there is tradition and addition. As the list of Zorro movies adds up, we see a repetition of certain aspects such as the fight for justice, the dialogues with few words in Spanish that remind us of the history of the village and Zorro's aristocratic ascendance, among other details. But there is also an addition of new elements. Some of them are part of a particular Zorro movie, and other innovations stay as part of an updated tradition. In the Republic series, and then in the Disney series, Zorro is multiplied and the dual identity characteristic is not seen only in him, but it is displaced on other characters, especially on his enemies, or in Zorro replicas. Here again, this resource is used almost in every episode. Bernando dresses up like Zorro and Maria is also the Scarlet Whip, but in addition, Diego's cousin also pretends to be Zorro, which leaves us with three Zorros, something seen in previous incarnations.

In the list of the additions for this unconventional plot for a Zorro movie, modernity stands out. Modernity, on one hand, has allowed people like Zorro to become more efficient fighting injustice with the technological advancements. On the other hand, it has changed almost totally the geopolitics in which the story of Zorro takes place. Clearly, this Pueblo Grande location of the movie has nothing to do with Latin America or old California. With no need to mentioning it, we know that this Pueblo Grande is a city in the United States, though most of the characters' names are in Spanish and sometimes they speak in Spanish. Pueblo Grande is also a city with lots of immigrants and interestingly, those are the ones causing the most trouble. Zorro fights against an Italian mafia gang, and Sergeant Garcia with his strong Mexican accent, appearance, and attitude (lazy and always eating cake and burritos) could be easily pointed as a foreigner among the rest. Zorro, however, does not fall into this category though we know about his origin from previous movies. He is not a foreign hero, or at least he is not one coming from south of the border.

Towards the end of the movie, Zorro's enemies are harder to destroy since they have discovered how to hack Zorro's technology. Then Diego decides to come back to the old Zorro costume, with the sword and whip used by his ancestors. Though that without technology it is almost impossible for Diego de la Vega to be an undestroyable hero (the old costume requires from him to use his own abilities), he successfully finishes his last battle.

What does this movie tell us about generations of Zorro to come? Will future Zorros renounce to their Latino identities and become more American-like in name of modernity? In the movies about old California, Zorro was known for protecting Indians and local people in poverty from the elitist exploitation imposed by the Spanish royals. But now that we are presented with a futuristic version of Zorro in which there is not a single trace left of the colonial period other than Spanish sounding names. We do not see priests or Mexican indigenous like in the traditional stories (though we do see a native American woman who is Diego's aunt), and thus there is no exploitation against them for which Zorro's fight is not to protect indigenously (and hardly ever is seen protecting the poor) but he fights crime in general, more like what a Marvel superhero would do.

Zorro: Return to the Future

2018-07-07T20:26:00.000-07:00

The animated film Zorro: Return to the Future (2007), directed by Stuart Evans, relates the adventures of a new Zorro (sometime in the future), this time helped by high technology and an equally skillful partner called Scarlet Whip. Instead of a sword, Zorro is equipped with a laser weapon in the form of a Z that works equally as sword, whip, or a laser shotgun as needed. And instead of riding the traditional black horse, this new generation Diego de la Vega rides a purple motorbike.

The movie is a spin-off from the series Zorro: Generation Z (2006), whose animation is identical to this one and which likewise presents Zorro and Scarlet Whip in a futuristic scenario. However, the movie provides a back-story to explain how Diego became Zorro, which is not a part of the series.

Diego de la Vega is a rich guy from Pueblo Grande city. He spends his family's money buying expensive toys like cars and bikes. He also has a personal assistant of the same age as his who is dumb, like the servant of McCulley's Spanish Californian Don Diego. His deceased grandfather, the Diego de la Vega of a previous generation, leaves a note for young Diego introducing him to the legend of Zorro which was carefully kept as a secret from Diego's dad, Alejandro de la Vega. In a hidden cave under his house, Diego finds the tools of all the previous Zorros, including swords and whips. "Every generation has a Diego, and so every generation has a Zorro," young Diego's grandfather had told him as a kid while relating Zorro's fairytales and legends.

Evans uses several of the resources of previous Zorro movies. He takes inspiration from "Zorro's Black Whip" to create the character of Scarlet Whip. Just like the Black Whip, Scarlet Whip is a female hero with a mask and a whip inspired by Zorro, but she is a totally different hero. Although the plot of this animation seems to be much further away from the old California to be developed in the future and combine previous incarnations of Zorro in one, there are many returns to base elements of the established tradition. It is then repeated names and very familiar stories of past occasions. Diego de la Vega fighting to remove the corrupt Mayor Martinez from power. Martinez helped by an incompetent Sergeant Garcia who is now presented with a strong Mexican accent and spends most of his time eating.

The repetition of characters and their names are explicit (although with the futuristic touch that predominates throughout the plot). But it is not a simple repetition of the original story. In addition to returning to the name Diego de la Vega and showing that this is one of a number of generations of Zorro, Evans has borrowed characters from incarnations of this hero that are very particular. In this movie the plurality that was seen in Blasco's Three Swords of Zorro since just like that movie, this animation shows us three Zorros, two men (one Diego de la Vega, the second is the dumb assistant Bernardo) and a woman (Scarlet Whip) which adds on to the complexity that is already present in masked heroes' dual identities.

So beyond the laser weapons, motorcycles, cars, and planes, Zorro: Return to the Future is hardly as innovative as one expects it to be from its title. Moreover, Zorro's motivations are not futuristic at all. There are the same problems of government corruption, and the poor are still poor (this time living in shelters). What has changed is the geographical situation. Pueblo Grande is a city named in Spanish, and a few words in Spanish are heard throughout the movie, but the reasons for this are unclear unless the audience has some prior knowledge of the Zorro tradition.

The Legend of Zorro

2018-07-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

Once again Antonio Banderas puts on the mask and takes the sword and whip to play the role of Zorro in this new film directed by Martin Campbell. "The Legend of Zorro" (2005) is a sequel of Campbell's 1998 "The Mask of Zorro" starring Banderas as Alejandro de la Vega and Zorro, and Zeta-Jones as Elena, Alejandro's wife and Zorro's fighting partner. They both fight together for the freedom and peace of California, but also for their ten-year-old kid who knows nothing about their secret identities.

Visually, the movie has a lot to give. Though it takes place in the 1850's pre-statehood California, the airs of modernity are easily perceived. Modernity promises to come from the Northen Union. There are big explosions, and the threat of a conspiracy to destroy the country that has taken Europe's post in leading the world, the United States. With these modifications, Campbell tries to transform Zorro in a real Hollywood-like superhero, a legend. In contrary to previous movies where Zorro protects the Spanish rule (the problem is not colonialism, but corruption within it), here he is a populist leader accepted by the people and the government who carries out the wishes of Californians of becoming finally free from exploitation by joining the US. Though the movie points out that the exploitation is coming from the aristocratic elites in California, it is not clear whether these aristocrats are from Mexico, Europe, or America.

At the end of the movie, Zorro and Elena disclose their secret identities to their son whose latino blood has taken him to act as a little Zorro, even before it was revealed to him that his father was the masked swordsman. He jumps around, fights with rulers (instead of swords), and speaks a bit of Spanish like Zorro would do. Latin America is in his blood. The three of them fight together until California finally joins the Union.

Zorro movies portray California's colonial and post-colonial history, directly or indirectly. Campbell shows the process of California's Americanization, however, in this movie he rewrites history to make it more American friendly. It presents a unanimous agreement from all Californians, rich and poor, indigenous or aristocrat criollos, to become American, which in reality required a civil war.

Even though all Zorro incarnations are influenced by McCulley's stories, each director portrays the justice Zorro fights for in their own way. Campbell's interpretation of Zorro and his sense of justice (in the previous movie but even more in this one) are completely different from the established film tradition surrounding Zorro. What Campbell has maintained from McCulley's original stories is only the character of Zorro, his bravery, his Spanish aristocratic ancestry, and his solidarity with the Catholic church and indigenous people. But Zorro has abandoned his devotion to the Spanish Crown as an aristocrat, and his interest for Latin American identity of Mexican California of the old Latino Zorro. America symbolizes true justice and freedom. Freedom from what? Not even once Mexico is mentioned in the movie's portrayal of civil war. It is like California passed directly from being a colony of Spain to democratically decide to join the United States. And whoever opposes to that decision is an enemy of democracy and modernity.

Nevertheless, this fictional depiction of California's history does tell us something about Hollywood's opinion of the complex demographics of the state. It is difficult to generalize Californians' ancestry. Are they Mexicans, Europeans, or Americans? Like Zorro, Californians are all and none at the same time. It is precisely that complexity and openness which makes California a fascinating place, but also a weak point for the otherwise collective identity of the United States.

The Many Faces of Zorro

2018-07-05T21:18:00.000-07:00

"The Many Faces of Zorro" (2002) is a documentary directed by Brett Ellis about the filming tradition in Zorro movies throughout time. This documentary contains three sections. First, there is a summary of the different versions and characters behind the mask of Zorro since its creation in McCulley's comic-like, Californian adventure stories, to the latest (at that time) incarnation in Campbell's "The Mask of Zorro" (1998). Second, Ellis interviews the stars of Codwall's Zorro: Caroline Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins, and Antonio Banderas; additionally, there are interviews to few actors and actresses of previous Zorro versions such as Linda Stirling from Zorro's Black Whip and Britt Lomond from the Zorro Disney series. And third, Ellis includes two interviews with sword and whip choreographers who explain the importance of those instruments in history and in Zorro movies.

Appart from being a documentary about Zorro, it is a documentary about "The Mask of Zorro". According to the research made for this documentary, the stories of Zorro were widely popular since its first appearance on screen with Douglas Fairbanks acting as the dual-identity hero. With the time many other producers found the potential of Zorro's character and its versatility to inspire new stories with the same, or new heroes that were basically imitations of Zorro. Nevertheless, none of those reincarnations of Zorro reached the popularity McCulley's writings had. That seemed to have changed with the Zorro Disney series. With a bigger budget, talented actors, and under the Disney slogan, Zorro became one of the favourite TV shows of a Saturday morning. All previous or future movies about the masked legend stayed under the shadow of Fairbanks for being the first or Disney for its fame. But there it comes Ellis' Zorro, the promise of reviving the old Californian hero and take him finally to the big screens of Hollywood.

Why did a hero that has been incarnated more times than we can count take so long to arrive at the big screens? For Ellis, Campbell movie is the final and necessary come back to the traditional Spanish Californian Zorro that helps the less fortunate. History and tradition kept Zorro stories alive, but relegated to low-budget production, to easily forgotten weekend matinee series, or to inspire imitations of new invincible superheroes that over the years have lost almost every connection to their father, Zorro. Ellis tracks and shows those connections of the most famous Hollywood superheroes such as Superman, Spiderman, Captian Marvel, Batman, among others, with the original stories written by McCulley. All of them emerged from the Spanish and later the Mexican California popular legends and reflect its history of struggles for decolonization and national independence. And each new modification in the plot again reflects a period of instability or conflict. Lots of Zorro movies are produced after wars or are about wars.

Through interviews with sword and whip choreographers we introduced to the history behind the use of those instruments and their importance for the Zorro movies plots. Just like dialogues in Spanish remind us of California's past as part of Mexico, swords and whips create a permanent attachment between any Zorro movie, and colonial Latin America, especially with Mexico and the Spanish rule of California before becoming part of the United States.

But more importantly, Zorro and the performative nature that is deeply-rooted in the duality of the character (one actor performing the roles of two different characters) say a lot about what is acting itself. Since its beginnings, Zorro's double personality was used by Douglas Fairbanks to demonstrate and promote his acting skills on screen. This is the case as well in The Mask of Zorro. From learning how to use the sword and whip as Spaniards would use them, to pretending to be a romantic Latino in Banderas case (as an actor), or an aristocrat when he is the peasant son-on-law to-be of Don Diego de la Vega (as Alejandro de la Vega character).

Though we have become more familiar with the repetition of heroes hiding second identities, Zorro is by essence different. It carries in itself the origins of those new masked heroes. It portrays Latin America's history from the colony to how we know it today. It is a reflection of California's evolution and transitions out of Latin America to being an American state. And it is the display of character appropiation in acting, making the viewer forget that is seeing Banderas, de la Vega, and Zorro at the same time, instead we are convinced of being seeing one at the time.

Three Swords of Zorro

2018-06-28T17:37:00.000-07:00

Zorromania comes in many different forms. On this blog alone, we are introduced to the about ten of them. Among them, there is the original Spanish-Californian aristocrat Zorro, the Son of Zorro, a gay Zorro, a female Zorro, an animated Zorro. Yet, the list continues with more and more incarnations of McCulley's hero. Now we are presented with not one but three legendary Zorros in this Spanish-Italian film. They are not only driven by the pursuit of justice for the poor and Indians, but they also look for individual justice, desires for revenge that have become stronger over the years.

Ricardo Blasco's Three Swords of Zorro (1963) opens in 1830 shortly after Mexico gained its independence, then it jumps to 1840 and finishes in 1855 with the Reformation period. At the beginning of the movie, the popular hero Zorro fights against the local governor who has imposed tyranny over just freed people. Taking advantage of the distance between the newly established federal government and the district, the governor Don Manuel Paredes (Antonio Prieto) and the military force the poor to pay high taxes, burns their houses and kills anyone who dares to oppose the regime like Zorro's family. Ten years later, the identity behind Zorro (Guy Stockwell) angrily faces the general for having killed his wife and son. Zorro is sent to prison, but he continues to be a legend among the people. We discover that Zorro's son was saved by an indigenous and named Diego Guadalupe (in tribute to the Virgen of Guadalupe) who grew up with an adoptive family. Coincidentally he keeps the Zorro legend alive by becoming the new Zorro. There it is the second sword.

The timeline of the plot shows a transition from colonial to post-colonial Mexico. The construction of the Mexican latinidad (influenced by the coloniality from its Spanish-past) is shown through culture and traditions. The church does not have political power anymore like in the old Zorro, but Catholicism has taken roots in society with the adoration of saints of Mexican origin such as the Virgin of Guadalupe. Romance, music and dance remain as part of the plot but this time more Mexican, more Latino: Maria (Mikaela Wood) act as mariachi singing rancheras about the old Mexican California for her customers at a pub. On the other hand, the colonial power and influence of the aristocrats did not disappear totally like the church's power did. The powerful and rich families from the old Spanish Mexico still occupy the highest positions in government and gather for the fanciest parties of European style.

Some scenes of the movie are obviously a replication of Fairbanks' The Mark of Zorro. In both movies soldiers joke about Zorro and say that they will destroy him without complication, then there is a knock on the door with the expectation of finding Zorro at the other side. Don Diego (young Diego Guadalupe in Blasco's film) gets in the pub calming the soldiers' fears, but soon Don Diego manages to wear Zorro's clothes to battle and ridicule his enemies. The difference is that Fairbanks tell us from the beginning that Don Diego and Zorro are the same people, while Blasco does not, but he does not need to neither. The remake of this scene is enough to know that the young Diego is indeed Zorro. In the movie as in reality, the general story of Zorro is well known and thus it generates expectations. Attractive and strong Maria (Diego's half-sister) is our best guess for the third sword of Zorro, and once again we are right. She is the third sword. But though our expectations are meet, they are also broken when Zorro's multiplicity is exposed and exploited in Blasco's plot.

Why create a second or third Zorro? What happened with the imprisoned Zorro? Is this new Zorro an impostor of the real one? This movie is a visible example of Zorro's plurality. Blasco puts the three Zorros together in a masked ball (the old, the son, and the woman) as a plan to destroy the corrupt general. But there are not only three Zorros. People attending to the ball decide to dress up like Zorro and act like him too. Thus we eneded up having not three but four, six, or even ten Zorros. It is hard to determine who is the real Zorro. In the movie we hear people commenting that such multiplicity of Zorro is vulgar. Others say it is smart. In both this movie and filming industry, there is not such a thing as "the real Zorro" anymore. Zorro is one and is many at the same time. There are uncontable variations of the hero, but they all call themselves Zorro. Anyone can be Zorro, an aristocrat, an orphan, old or young, man or woman.

Though that Diego is a son of Zorro, he did not choose to appropriate the second identity because of his relationship with the hero, as in Don Q, Son of Zorro. Instead, he is motivated by the stories the people of the village grew up listening to. Like music, dances, and romance, also El Zorro is in this plot an essential part of Mexico's culture, even after California annexed to the United States. But Zorro is a popular hero among the poor Mexicans. The original dual-identity of the original story has also changed. Now both the person behind the mask and Zorro are Mexican and of a low economic status. In fact, it is not important to know whoever is using Zorro's identity since it is the costume itself that comes with a personality attached, independently of the person acting the character.

Zorro as well is a living example evolution from colonial Spanish America to postcolonial Latin America, but there is something clearer than other versions of the movies: Zorro is Latino. When presenting male and female versions of Zorro and the people embodying him, Blasco also depicts a romanticized image of Latin American identity. Latinos are courageous, romantic, good singer and dancers. Latinas are beautiful, strong, good singers and dancers, and do not need a man to protect them, which make them more attractive.

Zorro's Black Whip

2018-06-26T12:33:00.000-07:00

Directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet and Wallace Grissell, Zorro's Black Whip (1944) recounts the adventures of a hero similar to the original McCulley's Zorro. As many of the Republic Pictures's Zorro films, this is a twelve short episode serial, but this time a new version of our Californian hero rides his horse in the 1889 pre-statehood Idaho, in the United States. Bennet and Grissell move us from the original colonial land of Caballeros to a post-colonial land of Westerns cowboys.

Though the name of the serial is Zorro's Black Whip, the word Zorro (and the character as we know it from previous films that incarnate it) is not mentioned even once throughout any of the twelve episodes. On the contrary, the Black Whip seems to be a totally different hero, fighting in the pursuit of goals that fit new scenarios and circumstances, without church or Indians to defend like in other Zorro movies. The changes introduced to this film, even though it acknowledges being inspired by McCulley's story, they break in many aspects the tradition of El Zorro, from gender to the geographical areas where the story unfolds, while keeping other elements present like the dual-personality dichotomy or the whip and horse complementing Zorro's and Back Whip's outfit.

Undoubtedly, what stands out in this release is what has changed. Unlike the old Zorro, Black Whip is apparently in a more advanced and homogenous society (by 1889 the post-colonial Mexico had already lost California, and territories that were once part of Spanish America went through a period of Americanization allowing settlements of Northen migrants that modified their demography and state affiliation). In pre-statehood Idaho, neither Indians nor priests are part of the plot. Everyone looks American with no Hispanic names, words, or accent. The characteristic romance and grace of the "Latino" Zorro are replaced by pure action and risky adventure. There are guns instead of swords, citizens committee instead of imperial control, and a woman behind the male Black Whip's mask.

The dual-identity character remains as part of the plot, however, making one of the identities a woman is an interesting variation that is simultaneously affecting the second personification as the Black Whip. Linda Stirling acts as both Barbara Meredith and the Black Whip. After the previous Black Whip dies (her brother Randolf that is only seen in the first chapter), she decides to continue with legend her brother had created. The identity of the Black Whip is gendered, it is a male. But Barbara does not use the second identity to reflect something hidden from her own. As Barbara, she is equally good at riding horses and using guns as the Black Whip is, but despite the fact that she freely shows her abilities (not like Zorro that pretends to be slow or not interested in fights), Barbara is not a suspect because she is a she. In the ninth chapter of this serial, Barbara is about to be discovered, but her gender does not fit in the description. "She couldn't be! The Black Whip's got to be a man. He's outshot us, outrode us, and outfought us. Stopped us at every turn!".

Additionally, Black Whip has a partner, Vic Gordon (George J. Lewis) different than the usual servant from the Zorro movies. This partner helps Rebecca in action, but he also helps the Black Whip when discovers the real identity behind it. Performativity, essential aspect of Zorro's duality is questioned once more. Don Diego is Zorro, and apparently, Zorro is the real Don Diego, but the Black Whip is not the real Barbara. Black Whip is not a character by itself, but it carries an identity by itself. Vic Gordon wears Black Whip's clothes and immediately becomes the Black Whip, no matter who is behind, man or woman, a son or a sister. Pretending to be some else can help a person to show its nerve like a hero, but also can protect a villain's identity as it works for Dan Hammond (Francis McDonald) who pretends to be a supporter of statehood while sabotaging it.

What is left of Zorro, other than the name in the title, is a visual template to fill in with new stories, places, and times, and implicit narratives of justice, power, heroism, politics. The word Zorro in the title is not another thing than an inconclusive acknowledgement of a character which extreme flexibility and many sons have created heroes. Zorro's horse, whip, sword, and mask are detached from their historical and geographical context. Those elements as well, together or separate are as flexible and important for a new plot as the character to whom they were once attached.

Back From Eternity

2018-06-23T18:30:00.000-07:00

Seventeen years earlier, John Farrow directed what was probably one of the first airplane crash thrillers. Despite the fact that Five Came Back remained known as an adventure B movie, its fame helped most of its characters to move forward to Hollywood A production industry. It is in 1956 that Farrow directs Back From Eternity, a remake of the low-budget 1939 hit, but know 'correcting' aspects of the plot that failed to make it more recognized, from characters to extensions of the dialogue.

The general plot is basically the same: eleven passengers on a commercial aircraft flying towards Latin America crashes in the middle of the jungle and only five of them come back in the partially repaired airplane. However, to make this a mainstream movie, Farrow's movie starred a highly popular cast for promotion purposes. This was made very clear on the movie's poster which emphasizes the participation of the renowned superstar Anita Ekberg with the phrase "Ooh that Ekberg!".

Among the changes made to the movie (of course thanks to bigger budget expenses) there are some that concern to the quality of the production such as more filming locations and characters that allow to expand the story, better accessories, and an evidently more modern plane; there are other changes that might reflect the audience input after seeing the first movie, and also the good neighbour policy of the previous decades which influenced in the portrayal of Latin America in a different way than in the original movie. Certainly, Back From Eternity shows a friendlier approach regarding Latin America and its people. In the 1939 movie, the only occasion in which the United States and Latin America are contrasted is in the airport in Mexico, but this contrast, ironically, shows that there is no such thing because American culture and language predominate in the only Latin American city depicted in the movie. In this new delivery, in contrast, we visit El Paso and Panama City before the crash. The difference is evident. In addition to people finally speaking in Spanish and passengers excited to try local foods, at the entrance of the Mexican airport the first image we see is a humble Mexican woman selling ponchos, in contrast to the convicted Panamanian criminal who is the first Latino we see in the previous movie.

The character of the Latino criminal has been modified too. Now he is not even Latino, but a European that nationalized in the fictional South American destination called Boca Bravo. In this movie, he is not considered an anarchist or a dangerous person. Instead, Vasquel's (a variation of Vasquez, name used for the character in the original movie) friendly personality makes the rest of the group consider him trustworthy which also affects the end of the movie. In this occasion, Vasquel does not steal the gun but the group entrusts it to him. Interestingly, Farrow's choices on Vasquel's character and dialogue reflect the transition from the Good Neighbour Policy era to a returning period of US intervention during the Cold War which amounted to Soviet influences on Latin America. Though neither the non-intervention principle's nor the US-Soviet conflict is mentioned, Vasquel portrays just those two with his friendship with the old American couple, plus the rightfulness of his cause. He killed a politician but because he was aiming to kill a dictator that was as oppressive as the ones in Europe.

Thus, we are implicitly introduced to a Latin America struggling to get help to overthrow its dictatorial governments. We see its humble and friendly people who are deserving of that help. But still, Latin America is again in this remake a place of adventure that offers promising vacations or new beginnings but also it is the home of dangerous tribes where civilization has not reached yet. This movie is all about what the audience wants to see: more emotions, bigger planes, and more references to the reality, or what it should be like.

Five Came Back

2018-06-23T17:42:00.001-07:00

John Farrow’s Five Came Back (1939) is a black and white thriller about an airplane crash in the middle of the dense Amazon jungle. Though it is remembered as a ‘B’ production, it is probably the first movie of its kind and inspired later airplane disaster movies from the remake Back from Eternity (1956) to the Airport series in the 1970s. Travelling from Los Angeles to Panama City, a commercial flight with twelve people on board suffers an engine problem because of a tropical storm and ends up landing in the Amazon rainforest. In the wait to get rescued or repairing the damaged plane to fly back home, the passengers will rediscover themselves after living and cooperating with each other to survive for twenty-four days.

The movie starts with a quick introduction of the characters in the airport before they get on the plane. From then we know that every passenger has a different motivation to travel to Latin America, but they will agree on the reasons to come back.

Judson (Patric Knowles) and Alice (Wendy Berrie) are a rich couple going to Panama to get married against their family wishes. An old couple, Prof. Henry Spengler (C. Aubrey Smith) and his wife look for a tropical adventure that can revive their love. Pete (Allen Jenkins) is a gangster’s right hand escaping with his child away from American justice. The seventh person is Peggy Nolan (Lucille Ball) who is trying to forget about her failing romances in a place where can start over. And finally, extradited to his home country by the US government for having killed a high-rank politician, Vasquez (Joseph Calleia), a Panamanian anarchist travels to face justice accompanied by Crimp (John Carradine) as his custodian. Of course, we also see the pilots Bill and Joe (Chester Morris and Kent Taylor) and the flight steward Larry, but it is not after the crash that we get to know more about them.

First the plane lands in Mexico for a layover. As soon as the passages know they have crossed the border, the general assumption is that the food will be too spicy and the people Spanish speakers. Ironically, however, the America versus Latin America contrasting imagination fades away when the group realizes that the airport restaurant is run by a Chinese-American chef who speaks English.

The characters, dialogues and landscapes are used by Farrow to portray the different realities that one might experience when travelling to Latin America. The Mexican airport, for example, is the Latin America for the tourists, made by Americans and for Americans. Such is the influence that the passengers do not have to worry about speaking a foreign language or eating foreign food. That is a controlled and secure place, but then we are taken to a totally different Latin America after the crash. The Amazon jungle is nothing like what everyone was expecting when arriving in Panama City. The closest city can only be reached by flying out; the jungle provides enough food and water to survive, but the Amazon Indians will soon come to torture or kill everyone.

The Amazon jungle in its anarchical and isolated state forces the group to commit to an organization based on reason, but also power, similar to Hobbes’ hypothetical state of nature. The Amazon jungle then is the place where theories of pre-civilization stage, where political fiction can be experimented with. To survive, Hobbes argued, a leader with coercive power is designated to protect the whole from the fear of brutish dead. Farrows movie likewise is about the survival of the whole, and the fear of being attacked by an uncivilized tribe motives them to chose one leader, and the power that leader has for ensuring control is a gun. Whoever has the gun, has power too. This unexpected experience and the designation of roles (women cook and take care of the child, men repair the plain, look for resources, and protect the settlement) profoundly transforms each person’s perception of life. The most important change is produced in the anarchical criminal mind of Vasquez. Seeing that the group has been able to organize itself, Vasquez accepts that figures of authority for politics and justice are necessary and that the problem is corrupt people and anarchists like him.

After two people get killed by the Indians, there is no other option than trying to fly out or die in their hands, but only 5 people can get on the plane. Vasquez takes the gun and thus the power to decide. He kills the rich Judson who became an alcoholic and offered money to get a spot. The kid, the two young women and the two pilots who are now romantically involved go back, and the old couple who revived their love and got to explore Latin America decide to stay with Vasquez.

Latin America is shown with its many faces. It is a safe touristic destination highly influenced by the United States, in language and in food, as well as in social and political practices; it is the “civilized” Latin America. But in places beyond the reach of American influence, such as the Amazon forest, it remains an exotic, uncivilized, and dangerous place, like in pre-colonial periods. This second face of Latin America is fictional. Indeed, Farrow had constructed the jungle in a studio with plants brought from the jungle but arranged as his imagination about the place took him. Remote places or societies restricted from American culture, technology, language, politics, etc., are stigmatized, but at the same time, that “untouched” nature of the jungle is romanticized since it becomes an opportunity to find the real self and experience, from zero, the beginning of civilizations when governed by reason.

Moreover, the movie shows an implicit support for gun use as a mean to enforce justice. So the question is: had the gun not been present, would the five survivors still be able to get on the plane? Perhaps without it, the corrupt and alcoholic Judson could have taken one of the pilots’ seats or left a woman behind. The gun is as well the door for a better death for those staying than being tortured by savage Indians. And the Indians, aren’t they also beings of reason which make them able to create norms and rules in the same “state of nature” circumstance? Certainly, in this movie the answer might be negative since Farrow shows only the fear those Indians provoke, we do not see their faces, but we know they are coming to hunt foreigners.

The Temptress

2018-06-17T22:02:00.000-07:00

Fred Niblo’s The Temptress (1926) is a classic black and white silent movie that recounts the love and hate relationship between a hard-working Argentinian architect and an extravagant European woman. The Argentinian Manuel Robledo (Antonio Moreno) falls in love with Elena, the Marquess de Torre Bianca (characterized by the famous actress Greta Garbo). After a quick visit to France, Robledo goes back to work in Argentine and all the plot moves there when Elena and her husband travel as well to “the land of the second chances” escaping from criticism and poverty.

Though Elena’s beauty is the center of attention throughout the movie (in France and in Argentine), Robledo’s appearance and personality too play an important role for this romantic drama since he is presented as the Latin lover, like in other films of the decade starring Antonio Moreno.

The movie begins in a masked ball where the Marquess and Robledo meet. They declare their love for each other, but the next day Robledo discovers that Elena is married to one of his friends and that she uses her beauty to obtain jewels from rich men to maintain her and her husband’s status. Here we see a Europe in crisis (probably a consequence of the Great War), even the richest person is broke. It is a place of appearances and men are not real men because women have become the real rulers (with their beauty). In contrast, Latin America proves to be a land without appearances. The rich are really rich, and the poor are really poor, and every man works hard to provide his women at home. Fixed gender roles are clearly portrayed and even prized in the movie.

Robledo is received like a national hero when he arrives in Argentine. All the people in the village get excited to know what things the architect, whose projects provide jobs for the local and the foreign, has brought from the old continent. Thus, we meet two European men (one French and one Italian) and their reason for being in Argentine. Like those two, hundreds of European have migrated to work in Latin America to pay their debts back home and support their families. Latin America then was the land of the opportunity.

Elena brings to the Argentine many things from France; her expensive clothes, her luxurious lifestyle, and of course her beauty which has become a mortal distraction for the hardworking men that now fight to earn her love. “This is not a place for European women” exclaims Robledo very worried about what could happen to the temptress woman. Elena is not only there to play the role of an elegant European woman, but to portray Europe itself and compare it to what she finds in Argentine. Thanks to her presence in the village, the high-standards of European lifestyle are compared with those ordinary practices of the Argentinian people; a masked ball versus a village party, a huge dinner wearing the best clothes versus a dinner after a long day of work. Though Argentine for Elena is better than a France full of appearances and lazy men, and that it is also the opportunity for many European migrants to overcome the economic crisis, by the end of the movie we can see that Robledo chooses to live in France. His decision as well as the fights occasioned by the temptress give us a clear message: European women and European life are better (if we exclude the economic problems).

The ways in which Latin America is portrayed in this movie are very different to later depictions of the place. In “The City of Your Final Destination” for example, we are presented with some images supposedly from around the same time “The Temptress” was filmed to explain some of the reason and conditions in which Europeans migrated to South America. In that movie, we are only introduced to rich European migrants that arrived at Uruguay to continue living in opulence and did not want to go back to Europe. Some contemporary American movies about Latin America still present the place as an opportunity to begin new lives, but that does not include economic reasons, indeed, now Latinos are the ones who migrate to North America or Europe in the movies.

Gender roles as well are particularly different than what we see nowadays in the movies. Latin America itself becomes a place to determine standards of masculinity (Latin America is the land of men), like hardworking and provider for women, and not the contrary, which helps to shape Robledo’s Latin lover personality; and the temptress, of course, is also a sample of the most desirable woman. It is evident that European women like Elena are attractive and seductive, desirable for any men. Totally opposite to what we see in Carmen Miranda’s movies, here Latinas are not an exotic sexual symbol at all.

Hearing the phrase “the land of the second chances” one might think it is talking about the Americas as a whole (including North America). However, it is clear that in this movie that phrase makes reference only to Latin America, even though both Antonio Moreno and Greta Garbo migrated to the United States for economic reasons as in the movie. So why not to film a movie in the US and choosing Argentine instead? Niblo’s Latin America is the scenario to portray a society nothing like Europe, which perhaps could not be done in a more Europeanised or modern place such as North America. Like in the movie, the idea that European appearance is better might be also the reason to present Latin America as the other with respect to North America, the different, the less European.

Tetro

2018-06-15T17:00:00.000-07:00

Francis Ford Coppola described his movie Tetro (2009) as symbol of reinvention for his now more personal narratives (autobiographical in some respects) and opposing to the Hollywood mold that “makes the same movie over and over again”. “I view this as the second movie of my second career” Coppola commented about Tetro and the first of his 2000s’ movies “Youth Without Youth”. Both movies very different to the ones that made him famous like The Godfather trilogy, but in which cinematographic images of colourful but confusing memories, dreams, and traumas typical of Freudian psychoanalysis persevere. Following this new wave in Coppola’s work (but maintaining some of the recurrent themes of previous productions: black-and-white films, family dramas, and Italia American influences), Tetro comes with a plot about a truth that is being repressed.

And what better way to give a new face to the plot than to take it to a place like Latin America. Presented at first in black and white, the movie starts with the arrival of Bennie Tetrocini (Alden Ehrenreich) to La Boca neighbourhood in Buenos Aires looking for his older brother Angelo (Vicente Gallo), an unsuccessful novelist who now is known under the name of Tetro. Bennie wants to understand why Tetro moved to Argentina and why he hides his past. To unveil Tetro’s mystery, Bennie reads and completes an unfinished novel written by Tetro and that seems to be based on his life. This codified text allows every character to remember fractions of Tetro’s traumatic experiences like the death of his mother, and the treason of his first love with his father the opera conductor Carlos Tetrocini (whose fame always overshadowed Tetro). This text triggers flashbacks, but it also influences the creation of dreams and stories for a play that are the only colourful parts of the movie.

Convinced that his bother’s dark personality is explained by the traumatic stories of the novel (and aware of the potential of the material) Bennie decides to publish the novel to help his bother overcome the past, and produces a play using his brother name, Tetro. However, the cure ends up being worse than the disease. Like in psychoanalysis itself, interpretations might be relative to those trying to materialize what is in the mind. Even though dreams and memories are fragments of a truth, they are still a fantasy representation that projects something else, and in this case, it is also the repression of Bennie’s own memories.

Tetro means many things. It is the apocope of the surname Tetrocini. Tetro is also the new name that Angelo Tetrocini has decided to use in Argentina to start a new life. "Angelo no longer exists, I am Tetro" the protagonist exclaims, referring to Tetro as a totally new person, with no past (although in reality he is hiding one that torments him). But Tetro is also an artistic name. It represents the ambivalence of the family drama that is recurrent in Coppola's films. This ambivalence is also part of the family trauma that makes us see several flashbacks and surreal mental representations (quite expressive and colorful moments) are characteristics of neo-noir cinema. But despite the color scenes, most of the video is true to the black and white of the classic noir.

In this movie, the way in which Argentina is portrayed contributes a lot to the family drama of the plot and to the style of the movie. The streets of La Boca neighbourhood are surrounded by a bohemian life environment: people going out all the time, enjoying street art and open sexuality, and meeting at nightclubs to present their new creations. Music, theater, literature and the importance of art as a whole in Tetro’s life help to build a plot charged with emotions and mystery. Those same elements maintain the noir genre though it is adapted to new audiences and times, as the New York Times called it: “Family Dynamics, Without Bullets”.

The City of Your Final Destination

2018-06-14T08:03:00.000-07:00

James Ivory’s The City is Our Final Destination (2009) is a drama that recounts the adventures of Omar, a PhD student in Literature who travels to Uruguay to convince the family of the deceased novelist, Jules Gund, to grant him permission to write his biography. Ocho Rios is a huge farmhouse owned by the Gund family and the place where Omar will reconstruct his own identity while unveiling the history and the secrets of his favourite author’s family. Based on the novel with the same name by the American writer Peter Cameron, Ivory takes us to a place that evinces a dichotomous reality about the Latin America of the past, and the Latin America of the present, both envisioning a better future. This magical destination is the meeting place for those trying to flee from their sad unwanted realities, but it is also a place some want to escape from. This is a movie about who we are, who we pretend to be, and who we wish to become.

Wanting to please his girlfriend, Omar travels to Uruguay seeking the authorization to write Jules Gund's biography. In Uruguay (though the film is shot in Argentina), Omar arrives at the Ocho Rios ranch which had been the writer's home, and also the spectacular setting for many of his works. The house is large, elegant, and full of old artifacts that reflect its origin, and the origin of what was once a rich European migrant family getting to enjoy the wonders of the New Continent in Uruguay. Although Omar finds a dream place according to Gund's books, he will soon discover that his knowledge about the author is nothing compared to the complexity brought by the family and the secret behind his suicide (which took place in the same house).

Ivory leads us to understand the many reasons why the characters in the film have come to Uruguay, which is also part of the history of the region and the reason for filming there. Thus we are presented with images from the beginning of the twentieth century before and after the Second World War. Boatloads of rich Europeans arrived in South America to rebuild lives that the political and economic crises of their countries had destroyed. “They lived in the past, their past, they did not want to know anything about the present, any present, anywhere. South America is good for that if you reach far enough” Adam (Jules’s older brother) comments while showing Omar pictures of his parents on their way to Uruguay.

Latin America becomes a place to reinvent yourself. As the movie's title says, it is the city of final destination. Throughout the twentieth century, people travelled to Latin America because of their nostalgia for the old good days in Europe. Adam, for example, so in Latin America an opportunity to openly experience his homosexuality with his partner. Arden (Jules’ mistress) had arrived in Latin America as a gypsy looking for an adventure. Omar found in Uruguay his real self, and his real romantic love. Romance itself is a characteristic of Latin America and its people. “People here like imagining men and women together,” says Arden about the comments people make about here and Omar.

But on the other hand, there are those that want an escape from the present offered by Latin America, a present that seems to be stuck in the past, with no technology, no places of entertainment other than talking about the lives of the neighbours. For those people, adventure, romance, and renouncing to what modernity has to offer could be something beautiful, but wild and extremely boring. In the movie, those who have their feet on earth (and the necessary amount of money) will rather live in a city like New York like Caroline (Jules’ widow) and Deirdre (Omar’s girlfriend) decide by the end of the movie.

The versatility provided by a place like Latin America is the ideal scenario for the plot represented by Ivory: it is beauty, it is wilderness, it is love, it is past, it is present, and it offers a future at the same time. Perhaps, in literature, it is easier to create a fantastic, romantic place. But as Ivory comments, when they read the novel, they undoubtedly knew that it should be filmed in Uruguay or some similar place like Argentina, that it could not be faked in a studio. What Latin America provides to the process of filmmaking was in this case irreplaceable. In the plot (as in the filmmaking process) Latin America is a beautiful place, but it is stuck in the past, and places like New York or European cities are the symbol of modernity, culturally and technologically.

Salt and Fire

2018-06-10T08:17:00.000-07:00

Filmed in Bolivia, Salt and Fire (2016) is another episode from from Werner Herzog’s catalogue of man-vs-nature stories. This time, Herzog’s fascination for Latin American nature is presented as a manner of critique to environmental studies that separate human interrelations from their “objective” measurements of natural disasters. A scientific delegation funded by the United Nations travels to Latin America to finish their studies of Uturunku, an active supervolcano whose eruption could cause a worldwide catastrophe. Upon arrival, the delegation is taken hostage by the CEO of an international company that has been declared responsible for producing the ecological disaster in Salar de Uyuni, the largest salt flats in the world, whose growing toxicity will soon affect the surrounding villages.

A militia group led by a company easily bribes the government, police, and people in the airport to take their place when the international scientific delegation arrives. With fake documents, they convince the group that there was a change of plans and then take them hostage to an unknown location on the mountains.

As in Aguirre, Wrath of God, the plot of this Herzog movie develops around mystery and the unknown. Soon the dialogues are only between the leader of the scientific delegation Laura Sommerfeld (Veronica Ferres) and the CEO Matt Riley (Michael Shannon). Many days pass and the long conversations of Laura and Riley only confirm that there is something that we do not know. We see a lot of dysmorphic art distorting reality or exposing a different one. Typical of Herzog’s nihilist messages of his movies. Everything is in question.

Laura is taken to an island in the middle of the Salar de Uyuni and she is abandoned with two blind children called Huascar and Atahualpa. After a week, the few supplies Laura and the kids had on the island are at an end. Riley comes back and explains that everything was part of a plan, from the hostage-taking to the week with the two blind children in the island. The mystery is exposed. The salt flats were a man-made disaster (Laura already knew that), but Riley wanted Laura to understand that studies of nature with statistics and calculations could not reflect a deeper layer of the problem which is the human cost of the disaster.

Bolivian landscapes are the perfect set for Herzog's story. As in many of his movies, Latin American history, resources, culture, people and landscapes are the inspiration for fascinating plots for fictional stories. Herzog portrays the beautiful scenery of the Bolivian salt flats and Andean volcanos, but at the same time presents another reality in which those same elements could be equally disastrous. Latin America can be dangerous, its governments easily corrupted, its tourists easily kidnapped, but it can also be a beautiful place with incredible geological formations that are so magnificent that seem close to fantasy. We can see this dichotomy at the end of the movie. Riley is tormented about the noxious atmosphere his company has created around the salt flats which killed the mother of Huascar and Atahualpa (the same toxins caused their blindness), but then they take pictures that foreground the remarkable beauty that looks like it is taken from a surreal painting.

Though the extraordinary locations of the movie are real, Bolivia is not once mentioned throughout the movie. the salt flats and the volcano are the only places that are important. Other locations, like the airport where the group arrives or the village to which they are taken, remain anonymous. There is nothing to learn about Latin America in this movie. How can someone learn something from a fictional place with fictional history? Following the pattern of Herzog's previous films, this movie asks us to make our conclusions. Everything in this movie (locations, kidnapping, dialogues, images) exposes different manner to see reality, multiple intentions, theories and points of view.

MacGruber

2018-06-09T15:26:00.000-07:00

Jorma Taccone’s MacGruber (2010) is a comedy (more like a parody of an action movie) about a legendary hero of the US military who moves to Latin America to take a break from his work, after his wife is assassinated by his worst enemy. MacGruber (Will Forte) fakes his own death and hides in Rio Bamba, Ecuador (a fictional city named after Ecuador's real Riobamba). The MIA (a security agency based on the CIA) tracks him down and convinces him to participate in an operation led by his wife’s murderer. He travels to Washington DC and forms a team with agent Piper and an old friend called Vicki.

The plot is built around the character of MacGruber. Considered a legend because of past successes helping the US government in uncountable special operations, MacGruber is depicted as the only hope to stop Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). However, the ten years he has spent hidden in Ecuador seems to have taken his abilities away. He has become the opposite of a hero: a man whose egocentrism and evident mental issues are reflected in constant failure. Thus, as the plot develops, we realize that the legend of MacGruber is more and more fictitious. He still does his job, albeit rather takes the credit for other’s job, from beginning to end.

Basically, only the second scene of the movie portrays something about Latin America (which adds up to about five minutes of the whole production). In Rio Bamba, we see MacGruber meditating in a small monastery with religious portraits over the walls. The village had been MacGruber’s peaceful refuge for ten years. While the MIA general is trying to convince the hero to join the operation, people from what seems to be an indigenous peasant village walk in the background. However, the clothes the people wear, and the landscapes shown, do not belong to an accurate representation of an Ecuadorean village (still less of the real Riobamba, which is not a village but one of Ecuador's largest cities). The place looks more like something inspired on a Mexican village. But these details do not change what is depicted of Latin America, from its name we know that it is a fictional representation of some poor and hidden village that no one cares about.

Arranging the set in which the scene of Rio Bamba is recorded with Mexican molds gives us an understanding that, on the one hand, the imagination of Americans about Latin America is that everything south of the border looks the same. Or on the other hand, that Americans do not know much about Latin American society or its people (or that learning about them is irrelevant), and that their depictions of Latin America are mostly based on general imaginations of it (often stereotyped assumptions).

What is being depicted in the movie about Ecuador does not tell us anything about the country or Latin America, it is not realistic, but it is not important neither. Indeed, the entire movie was filmed in New Mexico, US. The only reason that this scene is included for MacGruber’s plot is to emphasize that a hero decided to go to a place where he was going to be difficult to find. Why would someone go to that village with houses made of dry mud, dirt streets and no electricity? An American hero was there and that made that place interesting enough to travel to.

Get the Gringo

2018-06-07T18:04:00.000-07:00

Adrian Grunberg directs the crime movie “Get the Gringo” (2012). Following the themes of many other film productions in which Grunberg has had a part (Narcos, Going Back to Cali, among others), Get the Gringo comes with a chaotic portrayal of criminal life in Mexico through the eyes of a criminal, but an American one. The Spanish title for this movie is “Vacaciones en el Infierno” (Vacation in Hell), which better reflects what the film portrays. The Hollywood action superstar Mel Gibson is The Gringo, an American criminal captured by Mexican authorities who send him to a local prison called “El Pueblito” (little town) in Tijuana, a city next to the US-Mexico border. “Is this a prison, or the shittiest mall?” Gibson asks himself while walking around the prison’s patio where convicted criminals have set up their businesses, formed families, educated their children, and even keep committing the same crimes for which they were imprisoned in the first place, like they were living in a little town (but much more dangerous), not within four walls.

A former US soldier steals millions of dollars from the United States and drives towards Mexico where he might hide the money and escape to have a beautiful vacation. Though the persecution started on US soil by its police, he is captured on the Mexican side of the border. The corrupt Mexican police take the robber to the worst prison around, “El Pueblito,” and keep the money for themselves. In the border scene, we can see the wall dividing both countries, an old fence that delimits how far American law enforcement can go to.

Being the only American prisoner, Gibson’s character becomes quickly identified as the Gringo. The place is like hell, entire families of criminals, poverty, drugs, sex, music and gambling are everywhere, every day. The prison guards stand around showing a blind eye to all the madness around them because they are getting bribed by a crime lord called Javi who oversees everything from the top of his prison penthouse, deciding over every living being under him, like the devil itself. To survive, the Gringo starts a friendship with a little kid who gives him information about how the place is run. The kid and his mother live in El Pueblito not because they are criminals, but because the father was one, and he took them to live there. In exchange for his freedom, the Gringo leaves the millions he stole to Javi, but after killing the owner of the money he returns to take it back. He kills the bad guys saving the kid and the mother from being killed, and escapes with them to some beautiful beach in Mexico, the real vacation.

From simple things like music and physical appearance to corruption and crime, Mexico and its people are portrayed in stark conrast contrast to what we see of the United States in the movie. As soon as we are taken south of the border, music is one the clearest features that portray the low standards of culture and life with nostalgic songs about gangsters, love, among others. “Tortured by mariachi!” complains Gibson closing his ears with the ends of two cigarettes. And crime itself is different on either side of the border. El Pueblito is a prison, so of course it looks more chaotic and dangerous than anything else shown in the movie. However, it is almost impossible to know which scenes are happening inside of the prison and which are on the outside. From the littlest kid to the oldest grandma, and from the lowliest guard to the highest ranking prison officer, they are all involved or know about the crimes and protect each other, especially from outsiders like the Gringo, (for being family and for being Mexican). The perception is as if the life within the prison is equal to the life in Mexico as a whole. When the plot moves to the US, however, we know that the only criminal on camera is the Gringo, and that the only reason he could get away with his plan is because he could not get caught on US soil.

When we see a narco film, the biggest fear of the narcotraffickers is ending up in the hands of the gringos. No matter how dangerous South America criminal life could be or how likely to get sent to the most awful and unsafe prison (as in this movie), US law enforcement is worse than that. Perhaps not because of the violence or conditions, but because once caught it is impossible to avoid getting the punishment one deserves. This is the same idea that Grunberg depicts in the movie about Latin America, but most important, about the United States, the terror of the criminals. El Pueblito might be chaotic, and it has the worst living conditions for its prisoners, but neither its walls nor those who are supposed to enforce order within it can stop the Gringo from escaping. Latin American law enforcement is useless compared with the United States (they could not even find the real name of the Gringo) or so the movie seems to claim. And using the name of a real example gives credibility to this idea. El Pueblito was a real prison in Tijuana that was closed because of the corruption that allowed entire families and businesses to develop in its patio.

The ways in which law enforcement and security in Mexico are portrayed in the movie could help to justify arguments to support US intervention south the border. Without the old fence that we see at the beginning of the movie that stops the US officers, perhaps the Gringo might have been caught by responsible and honest officers that would have given the stolen money back. There are a lot of ideas that may support the opening of borders for justice and law enforcement North to South; however, South to North is a different story. We see the Gringo crossing over to the United States with a counterfeit passport. We see a criminal crossing without constraints. At the same time that we see the need to open up the border towards the South, we are introduced to this scene in which it seems necessary to close up the border towards the North, or at least a need to make it stronger.

Strange Wilderness

2018-06-06T17:10:00.000-07:00

Strange Wilderness (2008) is a comedy directed by Fred Wolf about an animal TV show. A son takes over his dead father’s TV show which has become a failure at risk of cancellation as it lacks inspiration, budget and audience. The program is widely criticized because of the inaccuracy between its themes and what is presented on the screen; the show has passed from being an educational natural wilderness-themed program to a sensationalist and ridiculous representation of human wilderness (sex, blood, and drugs). To honour his father’s memory, the son, Peter (Steve Zahn), forms a group of four men and a woman to look for the legendary “Bigfoot” creature in the Ecuadorian forest. A trip to Latin America could help the group increase the show’s ratings, and it is also an opportunity to go on a real and wild adventure. It is a parody of animal-life shows like National Geographic or Animal Planet and questions the concept of “wilderness.”

By the time they get to the jungle, we know that any representation of animal wilderness will have a sexual undertone, a tragic death, or some footage of animal life accompanied by a nonsensical description. When they arrive at the Ecuadorean jungle, for example, the first wild animal to be portrayed in the TV show is a monkey, shown with the comment that “monkeys make up over 80% of the monkey population.” Immediately thereafter, Peter randomly talks about lions, zebras, giraffes, and gazelles, all iconic animals from Africa, not South America. The movie is full of generally mistaken and mismatching information like this one that let us assume that the group has no idea of what they are doing or talking about, which contributes to the simplistic humour of the plot.

Clearly each member of the group has a problem with drugs, alcohol, or/and a perverted mind which relates everything to sex. Men are presented like some kind of prehistoric troglodytes trying to show off their masculinity to the rest of the group Their uncontrollable and desperate need for women, and their failing efforts to prove themselves superior to animals, make their silliness extremely obvious. The only woman in the group (also basically the only woman in the movie) adds the brain to the group. She seems very aware of the ridiculousness of the trip and of the teenage-perversion of the group, but she is doing her job, so her opinion does not really count.

The trip to Ecuador is not only an adventure to find Bigfoot; it also represents hope to find their better selves. For Pete, keeping the show on screen is saving a legacy and part of his pursuit to become more like his dad. For Whitaker (Kevin Heffernan), going to a recondite place in the middle of the jungle is a chance to force himself out of alcoholism and to experience real life (sober). For the group as a whole, this journey forms not only a group of colleagues but a group of new friends.

In the movie, travelling to the South American wilderness (and finding Bigfoot) is the craziest idea one could have. And to everyone's surprise, since the plot is full of failures, in the end they do indeed find the creature. However, their hopes vanish after they “accidentally” kill Bigfoot and go back to the United States.

How is Latin America being portrayed? One of the reasons the group travels South the Border is to fulfill their expectations of presenting “real wilderness” in the TV show so it stays on the screen. Through the journey across the jungle to find Bigfoot, we are introduced to a dangerous place (funny, exotic, but dangerous): a lot of monkeys, snakes, carnivorous piranhas, tribes that cut scrotums and kill with arrows, explorers who will take advantage of you and steal your belongings, and of course the enormous Bigfoot.

Yet the portrayal of Latin American nature is not really important to the plot (we know that all the information given is intentionally mistaken or exaggerated because of the genre). The main reason for going on the trip is to seek out new material that will increase the TV show’s ratings. Animal life, whether it is a Latin American beast or an insect from the tree outside a building, is taken and exploited as a commodity. In the movie, those kinds of TV shows will not portray wilderness as it is, but as the audience wants it. Nature has been fetishized with sensationalist images; sex, blood, or comedy itself are more important than the facts. This is very clear at the end of the movie after the Bigfoot report is not accepted since Pete decides to film an episode about shark attacks, which saves the TV show. "People love shark attacks, you are back again," says the TV director. And what is wilderness? Who or what is "the wild"? Even though the TV show is called Strange Wilderness (referring to wild animals) and the Latin America jungle is the wildest place they could go to, ridiculing aspects of American pop culture like views on the use of drugs and guns, the sexual portrayal of women on TV (even worse of women of tropical places like Latin America and Africa), and sensationalism to create profit, suggest that animal-life or Latin America is not the only wild ideas portrayed in this film (they are scarcely important at all in the movie, to be honest).

Certainly, what is being portrayed about the Latin American jungle might appear quite wild, but these imaginaries of wilderness (like violent indigenous tribes and creatures living in caves) are only the space to which Western Society compares itself to argue it is superior, and a more civilized society. Wilderness is a word used to emphasize the most uncivilized, least human, least Western aspects of life. It is a word used to create a division and to reject certain truths that make "civilized" society uncomfortable. What could be wilder than killing animals for no reason, seeing women as a sexual object, becoming desperate for food or sex, doing crazy things under the influence of alcohol and drugs, feeling entertained when there is a shark attack or someone dies, and then using all these things to have more ratings on screen?

Snatched

2018-06-04T14:48:00.000-07:00

The New Yorker Jonathan Levine directs the comedy Snatched (2017). In this movie, Levine satirizes the typical motivations an American decides to travel to the Latin American “paradise”. Emily (Amy Schumer) convinces her boring mother Linda (Goldie Hawn) to be her partner in a journey to Ecuador. Ecuador for Emily is not the typical resort vacations in some Mexican beach, but rather it is a real exotic adventure that can make her forget about her pathetic life (and it is also a non-refundable ticket that must be used). Ironically, they stay in a fancy resort at the beach, but Emily wants to experience the real Ecuador with a handsome guy she just meets at the pub.

Without listening to the advice of two retiree US intelligence agents, Emily goes to a party in the middle of a jungle landscape with a stranger in which Emily parties as Latinos do, learning capoeira? The day after she brings her mother to an adventure with the same guy who is supposed to take them to see waterfalls, but he was taking them far enough so they can get kidnapped. On the next morning, they wake up in Colombia and try to escape. Trying to get help, they find another American called Roger Simmons in a small village who appears to be their hope for salvation. Roger wears an explorer outfit and is very confident taking the two women through the jungle, though he has been in Latin America only for three weeks.

This movie portrays the ingenuity and imprudence of Americans when they travel to Latin America. Tourist look for adventure in an exotic place. But they also put themselves in dangerous situations, consciously like the American that pretended to be an explorer and the retiree agents that are looking for some action, or unconsciously like Emily and her mother who were too foolish that it becomes part of a predictable and laughable comedy.

Another interesting portrayal of the previous one (not about Latin America alone, but about American in Latin America) concerns foreign intervention for security reasons. Emily’s brother Jeffry calls and goes repeated times to the policy after he is informed of the kidnapping. Though of all the resources the police department has for tracking people, they do nothing until it is almost too late. American intelligence agents appear at the end of like the saviours, but when all the work was already done. The US embassy in Bogota neither could help. Basically, the message is that once you cross the border, the United States will not protect any of its citizens (but it could).

If this plot was not a comedy, a kidnapping and no support from the US will be terrifying. However, Levine makes those events seem better than they look, and mother and daughter even go again on a trip after this awful experience. Latin America is in this movie a place for adventure (though it might be a dangerous one). Even after experiencing violence and almost being killed, the trip was probably better than whatever they could be doing back home, and even inspires them to travel again. The plot might not be clearly promoting or opposing Ecuador, Colombia or any other Latin American country as a travel destination, but it shows that it is the American tourist who put themselves in danger by idealizing Latin America as that exotic place full of adventure, but by overestimating their own capacities and of their country. Latin America becomes attractive because it makes visitors leave their comfort zone.

The Green Inferno

2018-06-03T19:05:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the well-known cannibal film, Cannibal Holocaust, Eli Roth directs The Green Inferno (2013), a horror and adventure movie that portrays the controversial practice that was allegedly once part (or perhaps still is part) of the cultural rituals of some indigenous tribes living in the Amazon forest, human cannibalism. A group of young American humanitarian activists travel to the Peruvian Amazon to oppose the establishment of a multinational corporation helped by the local government which will destroy “untouched” areas of the jungle and kill indigenous tribes living there.

On their way to the Amazon, the group can see from the window of their plane the beautiful landscape of the rainforest: the predominant colour on the screen is the green of the jungle with some rivers crossing in between. Those images, and later the long trip by boat to the construction site, make the activists think that indeed the Amazon is an untouched environment in danger. They use as a strategy the exposition the corporation and the military supporting it (ready to kill the natives) on social media. Their plan seemed to have worked, so get on a plane on their way home after having saved the Amazon. Unfortunately, the plane crash in the middle of the jungle where they get kidnapped by a Cannibal tribe that tortures them one by one and prepare them as food for the whole tribe. Like Cannibal Holocaust, Roth makes the bloody killings look very realistic and transmits the feelings of the horrified activists. Nevertheless, the movie does not portray the cannibal tribe as evil or inhumane, on the other hand, Roth discusses different controversial traditions (including genital mutilation and cannibalism) and the difficulties on trying to eliminate or condemn certain practices that are deeply rooted in some cultures. The “human” side of the tribe is represented with the little girl that helps the protagonist Justine (Lorenza Izzo) to escape.

Justine finds her way out of a genital mutilation ceremony and runs into an armed conflict between another private corporation and the tribe. She uses this moment to get rescued and appeal for some real action to stop the destruction of the Amazon and the persecution of the tribe. Once she goes back to the U.S. she uses the influence of her father (lawyer in the UN) to denounce the private corporation’s abuse of human rights. At this point, Justine does not mention anything about her experience or how her group was assassinated by the tribe which will protect the tribe and strengthen the argument for the Amazon preservation.

In addition to displaying bloody and shocking scenes of cannibalism, this movie communicates a sarcastic opinion about activism and about efforts to protect the Amazon rainforest. Before the protest, all the activist group is seen excited about promoting meaningful changes in society and politics, but their efforts remain useless. By the end of the movie, we are taken to some point at the beginning of the movie when Justine was still at the university campus; she wakes up from a horrifying nightmare and the little group of activists that convinced her to travel to the Amazon are still protesting for some campus-related issue. Protecting the Amazon forest and its people is solely a fantasy. Even if there are people protesting for a good cause like preserving indigenous communities with centuries of history, there are numerous layers that make the issue more difficult to tackle such as the flow of money involved, corruption, or the fact that Amazon is not really “untouched” nature. Even those aspects of the tribes like cannibalism could change the way one thinks about them (Are cannibals worth fighting for?).

Various aspects of the Amazon forest are portrayed in the movie, but throughout it is suggested that it would be better not to venture too far in the jungle. The Amazon's dangers (be they human or natural) win out over the beauty of its green richness. Interestingly, there is nothing said about the protection of plants or animals of the Amazon like it is usually done in other Amazon or jungle movies. On the contrary, the plot shows little consideration to the animal life (a machete and a gun are given to the young Americans in case they find any animal in the jungle). Travelling to the Amazon for activism or tourism is portrayed as a worthless cause. Its landscape could seem very green, but its insides are more like an inferno for those who are not aware of how life is there.

South of the Border

2018-06-03T19:03:00.001-07:00

By the end of the twentieth century the United States became head of international politics establishing its neoliberal ideology at a global scale. Western capitalism apparently buried the ideals of a once expanding communism (and socialism) which influence in the Americas only remained in Cuba, which the United States made sure to block and isolate from the rest of the world system. Nevertheless, as the classic liberalism revived with neoliberalism, in the same way the old and feared socialism is comes restored and stronger with the name of “The Socialism of the Twenty-first Century”. Oliver Stone’s South of the Border (2009) is a documentary that recounts the realities of five countries that have turned their traditional right-wing politics to a charismatic left-wing revolutionary mandate of “the people.” The socialist leaders of Venezuela, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina, and Ecuador share their opinion of the effecto of United States foreign policy on their countries and how their new movement in the protection of the most vulnerable groups (the poor, the indigenous and the worker) represents independence and real progress for all Latin American societies.

The documentary starts with a recollection of North American news that talks about Hugo Chavez’s “dictatorship” in Venezuela. Stone puts together media reports depicting Chavez’s government as a threat to the United States and all the Western democratic system like Cuba once was. However, by travelling to Venezuela, experiencing the life of its people beyond what is presented on the screen, and personality interviewing Chavez, the narrative of the documentary leans to left to supports the truth that is being hidden by the media (media that is probably influenced by people or corporations that protect American neoliberalist interests). There are very few personal comments from the director about the ideology since providing Chavez with an open floor to criticize U.S interventions in Latin America is more than self-evident support to the new ideological wave developing in most countries south of the U.S-Mexico border. In addition, the only times the United States’ perspective or comments on Latin American left-wing governments are shown, they are considered overreaction resulting from national security paranoia, conspiracy theories, or justification for controlling the region and its natural resources such as the Venezuelan oil.

Stone problematizes and to some extent destroys the idea that everything happening south of the border (politics, economy, culture) is the same. Chavez, for example, created policy that would benefit the lowest economic classes in the country and that meant using Venezuelan oil in Venezuela and for Venezuelans (cutting the supply to the United States). The Bush administration considered Chavez’s national policy dangerous for democracy and threatening for his government, creating tension between the two countries. When other of South America joined the new socialist movement, the United States unsuccessfully conspired to take their governments down because they were all the same as Venezuela, thus more anti-US leaders, less resource-access. On the other hand, we hear interviews from each socialist leader, Chavez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, the Kirchner couple in Argentina, and Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Each of them is intentionally shown very different materially, and ideologically speaking. Chavez with a military background, Morales a coca-grower indigenous, Lula a metalworker and labour union member, the Kirchner shown in their elegant house, and Correa with a revolutionary discourse. Each country has a different history and experiences different realities, but they all have been subjected to and exploited by American neoliberalism.

Cuba comes back to the story. For the Bush administration, Cuban communism might not be a threat or influence in the United States anymore, however, it could have influenced other Latin American countries. In contrast, how the other five countries of the documentary are portrayed, there is no support to Cuba or any of its policies. The interview with Fidel Castros’ brother is included to clear the misconception that the Socialism of the Twenty-First Century is the same as communism. In numerous occasions each president is asked whether the Cuban communism is the “grandfather” of their projects (since the “father” would be Venezuelan Chavismo) or at least it has inspired them, but the answer is clear: no, they share ideology and their projects seem to follow the same pattern, but socialism developed independently.

The last part of the documentary summarizes all the encounters with the socialist leaders, the paranoia and sensationalism of American news, and Latin America’s history of struggles due to indiscriminate foreign intervention in their politics. In addition, possible unfolding of the socialist wave of South America is discussed. Nowadays, this discourse could need upgrades, but by that time Obama represented hope and openness to new ideas that could clear Bush’s intolerance and reconstruct alliances with Latin America. Stone not only supports this new social and political movement, but he suggests that its expansion to northern countries in Latin America has shown that an historical change is starting.

Political changes like this new form of socialism that has decreased poverty, has increased technological and social development, and has stood up against neoimperialist forces to protect their sovereignty might be something that the United States is lacking. Latin America is portrayed as a victim of US foreign policy, powerless in the face of the economic and political control the United State has over most international organizations. Latin American politics are the result of the direct and indirect oppression, and socialism re-emerges within those conditions and to change them in favour of its people.

The Blue Butterfly

2018-05-31T18:15:00.001-07:00

The Blue Butterfly (2004) is a Canadian production inspired by the true story of entomologist George Brossard and David Marenger, but adding a touch of fantasy and mystery to the plot. Its director Léa Pool takes us to the middle of the rainforest in some unnamed part of Latin America (in fact, the movie is filmed in Costa Rica) on a magical journey to fulfill the dream of a little kid who has a terminal brain tumour: catching a very rare blue butterfly, the Blue Morpho. The story is related by the young boy, Pete Carlton (Marc Donato), who in the course of the movie shares with us his memories, personal thoughts, feelings, and what he learns. The entomologist Alan Osborne (William Hurt) agrees to be a guide for Pete and his mother Teresa (Pascale Bussieres), however, the task of finding the butterfly turns out to be more difficult than expected due to the changing seasons and dangerous incidents while exploring the jungle.

For Mr. Osborne and little Pete, seeing a blue butterfly is one of the most beautiful and miraculous events. Once in the rainforest, their passion for insects and their desire to catch this exotic creature make them ignore the beauty of their surroundings: the many other living beings, landscapes and moments that could make the rest of Pete’s life more happy and meaningful than simply adding one more insect to his collection. Influenced by the people of a small village in the middle of the rainforest and their stories (beliefs passed on by their ancestors and myths about the jungle), Pete starts to appreciate these other things than just the Blue Morpho, which eventually becomes less relevant. Nevertheless, Pete keeps those thoughts for himself since Osborne and his mother have already spent time and resources to find the butterfly in very unfavourable conditions, so he continues with the search.

Pool presents the rainforest as a beautiful and exotic place; such beauty makes it a place with an atmosphere full of magic and spontaneous mysticism by which one can achieve an understanding of nature. There are many close-up shots framing diverse animals and plants and complete shots that accompanied by peaceful background sounds and intense colours captivate our attention. All the emphasis is given to the flora, fauna, and landscapes of the jungle creating a romantic portrayal of the Latin American rainforest. Even though there are people living in the village, the plot shares with the viewers a general perception is of an ideal environment free of human intervention when the three Canadians leave the village to explore the jungle; for Pete, there is a division between nature (represented by the butterfly) and himself as a human. On the other hand, Pool also questions this romanticization of nature by exposing another side of the exploration and problematizing the concept of nature.

Meeting Yana, a girl from the local village, Pete reflects on her questions about his desire to catch the Morpho. When Pete says that the butterfly is a miracle, Yana replies "I am blue butterfly, you are blue butterfly, everything is blue butterfly." This line changes Pete's perception of nature and its apparent separation from humans. He understands that what he had considered a miracle of the Latin American rainforest, is in fact only an alibi for his desire to escape his own reality, to stop thinking about his illness. In the end, finding the butterfly does not satisfy Pete's desires, but the journey does help him to understand that Latin America and its natural "miracles" have nothing magical or mystic on them other than what society constructs. The way in which the rainforest is romanticized can misrepresent the reality, whether this omitted information or attributes are positive or negative, like the beauty of its people's culture and traditions, or the dangers of its wild places and species, as presented in the movie.