Canoa opens in 1968 with the sound of a typewriter, as a journalist sits late at night in his office, typing up a live report he receives over the phone. The report reads “five students were lynched tonight by the people of San Miguel Canoa.” As cigarette smoke fills the air an impressive deep focus shot diagonally stretches the background into the foreground. The shot magnifies the typewriter in both physical size and dramatic significance while the news is delivered and the tension heightened as we subsequently hear each student’s name slowly spelled out. When the report is finished, the film successively cuts to a street protest, a military march, and finally the credits rolling against one long fragmented POV black-and-white take that appears like a scan of the crime scene, capturing the brutalized bodies of the students and the police force on the scene.
One of the film’s greatest virtues is its particular use of narrative. In the first ten minutes the film switches from linear dramatic form to documentary observation to live reportage that seems to come off like footage captured by a war correspondent. The remainder of the film then tells the story of the town San Miguel Canoa but in different narrative modes, incorporating continuous but eloquent shifts in point of view, voice, and tense. Beginning in third person, as a kind of ethnographic portrait, and switching to first person, the film depicts one of the town’s citizens, a rancher and one of the film’s recurring narrators, talking to camera and telling of the nature of its people and the different tensions existing in the town. He includes the story of the Catholic priest, who we learn “runs” the town both in the geopolitical sense, as he runs the water supply and rigs its elections, and in the ecclesiastical sense, as he (mis)uses his clerical position to push people into doing his will. It is the central idea that this rancher-narrator relays, and which we later see unfold, that the priest under the pretense of fighting communism maneuvered the people of the town toward a public lynching. The first-person mode, however, also includes interviews with administrative and political figures of the town, as well as the priest himself, who deny participation in the lynching.
The remainder of the film tells of the night on which the unsuspecting students arrive, their coming to be stranded by their missing the last bus, their being taken in by one townsperson after being rejected by the rest, and finally the growing riot that leads to the lynching of the students. The film switches in point of view throughout but also in voice/tense. In the former, it incorporates the perspectives of the students, the people who did the lynching, the bystanders (the rancher-narrator), and the press who report it. In the latter, it switches from past to present to future rather quickly and, frequently, in the most intense moments, as in the instance just before the lynching, when we move into the hospital where the half dead student (who survives the immediate lynching) talks to the press. In using the type of nonlinear narrative that incorporates and moves between a series of different perspectives from the standpoint of character, theme, and tone, the director manages to conduct a thorough visual dissection of the event in question. The essay by Fernanda Solórzano included with the Criterion edition of the film is useful for contextualizing the production history of the film, though I am not sure to what extent any of its critics or the filmmakers who hail the film’s director Felipe Cazals, including Alfonso Cuarón, whose conversation with the director can be found on the Criterion edition of the film, have really engaged with his use of narrative form and its implications for aesthetics.
The real questions that the film poses are how does the film’s use of narrative form relate to aesthetics, and does the film — and if so to what extent — contribute to a specifically political aesthetic that has been an important factor in Mexican cinema since the silent era? The narrative form is brought out by an extremely prosaic but equally visceral visual account of the lynching. In the first instance, symmetrical to asymmetrical composition and jagged high-contrast editing (particularly between the lynching and its aftermath) provide the film with a visual means of communicating modal shifts in voice and tense, which perhaps too obviously resemble thematic shifts between power and powerlessness, strength and weakness. In the second, the deep and varied color palette (admittedly well brought out by this 4K restoration), the claustrophobic use of physical space and character blocking, and the psychologically grounded use of sound (most efficiently in the indoor scenes of the hut with the townsman sheltering the students, where the conversation is underpinned by the background sounds of the town mob rising as if from a well) infuse the film with the tonal depth and emotional strength that enable all its conflicting perspectives to converge in a meaningful way in the final ten minutes. Aesthetics thus form an important part of the film’s formal structure.
By political aesthetics I refer not to a film’s thematic preoccupation with political subject matter but the innovative use of visual form to deconstruct that subject matter and, frequently, destabilize dominant ideological discourse. In the history of Mexican cinema, as in many other national cinemas, the number of films which dealt with political subjects often outweighed the number that were subversive in the same. Canoa may be innovative in form, using it to unpack the microcosmic political relations that exist in a rural society, including the familiar one of a priest who uses the pretense of divine authority to exercise personal tyranny over his townspeople, but the extent to which it destabilizes dominant ideological discourse is contestable. To be answered sufficiently that requires a greater comprehension of the sociopolitical context of late 1960s and early 1970s Mexico that can serve as the subject of another discussion.
Author Biography
Mina Radovic is a doctoral researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London. A FIAF-trained archivist and filmmaker, he regularly contributes to international film and academic journals and runs the Liberating Cinema project. His research expertise is in film history and historiography, archiving and restoration, Yugoslav cinema, early cinema, language and ideology, and the works of Pier Paolo Pasolini.
Film Details
Canoa: A Shameful Memory (1976)
Mexico
Director Felipe Cazals
Runtime 115 minutes
Blu-ray
USA, 2017
Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region A/1)
