Художественная культура (Dec 2023)
“Captured Crisis”: C. Reygadas’s Cinematography at the Crossroads of Cultural Paradigms
Abstract
This article examines the work of the Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas. The representative of the new auteur cinema, the developing direction of “slow cinema”, he is the exponent of those social and cultural problems on which the attention of European directors of the first third of the 21st century is focused. The example of Reygadas’ films shows the changes that society has undergone in recent decades in the transition from the postmodern to the metamodern culture. The interdisciplinary approach to the study of his work is designed to more fully reveal the ideological and thematic orientation of the films and to illuminate the cultural and historical process of the first decades of the 21st century, which will constitute the novelty of the study. Based on the ideas of T. Vermeulen and R. van den Akker that the metamodern seeks to remove the contradictions between different art movements, past and present cultures, the author of the article attempts to demonstrate how this trend manifested itself in the work of Reygadas. At the same time, the reference to the mythology of Mesoamerica and the “philosophy of liberation” of Latin America shows that Vermeulen and van den Akker’s concept of culture transformation through the resolution of contradictions reflects the situation of a crisis in which modern society is involved. In the director’s films, this is reflected in the inability of the individual to make contact with the Other and the reality around them. Moreover, the films of the 2000s showed an attempt to get out of the former social and cultural paradigm, but by the end of the 2010s, the problem of interpersonal relations was not resolved, and reality acquired the status of “elusive”. This allows us to draw a preliminary conclusion that society is still in a state of a crisis, experiencing a change of cultural formations, and the transition from postmodernism to metamodernism cannot be considered a completed process.
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