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| Curating ‘Remains
of Mexico’ Tarek Elhaik, Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, Rice University |
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The following is an abstract of the paper presented at the conference.
The paper is a reflection on my film curatorial practice, specifically on a program of Mexican avant-garde cinema I recently curated at Rice Cinema, Remains of Mexico. The paper examines two recent experimental documentary films as symptomatic returns to the avant-garde activity of post-revolutionary Mexico: Olivier Debroise’s Banquet in Tetlapayac (2000) and Jesser Lerner’s TSH (2004). These two films were part of Remains of Mexico. Curator, writer and contemporary art critic Olivier Debroise revisits the work of Sergei Eisenstein, the elusive and enduring figure of the Soviet avant-garde. Debroise invited 14 popular and experimental artists, filmmakers, critics and historians to join him for a banquet at the same desert hacienda Eisenstein stayed in, while working on his unfinished and controversial film "Que Viva Mexico!" during the 1930s. Film Curator and filmmaker Jesse Lerner reconstructs an Estridentista poem by Luis Quintanilla. The Estridentistas were a vanguard group similar to and influenced by the more familiar Dadaists and Futurists. Both experimental documentaries explore the relationship between filmmaking and historiography with a keen attention to the singularities of the Mexican avant-garde and to processes of unearthing precious archival material of the 1920s and 30s. These documentaries not only continue the tradition of mobilizing filmmaking to contest nationalist historiographies and modes of visualizing Mexican modernity, they also question the links between the aesthetics of the historical avant-garde, ethnography, cosmopolitan modernism of the 1920s and 1930s, and contemporary visual art practices in Mexico. In addition to engaging these two experimental documentaries as fascinating pieces of filmmaking and reflections on the avant-garde in Mexico (specifically) and the historical avant-garde (in general), it also addresses the challenges posed by these correspondences to contemporary intersections between anthropology, film curating and contemporary art. |
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