Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252090110 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2010 |
| Series: | Contemporary Film Directors |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Celestino Deleyto is a professor of film and English literature at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, and author of The Secret Life of Romantic Comedy and other books. María del Mar Azcona is an assistant professor of film at the University of Zaragoza and author of The Multi-Protagonist Film.
Read an Excerpt
Alejandro González Iñárritu
By Celestino Deleyto María del Mar Azcona
UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of IllinoisAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-03569-2
Chapter One
Of Times and Places The Films of Alejandro González Iñárritu
Down Mexico Way
In 21 Grams, sometime after the deaths of her husband and two daughters, Cristina (Naomi Watts) walks to the corner where they were run over by a truck and sits briefly on the curb, overwhelmed by grief (fig. 1). The film underscores the importance of the moment visually and acoustically: in the first shot of the sequence, a long take, the handheld camera follows the character along the street in a sustained close-up, circles around her when she reaches the spot, and nervously stands in front of her while she looks around as if lost. Two briefer shots show her sitting and looking at the road, and then the camera pans left, leaving her offscreen, and focuses on the empty road where the accident took place. While Gustavo Santaolalla's slow musical theme incorporates a strain of sad tango music, a sound bridge of Michael's (Danny Huston) last cell-phone message carries us to the end of the sequence: Cristina lying on her bed, first in close-up and then in an oppressive high-angle long shot, listening to her husband's words again and again. The stylistic articulation of the sequence, along with Watts's effective performance, forces spectators to feel the unbearable loneliness of the character after the deaths of her dear ones and her radical isolation from a world that has stopped making sense. Comparable close-ups and extreme close-ups of the three protagonists' faces abound throughout the film. Long shots, generally brief, constantly punctuate the narrative, emphasizing the barrenness and desolation, which can be felt so strongly at this point. This sequence may therefore be seen as a stylistic mise-en-abyme of the whole text.
Both stylistically and narratively, 21 Grams is immediately recognizable as an early-twenty-first-century U.S. independent film. Indeed, the movie was produced by This Is That, Ted Hope's production company, and distributed by Focus Features, headed by James Schamus. Hope and Schamus cofounded Good Machine in the early 1990s and quickly turned it into one of the crucial players in the independent scene. Following the path of other independent companies, Good Machine was acquired by Universal Pictures, whose new "independent" branch was renamed Focus Features. Schamus stayed in the studio while Hope broke away, but both remained important figures within the now-reshaped field. 21 Grams was representative of these developments at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In addition, the presence in the cast of such crossover actors as Naomi Watts, Sean Penn, Benicio del Toro, and even Danny Huston place the film firmly within "the discourse of independence." According to Yannis Tzioumakis, what had once literally been independent (films produced and distributed outside the Hollywood industry) evolved into a label to designate the more adventurous products of the specialized divisions of the majors and, more significantly, a specific way of speaking about certain movies (9-11). Iñárritu himself feels part of this discourse when he describes himself as an independent filmmaker (Wood 145), thus adding his name to a cinematic tendency that only makes full sense within the cinema of the United States and with reference to Hollywood. At first sight, then, 21 Grams can industrially and stylistically be considered part of the independent scene, along with films released in the same year, such as The Good Girl, Lost in Translation, Thirteen, The Station Agent, American Splendor, or Casa de los Babys.
Yet the history of 21 Grams began many months before as a story and a script written in Spanish to be filmed in Mexico with Mexican actors. The film was the second feature directed by Iñárritu, who, after the international success of Amores perros, had become, along with his fellow filmmakers Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro and the actors Gael García Bernal and Salma Hayek, a symbol of the success, vitality, and strength of Mexican cinema at the beginning of the twenty-first century. If there is little doubt that the discourse of American independent cinema constitutes an appropriate context for the study of a film like 21 Grams, is the recent history of Mexican cinema another such context? Can the film usefully be seen not only as an instance in the career of its director but also as bearing specific resonances of his national culture? In more general terms, is this film, and its director's oeuvre as a whole, representative of larger trends within contemporary cinema? In this section we would like to look at the films of Alejandro González Iñárritu in their national context. We will interrogate the validity of the concept of Mexican national cinema and explore the extent to which the texts originate from and illuminate the extremely porous nature of that concept. As a necessary corollary, we will point at the ways in which they relate to the much debated but central notion of mexicanidad.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Alejandro González Iñárritu by Celestino Deleyto María del Mar Azcona Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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