Istanbul Institute of
Russian and Sovietic Studies
The film did not attract public interest when it was shown both in Mexico and in USA. The box office was a complete failure. Moreover, Spanish media reported that the film triggered racist attacks in Mexico. So was the reason for the lack of public interest to the film a deep reaction to bring the indigenious X white distinction and discrimination back to the top of the agenda?
In the modern-post-modern world, the relation between art and politics is as corrupted as the relation between art and the market. This relationship takes its roots from Trotsky’s art doctrine: Trotsky rejects all kinds of formalism in art, thus he rejects art education, institutionalization in art, and the patronage/support of the state apparatus on/for art.
Alfonso Cuaron’s ‘Roma’ was nominated for 10 awards for the 2019 Oscar Awards to be released on February 24th. According to some sensational reports, the nomination of a single film in 10 branches was the first time in the history of Academy Awards. The media described it as a “record.”
Meanwhile, the film produced a positive result in Mexican domestic politics: the vast majority of informal workers, who were indigenous, were taken under mandatory insurance by the Supreme Court.
Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘The Favorite’, a contender for Cuaron’s ‘Roma’, was nominated for 10 branches of Oscar too. But the news that ‘The Favorite’ has been nominated in 10 branches – for some reason – didn’t declare that this film broke the same record.
In fact, the record had to be searched elsewhere: Jorge Antonio Guerrero in the role of the fascist paramilitary (Los Halcones) member Fermin, had applied to the US Consulate in Mexico for a work permit in the US shortly before the filming began. His application was rejected. Now, Guerrero is nominated for the Best Supporting Actor prize. If Jorge Antonio Guerrero wins the prize, he will have really set a record for being an Oscar-winning actor who couldn’t get the US visa.
How came that a film could manage to get nominated for ten prizes for the first time in the history of the 91-year Academy Awards (which is said to be – we did not confirm the truth of this news)? Let’s look at the other oddities that brings the film ‘Roma’ in front of us:
Netflix X Cannes opposition and the Venetian polish
The film was supposed to be shown first in Cannes Film Festival in May 2018. However the festival jury refused to show the film on the gound that it belonged to Netflix (1). Because the Cannes Film Festival objected to Netflix’s politics and discourses on seeing the future of cinema as home cinema.
That was the first sign that the film was linked to Netflix. Since the relationship was a trade secret, any information about the kind of this link (producer, distributor, partner, or both, etc.) was not reflected in the press.
The Venice Film Festival, held between August 29 and September 8, 2018, did not show the same sensitivity and included it in the competition. In Venice, the film was awarded by the Golden Lion Prize.
Commercial failure
The film was released on November 21, 2018 in cinemas. In the meantime, we learned that the film cost $ 15 million. The box office, however, signaled a complete failure: in early December the output was around 900,000 dollars. Due to the lack of interest of the public, the film started to be withdrawn from cinemas.
The commercial fiasco surprised the critics who wrote epics on the film. They attributed the low level of revenue to the pretext that the film was shown in a limited number of halls. According to critics, the reason for the lack of public interest was that the film had not been promoted enough.
Was this the real reason?
Mexican press, while praising the performance of the leading actor Yalitza Aparicio, reported that she was exposed to racist taunts because of her Mixtec origin (2). The Mixtecs are one of the four indigenous minority groups in Mexico (others are Nahua, Maya and Zapotec). The ratio of the total of these four minorities to the total population of Mexico has fallen to 5% today. The reason is the rise of a crossbred population!
So was the reason for the lack of public interest to the film a deep reaction to bring the indigenious X white distinction and discrimination back to the top of the agenda, which had now fallen on the bottom of the agenda during the recent decades? It was obvious that neither the Americans nor the Mexicans were not eager to watch the lost life of a maid, a film patched with a depressed form of artisty by its black and white shooting with the pretext of “I memorate my nanny”.
At this stage, we began to see Netflix again in the press: a big ad campaign was launched on the Netflix site. In the ‘Golden Globe’ ceremony held in January in the USA, the film was awarded by the Best Foreign Language Film Award to invite Mexican people and the Mexicans in the US to watch it. All kinds of ways to make people to watch the film began to be tried. The New York Times reported that Netflix promoted the film with a campaign budget of nearly $ 20 million (3). Despite all these efforts, the box office proceedings before the Oscar ceremonies could hardly reached to 4 million dollars.
Why did Netflix embark on such an investment despite this commercial failure? To serve the public, to convey the ‘deep art’ and the ‘supreme’ political messages in the film to humanity?
Ideological Clash with ‘The Favourite’
Another film which was nominated for 10 Academy Awards was Yorgos Lanthimos’ ‘The Favourite’, which portrayed Queen Anne’s private life. Queen Anne ruled between the years 1702-1714 as the Queen of England.
Queen Anne was the last representative of the Stuart dynasty, which had been on the throne of England since 1603. The film depicts the struggle of Queen’s girlfriend, Sarah Churchill, with the Queen’s new favorite, Abigail Masham.
Sir Winston Churchill who we know with his famous Havana cigar, and Lady Diana Spencer who was killed in an unfortunate car accident after the current Queen’s wrath, they both come from the descendants of Sarah Churchill.
Cuaron’s film ‘Roma’ shows the solidarity of women from different classes, while Lanthimos’ film ‘The Favourite’ tells of the intrigue of homosexual women.
While the film ‘Roma’ is deeply in the midst of the gap between the indigenious Mexican and the white Mexican, the film ‘The Favourite’ describes how a queen on the throne of England was manipulated by a clever and ambitious woman of noble origin, who had become a servant as a consequence of some misfortune.
When we confront Cuaron’s ‘Roma’ with Lanthimos’ ‘The Favorite’, one is almost like the exact antithesis of the other.
The film ‘Roma’ is scratching ethnic sensitivities in a period when Trump’s plan to build wall to the Mexican border ignites the -so-called- humanist shoutings propagating that families were breaking up.
The film ‘The Favorite’, whereas, came upon the revealing of the file about the Russian support in Trump’s election, by Christopher Steele, the British former MI6 agent and the current boss of Orbis Business Intelligence company.
Here is a moment when this tension in the background spurts out:
Trump kept the 92-year-old woman waiting for 15 minutes (caught in traffic when reaching the ceremony), moreover he forgot to button his jacket when checking the guards’ batalion (due to the extra hot weather). As they walked side by side, he lost the Queen (again from the heat), planted up in front of her like a wall, puzzled the Queen from which side she is going to pass through . When climbing the stairs together with the Queen, he didn’t hold her hand to show extra courtesy (this was right, as it’s forbidden to touch the Queen).
Discreditting his own masterpiece
Alfonso Cuaron’s $ 25 million budget 1998 film ‘Great Expectations’ has become very famous. This film, which ‘experts’ and ‘critics’ did not like, grossed $ 26.3 million in one year and $ 55.5 million box office till today.
Interestingly enough, Alfonso Cuaron said in an interview at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016 that ‘Great Expectations’ was a failed film (4).
What did Cuaron need to discredit his own work after 18 years? Why would a director abase his most favorite movie?
Alfonso Cuaron made that big mistake in ‘Great Expectations’: the film was telling about a young man (Finn) becoming famous in New York by the hidden support of a mafia man he accidentally had helped when he was child. Finn had never been trained in art. He was doing simple, patchy paintings.
We should pay special attention to how Cuaron invents spiels in that interview (4) without concrete justification to discredit his film. Moreover, the following two points are very important:
1) It was the year 2016, when Cuaron felt the need to make this statement, and 2016 was the year when he began working on his film ‘Roma’ (5).
2) The date of this statement and the period when the film ‘Roma’ began to be fictionalized also coincide the days when Trump was promissing a policy of limiting the flow of immigrants, before the November 8, 2016 US Presidential Elections.
The film ‘Great Expectations’, which Cuaron is now discredited but is -for us- a masterpiece, did a great job in the 90s when neoliberalism was in full steam. It ridiculed the values and ideals of the youth we define as ‘the generation y’, which is grown with the motto “just do it“.
The film is a form of wobble between the dream (fantasy) and the real. The old woman’s quaint mansion, where the children meet to dance once every week, the appearence of Estella next to Finn while he was asleep, by somehow passing through the closed doors, Finn’s picking Estella away from her future husband… and all these sweet moments uncomfortably interrupted by some disturbing incidences: uncle Ruth comes to the exhibition, making fun of his own picture, feverishly describing the way Finn was playing in the sand when he was child and his turning down the wine glasses and similar unsettling signs become meaningful at the end, when Finn discovers that he owes his “success” to the mafia man he saved many years ago and that his ‘artistry’ was in fact a big lie. The film indeed satirizes the Trotskyist doctrine of art, which rejects any formalism in art and eventually the classical art education too.
The meeting at the club is especially important. Estella says that her first love was Finn (50:40). Although this proclaim disclosing this intimate fact in the official meeting sounded somehow disgusting, the idiot Finn gets in the mood for a moment and tells Estella – again in a way in which everyone in the office could listen and watch them – that he wanted to make her painting again. The camera focuses on Estella’s face. Estella pities on Finn as if to say “oh poor guy, you are rubbish, and even worse, you are not aware that you are a rubbish“. Meanwhile, the other woman in the meeting is laughing out loud. In this slow-down scene, at the same time, the boss, who was holding Estella’s hand to imply that they were couple is also asking Finn how was he pricing her paintings: “Do you price your paintings according to their size or the time you spend for them?” (52:30 – 53:20).
Why is it so hard and uncomfortable even for Cuaron to get confronted with his own film, the way in which the fabrication of avant-gard, post-modern art and artists was revealed?
In order to find a sociological answer to this question, it is necessary to sleuth the evolution of the lumpen-bourgeois-intelligentsia nested in gentrified urban centers and their function in the art-politics spiral of the advanced capitalist order.
Art investments can be deducted from tax, moreover, the identity of the buyer and seller can be kept confidential in auction firms such as Sotheby’s and Charlie’s. Is this a scheme for hijacking the money of publicly traded companies (in other words, people’s money)? On the other hand, art and artist fabrication from rubbish attracts the unemployed lumpen-bourgeois youth to the bohemian, ‘free’ and ‘protest’ lifestyles in the gentrified city centers. They undertake the hopes of becoming a great artist without going through any arts education. This network offer them a model of life and identity that make them to loiter around without really feeling their uselessness. Thus, a large amount of human waste, which may cause problems in the functioning of advanced capitalism, is absorbed and pacified, by also having indirectly been given a consumer function.
Millions of books have been written, endless lectures have been given on this work in art schools. Terms such as suprematizm, non-objectivism, are invented to “understand” the supreme aesthetics in it. But what if it was just a simple and clever propaganda act that would actually display the Russian Anarchist Party flag without getting arrested from anarchism under the pretext that “I am doing art” in the free art atmosphere in Tsarist Russia?
When we look at the subject through such concrete and simple facts, we see that these ‘expert’ windiness are nothing but having fun with people’s minds.
In the modern-post-modern world, the relation between art and politics is as corrupted as the relation between art and the market. This relationship takes its origin from Trotsky’s art doctrine: Trotsky rejects all kinds of formalism in art, thus he rejects art education, institutionalization in art, and the patronage/support of the state apparatus on/for art. He is even against building an art form peculiar to the socialist state, a proletarian art, therefore is against Proletkult too. Despite his discourse against mysticism, as he is unable to substantiate, he mystifies the ‘revolutionary-artistic-creativity’. He advocates the destruction of the legacy of the past, all kind of classical art forms, institutions and art education. He claims that the art in classless society will completely be abolished by his arrogant romantic rhetoric plastered to Marxism (6).
Escamotage (7)
Although the allergy is formalism in art, Cuaron’s film ‘Roma’ exhibits an eminent performance in terms of technique (form), that is, use of camera (keeping equal distance to each actor and actress); sound; use of space; clothes (keeping the period alive). In addition to this high-level technical performance, the scenario camouflages ethnic scratching in two ways – to express with the words of Professor Zizek – in a way that allows the viewer to applaud the film for “wrong reasons” (escamotage) in two ways:
1) Master – Servant Conflict: The film seems to put class antagonism in the center. In this way, it makes a call to the leftist audiences familiar to Hegel’s philosophy and Marxist literature. On the other hand, in addition to portraying an indigenious as the main character under the pretext of “I memorate my nanny”, it also intertwins various ethnic incidences like the two servants speaking in the Mixtec language between each other. The fact that indigenous people work as servants in the cities as they migrate to the cities from villages (because they are of village origin) is a well known fact in Mexico. The ‘ethnic difference’ largely overlaps with the ‘class difference‘ in Mexican society. Moreover, unlike the ‘Southeastern Problem’ in Turkey, the ‘ethnic difference‘ also overlaps with the ‘phenotype difference‘ in Mexico. If you leave the dialect or language differences aside in Turkey, a ‘Kurdish’ cannot be distinguished from a ‘Turkish’ by phenotype (outward appearance). In Mexican society, however, the distinction between indigenous and white is also evident in terms of phenotype and this fact further sharpens the class polarisation by culturally translating it into the caste system.
However, over time, this class-phenotype ‘overlap’ has been reduced by crossbreeding and now the ratio of pure indigenious people to the total population has fallen to 5% – thanks to exogamic relations and the abolition of the peasantry by the rise of rational and mechanized agriculture and the rise of ‘farmer’ (as opposed to ‘paesantry’) in the countryside. This long term development made a clearer leftist politics free from ethnic reflexes, possible. Cuaron’s film disgusted the public because it blurred this clarity back again.
2) Women’s Solidarity: In the cases where the class antagonism stucked by concrete oxymoron cases, namely the suppression of the “leftist” white-bourgeois student uprising by the “fascist” indigenious-paramilitary group Los Halcones, Cuaron engages the women’s solidarity. This is even a more effective camouflage of the deeper-rooted ethnic scratching, because it makes audible such a message that is already unacceptable at first sight: “You can be a peasant servant, I may be the wife of a city rich doctor, but we are both abandoned because we are both women and therefore we are both victims, so the master-servant contradiction between us shall no more be into effect. As you continue to clean the dog shit (the last scene), I found a job too“.
Mexico is a similar geography for the United States as India was for the United Kingdom: The caste system is a very functional sociological structure for the ‘backyard’ control to suppress either through the passivization or through premature blast of left movements. The history Mexican left is full of such cases that exemplify this regressive functionality of ethnic politics.
Cuarón’s film is named after the Colonia Roma district of Mexico City. This district is part of Cuauhtémoc which is located in the very center of the city. Director Alfonso Cuarón spent his childhood in this neighborhood. The district was built in 1903. The land on which the district was built belonged to Edward Walter Orrin, the owner of Orrin Circus (8).
The Colonia Roma district was excluded from the development of Mexico City during the 1910 – 1920 Revolution years. Later in the 1920s, Mexican President Alvaro Obregon was living in this district. In 1928, when Obregon went out to go to a friend’s house for dinner, he was killed by a Catholic fanatic for the reason that he followed secular politics against the church.
Surrealism’s worldwide painter Leonora Carrington also lived in Colonia Roma. A close friend of Leonora, world-renowned pioneer of Surrealist photography, Kati Horna, the surrealist woman painter Remedios Varo, Jose Emilio Pacheco, Sergio Pitol, Fernando del Paso and Ramon Lopez Velarde lived too in this district. During this period, Colonia Roma had almost become to be called as the district of surrealists.
Until the mid-1940s, rich families lived in the area. Then, as the families from southeast Mexico began to settle, rich families moved to newly established districts. In the 1960s, it became a place where schools, workplaces and the middle class people lived. The district suffered a great damage during the 1985 earthquake. Then in the 1990s, it became a gentrified district of culture where art galleries and bookstores settled.
From the beginning of the twentieth century to the present, the newspaper news we have scanned about this district always referred to it as “Colonia Roma”. Not as “Roma”. Our impression is that the name used for the local people in their language has never been “Roma” but “Colonia Roma”. If this is true, why did Cuaron name his film as “Roma”?
The Italian director Federico Fellini made a film called “Roma” about his own life, in 1972. This film took its place in the history of cinema. We doubt that Cuaron might have given the same name to his film as an allusion to Fellini’s ‘Roma’.
In this film, Alfonso Cuaron tells the story of his own childhood, focusing his own nanny Libo Rodriguez. The indigenious Libo is still alive and 74 years old. Her role was played by indigenious Yalitza Aparicio. The name Libo was renamed as Cleo Gutierrez (9).
Yalitza Aparicio, nominated for Best Actress, is from Oaxaca, central Mexico, known as Mixtecapan (people of the rainy place). Meanwhile, Yalitza became the cover of the Mexican Vogue magazine, and it was the first time that an indigenious was a cover in this magazine. Libo, the real nanny of Cuarón, is from the same city as Yalitza (10).
Corpus Christi
In the film, the rapid passage of the June 10, 1971 Corpus Christi massacre left a sense of dissatisfaction in leftist audiences. Since leftist audience expected these scenes to be processed in a more detailed and more dramatized way. The film received comments and criticism from this perspective (11).
It must be considered whether this rapid transition -which caused dissatisfaction on the left flank – was made by Cuaron on purpose or was it a purposeless symptom. Was it because he confronted with a ‘fact’ (the suppression of the “leftist” white-bourgeois student uprising by the “fascist” indigenious-paramilitary group Los Halcones) which by no means fit to leftist ‘social event’ scheme that he quickly passed it? Because the elite whites, who were shown to their firing range with their modest pistols, had never really had to act on their weapons during these street clashes. Because the indigenious ‘solved’ the issue on behalf of them! After the Oscar Awards, which will be collected with the promotion of Netflix, we hope that we will find answers to these questions in “expert” views.
When we look at the historical background of the Corpus Christi massacre, we again encounter the grave paradoxes of the Trotskyist left:
Mexico was ruled by the one-party regime, by a party with the name “Revolutionary”, until 2000 (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI). On 1 December 1970, the former interior minister, Luis Echeverría Álvarez became the new president and soon he sent warm messages to students and leftists on issues related to university autonomy and other freedoms. But just after a few months Álvarez took the office -for some reason!- the students began to walk for university autonomy.
The typical Trotskyist view blesses all kinds of uprising no matter what the reason is. It advocates going out to the street instead of sleeping lazyly in the house without much caring the motives and the results of the uprise. It presumes that it will eventually good things happen no matter what losses and rout happens in a single event. In Corpus Christi massacre too, the assumption was again that the students who were rebelled for ‘university autonomy’ would be followed by workers, peasants, other oppressed, and that the movement would grow … In contrast, the counter-guerrilla organization US-made fascist Los Halcones paramilitaries came out and the uprise ended up by a massacre where 120 students was killed.
The documents we found – as far as the US let them to get published – show that a colonel, Diaz Escobar, demanded the counter-guerrilla elements to be trained and organized in the United States. The matters such like which student leaders led the demonstrators to start the uprise, the connections of these leaders, to what extend President Alvarez – who protected Allende’s wife, who sent warm messages to the Palestinian movement and so on – was aware of and responsible from this massacre, are still subjects that are untouched by historians (12).
Gabriel Retes ‘El Bulto’, which was released in 1992, is the only film ever made on Los Halcones.
Yet at this point, let’s try to patch a ‘supreme’ symbolism to Cuaron’s film, similar to that is made for Sergei Eisenstein’s films: Is this premature leftist uprise attempt of college students symbolized by the stillborn baby of Cleo? Does the scout court passing in front of the house, the day after the massacre, symbolize that the order was re-established? We will try to understand the supreme art of Cuaron by reading such “expert” idioms after Oscar ceremonies.
Let us make an important reminder when we finish: Mexico had also been an important stop in both Sergei Eisenstein’s and Trotsky’s lives.
Sergei Eisenstein spent the last part of his four-year trip abroad (that began in 1928), in the home of Diego Rivera + Frida Kahlo couple, in Mexico. The reason for his stay here was the order of Upton Sinclair, to shoot the movie we know today as ‘¡Que viva México!’. Although he burned 61km negatives, he could not produce any watchable film. This situation carried Sinclair’s patience, the financing was cut, and in 1932 Eisenstein had to return to Moscow with his team – also having received the personal telegram-order of Stalin. Years later after his death, four different unfinished films were produced from this 61km negative by a large staff work. This 61km negative is still stored in MoMA. After the Oscars that will be collected by the film ‘Roma’, we can expect to see these Eisenstein labeled films being promoted and put on the market again.
Seven years after the hosting of Eisenstein and his team, the home of the couple of Diego Rivera + Frida Kahlo became Trotsky’s last stop. In this house, which was financed by Ford, Trotsky was killed after the events such as the love polygon including Trotsky, and the mediatorship of Diego Rivera in the workers’ uprisings in Detroit. The perpetrators fled to Moscow and were given a badge by Stalin.
The major Detroit industrialists of their time are the founders and financiers of the New York-based avant-gard art museum and archive MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), known by its Trotskyist identity. Like Sergei Eisenstein’s relationship with Upton Sinclair, MoMA employees have always been in direct contact with the circles of Bolshevik avant-gard artists who were scattered from Proletkult. However, the primary sources of these contacts in the archives have not yet been studied by historians, so the traces of these relations have not yet been reflected in English sources. Due to the fragility of the ethnic-based caste system, Mexico have always been a nest to these bohemian Trotskyist, so called “leftist” elites fed by multinational capitalists proceeding their social experiments. The film ‘Roma’ project, carried out today through Cuaron, therefore, reminds us of the previous historical stops of art-politics fabrication in this land.
Istanbul, February 24, 2019
engin_kurtay@yahoo.com
This article is based on the data provided by AliPolaT’s (Ali Polat) months of meticulous research. We would also like to thank the film critic Ruveyda Bayram who helped us by interpreting the film ‘Roma’ from a technical point of view.
Footnotes:
- https://www.slashfilm.com/netflix-pulls-out-of-cannes/
- https://www.playgroundmag.net/cultura/ataques-racistas-contra-yalitza-aparicio-la-mejor-actriz-de-2018_31318869.html
- https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/14/movies/roma-critics-choice-awards.html
- https://variety.com/2016/film/news/alfonso-cuaron-great-expectations-1201757974/
https://talkfilmsociety.com/articles/aint-love-grand-alfonso-cuarns-great-expectations-1998
- https://variety.com/2016/film/news/alfonso-cuaron-new-movie-participant-media-1201855134/
- Leon Trotsky, Literature and Revolution, 1924.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lit_revo/
- Escamotage: the dialogue / discussion / negotiation technique, which draws attention to other issues associated with the real subject and drowns the discussion in these issues, which serves to impose the project about the real issue in one’s mind to the counterpart.
- https://www.maspormas.com/ciudad/colonia-roma-en-el-tiempo/
- https://theconversation.com/the-oscars-what-you-may-have-missed-in-roma-109330
- https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/12/219182/roma-true-story-real-people-alfonso-cuaron-life
- https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/12/17/alfonso-cuaron-bears-witness-to-peril-with-roma
- The National Security Archive, The Corpus Christi Massacre, Mexico’s Attack on its Student Movement, June 10, 1971, Kate Doyle (kadoyle@gwu.edu) Research Assistance: Isaac Campos Costero, Additional Research: Tamara Feinstein and Michael Gavin Posted – June 10, 2003
and
The National Security Archive, The Dawn of Mexico’s Dirty War Lucio Cabañas and the Party of the Poor, Kate Doyle, Research assistance by Isaac Campos Costero, Eli Forsythe and Emilene Martínez Morales – December 5, 2003