Of Guns and Sewing-Machines. On the Minor Nature of Third Cinema in Mexico

Abstract

One of the most telling examples of the afterlives of Mexico’s movement of 1968 was the emergence of a significant number of art and film collectives that sought to articulate aesthetics and politics. The Marginal Film Coop (Cooperativa de Cine Marginal, 1971-1975) was the first of this kind of collectives, and probably the most politically committed of them. Created in 1971 as a grouping of young independent filmmakers, students, political activists, film clubbers and critics that had played different roles in the brigades of the 1968 movement, the Coop soon became a national network of production, distribution and exhibition of radical political cinema composed of more than 35 people, with solid relations with workers and unions across the country.

Based on interviews, personal archives of some of its members, film journals and scattered Super 8 materials held at Filmoteca UNAM, my reading of the Coop explores how the “unsustained nature” of Mexican political cinema was part of a political and aesthetic operation of contesting a prevailing metaphor of Latin American’s political cinema, the camera as a weapon, and the temporality associated to it.