Watching a movie is uniquely artistic in the way it is experienced: with sound and image. A movie is the experience of watching and listening, and the emotions the spectators experience are cued to them through the audiovisual choices the producers made. In Y Tu Mama Tambien many of the audiovisual clues came from the juxtaposition between the dialogue and the scene, or the scene showing two point of action at the same time. And the voiceover calls attention to them both.
In a scene where Luisa, Tenoche, and Julio are in the car together, engaged in a vulgar but amusing conversation about techniques to use in bed, they drive by a scene of police brutality against a poor man on the side of the road. Framed by the car window, the shot gives an element of separation between the upper-class main characters and the conditions of the places they’re driving through. Another example of this juxtaposition is a scene at the beginning of the movie, where Julio and Tenoche are laughing about passing gas while a migrant worker’s dead body is being picked up on the side of the road. There is a play of duality, an attention to irony, and a call to class distinction.
Many of these scenes which highlight the duality, after the introductions of the second point of action, cut to it. They explain the background of the man on the side of the road using an extradiagetic voice–the voiceover. These cuts to the other world, or the internal world of a character, further bring attention to irony, duality, suffering, and injustice.
The visual juxtapositions, the juxtapositions between the audio and visual, and the voice over all serve to heighten the emotion and refine the messages of the movie. They are keen uses of audiovisual language.
Watching a movie is uniquely artistic in the way it is experienced: with sound and image. A movie is the experience of watching and listening, and the emotions the spectators experience are cued to them through the audiovisual choices the producers made. In Y Tu Mama Tambien many of the audiovisual clues came from the juxtaposition between the dialogue and the scene, or the scene showing two point of action at the same time. And the voiceover calls attention to them both.
In a scene where Luisa, Tenoche, and Julio are in the car together, engaged in a vulgar but amusing conversation about techniques to use in bed, they drive by a scene of police brutality against a poor man on the side of the road. Framed by the car window, the shot gives an element of separation between the upper-class main characters and the conditions of the places they’re driving through. Another example of this juxtaposition is a scene at the beginning of the movie, where Julio and Tenoche are laughing about passing gas while a migrant worker’s dead body is being picked up on the side of the road. There is a play of duality, an attention to irony, and a call to class distinction.
Many of these scenes which highlight the duality, after the introductions of the second point of action, cut to it. They explain the background of the man on the side of the road using an extradiagetic voice–the voiceover. These cuts to the other world, or the internal world of a character, further bring attention to irony, duality, suffering, and injustice.
The visual juxtapositions, the juxtapositions between the audio and visual, and the voice over all serve to heighten the emotion and refine the messages of the movie. They are keen uses of audiovisual language.
Fue Sin Querer: Literature, the lived life, political death [more will be written in the future]
[I seem unable to embed the 4 pictures I gathered]
Fue sin Querer by Alejandro Montes de Oca
The poster, the book, the poster (again), the framed book, the framed book (again).
This many sided and repeating prop has thoroughly haunted my third watching of Y Tu Mamá También.
What does it mean to do something without wanting to? There must be a level of complicity with the event no matter the intention or the circumstance.
We all participate to an extent with the past, the present, and the creation of the future.
Dark thoughts form at this, the complicity of our own torture and destruction. The space I inhabit has been conceived through violence (colonization, slavery, capitalism). Driving a car and witnessing two heavily armed policemen get out a truck. Going to work every morning for the continuation of working. Kapos.
The words: Fue Sin Querer become more than Jano’s words.
No. Fue sin quere references another theme. Unfaithfulness/cheating. ‘Jano’ has sex with someone other than Luisa (multiple times with different people). Julio and Tenoch have with each other’s girlfriends. Luisa has sex with both Julio and Tenoch. The words after all these relationships: I am a dog, I hated it, I should not have: Fue Sin Querer. Interpersonal relationships have been construed around a notion of possession (may that be the other person or the relationship itself). The relationship is the interaction, not a third space (although it often becomes this established entity (even an institution, as in marriage or girlfriend/boyfriend)).
The prop enters the plot, exists at the plot’s margins, and resides completely outside the plot.
The lived life.
“Vivido y madurado la vivencia” are Jano’s words.
Jano, the writer, the torch bearer for (great) literature, who plasters his apartment with an unopened (and unread) book, can only pretend to live.
Who lives their life? It is Julio, Tenoch, and Luisa. Until the release of the movie: ¿Y tu Jano, También? Jano is dead, outside of the camera.
The political death (a visual and narrative motif throughout the film) is completely silent in the literature. Fue Sin Querer. What is exactly the literature in the movie? (We know it is not the book).
The most interesting part to me this week would be the concept of Kuleshov Effect that was discussed in class. Kuleshov Effect seems to encompass different things including Crops, Metonymy, and Synechdoche in trying to induce or aid the understanding of audience by presenting a new or old topic using different measures.
However, I still find it still an irony to see that how films in particular of the three types of performance, film, performance art, and theater uses vague notions in parts of story to leave the audience to open to interpretation.
Even if it might be called self imposed or planned, it would seem that film has a limit in what it can take it in the camera view and it’s duration of film. Which is why I would think that the Kuleshov Effect was introduced.
For instance, the facial reaction is a key figure in theater and performance art where every one can look at and read the mood of atmosphere in a certain play. In Y Tu Mama Tambien, it might have been covered with a Kuleshov Effect, but I find it very sad that I wasn’t able to see the facial interactions of both Luisa and Jano at the same time between their phone calls.