'Amores Perros' and Crime in Mexico

Professor John Kraniauskas teaches at the University of London. He is a specialist in Latin American literary and cultural studies, with particular interests in relations between state and cultural forms. In 1992 and 1995 he was a Visiting Associate Professor at the Universidad Iberoamericana, and in 1996 at Duke University.

DEATHWORK: THE POLITICS AND ETHICS OF 'AMORES PERROS'

'Amores perros' is a Mexican work of urban neo-naturalism with all the populist scope and will-to-representativity of a moving three-panelled mural. In this talk, Kraniauskas will read each of the film's three parts with a view to understanding their autonomous compositional principles and themes, as well as their specific articulation to the film's narrative as a whole. If each part focuses on a broken familial relation, they do so in different ways. The first part of the film dramatizes a conflict between 'the good' and desire ECONOMICALLY, Octavio and Susana's story is a story about money. The second, pivotal part of the film dramatizes the existential internalization by Daniel and, especially, Valeria of death CULTURALLY, and inscribes the film-text into a particular post-Revolutionary Mexican narrative tradition. Finally, the third part of the film gathers together the ECONOMIC and the CULTURAL logics of the film POLITICALLY, producing an overarching narrative centred on 'el Chivo' that dramatizes the deathwork of the state.