Flowers in the Foreground

The film Erendira is a lot of fun, I think. It manages to be darkly comic and dreamy at the same time which is not easy to pull off. Fellini, the most obvious antecedent, certainly manages the same task with aplomb. If there's a difference between Erendira and the 1960s, "color" Fellini of Juliet of the Spirits -- the film of his that reminds me most of Erendira -- it's that Erendira more forcefuly provokes us into trying to figure out whether it is a political allegory. All of the "Onesimo es distinto" parts with the Senator temper the "timeless" tale of Erendira and her grandmother with a reality that's hard to suppress.

One reason I wanted to show Erendira is that, as I suggested in class, it make it easier for us to read so-called "magic realism" of the sort Márquez is famous for. The translation of his prose into moving pictures makes the workings of his style easier to comprehend.

I'm thinking in particular of the out-of-focus flowers that appear in the foreground during many interior scenes in Erendira. Márquez consistently undercuts the darker aspects of 100 Years of Solitude with fanciful details that makes us feel good even when we know we're supposed to be feeling bad, not unlike the character of Erendira once she settles into her exploitative routine as a sex worker. The word "magic" in "magic realism" does more than describe the intrusion of supernatural powers in everyday life. It also captures the effect of the author's rhetorical flourishes on readers. A "flourish" is, after all, a kind of flowering. And one that impresses all the more when it looms hazily into the frame.

Comments

[Megan]

I can't remember if the subtitle translation of the final moments of the film, the last we hear of/from Erendira, actually used the word "trace" or not; it was something along the lines of "and not a trace" or some other phrase signifying a lack, "was heard of me again" (the of/from distinction there seems sort of important). I like very much that as she says this she is leaving footprints in the sand, which undercuts a bit the idea that no one ever found her, or rather the "trace" of her, as she has left this spoor of sorts behind--which becomes more interesting as those footprints become, instead of simple imprints, indelible red marks, even more like the blood spoor of the hunted animal. So she in fact leaves the trace, spoor, footprint, etc. but no one ever follows it, or is able to follow it. I wonder if her legend or even attraction relies as much on the role of the grandmother as on her own body, and the grandmother's death is not just what lets her get away, but lets her be forgotten.

[adrienne]

While I agree with Charlie's description of Erendira as "darkly comic and dreamy at the same time," I often felt something like horror while watching the movie--and feel the same as I read One Hundred Years... While the fantastic, the magic and the flourishes do provide a kind of visceral and sensory pleasure, often the lush aesthetic itself becomes overwhelming. I often felt bombarded by one horrible and beautiful thing after another--a kind of sensory overload from all the vivid images, from the horror and sadism. The film (the author, some of the characters) seemed to luxuriate in such things.
I am thinking about in Hundred Years when Rebeca eats the soil and how horrible and sensual this image is... Would it be appropriate to think about the relationship between Gothic and magic realism?

I am also thinking about the postmodern idea of instability and how there is so much movement in the world of Erendira, and there is a sense of fluidity. I thought that the opening scene where the wind is blowing through the house did a nice job of setting this feeling up. In both Juliet of the Spirits and this movie, there is pervasive sense of movement and also of threat, of darkness and violence--sometimes, it seems, as a result of instability.

Lastly, if I remember Fellini's movie, the central character also often finds herself subject to the desires of others and to violence, but her dreamy, whimiscal nature allows her to transcend a dark and threatening world...
Am I remembering that movie correctly? So how and where does the comic enter? Through this transendence? Through the absurd?

[Amy]

Megan's comments regarding the idea of leaving a "trace" made me think about the Indian laborers, who also do not leave much of a trace in the film (particularly in the subtitles). In the movie, for example, we have some sense of the Indian labor needed to erect the elaborate tents, but for the most part that labor and the laborers are invisible - we really only see them during the scenes where Erendira and her grandmother are transported from place to place. The subtitles further erase them by frequently not translating the word "indios" and instead relacing it with a much vaguer word usually indicating scoundrels or peasants.
The marginalized Indians combined with Ulysses' blonde hair and "explorer's name," makes me wonder about the role of colonialism in the film. Reminders of ethnicity and colonialism (even when the reminders are marked by silence or invisiblity) certainly seem to support Charlie's idea that the "Onesimo es distinto" scenes challenge the timeless or mythic elements of the story.

[Amanda]

To make a rather dangerous tangential move, Charlie's comment about Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits made me think of Teresa de Lauretis's Technologies of Gender and her article "Fellini's 9 1/2," which addresses what she sees to be a rather misogynistic touch on the part of Fellini. To be brief, de Lauretis sees this film as Fellini's Jungian attempt to explore his feminine alter ego, in the guise of his wife, as the sexuality of the women in the film always seems to be focalized through the eyes of an everpresent but ever off stage Fellini.
So, to come back, I wonder what we might say about Erendira in these terms, and how is the film reproducing an aesthetics of eroticism that seems to be much more focalized through the author/director/Marquez? than the main character, who claims to narrate at least some portion of the story? I wonder if this is one of the reasons that Charlie finds something about these films to resonate in simliar fashion. If not, can you tell us?

[Coach Outlet]

The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past, you can’t go on well in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches.