DR ANDREA NOBLE

[University of Durham]

"If Looks Could Kill: The Politics of Spectatorship in María Candelaria"

This paper aims to offer an account of the specificity of spectatorship within the context of Mexican cinema.  It argues that the gaze has a history in Mexico, which can be traced back to looking relations that developed in the colonial period.  Drawing on the work of colonial historian Serge Gruzinski, who reads the conquest and colonisation of Mexico in terms of a war of images, this paper explores María Candelaria (Emilio Fernández, 1944) as a film that furnishes a field upon which historical conflicts at the level of the gaze are registered and inscribed.  Discussion is centred on the painted nude image depicting an indigenous woman, María Candelaria of the film’s title, in which a series of meanings is condensed.  The first section focuses on the way in which the film stages a contest to look and possess María Candelaria that takes place between two clearly delineated gazes with origins in the colonial period.  The second section goes on to link this contest with (i) the positioning of the film’s spectator who significantly is denied sight of the painting and (ii) the role of the cinema in the process of modernisation in Mexico in the 1940s.

Thursday, 16th December, 1999

4 p.m.

O'Rahilly Building, ABL 1.24

followed by public lecture at 6 p.m. in Room 3.03 - Brotherhood of Light ~ Mexican Photography Exhibition