From Text to Film and Back: The Garcia Ponce-Gurrola

Collaboration in Tajimara

Bruce-Novoa

Discourse, 26.1&2, Winter & Spring 2004, pp. 148-172 (Article)

Published by Wayne State University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/dis.2005.0008

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/185035

Access provided by Australian National University (23 Aug 2018 22:00 GMT)
 From Text to Film and Back:
The Garcı́a Ponce-Gurrola
Collaboration in Tajimara

Juan Bruce-Novoa

Events are related to other events not by causal-

ity, but by analogy and correspondence.

—Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body 209.

In the 1950s and 60s Mexican cultural production shifted away

from the nationalistic trends that dominated the first half of the
century and towards what we now have come to call postmodern-
ism. During those decades the younger generations of artists and
writers—mentored by few outsider figures of the late ‘40s like Oc-
tavio Paz and Rufino Tamayo—struggled to open spaces within
which they could display their new sensibilities and compete with
the established, sanctioned, and subventioned forms of expression
that had come to be accepted as national artistic forms. The visual
artists carried out a well-documented campaign against the Mexi-
canist School as epitomized in the murals Diego Rivera, José
Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siquieros (Conde, ‘‘La apari-
ción’’ and Un pintor; Romero Keith). The most significant group-
ing of painters came to be known as La Ruptura, an appropriate
name in that it captured their gesture of breaking with the norm.1
While heterogeneous in their styles, group members shared an ori-
entation towards abstraction and away from nationalistic/populist

Discourse, 26.1 & 26.2 (Winter and Spring 2004), pp. 148–172.
Copyright 䉷 2005 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:39 PS PAGE 148

Winter and Spring 2004 149

iconography, as well as a view that art was exploration in search of

meaning more than mimetic representation of objects of a priori
signification. They dialogued with the international figures of high
modernism, of course, but like young artists in other world capitols
they felt part of the hip counterculture coming out of London and
New York.
The literary scene produced similar agitation in some of the
central cultural agencies in Mexico: the Coordinación de Difusión
Cultural (administrative office for all cultural activities of the mas-
sive National University) from where the group turned the Revista
de la Universidad into a world-class journal; La Casa del Lago, the
most dynamic performing arts center of the period was their cre-
ation, as was the project for literary and cultural recordings called
Voz Viva de México where they collaborated with another mentor
figure, Juan José Arreola (Albarrán). By the 1960s they controlled
the most influential cultural magazines in the country. The axis
mundi of their multi-facetted activities was the Revista Mexicana de
Literatura in its three phases that spanned from the years 1955–65;
editors included Emmanuel Carballo, Carlos Fuentes, Tomás Sego-
via, Antonio Alatorre, and Juan Garcı́a Ponce. As a platform it
launched the careers of their Mexican peers and introduced to
Mexico international figures such as Julio Cortázar, Hermann
Broch, Herbert Marcuse, Denise Levertov, and Lezama Lima, and
provided new translations of Mann, Musil, Pavese, Miller, Joyce,
and Merleau Ponty, among others. The first monographic issue of
a journal dedicated to Borges was their doing—as they had dedi-
cated an issue of Revista de la Universidad to Malcolm Lowry (Nov.
1964). The journal’s name underscored the group’s attitude: loca-
tion and staff made it Mexican; the subject matter, literature, was
neither modified nor limited in any way. Understandably, observ-
ers have come to refer to these authors as the Generation of the
Revista Mexicana de Literatura, following the Mexican tradition of
associating generations with a journal. Recently, however, the
name La Generación de Medio Siglo has garnered more currency
among Mexican critics, perhaps because these writers ran so many
journals that they dominated the period (Pereira, ‘‘Juan’’ and ‘‘La
Generación’’).2
Under either rubric, the group’s major writers concerned
themselves with the visual arts. They took up the Ruptura cause,
reviewing their exhibits and defending them against attacks by the
entrenched official critics and the likes of Siqueiros and his ilk.
Ruptura painters in turn participated in literary endeavors like cre-
ating scenery for plays at the Casa del Lago and cover art for
books—Vicente Rojo revolutionized Mexican graphic arts during

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:40 PS PAGE 149

150 Discourse 26.1 & 2

the period (Rojo). The first book to present the painters of La

Ruptura as a group, Nueve pintores mexicanos, was authored by the
acknowledged leader of the Generación de Medio Siglo, Juan
Garcı́a Ponce (Carballo 7). Even after the Generation had lost edi-
torial control of the Revista de la Universidad, its cover continued to
be a catalogue of Mexican contemporary art, with the great major-
ity of the issues dedicated to Ruptura artists or fellow travelers.
If one were to try to encapsulate succinctly the collaborative
mood that permeated the plastic and literary renovation in the
early 1960s in Mexico, the following statement aptly fits the bill.
Written for the catalogue of Fernando Garcı́a Ponce’s 1963 exhibit
by Ramón Xirau—who as a director of the Centro Mexicano de
Escritores was in a position to observe trends among Mexico’s top
young writers—the following passage not only dissolves the bound-
aries of the arts, but also questions the process of perception on
which such categories are founded:

Las diferentes formas artı́sticas se aproximan cada vez más a la lı́rica.

¿Será que la expresión de la intimidad es hoy, y necesariamente, más
melódica, menos hecha de conceptos y de palabras? Me parece probable
y me parece también que esta musicalidad de la expresión poética y
artı́stica responde a la convivencia de una búsqueda y una desconfianza:
la búsqueda del Sentido; la desconfianza en cuanto a la existencia del
Sentido. Solemos vivir en un mundo de señales—primer paso de toda
experiencia de lo sagrado—sin llegar a deteminar el origen de las señales
que vemos. (Xirau 36)

(Everyday the variety of artistic forms moves closer to the lyrical. Could
it be that intimate expression today is, necessarily, more melodic, and
less a matter of concepts and words? I think it is likely, and it seems to
me as well that this musicality of poetic and artistic expression responds
to the coexistence of a quest and a doubt: quest for Meaning; doubt as
to the existence of Meaning. We customarily live in a world of symbols—
first step in every experience of the sacred—yet incapable of determining
the source of the symbols we see.)

Elsewhere I have pursued the ramifications of Xirau’s statement

(Bruce-Novoa). Here let it suffice to indicate how a major partici-
pant/observer in the artistic production of that moment took for
granted the fusing of the arts in a common cultural pursuit, one
that centered on the question of perception and the postmodern
problematic of the loss of master narratives of signification.
It should surprise no one, then, that these young artists, swept
up in the heady atmosphere of their success, would turn their ef-
forts to that quintessential of modern cultural production, film.
The opportunity came in 1964, when to revitalize the flagging film

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:41 PS PAGE 150

Winter and Spring 2004 151

industry the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Cinema-

tográfica organized the First Experimental Film Competition
(Garcı́a Riera). Contestants were for the most part creative people
from other fields, among them a select representation of the
young intellectuals so active in literature and painting. Juan Rulfo,
Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garcı́a Márquez—a Mexican resident and
regular at the Ruptura activities—Inés Arredondo, Juan de la Ca-
vada, José Emilio Pacheco, and Juan Garcı́a Ponce contributed
texts and collaborated in their adaptation and production. Artists
designed sets. Bit parts, cameos, and group scenes featured paint-
ers, writers, and their friends and lovers. The contest became yet
another group activity, a sort of generational happening.

Tajimara As Text

In 1963 Garcı́a Ponce published La noche, his second collection

of short stories. Of the three stories included, ‘‘Tajimara’’ attracted
the most interest and admiration. Within a year of its Mexican pub-
lication, Denise Levertov’s translation appeared in New Directions’
annual anthology. A decade later Emir Rodrı́guez Monegal consid-
ered it the best of Garcı́a Ponce’s production (unpublished com-
mentary). Garcı́a Ponce himself favored it, choosing to record it
for the Voz Viva collection and to adapt it into a screenplay for the
1964 competition.
In the story, Roberto, the narrator/protagonist, narrating ev-
erything in a tone of nostalgic recall, claims he wants to tell us the
story of Julia and Carlos, brother and sister artists who have rented
a house in the village of Tajimara so that they can pursue their
painting careers. However, his own relationship with Cecilia has
him obsessed. The narrative opens when the two of them are on
their way to Tajimara. After several months of not coming to see
him, Cecilia has asked Roberto to accompany her to Julia’s engage-
ment party, which will be Cecilia’s as well, since she announces
that she is going to marry her childhood sweetheart, Guillermo.
Although she and Roberto have an intimate relationship, and he
loves her, she prefers to marry Guillermo so she can, as she states
it, get her revenge on him directly. From this point on the narra-
tive moves back and forth among different periods in Roberto’s
life with Cecilia: their adolescence when he pursued her while she
was already in love with Guillermo, then ten years later when he
was working as a translator and they have their own love affair, and
the night of the last party at Tajimara when Cecilia picks him up
to accompany her, and finally Cecilia’s wedding day. All of these

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:41 PS PAGE 151

152 Discourse 26.1 & 2

periods are recalled from an undefined place and time after the
wedding when they exist simultaneously in Roberto’s memory.
The story Roberto wants to narrate, that of Julia and Carlos,
occurs during his love affair with Cecilia. They appear because Ro-
berto is forced to find another apartment when Cecilia destroys
his roommate’s belongings. She arranges for him to rent Julia and
Carlos’ place since they are moving to the country. The narrator
recalls Carlos and Julia’s relationship as a beautiful, ideal love af-
fair lived in the intensity of their mutual pursuit of art and despite
being brother and sister. It only ends when Julia gets pregnant and
decides to marry to cover it up—abortion was neither legal nor
easily procured in Mexico or the United States in 1963. The two
love stories reflect each other as failed attempts to recuperate and
hold the innocence of an asocial love similar to that which exists
among children in the state of polymorphous sexuality before they
are subjected to the reality principle. The story is tinged with nos-
talgia for the lost possibility of unity in love, a possibility nullified
by the inexorable imposition of repression. The rhetorical equiva-
lent of these thematic concerns appears in Garcı́a Ponce’s under-
mining of the narrator’s authority by consistently demonstrating
his lack of control over the material that he tries to mold into a
logical narrative. The conflict between the story of Carlos and Julia
and his own memories of Cecilia assumes the dimension of a strug-
gle between the seemingly random surfacing of images and the
narrator’s attempt to order and convey information; that is to say,
between scenes of a marked lyric quality and sections that could
be more associated with prose. However, as the narrator learns,
strict lines between approaches or genres are tenuous at best, and
eventually the classic dichotomies fail when the lyrical flow perme-
ates everything, frustrating attempts to impose order.

Tajimara as Film3

A selection of Generación members and close friends worked

on and appeared in the film. Fernando Garcı́a Ponce and Manuel
Felguérez managed set design and appeared in the party scenes
along with Lilia Carrillo. From among the writers, Tomás Segovia
played Julia’s fiancé, and Juan Vicente Melo and Carlos Monsiváis
joined the party guests. Also among the party guests appeared Juan
Garcı́a Ponce’s wife, Mercedes Oteyza as well as his future mate,
Michéle Alban. Sets featured Vicente Rojo posters and an entire
sequence was shot in the then recently inaugurated Museum of
Modern Art with all it symbolized of the art scene in tune with La

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:42 PS PAGE 152

Winter and Spring 2004 153

Ruptura’s program. That Julia and Carlos are painters allowed the
designers to utilize their studio and apartment to feature Ruptura-
style paintings and turn the walls of the party scenes into a gallery
of abstract art.
The choice of Juan José Gurrola to direct the film made com-
plete sense within this ethos of group collaboration. The ultimate
insider, Gurrola had supervised the program of poetry and drama
readings of the Casa del Lago since its inception in the 1950s (Alb-
arrán 5). He directed the Casa’s production of Dylan Thomas’
Under Milk Wood—collaborating on the translation with his wife,
the actress Angela Pixie Hopkins who plays Julia in Tajimara—
designed the sets for Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve, and set Octavio
Paz’s poetry to jazz. As the director of UNAM’s School of Architec-
ture theater, he staged plays with an experimental flair. He
founded and edited the theater journal La Carpa (Batis 127). By
1965 he held the post of Artistic Director of UNAM’s Television
Department. As Garcı́a Riera summarized it, ‘‘Gurrola tenı́a el muy
merecido prestigio de ser uno de los más auténticos renovadores
de la escena mexicana’’ (191).
Gurrola and Garcı́a Ponce share screenplay credit for Tajimara
and both have spoken to me of their close collaboration during
filming. It was nothing new for them, having collaborated pre-
viously on the staging of Garcı́a Ponce’s translation of Arthur Kop-
it’s absurdist play Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet
and I’m Feelin’ So Sad as well as Garcı́a Ponce’s original anti-Actor’s
Studio satire Doce y una, trece. The same year Tajimara was com-
pleted, 1965, Garcı́a Ponce wrote text for, as well as contributed
the voice-over narration on, three Gurrola documentaries on Mid-
Century Generation painters: Vicente Rojo, Alberto Gironella, and
José Luis Cuevas. Hence, to attribute the changes in the film to the
director in contrast to the author would be misleading. Although
in an essay dedicated to the film, Garcı́a Ponce calls Gurrola the
real author of the movie, he also emphasized that their collabora-
tion was so intense, so intimate, that he felt this project to be much
closer to him than other in which he participated, even with Gur-
rola (Garcı́a Ponce, ‘‘Tajimara en cine’’ 137). Their collaboration
produced a film that stays quite faithful to the text, not only mak-
ing no major changes to the characters or the general outline of
the plot, but also replicating the effect of an authorial narrative
voice in the form of voice-over narration. Garcı́a Ponce states that
he insisted on preserving ‘‘el sentimiento de nostalgia por la ino-
cencia perdida y el tono narrativo del cuento’’ (the feeling of nos-
talgia for lost innocence and the story’s narrative tone) (139).
Both effects were strongly foregrounded through voice-over. It

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:43 PS PAGE 153

154 Discourse 26.1 & 2

allows the film to cite the text throughout, emphasizing its retro-
spective perspective and nostalgic tone, and conveying the protag-
onist’s desperate melancholy. Thus it captures the extra signifying
level of distant perception so essential to the overall effect of the
reading. Also, both film and text obsessively focus on the image of
Cecilia. The many lines dedicated to her description in the text—
epitomized in the panoply of her images enumerated on page
79—were turned into the many minutes of total time which the
actress Pilar Pellicer’s body and face occupy the screen. Obviously,
the goal was not to use the text as the basis for a freewheeling
adaptation, but to find cinematic ways to recreate the style, strate-
gies, and effects of the original.
Essential to the style of the textual narrative is the way it floats
across time. Since all action exists in the present of the narrative
act, like one total image fully and simultaneously accessible to
memory, any specific data can appear at any moment. The logic
appears random, but in the text it proceeds mostly through the-
matically synecdochic association. The film heightens the perme-
ability of the temporal divisions by exploiting the multiple
possibilities opened by the added dimensions of film: audio and
visual synecdoche and the simultaneity of perceptual fields. For
instance, the night Cecilia and Roberto meet as adults, as they
leave the café he asks if she still lives in her old house. She answers
in the affirmative and suggests that he call her (16:20 minutes).4
The camera follows them as they walk into the darkness, continues
to move as though focusing on them in the shadows among the
trees along the street, only to have the adolescent Roberto reap-
pear from the dark, walking in the same direction into the dim
light among trees in front of Cecilia’s house, but now a decade
earlier (16:28 m.). He then throws stones at a second story window
and the young Cecilia appears, ready for bed and dressed in a
white, lacy robe, the epitome of sweetness and innocence. Picking
up the topic of the conversation from the end of the café scene
seconds earlier but years later, Cecilia says that they can talk the
next day and disappears back into the room. Below, Roberto sits
next to the sidewalk while the camera pans up into the darkness
and straight into a shot of the adult Cecilia, semi-nude under a
white sheet, in Roberto’s apartment, standing on a window seat
above him, the epitome of adult, brazen temptation (17:28 m.)—a
shot that picks up her position at the close of a scene back in min-
ute five from the first day she came to his apartment sometime
after their meeting in the café. This time the scene continues with
Roberto embracing her and Cecilia asking to be taken to the bed-
room. The camera closes tightly on their bodies until focus blurs.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:44 PS PAGE 154

Winter and Spring 2004 155

When it refocuses, pre-Columbian artifacts belonging to Roberto’s

roommate come into view, objects that we had seen Cecilia break
earlier (11:02 m.). Meanwhile, the voice-over tells us the result of
that destruction—Roberto had to leave the apartment, leading to
the introduction of the Julia and Carlos into the plot—but here
(18:02 m.) it is spoken over the restored objects as they existed
before their destruction. By the end of this sequence, all sense of
linear chronology has been dispensed with.
A similar transition happens towards the end, at the close of
the engagement party. The camera lingers a moment on a tight
close-up of Julia (48:00 m.), then pans over objects at such close
range that they blur unrecognizably; when the blurred shapes
clear, the hem of a priest’s robes appears (48:23 m.), then the shot
quickly widens out to show Julia’s wedding. All the while the same
song, Dusty Springfield’s ‘‘Anyone Who Had A Heart,’’ is heard,
fading slightly only for Roberto’s voice-over (48:46 m.), to return
full force at 49:10 m. and continue in a similar process until the
end. In this case the transition, while chronologically linear, func-
tions at the level of the thematic implications suggested by the
lyrics of the Springfield song. The transition begins when Carlos
has given his farewell speech and begun to dance with another
woman. While Julia looks on, Roberto moves across the back-
ground, watching as he had in an earlier scene when he observed
them intimately kiss, discovering their incestuous relationship. So
when the song begins—‘‘Anyone who ever loved/ Could look at
me and know that I love you;/Anyone who ever dreamed/ Could
look at me and know I dream of you/ Knowing I love you so’’
(Bacharach and David)—the thematic motif of unrequited love is
thrust into the audio foreground, while simultaneously the motif
of Roberto’s voyeuristic position, both as an adolescent watching
Cecilia and as an adult watching Julia and Carlos, is referenced
in the visual background. Furthermore, the sensitive viewer will
remember that at the end of a previous party scene, when Guil-
lermo reappeared to interrupt Cecilia and Roberto’s love affair,
the same song had played, though only in an instrumental version
(36:25 m.). The reprised song links the two love stories at the level
of audio suggestion, then the lyrics amplify them thematically.
These and related techniques create a smooth flow of one continu-
ous, almost seamless stream of images despite the continual leaps
across disparate time zones. And while the effect stems from the
same intention as experienced in the reading, the film expands it
into the added sensual levels of sound and sight. Across scene cuts,
the film creates links through over lapping music or narration, or
through related visual imagery, as seen above, or the return to a

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:45 PS PAGE 155

156 Discourse 26.1 & 2

scene with new relationships between it and apparently unrelated

scenes having been supplied in the interim, as will be explained
below.
One of the most interesting aspects of ‘‘Tajimara’’ is the narra-
tor/narrative relationship. One might classify it within the cate-
gory of unreliable narrator, but it is a special type. Instead of
coming to realize that the narrator does not or cannot provide
readers with correct information, Garcı́a Ponce creates a narrator
who struggles to understand the meaning of what he is describing
as he describes it. At the same time, he tries to tell one story and is
frustrated by the interference of another. He comes closest to the
traditional unreliable narrator in his inability to understand that
both stories are essentially about the same thing, complementing
instead of distracting from each other. This is achieved in part by
the constant movement across different levels of past time, allow-
ing the story to slowly develop in a series of mutually reflecting
scenes. In the film, as seen above, this effect also is achieved.
There is, however, another, more profound sense to Garcı́a
Ponce’s technique. Coming out of a phenomenological orienta-
tion of patient observation and a belief in the subjectivity of objects
revealed ultimately as a mystery of never-fully-comprehended es-
sence, Garcı́a Ponce seeks to create that experience in readers.5
Hence, the technique evinces the creation of altering surfaces on
which meaning becomes gradually apparent, often through the
accumulation of data supplied through retrospection. The film
tries to produce the same effect. As seen above, the juxtaposition
of images from different times, or the return of a previously seen
object, allows for the accumulation of meaning in what is appar-
ently the same image. When an image is reprised, intervening ma-
terial allows for fuller comprehension. A good example is the
image of Cecilia falling-down drunk and Roberto holding her up
and helping her into his apartment (31:09 m.). Roberto’s voice-
over states only his regret that he hadn’t married her when they
were young, evoking the motif of the lost chances for love during
their adolescence. The explanation is vague, but unlike the case of
reading, where one could stop to ponder what has been elided
and why, the audience is not given time to sort it out because when
they reach the apartment, the scene cuts to the start of the party
at Tajimara they had just attended (31:59 m.). Guillermo shows up
at the party and Cecilia spends most of the time with him. Of
course, Guillermo is the reason why Cecilia and Roberto did not
get married when they were young. She gets drunk and, only after
the party has shifted into a down-beat mood of melancholy—
underscored by the melody of ‘‘Anyone Who Had A Heart’’—goes

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:45 PS PAGE 156

Winter and Spring 2004 157

back to Roberto. They leave together and arrive at his apartment

where Cecilia drunkenly stumbles out of the car (37:59 m.), replay-
ing the shot from 31:09 that set off the party flashback. Now the
audience understands Cecilia’s motivation, yet the full import of
her action still remains unclear. The final result will become appar-
ent only in the closing scene at Julia’s wedding when we glimpse
Cecilia sitting with Guillermo in the church. Added to the process
is the synecdochic link through the use of the song ‘‘Anyone Who
Had a Heart,’’ which first played instrumentally at the end of the
party when Guillermo reappears (36:25 m.), and then is reprised
as background for the film’s last two and half minutes when we
witness the destruction of both pairs of lovers through both wom-
en’s marriages to intruder figures.
The best-achieved visual realization of Garcı́a Ponce’s belief in
the revelation of meaning within the enigmatic surface is the use
of the blurred imagery of the film’s opening sequence. For the first
minute and a half, as the title and credits run, the screen is an
opaque but luminescent surface that appears to shimmer, bubble,
and flow as if moving both on the surface and simultaneously
below or behind it. With the distraction of the credits and no ver-
bal or textual clues to the meaning of the imagery, spectators are
faced with something like an abstract expressionist painting. In
effect, the opening image resembles a Vicente Rojo painting from
the mid to late 1960s, especially his series called Señales. His canvas
presented patches of textured color, as if the surface covered the
remains of other surfaces whose details left traces visible below the
outer layer. A geometric symbol is visible, but its significance re-
mains enigmatic within a field void of clear indicators to a referen-
tial discourse. Rojo’s señales (symbols) never become signos (signs)
and thus create the sense of floating ambiguity. In the polyvalence,
señales function more like poetic images than prosaic discourse; in
film, polyvalent images undermine the assumed reality of a firm
identity of character or objects viewed as if they were signs with a
congruent set of characteristics, their signifieds.
While Tajimara’s opening illustrates splendidly the principle,
the scene that follows upon the fading of the credits might seem
to present a sudden leap back to the concrete. A quick fade reveals
the full-figure image of a woman waiting in front of a building, a
woman identified as Cecilia by a male, voice-over narration—in
effect, the narrative voice ‘‘appears’’ as the result of the need to
bespeak the woman as its object of desire, Cecilia, fusing them in
an apparent mutual dependence. This is heightened by the fact
that she is there to ask Roberto to accompany her to Tajimara to
the engagement party. She convinces him just as it starts raining.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:46 PS PAGE 157

158 Discourse 26.1 & 2

The car is then seen off the highway, but by 3:20 m. the film has
switched to the start of a series of sequences of flashbacks. Only at
11:20 m. do we return to the car for some twenty-five seconds dur-
ing which Cecilia introduces the character of Guillermo into the
conversation. Then suddenly we are back to the café the night
Cecilia and Roberto met as adults and the beginning of another
series of flashbacks to fill in more of their conflictive relationship,
now haunted by the knowledge of Cecilia’s love for Guillermo
when they were adolescents. When we return a third time to the
car on its way to Tajimara (20:54 m.), Cecilia tells Roberto that she
will not return to him because of Guillermo. However, Roberto
gets her to pull the car over to the side of the road and they have
sex. Finally, at the film’s very center—25:08–40 minutes out of
50:30—the screen returns to the original image of the opaque,
shimmering surface, the significance of the movement now ren-
dered clear despite its continued visually obscure quality. Not only
do we understand that the nebulous forms moving beneath the
surface are Roberto and Cecilia having sex, but the action is now
charged with significance supplied by all the information garnered
from the scenes we have been shown of the history of their rela-
tionship. Also, later, at the end, the audience should remember
that at the film’s heart there remains buried, literally, the union of
Cecilia and Roberto in the visual terms of mystery and revelation
that lie at the heart of the author’s aesthetics.
Yet, from the point of this sexual union in the car forward,
despite Roberto’s best attempts to fill his memory and our field of
perception with the glorious images of Julia and Carlos, both love
stories will inexorably degenerate under the pressures of outside
interventions. Just as Roberto and Cecilia’s beautifully portrayed
coupling, revealed and simultaneously hidden behind the rain-ob-
scured automobile window, cannot sustain itself once the couple
leaves the sheltered isolation of a car parked at the edge of forest,
Julia and Carlos’ beautiful, ideal love affair, lived in a sheltered
house in a remote village, cannot survive a pregnancy that forces
them back into society. Furthermore, it is interesting that the only
description of a painting by the artist/lovers in the text resembles
this image of the blurred and swirling window in the film, as will
be seen below.
As mentioned above, when the credits sequence ends, a fade-
in displays the image of a woman waiting in front of a building.
However, my comment, that the woman is identified as Cecilia by
voice-over, was, if not misleading, at least insensitive to the skillful
camera technique and control of movement that perfectly conveys
the same phenomenological aesthetic of fragmentary revelation in

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:46 PS PAGE 158

Winter and Spring 2004 159

a surface that presents itself only in a series of partial revelations.

In other words, the shift in visual imagery to what appears to be a
clear, comprehensible object made up of a woman and a building
turns out to be just as difficult to decipher, just as mysterious, as
the opening imagery that ran behind the credits.
The first clue that something significant is about to occur is
yet another small element I passed over too quickly above—like
viewers seeing the film probably would not take notice until re-
turning to watch or even study it. Between the opening, title/cred-
its sequence and the waiting/women sequence, the fade involves
an intricate movement of lens adjustment. The first sequence fades
out to allow the second to appear, but the latter is still out of focus.
Almost immediately, the image adjusts to clarity in a blatantly open
manner that underscores the action as an intentional, highly con-
scious act of framing and placement of the image of a woman.
First, the adjustment renders the previous sequence’s blurred qual-
ity a choice of presentation, underscoring the need to read it as
significant rather than merely a happenstance of visual decoration.
To reconsider the meaning of that blurred surface and decipher
the image—that is, to bring it to clarity—requires another encoun-
ter. When the opportunity comes in a reprise of the initial image,
as explained above, viewers armed with sufficient, newly-acquired
information will perform that visual refocusing. Second, the refer-
ential evocation of film tradition is unavoidable: the camera’s gaze
is associated with the patriarchal position. It is exactly this tradition
of male desire and its attempt to control nature/woman through
representation that Garcı́a Ponce’s work continually evokes and
debunks—just as the development of the sequence will debunk its
opening, its origin, as we will be seen below. That Gurrola staged
a visual materialization of this epistemic point in Garcı́a Ponce’s
discourse represents the intimate nature of their collaboration.
The woman stands in profile screen right, leaning against wall.
With her left foot on one step and her right on a step above it, her
hand in the pocket of her raincoat, and looking off to screen left,
she could be a model posing passively for the camera. Nothing has
been said yet to explain who she is; the opening music continues.
Then the women glances over her shoulder as if looking for some-
one, before walking right to left across the entrance to the build-
ing. The camera follows her for four paces, but when she disappears
behind the column to an open gate stage front, the camera stops,
focused on the empty entryway to the building. Almost immedi-
ately the camera begins to pan down as the woman reappears walk-
ing down the steps. The voice-over begins, offering Roberto’s
opening statement: ‘‘El sentido de la historia es lo de menos.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:47 PS PAGE 159

160 Discourse 26.1 & 2

Ahora, sólo recuerdo la imagen de Cecilia’’ (The meaning of the

story is of least interest. Now, I only remember the image of Ce-
cilia.) This statement announcing the superior status of imagery
over logical meaning—one could say over linear, cause-and-effect
plot structure—could not be clearer. And yet, the visual manipula-
tion of Cecilia’s image offers a subtle, though quite startling if ana-
lyzed, counterpoint. As she descends the steps to come back into
the camera field, the camera begins to pan down to follow her as
it had across the screen seconds before, but this time the result is
to capture only part of her body. Since she is now approaching the
camera, it cannot keep her entire body within the frame. The cam-
era would have had to retreat or adjust its lens to a wider focal
angle. As it is, by the time Roberto states that ‘‘Now, I only remem-
ber the image of Cecilia,’’ that image has been reduced to a slightly
out-of-focus shot of her raincoat-covered torso from just below her
shoulders to above her knees. And then she turns and walks back
up the steps and out of the frame, leaving the camera tightly fo-
cused on the now empty steps. Then suddenly her feet and lower
legs rapidly descend the steps and pass through the camera’s field
to end the scene. In forty-five seconds the film has conveyed the
difficulty of capturing Cecilia’s image. What begins as her full-
length, posing body, offered to the camera’s gaze like an object
of admiration, rapidly expresses subjectivity through impatience,
freedom of movement, a lack of willingness to remain within the
frame, and a propensity for unpredictable approach, retreat, and
escape that renders futile any effort to capture and document her
total, ideal image. The conflict between reality and memory, and
both in relationship to artistic reproduction that underlie Garcı́a
Ponce’s story—and his entire literary production—is conveyed in
less than a minute.
Within that opening sequence, the pretense of mutual depen-
dence is redefined into the frustrated attempt to impose limits on
the object of desire that could only be achieved if the sequence
could perfectly controlled to keep her in focus, or held, like a still
photo, at a moment when Cecilia is in full view. This would be
consonant with what has been referred to as the male gaze of dom-
inance. That Cecilia refuses to stay put defines the narrator’s di-
lemma and Garcı́a Ponce’s point that the male gaze is at best a
nostalgic project destined to fail when confronted by a world of
objects with their own subjectivity. The most one can do is give
up trying to make sense—impose logical order—and evoke images
within a space where they can be observed repeatedly in their
ephemeral apparitions.
Furthermore, Roberto’s opening statement in the film comes

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:47 PS PAGE 160

Winter and Spring 2004 161

from the second to last sentence of the last paragraph of the short
story (91). In other words, the start in the film is actually the end
of the textual version, creating in the intertextuality a further com-
mentary of the futility of set structures within which the author
would capture the object of desire. The last scene of the film, show-
ing Roberto walking away from the church where Julia is being
married and Cecilia sits with Guillermo, quotes the opening lines
of that same paragraph:

Componemos todo con la imaginación y somos incapaces de vivir la rea-

lidad simplemente. Recuerdo la destartalada y antigua casa en Tajimara,
el estallar de los manzanos e higueras, la voluntaria confusión de los
cuadros de Julia y Carlos, y el vacı́o de las tardes sin Cecilia. ¿Para qué
hablar de todo eso? (91)

(We compose everything with the imagination and are unable to live
reality simply. I remember the barely furnished and ancient house in
Tajimara, the apple and fig trees bursting into bloom, the voluntary con-
fusion of Julia’s and Carlos’ paintings, and the emptiness of the evenings
without Cecilia. Why talk about all of that?)

In other words, the entire film appears within a space opened

within the text’s last paragraph. However, in a fashion fitting the
concept of non-linearity, the order of the textual citation is in-
verted, the beginning becoming the ending, while the end is
moved to the beginning of the film. The subtlety will surely be lost
on viewers unfamiliar with the text, but that does not lessen the
splendid, intricate result that is the artistic product and the fact
that it so accurately conveys the interplay of the arts that fascinated
this generation.
All of the above mentioned filmic translations of textual mate-
rial, despite their inherent value as cinematic art in and of them-
selves, are still derivative in the sense they spring from clues
embedded in the short story. Yet two sequences, constructed
around unforgettable visual images and one supported by an ex-
tremely fortunate choice of musical background, were entirely
new: the Museum of Modern Art and a skating rink.
In the story Julia and Carlos are painters. We are told that they
have had a critical acclaimed joint show and that on that basis their
father gave them money to buy the house in Tajimara that they
turned into a studio (Garcı́a Ponce, ‘‘Tajimara’’ 79–80). Thus,
painting both allows them to establish their own space and is the
activity they pursue together—they jointly paint a mural (89) and
we are told that their painting showed a sought for confusion be-
tween them (91). The only indication of how they paint, however,
is the description of a painting by Julia mentioned above in the

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:47 PS PAGE 161

162 Discourse 26.1 & 2

context of the film’s opening imagery: ‘‘Era una gran tela negra
con una mancha roja en el centro en la que el empaste producı́a
una obsesionante sensación de movimiento’’ (82). (It was a large
black curtain with a red stain in the middle in which the impast
produced an obsessive sensation of movement.) The evocation of
La Ruptura tendencies would have been lost on no one at the time.
In the film version, however, Julio and Carlos are introduced
to the audience in a sequence staged in the then new Museo de
Arte Moderno in Mexico City (18:12–19:29). While at the end of
the previous scene the camera is still tightly focused on small pre-
Columbian objects on a shelf, the ones that Cecilia destroyed in
an attempt to provoke Roberto, his voice-over explains that the
destruction infuriated his roommate, so Cecilia arranged for him
to rent Carlos and Julia’s apartment studio. In mid-dialogue, the
brother and sister appear foregrounded against a screen that has
exploded into brilliant luminosity. In contrast to settings that up
till then could be characterized as dim, limited, framed, internally-
focused—i.e., the enclosed gate area of the first scene, the se-
quences inside the car, the encircled skating rink, the inside of
Roberto’s apartment, the dimly lighted café, the shadowy street
lined with fence-like trees—this shot flows from edge to edge unin-
terrupted, only a gentle, upwardly curving line sweeping from
edge to edge lending shape to the expanse of space. And although
one comes to realize that the entire background is actually a solid
surface, its luminosity, smooth texture, and milk-white tone give
the impression of an unlimited field of vision bleeding off the
edges of the screen. Julia and Carlos, profiled against the brilliant
background that is actually the central cupola of the Museum of
Modern Art, are shot from below, emphasizing their splendid isola-
tion within the purity of mutual dependence and sustenance. As
they then saunter through the museum, along an outdoor display
of free-flowing abstract sculptures, past a Tamayo canvas, to come
to a stop in front of a hard-edged geometric painting, the couple
moves with a loose-limbed, tall-and-slim elegance, and fluid self-
assurance reminiscent of London SoHo-mod fashion shows of the
period, poster-children of the youthful counter-culture. There is
something untamed but noble about them, like beautiful wild ani-
mals. The Museum’s style of curves and sweeping lines becomes
more than a mere setting to visually represent the desired escape
from limits; it embodies the freedom and fluid movement sug-
gested by the ideal couple. Moreover, within the Mexican context
the choice of the Museo de Arte Moderno unmistakably evokes
Ruptura and Mid-Century principles. The building, inaugurated
on September 20, 1964 bespoke the international, high-modernist

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:48 PS PAGE 162

Winter and Spring 2004 163

aesthetics that both groups shared. The building’s architects,

Pedro Ramı́rez Vázquez and Rafael Mijares, had gained interna-
tional acclaim for their brilliant National Museum of Anthropol-
ogy and History located in Chapultepec Park just down the street
from the Museo de Arte Moderno. Although the two projects share
a high modernist ethos, the former’s hard-edged, straight-lined
and right-angled, machined geometry formed a diametrical oppo-
site of the curvilinear, ever-flowing organic urbanity of the latter, a
faithful reflection of the panorama of tendencies one could find
in the Ruptura group itself (Noelle 71–72). Mexican viewers could
hardly have missed this carefully planned characterization of Julia
and Carlos.
The last touch in the museum sequence is a foreshadowing of
the dénouement. The scene closes with the voice of an unseen
man telling Julia that smoking is prohibited in the museum. Their
momentary pleasure in freedom of expression, movement and
self-indulgence is suddenly challenged and restricted by the voice
of social authority. Julia responds in a matter of fact and under-
standable way: ‘‘Everything is forbidden. That’s why I can’t stand
museums.’’ Her comment ends the sequence and effectively turns
it into a miniature duplication of the dual love plots. What starts
out as pleasurable excitement and unfettered possibility is re-
pressed through the imposition of social expectations when their
self-indulgence clashes with taboos. Julia reveals her character and
prefigures her ultimate action when she obediently puts away
the cigarette and retreats in the face of authority. At the end,
she likewise will hide the sign of her violation of social rules—
pregnancy—by abandoning her self-indulgence—her sexual union
with her brother—to retreat into marriage.
The use of the skating rink is more complex. The nostalgic
quality of the textual narrative has been mentioned already. The
challenge for the filmmakers was to convey the same mood. Cer-
tainly the tone of the voice-over narration lends itself to this pur-
pose, as does the topic of opportunity and regret that effects both
the period of adolescence as well as the adult reencounter of the
ill-fated lovers. Yet, the story also dedicates a certain amount of
space to images of youth that are meant to convey the joyful excite-
ment of adolescence and particularly the game of desire and ap-
proach within the defined limits of the Mexican middle class in
the 1950s. The text evokes images of the girls in school uniforms
and the secondary school itself (72), and the parks young people
frequented when they could not yet receive visitors at home (85).
Roberto is seen in both story and film standing in front of Cecilia’s
house, tossing rocks at her window, and speaking to her without

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:48 PS PAGE 163

164 Discourse 26.1 & 2

daring to say what he feels (68). The skating rink is introduced to

augment the effect of those textual evocations.
Made up of four separate units, the entire skating-rink se-
quence also encapsulates in miniature Cecilia and Roberto’s rela-
tionship. The initial segment (6:16–7:10 m.) is a flashback to their
youth set off during the scene of their meeting in a café after ten
years of not seeing each other. It opens with the camera focusing
briefly on different youngsters moving around the rink until
among them an adolescent Cecilia appears skating alone. She
passes three kids standing at the edge of rink on whom the camera
lingers until the young Roberto separates himself from them to
follow Cecilia, watching her skate with one boy then another. He
gets close enough to call her name a couple times until she realizes
he is there and acknowledges him. The scene ends. The impres-
sion of movement, approach and separation, of desire and hesita-
tion, of Cecilia as the object of desire in a field of observers of
whom Roberto is the least mobile, all has been visually established
within a space of adolescent play and apparent innocence. And of
special significance for Roberto’s characterization, he is positioned
as an observer with a passive bent.
The second one (12:15–13:50 m.) comes after Cecilia has in-
troduced the topic of her love for Guillermo that dates back to
their adolescences. She does so first in the car on the way to Taji-
mara, which sets off a flashback once again to the café on that first
night they met as adults. Within the café setting, Cecilia tells him
that she was in love with Guillermo when they were young, and
Roberto claims to have thought he was just one among the
many—a reference to the earlier rink scene—and that he had not
noticed her interest in Guillermo. He closes the scene by asking
her if she remembers, which sets off the skating-rink music as a
close up of the young Cecilia fills the screen. She is singing along
with the song, and as the camera pans left Roberto appears at her
side singing as well. Guillermo skates by and looks back at them.
Roberto asks if she wants him to pass by for her after school the
next day, but Cecilia is watching Guillermo. After a moment she
responds, ‘‘Whatever you want.’’ But then Guillermo skates by
again, looking at her, and Roberto asks if that is Guillermo. Cecilia
says yes and laughs, all the while watching Guillermo do some
fancy skating. When he stops near them, Cecilia asks him if he is
tired. He says yes, so she offers to go with him if he wants to leave.
They skate away with just a ‘‘Ciao’’ to Roberto who watches them
sadly. The episode functions to ironize Roberto’s claim to have not
noticed Cecilia’s interest in Guillermo and that she treated all the
boys the same. In contrast, the young Cecilia is seen not to be able

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:49 PS PAGE 164

Winter and Spring 2004 165

to take her eyes off Guillermo and while staring at him she treats
Roberto with reticence bordering on indifference. After this
flashback one would have to wonder at Roberto’s delusional deter-
mination not to see Cecilia as she is. It also prepares the audience
for Cecilia’s callous abandonment of Roberto, an act that, as is
clear from this flashback, simply repeats what she did to him in
their youth. It also prepares viewers for Roberto’s eventual return
to the position of abandoned onlooker.
The third sequence is brief, a matter of seconds, in which the
young Cecilia is seen skating by herself on the dim rink, her back
to the camera and moving away (27:36–40). It appears among im-
ages of the adult Cecilia and during a voice-over in which Roberto
states that he does not know which of the Cecilias he remembers
is the real one. The adult Cecilia is pictured running away through
the Tajimara garden, then becoming the young Cecilia skating
away at the rink. Then, as Roberto adds that it is useless, the screen
cuts to Julia and Carlos, and Roberto announces that they are
brother and sister. Thus, Roberto’s realization of the ultimate futil-
ity of his search for a real Cecilia, the object of his love and obses-
sion, is visually fused with the taboo that seems to doom Julia and
Carlos’ love. Almost immediately Clara, a sinister character who
later will bring Cecilia and Guillermo back together, enters the
plot, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden. But the destructive
force had already been introduced in the garden of innocence of
the rink in the form of Guillermo.
The final skating-rink episode appears when the logical
conclusion of Roberto’s announcement at the end of the previous
one is enacted in the form of Carlos kissing his sister on the
nape of her neck as Roberto observes them in the background
(30:40–30:47). The open expression of incest now cannot be ig-
nored because the couple is daring to show it in public—the equiv-
alent of Julia’s smoking in the museum. In other words, they are
violating social rules in a society not known for its tolerance. Sud-
denly, the skating-rink music rises again along with the visual im-
ages now familiar to the motif. Yet the scene is different in mood.
The rink is much more crowded and some of the male skaters,
those that attract the camera’s eye, move rapidly and recklessly
through the rest. While in earlier episodes the skaters moved to
the beat of the music, these skaters pay no attention to the musical
rhythm, producing a disturbance in what has functioned pre-
viously as a utopian space of adolescent innocence. In the crowd
and the semi-violent racing of the young men, Cecilia is glimpsed
but lost in the press of the masses as the camera follows the racing
boys. Of course, by now we and Roberto have been informed by

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:49 PS PAGE 165

166 Discourse 26.1 & 2

Cecilia that back then she had already had sex with Guillermo. In
other words, the impediment of consanguinity in Julia and Carlos’
origin is correlated in Roberto and Cecilia’s relationship to her
having given her virginity to Guillermo. And if one asks what this
means for their love, once again the flashback episode can be
viewed as a foreshadowing. The boys skate faster and faster until
one of them is sent careening over the railing and out of the rink—
and the film cuts to the image of a drunken Cecilia discussed
above. The synecdoche is obvious: Cecilia’s life has been sent reel-
ing by the dangerous carelessness of men at play. And in turn,
when she seeks her revenge, she will do the same to Roberto,
whose skating and social skills have been shown to be minimal
from the start.
While the skating-rink sequences constitute a masterful fusion
of thematic and visual effects to move the plot forward and simulta-
neously add depth of resonance to the complex of interrelated
subplots, the selection of music, as in the case of the Springfield
song seen above, proves deftly appropriate. Concurring with the
nostalgic tenor of the sequence, the song used for the skating rink
is from the early 1950s: ‘‘A Kiss to Build a Dream On.’’ The lyrics
capture accurately Roberto’s character, his somewhat pathetic de-
sire to have at least something of Cecilia’s to remember as well as
his ability to build a life project on minimal collaboration from
her.

Give me a kiss to build a dream on

And my imagination
Will thrive upon that kiss
Sweetheart, I ask no more than this
A kiss to build a dream on.
Give me a kiss before you leave me
and my imagination
will feed my hungry heart
Leave me one thing before we part
A kiss to build a dream on.
When I’m alone with my fancies
I’ll be with you
Weaving romances
Making believe they’re true.
Oh, give me your lips for just a moment
and my imagination
will make that moment live
Give me what you alone can give

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:50 PS PAGE 166

Winter and Spring 2004 167

A kiss to build a dream on.

(Kalmar, Ruby, and Hammerstein II)

The song echoes in juxtaposition to the desperate resignation

of the Dusty Springfield lament with which the film closes, captur-
ing Roberto’s struggle between his ideal image of Cecilia and the
frustrating reality of their relationship. Like the museum and the
skating rink, the musical score is a completely new addition to the
story made possible by film’s access to another sensual level of per-
ception. That it functioned so well, becoming an integral part of
the total, enhancing the story and even expanding it to levels unex-
plored by the textual version bespeaks the talent and creativity of
the production team of Gurrola and Garcı́a Ponce.6

Conclusion

Juan José Gurrola and Juan Garcı́a Ponce would collaborate

again several times over the years, but not on a feature film. Per-
haps their vision of the intricacy of textual/filmic dialogue, and
the fascination with enigmatic imagery, to say nothing of radical
non-linearity, did not lend themselves to commercial filmmaking.
Certainly their product was more in line with European art film,
especially, as Carmen Serrano has shown, that of Italian directors
like Antonioni (Serrano). Nevertheless, what remains most impres-
sive about their collaboration is not how faithfully they reproduced
the original short story, but how well and creatively they took ad-
vantage of the non-textual opportunities offered by film to pro-
duce a different entity with its own integrity. And yet, as Garcı́a
Ponce would say, the two are essentially identical in the errrancia
sin fin of artistic space.

Notes

1
A comprehensive list of Ruptura participants would include, as Ro-
mero Keith explains, four generations of artists born between 1904 and
1943. First generation: Alice Rahon (1904–1987), Cordelia Urueta
(1908), Remedios Varo (1908–1963), Gunther Gerzo (1915–2000), Ma-
thias Goeritz (1915–1990), and Leonora Carrington (1917). The second:
Juan Soriano (1920), Vlady (1920), Alberto Gironella (1929–1999), Pedro
Coronel (1922–1985), Enrique Echeverrı́a (1923–1972), and Manuel Fel-
guérez (1928). Third: Geles Cabrera (1930), Lilia Carrillo (1930–1974),
Rafael Coronel (1931), Vicente Rojo (1932), Fernando Garcı́a Ponce
(1933–1987), Roger von Gunten (1933), José Luis Cuevas (1934), Helen

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:50 PS PAGE 167

168 Discourse 26.1 & 2

Escobedo (1934), Rodolfo Nieto (1936–1985), and Francisco Corzas

(1936–1983). Fourth: Arnaldo Coen (1940), Francisco Toledo (1940),
Hersúa (1940), Felipe Ehremberg (1943), and Xavier Esqueda (1943).
(See Romero Keith 26–27).
2
A list of authors who could be included in the Generación de Medio
Siglo might include: Tomás Segovia (1927), Jorge Ibargüengoitia (1928–
1983), Carlos Fuentes (1928), Inés Arredondo (1928–1989), Emmanuel
Carballo (1929), Juan Garcı́a Ponce (1932–2003), Salvador Elizondo
(1932), Juan Vicente Melo (1932–96), Sergio Pitol (1933), Vicente Leñ-
ero (1933), Elena Poniatowska (1933), José de la Colina (1934), Huberto
Batis (1934), Isabel Fraire (1934), Fernando del Paso (1935), Carlos Mon-
siváis (1938), and José Emilio Pacheco (1939).
3
Tajimara was produced by Manuel Barbachano Ponce and packaged
together with Un alma pura, an adaptation from a Carlos Fuentes short
story, and released under the title Los bienamados. The two films shared
the theme of brother-sister incestuous love. For basic credits, synopsis, and
brief commentary on both films, see: ⬍http://cinemexicano.mty.itesm
.mx/peliculas/bienamados.html⬎.
4
While Tajimara is listed as a black-and-white, forty-five minute film, a
VHS timer consistently reads it as lasting 50:30 minutes. The times given
in parenthesis in the text follow this VHS count.
5
Phenomenologists, like Maurice Merleau-Ponty or Gaston Bache-
lard, reject the solipsism of Kant’s strict division between consciousness
and the noumenal. Instead, they emphasize mutual dependence within
the phenomenological field. Bachelard’s ‘‘applied realism’’ postulated an
interaction between reasoning and the natural world in which the two
elements create a higher realm of the natural, ‘‘mind and reality, and
between them there are constant reactions, reactions that give rise to re-
ciprocal resonance’’ (Bachelard, Essai 26). Both philosophers foreground
the body’s role in the encounter between human consciousness and the
material world. Merleau-Ponty insisted that any ‘‘theory of the body is al-
ready a theory of perception. Our own body is in the world as the heart is
in the organism: it keeps the visible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes
life into it and sustains it inwardly, and with it forms a system’’ (Merleau-
Ponty 203). Bachelard emphasizes the mediated/mediating point be-
tween body and mind, believing that all human expression, from the sci-
entific to the fanciful, flowed from reverie, a free play of the mind around
and about objects: ‘‘Reverie is an oneiric activity in which a glimmer of
consciousness subsists’’ (Bachelard, Poetics 150). Moreover, to be compre-
hended, ‘‘reverie cannot be recounted. To be communicated it must be
written, written with emotion and taste,’’ as the narrator in ‘‘Tajimara’’
tries to do (Bachelard, Poetics 7). Yet, it is never possible to fully capture
the object of reverie, only approximate the experience of it. That is why
Bachelard’s preferred type of engagement with phenomena is poetic rev-
erie that engages the entire range of corporal/mental faculties: ‘‘All the
senses awaken and fall into harmony in poetic reverie [that] listens to

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:50 PS PAGE 168

Winter and Spring 2004 169

this polyphony of the sense, and the poetic consciousness must record
it’’ (Bachelard, Poetics 6). Both philosophers emphasize experience as a
reservoir of stored wisdom beyond the rational memory. For Bachelard,
of the reservoirs of silent revelation awaiting poetic discovery, inevitably
the feminine promised the source of ultimate significance. Yet both also
emphasized the need to constantly revise that experiential archive.
Merleau-Ponty privileged the synchronic, insisting that meaning is primar-
ily the function of present usage alters historically provided phenomenon,
adapting it for current needs. Bachelard coined the term philosophie du
non (philosophy of negation) to name the constant process of reformula-
tion in concepts and ideas to account for data or experience provided by
new discoveries that fail to be accounted for within established formula-
tion of reality (Bachelard, Philosophie). The process of discovery and ad-
justment in both versions of ‘‘Tajimara’’ could be seen as an application
of the discourse of the philosophie du non. Similarly, Merleau-Ponty’s posi-
tion on the incarnate nature of perception produces a perceiving subject
constantly adapting itself to the changing phenomenological field, always
going through a process of rebirth. Consciousness is not a subject per
se—one autonomous and separate from objects within it gaze—but rather
a perceptual process of establishing and confirming the certainty of its
perception through reflective analysis of the relationships of objects
within the field which include the very perceiving body among them. Nei-
ther Merleau-Ponty nor Bachelard accept ideal, universal certainties at the
level of ideas. Yet, since the empirical world offers a set of givens, the
phenomenologist must shake empirical delusions by scrutinizing objects
in the rare light of the mutual creative potential they offer humans. Phe-
nomenological reflection and reverie are acts of pondering the essential
character of a perceptual event within the specificity of its field of appear-
ance and especially in relationship to the reflective point of perception
and the reformulating act of writing/reading/viewing.
Implicit then is phenomenology’s concept of the human subject as a
quasi object in the world—one among many, albeit burdened by the cen-
trality that bodily perception and consciousness provide—and objects as
quasi subjects with agency in their self-determination within their interac-
tion with humans. The interfacing of human and non-human quasi sub-
jects effects mutual change. Mikel Dufrenne extended these concepts to
the art object/quasi subject with its own self-determination in collabora-
tion with spectators capable of, or shocked into, suppressing their pre-
sumed, habitual, and unreflective subjectivity in favor of the object’s
project. The act of display/viewing turns into an aesthetic experience in
which something like Bachelard’s second nature emerges to redefine the
relationship of the object/subjects within the field of experience, and
hence whatever individual identity either can presume to possess (Du-
frenne 147–233). ‘‘While penetrating into it, I allow it to penetrate into
me, rather than keeping it at a distance’’ Dufrenne states, echoing Bache-
lard’s many expressions of reverie in process (231). In this context, the
human body often represents itself in the material objects at hand. This
explains the narrator’s obsessive reexamination of possibilities offered by

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:51 PS PAGE 169

170 Discourse 26.1 & 2

images retrieved in memory and how they change in the light of added
information.
An image’s ability to generate multiple meanings recalls Bachelard’s
‘‘Reveries on Reverie (the Word Dreamer)’’ chapter in The Poetics of Rev-
erie. Words evoke images beyond their status as signs with historical and
rational signifieds. Setting signs afloat in a reverie of associations—
allowing them to perform as a quasi subjects capable of their own process
of revelation—frees a text and the experience of it to expand beyond
rational, limited denotations, tapping its connotations and related imag-
ery in an extensive web of interrelationships. Bachelard, in his Jungian
influenced reading, would say that such reverie leads one eventually to
the hidden dialectic of gender—the mystery of significance—underlying
all existence. ‘‘Dreams (rêve, m.) and reveries (rêverie, f.), dreams (songe,
m.) and daydreams (songerie, f.), memories (souvenir, m) and remem-
brance (souvenance, f.) are all indications of a need to make everything
feminine which is enveloping and soft above and beyond the too simply
masculine designations for our states of mind’’ (Bachelard, Poetics 29).
‘‘Tajimara’’ shares this sense of reverie-like meditation on the need to
make the male-generated text encarnate as the feminine image, what the
narrator senses to be the mystery at the essence of the story, the something
that escapes yet appears in the image of Cecilia.
6
A third song, ‘‘Do You Ever Think Of Me?’’ was added to the party
sequence when the Guillermo character appears. It functions in a similar
manner to the other two to reflect a situation in the plot while it is being
played out towards resolution on the visual plane. The lyrics raise the
question of thinking about a previous lover when in the arms of another.
While it is being mimed in comic fashion for the delight of the party
quests, Roberto watches Cecilia with Guillermo or other men, the way he
used to at the skating rink. Julia, who at the start participates in the mim-
ing, sits down and watches her brother as he stands next to another
woman. The comic gesturing and the laughing guests produce an ironic
counterpoint to the as yet controlled despair of the couples experiencing
separation that in the end will become permanent.

Works Cited

Albarrán, Claudia. ‘‘La generación de Inés Arredondo.’’ Casa del Tiempo

Sep.1998 ⬍http://www.uam.mx/difusion/revista/septiembre98/
albarran.html⬎.
Bacharach, Burt, and Hal David. ‘‘Anyone Who Had A Heart.’’ Stay Awhile,
I Only Want To Be With You. Perf. Dusty Springfield. Polygram Records,
1964.
Bachelard, Gaston. Essai sur la connaissance approchée. Ed. McAllester Jones.
21–26.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:52 PS PAGE 170

Winter and Spring 2004 171

———. La Philosophie du non: essai d’une philosophie du nouvel esprit scienti-

fique. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970.
———. The Poetics of Reverie, Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos. Boston:
Beacon P, 1969.
Batis, Huberto. Lo que ‘Cuadernos del Viento’ nos dejó. México D.F.: Dióge-
nes, 1984.
Brown, Norman O. Love’s Body. New York: Vintage, 1966.
Bruce-Novoa. ‘‘Invisible Apparitions: Mexican Aesthetics of the Mid-Cen-
tury.’’ 2002 ⬍http://www.lib.uci.edu/images/bruce-novoa.pdf⬎.
Carballo, Emmanuel. ‘‘Prólogo.’’ Juan Garcı́a Ponce. México D.F.: Empre-
sas Editoriales, 1966.
Conde, Teresa Del. ‘‘La aparición de la Ruptura.’’ Un siglo de arte mexicano.
México D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes/Landucci Editores,
1999. 187–213.
———. Un pintor mexicano y su tiempo: Enrique Echeverrı́a. México D.F.: Uni-
versidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1979.
Dufrenne, Mikel. The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Evanston: North-
western UP, 1973.
Garcı́a Ponce, Juan. ‘‘Doce y una, trece.’’ Revista de la Universidad de México
17.1 (1962): 9–17.
———. La errancia sin fin: Musil, Borges, Klossowski. Barcelona: Anagrama,
1981.
———. Nueve pintores mexicanos. México D.F.: Era, 1968.
———. ‘‘Tajimara.’’ La noche. México D.F.: Era, 1963. 63–91.
———. Tajimara. México D.F.: Voz Viva de México, Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1968.
———. ‘‘Tajimara.’’ New Directions In Prose and Poetry 18. Trans. Denise
Levertov. New York: New Directions, 1964. 55–68.
———. ‘‘Tajimara en cine.’’ Trazos. México D.F.: Universidad Nacional
Autónoma de México, 1974. 137–142.
Garcı́a Riera, Emilio. ‘‘1964/1965, El I Concurso de Cine Experimental.’’
Historia documental del cine mexicano: Época sonora. Vol. 9. México D.F.:
Era, 1978. 153–211.
Kalmar, Bert, Harry Ruby, and Oscar Hammerstein II. ‘‘A Kiss To Build A
Dream On.’’ The Strip. Hollywood: Metro-Goldwyn Mayer, 1951.
‘‘Los bienamados (1965).’’ Cine Mexicano. ⬍http://cinemexicano.mty.ites-
m.mx/peliculas/bienamados.html⬎.
McAllerster Jones, Mary. Gaston Bachelard: Subversive Humanist, Texts, and
Readings. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1991.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:52 PS PAGE 171

172 Discourse 26.1 & 2

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul, 1962.
Noelle, Louise, and Carlos Tejeda. Catálogo guı́a de arquitectura contemporá-
nea Ciudad de México. México D.F.: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 1993.
Pereira, Armando. ‘‘Juan Garcı́a Ponce y la escritura cómplice.’’ La escri-
tura cómplice: Juan Garcı́a Ponce ante la crı́tica. México D.F.: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México/Era, 1997. 11–22.
———. ‘‘La Generación de Medio Siglo.’’ Juan Garcı́a Ponce y la generación
de medio siglo. Xalapa: Universidad Veracruzana, 1998. 127–132.
Rojo, Vicente. Vicente Rojo: Cuarenta años de diseño gráfico. México D.F.: Era,
1990.
Romero Keith, Delmari. Tiempos de Ruptura: Juan Martı́n y sus pintores. Méx-
ico D.F.: Landucci Editores, 2000.
Serrano, Carmen. ‘‘Antonioni en Tajimara.’’ Unpublished paper pre-
sented at the Novena Conferencia de Crı́tica y Arte en México, U.
California Irvine. 1–3 May 2003.
Tajimara. Prod. Manuel Barchano Ponce. In Los Bienamados. México D.F.,
1965.
Xirau, Ramón. ‘‘El mundo de las señas.’’ Fernando Garcı́a Ponce. Ed. Marı́a
Lluı̈sa Borràs. México D.F.: Fomento Cultural Banamex, 1992. 36.

................. 10990$ $CH9 05-31-05 13:50:53 PS PAGE 172