Realistic and Fantastic: Comparison between Machuca and Pans Labyrinth - Essay Example

The Realistic and Fantastic: A Comparison between Wood’s Machuca and del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth Introduction Latin American cinema, across the globe, differs greatly, but it does have a number of distinctive features. The most remarkable aspect is that it mirrors the region’s issues and culture (Shaw 2003). Moreover, film producers in the region do not have sizeable budgets hence their films cannot depend on costly visual or special effects, sounds, and the other types of ‘whizbang’ that generally characterize Hollywood movies (Noriega 2000). Latin American directors should be ingenious and practical, and numerous times they construct an absorbingly eccentric worldview where in human character and disposition, not expensive visual effects, rules the endeavor. Another striking attribute of most Latin American movies is the political, economic, and social situation that prevailed in the country at the period they were created (Elena, Lopez & Salles 2004). The status of Latin American film at present is that of a sequence of average to small, at times minuscule, national movie industries, every one of them burdened with small markets and structural limitations, but teeming with imagination, talent, and creativity (Elena et al. 2004). It is also a film industry with a moving and proud history of artistry and political revolution. It is previously mentioned, among Latin American directors themselves, that they did not constantly have excellent scripts, that scripts were a weak spot and that their creation was a filmmaker’s cinema (Noriega 2000). Today they commonly recognize a different dilemma: the absence of efficient producers, who know how to build up the finance, bring the needed people together, and form a production. Nevertheless, this in turn is indicative of a bigger problem. Making a feature film is mostly a kind of organized chaos, which necessitates a strong foundation (Hart 2004). Without the types of equipment which can be undervalued only in highly industrialized economies, I have frequently thought that to succeed in creating a film in several parts of Latin America is a negligible wonder. This essay will argue that contemporary Latin American cinema does not remove form from content, but give characters murkiness and strength, affection, life and death through comparing the Andres Wood’s Machuca and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. Latin American cinema becomes successful in reaching its target audience not through amazing special effects, but through building on human qualities such as courage, compassion, beauty, violence, and evil. Machuca and Pan’s Labyrinth: War and Beauty in the Eyes of Children What was specifically dreadful about the takeover of Gen. Augusto Pinochet of Chile’s democratic government on September 11, 1973 was not merely the ruin of a constitutional democracy. Instead, it was the exposure of the strikingly self-serving fable of some political groups that Chile was, in reality, a venerable democracy (Shaw & Dennison 2005). In spite of tremendous class hierarchies, in spite of tremendous economic gaps, in spite of a feudal oligarchy accompanied with suspicious ignorant elites, Chile was governed by the fable that it was a remarkable model of successful democracy in Latin America (Shaw & Dennison 2005), quite more advanced institutionally to blatantly prejudiced and recurring oppressions in countries like Brazil and Argentina. Machuca is a movie about such deceits. Wood has decided to concentrate on the consciousness and perception of a young child, a person who will in the future become Chile’s consciousness embodied by Wood himself and those witnesses who would approve of his understanding of the implications of the rebellion. Gonzalo Infante, the young child of a public servant, seems to have discovered the means to surpass the political and social calamity of his country by admitting a position abroad. Gonzalo’s family refused to go with him because his sister is infatuated with a skin-head-type adherent of the rebellion and because his mother is intimately relating with an adherent, at this point more publicly well-known, of the oligarchy. Gonzalo, who goes to a prominent Catholic boy’s school where in the subjects are in English, makes friends, in so far as he is befriended by, a native classmate who comes to school as part of the final heartbreaking attempts of the Principal at social unity. Machuca, the name of the native boy, will ultimately endure physical cruelty at the hands of his school peers and soldiers of rebellion and become one of the numerous vanished of the new government. Gonzalo will be left thinking, initially, the hostility against slum dwellers and afterwards the complete eradication of their shabby houses as though they never existed; subsequently, when he comes home, he will see the brand new wealth of his mother, who takes pleasure from drinks with her aficionado as a group of workers repairs their house. Gonzalo is an observer, the repetition of the numerous spectators within Chile of the terrible consequences of the movement against Allende and afterwards the apparently advantageous effects of the despotism and its neoliberal economic rules. Gonzalo is likewise the mirror of the audience of the movie, which, with an aura of weakness, witnesses the unrelenting growth of social conditions in Chile. The movie begins on September 1973, and nobody can be naïve as to what will be the predictable narrative direction of the movie. Undoubtedly, the fact that the viewers knows in advance what should transpire enables a distancing impact (King 2000) where in one can concentrate on the essentials of that predictability, since the expansive summaries are already provided. Hence, for instance, one can reflect on the manner in which the theme of resentment against the socially inferior on the part of several parents of children in Gonzalo’s school is somewhat less astounding, due to the fact that one knows the discourse in advance than the confused remarks of Gonzalo’s mother, who actually has no dogmatic commitments beyond only desiring to prolong her very profitable affair. Undeniably, there is a good deal that is inevitable about Wood’s movie, and there are several distasteful scenes. For instance, Gonzalo’s mother brings her child to her intimate rendezvous, a point that is obviously intended to persuade us, as though that were needed, of the intensity of her thoughtless suspicion. Her lover, Federico Luppi, is absolutely excessive in the movie: if Luppi has acted out several major film roles in the embodiment of a courageous fight against tyranny, his role here is quite excessive as to be agonizing. Simultaneously, the voices of the masses in the movie are so righteous, so powerful, and so heartfelt as also to be sometimes agonizing, such as when Gonzalo witnesses the killing of the lower-class woman he would adore in her effort to safeguard her father from cruelty at the hands of mercenaries who are involved in a mass arrest of slum dwellers. In spite of the mediating role of Silvana between Machuca and Gonzalo, there is unfamiliar but quite obvious homosexual attachment between Machuca and Gonzalo, and the long enduring stare between the two: Machuca experiences the procedure of being vanished and Gonzalo gazes on helplessly greatly overwhelms several of the highlights of the moment. In addition, one is thankful that the bulk of the movie concentrates on the pre-rebellion relationship between Gonzalo and Machuca, and Pinochet is relegated to short appearance on a sputtering black-and-white television. It is notable that Machuca is not about the rebellion; instead it is about people’s lives and relationships, and even the possible intimate attachment that is eventually devastated by what remains one of the frameworks of despotism in Latin America. Wood’s Machuca is all the more moving and powerful specifically due to the fact that Pinochet remains a presence that disturbs Chile’s unfinished course of re-democratization. In contrast to the realistic presentation of Machuca, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth is magical or somewhat alchemical. To an amazing level, the Mexican filmmaker well known for his major involvement in the Hellboy and Blade contracts has altered the terror of mid-20th-century European history into a daringly out of this world illustration of what surrealists would refer to as marvelous. Symbolically and factually spectacular, a rich, bold combination of politics and fantasy, Pan’s Labyrinth starts with a fairy tale-like introduction, and then becomes completely detailed. The civil war in Spain has ended in 1944, and Franco’s Falangists have conquered the country. The last vestiges of Republican resistance, the Maquis, are fighting an underground action in the wooded hills of the north. Ofelia, the young girl, and her unwell, pregnant mother have been transferred there, to a far-flung military headquarters commanded by Capitín Vidal, Ofelia’s new stepfather, an apathetic and merciless despot. Similar to Machuca, Pan’s Labyrinth itself may be excessively brutal and gruesome for children, even though children would certainly welcome its superb bloodiness. Both these movies are nevertheless set in a child’s perception of reality, though Pan’s Labyrinth is oriented to a magic dimension of fairy insects and ancient remains. A determined dragonfly, possibly the expression of her own developing insanity, directs Ofelia from her bedroom to the interior of an unkempt garden labyrinth. There in the gloom she meets the horned faun. The faun convinces Ofelia that she is a princess and gives the seriously self-reliant child a chain of magical missions; her quests in the underworld are afterwards interspersed with the guerilla fighting in the woods. Wood and Del Toro have an extraordinary ability to keep the story progressing on two levels. Everybody has a task. Mysteries flourish. Gonzalo and Machuca are inspiring the beauty of friendship in the face of bloodshed; Mercedes, the commander’s housekeeper, is helping the rebels, as is the local physician. From Gonzalo, Machuca, and Ofelia’s point of view, there are all kinds of evil creatures, human and otherwise. Wood and Del Toro have combined the uncanny and historical before. Both their movies were a humiliating, though grand, combination of children’s adventure tale, gothic thriller, and political metaphor- visually articulate if modernly harsh. Both movies are not merely powerfully imagined but splendidly incorporated and spectacularly flowing. They are also seriously profound. Just as the illustrations in the magical book of Ofelia disperse like sands throughout the pages, all mode of similarities and conflicts boils below the movies’ storyline. That exterior is richly thorough. The illumination is shaped. Wood’s score is emotional. The entirety of del Toro’s visual artistry looks similar with Tim Burton’s, and the former appears similarly obsessed with the marvelous, murky work of Arthur Rackham, an English illustrator. Unlike Wood, del Toro is resistant to desire. There is definitely a hint of pathos to the ending of Pan’s Labyrinth but there is nothing sentimental about Ofelia’s fight with evil, unlike Gonzalo and Machuca’s emotional struggle with the wickedness of humans. Magic realism fermented with moral gravity, Pan’s Labyrinth joins a few classic film fantasies. Even though completely different varieties of filmmaking, Wood and del Toro’s movies are both narratives of courageous children lost in a world of violence and innocent victims of a cruel regime. Conclusions Contemporary Latin American cinema, as demonstrated by Machuca and Pan’s Labyrinth, flows into and is nourished by the controversial and sometimes conflicting character of Latin American economy, social politics, and culture (Berg 2002). Thematic statements, conceptual expressions made by Wood and del Toro, cultural advocates themselves, narrate a story and, thereby, recover portions of Latin America’s history, its historical account, that most of the time taken for granted. The movies of Wood and del Toro typifies the contemporary Latin American themes, focused on a politics of embodiment anchored in the idea of underdevelopment, as shown in the eradication of slum dwellers in Machuca. On the other hand, both the movies’ power of persuasion is more intense because of its exploitation of children’s innocence to narrate an adult issue, such as violence or warfare. It is the power innate to an excellent narrative in the voice of an innocent teller. The explanations for this effect may dwell in those features that draw variations with information conveyed by mass media. A child’s activity such as storytelling binds the past and present so intensely that it is not possible to replace its individual effect with any other method or technology. We live in a space-temporal dimension that is equally shared by everybody. When a child narrator acts out in a war movie, audiences are more likely to be immersed in the most wonderful and extraordinary dimension of the world’s creation, in the past and present. The communication between Wood and del Toro’s audiences and young storytellers is a complete process, and it considers the core meaning of the concept: it is a blending in shared gratitude to the story. The audiences and the young narrators are simultaneously senders and receivers. The storytellers are performing for the target audiences, armed with their rich cultures, that specific moment, and not for other distant ones. Hence, if a child, for instance, shows intense fear on his/her face, these Latin American filmmakers will soften the terrifying images of their narrative by employing various methods, such as infusing magic, fantasy, extraordinary forms of human relationships, and passionate camaraderie in order to prevent an unmanageable sensation in their audiences. Diverse interactive methods, modern and ancient, have been used by Wood and del Toro as essential components of their narratives, such as realistic or magical interactions among humans, between humans and supernatural creatures, or between good and evil. These are empowering strategies in the hands of different Latin American filmmakers. Wood and del Toro’s dwelling in the deepest recesses of the human mind gives their storytellers in most cases immense power, for the audiences captivated by a narrative is imitating with his/her wide range of examples, stereotypes, similarities, and relationships all of what is associated to his/her socioeconomic status, cultural identity, and certainly, related to his/her personal life. The emotions, humor, and tension of Wood and del Toro’s narratives produced by and within each individual relied heavily on defeats and victories, sensible emotions, and love history. References Berg, Charles Ramirez. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, and Resistance. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press , 2002. Elena, A. & M.D. Lopez & W. Salles. The Cinema of Latin America. London: Wallflower Press, 2004. Hart, Stephen. A Companion to Latin American Film. UK: Tamesis Books, 2004. King, John. Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America. UK: Verso, 2000. Noriega, Chon, ed. Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Shaw, Deborah. Contemporary Cinema of Latin America. New York: Continuum, 2003. Shaw, L. & S. Dennison (eds). Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity. North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2005. Read More