"Sombra's Soundscape: Music, Silence, and Nostalgia in Alonso Ruizpalacios's Güeros (2014)"
Online on Monday, April 6, 2020
2:00 p.m | Free Zoom Call, Open to Everyone
Please Note:
For access to Jacqueline's recorded Zoom presentation, please e-mail Eric Hansen at eric.a.hansen@colorado.edu.
This presentation navigates through the eclectic soundscape that shapes Mexico City and its ties to contemporary Mexican national identity and Mexican national cinema of the past. While displaying characteristics of the road movie genre, Alonso Ruizpalacios's Güeros (2014) supplies a new musical paradigm for understanding aural constructions of both Mexico City and the changing identity politics taking place on and off the silver screen. Dr. Avila's talk is sponsored by the AMRC and the Department of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts.
Jacqueline Avila is Associate Professor in Musicology at the University of Tennessee. Her research focuses on film music and sound practice from the silent period to present, and the intersections of cultural identity, tradition, and modernity in the Hollywood and Mexican film industries. Dr. Avila was the recipient of the UC MEXUS Dissertation Research Grant, the American Musicological Society's Howard Mayer Brown Fellowship, the UC MEXUS Postdoctoral Fellowship (2014-15), and the University of New Mexico's Robert E. Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar Award (2016). Her publications can be found in the Journal of Film Music, Latin American Music Review, Opera Quarterly, and the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Dr. Avila is the author of "Cinesonidos: Film Music and National Identity During Mexico's Época de Oro."
Güeros, described by Filmmaker Magazine as a "wry, visually audacious film," is the winner of the Best First Feature award at the 2014 Berlin International Film Festival, the Best Cinematography award at a recent Tribeca Film Festival, and was nominated to 12 Ariel Awards (Mexico’s top film award). The film is set in 1999, when a year-long university strike both engaged and set adrift thousands of students in Mexico City. Left on their own devices, Sombra (Tenoch Huerta) and Santos (Leonardo Ortizgris) begin to look for strange ways to kill time. The unexpected arrival of Tomás (Sebastián Aguirre), Sombra’s kid brother, pushes the trio into a road trip in search of Epigmenio Cruz, a Mexican folk-rock hero who “made Bob Dylan cry.” Eventually, the beautiful pirate radio DJ Ana (Ilse Salas), who is also one of the leaders of the student strike, joins them on their trip through Mexico City. Beautifully shot in black-and-white (and in 4:3 aspect ratio), this coming-of-age comedy pays homage to the French New Wave (the director names Monte Hellman's Two-Lane Black Top and Godard’s Bande A Part as key works) and American indie cinema (such as works by Jim Jarmusch), proving once again, the global reach of contemporary Mexican cinema.