Re: [Marxism] There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”

[Jeffrey Masko via Marxism]

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I thought I'd give a link to Catherine Grant's excellent Film Studies For
Free website for those who are interested in a deeper look at it from film
scholars. I've felt mostly ambivalent toward Cuarón's body of work and
certainly not keen on *Children of Men* (nice long takes doesn't negate
shitty politics), even though he did this years back...

Naomi Klein: The Shock Doctrine: Naomi Klein, author of "No Logo", and
Alfonso Cuaron, director of "Children of Men", present a short film from
Klein's book "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism."
www.shockdoctrine.com (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuyRdJupbvU).

*Roma *has garnered a lot of attention and FSFF is able to get a quick turn
around that traditional peer reviewed journals cannot. It also has top rate
video essays from top scholars such as Jason Mittell.

MEDIÁTICO

- *Special Dossier on Alfonso Cuarón's Roma* (2018) by nine world-leading
scholars on Latin American Cinema

   - INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL DOSSIER ON ROMA (ALFONSO CUARON)
   

   by Dolores Tierney
   - WATCHING ROMA IN MEXICO CITY
   

   by Paul Julian Smith
   - BROKEN MEMORY, VOICE AND VISUAL STORYTELLING
   

   by Pedro Ángel Palou
   - ALFONSO CUARÓN’S LOVE LETTER TO HIS NANA
   

   by Deborah Shaw
   - CLASS TROUBLE
   

   by Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado
   - MEMORIES OF C/LEO – ON AUTEURISM AND ROMA
   

   by Jeffrey Middents
   - FEMINISM AND INTIMATE/EMOTIONAL LABOR
   

   by Olivia Consentino
   - THE PARADOXES OF CINEPHILIA IN THE AGE OF NETFLIX
   

   by Belén Vidal
   - RECUERDA, NOTES ON ALFONSO CUARÓN’S ROMA
   

   by Robert Carlos Ortiz
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Re: [Marxism] There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”

[Richard Fidler via Marxism]

the film is directed by a woman, Josie Rourke. This 
team has produced an unconvincing attempt to cast Mary Stuart as a feminist 
heroine for our times, hampered by the character’s erratic decision-making and 
belief in her divine right to various thrones.

Meanwhile, The Favourite, a movie about another British queen, was written by a 
woman and a man (Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara) and directed by a man, Yorgos 
Lanthimos. Its anachronism is conscious and witty as it examines the power 
struggle between two scheming ladies-in-waiting – Rachel Weisz’s Duchess of 
Marlborough and Emma Stone’s Abigail Masham – and their unhappy pawn, Queen 
Anne herself, a figure of much pathos created by Olivia Colman.

What I liked about The Favourite is that all three women are bad: selfish, 
manipulative and cruel – rather like men. Despite the dialogue’s contemporary 
zingers and Lanthimos’s baroque staging, the characters seemed more 
recognizably human than Ronan’s upright Mary alternating between the 
supercilious and the sympathetic.

Real women, or perhaps more thoughtful examinations of female experience, can 
be found in the furthest corners of global cinema. One overlooked gem that 
showed up this year was Marlina the Murderer in Four Acts, an Indonesian 
magic-realist revenge fantasy in which a woman who has been raped by a thief 
travels many miles to a police station carrying his severed head in a cloth 
bag. Mouly Surya directed Marsha Timothy as the frightened but unwavering 
Marlina.

And, as a significant counterpoint to Cuaron’s film, consider another Mexican 
film, The Good Girls. It is set only a decade later in a bourgeois 
neighbourhood that looks much like the one called Roma, but here, director 
Alejandra Marquez Abella only presumes to know the lady of the house. Ilse 
Salas plays the pampered and snobby Sofia, watching in disbelief as the Mexican 
currency crisis destroys her husband’s business and her lifestyle. Her servants 
are minor figures in a quietly satirical drama: Mainly, they complain they have 
not been paid. (The little-heralded film, based on Guadalupe Loaeza’s novel of 
the same title, was shown briefly at the Toronto International Film Festival; 
so far, no word on when it might show up again in Canada.) It’s not that anyone 
really wants to prevent Cuaron from making movies for one year, let alone 50, 
it’s that Surya, Abella and their ilk need to be making more movies and getting 
more recognition for them.
 
The year 2020 will mark the 125th anniversary of cinema, an artistic progress 
overwhelmingly controlled by men. At the end of Roma, the family returns from a 
beach holiday and settles back into the house while Cleo climbs the exterior 
stairs to the roof to start the laundry. As she reaches the top, she simply 
disappears from view, as though she has ascended into the sky itself. Then, 
Cuaron’s dedication to Libo appears on the screen. It’s a beautiful moment, but 
in 2018, beatifying the person who washes your socks feels like a poor solution 
to cinema’s long history of dirty laundry.

-Original Message-
From: Marxism [mailto:marxism-boun...@lists.csbs.utah.edu] On Behalf Of Louis 
Proyect via Marxism
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2018 1:27 PM
To: rfid...@ncf.ca
Subject: [Marxism] There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”

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(Not sure whether I will get around to torpedoing Alfonso Cuaron's 
"Roma", especially after reading this stellar take-down. When I went to 
Bard, there were any number of wealthier Jewish students who spoke 
fondly of their African-American maids, who were like mothers to them. 
Behind their backs, they were called "schvartzes", the Yiddish word for 
blacks--a slur. I couldn't help thinking of this watching Cuaron's film. 
Maybe it got such rave reviews because it reminded so many critics of 
their own beloved "schvartze".)



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[Marxism] There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”

[Louis Proyect via Marxism]

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(Not sure whether I will get around to torpedoing Alfonso Cuaron's 
"Roma", especially after reading this stellar take-down. When I went to 
Bard, there were any number of wealthier Jewish students who spoke 
fondly of their African-American maids, who were like mothers to them. 
Behind their backs, they were called "schvartzes", the Yiddish word for 
blacks--a slur. I couldn't help thinking of this watching Cuaron's film. 
Maybe it got such rave reviews because it reminded so many critics of 
their own beloved "schvartze".)



The New Yorker, December 18, 2018
There’s a Voice Missing in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”
By Richard Brody

“Roma,” written and directed by Alfonso Cuarón, centers on Cleo (Yalitza 
Aparicio), whom Cuarón modelled after his own impactful nanny but whom 
he reduces to a bland and blank trope.Photograph by Carlos Somonte
Even noteworthy filmmakers may not see what they’re doing. They can 
reveal crucial aspects of their work inadvertently, bringing to light 
the cinematic unconscious, hinting at what a movie could and should have 
been. That’s what Alfonso Cuarón, the writer and director of “Roma,” did 
in an interview for a recent magazine article. Set in Mexico City in 
1970-71, “Roma” depicts a family much like the one in which he was 
raised and is centered on a domestic worker, both maid and nanny, named 
Cleo Gutiérrez (Yalitza Aparicio); the character, Cuarón has said, is 
based on a woman named Libo Rodríguez, who played a similar role in his 
childhood (and to whom the movie is dedicated).


In the article, the journalist Kristopher Tapley conveys the substance 
of Cuarón’s inspiration for “Roma”: “Rodríguez would talk to Cuarón 
about her hardships as a girl, about feeling cold or hungry. But as a 
little boy, he would look at those stories almost like adventures. She 
would tell him about her father, who used to play an ancient 
Mesoamerican ballgame that’s almost lost to the ages now, or about witch 
doctors who would try to cure people in her village. To him it was all 
very exciting.”


Watching “Roma,” one awaits such illuminating details about Cleo’s life 
outside of her employer’s family, and such a generously forthcoming and 
personal relationship between Cleo and the children in her care. There’s 
nothing of this sort in the movie; Cleo hardly speaks more than a 
sentence or two at a time and says nothing at all about life in her 
village, her childhood, her family. She’s a loving and caring young 
woman, and the warmth of her feelings for the family she works for—and 
theirs for her—is apparent throughout. But Cleo remains a cipher; her 
interests and experiences—her inner life—remain inaccessible to Cuarón. 
He not only fails to imagine who the character of Cleo is but fails to 
include the specifics of who Libo was for him when he was a child.


In the process, he turns the character of Cleo into a stereotype that’s 
all too common in movies made by upper-middle-class and intellectual 
filmmakers about working people: a strong, silent, long-enduring, and 
all-tolerating type, deprived of discourse, a silent angel whose 
inability or unwillingness to express herself is held up as a mark of 
her stoic virtue. (It’s endemic to the cinema and even leaves its scars 
on better movies than “Roma,” including some others from this year, such 
as “Leave No Trace” and “The Rider.”) The silent nobility of the working 
poor takes its place in a demagogic circle of virtue sharing that links 
filmmakers (who, if they offer working people a chance to speak, do so 
only in order to look askance at them, as happens in “Roma” with one 
talkative but villainous poor man) with their art-house audiences, who 
are similarly pleased to share in the exaltation of heroes who do manual 
labor without having to look closely or deeply at elements of their 
heroes’ lives that don’t elicit either praise or pity.


That effacement of Cleo’s character, her reduction to a bland and blank 
trope that burnishes the director’s conscience while smothering her 
consciousness and his own, is the essential and crucial failure of 
“Roma.” It sets the tone for the movie’s aesthetic and hollows it out, 
reducing Cuarón’s worthwhile intentions and evident passions to vain 
gestures.


“Roma” is the story of a family in Mexico City’s Colonia Roma 
neighborhood (where Cuarón grew up): father, Antonio (Fernando 
Grediaga), a doctor; mother, Sofía (Marina de Tavira), a biochemist who 
is running the household and not working; grandmother, Teresa (Verónica 
García), who is Sofía's mother; and four children (a girl and three 
boys), ranging, seemingly, from about six to about twelve. And then 
there’s