Approaching the real in Everardo Gonzalez's cine-ma

Comunicación y Medios N°36 (2017) ISSN 0716-3991 / e-ISSN 0719-1529 www. comunicacionymedios.uchile.cl Approaching the real in Everardo Gonzalez’s cinema Aproximaciones a lo real en el cine de Everardo González Javier Ramírez-Miranda Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Ciudad de México, México [email protected] Abstract Cuates de Australia is the chronicle of a catastrophe. It is the name of a ranch in the north of Mexico, where the families of the place cyclically face the rigor of the summer and only resist by a diffuse tradition, whose roots are lost in time. The natural disaster causes others: poverty, disease and migration. Every year they gather their things and leave the village waiting for the rains to return. While recording the conditions of life, Everardo Gonzalez chronicles an anticipated but inevitable catastrophe. It uses a contemplative and static style that testifies to misfortune and resignation. This work analyzes the discursive mechanisms of the film to put into context the conditions of life of this community, and to propose a political vision of the subject. Likewise, it raises the analysis of the complete body of the work by the filmmaker, from which this movie can be considered as a synthesis of his rhetorical searches. Keywords Documentary; migration; catastrophe; contemplative cinema; drought. Resumen Cuates de Australia es la crónica de una catástrofe. Es el nombre de un ejido en el norte de México, donde las familias del lugar enfrentan cíclicamente el rigor del estío y sólo resisten por una tradición difusa, cuyas raíces se pierden en el tiempo. El desastre natural acarrea otros: la pobreza, la enfermedad y la migración. Cada año reúnen sus cosas y dejan el pueblo esperan-do las lluvias para volver. Al registrar las condiciones de vida, Everardo González hace la crónica de una catástrofe anticipada pero ineludible. Se vale de un estilo contemplativo y estático que atestigua la desgracia y la resignación. Esta cinta sintetiza mucho del trabajo de su director, por ello, este artículo analiza los mecanismos discursivos de la película, para poner en cuadro las condiciones de vida de esta comunidad, y para proponer una visión política del asunto, pero plantea el análisis del cuerpo completo de la labor del cineasta del que este filme se puede considerar como un resumen de sus búsquedas retóricas. Palabras clave Documental; migración; con-templativo; sequía. catástrofe; Received: 29-04-2017/ Reviewed: 24-08-2017 / Accepted: 12-12-2017 / Published: 30-12-2017 DOI: 10.5354/0719-1529.2017.45757 cine 33 34 Comunicación y Medios N°36 /2017 J. Ramírez-Miranda 1. Introduction The drama of human sciences is that we must consider human beings as things. And this is not true: the human is “the other”, and the other is never a thing. Jean Rouch Cuates de Australia (2013), is a ranch in the mountains of the State of Coahuila, in northern Mexico, inhabited by families that, cyclically face a foreseen catastrophe: when the summer season hits with full force, the inhabits survive there thanks only to a diffuse tradition, whose roots are lost in time. The natural disaster causes others: poverty, marginalization, recurring disease and finally migration, which is the only constant for this population. Once the water runs out, they gather their belongings and abandon the town for months, waiting for the rains to return. Thus, the community is left on its own, a destination that lives with an absolute resignation: “God sends the rains, only he knows why he hasn’t sent them to us…”, are the words of a woman in the movie who doesn’t understand, but accepts the circumstances. When registering the conditions of life of this population, Everardo González 1 chronicles a catastrophe that is paradoxically inevitable, despite being predictable and reoccurring, due to its natural origin. As its etymologic roots suggest, the catastrophe has to do with that which returns, that turns on itself and, this way, makes a movement of conversion and has an outcome that ends in death. The drought in the population is an event for the community that suffers it. It is brutal but it is not sudden; and, although that is one of its relevant aspects, the one that most interests the filmmaker is that of the social distress that it brings. So says Sociologist Lowell Carr: not every storm, earthquake or flood is a catastrophe; catastrophes are defined by their work (1932: 211). In this case, by its results. For his filmic exploration the director relies on a photographic style that is contemplative, static and its apparent “nothing’s happening” is testament to the tragedy and resignation. This work analyzes the discourse mechanisms used in the film, to define the particularities that characterize the life of the community and, therefore, propose a political vision of the issue. At the beginning of Cuates de Australia, the series of sounds heard remind one of nighttime in the countryside: crickets and other insects are the only sign of life present for the audience who can only see a dark screen. Together with the sound of footsteps, the light of a lamp goes opening small spaces to one’s view; thus indicating whoever is holding the lamp is moving, possibly to show us something. This movement of a view that opens as it moves is, largely, what makes Everardo Gonzalez cinema special. But that is just the beginning, and over such images the opening credits roll. As the film progresses, the attitude of the men reveals them as nighttime hunters, that fire their guns and continue their way towards the prey. The body of a deer constitutes the background over which the title of the film appears. This beginning is also a manner to express that which the film wants to speak about: the relation between what is shown, a place that is revealed to us as marginal, and a particular connection with life and death. Cuates de Australia is the fourth feature film by the filmmaker that has explored different approaches to the real via the documentary that, before a format, establishes a central attitude on the principle of the register and Approaching the real in Everardo Gonzalez’s cinema in a relation essentially different to the reality that the fiction proposes. The documentary is expressed via the construction of a discourse and uses different forms of approach: from the distance that creates the memory, from the place of the testimony as device and, finally, from the participative collaboration of the documented subject. This distance between the rhetoric and the real is shown as a big problem, so it is no accident that it is central in the debates on cinematic theory, at least from the postwar (Bazin, 1990: 23-32)2. documentary filmmaker goes approaching his characters, which the film permits; but the way this approach is done occurs in different ways, and thus, different documentary forms. 2. The testimonial register From him first feature film, La canción del pulque, the filmmaker’s works show ability of testimonial approach. In them, the director observes something that happens, he registers it and creates a discourse based on making the audience see something that, until then, was hidden from view. However, starting with Los ladrones viejos and especially in El cielo abierto, he is no longer the witness, but rather el que recoge el testimonio. The memory of a distant past is the basis of these films. Therefore, the use of archive material is key. According to Antonio Weinrichter, “the essence of the documentary is being there, the register in real time of a situation in reality”, to directly capture, serve as witness (Weinrichter, 2004: 77). It’s important to remember that the difference between fiction and nonfiction is not only based on its intrinsic textual properties, but also in its extrinsic context. But the connection between intrinsic and extrinsic is built using a link between the documentary filmmaker, the spectator, and the discourse where the real emerges as the center. Carl Plantinga cites Wolterstorr and his theory of possible worlds, where he reminds us that in narration, we are asked to consider a certain state of things as an imaginative fiction, and therefore, “adopt the fictional stance in regards to a state of things doesn’t not mean saying that the state of things is true. It’s not about asking if its real, it’s not asking it to be real, it’s not desiring it to be real. It is simply inviting us to consider said state of things” (Plantinga, 2014: 39). On the contrary, nonfiction movies are those that affirm that the state of things they present occurs in the real world. The nonfiction affirms a belief in thatcertain objects, entities, states of things, events and situations really occur or exist in the real world as presented. In Cuates de Australia there is a return to testimonio but with an essential difference: the director atestigua and builds the discourse, but the inhabitants of that place contribute more than a testimony. There is an intense collaboration between the filmed subject and the filmmaker, that is explained by a process of compenetración between both. It is not that this integration did not occur in his previous films, it’s that in Cuates de Australia, the movie is made possible by it. In his work, the Trevor Poncha says that “a filmmaker shows that something happens when he tries to give the viewer particular perceptions, impressions, beliefs, or certain types of knowledge as a result of seeing a film or filmed sequences” (Plantinga, 2014: 47). But what is particular about the use of these strategies in nonfiction is that all are used to make statements about the real world, and the filmmakers take an assertive stance towards what they present beyond the rhetoric used. La canción del pul- The position of filmmaker Everardo Gonzalez in the films he directs is clear, and in each one of them it is shown using different formulas. It is the creation of a documentary via dialogue, as a construction where the filmmaker can go giving up ground to the subject that is filmed. At some time in every one of his films, the filmmaker’s voice interrupts the discourse with a question reminding the audience that there is someone behind the camera, that we are in the presence of something created, and never the empiric reality. 35 36 J. Ramírez-Miranda Comunicación y Medios N°36 /2017 que (2003) is a movie based on this principle: the filmmaker takes his place, has presence, and his camera captures, although the film is not an automatic re-telling of this register. For the director, the filming of a documentary is barely the beginning of a series of decisions that start with the choice of a topic or story: “personally I am attracted to stories that present a series of ports of entry and the possibility to build and interpret reality using cinematographic tools. People susceptible to contradiction and transformations” (González, 2012: 102). From this point of view, a movie like La canción del pulque submerges you in a particular environment that inevitably tends to evoke a time in the past, a remote place in time that, nevertheless, emerges like present day. The pulque bar, the scene of action, is like a scene from the past, a meeting place for “retired bullfighters, boxers…”. So says “Cantarrecio”, one of the regulars at this place and who the camera always follows. In this space, Everardo finds the possibility of multiple “ports of entry”. It is the intersection of many stories, the place where the drunks speak their mind, remember, and spend time together. There is an old man who tells with a barely audible voice “there used to be over 60 pulque bars in the city…” a statement that seems to refer to a time long ago when in the city there were many bars selling pulque (an alcohol from the Mexican highlands), but also a place far away. The movie refers in this way to Mexico City having countless pulque establishments, a site of great consumption, despite the drink being produced in areas far from the metropolis. In fact, the truth that the director proposes has to do, in the first place, with a construction that starts with a close but distant register. This tension is constantly at play, between the present day, although decadent, and a series of distances that open in time and space. The title of the film is not gratuitous. The songs that appear throughout the film seek a sound-track to organize the film space. If in classic organization, the image organizes the discourse and the soundtrack serves to evoke an environment and a past, in this film these two are switched. While the music organizes, the image evokes. And this that works in La canción del pulque is repeated forcefully in the rest of his filmography. 3. The memory Using a different outline and supports, Los ladrones viejos (2007) is a film based on a memory in which the testimonies tell the story of a past that is not only remembered, but upon doing so, is reconstructed. The characters re-create the the past, but they do it differently given that they give new meaning to it when remembering some events while they forget others and by joining together what is left, the story changes. Because narrating is organizing, and they, while they narrate the world, they organize it in a way that it only seems to exist in their memory. There is a starting point based on that which Weinrichter calls “trusting the witness”. In other words, a format whose verisimilitude comes exactly from a person who witnessed the event, who replaces the “being there” with the memory and the testimony of who “was there” (Weinrichter, 2004: 43). Everardo Gonzalez says that, in its origin, the film was not designed to be a series of testimonies. Yet, upon finding that all these interviews were with characters who were in prison, “I had to change at once and base the narration on those testimonies. Otherwise the movie would be permanently making reference to the prison stories, and what interested me were the years the robbers were free, the time of their misadventures” (González, 2012: 97). As a result, the formal decisions of the documentary production are conditioned by the thematic content, and reproducing the testimony implies then a commitment to a desire to say that only in specific ways is the use of the image set: to the testimony of a remote past an image is added that reminds of that Approaching the real in Everardo Gonzalez’s cinema place in time, so as to put it in the center of the narration overlapping the present of that description. But the filmmaker is not just a mere witness. As filmmaker, he takes the strands of remembrance, the memories and the reconstructions in order to formulate a discourse and transmit certain ideas. Thus, the film reveals a society in transformation. Plus, throughout the work it is clear how the ways to committing the profession of robbery have taken on new characteristics and connotations over time. In their memories, these robbers defended the nobility of their profession, the violence spared and the corruption to which they, before becoming part of it, were victim. Therefore, they brag about having committed serious crimes without using weapons or other forms of direct aggression. The contrast between the gratuitous and uncontrolled violence of “today’s criminals” is easy to see. This gives way to a reflection on the system of administration and serving of justice, which, like the robbers themselves say, only wants guilty parties, never justice. Therefore, they emerge as victims of the machine of Mexico’s government, which brings them to identify their actions with those of Robin Hood, who stole from the rich to give to the poor. In Los ladrones viejos the hero is Efraín Alcaraz Montes de Oca, the Carrizos, whose figure generates identification and even a liking from the spectator. However, the filmic structure is built around the antagonist, Dracula, which in many ways depends on absence. First, because he does not appear, except for in a few photos. Nor does his argument appear, which should counteract the point of view of Carrizos. Finally, he refuses to give his testimony, leaving it to be interpreted by the filmmaker and, above all, the audience, who will judge based on the proposed discourse. However, there is a particular use of the archive images: the evocation of a past era and, with it, presenting the audience with the environment of a special place. In other words, they’re a way to travel through time, classic function of the cinematographic device. Plus, by using the materials of news broadcasts of previous decades, the film aims to remember the work of other filmmakers, and thus is included in the homage. The music works in the same way, but adds a sentiment of nostalgia. Thus, the song Y volveré by the band Los Ángeles Negros, reoccurring as leit motiv, speaks of a better past that possibly one day will come again, “maybe tomorrow the sun will shine”. It is the lost glory of the old criminals who refuse to lose it all, even though they only preserve it in their memory. This constant tension between the past and present, made possible by the memory and the archive, has one last purpose: cause the audience to reflect. Despite the issue of justice being the film’s central theme, there is not a once-and-for-all explanation for crime. There is, however, a series of reversals based on the proximity of the audience to the old, decadent, abandoned criminals that confess before the camera. Faces that, close to the end, go opening the film to multiple explications. Nevertheless, there is one last gesture: the image of a news clip from the 70s, where a woman reporter interviews a small child that is crying, because an officer has taken from him the shoeshine box with which he earns money. To the question “What are you going to do now? the child answers simply “I’ll just have to see…”. Here it is no longer about justice that wants guilty parties, but rather the justice device that makes people criminals. 4. The use of the archive and cinema as a result In the history of cinema there is an important production, especially documentary, that uses stock material, product of a register done in conditions and with intentions different from those that new material presents. Behind this reuse is search for verisimilitude, 37 38 Comunicación y Medios N°36 /2017 an argumental effort by way of images that evoke the real presence, the true register. Although you could say that that recorded in on tape happened, it doesn’t mean that is all that happened (given that it is only a part of if) nor can you confirm or deny its veracity. Even less so when the mediation between that filmed and that shown is greater due to search of what we can call the effect of reality. According to Georges Didi-Huberman (2013), an image is a cut made in the visible world that “burns” when making contact with the reality from which it comes, upon being drawn from and, therefore, saved from being forgotten. Even when it is only about a remnant of what it once was, its main reason for existing is serve as memory, survive, “despite everything” and in different ways. “But, to know it, to feel it, you have to be brave, you have to approach the fire and blow softly for the embers below to fire up once more, their brightness, their danger. As if, from the gray image, a voice will come: «Can’t you see I’m burning?»” (Didi-Huberman, 2013: 36). If that is the questioning of the visual standpoint product of a recent register of the real, “What will ask that film which they have decided to overlap with one that is previously manipulated? If in Los ladrones viejos the use of archive images had the intention of evocation, in El cielo abierto (2011), it would allow it to not only carry it out, but go one step further; given that, by playing with these images, a process is reconstructed that interweaves the historical events, the personal and filmic development by way of the recurrence of the testimony. El cielo abierto shows a predilection to portray social actors in process of transformation. This film, before the portrayal of the spiritual leader, is the collection of testimonies of man and women that, when they show the ins and outs of their relationship with the cardinal, are seen immersed in a more personal change, in a political action. It is the same process in which the prelate is included. As we have seen, the cinema of Everardo Gonzalez likes J. Ramírez-Miranda to show what doesn’t want to be seen, this film in particular makes a theme out of this situation. El cielo abierto is based on the way in which a community “makes visible” their problems and in which way they affect and are affected by the political scene of a country in convulsion. It’s true that the memory has a central theme, but the stock material is questioned and used in a new way and the filmmaker tries to “ignite” these images also, in a tension between the constructed image and its origin in reality from which it is taken. In this case, the problem of the documentary filmmaker is focused on how to maintain this balance between giving verisimilitude to the discourse and to the argument that it tries to support while taking advantage of materials that were register of other intentions. In other words, in what way can you conserve the essence of the documentary, the “being there”, when the visual argument is testimony of a different past? The director has structured his film as a requiem mass for Monsignor Arnulfo Romero. He seeks to reproduce a ritual of sacrifice, but while he narrates it, he stops and describes the process of awareness that the leader himself experienced in his contact with the people. He experienced a transformation that is truly noteworthy; given that, upon witnessing the real life conditions of his flock, he distanced himself from the stances of the Catholic hierarchy and chose the people instead. Said path can be compared to the process of transformation of many people that gave testimony, and in the end, with the effort of the cinema by having political content: shows to make it known. The discourse of the Theology of the Liberation (that, for a portion of the rural population in El Salvador of the 80s, becomes a more tangible form of spirituality than the very paradise offered) was a way for the archbishop to have a better approach to that part of the population who were the country’s poorest. A parallelism can be established between this form of discourse and that of the film, which has a manifest intention Approaching the real in Everardo Gonzalez’s cinema to create a “simple film”. For Everardo Gonzalez cinema is a result: “my work is not necessarily directed to cinema savvy people. It’s the life I lead. From this I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner and keep myself awake at night. It has become a way of life; my movies are only a consequence” (Ramirez, 2011: 25). 5. Participative Collaboration The distance that the filmmaker establishes before the audience has to do with something else: that which is addressed between the director and the film’s characters during filming. In Cuates de Australia there is a great closeness that is evident in the various moments of intimacy that the film shows. On the contrary, the first takes of the ranch are distant. The camera merely observes at a distance, in a series of establishing shots, he shows the audience the place they will visit throughout the documentary. But very soon he contrasts two images: that of the horses mating and the testimony of a child about his nightmares, whose voice is overlapped with the image of the animals. In the following scene, a couple sees their unborn son’s development via an ultrasound, while the sound let’s you hear the “canto cardenche”, a song of pain that returns at key moments during the film. It is no coincidence that its name reminds one of the “cardo”, a plant with sharp thorns. Strategies of this type allow the documentary filmmaker to improvise all the time, while showing the life of a community that, in its daily routine, lives in the shadow of death upon facing the drought. In this sense it is a cinema that shows and questions, that depicts and confronts. Takes are constantly prolonged as if pressing on the viewer a reflection that emerges from contemplation. An example of this are some moments from La canción del pulque. Something that happens in Cuates de Australia, which is different from his earlier films, is he lets viewers revel in the landscape. Even more so, the natural beauty of the desert, the wildlife and vegetation give them the chance to observe the cycles of nature and the way in which life in this community plays a part in them. The lapses make up an approach and experience that are marked by the contrasting presence of children and senior citizens throughout the film. The water problem is connected to the periods of time and is central to the film. Thus, it emerges as a denouncement of the miserable conditions of life for the inhabitants of this town. To do so, it does not resort to misery that these discourses like to do on occasions to appeal. It is a naturalized condition, internalized. Although every year they must carry out an exodus, the townspeople always come back, saying “Where are we going to go?” or as they say at another opportunity “To own a piece of land, one must suffer. Why don’t people leave? Because they were born here, they grew up here, everything here…”. The image at the almost very beginning of the film, the one of the pregnancy, is the beginning of the story of a child, and the drought they must face is shown as a difficult condition for him as well, which is indicated by the words of the doctor: the pregnancy is high-risk. There is little fluid. The mother’s malnutrition naturally passes on to the baby. But in addition, this fact brings us back to the initial problem, the lack of water. The difficult life in the desert gets even harder when the lack of rain brings down the level of the only water sources. The senior citizens look for water while the schoolchildren read: “The children of the city know the ocean well, but not the earth”. As the documentary goes on, we see children fighting to not have to drink that dirty water, which is all they have. We see animals lose weight. Men get desperate. We see, in the end, stark poverty and we see, above all, that we don’t want to see. Once the water is gone, the population must embark on their annual exodus. The gesture of closing the door to the empty house an- 39 40 J. Ramírez-Miranda Comunicación y Medios N°36 /2017 nounces the hope of return. Only the camera remains and is witness to 40total decline and death. In a scene of tremendous visual impact, a colt walks along listlessly. It’s been beaten by the draught and soon will fall to the ground. Later, the scavenger birds, that are already flying overhead, will take care of its remains. The following scenes show the fight between the coyotes and the vultures for the animal carcasses. The emptiness of the abandoned city is the place of death in this cycle. Wild nature reclaims its territory via scavenger birds, coyotes and the swarm of insects in the face of the human work abandoned and useless. The takes of the empty houses don’t make but rather emphasize the fact: the clothes hangers on the line that will not hold anything, the dresser drawers that have been emptied in a hurry, the place of absence, that which all have left behind. Everything, except the camera which continues to record. Some scenes the cycle closes. Then we see the birth of a baby in a hospital. The clouds hover over the ranch, the rain begins and the course of life and death begins again. From water everything will be born again like the life of the community, and everyone returns to their home. The filmmaker enjoys an important level of rapport with the community, given that only based on an intense collaboration could you have the proximity to many characters and and the register of intimate moments. There is a relation created between the individuals and the camera when towards the middle of the film the argument between two boys escalates, to the degree that it provokes a fight; the smaller one defends himself by signaling the presence of the camera. It is true that in that moment, the camera represents a sanctuary, but it is also certain that the characters are aware of its presence, as it is made obvious by the signaling of the child. In the end, the movie insists on the central theme: life goes on, it always goes on, starts again. But only they know this, those that are in contact with the earth, with nature, and are capable, therefore, of reading its signals. 6. Life goes on In 1990, Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami returned to places that he had filmed in a few years before during the filming of La casa de mi amigo. The region had been rocked by an earthquake and the evidence of devastation was very apparent. Kiarostami filmed La vida continúa (1992) in this place. It’s a film that affirms the possibility of an existence that continues forward despite tragedies, and that tells the story of a search and discovery to which the title of the film alludes. “Life goes on” is what the cinema of Everardo González seems to say and the sequence of the Los ladrones viejos close to the end, where you see the prisoners going about their daily lives, exemplifies it. Life always goes on, even in prison, even in helplessness, even after death. But it is not moral resignation like that proposed by a creed. Life goes on because that is its purpose, to continue. The customers at “La Pirata”, the film’s pulque bar, know that life goes on, the testimonies indicate this continuity. The followers whose spiritual leader is killed know it also, his life survived many other deaths. This formulation is more evident in Cuates de Australia, where life goes on beyond the tragedy, the misfortunes, the poverty, because life will always be born. The cycle ends to start again. The cycle of life and death. 7. Conclusions: Political cinema To what degree can this cinema be considered as political cinema despite the postmodern relativization that “everything is political”? Evidently and as a central theme, these films refer to large problems of man in community. In other words, politically: access to justice, protection, equality. But also, Jacques Ranciere (2012) reminds, “a social situation is not enough to politicize art, just as an evident affection for the exploited and helpless is not enough to help them” (127). First, to the treatment of these topics you must add a way to represent capable of making “that situation intelligible Approaching the real in Everardo Gonzalez’s cinema like the effect of certain causes and the muestre productores de formas de conciencia y afectos that modify it” (Ranciere, 2012: 129). In Mexico, the long tradition of political and militant cinema has notable examples; due to the sum of a topic and a form of expression has generated an eminently revolutionary and militant art whose manifest intention is move the consciences and lead to action and social change. A good portion of contemporary cinema, while still being political, has abandoned the effort to be explicative and mobilizing. It is a cinema that, upon showing, wants people to see, and obligates them to do so; but has lost its unifying, organizing, and explicative spirit, that gave it its politicalness. Meanwhile new ways of establishing a relation between art and politics have emerged. The question is no longer whether the movie is political or not, but rather in which concrete way is it, what topics does it address and what strategies does it use. Everardo Gonzalez appeals to his viewers in different ways. As we have seen, throughout his career, he has employed different types of approach to the “real” and has expressed a world while seeking a truth. But it is a cinematographic truth, the only one that cinema can express. In other words, the documentary filmmaker is conscious of the impossibility of the art to imitate the world, but it appeals to the possibility creating a filmic truth. Different from various decades of tradition in Latin American cinema, he avoids making exploitive cinema, making one that is rather of helplessness. The aesthetic of this art is marked by the exploration of the life of those that have nothing, and live on the margins of society, but know to continue living. In the pulque bar, in prison, on an isolated ranch. The subjects filmed by Everardo González portray the daily effort to survive. The first political act of cinema has to do with giving visibility and this cinema makes an effort to make people see. From there the director brings to the screen situations that are often absent from it and which he tries not to take away their dignity. The imprisoned crimi- nals, who are serving long sentences, are considered in their entirety as subjects. Everardo refuses to call them “his characters”, and thus avoids objectifying them and, this way, maintains their humanity. Possibly following the statement made by French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch, that is the epigraph of this article: “the human is the “other” and the other is never a thing”. Said phrase summarizes one of the most important aspects of his praxis: his opening to the people (a result of his training as an anthropologist and admiration of the work of Robert Flaherty) and, as a result, the reduction of the distance between director and filmic subject. Characteristics with those that innovated the work of ethnographic filmmakers, giving their films an important place in the history of cinema (Henley, 2009: 310-339). These last few, as well as his written works, make up the legacy of Rouch to the documentary filmmakers that, like Everardo Gonzalez, seek to have a representation based on approach in time and space to those individuals whose lives they want to emphasize. Thus, via different ways, the work of the director of Cuates de Australia establishes relations with the real, part of the testimony, based on the memory, archive and collaboration to express a vision of the world that implies a strong political stance. A vision of justice, a standpoint that wants people to see the problems of the communities he observes. This cinema opens something real to the view of the audience, gives visibility to a world in conflict and talks about human problems while saying, despite everything, life goes on, it always goes on. Notes 1. Everardo González is a Mexican filmmaker born in 1971 and trained at the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica, where he made his first film in 2003 (La canción del pulque). Since then he has made a career in Mexican documentaries that have won him various awards, like the Ariel Award given by the Academia Mexicana de las Ciencias y Artes Cienematográficas among many others. 41 42 J. Ramírez-Miranda Comunicación y Medios N°36 /2017 2. In his Ontología de la imagen cinematográfica (1990), André Bazin put emphasis on the tension between reality and image based on the “manipulation” that classic cinema had created as a rhetorical vehicle. From this emerged two types of filmmakers, those that believe in the image and those that believe in reality. To an extent, this text is the basis for a series of debates that cinematographic theory had to address in the following decades and that give way to an intense discussion regarding the statute of reality in cinema. Bibliographic References Bazin, A. (1990). What Is Cinema? Madrid: Ediciones Rialp. Carr, L. J. (1932). Disaster and the Sequence-Pattern Concept of Social Change. American Journal of Sociology, 38(2), 207-218. Recuperado de: http://www.jstor.org/ stable/2766454 Gonzalez, E. (2012). The Fortune. In T. Huezo (coord.), The trip… routes and roads taken to arrive to other planets. México: Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica. Henley, P. (2009). The Adventure of the Real. Jean Rouch and the craft of ethnographic cinema. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Didi-Huberman G. (2013). When images touch the real. Madrid: Círculo de Bellas Artes. Plantinga C. (2014). Rhetoric and representation in nonfiction cinema. México: Universi-dad Nacional Autónoma de México. Ramirez G. (30 de agosto de 2011). Cinema as a result, interview with Everardo Gonzalez. Frente (22). Rancière, J. (2012). The distances of cinema. Buenos Aires: Ediciones Manantial. Weinrichter, A. (2004). Deviations from the real. Madrid: T & B Editores. About the author: Francisco Javier Ramírez Miranda has an undergraduate in Communication Sciences, Masters and Doctorate in Art History from UNAM. Research professor of Art History undergraduate program at UNAM. Author of the book “Ibargüengoitia va al cine” (Universidad de Guanajuato, 2013). Director of the cinematographic analysis journal Montajes, Revista de Análisis Cinematográfico. How to Cite: Ramírez-Miranda, F. (2017). Aproximaciones a lo real en el cine de Everardo González. Comunicación y Medios, (36), 33-42. www.comunicacionymedios.uchile.cl