Mexperimental Cinema: 60 Years of Avant-garde Media Arts from Mexico
A roller-skating nun prophesizes the death of rock’n’roll in spray paint on the walls of a Mexico City high-rise. The angular, succulent leaves of the maguey plant dance to the rhythm of Shostakovich’s 11th Symphony. A feminist prankster wreaks havoc in a monastic order by adding LSD to the friars’ drinking supply. A postmodern ranchera singer savors the taste of her own pumping heart. Mexican cinema is ripe with such subversive images: over the last sixty years scores of film- and video-makers have fractured narrative and toppled conventions in an avant-garde rebellion that has taken a myriad of subversive forms, and they are all sampled in this first-ever survey of experimental Mexican media arts.