Violence, Affect, and Time-Based Media in Mexico, 2010–2019

This essay examines what affect studies can contribute to the analysis of violence and audiovisual media in twenty-first-century Mexico, paying particular attention to the temporal nature of violence and of time-based media. Does the photo of a dead child and her father on the Mexico-US border, as seen on the front page of a newspaper, allow viewers to perceive the slow violence of neoliberal economies and contemporary immigration policies? Or does it merely encourage shallow cries of pity? Given today’s saturated and vertiginously paced mediascape, do feature films have any role to play in encouraging audiences to viscerally recognise the duration and weight of state repression? In order to adequately analyse the complex sensorial dynamics of audiovisual media, this essay begins by proposing a tripartite conceptual framework that recognises multiple and inter-related forms of violence, overlaid audiovisual economies, and the contemporary scopic regime. The essay then deploys this framework in a comparison of the sensorial engagements of two recent films: Desierto (Jonas Cuarón, 2015) and Ayotzinapa, el paso de la tortuga (Enrique García Meza, 2017).