Vídeos sin futuros
Emiliano Rocha Minter on the films of Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha
SOMETHING JUMPS off the screen and it’s scorched onto your brain. Branded for life. Small screen, big screen, no matter. Sarah Minter’s 1986 film Nadie es inocente (None are Innocent) happened to me in this way. Nadie es inocente was shot on ¾” tape so it’s really more of a video than a film, but whatever it is follows a gang of teenage punks playing themselves in a paper-thinly fictionalized docudrama version of their lives in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, the vast and hardscrabble ex-urb of Mexico City dubbed “Neza York”.
When I was a teenager in the suburbs of north Seattle, going “punk” would have meant buying a Dead Kennedys shirt, or black Chuck Taylor Converses, or a wallet chain, and striking a defiant pose. It never happened; the ne plus ultra would have been the mohawk my friends joked about me getting, extra funny because I was and remain the biggest square of all time. As a cinephile, my best frame of visual reference for the sooty sand-scapes and leather motorcycle jackets in Nadie es inocente was George Miller’s original Mad Max trilogy, or maybe a Mexican spoof of Mad Max like Francisco Guerrero’s Intrepidos Punks1. But punk is not a consumer choice or mere dumb affect for the kids you see in Nadie es inocente, nor its progenitor short film Sábado de mierda (Saturday of Shit, or Shitty Saturday, codirected by Gregorio Rocha with Minter); these children have no one supervising them and no imminent opportunities available, so they look out for one another. They also try to have fun.
These films are rare, precious and all-too-human artifacts from a bygone era. They don’t just show urban poverty but also the consequences of pre-NAFTA globalization, as the territories skirting Neza’s margins include massive piles of abandoned clothes and decrepit industrial wastelands, which the gang of “Mierdas Punks” (Shitpunks, or Punk Shits) correctly identify as the perfect types of venues for a pop-up punk show or bottomless moshpit. The films feel like unfakeable dispatches from a real-world desert dystopia. They adjoin the hyperreal fluidity of handheld video with druggy, surreal editing. Comparisons to Luis Buñuel’s 1950 masterpiece Los Olvidados invite themselves; I would add to the same list Leandro Favio’s Chronicle of a Boy Alone (1965) and Martin Bell’s Streetwise (1984). (Minter and Rocha’s films also feature un-licensed music exported from the “First World” such as the Sex Pistols, the Ramones and This Heat; after watching them, you will never hear these songs the same way again.)
It’s a breakthrough that Rocha and Minter’s collaborations have been available to stream this month on the Criterion Channel, as part of a program called “Mexico City Punk”, featuring Nadie and Sábado as well as Minter’s riotgrrrl feature Alma Punk (1991) and no-less-crucial documentary from 2010, Nadie es inocente: 20 años después (None are Innocent: 20 Years Later), which returns to the Mierdas Punks who “starred” as themselves in the prior films. (It’s worth noting that the Criterion Channel is only accessible to viewers based in the United States and Canada, but several of Minter’s works live for free without English subtitles on YouTube.)
Sadly, Sarah Minter passed away in 2016, and Gregorio Rocha in 2022. So in hopes of drawing attention to the Criterion package, I reached out to their son Emiliano Rocha Minter, one of the cofounders of the mysterious Mexico City microcinema known as La Cueva, and a highly accomplished director of narrative films in his own right. Emiliano’s 2016 debut Tenemos la carne (We Are the Flesh) is a scabrous horror-satire that’s currently free to watch via Tubi, albeit with ads. Emiliano and I caught up via ZOOM; hanging on the wall of his office was a gigantic vintage poster for Fritz Lang’s M (1931). Our conversation has been edited for clarity.
Emiliano, I’m embarrassed we haven’t met in person yet because we have friends in common. My friend Kristin, who spent some time in Mexico City, was telling me about you before I even realized your parents were Sarah Minter and Gregorio Rocha. And I first saw your film Tenemos la Carne because it was programmed at Spectacle by my friend and colleague Josh Bogatin in 2021.
Yes. But tell me about the cinema, Spectacle. I don’t understand how it works. I’m really curious about it.
Well, it’s all-volunteer. The theater pays its bills, artists or filmmakers or distributors get paid, either on the basis of box office, or a flat fee… But there’s no staff who gets paid. And among the volunteers there’s no formal, established hierarchy. It opened in 2010, I’ve been there since 2011. When I started there were four people; I think now there are about fifty people. In 2010 there was nothing unusual about an arts venue where people were willing to do this kind of creative-service work for free. Now, there are fewer of these places, and I have met at least a dozen people who seem to have spent years under the impression Spectacle was a job, paying me and others a livable wage…
But what about the people who founded this theater? They are kind of hardcore, no?
It was a couple different guys in 2010. None of them are involved anymore. (sends photo of Troy Swain)
So this guy founded the space with some other guys, and now he and the other guys are not around.
Not on a daily or operational or even on an aesthetic, creative level. There’s an extended family. There’s a new generation of programmers and volunteers. Their ages vary, some are young enough that I think they maybe followed the theater online from their teenage years.
Here we have La Cueva, which is also a kind of "microcinema", but we have different art projects in the same building, kind of focusing on studio artists.
No website, no social media—just WhatsApp and physical reality, is that right?
That’s right. It affords us a way to show performances too.
My friend C. Spencer Yeh reminded me, every Spectacle screening is a kind of performance.
How did you learn about Sarah’s films?
I went to a big feminist survey show at the Brooklyn Museum, in partnership with the Hammer Museum, in 2018. They were playing a short clip from Nadie es inocente on a TV in a gallery; the thing that caught my attention was “Flowers of Romance” by Public Image, Ltd., which was one of my favorite punk records and still is2. I reached out to Claudia Bestor at the Hammer and she referred me to you, because the film did not have a US distributor. You understood the Spectacle ethos perfectly, which is rare, so we had a small retrospective. Thank you again for that. Since then Nadie has been shown by e-flux, at the Museum of Arts and Design…
And we showed some of Sarah’s films here at La Cueva. Will Noah came, he saw them and he came back to me with a proposal to show them on the Criterion Channel.
Do you enjoy representing your parents’ films, answering questions about them? Or is it more of an obligation?
It’s my duty to do this, in a way. And it’s easy for me to lapse into talking about the films as if I was there. I was never there! Well, for some of them I was. Sarah’s later work, for instance: I was the director of photography on Nadie es inocente 20 años después. But what I’m trying to say is, it’s personal, it gets personal, it’s held in my body and my mind. I feel so related to the films, I know the people, I know the stories. It gets easier for me to understand what was going on in that period… The more I have the opportunity to see them, the better I understand them. For me it’s natural, organic. And since both of my parents have passed away, it’s a way to connect with them.
Has this work of promoting their films and talking about them ramped up?
The work is consistent since Sarah passed away, in 2016. That’s when it became a big part of my life.
Do the films have regular distribution in Mexico, or is it mostly screenings?
It’s mostly screenings and exhibitions. It’s good that they are on the Criterion Channel for a while—it’s a way for people to access the work without my participation. I was waiting for that. Because the work lives in a strange place, between cinema and video art. It’s funny because you saw the film in a gallery context…
Do you have a favorite among them?
When I was a kid I saw Sábado de mierda and I thought it was just so cool. I was with my father and it really appealed to me.
Sabado feels like a dream, or an experimental film. Nadie feels like documentary at some points, fiction film at others. In Alma Punk, you’re seeing the tools of video and documentary applied to a more straightforward narrative, but still very authentic…
It’s super scripted. In a way, among the four on Criterion, Alma Punk is the most like a classical movie, but shot in a digital or artistic way. Trying to find a path for the characters, the script… Sábado de mierda is more wild. More improvised. More chaotic and more open to the lives of these punks under the pretext of doing a film. Much more about being there, shooting stuff as it’s happening. That’s what you bring to the screen. Alma Punk and even Nadie es inocente, the gaze is about bringing “your film” to these situations. But these are different approaches to the same thing.
Some of the same 16mm footage appears in both Sábado de mierda and Nadie es Inocente.
It really breaks the style of Nadie es inocente in my opinion, but I understand that it appeals to the character of the project. They were loving the same person, the same atmosphere, the same world. Sarah shot those scenes on 16mm and this was a way of saying, “I was part of that as well.” I think it could have been difficult for them, as a couple—doing films about the same stuff. Like, what the fuck? (laughs)
Before we turned the recorder on, you mentioned that it was only recently you had really sat down and watched Alma Punk front to back. If I may ask… Why?
My philosophy with their works is, I’m not an expert. I’m becoming a little more aware but always, when someone asks me, “Can we host a screening of Alma Punk?” I say yes. Or a different artwork. And then I see it with different eyes, because we watch it together. I’m always excited to see new works by them as the requests come from curators, cinemas, galleries.
The difference between watching it on a computer, or alone, versus with an audience…
Yes. We watched Alma Punk in a full, crowded, excited cinema.
At Spectacle we also showed Video Road and San Frenesi, two short films that are, let’s say, less punk than the ones on the Criterion Channel… San Frenesi felt more French New Wave to me, while the rest of her works are super intimate. Breaking down barriers and artifice.
Video Road was the two of them, a collaboration. I love the style, the aesthetics. San Frenesi, I like, but that’s more like a student film. I think they were really obsessed with Wim Wenders and the road trip vibe. More recently, we found a super-8 film Sarah made, called Adagio. Maybe the only film before she switched to video forever. It was so nice to see this early work from her. Celluloid film is so exquisite, of course. I think the films you mention are when she leapt from the filmmaking mentality to the video art idea. A different approach to reality, where you can really see time passing.
They traveled to New York and saw works by Nam June Paik at an exhibition. It was the video art moment, you know? It just sounds cool: “Video art”. That became her commitment. I don’t think she wanted to do more movies. I never knew Sarah to have a screenplay or a pitch for a feature film. She was shooting everything herself. She didn’t want or need the entourage that cinema requires. But Gregorio kept making movies. His 2003 film Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa (The Lost Reels of Pancho Villa) is really amazing.
Did you grow up punk? Did your parents self-identify as punks? Or were they outsiders, making these films?
I think they were punk, in the sense of their free spirits. The more appealing thing for me is the spirit of doing things without asking permission. Then you can get more into anarchism, very interesting… But I think they were punks at heart, but not in a dogmatic way. What really appealed to them about the Mierdas Punks was their humanity. You see these kids and you fall in love because they are so true, you know? Doing 20 años después I met these guys, and they were amazing, truly special people. They found punk as a pretext to gathering and having something to believe in, in a world that was not giving them anything to believe in. If you are from the suburbs of Mexico City in the 70s, the 80s, that’s hardcore shit. There isn’t much of anything. Their houses didn’t have water. So you understand how they get into these gangs and find identity, a kind of weird family. There’s always a part of society that doesn’t fit in. Punk could be a possibility of finding new standards if you weren’t the normal type. In that way, Sarah and Gregorio really related to them. They were definitely the punks of their film school. Sábado de mierda was supposed to be Gregorio’s thesis, but of course it was a huge problem for the instructors, seeing this film.
Controversial?
Well, just, “this is not what we asked you for.”
Were the works famous during your childhood? Or more in the 2010s? Was there a reevaluation or did they get the same kind of attention all along? Are they famous now? (Will they be famous after the Criterion streams?)
Nadie es inocente and Sábado de mierda have always been cult movies. Alma Punk, I think it has a new following. These films create communities, people are stuck because they made these films together, you know? Not stuck but glued. They are joined together. That’s what happens when you make a film!
My understanding is Sarah went in a more “fine art” direction, still shooting video and still photography but in an interdisciplinary way3, while Gregorio continued making feature and documentary films, and was also a collector of film materials, an archivist.
My father loved history. He started to do these documentaries about history, but then he started to get into cinema history, and there he started to become an archivist. His last sixteen, eighteen, perhaps twenty years, he was obsessed with making a huge collection of films—35mm, 16mm, super-8, but also machines of cinema. Cameras, projectors, a lot of stuff. And then more and more stuff. He was free to make this archive which was alive, in a way. Going off of, how you can introduce old things to the present, to new generations of viewers? I think experimental cinema is one of the few areas where this kind of stuff is appreciated, you know? So he became obsessed with this. This archive became a huge project for him—like making a filmoteca, but with different formats and technologies… Sarah went more in the line of video art, that was really her obsession, moreso than cinema.
Why this obsession? Did he want to connect young people with the materiality of cinema?
I think my father was in love with the past. He had old motorcycles, engines, projectors, mechanics. There’s a part of our family that came to Mexico from Switzerland and I learned they made clocks. It’s crazy! I said, of course: that’s the part of my dad that’s obsessed with clocks and engines. He was always obsessed by history, saying he was born in the wrong time. He loved the past more than the present. A nostalgic obsession. All his money was spent on old stuff (laughs). He was also obsessed by the value of the old stuff. A lot of stuff was salvaged from the trash. He moved to Estudios Churubusco, the big studio in Mexico; there’s a lot of filmmaking history there, from the 1920s and on. It’s an old place of cinema. He became obsessed with the history of this place. An obsession with telling stories from the past before they vanish, before they fade away. He was really deeply connected to these ancient things. Not just the stuff, but family history as well. Photos and documents were hugely important to him. “Don’t throw that out!” I think it’s a very specific character in society. You’ll find this personality type in every culture, the archivist or the caretaker of the past.
Here it could be a collector, a curator, a connoisseur—a hoarder, which is someone who can’t let go of anything… You visit their home and there are dozens, hundreds, of items like newspapers, clothes, clocks, furniture, whatever it might be…. But when you talk about engines and clocks, I get the impression of someone with a very orderly mind.
He was obsessed with the administration of things. He wanted to accurately gauge the value of everything he had. He was really methodical in everything. He wanted everything in its place.
About your own filmmaking: this is what you always wanted to do? Or was there a “lightbulb moment”?
Growing up, I wanted to be a physicist. I don’t know why. Then I went with my father to a shoot. They were shooting some scene with horses, with guys dressed up like Mexican revolutionaries, in the north of Mexico. For Los rollos perdidos de Pancho Villa. So we’re in the middle of nowhere, in the north of Mexico. And it was the most exciting thing I ever lived. “This is true adventure,” I thought! I fell in love with cinema then, there. That was the moment I decided I wanted to become a filmmaker. The feeling was so strong, so exciting. It was a little Apocalypse Now, like… it starts raining, it’s impossible to shoot, everything was a mess, they were shooting in 16mm. All I could think was: “Wow, this is a cool job!”
How old were you when this happened?
Thirteen.
Had they shown you specific films, growing up? What was their canon?
Sarah was obsessed with Man With a Movie Camera, by Dziga Vertov. For her, that was the fountain: if you see that film, you can learn a lot. It always makes me think of the possibilities for cinema, but in a really simple way. I always keep that film in my heart. It’s a fucking classic! The classic of the classics. I should watch it again.
And Gregorio?
He loved Harold and Maude. He was always talking about it. I rewatched it the other day, I mean… It’s pretty wild, a love story between a kid and an old woman. He was emotional and sensitive about that film, and I love it too. I love Hal Ashby, that period of American cinema is quite amazing.
What can you tell me about their dynamic as a filmmaking team?
I think Sábado de mierda and Nadie es inocente came from a moment they were doing a lot of things together. Sarah started as a graphic designer, then she became obsessed with cinema; my father was in film school, and that’s where and how they met. So I think the first ten years of the relationship, they were doing everything together, thinking together about films, why and how to do them. I think in the end each of them was in the school of the other. Everything they learned to do, they did together. Sábado de mierda, the photography was made by Sarah, but it’s a student film. For the school. Gregorio was in the school and Sarah wasn’t, but she was attending the classes without actually being in the program.
Auditing?
I guess so. Gregorio was in this program, and then they become obsessed with this idea of video as freedom. The opposite of film, because film is so difficult and so expensive, whatever…. So they get into this idea of freedom, always. I see Sarah’s life in particular as a pursuit of freedom. She came from a family of eight siblings. She had to find her own. She started working without a degree or anything. Her attitude was, “if you want to do it, you can do it.” It’s like a magical life of things happening—but at that moment in Mexico there wasn’t much government money for films. If you see stuff from the 80s, the 90s, it’s pretty rough. I think that’s why they looked for a way of doing films with total independence, total freedom. This is how they shot Nadie es inocente: two people, sometimes one more person helping, one camera, and they go into the suburbs with these punks… You see the photos and the crew is three people, it’s crazy.
What has changed in Mexican cinema since the era they were making these artworks together?
I’m not an expert. What you can clearly see is that shooting a film in that period was hardcore shit. (laughs) Few directors were making films for so little money. After Y tu mamá también, Japón, Amores Perros—that’s the “Mexican miracle”, because these films came one year after another. Mexican movie stars become international movie stars. Cuarón shooting in the States, Iñárritu following him. This led to a new period and from there, the last few decades, the number of films we make here in Mexico has been growing and growing and growing. And there’s plenty of money—from the government, Netflix, Amazon, HBO, whatever. I feel the market is actually strong now. Lots of films going on. Everyone is a filmmaker, a producer…
Mexico has become a center, if not the center, of the Latin American film industry. So when I see a film like Alma Punk or Nadie es inocente I’m like, wow. There really wasn’t much back then. Not just film but the art industry in general. That was kind of related with Sarah, because a lot of her friends came from the art world, not the world of cinema. Not filmmakers. The art scene in Mexico is huge now too, it’s crazy: galleries, money. I think there were just a few small things going on back then. Which is why I reevaluated, and re-valued, the films, because understanding that makes them more unique. There’s something about the innocence and the approach to the filmmaking that is so hard. Today you see the opposite: more industry money means less truth. If you see Alma Punk, you see it’s a portrait of that period of art and cinema in Mexico—it’s got a lot of truth. A girl trying to find her way in a man’s world. I love watching the film today and it’s like, maybe these characters don’t exist anymore.
Was there a great promise of money or fame at the other end of making something like Alma Punk?
No. The money was impossible. When you talk about “independent cinema”, it’s so confusing now, what does it mean? It means people get to do a film for reasons other than money. That whole perspective has changed. Maybe like three percent of the films made in the world are done in this hard way. Even Cassavetes, you can see the goal was not to make money. These people wanted to do something because they wanted to do it! And it’s funny because film is the perfect excuse to do something. If you approach someone and say “We’re going to do a film”, they respond: “Ah!” It’s like an adventure. Nowadays, you can do an independent film in that way, and there are people out there who want to make true, real cinema. But if you’re in the industry you’re going to encounter a lot of shit.
Tell me about working as cinematographer on Nadie es inocente 20 años después. You must have been very young.
I was twenty, or something like that. I always remember shooting this scene of Rafa dancing. Some kind of ballet. Rafa Punk was so charismatic, a true poet in his soul… We hung out with him a lot, and somehow we get this idea of him dancing in his house, with this dreamy light. I don’t remember where it came from. This is the best thing about cinema: the moment of shooting something when you and your cinematographer kind of acknowledge, “Wow, this is something special.” I think that’s why we make movies. Sometimes you are there together at the precise right time, the right hour, you know it was beautiful, and you know it’s in the file. In the can. I always remember that scene.
My filmmaking experience is best left undiscussed. But even I’m aware there’s no magic bullet, all-in-one piece of wisdom or advice that will teach you everything you need to know. You could get the best advice in the world and the instant you’re on-set, trying to make the thing, there’s gonna be something you never anticipated having to deal with… Did your parents shape your approach? What did you learn from them, as a filmmaker?
They gave me the approach of cinema as a possibility: “If you want to do a film, just go and do it.” Like… don’t wait until someone tells you or allows you to do something. For me all the education from them was, no excuses. Especially from my mother. It’s a way of approaching life as well: if you really want something, you have to use whatever is available to you. And then you realize how much talent is available to you, the richness of the things in your life. That is what makes it possible to make a film, and it’s always possible.
Can you tell me anything about your new film? Is it a horror film like Tenemos la Carne?
It’s my second feature, and it’s about being a director and trying to make a film. It’s a surrealistic comedy. I reached this moment of saying, “I want to laugh about everything and not take things so seriously,” you know? Free yourself from what you think is important; laugh about everything.
Current Mood: Motivated 😈
Current Music: This Heat - Live in 1982
Special thanks to Emiliano Rocha Minter, Kristin Thoreson, Josh Bogatin, Claudia Bestor and Anthony Banua-Simon.
As it happens, this film and its sequel La Venganza de los Punks have been restored by Vinegar Syndrome and will be playing at Spectacle in August 2024.
Circumstances oblige me to recommend Vivien Goldman’s hybrid memoir-review detailing the making of this record, at Pitchfork…
For more on this I recommend her official Vimeo channel, which also includes excerpts from the films discussed in this interview.