Revolución, intimidad y melodrama en el documental Morir de pie (Jacaranda Correa, México, 2011)
(2016) Letras Hispanas — Vol. 12, p. 236-249 (2016)
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- Abstract
- (en) This article analyzes the generic configuration and the uses and effects of intimacy in the Mexican documentary Morir de pie (Jacaranda Correa, 2011). This film shows the radical metamorphosis of a Mexican who is affected by a degenerative disease, and it does so by juxtaposing two depictions without any transition between them: in the first part we see a man identified with Che Guevara; in the second part we discover the woman (called Irina) into which this man has transformed himself years later, after a transsexual process. The documentary records in this way the passage from a political, activist life, directed by the socialist-communist ideology, to a life guided by a personal cause (the claiming of one’s transsexual identity), a cause which appears to be opposed to the prior and very marginal in Mexican society. The article examines the melodramatic strategies in the protagonists’ discourses as well as in the documentary’s editing, strategies which appeal to the spectator’s empathy with “Irina’s” subjective self-construction. The purpose and the effects of the staging of the character’s physical intimacy are also interpreted from this point of view.
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Dufays, S. (2016). Revolución, intimidad y melodrama en el documental Morir de pie (Jacaranda Correa, México, 2011). Letras Hispanas, 12, 236-249. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/179635 (Original work published 2016)