Circumnavigating chiapas contact, conquest, rebellion and the filmic eye

This thesis combines field notes from my journey through Chiapas and my interpretation of four documentary films: A Place called Chiapas (1998), Sowing Justice ... From Acteal: Las Abejas before the Supreme Court of the Nation (2009), The Last Zapatistas: Forgotten Heroes (2002), and 10 Years of Impunity: And how Many More? (2008). These films relate directly and indirectly to the Zapatista uprising of 1994 and the Acteal massacre of 1997. Propelled by a sense of uneasiness and failure to make sense of either real life experiences or filmic representations, I move between my notes and other interpretations to explore the themes of contact, conquest, injustice, complicity and tragedy. Beginning with James Clifford's idea of Traveling Cultures as a way to embrace the disconnected and fragmented nature of contact and the creation of stories, I attempt to complicate the matter by classifying myself as what Dick Pels calls the Privileged Nomad. This privileged nomad risks collapsing self-identification and the identification of the Other in a romantic twist that equates the plight of the self with the plight of the Other. As Roger Bartra suggests, romanticism thought to find the solution to the tragedy of modern man. It is this struggle between romanticism and tragedy that I use to make sense of my field notes and the films. By investigating the indigenous 'awakening' which is seen to have spurned the uprising, as well as the stories of conquest, colonialism and rebellion that still resonate so strongly in Chiapas, the theme of tragedy continues to occur. Focusing on Michael Taussig's idea of the civilizing dialectic, mimesis and alterity, as well as his work on the aesthetics of terror and beauty as the main drive behind human history, I look at the films' potential to explore ideas of justice and responsibility through the tension between romanticism and tragedy. As a mimetic machine, the camera perhaps allows us to see ourselves in the images of the Other and to create what Taussig calls a 'second contact'. Alternatively, it can slip once again into a tool of conquest and colonialism. Here, film, and particularly the documentary as a genre, finds itself grappling with parallel concerns, its objective and subjective potentialities, and its own paradox. Just as Chiapas finds itself haunted by its colonial past, by misrecognitions and violence, so too does film find itself haunted by the ghosts of realism and illusion. The combination of the two, as film seeks to represent Chiapas and Chiapas seeks itself in film, leads us to marvellous and dangerous places, where, if deceit and illusion are believed, contact and mimesis can quickly revert into conquest.