I glance around nervously as I take my seat in Princeton University’s Firestone Library. It’s a Friday night in October 2014, and only a few bleary-eyed students are scattered among the long tables. My movement draws the attention of another patron, and I carefully angle my screen so it is out of her line of sight. I double-check the volume of my laptop and ensure that it is silenced. From Google, I pull up a collection of videos to begin my research. My finger hovers over the touchpad. After a pause, I click play. My muscles tighten in anticipation of the images I am about to view. A pit deepens in my stomach.
Even the most disciplined scholar is unprepared to witness a beheading. Critical distance collapses at the sight of a body cut into pieces. The initial reaction is of sublime horror from which I cannot look away. My screen doubles as Perseus’s shield, reflecting the image of the Gorgon. The authors of these images have created a macabre spectacle that for years has circulated on social media, sensationalist blogs, and seedy internet forums. In August 2014, Daesh militants constructed a sound stage in the Iraqi desert and beheaded the American journalist James Foley on camera. A wave of decapitation videos overtook the international news cycle, reminiscent of recordings produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the start of the War on Terror. A month after Foley’s decapitation, 43 normalistas disappeared in Iguala, Mexico. Within days of the mass disappearance, images of torture victims, alleged to be among the missing students, began circulating on social media. The narco conflict had gone viral, and not for the first time, drawing attention to the audiovisual production of what Rossana Reguillo dubs the necromáquina.[1] Echoing the tactics of religious extremists, criminal organizations in Mexico had proven adept at manipulating digital media for ideological ends. These amateur videographers have produced dozens of decapitation videos since former Mexican president Felipe Calderón’s declaration of a deceptively-named “war on drugs” accelerated violence in 2006. The authors of the videos seized the potential of Web 2.0. The first decapitation video to go viral in Mexico, entitled Haz patria, mata un Zeta, was uploaded to YouTube in 2006 —months after the platform had launched. Echoing Walter Benjamin’s conclusion in his seminal essay on the technological reproducibility of the image, these forces wielded digital media to aestheticize politics. After all, decapitation lies at the origin of both figuration and the political.[2]
The decapitation video is a product of the transformation of cinema and politics in the present. The growing accessibility of digital technology accelerated the representation of political violence. Every militant, soldier, and narco carried with them a digital camera with which to register their cruelty. Changes to image distribution and spectatorship precipitated by digital media further enabled the consumption of violent imagery at an unprecedented scale. A tide of unwatchable imagery—decapitated, dismembered, and mutilated bodies—saturated the internet. These images frequently went viral on social media and drew millions of monthly viewers to sensationalist outlets such as the Blog del Narco.[3]
Just as the materiality of the audiovisual apparatus mutated at the turn of the twenty-first century, so too did political institutions emerge transformed by the neoliberal model. The influence of the nation-state, which had positioned itself as the agent of Latin American modernity, receded as power became concentrated in transnational institutions. Furthermore, within the nation’s territorial borders non-state actors such as criminal and paramilitary organizations challenged the state’s sovereignty and monopoly on violence. The social contract frayed, and the popular no longer legitimated the state through hegemony. Cinema, one of the most politically influential technologies of the twentieth century, ceased to mediate the relation between the masses and state power. The crisis of Latin American cinema coincided with this crisis of the national popular.[4] These developments have forced Latin American cultural studies to reckon with the remains of cinematic politics today.
***
The elegant reading room of a prestigious research library is an odd place to view a snuff film. I watch video after video, taking notes on composition, camera movement, mise-en-scène, and editing. To understand these images, I aim to elaborate a viewing position that evades either moralism or sensationalism. I decide not to shield my eyes so that I may subject this object to aesthetic judgment and political critique. What does the decapitation video reveal about audiovisual politics in the present?
In Haz patria, mata un Zeta, the act of beheading is itself suppressed by audiovisual form. The camera opens on a nude torso with its head severed by the framing of the shot. After a brief interrogation, in which the victim confesses to his membership in the criminal organization Los Zetas, two disembodied hands enter the frame and place a razor wire around the man’s neck. As the victim’s body stiffens, the authors of the video cut to an image of the decapitated corpse. The act of beheading is not represented; rather, it is displaced onto the cut that juxtaposes these images.
In substituting montage for decapitation, the authors of the video repeat a strategy that gave rise to film editing at the end of the nineteenth century. The proto-cinema of Thomas Edison startled early audiences by simulating the act of beheading through the substitution splice. As the pro-filmic body is about to lose its head in The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots (1895), Edison cuts, substitutes the actor for a mannequin, and beheads this synthetic body instead. When the edited film is played back, this cut goes unnoticed and the splice simulates a decapitation. The technique was soon adopted by Georges Méliès, the pioneer of special effects, who delighted in beheading himself on screen through a combination of the substitution splice and double exposure.[5] These examples associate the cinematic cut, a structural element of audiovisual form, with the severed head. The decapitation video’s aestheticization of violence continues a tradition that has accompanied cinema since its infancy. Like the short films of Edison and Méliès, these images overwhelm their audiences.
The decapitation video weaponizes the affect that these early filmmakers had commercialized as a form of entertainment.[6] The authors of these brutal images appropriate an aesthetic strategy that defined cinema, reconceptualizing its politics. The avant-garde first politicized the perceptual effects of the cinematic cut pioneered by early filmmakers. Sergei Eisenstein experimented with the shock of montage, drawing on the cut to stage the delirium of revolution and mobilize the spectator. Mexico was a point of inflection in Eisenstein’s film theory. In his intellectual, artistic, and cinematic work from this period, the filmmaker drifted from his previous conceptualization of intellectual montage to explore the cinematic cut as a sensuous and “pre-logical” form of thought. The relationship between the severed head and the cinematic cut shaped Eisenstein’s account of Mexican history in his unfinished film, ¡Qué viva México! In a sequence on the roots of the Mexican Revolution, a group of peasants on a Porfirian hacienda revolts after an episode of unjust violence. The young men are soon captured and buried up to their necks in the maguey fields. With only their heads protruding from the earth, their overseers trample them on horseback. Eisenstein captures the intensity of this violence in a rapid montage. At its climax, the filmmaker inserts a close-up of a peasant screaming in pain. This severed head, decapitated by the frame, fills the screen and charges the image with pathos.
***
Cuts of Eisenstein’s unfinished film circulated throughout Latin American cineclubs in the years following the filmmaker’s abrupt return to Moscow. ¡Qué viva México! proved influential among the generation of filmmakers that collectively defined the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC). In the wake of the Cuban Revolution, the NLAC experimented with cinematic form to mobilize spectators and create the conditions for further revolutionary movements throughout the region. Film historians have long framed the NLAC as a regional project that advanced a didactic and cerebral cinema. Filmmakers such as Santiago Álvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sara Gómez, and Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino, among others, developed an intellectual montage that represented capitalist and neocolonial exploitation and mobilized the spectator through political lessons. Laura Podalsky offers a necessary corrective to this historiography, arguing that this account overlooks the politics of affect in the NLAC (21). Following Podalsky, through the association of the cinematic cut and the severed head it is possible to trace an alternative current of montage within the NLAC that privileges affect over intellect. For example, Glauber Rocha’s Cabezas cortadas (1972) and Fernando Birri’s Org (1978), long overlooked in the history of the NLAC, both associate decapitation and the cinematic cut through loose political narratives and an experimental montage meant to heighten the spectator’s sensation. In conflating the severed head with an affective montage, Rocha and Birri advance a posthegemonic politics of cinema that exceeds representation.
In framing political struggle as an intellectual affair, the conventional account of the NLAC overlooked the role of catharsis in revolution. There is no better example of revolutionary affect than the guillotine. Of course, one of the great ironies of the French Revolution lies in the fact that this device was championed as a symbol of rationalism and scientific progress. Designed by a physician, the guillotine promised to reduce human suffering by mechanizing political execution and capital punishment. Nevertheless, it staged a Dionysian spectacle of cruelty and mediated a torrent of bloody passion among the masses (Traverso 2021, 87). The legacy of the guillotine’s affective force leads film theorist Raymond Bellour to trace the origins of cinematic affect to this apparatus (31-32). Both guillotine and cinema hypnotized the urban crowd through the cut. Not unlike the rise and fall of the guillotine’s blade, the razor of the film splicer, which editors use to execute a cut, unleashes intensities in the audience. I coin the concept of the visual guillotine to refer to this conflation of decapitation and cinema, which filmmakers such as Rocha and Birri thematized in the service of revolution.
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As a concept, the visual guillotine allows me to trace a through-line in audiovisual politics. I began this text with my reflection on the decapitation video, which I linked to the earliest examples of editing that similarly established the relation between the cut and the severed head. The sensations these films unleashed through the cut were soon politicized by Sergei Eisenstein. Through his theoretical texts and unfinished Mexican project Eisenstein had a lasting effect on the NLAC (Birri 2007, 261).[7] By the 1980s, the political project of the NLAC had lost its momentum. The adoption of the neoliberal model throughout the region led to a shift in politics and audiovisual aesthetics throughout the 1990s. The liberalization of trade and acceleration of globalization provoked a crisis of the nation-state and the national popular as the locus of cinematic politics. The politicization of aesthetics, for example the utilization of montage towards revolutionary affect in the NLAC, had been eclipsed by a politics of representation organized around new identity forms (Aguilar; Sánchez Prado). While the pueblo is no longer the collective subject of cinema, the decapitation video offers a counter-example to this broader shift away from a politics of form. The cinematic cut, which continues to be associated with the severed head as political sign, grounds the politics of the audiovisual apparatus in this conflict. The most concerning consequence of this development, of course, is that the register of a political aesthetics has shifted from the emancipatory movements of the 1960s and ‘70s to a reactionary politics intended to paralyze the public sphere through horrorism.[8]
An apparatus (dispositif) is a material and discursive formation that functions as an instrument of governmentality. The apparatus establishes relations between heterogeneous elements—practices and objects—that displace power from (state) institutions to the practice of everyday life (Foucault 1980, 194). The concept of the apparatus was central to the theories of cinematic politics that emerged in the 1970s, which combined the thought of Althusser and Lacan to critique the formation of ideological subjects through cinema. By the early ‘90s, theorists interested in conceptualizing cinematic affect reacted against this tradition, which they accused of privileging a heady formalism over sensation. The audiovisual apparatus faded from their concerns as the spectator’s body came to the forefront of film theory. Decades later, Eugenie Brinkema critiqued these theories of cinematic affect for their overzealous rejection of cinematic form (40). Instead, Brinkema proposes a radical formalism that locates affect not in filmmakers’ representation of affective states, nor even in the ways that moving images affect the audience, but in form itself (37). Brinkema’s defense of formalism is a significant development for efforts to conceptualize the role of affect in the audiovisual apparatus, which is also one objective of my concept of the visual guillotine. However, I distance myself from Brinkema’s similarly overzealous rejection of the concerns with the spectator’s body that affect theory prioritized. Furthermore, Brinkema’s radical formalism is not radical in the political sense, and in fact sidesteps the questions of politics that guided the formalism of apparatus theory. As we see in the example of Haz patria, mata un Zeta, the cut that substitutes for decapitation gives form to affect, but the video’s authors politicize this affect through horrorism.
More than a macabre oddity in the history of early internet culture, the decapitation video exhibits the transformation of audiovisual politics in the twenty-first century. Its weaponization of form and affect exemplifies a posthegemonic politics. However, as Jon Beasley-Murray has argued, posthegemony did not simply succeed hegemony once the pueblo lost its political agency with the adoption of the neoliberal model (x). In advancing political affect, which it inscribes in the form of the cut, and which consequently can only be sensed and not seen, the visual guillotine offers an example of an audiovisual politics beyond representation, from the avant-garde to the present. Yet this return of political aesthetics is alarming because it radically reorients audiovisual politics from emancipatory radicalism to reactionary horrorism. Latin American cultural studies must thus contend with this aestheticization of politics by reviving theories of the apparatus and form for the contemporary horizon of the digital.