Nahual Cinema and "The Living Idol" (Albert Lewin and René Cardona, 1957)

Byron Davies (University of Murcia)

On November 26 3-6PM, join us at NOVA FCSH (Berna Campus, Room A206) for a presentation by three members of Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU): Bruno Varela, Marcela Cuevas and Byron Davies. They will talk to us about "Nahual Cinema and The Living Idol (Albert Lewin and René Cardona, 1957)".

Abstract In Anáhuac (in the Western imaginary, “Mesoamerica”), a nahual is a non-human entity like an owl or a rabbit (or even a meteorological phenomenon) that spiritually accompanies or advises a human, and of which that human can be a manifestation. The concepts of nahual, nahualli, and nahualismo are intimately linked to questions of death via their conceptual and etymological connections to tonalli, the Nahuatl word for one of three conceptions of the soul, in this case the one most closely associated with shadows. As Roberto Martínez González says, “The nahualli is the nocturnal aspect of the beings that inhabit the world. It is the hidden face that is revealed once the underworld has invaded the earth during the darkness of the night.” Since 2023, the Oaxaca, Mexico-based film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU) has organized an annual Muestra Nahual, mainly focused on “other cinemas” from Oaxaca, and which last year also included a presentation of the 1957 MGM horror film The Living Idol (directed by Albert Lewin and René Cardona). This presentation at NOVA -meant as preparation for a forthcoming video essay - will use that same film as a basis for examining the links between nahualismo, film theory, and death. Beyond nahual references in its plot (about a contemporary Mexican woman possessed by the spirit of a Mayan princess and transfixed by the figure of the jaguar), we will explore how the film itself constitutes a kind of nahual - an animal shadow - of Golden Age Mexican films, as well as, more generally, how the idea of a nahual cinema speaks to classical film theory, with the animal shadow serving as a potent figure for the internal connections between film and mortality.

Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU) in Oaxaca, Mexico, is a working group that collaborates in
generating experimental practices in film through exhibition, management, and educational
activities.

Bruno Varela (Mexico) is a self-taught audiovisual artist, researcher, and film and video creator. His works, mainly set in the geographical and conceptual South, have been featured in museums and festivals such as the Guggenheim Museum (New York), Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), the Carrillo Gil Museum of Art (Mexico City), the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival (Germany), the Ann Arbor Film Festival (USA), the Morelia International Film Festival, and FICUNAM. Varela has received awards such as the e-flux Award from the Oberhausen Festival (2015), the Rockefeller Foundation's Media Artist distinction (2006), and the award for best work at the Geografías Suaves Festival (2002), as well as awards from FICUNAM (2012, 2023) and the Experimental Video Biennial in Mexicali, B.C. (2007, 2012). In 2019, he was a member of the National System of Art Creators (SNCA). He is a member of the film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU), based in Oaxaca (Mexico).

Marcela Cuevas (Mexico) is an intermedia artist and cultural manager. She has studied photography, psychology, stage design, and the anthropology of art. She works in the areas of production, programming, and pedagogical processes in experimental cinema, as well as in creative writing, therapeutic accompaniment through art, performance, stage design, and community video. Her work has been presented in various museums, cultural spaces, and festivals in Mexico and abroad, including Australia, the United States, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Canada, Uruguay, Paraguay, Spain, Chile, Guatemala, and Bolivia. She is a member of the film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU), based in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Byron Davies (U.S./Mexico) is a researcher in philosophy, film curator, and visual artist originally from the United States and a naturalized citizen of Mexico. From 2024 to 2026, he is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow with the Aresmur research group on aesthetics and art theory at the University of Murcia in Spain, carrying out the research project “Materialism and Geographic Specificity in the Philosophy of Film.” From 2018 to 2020, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Philosophical Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and just before that, he completed his doctorate in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard University. His writings on film and media have appeared in October, Screen, Millenium Film Journal, The Baffler, Desistfilm, Los Experimentos, and NECSUS_European Journal of Media Studies, in addition to co-authored pieces in La Furia Umana and Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies. He is a member of the film exhibition and programming collective Salón de Cines Múltiples (SACIMU), based in Oaxaca (Mexico).

Funded by the European Union (ERC, FILM AND DEATH, 101088956). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.