De Panzazo Analysis

It is thus not surprising that Rulfo’s most recent documentary De panzazo (Barely Passing the Grade, 2012) was codirected by Televisa newscaster Carlos Loret de Mola (1976-), one of López Obrador’s most notorious public enemies in the media, or that the film’s attack on the deficiencies of Mexico’s educational system in general, and on the teachers’ unions in particular, aligns with the educational reform that then-candidate Enrique Peña Nieto was beginning to float and that became law a year later. Unlike Luis Mandoki or Carlos Mendoza, Rulfo cannot be pigeonholed within any particular political ideology or party line, and his documentaries achieve a considerable degree of media exposure and audience access precisely because their ideological
ambiguity renders them an effective film commodity in the neoliberal marketplace.
Tellingly, De panzazo was produced by an NGO called Mexicanos Primero, led by Carlos X.
González, son of the former president of Mexico’s Chamber of Commerce and current chairman of the Board of Directors of Kimberly-Clark, Mexico; he was also president of the Televisa Foundation and has been involved in major initiatives of both that media conglomerate and the PRI. Furthermore, the director of Mexicanos Primero is David Calderón Martín del Campo, a leading educational reformer who strongly advocates for the ENLACE test, a teacher evaluation tool staunchly opposed by the unions. The documentary strongly pushes the evaluation and negatively presents the unions’ opposition to it. Loret de Mola is known for his contentious interview with former union leader and politician Elba Esther Gordillo, whose arrest in 2013 for embezzlement and other crimes allowed for the Peña Nieto government’s education reform to pass in that same year. De panzazo does have an editorial voice and is not as ambiguous in its politics as En el hoyo. Nevertheless, it capitalizes on the generalized opposition that many people in Mexico, both of the left and the right, felt for the notoriously corrupt. The film also enjoyed considerable media exposure due to Loret de Mola’s standing as the host of Televisa’s morning news show and of a popular radio show on Radio Fórmula. This exposure led to box-office receipts of 3.6 million
dollars.
Three crucial points emerge from De panzazo. First, it shows that we must question any naturalized linkage between Mexican documentary cinema and the social and political paradigms typically identified with the genre. De panzazo is a film that uses documentary cinema’s traditional strategies for social engagement, but does so to push a hegemonic reform project that the vast majority of the political establishment supports. Consequently, it retrospectively validates my reading of En el hoyo as a veiled critique of the modernization projects pushed forward by López Obrador, whose political coalition includes dissident members of the teachers’ union who have expressed opposition to the type of teaching evaluations portrayed in De panzazo.
Second, along with Presunto culpable, Rulfo’s film pushes us to reconsider the notions of politics and of the political in Mexican cinema. It is clear that the displacement of film audiences, including those who favor documentary, to the middle and upper classes who benefit from neoliberal economic reforms, has resulted in the rise of documentaries that advance the cultural and political values of the social elite. In De panzazo, Loret de Mola, whose newscast typically presents a favorable view of PRI educational policies, embodies the viewpoint of an elite class that includes both neoliberal social reformers and members of the business elite who participate in institutions like Mexicanos Primero. This type of conservative NGO politics channels the interests of the middle and upper classes who resent the effects of statist and socialist policies in Mexico’s modernization. These same NGOs have aggressively mobilized against López Obrador and other left-wing politicians on issues such as crime and impunity, which characterized, for example, the platform of the conservative candidate for Mexico City’s major office, Isabel Miranda de Wallace. Even though the educational system and the judiciary undoubtedly victimize Mexico’s poor, it is also true that the policies advocated by De panzazo and Presunto culpable (neoliberal educational reform and the fight against judicial abuses and impunity) are two causes that mobilize middle- and upper- class conservative activists.
Finally, one must also consider the synergies between the film industry and other media structures, like radio or television, to fully account for the development of commercial documentaries like De Panzazo. Unlike the precarious circulation of more politically engaged work, which relies on internet sites, bare-bones commercial structures, and, in many cases, underground circulation in political organizations or in the piracy market, the commercial documentary fully embodies its nature as a neoliberal media commodity and takes advantage of media languages and infrastructures previously unavailable to the genre.
An example, in this regard, is the work of Lynn Fainchtein, who has been very influential as a producer of major documentary productions. Fainchtein began her career as a radio personality in the 1980s on the alternative music station Rock 101. She has been an extremely prominent music supervisor during Mexican cinema’s neoliberal transition, almost singlehandedly revolutionizing the role of the music soundtrack as an aesthetic and marketing instrument. Of the dozens of films she has scored, one can recall Amores perros and Fernando Sariñana’s (1958-) Todo el poder (Gimme the Power, 1999), two highly successful works that redefined the role of film music in Mexico. Beyond this, Fainchtein, who remains a music supervisor in the industry and who hosts a daily segment about music on the radio news show Atando cabos (Tying Loose Ends), has produced three documentaries crucial to understanding the gradual insertion of the genre into commercial circuits: Olallo Rubio’s ¿Y tú, cuánto cuestas? (So, What’s Your Price?, 2007); Lorenzo Hagerman’s (1969-) 0.56% ¿Qué le pasó a México? (0.56%, What Happened to Mexico?, 2010, which Fainchtein also cowrote); and Duncan Bridgeman’s (1959-) Hecho en México (Made in Mexico, 2012). 0.56% more properly belongs to the mainstream forms of Mexican documentary cinema. Like Luis Mandoki’s Fraude 2006, 0.56% documents the controversial 2006 election (the title refers to the differential in votes received between Calderón and López Obrador in official results), but in a less controversial way. The film does not accept the narrative of fraud, but rather presents a more neutral rendering of the controversy between López Obrador’s and Calderón’s followers. 0.56% achieved far more commercial exposure than Mandoki’s film, in part because it did not have to face censorship (it was partly financed by the Mexican Film Institute), but also because Fainchtein’s media presence allowed for better distribution. The notable aspect of this film is its noneditorial, testimonial approach, which in Fainchtein’s film allows her to defuse the controversial nature of the subject, demonstrating how “civil society,” expressed as a plurality of perspectives, can depolarize a hot-button issue and make it more palatable to viewers. Like in the cases of the other films I have discussed thus far, such a diffuse, depolarizing approach makes the film an effective politics-commodity, because it allows both Calderón’s and López Obrador’s followers to feel vindicated, as it does not take a stand regarding the veracity of the election fraud claims.