Our Time

For whatever thematic heavy-handedness or structural deficiencies Carlos Reygadas’ films may consistently and inevitably fall victim to, the man sure knows how to open a movie. Information, images, forms arrive from somewhere as something undefined—stars shining from who knows how far away; a small child lost in a field as day loses light—and we enter into them consumed by unawareness. In the beginning, there’s only vision and the senses: perception itself. Reygadas respects realism in his representations, but he also understands that our relationship to the world is always more unstable than we can ever realize. And so he elongates his preludes, edging us in a layer at time, protecting us from the onrush of imagination-annihilating impulses to identify, shape, and “read” images as information for as long as he can. He inevitably abandons abstraction in favour of a structured narrative—how could