Affecting the audience through motion pictures:

The cinematography of Amores Perros

Introduction

Amores Perros

(2000) is the first feature film of Mexican Filmmaker Alejandro González

Iñárritu. Released in 2000 at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie won the Prize of the Critic′s

Week at Cannes. It was the first Mexican film after 25 years that entered an Oscar competition.

By referring to specialist magazine

Cine XS

(Flores-Durán and Pedroza, 2000) Paul Julian Smith

explains that `

Amores Perros

is representative of a `new trend′ in Mexican cinema′ (Smith,

2003, p. 25).

The winner of over thirty awards (including the most successful film at the Mexican box

office of its year),

Amores Perros

is widely credited with kick-starting a Mexican film

industry which was in ruins and heralding a renaissance for the national audiovisual

sector. (Smith, 2003, p. 10)

The film not only won a lot of prizes at international film festivals, it was also very successful at

the box offices. It earned $ 10 million in Mexico, $ 5 million in the US and $20 million

worldwide (Smith, 2003, p. 13). `The critical and commercial success of González Iñárritu′s film

comes at a time when the Mexican film industry appears to be going through its worst period

since the early 1930s′ (D′Lugo, 2003, p. 221).

But what makes this film so successful? The brilliant narration, the strong soundtrack, the

outstanding cinematography and special marketing strategies could be factors for its success. The

cinematic and editing techniques used in this movie are very different from films of former Latin

American filmmakers. In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the cinematography of

Amores Perros

and analyse how it creates meaning and supports the story and the characters.

I′ll start with general information about the movie and then I will sum up the plot very briefly.

After that, I will begin the analysis of the cinematography and give some background

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information about the production. Firstly, I want to give some general information about the

specific cinematographic techniques used in

Amores Perros

and then I would like to analyse

several sequences more properly. The opening sequence will be analysed accurately, then I

concentrate on several key-scenes.

Amores Perros

is `structured around three loosely connected stories linked by a car accident′ (De

la Fuente, 2001, p. 17). The plot isn′t linear, it doesn′t use flashbacks or flash-forwards, it tells

three stories - `Octavio and Susana′, `Valeria and Daniel′ and `El Chivo and Maru′ - edited

together in an unusual way. The protagonists of these stories have nothing in common, but a car

accident and the fact, that they are dog-owners.

Plot

The film begins with a car race and crash. Octavio, his friend and the bleeding dog Cofi in the

back of the car are escaping from another car. At a crossroad, they hit the car of a beautiful

woman, who gets seriously injured. Then the plot immediately switches to an illegal dogfight to

tell the story of Octavio and Susana. Octavio is in love with Susana, the teenage mum and wife

of his violent brother. He earns money with dogfights and gives it to Susana in order to run away

with her and start a new life somewhere else. Therefore Octavio pays a gang to beat up his

brother Ramiro. But instead of wining Susana by getting rid of Ramiro, Ramiro and Susana flee

with Octavio′s money. At its last dogfight, Octavio′s dog Cofi gets shot by a jealous combatant,

Jarocho, whose dog is going to lose. As a countermanoeuvre, Octavio stabs Jarocho in his

stomach and flees with his dog and his friend in his car from Jarocho′s gang. The car race that

we already saw in the opening sequence starts again. This time we get to know the woman in the

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second car of the car accident: it′s Valeria Amaya, a model, who attended a TV show that

Octavio and his friend were watching before going to the last dogfight.

Now the second story, `Valeria and Daniel′, begins. Model Valeria and editor Daniel had just

moved into their new apartment, because Daniel suddenly left his wife Julieta and his safe family

life for the beautiful and successful model Valeria. Valeria′s leg gets hurt in the accident and has

to be amputated after some weeks. In the meanwhile, her dog, Richie, falls down the floor and

gets almost eaten by rats, rescued in the last moment by Daniel, destroying the floor to get the

dog out of it.

The last story `El Chivo and Maru′, is about the tramp El Chivo, who makes his money as a

hired assassin, trying to get in contact with his daughter Maru, who thinks that her father is dead.

El Chivo′s actual job is to kill Louis Miranda Solares, the half-brother and business-associate of

Gustavo Garfias, who hired El Chivo. `We see the car crash once more, but this time from

Chivo′s point of view as he is about to assassinate Louis, and instead saves Octavio′s dog, Cofi′

(Hart, 2004, p.187). Cofi later kills all of El Chivo′s dogs. Later Chivo decides not to kill Louis,

but instead kidnaps the two brothers to leave them alone with a gun. He dresses up, leaves his

daughter an actual photo of him and a message on the answering machine and disappears

together with Cofi, who he named Negro, into the horizon.

The shooting

Amores Perros

is shot during 10 weeks on location at several places in Mexico City, using a

documentary-style camerawork. Iñárritu `feels that no set looks and feels like a real location′

(Oppenheimer 2001, p. 27). Thus, there is no scene of

Amores Perros

shot in the studio. These

two facts, the hand-held camera and the on-location-shooting, make the film realistic.

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