SLAC 15 (2) pp.

217–232 Intellect Limited 2018

Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

Volume 15 Number 2
© 2018 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/slac.15.2.217_1

María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

Virginia Tech

Symptoms of a civil
war: Affect, disease and
urban violence in Arturo
Menéndez’s Malacrianza/The
Crow’s Nest (2014)

Abstract Keywords
Arturo Menéndez’s award-winning Malacrianza/The Crow’s Nest (2014) chroni- Malacrianza
cles the tribulations of Don Cleo, a poor piñata salesman suffering from mental and El Salvador
physical ailments. Cleo’s life is turned upside down when he receives an extortion Salvadoran cinema
letter asking for US$500 in exchange for his life. This article examines Malacrianza’s affect
linkage between the protagonist’s body and his ailments and the broader sociopo- disease
litical matrix. I argue that the symptoms he demonstrates are manifestations of the phenomenology
impact of civil war and urban violence upon the social telos of Central America. My violence
study explores phenomenological film analysis as a tool for examining affects and
their circulations in the film. By using an affective code, Malacrianza engages the
viewer in an intimate experience of the violence(s) of contemporary El Salvador.

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María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

1. All translations from When everything is silent, the gravity of the events overflows […] our
the original Spanish are
my own.
understanding and even our imagination, then there it is, ready, open,
stuttering, hurt, stammering, the language of pain.
2. Deborah Shaw’s
meditation on Latin
(Garza 2011: 16)1
American cinema is
pertinent here. She Terror appears when the body trembles and flees to conserve its life. The
argues that only
recently has Latin terrified fears and, due to residing within the sphere of fear, seeks an
American cinema ‘been escape. The horror […] is beyond the fear that so often portends against
transformed in terms of danger […] that which terrifies separates lips, which are incapable of
international visibility
and recognition’ (2007: pronouncing any word, incapable of linguistically articulating the disar-
1). Shaw furthers that ticulation that fills the gaze, that bites the air.
‘Latin American cinema
is a generalized term,
(Garza 2011: 11–12)
which while useful in
creating a space in the Billed as ‘the first Salvadoran film with international distribution’, Arturo
market for films from
the region […] does Menéndez’s Malacrianza/The Crow’s Nest (2014) narrates the vicissitudes
not manage to include of Don Cleo (Salvador Solís), a chronic back pain sufferer, who one morn-
all of Latin America’ ing receives an extortion note demanding US$500 to be delivered in 72 hours
(2007: 3): academic
discussions and books (Anon. 2014). The penalty for not acquiescing to the demand is death. A resi-
‘rarely, if ever, include dent of a marginalized neighbourhood, a worker in a piñata store and the
films from many Latin
American republics,
father of a drug addict, Don Cleo is charged with the frantic task of gathering
including Bolivia, the funds before the deadline. Carrying a heavy backpack, he traverses the
Paraguay, Venezuela, busy and noisy streets of the Salvadoran capital looking for help.
Guatemala, Costa Rica,
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Arturo Menéndez has directed five films (three shorts and two features),
or Honduras’ (2007: 3). which have won international awards: Parávolar/To Fly (2008), Cinema Libertad/
Freedom Cinema (2009), Nada/Nothing (2015), Malacrianza (2014) and Pablo’s
Word (2017). Malacrianza has received critical accolades both at home and
abroad. International outlets such as the BBC, HBO, CNN and Variety have rated
the film positively, and it has been featured in the Festival Latinoamericano del
Instituto Americano de Cine (Latin American Festival of the American Cinema
Institute) in Washington, DC. The film’s producers have also made an effort to
market the film to a global audience, as evidenced by its selection in film festi-
vals in Havana, Panama, Chicago, Innsbruck, Vancouver and Costa Rica.
While Malacrianza has gathered some critical praise, it has not yet,
however, captured the attention of the academy.2 The film has also received
harsh critiques from domestic cinephiles. Héctor Ismael Sermeño – a histo-
rian, writer and art critic – for example, notes that ‘publicised as the first feature
film since 1969 […] Malacrianza […] is not what they have advertised’, argu-
ing that the film ‘really is a 70-minute medium-length film’ (2015). The critic
further refutes the film’s tagline as the first Salvadoran feature since 1969,
retorting that Malacrianza is ‘the umpteenth first Salvadoran film’. Sermeño
goes on to provide an extensive list of features premiered after 1969 to back up
his claim. In this list are films such as Los peces fuera del agua/Fish Out of Water
(1969) by José David Calderón; Sexo para dioses/Sex for Gods (1985) by Otmano
Luna Figueroa; Nacidos para triunfar/Born to Triumph (1994) by Javier Durán;
and Sobreviviendo Guazapa/Surviving Guazapa (2008) and El libro supremo/The
Supreme Book (2013) by Roberto Dávila. Sermeño also adds that in Malacrianza
‘the story ends after half an hour and starts to repeat and repeat itself’ and that
‘the film suffers in terms of […] continuity […] editing […] inexpert actors
[…] mise-en-scène […] [and] script’. Sermeño also critiques the film for lacking
a thesis on ‘the national reality’ and for what the critic calls a lack of characteri-
zation in the performance of the protagonist. Jorge Ávalos, in turn, poses that
while the production is

218   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Symptoms of a civil war

a miracle if we consider the limitations of the material which is in the

film […] these same limitations impede better editing […] which seems
more concentrated in filling narrative voids than in imbuing the film
with a rhythm in line with the film’s action.
(2016)

Ávalos also questions the camera’s movement in several scenes, including

when the protagonist, Don Cleo, meets Orlando, a visitor who claims to be
his son. In this example, Ávalos argues that the scene ‘deserved gradual move-
ment towards intimacy and a more dramatic contrast in the coming together
of the two characters’. He does, however, value Solís’s acting in a scene set
in a police station, where the protagonist provokes a ‘moving and profound
pathos’; this praise, however, is turned on its head in a later scene that takes
place in a bank, where the acting is harshly panned: ‘the character’s intentions
are diluted thanks to an erroneous interpretation of the guiding dialogue’. The
acting in this particular instance ‘collapses’, since the character ‘stops being an
ingenuous and simple man in a cruel world and becomes, instead, an appar-
ently stupid person, incapable of understanding very simple instructions’
(2016).
It is evident from these initial commentaries that early critiques of
Malacrianza adopt a formalist, and even realist, point of view, focusing on the
artificiality of the cinematic and the film’s ability to ‘offer a hitherto unattain-
able view onto (non-mediated) reality’ respectively (Elsaesser and Hagener
2010: 3). Though such readings are entirely valid, I propose a phenomeno-
logical point of entry into the film. Working with ideas forwarded by theo-
rists such as Vivian Sobchack, Jennifer Barker and Laura Marks – all of whom
are largely guided by the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty regarding film and
phenomenology – I propose to explore the connection between the protago-
nist’s body and his ailments and the broader sociopolitical matrix in which the
extortion attempt takes place. I argue that the symptoms he demonstrates – of
both psychological and physical afflictions – are manifestations of how civil
war and urban violence have impacted the social telos of Central America.
These pages explore phenomenological film analysis as a fruitful theoretical
framework for reading Malacrianza, and argue that by engaging in an affective
coda, the film involves the viewer in an intimate experience of the afflictions
of contemporary El Salvador.

From the scopic to the polysensorial

In Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Sobchack affirms
that ‘instead of seeking essences […] a phenomenological approach seeks […]
the meaning of experience as it is embodied and lived in context – meaning
and value emerging in the synthesis of the experience’s subjective and objective
aspects’ (2004: 2, original emphasis). Barker, in turn, parts from ideas posed by
Sobchack and Sara Ahmed to add that phenomenological film analysis

focuses neither solely on the formal or narrative features of the film

itself, nor solely on the spectator’s psychic identification with characters
or cognitive interpretation of the film. Instead, phenomenological film
analysis approaches the film and the viewer as acting together, correla-
tionally, along an axis that would instead constitute the object of study.
(2009: 18)

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María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

3. For a more complete Unlike formalist theorems, ‘which were predicated on the assumption of
overview of affect and
phenomenology in
a distance or separation between film and spectator, a phenomenologi-
Hispanic film studies, cal approach highlights the interplay, continuity, and transition between the
see The Politics of two’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 119). The spectator is no longer ‘some-
Affect and Emotion in
Contemporary Latin one defined by ocular verification’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 10), and ‘is
American Cinema no longer passively receiving optical information, but exists as a bodily being,
(2011) by Laura enmeshed acoustically, senso-motorically, somatically and affectively in the
Podalsky; Cinema
and Inter-American film’s visual texture and soundscape’ (2010: 10). Although the visual remains
Relations: Tracking without a doubt the main point of entry to the moving image given the
Transnational Affect
(2012) by Adrián Pérez-
graphic nature of the medium, a phenomenological approach de-centres the
Melgosa; Screening hegemony of the visual, posing instead that it
Neoliberalism:
Transforming Mexican
Cinema, 1988–2012 informs other senses in a dynamic structure that is not necessarily or
(2014) by Ignacio always sensually hierarchical […] [w]hen we watch a film, all our senses
Sánchez Prado; New are mobilized, and often, depending on the particular solicitations of
Maricón Cinema:
Outing Latin American a given film or filmic moment, our naturalized sensory hierarchy and
Film (2016) by Vinodh habitual sensual economy are altered and rearranged.
Ventakesh and the
edited collections
(Sobchack 2004: 80)
El lenguaje de las
emociones: afecto y Parting from this idea, Marks develops the notion of ‘haptic visuality’ to refer to
cultura en América
Latina (2012) by how ‘vision itself can be tactile, as though one were touching a film with one’s
Mabel Moraña and eyes’ (2000: xi). In this line, conceiving of the film as a sort of skin ‘acknowl-
Ignacio Sánchez Prado edges the effect of a work’s circulation among different audiences’, since the
and ‘Affect, bodies,
and circulations in film may be ‘as impressionable and conductive [as] skin’ (2000: xi). James J.
contemporary Latin Gibson adds that ‘vision is kinesthetic in that it registers movements of the
American film’ (2016) by
María del Carmen Caña
body just as much as does the muscle-joint-skin system and the inner-ear
Jiménez and Vinodh system’ (1979: 183). For Barker, tactility ‘is a mode of perception and expres-
Venkatesh. sion wherein all parts of the body commit themselves to, or are drawn into, a
relationship with the world that is at once a mutual and intimate relation of
contact’ (2009: 3). She adds that cinematic tactility is

a general attitude toward the cinema that the human body enacts in
particular ways: haptically, at the tender surface of the body, kinestheti-
cally and muscularly, in the middle dimension of muscles, tendons, and
bones that reach toward and through cinematic space; and viscerally, in
the murky recesses of the body, where heart, lungs, pulsing fluids, and
firing synapses receive, respond to, and reenact the rhythms of cinema.
(2009: 3)

While ‘the phenomenological paradigm has received a tremendous boost since

the 1990s (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 119), its presence in Hispanic studies
is, as Vinodh Venkatesh points out, a relatively new phenomenon (2016: 8).3
Studies by Venkatesh and Laura Podalsky are particularly pertinent to the
reading of Malacrianza that I undertake here. Following the thread spun by
Sobchack, Marks and Barker, Venkatesh poses in New Maricón Cinema that ‘the
relationship between the image and spectator is an intimate one that, at times,
is underlined in prelinguistic sensations and somatic reactions’ (2016: 8).
He clarifies this point, however, by adding that ‘[i]t is not so much viewers
“losing” themselves in the film as it is their moving past the skin of the film
and the subject occupying the ephemeral, protolinguistic sensations that an
affective cinema provokes’ (2016: 8). Venkatesh suggests that ‘such a shift is
both personal, in that reconfigured structures of feeling are imposed over

220   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Symptoms of a civil war

antiquated regimes, and plural, in that individual reorientations further a 4. Evidence of this may be
found in works such as
change of directionality and feeling in the group’ (2016: 8). He echoes Steven Baile con serpientes/
Shaviro’s notion of cinema as a productive art that not only represents ‘social Dance With Snakes
processes, so much as [it] participate[s] actively in these processes, and help[s] (Castellanos Moya,
1996); La diabla en el
constitute them’ (2016: 2). espejo/The She-Devil in
It behooves us at this point to link the social processes occurring in El the Mirror (Castellanos
Salvador to the film; in other words, what are the issues in which Malacrianza Moya, 2000); El
arma en el hombre/
actively participates? Erik Ching points out that the civil conflict in the country Weapons Within Man
(Castellanos Moya,
2001); El cojo bueno/
was a brutal, twelve-year-long affair (1980–1992) that left an indelible The Good Cripple (Rey
imprint on the nation’s psyche […] approximately 75,000 were killed, Rosa, 1996); Piedras
another 350,000 or more were wounded […] around one million were encantadas/Enchanted
Stones (Rey Rosa, 2001)
displaced from their homes, many of whom fled the country and ended and Managua, Salsa
up in the United States […] tens of thousands […] were tortured, incar- City (Galich, 2000); Y
cerated, raped, conscripted, and/or abducted [while] [t]he number of te diré quién eres:
Mariposa traicionera/
people suffering debilitating psychological trauma remains impossible I’ll Tell You Who You
to determine. Are: Treacherous
Butterfly (Galich, 2006).
(2016: 3) In this same vein, but
in connection to the
He adds that the amnesty law enacted at the end of the conflict ‘makes it cinema, Ávalos furthers
that ‘es inevitable
impossible for anyone to be prosecuted for their activities during the war […] que los países de
[and] El Salvador […] lacks anything like an ongoing truth and reconciliation Centroamérica
commission’ (2016: 2). Not only does the relatively small country of six million atraigan atención
por los dramas
inhabitants lack institutional mechanisms that allow for a juridical evaluation humanos derivados
of past crimes, but also, in 2015, ‘statistically it became the worldwide murder por la violencia’, citing
examples by directors
capital’ (Ávalos 2016). Though the war ended with the signing of a peace treaty such as the Frenchman,
in 1992, it is evident that widespread violence continues to plague the public Christian Poveda in La
urban sphere (Mackenbach and Wallner 2008: 85). These forms of violence vida loca/This Crazy Life
(2009); the American
‘have transformed relationships of the individual with his surroundings and Cary Jogi Fukunaga in
countrymen, with the concept of citizenship and identity [and even] with Sin nombre/Nameless
his own body’ (2008: 85). Werner Mackenbach and Alexandra Ortiz Wallner (2009); the Guatemalan
Julio Hernández Cordón
argue that in fiction, ‘San Salvador, Managua, Ciudad de Guatemala, San Jose, in Las marimbas del
Tegucigalpa and other urban spaces appear […] as privileged sites to narrate infierno/Marimbas
from Hell (2011); and
stories impacted by violence’ (2008: 86).4 As we may glean from this affirma- the Salvadoran Marcela
tion, the conflictive past in El Salvador is not situated in the past tense, in a Zamora in El cuarto de
distant history of the nation: its effects, transformed now in a contemporary huesos/The Room of
Bones (2014).
symptomology, continue to threaten the bodies and minds of its citizens. The
impossibility of separating the present from the past maintains the citizen in a
perpetual state of vulnerability.
In the language of film, the security afforded by distance is best evoked by
the scopic as a point of entry into the moving image. While this security is, as
shown in Malacrianza, relatively impossible in El Salvador (due largely to the
lack of institutional channels of justice or official mechanisms of human rights
discourse), the cinema, as ‘one of the most potent analyzers of social trans-
formation and one of contemporary society’s most efficient mechanisms of
reflexivity’ is charged with faithfully portraying and engendering the feelings,
affects and emotions that may result from this condition (Reguillo 2002: 199).
Of relevance in this theorization are the ideas forwarded by Podalsky in The
Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Podalsky

situates affective work […] in relation to a moment of epistemological

crisis wherein the visual record is rendered insufficient to the task of

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María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

5. Pedro Geoffroy Rivas registering past experiences and their influence on the present, as well
(Santa Ana 1908 – San
Salvador 1979) was
as widespread uncertainties about the future.
a poet, linguist and (2011: 19)
anthropologist whose
poetry marked an
important moment Venkatesh elaborates Podalsky’s point and adds that ‘the practice of phenome-
in the development nological film analysis is a strategy to unearth the polysemantic and cognitive
of a national poetry. interactions that lay bare the fallacies of the strictly scopic’ (2016: 9). In opposi-
The verses that
appear in the opening tion to the formalist and realist readings of the film to date – and in consonance
image belong to the with the politico-ethical gesture offered by Podalsky and Venkatesh –
collection Canciones
en el viento/Songs in
I argue that it is only through phenomenology and an acknowledgment of
the Wind (1933). The affect that the viewer of Malacrianza is able to participate in the total real-
poet’s initial works ity contained in the diegesis. It is only in this fashion that the viewer is able
are characterized by a
strong political voice, to recognize fully the aesthetic value and ethical compromise of Menéndez’s
wherein Geoffroy Rivas feature. As I demonstrate in what follows, Malacrianza echoes Podalsky’s
denounces the 1932 theorem on the moving image vis-à-vis politics by uncovering the inadequacy
Salvadoran peasant
massacre. of the visual to document the past and the impact it may have not only in the
present, but also in the future.
6. Literary trend popular
during the nineteenth This is clear from the very first image of the film. On a black screen prior
century that focuses to the introductory credits, we see the following verses: ‘Patriotism without
on the depiction of
everyday life, traditions
happiness / pain / and another pain / and more pain / and tears of stone.
and folklore. Patriotism with hope / firm / pure / desolate / clean’. It is not until the appear-
ance of the final verse – ‘you have turned into a volcano in my chest’ – that
we know the identity of the poet, Pedro Geoffroy Rivas. It is also here that
the musical soundtrack begins, which invites the viewer to engage with the
film not only through the visual, but also through the auditory.5 The melody,
not unlike the traditional and repetitive music that one may encounter in a
fairground, brings to the image an air of nostalgia and even melancholy by
directing the viewer to a historical moment that is impossible to relive. The
prevalence of the historic appears here in tandem with a series of images
within the shot (i.e., frames within the frame, as though they were filmic
images within the film) that are characterized by a certain costumbrismo.6 In
the montage of these images we see naked and half-naked children playing
by a humble home; a young girl, about twelve years old, holding a baby in her
arms; bare-breasted mothers feeding their babies; a young boy accompanied
by what seems to be a soldier brandishing a rifle; adults who, in their facial
expressions, appear to be mimicking children; a young, bare-chested youth
lying on the ground with his arms forming a cross; women accompanied by
their children washing clothes; a woman who carries wood; a man accompa-
nied by a boy performing household chores.
Towards the end of this montage, a male voice is superimposed onto the
images and the musical track. We hear this voice say, ‘inhale […] exhale […]
inhale […] exhale’, followed by the sound of deep breathing that follows
the given directions. Immediately after, we hear a short exchange between
two men: ‘– Does it hurt? –A little doctor […] there yes it hurts, there yes it
hurts, doctor, there yes’. The archival montage is followed by a close-up shot
that visually and aurally captures what the viewer soon realizes is bubbling
glue. The camera alternates between the boiling substance and fragmented
images that portray the process of creating a piñata. The focus here is on the
object under construction and, more specifically, on the different steps that
are involved in its production. The person undertaking the tasks is reduced to
a fragment of its constitution: hands that are, at the moment, anonymous. It
merits pointing out that the viewer is rarely presented with frontal shots of the

222   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Symptoms of a civil war

Figure 1: This montage is the first sequence of Arturo Menéndez’s Malacrianza/

The Crow’s Nest, El Salvador, 2014. © Itaca Films, Meridiano 89, Sivela Pictures.

action. Instead, Menéndez employs low- and high-angle shots that situate the
viewer in relation to the spatio-temporal coordinates of the diegesis, in angles
that promote an almost voyeuristic gaze onto the hands crafting the piñata.
This praxis of voyeuristic vigilance is underlined by the viewer’s contin-
ued aural access to the doctor–patient conversation. In this dialogue, we are
privy to the physical and psychological maladies that afflict the protagonist.
When asked ‘[a]nd how long has it been since your last drink, Don Cleo?’
the protagonist answers, ‘[a]bout four years ago doctor’. The doctor meets this
response with guarded disbelief, and asks the question again, to which Don
Cleo now answers honestly: ‘[t]hree weeks ago I suffered a relapse, you know
how it works’. After asking him if he smokes tobacco, the doctor rules out the

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María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

Figure 2: Shots from a piñata workshop which accompany the sound of Don Cleo’s
conversation with the doctor in Malacrianza.

Figure 3: The doctor looks through Don Cleo’s backpack.

possibility of a muscle spasm. He does note, however, that ‘[t]he pain in his
back here worries him’ (emphasis added). Immediately afterwards, the doctor
recommends that Don Cleo undergo a series of tests and x-rays since he is
almost certain it is a problem of ‘the spine’. The medical exam ends with what
appears to be an almost random line of questioning as the doctor takes inter-
est in the protagonist’s backpack. He asks him: ‘[a]nd this backpack you carry

224   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Symptoms of a civil war

around? Is it heavy?’. Don Cleo answers ‘[a] little doctor’ at which point the
doctor asks to inspect the bag: ‘[l]et’s see’. It is at this moment in the conversa-
tion that the viewer is finally granted visual access to the scene at hand. It is
also at this juncture that the viewer sees the doctor beginning to examine the
backpack, which as a sort of x-ray (as we will see in the continuing section)
uncovers the most intimate and vulnerable parts of Don Cleo.
While the analysis above may suggest that the film privileges the visual as
a point of entry, a phenomenological analysis of the first five minutes of the
film – in images that occur prior to the title credit – will show that Malacrianza
initiates from the very beginning viewer participation anchored in the haptic
and the muscular. From a phenomenological standpoint, to discuss muscula-
ture is not solely to focus on the anatomical or mechanical aspects of the body
but, as Barker notes, on its expressive and perceptive functions (2009: 76). In
her theory of the moving image,

the musculature isn’t a set of body parts that we have, but something
through which we live and experience the world […] the musculature
[…] denotes […] any aspect of the body that can employ consciously to
our bidding, to carry us toward the world and into our particular projects
in that world.
(2009: 76)

Keeping this in mind, let us return to Geoffroy Rivas’s verses that, accompa-
nied by a deafening silence, open the film. Their abrupt appearance minutes
before the title credit serves as what Gérard Genette calls a paratext, that
is, ‘texts which surround another text, attach themselves to it, occupy it in a
parasitical way [and] help and support it’ (Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 41).
Thomas Elsaesser and Malte Hagener point out that these paratexts ‘create
a space of transition and transaction’, and since they are intended for an
audience, ‘they pre-structure horizons of expectation and call forth promises
of identification’ (paraphrased in Elsaesser and Hagener 2010: 41). They add
that these paratexts ‘mediate between the actual text and what lies outside it
(its audience, other texts, institutions)’, and thus function as guided points of
entry into the diegesis (2010: 41). While this entry may be conceived as being
exclusively visual, since a simple closing of the eyes would negate our partici-
patory role in the verses, a detailed examination of the actual words of the
poem pose instead the notion that the viewer is invited to participate in the
film through a complex, polysensorial engagement with the moving image.
Words such as ‘pain’, ‘tears of stone’, ‘firm’, ‘clean’ and ‘a volcano in the chest’
contain and engender a strong affective intensity that appeals to the haptic.
‘Tears’, for instance, provokes the tactility of the humid; the scent of cleanli-
ness is engendered by ‘clean’, the muscular through the reference to ‘firm’ and
even the visceral in relation to the ‘volcano’ in the chest. The latter, though at
first glance only a metaphor, links us to Barker’s notion of the visceral as ‘the
deepest [and] most secretive rhythms of the body’ (2009: 123).
The poet’s emphasis on pain by means of the repetition of this word –
pain – is particularly relevant in the development of the plot. Ahmed notes
that ‘[b]odies take the shape of the very contact they have with objects and
others’ (2004: 1), adding that ‘the affectivity of pain is crucial to the forming
of the body as both a material and lived entity’ (2004: 24). It is through pain,
or the contact between the dermal surface and an object or entity, that one
is able to perceive the material corporality of the body. In other words, ‘the

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7. Dialoguing with the skin as a surface […] is felt only in the events of being “impressed upon”’
work of Brian Massumi,
Teresa Brennan and
(2004: 25). Ahmed adds that one ‘become[s] aware of [their] body as having
Silvan Tomkins, Eric a surface only in the event of feeling discomfort’, that is ‘transformed into
Shouse theorizes the pain through an act of reading and recognition (“it hurts!”)’ (2004: 24). We
differences between
feelings, emotions must remember that the first words enunciated by the protagonist are: ‘[a]
and affect. He notes little doctor […] there yes it hurts, yes it hurts there, doctor, there yes’. These
that feelings are a words linguistically articulate an affective intensity, thereby both coalesc-
sensation ‘that has
been checked against ing affect into a feeling and materializing the corporality of Don Cleo in the
previous experiences film.7 It bears mentioning that the viewer does not have visual access to the
and labeled’ (2005:
3); emotions are the
mise-en-scène at the moment of enunciation, but rather is only privy to the
physical manifestation audio track of the dialogue. The use of the deictic ‘there’ allows the viewer
of feelings; and affect to imagine the actions performed by the doctor, and may even simultane-
is ‘a non-conscious
experience of intensity’ ously provoke a feeling of empathy in the viewer, who may identify with the
(2005: 5). scenario of a medical exam. The deictic may also provoke in the viewer a
desire to meet the patient and to know what affliction is affecting the ‘there’.
The use of pre-lapping in the opening minutes of the film, as a sort of bridge
between the opening montage and the first scene, is a gesture that incites the
viewer to feel the filmic body. Barker highlights that a ‘film expresses itself
to the world through its muscular gestures, which take the form of specific
cinematic devices or techniques’ (2009: 78), and adds that ‘a film [frequently]
encourages a muscular gesture in the viewer and then expresses its empa-
thy with us by performing the same gesture itself’ (2009: 81). This dialectic
plays out in the very first images of the film. The viewer is first disoriented
by the inability to see what she hears, only gaining visual access to dispa-
rate archival images and images of the construction of the piñata. Faced with
the mismatched visual and audio tracks, the viewer seeks the complemen-
tary images of the dialogue taking place between doctor and patient. The film
responds to this muscular gesture by slowly giving way to a medium shot that
reveals the identities of the two interlocutors.
It bears repeating that this visual gesture corresponds with the doctor’s use
of the verb ‘to see’, thus establishing a connection between the diegesis and
the viewer. It is by means of this movement that the film responds – muscu-
larly – to the gesture of disorientation and orientation in the viewer, there-
fore producing a sensation of empathy between the film and the spectator.
Something similar happens later on when the alleged son meets Don Cleo.
While the conversation takes place in the piñata store, the initial dialogue
is accompanied by images that do not correspond to their presence inside
the business. On the contrary, the conversation is visually accompanied by
fragmented images of a youngster wandering along the Salvadoran streets
and the piñatas inside the store.
The lack of connection between the visual and the aural registers enhances
the state of disorientation of the protagonist and encourages the spectator
to share this feeling. This gesture towards the muscular is evident through-
out the film. Another clear example occurs in the opening archival montage:
each sequence demonstrates a studied focus on anatomical and mechani-
cal corporality. The portrayal of fragmented parts of the body, such as the
torso of children, the exposed breast of the mother or the naked chest of the
youth on the ground, signals the musculature of the body from an anatomi-
cal standpoint. The weight of the wood, the baby and the rifle or the physical
actions of washing clothes and the balancing of rocks evoke the body through
mechanics. Similarly, the low- and high-angle shots of the piñata also func-
tion as a muscular gesture on the part of the film, as the placement of the
camera evokes a tension that is generated in the body by the placement of the

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 Symptoms of a civil war

Figure 4: Images of a youngster wandering along the Salvadoran streets that do not
match the dialogue.

spectator in low and high angles. The shots used in the portrayal of the
piñata evoke in the viewer a recognition of the body and its movement, as
she is placed in unconventional positions vis-à-vis the subject of the image.
A consciousness of the sensorial is also produced in these images, as haptic-
ity is evoked by the hands crafting the object, and smell through the bubbling
glue. By means of the presence of polysensorial stimuli, the film invites the
spectator to engage with the moving image through a complete corporal-
ity, submerging themselves in the diegesis through the five senses and not
through the security of distance afforded by the purely scopic.

From symptomology to diagnosis

In theorizing pain, Ahmed argues that ‘[e]ven though pain is described by
many as non-intentional, as not “about” something, it is affected by objects of
perception that gather as one’s past bodily experience’ (2004: 25). Here, Ahmed
echoes Lucy Bending’s notion that ‘although pain may not be about some-
thing, it is still “because something” and this “because,” involves acts of attribu-
tion, explanation, narration, which function as the object of pain’ (2004: 25).
Ahmed furthers that

the sensation of pain is deeply affected by memories: one can feel pain
when reminded of past trauma by an encounter with another. Or if one
has a pain one might search one’s memories for whether one has had it
before, differentiating the strange from the familiar.
(2004: 25)

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8. It is telling that Don Pain is not only an affliction that connects the paratextual poem at the beginning
Cleo turns to the Mara
(M-13) after failing
with the conversation between Don Cleo and the doctor; it also functions as a
to find help in the leitmotiv throughout the film in the guise of the backpack that the protagonist
institutions charged always carries. From a phenomenological standpoint, the continued presence of
with justice (the police)
and health (the doctor), the backpack and the resultant intensified pressure on the character’s lower back,
who turn their backs reminds the protagonist (and by extension, the viewer) of his corporality. The
on him when faced presence and intensities engendered by the backpack evoke the transgression
with the threat of the
extortion letter. ‘of the border between inside and outside’ (Ahmed 2004: 27). This transgression
serves two purposes. First, it serves to remind us of the fragility and vulnera-
bility of Don Cleo’s body. This is highlighted, of course, by the appearance of
the extortion note. Second, the muscular empathy provoked in the viewer (who
empathizes with the protagonist’s back pain) transgresses the barrier between
the image and the spectator, thus breaching the limits established in the diegesis.
From a narrative standpoint, the backpack serves as a metaphor of the
past. As the doctor removes objects from within (pliers, a voltage tester, paint,
a bottle of water, a bible and some stones), he says to Don Cleo: ‘I suppose
you’ve been carrying that backpack for a while’. The protagonist answers: ‘[f]or
a few years […] after the war’, to which the doctor answers ‘[d]id you fight?’.
Don Cleo responds with a simple nod of the head, to which the doctor says: ‘[i]f
you do not look after yourself, who will look after you?’. This is the only explicit
reference to the war in the entire film (though its presence and aftershocks are
palpable throughout), and thus merits special examination. While a detailed
analysis of each of the objects contained in the bag would elucidate telling
links to the national past, what interests me here is their connection to the
protagonist’s pain. Each item materializes a memory that, in line with Ahmed’s
theorization of pain, requires an explanation and/or narrative that would thus
function as an object of this pain. This would allow for a certain distancing from
pain. Don Cleo’s reaction to these objects, however, is poignant. He is incapa-
ble of explaining their use or presence in the backpack, with an attitude that
borders upon the infantile and uncertain. He is only capable of saying: ‘[y]ou
never know doctor’. It bears underlining that his principal gesture in this scene
is a movement of the head, and not the afore-privileged audio track. In other
words, the auditory takes a background role to the movement of a protagonist
who is incapable of linguistically articulating his pain. This subtle shift in the
film forces an active spectator who is faced with the difficulty of deciphering
Don Cleo’s ailments. It also demonstrates the institutional silence (or inaction)
that exists vis-à-vis the nation’s past. Evidence of this is the doctor’s advice to
Don Cleo that nobody will care for his wellbeing except himself.8
The doctor is incapable of curing his maladies, and prescribes some pills to
ease the pain. He also gives Don Cleo a pair of outlandish Ray Ban sunglasses
as a small gift. These brightly coloured glasses become, like the backpack, part
of the physical characterization of the protagonist throughout the film. While
the doctor’s attitude may initially seem as caring, the gift of the glasses suggests
instead a patronizing position, since the gift may be analogous to a paediatrician
giving a young patient a lollipop after a successful check-up. This is suggested by
the manner in which the doctor asks him to try on the glasses, indicating with a
slight touch on the shoulder that he should try them on in front of a mirror. The
way in which he searches through the backpack also remits the viewer to such
a conclusion, as he shows no indication of respecting the privacy of the patient.
The past and the present share centre stage in the clinic, thus demonstrat-
ing that it is not only the former that troubles the protagonist, but also the
uncertainty of the latter (‘[o]ne never knows, doctor’). The uncertainty of being

228   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Symptoms of a civil war

Figure 5: Don Cleo wearing the sunglasses given to him by the doctor.

able to gather the ransom – like the marks of the war – haunts Don Cleo. In
a parallel fashion, the viewer also experiences the weight of the present (akin
to the phenomenological presence of the weight of the backpack in the early
scene). The appearance of the film’s title is relevant. The title credits are accom-
panied by a frenetic extra-diegetic soundtrack and visually paired with a vertig-
inous contemplation of the urban space of the Salvadoran capital from the
inside of a bus that Don Cleo rides after leaving the clinic. This shot places the
viewer within the bus, sharing the spatio-temporal coordinates of the protag-
onist. The spectator shares not only the view of the streets in rapid motion,
but also a visceral reaction (a faster pulse, sweat, anxiety) that is provoked by
a thief on the bus who goes from patron to patron demanding their valua-
bles. The extradiegetic soundtrack serves to intensify this sensation, providing
an aural cue to the affects and emotions felt by Don Cleo. The extradiegetic
music disturbs our perception and strengthens these affective intensities. The
film regularly encourages the aural participation of the spectator in multiple
ways, including the use of pre-lapping, the overlay of frenetic music or even the
augmentation of urban sounds within the diegesis. In several scenes, the exag-
gerated urban noise overpowers the dialogue between characters, forcing the
viewer to edge closer to decipher what is being said. For example, when Araceli –
his friend and confidante – surprises the crouching protagonist reading
passages of the Bible in the piñata store, the viewer cannot really apprehend
what the characters say because of the amplification of the background noise
of traffic that surrounds the locale. Another example occurs in the scene when
Don Cleo comes upon Polocho, a youth who sells bread and tries to convince
him to buy a wristwatch of dubious origin and to join him on a journey to the
north (the United States). Again, the ambient noise of the hustle and bustle of
the surrounding traffic is amplified, so much that the viewer must physically

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María del Carmen Caña Jiménez

move closer to the screen to better discern their conversation. The disjunction
between the loud sounds and the slow candour of their dialogue may also be
interpreted as a portrayal of the acceleration of daily life in San Salvador that is
imposed onto its inhabitants. This, following Barker’s notion of musculature, is
a clear example of the corporal participation of the viewer vis-à-vis the diegesis.
The viewing experience follows Elsaesser and Hegener’s argument that ‘sound
has a much more encompassing role of actually and metaphorically anchor-
ing and stabilizing the spectator’s body (and self-perception as a perceiving
subject) in space’ (2010: 131). Here they echo Mirjam Schaub’s idea that

The main ‘anthopological’ task of hearing […] [is] to stabilize our body
in space, hold it up, facilitate a three-dimensional orientation and,
above all, ensure an all-around security that includes even those spaces,
objects and events that we cannot see, especially, what goes on behind
our backs. Whereas the eye searches and plunders, the ear listens in on
what is plundering us. The ear is the organ of fear.
(paraphrased in Elsaesser and Hegener 2010: 131)

The acceleration felt by Don Cleo and the spectator throughout Malacrianza is
nothing more than one of the symptoms of fear – a condition that afflicts both
laypeople in today’s El Salvador and Don Cleo as he carries a backpack as a
remembrance of the past. In the same way that he tells the doctor that ‘there yes it
hurts’, he confesses to Araceli that he is afraid. Fear, as Ahmed argues,‘announces
itself through an ontological statement, a statement a self makes of itself […]
“I’m frightened”’ (2004: 65, original emphasis). Fear portends pain, ‘project[ing] us
from the present into a future’ (2004: 65). Pain, therefore, serves as a leitmotiv that
establishes a linkage between the past, present and future. Furthermore,

the feeling of fear presses us into that future as an intense bodily expe-
rience in the present. One sweats, one’s heart races, one’s whole body
becomes a space of unpleasant intensity, an impression that overwhelms
us […] which may sometimes involve taking flight, and other times may
involve paralysis.
(Ahmed 2004: 65)

Fear produces a muscular and visceral reaction in the subject. Malacrianza gener-
ates the affective intensities that engender and coalesce as fear via a series of
cinematographic techniques that appeal to the affects of the spectator through
muscular gestures that thereby provoke a sensation of acceleration akin to that
which defines the social body portrayed in the film. The terror felt by Don Cleo
(and to an extent, the viewer), is evocative of Hannah Arendt’s notion that

terror is the realization of the law of movement […] terror is not simply
an emotional and psychological phenomenon but a physical one as well
in the sense of the physics and kinetics, a phenomenon related to […]
the ‘acceleration of reality’.
(quoted in Virilio 2012: 21)

The acceleration of reality that is experienced by Salvadoran society at large

is nothing more than the result of a rapidly changing economic ethos that,
while precipitously quickening the process of globalization and the appear-
ance of multiple and diverse forms of violence, is also evading the latency of
a past that is still very much afflicting the present. The Ray Bans that are put
over the protagonist’s eyes gesture towards the rapid shift from civil war to a

230   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

 Symptoms of a civil war

neo-liberal present, where rapid economic changes have not allowed for a
proper ‘healing’ of the afflictions and pain of the past, metonymically portrayed
by the ubiquitous backpack. The two accessories that best characterize Don
Cleo also represent a broader status quo.
Throughout this analysis, I argue that Malacrianza successfully portrays
the maladies that afflict the social body of El Salvador by repeatedly appeal-
ing to the corporality, affects and empathy of the spectator. A phenomeno-
logical reading has allowed an in-depth evaluation of the ethics and aesthetics
of the film, which are otherwise dismissed by more formalist readings. A
phenomenological approach has also allowed me to probe Podalsky’s ideas
that analysing the phenomenology of a film unveils the polysemantic real-
ity that is hidden beneath the purely scopic and that it is through these
affective circulations that the spectator is privy to the political reality hidden in
the apparently ‘apolitical and sensationalistic’ (Podalsky 2011: 7). Accordingly,
I defend Solís’s acting in the bank scene that was eviscerated by Ávalos. What
for Ávalos is nothing more than the mise-en-scène of ridicule and stupidity
in Don Cleo is, in a phenomenological reading, a clear representation of the
complete dismantling of a character who – as a victim of fear, pain and the
consequences of the war – is paralysed in the face of helplessness and terror.

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Suggested citation
Caña Jiménez, M. d. C. (2018), ‘Symptoms of a civil war: Affect, disease and
urban violence in Arturo Menéndez’s Malacrianza/The Crow’s Nest (2014)’,
Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas, 15:2, pp. 217–32, doi: 10.1386/
slac.15.2.217_1

Contributor details
María del Carmen Caña Jiménez is an assistant professor of Spanish at
Virginia Tech. She has published articles on issues of violence and aesthet-
ics in contemporary Latin American literature and cinema. She has co-edited
Horacio Castellanos Moya: El diablo en el espejo (Albatros, 2016) and a special
dossier in Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies on affect and film. She
has also edited a special issue of Hispanófila on violence in contemporary
Hispanic cultural production.
Contact: 332 Major Williams Hall, Virginia Tech, 220 Stanger St., Blacksburg,
VA 24061-0225, USA.
E-mail: canajime@vt.edu

María del Carmen Caña Jiménez has asserted her right under the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in
the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

232   Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas

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