She Wants Revenge: Michelle Garza Cervera’s Scalpel-Sharp Filmmaking

by: Valeria Villegas Lindvall , February 6, 2024

Mexican state funding for filmmaking received a decisive boost with the introduction of the fiscal stimulus EFICINE 226/189 in 2007. However, out of 743 projects supported between 2007 and 2020, only approximately 40 were genre features (Villegas Lindvall 2021: 74). It is particularly provocative that out of the limited pool of supported projects within horror and fantasy, only three were directed by women: Eva Aridjis’s Los ojos azules/The Blue Eyes (2012), Issa López’s Vuelven/Tigers are not Afraid (2017) and Michelle Garza Cervera’s Huesera/The Bone Woman (2022). Huesera provides a clearly gendered reflection on nationality and the roles allotted to women within its grander scheme. It follows the story of Valeria, whose pregnancy is assailed by an entity only fathomable as ‘the Huesera’. This haunting is precipitated by Valeria’s revisiting of her past as a young punk and her encounter with her former lover Octavia, showcasing the suffocation she experiences within the confines of a distinctly national and normative model of heteronormative, maternal bliss.

Garza Cervera’s work marks not only a turning point in the production of genre films within the Mexican mainstream, but also illustrates the significance of anti-patriarchal co-authorship. Garza Cervera co-wrote Huesera with Abia Castillo, and they have a number of forthcoming projects together, including Palizada, La Hora Marcada, and their adaptation of Mariana Enríquez’s Ese verano a oscuras/That Summer in the Dark. This collaboration makes a case for the importance of creative coalition between women and underscores the need for scholarly attention to co-authorship. Garza Cervera and Castillo’s dissection of uneven power distributions, undertaken with scalpel-like precision, continues to open up the patriarchal wound instead of letting it fester.

Although an embargo at the time of making this videographic work hindered the creation of a project about  Huesera, this restriction has turned into a creative obstruction, as it called for an exploration of her short films instead. This has created space for for fruitful reflections about the recurrence of medical imagery in three of Garza Cervera’s short films, La otra mitad/The Other Half (2010), The Original (2018) and Vitriol (2017), all of which explore the different positions that women inhabit in medical scenarios arbitrated by men.  My video essay ‘She Wants Revenge’ illustrates the uncomfortable dynamics of attachment and detachment of the camera in Garza Cervera’s short films, a discomfort that results in a potent illustration of the symbolic and actual violence exercised on the feminised body.

The Other Half deals with the literal reification of the female skin by using unsuspecting subjects: an elderly woman at the hands of an elderly doctor. The Original illustrates the loss of the self under the surveilling eye of the medical establishment, which in the film continues to disenfranchise racialized, queer, feminised bodies. Lastly, Vitriol disrupts this cycle in that it is not embedded in an explicitly medical environment. As a part of the México Bárbaro II anthology, the film traces the story of a model sexually abused by a photographer. Vitriol conceives the gaze as constituted within national identity, weaponised as a device of patriarchal power and as a technology of control over the feminised body. It then reverts this control, reclaiming the face and the gaze.

Vitriol also draws kinship to Enríquez’s short story ‘Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego’/‘Things we Lost in the Fire’ (2016), in which women immolate themselves as a response to the brutal violence within which their bodies are routinely de-subjectivized. Enríquez’s short story and Garza Cervera’s short film both act as responses to necropolitical modes of governance that continue to de-subjectivize the feminised body and guarantee the reprisal of colonial modes of binary masculinity and femininity. As Sayak Valencia (2010, 2018) writes, by constituting a necromasculinity that guarantees these forms of violence, coloniality continues to mould contemporary and uneven distributions of power. Vitriol thus offers a fitting end to my video essay, as it illustrates resistance to seemingly inescapable misogynistic violences that is a feature, not a bug, of national identity.

‘She Wants Revenge’ demonstrates how Garza Cervera’s three short films progressively subvert the medical gaze and assert it as a gendered device of violence. The aesthetic premise of this work then sets out to replicate the discomfort that Garza Cervera’s imagery affords by adding a layer that comments on her versatile authorship. The music featured in the video essay is taken from Mostrame Lo Peor EP (2018) by Forra, a female punk band whose lineup includes Garza Cervera. This aesthetic choice highlights the nature of collective authorship and intimates the importance of cooperative dynamics of liberation—a punk gesture in nature. Forra are the sound of nails on a blackboard scored with heteronecropatriarchal (a term I borrow from Valencia) imperatives that mercilessly traverse the feminised, racialised and/or impoverished body. Therefore, in this work, I lean into the transformative practice of play, relying on the assaultive, discomfort of punk music to underscore the sharp social critique of the filmmaker’s work. As such, this audiovisual analysis is an exercise in disobedience. It refuses to adopt a chronological, linear trajectory to examine Garza Cervera’s work. Instead, it suggests we torch the edifice that is built on the mortification of the bodies represented in the filmmaker’s precise gaze.