SNUFF AND ART

An interview with Enrique Arroyo
By Ana Peraica, 8 December 2007

What do you think a production of snuff moviesA snuff film, or snuff movie, depicts the actual killing of a human being - a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetrated for the medium of film for the purpose of entertainment and distribution ... in contemporary culture indicates about our culture? Namely, this type of movie has started to appear widely only when the equipment was made cheaper. Do you know it existed even before video times or it is rather a product of the contemporary society that has started to consume death?

The first information about snuff films I found, is from the 1920s in the United States, from Hollywood. It was shot on 16mm. I don´t think snuff films are a product of video technology; I think video technology has made them accessible. They are easier to make and to distribute, and the Internet is a fertile medium for that purpose. Unfortunately, I don´t think “societies need to consume death”, as you put it, is a product of this era, either. History shows that “dead spectacles”, have been popular in most societies. The Romans and their Coliseum could be an example. Do I think this says something about human kind? Yes I do, but that’s an entirely different discussion.

It seems that there were more snuff moviesA snuff film, or snuff movie, depicts the actual killing of a human being - a human sacrifice (without the aid of special effects or other trickery) perpetrated for the medium of film for the purpose of entertainment and distribution ... recorded in Mexico than discussions of these women who got killed? Has your film that actually enters into the genre and talks about the problem made some differences?

The other American dream, the short film we made, talks about a problem in a town called Ciudad Juárez, that is in the border of México and the United States. By the time we started production there had been more than 350 women murdered, and more than 500 disappeared. In México these women are known as “las muertas de Juárez”, the dead women of Juárez – and the first one appeared in 1993. We started production in 2004, eleven years after the first murder. Our short is not specifically about snuff film-making, although that happens in the short. Our film wanted to address the bigger issue of “las muertas de Juárez”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_homicides_in_Ciudad_Ju%C3%A1rez By the time we had finished our investigation there were eight reasons for the murdered women: drug trade, human smuggling, violent sexual crimes, passion crimes, satanic religious cults, organ smuggling, snuff films, and I´m forgettingAmnesia is the partial or total inability to recall past experiences; may be of organic or emotional origin (Sadock, 2003) ... one. There are people in jail for committing all these sorts of crimes, and there are dead women who were victimsIn different sciences the term victim has different meanings. The term is most often use in criminology, religion, psychotherapy and New Age context ... of these crimes. When we were writing the script, we tried to include all the reasons for the “muertas de Juárez”. To my knowledge, snuff films account for a very small percentage of the “muertas de Juárez”. This is determined by the type of dead they had, and I had the chance to read the forensic reports, in which the doctors explained how they died.

When we finished the film, we sent it out to a lot of organizations based in Ciudad Juárez, and in Chihuahua, the state to which Ciudad Juárez belongs, at the request of one of the mothers who had lost her 16 year old girl to the crimes in Juárez. They had been trying to generate a social conscience in our country for years, against the crimes, and she, along with other mothers who have an organization for this purpose, thought our film could help in raising awareness of the problem. That is the reason why we made it, so we were happy to comply. And they achieved their goal: the crimes were recognized by all the society, there were lots of discussions about it, about the horrors, and the government had to take a hand in stopping them. Although the crimes of Juárez have not completely stopped, they have been almost eradicated.

I've heard the jury went out on one of screenings. Somehow this makes me conclude that not only are there people consuming violent deaths for real, but also there are others that deny what happens, turning their heads away. What do you find worst?

You are asking me to make a moral judgment, and to assign guilt, and that is something I'm not prepared to do. But we have a saying in México, I´ll put it in Spanish and try to translate it: “Tanta culpa tiene el que mata la vaca, como el que le jala la pata”. In English it means something like: “the one who holds the cow is just as guilty as the one who kills it”. If you want to assign guilt, I think we are all guilty, as a society, for not stopping this sooner.