At the Top of Grasshoppers Hill (Trailer)

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Organized in three chapters, this essayistic film examines the overlapping narratives in Mexico City surrounding the Second French Empire’s invasion in Mexico in 1861 and the 1968 state-sponsored student massacre at Tlatelolco, tracing the densities and accruals of time, history, and memory, and the power structures and technologies that produce them as such.

Using the examples of the National History Museum (which was once the Imperial residence of Emperor Maximilian and Empress Carlota), the site of the 1968 student massacre at Tlateloloco (which was also the site of the last massacre of the Aztecs in 1521), and the National General Archives (which was once a panoptic prison called The Black Palace), this work questions how the remnants of national memory and cultural heritage can be mobilized, co-opted, and diffused through images and their circulation.

I trace a single moment in which I encountered a display about the 1968 student protests against the government within the National History Museum, void of any acknowledgement of the state-sponsored massacre that occurred ten days before the first ever Olympics in a Spanish speaking nation.

The film is told through the voice of Empress Carlotta as she feigns for and chastises her husband, the puppet ruler Emperor Maximilian. Adapted from the novel News From the Empire by Fernando Del Paso, her narration travels through time, noting the developments of new military technologies, and chronicles the advent of modernity. I position her lulling voice to slip between contexts between the death of Maximilian and the totalitarian regimes of the 60’s and 70’s in Mexico, intercutting footage of Hollywood-esqe films about the student massacre as well as footage shot in 16mm by the military themselves.

Through the visual permutations across these three chapters and their relationship to these institutional sites of remembrance, these filmic genealogies and this work itself, becomes a meditation on the question of the medium of film, photography and vision as modes of constructing national memory.

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