The Visual Guillotine: The Cinematic Cut and Politics in Latin America, Thomas Matusiak, 2026, University of Minnesota Press
It seems appropriate to trace the contours of a new Latin American cinematic theory just as London hosts its inaugural Latino Film Festival from 1 to 6 October.
Author Thomas Matusiak does not shy from controversy in his examination of the politics of the moving image by taking as his point of departure how decapitation is represented.
Nor does he shrink from the analysis of such disturbing content as “Haz patria, mata un Zeta”—the first decapitation video to go viral in Mexico, uploaded to YouTube in 2006.
As violence began to erupt with the declaration by President Felipe Calderón of the “war on drugs”, this video launched a genre disseminating extreme brutality that has since transformed perceptions of, among others, narco-traffickers.
In The Visual Guillotine, however, decapitation has been given broader meaning: from the real acts of violence filmed by narco-traffickers to terrify enemies, to the cinematic cut and close up, whereby heads are figuratively separated from bodies as part of a montage.
The author traces this process from the perspective of a deep grounding in cultural theory, within which there are many writers who have acknowledged the separation of the head as a highly symbolic and meaningful notion.
Philosopher and literary critic Julia Kristeva, for example, traced the contemporary spectacle of the fragmented body to the ancient skull rites that marked the emergence of visual culture in her influential book The Severed Head.
The display by many ancient cultures of severed heads marked one of the first examples of public representation by converting the object into a signifier within new symbolic orders.
Thus it was with cinema in Latin America, argues Matusiak, who traces the politics of the cinematic cut back to the guillotine—an apparatus of execution celebrated for its use in revolutionary France, but also a metaphor for equipment used in the cutting room to splice film.
The guillotine, the author asserts, anticipates modern media by creating a spectacle of the body in pieces; through montage and close-ups, cinema is similarly an apparatus that continuously produces severed heads (“beheaded by the close-up”).
He writes: “As an instrument of revolution, the guillotine has come to symbolise the emergence of political modernity. With the decapitation of the king, power passed to the people, who surrounded the scaffold as a mass of spectators. Put differently, the cut that mechanically reproduced severed heads gave form to popular sovereignty.”
More importantly, he says, this inscription of symbolic violence in the audiovisual form is also a means of advancing political concepts that position the spectator as a political subject.
One reason for this, Matusiak argues, is that as a mass medium cinema has been one of the most transformative cultural forms of modernity, and from Mexico to Cuba and beyond, revolutions and radical movements that marked Latin America’s 20th century were accompanied by and institutionalised through it.
He writes: “The modern nation-state, positioning itself as the agent of Latin American modernity, wielded cinema as a tool of hegemony. By representing the national popular—‘the people’, el pueblo— they reinforced collective identity and secured the consent of the governed.”
Nonetheless, filmmakers also challenged the state through the screen, not least those who collectively articulated the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) that challenged the stylised images of the masses who served the state’s interests.
By structuring the hegemonic politics of national cinemas as well as the revolutionary inclinations of the NLAC, filmmakers aligned the politics of the cinematic cut with popular sovereignty, wielding the “visual guillotine” to create an image of “the people” as a spectator of revolutionary transformation.
Cinema’s relationship with politics would change dramatically from the late 1970s to the 1990s, with the rise of repressive dictatorships, neoliberal economic policies, and accelerated globalisation, as national film industries collapsed and filmmakers came under pressure to put commercial viability before politics.
The loss of state subsidies meant cinema survived through transnational financing and by appealing to international markets, and hence this period was a threshold separating the popular, autonomous and identity-led cinema of national film industries and the NLAC from the depoliticised global filmmaking of today.
Matusiak writes: “New conceptualisations of politics emerged in the 1990s, as neoliberalism provoked the crisis of the nation-state and the pueblo. The cinematic cut also mutated during this decade, with electronic and digital media displacing analogue film.”
Nonetheless, the author suggests, while Latin American film history tends to emphasise this rupture, his own account of the visual guillotine traces continuities in the politicisation of the audiovisual form in a contemporary cinema that is deeply disturbing for what it tells us, one example of which is the decapitation video.
He says: “The confluence of the severed head and audiovisual form returns in the images of explicit violence that have accompanied the unending cycle of global conflict in the 21st century.
“After the exhaustion of the concepts that defined political modernity—popular sovereignty, the nation-state, hegemony—the confluence of the severed head and the cut gives form to necropolitical configurations of power in the present.”
Necropolitics—a concept developed by the Cameroonian post-colonial historian Achille Mbembe—is a recognisable politics of the present driven by racism, by which entire marginalised and neglected populations are subjected to the status of the living dead.
Matusiak employs this notion to draw attention to the “weaponisation” of the cinematic cut by those who aim to paralyse the public sphere in their ethically unrestrained pursuit of capital through “horrorism”—what the Mexican philosopher Sayak Valencia terms “gore capitalism”.
Like-minded thinkers such as Rita Segato and Rossana Reguillo have also suggested that the severed heads and mutilated bodies that overshadow claims to neoliberal progress are not barbaric exceptions but merely the product of this systematic shift towards necropolitical sovereignty and gore capitalism.
Mexico, argues Matusiak, offers many examples of this genealogy towards horrorism in the moving image, with the resurgence of decapitation often reflecting the barbarism of narco-violence as a contemporary form of necropolitics—managing marginalised communities through death.
The author explores severed heads in a rich catalogue of films, not least those of the Argentinian filmmakers María Luisa Bemberg (El mundo de la mujer, 1972) and Lucrecia Martel (La mujer sin cabeza, 2008).
He has bravely taken the trouble to watch and analyse decapitation videos—which cannot have been easy—while drawing upon a rich corpus of theoretical work and entering a dialogue with such figures as Jean-Louis Comolli.
His book is both history and innovative theory, an exceptional and ground-breaking study of how Latin American filmmakers stage political concepts through the cinematic cut, while also demonstrating its continuity in the post-ideological era.
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