Somewhere Beween Jalostotilan and Encarnation

“‘The bus stopped on the Mexican Highway placing us in full view of a young boy lying motionless on the hot pavement.’ Printed text derived from the filmmaker’s journals, outlines the incident and the artist’s dilemma about recording and representing death. The written passages punctuate Mexican village scenes, most of the images lasting twenty eight seconds, the ‘breath’ of a springwound Bolex camera.” Blaine Allan, A Play of History.
“The film concerns Hoffman’s inability to record the scene of a young boy’s death in Mexico. The film is structured around the absence of that image we most want to see. Paradoxically, it is the absence of the photographic record which captures Hoffman’s experience of the event most vividly.
The discussion following the films concerned the morality of Hoffman’s decision not to record the death scene. Don North, a war correspondent who makes a living recording this kind of tragic scene, felt that the film would have been stronger with the addition of the death. What North missed, I think, was the very structure this absence provided, and Hoffman’s implied critique of North’s type of filmmaking.” – Shelly Stamp, Systems in Collapse, Grierson Documentary Seminar 1984.