Introduction

The interdependencies between film and the city have been the object of much critical investigation. Likewise, the lateral connections imposed or encouraged by urban existence have long been coded in terms of the dissolution of boundaries between the human and the machinic, with the city being understood as a technology for moulding the body to the forms of industrial manufacture and consumption. Latterly, the massive emergence of cybernetic cultures has collapsed at its very base the distinction between the sphere of industry – the technological transformation of the material world – and the (ideological) sphere of representations. If representations – in the form of information, styles, and codes – have become the ‘raw material’ on which the cyber economy does its work, and if all transformations of the material world (even and most especially biological processes) can be coded in terms of a problem of information processing, of obtaining the ‘correct’ representation, model, or simulation, then cultural forms such as film, originally an imaginary nexus between the individual and the collective (particularly the city), take on a new and profoundly allegorical character. This is the case, in very different ways, with the two principal Latin American cyborg films I shall be examining here: Guillermo del Toro's Mexican film Cronos of 1993, and Fernando Spiner's Argentine film La sonámbula of 1998. In the former, a uniquely Mexican baroque cyborg, which has its origins in narratives of colonisation, embodies the transgression of boundaries between nature and technology as a microcosm of the cultural fusions and transfusions of the megalopolis, and in particular of the vampiresque operations of multinational capitalism which threaten the loss of temporal depth and cultural memory. In the latter Argentine case, the overwhelming but socially disavowed presence of the dictatorship, coupled with a cultural current of engagement with cinema itself as the mechanical simulation of absent bodies, makes the cyborg into a figure for prosthetic, celluloid memory processes (including programmed amnesia). But before we can work out the allegorical dimension of these films, it is important to consider the specific meanings and potentialities of the cyborg figure for Latin American cultural practice.