Product details
- ISBN 9798899480133
- Weight: 454g
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 16 Mar 2026
- Publisher: Northwestern University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The sordid is not an ideology, an affect, or even a form of taste or sensibility. It is, Agustín Zarzosa argues, an image and an evocation of the process of degradation. The Sordid Image: The Naturalist Cinema of Arturo Ripstein and Paz Alicia Garciadiego offers the first sustained study of this pivotal filmmaker-screenwriter pair, drawing on their multidecade collaborations to reframe an enduring problem of film theory: how to represent marginalized people.
Together, Ripstein and Garciadiego have constructed a recognizable cinematic world filled with social outcasts, characterized by self-degradation and unreason, and set within squalid environments. Inscribing the Ripsteinian universe within the literary and cinematic traditions of naturalism, this book theorizes the notion of the sordid to examine the partners' unique and epoch-defining films. We can, Zarzosa contends, understand the sordid as a cinematic image, with its specific components and pleasures, recasting questions of authorship, mise-en-scène, spectatorship, genre, and language.
Agustin Zarzosa is an associate professor of cinema studies at Purchase College. He is the author of Refiguring Melodrama in Film and Television: Captive Affects, Elastic Sufferings, Vicarious Objects.
