Affecting the audience through motion pictures: The cinematography of 'Amores Perros' (ePub)

Amores Perros (2000) is the first feature film of Mexican Filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu. Released in 2000 at the Cannes Film Festival, the movie won the Prize of the Critic's Week at Cannes. It was the first Mexican film after 25 years that entered an Oscar competition. By referring to specialist magazine Cine XS (Flores-Durán and Pedroza, 2000) Paul Julian Smith explains that 'Amores Perros is representative of a 'new trend' in Mexican cinema' (Smith, 2003, p. 25). The film not only won a lot of prizes at international film festivals, it was also very successful at the box offices. It earned $ 10 million in Mexico, $ 5 million in the US and $20 million worldwide (Smith, 2003, p. 13). 'The critical and commercial success of González Iñárritu's film comes at a time when the Mexican film industry appears to be going through its worst period since the early 1930s' (D'Lugo, 2003, p. 221). But what makes this film so successful? The brilliant narration, the strong soundtrack, the outstanding cinematography and special marketing strategies could be factors for its success. The cinematic and editing techniques used in this movie are very different from films of former Latin American filmmakers. In this essay, I would like to concentrate on the cinematography of Amores Perros and analyse how it creates meaning and supports the story and the characters. I will start with general information about the movie and sum up the plot very briefly. After that, I will begin the analysis of the cinematography and give some background information about the production. Firstly, I want to give some general information about the specific cinematographic techniques used in Amores Perros and then I would like to analyse several sequences more properly. The opening sequence will be analysed accurately, then I concentrate on several key-scenes.