Fabiola Torres-Alzaga’s Movie Magic

Film’s great fiction is its reliance on the persistence of human vision: our retinas retain an image for a split second before replacing it with a new one, allowing our brains to create the illusion of a continuous moving sequence. Fabiola Torres-Alzaga has dedicated years to a filmmaking practice that interrogates the illusion of the still-image-as-film. But, unlike most expanded or anti-illusion cinema, her work doesn’t reject the spectator’s absorption in the immaterial world onscreen; it stages an encounter between the filmic apparatus and its ability to serve as a portal to other places and times, between the mechanics of the illusion and the illusion itself.

In the 12-minute video The Uninvited (2023), which also lends its name to the title of her show at the Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, Torres-Alzaga uses a single long take to film the inside of a house. Her framing of the space draws from film noir aesthetics: high contrast black and white, labyrinthine takes, beautifully dramatic lighting and shadows. Though there are no people in frame, we slowly get the sense that the house is populated by something else – a ghost lurking behind the tight shots of foggy windows, rustling curtains and opening doors. The camera then pans to reveal the film set: the metal bars, wires, fans, camera dolly and other intricate workings involved in creating fictional paranormality on screen.

Torres-Alzaga has probed and deconstructed the mechanics of cinema and the histories of cinematic effects in previous works such as Staging (2015), a looped video which alternates between shots of a sphere that appears to be floating and of the base that is actually supporting it. As much as Torres-Alzaga manifests a clear investment in the materiality of filmic tricks, she never relinquishes a fascination for the magic resulting from them. ‘The Uninvited’ is the result of her research into the regulation of 1950s Hollywood cinema under the Hays Code – a set of moral guidelines that, between 1934 and 1968, dictated what could and could not be shown on screen – and into the dissident spectral presences that managed to slip in through the cracks. That which is absent, excluded and unseen – what Torres-Alzaga thinks of as cinema’s hauntings – finds visibility in the space outside of the frame, once cinema has been revealed as a kinetic illusion and its viewers free to explore the kaleidoscopic possibilities of looking.

The adjacent gallery evokes a kind of apparitional set through the use of sculptural forms and drawings that anatomize the mechanics of the mise-en-scène shown on video. The space is dark except for the LED lights illuminating Set 1 and Set 2 (both 2024), partial models of doorways and walls supported by scaffolding. But where the installation in The Uninvited attempted to create the illusion of wholeness for the filmic shot, these sculptures make explicit the visual reductions and cuts that compose the incomplete reality of the frame, allowing viewers physically to move through its blind spots. The sculptures cast sharp shadows onto the walls where hang two graphite drawings, Fragments of the Fourth Wall (Branch) and Fragments of the Fourth Wall (Curtain) (both 2024). Each depicts a tool of cinematic artifice: a curtain, used to create a world of expanded space in the absence of windows, and a metal pipe from which to hang lights, scenery and drapes.

This ability to deconstruct film in terms of its moving parts is neither an attempt by the artist to dismantle dominant cinema nor to purge its magic. In the second part of the video, when the camera is moving through the film set, flickers of light particles glint amid the production gadgets. The ghost in the house has been revealed as a hoax, but Torres-Alzaga nonetheless urges us to dwell in the supernatural – the space of wonder and marvel between what is seen and what is still to be imagined.

Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, ‘The Uninvited’, is on view at Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City, until 23 February 2025

_{Main image: Fabiola Torres-Alzaga, ‘The Uninvited’, 2024, exhibition view. Courtesy: the artist and Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo}