The Secret Formula · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Six men lie in a row on gurneys, each with a tube in his arm. The bottles above them hold Coca-Cola. Nobody reacts. No doctor arrives to explain, no character objects, and the film never cuts to a scene that would place this inside a story. It just holds, lit with the care a studio would have spent on a saint.

Hold that image. It is among the most reproduced pictures in Mexican cinema, and it is the clearest way into what Rubén Gámez actually invented in forty minutes of black and white.

Start with what the shot is made of. Gámez photographs in the vocabulary of the Mexican school — deep focus, low horizon, filtered black sky, the peasant head sculpted in three-quarter light. Gabriel Figueroa codified that look with Emilio Fernández; it descends from Eisenstein's Mexican footage and from Paul Strand's fishermen in Redes, monumentalized in low profile against open sky. By 1965 those compositions were national brand images. An audience read them automatically: dignity, endurance, the land, us.

Deleuze, borrowing from the logician Peirce, has a plain name for an object that means something because of the chain it usually sits in. He calls it a mark. See the low horizon and the noble face, and you know what is supposed to follow. He also has a name for whatever enters that chain and won't fit: a demark, an anomaly that breaks the habit and forces you to interpret instead of recognize. The tube in the arm is a demark. So is the row of gurneys under a sky built for pride. That is the film's engine, and it runs the whole length. Gámez doesn't reject the beautiful national image. He shoots it impeccably, then shows you it was always available for other uses.

Why bring Deleuze to a film with no story? Because his two cinema books aren't a theory of plots. They are a taxonomy of what images do: perceive, feel, act, relate, think. Most movies let you skip that question, since the plot carries you past it. This one has no plot to carry you. It has blocks of imagery, a voice that refuses to match them, and an argument. There is nothing to attend to except what the images are doing, which is precisely the thing Deleuze built his vocabulary for.

The men on the gurneys are not characters and they do not act. In Deleuze's scheme this is an attraction-image: action transposed into staged figure, the shot posed so that it argues rather than advances. He takes the term from Eisenstein's montage of attractions, a staged shock placed to produce a thought. Figures stare down the lens, too, the way Vigo aimed frontality in À propos de Nice as accusation rather than description. Then Gámez cuts. Transfusion to slaughterhouse: carcasses swinging in cold high-contrast monochrome, Franju's Le sang des bêtes down to the tonal split between the atrocity onscreen and the unhurried literary voice above it. Two shots sharing no space, no time, no person. You supply the third term. That is the Soviet dialectical line in Deleuze's account of montage: shots collide and a new quality jumps out that was in neither one. Gámez took both halves from ¡Que viva México!, the icon set and the collision principle together.

This puts him on the far side of the argument Bazin was winning at the time. Bazin's case for realism was that the shot should keep the world intact, ambiguity and all, and that cutting for meaning was a species of lying. Gámez shoots like a Bazinian and cuts like an Eisensteinian. Real terrain, real bodies, no sets, studio-grade photography. And then meaning made entirely in the gaps. Buñuel's Las Hurdes had done this in 1933: photograph real hunger straight, then detonate it with a commentary track pitched wrong on purpose. Un chien andalou taught the other half — assert an outrageous image flatly, once, with no causality offered to soften it. A tube of Coca-Cola in a farmer's vein is that lesson applied to economics.

Under the fields and the clinic there is an abattoir, and Deleuze would call it an originary world: the ordinary milieu peeled back to show appetite underneath, feeding and slaughter, the drives the social surface rests on. Gámez reaches for the Catholic repertoire that saturates Mexican visual culture, the sacrificial body and the procession and the cross, and reroutes all of it toward consumption and extraction. The sacrifice is still being performed. Only the recipient changed.

Now the sound, which is the film's second author. Nothing on the track confirms anything in the picture. Over the images runs a text by Juan Rulfo, the writer who had already given Mexico its definitive account of rural abandonment, delivered in Jaime Sabines's voice: understatement, grievance held very still. Deleuze's word for this arrangement is heautonomy — image and sound each become a whole in its own right and communicate only across the gap between them. Rulfo's text would stand as literature with no film beneath it. The images would stand as photographs with no voice. Neither illustrates the other, and the mismatch is the argument: the country described is not the country shown. Nobody onscreen speaks these words and nobody answers them. It isn't dialogue. It is what Deleuze calls a speech-act, testimony laid over a landscape that cannot reply.

All of which arrives at his late concept of the lectosign, the image that has stopped cueing action and now asks to be read. His usual examples are difficult European films of the seventies. Gámez got there in 1965 by a different road, and the rhythm does half the work: long static holds that dare you to keep looking, then bursts of percussive assembly. Each shot is built to be read as a sign rather than joined to the next by continuity.

Read that way, the real subject surfaces. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema begins when a filmmaker can no longer speak for a people that already exists and knows itself. The people are missing, and the film has to work inside that absence. The Golden Age had supplied a people, or an image of one, and licensed a shrinking roster of directors to keep printing it. Gámez shoots the same faces with the same light and shows you what is being pumped into them. Coca-Cola en la sangre. The bodies are present; the nation they were made to stand for is not. The film poses that problem and refuses to close it, which is what Deleuze means by an image carrying a discourse it cannot resolve.

The circumstances sharpen it. This was not guerrilla 16mm. Mexico's union controlled the 35mm cameras, the labs, and entry to the profession itself; the First Experimental Film Competition cracked the door, and Gámez walked in, made an insurgent film on the establishment's own equipment with the establishment's own gloss, and took first prize. He made one more feature in his life. His body of work is essentially a single gesture delivered once, and it became the hinge between a calcified studio system and every Mexican cinema that followed.

Watch it again for the sky. Once you have seen the tube in the arm, the sky stops being a backdrop and becomes a question — the same question the title asks and never answers. Coca-Cola's formula is the most famous trade secret in the world. National character is the other kind of secret: the kind everyone claims to know already.