ABSTRACT
After a rapid industrial, economic, educational and symbolic modernization during the 1960s, Mexico City’s countercultural spheres experienced a violent crackdown upon its musical spaces. Rock, which initially had made its appearance under state sponsorship as a way of gaining entry into (sanitized) global cultural flows, was quickly transformed into a tool against state-guided nationalism, an ‘organic’ phenomenon that rapidly led to social unrest due to bringing together youthful bodies into the same spaces. 1 The technological developments that led to the global explosion of counterculture also provided, besides the sounds of electronic music in rock, a powerful tool for the establishment of alternative forms of representation: Super 8mm film. 2 First introduced as a bourgeois commodity for family videos (and arguably always a contraption of privilege, as opposed to more horizontal technology in the form of musical instruments), Super 8mm film quickly became a tool for the counterculture, a weapon of ideological warfare whose intrinsic technical limitations made it the perfect medium to avoid capture by entertainment industries. 3 Super 8mm had the possibility of empowering movements of resistance, cultural representation and exploring non-industrial cinema, especially outside the context of Hollywood.
