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The sordid is not an ideology, an affect, or even a form of taste or sensibility. It is, Agustin 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-scene, spectatorship, genre, and language.