Politics & Power Quote by Manuel Puig

Puig’s complaint lands like a scalpel because it targets the most flattering story cinema tells about itself: that it “captures” life. He’s not rejecting realism; he’s rejecting the lazy conflation of realism with mere replication. “The intention is to understand a certain reality” points to a noble ambition - art as inquiry, not decoration. Then comes the gut-punch: what we get is “nothing but a photographing.” The verb choice is surgical. Photographing implies a neutral, mechanical act: record, reproduce, move on. Understanding, by contrast, demands selection, distortion, emphasis - the risky work of interpretation.

The subtext is Puig’s broader suspicion of mass culture’s smooth surfaces. As a novelist who famously absorbed and rewired popular forms, he understood how images can seduce viewers into mistaking recognition for knowledge. Modern American cinema, in his view, offers the comfort of the already-legible: social reality presented as a set of visuals you can consume, not a problem you have to think through. It’s critique aimed at technique, but also at ideology: a culture that prefers documentation over confrontation because confrontation might reveal contradictions it can’t easily resolve.

Context matters: Puig is writing from a Latin American vantage point, shaped by political volatility and a literary tradition (and moment) that demanded that art wrestle with power, desire, and social masks. Against that pressure, a cinema satisfied with “photographing” looks less like realism than like avoidance - an aesthetic of surfaces that pretends to be depth.