Carlos Reygadas: In Search of a New Time (Yaroslav Vasiutkevych)

I've invited Yaroslav Vasiutkevych to write a letter to introduce the 2026 re-edition (revised and updated) of his 2024 book on Carlos Reygadas (Carlos Reygadas: In Search of a New Time). It is illustrated by his daugther, Zlata Vasiutkevych, with beautifully eerie paintings from Reygadas's photograms. It is available in English, but also in Spanish, in Italian and in Ukrainian (see the QRcodes on page 2 of the English version linked above).

Illustration from the book : Zlata Vasiutkevych

Yaroslav Vasiutkevych writes :

Carlos Reygadas: In Search of a New Time

When I first encountered the films of Carlos Reygadas, for a long time I placed them alongside other works of auteur cinema, cinema that positions itself in opposition to genre conventions and, above all, to the tradition of American filmmaking. Long takes, weakened narrative, the absence of conventional plot dynamics, and the slow unfolding of events on screen can all be found in the work of many filmmakers operating outside classical narrative cinema.

But my encounter with Silent Light changed the way I perceived Reygadas. In this film, I sensed the presence of another element, one that became the key to his cinema for me: the concept of the Miracle.

Cinema is capable not only of recording the reality that exists before the camera. In some difficult-to-explain way, it can allow the viewer to see or sense what lies beyond that immediate reality: the transcendent and the eternal, something that does not submit to profane time. From my point of view, it is precisely through this possibility that one can come especially close to the world of Reygadas.

From this also emerges a particular experience of time in his films. Cinema becomes a kind of machine for the perception of time. It does not literally transport us into the past or the future, but forces us to experience the present anew and, through it, brings us closer to what lies beyond immediate experience.

From this, the main lines of the book gradually took shape: time and duration, nature, space and the home, the body, non-professional actors, the camera, sound, and the relationship between the immanent and the transcendent. A special place is occupied by children and the child’s perception of the world, understood as a possibility of returning to the very beginning of nature and, at the same time, to the beginning of history, to a state of pre-History in which the world has not yet been finally divided into the rational and the irrational, the real and the miraculous, the profane and the sacred.

Another important theme for me is religiosity in everyday life. As the human being leaves behind the condition of the child, the animal, and the state of pre-History, they enter History and at the same time fall under the rule of mechanical, profane time, time that measures, disciplines, accelerates, and constantly reminds us of the finitude of human existence.

From my point of view, the modern world’s rejection of the Miracle and of the very possibility of the transcendent does not free the human being from the pressure of this time. On the contrary, the individual becomes even more dependent on its rhythm and its power. In order to cope with this pressure, new forms of religiosity become necessary, forms no longer necessarily connected with traditional religion. They emerge as secular, domestic, and everyday practices and rituals that help the individual, at least temporarily, to order existence, weaken the pressure of profane time, and find a form of inner resistance to its continuous movement.

These new forms of religiosity, arising after the loss of the Miracle and after the human being’s departure from the condition of pre-History, therefore become another important theme of the book.

A separate chapter is devoted to Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet and its relationship to Silent Light, a connection that is especially important precisely in the context of the Miracle.

I did not set out to write a book that would definitively “explain” Reygadas. I was less interested in a strictly scientific and methodological formulation of the problem or in constructing a closed theoretical system. What mattered much more to me was the emotional and cognitive dimension of knowledge, the possibility of approaching an understanding of the world and of oneself through Reygadas’s cinema.

What interested me was a careful movement outward from the film itself, from a particular shot, gesture, space, sound, or recurring motif, toward a broader interpretation and toward the viewer’s inner experience. For that reason, I see this book as existing somewhere on the border between film research, film theory, and personal essayistic reflection.

The 2026 edition gave me an opportunity to return to this study, to revise the English text, correct inaccuracies, and supplement the book with new visual material. But the central question remained the same: can cinema, while remaining an art of physical reality, somehow allow us to experience the presence of the Miracle, a touch of something that exists beyond profane time and immediate experience?

Yaroslav Vasiutkevych