The Five Suns: A Sacred History of Mexico

Produced by Patricia Amlin. 59 min. Color. 1996. Available as: VHS and DVD Captioned: No Catalog #: 0019 Order this title Sale Price: $295.00 Apply for Discount

This new "artistic and intellectual triumph" is by Patricia Amlin, the extraordinary animator who created our widely honored and best-selling film, "Popol Vuh: The Creation Myth of the Maya." Just as "Popol Vuh" took authentic images from ancient Maya ceramics and turned them into a riveting retelling of the Maya creation myth, so "The Five Suns" employs authentic pre-Columbian Aztec iconography to depict the most important creation myths and sacred stories of the Aztecs and other Nahuatl-speaking peoples of ancient central Mexico.

All imagery derives from the colorful and brilliant art style of late post-Classic Mexico (A.D. 1250-1521), as taken from the body of pre-Conquest codices known collectively as the Borgia Group. These ancient screenfold books are filled with detailed and vivid scenes of native calendrics, rituals, mythical events, and cosmology.

"The Five Suns" tells how Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca create heaven and earth, journey to the underworld to create humans and find sustenance for them, and finally create the sun and the moon. Like all creation stories, this one provides mythic answers to life's most perplexing questions and offers an ethical vision of how we should live.

"The Five Suns" is essential viewing in a wide variety of classes and at many educational levels. it was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Reviews

"An impressive achievement! The film combines scholarly rigor and accuracy with great artistry and beauty. The filmmakers are entirely adept in the conventions and style of the period, and it is truly wonderful to see this brilliantly colored artwork come alive in sound and motion." -- Karl Taube, Prof. of Anthropology, Univ. of California, Riverside

"An amazingly happy combination of scholarly accuracy and artistic quality. I presently use the Popol Vuh film in two separate courses, but the combination of it with this new film will provide me with a wonderful introduction for students to two important Mesoamerican mythologies and a vivid 'compare and contrast' showcase for two different Mesoamerican artistic styles. -- Peter L. van der Loo, Prof. of Humanities and Religious Studies, Northern Arizona Univ.

Awards

• "Special Jury Citation," Native Americas Intl. Film Exposition, Santa Fe
• Society for Visual Anthropology Award
• American Anthropological Assn. honoree
• American Society for Ethnohistory honoree