A Writing Haunted by Cinema: The Film Theories of Three Latin American Fictions

Abstract

Ontology's OutsidersThe film-theoretical work of Latin American writers is far from absent in anglo- and francophone film studies. Perhaps the most anthologized text that appears alongside canonical names like Bazin, Bordwell, and Mulvey is Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's manifesto Toward a Third Cinema.1 Joining these Argentinian filmmakers behind the classic documentary La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Octavio Getino, Fernando E. Solanas, AR, 1968) is Brazil's Glauber Rocha, who contributed to the search for a film praxis that both stood outside and opposed Hollywood's imperialism with pieces like Aesthetic of Hunger and films like Antonio Das Mortes/Black God, White Devil (FR/BR/DE, 1969). Two similarities between these writings, besides their contemporaneity and resonance with the events of May 1968, stand out: they were written by filmmakers with an eminent body of work and they are about Latin American cinema.These common features are indicative of certain tendencies within the context of European and North American academic film studies. Hispano- and lusophone writings on the nature of cinema from Latin America are usually relevant to the hegemonic centers of the when filmmakers whose work is already under study wrote them, or when they supply inroads to understanding Latin American cinema itself.2 Film theory from the region is thus quickly folded into area-specific cinematic research, and while it would be counterproductive to object to those approaches, it is impossible to shake a growing sense of territorialization. Solanas, Getino, and Rocha are what Francesco Casetti would call field theorists of film, or public intellectuals whose theoretical work is inseparable from their political and cultural criticism.3 Insistently tasking these writers with representing the cultural particularities of their regional cinema obstructs the realization that their writings might also strive for sharable, cross-cultural generality. Like Fredric Jameson's suggestion that all third-world texts are necessarily allegorical because they always seek to complete, through storytelling, an unformed national identity (a remark that Jameson himself acknowledges as sweeping),4 there is a tacit exclusion of Latin American voices from certain domains of theoretical thinking. In the case of film studies (to continue with Casetti's categories), the voices are excluded from the realm of ontological theory, where they could construct conceptual models of the unobservable underlying reality.5Their absence involves more than one kind of language barrier. Looking for texts that establish frameworks to define cinema's existence and reconstructing them through a close reading and a careful translation is a necessary step in repairing the gap. Here, however, I want to locate theories of cinema within genres of writing that do not replicate the structures and methods of the canonical texts, and to suggest that the relative dearth of paradigms of film ontology from Latin America has been not only a matter of linguistics, differing modernities, and unbalanced power dynamics between geopolitical entities, but also one of approach to the very task of theory-creation.To identify these diverging methodologies, Christian Keathley lays out a useful distinction when he proposes a form of film writing (the cinephiliac anecdote) that attempts to overcome the conundrum most eloquently delineated by Roland Barthes:Either to posit a reality which is entirely permeable to history, and ideologize; or . . . to posit a reality which is ultimately impenetrable, irreducible, and, in this case, poeticize. . . . We constantly drift between the object and its demystification, powerless to render its wholeness. For if we penetrate the object, we liberate it but we destroy it; and if we acknowledge its full weight, we respect it, but we restore it to a state that is still mystified.6Hence Keathley diagnoses the state of cinema studies at the turn of the 21st century and sees the balance unmistakably tilted within Barthes's tension between ideologizing and poeticizing. …