Manifesting La Historia : Systems of 'Development' and the New Latin American Cinema Manifesto

Abstract

New Latin American Cinema both feeds into and is fed by the contentious and at times contradictory nature of Latin American culture, social politics, and economy. Manifesto documents, theoretical statements made by the filmmakers-cultural activists themselves, like the film texts, tell a story and, in so doing, recover parts of Latin America's past, its historical narrative, that oftentimes go unnoticed.' julianne Burton, recognizing the confluence of the filmmakers' theoretical statements and the derivation of those theories from the concrete practice of filmmaking under specific historical conditions, points to a glaring omission by mainstream critical theory to account for this body of cinema, another instance of the asymmetrical nature of cultural exchange between the developed and underdeveloped spheres (Marginal 4). Zuzana Pick similarly characterizes the New Latin American manifestoes' theoretical objectives, centered on a politics of representation grounded in the consciousness of (New 18). Orientations toward we shall see, become the crux of conceptualizing Latin America. In the late 1950s, studies of underdevelopment in Latin American and Caribbean nations and the whole global region suggested that progress could only be attained through the particular types of modern progress acquired in the Western industrialized nations. Coincidentally, the technocratic and aesthetic dominance of Hollywood continued pushing across the Americas and the globe. The earliest manifestoes of the New Latin American Cinema address this intersection of art, social politics, and global markets through their articulations of development and revolution. In some readings, New Latin American Cinema's revolutionary resistance to imperialistic forms of development are translated as militant, invoking the violence and aggression highlighted by sensationalistic media coverage of the region; militance, however, figures into the revolutionary quality of these manifestoes as they presage the perturbation of newly-found consciousness, Ia conciencia, in and arising from the cultural expressions.2 This consciousness-building, far from simply emulating the socialist-state model from which the United States has cited a threat, reveals a long-standing process of democratization in the global region and particular Latin American nations. As David Williams Foster argues, in spite of the political rhetoric of the documents and paradoxes in continental character, clear correspondences exist among the position of the manifesto-writing, the need for social transformation, and the process of redemocratization in Latin America (467-8).3 As a part of this democraticizing project, these manifestoes redraw and reveal how New Latin American films depict tropes of development, sometimes in revision and revaluation of official discourses. In this essay, I examine the function of formative New Latin American Cinema manifestoes and argue that in their reassessment of the tropes of development, the manifestoes critique dominant conceptualizations of the global region and individual countries of Latin America. The terms of these manifestoes-Aesthetics of Hunger, Underdevelopment, Revolution, Imperfect Cinema, and Third Cinema-are historically situated in nationalist contexts, and yet they are capable of accounting for the hetereogeniety of aesthetic and ideological aspects of the New Latin American Cinema movement, as Zuzana Pick and Coco Fusco acknowledge (Pick New 22, 56; Fusco Reviewing 7). Re-reading with hindsight these relatively well-known manifestoes-written by Glauber Rocha, Fernando Birri, Jorge Sanjines, julio Garcia Espinosa, and Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino between 1965 and 1976-in dialogue with contemporary political contexts and prevailing social theories reveals the theoretical and aesthetic aims of New Latin American Cinema and its relationship to the culture, socio-politics, and economy of a liberal, democratically-informed Latin America. …