'New' Latin American Cinema and Authorship: Old Wine in New Bottles?

Abstract

By analysing the recent work of three of the mainstays of the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s — the Argentine Fernando Solanas, the Cuban Julio García Espinosa, and the Bolivian Jorge Sanjinés —, this article focuses on the notion of film authorship to question these filmmakers' uses of it as a means of lending historical depth and narrative continuity to their careers, which are indissolubly linked to their respective political and ideological agendas. In parallel, and given the persistence of a socially committed Latin American cinema that is manifest not just in the films of such 'classic' directors but also in those of a new generation of Latin American filmmakers, this paper ponders the possibilities and the reach of reading such a cinema from an auteur-oriented critical perspective. Furthermore, given the prominence and importance of film authorship throughout the history of Latin American cinema, the article asks to what extent these directors' recent productions — and indeed the whole 'New Latin American Cinema' project itself — really do constitute a clean break with their previous work, or whether they are simply recycling tried-and-tested strategies.