Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes Micah Mckay Fornoff, Carolyn and Gisela Heffes, eds. Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema. State U of New York Press, 2021. xiii + 361 pp. ISBN 978-1-4384-8404-4. What can the consummately human medium of film—movies are, of course, made by and for human beings—tell us about the needs, perspectives, and realities of nonhuman beings? And what can film do to interrogate its own seemingly inherent anthropocentrism? These are two of the fundamental questions addressed in Carolyn Fornoff and Gisela Heffes's edited volume Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema, the first book to bring to bear the preoccupations of ecocriticism, new materialism, and posthumanism on the study of Latin American film and an essential contribution to the burgeoning field of environmentally-minded Latin American cultural studies. To name just one other recent example, Lucy Bollington and Paul Merchant's edited volume Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020) shares with Pushing Past the Human the desire to show how Latin American cultural texts can help us see beyond the notion of the human in order to better understand our place in the larger web of life. But, as Fornoff and Heffes put it in the introduction to their volume, this emerging critical enterprise highlights the fact that the epistemological move "beyond the human" does not mean leaving the human or human concerns behind; rather, it "warn[s] against losing sight of the human altogether" and "dramatiz[es] the inextricability of planetary care and social justice" (12). The productive tension between human and nonhuman concerns, social justice and planetary care, is one of the elements that gives Pushing Past the Human a sense of coherence and a sense of urgency in the context of ongoing and ever-accelerating environmental crises that are exacting heavy ecological and social tolls. Pushing Past the Human gathers together fifteen essays (including the introduction) written by scholars whose institutional homes are largely found in universities in the Unites States and Europe. Fornoff and Heffes's introduction makes a clear and concise argument for cinema's unique ability to allow viewers to consider the world beyond anthropocentric perspectives through technological innovations and filmmaking techniques that disrupt human timescales and represent ecological relationships that are difficult for the human sensorium to fully grasp. What is more, Fornoff and Heffes make a compelling case for the ability of Latin American cinema in particular to intervene in the theoretical and political debates of ecocriticism and posthumanism due to the region's history of colonialism, its experience of extractive capitalism, and the various modes of decolonial, and posthumanist thought that those experiences have given rise to (they engage, for instance, with Macarena Gómez-Barris's notion of "submerged perspectives" and Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's distillation of Indigenous people's experiences of the end of the world). In addition to providing a solid theoretical grounding for the volume, the introduction offers useful information about the development of ecocinema in Latin America and the wide array of film festivals that showcase it. The volume's other fourteen essays are divided into three thematic sections that address questions of cinematic genre, the staging of human/nonhuman difference, and [End Page 162] indigeneity. The first of these, "Genre Beyond the Human," features essays on the road movie, disaster films, documentary, and slow cinema. By paying close attention to the conventions of each of these genres (and the ways the films each author studies push against those conventions), these chapters offer valuable insights on, for example, the damages wrought by extractivism in the Brazilian Amazon (Patrícia Vieira) and the way cinematic depictions of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake are paradigmatic examples of Anthropocene cultural texts because they stage the interaction between deep time and human history in a way that complicates clear distinctions between "natural" and "human-made" catastrophes (Fornoff). The five chapters in "Encountering Difference," the volume's second section, engage with portrayals of animals raised for slaughter, the vibrant materiality of objects in film animation, lush rural landscapes...