Special Issue Introduction: Historical Reflections/Cinematic Projections of Latin American Film

Abstract

Looking for Latin American history: to interrogate the ideas of history1 and to at and through cinema is an appropriate way to address this first of two special issues of Film & Histon>34.1 devoted to Latin American film and history. We stand amidst profound debates over the modernity and postmodernity of Latin America and La Patria Grande-the Great Motherlands of the Americas-and their inhabitants, La Raza Cosmica.2 To look at the complex hybridization and, at times, contradictory and abrupt oppositionalities of the traditional and modern aspects of the Latin American-Caribbean global region and its nationstates requires interdisciplinarity;1 it requires an awareness of certain hazards and potential pitfalls; it requires reflecting on the past and projecting the future. Approaches to this mediated subject must contend against universalized or overdetermined definitions of film that purport meaning in form alone, but rather they can adopt the practical application of cinema within cultural, social, political, economic, and contexts of Latin America itself.4 Such approaches can redirect the typical route of similar studies from peripheralizing Latin America into an area study.5 This debate over modern Latin America, then, as Claudia Ferman, Roy Armes, among others aptly point out, has gravitated on two formidable and controversial issues: first, transnationalized cultural-expressive productions; and, second, the aesthetic-cultural correlation within national and transnational socio-political expressions (Ferman vii; Armes 21-50). The essays collected in this special issue, similarly, can be categorized along these lines as they enter into and carry forward this significant debate. The first two essays in this special issue confront the issues involved in the production of Latin American messages. Tamara Falicov, in her essay, U.S.-Argentine Coproductions, 1982-1990: Roger Corman, Aries Productions, 'Schlockbuster' Movies, and the International Market, examines the phenomenon of the international co-production and their viability as expressions of culIure and politics in Latin America. Falicov finds that United States-Argentine co-productions, although oftentimes filmed in Argentina, either erase or distort the representation of Argentina. Taking Roger Corman and Hector Olivera's team-productionsfrom sword and sorcery films to Two to Tango/Matar Es Morir un Poco (1988)-as her case study, Falicov argues that their production is markedly different from typical art-house co-productions in that typically they were not meant for international-festival audiences or marketed in both U.S. and Argentine markets and they were ultimately misrepresentations of Argentine society. At the root of these differences, as Falicov demonstrates, is the historically situated circumstance of international markets toward the end of the 20' century and, more specifically, the economic inequalities bound into the United States and Latin American film industries. (Hi)stories of Mexico: Fictional Re-creation of Collective Past on Television by Maria de los Angeles Rodriguez Cadena similarly looks at the issues of production of Latin America media, in this case through the culturally expressive form of telenovelas. Contemporary Mexican soap operas such as El Vuelo del Aquila ( 1994) and Senda de Gloria (1988) represent a specific period of collective knowledge, according to Rodriguez Cadena; as such, they foster an integration among their spectators and allow them to identify with the romantic heroes typically depicted in them. These soap operas, rooted in the past and burgeoning in the future, act as what Rodriguez Cadena classifies as historical kinetic murals, advancing the ideas of equality in Mexican tradition, verifying at times and contesting at other times official versions of Latin American history. Looking at contemporary televised historically oriented melodramas provides examples of how the production of Latin American media is influenced by national and international factors. …