The State of Things: New Directions in Latin American Film History

Abstract

Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging “new” cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, “Our America”), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay, unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of “master histories” written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.