Turning Pages on Latin American Film and History Studies

Abstract

In a room, alone, with parchment in hand, Aureliano impatiently reads, skipping pages at a time, to decipher his own conception and to prophesize himself in the very act of reading, as if looking into a mirror. In his existence, we can see all of Latin and all of humanity. Thusly Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude draws to conclusion, with a reader knowing that a certain type of existence is created in the reading of a text and can end at the bottom of the last page. Perhaps this is an overly romantic image in which to introduce the second special issue of Film & History (34.2) on Latin American film and history or in which to describe the countless Latin-Americanist academics lost in the labyrinths of discipline-bound programs. In its one hundred years of history, has Latin American cinema experienced a similar form of solitude through that are symptomatic of the kinds of disciplinary insularity and institutional isolation that one witnesses in most of the area studies and especially of the marginalized, financially disadvantaged, and over-determinedly inferior third area? Does the mask that Octavio Paz describes as the shield one wears in the labyrinth of solitude to self-efface and defend oneself from the glare of the outside world fit Latin Americanists and the texts they read? Or has this tradition eroded in recent decades, as James C. Scott convincingly argues, as the transcripts, hidden behind disguise of the mask, have become themselves respectable public performances and socio-politically viable expressions? This second special issue on Latin can only reset the table for further discussions of these and other timely issues in contemporary Latin American studies. In its emphasis and through the articles collected herein, the issue does, however, assemble a collective of voices that reinvigorates the interdisciplinarity and collegial exchange necessary for Latin American to continue to progress in the 21st century. And, of course, these issues do not apply only to Latin American scholars, artists, and teachers, but they reach across the Amcricas and around the globe, to community-building and citizenship-formation required for our future, as William F. Flores articulates (15-17). Thus, these articles, the guest editors hope, appeal to readers of this journal and incite further investigations of this elusive field. In Teresa Hoefert de Turegano's The International Politics of Cinematic Coproductions: Spanish Policy in Latin America and Scott L. Baugh's Developing History/Historicizing in MexicanNuevo Cine Manifestoes around 'Ia Crisis' both authors borrow from economics and social-science paradigms to read articulations of alternative production models in Latin American cinema. Teresa Hoefert de Turegano argues that shifts in global-regional and national characters of Latin of the 1990s owe in part to changes in government policy, the prominence of Spanish coproductions, and the consumption of the coproduced films in Latin American and other markets. As such, national and cultural identities are shaped by this redefinition of film production. Scott L. Baugh also focuses on national and cultural identity-formation, specifically in the productions of the Mexican Cinema of the early 1960s. In an examination of the multiple conceptualizations of independent in the manifestoes of the group of filmmakers first claiming the Nuevo Cine in Mexico, Developing History/Historicizing Development calls for a reconsideration of the various notions of crisis used to describe Mexican society and culture and the history leading up to Mexico's revolutionary 1970s New Wave. Nohemy Solorzano-Thompson, in Vicarious Identities: Fantasies of Resistance and Language in juan Ibanez's Los caifanes (1966), likewise takes an inter-disciplinary approach to reading the crises of Mexico's mid 1960s through the cult classic, Los caifanes. …