Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez

Abstract

Reviewed by: Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano by Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez Dennis West Schroeder Rodríguez, Paul A. Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano. Traducción de Juana Suárez. Iberoamericano-Vervuert, 2020, pp. 481. ISBN 978-8-49192-093-9. Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez’s Una historia comparada del cine latinoamericano is a translation of his Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History published in 2016 by the University of California Press. This latter work was the first comparative history of Latin American cinemas to be published in any language. Its competent translation to Spanish, by Juana Suárez, represents a laudable effort to make this author’s in-depth, wide-ranging, and up-to-date research known to Spanish-speaking scholars who do not read English. Schroeder Rodríguez’s methodological framework is a manifestation of the recent comparative tendency in the field of Latin American film studies. As he acknowledges, this trend has been prominently exemplified by film historian Paulo Antonio Paranaguá in his influential collection of essays entitled Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina (2003). Una historia comparada constitutes an ambitious and unusual work of synthesis since this researcher writes as a film historian, as a theoretician of comparative modernity studies, and as a film critic. Most histories of individual Latin American national cinemas have focused on fiction features; and Schroeder Rodríguez the film historian follows this precedent as he unfurls a chronological and comparative narrative account of the medium’s socioeconomic, technological, and esthetic evolution from its beginnings to the present. The writer concentrates on the production of the three major movie-producing countries of the region: Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. All the major historical periods are examined according to the following periodization: the silent era, studio cinema, neorealism and art cinema, New Latin American Cinema, and contemporary cinema. The author’s comparative perspective situates the region’s national cinemas within the context of the century-old “triangular flow” of moving images amongst Latin America, Europe, and “Hollywood.” Prospective readers should be advised that Schroeder Rodríguez does not propose to sketch a more-or-less comprehensive historical survey in the manner of the standard texts Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America (1990) and Historia del cine latinoamericano (1987) by John King and Peter B. Schumann respectively. Rather, Schroeder Rodríguez tends to concentrate on selected cineastes who have succeeded in creating unique cinematic worlds, such as the contemporary Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, or the Brazilian auteur Glauber Rocha. This approach tends to downplay certain important historical movements, such as Brazilian Udigrudi, and certain popular culture genres, such as the Mexican wrestling movies exemplified by the popular El Santo franchise. Cult figures, such as Alejandro Jodorowsky and José Mojica Marins (Zé do Caixão), also receive short shrift. Documentary production is not examined apart from a few notable exceptions, such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s celebrated La hora de los hornos. Schroeder Rodríguez excels as a theoretician of the interdisciplinary field of comparative modernity studies. The scholarly question of Latin America’s modernity remains an unsettled issue; and here he parts ways with Paranaguá in that the latter conceives of a single Latin American modernity while the former postulates multiple forms or discourses of modernity for the region, to wit: liberalism, socialism, corporatism, and the baroque/neobaroque. As Schroeder Rodríguez clarifies, the baroque/neobaroque version of Latin American modernity is the most problematic as its theorization continues to be on-going in the work of scholars such as the late Aníbal Quijano. These discourses of modernity are carefully elucidated by Schroeder Rodríguez; and they have been deeply researched—in the case of corporatism, for instance, from Saint Paul’s description of the body politic (I Corinthians 12:12–28) to Thomism, the dominant ideology in colonial Latin America. The author’s evident abilities as a film critic are on display in the volume’s approximately fifty close textual analyses of paradigmatic films. In the tradition of Marxist-influenced thinkers such as Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson, Schroeder Rodríguez considers films as cultural texts [End Page 514...