Latin American Cinema Research Articles

Becoming Part of the Moving Story: Jews on the Latin American Screen

Jews were among the pioneers of film and television in most of Latin America. The historiography of cinema, however, does not usually mention the ethnicity or religion of the filmmakers since Latin American intellectuals tend to reject ethnicity as an important analytical category, unless it relates to indigenous groups or people of African descent. This approach is shared by many intellectuals identified with specific ethnic backgrounds, such as Jewish Latin Americans, Arab Latin Americans, and Asian Latin Americans.Most of the meager information about Jewish contributions to filmmaking in the past can be found in the publications of community institutions, which endeavor to highlight Jewish contributions to various facets of life in Latin America. They are also available in personal memoirs and on websites. Moreover, several authors writing about the Jewish achievement in Latin America have not considered cinema as a worthy enough activity to be mentioned among their accomplishments. In his 1960s book on the Jews of Argentina, for example, Jose Liberman recounted the history of Jewish agricultural settlement in the country, discussed the establishment of community institutions, and added a long list of Jews active in politics, the economy, and culture, 1 but he did not mention Jews active in popular culture, such as movies, television, music, or sports. More than forty years later, Ricardo Feierstein, in his history of Argentinian Jews, devoted only five pages out of 459 to mentioning Jews who were prominent in these fields.2 In both cases, it is impossible to know whether the characterization of certain people as Jewish relied on research in archives or was merely based on pinpointing names that sounded Jewish or simply on personal acquaintance.In the past decade methodological and theoretical discussions, however, have encouraged new studies of Jewish Latin American experiences.3 Recent studies are less focused on political aspects, giving more weight to cultural and social facets. Scholars nowadays are less concerned with Jews as victims of anti- Semitism, xenophobia, or racism and more with their place and role as integral parts of society at large. Research is no longer based so much on communal and institutional sources as on testimonies produced by nonaffiliated ethnics, focusing on history from below and on oral testimonies rather than on official stories. Many authors currently favor comparative perspectives, both across ethnic divides within the nation and from a transnational viewpoint regarding the Diaspora links to its real or imagined homeland.4 The present issue of Jewish Film & New Media reflects the vitality and innovativeness of Jewish Latin American studies.When it comes to the bibliography on Latin American cinema, the challenges are no less significant. Since Jews are often identified with the hegemonic white population, the research focused on the Jewish contribution to film and television, or on the representation of Jewish experiences in movies, has been minimal or conspicuously absent until the rise of multicultural perceptions in the late twentieth century. Thus a dictionary of filmmakers published in the late 1990s includes four hundred entries for Latin American directors without mentioning their ethnic identity or religious faith. On the other hand, the dictionary includes special chapters on foreign directors who visited the Latin American continent, and on exiled Spanish filmmakers who found refuge in Argentina and Mexico following the victory of the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39).5 Similarly, a book of interviews with seventy well-known filmmakers from all over Latin America casually mentioned the Jewishness of only one of them, and ignored that of at least one other.6Moreover, before the upsurge of democratization in the eighties, and the integration of national economies into globalized markets from the early 1990s onward, very few films featured Jewish characters. …

Cynthia Tompkins. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: U of Texas P, 2013. x+ 294 pp.

Review of Cynthia Tompkins. Experimental Latin American Cinema. Austin: U of Texas P, 2013. x+ 294 pp.

Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film ed. by Stephanie Dennison (review)

Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film ed. by Stephanie Dennison (review)

Carmela Garritano. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History.Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. xii + 246pp. List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Notes. List of Films and Videos. References. Index. $32.95. Paper.

Carmela Garritano. African Video Movies and Global Desires: A Ghanaian History. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013. xii + 246 pp. List of Illustrations. Acknowledgments. Notes. List of Films and Videos. References. Index. $32.95. Paper.With African Video Movies and Global Desires, Carmela Garritano has established her place among the major interpreters of contemporary African video films, alongside Jonathan Haynes, Onookome Okome, Moradewun Adejunmobi, Birgit Meyer, John McCall, and others whose groundbreaking work has served to establish a new field of cinema studies and a new approach to African cinema. This is all the more significant in that the subject of her study is what she has defined as a minor cinema in the shadow of a minor cinema, that is, Ghanaian cinema as the junior cousin of Nollywood.But this is only a frame of reference: the actual subject of her study is the tracking of global South cinema in an age of globalization and neoliberalism. Her work reaches out to the theorizing of South Asian and Latin American film, but is firmly grounded in Ghanaian history, society, and culture. Her personal observations-as in those involving the backgrounds and thoughts of major figures in the industry, key directors like Bob Smith or Socrate Safo, Shirley Frimpong-Manso, and Veronica Quarshie, and many important producers and distributors-mark this study with her astute judgments. Since she experienced part of the period of the effulgent growth of Ghanaian video while living in Ghana, visiting the new mall with its multiplex cinema as well as the small quartier projection sites, and viewing in person the work of the filmmakers, we learn directly of the look and feel of the place, the viewers, and their world. The of cultural studies is conveyed in its immediacy, while the theorizing about Culture is informed by the major writings of James Ferguson, Achille Mbembe, Timothy Mitchell, Sarah Nuttall, Brian Larkin, John and Jean Comaroff, Simon During, and others, and of studies scholars like Tom Gunning, Moradewun Adejunmobi, and Stephen Heath. Historians and critics of Ghanaian culture and also abound. Garritano has seemingly read and absorbed them all-Birgit Meyer, Stephanie Newell, Esi Sutherland-Addy, Esi Dogbe, D. J. Smith, and others.By centering her work in the Ghanaian industry, Garritano has constructed a portrait of the globalized local centered in Accra and Kumasi, as well as in locations of Ghanaians living abroad. The context shapes our understanding of cinema studies today-that is, in terms of what context comes to mean in its local parameters in an age of global cultural flows. What distinguishes this study, however, is not the mobilization of the work of others-thorough and sensible though it is-but the author's original approaches in reading the cinema and its import. She establishes a baseline of what Ghanaian audiences and filmmakers understand as professional cinema-what we might otherwise define as commercial film, mainstream, or Hollywood cinema-in contrast to the variants of the local or minor cinemas in Ghana, often marked by melodramatic or magical indices. Instead of these familiar video film/telenovella genres marking an endpoint for her, they are starting points for more sophisticated elaborations on the directions local filmmakers have taken in pushing the envelope of what is possible, given the constraints of competition with Nollywood. For instance, her analysis of films, involving Ghanaians traveling to or living abroad, extends the sense of Ferguson's coevalness in a transnational practice- elaborated through her readings of the approaches taken by Socrate Safo and Bob Smith in films set in Ghana and Italy, Amsterdam, or New York, and marked by current conditions of and expatriation.The nature of travel film today might be seen not simply in the lives and dependencies of those living in the Ghanaian diaspora in relationship to those at home, but also in relationship to the structures of representation of their cultural singularity. …

The Representation of Gays and Lesbians in South African Cinema 1985–2013

THE REPRESENTATION OF GAYS AND LESBIANS IN SOUTH AFRICAN CINEMA 1895-2013 Despite South Africa's progressive constitution which prohibits discrimination against gays and lesbians, as well as a strong gay movement, South African cinematic images of gay men and women are limited and still at the margin of the South African film industry. One ends up with less than 20 short films, a few documentaries and less than 10 features with openly gay and lesbian characters in the past 114 years of South African cinema. Under apartheid, gay and lesbian voices in film and television were silenced. In a 20-year study of the representation of gays and lesbians in African, Asian and Latin American cinema (Botha 2003; 2012; Botha & Swinnen 2010), the author has noted that homosexual experience is unique in South Africa, precisely because of South Africa's history of racial division and subsequent resistance. South African gay identities...

Abstracting the checkpoint: American fantasy-lives and security nightmares

Popular contemporary film and music aestheticize what is already well known throughout the Americas, but cannot be spoken at the state’s threshold: the global expansion of checkpoint architecture as the voyeuristic mechanism of state securitization. From Baauer’s Harlem Shake and Sean Paul’s She Doesn’t Mind, to Latin American films such as Maria Full of Grace and Por Sus Propios Ojos, I demonstrate the erotics of power simultaneously concentrated and disavowed within the space of the checkpoint. As a form of “security sexualization”, checkpoint technologies require the physical, optical or digital stripping of human bodies – a gatekeeping procedure of sovereign command, intrinsic to the satisfaction of security officials’ professional duties, in which denuding surveillance is rhetorically denied any sexual content. This article opens up critical discussion about the fantasy worlds of security sexualization as such, pointing attention to necessary filmic “abstractions” of the security state’s imposing homosociality, and the way in which checkpoint surveillance resists being represented at all.

Times of transition in Hispanic cinemas

Abstract This special issue of Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas contains selected contributions presented at the international conference ‘In Transition: Historical, Political and Cultural Changes in Cinema and Television’, held in November 2012 at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. Both the conference and the articles included in the following pages explore technological connotations of ‘the transitional’ from historically conscious and comparative perspectives in an effort to better understand and appreciate the impact of transnationalism for the field of Hispanic and Latin American studies. While ‘the transnational’ has already been explored by other scholars in film and media studies, the articles to follow add a strong political dimension to the field as they present a variety of case studies of transnational practices in the cinemas of Spain and Latin America. By placing the studies of transnational activities in Spanish and Latin American contexts, we are better able to assess the implications of these different types of transition for the Hispanic world, both from a national and a transnational level.

Hispanic cinema and the aesthetics of deceleration: Festival report

Abstract As in past years, the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival continued highlighting Spanish and Latin American cinema. Many of these films were characterized by their slowness or the ‘cinema of deceleration’ (Gemünden). Prominent proponents of this new aesthetic are Sebastián Lelio’s film Gloria (for which Paulina García won the Silver Bear), Neus Ballús’ first feature length semi-documentary La plaga, Ana Guevara Pose’s and Leticia Jorge Romero’s Tanta agua and Isabel Coixet’s slow-moving, science fiction Ayer no termina nunca, among many others. Of particular note was the workshop given by Argentine Lucrecia Martel.

From self-portrait to the portrait of a generation in Latin American cinema: genesis, staging and meaning

A partir del análisis de algunas producciones latinoamericanas recientes, este artículo se centra en la consideración del autorretrato cinematográfico como retrato generacional, y plantea que este podría ser uno de los sentidos más fuertes que explican la frecuencia con la que el autorretrato se convierte en materia principal de esas obras. También se analizan la génesis creativa del autorretrato audiovisual, su escenificación y su sentido, con el fin de ofrecer herramientas que ayuden a identificar las estrategias y los recursos creativos desarrollados por los autores de la producción audiovisual de los últimos años. Asimismo se estudia el vínculo entre el autorretrato audiovisual y la autobiografía literaria, con el objetivo de comprender qué elementos componen su génesis creativa y cómo se produce su escenificación. Por último, se propone una de las posibles claves que ayudan a explicar el contexto en el que el autorretrato audiovisual se convierte en un retrato generacional.

Latin American documentary filmmaking: major works

American Documentary Filmmaking is the first volume written in English to explore Latin American documentary filmmaking with extensive and intelligent analysis. David William Foster, the leading authority on Latin American urban cultural production, provides rich, new interpretations on the production of gender, political persecution, historical conflicts, and exclusion from the mainstream in many of Latin America s most important documentary films. Foster provides a series of detailed examinations of major texts of Latin American filmmaking, discussing their textual production and processes of meaning. His analysis delves deeply into the world of Latin American film and brings forth a discourse of structure that has previously been absent from the fields of filmmaking and Latin American studies. This volume provides perspective on diverse and methodological approaches, pulling from a wide scope of cinematic traditions. Using his own critical readings and research, Foster presents his findings in terms that are accessible to non-Spanish speakers and Latin American film enthusiasts. A much-needed contribution to the field of Latin American documentary film, Foster s research and perspective will be a valuable source for those interested in film studies, gender studies, and culture.

Cinema and/as Revolution: The New Latin American Cinema

The New Latin American Cinema has been traditionally defined as a political cinema committed to the transformation of the social conditions that characterized Latin America in the 1960s. The notion of revolution has been placed in the core of this movement. Deeply influenced by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and by several political movements throughout the continent, a group of filmmakers proposed an aesthetic transformation of what they described as a colonized culture. Our aim in this essay is to explain what these filmmakers understood by a cinematographic “revolution” that could be the condition for a broader political and social transformation. It is not our intention to stand up for the concept of revolution in the New Latin American Cinema, but to try to avoid the stereotypes around this concept and to understand what this notion involved within a particular context.

Replaying Carlitos: Chaplin, Latin American Film Comedy and the Paradigm of Imitation

In his landmark study Hybrid Cultures, Néstor García Canclini rejects originality and its opposite – imitation – as inadequate analytical paradigms for Latin American cultural practices. This paper argues for a reevaluation of the imitation paradigm, arguing that it should be understood neither as a synonym of colonial subordination (as García Canclini implies) nor, in Homi Bhabha's sense, as a dangerously ‘destabilizing’ sign of ‘partial presence.’ Glissant's concept of détour (diversion) is perhaps a more appropriate mode of analysis, since it captures the ‘playful’ oscillation between the extremes of mimesis outlined by García Canclini and Bhabha. Latin American film comedy's relationship with Hollywood from the 1930 through the 1950s – and specifically its wide-ranging treatment of Charlie Chaplin's work – illustrates such mimetic ‘diversions.’ From outright impersonation to homage and quotation, spanning the Chaplinesque adaptations of Cantinflas, Tin Tan, and Luis Sandrini, and the multivalent parodies of Brazilian chanchadas, Latin American film comedy of the period used imitation as a shifting, elastic, and critical trope revealing local and national subjects' contentious links with hegemonic models.

Ecce Homo Novus: snapshots, the ‘new man’, and iconic montage in the work of Santiago Alvarez

This essay explores Santiago Alvarez's iconic, montage-style filmmaking as it prefigured Modernity's accelerated crisis as produced by transnational capitalism and theorized years later by poststructuralists and postmodernists. Alvarez, one of the fathers of New Latin American Cinema, stands as an ever more relevant mentor for many contemporary young filmmakers in terms of his lessons about audience cultivation and politicized, immediate, innovative image-making in a context of what he termed ‘accelerated underdevelopment’. His aesthetic of limited resources and limited time and his early emphasis on the tactless camera eye has become a veritable weapon for change for many filmmakers in Latin America's latest decade, which saw successive economic crises, the failure of neoliberal policies, and a rise in left wing governments.

Experimental Latin American cinema: history and aesthetics

Experimental Latin American cinema: history and aesthetics

O conceito de "novidade" no projeto do Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano

Este artigo aborda o projeto de desenvolvimento cinematografico conhecido como Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano a partir de uma analise do conceito de novidade. Ele esta centrado nas razoes que levaram alguns cineastas, no final dos anos 1960, a considerar que seus filmes eram novos. Analisa assim suas particularidades em relacao aos novos cinemas europeus, com foco no vies revolucionario que adquire o termo novo na America Latina. Por fim, o conceito e estudado utilizando como fonte as declaracoes e os debates publicos dos festivais do Sodre, em Montevideu (1958), Sestri Levante (1962 e 1963) e Vina del Mar (1967).

Escapar de los géneros entrando en ellos. Una tendencia del cine latinoamericano actual

The article approaches an actual Latin-American cinema tendency that has put in the center of the debate the discussion about the way Latin-American reality is been represented and, a supposed return to the realistic ways of representation. One of the most featured components, and the core of the debate, is the relation between documentary recording and staging. We propose that this antagonism is articulated in a large number of these films, as a borderline situation that allows a game of ruptures and dialogues that builds a new contact with what’s “real”, allowing us to read it as another way of relating with the social aspects. Thus, through a series of strategies that privileges a location in the genre frontiers, braking with the naturalized conventions.

Latin American Cinemas. Local Views and Transnational Connections ‐ edited by Bermúdez Barrios, Nayibe

Latin American Cinemas. Local Views and Transnational Connections ‐ edited by Bermúdez Barrios, Nayibe

The first rule of Latin American cinema is you do not talk about Latin American cinema: notes on discussing a sense of place in contemporary cinema

ABSTRACTWithin the context of contemporary globalization, the concept of ‘Latin American cinema’ has become increasingly problematic, particularly since such geographically based terms (such as ‘national’, ‘continental’, ‘transnational’, ‘regional’, ‘local’, ‘rural’ and/or ‘metropolitan’) invoke intense cultural, ideological, political and economic references and debates that are often cloaked in nostalgic references to the period of militant film-making from 1960s and 1970s. This article therefore highlights the multiple methodological approaches that must be taken into account when narrating ‘place’ with contemporary Latin American production, whether the contexts be international (e.g. through transnational funding and exhibition opportunities in Europe, especially Spain, and the United States) or intranational (e.g. encouraging one kind of production for domestic audiences and another to negotiate the international film festival circuit).

Meeting points: A survey of film festivals in Latin America

ABSTRACTThis article is a survey of the film festivals of Latin America. We focus on the historical development of film festivals throughout the region, which culminated in the institutionalization of Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano/New Latin American Cinema at the Havana Film Festival in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The article then draws upon the parallel development of the Buenos Aires International Independent Film Festival (BAFICI) and New Argentine Cinema in the 1990s to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between film festivals and film production in Latin America. In the 2000s, following the example set by BAFICI, new and notable film festivals have proliferated throughout the region. As an essential component of the current creative boom in Latin American cinema, these emerging festivals must consolidate themselves to provide needed platforms for the exchange of ideas and exhibition of new work.

The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema by Laura Podalsky (review)

Reviewed by: The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema by Laura Podalsky Joanna Page Podalsky, Laura. The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 218 pp. Podalsky’s study of the intersection of politics and affect in contemporary Latin American film is admirably subtle in its grasp of the complex and varied ways in which film may mediate between the two. A focus on the sensorial and emotional aspects of film as separate (if related) from its ideology and aesthetics allows Podalsky to map with precision “the range and complexity of the sociopolitical work performed by films’ affective appeals” (20). Rigorously historicized, her analyses are also very attentive to relevant theoretical work. The corpus of films chosen for study is pleasingly and appropriately eclectic, ranging from the well-distributed to the relatively obscure, from the high-budget fiction film to the shoe-string documentary, and from films that are thoroughly anchored in a national context to ones whose directors, subjects and modes of production and distribution are engaged in multiple transnational crossings. Where Podalsky analyzes films which have already attracted [End Page 201] repeated critical attention—such as La hora de los hornos and Amores perros—she does so in a way that makes clear how her readings build on and contest existing scholarship. A concise and provocative introduction situates Podalsky’s work in relation to those theorists and critics whose insights have most influenced her own, notably those working with Deleuzian notions of affect, but also theorists of modernity and the global such as Martín-Barbero, Appadurai and Bauman. Podalsky also signals clearly where her approach differs from the more dehistoricized perspectives of cognitivist film scholars such as Noël Carroll, and from the distinctly disparaging accounts of contemporary media culture in Latin America offered by Beatriz Sarlo, Nelly Richard and Jean Franco, among others. The structure of the book more or less corresponds to the five “formal, thematic, and industrial tendencies” which for Podalsky characterize Latin American cinema of the past two decades (8). The first of these, the representation of the recent past and its relation to the present, provides the focus for a chapter on the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, included here as an important precursor to the more contemporary films discussed in subsequent chapters. Taking issue with the dominant critical emphasis on these films’ eschewal of emotional appeal in favour of Brechtian techniques of distantiation, Podalsky analyzes the “sensorial dynamics” which are key to the political engagement of the viewer (30). She explores a “neorealist sentimentality” in Rio 40 Graus and traces the work of directors like dos Santos and Birri back to the nineteenth-century literary quest to promote nationalist sentiments (33). Discussions of La hora de los hornos and El chacal de Nahueltoro demonstrate these films’ tactical use of emotion, and indeed the extent to which their “sensorial charge” often exceeds their directors’ intentions to provoke a political response in their audiences (56). The second chapter, on the recent reemergence of genre films, explores the use of the thriller—a genre constructed around questions of knowledge and time— to reexamine past social trauma and to construct knowledge of the past as something which goes beyond the rational. In contrast with O Que É Isso, Companheiro?, Podalsky finds that both Death and the Maiden and Açao entre amigos are less interested in historical revisionism and more interested in interrogating how we acquire knowledge of the past and questioning the nature of evidence in historical investigations. This chapter explicitly formulates an important point which underpins much of Podalsky’s work in this book: that “a film’s ideological stance (as measured through its narrative strategies and levels of formal experimentation) is not the sole determinant of the sociocultural work it may perform. Nor do a film’s sensorial appeals always work to serve or uphold its political propositions” (79). This insight is what allows Podalsky to tease out how films such as Amores perros, which has been charged with complicity with the neoliberal agenda by undermining the validity of the utopian projects of the Left, can nevertheless...