Latin American Cinema Research Articles

The Human Tradition in Mexico (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 267 The Human Tradition in Mexico Scholarly Resources, 2003 Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher Edited by Jeffrey Pilcher, this collection of articles is the sixth title in the Scholarly Resources series "The Human Tradition Around the World." These books are intended for use in the classroom and offer useful supplements to the standard undergraduate history textbooks. Pilcher's volume makes a welcome addition to this continuing series of texts that already spans diverse regions and time periods. This new text provides fifteen original articles written by respected scholars and addressing events in Mexican history since the middle of the eighteenth century. The quality of material in this collection is excellent overall and will provide college-level instructors with a valuable teaching resource. Neirher a textbook nor a documentary collection , the book flows roughly chronologically, but is organized around people rather than events. The articles contained in this text are, in effect, mini-biographies, each detailing the life of an individual while situating their actions and experiences within the broader historical context . The men and women whose lives are discussed range from the eighteenth-century actress Josefa Ordóñez, to the Revolutionary soldadera Rosa Torre González and rock musician Armando Nava. A few of the protagonists in these accounts gained widespread recognition and fame, such as AgustÃ-n Lara and MarÃ-a Félix, while the majority remained obscure. Pilcher has grouped their biographies in generational fashion, emphasizing the book's focus on individual lives in place of totalizing narrative. This approach yields a view of history not so much from the bottom up, as from the perspective of lived experience. Readers are challenged to see the world not in terms of broad generalizations , but of the specificities of the local and the particular. Students are encouraged to see that while everyday life is lived in the context of the major events, these great occurrences are also the sum total of individual actions and lives that usually pass unremembered. At the same time, these articles remind us that the trajectories of individual lives need nor be entirely coterminous with the larger-scale events of which they are a part. Students accustomed to the conventional textbook narrative may initially find diis approach disorienting. Each selection, however, offers an intriguing starting place for classroom discussions. This utility of the book for teaching purposes is furthered by the intricacy and rich contextual detail of each section. The articles are "multivalent " in that they introduce a range of themes that allow discussion to flow in different directions. Students are thereby challenged to make connections amongst the life histories, to identify emerging themes, and to draw their own conclusions from the material. The book suffers from two slight deficiencies . First, and perhaps inevitably, the life histories presenred in this volume are predominately those of upper-class individuals, or those who obtained prestige within the course of their lives. With certain exceptions, this tends to skew the articles' focus towards elite perceptions and experiences. It also moves analysis away from the features of everyday life and towards the unique or exceptional. Second, while die tide suggests a comprehensive volume on Mexican history, this is actually a collection dealing exclusively with the modern era. This means that the book would work very well with courses moving from independence to the present, but one might still wonder why the previous centuries of colonial rule receive no mention. These minor shortcomings do not seriously detract from what is otherwise a very well-constructed volume. The articles contained in this text should provide a valuable classroom resource and useful supplement to the available history textbooks. Glenn Avent The University of Arizona Convergencias Hispánicas: Selected Proceedings and Other Essays on Spanish and Latin American Literature, Film, and Linguistics Juan de la Cuesta, 2001 Edited by Elizabeth Scarlett and Edward B. Wescott ...

Convergencias Hispánicas: Selected Proceedings and Other Essays on Spanish and Latin American Literature, Film, and Linguistics (review)

Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 267 The Human Tradition in Mexico Scholarly Resources, 2003 Edited by Jeffrey M. Pilcher Edited by Jeffrey Pilcher, this collection of articles is the sixth title in the Scholarly Resources series "The Human Tradition Around the World." These books are intended for use in the classroom and offer useful supplements to the standard undergraduate history textbooks. Pilcher's volume makes a welcome addition to this continuing series of texts that already spans diverse regions and time periods. This new text provides fifteen original articles written by respected scholars and addressing events in Mexican history since the middle of the eighteenth century. The quality of material in this collection is excellent overall and will provide college-level instructors with a valuable teaching resource. Neirher a textbook nor a documentary collection , the book flows roughly chronologically, but is organized around people rather than events. The articles contained in this text are, in effect, mini-biographies, each detailing the life of an individual while situating their actions and experiences within the broader historical context . The men and women whose lives are discussed range from the eighteenth-century actress Josefa Ordóñez, to the Revolutionary soldadera Rosa Torre González and rock musician Armando Nava. A few of the protagonists in these accounts gained widespread recognition and fame, such as AgustÃ-n Lara and MarÃ-a Félix, while the majority remained obscure. Pilcher has grouped their biographies in generational fashion, emphasizing the book's focus on individual lives in place of totalizing narrative. This approach yields a view of history not so much from the bottom up, as from the perspective of lived experience. Readers are challenged to see the world not in terms of broad generalizations , but of the specificities of the local and the particular. Students are encouraged to see that while everyday life is lived in the context of the major events, these great occurrences are also the sum total of individual actions and lives that usually pass unremembered. At the same time, these articles remind us that the trajectories of individual lives need nor be entirely coterminous with the larger-scale events of which they are a part. Students accustomed to the conventional textbook narrative may initially find diis approach disorienting. Each selection, however, offers an intriguing starting place for classroom discussions. This utility of the book for teaching purposes is furthered by the intricacy and rich contextual detail of each section. The articles are "multivalent " in that they introduce a range of themes that allow discussion to flow in different directions. Students are thereby challenged to make connections amongst the life histories, to identify emerging themes, and to draw their own conclusions from the material. The book suffers from two slight deficiencies . First, and perhaps inevitably, the life histories presenred in this volume are predominately those of upper-class individuals, or those who obtained prestige within the course of their lives. With certain exceptions, this tends to skew the articles' focus towards elite perceptions and experiences. It also moves analysis away from the features of everyday life and towards the unique or exceptional. Second, while die tide suggests a comprehensive volume on Mexican history, this is actually a collection dealing exclusively with the modern era. This means that the book would work very well with courses moving from independence to the present, but one might still wonder why the previous centuries of colonial rule receive no mention. These minor shortcomings do not seriously detract from what is otherwise a very well-constructed volume. The articles contained in this text should provide a valuable classroom resource and useful supplement to the available history textbooks. Glenn Avent The University of Arizona Convergencias Hispánicas: Selected Proceedings and Other Essays on Spanish and Latin American Literature, Film, and Linguistics Juan de la Cuesta, 2001 Edited by Elizabeth Scarlett and Edward B. Wescott 268 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Following a largely traditional approach in defining the object of cultural analysis in terms of static modes of signification (writing and film), the present volume is successful in presenting a body of work that has redefined the existing canonical interpretations of those artifacts. As the introduction...

Stereotypes But…

Essay| December 01 2002 Stereotypes But…: Gender Roles in Contemporary Latin Cinema Viviana Rangil Viviana Rangil Viviana Rangil is Associate Professor of Spanish at Skidmore College, in Saratoga Springs, NY. Her teaching and research interests include Latin American and Latina film- making and literature, on which she has published journal articles and book chapters. She is currently working on a book on cooking, gender and economics. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Afterimage (2002) 30 (3-4): 8–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2002.30.3-4.8 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Viviana Rangil; Stereotypes But…: Gender Roles in Contemporary Latin Cinema. Afterimage 1 December 2002; 30 (3-4): 8–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/aft.2002.30.3-4.8 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentAfterimage Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2002 by The Regents of the University of California2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Heroes, Villains and Women: Representations of Latin America in The Voyage by Fernando Solanas

This article provides a close study of Solanas’s most ambitious film, The Voyage (El viaje). It examines the director’s attempts to create a model of Latin American cinema in opposition to Hollywood aesthetics. The paper discusses the extent to which Solanas is successful in this project, and examines the ways in which he has been faithful to his political views. In addition, the paper challenges the film’s representations of women, arguing that in this respect The Voyage fails in its attempts at radical filmmaking; the hero’s quest is seen in patriarchal terms and the female characters are marginalized.

Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin America

As its cover announces, the book reviewed here is a new edition, not a revised one. Magical Reels’s previously published chapters are unchanged since their original appearance in 1990. The new edition’s new addition is an afterward, covering developments during the last century’s last decade. This substantial final chapter offers John King’s cautious, yet shrewd, observations about macro issues—such as transnationalism, globalization, and neoliberalism—pertinent to (Latin American) cinema’s contemporary history (and intellectual discourse about mass culture). It also replicates the earlier chapters’ admirable mixture of material and representational analysis as well as their nation-by-nation survey of Latin American filmmaking. In doing so, this new final chapter makes good use of recent works about fin de siglo filmmaking to explore the interplay of contemporary economic patterns and cultural production. The previous chapters, however, do not benefit from interpolation of significant scholarship published since 1990 about pre-1990 Latin American film.Magical Reels’s cover photograph indicates, too, what is different and the same about its millennium edition. As with the earlier version, the current one features a production still, depicting a heterosexual couple, from an “internationally acclaimed” Mexican film (that is, one well-received in U.S. and European art house film circuits). An image of María Rojo and her dance partner from María Novaro’s Danzón (1991) replaces one of Pedro Armendáriz and Dolores del Río from Emilio Fernández’s María Candelaria (1943). This change announces the most obvious difference between this edition and its predecessor: coverage of the 1990s. It also perpetuates Mexican cinema’s dominant visibility within English-language scholarship about Latin American film. To a large degree this is derived from the overrepresentation of internationally influential films (that is, relative critical and commercial “successes” in North America and Europe) in scholarly discourse about cinema. It is often a story of “winners,” judged as such by their presence among elite audiences outside of Latin America more often than by their resonance among popular ones within the region. This too-common convergence of international market and scholarship belies Magical Reels’s comprehensive geocultural scope. However, by displaying, in the first case (1990), an iconographic marker of canonical film history, and in the second (2000), a widely identifiable contemporary commercial symbol, the book’s cover anticipates its broad audience. Neither film represented was mere quotidian fodder, but international film-festival fare; both feature not just any actors but movie stars; each is the work of an auteur.Magical Reels is essentially a political history of culture. Its top-down approach foregrounds national production and individual accomplishment. It focuses more on the formation of famous filmmakers, state policies, and business ventures than on life in and around the movie theater. The impact of economic and political power on filmmaking takes precedence over that of cinema on national and international history. Its representational analysis privileges particular plots and genres over discursive patterns and practices. But Magical Reels is particularly effective in demonstrating the centrality of state intervention and (more recently) nonintervention in the development of Latin American culture industries. And students and scholars of not only mass media but almost every other aspect of twentieth-century Latin American history—including state formation and national identity, economics and business, revolution and international relations, art and ideas, class, race, and gender relations, to name a few—will find much to add to their respective historiographies. This underlines a broader point implied by Magical Reels, but one that deserves explicit enunciation: the integral relationship between the historical study of audiovisual culture and “the rest of ” history. Film (and radio and television) is not a short subject preceding “real” history’s feature presentation. Rather it offers a fresh field on which to engage issues that generate far-reaching empirical insights relevant to noncinematic historical analysis.Any historical synthesis—especially one of such prodigious scope—demands analytic compromises. Magical Reels does not undermine its indispensability to readers who seek comparative analysis of cinematic developments within Latin America. King’s linkage of broad political and economic developments to specific national cinematic practices suggests the need for more monographical research about Latin America film culture (broadly defined) that probes interactions between screen and society as well as production and politics. Such micro-level historical studies, ones that intensively investigate archives and thickly contextualize films, will provide building materials for new syntheses. These will relate our present understanding of production trends and auteurs to cinematic history that lies beyond the screen. In the meantime, Magical Reels remains the most useful English-language introduction to Latin American film. The new edition’s after-ward merits the attention of all scholars already familiar with its predecessor. And the entire work remains foundational not only for those interested in Latin American cinema but in the history of twentieth-century Latin America, generally.

The Trials of "Las Mujeres Pensantes": Juana Inés and María Luisa Find a Room of Their Own

... after making Sor Juana, after telling dramatic story of this extraordinary woman--I don't think in world there's been a woman with competence and richness of mind of Sor Juana--I said to my own sex, to my beloved sisters, here are five films each with questioning women. Here are examples by which to model your own identities. Maria Luisa Bemberg, qtd. in Caleb Bach 27. Maria Luisa Bemberg is one of more significant among handful of women filmmakers working in contemporary Latin American cinema (recognizing her death in 1995). During her brief career, she made films that are not only examples of quality cinematographic production in Latin American context, but also important feminist interventions into filmmaking. Even she noted her unique position, describing herself and her positive reception as the first successful grandmother filmmaker in [Argentina] (qtd. in Bach 23). Her exceptional status in male-domi-nated spheres--be they artistic, intellectual or social is distantly parallel to another avis rara, woman considered by many to be first feminist of America, (1) Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz. It is therefore significant that one of her last projects is a film on life of Sor Juana, Yo, la peor de todas (1990). True to life and work of her subject, director identified project as part of her continued efforts to break with traditional stereotypes of women: Para mi era imperativo contar la historia de esta mujer, porque uno de los compromisos eticos y morales que asumi cuando decidi hacer cine era tratar de romper el cliche tradicional que tiene el cine sobre la mujer, estereotipo con el cual es dificil que las mujeres pensantes puedan identificarse (Burton-Carvajal 78, my emphasis). The basis of film is monumental literary psycho-biography of Sor Juana, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, o las trampas de la fe (1982), by Octavio Paz. Stephanie Merrim contends in her introduction to Feminist perspectives on Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (1991) that Paz's work has widened parameters for feminist study on this notable woman: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz at once represents a milestone and a watershed in critical reception of Baroque writer's works: as it rounds off both Paz's own intellectual endeavors and critical tradition surrounding Sor Juana, study also paves way for a more enlightened feminist understanding of its subject.... [T]he work avoids ideological blunders regarding its female subject, be they overt or implicit, so rife in other critical studies. (16) Merrim takes necessary steps of problematizing his analysis, yet she also acknowledges its success in dispelling earlier psychologistic readings that were overtly negative and sexist in their assessment of Sor Juana. (2) Merrim's largely favorable treatment of Paz provides an unintentional apology for Bemberg's sole reliance on his work, a fact that may otherwise be unpalatable to many feminists to extent that her feminist film does not utilize in anyway work by feminist scholars such as Dorothy Schons, Rosario Castellanos, Anita Arroyo, or Marie-Cecile Benassy-Berling, all of whom, between 1925 (Schons) and 1982 (Benassy-Berling)--i.e. before screenplay for film was written--have contributed greatly to a biographical, cultural, literary and historical understanding of Sor Juana from a feminist critical perspective. Despite this deficiency, Bemberg uses work of Paz to inserta clear and direct feminist message into her film, explicitly highlighting Sor Juana's struggles as a woman in a restricted patfiarchal environment. Consequently, Iris recognition of Sor Juana as a revolutionary and singular figure, most notably for her position as a woman intellectual in a male-centered and male-dominated universe, becomes motive and driving force of Bemberg's feminist recovery. …

Primitivism and identity in Latin America: essays on art, literature, and culture

Although primitivism has received renewed attention in recent years, studies linking it with Latin America have been rare. This volume examines primitivism and its implications for contemporary debates on Latin American culture, literature, and arts, showing how Latin American subjects employ a Western construct to return the gaze of the outside world and redefine themselves in relation to modernity. Examining such subjects as Julio Cortazar and Frida Kahlo and such topics as folk art and cinema, the volume brings together for the first time the views of scholars who are currently engaging the task of cultural studies from the standpoint of primitivism. These varied contributions include analyses of Latin American art in relation to social issues, popular culture, and official cultural policy; essays in cultural criticism touching on ethnic identity, racial politics, women's issues, and conflictive modernity; and analytical studies of primitivism's impact on narrative theory and practice, film, theater, and poetry. This collection contributes offers a new perspective on a variety of significant debates in Latin American cultural studies and shows that the term primitive does not apply to these cultures as much as to our understanding of them. CONTENTS-Paradise Subverted: The Invention of the Mexican Character / Roger Bartra-Between Sade and the Savage: Octavio Paz's Aztecs / Amaryll Chanady-Under the Shadow of God: Roots of Primitivism in Early Colonial Mexico / Delia Annunziata Cosentino-Of Alebrijes and Ocumichos: Some Myths about Folk Art and Mexican Identity / Eli Bartra-Primitive Borders: Cultural Identity and Ethnic Cleansing in the Dominican Republic / Fernando Valerio-Holguin-Dialectics of Archaism and Modernity: Technique and Primitivism in Angel Rama's Transculturacion narrativa en America Latina / Jose Eduardo Gonzalez-Narrative Primitivism: Theory and Practice in Latin America / Erik Camayd-Freixas-Narrating the Other: Julio Cortazar's Axolotl as Ethnographic Allegory / R. Lane Kauffmann-Jungle Fever: Primitivism in Environmentalism; Romulo Gallegos's Canaima and the Romance of the Jungle / Jorge Marcone-Primitivism and Cultural Production: Future's Memory; Native Peoples? Voices in Latin American Society / Ivete Lara Camargos Walty-Primitive Bodies in Latin American Cinema: Nicolas Echevarria's Cabeza de Vaca / Luis Fernando Restrepo-Subliminal Body: Shamanism, Ancient Theater, and Ethnodrama / Gabriel Weisz-Primitivist Construction of Identity in the Work of Frida Kahlo / Wendy B. Faris-Mi andina y dulce Rita: Women, Indigenism, and the Avant-Garde in Cesar Vallejo / Tace Megan Hedrick-

The quest for the autochthonous in Hispanoamerican cinema

The author presents a view of Latin American cinema in the 20th century. The directors' reflections on the esthetic activity and their analyses of the sociocultural reality of each country represent one of the main characteristics of the Latin American cinema: the search for an identity. Another issue addressed is the complementarity between the literary and the cinematographic creations which allowed the rise of native forms of narration, a way toward decolonization. This article is an excerpt of the author's work that received the National Culture Award Universidad de Antioquia 2001.
 How to reference this article:
 Cadavid, A. (2001). La búsqueda de lo propio en el cine hispanoamericano. Íkala. 6 (1-2), pp. 63 – 89 

El cine de las mujeres en México: situando el deseo del sujeto femenino

Millan argues that Mexican women's cinema of the eighties is similar to the rest of Latin-American cinema in that it also shows a movement towards interiority. She suggests that this movement is seen, for instance, in the films of Marisa Sistach, Busi Cortes and Maria Novaro. The main aims behind this interiorization are coming to terms with the past (with the past in images, with the past in the history of the country), the acknowledgement of one’s own sensitivity (romanticism recovered in a feminist way), and the emergence of magic realism as denaturalization of women’s world, as a way of making representation visible. Millan suggests that this interiorization runs the risk of neglecting one’s social and historical realities. However, she goes on to suggest that this process of interiorization may perhaps be an essential initial step before denouncing women’s social and historical oppresion.

Reviews. New Latin American Cinema. MT Martin [ed]\Tropical Multiculturalism. R Stam\Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies. DF Stevens [ed]\Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema. I Xavier

Reviews. New Latin American Cinema. MT Martin [ed]\Tropical Multiculturalism. R Stam\Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies. DF Stevens [ed]\Allegories of Underdevelopment: Aesthetics and Politics in Modern Brazilian Cinema. I Xavier

Latin American Cinema Conference: Theory and Praxis, University of Leeds, 29-30 June 1999

Journal Article Latin American Cinema Conference: Theory and Praxis, University of Leeds, 29–30 June 1999 Get access Andrea Noble Andrea Noble Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 41, Issue 2, Summer 2000, Pages 238–241, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/41.2.238 Published: 01 July 2000

Nationalism as Burden: Rituals of Migration and Exile in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Nationalism as Burden: Rituals of Migration and Exile in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds

Changing Reels: Latin American Cinema against the Odds

Review Essay: New Latin American Cinema and International Recognition

Review Essay: New Latin American Cinema and International Recognition

Latin American Cinema in the 90s. Representational Space in Recent Latin American Cinema

The situation of Latin American cinema today is that of a series of medium to small, sometimes tiny, national film industries, all of them plagued by structural weakness and small markets, but supplied with a wealth of talent and imagination. It is also a cinema with a proud and inspirational history of aesthetic and political radicalism.

Araya Across Time and Space: Competing Canons of National (Venezuelan) and International Film History

ARAYA ACROSS ??? AND SPACE: COMPETING CANONS OF NAHONAL (VENEZUELAN) AND INTERNAHONAL FILM HISTORY ______________JULIANNE BURTON-CARVAJAL_____________ Latin American & Latino Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz Araya, a 90-minute scripted documentary filmed in 1957, depicts a twenty-four hour cycle in the subsistence rituals of three communities of salt gatherers and fishermen on Venezuela's remote and barren northeastern coast. The unusual reception trajectory of this self-consciously poetical social documentary has been marked by bursts of rekindled interest at ten-year intervals. Honored with two important prizes at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival , commercially released in France in 1967, premiered in Venezuela in 1977, featured selection of the ambitious Latin American Visions retrospective organized in Philadelphia in 1987, it generated enthusiastic critical response at the 1995 Chicago Latino Festival and was honored with tributes in Venezuela and Colombia in 1997. Despite this remarkable resiüence,Araya's historical place in the formative history of both Venezuelan national cinema and the New Latin American Cinema movement is stiU contested. Over the decades, European and North American critics have not hesitated to celebrate the film as universal masterpiece, authentic national product, and exemplar or precursor of regional cinema's highest capabilities. Upon its long-deferred Venezuelan release, a number of commentaries in the press likewise heralded Araya's preeminent position in national and in Latin American cinema: "the crowning achievement of national cinema" (Matías Carrasco, El Universal May 17); "national cinema's most important film" (Alfonso Molina, El Nacional, May 18); "a cinematic work of authentic national expression with universal projection" (RAS, El Nacional, June 1); "precursor of aU Latin American cinema" (Penzo, Momento, May 23). For these writers, Araya's earüer European success, its "universal" appeal and "world-wide" acclaim , confirmed and enhanced its national import. In marked contrast, a pair of Venezuelan film speciaUsts writing in various film publications over a twenty year period disputedaraya's status as a foundational film and as a national and Latin American product. For these©1998 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XI No. 21/22, Enero a Diciembre 1998 208_________________________________________JULIANNE BURTON-CARVAJAL writers, formed within a Marxist, anti-imperialist tradition, European exhibition was not a vaUd point of entry into national and continental production histories. The very precariousness of these stiU-emerging geneologies dictated that aU taint of dependency be rejected. Its European post-production and the nearly twenty years that elapsed between its filming and its reception in its country of origin made Araya tangential to the evolution of national and continental cinema. As we shaU see, the readings of the film elaborated by these critics emphasized an understanding of history effectively circumscribed by its own historical moment. Araya was made by Margot Benacerraf. Born in Caracas in 1927 to Sephardic immigrants from North Africa who accumulated great wealth in their adoptive land, the young Margot was educated in literature and art history under the tutelage of a number of illustrious refugees from the Spanish Civil War. She subsequently studied drama in New York and filmmaking in Paris, editing her first film, Reverán (1953), as weU as Araya (1959) in the latter city, where her extended residence put her in close contact with many of the foremost international artists of the period including Pablo Picasso, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Roberto Rosselini, and Luis Buñuel. It is not unusual for Latin American filmmakers, including the more militantly engaged ones, to come from families of means, to develop close ties with leading international artists, and to seek European co-production funds or facilities. Judging from the examples of Margot Benacerraf and Argentina's María Luisa Bemberg, however, the "original sin" of class privilege seems to be less pardonable in a woman filmmaker. I can only speculate on the role of class and gender in Benacerrafs marginalization by film critics and historians identified with the militant left, whüe acknowledging that there may be other contributing factors imperceptible from my current vantage point. Any attempt to understand Araya's anomalous inclusion-exclusion status —its inclusion in a transnational canon and persistent exclusion from national and continental film histories— must therefore be centrally located in the film itself. What insights into processes of...

Retrieving Orson Welles's Suspended Inter-American film, It's All True

RETRIEVING ORSON WELLES'S SUSPENDED INTER-AMERICAN FILM, ITS ALL TRUE __________________CATHERINE L. BENAMOU__________________ University ofMichigan Too much effort and real love went into the entire project for it to fail and come to nothing in the end. I have a degree of faith in it which amounts to fanaticism, and you can believe that if It'sAll True goes down into limbo I'll go with it. Orson Welles, in a letter to Fernando Pinto (1943) For over fifty years, Orson WeUes's unfinished semi-documentary film It's All Tme, shot in Mexico and Brazil in 1941 and 1942, has figured as a proverbial pea under the matress of EuroAmerican film history, especiaUy within the sector devoted to WeUes's film oeuvre, where it has commonly been perceived as holding the key to his rupture with the HoUywood industry early in his career. The curiosity it has attracted, if not the dismissive epithets ("misadventure," Allais, 1961; "curse," JeweU, 1988; "wound," Thomson , 19%), is weU-deserved. It's All Tme was the first film to be directed by WeUes on location using 35mm Technicolor camera and stock. (This was also the first usage of this technology, together with synchronized sound recording equipment, outside the continental United States). It was the third project that WeUes intended to shoot in Mexico, with Mexican crew and talent (foUowing a proposed "Nazi" spy thriUer based on Alexander CalderMarshaU 's The Way to Santiago, and a Mexican "melodrama"). It was the only film incorporating documentary strategies and subject matter that Welles would make untU the sixties and seventies. It was the only film WeUes ever directed under the aegis of the United States government. Of aU of the films (but not projects) sponsored directly by the Motion Picture Division of Nelson RockefeUer's Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OCIAA) in the early forties, it commanded the largest budget: $300,000 guaranteed against losses if a class "A" picture had been released. Yet, for many years, these aspects and many other questions linked to the intrinsic qualities of It's All Tme as both a work-in-progress and an historical event have remained obscure within the historical record owing partly to circumstantial factors. RKO abruptly terminated support for the project in mid-1942, at a point when shooting was nearly complete, leaving much of the footage in an unedited —and for many, undecipherable— state for decades. The prolonged inaccessibiUty of the footage due to its sequestering©1998 NUEVO TEXTO CRITICO Vol. XI No. 21/22, Enero a Diciembre 1998 25J)____________________________________________________CATHERINE L BENAMOU by the studio in the mid-forties, when Welles was unable to secure the financing necessary to retain the rights, led to the presumption that it was lost. It was then transferred to Desilu in 1957, then from Desilu to Paramount in 1967. Along with the wide geographic dispersion of historical evidence, the international dimension of the project carries in its wake not only linguistic and logistical chaUenges for both the participant and the investigator , but a high degree of complexity at the level of textual construction (sound-image relation, thematic articulation of distinct sociocultural spaces of expression, stylistic variations) motivated by strategic as weU as creative concerns. FinaUy, the ethnocentric and auteurist bias in much of the Uterature on WeUes has ironicaUy caused the project to be viewed as an anomaly —and therefore unworthy of serious historical or textual analysis— within the scope of the director's oeuvre, and has excluded from consideration key protagonists and developments within the broader historical context where both the causes and the impact of the film's suspension are concerned. In particular, there has been a tendency to overlook those factors that are linked to the film's design as an instrument of U.S. cultural diplomacy during World War II. Unfortunately, the release in 1993 of a partiaUy restored and reconstructed version of the film has not produced a dramatic reversal in this tendency towards critical neglect. I. Points of Departure My work with It's All Tme, at least initiaUy, did not stem from an interest in Orson Welles, but rather from ongoing comparative research into Latin American film...

Framing Latin American cinema: contemporary critical perspectives

Framing Latin American cinema: contemporary critical perspectives

Latin American films, 1932-1994: a critical filmography

In 1931 Antonio Moreno completed Santa, Mexicos first true sound film. In it he established one of the foremost genres of Latin American cinema--the popular melodrama--which continues to this day. Latin American filmmakers came to the fore in the fifties and sixties and, as 1992s Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate) showed, Latin American films continue to be a major part of the international film scene. In this work over 300 of the most significant films from Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and other Latin American countries are covered. Each entry includes the English title, director, year of release, running time, language, country, and a detailed plot synopsis. Notes about the production and the filmmakers are also provided for many entries.

: The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project . Zuzana M. Pick.

Book Review| December 01 1995 Review: The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project by Zuzana M. Pick The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental ProjectZuzana M. Pick Christopher Ortiz Christopher Ortiz Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Film Quarterly (1995) 49 (2): 61–63. https://doi.org/10.2307/1213319 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Christopher Ortiz; Review: The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project by Zuzana M. Pick. Film Quarterly 1 December 1995; 49 (2): 61–63. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/1213319 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentFilm Quarterly Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1996 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.