Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

With foreign eyes: english-language criticism on latin American film1

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320802228096

1469-9575

David Wood,

Cinema and Media Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 I am grateful to Constanza Burucúa for her useful comments on a draft of this essay. 2 See De los Reyes (1981 De los Reyes, Aurelio. 1981. Cine y sociedad en Mexico, 1896–1930. Vol 1, Vivir de sueños, 1896–1930, México City: UNAM/Cineteca Nacional. [Google Scholar], 1983 De los Reyes, Aurelio. 1983. Los orígenes del cine en Mexico, 1896–1900, Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública/Fondo de Cultura Económica. [Google Scholar]). 3 See Solanas and Getino (1973 Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio. 1973. Cine, cultura y descolonización, Buenos Aires: Siglo Veintiuno. [Google Scholar]). The slippage between radical ‘Third Cinema’ spectatorship and arthouse consumption patterns in Europe and North America is discussed by Julianne Burton (1985 Burton, Julianne. 1985. Marginal cinemas and mainstream critical theory. Screen, 26(3–4): 2–21. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 1997 Burton, Julianne. 1997 [1981]. “Film artisans and film industries in Latin America, 1956–1980: Theoretical and critical implications of variations in modes of filmic consumption”. In New Latin American Cinema, Edited by: Martin, Michael T. Vol. 1, Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2 vols [Google Scholar]); Chon A. Noriega, in his introduction to Noriega (2000 Noriega, Chon A. 2000. Visible nations: Latin American cinema and video, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]); Antony Guneratne (2003 Guneratne, Antony R. 2003. “Introduction: Rethinking third cinema”. In Rethinking third cinema Edited by: Guneratne, Antony R. and Dissanayake, Wimal. London and New York Routledge [Google Scholar]); and Marvin D'Lugo (2003 D'Lugo, Marvin. 2003. “Authorship, globalization, and the new identity of Latin American cinema: From the Mexican ‘Ranchera’ to Argentinian ‘Exile’”. In Rethinking Third Cinema, Edited by: Guneratne, Antony R. and Dissanayake, Wimal. London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). Even so, I have pointed out elsewhere that not only was militant Latin American cinema indeed distributed on some arthouse circuits in Latin America during the 1960s and 1970s, but it also circulated on occasion in marginal ‘Third Cinema’-type surroundings in Europe and North America (Wood, 2005 Wood, David. 2005. Revolution and Pachakuti: Political and indigenous cinema in Bolivia and Colombia. PhD diss., King's College London. [Google Scholar]: 26–78). 4 For English-language criticism that goes far beyond a privileging of the 1960s and '70s revolutionary cinemas see, for instance, Stock (1997 Stock, Anne Marie, ed. 1997. Framing Latin American cinema: Contemporary critical perspectives, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]); Noriega (2000 Noriega, Chon A. 2000. Visible nations: Latin American cinema and video, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. [Google Scholar]); Elena and Díaz López (2003 Elena, Alberto and Díaz López, Marina, eds. 2003. The cinema of Latin America, London: Wallflower Press. [Google Scholar]); and the special issue of The Americas dedicated to Latin American film history, 63(2) (October 2006). 5 Paranaguá (2003 Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio. 2003. Tradición y modernidad en el cine de América Latina, Madrid: Fondo de Cultura Económica. [Google Scholar]: 16, my translation). See also Paranaguá (2000 Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio. 2000. Le cinéma en Amérique Latine. Le miroir éclaté, Paris: L'Harmattan. [Google Scholar]). 6 Elena and Díaz López (2003 Elena, Alberto and Díaz López, Marina, eds. 2003. The cinema of Latin America, London: Wallflower Press. [Google Scholar]: 1–12). The Mexican film scholar Eduardo de la Vega, among others, has turned in recent years to the study of the local and the regional within national film history: see, for instance, De la Vega (2000 De la Vega, Eduardo (coord.). 2000. Microhistorias del cine en México, Mexico: Universidad de Guadalajara/UNAM/IMCINE/Cineteca Nacional/Instituto Mora. [Google Scholar]). 7 López, 1991 López, Ana M. 1991. Setting up the stage: A decade of Latin American film scholarship. Quarterly Review of Film and Video, 13(1–3): 239–60. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 256; ‘General Introduction’, in King, López and Alvarado (1993 King, John, López, Ana M. and Alvarado, Manuel, eds. 1993. Mediating two worlds: Cinematic encounters in the Americas, London: BFI. [Google Scholar]: xvii–xxi). 8 Avellar (2003 Avellar, José Carlos. 2003. “Limite”. In The cinema of Latin America, Edited by: Elena, Alberto and Díaz López, Marina. London: Wallflower Press. [Google Scholar]). Ivana Bentes's essay on Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Glauber Rocha, Brazil, 1964) in the same volume (Bentes, 2003 Bentes, Ivana. 2003. “Deus e o diabo na terra do sol”. In The cinema of Latin America, Edited by: Elena, Alberto and Díaz López, Marina. London: Wallflower Press. [Google Scholar]) signals the heterogeneity of the politicized cinemas of the 1960s, pointing out Rocha's engagement with mysticism, sadism and popular banditry, and his refusal to cast the people as passive victims of injustice – concerns avoided by many of his contemporaries. 9 See, for instance, recent work on indigenous video in many parts of the globe, which has shown how the articulation of private gender and ethnic identities is intimately linked to, although far from subsumed by, the promotion of wider political projects: Schiwy (2002 Schiwy, Freya. 2002. Reframing knowledge: Indigenous video, gender imaginaries, and colonial legacies. PhD diss., Duke University. [Google Scholar]); Ginsburg (1991 Ginsburg, Faye. 1991. Indigenous media: Faustian contract or global village?. Cultural Anthropology, 6(1): 92–112. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 10 On the origins of genre criticism in the UK and US, see Neale (2001 Neale, Steve. 2001. Genre and Hollywood, London and New York: Routledge. [Google Scholar]: 10–13). López (1993 López, Ana M. 1993. “Tears and desire: Women and melodrama in the ‘old’ Mexican cinema”. In Mediating two worlds: Cinematic encounters in the Americas Edited by: King, John, López, Ana M. and Alvarado, Manuel. London BFI [Google Scholar]) provides an incisive and nuanced account of classical Mexican melodrama, critiquing the simplistic dismissal of melodrama as alienating by many politicized critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The critical reappraisal of previously dismissed melodrama and notions of the popular in 1980s Latin America was, as Constanza Burucúa has argued, partly contingent on the historical circumstances of a continent undergoing redemocratization in that decade (Burucúa, 2007 Burucúa, Constanza. 2007. El melodrama en América Latina. Persistencia de un sentimiento. Cuadernos Hispanoamericanos, 679(enero): 37–44. [Google Scholar]).