100 Years of Cinema- Cinema in Latin America, 1995

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This essay appeared in the book: Maitra, Prabodh (ed.). One Hundred Years of Cinema. Calcutta: Nandan- The Art Film Centre, 1995. Print.

Transcript of 100 Years of Cinema- Cinema in Latin America, 1995

  • CINEMA IN LATIN AMERICA : A CULTURAL - HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

    INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY Ever since the Old World discovered the New and decided to call it America in honour of an obscure Italian navigator, a plethora of outrageously distorted images of the New World started seeping into the European mind. Among the extant documents are a dozen volume of engravings of the Great Voyages (called Historia Americae) inspired by Columbus extravagant accounts of the exotic lands. These images claimed to have given visual form to the world discovered by the conquistadores, enfolding them within the mythological vision of a Europe still emerging from the Middle Ages. The fantastical images of America -- where men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders 1 -- found unscrupulous acceptance in Europe over a long period spanning several centuries. The New World was almost a European invention and had been since the Renaissance a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories, landscapes and unusual experiences. For Europe (and later on, Anglo-Saxon America) Latin America represented one of its deepest and recurring images of the Other. With the advent of photography around the middle of the nineteenth century, this image of the exotic underwent a transformation. Not only did a change come about in the conditions in which images were produced but the fact that photography became a vehicle of nineteenth century empiricism must have also played a significant role. The camera may have conquered geographical distance but the cultural chasm clearly subsisted. ARTIST AND HISTORY Christopher Columbus discovery 2 of America in 1492 initiated a long chain of unfortunate events. In the wars that ensued, the conquistadores did not merely overwhelm the inhabitants of America in terms of warfare. They systematically obliterated the immensely rich cultures of the Mayas, the Aztecs and the Incas. The possible flowering of an authentic American civilization was thus nipped in the bud. In several countries, these rich civilizations were uprooted completely with no cultural vestiges whatsoever. In others, the Indians were banished to the remote countryside, far away from the urban centres of power and visibility and were thus condemned to live forever a marginal existence. Contemporary Mayan responses to state intervention in Chiapas are merely aspirations towards the re-assertion of a long-lost indigenous identity. For Latin America, colonial rule thus represented a definitive cultural rupture. The vacuum created by an enforced amnesia gradually gave way to the unequal encounter of three different races that had never met each other before: the European white, the indigenous Indian and the African black. The encounter of the three races is imbued with such deep significance that the Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier considered the discovery to be the most important watershed in history, alienating the New World Man from pre-Columbian Man. Latin America eventually became the site of a creative cultural symbiosis, immensely rich with the possibilities of cross-fertilization. Most thinkers from the nineteenth century down to our own time have located the cultural specificity of Latin America to the (somewhat) incongruous amalgam of the continent. Crisis of identity and the search for forms of authenticity have consequently become the abiding concerns of Latin American culture for the last one hundred and fifty years. Masks and labyrinths (at once simple and complex ) have thus appeared as recurring metaphors virtually among all major

  • writers. In the lives of most artists, the private search for meaning and authentic personal language has become confounded with a larger continental quest for identity. It is perhaps for this reason that in every cultural sphere of Latin America, art, society and history have become profoundly interlinked. Nerudas invocation of The Heights of Macchu Picchu or Cesar Vallejos lamentation in Trilce (...between my where and my when / this crippled coming of age of man )3 are moments when personal anguish moves to a broader vision of a suffering humanity. There are indeed instances in possibly every culture where an individuals personal conflicts mirror as well as dramatize the central social crises of his/her time. But in Latin America, perhaps more typically than any other place in the world, the individual artists private search for meaning has epitomized the societys search for a new, amorphous self-definition. Every work of art has consequently implied a certain social ideal even if it chooses to represent a deliberately alternative reality (as did Jorge Luis Borges or Julio Cortazar). Alejo Carpentiers landmark novel Los Pasos Perdidos (The Lost Steps, 1953) is revealing in this sense as it deals with the theme of restless searching in an allegorical form. In the novel, a successful music composer in a modern cosmopolitan city, desiring to escape from an empty existence, sets out on an expedition to collect primitive musical instruments from the Orinoco jungle. The musicians journey becomes a pilgrimage to retrace his own lost steps. He joins an expedition of people who are fleeing from modern life in order to found a new community far from civilization. He accompanies them into the heart of the jungle, coming upon more and more primitive communities until, at last, he reaches a region in which man has not settled. For a time, the musician is tempted to settle in this new Eden, but he finds that he cannot reconcile this existence with his musicians craft. He returns temporarily to civilization; when he attempts to go back to the jungle community, he finds that he can no longer find the way. Carpentier ends his novel on a didactic note: the artists place is on the frontier of the future; he can retrace lost steps but not stay in the past. He has to undertake a harrowing search for the retrieval of history but there is a greater urgency to become, in Octavio Paz's words, the contemporaries of all mankind. CIVILIZATION AND BARBARISM The turbulent excitement of political life in nineteenth century Latin America stood in sharp contrast to the dullness of much of its literature and painting. Eccentric despots, mad tyrants and military caudillos (leaders) swept across the historical scene without ever being captured in the pages of the insipid historical and romantic novels of the time. Reality was perhaps too strong and strange to be grasped by writers accustomed to the narrow refinements of Paris and London. With independence from colonial rule and the birth of new republics, intellectuals expected a marvellous flowering of an original culture, not a mere shadow-boxing between European fashion and Latin American reality. While some thinkers like the Uruguyan Jos Enrique Rod hoped that the noble and winged part of the spirit would eventually rule over gross sensuality (Ariel, 1900), others like the Cuban Jos Mart declared in a celebrated essay called Nuestra America (Our America,1886) that the barbarians had an authenticity and spontaneity which would finally be more valuable to the continent than the borrowed fineries of the civilized European. While the traditionalists endorsed a reworking of the clerical civilization of Catholic Spain suitably adapted to the new republics in their post-colonial era, the liberals turned to the values of the French Enlightenment with its primacy of reason and equality before the law.The latter found its most influential expression in a polemical essay by the Argentine Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo o la

  • civilizacin y barbarie (Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism, 1845). Sarmiento argued that the young republics of Spanish America would have to overcome the perils of barbarism (i.e. the appalling breakdown of social and political order) by drawing on the political theory and institutions developed in Europe since the Enlightenment, as the USA had managed to do so successfully. A broad consensus, ambivalent in tone, seems to have emerged at that time in choosing the theme of the pampas (the Prairies) as an archetypal landscape -- a place of barbarism but also the crucible of national identity -- for Argentina. The gaucho (inhabitant of the pampas) became the primary agent of this landscape. In several countries with strong indigenous traditions, the liberal Creoles laid the foundation of a neo-classical americanismo disclaiming the heritage of Spain by evoking an ideal vision of the Indian past. Thus in every country, there emerged an archetypal, authentic son-of-the-soil and by transforming that figure into an ambivalent national symbol, artists and intellectuals temporarily crystallized the problem of national identity which all the new republics experienced. Social debates of this period, addressing the issue of nation- building and speculating upon the course that Latin American culture should follow, unanimously rejected the materialistic and utilitarian values of the cold America of the North while sounding a grave warning against the increasing threat that it posed for the warm America of Spanish origin. Positivism became the dominant turn-of-the-century ideology. It was believed to be the instrument through which Latin American adherents of Comte and Spencer hoped to liberate themselves from the retrograde influence of Spain. Later on when Positivism became the justification behind oppressive military dictatorships (particularly in Mexico in the first decade of the twentieth century), intellectuals argued for the abandonment of Positivism and called for the exploration of other contemporary streams of thought like Bergsonism and the return to metaphysical speculation which Positivism had condemned as fruitless. Oswald Spenglers The Decline of The West (1918) was received with great fanfare because it suggested to them that Latin Americans may soon leave behind their sense of inferiority to Europe.4 Latin America thus stumbled along into the twentieth century driven by three burgeoning but immensely powerful forces: the rising tides of nationalisms (or even an idealistic Pan-Americanism), a rapidly emerging aggressive imperialism of the North and the arrival of cinema, still in its embryonic form. LATIN AMERICA AND HOLLYWOOD As early as 1898,two cinematographers of the United States who claimed to have filmed a naval battle of the Spanish-American War in Cuba, actually shot picture cutouts of war-ships in the bath tub of a New York studio and passed them off as The Battle of Santiago Bay. The fact that this film was unquestioningly hailed in the USA as the most palpable testimony to the War, must be one of the deepest ironies in film history. Cinema and imperialism thus came together in the very beginning and dissolved into the screen with the claim to a triumphant ideology. Ever since then, the myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority (often called the American way of life) has been endlessly glorified through the providential intervention of a law-abiding American in the face of any threat to the world order. The unequal war that ensues between the good and the bad leaves behind it not merely stories or ideas but dramatic principles meant to be emulated in the same vein. The infallibility of the Hollywood dramatic model thereby established a certain variety of cinema as the cinema. By 1917 Hollywood almost entirely removed its European competitors from Latin America. The only major contestant had been the early Italian cinema which dominated the market after the First World War prior to which most films seen in the continent were of French origin. The nascent

  • Soviet cinema of the period --Hollywoods ideological rival -- was banned in most countries. Further, the First World War had disrupted European production. The American producers took advantage of these conditions. Hollywood established itself firmly in Latin American markets through a concerted sales drive in 1916 as the industry emerged from the internecine squabbles of the patents war. By 1920, 95 per cent of the screen time in Latin America had been taken over by U.S. films and the figure has remained the same since then. Cinema in Latin America has therefore made the Hollywood film its constant point of reference by denying it, rejecting it or embracing it altogether. The myth of Anglo-Saxon superiority was partly propagated through an endless number of denigrating and ridiculous stereotypes of the Latin that the Hollywood cinema perpetrated: beautiful seoritas with gazes of brazen sensuality, Don Juanesque men who play serenades to their beloveds leaning over from balconies, lazy servants, prostitutes who carry jasmine on their ears, wild anarchists with an uncontrollable sexual appetite, rebels without any cause, stupid and submissive amigos, ad nauseum.5 During the Second World War, this negative image of the Latin underwent an interesting change in the face of the Roosevelt governments Good Neighbour policy of economic penetration of Latin America and the need to defuse revolutionary nationalisms through indirect means. In Juarez (1939), the Latin protagonists goodness consisted in that he was an enthusiastic admirer of the democratic ideas of President Lincoln. Later, when Brazil and Mexicos cooperation was considered crucial in the Allied war effort, Walt Disney created Saludos Amigos (1943) and The Three Caballeros (1945). In these films, Donald Duck teams up with his new pals: the parrot Jos Carioca (symbol of Brazil) and Panchito Villa (a real-life General of the Mexican Rebel Army transformed into a cartoon figure) as the pistol-clad cowboy. Panchito leads the gang, three birds of a feather on a folkloric journey through Mexico along with his American friend Donald Duck. EARLY CINEMA Much of the Latin American cinema in the first half of the century was primarily concerned with evolving a contrapuntal imagery in reply to Hollywoods negative images. Early cinema particularly in Brazil and Mexico (up to 1917) concentrated almost exclusively on capturing reality as the human eye perceived it. As though propelled by the Positivist philosophy of that period, the early filmmakers tried to use the camera as one means of recording the truth. The fact that the birth of cinema coincided with the rising tide of nationalisms, prompted many Latin Americans to seize on the film as an appropriate means to encourage that nationalism through films that purported to be authentic history. This was particularly felt in countries where a majority of the citizenry was illiterate. In search of a positive iconography of the continent, some filmmakers developed interest in idiosyncratic landscapes, believing that local history was somehow linked with it. To think of the landscape of Latin America purely in terms of its visual effect is to ignore the greater part of it. Any consideration of the land is charged above all with questions of occupation, ownership and use, of appropriation, exploitation and control. Scenes of virgin landscapes thus showed the raw strength of a young developing nation not yet prey to the decadence of Western civilization. We may remind ourselves that Indian writers of that period were also taking initiative in the representation of their geography as edenic, natural, wild, a site of myth and ritual to be either reclaimed or mourned. (Raja Raos Kanthapura or Tagores short stories can be considered as examples).

  • In one of the most remarkable films of the forties, titled Maria Candelaria (Mexico,1943), Emilio El Indio Fernandez, a distinguished director of the period, created an almost allegorical style where the expressive physiognomies of the female and male protagonists of the film harmonize and mingle with the expressive nature of the landscape. Mexico, for Fernandez, is elemental, atavistic, the site of primal passions and violence from which can be forged a new progressive nation. 6 In the painting of this period, we find a far more articulate expression of the intersection of landscape, history and gender. In the work of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (whom Andr Breton at one time called the greatest of all surrealists), there is a conjunction of her self-consciously female iconography with the traditionally gendered image of colonization -- that of the female land taken by force and condemned to give birth to a bastard culture. Kahlo transforms the metaphor to allow for a more positive reading of the indigenous. Her allegorical female is not the victimized, raped, essentially passive chingada 7 but an assertive presence with the power of life and death. Though several exciting avant garde movements in literature and the arts swept across a number of Latin American countries in the twenties (particularly in Argentina and Mexico), cinema remained virtually untouched, as in India as well, by the cultural vitality of that period. A recent writer on the subject has observed that as early as 1922, the anthropophagous movement in Brazil had suggested that the way of dealing with cultural imperialism was through creative cannibalism, digesting and recycling foreign influences through sarcasm and parody. 8 Cannibalism was adopted as a metaphor of defiant barbarism, as an expression of scorn for bourgeois and capitalist values, but it also spoke of an anti-imperialist attitude to European civilization. In retrospect, it now seems interesting that this perception which proved so prophetic for a good part of Latin American culture since then, has had to wait at least four more decades to percolate down to cinema. Filmmakers possibly could not find immediate ways of digesting and remoulding the Hollywood cinema. In this context it is important to remember that Jean Franco, the author of the work titled The Modern Culture of Latin America (Penguin,1970), refers to the nature of the movements in the arts (in the continent) which have not grown out of a previous movement (as in Europe) but have arisen in response to factors external to art. A new social situation defines the position of the artist, who then improvises or borrows a technique to suit his/her purpose. Hence, the history of arts in Latin America is not a continuous development but a series of fresh starts. (Franco, p.11). This is fundamental to any real understanding of Latin American culture, even its cinema. The pursuit of a self-referential inward-looking art has had little attraction here. Life and art are too closely bound up, the experience of reality too urgent and omnipresent to be ignored or avoided or wished away. Though mostly insipid and conventional, at least one film from the twenties can be considered among the greatest films ever made in the continent. In the eighteen-year old Brazilian Mario Peixotos Limite (Boundary, 1929), three strangers float through the ocean in a boat somewhat aimlessly, one of the women chained by handcuffs. The indirect and fragmented narrative style of the film, unusually advanced for its time, created images of imprisonment and limits that evoked almost an existential anguish. The precarious cinemas of Latin America that emerged in the forties and fifties were, on the whole, based on the Hollywood model and the demagogic principles of the culture industry of the time. Local colour was sprinkled all over, spiced enough in a recognizable Creole dressing and used as a necessary additive for greater commercial success. The Old Latin American cinema hardly made any attempt to seek an idiomatic expression. Furthermore, it gave a picturesque version of its own reality, thereby privileging the neocolonialist strategy of cultural penetration. However, as Ana Maria Lpez convincingly argues, ...this was the first indigenous cinema to dent the Hollywood industrys pervasive presence in Latin America; the first to consistently circulate Latin American images, voices, songs and history; the first to capture and sustain the interest of

  • multinational audiences throughout the continent for several decades. 9 BUUEL IN MEXICO Luis Buuel spent a very important phase of his career in Mexico where he was invited by a Hollywood producer to make some commercial films. Among his memorable Mexican creations are Los Olvidados (1950) and El Angel Exterminador (The Exterminating Angel, 1962). Though apparently neo-realist, in Los Olvidados Buuel constantly subverts the tenets of neo-realism. Even while narrating external details, Buuel makes sudden incursions into unnatural and apparently irrelevant actions through which he explores the irrational and repressed aspects of his characters minds. Unfortunately, Buuel did not leave behind him any disciple and his impact on Mexican cinema was minimal. THE NEW CINEMA In the 1950s, Latin America witnessed a remarkable explosion of cultural activity. In the search for authentic forms of expression and a language entirely its own, literature of the continent reached maturity (the so-called literary boom) at a time when cinema had not even embarked upon a similar journey of self-discovery. Significantly enough, three crucially important literary works were published during this period in quick succession: two major epics of cultural identity, viz., Pablo Nerudas Canto General (Chile,1952) and Alejo Carpentiers Los Pasos Perdidos (The Lost Steps, Cuba, 1953), and a powerful indictment of colonialism in the Caribbean Aim Cesaires Discurso sobre el Colonialismo (Discourse on Colonialism, Martinique, 1951). The fifties were also a period of great political upheavals that shook the entire continent, strongly marked by a spirit of non-conformism with existing political structures. Dictatorships were defeated in Venezuela, Nicaragua, Colombia and Cuba; countries such as Bolivia, Guatemala and Cuba were rocked by left-wing revolutions; Puerto Rico, Brazil and Argentina offered strong resistance to imperialist designs and established democracies, and events like the execution of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua would carry deep significance in retrospect. This was also a period when the American film industry was adversely affected by the Cold War boomerang that culminated in Senator McCarthys sinister witch-hunts in Hollywood. Political events along with the marvellous flowering of a literary tradition were clear indicators to a time of change and consciousness-raising. Cinema could hardly remain immune to such vibrant socio-cultural developments. New cinemas gradually grew up in the optimistic conditions of this period in different parts of the continent. By the early fifties, Rome became almost the Mecca of cinema for several of the future Latin American filmmakers who went to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in the heyday of the neo-realists. Italian neo-realism exposed to them the seamy underside of a supposedly advanced nation. In the humane portrayal of marginal lives, the Latin Americans perceived a European metaphor of an underdevelopment that was similar to their own milieu. Post-war Italian cinema also provided them with a valuable role model in terms of production. In the socio-economic conditions of the continent, the neo-realist mode of production seemed to be the only possible alternative for creative filmmakers working outside the glittering centres of commercial cinema in Buenos Aires, Mexico City or So Paulo. Neorealism made them realize that the problem lay not in what the Old cinema showed but what it tried to conceal. It thus effected a shift of emphasis from a mere opposition to the explicitly false images of Latin American life to a studied and subversive exposure of the moralizing concerns

  • implicit in them. El Nuevo Cine (New Cinema) that emerged in different countries of Latin America from the early fifties up to the late seventies, concerned itself not with the desire to re-aestheticize traditional cinematic codes but to politicize its aesthetics. Concentrating on social problems, Brazils Cinema Nvo looked sharply into the two areas of greatest poverty and social injustice: the favela or slum (as in Nelson Pereira dos Santos Rio 40, 1956) and the serto or the arid backlands (as in Glauber Rochas Black God White Devil, 1963 or Antonio dos Mortes, 1969). In the latter film, an operatic drama of epic proportions with complex political and mystical dimensions, Rocha suggests that revolution could be found in an ecstatic blending of messianic religion and social banditry. The people, he believed, are not alienated masses but repositories of wisdom that intellectuals must tap into. A decade earlier, the Argentine Fernando Birri had returned from Rome and made Tire di (Throw us a Dime, 1958), the first social documentary in Latin America. His aspirations for a populist cinema seem to anticipate that of Rocha, though apparently in a different way. Birri, whom Garca Mrquez calls the grand Pope of the New Latin American cinema, sought to adapt neo-realism to his own context. His cinema is fundamentally a proposal for a philosophy of praxis, informed by both the philosophy and the theology of liberation 10 in Latin America with their emphasis upon the process of concientizacin (grasp of awareness), particularly in the works of the Brazilian educationist Paulo Freire. Just as Freire believed that it is never a mere reflection of but reflection upon material reality, Birri too sees the documentary image as not a simple reflection of reality but a reflection upon it by both the filmmaker and the audience. Film-making represents for him a significant human action upon objective reality through which consciousness can take on a critical and dialectical form. Birri finds inspiration in Freires contention that only beings who can reflect upon the fact that they are determined are capable of freeing themselves. Like Freire (and Rocha), he too seeks a rupture with the culture of silence (non-representation, powerlessness and ignorance) that may pave the way for the masses to enter into the historical process. Historicism is an inseparable category of this New Cinema, however heterogeneous it may be in style or content. Among the more memorable expressions are the Argentine Fernando Birri's Los Inundados ( Flooded out, 1962), and Fernando E. Solanas La hora de los hornos ( The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968-69); the Cuban T.G. Aleas Memorias del subdesarollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), and Humberto Solas Lucia (1968); the Chilean Patricio Guzmns La batalla de Chile ( The Battle of chile, 1975), Miguel Littns El chacal de Nahueltoro ( The Jackal of Nahueltoro, 1968) and Raul Ruzs Tres tristes tigres ( Three Sad tigers, 1971); the Brazilian Glauber Rochas Terra em transe ( Earth Entranced / Land in Anguish, 1967), and Nelson Pereira dos Santoss Vidas Secas ( Barren lives, 1963), to name only a few. Driven by a strong sense of social purpose, all these directors looked upon film-making as a politically symbolic act and wished to reduce technique to its barest essentials, a camera in hand and an idea in the head in Rochas telling phrase. On a more formal level, most of these films reject the false distinctions between documentary and fiction film. The documentary mode of representation exerted an influence on the fictional mode by creating a common base that permitted the documentary to enrich itself with certain narrative and dramatic structures that belong to fiction (as in Senna/Bodanskys Iracema) whereas a certain degree of documentary contextualization lends haunting significance and ongoing resonance to many fictional narratives (as in Aleas Memories of Underdevelopment) In Cuba, the Revolution gave a fillip to the development of a vibrant film culture with a personality entirely its own. The Cuban cinemas distinction lies in underscoring the process of development and

  • the tensions that exist in the problems confronted both at individual and societal levels. Several of these films underscore the ideological underpinnings of traditional cinematic codes. Solas Lucia (1968) or Sergio Girals El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco,1973) for example, are subtly deconstructive in their parodic impulse. Girals film seeks to adapt the first anti-slavery novel (Francisco) but in the process criticizes, parodies and subverts the historical melodrama. In retaliation to the Yankee strategy of cultural penetration through childrens comics and animation film, Juan Padrn created in the character of Elpidio Valdes (1979) a counter-Donald Duck figure, providing the Latin American child with the possibility to build his/her world of fantasy based on values other than the Hollywood glorification of individualism, competition and condescension towards marginal characters. The New Cinema filmmakers often highlighted the hostile conditions in which they made their films. Sometimes this was inscribed within the film itself (as in The Battle of Chile where the photographer shoots his own death) or through their writings that insisted on transforming scarcity itself, the inescapable condition of production into a signifier. In our own country, working in somewhat similar conditions, Satyajit Ray had made an almost identical declaration: There is something very exciting about creating art out of the barest of means. After all, we have the essentials to get to the human essence. Aesthetics of Hunger (Glauber Rocha), Critical realism (Fernando Birri), Third Cinema (Solanas and Getino), Peoples Cinema (Jorge Sanjines) or Imperfect Cinema (Garca Espinosa) were actually different terms coined by filmmakers to arrive at the same thesis, each in his own way. The important thing, wrote Solanas, was not the film itself but that which the film provoked. The major theoretical essays of the New Latin American cinema were all written by filmmakers themselves. Their theoretical positions may have been derived from the concrete practice of attempting to make specific films under specific circumstances. This has been, in fact, the source of both their strengths and their weaknesses. THE SEVENTIES Though the seventies initially witnessed the victories of the Popular Unity government in Chile and the Frente Sandinista in Nicaragua, several misfortunes were to follow. Latin America was soon plunged into a series of military coups and dictatorships in Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina (where the Peronist movement failed in 1975-1976) The possibilities for creative national cinemas to flourish in such adverse conditions began to be increasingly thwarted. Military censorships often forced filmmakers to adopt intricate symbolism (as Glauber Rocha did in Brazil in the sixties) so much so that such films spoke only to intellectuals who could understand the hidden message. Unsympathetic to the purposes of the New Cinema, the military rulers strangled it and returned the film industry to the innocuous domain of the soap opera and musicals, preferring a lulling dream world to the pursuit of truth. Despite political vicissitudes, by the mid-seventies the New Latin American Cinema achieved most of the objectives that it had aspired for. The Fourth Encounter of Latin American Film-makers in Caracas (1974) registered several new phenomena: the birth of national cinemas in the smaller countries like Panama, Costa Rica and Haiti; the re-birth of the Chilean cinema in exile; the boom of Peruvian documentary and the emergence of new genres and sub-genres. All these indicated that not only was the New Cinema alive but could now be considered one of the most remarkable developments in the twentieth century cultural history of the continent. Among its precedents, the New Cinema shared with the Mexican mural movement several of its basic concerns: the same search for authentic roots, a similar decolonizing impulse and the same desire to create a language specific to itself. The search for the authentic in Latin America, has always included the

  • imaginary dimension as an inseparable component of the reality that is explored and revealed. Filmmakers, too, are increasingly searching for that sudden but continuous eruption of the imaginary within the limits of everyday existence (as in Joaquim Pedro de Andrades Macunaima, Brazil,1971) The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has traced the Latin American concern with fantasy to the prohibition of novel-writing (and reading) during the colonial period. The Spanish Inquisition was perhaps the earliest political power to have recognized the subversive potential of fiction. Denied a legitimate existence, the novel took its revenge, as it were, by moving out of its own boundaries and making an onslaught of fiction on every aspect of life: history-writing, journalism, religion, science and art. It is the consequent novelization of whole life wherein Vargas Llosa locates the creative source of magic realism. CONTEMPORARY CINEMA On a formal level the eighties have seen a general return to the transparency of the traditional classic film style wondering whether conventional film narrative and individual psychologism can create more effective ways of raising consciousness. It has also meant a corresponding decline in the deconstructive approach. Maria Luisa Bembergs Camila (Argentina,1984) typifies this trend, though at the same time it points towards patriarchal institutions and nationalist rhetoric as contributing factors to some of the worst excesses in the countrys history. Contemporary cinema in Latin America is a rebellion against the sterile rhetoric and ideological blindspots of the sixties and seventies. Many critics now argue that the conceptual and intellectual insistence on revolutionary action independent of mass support in the late sixties and early seventies, gave the reactionary forces in several countries the excuse to take over the machinery of government. The military often took left-wing rhetoric as the justification for its rule. In other words, the binary oppositions between political and commercial cinema or between the national and foreign stand changed irrevocably. The concept of a national cinema itself is now put into question. There is now a far greater willingness to accept the hybrid nature of cultural formations and a lesser hankering after some elusive essence of national identity. In countries like Chile and Argentina, the condition of exile has created a serious dislocation between the filmmaker and the nation. Chiles national cinema of exile (1973-1985) flourished far outside its national territory. In Sur (South, Argentina, 1988), a film centering around the theme of exile, Solanas attempts to redefine the nation and the national struggle and reconstruct the culture of resistance in search of another viable political ensemble. The two key figures of Chiles cinema of exile are Ral Ruz and Miguel Littn. In terms of both theme and form Ruzs cinema is entirely different from that of others in Latin America. While Ruz explores the possibilities of film language in his characteristically introverted tone (as in Three Crowns for a Sailor, France,1982), Miguel Littns films stand as epics of Latin American resistance (Letters from Marusia, Mexico,1975). The brilliant Uruguayan historian Eduardo Galeano refers to the long tradition of syncretism in Latin America as the eclecticism of survival. He gives expression to a view that is perhaps representative of an entire generation: National culture is defined by its content, not by the origin of its elements. Alive, it changes incessantly; it changes itself, it contradicts itself and receives external influences that at times increase it and that are wont to operate simultaneously as a threat and a stimulus. It would be a delusion and an act of reactionary stupidity to propose the rejection of European and North American cultural contributions already incorporated into our heritage and into the universal heritage, arbitrarily

  • reducing those vast and complex cultures to the machinery of imperialist alienation implicit in them. Anti-imperialism also is prey to infantile disorders. The lack of what is denied to us need not imply the refusal of what nurtures us. Latin America need not renounce the creative fruits of cultures which have flowered in great measure thanks to a material splendour not unconnected to the pitiless exploitation of our people and our lands. 11 Cinema in Latin America is far too heterogeneous now than ever before and is certainly not a static category. Whether it can be seen as an unbroken continuation of the New Cinema of the sixties is arguable but a vibrant film culture is clearly perceivable. The writer Gabriel Garca Mrquez, a great force in contemporary Latin American cinema, is one among many who convincingly affirm the existence of a New New Cinema: . . .The fact that this evening we are still talking like madmen about the same thing, after thirty years, and that there are with us so many Latin Americans from all parts and from different generations, also talking about the same thing, I take as one further proof of an indestructible idea. 12 1 . . . travels history: Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, . . . And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. (Act I, sc. iii, W. Shakespeare, Othello, 1605) 2 It may be said that America was not discovered but invented by the European imagination. Amerigo Vespuccis reports (the Italian navigator from whom the continent got its name) encouraged Sir Thomas More to invent a vision of an ideal society in his Utopia (1515). Three mechanical inventions, wrote Francis Bacon, had changed the whole face and state of things -- printing, gunpowder and the magnet -- which permitted literature, conquest and navigation and let the Renaissance spirit flourish. Indeed it can be said that the discovery of the New World released the Renaissance imagination itself. 3 . . . entre mi donde y mi cuando esta mayoria invlida de hombre. Trilce, 1922 (Translation mine) 4 Spenglers explanation of history in terms of cycles of cultural growth and degeneration enabled Carpentier to overcome his pessimism about the historical prospects for Latin America: if the loss of spirituality to which rationalist humanism appeared to lead was not an ineluctable destiny, then to approve the vitality of primitive cultures as the nativist writers had done, was not necessarily reactionary; for these local cultures could now be seen not as vestiges of the past but as the seeds of a new, specifically American culture in the making. Edwin Williamson, Coming to Terms with Modernity in John King. (ed.), Modern Latin American Fiction : A Survey , London : Faber and Faber, 1987, p. 83. 5 Allen L. Woll, The Latin Image in American Film, Berkeley : University of California Press, 1980. 6 John King, Magical Reels, London : Verso, 1990, p. 4 7 The Violated Mother of modern Mexico. This archetype of woman as an epitome of the nation has been brilliantly analysed by Octavio Paz in Chapter 4 of The Labyrinth of Solitude, Harmondsworth : Penguin, 1985.

  • 8 John King, Magical Reels , p. 23 9 Ana M. Lpez, John King, Manuel Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic Encounters in the Americas , London : BFI , 1993, p. 148. 10 Theology of Liberation is a very important and powerful religious movement in Latin America. A section of the Christian Church felt the necessity of taking Christianity back to its roots by involving itself directly with social causes, particularly those of the poor. It laid emphasis on the poverty of Jesus and the subaltern and emancipatory aspects of Christianity. Liberation Theology thus implies a possible amalgamation of Marxism and Christianity. The Right wing has often dismissed Liberation Theology as being merely a Marxist manipulation of the Church. For a study of Liberation Theology in India (the dalitization of Jesus), see Sathianathan Clarke, Theology of Liberation in India : Dalits and Christianity (OUP, 1998) 11 Socialist Review, number 65, p. 14 (Emphasis mine). 12 Inaugural lecture, EICTV, Anuario 1988, Havana