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-thesoil 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

. . . 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)
1

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.
4

Allen L. Woll, The Latin Image in American Film, Berkeley : University of California Press,

John King, Magical Reels, London : Verso, 1990, p. 4

1980.

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.
7

John King, Magical Reels , p. 23

Ana M. Lpez, John King, Manuel Alvarado (eds), Mediating Two Worlds: Cinematic
Americas , London : BFI , 1993, p. 148.
9

Encounters in the

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)
10

11

Socialist Review, number 65, p. 14

(Emphasis mine).

12

Inaugural lecture, EICTV, Anuario 1988, Havana