The Ties That Bind: Some Notes on Literature & Cinema in Latin America

Indranil Chakravarty

Here I will try to delineate a tentative outline of the complex relationships that exist between the
literature and cinema of Latin America. I would also like to make some passing references to Indian
cinema and literature as part of a larger intention of bringing India and Latin America in some kind
of a comparative framework.
In the first half of the century, cinema drew somewhat uncritically from the resources of literature in
search of captivating plots and characters. This happened mainly because cinema in Latin America,
as everywhere else in the world, recognised the novel as having the narrative structure most relevant
for its own needs. However, the relationship between the two became more complex and
problematic in the latter half of the century when cinema started to influence literature both in its
narrative strategies as well as thematic concerns, and film adaptations of literary works rarely abided
by the virtue of fidelity but showed a more detached, ironic, and even a deconstructive strain in
some cases. As an example of experimentation with a non-novelistic narrative strategy, one can
think of Mario Vargas Llosa's Tia Julia y el escribidor (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, 1977) where the
novel uses the dramatic pattern of the popular soap opera as simultaneously its theme and
structuring principle with a multi-layered narrative and an open-ended episodic structure that
reaches a crescendo by the end of each episode. Though in this case it is the radio version that is
emulated and parodied, the structure and content is similar to that of the TV soap. In Manuel Puig's
Betrayed by Rita Hayworth (1971), the engagement with cinema and popular culture is deeper. It is a
surprisingly fine parody of all those dreamy, passionate, utterly unreal romances Hollywood
produced in the 1930's and 40's, in particular the sentimental melodramas starring Rita Hayworth.
Here too, as in Vargas Llosa, Puig uses the formula of the melodrama to give the novel its basic
narrative spine.
In Latin America, the relationship between literature and cinema has been rather intimate and selfconscious. Most of the major writers like Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Guillermo Cabrera
Infante, Joo Guimares Rosa, Manuel Puig and Gabriel Garca Mrquez, not only took a deep
interest in cinema but were actively involved with it in different ways. Most of them frequently
wrote film reviews -- rich with insightful reflections on cinema -- some of which have been
subsequently anthologised in books. Manuel Puig and Garca Mrquez actually studied at the
celebrated film institute -- Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome -- in the heydey of the
neorealists, with an eye to taking up filmmaking as a full-fledged profession. Though they both left
the course unfinished, Garca Mrquez once wrote in retrospect that over all the years of his creative
struggle in the fields of journalism and literature, he harboured another ambition, "wanting nothing
more in life than to be the filmmaker I never was".
Centro Sperimentale became the cinematic Mecca in the 1950s for many of the filmmakers who would
play a pioneering role in the emergence of a 'New' Cinema in Latin America. It was in Rome that
these filmmakers from different countries of the continent met each other for the first time and
recognised in the Italian neorealist cinema a cinematographic style that was extremely relevant to
them for various reasons. In the decade that followed they would rework and transform neorealism

to their own contexts, each in his own way. It is interesting that in another European city -- Paris -Latin American intellectuals and writers from the various countries had also met each other in the
1830s where they asked themselves and debated the same issues that filmmakers did more than a
century later. It was in Europe that the Latin American writers discovered their commonalities as
well as their differences. For geographical and political reasons it was impossible for them to gather
in any one Latin American city. So, Paris, their common destiny, became the cradle of modern Latin
American literature much in the same way as Rome became the cradle for filmmakers.
Most of the "boom" writers have had a bit of the scholar and the critic in themselves, a far cry from
the idea of the naif and natural artist. With their scholarship and conscious awareness of history and
cultural polemics, they constantly crossed the borders of their own discipline in search of
inspiration. Cinema provided them, in this sense, with a rich treasure-house of images and storytelling methods to draw upon.
We have seen how even a serious writer like Borges inscribes his metaphysical fictions within the
humble generic structures of the detective story and the Western. Though far from a literature of the
masses, we see that the Latin American novel can and does accommodate the culture of the masses
(in particular, the tango, the fotonovela, the Hollywood B-movie, soap opera, literatura de cordel,
etc). In fact, discussing his novel La Habana visto por un infante difunto (Infante's Inferno, 1977),
Cabrera Infante said: "It is with the movies with their raucous vitality, with their endless dynamism,
with their popular taste that I want my brute of a book to be associated".
One may wonder why these writers were so enamoured by the Hollywood B-movie rather than the
high-brow European cinema with which they were expected to empathise. The reason may lie in
that these writers were trying to represent and make use of certain aspects of popular culture which
these films -- intended to be entertaining with no artistic pretensions -- represent. Targeting mass
popularity, the B-grade Hollywood romances or horror films take recourse to extreme forms of
human actions, generating extreme reactions in their viewers. Through their melodramatism they
thus fulfil the classical function of catharsis by articulating emotions that would otherwise remain
repressed. Thus the B-movie, like the Indian popular cinema, make available to us certain
dimensions of popular psychology which writers like Puig or Cabrera Infante were interested in
addressing.
The use of movies as a language for repressed fears in Infante's Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Trapped
Tigers, 1971), becomes the determining factor in Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman where it forms part of
a whole cluster of elements which depend on an analogy between movies and dreams. In Betrayed by
Rita Hayworth (1968), Puig supplements the melodramtic spine of the novel with snathches of gossip
about film stars, popular lyrics, random bits of conversation, internal monologues, dreams,
newspaper accounts, police reports, clichs from advertisements, etc to show that the language and
emotions of the entertainment industry and cheap journalism are the only available registers for the
common people to think about themselves and construct their identities. Seduced by false beatitudes
of films and denied other sources of information, the common person tries to resolve all his/her
crises in terms of simple, melodramatic myths. In an obvious allusion to the home-grown political
myth of Eva Peron, the novel satirises demagogic politics, cultural control and sexual passions.
In the 1940s when the literature of Latin America reached maturity, the continent's cinema had not
even embarked upon the exciting and arduous journey of self-discovery. And yet, as soon as cinema

developed an idiosyncratic "Latin American" language (in the 1960s), it entered into a dialogue with
literature. Though several exciting avant garde movements in literature and the other arts swept
across a number of Latin American countries in the twenties (particularly in Brazil, Argentina and
Mexico), cinema remained virtually untouched by the cultural vitality of the period, as in India as
well. 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."
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. When Macunaima, the celebrated novel of Oswald de Andrade
that gave expression to "creative cannibalism" was adapted to the screen four decades after it was
written, it reinvoked the cannibalist metaphor in order to make a contemporary critique of both the
voracious capitalist exploitation and also the self-inflicted wounds of the left. Literary perceptions of
the past were thus filtered through a contemporary sensibility. In other words, in Latin America as in
India, cinema missed out on the possibilities of cultural cross-fertilisation through an early encounter
with modernist art in the twenties and thirties.
Differences apart, there is, however, a strikingly similar pattern through which both the continent's
literature and cinema found its own way. In order to recognise that, one has to acknowledge the fact
that the process of cultural development in Latin America does not fit easily into European terms of
explanation. It is very tempting to use the Peruvian writer Jos Carlos Mariategu's rejection of the
standard periodisation of art into the Classical, the Baroque, the Romantic and so forth and also the
orthodox Marxist classification of feudal-bourgeois-proletarian because neither is appropriate to
either Peru or Latin America as a whole. Instead, he suggests the brilliantly simple scheme of three
periods: the colonial, the cosmopolitan and the national.
In the colonial phase, the literature of the country concerned is not that of its own people but of
the conquistador. It is an already evolved literature transplanted into the colony where it actually
continues to exert influence beyond the overthrow of the colonial power. During the second period,
which is ushered in the establishment of the independent republic, elements from various foreign
literatures are assimilated simultaneously, and the unique cultural hold of the original colonial power
is broken. Finally, in the third period, which implicitly only arrives with proper economic as well as
political independence, a people "achieves a well-developed expression of its own personality and its
sentiments".
If we compare this with the schema offered by a seminal text of the "New" Cinema/ Liberation
Cinema written by Fernando Solanas titled Towards a Third Cinema, one is struck by the resemblance
in conceptualisation. Solanas merely transports the time scale to coincide with cinema's development
and clothes it in a militant rhetoric. Mariategu's "colonial" phase becomes the phase of "unqualified
assimilation" in Solanas' scheme; the "cosmopolitan" phase becomes "remembrance/ return-to-thesource", a phase characterised in cinema by a re-invocation of the heroic past where legends and
folklore abound. It is at this juncture in history that cultural decolonisation begins. The "national"
phase of Mariategu is, for Solanas, the "combative" phase of maturity signifying emancipatory selfdetermination. Cinema, now, relies upon another culture neither for the stuff its stories are made of,
nor for the way in which they are told.

Both literature and cinema in the latter half of the twentieth century has been characterized by an
increased preoccupation with man as the victim of alienating forces -- solitude, identity crises,
anguish, and evil -- and by a marked determination to create new forms and techniques. Above all, it
has put forth a new language more responsive to the demands imposed by increasingly complex
spiritual, social, and ideological concerns.
Once literature or cinema achieved "maturity" or reached the national/combative phase, we find
that in either case the literary/cinematic pursuit of form/content has diversified in three major
directions.
In literature we see the first of these tendencies epitomised in the work of the Guatemalan writer
Miguel Angel Asturias, who drew upon the pre-Columbian traditions in order to explore the myths
and realities of the people of Guatemala. In cinema, we see this impulse at work particularly in the
films of the Bolivian filmmaker Jorge Sanjins, who is concerned less with formal issues and more
with the representation of the indigeneous Indian in the context of their myths, legends and realities.
The second tendency is best symbolised by the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges who
asserted a self-confident cosmopolitanism and taught writers to concentrate on form and intellectual
coherence in writing. The obvious parallel in cinema would be the Chilean director Ral Ruz, the
proverbial 'renegade' of the New Latin American Cinema, who has spent a large part of his life in
exile. Ruz's films, like Borges' 'ficciones', are abstruse meditations on form where the idea of Latin
American-ness is signified/ addressed at a level where all cultures merge. The third major tendency
is exemplified by the Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier who defined and explored the "magical realism"
of the continent. One can think of cinematic parallels in this case too but there is an important
distinction. In cinema, magical realism is a rather recent phenomenon when it had almost become a
fad all over the world. Unlike writers, filmmakers have been far more attracted to the immediacy and
impact of the documentary mode of representation which includes the feature film. This does not
exclude a certain tendency in the cinema, which, like the costumbrista novel before it, was
characterised by sketches of local colour and was also a way of focussing on and even rejoicing in
the historically arrested aspects of Latin America, resistant or oblivious to modernisation. However,
filmmakers whose early works show a militant tendency have realised in their subsequent work, the
limitations of the strictly realist mode and have often taken the magical realist route in order to delve
deeper into a reality where facts merge with myths, fantasies and dreams, all within a profoundly
historicist framework. As examples, we can think of Fernando Solanas' latter works or that of Eliseo
Subiela, both Argentine.
Literature, in Latin America as much in India, played a very important role not only in the growth of
nationalist consciousness since the second half of the nineteenth century but also helped in
constructing the idea of nationhood in the newly independent republics. Cinema too participated in
the process of nation-construction, often in terms of epics about nationalist/revolutionary leaders.
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. 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. Perhaps that is why
early cinema particularly in Brazil and Mexico (up to 1917) concentrated almost exclusively on
capturing reality as the human eye perceived it.

Unlike literature, for Latin American cinema, the major compulsion had been to find alternative
ways of representing Latin American reality than the stereotypical and denigrating images of the
continent recycled by the Hollywood cinema which came to dominate the screens. Much of the
Latin American cinema in the first half of the century was thus primarily concerned with evolving a
contrapuntal imagery in reply to Hollywoods negative images. 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. 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). 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. Interestingly, while Emilio El Indio Fernandez, a distinguished Mexican
director, created an allegorical style in his film Mara Candelara (1943) where the expressive
physiognomies of the female and male protagonists of the film harmonize and mingle with the
expressive nature of the landscape, the Mexican novelist Juan Rulfo, depicted in Pedro Paramo (1956)
a dusty Mexican rural landscape as one that is essentially inhospitable to human existence.
In Brazil, the most underdeveloped part of the country -- the barren north-eastern serto -- became
the reference point for probing into the anomalies of contemporary reality. The serto recurs as the
backdrop as much in the novels of Joo Guimares Rosa and Graciliano Ramos as in the Cinema
Nvo films of Glauber Rocha, Nelson Pereira dos Santos or Ruy Guerra. For example, Guerra's film
The Guns (Os Fuzis, 1964) deals with drought, poverty and mysticism in the Brazilian Northeast.
Unlike dos Santos' Barren Lives or Rocha's Black God White Devil, The Guns provides a critical
perspective on the religious belief and violence, deconstructing the representations and discourses
through which the Northeast has been interpreted. Guerra takes an innovative approach toward the
oppressive and alienating realities of the serto. He draws on historical and contemporary
representations of the region that have been circulated through a variety of texts. They include
literary chronicles (Rebellion in the Backlands), novels (Graciliano Ramos' Barren Lives), contemporary
essays, poetry (Guimares Rosa) and oral folklore collected in the folhetos de cordel (literature-onstrings), which have played an important role in the preservation of popular memory in the
Northeast.
Thus, the representation of the serto in The Guns as a geographical, historical and cultural formation
is accomplished through the deployment of codes that have their origins in this intertext that
immediately calls up roughly sixty years of inter-related discourses. By appropriating this intertext,
Guerra's film promotes dialectical readings of the region's history.
The complex operations between literature and cinema may be more evident through a
consideration of Sergio Girals film El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco,1973) which is subtly
deconstructive in its parodic impulse. Girals film seeks to adapt the first anti-slavery novel, Francisco,
written under the influence of European Romanticism but in the process of adapting the novel,
criticizes, parodies and subverts the historical melodrama.
In the film, Giral invokes a historical personality, Domingo del Monte, an editor in the 1830s of a
fashionable literary magazine called La Moda. The opening scene of the film takes place in del

Monte's salon. He has invited the author of the novel 'Francisco' -- Suarez y Romero -- to read his
new novel to a visiting Englishman by the name of Richard Madden, an agent of the British
government with a commission to investigate violations of the treaty between Britain and Spain on
the suppression of the slave trade. The members of del Monte's circle were liberal intellectuals
opposed to slavery and in favour of social reform. The image of the slave that the novel presents is a
romantic one -- the film is called "The Other Francisco", because it sets out to show what the
suffering hero, the slave Francisco, might have been like, what kind of life he really would have led
had he been an historical figure. Between the scenes in the film that narrate the novel and
reconstruct it to show the contrast between the romantic fiction and historical reality, we are shown
the progress of Madden's investigations. The different strands come together in a brilliantly
imaginative stroke when Madden, travelling around the island, visits a plantation where he meets the
characters in the novel. What Giral implies is that at the time of the novel's writing, there was no real
cultural sensibility among the dominant class because there was no preparedness to admit critical
thinking.
The relationships between literature and cinema are thus immensely complex and each cultural form
has been enriched by its contact with the other. Both have been concerned with the search for an
appropriate language for itself with a profound sense of history and a "conscious concern with
conscience".
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Revised version of the paper presented at the Sahitya Akademi seminar: "Latin America: Convergence in Distance
and Diversity -- A Case of Literature" (20th May, 2000)