El alquimista poético-político

Fernando Birri (1925-2017) was a puppeteer, writer, artist, director, cinema theorist and teacher. The intellectual from Santa Fe has made syncretism and eclecticism the trademarks of his art. After completing his studies in Italy in 1956, he went back to his birthplace Santa Fe where he founded the Instituto de Cinematografía, the first cinema academy of the country. With his work and academic activity Birri redefined the function of Cinema, transforming it into an educational instrument for the creation of a Latin-American social self-awareness. Birri has revolutionised South-American Cinema, to the extent that he has been named ‘Padre del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano’ (Father of the new Latin-American Cinema). This paper does not claim to be an exhaustive analysis of Birri’s work. It aims instead to offer an entry point to awake the interest about the first part of his production, in order to screw up some point for a future investigation.

Decolonization and Collaborative Media: A Latin American Perspective

The six-month-long occupation of the historic city center of Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006 became one of the first social uprisings to be thoroughly intermeshed with the creation of old and new media. Graffiti, performance protest, and independent radio proliferated and found its way into the many digitally recorded activist videos shown in community centers, on occupied television, distributed on DVD, and streamed on the Internet. Such media activism attests to continuities and discontinuities with what has been known as “New Latin American Cinema,” that is, the militant and social realist films made in analogue formats that were gaining world attention in the 1960s and 1970s. Oaxaca’s media activism also signals links among diverse leftist social movements and community and collaborative video in indigenous languages from throughout Latin America and beyond. Often called “indigenous video,” these works, like the New Latin American Cinema, have also spawned diverse scholarly interpretations. Although the Mexican student brigades and Super 8 video movement are not usually included in the critical scholarship on New Latin American Cinema, they, too, constitute important precursors for Oaxaca’s media activism and for collaborative and community media in the region. How to understand media militancy and anticolonial struggle, in turn, has changed. These changes reflect technological shifts from analogue film to digital video and the growing impact of indigenous social movements on the political left. Audiovisual militancy has shifted from the denunciation of U.S. neoimperialism and a Marxist-Leninist vision of revolution to broader, more open-ended, antiauthoritarian alliances among filmmakers, anarchists, feminists, indigenous organizations, and diverse other social movements that embrace decolonization. In contrast with anticolonial struggles, decolonization does not necessarily seek to oust a colonizing military force but aims to change colonial relations and their postcolonial aftermath under settler colonial conditions through prefigurative politics.

Sanjinés, Jorge (1936--)

Jorge Sanjinés is a Bolivian director, screenwriter, and author. A committed political filmmaker, Sanjinés’s films and essays attempt to integrate Marxist revolutionary theory and indigenous ways of knowing towards the creation of a popular, transformative, liberating cinema. His first feature, Ukamau [And So it Is] (1966) tells the story of a native man who exacts revenge on a wealthy mestizo for the rape and murder of his wife. His second film, Yawar mallku [Blood of the Condor] (1969), is a story of indigenous resistance against a covert US Peace Corps sterilizing program affecting the women of an Andean peasant village. In 1971 Sanjinés directed El coraje del pueblo [The Courage of the People], a documentary re-enactment of the government-sponsored massacre of miners in 1967 using survivors of the slaughter itself. Considered an integral part of the New Latin American Cinema, Sanjinés’s filmmaking practice is notable for its intimate collaboration with indigenous peoples through his production collective, Grupo Ukamau. Sanjinés’s films, though frequently affected by limited financing and marginalized forms of exhibition and distribution, have been instrumental in preserving the indigenous language Quechua, challenging ethnic and class hierarchies, and revealing the injustices, exploitation, repression, and racism in Bolivian society. His latest film, Insurgentes (2012), is a historical tracing of the lost sovereignty of Andean communities in Bolivia from Spanish colonization to the first indigenous President of Bolivia, Evo Morales.

Mock Classicism

This book reconceptualizes both the geopolitical boundaries and the periodization of Latin American film histories in order to reveal a predominant comic mode in the cultural practices of Latin America in the twentieth century. Comedies have been either relegated to the margins of regional film histories in the shadow of the New Latin American Cinema or articulated to the broader socializing and nationalistic function of earlier commercial traditions. Rather than map Latin American cinema according to radical politics, film directors, or film movements—as do conventional film histories—this comparative project examines the formal and narrative operations of Argentine, Brazilian, and Mexican commercially successful comedies released between the 1920s and the 1950s in order to demonstrate how they functioned as peripheral responses to modernization and prefigured the more explicitly political New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s. Each chapter braids empirical research, close reading, film theory, and Latin American studies to argue that Latin American cinema from the studio period became classical in ways that were phenomenally distinct from but structurally akin to those of Hollywood. To that end, each chapter presents one way that classical Hollywood was constructed within film studies and demonstrates how the ways cinema became classical in Hollywood do not occur identically in Latin America. Using an approach that encompasses both textual analysis as well as a range of practices from the film experience, such as stardom, trade and popular publications, and broadcast media, this book proposes thinking classicism as a discourse that mediates and renders the world, looking at the construction of the aesthetic world as diegetic totality and the circulation of the texts and objects in global circuits of economic exchange.