The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema

Marvin D'Lugo, Ana López, Laura Podalsky, Marvin D'Lugo, Ana López, Laura Podalsky, Marvin D'Lugo, Ana M. López, Laura Podalsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367581114
• eBook ISBN: 9781317518976
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema is the most comprehensive survey of Latin American cinemas available in a single volume. While highlighting state-of-the-field research, essays also offer readers a cohesive overview of multiple facets of filmmaking in the region, from the production system and aesthetic tendencies, to the nature of circulation and reception. The volume recognizes the recent "new cinemas" in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and, at the same time, provides a much deeper understanding of the contemporary moment by commenting on the aesthetic trends and industrial structures in earlier periods. The collection features essays by established scholars as well as up-and-coming investigators in ways that depart from existing scholarship and suggest new directions for the field.

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PART I

Historiographies

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1

NATIONAL CINEMA

Juan Poblete

Editors’ introduction

National cinema has been a defining concept for film criticism, frequently determining the scope of given studies. As noted in the introduction to this volume, the earliest monographs aimed to delineate the historical development of films made within given countries, and since that period there have been numerous books on Mexican cinema, Bolivian cinema, Cuban cinema, etc. Yet, starting in the late 1980s, numerous theorists began to question the underlying (and often unacknowledged) parameters that have been used to delineate the category itself (Higson 1989, 2006; Crofts 2006). Does national cinema refer to all films made within specific countries, or does it refer primarily to those films that uphold a (given) notion of national identity? Could the term refer to something other than domestic productions?

In a chapter that resonates with the contributions of other authors in this volume, Juan Poblete begins by examining the larger geopolitical dynamics and scholarly tendencies (both within and outside of Latin America) that have underwritten existing conceptualizations of “national cinema” before turning to an examination of contemporary Chilean cinema. Anticipating Niamh Thornton’s questioning of national categories on online servers such as Netflix in Chapter 24, Poblete recognizes the precariousness of any rigid definition of national cinema. At the same time, like the co-authors of Chapter 3, he argues for the category’s ongoing viability. Yet, whereas Lisa Shaw, Luis Duno-Gottberg, Joanna Page, and Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado address the topic by offering a historical overview of the different social agents (e.g. filmmakers, government officials) who have staked a claim to the category of national cinema, Poblete creates a four-pronged model for identifying different types or forms of national cinema. This framework illuminates the importance of rethinking “national cinema” to recognize not only how the cinema participates in the discursive construction of an imagined community, but also how audiences within given countries are constituted as interpretive communities based on shared practices of reception, cultural competencies, and vernacular sensibilities.

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In most countries (including those in Latin America), the idea of a “national” cinema has long been more an aspiration than a reality. With the implacable economic reality of the medium, even when budgets are kept very low, it takes a minimum number of spectators for the film’s producers to recoup their investment. Most domestic audiences do not, on a regular basis, offer such a minimum for most locally produced films to be commercially profitable. Thus, a homegrown production often requires the help of international markets to be at least viable, if not financially successful. The locally produced film in the region thus inevitably makes the national dependent on the international for its sustained viability.

Throughout history, national cinemas have been connected to the international in at least three key respects. First, film technologies, advanced financing, technical expertise, and, crucially, access to circuits of distribution and exhibition have all depended, in one way or another, on foreign actors and foreign circumstances. Second, as a modern invention, cinema has often depicted historical and cultural processes directly relating to internationally spreading modernity: rural migration to the cities, the life of the newly arrived in the city, transformations in the backcountry, the formation of the urban middle class, and the impact of mass media itself. Third, Hollywood, heavily involved in the global control of screen traffic, and responsible for the production of its naturalized visual narrative styles, has dominated the world scene since the early twentieth century. In sum, despite the protestations of autonomy and cultural specificity of its supporters, national cinema is a concept haunted by its international (repressed or less visible) dimension.

Furthermore, it can be critiqued along the same lines as national literature, a related and older concept. Until relatively recently, most national cinemas in Latin America (i.e. most critically acclaimed and often state-sponsored cinema) have served as an echo chamber for the lettered elite that has produced them. This is evident in the elitist orientation of their high modernist texts, the exclusive use of the dominant language of (national) culture (overwhelmingly Spanish and Portuguese) in often deeply multilingual countries, and the problematic representation of the poor and indigenous along with other others of elite-led national culture. If, for instance, the concept of national cinema were to be systematically subjected to the same scrutiny subaltern studies has provided for national literatures, it would certainly be found wanting. National cinema would have an additional difficulty justifying its expansive claim to speak to/for domestic audiences within a given territory. Unlike various national literatures, which were incorporated by Latin American states into their educational curricula at some point in the early to mid twentieth century, national cinema was never really adopted as a crucial part of school lessons. Instead, it was left to fend for itself when facing Hollywood, a formidable competitor that excelled at socializing massive audiences in its ways of understanding and consuming cinema and encompassing populations well beyond the national school system’s reach. Thus, critical canonization of film at the national level never enjoyed the benefits of the formal and systematic cultural inculcation nor the training in (national) ways of reading or seeing, that school provided for literary texts. In other words, national cinema has had no mediating agent capable of bridging the distance between its texts and those mass national publics that such texts are said to be addressed to, and of which they are said to be representative. By way of comparison, Latin American television may be seen as recently awakening to this function of mediation between national cinema and a national community that has long been so crucial in the European model of TV that sponsors and widely broadcasts national cinema. Efforts to broadcast the national visual patrimony on a regular basis on TV include current and proposed national audiovisual channels in Argentina (INCAA TV), Brazil (TV Brasil and TV Cultura), and Chile (Canal de Televisión Cultural, proposed).

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If literature belongs to the Gutenberg(ian) modernity that closely linked the book, literary discourse, and the state inside the territory of a national culture, then film may be seen to inhabit a world of visual and electronic media whose technologies, markets, circulation, and consumption are, at least partially, international (and now transnational) in orientation. Nonetheless, I want to put forward a concept of national cinema as a necessary category of analysis that cannot be sidelined by the realization of how inter- and transnational film culture has become or has always been. The category of national cinema is needed for the simple reason, if nothing else, that for most films, that is the only accurate sphere of real distribution, exhibition, and consumption. Those films only seen nationally (the majority) coexist with a more selective group of often internationally circulating films that different actors inside and outside the nation recognize, too, as defining national cinema. I begin with a few general comments on the concept of national cinema and its relation to Hollywood; then I expand that discussion to the more specific Latin American context; and, finally, I develop one case study, Chilean national cinema, as a concrete example of some of those complexities.

The discussion on national cinema

In an often-cited article, “The Mass Production of the Senses” (1999), Miriam Hansen revisits the issue of modernity and film in relation to one of the field-structuring divides in film studies: that between classical or hegemonic Hollywood cinema and high modernist film. If the first type of film had been defined by the very effective marriage of a production mode (the studio) and a style (realism), both “rooted in neoformalist poetics and cognitive psychology” (Hansen 1999: 63), the second depended for its efficacy precisely on the undoing of all those classical and bourgeois aesthetic principles, emphasizing instead ruptures and discontinuities.

This binary has had immense repercussions, underwriting scholarly distinctions between Hollywood productions and cinemas made elsewhere in the post-World War II period, and classifying the latter as “national.” If what defined Hollywood films was their direct popular orientation and the modern experience they provided their spectators (through theater attendance and often subject matter), national cinemas could claim the unclaimed territory of high cultural sophistication as defined by the national bourgeoisies.

Rather than trying to fully distinguish the clear territory of national film, it is more useful to recognize the term as a category through which various stakeholders (scholars, and also the state and filmmakers) make claims. Methodologically, declaring a film as national has meant, in brief, a context for and a direction in which any analysis of such a film should proceed. Analytically, the national as a category has provided for the cinematic work in question: (a) a historical context, and thus an inscription within a historical process connected to the evolution of such sociopolitical and cultural entity (the nation); (b) a cinematically specific tradition (movements, directors, themes, aesthetics) within which the work is to be inscribed and against which it must be measured; (c) an intended audience, and thus an encyclopedia of pertinent references (shared knowledges, languages, experiences); (d) a comparative perspective with other national film traditions; and (e) the reduction of all relevant external factors to stylistic influences or details of production that do not affect the centrally national core of the film.

In the 1970s and 1980s, this scholarly framework privileged a certain type of Latin American cinema—the politically militant and aesthetically experimental New Latin American Cinema—as exemplary of national cinemas in the region and as quintessentially non-Hollywood. However, before the notion of national culture was radicalized as revolutionary and anti-capitalist in the 1960s by Third World anti-colonial movements, it had had a decades-long life in Latin America as national-popular culture. The latter was promoted by a series of populist governments involving popular front-like formations in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Between the 1930s and the 1950s, these cultures produced both the first incarnation of national cinemas in Latin America (Mexican, Brazilian, and Argentine cinemas) and created, also for the first time, a continental market for some of its products, especially comedies, musicals, and melodramas (Noble 2005; Shaw and Dennison 2007).

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This dominance of genres was no accident. It prevailed—as Martín-Barbero (1987), Monsiváis (1995, 2000), and Ortiz (1988) have demonstrated—because it presented a high degree of continuity between pre-mass media forms of popular entertainment, such as the comedy-circus, the vaudeville show, the carnival, and their mass media inheritors, such as radio and film. For these three authors, popular cinema functioned in these decades as a highly influential and educational medium, helping Latin Americans become simultaneously national, urban, and modern. Along with Hollywood, and not just simply against Hollywood, national-popular cinemas, following Hansen’s argument, produced vernacular modernities in the region.

Film comedies and melodramas are types of film in which the national products, can compete with Hollywood on a much more level field. The difference in budgets and production values—seen as paltry or amateurish in other genres compared to Hollywood products—is offset in the more modest settings of the comedy or the melodrama by what elsewhere I have called a vernacular advantage, or the advantage of the vernacular in Latin American film comedies (Poblete 2015a). In these genres, the settings are often simple, the actors are frequently already well-known nationally for their work in national radio or TV shows, and a significant portion of the primary material is itself the national situation and the national language (i.e. something that Hollywood can do best only for the American context). These genre films were, and still are, very popular with their respective national audiences and (in the case of many Mexican films of the golden era) with Latin American audiences, then and now (through endless programming in TV and cable, including Latino channels in the US).

Until relatively recently, many scholars dismissed these popular films as not artistic enough and too commercial, and defined national cinema around the New Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s based on its radical opposition (as Third Cinema, imperfect cinema, or cinema of hunger) to the capitalist industrialism and aesthetic conservatism of Hollywood. Indeed, somewhat paradoxically in light of the binary outlined by Hansen, the New Latin American Cinema achieved the status of the classic or natural form of Latin American cinema, the golden rule against which all other film products in the continent were deemed wanting or irrelevant, too commercial or not political enough, and thus insignificant. Michael Chanan is highly representative of this critical tendency. Referring to the New Latin American Cinema in 2006, he felt it was still possible to write: “Forty years ago—after decades of low-level commercial production, Latin American cinema underwent an astonishing rebirth as a vanguard film movement with objectives both political ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Troubling Histories
• Part I Historiographies
• Part II Interrogating Critical Paradigms
• Part III Business Practices
• Part IV Intermedialities
• Index