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Introduction
Political documentary cinema in Latin America
Antonio Traversoa and Kristi Wilsonb
aSchool of Media, Culture and Creative Arts, Curtin University, Perth, Australia; bRhetoric and Composition, Soka University of America, Aliso Viejo, CA, USA
Political documentary cinema in Latin America has a long history of tracing social injustice and suffering, depicting political unrest, intervening in periods of crisis and upheaval, and reflecting upon questions regarding such pressing subjects as ideology, cultural identity, genocide and traumatic memory.1 As this collection shows, in the genre's socially committed orientation the aspirations and struggles of militant collectives, ethnic and sexual minorities, the victims of state violence, and workers' and women's movements, among other disenfranchised groups, often find artistic expression.
While documentary film in Latin America has traditionally been regarded as fiction cinema's younger cousin, as it is also for that matter around the world, perhaps it is especially in this region that the work of documentarians - consistently urgent, committed and explorative - has contributed to the development of Latin American narrative film's recognizable international character as a spontaneously raw, artistically innovative, and politically engaged cinema. The essays collected in this volume show, in varied ways, the important role that political documentary cinema has played in the emergence and development of a socially engaged film culture - films, filmmakers, film institutions, publics, and scholarship - in the Latin American region since the 1950s. This is an aspect that clearly manifests in contemporary films by Latin American directors that time and again figure as award-winners in international film festivals. The practice of socially engaged documentary cinema has sometimes served as a blunt and confrontational form of training in filmmaking. Young directors and those in other creative roles have frequently learned and perfected their skills in the midst of documenting social and political upheaval before moving on to fiction cinema. Jacqueline Mouesca, a Chilean cinema historian, states that during the Unidad Popular government in the early 1970s, the state-owned production company Chile Films served as a learning space for emergent filmmakers who devoted themselves largely to documentary production; among these were the now legendary epic documentary projects of Patricio Guzmán and Miguel Littin (Mouesca, 2005, p. 76). However, to many on the Latin American continent, documentary filmmaking was never a waiting room or a means to gaining access to fiction cinema. According to Alicia Vega, another historian of Chilean cinema, the work of two key documentarians of the 1960s, Rafael Sánchez and Sergio Bravo, suggested that documentary film would have its own specific function and, as a result, 'they didn't engage in documentary filmmaking as a learning school to move on to fiction film later, but they approached it as a form in its own right' (Vega, 2006, p. 16). Such a commitment clearly reverberates in the practice of politically engaged documentarians across the continent, as the essays collected herein attest. With only one 'regrettable' - in his own words - incursion into fiction (Ricciarelli, 2011, p. 155), Patricio Guzmán, indisputably one of the most influential Latin American documentary directors, has dedicated his entire filmmaking career to exploring, expanding and promoting the documentary genre. According to Guzmán:
documentary cinema is complex, slow to produce, hard to finance, and ... few get to see it, although those few never forget it. It's a different kind of genre, with a limited public... that occupies a rather important and influential space.
(Ruffinelli, 2008, p. 241)2
Documentary filmmaking opens up spaces for formal experimentation often not permitted to sponsor-constrained narrative film directors (as demonstrated in essays by Erin Aldana, Kristi Wilson, and Amy Sara Carroll in this collection). Broadly speaking, one could argue that political documentary cinema in Latin America has constituted itself as a prime esthetic and ideological referent for all cinematic forms and practices in the region. Such an inclination to radical and critical forms of social realism certainly inspired the movement of revolutionary filmmaking that shook the world's screens during the second half of the twentieth century.
As an area of interest in film studies in English, Latin American cinema is more often than not associated with, or even sometimes perceived as equivalent to, the militant film culture that emerged and thrived in the region between the 1950s and 1970s, which is generally encountered in literature under the banner of the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC).3 Students of world cinema learn that as an explosive film movement, the NLAC was born out of the historical urgency of equally explosive social and political circumstances, such as social unrest, revolutions, military dictatorships, foreign invasions, and internal and external wars. They are required to study the origin and main substance of this movement through a series of remarkable cinematic experiences taking place in a handful of Latin American countries at the time. The list includes Argentina's Fernando Birri and his Santa Fe Documentary School (Isis Sadek's essay in this collection discusses a groundbreaking film of 1958, Tire dié [Throw me a Dime], the best-accomplished outcome of Birri's work with his Santa Fe students). Also from Argentina is the collaboration of Fernando Solanas with Octavio Getino through the film collective Cine Liberation, which produced not only one of the world's greatest works of militant cinema, the lengthy 1968 agit-prop film La horn de los homos (The Hour of the Furnaces) (discussed by Mariano Mestman in this collection), but also one of the key political film manifestos of the period, the 1969 essay 'Hacia un tercer cine' ( 'Towards a Third Cinema'). Furthermore, the list includes Bolivia's Jorge Sanjinés and his collaboration with highland indigenous communities of the Andes region through his work with the film collective Grupo Ukamau; and Brazil's Glauber Rocha and his cinematic experiments articulating a radical film philosophy, as expressed in his 1965 essay 'Eztetyka da fome' ( An aesthetic of hunger'), another of the period's list of film manifestos, which gave ideological substance to the Cinema Novo movement. In addition, invariably found on the list are Chile's Miguel Littin's and Raúl Ruiz's early film experiments with generic hybridization in the late 1960s, as well as the socially oriented, neo-realist work of Aldo Francia, who was the organizer of the first festival of the NLAC in Viña del Mar, Chile, in 1967, where the expression 'Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano' was coined and a common ideological commitment was identified by film practitioners from countries across the continent.
The final case on our essential study list is Cuba, the then pan-American spiritual patron of revolutionary art and the only country up to the late 1960s - until Chile joined it after the presidential electoral victory of socialist Salvador Allende in 1970 - where efforts towards a new revolutionary cinema were articulated from within the state's superstructure. In Cuba this was achieved through the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos), whereby state-funded, industry-standard resources were put to the service of the development of a new film industry, culture and public. In studying the Cuban contribution to the NLAC, the names that are often highlighted are those of film directors Tomas Gutiérrez Alea, Santiago Alvarez (Kristi Wilson's essay in this collection discusses his experimental agit-prop cinema), and Julio Garcia Espinosa, the author of another film manifesto of 1969: Tor un cine imperfecto' ('For an imperfect cinema').4 While the preceding list is not encompassing of this movement, it can safely be regarded as the essential canon. In all these cases, the paradigmatic films normally studied are documentaries, fiction-documentary hybrids, or narrative works with strong stylistic and methodological definitions towards forms of documentary social realism.
Yet, despite the unmistakable influence that this movement has had on contemporary Latin American filmmaking, this influence is neither absolute nor did cinema in Latin America start with the NLAC. Despite what the activist filmmakers of the NLAC purported, not all films produced in Latin American countries prior to the late 1950s were alienated and colonized second-hand versions of Hollywood or European auteurism. This is particularly so in regards to documentary film, a genre that is thematically, aesthetically and methodologically diverse, and which possesses a long, heterogeneous history in this continent.
Furthermore, while contemporary documentary films in Latin America often share the NLAC's enhanced social commitment, many respond to formal strategies and traditions that have little to do with that movement. In fact, some contemporary Latin American documentaries seem to respond less to the NLAC than to such diverse influences as literature and the social sciences. In the case of the former, the literary genres of the confession, the auto-biography and the testimony have clearly informed the boom of subjective, personal, self-reflexive memory documentaries that followed the periods of dictatorship in countries such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay (in this collection, Paola Margulis discusses one of such films). And in the case of the latter, social science methodologies have informed investigative documentarians who work along with forensic professionals in the task of resolving cases of political disappearance and other extreme human rights violations effected by governmental intelligence agencies (Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli's essay in this volume offers an analysis of a 'forensic' documentary). Thus, Latin American documentary precedes, cohabits with, embodies and then continues after the NLAC movement. Indeed, the documentary genre in Latin America possesses its own independent trajectory while nurturing political film movements technically, esthetically and ideologically.
The essays in this collection bear witness to this multiplicity, discussing documentaries with topics as diverse as national political contingency, such as workers' strikes, riots, and military coups against elected governments; crime, poverty, homelessness, prostitution, children's work, and violence against women; urban development, progress, (under)development, capitalism, and neoliberalism; exile, diaspora and border cultures; trauma and (post)memory. Additionally, the films debated here include methodological and stylistic definitions as varied as agitprop, collage, film essay, direct or observational, voice-over, docudrama, media reportage, investigative, forensic, interview-based, and self-reflexive.
While scholarship in English about Latin American narrative cinema - both historical and contemporary - is abundant, the same cannot be said about studies of the region's social and political documentary cinema. In 1990, Julianne Burton wrote that '[d]espite the thematic, stylistic and "generic" variety of Latin American documentary ... and its broad social and cultural impact, the existing literature on Latin American documentary practices is sparse indeed' (1990, p. ix). Over two decades later, despite an explosion of documentary practice in the continent during the 1990s and 2000s, the paucity of scholarship in English on the subject continues. In fact, despite growing numbers of papers read at Latin American studies conferences that focus specifically on documentary films and increasing numbers of articles on the topic published in academic journals, Burton's (1990) essential anthology continues to be the only book-length source in English that systematically and specifically draws a picture of the state of affairs of the social documentary in the region. In an attempt to expand this still emergent area of study, the essays in this anthology engage with historical, stylistic and theoretical issues of political documentary in Latin America, contributing in this way to key theoretical debates in global documentary film theory through analysis of specific films. The collected essays theorize political documentary cinema in Latin America from a national, regional and continental perspective, and focus on films, filmmakers and film movements, and the historical and political contexts from which they emerge, since the 1950s to recent years.
The mam publication in Spanish on this topic to date, Paulo Antonio Paranaguá's (2003) anthology Cine documental en América Latina, is equivalent to Burton's collection, in the sense that it is one of the few sources in Spanish that offers a systematic view of documentary cinema across the whole Latin American region. However, the shortage of literature found in English is not replicated in film and cultural studies from Latin American countries, where the number of publications in Spanish, and Portuguese in the case of Brazilian cinema studies, is on the increase.5 In some cases, authors may focus on documentaries from a specific sub-region, as with the 2013 collection on political documentaries from the Southern Cone countries - Argentina, Chile, and Urguay - edited by Antonio Traverso and Tomas Crowder-Taraborrelli. Or the focus may be placed on a single documentary director, as is the case of the already cited titles about the cinema of Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán. Or even they may focus on a particular film, as with the numerous publications on Argentina's Albertina Carri's polemical 2003 documentary Los rubios (Carri, 2007; Noriega, 2009).6 With the relatively recent approval of cinema laws in many Latin American countries, which has lead to the creation of funds for film production and film culture, film archives, national cinematheques and film schools, particularly from the 1990s onwards, new generations of technically skilled and theoretically savvy filmmakers as well as film researchers have appeared on the scene. Recent tendencies in scholarly research in cinema studies within Latin American countries seem to be pointing in the direction of recovering and reinterpreting culturally significant cinematic histories, experiences and proposals, whereby many of them focus on their respective national documentary cinemas (for example, on Argentina's documentary, see Campo & Dodaro, 2007; and the two volumes by Lusnich & Piedras, 2009; on Chilean documentary, see Corro, Larrain, Alberdi & Van Diest, 2007; Vega, 2006; Mouesca, 2005).
Thus, the authors collected in this anthology reflect the cultural and linguistic diversity of current Latin American film scholarship, with some of them writing in Spanish and Portuguese from Argentina and Brazil (with their original works especially translated for this anthology), and others writing in English from Australia, Europe, Mexico, and the USA. One of this collection's most significant contributions is the sense in which it bridges the traditional gap between Latin American film studies written either in English or Spanish/Portuguese.
While some of the collected essays focus on documentaries made in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela, others focus on the work of US Latino and diasporic Latin American political documentarians. The collection also includes a visual essay reflecting a work-in-progress memory documentary from Chile and an original interview with a Jamaican independent documentary fil...
