Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium

María Guadalupe Arenillas, Michael J. Lazzara, María Guadalupe Arenillas, Michael J. Lazzara

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781137495228
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137495235
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Film e video

Nearly two decades into the new millennium, Latin American documentary film is experiencing renewed vibrancy and visibility on the global stage. While elements of the combative, politicized cinema of the 1960s and 1970s remain, the region's production has become increasingly subjective, reflexive, and experimental, though perhaps no less political. At the same time, Latin American filmmakers both respond to and shape global tendencies in the genre. This book highlights the richness and heterogeneity of Latin American documentary film, surveys a broad range of national contexts, styles, and practices, and expands current debates on the genre. Thematic sections address the "subjective turn" of the 1990s and 2000s and the move beyond it; the ethics of the encounter between the filmmaker and the subject/object of his or her gaze; and the performance of truth and memory, a particularly urgent topic as Latin American countries have transitioned from dictatorship to democracy.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

María Guadalupe Arenillas and Michael J. Lazzara (eds.)Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium10.1057/978-1-137-49523-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium

María Guadalupe Arenillas¹ and Michael J. Lazzara²

(1)

Department of Modern Languages and Literatures,, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI, USA

(2)

Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of California, Davis, CA, USA

End Abstract

The upsurge in Latin American documentary film at the turn of the twenty-first century is undeniable. In a region that has made documentary films, in some form or another, since the end of the nineteenth century, fiction film has long eclipsed the documentary in terms of prestige and circulation. Yet signs indicate that this situation is changing. While documentary production in the USA enjoyed something of a boom in the 2000s—it now comprises about 10% of the market—in Argentina, as Jens Andermann has noted, documentary now accounts for about 40% of total film production. ¹ The reasons for this boom are likely many and may include factors such as: an increase in documentary festivals; the creation of alternative distribution channels; the relatively inexpensive nature of documentary filmmaking; the democratization of the “field” for aspiring filmmakers; the use of portable media and new technologies; and the advantages of documentary for dealing with urgent social, political, or economic issues. ² Moreover, this boom in documentary has been accompanied not only by increased academic inquiry about the documentary form, but also by sustained innovation in documentary filmmaking practices—practices that are increasingly reflexive, metacinematic, and that blur the line traditionally separating documentary from fiction film.

Given this state of affairs, this book brings together a group of established and emerging film scholars to ask some simple but important questions: What are the most salient characteristics of Latin American documentary film in the new millennium? What has changed in the last twenty-five-or-so years compared to previous historical and aesthetic moments? And what signs do we have regarding where documentary may be headed? To answer these questions, our authors examine trends, problems, and specific films from the 1990s to the present. The book therefore constructs a temporal bridge that maps the contributions of Latin American documentary filmmaking in the twentieth century onto that of the twenty-first.

To think about the state of Latin American documentary film today, it is necessary to have an awareness of its trajectory until now. Jorge Ruffinelli points out that on the international stage, documentary emerged in fledgling form in 1895 with the Lumière brothers’ short films, but really gained traction with Robert J. Flaherty’s ethnographic films, like Nanook of the North (1922), or Soviet Dziga Vertov’s technically daring, experimental film Man with a Movie Camera (1929). ³

In contrast, in Latin America, it is difficult to talk about a consolidated documentary cinema until around the 1950s. ⁴ Up until that time, the appearance of documentaries was rather sporadic. While travelogues, scientific films, newsreels, landscapes, and historical documentaries exist from as early as the first quarter of the twentieth century, very few Latin American countries in the first half of the twentieth century—with Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil being marked exceptions—produced significant amounts of documentary film or film in general. In Mexico, early twentieth-century filmmaking focused largely on wars and conflicts, particularly on the Mexican Revolution (1910). But even before that, President Porfirio Díaz, who was in power from 1876 to 1911, hired filmmakers to produce propagandistic documentaries that glorified his regime; other filmmakers, in an opposite move, adopted critical positions and used documentary film to denounce grave injustices and social ills. From very early on, then, we see the emergence in certain countries of what Julianne Burton, in a much cited and influential book, called the Latin American “social documentary.” ⁵ To all of this, Michael Chanan adds that as early as the 1930s, we can find examples—though few—of Latin American documentaries that break with the traditional strictures of genre and show important degrees of experimentalism. ⁶ These films foreshadow the rich documentary cinema that would flourish in subsequent decades.

As the “New Latin American Cinema” burst onto the scene into the 1950s and 1960s, so did a new generation of filmmakers who benefitted from the modernization processes that were taking place in capital cities around the region. Handheld cameras and the influence of Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité had a significant impact on filmmakers like Argentine Fernando Birri, whose training in Europe brought new techniques that would later be expanded and adapted to different Latin American contexts. Although imported Hollywood cinema accounted for about 80% of the Latin American film market in those years, a generation of young filmmakers eager to break with cultural imperialism and the commercialization of Latin America’s film industry cultivated a politically committed cinema that would challenge the “first cinema” of the USA (i.e. Hollywood cinema) as well as the bourgeois “second cinema” (“auteurial” art films) of Europe. Many of these young, militant artists belonged to leftist social movements that adhered to Marxism or other revolutionary ideological currents. In that vein, Julianne Burton mentions that “the rise of Marxist-inflected ideologies in Latin America prescribed a dual quest: for a less stratified socioeconomic system, and for authentic, autonomous, culturally specific forms of expression.” ⁷ It is from this dual quest that “Third Cinema” was born.

The conflicted, impassioned, and ideologically driven revolutionary movement of the 1960s and early 1970s saw the birth of a filmmaking movement that really put Latin American documentary on the map. Fernando E. Solanas and Octavio Getino’s landmark diatribe against neocolonialism, La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), quickly gained recognition around the globe and continues to stand as a monument within the canon of Latin American documentary. It is perhaps the best-known example of Third Cinema. A didactic film that offers a revision of Argentine history meant to inspire revolutionary commitment to armed struggle, La hora, demanded an active spectator who would engage with the film’s images and messages both affectively and intellectually. An heir to the Soviet cinema of Vertov and to the cinema of the Cuban Revolution (1959), Third Cinema’s radical goal was to decolonize film, the filmmaker, and the viewing public—to turn filmmaking into a weapon that could play a role in the multifront battle to liberate the oppressed. ⁸ An array of influences “ranging from early Russian constructivist film, Italian neorealism, and European new-wave cinema to Brechtian theater, visual arts, advertising, and revolutionary propaganda” gave this cinema a richness (beyond its historical relevance) that elevated it to a level of global importance. ⁹ In the Third Cinema years, the observational and expository modes that traditionally governed documentary film in the region gave way to layered, reflexive works that, more than mere testimonies, should be seen as interactive compositions densely layered with meaning. ¹⁰ The twenty-first-century militant cinema movements, like Argentina’s cine piquetero (picketer cinema), or perhaps even indigenous filmmaking or films by activist collectives of different kinds, are in many ways connected to, although also distinct from, the Third Cinema movement.

The 1970s and 1980s ushered in a period of civil conflicts—“dirty wars” and “civil wars”—that from Mexico and Central America to the Andes and the Southern Cone would pit military and paramilitary forces against leftist insurgency. The different and complex histories of the Cold War period and the civil conflicts it generated brought unfathomable bloodshed and misery to the region: torture, forced disappearance, exile, and myriad other types of human rights violations. From the pain of exile, state terror, and the defeat of the revolutions, a cinema of memory and political protest emerged that, though born in these years, continues to flourish in the present. Very much connected to the search for truth and justice, the cinema of memory has taken up themes like the forensic disinterment of the disappeared; the ongoing search by mothers, grandmothers, and family members for their missing loved ones; the international dimensions of the Latin American dictatorships; and the persistent effects of violence on indigenous communities, students, and other groups. Of course, censorship by military dictatorships had detrimental effects on the amount of cinema produced in countries like Chile or Argentina, not to mention Peru or Guatemala. Yet despite censorship, the dark years of military counterinsurgency also gave us monumental films like Patricio Guzmán’s three-part epic on Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government, La batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile, 1975–1979), or Brazilian director Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (Twenty Years Later, 1984), which looks back at the 1962 murder by landowners of a peasant leader from the state of Paraíba.

In the 1990s and into the new millennium, we have witnessed (and continue to witness) a number of phenomena: transitions to democracy; truth commissions; persistent socioeconomic inequality; continued battles over memory and justice; struggles for gender equality, sexual rights, and equal access to education; as well as the return to power of leftist governments and political actors who just two decades earlier were brutally persecuted. These phenomena coexist with the entrenchment of neoliberalism in the region, which, next to bodily and psychological violence, is perhaps the greatest legacy of the recent wave of Latin American dictatorships. The neoliberal moment has also sparked battles over a lost sense of solidarity and community that many suggest was more prevalent and palpable in previous historical moments. In the academic realm—particularly in the social sciences and humanities—the consolidation of neoliberalism caused critics like Beatriz Sarlo to speak of a “subjective turn”—a restored confidence in the subject’s right to speak—that both interfaces with and channels struggles for equality and rights by subaltern actors. ¹¹ In a similar vein, Leonor Arfuch signals a “more widespread [obsession with the first person] that not only involves film, but also visual arts, literature, the media, politics, and even academic research.” ¹² This insistence on the subjective, as we have said, certainly has to do with rights-based claims by individuals and groups, but it may also be telling us something important about the nature of the globalized, neoliberal era in which we live: a time in which individualism is rampant, and social media or reality TV, among other media, bombard us daily with first-person constructs.

New work on documentary film—and here we are referring not just to Latin American documentary film—insists that one of its most salient characteristics at the turn of the millennium is the “boom” of first-person, reflexive filmmaking. Various authors, most notably Michael Renov, Bill Nichols, Stella Bruzzi, Alisa Lebow, Jay Ruby, and Pablo Piedras, among others, have called attention to the subjective (Renov), autobiographical (Nichols), performative (Bruzzi), or reflexive (Ruby) aspects of current documentary films. ¹³ Nichols, for example, points out that although documentary filmmakers since Vertov have experimented with reflexive forms that draw the audience’s attention toward the process of filmmaking—in metacinematic fashion—rather than toward the object of representation, it really is not until the 1970s and 1980s that reflexivity begins to play a more prominent role within the documentary filmmaker’s repertoire on the global stage. ¹⁴ For decades, it seemed that documentary filmmaking—plagued by pretensions of objectivity and a privileged relationship to the real—“had few tools at its disposal to address the issue of the reflexive or ironic, and, even less, to see it as a potentially more powerful political tool than the straightforward, persuasive presentation of an argument.” ¹⁵

The global turn toward the reflexive that began in the 1970s really took off in Latin America as of the 1990s. Perhaps as a reaction to myriad nationalistic, ideological, or authoritarian narratives that had been imposed upon Latin American nations by political elites throughout history (and particularly during the Cold War period of authoritarian rule), the subjective turn (which coincided with the transitions to democratic rule as well as the neoliberal moment) brought a poststructuralist critique of language (and the image) and a feeling that political transformation would come through the rescuing of alternatives histories, memories, and experiences that could lead to deeper democratization. Filmmakers used reflexivity to question conventional truths and to challenge objectivity both formally and politically.

Nevertheless, documentary filmmaking, even in the new millennium, is always reticent to abandon objectivity completely. There is still something about the genre that makes filmmakers and viewers feel that by watching a documentary, we are somehow getting closer to reality. This longstanding pretension may be the impetus behind Stella Bruzzi’s insightful observation that “documentary practice and theory have always had a problem with aesthetics.” ¹⁶ Documentary filmmaking in the new millennium, however, clearly acknowledges that aesthetics are a key part of the documentary enterprise. Reflexive techniques allow filmmakers to more easily introduce a critical point of view and to deconstruct the narratives that shape individuals and modern societies. This seismic shift in documentary practice has caused Pablo Piedras, in his study of recent Argentine filmmaking, to signal a “profound transformation,” that is, occurring “in the epistemic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium
• 1. The Subjective Turn and Beyond
• 2. The Ethics of Encounter
• 3. Performing Truth: Memory Politics and Documentary Filmmaking
• Backmatter