Film and Democracy in Paraguay

Eva Karene Romero

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319448138
• eBook ISBN: 9783319448145
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book is dedicated to the study of Paraguayan film, particularly small cinemas and movies which represent a socio-politically charged perspective that has until now been overlooked in Latin American Studies. Romero demonstrates that these films are critical to understanding the dynamics of politics and cultural identity in Latin America as a whole. An in-depth exploration of the Latin American post-dictatorial transition of power Romero investigates this contemporary crisis through the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Each chapter takes a film or films as its jumping off point, then zooms out to encompass elements of the national political, economic, social, and historical context. Romero analyzes some of the most pressing social issues in Paraguay while reflecting on the power of cultural discourse through film.

© The Author(s) 2016

Eva Karene RomeroFilm and Democracy in Paraguay10.1007/978-3-319-44814-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Eva Karene Romero¹

(1)

Tucson, Arizona, USA

End Abstract

Statement of Aims

Film and Democracy in Paraguay is a study of Paraguayan film, an industry that surged substantially in the 2000s. More than a collection of film studies, however, Film and Democracy in Paraguay constitutes an in-depth exploration of Paraguayan studies. Written from a cultural studies perspective—that is, using an approach in which the formal elements of films, the content of the films, and the contemporary/historical contexts of the films are explored in detail—each chapter takes a film or films as its jumping off point, then zooms out to encompass elements of the national political, economic, social, and historical context. The main concern of Film and Democracy in Paraguay is what many see as the nation’s most urgent contemporary crisis: post-dictatorial transition of power. This concern is explored through representation and social relations; particularly the dynamics of race, class, gender, and sexuality.

At the crux of Film and Democracy in Paraguay is a particular tension: the desire to advocate for underclasses and the fear that if they are not drawn into a new, post-dictatorial democratic order—the order of the new counter-elite—they pose a serious threat. Young directors constitute an important segment of this counter-elite, a group that Kregg Hetherington refers to as the “new democrats”; a small, educated, urban segment of the population with an increasingly influential role in media, social analysis, public criticism, and international relations. Film and Democracy in Paraguay takes recent films as its object of study, focusing on the ideologies of which the new democrats and these films are a product and analyzing efforts to democratize Paraguay by putting visual information regarding “the people” into circulation, creating a visual turn with the goal of opening access to memory and national identity beyond the symbolic use of the few.

The signs traditionally preferred by the elite were replaced with symbols recognizable to those inhabiting subaltern subject positions; the first group recognized by Paraguayan film being specifically campesinos. Guaraní replaced Spanish as the language of Paraguayan cinema in an effort to invert the traditional order of linguistic power, despite the difficulty that this presented for most directors: asuncenos with limited fluency in the Guaraní language. The Guaraní/Spanish dynamic has traditionally produced a cultural divide between literate, Spanish speakers in Asunción and “backwards,” Guaraní-speaking campesinos with little access to written language. (While Guaraní, an indigenous language, is an official language of Paraguay along with Spanish, it is spoken by a significant percentage of the population who are not ethnically members of indigenous tribes.) ¹ Eventually, examples of the subaltern classes represented in these narrative and documentary films extended to the concerns of women, the urban poor (particularly, the minors for whom the street has become home and/or their source of livelihood, and who are inadequately protected or supervised—that is to say, minors represented by the “street kid” trope) and the persecuted queer subject (primarily represented in this study by homosexual men and trans women). Film and Democracy in Paraguay illustrates how the visual and rhetorical language of new democrats in Paraguay is marked by an erasure of politics substituted by a preference for a call to universal values and advocacy in the name of the common good with an eye toward the aforementioned subaltern classes. What these depoliticized causes hide, however, is how they function specifically in the service of the new counter-elite. Film and Democracy in Paraguay analyses how the subaltern classes are included rhetorically, yet simultaneously marginalized by the resulting new language of power. ²

Recent film production in Paraguay provides a window (a recurring device in the films herein) through which to explore the ensuing ideological clashes, such as those between democratizing strategies and neoliberalism; and also between a burgeoning emphasis on the representation of subaltern subjects and long-held, deeply ingrained deterministic ideologies around these segments of the population. This determinism is related to a secondary, but key focus of this book: how temporality is folded into the axis of social structure inclusive of race, class, and gender, integrally linking how people, places, and products are related to the past, present, or future, how this relates to their race, gender, nationality, and ranking in the evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of progress that is often presented as a statement of fact, devoid of politics. In these films, Paraguayan national identity is constructed in a manner that contributes to dominant ideologies that have the effect of justifying and explaining away unequal distribution of wealth and power—no one can help “the way things are.” The business of forging national identity in the name of inclusive politics, once more, is a matter of exclusion.

Small Cinemas and Small Countries Matter

Historically, the majority of US scholarship on Latin American Cinema has been predominantly dedicated to production from the “big four”: Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Argentina. ³ More recently, the focus has shifted to be more inclusive of film from Chile and Uruguay as well. There has also been a tendency to concentrate on Latin American cinema from the 1960s to the present. Revolutionary film movements, such as Cinema Novo in Brazil, the post-revolution cinema of Cuba or films about Allende’s Chile have dominated scholarship, while small cinemas outside of revolutionary contexts have largely been ignored. Considering this situation and the relative shortness of the Paraguayan film production history—or boomcito, as Paraguayan directors affectionately call it—it is unsurprising that there is so little academic literature published on the topic of Paraguayan film studies at this time. ⁴ That said, more and more attention is being paid to the smaller cinemas of Latin America, with the understanding that their inclusion is integral to the study of Latin American cinema as a whole. In Tamara Falicov and Jeffrey Middents’ introduction to their special section on small cinemas in Studies of Hispanic Cinemas, they cite Puerto Rican film-maker and scholar, Frances Negrón-Muntaner:

When speaking about a politics of small problems, we are then referring to a set of political investments and critical assumptions: that despite the fact that major public and intellectual attention tends to gravitate toward ‘big’ objects; places, practices, and peoples thought of as small are central to thinking about how the larger world works. ⁵

This question of why scholars should study small cinemas—and indeed, small countries—is deeply offensive from a humanistic perspective, as if the lives and art of people from small countries mattered less. The fact that small cinemas and their study often have to be sold as valuable due to their relationship to larger cinemas reveals that the current dominant critical assumptions around the politics of small problems are structured by contemporary neoliberal thought. The question of why study small cinemas demonstrates an inability to imagine a way to think about “value” without measuring, quantifying, and proving with numbers as neoliberalism demands. The important question is not why small cinemas, but rather, what can be learned specifically from particular cinemas (regardless of their size). Analyses are more complete when films are considered within the larger contexts that inform them. But when a small cinema’s study can only be justified by its relationship to another, bigger industry, scholars must ask themselves if marketing problems are taking up the space in our brains that used to be occupied by a thirst for knowledge.

Obstacles to Paraguayan film studies and Paraguayan studies in general have not only been ideological, however. Historically, Paraguay is not an outward-facing society, but rather, an inward-facing one. Historic isolation and isolationism have made it difficult for Paraguayans to market their country to the world outside their borders, a legacy that has contributed to a vigorous contemporary debate about how to go about constructing a marca país for foreign consumption. US-based students often contact me about their interest in doing research in Paraguay, seeking to find answers about the most basic questions regarding logistics (“Where do I stay?”; “How do I get around?”; “What do things cost?”). At times, Google searches have revealed that I was easier to find than this information. Perhaps many Paraguayan businesses do not think much about their online presence because only 20% of Paraguayan households have internet access at home. ⁶ Word-of-mouth is still the most effective search engine in-country. Often I tell scholars to take a leap of faith and understand that most of their problems will be solved after they land on Paraguayan soil and start talking to people.

Peter Lambert and Andrew Nickson address this history of isolation and describe its effects in The Paraguay Reader: History, Culture, Politics:

This long historical isolation (geographical, cultural and political) has meant that Paraguay has been largely neglected by historians, journalists and travel writers, leading to a dearth of serious writing on its history, politics, society and culture. This has led to considerable misunderstandings of the country … Ignorance has allowed Paraguay to become a perfect blank space … Paraguay is still seen as a surprise package, a small plucky nation somewhat out of its depth against international opposition … Such invisibility … is apparent in far more important arenas, such as trade, investment, tourism, diplomacy, and politics with damaging results. ⁷

Indeed, this ignorance of Paraguayan history and silencing of Paraguayan voices has resulted in a blank onto which outsiders have projected depictions that revealed their own fantasies and desires most clearly; “Paraguay is portrayed as an unspoiled land, a pre-industrial utopia, a blank canvas for the creation of paradise on earth … For foreigners … often seeking to create their own utopias over existing realities.” ⁸ One infamous and fascinating example of this history is Nueva Germania, the German white supremacist colony started by Friedrich Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her husband, Bernhard Förster in 1887. (The colony did not thrive and Förster committed suicide in 1889.) Film and Democracy in Paraguay is a critical contribution aimed at filling this dangerous void of knowledge in Paraguayan film studies and Paraguayan studies at large. Here I argue that as part of the Latin American film context, Paraguayan film is often submitted for judgment (figuratively in the case of publics—and more literally in the case of funding and festivals) in terms of its engagement with either the poverty or the political issues of the region. While this engagement is often designed with post-dictatorial advocacy in mind, analyses of representation also demonstrate strong anxieties regarding the potential failure to fold the subaltern classes into the new order. I advance the idea that the most visible narrative and documentary film production from Paraguay represents previously unrepresented classes and identities—a fact for which it has been celebrated and rewarded—while also representing a byproduct: dominant transnational ideologies regarding what it means to democratize and develop nationally in neoliberal times, juxtaposed with post-colonial, deterministic anxieties informed by narratives of a specific, Paraguayan national history.

Transition

Transition structures Film and Democracy in Paraguay. Paraguay’s transition of power from dictatorship to democracy occurs in tandem with a cultural turn from the written language of the elites toward visual language considered more accessible to the masses. These transitions occur within the context of larger global transitions, such as the shift from the national to the post-national ⁹ and the shift from regulated economies to neoliberalism (or arguably, post-neoliberalism.)

In consideration of the transition from regulated economies to neoliberalism, the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century has been thus far characterized by an urgent concern regarding how nations can transition from authoritarian or corrupt regimes to more democratic ones; the fear being that if the people do not take over the power vacuum left by totalitarian governments, undesirable elements will, challenging peace and stability while creating a more fertile environment for organized crime and terrorism. Implicit is the assumption that democracy is unquestionably the most superior model of political organization available, and necessary for the economic deregulation that neoliberalism requires. Questions of how to support democratic transition boil down to how to transfer more power from the elite to the people and how to “free” the market. The post-dictatorship economic growth spurt of the early 1990s in Latin America, for example, was touted as evidence that free market reforms were working, once more supporting the idea that economic liberalization was intrinsically tied to political democracy. The question of how to increase democracy was similarly answered by gathering information about the population and making this type of information transparent and available to the public, an issue Kregg Hetherington explores in Guerilla Auditors: The Politics of Transparency in Neoliberal Paraguay—with which this study is dialogic. The larger critical agenda I aim to establish both draws from and shares in certain theoretical aspects of Hetherington’s book, in which he advances a critical rearticulation of the developmental antagonisms between mass information projects and questions...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Hamaca paraguaya (2006): The Campesino and Circular Time
• 3. Frankfurt (2008): Documentary, Fútbol and the Campesino Icon in Paraguay
• 4. Rape of the Nation: Karai norte (2009) and Noche adentro (2010)
• 5. Queering Paraguayan Film: 108/Cuchillo de palo (2010) and Semana capital (2010)
• 6. The Child as Paraguay’s Future: “Calle Última (2010), Mita´í (2011), and 7 cajas (2012)”
• Backmatter