Epilogue: Contemporary Cinema in Latin America

This is the last chapter of a book titled ‘The New Latin American Cinema: Readings from Within’ (Calcutta, 1998), edited by Indranil Chakravarty & Samik Bandopadhyay.

EPILOGUE INDRANIL CHAKRAVARTY The eccentricity of Latin America can be defined as a European eccentricity : I mean it is another way of being Western. A non-European way. Both inside and outside the European tradition, the Latin American can see the West as a totality and not with the fatally provincial vision of the French, the German, the English or the Italian. Octavio Paz i Is this an Indian disease, this urge to encapsulate the whole of reality? Worse: am I infected too? Salman Rushdie

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For at least three decades beginning from the 1940s, Latin America witnessed a cultural explosion whose intensity, significance and impact have rarely been experienced elsewhere in the world in this century. The earliest cultural manifestations were observed in the fields of literature and the visual arts and only much later in the cinema. These works not only made a conspicuous rupture with the Latin American literature, art and cinema of the past, but also addressed and challenged the hegemonic centre-periphery relations. However, in the transition from the political turbulence and militancy of the 1960s to the global vertigo of the 1990s, the cultural paradigms have undergone major changes. The problems have perhaps been more visible in the sphere of cinema because unlike literature, it is conditioned, as a technological form, by capitalist laws. This section intends to touch upon some of these developments and the problems that they throw up for viewers in India. The aspirations and achievements of the New Latin American Cinema have indeed been phenomenal. It rejected the ‘national’ cinemas that uncritically took the Hollywood cinema as its model (which it pejoratively called the ‘old’ cinema) and challenged the conventional modes of production and consumption, and attempted to create alternative structures for dissemination. As a cinematographic renewal, it evolved a language and style of its own, often ‘revoIutionary’ in content and anti-imperialist in its thrust, negotiating the dialectical interactions between regional expressions, national projects and continental ideals, challenging the hegemonic forms of social and cultural discourse, rejecting traditional genres and frequently conflating them, retrieving lost histories of the nation with an awareness of ‘official’ historiography’s elisions and its conformity to ruling interests (both past and present), all in search of an appropriate cinematic language. It also betrayed a deconstructive impulse whose intention was to lay bare the ideological underpinning of the institutionalised model of the classic realist text. The New Cinema also addressed issues such as what constituted ‘national reality’, examined the relationship between filmmaker and the ‘people’ whose voices and desires they claimed to give expression to in their films and probed into the very nature of popular

culture. Taking inspiration from Italian neorealism and the French ‘politique des auteurs’, filmmakers of the New Cinema transformed both the styles to give birth to an idiosyncratic film language, much in the spirit of syncretismiii that has often been a defining characteristic of Latin American culture.

CRITIQUE OF THE NEW CINEMA By the early seventies, the New Cinema began to lose its vigour partly due to the hostility of the governments that came into power which not only refused to support the movement but stifled it in every possible way with its draconian policies (as in Brazil, Argentina and Chile). Just as the New Cinema flourished at a time of unprecedented optimism, a retroversion of the general political atmosphere led to a decline of this cinema. Even in Cuba, where a vibrant and innovative cinema was born completely with state support, this cinema too was debilitated by a hardening of the ideological position along with a collapse of the economy. Apart from the political misfortunes, the movement also had some inherent weaknesses which gradually became distressingly apparent. In the period that followed, some filmmakers of the New Cinema changed their positions, acknowledging the logic of the market, returning to a more conventional tradition of narrative transparency but without denouncing their ‘conscious concern with conscience’. Others continued to work in exile, which certainly cannot be seen as an uninterrupted continuation. There were still others (like Carlos Diegues in Brazil) who completely abandoned the New Cinema agenda in search of an-other ‘new’ cinema that would be more socially valid in the altered context. The crisis of the New Cinema was largely a “rhetorical and ideological crisis”.iv Disillusioned by latter-day developments in the continent, the ‘sterile’ rhetoric propounded by some of the filmmakers of the movement was held responsible for the ideological excesses and the consequent political misfortunes that followed and were thus subject to virulent attack. [ Fernando Birri’s “Poem in the form of a film poster” in this collection is one such example of rhetorical excess.] Glauber Rocha’s insistence in Black God, White Devil that “the sertão will become the sea and the sea the sertão” may have had a great appeal to a generation that had faith in revolutionary change but in the eyes of a cynical generation such naive hope seemed utterly misplaced. Let us take, for example, a film which has remained a recurring point of reference for the radical cinema of the sixties (and effusively ‘overview’-ed in this collection): Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces. The film, a rousing call to insurrection, is a masterful propagandav which argued for the ‘Third World’ status of Argentina. It emphasised the role of the peasantry and the proletariat, the mestizo and indigenous components of the national culture and above all the foreignness of the middle and upper classes, an urban, elite, dominated by that ‘Goliath’s head’, Buenos Aires. What the film did not say was that in the sixties and seventies, Argentina could hardly be considered a Third World country in the same category as Bolivia or North-East Brazil, nor could Peron be seen as a revolutionary leader free from capitalist ties. Buenos Aires, a 2

city which houses almost half the country’s population cannot be called ‘unrepresentative’ of a nation and its concerns, or dismissed as ‘liberal’ and ‘foreign’. The political message can also be seen as questionable. Insurrection may have been valid for a country like Cuba but many critics in Argentina now argue that the intellectual insistence on revolutionary action, independent of mass support, in the late sixties and early seventies, gave the reactionary forces in Argentina the excuse to take over the machinery of government. They used the well-intentioned words of revolutionary intellectuals as proof of a ‘Marxist’ conspiracy against the nation’s Christian values, and from 1966 to 1983, with the brief period of Perón’s second government as the only respite, the military took left-wing rhetoric as their justification for starting the ‘infernal machine’ that would end the lives of tens of thousands, send innumerable citizens into exile with several thousands simply “missing”. Exile and the collapse of a once prosperous nation are components of a nightmare that would become the central thematic concern of Argentine cinema, openly in the new democracy and allegorically during the military dictatorship. Solanas’s rhetoric extends to his polemical essay, “Towards a Third Cinema”, that argues for a “guerrilla cinema” likening the camera to a ‘gun’ and insists on his ‘Third Cinema’ as the model for ‘Third World’ filmmakers as, perhaps, the only form of oppositional cinema. Apart from the problem of situating cinema solely within the frame of economic determinism, Solanas also creates a myth of the Third World as a monolith. It thus attempts to block the enlistment of some of the most viable methodological and critical propositions. Further, the term has a historical link to Gen. Juan Perón’s ‘third option’ for Argentine politics, a form of non-aligned developmentalism. The political connection to Peronism moved a large number of Latin American filmmakers to reject the term “Third Cinema” in favour of other designations. Hour of the Furnaces, like several other ‘key’ works of the movement, betrays the desire to return to a state of pre-colonial innocence and integrity, to strip off ‘alien’ layers until the pure essence of national culture reveals itself. It is here that we can find the rhetoric of cultural nationalism at work. It presupposes the ‘container’ theory of culture which conceives of a finite substance which can be spent and therefore requires that the remainder (of culture) be ‘conserved’. This tendency was common among Latin American intellectuals in the early twentieth century who set out on a tortuous quest for national essences -- a quintessential Argentine-ness, Mexican-ness, Cuban-ness etc. The ideology of nationalism did lead to the discovery of popular traditions and ethnic lore, which came to be regarded as touchstones of cultural authenticity that reinforced cultural nationalism, paving the way for the economic nationalism of the 1930s and the intensive state-led development of subsequent decades. However such obsessions with the immaculate conception of authentic national cultures proved to be elusive and often led to various forms of dogmatism which obscured the complexity of cultural formations. The legitimisation of national nostalgia created a situation where liberal ideas were not only dismissed as alien 3

imports but the struggle for ‘authenticity’ got embroiled with anti-democratic and anti-progressive policies where electoral politics was scorned as a bourgeois charade. The emphasis on identity even led to a rejection of modernity because the two were often at conflict with one another. Thus the New Cinema operated within an ideological paradigm that subordinated the articulation of the cinematically specific to the articulation of the culturally specific. As Ann Marie Stock argues: ... to evaluate cultural expression solely or primarily in terms of its geo-political specificity... has serious implications; not only does it marginalize a great deal of contemporary expression, it overlooks those films that attest to culture’s role in the construction of identity. ... To insist on viewing cultural phenomena exclusively through an authentic-inauthentic binary lens is to obliterate any space for engaging with the ways in which identities are constructed and negotiated. vi In contrast to the old New Cinema, several contemporary films consciously (and perhaps provocatively) flaunt their cultural hybridity and migrancy. The New Cinema’s discursive-ness, irreverent though it may have been, limited the free exploration of film language. If the New Cinema filmmakers were intent on breaking the shackles of traditional narrative in an iconoclastic vein, contemporary filmmakers show a proclivity towards discovering the enchantment of narrative. The validity of the concept of a ‘national cinema’ is also put into question in the contemporary world. The issue no longer is of choosing between tradition and modernity but reorganizing the cultural arena. Earlier film movements such as the French New Wave or the New German Cinema may have been characterised in terms of nationalities but in the trans-national condition of the contemporary world where distinct cultural codes constantly intersect and private and public realms interpenetrate, such notions of ‘national’ styles based on an idea of a certain national identity, may no longer be tenable.vii The Argentine anthropologist, Néstor García Canclini, makes the point strongly: What remains of national identities in a time of globalization and interculturalism, of multinational coproduction and the Chain of the Americas, of free trade agreements and regional integration? What remains when information, artists, and capital constantly cross borders?... In view of (the) multinational hybridization, which also blends various genres and techniques, one must ask if -apart from art and mass communication -- there exist scenarios of national identity? ... Rethinking national identities today supposes a questioning of the ways the state represents these identities.viii The situation of exile further problematised the notion of ‘national cinema’ through its dislocation of filmmaker and nation. Kathleen Newman shows that Fernando Solanas’ Sur (South, 1988) attempts to chart a new course for both Peronism and ‘third cinema’ but in the attempt to do so, reveals the extent to which globalization has already erased the nation as a viable political ensemble. She writes: ... Given that the language and politics of the film are those of exclusion and distantiation, Sur exemplifies national cinema after globalization. The nation, 4

necessary to the previous period of capitalism, exists in the nostalgia of nationalist political projects: Sur may express Solanas’s desire that nation should triumph over the restructuring of all political relations at this conjuncture, but it suggests that the one exile that will not return to Latin America in the 1990s is the nation itself. ix One of the more persistent allegations of the post-New Cinema filmmakers against the New Cinema is the latter’s inability to defend its own audio-visual space. “With its intentionalism and neurotic need to prove something,"x the 'highbrow' New Cinema failed to draw its own public to the halls, a factor that facilitated the overriding dominance of both the American cinema and an apolitical, uncritical, unthinking indigeneous cinema. In this sense, it failed where the "old" cinema succeeded. Glauber Rocha, for instance, could neither understand why the "people" did not see his films in spite of his passionate "resignification" of their myths, desires and narrative traditions, nor could he accept that Cinema Nôvo had come to an end. Ironically, all the major directors of the New Cinema actually set out to create a popular cinema that would be valid in a Latin American context. The desire for ‘a socially productive popular cinema’ is at the heart of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s essays in this collection. It was this failure of the New Cinema that provoked many subsequent filmmakers to experiment with popular modes of address such as melodrama or use strategic distancing techniques such as parody to make films in the Hollywood mould whose production values, filmmakers in Latin America, could not possibly emulate.

CONTEMPORARY RESPONSES Contemporary cinema sets off with the premise that the very idea of revolution has lost significance, assuming as its strategic perspective, ‘the democratisation of democracy’, redefining nationalism and its relation with the American cinema and acknowledging the logic of the market. Many filmmakers (particularly in Brazil) hold that popular culture can be emancipatory in helping form a future society. Debates have also somewhat shifted from cinema proper to television and its accompanying dramaturgical demands. While the New Cinema had a clear unifying thread -- the call for national liberation in general and cinematic decolonization in particular -- contemporary cinema offers no such clarity or unanimity. It is, in fact, a much more dispersed and eclectic phenomenon. From the seventies on, a new generation of film and video-makers, particularly women, (like María Luisa Bemberg in Argentina, Tizuka Yamasaki and Ana Carolina in Brazil) addressed the relevance of the personal to relocate activism away and beyond the public space of partisan politics. As B. Ruby Rich observes , In this new environment, a cinema which turns inward and which begins to enable viewers to construct an alternate relationship -- not only with their government but with an authentic sense of self -- is an indispensable element in the evolution of a new sociopolitical environment. Slogans, pamphlets, and organizing have been key to political change; character, identity, empathy, and 5

most importantly, a sense of personal agency, now are of equal importance to political evolution. xi While earlier many of the serious directors held the view that telenovelas (TV serials) with their Cinderella plots and idealization of history could not be forces for liberation or positive social change, they later realised that melodrama activates the cultural memory of the popular classes and helps to unify the popular cultures of the past and the present. Telenovelas, some argue, are polysemic, representing discourses from more than one perspective. They revolve around personal relations and tend to resolve whatever social conflicts might be presented at the individual level. But the stories and their elaboration are open to enough interpretation to permit critical, counterhegemonic perceptions of class and gender relations. The critic Jesús Martín-Barbero argues that it is through the process of identification (in melodrama) that the audience formulates its own culture, one that encompasses the prevailing social order but does not necessarily exclude resistance.xii Plots develop more freely as if following the emotions of the characters, and situations resonate with national and individual experiences. Melodrama seems to have taken up the challenge of realism in a genre devoted to love triangles and affairs exclusively of the heart. The most creative developments have been observed in Brazilian cinema. There is a salutary sense of a passionate but undogmatic dedication to cinema combined with, at times, an analytical lucidity and a determination to survive outside Hollywood and the TV machinery. The best of these films open up new ways of engaging with notions of ‘the popular’ and with cinematic pleasure while maintaining a sense of cultural-political pertinence and refusing the constriction of ‘art cinema’ or other generic straitjackets. Often drawing on Brazil’s own historical avant garde of the twenties, these films evince a freewheeling attitude towards questions of realism, verisimilitude and historicaltemporal conventions with narrative genres. Udigrundi (Underground Cinema) and pornochanchada (musical sex-comedy) are the two important tendencies that emerged in the seventies and eighties. The pornochanchada was used by some filmmakers to represent ‘displaced’ investigations of social forces and relations of power (eg, in the films of Carlos Reichenbach). Elements of the genre also fed into the Tropicalistxiii cinema emerging from São Paolo (eg, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaima). The celebrated Brazilian film scholar and teacher, Paulo Emilio Salles Gomes, repeatedly pointed to the lessons that could be learned from the pornochanchadas in terms of their language, the radical style of the rapport between them and Brazilian audiences and culture in general, a factor contributing to their popularity. Reichenbach’s ‘intellectual pornography’ or meta-pornography is actually a ‘critique and transvaluation of porn’ where ‘eroticism is always distanced and voyeurism always shortcircuited’.xiv The Udigrundi (comprised of Julio Bressane, Rogerio Sganzerla, Andrea Tonacci, etc) emerged out of a very active left movement during Brazil’s slow return to a more democratic regime and dealt with all forms of marginality -- political, cultural, economic, sexual. Udigrundi represented a negation of certain aspects of Cinema Nôvo while continuing it at another level, despite vociferous 6

antagonism manifested vis-à-vis Cinema Nôvo by some Udigrundi filmmakers particularly critical of their predecessors’ conventional aesthetics. Robert Stam and Ismail Xavier have analytically observed that the ‘crisis of representation’ led post-Cinema Nôvo filmmakers to employ diverse strategies : metacinema, carnivalization, ‘abertura’ (punctured, subverted) naturalism and national allegory, “as responses to a new historical juncture where there is little place for the messianic optimism of Cinema Nôvo or the aggressive nihilism of ‘marginal cinema’.” xv

THE PROBLEM OF RECEPTION A refusal to acknowledge the amorphousness of identity and the complexity of cultural formations in contemporary Latin America can easily lead to simplistic categories. In fact the division of the present anthology according to nationalities of authors reinforces a persistent faith in a mode of thinking that tends to interpret culture through a set of binary opposites -- national and foreign, commercial and art cinema, elite and popular culture -- thereby obscuring the intervening discursive spaces and the possibilities of negotiation. It is this notion of Latin American culture which is increasingly under attack. A nation-based view of the New Latin American Cinema also tends to overlook the trans-national aspect of the movement. Latin America’s post- New Cinema has had a particularly unenthusiastic reception in India which may be more revealing about ourselves (in India) than the continent’s culture from where these films emerge. In general, Latin America tends to be perceived and appreciated in India largely in a Western Marxist mould which, apart from the problem mentioned above, has its own expectations from the continent’s culture. Any tendency that does not conform to that mould (or a reality that challenges it) is usually rejected. Latin American cinema (in particular) and culture (in general) has often been appreciated or rejected in India in tandem with the vicissitudes of the Left. Now, at a time of apocalyptic visions (in contrast to the utopian sixties), when revolution and radical social change seem no longer probable, Latin America ceases to interest the ‘progressive’ Indian spectators. Most viewers are disappointed when a film from Latin America seems to be overtly apolitical. Solanas, for example, laments that no one interviews him about film art, only about politics.xvi This is, in fact, a more pervasive problem. Beat Borter tells us that even viewers in Switzerland, invited to a screening of Fernando Pérez’s film Hello Hemingway, “appeared bewildered that such a sensitive study of an individual should come out of a socialist country. What, then, is a ‘Cuban’ film?” xvii One wonders why is it that Latin Americans are denied (by non-Latin Americans) a legitimate engagement with the larger, universal themes and issues of life! The great Argentine writer, Jorge Luis Borges, we may recall, asserted a self-confident cosmopolitanism and taught novelists to concentrate on form and intellectual coherence in writing. There are several important filmmakers, as well, of both the past and the present, who have taken a bellicose, cosmopolitan stance. Raúl 7

Ruiz, that brilliant renegade of the New Latin American cinema and the epitome of cosmopolitanism, is often rejected in India for his obscurity, so untypical of ‘Latin Americans’. Yet it is this prejudice that leads to a ‘dislike’ of extraordinary contemporary films like Eliseo Subiela’s Don’t die without telling me where you are going. The ‘typical’ viewer seems further confused when an acknowledged stalwart of that cinema (like Gutiérrez Alea) ‘returns’ to a straight-line narrative or García Márquez extols melodrama. It seems that Latin America does not interest us for what it is. Rather, it is expected to conform to what we think it represents. Relegating the plurality of cultural discourse in an entire continent merely to the realm of the political is an indication of the parochialism of our reception. Similar stereotypes of reception tend to classify the American cinema as merely ‘entertainment’, and European cinema as ‘art’. This epilogue has tried to argue that the problem with contemporary Latin American cinema is certainly not a lack of creativity (in fact, it is very much alive and kicking) but the problems of reception that tend to take the radical cinema of the sixties as normative. But the problem is not limited to India or other nonLatin American countries. Ann Marie Stock arguesxviii that though film-making practices in Latin America have ventured far beyond the issues of nationalism and cultural authenticity, critical practices in the continent continue to be circumscribed within the paradigm of national cultures. Most of the reception problems stem, probably, from a subconscious need to ‘encapsulate’ Latin American reality and its cinema. Perhaps these tendencies are exemplified in some parts of the ‘overviews’ in this anthology. The complexity of cultural formations in contemporary Latin America demands that we reconsider the usual (pejorative) connotations of melodrama, popular culture and even sex-comedy, keeping in mind the terms of their debates, their contexts, their exigencies and the necessary eclecticism of their survival. Otherwise, it is easy to dismiss Maria Luisa Bemberg’s Camila thinking that “she has played safe” or “joins the European mainstream quite naturally!” (page 31) without realising that the film actually demonstrates the ability of cinema to recycle the past in order to intervene in contemporary politics, somewhat allegorically. In fact, the film uses the historical melodrama in order to point an accusing finger to patriarchal institutions and the nationalist rhetoric responsible for some of the worst excesses in Argentina’s history. Or, one may talk simplistically and condescendingly, of “the machismo rooted in the Afro-Cuban tradition” (page 161) ignoring the existence of the profoundly patriarchal Catholic, colonial, traditions. Or dismiss a film on the ground that it contains a “South American overdose of sex and dance” (page 32, italics mine) without taking into account their importance in forging identity, the polemics involved in the representation of sexuality, and above all, without considering what constitutes an ‘overdose’ of sex (that too, by modest Indian standards!). This situation is indeed very unfortunate. There is a great possibility of crossfertilization between India and Latin America, whatever the actual reasons may be. Miguel Littin’s insistence that his films are better appreciated and understood in India than in Chile, may be one indication.xix Latin America’s debates can indeed enrich our own by offering brilliant insights, particularly because there is 8

some truth in Carlos Fuentes’ observation that there has been “a certain Latin Americanisation of the world, ... many problems we thought were particular to Latin America, turned out to be universal problems”xx. In India, we are now living - for over a decade or so -- for the first time in our history perhaps, the crisis of identity. It is likely that when we look at their mirror -- the narratives of their identity -- we may see our own faces in it, in a dream, as it were. October, 1998

NOTES i ii iii iv v vi

vii viii ix x xi xii

xiii

xiv

El arquero,la flecha y el blanco, Vuelta 117, August 1986, p 26 Saleem Sinai’s monologue in Midnight’s Children , Avon Books, New York, 1980, p 84 Cultural cross-fertilization between the New World (American continent) and the Old World (Europe) Patricia Aufderheide, “Latin American Cinema and the rhetoric of cultural nationalism”, Quarterly Review of Film & Video, Vol. 12, no.4 (1991), p 62 “A Peronist videoclip”, in Miguel Littín’s words. (Personal conversation, 1997) “Through Other Worlds and Other Times”, in Ann Marie Stock(ed), Framing Latin American Cinema : Contemporary Critical Perspectives (University of Minnesota Press, 1997) pp xxvi-xxvii It may be recalled that the process of cultural globalisation and multiculturalism were experienced in Latin America much before than they were in India. “Will there be Latin American cinema in the year 2000?”, in Framing Latin American Cinema, pp 2247-48, 252 “National cinema after globalization: Sur and the exiled nation”, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Vol.14,no.3 , pp 69-83 José Carlos Avellar, "Backwards Blindness: Brazilian Cinema in the 1980s", in Framing Latin American Cinema , p 27 Quoted in Zuzana Pick, The New Latin American Cinema : A Continental Project (University of Texas Press, Austin, 1996) p35 Jesús Martín Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the media to mediations (Sage Publications, London, 1993) Tropicalism implies a reactivation of the elements of the 20s avant garde(anthropophagous) movement, announced in Rocha’s films and Gilberto Gil’s music. Robert Stam and Ismail Xavier, “Recent Brazilian Cinema: Allegory/ Metacinema/ Carnival”; Film Quarterly, Vol. 41, no.3, Spring 1988, p17

xv

“Recent Brazilian Cinema”, p16

xvi

Personal conversation (1993)

xvii

“Moving to thought: The inspired cinema of Fernando Pérez”, in Framing Latin American Cinema, p155

xviii

Editor, Hispanic Issues, Volume 15, 1997

xix

Personal conversation, 1996

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xx

John King (ed), Latin American Fiction : A Survey (Faber and Faber, 1987) p 149

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