The Screenplay in the Archive: Screenwriting, New Cinemas, and the Latin American Boom

Widely known for their novels and short fiction, the writers of the Latin American Boom were also prolific screenwriters. This aspect of the Boom has been largely neglected in literary criticism, and in fact many unproduced and unpublished screenplays written by these authors remain virtually unread. Focusing on two unproduced screenplays that are part of this vast corpus, this article proposes a systematic and comparative analysis of “the screenplay of the Boom,” a textual form grounded in a transmedia poetics that reworks central concerns developed in the terrain of literary fiction within the realm of screenwriting. An analysis of these screenplays prompts us to consider that the Boom may represent a significant moment in the cultural history of Latin American screenwriting and invites us to reconsider this term in relation to alternative notions of authorship and textuality.