Hamaca Paraguaya (2006): Temporal Resistance and Its Impossibility

Periodization is inevitable but never innocent. Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State”

June 2012, Curuguaty, Paraguay: a violent land dispute takes place resulting in the impeachment of President Fernando Lugo. Seventeen people are killed in gun battles between the police and landless farmers (or hired guns. At the time of this writing there is insufficient evidence to determine who, exactly, started the shooting.) The police had been sent in to evict about 150 farmers from the land, a forest reserve owned by Blas Riquelme, a politician opposed to President Fernando Lugo. Advocates for the campesinos sin tierra argued that the land was wrongfully acquired from the state by Riquelme during the Stroessner dictatorship and should have been part of a land reform program. Lugo won the presidential election in 2008 in part on a promise of agrarian reform that would benefit 87,000 Paraguayan farm families, although this was never delivered.¹ In the media coverage that followed the gun battle and ensuing impeachment, the campesino figure was depicted in ways that ran the gamut from the most disenfranchised victim of the State to the most violent and lawless of criminals.

The events of June 2012 are just examples of how politically-charged the campesino figure has been and is in Paraguay today. Paraguayan film emerging in the last decade has been highly dedicated to representing a Paraguayan national identity, or paraguayidad, through the campesino figure. Notably, Hamaca Paraguaya (2006) takes the campesino figure as its protagonist, and includes dialogue spoken entirely in Guaraní, the indigenous language of Paraguay and the language dominantly spoken in rural areas. In this essay I analyze the form, content and national/transnational context of Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes 2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could be “successful” on a world stage. I address how specific formal choices related to temporality make Hamaca a potential site for resistance, while also accounting for how certain temporal choices and structures liken Hamaca to a palimpsest onto which a historic, subordinating world order is still grafted, and cannot be completely erased. By temporal choices, I refer specifically to 1) the way in which a lack of action or plot produces a tempo that is slow in comparison with the tempo of mainstream, Hollywood cinema and how 2) Hamaca represents two different temporalities simultaneously: one that is congruent with the familiar arrow of time in which one moment is proceeded by the next, and another time that could be described as circular. Finally, I address how the main characters themselves are temporalized, linking this to a problematic racialization and gendering congruent with deterministic development discourse condemning Paraguay’s future to more of the same. I see the hope that this film’s triumph represents as somewhat ironically juxtaposed with its entrenchment within a cultural, economic and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the building blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and transnational imbalances of power and wealth.

A Film in Which Protagonists Do Almost Nothing, Dialogue Is Never Spoken and Important Characters Remain Invisible

Early Latin American film manifestos such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s “Toward a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World” consider that formal difference from U.S. cinematic models is needed so as not to replicate the forms emerging from and demanding compliance with the ideology of U.S. finance capital (41).² This move in and of itself was seen as “an attempt at cultural decolonization” (42). Similarly, in “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” Fernando Birri also describes cinema as a tool to fight “external and internal colonialism” when it rejects “the same general characteristics of the superstructure” (93). In “For an Imperfect Cinema” Julio García Espinosa describes imperfect cinema as a “cinema of denunciation” and a potential weapon in the struggle against imperialism (80). He states that

the only thing imperfect cinema is interested in is how an artist responds...