Film and History News

10.British Paramount Issue No. 674, 12/8/37. "398 Planes Test London's Air Defense Plan." 1 1.Gaumont British Issue No. 390, 23/9/37. "Berlin Air Raid, French Maneuvers." 12.Gaumont British News Issue No. 419, 3/1/38. "Russian Air Display." FILM AND HISTORY NEWS O.A.H. CONVENTION The HFC sponsored two screenings of the 1975 Academy Award winning documentary, Hearts and Minds, at the Organization of American Historians convention in St. Louis, Apnl 7-10. The event was publicized in the local newspapers and the combined audience totaled 250. The HFC looks forward to participation in future OAH meetings. REPORT FROM LATIN AMERICA, BY WILLIAM BOLLINGER William Bollinger is a graduate student at UCLA He hat recently returnedfrom doing research onfilm and history in Peru With the exception perhaps of the "Cuzco School" formed in the late 1950's, Peru has been virtually without a creative indigenous cinema movement. The so-called Golden Age of Peruvian film, 1936-1940, was little more than an imitation of the melodramas of Hollywood, Mexico City, and Buenos Aires. Armando Robles Godoy's The Green Wall, a sentimental treatment of the frustration and tragedy produced by bureaucracy in Latin America, gained an audience in the United States in 1968; but the tiny handful of "major" producers in Peru, led by Bernardo Batievsky, have since demonstrated that The Green Wall was a false promise. The most recent feature-length triumph from among their hackneyed and vulgar commercial exploitations of Peru's social environment is Allpa Kallpa. a comedy at the expense ofthe impoverished Indian migrants to the capital city of Lima. Meanwhile, despite the military government's rhetoric about cultural and moral "reform," the hundreds of Peruvian movie houses continue to reap a fortune from the standard Karate/Sex/Disney/Towering Inferno formula (The Poseidon Adventure ran for 67 straight weeks in Lima). In a purely economic effort to stimulate the local film industry, the government now requires that the imported features be accompanied by a Peruvian-made short. The result generally has been a parade of awful travelogues and contracted-for documentaries extolling the virtues of different state agencies. The real and present threat of censorship and political repression, added to the concentration of financial resources in the hands of a few conservative producers, has effectively prevented the emergence ofa creative and progressive cinema in touch with Peruvian reality. Despite this depressing overall picture, however, there have been some very positive recent advances in Peru. Several veterans ofthe Cuzco School are once again 31 making films. Their best work is Luis Figueroa's El Cargador, a short, stark documentary about the men who labor in Andean cities as beasts of burden. Among the younger, progressive filmmakers are Liberación Sin Rodeos and another group led by Jorge Reyes; the latter's Teatro En La Calle (Theater in the Street), a documentary on the life and art of Peru's best-known mime, has been censored by the military regime. All of these groups are in a quandary: ifthey want to reach a large audience, utilizing the production and distribution infrastructure of the film industry, they must subordinate their creativity to the ideology and political needs of the military government. A couple of young filmmakers are trying to work underground with the workers' and peasants' movements, but their prospects are unknown; an underground Super-8 newsreel has had limited distribution. If any victories are won in these efforts to overcome the obstacles to a new Peruvian cinema, much ofthe credit will go to the recent emergence of two combative union movements. Both SITEIC, the new screen artists union, and FETCINE, the federation of theater workers' unions, have been in the forefront of the fight in Peru to end censorship and to organize a socially relevant film industry. All of these positive tendencies are brought together in Cinematógrafo, Peru's newest and most important journal of film criticism. Edited by Francisco Adnanzen and others in the Cine'aste style, Cinemato-grafo focuses on the new currents struggling within Peru's own film industry, while at the same time analyzing the larger world of film as it relates to Peru...