The State of Things: New Directions in Latin American Film History

Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging "new" cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, "Our America"), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay,¹ unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of "master histories" written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.

In the 1980s, however, a new generation of scholars, for the most part trained in film studies, put Latin American cinema in the "map" of the discipline in the U.S. This was still passionate, committed scholarship and still primarily focused on the New Latin American Cinema. Many of us writing about the New Latin American Cinema then participated in its development, decried the setbacks produced by authoritarian regimes, identified new parameters such as exile cinemas, and heralded the various "returns" of national cinemas under emerging democracies. But we also struggled to insert the movement into the theoretical debates then taking place in the field. With historical hindsight, it is now clear that some of our work in the 1980s was probably still too identified with the movement itself: critical distance and acuity are difficult to achieve when immersed in a constantly shifting maelstrom of political, social, and aesthetic forces. Yet in the late 1980s and through the 1990s and beyond, it became clear that a shift had taken place within Latin American film scholarship. In line with a general turn within the discipline of film studies, scholars took on the challenges of historicizing Latin American Cinema.

Film and History

What does it mean to "do" film history? Thirty or forty years ago, doing film history meant producing a chronicle of dates, names, inventions, directors and films, loosely linked to some social causality. Of course, not all names and films could be included in any one account and the presumption was that what was included was aesthetically valuable, worthy of mention and, at the very least, significant for some later development. These canonical film histories set the stage of what was valued and, therefore, of what was studied and talked about. By default, these early chronicles were also exclusionary. This was not necessarily malicious, simply the result of being bound by the perspective of the individual historian and his (de facto) universe of knowledge and expectations.

In the 1980s, the work of film historians was also sharply distinct from the work of film studies scholars. Whereas the former were almost exclusively concerned with contextual issues—the production and reception of films—the latter were primarily preoccupied with texts and the close reading of the style and structure of films. One tradition emerged from the discipline of history and relied upon its positivist heritage, eventually evolving to privilege exhaustive archival research, corroboration, and sound historiographical practices. The other was more closely aligned with the practices of the study of literature and the close analysis of texts. To put it simplistically, film historians might have accused film studies scholars of dealing with dense and impenetrable theoretical systems in which individual films existed in a social and historical vacuum, while for film studies scholars, the work of film historians seemed theoretically naïve, positivist, and reductive of films' semantic and linguistic complexity.

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