An Appraisal of Latin American Cinema

This selection of texts on Latin American cinema is uneven but valuable. It is so primarily because the book contains much anticipated historical essays on cinemas that are often internationally invisible, like the Peruvian and Uruguayan ones. But it also presents up-to-date analytical accounts of more high-profile national cinemas, such as Brazilian, Cuban, and Mexican. The editors seem to draw correctly from the consideration put forth by John King in his seminal History of Cinema in Latin America: that it is impossible to assess Latin American (or Asian or European) culture while disregarding the specificity of localized experiences. Most essentially, the ensemble of these essays offers a non-reductive panorama of the region's motion picture endeavors.

The threefold subtitle is useful as it reveals at once the editors' embrace of a cultural studies perspective (especially in cherishing gender as an approach). Not so beneficially, the three topics cited in the title also define a somewhat arbitrary chapter division, which ends up disclosing even more important problems in the volume's organization. First, "modernity" is too general a rubric for a chapter. If we have in mind that a certain level of modernization is implied by the very existence of an industrial medium such as cinema, this heading could classify the majority of texts in the book. National identity, in the same manner, is implied by the book's own framing of different regions and the filmmakers' efforts to keep national cinemas alive—so it would not serve too well as a way of differentiating the essays. Furthermore, the similarity of approach in the texts classified under varied headings is manifest in some of the most insightful articles of the volume, such as Randal Johnson's "TV Globo, MPA and the Contemporary Brazilian Cinema," Sarah Barrow's "Images of Peru," and Keith Richard's "Cinema and Social Imaginary in 21^st-Century Uruguay." All of them analyze national film productions within the context of recent tension between increasingly necessary international co-productions and potentially conflicting (inter)national representations.

The only understandable section heading turns out to be the one on gender and sexuality. The topic allows a fruitful emphasis on many key points: the sociopolitical strength of patriarchal forces within Latin American institutions (not only filmic); the overspread interplay of sex as a moral subject and marketplace attraction; and the complex remix of highbrow and lowbrow in Latin America's overtly mestizo culture. Unfortunately, the benefit from such an emphasis is not fully realized. Apart from acknowledging the basic insight that genders are social constructs reified and revisited by performance, the essays that constitute this chapter explore the topic's potential only very slightly. Claire Taylor's piece "Performativity and Citation in Camila and Yo la peor de todas," for instance, holds a loose argument on cinematic intertextuality. Furthermore, Ismail Xavier's "Mirror Images and Social Drama," followed by Stephanie Dennison's "Two adaptations of O Beijo no Asfalto," both focus quite redundantly on the obvious moral judgments implied by the assessed films' plots. Only Alison Fraunhar's "Mulata Cubana" goes beyond the traditional assessment of gender as a privileged field of oppression toward a comprehensive understanding of its discursive tensions and rhetorical uses. However, symptomatic of the incoherence in the book's classification, her essay is placed under the chapter on national identity.

Ironically, some essays even go the other way around their chapter organization. Robert J. Miles' "Crossing the Line in Mexico?" forgets the topic of national identity, and instead claims that many European critics dismiss the better part of Buñuel's production in the region. Lisa Shaw and Maite Conde's "Brazil through Hollywood's Gaze," classified under the same section, displays how and why Hollywood's exotic imagery of Brazil was interiorized by Brazilian culture and eventually incorporated into the chanchada movies of the 1950s. The essay then challenges the framing of the book from the very title, focusing mostly on American movies, barely dissecting the Brazilian works. This...