Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video (review)

In the 1960s, the movement known as the New Latin American Cinema stressed what film making by and about Latin Americans had in common. Since that time a number of studies have explored film making both within the framework of New Latin American Cinema and in the context of particular nation-states, especially Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico. Chon A. Noriega, in his introduction to this wide-ranging collection of essays, also points to the significance of the broader contexts in which telecommunications (and not just cinema) are in a process of globalization. Although Hollywood has dominated international markets for movies, the "globalization [of telecommunications] has followed a more multicentric and regional path. Herein lies the imperative--voiced most insistently outside the United States--to read the 'local,' 'popular,' and 'national' into the discussion of U.S.-dominated global media" (p. xiii).

Visible Nations approaches the nation and its international and regional contexts in three ways, which are exemplified in the three sections into which the book is divided: "(1) retheorizing national cinema through revisionist accounts of the classical period, (2) exploring the representation of desire and the nation in contemporary cinema, and (3) examining the global politics of community-based and independent media" (pp. xiv-xv).

The first section of the book consists of four splendid essays. Charles Ramírez Berg revisits El automóvil gris (1919), based on the true story of a series of home invasion robberies carried out by uniformed authorities bearing official search warrants during the Mexican Revolution. The film was originally released as a serial in twelve episodes and later re-edited to feature-film length. Enrique Rosas, who produced and directed the film, used "reality" footage as well, including film he shot during the executions of some of the actual robbers. Through a formal analysis of the film's style, Ramírez Berg demonstrates that this successful film was both an artistic triumph and "uniquely mexicano" (p. 26).

The three other essays in this section provide a more complex, or perhaps ironic, view of the role of nationalism in golden age films. Ana M. López has been following the trails of "intracontinental travelers" (p. 35), one of whom, Carlos Hugo Christensen, is the subject of her essay in this volume. Christensen's film La balandra Isabel llegó esta tarde (1949), set in the context of Afro-Venezuelan culture of the coast, used a variety of international personnel and influences as part of a state-funded attempt to construct a national film industry. Julianne Burton-Carvajal's essay also focuses on the problematic nationalism of a film from Venezuela, Araya (1957), a documentary on twenty-four hours among salt gatherers and fishermen of Venezuela's Araya peninsula, just as mechanization arrived there. The film was directed by Margot Benacerraf, who was born in Caracas, the child of Sephardic immigrants. The national status of the film is complicated by Benacerraf's gender and heritage, her family's wealth and access to international artists, her great technical proficiency and the film's subtlety. Araya was seen in Europe as "authentically" Venezuelan, but was rejected in Venezuela, when finally released there twenty years later. Burton-Carvajal makes a number of important points, among which is the likelihood that Araya influenced Glauber Rocha, one of the founders of Brazil's Cinema Novo movement. Seth Fein contributes another of his well-documented essays detailing the connections between Hollywood, the U.S. State Department, and the Mexican film industry. Here he focuses on two films, The Fugitive (1947) and Dicen que soy comunista (1951), emphasizing the two-way flow of cultural influence between Mexico and the United States.

The remaining two hundred pages include two parts. "Desire and the Nation: Contemporary Cinema" contains five essays on "national cinemas since the 1970s," when "a national cinema of social change necessarily turned...