Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema and Culture—Cinembargo Colombia by Juana Suárez (review)

This collection of essays represents a valuable contribution to the study of Colombian cinema and culture, offering a range of detailed analyses of moving images in Colombia that contribute to a fast evolving field of cultural reflections on the nation and its long-standing conflicts. Beyond what it adds to debates surrounding the representation of violence in Colombian culture, the collection also considers aspects of Colombian cinema that have received little scholarly attention, with fascinating chapters on topics such as silent cinema and the pioneering work of female documentary filmmakers. The book will undoubtedly become a key point of reference for students and scholars interested in Colombian film. It will also help consolidate comparative perspectives on Latin American cinema more broadly.

Chapter one examines four silent films in terms of their reworking of nineteenth-century cultural tropes, and gives a detailed account of early Colombian cinema’s participation in the restructuring of society occasioned by new forms of capital. While the appeal to Sarmiento’s “civilization or barbarism” paradigm is a little anachronistic—Núñez’s “anarchy or order” would enjoy a wider circulation at the time—Suárez compellingly situates these films in relation to tensions arising from the revival of Hispanism and the articulation of defensive nationalist discourses, tensions compounded by the historical coincidence of the first centario with Colombia’s loss of Panama. By reading works like Bajo un cielo antioqueño (1925) against the grain of elite anxieties of “progress,” she also provides a balanced assessment of the ways in which they simultaneously celebrate the social mobility facilitated by modernization while seeking to neutralize, through Christian, patriarchal conceits, the new social divisions that modernization generated. Her reconstruction of the troubled production of Jambrina’s Garras de oro (1926) is a tour-de-force of archival research.

Chapter two analyzes seven films about La Violencia. While these fail to construct a unifying cinematographic narrative of the conflict’s regionally fragmented, politically heterogeneous and historically indeterminate constitutive processes—and remain distinctly muted as political critiques—they do at least offer a tentative “revision from below” of standard historiographical exegeses. In this chapter the analyses are at points a little schematic and there are some salient gaps in the bibliography, especially in the second section. By limiting discussion of Vallejo’s Crónica roja (1979) to questions of censorship and counter-censorship, Suárez may overlook its striking participation in the mediatization of violence that is a constant in Colombia. The dismissal of Pisingaña’s (1985) “machista viewpoint” also gives short shrift to the film’s conscious reflection—very much part and parcel of its denunciation of middle-class “repression, alienation, and direct and indirect violence” (62)—on the fine line that separates voyeurism and violence. By contrast, while underscoring the regionalism and apoliticism that hamper earlier films like El río de las tumbas (1964) and Cóndores no entierran todos los días (1971), her readings rescue these films from critical ostracism by highlighting how they translate La Violencia’s powerful symbolic dimensions into a unique filmic language.

Chapter three explores the cinematographic mapping of the social violence endured by those living in the margins of the nation and on the volatile fringes of capitalist development. Here the contrast between the ethnographic work of Rodriguez and Silva’s Chircales (1972) and the more exploitative Gamín (1977) preempts the later perversion of Gaviria’s innovative and immersive cinematographic mapping of the precarious life of Medellín’s “disposable” poor. In a twist of fate already parodied by Mayolo and Ospina’s Agarrando pueblo (1978), films such as Barbet Schroeder’s La Virgen de los sicarios (2000) and Scott and Martínez’s La sierra (2005) pervert Gaviria’s innovations by turning the immersion into social breakdown as an exportable formula aimed at generating capital. The chapter offers a useful synthesis of criticism of Gaviria’s Medellín trilogy and complements the first chapter’s engagement with...