Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema ed. by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet (review)

Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema, edited by Carolina Rocha and Georgia Seminet (Lexington Books, 2014) is history in the making, literally. The volume is a first in the fast-evolving field of youth subjectivities in Latin American cinema, as well as a successful attempt to historicize Latin American subjectivity processes as expressed through the voice and point of view of the children and adolescents depicted in the cinema of the region. The editors’ previous volume, Representing History, Class, and Gender in Spain and Latin America: Children and Adolescents in Film (Rocha & Seminet, NY: Palgrave, 2012) surveyed and analyzed the vast portrayal of minors in the Hispanic world, and how the preadolescent and adolescent perspective is used in cinema to question history and traditional representations of gender and class. The present book, however, takes a distance from the use of the minor’s image to depict innocence, monstrosity and a longing for what has been lost in modern times. The authors of this new volume find a niche in the unexplored means by which the subjectivity of the minor complements and differs from that of their adult counterpart.

As the main goal of Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema is the analysis of filmic representations of children’s subjectivities and their developing agency in diverse socio-political and economic contexts, the editors recognize various hurdles, one being the very cinematic mediation of the image of the minor. Children and adolescents, unlike other minorities portrayed in film, have no access to producing films, and thus are in principle unable to revert or deconstruct the “adult gaze” that objectifies them. Emphasizing the importance of a Bakhtinian dialogic conception of subject formation, the authors of the volume demonstrate that the array of chosen films allow their young characters the possibility to escape the adult gaze and “reflect” their look back in an engaging relational process of the self and the other, young and adult actor, characters and spectators. In sum, the essays that compose the volume successfully reflect on their young characters’ process of becoming or gaining agency through ingenuity and determination despite the hardships of socio-economic and political adversity: orphanhood, violence, disability, poverty and migration.

The essays of Screening Minors in Latin American Cinema have been carefully arranged in a comprehensive series of four parts, moving with ease from one area of investigation to another: from the construction of children’s subjectivity to the relational implications of child-parental bond in a variety of sociocultural contexts; from the construction of minors’ subjectivities in extreme circumstances to the contexts and techniques employed by film-makers to construct agency in their young participants. Every chapter shares similar preoccupations for the construction of a young subjectivity and agency in fierce negotiation with the objectifying gaze of the adult filmmaker and spectator. In Part I, relaying on the Lacanian notion of the structural access to the symbolic through language, Carolina Rocha, avidly demonstrates that the directors of her analyzed films subvert the “colonizing” adult gaze of the movie industry through formal filmic resources that empower the young character to find their own voice. The two films analyzed by Sophie Dufays depict a filmic system where the child’s world substitutes a normalizing symbolic one. According to Dufays, those two non-allegorizing films break from linguistic memory transmission and result in a “melancholic conception that stresses the failure of communication and language” (20). Similarly, but relying on a Freudian concept of children’s “deviant” or non-normative sexuality, Alejandra Josowicz opposes the stereotypical cinematic depiction of girls as pure and innocent victims of adult corruption, and shows effectively that the girls of her studied films model a regained agency through an unconventional, sexually-charged behavior.

Part II takes a relational approach on the significance of subjectivity formation for both child and adult. Sarah Thomas explores the asymmetries of the child and adult agencies through the child’s imagination as a complex and nuanced representation of subjectivity in clear opposition...