The Limits of National Film Histories and the Logic of Expansion

Tracing the Historical Turn

In recent years, Latin American film studies in the United States has seen a steady output of monographs on national cinematic traditions that is due, in large part, to the genealogy of this young field and its relation to the broader discipline of film studies. Despite the region's long cinematic history, it was first introduced to the Anglophone academy in the 1970s through the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC).¹ Latin American film studies began to congeal around two crucial assumptions that were characteristic of this movement: its object of study was, on the one hand, explicitly political—having its origins in Third Cinema and global projects of decolonization—and, on the other, regional. Robert Stam, Julianne Burton-Carvajal, Michael Chanan, and Ana M. López, among others, put Latin American cinema on the academic map in the United States through their work on the NLAC.²

Nevertheless, scholars soon began to question the limitations of this approach. Summarizing a decade of scholarship from the 1980s, López argued that early work on Latin American film confined itself to the contemporary politics of the Third World and was thus ahistorical ("Setting up the Stage" 256). While this research demonstrated the growing interest in Latin America in film departments, scholars would need to historicize their object of study to justify the consolidation of Latin American film studies as an independent field. An initial emphasis on the radical critique of the Hollywood model by filmmakers such as Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino, Fernando Birri, Jorge Sanjinés, and Glauber Rocha—to name only some of the most widely studied filmmakers of the NLAC—ignored decades of Latin American film history, especially its early cinema and commercial productions.

The early critical construction of Latin American cinema as a regional and contemporary project was not entirely in step with the discipline of film studies. Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie note that as film studies began to institutionalize in the 1960s, nascent departments oriented themselves around national cinemas, taking as a model influential histories such as Siegfried Kracauer's account of German cinema in From Caligari to Hitler (2).³ Once Latin American film studies gained sufficient momentum to receive disciplinary recognition in the US academy—with the establishment of the Latino/a Caucus within the Society for Cinema Studies (today the Society for Cinema and Media Studies) in 1990 and the Film Studies section of the Latin American Studies Association in 2002—a research agenda aligned with the need for retroactive historical scholarship along predominantly national lines had taken hold (D'Lugo et al. 2).⁴ This did not preclude resistance to a national framework within the field, especially as a result of rampant globalization in the 1990s and subsequent debates surrounding the crisis of the nation (Stock). Despite such objections, the field insisted on the relevance of this model.⁵ Furthermore, by López's own estimation, this decade saw the field turn to historicization following pressure from the wider discipline of film studies, which had begun to experience a historical turn ("The State of Things" 198). National film histories offered the clearest path forward.

Of course, researchers in Latin America had extensively documented the cinematic traditions of their respective countries for decades. Nevertheless, this scholarship remained untranslated and largely ignored in the United States.⁶ As the field took its first steps, a noticeable rift emerged in which US-based scholars—grounded in film studies departments that, in turn, typically derived from literary studies—limited themselves to textual questions of politics and form, while scholars in Latin America concentrated on film history (López, "The State of Things" 199). This echoed the...