Indianizing Film: Decolonization, the Andes, and the Question of Technology

2: Casting New Protagonists

2 y Casting New Protagonists The question “Who is actually making these films?” comes up frequently when indigenous media are screened outside the communities and the indigenous film festival circuits. The question points to a doubt generated in part by the apparent temporal clash between indigenous bodies and digital video technology that the images in figures 1 and 2 bring to the forefront . The doubt over whether these are really indigenous peoples making the films also indicates the desire to determine authorship and creative origin, and perhaps meaning as well. This interest in the authorship of joint projects is not new. The critical debates over Latin American testimonio unpacked the process of collaboration between editors and those telling their stories in the literary testimonial. Opinions varied as to how much control either the editor or the person giving testimony maintains over the narrative product. There has been a certain consensus that the ambiguous nature of authorship itself leads testimonio to interrupt the bourgeois autobiography and bildungsroman, along with a profound Western sense of individualism, where intellectual work seems based on individual reflection . The testimonio, in contrast, is the product of a collaborative process where those telling their stories represent or embody a larger group, a collective voice that is enunciated individually and translated into book form by an editor.1 Unlike the essay, novel, and autobiography, film is linked to industrial labor and the fragmentation of the creative process. Or, to put it in different terms, film has long been a collective enterprise that sits uneasily with the idea of authorship.2 In the film industry the producer frequently influences the final cinematic product as much if not more than the scriptwriter , director, actors, or other members of the crew. Yet despite the cult 64 ndianizing ilm of the director figure—whether as an effort to reconstitute cinema as an art form (e.g., Truffaut, Bazin, Sarris) or as a marketing tool—the Hollywood industry, socialist and testimonial third cinema, as well as indigenous video share from the outset a certain disenfranchisement of the author as creator. Indigenous media, like literary and the cinematic testimonio, however, emerges from a process of collaboration that entails relations of subalternity. In the widely read nineteenth-century text Facundo, or Civilization and Barbarism, the Argentine writer Domingo Sarmiento proposed an important task for the emerging national literature of his time: the assimilation of oral culture to modern civilization, the domain of letters. Literature was to purge the oral of its disruptive and arbitrary barbarism and create the cultural grounds for a Latin American national identity different from that of Europe (59–71). Making the link between literacy and intellect explicitly, he wrote that “if the glimmer of a national literature momentarily shines in new American societies, it will come from descriptions of grand scenes of nature, and above all, from the struggle between European civilization and indigenous barbarism, between intelligence and matter” (59). The late cultural critique Angel Rama argued that with the conquest literacy became an auratic practice in Latin America, sustaining a class of letrados (lettered men) who, at the service of the colonial Empire and later of the independent nation-state, controlled the symbolic and discursive production of reality (Rama, Ciudad 62–63). This group of writers, bureaucrats, church officials, and intellectuals formed a sphere of power that has proven tremendously resilient through time. Although the makeup of this group has changed and broadened, the lettered city has continuously re-created an intellectual elite whose practice disciplines a mostly illiterate population. In other words, literacy is a power that at once represents and produces reality. The collaboration between indigenous communities, their “audiovisual communicators” (comunicadores audiovisuales) as the media activists call themselves, and independent, nonindigenous collaborators entails unequal positions with respect to technological know-how and motivates preconceptions regarding intellectual expertise that are associated with literacy. The tendency is to either attribute intellectual agency and initiative to the nonindigenous filmmakers involved in indigenous media or to conceptualize the indigenous video makers as organic intellectuals. So who is actually making indigenous media? asting ew rotagonists 65 Indigenous Activists, Independent Filmmakers, and the Question of Initiative In creating a narrative of indigenous video, one could easily focus on the verbs that CLACPI deploys to describe its role: CLACPI “has promoted and stimulated training opportunities and developed opportunities for exchange [among indigenous communicators] in the same way...