Temporalities in Latin American Film

Is there anything distinctively Latin American about the construction of temporality in Latin American film? The existence of this special section would seem to beg the question. The reader might reasonably wonder if some unifying features will emerge from the diversity of films explored here—and our critical responses to them—that draw on common frameworks or bear witness to a shared experience.

Most of the hallmarks we would want to identify are not specific to Latin American film, but typical of many cinemas beyond Hollywood and Europe. These include an experience of time that is shaped by the virtual erasure of pre-colonial history, and the simultaneous presence of the “archaic” and the “modern” in the urban environment and in social practices, as well as the sense—as Octavio Paz describes it—of being “moradores de los suburbios de la historia” and “los intrusos que han llegado a la función de la modernidad cuando las luces están a punto de apagarse” (265–66). One could also point to cycles of stagnation and acceleration set in motion by the ebbs and flows of global capital, unsteadied by often-precarious states, to the irruptions of repressive regimes and revolutions, and to the frequent truncation of development projects, versus the dizzying speed of multinational incursions into local markets. The cultural theorist and anthropologist Néstor García Canclini defines “hybridity” in this context as the ability to “enter and exit modernity,” that is, to exist culturally within different yet overlapping temporal realms. The shattering of linear time into multiple, incompatible temporalities is characteristic of the postcolonial condition and of national and regional cultures located at the so-called periphery and semi-periphery of modernity; an exploration of the clash between these has framed the work of filmmakers from across the world, including Ousmane Sembène (Senegal) and Satyajit Ray (India) as well as Jorge Sanjinés (Bolivia).

Yet it would also be misleading to suggest that an interest in exploring alternative or non-linear temporalities has been the preserve of postcolonial or “peripheral” cinemas. Many European directors, for example, have explored in similar depth the disjunctive temporalities and the false memories that may result from traumatic experience, personal or collective; cinematic approaches to the Holocaust are important precursors to films made in response to the torture and disappearance of thousands in the Southern Cone dictatorships. The characteristically slow temporality of the work of Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia) has been cited as an important influence on films by Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas (Mexico) or Lisandro Alonso (Argentina). Allan Cameron has found a trend towards increasing temporal complexity in narrative films produced in many countries since the early 1990s, in examples as diverse as Pulp Fiction, Russian Ark, Run Lola Run and Code Unknown as well as 21 Grams, directed by González Iñárritu, whose experiments with episodic narration were already evident in his pre-Hollywood Mexican film Amores perros. These “modular narratives,” which “articulate a sense of time as divisible and subject to manipulation” stage encounters “between linearity and non-linearity, narrative and database, memory and forgetting, temporal anchoring and temporal drift, simultaneity and succession and chaos and order” (Cameron 1, 170). Similarly, critic Todd McGowan has coined the category of “atemporal cinema” to make reference to that very same canon, in order to emphasize a procedure that seeks to “distort time not simply because of the exigencies of plot but in order to reveal the circular logic of what psychoanalysis calls the drive” (10). In other words, just as postcolonial and non-European cinemas manage the problem of contemporaneity embedded in their historical experience through narrative interventions in temporality, global atemporal cinema signals an understanding of the present desperately connected to trauma and loss.

The advent of digital filmmaking and its impact on the temporalities inscribed within the cinematic image is also a phenomenon that transcends regional boundaries. Enthusiastically embraced in both the so-called First World and the Third (being significantly cheaper and more accessible), digital techniques often disrupt notions of temporality associated with analogue film by undermining the indexicality of photography, altering...