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The State of Things: New Directions in Latin American Film History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Ana M. López
Ana M. López*
Affiliation:
Tulane University New Orleans, Louisiana
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Extract

Twenty-five years ago, English-language scholarship on Latin American film was almost entirely identified with the New Latin American Cinema movement. The emerging “new” cinemas of Brazil, Cuba and Argentina, linked to evolving social movements and to the renewal of the pan-Latin American dreams of Martí and Bolivar (Nuestra América, “Our America”), had captured the imagination of U.S.-based and other scholars. As I argued in a 1991 review essay, unlike other national cinemas which were introduced into English-language scholarship via translations of “master histories” written by nationals (for example, the German cinema, which was studied through the histories of Sigfried Kracauer and Lotte Eisner), the various Latin American cinemas were first introduced in English-language scholarship in the 1970s ahistorically, through contemporary films and events reported in non-analytical articles that provided above all, political readings and assessments. Overall, this first stage of Latin American film scholarship was plagued by problems that continued to haunt researchers through the 1980s: difficult access to films, scarce historical data, and unverifiable secondary sources. Above all, this work displayed a blissful disregard of the critical and historical work written in Spanish and Portuguese and published in Latin America.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 63 , Special_Issue 2: Latin American Film History , October 2006 , pp. 197 - 203
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2006 

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References

1 López, Ana M., “Setting up the Stage: A Decade of Latin American Film Scholarship,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 13:1-3 (1991), pp. 239–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 See, for example, the work of Riera, Emilio García in his 18 volume Historia documental del cine mexicano (Guadalajara: University of Guadalajara, 1992-97)Google Scholar, the most anthropological reconstructions of the silent film heritage by Reyes, Aurelio de los in books like Allos orígenes del cine mexicano (1896-1900) (Mexico City: Fundo de Cultura Económica, 1983)Google Scholar and Filmografía del cine mudo mexicano (Mexico City: Filmoteca UNAM, 1986)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, the debates chronicled in Pines, Jim and Willemen, Paul, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: BF1, 1989)Google Scholar.

4 Kuhn, Annette, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London: LB. Tauris, 2002)Google Scholar.

5 Noriega, Chon, ed., Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)Google Scholar and Stock, Ann Marie, ed, Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

6 López, Ana M., “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Cinema Journal 40:1 (2000), pp. 48–78 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A most interesting exception is Berg’s, Charles Ramirez fascinating analysis of the Mexican silent film El automóvil gris in “El automóvil gris and the Advent of Mexican Classicism,” in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, pp. 3–32 Google Scholar.

7 See Carlos Monsiváis, , Mexican Postcards, trans. John Kraniauskas (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar.