After New Latin American Cinema

2006

In the past thirty years Latin American cinema has attracted the attention of scholars for its themes, aesthetics, and political particularities; however, the focus on this cinema has fluctuated almost as the industry itself, which is always going up and down in a constant struggle for development and survival. The situation of the film industry in Latin America has always been uneven, ranging from medium to very small national industries and from highly politicized intellectual movies to commercial ones. Most scholarly work in the past twenty five years has neglected not only smaller industries but also somewhat commercial, less artistic, and not as overtly politicized films, creating an image of an even and almost uniform Latin

This is the concluding chapter of the book 'The New Latin American Cinema: Readings from Within' (eds. Chakravarty et al, Celluloid Chapter, Calcutta, 1998) http://www.amazon.com/Latin-American-Cinema-Readings-Within/dp/B003DRQUWE Written in 1998, this essay outlines the achievements of the 'New' Cinema in Latin America, raising questions about some of its cultural assumptions while drawing attention to an emerging new 'New' cinema as the cultural paradigm undergoes a major shift in the 1990s.

The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema, 2017

Observatorio Journal, 2013

The New Latin American Cinema has been traditionally defined as a political cinema committed to the transformation of the social conditions that characterized Latin America in the 1960s. The notion of revolution has been placed in the core of this movement. Deeply influenced by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and by several political movements throughout the continent, a group of filmmakers proposed an aesthetic transformation of what they described as a colonized culture. Our aim in this essay is to explain what these filmmakers understood by a cinematographic “revolution” that could be the condition for a broader political and social transformation. It is not our intention to stand up for the concept of revolution in the New Latin American Cinema, but to try to avoid the stereotypes around this concept and to understand what this notion involved within a particular context.

Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, 2004

Revista de Estudios Hispánicos, 2018

New Transnationalisms in Contemporary Latin American Cinemas, 2018

In the late 1990s and early 2000s Latin American films Amores perros, Diarios de motocicleta, El hijo de la novia, Y tu mamá también, and Cidade de Deus enjoyed unprecedented critical and commercial success in global markets. Benefiting from external financial and/or creative input, these films were considered examples of transnational cinema. This book examines the six transnational directors (Iñárritu, Cuarón, del Toro, Meirelles, Salles and Campanella), who made these and the subsequent commercially successful and mostly ‘deterritorialized’ films (21 Grams, Babel, Biutiful, El espinazo del Diablo, El laberinto del fauno, Blindness, The Constant Gardener, Children of Men, On the Road, El secreto de sus ojos). Arguing against criticism in which these films’ commercial (Hollywood) and transnational features efface the authorial sensibilities of these directors and make them irrelevant to Latin American trends and politics, this book shows how they engage with national, continental a...

Cinema Journal, 2007

Since the 1990s, the phenomenon of media globalization has contributed to transforming the status of local and regional cinemas. This article offers a documented economic perspective and a critical approach to reassess the current situation of the major Latin American film industries. I believe that there is not just one Latin American cinema, just as there is no single Brazilian cinema. There are cinemas; made of sometimes contradictory currents that often collide, yet come together in a desire to portray our realities in an urgent and visceral manner. Walter Salles 1 Latin American cinema has changed. For many years, and primarily for critical discourse, referring to the cinema of the subcontinent was to allude to a corpus of films that would serve the transformation of the so-called underdeveloped societies-a cinema consciously utilized to inform the political through aesthetic means, and vice versa. Images and movements arose during the 1960s and 1970s that would uphold and defend the banner of "Third Cinema." It was the prescribed and urgent way of filmmaking for countries that were imagined to be integrated by analogous histories, conflicts, and similar goals. Some twenty-five years after, the Brazilian film director Walter Salles's words cited above seem relevant to reassess Latin American cinematic production. It appears more adequate, nowadays, to talk about diversity of styles and topics, and of different discursive and theoretical frameworks, all coexisting and, indeed, colliding. These diverse films have achieved a level of distribution and circulation never before anticipated. When Walter Salles released The Motorcycle Diaries, back in 2004, he probably knew he had a hit on his hands. Not only did he include the newest Latin American heartthrob Gael García Bernal as his leading actor, but also the talents of internationally successful musicians, such as Argentinean Gustavo Santaolallawho also wrote the score for

Since the 1990s, the phenomenon of media globalization has contributed to transforming the status of local and regional cinemas. This article offers a documented economic perspective and a critical approach to reassess the current situation of the major Latin American film industries. I believe that there is not just one Latin American cinema, just as there is no single Brazilian cinema. There are cinemas; made of sometimes contradictory currents that often collide, yet come together in a desire to portray our realities in an urgent and visceral manner. Walter Salles 1 Latin American cinema has changed. For many years, and primarily for critical discourse, referring to the cinema of the subcontinent was to allude to a corpus of films that would serve the transformation of the so-called underdeveloped societies-a cinema consciously utilized to inform the political through aesthetic means, and vice versa. Images and movements arose during the 1960s and 1970s that would uphold and defend the banner of "Third Cinema." It was the prescribed and urgent way of filmmaking for countries that were imagined to be integrated by analogous histories, conflicts, and similar goals. Some twenty-five years after, the Brazilian film director Walter Salles's words cited above seem relevant to reassess Latin American cinematic production. It appears more adequate, nowadays, to talk about diversity of styles and topics, and of different discursive and theoretical frameworks, all coexisting and, indeed, colliding. These diverse films have achieved a level of distribution and circulation never before anticipated. When Walter Salles released The Motorcycle Diaries, back in 2004, he probably knew he had a hit on his hands. Not only did he include the newest Latin American heartthrob Gael García Bernal as his leading actor, but also the talents of internationally successful musicians, such as Argentinean Gustavo Santaolallawho also wrote the score for

Cinema Journal, 2000