Latin
American Cinema. Stephen M. Hart.
London: Reaktion Books, 2015. 223 pp.
In Latin American Cinema, Stephen M. Hart diverges from the
more widespread materialist approaches to film analysis, which focuses on
thematic content, historical context, production, and financing. Instead he
sets out to reexamine Latin American films from 1896 to 2013 by focusing on
film-technology innovations. He extends Lev Kuleshov’s thesis about the
importance of blending theory and practice when approaching film, by arguing
that it is impossible to adequately analyze films without also looking at the
evolving technologies that enable their making. As such, Latin American
Cinema offers a swift historical expedition that highlights the development
of the technical machines behind visual and aural images. Organized in four
chapters, Hart’s study smoothly enters and exits national borders to trace,
instead, transnational associations between current films and their forebears.
Titled "Inauspicious Beginnings (1895-1950)," the first
chapter points to the emancipation of movement as the phenomenon that separates
"primitive cinema" from what Hart, citing Deleuze, describes as
narrative cinema. Cataloguing films across national boundaries for the first
half of the twentieth century, the chapter notes that the first narrative films
in Latin America were documentaries about famous individuals, such as El
fusilamiento de Dorrego (Mario Gallo, Argentina, 1910) and A vida do
Cabo Joao Candido (unknown, Brazil, 1910) among others. These are followed
by fictional narrative films like El automóvil gris (1919). The other
two films that stand out from the extensive catalogue are two Mexican films:
Sergei Eisenstein’s ¡Que viva Mexico! (1931) and Luis Buñuel’s Los
olvidados (1950). Hart notes how both filmmakers usher European, surrealist
elements to a Mexican filmmaking industry that by the mid-twentieth century was
“still playing out the last runs of its Golden Age years, in which men were
strong, women beautiful and love a word with a romantic aura” (28). In Hart’s exacting
genealogy, Los olvidados and ¡Que viva Mexico! represent not only
stylistic alternatives to the dominant ways of filmmaking in Mexico, but also
“the bedrock in which Latin American film directors would thrive” (31).
Chapter 2 focuses on the influence of Italian neo-Realism and
French New Wave on Latin American cinema. Hart begins with Cuban filmmakers
Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Titón), who collaborated on the
film El Mégano (1955) to create a realistic depiction of life in
pre-revolutionary Cuba. Following in the footsteps of their European
counterparts, Latin American filmmakers attempted to create “social
consciousness” through their films to counteract the action-packed
entertainment films made by Hollywood (57). In Brazil, similarly, filmmakers
such as Glauber Rocha promoted Cinema Novo as an attack on “cinema as
entertainment” with the goal of promoting a new and authentic Brazilian politique
des auteurs (43). In subsequent pages, Memorias del subdesarrollo and
Yawar Mallku stand out for their incorporation of political history and
what Deleuze conceives as time-image with its temporal ambiguity and
chronological disruptions. Discussing Memorias del subdesarrollo, Hart
notes Gutiérrez Alea’s dexterous integration of documentary footage into
fictional narrative, thus promoting genre hybridity in the service of political
historicizing (49). The chapter concludes with a brief review of political
documentaries (1970-75) with Patricio Guzmán’s La batalla de Chile
(1973) as the “landmark documentary,” whose raw footage enhances its feel of
authenticity and spontaneity (61).
In the following chapter, Hart mobilizes what he calls the
nation-image paradigm to discuss several films (from 1976 through 1999) that
offer a sociological vision of Latin America’s political history. Beginning
with Gutiérrez Alea’s La última cena (1976), Hart discusses a series of
films that function primarily metaphorically. Pixote: a lei do mais fraco
(Héctor Babenco, 1980), Camila (María Luisa Bemberg, 1984), La
historia oficial (Luis Puenzo, 1985), and La boca del lobo (Sendero
Luminoso, 1988) are some of the films closely looked at to show how private
stories carry in them the collective tales of national political realities.
Regarding Puenzo’s Oscar-awarded film, Hart incisively remarks on how the
filmmaker employs cinematographic focus to express “the atmosphere of secrecy
and covert spying, techniques that were part and parcel of culture animating
the Guerra Sucia” (81). The second half of the chapter argues that films like Cronos
(Guillermo del Toro, 1993) and Como agua para chocolate (Arau, 1993),
unprecedentedly large and expensive productions in Mexican cinema, mix genres
and styles to attempt yet fail to be political allegories while proving, on the
other hand, commercial successes. Highlighting the documentary aesthetics of
Walter Salles’s film, Hart points to Central do Brasil (1998) as the
most successful and final example of the nation-image dramas.
For the contemporary films (2000-2014) Hart discusses in the final
chapter, Deleuze’s concept of time-image helps to elucidate how the real and
imaginary no longer remain in a dynamic of rigid opposition. With the digital
image since the 1970s, Hart adds, real time and imagined time form a continuum
(108), which translates into productions that combine probing social themes and
aesthetic experimentation enabled by the plasticity of digital film and camera.
Inheritors of the 1960s Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, Amores Perros
(González Iñárritu, 2000), Cidade de Deus (Meirelles, 2002), and El
espinazo del diablo (del Toro, 2001) are some of the examples that have
afforded Latin American films World Cinema status. Many of these Latin American
filmmakers, notes Hart, begin to head multi-national productions for a cinema
that can no longer be affixed to a particular region or local history, without
for that reason sacrificing the political urgency of the realities films like 21
Grams (González Iñárritu, 2003) and The Constant Gardener (Mereilles,
2005) represent. Amounting to almost half the book, chapter 4 surveys a wide corpus
of films whose connecting thread appears to be the political impetus of the
Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano and digital Weltanschauung, which “allows for
new ways of seeing reality to emerge” (130).
Hart’s analysis of experimentalist films points out how Lisandro
Alonso’s Fantasma (2006) and Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men
(2006) combine varying filmic language with auteurist experimentalism (150). He
offers an astute, albeit brief, criticism of Gonzalez Iñárritu’s Babel
(2006) for its naïve plot, absurdity, and meaninglessness (153) while
highlighting some of the filmmaker’s signature fingerprints, such as the use of
a hand-held camera, visual rhyme, silence, and the ‘floating camera’ (157). His
extensive survey concludes with Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and
Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, both
of which received critical and popular acclaim in 2013. Unlike
previous chapters, the final chapter focuses on box office earnings in an
attempt to demonstrate the success that Latin American directors have garnered
internationally, leaving the reader with a primarily quantitative approach made
of plot summary and numerical data. Upon finishing the chapter, one is left
with the nagging feeling that filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel and Claudia Llosa
could have been studied more closely, especially considering the exquisitely
tense space their films straddle between local filmmaking and world cinema.
Hart offers a full but not exhaustive survey of Latin American
cinema today. While the survey is extensive and accompanied by numerous
illustrative images, the thorough theoretical analysis of each film clearly
falls outside the book’s scope. For this reason, the book may not satisfy
scholars in search of filmic analysis with greater reach in film theory and
cinema studies. And while Deleuze’s philosophical concepts serve to broadly frame
many of Hart’s film discussions, the book does not offer a focused engagement with
Deleuze’s theories on film. Those case studies that receive more sustained
attention are mobilized to signal key transformative moments in the history of
cinema that the book assembles. The deftness with which Hart moves from one
film to the next, or from a celebrated filmmaker to a more obscure one, owes to
the author’s comprehensive grasp of the subject matter. The final pages include
a brief biography of a select group of filmmakers, which may come handy for both
educator and student. Covering expansive ground, Latin American Cinema
stands as a valuable resource for the reader looking for a historical account
of Latin American films that can be reconsidered outside of strictly national
frames to foray into, as the book’s title anticipates, a continental approach,
if not altogether global.
Eunha Choi, California State University, Long Beach
Anahit
Manoukian, California State University,
Long Beach