With Foreign Eyes: English-Language Criticism on Latin American Film1

David Wood
I
Although film scholarship may have been rather slow on the uptake, with discourses
regarding globalisation and transnational flows only becoming de rigueur recently, cinema
has, since its origins, been closely imbricated with the complex set of articulations between
the global flow of capital and territorially (for instance nationally)-rooted political power,
between the production and circulation of scientific knowledge, notions of modernity and
progress, and the formation and unfolding of collective and individual imaginaries. Lisa
Shaw and Stephanie Dennisons valuable edited collection of essays, entitled Latin
American Cinema. Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity, came onto the
market in 2005 when, in the words of the editors, Latin American film is enjoying creative
possibilities [...] opened up by economic and cultural globalization, a feature of late
modernity. They implicitly, if fleetingly, situate their book itself within a globalised web
of political and economic interests, acknowledging that it is conceived as a response to the
increased academic interest in Latin American cinema in recent years, in turn due to both
the recent upsurge in production (thanks in part to international coproduction) and to the
student-led demand for a film studies component in Spanish, Portuguese and Latin
American Studies programs. Methodologically, and perhaps ideologically, the book is
presented as a corrective to previous omissions in the area, since scholarly publications
still tend to concentrate on the arthouse, revolutionary projects of the 1960s and 1970s for
which Latin American cinema is perhaps best known abroad (p.1). Responding to
theoretical concerns that frame much contemporary writing on cinema (not just Latin
American), the book is structured into three sections, each consisting of three essays:
Modernity and Globalization, Gender and Sexuality and Nation and Identity. The
first part of this essay will focus on the underlying premises and the layout of Shaw and
Dennisons volume with relation to the current state of scholarship on Latin American
cinema. I will then make some more specific comments on the contributions themselves.
1

NOTE: This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journal of Latin American

Cultural Studies Vol. 17, No. 2 August 2008, pp. 245-259, Taylor & Francis, available online at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569320802228096

II
In a context in which the oppositional cinemas of the 1960s and 70s have frequently been
placed on a revolutionary pedestal that focuses on their radical breaks from the past, while
overlooking their continuities with it, a work with such aims is certainly welcome. The first
problem that strikes one upon reading the volumes introduction, though, is the editors
failure to qualify or contextualise their references, cited above, to the recent growth in
interest in the field and to the previous over-privileging of the revolutionary cinemas
known under the collective banners of Third, Imperfect or New Latin American Cinema, by
stating that such observations hold true for Anglophone, but not Latin American, academia.
Since this is a book aimed clearly at English-language markets, this complaint may seem
nitpicking, an error due perhaps to an oversight or editorial constraints on space.
Nevertheless, it does signal a lacuna in the presentation of the volumes aims. Firstly, the
historically-contingent discipline of Film Studies does not exist in Latin America in the
same form as in countries such as the UK and the USA, with theoretical and historical
research and teaching on film in Latin America often dispersed throughout disciplines such
as Communication Studies, Art History, Sociology and hands-on filmmaking courses. In
any case, if there has been any increased attention to the study of cinema within those areas
in recent years, the reasons are not wholly coextensive with the upsurge in interest of late in
both Film and Latin American studies in Anglophone universities. On the second point, and
more seriously, the definition of the work of filmmakers such as Glauber Rocha, Julio
Garca Espinosa, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino as arthouse, revolutionary
projects is highly problematic. Solanas and Getinos foundational exposition of their
revolutionary Third Cinema drew a dividing line precisely between their own militant aims
and distribution practices, which strove to insert cinema directly into the channels of
political struggle, and the supposedly self-absorbed, apolitical discourses of arthouse
cinema so much is well-known to the point of clich. The marriage of the terms
arthouse and revolutionary is certainly not irrelevant, but it betrays a bias towards the
way such cinemas tended to be circulated and consumed outside Latin America on film
festival and television circuits, which frequently did insert them into arthouse contexts,
usually against filmmakers primary intentions.

Moreover, one can only reasonably claim that scholarly publications still tend to
concentrate on those revolutionary cinemas if one entirely overlooks research in the field
produced within Latin America itself and even then only at a stretch.2 Brazilian film
historian Paulo Antonio Paranagu, for one, has been harshly critical of what he sees as US
and European critics exotic fascination with the New Latin American Cinema. In his
excellent recent survey of Latin American cinema he makes the provocative claim,
referring to Cuban attempts to institutionalise the New Latin American Cinema through the
Havana film festival, that the naf Bolivarianism of the Cubans and their allies have had
little impact on film literature, with the exception of a few Anglo-Saxon academics. He
further lays waste to the historical privileging of radical continentalism, adding that Latin
American historiography has developed almost entirely within a national framework.3
Alberto Elena and Marina Daz Lpez, in their introduction to another important recent
volume of essays on Latin American cinema, critique this same historic atomisation of
cinema studies in different Latin American countries for atrophying a wider, transnational
sphere of analysis. Their solution to this problem involves questioning the very notion of
Latin American or national cinemas, shoring up a constructivist conception of
nationality (drawing on Anderson, Gellner and Hobsbawm) with a recognition that just as
important as nation are the tugs on identity coming both from globalising forces and, in the
opposite direction, from the under-studied category of regional cinema.4
Paranagus statement, tinged though it may be with an excessive antipathy towards
the New Latin American cinema, serves as a corrective to the tendency in some quarters to
equate Latin American film scholarship with Latin American film scholarship in
English. Of concern here is a failure adequately to acknowledge the peculiar conditions in
which work such as that contained in Shaw and Dennisons volume comes to be conceived
and published. Sixteen years have passed since Ana Lpez stressed the need for the work of
2

For English-language criticism that goes far beyond a privileging of the 1960s and 70s revolutionary

cinemas see, for instance, Stock (1997); Noriega (2000); Elena and Daz Lpez (2003); and the special issue
of The Americas dedicated to Latin American film history, 63(2) (October 2006).
3

Paranagu (2003, p.16, my translation). See also Paranagu (2000).

Elena and Daz Lpez (2003: 1-12). The Mexican film scholar Eduardo de la Vega, among others, has turned

in recent years to the study of the local and the regional within national film history: see, for instance, De la
Vega (2000).

Latin American film scholars to be more widely circulated and read in Anglophone circles,
in order that those approaching the subject from outside might better comprehend the
perspectives of native researchers. Otherwise, asserted Lpez, Latin American film
scholarship in English would be unable to face up to the complexity of its own position, or
to recognise that the encounter between first world academics and third world culture
should not be conceived of as a guided tour through exotic lands, but as a way of
temporarily inhabiting another culture, of assuming difference as the basis for all cultures
an approach justified elsewhere by Lpez, along with John King and Manuel Alvarado,
by cinemas own function in mediating two worlds, a process marked by the encounter of
distinct regimes of visuality.5
One problem that outsiders may encounter on approaching Latin American scholarship on
Latin American film is the selfsame nationally-oriented perspective of which Paranagu
speaks, sometimes bound up in nationalistic sentiment, which may seem like a conceptual
straitjacket to those whose academic training has focused precisely on cross-cultural
exchange; the foreign critic thus finds herself searching for a geographical, political or
cultural discursive space in which to legitimise her own position. Yet writing on a rather
different case to the one in hand, Paul Willemen (Willemen, 2006, p.34) reminds us that
film language is not universal but contingent on specific historical processes. Latin
American cinema is ostensibly more straightforward than its Japanese counterpart for, say,
a British critic to write about, given the history of stylistic and narrative dependency on
French and Italian (initially) and US (from the 1920s) models that has marked Latin
American cinema from the very start. It may seem, then, that we can apply the same
aesthetic and narrative criteria to foreign Latin American cinema as we can to our own.
Herein lies the catch, for it is precisely in the variations from and appropriations of the
metropolitan norm (Hollywood) made by such dependent cinemas that the cultural
(national) specificities can be found specificities that in order to be identified require a
finer comb than do the broader historical differences in, say, pictorial traditions between
China and Great Britain. It may be that non-Latin American critics erstwhile privileging of
Third or Imperfect cinemas was due in part to the fact that such radically other cultural
practices were more obviously, and self-consciously, different to mainstream
5

Lpez, 1991, p.256; General Introduction, in King, Lpez and Alvarado (1993: xvii-xxi).

representational practices. They thus lend themselves more fully to the culturally-aware
observer inscribing his own difference into his critical interventions into them.
Furthermore, such practices seemed attractive to politically-committed academics willing to
understand how formerly colonised cinemas were finally breaking free from the imperial
grasp. The received wisdom during the 1960s and 1970s heyday of the New Latin
American cinema (among both its practitioners and its foreign advocates) was that the
previous mainstream commercial cinemas of Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, and the
fruitless efforts to establish something resembling industries in other countries in the
region, were the result of greater forces such as cultural imperialism and internal
colonialism, making them easy to dismiss on aesthetic and ideological grounds. Thanks to
subsequent re-evaluations of national cinema histories, mainly, but not exclusively, by Latin
American researchers, such deterministic attitudes no longer hold sway. Admittedly dealing
with the exception rather than the rule, Elena and Daz Lpez open their own volume of
essays with an excellent piece by Jos Carlos Avellar on the silent Brazilian masterpiece
Limite (Mrio Peixoto, 1931), provocatively opening their historical narrative of the
continents cinemas with a classical avant-garde film, implicitly challenging the New Latin
American cinemas originary claim to being the continents first to seriously question
conventional narrative modes. In general their volume attests to the potential fruitfulness of
treating both mainstream and marginal cinemas with complexity and subtlety.6
Willemen draws on Bakhtin to evoke three possible modes of interpretation when writing
about other cinemas. The first two, undesirable by any account, are defined by Willemen
as projective appropriation (the projection of the writers own beliefs, world view and
cultural values onto the object of study) and ventriloquist identification (the conceit that
the writer can efface his voice entirely in order to give unmediated access to the
oppressed or popular voice under study). Both have been salient features of
Anglophone criticism on Latin American cinema. The third, which one can only echo
Willemen in advocating, is described as creative understanding, which takes advantage of

Avellar (2003). Ivana Bentes essay on Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Glauber Rocha, Brazil, 1964) in the

same volume (Bentes, 2003) signals the heterogeneity of the politicised cinemas of the 1960s, pointing out
Rochas engagement with mysticism, sadism and popular banditry, and his refusal to cast the people as
passive victims of injustice concerns avoided by many of his contemporaries.

the observers outsideness in order to approach a fuller understanding of both the culture
under study and ones own.
How can cultural difference be accounted for when writing on more overtly dependent
cinemas? How can we apply something approaching a dialogic mode of criticism when
writing on a cinema often characterised merely as a pale imitation of dominant filmmaking
practices? In her introduction to the 1997 edited volume Framing Latin American Cinema
one notable collection of essays that attests to the considerable water that has passed under
the bridge since Anglophone academia turned its critical attention away from the
revolutionary cinemas of the 60s and 70s , Anne Marie Stock addresses precisely this
problem, asserting that her contributors dislodge projective appropriation by taking
recourse to a wide array of critical approaches, making new juxtapositions and focusing on
conditions of production and reception rather than relying solely on projective textual
analyses (Stock 1997: xxi-xxxv).
While Stocks historical research and methodological innovation is welcome, her rush to
embrace the seemingly new postnational culture, and to rescue, as it were, the history of a
hundred years of Latin American film from the straitjacket of a national framework, leads
her to conflate the use of the category of nation (or continent) as a theoretical concept with
which to analyse cinema with discourses promoting a mythical and nostalgic cultural
authenticity, claiming that to evaluate cultural expression solely or primarily in terms of
its geopolitical specificity examining the extent to which it manifests its Cuban-ness, for
example, or Latin American-ness [...] overlooks those films that attest to cultures role in
the construction of identity (Stock, 1997, p.xxvi). She thus seems to make two confusions
identified by Willemen: the confusion between discourses of nationalism as objects of
study or as a political project, and [...] the issue of national specificity, and the confusion
between a concern with national identity and the specificity of a cultural formation
(Willemen, 2006, p.33). But following Willemen, the focus on geopolitical specificity need
not be reduced to a mere evaluation of the extent to which [a film] manifests its Cubanness, bound up in nationalistic sentiment or the defence of some pre-established notion of
identity: it can, and should, also embrace analyses of the densely-woven cultural fabrics in
which socio-cultural formations, such as nations, are forged. That is to say, attention to
cultures role in the construction of identity need not sideline consideration of the role of
6

the specificity of (national) cultural formations in determining the nature of those identities.
As Joanna Page has recently argued (she directly critiques Stocks position), to embrace
transnational or postnational flows of information too readily in detriment of cultural or
geographical specificities such as that provided by a national perspective risks not only
undermining the realities of current filmmaking practices in Latin America, but also
showing uncritical complicity, albeit unwitting, with the neoliberal logic of global capital
(Page, 2005). I would add that such an approach also risks incurring in a fallacious
teleology whereby cinema, since roughly the 1980s, has passed from being a primary
national affair to being a primarily transnational affair. As I argued above, it can be more
plausibly claimed that film production, distribution and consumption have always
performed a balancing-act between local, national and transnational interests and
representational strategies, even if the differing political and economic backdrops over the
last century have set such symbolic negotiations in varying lights.
III
The themes raised by the three headings chosen by Shaw and Dennison to divide their book
Modernity and Globalization, Gender and Sexuality and Nation and Identity are,
as another reviewer has suggested, so interlocking as to be almost redundant (Pereira,
2006), and the most provocative contributions are those that recognise the artificiality of
separating them out. Randal Johnsons essay, mentioned above, takes a pragmatic stance
regarding the role of the global market (represented here by both first and third world
inflections: the Motion Pictures Association and Brazilian media giant TV Globo) in the
production of contemporary Brazilian cinema. He advocates a strategic use of global
finance capital, channelled by some form of state support, in order to reclaim for homegrown products Brazils exhibition circuit, which he describes as a market occupied by a
foreign power. The weakness of Johnsons economistic position is that in privileging
communication with audiences over making aesthetic demands, he rather dismisses the
validity of questioning just how the market mechanisms that he describes intervenes (I will
not say distorts), in aesthetic or narrative terms, in the ongoing production of the
Brazilian socio-cultural imaginary. Ultimately he seems to conclude, on an oddly
nationalistic note, that it does not much matter what Brazil produces, so long as it is
Brazilian.
7

The contribution that converses most directly with Johnsons, but which was placed in the
Nation and Identity section (although it would have fitted in any of the three), is Lisa
Shaw and Maite Condes useful historical survey of Hollywood representations of Brazil
since the silent era, and the subsequent Brazilian re-appropriations of those externallygenerated identities. Shaw and Conde offer a convincing counter-argument to a cultural
imperialism stance, showing that Brazilian public opinion was able to influence
Hollywoods representation of the South American nation during the Good Neighbour years
by playing on US courtship of its powerful but potentially rebellious ally. Moreover, even if
certain deeply-rooted negative tropes remained in place, Brazil was subsequently able to
harness its image as an exotic land of plenty and excess in order to bolster its economic
(and therefore geopolitical) standing; and Carmen Mirandas baiana character later served
as a model for the low-budget chanchada genre that would become the staple fare of
Brazils film industry.
Implicit in Shaw and Condes analysis, but more explicitly dealt with in Alison Fraunhars
piece on the eroticisation of the mulata body in Cuban cinema, is the overlap between the
books three broad themes of gender, nation and globalisation. Fraunhars essay, like Shaw
and Condes, comes under Nation and Identity, but typically of this books organisation,
both deal with gender more satisfactorily than much of the Gender and Sexuality section.
Fraunhar is the only contribution to focus largely on Third Cinema, but unlike much
scholarship in the area, she deals with its continuities with, rather than its radical break
from, previous cultural expressions. Just as the Brazilian chanchadas took on the preexisting type of the baiana, Fraunhar accuses revolutionary Cuban cinema of failing to
challenge the tragic/erotic mulata figure inherited from nineteenth-century costumbrista
literature; even a film such as Luca (1968), that foregrounds an analysis of race and
gender, ultimately uses the passive mulata trope as a structuring device for its own
allegorical depiction of the emerging post-revolutionary nation. She draws a suggestive
parallel between this use of the mulata as a hidden signifier and Nol Burchs zero point
of film language: an ideologically loaded but effectively invisible, and therefore difficult to
challenge, unit of cultural/aesthetic understanding. In the later films El otro Francisco
(1974) and Cecilia (1982) the same tragic/erotic mulata trope is inscribed into a
problematic melodramatic idiom, which Fraunhar claims allows room for a questioning of
8

historical forces and social structures, but all the while allowing its political critique to be
voiced by character types steeped in colonial and patriarchal prejudice. She ultimately
holds that the foundational national trope of the tragic/erotic mulata has come to function as
a libidinal zone in post-revolutionary Cuban cinema that underscores the neo-colonial
desire central to Cubas new post-Cold War identity as a prime destination for sex tourism.
Above and beyond illustrating the (oft-reiterated) point, raised in the books introduction,
about the performative nature of gender and sexual identity, contributions such as the above
suggest that the public performance of gender (not the private experience of it) forms part
of the constant process of negotiation over how socio-cultural formations, such as nations
or national imaginaries, are constituted. Just as importantly, they show how external
depictions and expectations of those formations some of them perhaps emerging from
within the critics own social sphere influence the form that such imaginaries take, this
process involving multi-directional flows of cultural notions and prejudices that are in turn
partly shaped by political interests on both sides. In countries historically marked by both
external dependency and internal colonialism arguably the case for most or all of Latin
America and at a juncture at which the geopolitical articulation of identity is highly
relevant, such an approach helps to unfurl the complex symbolic exchange between private
utterances and public enunciations or characterisations of it, suggesting that the process is
bidirectional and potentially subject to emancipatory and co-optive gestures on either side.
The particular relations that a socio-cultural formation establishes with modes of expression
artistic forms and genres constitute a central aspect of the narration of its sense of self.
A number of essays discussed so far posit the recycling of genre conventions in order to
encourage audience reflection on those genres underlying assumptions: the reconversion of
melodrama in El otro Francisco and Cecilia, and in Bembergs Camila (all of which might
be considered literate or high re-readings of popular forms), and the sly use of
pornochanchada in Barretos film adaptation of O beijo no asfalto (more readily
identifiable as popular cinema). Although none of the contributors make the point
explicitly, they are nonetheless participating, as the editors signal in their introduction, in
English-language Latin American film scholarships long-delayed recognition of the rich
potential of exploring popular and commercial forms. While genre criticism became
widespread in the UK and the US in the 1960s and 1970s with the emergence of Film
9

Studies as an academic discipline, English-language work on Latin American cinema took

some two decades more to take popular genres seriously.7 Yet unlike tendencies in genre
criticism in the Anglo-American academe, which might set out to comment on visual
iconographies through identifiable sets of films, or to trace the interrelations between
audiences acquisition of generic knowledge and expectations and the development of
certain filmmaking trends, the contributions here have distinctly auteurist overtones,
signalling particular, authored instances of the subversion of generic patterns (Neale, 2001,
pp.9-29). Because genres are culturally-specific and contingent upon historical
developments that lead to the establishment of certain visual and narrative conventions, it
may be more accessible for critics on the outside (and their readers) to talk about such
moments of lucidity than about the particular social, historical and cultural constellations
that lead to particular genre conventions taking shape. Studies such as those mentioned
here, then, might be complemented by further inquiry into how the iconic and/or narrative
specificities of Latin American genres are configured: to what extent, for instance,
Argentine film melodrama draws on or alters Hollywood melodrama, and to what extent it
draws on differing traditions of native literary or theatrical melodrama (Fraunhar does deal
with this issue in relation to the costumbrista roots of the Cuban mulata figure).
IV
Many contributions to this volume touch upon, but without necessarily addressing directly,
certain theoretical notions that are central to metropolitan film studies: nation as an
analytical category, the use and reconversion of genre, and the articulation of gender insofar
as the formation of personal and collective identities and imaginaries. Such attention is
certainly welcome: as Ana Lpez has recently pointed out, in the 1980s those writing in
English on Latin American cinema, focusing primarily on the revolutionary New Latin
American Cinema, still struggled to insert the movement into the theoretical debates then
taking place in the field [of film studies] (Lpez, 2006, p.198). As I have discussed, this
7

On the origins of genre criticism in the UK and US, see Neale (2001, pp. 10-13). Lpez (1993) provides an

incisive and nuanced account of classical Mexican melodrama, critiquing the simplistic dismissal of
melodrama as alienating by many politicised critics in the 1960s and 1970s. The critical reappraisal of
previously dismissed melodrama and notions of the popular in 1980s Latin America was, as Constanza
Buruca has argued, partly contingent on the historical circumstances of a continent undergoing
redemocratisation in that decade (Buruca, 2007).

10

insertion is by no means a straightforward exercise: both historical and theoretical rigour

is required in order to avoid performing the cultural cross-border raid that Willemen
warns against. Lpezs essay cited here serves as an introductory piece to four pieces of
scholarship that all give far more berth to detailed historical research than did much
English-language scholarship in the field of previous decades; as she points out, they come
at a time at which the old opposition between Latin American scholars who did the
proper film historical research and European and North American researchers who
concentrated more on textual analysis, is finally breaking down. That is, theoretical and
textual analysis is consolidating the ground beneath its feet by immersing itself more
deeply in historical inquiry, enabling it to engage more deeply with the socio-cultural
formations and practices from which the film texts in question emerge.
The concept of a border that is imagined but somehow present, and its role in shoring up
illusory wholeness and in disavowing difference, is useful in conceptualising the Englishlanguage study of Latin American cinema. If the politically committed critics of the 1970s
and 1980s struggled tooth and nail to acquire prints of the latest the Latin American
revolutionary avant-garde cinema, the contributions to this volume show that the net can
now be cast wider. But we should not idealise the scope (real or potential) of the field.
Richards and Barrow are the only contributors to this volume to focus on cinemas beyond
the more traditionally-studied countries of Brazil (by far the most strongly represented),
Cuba, Argentina and Mexico. Likewise there is little coverage of silent cinema here a fact
due in large part to the difficult access to film sources in Latin America itself, a complex
issue conditioned by a whole array of economic, political, institutional and cultural factors.
Rather than believing that boundaries can simply be transcended, from either side, Englishlanguage scholarship on Latin American film needs to take stock of the nature of the
cultural, aesthetic, economic, social and (geo-)political boundaries that impose themselves
between itself and its object of study. Yet the temptation to think of either Latin American
or metropolitan cinemas, or socio-cultural formations, as discrete and specifically
definable rests on an idealisation of the rigidity of those boundaries, resulting from a failure
to comprehend the dynamics of cultural and political dependence between the distinct
spheres in question. An awareness of such pitfalls, enhanced by the cultural sensitivity of
researchers with a multi-disciplinary understanding of Latin American cultural formations,
11

also sheds light on shortcomings in metropolitan film studies. Only recently, as Willemen
makes clear, has that discipline begun fully to take on board the otherness of cinemas from
the margins of this quintessential medium, or art-form, of modernity, by pointing out the
impact that peripheral cinemas have had on the constitution of cinema and its field of
study. We would do well to heed Paranagus suggestion following ngel Rama that we
see foreign influences in Latin American cinema not as impositions but as forms of
transculturation that creatively alter not only the borrowing culture but also the norm from
which it derives (Paranagu, 2003). Many of the contributions to Shaw and Dennisons
volume are certainly a step in the right direction.
David Wood is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estticas,
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico. He has taught in Mexico City and at
Kings College London, where he also completed his PhD in the Department of
Spanish and Spanish-American Studies.

12

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