LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

Latin America (Spanish: América Latina or Latinoamérica; Portuguese: América Latina; French: Amérique latine) is the region of the Americas where Romance languages (i.e., those derived from Latin)—particularly Spanish and Portuguese, as well as French—are primarily spoken.[23][24]

It includes more than 20 nations: Mexico in North America; Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama in Central America; Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, French Guiana, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in South America; Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean—in summary, Hispanic America, Brazil, and Haiti.

Latin America, therefore, can be defined as all those parts of the Americas that were once part of the Spanish, Portuguese, or French Empires.

LATIN AMERICA AS UMBRELLA TERM THAT IS MORE POROUS THAN ANY UMBRELLA SHOULD BE

–Three sections w/ many subsections:

Caribbean: DR, Cuba, Puerto Rico

Central America + Mexico

S. America

–divided by radically different ethnic distributions, geography, mineral wealth, etc.

Latin Americans (Spanish: Latinoamericanos; Portuguese: Latino-americanos; French: Latino-américains) are the citizens of the Latin American countries and dependencies. Latin American countries are multi-ethnic, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds. As a result, some Latin Americans do not take their nationality as an ethnicity, but identify themselves with both their nationality and their ancestral origins. A good example of this is Brazil, as its population does not consider itself “Latin”, but simply Brazilian. Aside from the indigenous Amerindian population, all Latin Americans or their ancestors immigrated since 1492. Latin America has the largest diasporas of Spaniards, Portuguese, Black Africans, Italians, Lebanese and Japanese in the world. The region also has large German (second largest after the United States), French, and Jewish diasporas.

The specific ethnic and/or racial composition varies from country to country: many have a predominance of European-Amerindian, or Mestizo, population; in others, Amerindians are a majority; some are mostly inhabited by people of European ancestry; and others are primarily Mulatto. Various Black, Asian, and Zambo (mixed Black and Amerindian) minorities are also identified in most countries. White Latin Americans are the largest single group.Together with the people of part-European ancestry they combine for almost the totality of the population.

This is Latin America today—since we will only be focusing on films from a handful of countries, I’ll draw your attention mainly to their ethnic distributions.

HOW THINGS GOT THIS WAY

CONQUEST & EXPROPRIATION

1494: Treaty of Tordesillas divides the New World between Spain and Portugal.

1519-22: Hernán Cortés enters, lays siege to, and conquers Aztec capital Tenochtitlán.

1520: Death of Moctezuma II. He is replaced by Cuitláhuac, who reigns for only eighty days and dies of smallpox (a disease brought by the Spaniards). Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, continues to resist the Spaniards.

1521: Tenochtitlan falls to the Spaniards and their Indian allies.

1532: Francisco Pizarro captures Atahualpa, ending the Inca Empire.

1533-1536: Pizarro sets up Manco Inka as puppet ruler in Cuzco.

Approximately 90% of the indigenous populations of N and S America perished by the end of the 17^th c, anywhere between 50-90 million people.

Thence followed nearly 300 years dominated by the encomienda system that effectively enslaved many of the indigenous populations in areas dominated by Spanish & Portugese colonizers, and plantation slavery, mainly in the Caribbean islands, central American countries like Honduras, and particularly Brazil. Of all the slaves carried over to the Western hemisphere from Africa, 35% were brought to Brazil, with another 20% to Spanish America. Very large numbers were also brought to the French and British Caribbean possessions, with only 5% brought to the USA. 70% of slaves worked in sugar cane plantations.

The encomienda was a Spanish labor system that rewarded conquerors with the labor of particular groups of conquered non-Christian people. The laborers, in theory, were provided with benefits by the conquerors for whom they labored, the Catholic religion being a principal benefit. The encomienda was first established in Spain following the Christian conquest of Moorish territories (known to Christians as the Reconquista), and it was applied on a much larger scale during the Spanish colonization of the Americas and the Spanish Philippines. Conquered peoples were considered vassals of the Spanish monarch. The Crown awarded an encomienda as a grant to a particular individual. In the conquest era of the sixteenth century, the grants were considered to be a monopoly on the labor of particular groups of indigenous peoples, held in perpetuity by the grant holder, called the encomendero, and his or her descendants.[1]

Brazil last to emancipate in 1888, though Brazil and Mexico continued to selectively enslave Amerindians until 1910

END OF COLONIAL ERA/START OF US IMPERIALIST INTERVENTIONS

In wake of American and Haitian revolutions, the fervor for independence spread throughout Latin America, generated in many cases by profound any Spanish and anti-clerical feelings, though Spanish repressiveness would soon be replaced by US aggression.

Sarmiento (early 19^th c)

Problem of national/ethnic self-definition; chronic looking to Spain and Europe for validation; nationalists call for a rejection of Spain and identification with soil and emerging characteristics of “native land” (e.g. gauchos of the pampas). This is arguably something easier to do in Bolivia and Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador where indigenous populations draw on their own long-standing traditions. Much more difficult in places like Argentina, which are ethnically dominated by Europeans, not just from Spain but from Italy and Germany as well.

Problem exacerbated by huge headstart of USA, which goes on to exert dominating influences over many L American countries, particularly in Central America & the Caribbean, something which prompts Argentina & Chile to sustain relations with Europe at expense of those with other countries in region.

1816: Argentina declares independence.

1818: Chile declares independence: Colombian and Venezuelan independence.

1821: Agustín de Iturbide declares Mexico independent with his Plan of Iguala.

1822: King Pedro declares Brazil independent from Portugal.

1823: United States issues the Monroe Doctrine which warning Europe against the recolonization of the newly independent Spanish American republics.

1824-5: Peru gains independence; Bolivia declares independence.

1830: Gran Colombia splits into the separate countries of Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador.

1838: United Provinces of Central America breaks into five republics (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica).

1830s: Rise of caudillos, self-interested military dictators backed by private armies.

1824: The first Constitution of independent Mexico formally establishes a federal republic.

1833: Santa Anna becomes President for the first of eleven times.

1836: The State of Texas declares its independence from Mexico and begins a war against the central government. Santa Anna is defeated by the Texans.

1840s: Rise of Manifest Destiny, the belief that expansionism represented their God’s plan for USA.

1845: Texas becomes part of the United States of America.

1846-1848: Mexican-American War, ending with the defeat of Mexico.

1848: Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo cedes northern half of Mexico to the U.S.

1876: Porfirio Díaz becomes President in Mexico. He will reelect himself seven times, and his dictatorship, the “Porfiriato” (1876-1911), will last thirty-four years.

1879-84: War of the Pacific involves Chile, Peru, Bolivia.

1888: Abolition of slavery in Brazil.

1889: Brazil proclaimed a republic.

1895: José Martí launches war for Cuban Independence and is killed.

1898: Spanish-Cuban-American War. Cuban gains independence from Spain; United States takes control of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Phillippines.

1898-1902: United States Military Government in Cuba

1901: Platt Amendment to Cuba’s new constitution gives the U.S. the unilateral right to intervene in the island’s political affairs.

1903: United States engineers Panama’s separation from Colombia.

1904: Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine declares the U.S. to be the policeman of the Caribbean.

1904-14: Panama Canal built.

1906-09: Second U.S. Occupation of Cuba

1917-1922: U.S. Sugar Intervention

1909-33: U.S. Marines occupy Nicaragua, Haiti, and Dominican Republic.

20^TH CENTURY: Intervention, subversion, repression on a grand scale, carried on by homegrown demagogues and tyrants often directly supported by USA and entities like the United Fruit Company. Unequal development in 20^th c, excacerbated by chronic political crises in four of most populous and best resourced nations: Brazil, Argentina, Mexico and Chile, which are coincidentally home to 2 of the 5 largest urban areas in Western hemisphere, that is, Mexico City & Sao Paolo.

1910-1920 Mexican Revolution

1936-1979: Somoza era in Nicaragua.

1939-1959: Fulgencio Batista era in Cuba.

1942-47: Women gain the franchise in the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Panama, Argentina, and Venezuela

1946: Juan Domingo Perón elected president of Argentina.

1949-54: Women gain the franchise in Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Mexico, Colombia, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru.

1950: Jacobo Arbenz elected president in Guatemala. Pace of reforms accelerates, including expropriation of United Fruit Company banana lands.

1954: CIA overthrows constitutional government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.

1959: Triumph of Cuban Revolution.

1961: Failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

1962: Missile Crisis with the US, Cuba, and the USSR.

1965: US forces, fearing a Communist takeover, occupy Dominican Republic.

1968: A large and important Student Movement ends with police and army massacring 300 students at the Plaza of Tlatelolco in Mexico City.

1968: Latin American bishops meeting in Medellín, Colombia, embrace liberation theology and announce a ‘preferential option for the poor.’

1970: Salvador Allende in Chile elected president in Chile and becomes the first democratically elected socialist to take power in Latin America.

1973: CIA-backed coup overthrows Allende in Chile; military government under General Augusto Pinochet kills thousands of opponents.

1974-1976: Isabel Martínez de Perón assumes presidency of Argentina.

1976: On March 24, generals Videla, Massera and Agosti form a military junta in Argentina. Their resulting “guerra sucia” (Dirty War) lasted until 1983 and killed or “vanished” thousands of people.

1979: Sandinistas take power in Nicaragua

1980: Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrilla warfare starts in Peru.

1980: Archbishop Oscar Romero assassinated in El Salvador for his stance against military repression and human rights abuses. Guerrillas organize the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

1982: British victory in the Malvinas/Falklands war leads to the collapse of the military government in Argentina and a return to civilian rule.

1984: Raul Alfonsín, of the Radical Party, assumes the presidency of Argentina ending nine years of military rule.

1988: Pinochet loses plebiscite in Chile which was to extend his military rule.

1990: An elected civilian government takes over from Augusto Pinochet in Chile.

1999: Transfer of the Canal Zone from U.S. to Panamanian control.

Stereotypes:

–chaos & violence: Brazil & Mexico (Honduras, San Salvador)

–enormous resources: Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia

–European traditions: Chile, Argentina

–Misgovernment: everywhere except Costa Rica & Cuba but esp. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Honduras, Venezuela

–Corruption: everywhere except Costa Rica & Cuba

Bridge—stereotypes very much alive, though also contested in LA cinema.

In 1965 Glauber Rocha, one of the founders of Brazilian Cinema Novo, wrote:Thus, while Latin America laments its general misery, the foreign onlooker cultivates the taste of that misery, not as a tragic symptom, but merely as an aesthetic object within his field of interest. The Latin American neither communicates his real misery to the ‘civilised’ European, nor does the European truly comprehend the misery of the Latin American. This is the fundamental situation of the arts in Brazil today: many distortions, especially the formal exoticism that vulgarises social problems, have provoked a series of misunderstandings that involve not only art but also politics. For the European observer the process of artistic creation in the underdeveloped world is of interest only insofar as it satisfies a nostalgia for primitivism.

“Cinema is, first and foremost, the projection of a cultural identity, which comes to life on the screen. It mirrors, or should mirror, this identity. But that is not all. It should also ‘dream’ it. Or make it flesh and blood, with all its contradictions. Unlike Europe, we are societies in which the question of identity has not yet crystallised. It is perhaps for this reason that we have such a need for cinema, so that we can see ourselves in the many conflicting mirrors that reflect us.” (Walter Salles)⁸

I intend to lean heavily on Salles’s claims that LAs have a “need for cinema, so that we can see ourselves in the many conflicting mirrors that reflect us.,” but I also want to qualify that claim in a way that some of you may not be comfortable with. Mainly, I want to distinguish between the near-monopolistic claim that Hollywood commercial filmmaking practices and the commercial filmmaking practices of other national film industries—like Bollywood in India—exercise in defining what cinema is in the world today, and a counter-claim that has been launched since the 1920s by filmmaking practices in which personal or social expression, and the effort to bring cinema into the range of other serious artistic pursuits, have a greater priority than commercial incentives. It is, I would submit, mainly films that pursue this counter-agenda, films made for reasons other than escapism or pure entertainment, that best satisfy the need for cinema of which Salles writes and thus most often serve as “conflicting mirrors that reflect” the social, personal, and cultural concerns of film viewers. This does not mean that popular, commercial cinema cannot or does not reflect the concerns of their audiences, nor does it mean that what has often been called arthouse cinema is entirely free of commercial incentives. Several of the films on offer in this course—for example, Amores Perros, City of God, Y Tu Mama Tambien, The Official Story, and No—were clearly made for commercial incentives, and the first two are as violent, sensationalized, and exploitative as any Hollywood blockbuster. But even in pursuit of commercial incentives, these films operate throughout on a level of naturalism and realism to which most American audiences are unaccustomed while being acutely attuned to some of the most urgent social and political concerns and events of their moment of production. This is why both can effectively serve as “state of nation” films.

As for what is LA Cinema broadly considered, the term is an obvious misnomer that will be used here as a convenient bracketing device. As noted earlier, all Latin American nations are rooted in the Spanish and Portugese conquests of the 16^th century and most participated in the devastation and enslavement of indigenous Amerindian populations, and the equally widespread abduction and enslavement of West Africans. All eventually won their independence, and most (if not all) then endured anywhere between 150-200 years of autocratic tyranny and anti-democratic misrule while also being subject to the economic exploitation and political meddling of the United States. Some of them differ so widely from each other that linking them purely on the basis of historical origins and language is clearly oversimplified—this is especially the case in distinguishing between large nation states with well-developed cultural resources like Mexico, Argentina and Brazil and Central American and Caribbean countries like Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. That said, though there will never be a United States of S. America, shared or at least fairly similar languages make many things possible, such as Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal’s starring in films made by Chilean and Brazilian directors, one of whom, Brazilian director Walter Salles, cast Garcia Bernal as the famous Argentine freedom fighter Ernesto Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. Guevara in turn made his global reputation in the Cuban Revolution, and was later killed in Bolivia. In organizing the course, I’ve thus tried to mix and match both in terms of shared interests and concerns as well as in terms of specific national identities.

RUBEN DARIO (NICARAGUA) writes one of many poems/documents addressed directly to the US monolith

FLM 280: Latin American Cinema Spring, 2021

SYLLABUS

REQUIRED TEXTS:

Eduardo Galeano. Century of Wind, vol 3 of Century of Fire

Paul Julian Smith, Amores Perros (BFI Modern Classics)

RECOMMENDED TEXT:

Ed Sikov, Film Studies: an Introduction, Columbia University Press, 2009

SUGGESTED SECONDARY READINGS:

Frederick Luis Aldama, Mex-Cine: Mexican filmmaking, production & consumption (ebook)

Alberto Elena & Marina Díaz López, The Cinema of Latin America

David William Foster, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Stephen Hart, Latin American Cinema (ebook)

Raphael Hernandez Rodriguez, Splendors of Latin American Cinema

Michael Monteon, Latin America and the Origins of is 21^st Century (ebook)

Paul Schroeder Rodriguez, Latin American Cinema: a Comparative History (ebook)

Eduardo Angel Russo, The Film Edge: Contemporary Filmmaking in Latin America

Deborah Shaw, Contemporary Cinema of Latin America

ONLINE DATABASES & RESOURCES

For books on world/global cinema: http://subjectguides.library.american.edu/c.php?g=179016&p=1176490

For film production information, critical reviews, and user reviewers:

http://www.imdb.com/ and https://www.mrqe.com/

LEARNING GOALS

–To develop the capacity to respond in a thoughtful, informed way to a representative sampling of some of the more accomplished, influential, and challenging films produced in Latin America in the last 50 years.

–To demonstrate the ways in which film production and reception are connected to social, geographic, ethnic, national, and global networks of exchange and meaning.

–To help students develop an informed understanding of the social, economic, and political underpinnings of the different film cultures of Latin America.

–To enlarge the range of sympathy and respect for individuals and groups whose thoughts, feelings, history, and cultural experiences differ radically from one’s own.

–To help turn upside down (or right side up) the historical subordination of all things Latin American to a dominating and domineering Anglo-North American perspective and point of view.

PAPERS, PARTICIPATION, GRADING PROCEDURES:

You can plan on doing some form of writing on almost every film we screen and discuss in the form of assigned papers or Discussion Board postings. The films we screen are the true primary texts in this course, but screenings will be supplemented by additional readings available on Canvas, by Paul Smith’s short book on Amores Perros, and by Eduardo Galeano’s Century of Wind (Part 3 of Memory of Fire). Although we will only be discussing targeted sections of Galeano’s book, you should plan on reading it from beginning to end and on coming to class ready to discuss assigned pages (see below). All reading assignments are required components of this course and should be undertaken in a timely and attentive manner. Course requirements and grading procedures are as follows:

Four required but lightly graded Discussion Board postings (250-300 words).
Two 4-page papers (1,000 words each).
A 6-page final essay (1,500 words) on La Cienaga and Neighboring Sounds.

Though Discussion Board postings will be “lightly graded,” they are collectively worth 20% of your final grade (5 points each) and essential to assuring active engagement in class discussions. The averaged grade of the 4-page papers will roughly constitute another 50% of your final grade, with the final paper counting for the other 30%. I don’t, however, grade entirely according to mathematical laws. Your intellectual growth, responsiveness to the course’s learning goals, the quality of your class participation, and the intensity of your engagement with the course subject matter may well constitute crucial variables in the determination of final grades. All papers and postings must be submitted on time, without exception, on the specific Discussions or Assignments page. Late discussion postings will not be accepted or permitted.

CLASS MEETING & ASSIGNMENT SCHEDULE:

WEEK 1

Feb 9 Introduction to course. What is Latin America? What is Latin American

Cinema? What gets included and why? Start reading Monteon, “Modern Life & Modern Conflicts, 1956-1985,” also Galeano, 148-9; 159-60; 163-77; 180-1 for next class.

Feb 11 Module 1: State of Nation (1). Introducing Cuba & Memories of

Underdevelopment/ Stream Memories of Underdevelopment over weekend. Also read (or re-read) Monteon: 199-207.

WEEK 2

Feb 16 Discuss film & readings. Read T.C Wright, Chap 4, “The Dirty War in

Argentina,” in State Terrorism in Latin America, 37-67 and Monteon:

217-21 for next class.

18 Introducing Argentina: The Official Story/Stream film over weekend.

Also read Galeano: 228-9; 233-5; 238-40; 265-7.

WEEK 3

Feb 23 Discuss The Official Story in context of Dirty War chapter & Galeano

readings. /Read Galeano: 113-17; 170-1; 185-6; 217-18; 272-3 and

Monteon: 207-14 for next class.

25 Introducing Brazil: Central Station. First DB assignment. Stream film

over weekend.

WEEK 4

Mar 1 8 p.m. First DB posting due.

2 Discuss film & postings.Read Studying City of God: Introduction; Chap

3: Micro Elements; & Chap 4: Messages & Values for next class.

4 Discuss City of God chapters. Brazil paper assignment. Stream

City of God over weekend.

WEEK 5

9 ————-BREATHING DAY: NO CLASS———-

11 Discuss readings & City of God/Start reading T.C. Wright, Chap 3,

“Chile under State Terrorism,” pp. 1-37 for next class.

Mar 14 Brazil paper due: Midnight.

WEEK 6

Mar 16 Introducing Chile: Discuss reading + excerpts from Battle of Chile

18 Discuss Battle of Chile/Prep Machuca/Stream film, read Machuca

Notes, Vilches on Machuca, and post your response to the Second DB assignment.

WEEK 7

Mar 22 8 p.m., Second DB posting due.

23 Discuss Machuca & postings. Read Paul Julian Smith, Amores

Perros, Chapters 1-3 for next class.

25 Module 2: Mexican New Wave/Discuss Reading/Prep: Amores Perros.

Finish reading Smith’s Amores Perros, attend closely to the Viewing Notes, and stream film over the weekend. [Recommended: Monteon,

“Launched into the Present,” 269-80.]

WEEK 8

Mar 30 Discuss Amores Perros/Read Marvelly and Luiselli entries on Japón

before streaming Japón./Third DB assignment. Stream Japón over weekend.

Apr 1 ————NO CLASS———-

WEEK 9

Apr 5 8.p.m., Third DB assignment due.

6 Discuss Japón/Read Galeano: 31-5; 38-42; 57-61; 110-13; 200-2; 272-3

for next class.

8 Prep Roma & Paper Assignment #2. Stream Roma and read Richard

Brody review of Romaover weekend.

WEEK 10

Apr 13 Discuss Roma in context of Brody review/Read Galeano: 105-8; 119; 158-

9; 172-3; 184; 189-91 for next class.

15 Module #3: Sad Tropics/Introducing the Dominican Republic: Cocote.

Read Jonathan Romney on Cocote & stream film over weekend.

18 Midnight: Second 4-page paper on Roma due.

WEEK 11

Apr 20 Discuss Cocote/Read Interview with Ciro Guerra for next class and

Galeano, 19-20; 73-6; 131-5; 160-3; 203-4; 221-3.

22 Introducing Colombia: Embrace of the Serpent. Stream film over weekend. Fourth DB assignment.

WEEK 12

26 8 p.m. Fourth DB posting due.

27 Discuss Embrace of the Serpent & postings/Read “Interview with Lucrecia Martel,” “Sound in La Cienaga” and “What’s Outside the Frame” (Canvas) for next class.

29 Fourth Module: State of the Nation (2)/Reintroducing Argentina:

the films of Lucrecia Martel/Stream La Cienaga over weekend.

WEEK 13

May 4 Discuss La Cienaga/Read Galeano: 29-30; 77-8 for next class. (Who was

Limpiao?)

6 Reintroducing Brazil: Neighboring Sounds. Stream film over weekend.

Final paper assignment.

WEEK 14

May 11 Discuss Neighboring Sounds.

13 Discuss final paper assignment/Concluding concerns.

WEEK 15

May 19 5 P.M. FINAL ESSAY DUE.

CUBA

Viewing Notes: Memories of Underdevelopment

(dir., Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968, 97m)

Select Director Filmography: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996)

1995 Guantanamera

1993 Strawberry and Chocolate

1991 Con el amor no se juega

1988 Cartas del parque

1983 Hasta cierto punto

1979 Los sobrevivientes

1976 The Last Supper

1968 Memories of Underdevelopment

1966 Death of a Bureaucrat

1964 Cumbite

1962 The Twelve Chairs

1960 Stories of the Revolution

1959 Esta tierra nuestra (Documentary short)

Select Cast

Sergio Corrieri Sergio Carmona Mendoyo

Daisy Granados Elena

Eslinda Núñez … Noemi

Omar Valdés … Pablo

René de la Cruz Elena’s brother

Viewing Notes:

–Not only considered among the greatest LA films ever produced but among the most significant films of its decade worldwide. Praised particularly for its innovative techniques, principally the combination of fictional forms with newsreel and documentary footage, its use of nonchronological narrative time, as well as its editing.

–A co-founder of the Cuban Institute of Art & Industry and a self-described revolutionary, Alea used many of his films to criticize flaws in the Cuban political system, something repeatedly notable in MU. As he states himself:

[Spectators] should not return complacent, tranquil, empty, worn out and inert; rather, they should be stimulated and armed for practical action. [Films] must constitute a factor in the development, through enjoyment, of the spectators’ consciousness […] move them from remaining simple, passive spectators in the face of reality.

That spring of 1959, as ragged revolutionaries took their places behind desks and sought to channel their energy for battle into institution building, ICAIC was born as part of the new Ministry of Culture. Havana already boasted over 350 movie theaters—more than Paris or New York—where Cubans flocked to see Hollywood westerns and musicals and Mexican melodramas and gangster flicks. What ICAIC aimed to do was make Cuba a country that didn’t merely watch movies but produced them. In this, the institute’s filmmakers would prove hugely successful: over the institute’s first twenty-five years, they churned out some nine hundred documentary shorts and over a hundred narrative and nonfiction features. More complex was the inherent tension within the institute’s stated view that cinema was both “the most powerful and provocative form of artistic expression, and the most direct and widespread vehicle for education and bringing ideas to the public.”

The U.S. State Department may have refused him a visa to accept an award for the film because it was seen as a piece of agitprop hostile to Cuba’s bourgeoisie, but that interpretation would have been news to members of that group in Miami, who hailed the film as a potent depiction of why they’d left. Neither read feels exactly apt, but for Alea, such divergent conclusions meant success; the part of Latin America’s “Third Cinema” ideology that resonated most powerfully with him was the ideal of involving one’s audience in the cinematic enterprise—and thus trusting them enough to think and feel what they will.

For focus:

–Discontinuous editing; disestablishing shots; disruptive flashbacks (Hanna sequence); metacinematic moments (roundtable that includes Desnoes, scene that has Sergio & Elena interact w/ Alea); “ghost cuts” (quick shots of individuals who may or may not have played a role in Sergio’s life; frequent probings of apartment, distinctiveness of furnishings, posters, seen from a variety of points of view (Sergio’s, Elena’s, the housing inspector); set piece settings (airport, roundtable, Hemingway house); integration of newsreel footage with “social realist” photography to establish time-markings and revolutionary context.

–Tricky fluctuations of POV, such that we look with equal annoyance and irritation at Sergio, Laura, Elena and Elena’s family. How this operates has much to do with viewer’s own subject (class, political, social) position. Sergio’s voice and figure are our prevailing touchstones throughout but his vanity, misogyny, egotism, indifference, privilege, passivity, detachment, etc. become and remain objects of criticism.

–Class-based clothing, fashion statements, furnishings, behavior. Note how upscale/bourgeois Laura and her family and Pablo’s wife are dressed; how Sergio’s clothing differentiates him from the guys sitting next to him at the police station; at how wide Elena’s eyes get when she takes in the apartment and the dresses in Laura’s closet; at the slow take of the housing inspector at hearing that there are 5 bathrooms in the apt. Film set in former upper-class suburb Vedado, which later had become the center of cultural life in the city.

–seduction scene; function of telescope; scene in Hemingway house; courtroom scene, etc.

LECTURE NOTES

–The novel from which the film was made, published in English as Inconsolable Memories was written by Edmundo Desnoës, a Cuban intellectual who spent many years in the United States, who returned to Cuba after the revolution to an active position in the publishing house Casa de las Americas, and then went back to the United States to live his later years in New York City. Desnoës seems to have put a lot of himself into Inconsolable Memories’ first person narrator, giving that protagonist many insights and sympathetic qualities. But in the novel, he also puts this alter ego up to criticism. Within the formal structure of an autobiography, an unnamed protagonist is writing a diary to maintain his sanity and personal identity, to gain a kind of control over his own life. He also writes a first-person narration of lived experience since he feels himself to be a frustrated author who cannot create. In a circular fashion he sees the world as so complex that he has nothing to say. In Alea’s film this intellectual, named Sergio, stands as a “memory of underdevelopment,” a bourgeois who immerses himself in his own mental acuity but who cannot break out of alienation to enter into commitment.

— Sergio has literally stayed behind the revolution. He stays in Cuba when his wife and parents go to the United States because he wants to observe what is going to happen in Cuba. He thinks of himself as Europeanized; to him, underdevelopment means that the Cuban mind is underdeveloped. Sergio criticizes people, especially women, for forgetting and not being consistent, but in his own case, remembering everything paralyzes him.

–The film contains two stories, one explicit and one implicit, which Alea uses to comment on each other. In the background the film presents the story of Cuban society, which moves with the force of the revolution and history. The fact that political history provides the film’s framework is established by three principal documentary sequences. First, the film’s opening sequence shows a public dance at which a political leader is assassinated. Later, a central documentary sequence, seemingly unrelated to the narrative, depicts and analyzes moments from the trial of the counterrevolutionary officers captured at the Bay of Pigs. And a final sequence on the missile crisis combines both documentary shots and narrative material to conclude the film.

–In terms of film style, Alea is commenting in two ways on the topic of underdevelopment. He develops a psychological narrative in the style of European films about Sergio’s existential alienation. At the same time he holds that alienation up to criticism by means of documentary footage which shows us the revolution which Sergio will not join. The film mixes cinematic styles and modes of spoken discourse, moving back and forth in time, frequently according to Sergio’s memories. The shots of the Cuban people on the street during the film and particularly at the dance at the beginning of the film establish a sense of race, against which background we can see that Sergio, a tall fair man who looks like a gringo, is deliberately shown as very white — something a Latin audience would pick up on since skin color is often an index of class. Alea arguably uses such a fair-skinned protagonist to emphasize in visual terms this middle class intellectual’s alienation from the people.

In one sequence in the film, block captains come to inventory the apartment. During this time we learn that Sergio’s income is based on monthly state payments for a building of his which had been confiscated, payments he will receive for another thirteen years. Such details paint a picture of Cuba as being fair to those bourgeois who have stayed, letting them, like Sergio, just fade away and not stripping comforts from them. Yet what “message” does this apartment in the movie have for a Cuban audience? Maybe the audience looks on that nice plumbing with envy or thinks it should go to someone more deserving.

For his part, Sergio sees much that is true about Cuba and is presented as self-aware person. To criticize Sergio as an entitled bourgeois is easy. Yet he himself rejects most of the Cubans of his class, his wife Laura and his friend Pablo especially, as superficial, greedy, and self-deceiving. But he will also not use his intellect to serve the revolution. The film shows that Sergio’s refusal to join with others to build a new Cuban society depends both on his class position and on his temperament. The film depicts the cost to him personally of staying apart as an observer. Sergio has a great curiosity to see what will happen in Cuba next. A key prop in the film is a high-powered telescope installed on the porch of his apartment. Early in the film Sergio looks through it at a couple making love. At the end of the film he looks down on the mobilization for the missile crisis, in which the whole of Havana is unified in the face of impending destruction. Looking through the telescope means more than idle curiosity. At the end of the film, Sergio looking through the telescope is a Sergio trapped in his own introspection.

The film details the relation between the personal and the political, which comes out in the critique of Sergio as a womanizing male. In the film Sergio’s attitude toward women, his machismo, is clearly related to an outmoded pre-revolutionary (or anti-revolutionary) way of life. Sergio tries to mold women to fit his idea of what they should be. The women in the film include Naomi, the Protestant maid, about whose baptism Sergio has erotic fantasies; Laura, the wife, accustomed to a material standard of luxury with him, yet presumably eager to make new emotional and material ties in the United States; Elena, the young Cuban woman looking for adventure yet ultimately trapped inside an oppressive family situation; and Hanna, the German girl Sergio courted away from high school and whose expectations for him to develop intellectually he could not live up to. Each one of the woman characters reveals something different about Sergio, and each one also offers an opportunity to elaborate on what Sergio means by “underdevelopment” and what we the viewers are to think about that concept as well.

Elena, whom Sergio regards as a primitive, understands him more than he understands her. “You’re not a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary, ” she says. When he asks her what he is then, she answers, “Nada, tu eres nada–nothing, you’re nothing. “

As in the rest of the film Alea’s examination of false consciousness here is relentless. He does not hold Elena and her family up as idealized examples of the Cuban people, dignified or even right. Whereas Sergio is wrong to think of Elena as underdeveloped in the way he does, taking her to museums to improve her mind, Alea does not show Elena as having revolutionary goals. Indeed, the whole wit of the sequences with Elena’s family comes from the inappropriateness of their actions in a presumably revolutionary society. The film satirizes the family’s treating a female child as property, showing this as a reactionary way to behave. Elena is depicted as victimized both by Sergio and by her family, to which victimization she acquiesces.

The contrast between the long middle documentary insert, seemingly unrelated to the narrative, and the narrative part of the film serves to reinforce the theme of Sergio’s divorce from the political, yet the documentary footage also asserts the inescapable reality of that sphere. In this \ documentary section, the various counterrevolutionary leaders who are being tried do not define themselves as murderers. They define themselves as types with one specific function in society — the priest, the philosopher, the believer in free enterprise — all with their niches thought out for themselves. What comes out during the trial of Calviño, the sadistic army officer known as the “butcher,” is that by letting Calviño do all the torturing and by not thinking too much about it, the others could maintain their cohesively moral identity. The commentary states, “The truth of the group is in the murderer.” Alea uses this sequence in the film to emphasize the consequences of a false consciousness among the bourgeoisie, especially as related to Sergio, who thinks he is truly separate from political action. As the commentary states, all bourgeois society has a division of moral labor and places an emphasis on individuality so that nobody has to assume total consciousness/conscience. The counterrevolutionaries do not recognize themselves as members of a system that entangles them in their own act. In this section, the film also significantly offers the image of the role of a revolutionary woman. We see a strong and angry woman denouncing Calviño at the trial, which is an image of woman which Sergio cannot conceive of.

If as in Cuba, the audience already has a revolutionary mentality, the film stands as a critique of outmoded ways of thought. However, if in the United States we ask whom this film serves and how, we see from its critical reception that Memories of Underdevelopment has generally been appreciated as a picture of a sensitive person’s existential alienation in contemporary Cuba. Within the context of a society accomplishing a revolution, the film serves a political end. In the United States, it can be coopted.

Memories of Underdevelopment is an empathetic portrait of an unsympathetic man. In 1968 and after, many saw it as a burning indictment of the passive intellectual refusing to engage in revolution. Perhaps now it is easier to glean aims that were, for the filmmaker, far subtler. Sergio is flawed, but never inauthentic or inhuman. Gutiérrez Alea presents him as just as much a part of the revolution’s story, and of what it had to contend with, as the illiterate peasant.

https://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jlesage/Juliafolder/MemOfUnderdevt.html

https://www.criterion.com/films/29220-memories-of-underdevelopment

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Underdevelopment

http://southasastateofmind.com/article/memories-of-underdevelopment/

CUBA

THE LAST SUPPER

See World Cinema & Cultural Memory for article on Alea: Productive Memory: “Forward Dreaming” in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Cuban Films” by Inez Hedges

DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

VIEWING NOTES: COCOTE (dir., Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, 2017, 106m)

Director Filmography: Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias, b. 1985)

2017 Cocote

2015 Santa Teresa y Otras Historias

2011 Le Dernier des Bonbons

Credited cast:

Vicente Santos … Alberto

Jose Cruz … Sargento

Yuberbi de la Rosa … Patria

Enerolisa Núñez … Cantante de salve

Judith Rodriguez Perez Karina

Pepe Sierra … Martínez

Isabel Spencer … Chave

Ricardo Ariel Toribio … Asistente de Martínez

User review:

One of the highlights of [the 2017] Locarno Film Festival was this ‘revenge’ drama from the Dominican Republic. Alberto’s father has been murdered and Alberto returns to his home town for what he believes will be his funeral but his father has already been buried and his family want him to participate in the 9 day mourning rituals though he does not believe in them.

Director Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias constructs his film “Cocote” partly as documentary and partly as a straightforward drama, playing around with screen formats, colour and black and white. The technique alone decrees this is anything but a simple revenge thriller, drawing you into a strange biblical world that is more Old than New Testament with Alberto wanting to turn the other cheek while his sisters cry out for an eye for an eye. Alberto is now a card-carrying, (or in his case, a bible-carrying), Christian while the apparent ‘Christianity’ of the Jesus Freaks of his home town is only a stone’s throw away from Voodooism.

It’s certainly a beautiful looking film. In instances like this, do we really need to understand why the director chose to film it the way he did or just simply luxuriate in the film’s ‘style’ and it is indeed stylish with the cross-cutting between ‘the rituals’ and the main plot never seeming a mere affectation or a distraction. In terms of ‘action’ not a great deal happens; there is an awful lot of praying and it may feel a little overlong but this is a world most of us know nothing about. I found it fascinating and a remarkable piece of ‘pure’ cinema.

Viewing Notes:

— Cocote: the sacrificial breaking of an animal’s neck

–“Cocote is, for the most part, elliptical and mysterious. De Los Santos Arias’s camera often withholds as much as it shows: faces are obscured; characters are positioned outside the frame; at times, the camera pans away from people to show, well, nothing in particular. De Los Santos Arias’s stylistic experimentation feels intuitive more than programmatic, and if the reasons behind the filmmaker’s choices are sometimes inscrutable, the sheer variety—and perversity—of his approach is never less than engrossing. Occasionally, de Los Santos Arias employs formalistic strategies borrowed from structuralist filmmakers like Michael Snow, most intriguingly in Cocote’s violent climax, which is filmed in part in a fluid, 360-degree pan that captures more of the ambiance of a room than the actions of the characters within it. It’s a shot that seems to show everything and nothing at the same time—and like so much of Cocote, it’s weirdly, inexplicably compelling.” From

https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/cocote/

–What do you make of this very different review? “Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias […] keeps it pretentious, opaque and heavy-handed. Trying to be artsy-farty he makes a straight story crooked. The film is confusing as it veers back and forth between black-and-white photography and color, as it needlessly switches film stock, and confusingly chases after the emotional cultural conflicts that shake up the nine-day pagan mourning ceremonies that highlight the restless film. The drama only becomes unnecessarily complex as its style trumps narrative and its nice guy central character seems caught between a bad family and a bad country.” https://dennisschwartzreviews.com/cocote/

–There’s no doubt that the film’s screening of religious rituals is way over the top, sustained for considerably longer than most viewers are able to attend. But given the retrospective power of the film’s structure—that is, how the film’s ending tends to reposition everything that occurs before it—it may be better to ask why those long ritualistic sequences exist in the finished film: what work they were designed to do in the film as a whole.

–The film is also deeply engaged from the start in the culture clash between the placid, faith-based temperament of Alberto and the considerably more lively and aggressive lifeways of his sisters, whose religious/cultural practices are syncretic, associated with Haitian voudou and Afro-Cuban santeria.

–Though the challenge to Alberto turns upon the expected practice of revenge, the social differences between the combatants also makes it turn on an axis of oppression and resistance, which presumably licenses the turn the film takes in its last moments.

ARGENTINA

ARGENTINE HISTORY NOTES

1816 Argentine independence from Spain; geographic growth and growing prosperity throughout 19th c.

1900 Argentina the most advanced economy in S. America

1896 First filmic exhibition

1930-1943 Infamous Decade of coups and corruption

1933: beginning of film industry

1946-1955 Peronist years 1952: death of Evita 1955: coup

1966-73 Convulsive political turns–no direct path or continuity–leftist guerrillas. La hora de los hornos (Octavio Getino)

1974-76 Return of Perons–Isabel & Juan

1976-1983 National Reorganization Process: Dirty War: 11,000 dead;

30,000 “disappeared”

1983 Falklands War

BLENDED HISTORY & CINEMA NOTES

1985 Tangos (Fernando Solanas) 1988 Sur (Solanas)

1989 The Official Story (Puenzo)/hyper inflation under Menem,

beginning of govt subsidies to film industry

1992 Israeli embassy attacked: 29 killed

1993 Wall of Silence (Lila Stantic)

1999 Bombing of JCC: 85 dead

2001 “Argentinazo”–violence, social convulsions–26 die in protests

La LIbertad (Alonso) La Ciénaga (Martel)

2003 Nestor Kirchner President Cautiva (Biraben)

2004 The Holy Girl (Martel) Los Muertos (Alonso)

2007 Christina Kirchner President

2008 The Headless Woman (Martel) Liverpool (Alonso)

2012 Viola (Pineiro) 2014 Jauja (Alonso)

2017 Zama (Martel)

VIEWING NOTES: The Official Story

(1985, dir., Luis Puenzo, 112m)

Select Director Filmography: Luis Puenzo (b. 1946)

2004 The Whore and the Whale

1992 The Plague

1990 With Open Arms

1989 Old Gringo

1985 The Official Story

1973 Luces de mis zapatos

Select Cast:

Héctor Alterio … Roberto

Norma Aleandro … Alicia

Chunchuna Villafañe … Ana

Hugo Arana … Enrique

Guillermo Battaglia … Jose

Chela Ruíz … Sara

Patricio Contreras … Benitez

María Luisa Robledo … Nata

Aníbal Morixe … Miller

Jorge Petraglia … Macci

Analia Castro … Gaby

Laura Palmucci … Rosa

Viewing Notes:

–A product of the democratic apertura, this film was written and crafted in the immediate aftermath of the Dirty War that eventuated in the killing of 30,000 Argentines and the disappearing of thousands of others, including the parents of newborns and other young children, who were gifted to loyal supporters of the right-wing authoritarian state. The film very deliberately focuses on a sympathetic upper middle-class wife of a not terribly sympathetic husband who, in this paternalistic system, has apparently kept some of the facts about their adopted daughter hidden from her. The film thus operates in a revelatory as opposed to a revolutionary vein as the coming-to-consciousness of a rather astonishingly naïve, but nonetheless complicit, member of a ruling class that complacently allowed some of the worst horrors since WW2 to be committed in their own frontyards, as it were.

— Effort to blend high-end fiction filmmaking and cinematography with documentary film footage. Street demonstrations of mothers and grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo. “No pardon, no amnesty.”As a fairly sanitized, broadly humanistic representation of a very dirty war conducted by a hugely privileged sector of Argentine society against a more culturally, economically, and socially mixed citizenry associated, rightly or wrongly, with liberal, possibly socialist leanings, the film became celebrated worldwide and was even awarded the 1986 Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

For focus:

–Early classroom scenes: fervent singing of national anthem (note lyrics: freedom, equality, broken chains); ironic representation of Alicia’s comments about importance of history & memory in context of recent events; obvious social divisions in the classroom despite the school’s homogeneity. One student claims “history is written by murderers.” Contrasts with Benitez, the clearly more liberal, charismatic lit prof enjoying playing fast and loose with the Argentine national novel Juan Moreira, which allegorizes and celebrates the individual freedoms associated with the last of the gauchos.

–Scene with old friend Ana, who recounts her experience of torture to a clueless Alicia. How are we supposed to read Alicia here? Is she clueless b/c she’s simply not inquisitive? Does her lack of inquisitiveness make her complicit? How does the film provide physical clues to Alicia’s growing openness to new ways of thinking and feeling?

–Scene with priest: clearcut effort here to demonstrate the complicity of the church with state-sponsored violence. Occasional presence of crass or clueless Americans. USA not only thoroughly supported the Dirty War but actively sold weapons and helped train the Argentine military.

–Dinner scene with Roberto & brother, and their father and mother. What point is conveyed by establishing so bluntly the differences between Roberto and his father in particular? Roberto: “I am not a loser.”

–Violence of Roberto against Alicia has the effect of further eroding her complicity in the crime of stolen babies by rendering her a victim of male, patriarchal aggression.

–Ending shot of Gaby in rocking chair; recurs to Alicia’s depiction of her own sense of abandonment: How to read this? Does personalizing, humanizing Alicia’s despair and the feelings of abandonment Gaby is likely to feel indicate that returning the child to the grandmother might not constitute the best or only solution? Gaby’s song: “In the land of I don’t remember.”

–Competing assessments. Pro: “Puenzo’s film inaugurates a glorious period in the ‘harmed’ cinematography of this ‘harmed’ country. In this new era cinema will help us to complete our history.” Con: “Nobody speaks about the one who disappeared, the one who had the problem. It is rather the criminal who has the problem here. He and his criminal wife, a history teacher whose complete ignorance and innocence they are trying to convince me about.”

Additional Resources:

Children of the Dirty War: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/03/19/children-of-the-dirty-war
The Vanished Gallery: http://www.yendor.com/vanished/
Understanding the Dirty War through Memoir: https://library.brown.edu/create/modernlatinamerica/chapters/chapter-9-argentina/moments-in-argentine-history/understanding-argentinas-dirty-war-through-memoir/

Viewing Notes: La Cienaga (dir., Lucrecia Martel, 2001, 100m)

FILMOGRAPHY:

2017 Zama

2008 The Headless Woman

2004 The Holy Girl

2001 La Cienaga (or The Swamp)

CAST:

Graciela Borges Mecha

Martin Adjemian Gregorio

Mercedes Morgan Tali

Leonora Balcarce Veronica

Silvia Bayle Mercedes

Sofia Bertolotto Momi

Juan Cruz Bordeu Jose

Noelia Bravo Herrera Agustina

Maria Micol Ellero Mariana

Andrea Lopez Isabel

Sebastiano Montagna Luciano

Daniel Valenzuela Martin

Fabio Villafane Perro

Diego Baenas Joaquin

SETTING: Summer-house named La Mandragora near Salta, a religiously and socially conservative region of northwest Argentina.

WHAT TO LOOK FOR: All of Martel’s three features are set in Salta (her hometown) and its surrounds, which are as remote as one can imagine from the cosmopolitan center that is Buenos Aires. Martel deplores establishing shots and thus makes it twice as hard as it might otherwise be for viewers to get a broader handle on her characters and their interactions, which are literally staged in our faces, with very little mediation between ourselves and her camera. Martel leaves it to us to negotiate who means what to whom, how they are related, and how we are to assess their unusually close encounters and embraces. It should nonetheless become clear that we are mainly dealing with two closely related families, led by wives/mothers who are cousins (Mecha & Tali) but not otherwise terribly alike (Mecha is a lazy alcoholic who never gets dressed; Tali generally a very dutiful mother & housewife.) Mecha’s oldest son, Jose, moves between what we assume to be Buenos Aires & Salta over the course of the film. When he is in Buenos Aires, he appears to be living and/or sleeping with Mercedes–who is elsewhere identified as the erstwhile lover of Mecha’s husband, Gregorio. (That’s right, Mercedes is either concurrently or successively sleeping with the father and his son.) Another current worth noticing is Momi’s unusually pronounced affection for the house-servant, Isabel, who, like other indigenous people in the film, is considered inferior and not to be trusted by the “white” Argentines.

QUESTIONS TO CONSIDER:

–Where, if anywhere, does Martel provide us with a character to identify or sympathize with? Clearly, Momi, Isabel, and Tali often act in sympathetic ways. But they also demonstrate qualities of clinginess, abrasiveness, and obliviousness that are offputting and unappealing, and which, in one instance, leads to a fatal result.

–Is calling her film “the swamp” and then going on to immerse us in a crowded, sweaty, sloppy environment of “white” Argentines contributing nothing to anyone or thing in particular in the course of the few days we spend with them too obvious? How many objects or persons that are untended, neglected, scarred, contaminated can you come up with? And what’s up with that story about the “rat-dog”?

–Do we conclude that this “swamp” of corruption, inertia, laziness, indifference is a stand-in or symbol of Argentina today, or just a symptomatic part of the whole? is there any way to judge Martel’s aims on the basis of just this film?

–That said, there is something vital about the closeness and intimacy of the encounters between members of the two families and Mecha’s servants that Martel clearly wants us to notice. From this point of view, could we say that however objectionable many of the characters’ behaviors are, the family life put on display here is often presented in a neutral, as opposed to an insistently negative, manner?

–What do you make of Martel’s mode of approach to her characters? What is the inevitable effect of being brought so close into the encounters of these characters with each other, with nature, with their surroundings? Do you miss the absence of establishing shots or some direct form of explanatory exposition? In this kind of immersive cinema, does it feel like the characters are violating/contaminating our space, or that we are voyeuristically trespassing on their own?

–Why does Martel keep us in the dark about matters such as: what Jose does in the city, what Gregorio does for a living, what is really going on with Isabel and why she leaves her job at film’s end? Why doesn’t Jose say anything after he’s beaten up? Why exactly is he beaten up? How did Mecha’s younger son lose his eye?

–According to Martel, “Within my films there’s a way of administering information through depth with respect to the frame, through superimposition, that allows for all the themes, problems, or issues to be simultaneously present. For me, this complexity is something that exists especially within family scenes.” “Framing in the shot” is thus an instructive subject of focus and analysis, both with respect to set-up shots (that begin at the start of a sequence, say, when actors’ bodies are pre-configured in specific ways as they lay across a bed) and shots that present incomplete framings of faces and bodies (as in the film’s opening scene around the pool.) Another thing to attend closely to is Martel’s tracking of movement in small spaces, both inside or outside, say, in the two scenes that situate the boys around the dying and, later, the dead cow stuck in the mud.

–Given the unwholesomeness of the entire network of relations in Mecha’s household, does Martel provide any outlet of sympathy for Mecha herself? Are we led to see her now as what she has always been? If so, why in the end is it Tali who is implicitly held to account for the most consequential act of neglect in the film?

Response Paper: 2-pages on a single scene or sequence from Amores Perros or La Cienaga:

Starting point: Scroll through a DVD copy of either film to find a fairly brief scene or sequence (anywhere from 3-8 minutes long) that engages your visual interest and follow one or other of the following directives. Be sure to identify your scene of choice either by reference to its time signature (e.g., 3:32-8:20) or its chapter number on the DVD. It might also help to include one or two (or more) screen captures by way of illustration or to embed a clip of the scene or sequence in question. Should you do so, be sure to email me your paper (in addition to submitting a hard copy.)

For La Cienaga, “framing in the shot” would make for an instructive subject of analysis, both with respect to set-up shots (that begin at the start of a sequence, say, when actors’ bodies are pre-configured in specific ways as they lay across a bed) and shots that present incomplete framings of faces and bodies (as in the film’s opening scene around the pool.) Another thing to focus on would be Martel’s tracking of movement in small spaces, both inside or outside, say, in the two scenes that situate the boys around the dying and, later, the dead cow stuck in the mud.

You might also choose to use the following statement of Martel’s as a point of departure: “Within my films there’s a way of administering information through depth with respect to the frame, through superimposition, that allows for all the themes, problems, or issues to be simultaneously present. For me, this complexity is something that exists especially within family scenes.”

Viewing & Writing Notes: The Holy Girl (dir., Lucrecia Martel,

Argentina, 2004, 106m): 2-Page Response Paper Due

Weds, October 14

Select Director Filmography

2016 Zama (filming)

2008 The Headless Woman

2004 The Holy Girl

2001 La Ciénaga

Select Cast:

Mercedes Morán … Helena

Carlos Belloso … Dr. Jano

Alejandro Urdapilleta … Freddy

María Alche … Amalia

Julieta Zylberberg … Josefina

Mía Maestro … Inés

Marta Lubos … Mirta

Arturo Goetz … Dr. Vesalio

Alejo Mango … Dr. Cuesta

Mónica Villa … Madre de Josefina

Leandro Stivelman … Julian

Filming Locations: Salta, Argentina

Budget: $1,400,000 (estimated)

Opening Weekend: $28,327 (USA) (29 April 2005)

Gross: $304,124 (USA) (1 July 2005)

Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1

Printed Film Format 35 mm

From NYTimes Review by A.O. Scott (4-29-2005):

“The Holy Girl, Lucrecia Martel’s elusive, feverish and altogether amazing second feature, takes place at a provincial Argentine hotel during a conference of otolaryngologists. If that word is a mouthful (it’s the technical name for ear, nose and throat specialists), it also suggests a motif and a metaphor. The intense, unexpressed emotions that percolate through Ms. Martel’s story of innocence and desire are conveyed, more than in most films, through sounds — whispered and half-overheard conversations, the strange auditory signals that float in from the edges of perception.

Her visual style is similarly oblique, as she frames her characters through half-opened doors, at odd angles and in asymmetrical close-ups. To a degree that is sometimes disorienting, Ms. Martel explores the mysteries of the senses. They are our instruments for knowing ourselves, each other and the world, but they also mislead us, bringing pain, pleasure and confusion in equal measure.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/29/movies/at-a-hotel-where-desire-and-shame-intersect.html

WHAT TO LOOK FOR: All of Martel’s three features are set in Salta (her hometown) and its surrounds, which are as remote as one can imagine from the cosmopolitan center that is Buenos Aires. Martel deplores establishing shots and thus makes it twice as hard as it might otherwise be for viewers to get a broader handle on her characters and their interactions, which are literally staged in our faces, with very little mediation between ourselves and her camera. Martel leaves it to us to negotiate who means what to whom, how they are related, and how we are to assess their unusually close encounters and embraces. Martel’s films skillfully subvert the conventions of mainstream Hollywood film narratives by using extremely close shots and odd angles, open-ended narration, soft focus, dark lighting, and a camera that acquires a sense of mobility that almost transforms it into a character. As Martel herself has stated, “I always try to make the camera see like a ten-year old child. I do that consciously, because in that way I can observe things without prejudgment, with more curiosity, without condemning” (Bombsite interview).

–What do you make of Martel’s mode of approach to her characters? What is the inevitable effect of being brought so close in to the encounters of these characters with each other, with their surroundings? Do you miss the absence of establishing shots or some direct form of explanatory exposition? In this kind of immersive cinema, does it feel like the characters are violating/contaminating our space, or that we are voyeuristically trespassing on their own?

–How do some of the same questions apply to the interactions of Martel’s characters, several of whom voyeuristically trespass on the private spaces of others, engage in behaviors generally considered incestuous, and one of whom physically molests another?

Does the film represent all of these behaviors as “inappropriate” or perverse or as natural given the circumstances the characters find themselves in?

–Martel on desire as opposed sex: “Desire is something that can’t be governed, that someone can feel toward any person, really. It is always much easier to think of someone in terms of desire than in terms of sex. Desire is always above the law, beyond limitations. Desire is precisely where we see that the world can be anything” (Bombsite interview).

–What do you make of the film’s occasional conflation of sensual/sexual awakening and discovery and pursuit of the holy? How does the film represent relations between young women and their own bodies and the bodies of others? Why does Martel call Amalia “the holy girl” in the first place?

–From whose point of view is this film effectively told? How does the dominance of this point of view alter the ending of the film from something potentially very serious to something comedic? Why is this last scene set at the hotel pool? What function does the pool serve in the film as a whole?

BRAZIL

Viewing Notes: Pixote (dir., Hector Babenco, 1981, 128m)

Select Director Filmography: Hector Babenco (1946-2016)

2015 My Hindu Friend

2003 Carandiru

1998 Corazón iluminado

1991 At Play in the Fields of the Lord

1987 Ironweed

1985 Kiss of the Spider Woman

1977 Lucio Flavio

1981 Pixote

1975 O Rei da Noite

Select Cast:

Fernando Ramos da Silva … Pixote

Jorge Julião … Lilica

Gilberto Moura … Dito

Edilson Lino … Chico

Zenildo Oliveira Santos … Fumaça

Claudio Bernardo … Garatao

Israel Feres David … Roberto Pie de Plata

Jose Nilson Martin Dos Santos Diego

Marília Pêra … Sueli

Jardel Filho … Sapatos Brancos

Rubens de Falco … Juiz

Elke Maravilha … Debora

Tony Tornado … Cristal

Viewing Notes: City of God (dir., Fernando Meirelles & Kátia Lund, 2002, 130m)

Select Director Filmography: Fernando Meirelles (b. 1955)

2019 The Two Popes

2016 Rio 2016 Olympic Games Opening Ceremony (TV Special)

2011 360

2009 Som e Fúria: O Filme

2008 Blindness

2005 The Constant Gardener

2002 City of God

2001 Maids

Select Cast:

Alexandre Rodrigues Buscapé (Rocket)

Luis Otávio Buscapé Criança (Young Rocket)

Leandro Firmino da Hora Zé Pequeno (Little Ze)

Douglas Silva Dadinho (Little Dice)

Phellipe Haagensen Bené

Michel de Souza Gomes Bené Criança (Young Bené)

Jonathan Haagensen Cabeleira (Shaggy)

Jefechander Suplino Alicate (Clipper)

Renato da Souza Marreco (Goose)

Matheus Nachtergaele Sandro Cenoura (Carrot)

Seu Jorge Mané Galinha (Knockout Ned)

Alice Braga Angélica

Daniel Zettel Thiago

Emerson Gomes Barbantinho (Young Stringy)

Edson Oliveira Barbantinho Adulto

Roberta Rodrigues Berenice

Leandra Miranda Lucia Maracanã

Rubens Sabino Neguinho (Blacky)

Darlan Cunha Filé-com-Fritas (Steak and Fries)

Graziella Moretto Marina Cintra

Sabrina Roas Namorada do Galinha (Ned’s girlfriend)

Viewing Notes:

–From Stephanie Muir, Studying City of God: “Much debate about the film centres on this duality – on the one hand provoking praise for its hard-hitting depiction of life in the favelas but on the other being accused of voyeurism in its depiction of violence. The flamboyant and stylish spectacle has been criticised as using a nation’s poverty as entertainment, with the audience positioned as passive spectators of ghetto culture, its misery made palatable through MTV tricks.” In many ways, this is the crux around which consideration turns of the film’s status & standing as sensationalized consumerist icon or as informed representation of a nation caught up in crisis of lawlessness, poverty, & violence

–Editing: “The style of the so-called ‘classic realist film’ evolved through devices such as smooth continuity editing with its use of match cuts used to construct an illusion that what we are seeing is unmediated. This so-called ‘transparent’ style flows in front of our eyes and apparently requires little effort on the part of the spectator. […] Realism, formerly associated with the long take and deep focus that allow the spectator to ‘naturally’ absorb the material, here gives way to what some now perceive as the new virtual reality, associated with the ever increasing fragmentation of the world around us. This fragmented style, so apparent in City of God, conforms to the way that we are now used to consuming our entertainment; not as a flow but as a succession of jumpy and often disparate images – ad breaks inserted into a drama, MTV videos, skipping chapters on DVDs, channel hopping on our TVs, fast moving computer games. These appear to have become the new transparency and, for some (particularly the young), the required formula for viewing a film. The control buttons that we are able to use give us the illusion that we are in charge of the material, not just spectators but protagonists who can make decisions as to its outcome. How far this style lets us ‘experience’ the lives of the characters is debatable.” Do we actually possess “control buttons” that help contain or distance this kind of material? Is City of God more like a video game than anything else? How does the representation of events in this new manner of “transparency” actually connect to lives lived in the slower lanes of everyday life, even of lives lived in Rio’s favelas?

–Music: ‘The heartbeat of Brazil’: Brazilian popular music is an important component of Brazilian cultural and social life. At the time when much of the population was illiterate songs emphasised the oral traditions of the poor and disadvantaged. Radical ideas could be represented by the sweet, subtle and seductive sounds. The military regime that ruled Brazil in the 1960s found such music threatening and musicians and singers such as Gilberto Gil were forced into exile. Brazilian music therefore is the music of opposites, radical and popular, exciting and soothing, happy and sad. Brazilians describe it as ‘saudade’ which can be translated as ‘longing’ or ‘nostalgia’. The combination of Portuguese Fado, African rhythms, American jazz and traditional South American instruments such as the cuica and the barimbau gives the music a unique sound. The samba beat is particularly associated with the favelas ‘in the head and feet of each person’ and provides what has been said to be ‘the heartbeat of Brazil’. The music then often acts in a similar way to Rocket’s commentary, as a seductive counterpoint to the violent images. In many films the music underscores the mood of the drama played out on the screen. A tense, violent or emotional moment will be signalled and echoed by the sounds we hear. The music that accompanies the end credits of City of God is indeed saudade, leaving the audience with a feeling of nostalgia. How does this work against the carnage and deprivation we have been witnessing? Does it neutralize the impact of the film? You might also think here of the pivotal scene at the outdoor rave, which is one of the only moments in the film when we see a mass of favelados actually enjoying themselves in the best Brazilian manner. How does the carnage visited here against Bene and Knockout Ned’s girlfriend work against the apparent effort to neutralize the film’s ending?

–How, finally, do cultural outsiders like ourselves respond to this film as a valid representation of favela social life & culture? How do we gauge its authority as a “state of the Brazilian nation” film? What connections (if any) can be drawn between City of God and Central Station? (Note that this question will be extended to our last film of the semester, Neighboring Sounds?) How are figures of authority (parents, police, adults in general) represented in each instance? What’s particularly troubling about the group called “the Runts” in City of God?

CITY OF GOD: OUTLINES

Mireilles’s stated intention: “to bring the terrible conditions of the favela to the public’s

attention,” which he did succeed in doing. Film attracted an audience of 3.2 million in three months in 2002; this led to a second release in Feb, 2004, and a TV series-sequel named City of Men.

Muir: “Violence s City of God’s main theme—the driving force of the film.”

Glauber Rocha (1939-1981): “[W]e are searching for a means of communicating with the public through a language already familiar to them, one that uses many elements created by the people themselves. Though the process will be a long one, we believe we can achieve a genuinely Brazilian cinema that, since the structures are very similar, can also be a genuinely Latin American one. This naturally leads to a new acting style, new uses of color and forms of montage. For us, the violent elements typical of Brazilian films are a means of provoking the public out of its alienation… Almost all Brazilian films deal with political and social problems. Each has a different stance, but they use different forms… I have a particular preference for violent films because I like the epic genre. A people who have suffered centuries of oppression have many violent aspects: problems of hunger and psychological neuroses that come from social and economic circumstances.”

====================

Film interlaces three successive narrative lines that correspond to three successive phases in development and deterioration of the City of God favela:

Story of Tender Trio—“romantic phase” of promise, beginnings: time of petty crimes, wayward rather than evil; pivots on Miami Motel robbery & murders by Little Ze.
Story of Little Ze—changed favela, start of “complaining phase,” now a place of cime and violent criminality; focused on psychopathic killer/druglord.
Story of Knockout Ned—everyone contaminated and corrupted. Only Rocket escapes.

Stylistic components: use of split screen; wipes; montage; speeded up shots, overlay of headlines & time-signatures; skewed chronology, starting in early ‘80s, flashing bak to ‘60s, then up to ‘70s; voiceovers & commentary. Realistic, “authentic” look of actors and locations at odds with highly-stylized, non-realistic filmmaking & editing.

Kuleshov effect: editor/director creates film through ways shots are joined together in editing process.

Montage of attractions: colliding, as opposed to linking (or harmonizing) shots in order to produce shocks. Why “attraction”? To stimulate, provoke, arouse audience response. Examples: sudden shift from high to low angles; close-ups to long shots; movement within the frame, etc.

CITY OF GOD 4-PAGE PAPER ASSIGNMENT

In Studying City of God, author Stephanie Muir culls out these generally negative assessments of the film from three different reviews. I’ve taken the liberty of italicizing words and phrases that I’d like you to reckon with in developing your own assessment of the overall presentational style of the film:

ASSESSMENT #1 (Laurier)

Meirelles’ movie does express somewhat more the attitude of a mesmerised tourist than of a probing and angry investigator… The combination of these elements, however, works to create an inappropriate coolness that erects barriers to any serious involvement with the film’s protagonists. The result is a certain glamorizing of the violence and a dehumanizing of the film’s subjects…more akin to a mythological inferno than to its reality as the by-product of a bankrupt and irrational social order. (Joanne Laurier)

ASSESSMENT #2 (Pasolini)

The truth is, no matter how energetic and professionally made City of God is, with all of its ready-made artiness, it reeks of a swindle. Its MTV-style editing pace and frantic camera work has by halfway through the film destroyed any possibility of engagement with the narrative and the characters. It’s made to amaze and entertain, not to provoke thought… Perhaps the reason why it is so popular is that in the end the film is a middle-class roller coaster ride in someone else’s purgatory … Bravado filmmaking? Yes. A masterpiece? Never. (Antonio Pasolini)

ASSESSMENT #3 (Chaw)

I’m uncomfortable with Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s City of God – not for its brutality, but for the slick cinematic treatment of that brutality. …Neither about addictions or poverty, nor any of the social ills that create the situations documented in the picture, City of God is about children murdering children to a rollicking soundtrack and a parcel of slickified cinematic trickery. Artistic violence is escapist fare; marry it to actual historical tragedy and it becomes exploitation…The question of the picture isn’t what to do with the City of God, but really why do anything when such cool movies can be made from its suffering. Potentially a great film were it not based on fact, City of God makes a mistake in making human misery exhilarating – an invitation to rubberneck un-tempered by social responsibility, and the logical product of the widely held and cancerous belief that movies are really ever ‘just’ movies. (Walter Chaw)

What do all three critics find particularly objectionable about the ways in which the directors choose to tell the story they are telling? To what extent are these objections premised on the nature and content of the film’s subject matter? I’m particularly interested in what you make of Chaw’s statement that City of God would “[p]otentially be a great film were it not based on fact.” What difference would it make if the film wasn’t based on fact? What, if anything, are each of these critics missing about the appeal of the film and where that appeal comes from?

I have no idea how any of you will respond to this film, much less whether that last question means anything to you at all. I ask it not to encourage you to applaud or pretend to admire what you find repellent but to consider how and why children who grow up in what the critics variously call a “mythological inferno” or “someone else’s purgatory” may find what we consider repellent energizing and empowering. I want you to take all these considerations into account in drafting papers on the film focused on how the film functions as a form of social expression, on how it chooses to dramatize and depict the world of the City of God favela.

Viewing Notes: Central Station (dir., Walter Salles, 1998, 110m)

Select Director Filmography: Walter Salles,

2014 Jia Zhangke, A Guy from Fenyang (Documentary)

2012 On the Road

2005 Dark Water

2004 The Motorcycle Diaries

2001 Behind the Sun

1998 Midnight

1998 Central Station

1995 Foreign Land

Select Cast:

Fernanda Montenegro … Isadora/Dora

Marília Pêra … Irene

Vinícius de Oliveira … Josué

Soia Lira … Ana

Othon Bastos … Cezar

Otávio Augusto … Pedrão

Stela Freitas … Yolanda

Matheus Nachtergaele … Isaías

Caio Junqueira … Moisés

Viewing Notes:

–According to Salles, “the story [is] basically about the recuperation of one’s identity and also an investigation into the country’s identity. In Portugese, the words for father (pai) and country (pais) are almost the same. So the search for a father in Central Station is also a search for a country.” Note here how often Dora links her own failed relationship with her father to Josue’s situation.

–The Portugese film title, Centro do Brasil, very much insists on its status as a “state of nation film,” but its immediate setting in Rio’s main train station is also disarming insofar as the film seems more invested in re-centering Brazil in the sertão, a largely barren, desert area in the nation’s northeast where thousands of Brazilians go to remake themselves and their lives. At the least, the films wants to re-balance the popular notion of Rio or Sao Paulo as the space or place where the nation is defined or defines itself. (Note the sameness and difference when Dora sets up her Central Station letter-writing business in Bom Jesus.)

–While the sertão is not particularly more welcoming than the predatory world of downtown Rio, where early in the film a security man shoots a teenager for shoplifting and causes hardly a ripple in the onlooking crowd, Salles makes it seem more open to development, to a remaking of relations between citizens and their environment than seems possible in the corrupt and corrupting confines of the national city.

–Salles notes purposeful changes in the film’s color palette: “the closer they get to the heart of the country, the more colors they start to perceive. So the idea of recuperating one’s identity is linked to the idea of having a ore wide-ranging sensorial palette as well.”

–The film effectively offers a traditional narrative, cued into melodramatic conventions. Though it repeatedly has Dora in particular doing, and tempted to do, immoral things (like not sending the letters she writes, effectively selling a child for a TV), it also endows her with a conscience that almost always has her try to correct her misdeeds and mistakes. In this respect, it is, and becomes increasingly, a fairly sentimental film, especially in its characterization and treatment of the 9-year old Josué.

–That said, it also offers a raw, unembellished look at the people and places of contemporary Brazil, the crowding, filth, insensitivity, casual violence, and ignorance and gullibility of its most impoverished citizens. (The extent of illiteracy alone allows Dora to make what seems like a reasonably comfortable, if always precarious, living.)

For Focus:

–Representation of evangelical Christians, starting with the truck-driver, and moving on to processions and house of miracles at Bom Jesus. What’s the purpose and effect of populating the sertão with religious enthusiasts and religious iconography? (Note biblical names of Josue’s brothers, Isaiah and Moises, and father Jesus. Note also how incredibly nice and welcoming they are.) Cinematography and point of view in depiction of huge, candlelit religious gathering.

–Dora as very complicated individual, very different from any character manufactured by Hollywood. A lonely retired teacher who eschews make-up but cheats the most naïve and gullible, illiterate individuals who pay her to write letters for them. What “state of the nation” does she represent? (When she calls Irene towards the end of the film, why does she tell her to sell her refrigerator, furniture, and TV? Is she thinking about staying on in Bom Jesus or North Star? If so, why does she leave?)

–The film spends very little time and attention in explaining gaps in logic and information: Does Josue live nowhere despite having a mother who apparently has a job and money and vacation time? Do the people whom Dora “jilts” out of Josue just let her get away with the money they gave her? When, later in the film, Josue has the bright idea to have Dora write letters for illiterates in North Star or Bom Jesus, where does she get the paper and the envelopes, much less the desk? There are other gaps as well but do any of these concerns matter in the end? Do we ever really think this search for father/family is going to end as a failed quest?

–How does this film finesse the tension between its rawness and realism and its sentimentalism & melodramatic moves? Note, e.g., the coincidence of Josue running back for the top, which precipitates Ana’s death at the start of the film and being gifted the top made by his brother Moises at the end. Note also that in spite of seemingly devastating losses and abandonment, Dora and Josue always seem to recover and find their way against all odds.

Viewing Notes: Neighboring Sounds (dir., Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2013, 131m)

Select Filmography: Kleber Mendonça Filho (b. 1968)

2019 Bacurau

2016 Aquarius

2012 Neighboring Sounds

Cast overview

Ana Rita Gurgel Ana Lúcia

Caio Almeida … Namorado

Maeve Jinkings Bia

Dida Maia … Marido

Felipe Bandeira Nelson

Gustavo Jahn … João

Irma Brown … Sofia

Mauricéia Conceição Mariá

Irandhir Santos … Clodoaldo

Yuri Holanda … Dinho

Grece Marques … Cleide

Alex Brito … Sidiclei

Nivaldo Nascimento … Fernando

Clebia Sousa … Luciene

W.J. Solha … Francisco

Reviews & Interviews:

Recife Breathes: Kleber Mendonça Filho on Neighboring Sounds

https://www.hammertonail.com/interviews/a-conversation-with-kleber-mendonca-filho-neighboring-sounds/

https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-kleber-mendonca-filho-neighboring-sounds/

https://www.slantmagazine.com/features/interview-kleber-mendonca-filho-and-juliano-dornelles-on-the-politics-of-bacurau/

Viewing Notes

–Neighboring Sounds is a film that integrates many different moods, many different rhythms. It has, as it were, no central character, rather a series of characters who reappear more often than others in the film, some isolated out from the others, some belonging to the security squad headed by Cloadaldo, some associated with the single extended family headed by Seu Francisco.

–In fact, it could be said that the seaside Recife neighborhood of mixed high rises and single-family homes is the film’s central character, and that the more ghostly setting of Seu Fancisco’s sugar mill, house, and land-holdings in rural Pernambuco haunts the film throughout, ultimately delivering the final blow. This is the place that is glimpsed in the pre-credits b/w sequence and where Joao and Sofia have lunch with Seu Francisco and where they explore the abandoned cinema house.

–The film very much invites viewer participation in figuring out relations between characters, spaces & events, though, unlike Amores Perros, it has no particular interest in colliding all the principal characters in some mutually determinative event (like the car crash). The material dealing with Bia, her children, her husband, and the annoying dog have no particular relation to the material dealing with Joao & Sofia, on the one hand, or with the security guards on the other, much less with Seu Francisco. Where the different characters and “events” do interact, however, is at the level of anticipating some kind of threat coming from outside the development’s walls, as the ominous sounds (and the little girl’s nightmare) anticipate.

–Like MK’s other films, this one is deeply bound up with associations of the Brazilian past with the present, with changes in government and government policies, and with movements upwards and down of Brazil’s social classes and with the increasingly aggressive drive for wealth at all costs.

–How is Joao and Joao’s privileged position in this world represented? Why do we suppose Sofia breaks off her relationship with him? How do you respond to Joao’s interaction with his long-time servant Maria and with her daughter Maria who takes her place?

–How is Dinho represented? What do you make of the aggressive position he takes toward the security guards?

–What are we to make of Bia, of her obsession with the barking dog, blowing weed through her vacuum cleaner? What do you make of Bia’s household, the behavior of her children, their taking special lessons in English and Chinese?

–How does the film render the sudden arrival and subsequent behavior of the security guards led by Clodoaldo mysterious? Were you shocked or merely surprised by the sudden turn things take at the end of the film?

–What do you make of the sounds of Neighboring Sounds, of the substitution of sounds for soundtrack?

From Aaron Cutler, Cinemascope reviews:

“The sense that we get of the high-rises João leases is of the past buried and new work built on top of it, with glass and steel insulating the edifices from any life outside. But much of the area seems designed with an eye towards self-enclosure”

“Neighboring Sounds leaves a lot unsaid by design, challenging the viewer’s assumptions as the characters question each others’.”

“There’s film history, with, as a guidepost (among other works), Eduardo Coutinho’s great 1985 documentary Twenty Years Later, which compares footage of the same campesinos shortly before and after Brazil’s military dictatorship. There’s cultural and political history in the portrait of a society expanding post-Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva), Brazil’s President from 2002 to 2010, who grew up as a campesino’s son himself. As well, subtly but indelibly, there is a sense of personal history. And there should be—the movie takes place around the director’s home.”

According to Mendonça Filho: “If you use music in cinema, you risk giving the viewer instructions. Audiences have been programmed how to react to films, and that’s bad. When you take music out, a part of the audience is absolutely baffled, because there’s only you and the film. You don’t have anyone saying, “It’s all right to laugh, to cry, it’s all right to ask, ‘What the fuck?’” When you don’t have this relation, an audience grows tense because it needs to develop an original reaction. “The sense that we get of the high-rises João leases is of the past buried and new work built on top of it, with glass and steel insulating the edifices from any life outside. But much of the area seems designed with an eye towards self-enclosure”

The greatest concentration of these noises occurs in a nightmare scene. There’s a large bag being dragged, and nobody knows what that is, and there’s a heavy piece of furniture that I dragged across the floor, and then I slowed the sound down a little bit. There’s the wheel of a supermarket cart. The sound had to open up narrative holes and at times increase the estrangement, but still satisfy as a wonderful piece of noise.”

According to Mendonca Filho, Neighboring Sounds is “very much about the weight of history and how people carry history on their back.”

CHILE

BATTLE OF CHILE

The Battle of Chile is a documentary film directed by the Chilean Patricio Guzmán, in three parts: The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie (1975), The Coup d’état (1976), Popular Power (1979). It is a chronicle of the political tension in Chile in 1973 and of the violent counter revolution against the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende. It won the Grand Prix in 1975 and 1976 at the Grenoble International Film Festival

Allende’s “Popular Unity” coalition was put into office with only a third of the popular vote. His efforts to nationalize certain industries were met with internal and foreign opposition, and Chile suffered economic deprivations.

In the election Allende makes gains to 43.4 percent of the votes, though the opposition bloc is strong too, up to 56 percent. The film has street interviews, speeches, the violent confrontations, the mobs and meetings, the parades with workers chanting. Part One finishes with newsreel footage from an Argentine cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen who was photographing street skirmishes. A soldier takes aim and kills the cameraman, and the image spins skyward.

Part Two – “The Coup d’état” begins with the right wing violence of the winter of 1973 (June is winter in the southern hemisphere) against the government. Army troops seize control of downtown Santiago – but the attempted coup is snuffed out in a few hours. “The film leaps from one group to another … It shows the different elements in the explosive situation with so much clarity that it’s a Marxist tract in which the contradictions of capitalism have sprung to life. We actually see the country cracking open. Step by step, the legal government is overthrown.”

Everybody in Chile seems to know the coup d’état is coming and talk about it openly – yet the people who have most to lose can’t get together enough to do anything. Allende’s naval aide-de-camp Arturo Araya is killed, and the camera moves around the funeral attendees – General Augusto Pinochet among them. In July, the truck owners, funded by the CIA, begin their long strike, which paralyzes the distribution of food, gasoline, and fuel, and there is a call for Allende to resign. Instead Allende holds a rally – around 800,000 people arrive, but they have no weapons. On September 11, the Navy institutes the coup d’état, and the Air Force bombs the state radio station. The palace is bombarded from the air. The chiefs of the junta on television are seen announcing they’ll return the country to order after three years of “Marxist cancer”.

The military established a junta that suspended all political activity in Chile and repressed left-wing movements, especially communist and socialist parties and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR). Pinochet rose to supreme power within a year of the coup and was formally declared President of Chile in late 1974. The Nixon administration, which had worked to create the conditions for the coup, promptly recognized the junta government and supported it in consolidating power.

In the first months after the coup d’état, the military killed thousands of Chilean leftists, both real and suspected, or forced their “disappearance”. The military imprisoned 40,000 political enemies in the National Stadium of Chile; among the tortured and killed desaparecidos (disappeared) were the U.S. citizens Charles Horman, and Frank Teruggi. In October 1973, the Chilean songwriter Víctor Jara was murdered, along with 70 other people in a series of killings perpetrated by the death squad Caravan of Death (Caravana de la Muerte). The government arrested some 130,000 people in a three-year period; the dead and disappeared numbered thousands in the first months of the military government.

See:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/03/26/pablo-nerudas-poetry-of-resistance/

Battle of Chile Part 1:

Battle of Chile Part 2

Viewing Notes: Machuca (dir., Andres Wood, 2004, 121m)

Select Director Filmography: Andres Wood (b. 1965)

2019 Araña

2011 Violeta Went to Heaven

2008 The Good Life

2004 Machuca

2001 Loco Fever

1999 El Desquite

1997 Historias de Fútbol

Select Cast:

Matías Quer … Gonzalo Infante

Ariel Mateluna … Pedro Machuca

Manuela Martelli … Silvana

Aline Küppenheim … María Luisa Infante

Ernesto Malbran … Father McEnroe

Tamara Acosta … Juana

Francisco Reyes … Patricio Infante

Alejandro Trejo … Willy

Maria Olga Matte … Miss Gilda

Gabriela Medina … Lucy

Luis Dubó … Ismael Machuca

Excerpts from Patricia Vilches on Machuca:

“Wood developed the script from personal experience, basing it on a radical educational experiment that took place at Wood’s own private school in Santiago, St. George’s (called St. Patrick’s in the film). Gerard Whelan, an idealistic U.S.-born priest who believed in the social goals of the UP, incorporated children from the poor economic sectors as students at St. George’s.”
“In Machuca Juana María, Pedro’s mother, valiantly raises her voice to tell a hostile audience that she left the countryside at the age of 15 to create a better world for her children. […] In this political battle, [she] momentarily hushes the antagonistic audience when she tells about her life growing up in the countryside as the daughter of a peon, a man who was always blamed for any loss sustained on the landlord’s hacienda. She explains that she came to the city hoping that her children would escape the constant blame: “We are always the guilty party.That’s how it is.” [In response] an elegant woman shouts: “Resentful woman! How dare you! Get yourself and all these people out of here!” And, looking at Father McEnroe, the mother continues: “Get all of these Marxists out of the school once and for all!”
A Chilean audience plagued by the heavy burden of classism since colonial times needed only to hear the boys’ last names to understand the great real and symbolic gap that separated them: Infante “conjures up aristocratic origins,” whereas Pedro’s family name derives from machucar, to bruise, pound or crush, implying physical activity typical of lower-class employment.
The various political rallies for the momios (mummies—conservatives) and upelientos (UPers—supporters of the Unidad Popular) show members of each political side jumping

up and down to demonstrate that they do not belong to the other side: “El que no salta es momio/de la UP” (Those who do not jump belong to the conservative/UP side).

In Machuca the sharp edges of political hatred are softened by the presence of Pedro, Gonzalo, and Silvana, a poor girl from the neighborhood who becomes Gonzalo’s first love. They play together, begin a sexual awakening, and turn political rallies on both sides into their own personal playgrounds. The film thus results in a fictionalized, toned-down Battle of Chile. Because the protagonists live somewhat outside of the ugly world that the nation has become, the film succeeds in permitting Chileans to confront past violence in the space of the cinema. Nonetheless, its release provoked instances of violence in movie theaters, which puzzled critics who had dismissed it as insufficiently questioning the past. The fights in the theaters underscored the fact that the past was a contested space and that the task of formulating a collective memory had been reopened.
Chileans who regained material goods or continued to prosper during the military dictatorship did not share the same past as those who had been oppressed. On this, Wood observes that one of the successes of the military was that for many Chileans human life became a secondary value.

Discussion Board Prompts/Suggestions for Discussion:

–Note how carefully Wood lays out his mise-en-scene, how he puts things inside the frame that are just as telling as what gets said in dialogues: political + promotional graffiti (“FIFA tells the world all is normal in Chile again”); posters on the walls of the Machuca household; Gonzalo’s Adidas shoes that Pedro tries on and which later possibly help save Gonzalo’s life; the sharing out of the Lone Ranger book; Pedro’s teeming shanty town neighborhood and tumbledown houses vs. Gonzalo’s suburban home and surroundings, etc.

–Note the comparatively quiet but legible ways in which Wood builds the growing pressure and intensity of the social conflicts that led to the coup of 9-11-73. How hard/easy is it to read the signs of a given character’s social and political affiliations? (Is it surprising that Isabel’s nasty boyfriend Pablo turns up later in an anti-Allende demonstration?) Note especially the pivotal role played by the gathering of parents and children that begins at around 69 minutes into the film. How differently does Wood present the statements made by Juana Machuca on the one hand and Gonzalo’s mother and father on the other?

–This scene is prepared for by the conflicts that repeatedly occur among the children themselves beginning early in the film when the “scholarship students” from the shanty-towns are introduced by Father McEnroe. Yet these same children are notably shown to rise as one to bid farewell to Fr. McEnroe after Pedro Machuca first breaks the ice. Is this possibly symptomatic of what Vilches suggests when she calls Machuca a “toned-down Battle of Chile”?

–Though Wood is keenly aware of how difficult the economic conditions were in Chile on the eve of the 9/11 coup, his film is clearly on the side of Father McEnroe, the Machucas, and the UPers. How is his political (and moral) positioning more indirectly felt by the way he chooses to characterize the household and behavior of the Infante family, especially in contrast to how he presents the interactions of Juana Machuca with her children and relatives but also with the characterization throughout the film of Silvana? What kind of death does Silvana suffer and how does it figure in how you read the aftermath of the film, with Gonzalo pedaling “home” to meet up with his mother in the new house she now appears to be living in with her much older (and richer) lover?

Viewing Notes: Tony Manero (dir., Pablo Larrain, 2008, 97m)

Select Director Filmography: Pablo Larrain (b. 1976)

2019 Ema

2016 Jackie

2016 Neruda

2015 The Club

2012 No

2010 Post Mortem

2008 Tony Manero

2006 Fuga

Cast

Alfredo Castro … Raúl Peralta

Amparo Noguera Cony

Héctor Morales Goyo

Paola Lattus … Pauli

Elsa Poblete … Wilma

Nicolás Mosso … Tomás

Enrique Maluenda TV host

Antonia Zegers TV producer

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24572742?seq=1

Viewing Notes:

–Director’s note: “With this story, I intended to take a harsh look at a society that is incapable of coming face to face with its recent past; a society whose hands are covered in blood but that tries to look stylish and trendy, dancing under flashy lights while ignoring others’ suffering; a country that turns its back on itself, in exchange for the dream of progress.”

–This is the first of three films Larrain made that examine social conditions in Chile. The first two, Tony Manero and Post-Mortem are set between 1973-78, that is, from the last days of the Allende administration to five years into Augusto Pinochet’s authoritarian state. The third in the series, The Club, assails the Chilean Catholic Church’s harboring of pedophilic priests.

—Tony Manero is set in the last days of the waning Saturday Night Fever (1977) disco craze and targets a variably shallow and predatory consumer culture that has displaced the communitarian social ideals and aspirations of the Allende years. In a complex kind of allegory, the film refers directly and not so indirectly at the US intervention in the coup against Allende and explores the “virus” of home-grown Chilean tyranny and perversity.

–Raul’s cultish dominance over his group of dancers and would-be lovers and homicidal rage are made analogous to the cult-like lockstep of Pinochet’s right-wing followers and the prevalence of state-sponsored violence. Human predation has become the rule of the day—violence and duplicity permeate every level of society. The ruthlessness of Raul’s quest is also made analogous to Pinochet’s.

–The TV show Raul prepares for is made up of imitators of mainly American musical and Hollywood celebrities. The cheap and tacky emulation of US consumerism offers a dark meditation on cultural identity, such that worship of Tony Manero becomes an indirect form of consorting with Chile’s American oppressor. The film throughout plays off and parodies Hollywood conventions of the obscure man’s climb to success.

For Focus:

–Filmic style: hand-held camera, often use to deliberately blurry effect.

—Mise en scene: shabby working-class neighborhood, flats, and cantina contrasted both with glossy TV studio and the upscale neighborhood that surrounds it (which we only glimpse in the film’s last minutes.)

–Note frequent staging of police presence, abductions, and human rights violations; Santiago very much made to seem an occupied city. This is also put into play with glimpses of very modest forms of resistance mounted by characters like Goyo and Pauli.

–Staging of violence: we see the shocking rage and suddenness of Raul’s homicides but the film doesn’t revel in the gore left behind, and occasionally assumes that a murder has been, or will be, committed w/out staging it.

Questions:

–How do establish one’s own point of view towards such nasty proceedings? How to engage at all with a repellent protagonist who occupies virtually every frame of the movie? What other perspective or point of view does the film occasionally allow us to inhabit and see out from?

–In addition to his homicidal rage and violence, Raul also behaves with deliberate perversity, bordering on sadism in several repellent instances in the film? What do we make of this? Is he driven in these instances by rage alone or is there something more deliberatively cruel at work?

–What do you make of the dance sequences that feature Raul, particularly in the show that he and his consorts perform in the cantina? How well does he perform on the TV show? How does he respond to the result of the contest?

–What, if anything, accounts for Raul’s sexual appeal to all three women in the film? What exactly are we to make of Raul’s unusual sexual transactions with Cony and Pauli? What accounts in particular for the self-pleasure Pauli seems to take in her encounter with Raul?

————————————

I want you to start preparing this assignment by recalling Quinton’s 2009 review of the film, particularly the three paragraphs reproduced below on the subject of strong films:

Tony Manero is a strong film. By “strong” I don’t mean a good film, not even a solid film. It’s strong in the sense that it could not pass unnoticed. In the first place, this is because it comes from a rather unnoticed country in terms of film production—that being Chile.

There is a whole new game being played in Latin American cinema. About ten years ago, Argentina emerged as the place in the region where something fresh and contemporary was taking place: Film-school graduates were making low-budget, art-house oriented productions. Then Brazil followed, with the emergence of Walter Salles, a pioneer figure whose films appeal to a more mainstream, international audience possessing a certain appetite for third-world exoticism on a Hollywood scale. After Salles came Fernando Meirelles, whose City of God (2002) pushed Salles’ middle-of-the road filmmaking towards a more violent and spectacular exploitation of the favela. It made a strong impression on other Brazilian filmmakers (seen in the over the top, fascistic Elite Squad), and almost everywhere, including in the US, where Meirelles directed his next film. In that sense, also, Tony Manero is strong.

But after a slow start, the Mexicans won the race. In a few years, a new generation of Mexican filmmakers established themselves on top of both the Cannes and Hollywood pyramids, and now acts as the greatest inspiration for regional cinema as a whole. Alejandro González Iñárritu struck a chord in 2000 with Amores perros (a strong film), Alfonso Cuaron became a perfect bilingual director, and, better than everybody else, Carlos Reygadas became the man to follow after his very strong films Japón (2002), Battle in Heaven (2005), and Silent Light (2007), three films charged with a powerful dose of blood, sex, and even religion (who can ask for anything more?). While Iñárritu and his Hollywood spiritual soap operas represent success in its most blatant form, Reygadas is the most important mentor for his fellow countrymen thriving on the festival circuit. These guys make tough, deep, and very Latin American films. Strong, so to speak.

Use these passages, particularly the last one, to arrive at a fair definition or description of what Quinton means by strong films. How does that definition seem to evolve when he begins his appraisal of Tony Manero?
By the end of this piece, does the designation of “tough, deep, and very Latin American” to “strong films” sound as positive as it may have sounded earlier?
Has linking Tony Manero—earlier called not a “good” or “even solid film”—to Amores Perros and Japón changed or clarified your own assessments of those films? Has Quinton himself merely clarified his opinion about the quality of “strong films”? What, in the end, is his opinion? What’s yours?

Viewing Notes: No (dir., Pablo Larrain, 2012, 118m)

Select Director Filmography: Pablo Larrain (b. 1976)

2019 Ema

2016 Jackie

2016 Neruda

2015 The Club

2012 No

2010 Post Mortem

2008 Tony Manero

2006 Fuga

Select Cast:

Gael García Bernal … René Saavedra

Alfredo Castro … Lucho Guzmán

Luis Gnecco … José Tomás Urrutia

Néstor Cantillana Fernando

Antonia Zegers … Verónica Carvajal

Marcial Tagle … Alberto Arancibia

Pascal Montero … Simón Saavedra

Jaime Vadell … Minister Fernández

Elsa Poblete … Carmen

Diego Muñoz … Carlos

Representative reviews:

https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/film-week-no

https://www.seismopolite.com/pablo-larrain-no-and-the-aesthetics-of-television

Discussion Notes:

–Both Larrain films focus on the Pinochet era that begins with the successful military coup that Augusto Pinochet and other conservative Chilean militarists successfully launched against the democratically elected, socialist government of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Released in 2008, Tony Manero isset in the late 1970s, a moment in time when Pinochet was actively terrorizing and brutalizing his political opponents, both real and imagined. Released in 2012, No is set in 1988 and recounts the beginning of the end of Pinochet’s reign of terror, which happens when a constitutional referendum to extend Pinochet’s term of office is soundly defeated by a vote of “No”. The one film—presented in a raw, unadorned, brutalist style—nararowly concentrates the wide-ranging personal and political violations perpetrated by Pinochet in the person and personal circuit of a small-time serial killerand celebrity-impersonator. The later film, though set only roughly 10 years later, seems to represent an entirely different reality, concentrated as it is on the work and lifestyle of Rene Saavedra, a young, attractive, successful designer of upbeat advertising campaigns and TV commercials. One of the few, genuinely ominous signs in its make-up is the casting of Alfredo Castro in the role of Lucho Guzman, No’s somewhat sinister Pinochet loyalist (and business partner of Rene), in which he appears to “ghost” his earlier appearance as the homicidal sociopath, Raul Peralta, in Tony Manero. Indeed, as the Sight & Sound review (see above) notes, this ghosting of the sociopath in the form of Alfredo Castro also haunts No’s ending when Rene rejoins his business partnership with Guzman. –In what other ways does the ghost of Alfredo Castro/Raul Peralta and the visible presence (through documentary footage) of Augusto Pinochet haunt Larrain’s No? To what extent does No manage to exorcise these demons of the recent Chilean past? To what extent does it fail to do so?

–This isn’t, in fact, the second but the third time that Larrain has cast Alfredo Castro in a disturbing role in a film focused on the Pinochet era. In between Tony Manero and No, Larrain made Post Mortem (2010), a film set at the exact time of Allende’s overthrow and murder in September, 1973, which focuses on a man who works in a pathology office and is charged with typing up Allende’s own autopsy report. While this film may seem to constitute a missing link between Tony Manero and No, its difference from the brooding atmosphere and negativity of Tony Manero is so negligible as to constitute little difference at all.

–According to Genaro Arriagada, director of the No campaign, “The film is a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality […] The idea that, after 15 years of dictatorship in a politically active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do,’ that is a caricature.” In response, Larrain claims that what he’s made is a feature-length movie, not a fact-based documentary, while also seeming to maintain his sense that marketing may well have had as much to do with the campaign’s success as did voter registration. Where and how in the film does this sense of the power of commercial marketing make itself most evident? How would you tie Larrain’s apparent belief in the influence of popular culture on the formation of people’s minds and opinions to his characterization of the serial-killer, celebrity-impersonator in Tony Manero? In what sense are both films mining some of the same imaginative terrain?

–Among the “contributions” Pinochet made to Chile during his 15-year reign was to break its ties to democratic socialism while submitting it to the dictates of authoritarian capitalism. How does the success of the No campaign fit itself into these parameters?

For Additional Focus:

–Style of filming and presentation; attempt to emulate rough video look of late 1980s; historically specific costuming, cosmetics, and set-design.

–Casting of Garcia Bernal as marker of film’s mainstream, commercial aspirations: why does Larrain choose to take this route out of preoccupation/obsession with Pinochet era?

–Shadows cast by police presence and aggressive responses to demonstrations against the technicolor gloss of the No campaign’s proceedings: Can violent suppression of dissidents clamoring for freedom and self-determination continue in the bright glare of TV lighting and TV commercial jingles and optimism?

4-PAGE CHILE PAPER ASSIGNMENT

Write a 4-page essay in response to one of the two following prompts:

One of the few, genuinely ominous signs in No’s make-up is the casting of Alfredo Castro in the role of Lucho Guzman, No’s somewhat sinister Pinochet loyalist (and business partner of Rene), in which he appears to “ghost” his earlier appearance as the homicidal sociopath, Raul Peralta, in Tony Manero. Indeed, this ghosting of the sociopath in the form of the actor Alfredo Castro also haunts No’s ending when Rene rejoins his business partnership with Guzman. –In what other ways does the ghost of Alfredo Castro/Raul Peralta, the ghosts of The Battle of Chile, and the visible presence (through documentary footage) of Augusto Pinochet haunt Larrain’s No? To what extent does No manage to exorcise these demons of the recent Chilean past? To what extent does it fail to do so?

–According to Genaro Arriagada, director of the No campaign, No “is a gross oversimplification that has nothing to do with reality […] The idea that, after 15 years of dictatorship in a politically active human rights movement, all of a sudden this Mexican advertising guy arrives on his skateboard and says, ‘Gentlemen, this is what you have to do,’ that is a caricature.” In response, Larrain claims that what he’s made is a feature-length movie, not a fact-based documentary, while also seeming to maintain his sense that marketing may well have had as much to do with the campaign’s success as did voter registration. Where and how in the film does this sense of the power of commercial marketing make itself most evident? How would you tie Larrain’s apparent belief in the influence of popular culture on the formation of people’s minds and opinions to his characterization of the serial-killer, celebrity-impersonator in Tony Manero? How do both films represent the power of US-influenced popular culture on the hearts and minds of Chileans? In what sense are both films mining some of the same imaginative terrain and to what effect?

MEXICO

Viewing Notes: Amores Perros (dir., Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, 2000, 153m)

Selected Filmography:

2021 Bardo

2015 The Revenant

2014 Birdman: Or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance

2010 Biutiful

2006 Babel

2003 21 Grams

2000 Amores Perros

Viewing Notes:

–First off, you should immerse yourselves in Smith’s account of the film, its director, its financial sponsors, its marketing and promotion techniques, its sound, soundtrack, and cinematography, etc. Amores Perros brings an unusual blend of art-house and commercial techniques to bear both on how it explores and exploits its subject matter. You might, in this respect, want to attend critically to how it manages to synthesize these techniques. Can a film as interested as this one is in commercial success also claim to tell us something truthful about the world it represents?

—Amores Perros is one of a series of recent films produced in Mexico (21 Grams) and other parts of Latin America (City of God) that appear to revel in fast-paced representations of urban squalor and ultra-violence. As opposed to the politically self-conscious products of the “third cinema” movement, they appear to be marketing these visions of squalor and violence to a “first world” audience, which, in turn, can take pleasure both in the raw excitement on display and in its own remoteness from such experiences. Indeed, many of the best recent Latin American film-makers Alfonso Cuaron, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and Fernando Mireilles, City of God and The Constant Gardener) have already made the leap Gonzalez Inarritu has himself just made into big-budget, Hollywood-financed productions. How do we reconcile this pattern with the occasional bows to mexicanidad of Amores Perros? Is Amores Perros an example of Latin American or Mexican cinema or a symptom of the increasing internationalization of commercial film-making?

–How Mexican is it? Someone interested in current conditions in Mexico City will get both an earful and an eyeful of one of the world’s largest cities. On this account, see Smith’s remarks on mexicanidad, on the relation of the film to popular telenovelas on the one hand, and to the style of American films like Pulp Fiction, Traffic, and Crash. Like the latter, Amores Perros seems interested in offering its audience a cross-section of views of different social groupings and levels of everyday experience: working-class (Octavio and his family), upper-middle class (Daniel and Valeria), corporate yuppies (Gustavo and Luis), and an educated man turned political radical turned hit-man turned vagrant (El Chivo). How—apart from the crucial car crash—does the film succeed in bringing these groups into shared focus? What role in particular does El Chivo play in embodying the film’s prevailing point of view? El Chivo (whose name may mean Billy Goat or Informer—also Scoundrel, Creep, Asshole [like cabron]), on one level represents a fairly recognizable late 60s, 70s social type—the alienated intellectual or professor who commits himself to violent radical politics. In his later incarnation as hit man, he’s presented as a cynical, morally indifferent executioner. When he decides to give up killing, he does so in the guise of a different kind of social legislator or enforcer. What’s that all about? How integral is his “journey” to the film’s overall aims and design?

–Why does the theme of competitive, predatory brothers figure so prominently in two of the film’s plot strands? And what about the roles played by fathers? Smith says fathers are absent from the film but he’s wrong—Daniel, Ramiro, & El Chivo are all arguably failed fathers but not necessarily because they all want to be, and Octavio tries very hard to pretend to want to play a paternal role he may not be ready for.

–Film’s construction of Mexico City; its implied commentary on class difference, on corruption, on law & order; its exploration of the more macho components of mexicanidad (what’s up with El Jarocho anyway? A jarocho is a person, item or style of music from Veracruz, though it also means “brusque, or disordered”); its elaboration of what could be called the chingon vs. chingada complex or dialectic (see below).

–Note that the film sensationalizes its representation of Mexico City and its inhabitants by representing not the commonplace experiences of everyday people but by subjecting its characters to extreme experiences of violence, corruption, betrayal, and hypocrisy. It’s easy, in this respect, to take the part for the whole and assume that the film is presenting a representative glimpse into the reality of contemporary urban life, instead of an intensified, possibly hallucinatory take on it. To gain some perspective on such notions, follow Smith’s lead and focus on the film’s use of sound, soundtrack, and “soundbridges” on the one hand, and its “skip-bleached” enhanced, hyper-vivid visuals on the other: that is, on the obviously “manufactured” dimensions of filmic experience.

–“Love’s a bitch”. Each of the film’s three narrative lines focuses on strained expressions of love and desire: Octavio’s effort to steal Susana away from Ramiro; Daniel’s effort to consolidate his affair with Valeria; and El Chivo’s effort to convey his love to his daughter, Maru. At least two of the men seem sufficiently devoted (“devoted” not seeming the right word to characterize what Octavio feels for Susana), but none of them succeeds in fulfilling their plans or desires. How much expressive and thematic weight do these strained relations carry in the film as a whole? Does love seem possible on the levels of Mexican society Octavio and Susana, and Daniel and Valeria inhabit?

–“Amor es perros/Love is dogs: Arguably the most devoted relationships Octavio, Valeria, and El Chivo maintain are those with their dogs. How do dogs function in the film as both objects of affection and vehicles of violence? How do the dogfights of the first section in particular function as metaphors of human relations?

–Technical details: Focus on light, lenses, color, sound, editing, montage, cinematography, sound, soundtrack, structure, framing, pacing, rhythm.

Notes on Octavio Paz’s take on mexicanidad in The Labyrinth of Solitude

1. Mexican Masks – Life as Combat

1. Everything Mexicans do constitutes a defensive mask to avoid opening themselves to others: hermeticism in both men and women.

2. Pretend to be something or someone else to avoid revelation.

3. Love is no remedy, because there is never revelation, only substitution of the image of love.

4. Deny existence to other and to themselves: Nobody, invisible, silent.

2. Day of the DEAD

1. Fiestas suspend normal time to allow the eruption of the usually repressed expression of emotion, of life—hence they are supposedly liberating and regenerative. “Fiesta denies society as an organic system of differentiated forms and principles, but affirms it as a source of creative energy . . . re-creation, the opposite of recreation. . .”

2. But Mexican fiestas are destructive explosions, without communion; like skyrockets: noisy explosions, but they disappear without producing or changing anything.

3. DEATH: meaningful in old religions, both Aztec and Catholic, but modern death is not–no personal death because there is no personal life.

3. The Sons of La Malinche.

1. Explore forbidden words for clues to Mexican character.

1. Chingar, to wound, kill, ruin, rip open, violate, fuck.

2. Gran Chingón: the Macho male—closed: Father.

3. Chingada: female, opened by male: Mother.

4. In Mexico you either Chingar or you are Chingado [life as combat].

2. Chingón similar to the Conquistador—all men of power in Mexico.

3. Christ is the positive Male: He sacrificed himself for the suffering people.

4. Christ equals Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor, who was killed by Cortes, the Chingón/Conquistador.

5. To return to Cuauhtémoc/Christ would constitute the resurrection of the lost connection to the pre-European Mexico.

6. Guadalupe, the Virgin Mother who consoles the orphaned Mexican, is opposed to the Chingada, the violated, abject mother, abject.

7. Chingada: the incarnation of the feminine condition, always open to violation.

8. In the Conquest, the Chingada was the historical figure of Cortes’ interpreter, La Malinche

9. In rejecting Cortes and Malinche, Mexicans reject their origins, and return to solitude.

============================

World staying tuned to Mexico telenovelas

Chris Hawley, Republic Mexico City Bureau

Sept. 23, 2004 12:00 AM, MEXICO CITY

Cheap, low-tech and effective, that’s the Mexican telenovela business, and it is succeeding wildly worldwide. Once dismissed as a Latin American curiosity, these shows, a hybrid between a soap opera and a miniseries, are gobbling up airtime in more than 100 countries and winning devotees from Russia to Ghana. Mexican telenovelas have helped make the Univision network the most popular channel in Phoenix, in English or Spanish, and the Mexican-owned channel Azteca America recently signed a deal with Cox Communications Inc. to bring its own telenovelas to hundreds of thousands of cable viewers in Arizona.

Venezuela, Brazil and Colombia also make telenovelas, but Mexico City is the capital of the genre. On any given day, at least a dozen telenovelas are being worked on in sound stages across the city. Shows air five or six times a week and last five to seven months. By Hollywood standards, they are dirt cheap to produce: $50,000 an episode for the standard telenovela, $100,000 for a top-notch episode with on-location shots, special effects and big-name actors. The big studios have been experimenting with more-dramatic camera work and slicker production techniques, but most still look like a basic soap opera.

TV Azteca, the second-largest producer of telenovelas, says its international sales of the shows are increasing 20 percent to 25 percent every year, with Eastern Europe an especially strong market. Televisa, the No. 1 telenovela studio and producer of recent hits Rubi and Woman of Wood, has Web sites in Russian and English to serve its foreign fans. “Next week, Rubi starts here in Serbia and Montenegro. I’m so happy! I’m dying to see that novela!” gushed a visitor at a telenovela discussion group on the Univision network’s Web site.

The shows seem to transcend political divisions, with viewers in Israel and its Arab neighbors enjoying the same series, said Marcel Vinay, TV Azteca’s vice president of international sales. In conservative Muslim countries, scripts are tweaked and footage edited to eliminate kissing or explain away out-of-wedlock pregnancies, he said. In Israel, the translators invent things to gloss over Catholic phrases and concepts, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained in a recent column on the telenovela phenomenon.

Rachel Leket-Mor, a Hebrew literature expert at Arizona State University, used to write the subtitles for The Gaze of a Woman, a popular Mexican telenovela that was imported by Israel. The words had to share screen space with Russian subtitles aimed at Israel’s Russian immigrants. “They talked very fast, and many times there was not enough space to get all the information into Hebrew,” Leket-Mor said. “But I think we did OK. It was very big there.”

Paul Julian Smith on telenovela: “The telenovela’s Third World-ism lies in the fact that (unlike Protestant US soaps) it prefers to reduce the rich to penury than to raise the poor to honest wealth…its victimism lies in that, contrary to popular belief, it fails to provide happy endings but rather condemns its highly coloured inhabitants to failure…Just so in Amores Perros” (39).

Viewing Notes: Y Tu Mamá También (dir., Alfonso Cuaron, 2001, 106m)

Select Director Filmography: Alfonso Cuaron (b. 1961)

2018 Roma

2013 Gravity

2006 Children of Men

2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2001 Y Tu Mamá También

1998 Great Expectations

1995 A Little Princess

1991 Sólo con tu pareja

Select Cast:

Daniel Giménez Cacho Narrator (voice)

Ana López Mercado … Ana Morelos

Diego Luna … Tenoch Iturbide

Gael García Bernal … Julio Zapata

Nathan Grinberg … Manuel Huerta

Verónica Langer … María Eugenia Calles de Huerta

María Aura … Cecilia Huerta

Giselle Audirac … Nicole Bazaine

Arturo Ríos … Esteban Morelos

Andrés Almeida … Diego ‘Saba’ Madero

Diana Bracho … Silvia Allende de Iturbide

Emilio Echevarría … Miguel Iturbide

Marta Aura … Enriqueta ‘Queta’ Allende

Maribel Verdú … Luisa Cortés

Juan Carlos Remolina … Alejandro ‘Jano’ Montes de Oca

Viewing Notes:

–Followed closely in the wake of Amores Perros as a breakthrough moment in the emergence of a new Mexican cinema. Like AP, Y Tu Mama is at once culturally specific—note naming allusions to Tenoch, Zapata, Cortes, Huerta, Carranza, etc. and references to political & economic collusion of upper-class—and designed to appeal to an international audience.

–Apropos of the naming allusions, one critic writes that by “having two Mexican men sexually exploit a Spanish woman, we might argue that this film attempts to reverse the trauma of Conquest by exchanging the nationalities of the two parties involved in the primal scene.” This argument, however, not only ignores the fact that the “two Mexican men” are themselves genealogically Spanish, not Aztec, but the possibility that Luisa Cortes is also exploiting them.

–The film self-consciously uses themes and audiovisual codes of international youth culture in particular—chief among them music video aesthetics and sex and drugs as part of consumer culture—to market itself globally.

–Mines conventions of coming-of-age road movie genre as well as touching bases with telenovela conventions: steamy, “unorthodox” sex; sudden news of fatal disease, cross-class conflicts and collisions, etc.

—This film is saturated in sex and sexuality, from its comedic double masturbation scene at the start to its group sex scenes at its culmination, which include a same-sex coupling. Yet the sex clearly means different things and serves different purposes for Luisa than it does for the boys, who are fueled by rivalry and competition, not to mention displacements of their generally suppressed desire for each other. How does any of this comment on, or substantiate, Octavio’s Paz’s theories about the chingon andthe chingada? Is Luisa a latter day Malinche, passive victim of or collaborator with two latter day phallic conquistadors? Or does Paz’s theory break down into something more singular and uncategorizable?

–How much is this film actually centered on Luisa, on her marriage, health, character, choices, and desires? Would it be a mistake to see her as a passive object of late adolescent male lust and not as an active subject and agent in her own right? Or does the film rather collaborate with the boys’ tendency to objectify sexual commerce as sexual conquest?

–Straying shots: Note how several times the camera takes us to places not immediately pertinent to the development of the narrative and to what effect, e.g., at 37:40 when it “strays” into the kitchen where the foodworkers are collected, displaying what’s enabling the pleasures of consumers and consumption in the front of the restaurant; later it will stray with Luisa into an encounter with an old indigenous woman selling trinkets from a roadside stand but which are also valued remains of past lives (specifically of a daughter who died “crossing Arizona for a better future”). Also note shot of Luisa’s empty apartment at 51:22 while she’s phoning Jano from somewhere on the road.

–Voiceover: this device fulfills in a more detailed, expansive sense what the straying shots suggest, the lives lived behind the foreground of the narrative—like drivers and pedestrians killed on Mexico’s treacherous highways; like the future development of places like “Boca del cielo” that will displace the family of Cuyo and Mabel from the freedom and beauty of the coast to the reduced life of a janitor. The voiceover offers pointed critiques of Julio and Tenoch and their families, of the political life of the nation, of social and class divides. What do you make of this device in particular? How deeply does it intrude itself into the filmic narrative?

–In his even more autobiographical 2018 film, Roma, Cuaron will return to a household not unlike Tenoch’s to make a film focused on the figure and memory of his family’s indigenous housekeeper and nanny. In this film, the nanny figure plays a more marginal role but also effectively substitutes for an ineffectual mother. As in the later film, she operates as a force of stability in a household setting that Cuaron also sets out to contrast with Julio’s more lower-class household. What do you make of these contrasts? What role does class difference play in the relationship of Tenoch and Julio throughout, especially with respect to how it has evolved at the film’s end?

Viewing Notes: Roma (dir., Alfonso Cuaron, 2018, 135m)

Select Director Filmography: Alfonso Cuaron (b. 1961)

2018 Roma

2013 Gravity

2006 Children of Men

2004 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2001 Y Tu Mamá También

1998 Great Expectations

1995 A Little Princess

1991 Sólo con tu pareja

Select Cast:

Yalitza Aparicio … Cleo

Marina de Tavira … Sra. Sofía

Diego Cortina Autrey … Toño

Carlos Peralta … Paco

Marco Graf … Pepe

Daniela Demesa … Sofi

Nancy García García … Adela

Verónica García … Sra. Teresa

Andy Cortés … Ignacio

Fernando Grediaga … Sr. Antonio

Jorge Antonio Guerrero … Fermín

José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza Ramón

Background, Contexts:

—https://time.com/5478382/roma-movie-mexican-history/

—https://slate.com/culture/2018/11/roma-corpus-christi-student-massacre-el-halconazo.html

—https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Halconazo

–Anatomy of a Scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jCa6tRUretU

Viewing & Discussion Notes:

—El Halconazo or “The Hawk Strike” massacre of 10 June 1971 (as noted in above entries) is a destination Cuaron wants his film and us to reach but, as the Richard Brody piece contends, Cuaron is less specific about developing this or his other temporal markers. We hear, and in part see, campesinos (farmworkers) setting fire to the Uncle’s woods during the New Year’s celebration. We also hear that Cleo’s mother’s land has been confiscated by the government, and witness a politician claiming that he is going to bring running water to the shanty town where Cleo goes to look for Fermin. But we hear nothing substantive about any of these issues or events.

–This isn’t necessarily a weakness or a problem in a film that is so clearly centered on a single household in the upscale Roma neighborhood and that seeks to pivot around the character of Cleo in particular, though, as Brody notes, the film doesn’t try very hard to take us inside Cleo’s mind, emotions, and personal history. Is this or is this not the problem Brody makes it out to be? Could Cuaron’s reserve about exposing more of Cleo’s thoughts and feelings be dictated by the feeling that someone like himself can know only so much about someone like Cleo—or his family servant Libo whom Cleo’s character is based on?

–Social lines clearly drawn between upper-middle class “whites” who employ and working-class “indigenous” Mexicans who serve them. How do aspects of this divide emerge in the course of the film, even when it appears that Cleo is herself taking part in family life? Examples?

–Marriage tensions: how are marital strains represented from the start? How are the lines of authority and affection drawn between Sr. Antonio and Sra. Sophia? How do tensions emerge from the simple act of driving the Galaxy into the driveway? (Note echoes here of marital tensions in upper-middle class marriage in Amores Perros?)

–Cinematography: Repeated use of tracking shots or slow pans (shots that literally travel from left to right or right to left, sometimes purposefully, sometimes aimlessly, to supply sweeping views of a street, the inside or outside of a house, to offer, almost inadvertently, visual insights and information). A tracking shot can also move forward through space, incrementally opening up what’s not yet apparent ahead of us, as in the powerful beach scene near the end of the film. What’s particularly notable about Cuaron’s tracking shots, which often supply movement to his long takes?

–Lots of visual “rhyming,” images that recur or repeat: dog jumping behind gate; laundry on roof; car banging against walls of driveway, scenes at movie theater, etc.

–Sustained set-piece scenes: Uncle’s New Year’s party; upstairs/downstairs; fires, woods burning; social collisions and social divides. Moviegoing with Fermin; demonstration of martial arts. Visit to Fermin’s paramilitary training ground. Downtown trip with abuela leading to massacre of protesters.

–Use of telenovela melodramatic conventions in dramatizing Cleo’s liaison with Fermin. Sex, pregnancy, desertion, rejection (“Chingada!”), killing in furniture store as Cleo’s water breaks, still-birth in hospital, mourning, saving of children. All this carried off in parallel relation with husband’s abandonment of family and later plundering of household furnishings.

–Is this a “state of nation” movie, or more a state of privileged, upper-middle class family movie?

Viewing Notes: Japon (dir., Carlos Reygadas, 2002, 122m)

Select Director Filmography: Carlos Reygadas, b. 1971)

2018 Our Time

2012 Post Tenebras Lux

2007 Silent Light

2005 Battle in Heaven

2002 Japón

Select Cast:

Alejandro Ferretis … The man

Magdalena Flores … Ascen

Yolanda Villa … Sabina

Martín Serrano … Juan Luis

Rolando Hernández … The judge

Bernabe Pérez … The singer

Fernando Benítez … Fernando

Viewing Notes:

First feature film; second film Battle in Heaven focuses on relationship between rich girl and her father’s chauffeur, Marcos, and on kidnapping by Marcos and his wife of neighbor’s child who dies b/c of their inattention; strong focus throughout on class divisions, sexuality, violence, and religion. Both films use only non-professional actors.

Plot synopsis:Man leaves city behind for remoteness of a place he knew as a child, a village in a canyon 150 km from Mexico City, where he plans to kill himself. He finds lodging with sweet tempered, religiously inclined old woman named Ascen (short for Ascension which, as she notes, refers to ascension of Christ into heaven as opposed to Assuncion, which refers to Virgin Mary’s assumption, body and soul, into heaven). Rough, brutish, insensitive villagers are given to long bouts of drinking pulque. Nephew—who while in prison masturbated to pictures of the Virgin—wants to tear down old woman’s barn to use stones to build a house for himself: this—apart from developing relations between old woman and Man, and Man’s coming to terms with his own suicidal resolve—constitutes primary source of tension and “plot” of film.

Major “events”: Man meets chief man of town, and is brought to Ascen’s house to negotiate lodgings; Man shows art books to Ascen, smokes pot with Ascen; Man gets drunk and rowdy with village drunks (borrachos); Ascen washes Man’s clothes in river; Man tries but fails to shoot himself (several times); Man lies down beside corpse of dead cow (overhead shot); children and Man watch horses mating; Man asks Ascen to have sex; Man “fornicates” Ascen; nephew and fellow brutes knock down barn and get drunk as Ascen serves them; borracho “sings song” with dog; overloading of stones on flatbed drawn by tractor; final shots. NOTE: critics already consider the long tracking shot that ends film as one of the most compelling moments of “pure cinema” ever filmed.

Topics for Discussion:

–Film profoundly focused on visual, as opposed to verbal, presentation. Camera often takes the Man’s subjectivity as its point of view; probably no coincidence that the Man seems to be an artist (a painter) with a deep interest in music (note walkman and earphones and soundtrack of highly “spiritual” music of Bach, Shostakovich, and Arvo Part). Camera just as often operates panoramically: sweeping 360 degree turns that start from the Man’s pov and end up with Man as part of picture; overhead shots apparently made from vantage point of small plane or helicopter. The visual orientation of film is immersive: effort to envelop viewer in landscape, which, depending on quality of light and time of day, seems either forbidding and barren, or lush and inviting. What does film seem to want/expect from viewer? How does it seek to position us with respect to the Man and his “quest”? How does it seek to position us with respect to Ascen? Why does camera linger so long over their faces? Why does it linger so long over the landscape and sky?

–Why does the Man want to “fornicate” Ascen? Why, in his quest for “serenity”, does sex seem so important to him? If it’s not just sex, but serenity or love or affection that he wants, why subject Ascen to his needs? Why, for her part, does she consent? Why does she also consent to having her barn torn down for her nephew, which will jeopardize the capacity of her own “hut” to withstand winter winds? Why, in other words, is Ascen so passive? Is her passivity meant to seem a virtue, a good thing, something saint-like? How do we read/respond to her role in film’s ending?

–In an interview, Reygadas says that Magdalena Flores, who plays Ascen, “was unaware of the fact that she wasn’t beautiful because she is unaware of popular conceptions of beauty. It was an ethical and cultural problem concerning her nudity, which was overcome by mutual trust.” How does this actor’s trust and lack of self-consciousness about matters that we take to be transparent (who is or is not physically attractive or beautiful) help us suspend our own matter-of-fact attitudes about what is or is not beautiful or appropriate over the course of viewing this film?

–What are we to think of the Man? Does he merely embody the self-absorption of the upper crust cosmopolitan, or does his choice of this place to die, and responsiveness to its beauty and to the beauty of Ascen, suggest something deeper, more valuable in his character? When he asks Ascen to have sex, is he exploiting her or seeing more in her than anyone else sees? Should he have tried to do more to prevent her nephew from destroying the barn? Should he have anticipated the concluding disaster and intervened?

–How does Japon compare/contrast with Amores Perros? Does it seem similarly interested in the subject of Mexican identity, mexicanidad? If so, what does it seem to suggest is essentially Mexican? How is its construction of the brutal villagers analogous to the construction of the dogfighters and thugs in Amores Perros? If one conceives of the Man as a character like El Chivo, what does the Man gain or find on his trip out of the city into the remoteness of the mountains?

–In an interview, Reygadas claims that after seeing the films of the Russian director Tarkovsky, he “realized that emotion could come directly out of the sound and the image and no necessarily from the storytelling. For the first time I saw in cinema that emotion need not come from a plot-driven climax; just the sound and the image could release…power and beauty.” Use this statement as a point of departure to explore and explain just how sound and image combine to “release power and beauty” in Japon. If you like, try to extend this claim to an analysis of the ability of sound and image to do much the same in Amores Perros. In particular, how does Japon’s visual orientation compare/contrast with that of Amores Perros? Which film (if either) uses sound & image in a more immersive or more manipulative fashion?

–How does Japon satisfy Reygadas’s claim that “a good spectator comes to the cinema to live, not to forget about life.” What does a “good spectator” live in and through Japon that would otherwise remain inaccessible to him or her?

JAPON CRITERION NOTES

Reygadas reasons analogically. His gaze in Japón relies on analogy to advance the recurrent themes of death, life, and desire. His camera transfers spatial observations of landscape and nature into ones that regard the mind. But also vice versa: landscape and nature are given qualities of mental states or events—a dusty, arid road winding up a mountain is also a plunge into an interior vacuum and an emotional exhaustion; a rainfall is also a discharge of neurological surplus. In other words, in Japón, land and nature are endowed with a kind of soulfulness, and interiority is materialized in space.

HORSES—CHILDREN WATCHING

In a subsequent scene—the one that is maybe the film’s most difficult to stomach—the protagonist has asked Ascen to lend herself for sexual intercourse with him, and she has agreed. We see her aged naked body sitting on a wooden bed, and then him, aged but not as much, standing before her at the foot of the bed. We see her arrange her hair. And him, breathing more heavily. The scene directly follows one that takes place inside a church, during the Eucharist, when the sacramental bread and wine are being consecrated (signaling the moment in which they are being transubstantiated into the body of Christ before they are offered). Then we see and hear him, giving her instructions—lie down, like this, like that, not like this, turn around, put your arm there and your leg here, move to the side, kneel down, raise your hip. We see the man’s relentless drive toward the fulfillment of desire at the expense of anything and anyone, lost in the height of his heat. We see the woman complying, poised and a little skeptical—but her poise seems to reveal a kind of effort, an exercise of will, or maybe of the suppression of will. Or what is really happening? In the end, he breaks into tears and she comforts him mildly, the two of them naked on the bed, somewhat analogous to the bodies of two different representations of Christ: the Christ of suffering and the Christ of sacrifice. It’s an almost unbearable moment to watch. But we watch. And how are we different, as spectators, from the children watching the mare and stallion? How should we reconfigure a notion of ourselves, seeing ourselves seeing?

Japón heralded the arrival of a new Mexican cinema—one that was neither navel-gazing nor made for export. It looks at the world with a kind of foreign gaze, inasmuch as it is full of perplexity. It doesn’t show, reveal, or impose a view but rather observes and inquires and transmits ambivalence. It questions the way we view a film—and ultimately the way we take stances in the world beyond film. It transforms discomfort into a poetics and an ethics of viewing. It transfers responsibility from the maker to the observer, from the director to the audience. The question with Japón, as with the rest of Reygadas’s filmography, is not what it’s about but what the film does—to us, in the deepest of our emotional strata and our innermost neurological wirings.

MARVELLY

Unlike the psychological realism of present-day motion pictures, Carlos Reygadas joins an elite league of directors who champion a transcendental style of filmmaking or “slow cinema”, which is hallmarked by its focus on nominal plot and dialogue, panoramic landscapes and diegetic acoustics, coupled with an emphasis on paying attention to the here and now in a quest for absolute truth and the meaning of our very existence.

REYGADAS

My goal is to bring out the individuality of each person or object and to capture something of their essence. I’m not interested in filming the mask. This is why you see the particular bodies in the films. If they are not ‘conventional’ —if they are considered old, ugly or fat—I couldn’t care less; they are all people and they are all equally beautiful. Filming people as they are is my way of showing them respect.

DISCUSSION BOARD #3: SOUND & IMAGE IN JAPON (250-300 WORDS)

–In an interview, Carlos Reygadas claims that after seeing the films of the Russian director Tarkovsky, he “realized that emotion could come directly out of the sound and the image and not necessarily from the storytelling. For the first time I saw in cinema that emotion need not come from a plot-driven climax; just the sound and the image could release…power and beauty.” Use this statement as a point of departure to explore and explain just how sound and image combine to “release power and beauty” in Japon. Why does the camera linger so long over the faces of the Man and Ascen? What does Reygadas want us to see into and about them? Why also does the camera linger so long over the landscape and sky? How does the film’s soundtrack contribute to the “release” of “power and beauty,” especially in the long tracking shot that ends the film, which some consider one of the most compelling moments of “pure cinema” ever filmed?

Please feel free to use screen captures/screen grabs to illustrate or ground your commentary.

Viewing Notes: Gueros (dir., Alonso Ruizpalacios, 2014, 106m)

Select Filmography: Alonso Ruizpalacios (b. 1978)

2018 Narcos: Mexico (TV Series) (2 episodes)

2018 Here on Earth (TV Series) (2 episodes)

2018 Museo

2014 Gueros

2008 Café paraíso (Short)

Select Cast:

Tenoch Huerta Sombra

Sebastián Aguirre … Tomás

Ilse Salas … Ana

Leonardo Ortizgris … Santos

Raúl Briones … Furia

Laura Almela … Isabel

Adrian Ladron … Moco

Alicia Laguna … Esperanza

Camila Lora … Aurora

Sophie Alexander-Katz Mamá Joven

Alfonso Charpener … Epigmenio

Alonso Ruizpalacios … Doctor Ibarra

Notes

–The film is mainly set in and around the campus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) a few months into what would become a nearly 10-month long student strike to protest what the strikers considered an unaffordable rise in tuition. The film’s tone or attitude towards the strike and striking students tends to be indifferent, at times verging on the skeptical, throughout, despite Ana being one of the strike’s leaders and a clearly partisan underground radio DJ as well. (Sombra and Santos initially claim that they are “on strike against the strike,” though this effectively means that they do absolutely nothing constructive with their time.) See:

–As indicated above, this film is primarily light-hearted and humorous. It is effectively framed by Tomás dropping a water balloon from the top of an apartment building on a toddler’s head (which eventuates in his being exiled to Mexico City by his irate mother) and near the end by a younger boy dropping a concrete block through the windshield of Santos’s car (no one gets hurt). In between, much of the film takes us on a tour of strike headquarters and much of Mexico City as the expanded group of four seeks out the legendary musician Epigmenio Cruz. It becomes, in a sense, a combination quest narrative and road movie, whose circuit is fairly narrow and whose objective is as indifferent to them as they are to the strike. (Note that we never hear a sound of Epigmenio’s music in the course of the film, only songs that may suggest what it sounds like.)

–In the process, we get some unusual takes on everyday life in the big city, including why our group is called gueros (not necessarily b/c they are light-skinned) and how one’s expectations about others’ violent intentions can be misplaced. It would be especially good for you to assemble a list of things, people, and places that pass before our eyes in the film’s mise en scene, especially for how these compare with what’s put on display and into circulation in Roma, a film set in an upper-middle class milieu that also integrates material from a considerably more violent strike in 1971.

–Although this film barely operates as a “coming of age” film, it does offer Tomás a range of experiences that he would not likely encounter back home with his mom in Veracruz. The quest for Epigmenio is very much his quest, though its content and contours are best explained in a solemn speech his brother Fede (Sombra) delivers late in the film. In this respect, it echoes from a critical distance the more sustained “coming of age” themes of our two films by Alfonso Cuaron, Y Tu Mama & Roma.

COLOMBIA

Viewing Notes: Embrace of the Serpent (dir., Ciro Guerra, Colombia, 2015, 125m)

Select Director Filmography:

2019 Waiting for the Barbarians

2018 Birds of Passage

2015 Embrace of the Serpent

2009 The Wind Journeys

2004 Wandering Shadows

Select Cast:

Nilbio Torres … Young Karamakate

Antonio Bolivar … Old Karamakate (as Tafillama-Antonio Bolivar Salvador)

Jan Bijvoet … Theo

Brionne Davis … Evan

Miguel Dionisio Ramos Manduca (as Yauenkü Miguee)

Luigi Sciamanna … Priest Gaspar / El Missionero

Nicolás Cancino … El Mesias

Background, Context:

–Film takes much of its plot (such as it is) from the diaries of German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Theo in the films) and accounts of the later journey to the area by ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes in the early 1940s. It focuses on the historic abuses committed against Amerindians by Spanish conquistadors and colonizers and especially on the brutal and murderous exploitation of Amerinidians by the rubber barons in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. It also turns on the idealization of Amerindian ritual and religious practices, particularly those having do with the use of indigenous plants for their healing and hallucinogenic properties. In so doing, it features one character, the indigenous shaman Karamakate, as a bridge between the journeys to the Amazon of “Theo” in 1909 and “Evan” in 1940. Karamakate is played by two differently aged characters. “Doubling” also figures in the two visits made to a place called “the Mission” by Karamakate with his two different clients in 1909 and 1940, respectively.

Terms, Symbols, Definitions:

—Leishmaniasis, the disease killing the Messiah’s wife, is caused by parasites that are spread by the bite of certain types of sandflies. All forms do have skin ulcers as a symptom.

–The ‘serpent’ in the film’s title refers to the Amazon River that flows through South America, winding its way across like a snake. Karamakate even refers to the river as the “son of the anaconda.”

–The indigenous languages spoken in the movie are Cubeo, Wanano, Tikuna and Uitoto (pronounced Wee-toto).

—Yakruna: As depicted in the film, both explorers are searching for yakruna, but for different medicinal purposes: “Theo” is physically sick and yakruna is the only cure, while “Evan” is metaphysically ill and cannot dream. For both, the fictional yakruna represents a plant that Western scientists need and that only the Amazonian natives know the power of. According to Karamakate, the sacred plant was very important to the Cohiuano because it was used to make caapi, or ayahuasca, which induced dreams in those who consumed it, and these dreams were what guided the shamans. Shamans would meet with the spirit “Master of Caapi,”and have visions of the ancestral anaconda. Caapi, ayahuasca, is a decoction with a long history of hallucinogenic use and status as a “plant teacher” among the indigenous peoples of the Amazon rainforest.

—Mambe is a sacred, ancestral medicine from the Amazonia region of Colombia. Mambe coca is made of freshly harvested coca leaves and the ashes of Yarumo. Sometimes this green powder is also called Jiibie. There are several tribes who carry on the tradition of mambe coca in Colombia.

—Caboclo: A caboclo is a person of mixed Indigenous Brazilian and European ancestry (the most common use), or a culturally assimilated or detribalized person of full Amerindian descent.

—Jaguars (and shamans): Shamans often associate the jaguar as a spirit companion or nagual, which will protect the shamans from evil spirits and while they move between the earth and the spirit realm. The jaguar is said to possess the transient ability of moving between worlds because of its comfort both in the trees and the water, the ability to hunt as well in the nighttime as in the daytime, and the habit of sleeping in caves, places often associated with the deceased ancestors.

Notes, Questions:

— The aim of this film is at once to celebrate the biodiversity of the Amazon and its inhabitants and to lament the destruction of the same by North and South Americans alike. Though fact-based, this film takes many liberties with the historical record, most of these concentrated on defending and promoting Karamakate’s point of view; these include his rage at whites and caboclos alike as well as his suspicions about “Evan,” who is presented as searching for a better quality of rubber to support the allied war effort at the start of WW2. Evan’s character was otherwise based on the real-life individual, Richard Evans Schultes, whose motivations couldn’t have been more consistent with the respect for the sacred plants of the indigenous people Karamakate advocates.

–What do you make of the effect of the alterations of the historical record Guerra makes in his film? In what other ways does the film direct us to identify with Karamakate’s point of view, even when he and it seem to be at their most fanatically extreme (such as forbidding Theo to eat fish when it is clear that he will die without better nutrition)?

–Rubber as an abundant resource and as a sacred commodity for European and North American industry, commerce, and transportation competes with caapi’s status as a sacred source of wisdom and spirituality for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, with the search for the one generating the destruction of the other, along with the peoples and cultures that depend upon it. How is this competition staged and represented in the film’s double narrative?

FROM Santasil Mallik: https://brightlightsfilm.com/native-eye-embrace-serpent-2016-ciro-guerra-photography-postcolonial-documentary/#.XyRY1RNKiL8

— “The reason why director Guerra chose to shoot the film in black and white illustrates the futility of the camera as a Western eye. He learned that the Amazonians have fifty different names for the colour green. Realising the inability of the camera to articulate the varied details, textures, and nuances of greenness, he decided to abandon the idea of shooting it in colour. This strategy invites the audience to fill the frame with their imaginations regarding the greenness of the Amazon, for the director claimed, “what we imagine would certainly be more real than what I could portray.”

–“On his way to help Theo, he encounters and registers the perspectives of colonized workers in Amazonian rubber plantations, the Christianisation and torture of native children, and Theo’s mission for anthropological knowledge, only to despair in the end to find his native rituals colonised and appropriated. But many years later, in Karamakate’s second encounter with ethnologist Evans, the scene starts with the close-up shot of a rock mural being painted by Karamakate. Here he inscribes his own narrative in contrast to the photographic “truth” taken by earlier ethnographers. This scene of focusing on the rewritten “history” of the natives just after the metaphorical creation scene almost marks a resurrection of tribal agency.”

–“However, after manoeuvring Evans in the process of rediscovering his own narrative, he demands that Evans throw away his luggage “of knowledge gathered” and destroy the modes of production that generate ethnographic knowledge, among which the primary device is the camera. He not only eliminates the colonizer’s strategies of visual narratives but also re-inscribes their version of Amazonian myth in the colonizer’s consciousness. Here Karamakate uses the indigenous plant “caapi” to induce psychedelic dreams in Evans. He demonstrates the origin and the timelessness of his tribe’s own narrative, a narrative that is beyond the spatio-temporal dynamics of Western cosmology and that needs a divine level of inebriation through the course of a ritual preceding the consumption of the drink. However, unlike the objective language of early-twentieth-century photographic practices, Karamakate’s caapi “trip” is based purely on subjective suggestiveness, where one must “believe” in the traditional values in order to visualise and experience the cultural voice of Amazonians. Among many Amazonian forest societies the mechanism of cultural and biological survival is carried out through the “continuous cycle of ritual creation, destruction and re-creation,” and these are often manifested through the use of local drug-induced trance visions where they engage with their “mythical” past, and as Dolmatoff affirms, “the officiating shaman can adaptively orient the interpretations of the visions people project upon the vivid background of their hallucinations.”

–For an understanding of Guerra’s use of the concept of the chullachaqui, see

http://screenprism.com/insights/article/in-embrace-of-the-serpent-what-is-the-concept-of-the-chullachaqui

ADDITIONAL SECONDARY RESOURCES:

https://www.culturalweekly.com/embrace-serpent-tale-metamorphosis/

Falling into the Embrace of the Serpent by Deborah Shaw

Antonio Bolívar, shaman of Embrace of the Serpent dies from coronavirus

https://muse-jhu-edu.muhlenberg.idm.oclc.org/article/643315/pdf

RUBBER TALK

Rubber is one of the most important products to come out of the rainforest. Though indigenous rainforest dwellers of South America have been using rubber for generations, it was not until 1839 that rubber had its first practical application in the industrial world. In that year, Charles Goodyear accidentally dropped rubber and sulfur on a hot stovetop, causing it to char like leather yet remain plastic and elastic. Vulcanization, a refined version of this process, transformed the white sap from the bark of the Hevea tree into an essential product for the industrial age.

With the invention of the automobile in the late 19th century, the rubber boom began. As demand for rubber soared, small dumpy river towns like Manaus, Brazil, were transformed overnight into bustling centers of commerce. Manaus, situated on the Amazon where it is met by the Rio Negro, became the opulent heart of the rubber trade. Within a few short years Manaus had Brazil’s first telephone system, 16 miles of streetcar tracks, and an electric grid for a city of a million, though it had a population of only 40,000. Vast fortunes were made by individuals, and “flaunting wealth became sport. Rubber barons lit cigars with $100 bank notes and slaked the thirst of their horses with silver buckets of chilled French champagne. Their wives, disdainful of the muddy waters of the Amazon, sent linens to Portugal to be laundered…They ate food imported from Europe…[and] in the wake of opulent dinners, some costing as much as $100,000, men retired to any one of a dozen elegant bordellos.” The citizens of Manaus “were the highest per capita consumers of diamonds in the world.”

The opulence of the rubber barons could only be exceeded by their brutality. Wild Hevea trees, like all primary rainforest trees, are widely dispersed, an adaptation that protects species from the South American leaf blight which easily spreads through and decimates plantations. Thus, to make a profit, the barons had to acquire control over huge tracts of land. Most did so by hiring their own private armies to defend their claims, acquire new land, and capture native laborers. Labor was always a problem, so barons got creative. One baron created a stud farm, enslaving 600 Indian women whom he bred like cattle. Other barons like Julio Cesar Arana simply used terror to acquire and hold on to Indian slaves. Indians captured usually submitted because resistance only meant more suffering for the families. Young girls were sold as whores, while young men were bound, blindfolded, and had their genitals blasted off. As the Indians died, production soared: in the 12 years that Arana operated on the Putumayo River in Colombia, the native population fell from over 30,000 to less than 8,000 while he exported over 4,000 tons of rubber earning over $75 million. The only thing that stopped the holocaust was the downfall of the Brazilian rubber market.

The Brazilian rubber market was crushed by the rapid development of the more efficient rubber plantations of Southeast Asia.

SEE https://lab.org.uk/the-putumayo-atrocities/

1907 account of Putomayo atrocities

“The chiefs of sections…all impose upon each Indian the task of delivering 5 arrobas (about 75kg) of rubber every fabrico (a 3-month period). When the time comes to deliver the rubber, these unhappy victims appear with their loads upon their backs, accompanied by their women and children, who help them to carry the rubber. When they reach the section, the rubber is weighed. They know by experience what the needle of the balance should mark, and when it indicates that they have delivered the full amount required, they leap about and laugh with pleasure. When it does not, they throw themselves face downwards on the ground and, in this attitude, await the lash, the bullet or the machete…They are generally given fifty lashes with scourges, until the flesh drops from their bodies in strips, or else are cut to pieces with machetes. This barbarous spectacle takes place before all the rest, among whom are their women and children”.

1903

“Victor Macedo, the manager of La Chorrera, is one of those wretched assassins who usually gives free rein to his criminal instincts: he enjoys burning and killing the peaceful inhabitants of the jungle. One of the acts of ferocity committed by these wretched enemies of human kind… took place during the carnival of 1903 (it would have been in February), and it was an abominable and horrible crime. Unfortunately, around 800 Ocaina Indians arrived in La Chorrera to hand over the products they had harvested… After these were weighed, the man who led them, Fidel Velarde, picked out 25 of the men, whom he accused of laziness. This was the signal for Macedo and his accomplices to order that sacks dipped in gasoline be placed on the Indians like a tunic and set on fire. The order was dully obeyed and one could see the dreadful image of those miserable (Indians) screaming loudly and piteously as they ran towards the river hoping to save themselves by plunging in, but all of them died”.

DISCUSSION BOARD

Please respond to any one of the following prompts in the form of a 250-300 word posting. Should you prefer to pose and respond to a different question of your own, please feel free to do so.

What do you make of the effect of the alterations of the historical record Guerra makes in his film? In what other ways does the film direct us to identify with Karamakate’s point of view, even when he and it seem to be at their most fanatically extreme (such as forbidding Theo to eat fish when it is clear that he will die without better nutrition)?

Rubber as an abundant resource and as a sacred commodity for European and North American industry, commerce, and transportation competes with the status of caapi (the “real” name of yakruna) as a sacred source of wisdom and spirituality for the indigenous peoples of the Amazon, with the search for the one generating the destruction of the other, along with the peoples and cultures that depend upon it. How is this competition staged and represented in the film’s double narrative? Why does Guerra change Evan’s quest for the latter into a search for a better version of the former?

Why film one of the most colorful places on earth in black and white? According to Santasil Mallik, “The reason why director Guerra chose to shoot the film in black and white illustrates the futility of the camera as a Western eye. He learned that the Amazonians have fifty different names for the colour green. Realising the inability of the camera to articulate the varied details, textures, and nuances of greenness, he decided to abandon the idea of shooting it in colour. This strategy invites the audience to fill the frame with their imaginations regarding the greenness of the Amazon, for the director claimed, “what we imagine would certainly be more real than what I could portray.” How convincing do you find this account? What danger does Guerra court by filming in a style most viewers associate with a long-ago superseded technology of the past?

What understanding of the concept of the chullachaqui do you—and Karamakate—come to over the course of the film? How does Karamakate become false, and true, to his “real” self?

SUPPLEMENTAL READING & RESOURCES

Frederick Luis Aldama, Mex-Cine: Mexican filmmaking, production & consumption (ebook)

Alberto Elena & Marina Díaz López, The Cinema of Latin America

David William Foster, Queer Issues in Contemporary Latin American Cinema

Eduardo Galeano. Century of Wind, vol 3 of Century of Fire

Stephen Hart, Latin American Cinema (ebook)

Raphael Hernandez Rodriguez, Splendors of Latin American Cinema

Michael Monteon, Latin America and the Origins of is 21^st Century (ebook)

Paul Schroeder Rodriguez, Latin American Cinema: a Comparative History (ebook)

Eduardo Angel Russo, The Film Edge: Contemporary Filmmaking in Latin America

Deborah Shaw, Contemporary Cinema of Latin America

Paul Julian Smith, Amores Perros (BFI Modern Classics)

ONLINE DATABASES & RESOURCES

For books on world/global cinema: http://subjectguides.library.american.edu/c.php?g=179016&p=1176490

For film production information, critical reviews, and user reviewers:

http://www.imdb.com/ and https://www.mrqe.com/

Thomas Cartelli

LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

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