1. Camera lucida Jose Carlos Avellar 2. Footprints: Risks and Achievements in New Argentine Cinem... more 1. Camera lucida Jose Carlos Avellar 2. Footprints: Risks and Achievements in New Argentine Cinema David Oubina PART I: RETURNS OF THE REAL: RE-ENACTMENT, MEMORY, AND THE UNCANNY 3. Documentary Cinema and the Return of Past Events Andrea Franca 4. Re-Enactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema Ivone Margulies 5. The Return of the Natural: Landscape, Nature and the Place of Fiction Edgardo Dieleke 6. Beyond Reflexivity: Acting and Experience in Leon, Rejtman and Coutinho Joanna Page 7. The Scene and the Inscription of the Real Cesar Guimaraes PART II: ARCHIVES OF THE PRESENT 8. Global Periphery Ivana Bentes 9. Exploding Buses: Jose Padilha and the Hijacking of Media Tom Cohen 10. December's Other Scene: New Argentine Cinema and the Crisis of 2001 Jens Andermann 11. Archival Images - Memories of Labor: Citation, Recycling and Appropriation in Contemporary Argentine Cinema Mariano Mestman 12. In Praise of Difficulty: Notes on Realism and Narrative in Contemporary Argentine Film Domin Choi 13. The I as Other: the Real, the Archive and the Witness Alvaro Fernandez Bravo 14. The Documentary Between the First and the Third PersonL Gonzalo Aguilar
Este número de revista Artelogie parte de la idea que las representaciones artísticas de la natur... more Este número de revista Artelogie parte de la idea que las representaciones artísticas de la naturaleza en América Latina dan cuenta de una construcción cultural matizada por los procesos de colonización europea del continente desde el siglo XV y por su posterior formalización como estados modernos desde comienzos del XIX. Las imágenes de lugares naturales y culturales producidas en este período representan la experiencia directa o diferida de artistas -mayoritariamente extranjeros- que contribuyeron a crear un imaginario determinado por lo exótico, lo exuberante, lo sublime o lo pintoresco. La percepción de la naturaleza toma forma a partir de modelos estéticos de tradición europea, entrando en tensión, en diálogo o en combinación con las culturas locales. Así, conforman patrones epistemológicos (estéticos y científicos) de apropiación de la realidad particulares a la región. Les hypothèses de départ présentées dans ce numéro de la revue Artelogie partent de l’idée suivant laquelle ...
If film has been a way of mapping Latin America for viewers both national and foreign, landscape ... more If film has been a way of mapping Latin America for viewers both national and foreign, landscape has simultaneously represented a resource for this “cartographic cinema” (Conley) and an alternative visual regime of space and place. Landscape, this essay argues, has provided Latin American cinema with a form of self-reflexivity about its own spatial operations and their symbolic political and cultural valences. Rural locations in particular offered both a screen onto which national and continental narratives of origin could be projected and a way of resisting these by drawing out the singularity of the local. After briefly discussing the role of landscape in silent and early sound film, I move to sketch out its key importance for the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and finally to contrast the latter's aesthetics of space and place with those of twenty first-century films informed, I argue, by a critical “neo-regionalism.”
Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America, 2020
Twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals from the provincial interior, often combining in t... more Twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals from the provincial interior, often combining in their professional and intellectual lives different forms of expertise ranging from the humanities to medicine and the natural sciences, developed a prescient and idiosyncratic way of reflecting on the extractive frontiers advancing from the region’s political and economic centers. Taking as its sample case the essayistic writings from the 1930s of two authors from the Argentine Northwest—Bernardo Canal Feijóo and Orestes Di Lullo—this chapter argues that, in their attempt to reflect the social and cultural impact of deforestation, soil erosion and drought, these provincial intellectuals came up with a prescient and hybrid mode of writing and thinking, the urgency of which we are only beginning to understand today: a natural history of the Anthropocene. Thus, the chapter also argues for a re-appraisal of Latin American regionalism as an indispensable reference for a political ecology in o...
It must have been a strange, indeed uncanny, sight to any wanderer accidentally traveling through... more It must have been a strange, indeed uncanny, sight to any wanderer accidentally traveling through the area. For there in the clearing, illuminated by the sparkling campfire against the dark masses of the forest and the mountains of the coast fading in the gloomy dusk, the bulk of a human torso bent over the flames where some small game was roasting. But it would not have been so much the man, whose almost certainly dark features now became visible as he looked up again, observing the thicket, who would have made our accidental witness freeze with fear. Much more terrifying, surrounding man and campfire amid a strange array of boxes and bags, would have been the great number of animals, of birds, foxes, and lizards, standing motionless, under a spell that froze them in the midst of a leap, or spreading their wings, as if bewitched in the very moment they were trying to escape from this fearful site—as, almost certainly, our solitary wanderer would have done by now. The dark magic wor...
No parece casual que el término ‘emergencia’ detente, en español y portugués, un tamaño potencial... more No parece casual que el término ‘emergencia’ detente, en español y portugués, un tamaño potencial crítico, especialmente ahora que nos enfrentamos, en toda América Latina, una vez más, con formas catastróficas de cambio. El momento histórico que atestiguamos, a mi parecer, más que un mero colapso de los desarrollismos neokeynesianos impulsados por la caída en los precios de las commodities o una restauración del neoliberalismo al estilo de los noventa, asiste a la emergencia de regímenes militantemente reaccionarios, basados en novedosas articulaciones de un consumismo resentido, provocado incansablemente por oligopolios comunicacionales con agendas transnacionales y geopolíticas vinculadas al capitalismo financiero.
Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially fo... more Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America. Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?
Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium, 2016
Intersubjective performance has opened new avenues of inquiry for understanding the documentary “... more Intersubjective performance has opened new avenues of inquiry for understanding the documentary “pact” between the filmmaker and his or her object of representation. This chapter analyzes a series of Brazilian documentaries concerned with subjectivity, personhood, and its particular implications for the documentary encounter. These films are just as much about their subjects as they are about (documentary) cinema as a realm in which intersubjectivity and empathy are both produced and come up against certain limits associated with the genre’s protocols as an apparatus of truth-production. Films studied include works by Eduardo Coutinho, Sandra Kogut, Joao Moreira Salles, Marcelo Pedroso, and Gabriel Mascaro.
Emerging on the international festival circuit around the same time when the political and social... more Emerging on the international festival circuit around the same time when the political and social crisis in the country was reaching its peak, “New Argentine Cinema” was heralded by critics at home and abroad as the genuine, “raw” expression of its own moment: a cinema that, because of the way it experienced crisis as a daily reality of production, became a document and a mode of critique of the present not just through the objects of narrative but also embodied in the very form of cinematographic expression. Filmmaking, writer and critic Alan Pauls suggested, as a technological-financial venture was immediately exposed to the volatilities of the market, with the effect that, in new Argentine cinema, “to think about form is to think about production” (Beceyro et al., 2000: 1). This con-temporariness on the level of film form and even of the vital experience of filmmaking, moreover, was widely thought to have endowed Argentine cinema with a uniquely prescient, anticipatory grasp of social developments, forecasting the crisis of the nation in images that—as the ragged mobs of suburban poor raiding a supermarket in Jorge Gaggero’s Ojos de fuego (Fiery Eyes, 1995) or the incensed bank customers seeing their deposits evaporate before their eyes in Fabi a n Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, 2000)—had yet to reach the TV screens. Two assumptions—one aesthetic, the other political—sustain this reading of recent film production as being (once again) in sync with its social context, and both of them are primed on the idea of a “return of the real.” In fact, it is this shared notion of a reemergent real that provides the very basis of articulation between politics and aesthetics; between the “history made in the streets” and the “streets that move onto the screen,” to quote Siegfried Kracauer’s classic dictum about the cross-fertilization between revolutionary action and cinematic modernism (1960: 98).
1. Camera lucida Jose Carlos Avellar 2. Footprints: Risks and Achievements in New Argentine Cinem... more 1. Camera lucida Jose Carlos Avellar 2. Footprints: Risks and Achievements in New Argentine Cinema David Oubina PART I: RETURNS OF THE REAL: RE-ENACTMENT, MEMORY, AND THE UNCANNY 3. Documentary Cinema and the Return of Past Events Andrea Franca 4. Re-Enactment and Transmission in Contemporary Cinema Ivone Margulies 5. The Return of the Natural: Landscape, Nature and the Place of Fiction Edgardo Dieleke 6. Beyond Reflexivity: Acting and Experience in Leon, Rejtman and Coutinho Joanna Page 7. The Scene and the Inscription of the Real Cesar Guimaraes PART II: ARCHIVES OF THE PRESENT 8. Global Periphery Ivana Bentes 9. Exploding Buses: Jose Padilha and the Hijacking of Media Tom Cohen 10. December's Other Scene: New Argentine Cinema and the Crisis of 2001 Jens Andermann 11. Archival Images - Memories of Labor: Citation, Recycling and Appropriation in Contemporary Argentine Cinema Mariano Mestman 12. In Praise of Difficulty: Notes on Realism and Narrative in Contemporary Argentine Film Domin Choi 13. The I as Other: the Real, the Archive and the Witness Alvaro Fernandez Bravo 14. The Documentary Between the First and the Third PersonL Gonzalo Aguilar
Este número de revista Artelogie parte de la idea que las representaciones artísticas de la natur... more Este número de revista Artelogie parte de la idea que las representaciones artísticas de la naturaleza en América Latina dan cuenta de una construcción cultural matizada por los procesos de colonización europea del continente desde el siglo XV y por su posterior formalización como estados modernos desde comienzos del XIX. Las imágenes de lugares naturales y culturales producidas en este período representan la experiencia directa o diferida de artistas -mayoritariamente extranjeros- que contribuyeron a crear un imaginario determinado por lo exótico, lo exuberante, lo sublime o lo pintoresco. La percepción de la naturaleza toma forma a partir de modelos estéticos de tradición europea, entrando en tensión, en diálogo o en combinación con las culturas locales. Así, conforman patrones epistemológicos (estéticos y científicos) de apropiación de la realidad particulares a la región. Les hypothèses de départ présentées dans ce numéro de la revue Artelogie partent de l’idée suivant laquelle ...
If film has been a way of mapping Latin America for viewers both national and foreign, landscape ... more If film has been a way of mapping Latin America for viewers both national and foreign, landscape has simultaneously represented a resource for this “cartographic cinema” (Conley) and an alternative visual regime of space and place. Landscape, this essay argues, has provided Latin American cinema with a form of self-reflexivity about its own spatial operations and their symbolic political and cultural valences. Rural locations in particular offered both a screen onto which national and continental narratives of origin could be projected and a way of resisting these by drawing out the singularity of the local. After briefly discussing the role of landscape in silent and early sound film, I move to sketch out its key importance for the cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, and finally to contrast the latter's aesthetics of space and place with those of twenty first-century films informed, I argue, by a critical “neo-regionalism.”
Geopolitics, Culture, and the Scientific Imaginary in Latin America, 2020
Twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals from the provincial interior, often combining in t... more Twentieth-century Latin American intellectuals from the provincial interior, often combining in their professional and intellectual lives different forms of expertise ranging from the humanities to medicine and the natural sciences, developed a prescient and idiosyncratic way of reflecting on the extractive frontiers advancing from the region’s political and economic centers. Taking as its sample case the essayistic writings from the 1930s of two authors from the Argentine Northwest—Bernardo Canal Feijóo and Orestes Di Lullo—this chapter argues that, in their attempt to reflect the social and cultural impact of deforestation, soil erosion and drought, these provincial intellectuals came up with a prescient and hybrid mode of writing and thinking, the urgency of which we are only beginning to understand today: a natural history of the Anthropocene. Thus, the chapter also argues for a re-appraisal of Latin American regionalism as an indispensable reference for a political ecology in o...
It must have been a strange, indeed uncanny, sight to any wanderer accidentally traveling through... more It must have been a strange, indeed uncanny, sight to any wanderer accidentally traveling through the area. For there in the clearing, illuminated by the sparkling campfire against the dark masses of the forest and the mountains of the coast fading in the gloomy dusk, the bulk of a human torso bent over the flames where some small game was roasting. But it would not have been so much the man, whose almost certainly dark features now became visible as he looked up again, observing the thicket, who would have made our accidental witness freeze with fear. Much more terrifying, surrounding man and campfire amid a strange array of boxes and bags, would have been the great number of animals, of birds, foxes, and lizards, standing motionless, under a spell that froze them in the midst of a leap, or spreading their wings, as if bewitched in the very moment they were trying to escape from this fearful site—as, almost certainly, our solitary wanderer would have done by now. The dark magic wor...
No parece casual que el término ‘emergencia’ detente, en español y portugués, un tamaño potencial... more No parece casual que el término ‘emergencia’ detente, en español y portugués, un tamaño potencial crítico, especialmente ahora que nos enfrentamos, en toda América Latina, una vez más, con formas catastróficas de cambio. El momento histórico que atestiguamos, a mi parecer, más que un mero colapso de los desarrollismos neokeynesianos impulsados por la caída en los precios de las commodities o una restauración del neoliberalismo al estilo de los noventa, asiste a la emergencia de regímenes militantemente reaccionarios, basados en novedosas articulaciones de un consumismo resentido, provocado incansablemente por oligopolios comunicacionales con agendas transnacionales y geopolíticas vinculadas al capitalismo financiero.
Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially fo... more Brazilian-born artist Eduardo Kac’s (Rio de Janeiro, 1962) work has raised eyebrows especially for his ‘transgenic art’ projects, among others: Genesis, 1999; GFP Bunny, 2000; The Eight Day, 2001; Natural History of the Enigma, 2003/08. In all of these, Kac and his scientific collaborators realize genetic interventions into living organisms at the same time as they trigger audience reactions to these from playful kinds of interaction that is integrated into the works’ open and dynamic creative process. Yet whereas the ethical and political challenges Kac’s work poses have sparked lively debates within and beyond the realm of the arts – can and must art engage with the ‘creative’ potentials of biotechnology and genetics? Do these not in fact (as Vilém Flusser and others have suggested) hold the key to realizing the vanguardist dream of merging art and life? Or should the artist, from the vantage point of his own creative practice, not rather warn us against the ethical and political risks involved in genetic engineering? – much less attention has been paid to the way Kac’s art also continues and transforms a particular legacy of post-concretist, ambient and performance art in Latin America. Kac himself has referred to Brazilian artists Flávio de Carvalho, Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark as informing his interest in open, participative forms, which characterize both his transgenic and his earlier ‘tele-presence’ art projects. Other Latin American artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century have been producing intriguing engagements with living materials, multispecies habitats and organic remains, including such diverse names as Luis Fernando Benedit, Nicola Constantino, Nuno Ramos, or Teresa Margolles. In a conversation with Jens Andermann and Gabriel Giorgi at the University of Zurich’s Center of Latin American Studies on March 12, 2015, Kac addressed the way in which his work might be seen as continuing or challenging long-standing representations of the New World as a repository of ‘nature’, from colonial chronicles of discovery to contemporary discourses of biodiversity and conservation. To what extent is bio art – and the questions it raises about the Anthropocene as a threshold of radical biopolitical convergence between ‘history’ and ‘nature’ – necessarily ‘transcultural’ and planetary in its extension?
Latin American Documentary Film in the New Millennium, 2016
Intersubjective performance has opened new avenues of inquiry for understanding the documentary “... more Intersubjective performance has opened new avenues of inquiry for understanding the documentary “pact” between the filmmaker and his or her object of representation. This chapter analyzes a series of Brazilian documentaries concerned with subjectivity, personhood, and its particular implications for the documentary encounter. These films are just as much about their subjects as they are about (documentary) cinema as a realm in which intersubjectivity and empathy are both produced and come up against certain limits associated with the genre’s protocols as an apparatus of truth-production. Films studied include works by Eduardo Coutinho, Sandra Kogut, Joao Moreira Salles, Marcelo Pedroso, and Gabriel Mascaro.
Emerging on the international festival circuit around the same time when the political and social... more Emerging on the international festival circuit around the same time when the political and social crisis in the country was reaching its peak, “New Argentine Cinema” was heralded by critics at home and abroad as the genuine, “raw” expression of its own moment: a cinema that, because of the way it experienced crisis as a daily reality of production, became a document and a mode of critique of the present not just through the objects of narrative but also embodied in the very form of cinematographic expression. Filmmaking, writer and critic Alan Pauls suggested, as a technological-financial venture was immediately exposed to the volatilities of the market, with the effect that, in new Argentine cinema, “to think about form is to think about production” (Beceyro et al., 2000: 1). This con-temporariness on the level of film form and even of the vital experience of filmmaking, moreover, was widely thought to have endowed Argentine cinema with a uniquely prescient, anticipatory grasp of social developments, forecasting the crisis of the nation in images that—as the ragged mobs of suburban poor raiding a supermarket in Jorge Gaggero’s Ojos de fuego (Fiery Eyes, 1995) or the incensed bank customers seeing their deposits evaporate before their eyes in Fabi a n Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, 2000)—had yet to reach the TV screens. Two assumptions—one aesthetic, the other political—sustain this reading of recent film production as being (once again) in sync with its social context, and both of them are primed on the idea of a “return of the real.” In fact, it is this shared notion of a reemergent real that provides the very basis of articulation between politics and aesthetics; between the “history made in the streets” and the “streets that move onto the screen,” to quote Siegfried Kracauer’s classic dictum about the cross-fertilization between revolutionary action and cinematic modernism (1960: 98).
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