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Latin American cinema has commonly been looked at within a radical framework. From the middle of the twentieth century, filmmakers, journalists and scholars have celebrated a type of filmmaking that contains revolutionary ideals, anti-neocolonial stances and attempts at social reform (Chanan, 1997; Fusco, 1987; Pick, 1993). The peak of this radical filmmaking came about with the emergence of the New Latin American Cinema movement and the concurrent, but more globally orientated, Third Cinema movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Towards the end of the twentieth century these movements began to disperse and there is no longer the sense of a continent-wide radical cinema project. Nevertheless, there are still Latin American filmmaking groups and practitioners, such as CineMujer in Colombia and TV dos Trabalhadores in Brazil, that work towards the same fundamental aims, mainly to empower local communities and work against exploitation and discrimination (Aufderheide, 2002). The focus of this paper is on one such group, the Peruvian based Grupo Chaski; in particular it will focus on the way that Grupo Chaski is currently working to develop a solid infrastructure for cinema exhibition as a means to implement their aims of social reform. This study is the result of personal research undertaken in South America during 2004, 2005 and 2007 and much of the knowledge of Grupo Chaski presented within this paper draws on personal interviews and observations of this group. This paper will also draw on the critical tendencies that emerged through the New Latin American Cinema movement and Third Cinema to frame the way in which Grupo Chaski continues a type of radical cinema practice.
The Feeling Child: Affect and Politics in Latin American Literature and Film
Peruvian wounds: Children and violence in the fiction cinema of the Chaski Group, Gregorio (1984) and Juliana (1988)2018 •
The emergence of the militant revolutionary group, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), in the early 1980s and the Peruvian government’s violent military response caused widespread disruption to all parts of this Latin American nation. Influenced by Maoist-Marxist theories on society, Shining Path set out to replace bourgeois social structures with a peasant revolution that would also incorporate Incan customs and beliefs. Their approach to doing this, however, was one that relied primarily on extreme and increasingly indiscriminate violence, very often with children and young people coerced or seduced into the position of perpetrators as well as victims. The military responded in kind and their actions stirred up further resentments between the different cultural and social groups that comprise a vastly fragmented population in economic and ethnic terms. As the violence was prevalent during the 1980s in the more rural areas of Peru which were also profoundly affected by increasing economic hardship, these years also witnessed the mass migration of thousands of families and individuals to the cities of Lima, Trujillo and Arequipa, amongst other – mainly coastal – urban centres. Indeed, as noted by cultural theorist Jesús Martín-Barbero, Lima became one of the most extreme examples of urban migration in the 1980s as a result of these acute and specific circumstances. More specifically in demographic terms, most of the 70,000 victims of the “dirty war” conflict between Shining Path and the military were young Quechua-speaking indigenous Peruvians living in poverty either in the Andean sierra region of this Latin American country or as relatively recent economic migrants on the outskirts of its capital city Lima. Many of the so-called perpetrators also turned out to be young people, often children, whose idealistic dreams for a better future than that of their parents made them easy prey for the Shining Path leaders. With a focus in this chapter on the perspective and experiences of these children as expressed through fiction cinema as agents of change in their own and others’ lives, I align my thinking with a school of thought, largely found within migration studies and drawing on anthropology, psychology and media studies using participatory methods, that has paid increasing attention to the consequences of armed conflict for the young beyond that of trauma. As Jason Hart outlines in the introduction to his edited collection of essays about young people, political violence and displacement, in academic and journalistic discourse since the late 1990s, “there has been an increasing insistence on children’s agency.” This stems from a greater confidence in the young as empowered, resilient subjects who have the ability and wherewithal to influence the lives of others, as more complicated than previous discourses of trauma and victimhood had allowed, and “as subjects of knowledge rather than simply as the objects of adult expertise.” Common to the essays in this collection is the emphasis placed on the importance of context as integral to gaining a deeper understanding of the issues of children affected by conflict. For example, Cordula Strocka articulates in her contribution the perspective of “war-affected” young people in Ayacucho where the Shining Path had their heartland. Acknowledging their ongoing situation of acute poverty, Strocka’s account stresses the capabilities and resilience of those youngsters as being borne out of the experience of participating in youth gangs as a form of survival and self-expression. Much of the work she discovers at the level of the individual and small group coincides with reports from international policy groups such as OECD, and yet the personal and contextualised nature of her research has, arguably, greater impact. With these approaches in mind, I hope this chapter contributes to the sorts of debates provoked by the work of Laura Podalsky in seeking to go beyond an understanding of marginalized youth of contemporary Latin America as simply a “lost generation” and “a sign of the times (and of what is to come).” Despite numerous efforts to create memorials and reconciliation projects, it remains difficult to have a truly open debate in Peru on the issues that may have led to the dirty war, such as cultural conflict, social and economic inequalities, discrimination and structural violence. As Iliana Pagán-Teitelbaum noted in her essay on violence and trauma in Peruvian film, “it is still proscribed to talk about the war in Peru, so the social wound … of a brutal internal war that damaged social bonds and destroyed trust in individuals, society, and the Peruvian state has not been healed.” And yet, despite official restrictions (rather than outright censorship) on discussing the conflict in most media areas, fiction cinema from Peru has long served as an effective medium through which to depict and convey these events, most often with a child or young person at the heart of each narrative. This chapter thus interrogates the affective power of the child protagonist at the centre of one of the most significant periods of social, political and cultural turbulence for modern Peru, and investigates how that framing device has in fact made a significant contribution to keeping alive the memory of a divisive conflict, the legacy of which continues to raise concern about responsibilities, retribution, and reconciliation. Moving on from Karen Lury, who notes that in films involving conflict, “children are often ciphers for adult anxieties, fantasies and fears” and are presented largely as blameless for any suffering, I argue that the young protagonists of Peru’s fiction cinema are caught squarely amidst that suffering as observer/participant/perpetrator as well as victim and survivor. As such, I suggest, they bring the moral complexities of their own and the broader situations to the fore. As Mary Beth Tierney-Tello indicates, “writing from a child’s perspective or focused on a child protagonist is […] a representation of migrant subjectivity of a particularly effective sort” in that they imply a “double voice” that involves an adult narrator recalling the past from their own or another’s point of view. Indeed, several of the most successful and acclaimed Peruvian features of recent years, such as Paloma de Papel/Paper Dove (Fabrizio Aguilar, 2003) and Las Malas Intenciones/Bad Intentions (Rosario García-Montero, 2011), have chosen to adopt the perspective of the child in order to reflect back on the experiences of political violence as remembered by their writer-directors. However, this essay moves back in temporal terms and focuses on two of the landmark productions produced in the second half of the 1980s by the Grupo Chaski/Chaski Group that serve as influential predecessors to those more recent works. Gregorio (1984) and Juliana (1988) take children as their titular protagonists but are not explicitly written in the form of recollections by their filmmakers. Instead, I argue, they take the child’s perspective to show how the “other” might be seen, heard and understood in a way that served as counterpoint to official rhetoric that since the 1980s has tended to conflate youth delinquency with terrorism and that still largely refuses to recognise any link between acute economic inequality and the rise of the Shining Path. It shows how the image of the child as produced by a filmmaking collective working with and on behalf of the marginalised children of Peru has contributed to a different, disruptive and discomforting understanding of some of the social and cultural identities that comprise modern Peru. Finally, it shows how these films represent both a continuity with and departure from their 1950s predecessors in Italian neo-realism and the broader movement of collective filmmaking in Latin America with their influences of melodrama and emphases on dream-like narratives of hope.
Feminist Media Histories
Auteurism, Machismo-Leninismo, and Other Issues. Women’s Labor in Andean Oppositional Film Production2018 •
This article contextualizes and characterizes production practices in political cinema in Bolivia and Peru between the 1960s and 1990s, reading them as a communitarian endeavor that included many more women than official history acknowledges. It also documents the work of two overshadowed filmmakers—the Bolivian Beatriz Palacios and the Peruvian María Barea—mainly in their roles as film producers and managers of small producing companies, but also as directors. In order to effectively incorporate women into Andean cinema history, I advocate for a nonhierarchical historiographical methodology and the academic consideration of personal relationships as one of the driving factors in artisanal political production cultures. A non-auteurist approach to unearthing Andean women filmmakers is central to this revisionist project that aims to shed light on an entire range of women’s labor in collaborative film production, not only directorial work.
Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media
Future Experiments from the Past: Third Cinema and Artistic Research from Below2019 •
This article examines possible articulations of artistic praxis and research in relation to social conflict and political struggle. Taking some of the guiding principles of Third Cinema, which we will consider here both a film strategy and an epistemic project "from below", our aim is to provide elements for discussion to the current debates on art-as-research. Third Cinema, despite its specificities and differences with current times, provided a dialectical and dialogistic approach to artwork, which was conceived as an open realm for criticism, discussion, and struggle, inscribed within a radical political agenda. This article aims at recovering the importance of this critical movement in the arts and uses it as a source of inspiration to propose a series of insights on artistic research, in relation to contemporary interests in collaborative, long-term projects and the third wave of institutional critique. We seek to challenge commonsensical notions around four fundamental axes-experimentation; temporality; public sphere; and institutionalism-by confronting dominant views on these topics through what could be called a Third Cinema politics of artistic research from below-namely, from the perspective of those who embrace research as an intrinsic part of the creative and emancipatory potential of the arts.
New Review of Film and Television Studies
Constraints and possibilities: Lima Film Festival, politics and cultural formation in Peru2016 •
Constraints and Possibilities: Lima Film Festival, Politics and Cultural Formation in Peru The Festival de Cine de Lima (Lima Film Festival) launched in 1997 and, from humble beginnings, each year now introduces around 300 films to diverse audiences across the Peruvian capital and beyond. In 2014, for the first time in its history, four of the nineteen films selected for the feature competition were made by Peruvian directors, signalling a growing recognition of national talent by programming panels and critics that had tended to look beyond national borders for inspiration and challenge. Despite the relative paucity of co-ordinated film production activity in Peru, it is argued here that the flourishing of Lima Film Festival provides evidence of a deep sense of film appreciation that conveys a commitment to all forms of cinema. This essay reflects critically on the local, national and international impact of this Festival, its influence on the development of film policy in Peru , and explores its role as a ‘key building block of film culture’ (Iordanova, 2013) across a complex national framework.
Contemporary Latin American Cinema Resisting Neoliberalism?
Negotiating Neoliberal Demands on Contemporary Cinema: The Role and Influence of the Socially Committed Film Producer in Peru2018 •
The range of new opportunities available to Latin American film-makers since the late 1990s has enabled the renaissance, stabilization and flourishing of production in many countries of that region and advanced the worldwide recognition of their work. Film festivals, government departments and multimedia conglomerates across the world have become important sources of support for Latin American filmmakers. However, these opportunities, interventions and contributions have often entailed compromises in artistic, logistical or thematic terms which have led to new forms of hierarchy and power structures. Indeed, each one brings with it an increasingly complex scenario involving multiple partners with their own needs, requirements, commitments and mission statements. Some of these are linked to ideological agendas, while others are borne out of philanthropic motivations, and others still are part of broader cultural strategies at pan-regional level. There have been several excellent studies on the funding mechanisms supporting the development of film production in contemporary Latin America. Investigations have explored the impact that co-production and supranational funding initiatives have had on the film industries of Latin America in the twenty-first century and have started to address the relationship between films and their European audiences, encouraged by the profits generated by titles such as Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2001) and Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón, 2002). As yet, the specific role played by the Latin America-based producer figure in rooting out and exploiting such sources for national and regional cinema remains largely overlooked. This essay focuses on the role of the contemporary cinematic producer based in Latin America, especially those who have chosen to develop more socially committed films. I argue that their role has become more crucial than ever to the progress made by the film industries of the region within an economic, cultural and political landscape framed by neoliberal discourses and practices that have been dominant since the 1990s when, according to Nick Couldry, they tended to be imposed as a condition of multilateral external finance (2010, vi). The essay draws attention to what I term the ‘contemporary committed’ cinema producer as a highly collaborative and intermediary figure, fundamental to addressing and fixing issues of access, agency and diversity, as well as to navigating the increasingly complex terrain of private enterprise, competition and free market. xxx While the main case study of this essay focuses on the work and influence of Enid ‘Pinky’ Campos, producer of some of the most significant award-winning productions to have been made in Peru in recent years, it is important to take into account the work of Stefan Kaspar, the Swiss-born founding producer of the Peruvian film collective Grupo Chaski which was founded in 1982 during the period when the protectionist cinema legislation was bearing fruit. Kaspar had studied literature and communications in Berne and in 1978 he made his first trip to Peru to research the theme of internal migration. The Grupo Chaski was formed by Kaspar with fellow filmmakers Marita Barea, Fernando Barreto, Fernando Espinoza and Alejandro Legaspi, Susana Pastor and René Weber, and grew to over sixty members by the late 1980s. Their work, in documentary, fiction, feature and short form, contained clear traces of the militant, revolutionary socialist legacy of the broader New Latin American Cinema movement of the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, they shared with that movement “a commitment to making films with and for a marginalized community and a desire to alter mainstream commercial filmmaking practices” (McClennen 2008). Like the other groups within that movement based in Argentina, Brazil, and Cuba, they set out to distinguish their practices from the hierarchical structures that they perceived as common in Hollywood and in auteur cinema, and to approach projects in a much more collaborative, community-oriented way. Grupo Chaski worked within the context of a protectionist cinema policy that had been developed in the 1960s and was introduced in 1972 as part of the ambitions of the Revolutionary Government of the Armed Forces whose agenda was not concerned with maintaining the power and wealth of the economic elite, but with appealing more broadly to the masses in order to secure ongoing electoral support and control. While Chaski refused to depend on the Peruvian state for direct resources, the group did benefit from the infrastructure developments of the 1970s and the renewed appetite for local cinema. Kaspar’s own European connections were undoubtedly useful in terms of securing collaborations with media companies such as the German television channel ZDF. The group also received funding from international charitable and philanthropic agencies such as UNESCO. Two decades later, Campos’ position as intermediary between the increasingly neoliberal competitive funding environment and a new generation of filmmakers keen to make their mark on a global scale holds resonances with predecessors working under different circumstances while also providing a new model for understanding and appreciating the value of the producer in early twenty-first century Latin American cinema more generally. The films that Campos has produced include Paloma de papel (Fabrizio Aguilar, 2003), Días de Santiago (Josué Méndez, 2004), NN (Héctor Gálvez, 2014) and Climas (Enrica Pérez, 2014), as well as Madeinusa (2006), the first feature by acclaimed director Claudia Llosa who put her country on the cinematic map by winning the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2009 (with the film La teta asustada). All these titles have achieved success and praise from critics, audiences and investors from within and beyond national borders, and have been noted for their distinctive blend of globally recognizable themes and styles with local cultural references. Paloma de papel, Días de Santiago and Madeinusa are included in the library of films with socially engaging themes and subject matters that the Grupo Chaski has established as part of its more recent Microcine network project across Peru. As Miriam Ross has noted, with this initiative, Kaspar ensured that the Grupo Chaski continued to engage with ‘responsible cinema’ in Peru and in 2003 decided to take advantage of digital change in order to “bring about opportunities for improvement in the areas of Latin American cinema that have historically had the greatest weaknesses” (Ross 2008). The points of contact between Kaspar and Campos transcend their mutual interest in socially-engaged films in that the Microcine project, while being part of the work of a non-profit organization with no commercial aims, exists only due to the efforts of its founders to secure investment from highly competitive sources such as Rotterdam’s Film Festival’s Hubert Bals Fund. Kaspar, as a seasoned producer, was a highly skilled negotiator and networker who recognized the urgent need to focus on alternative forms of distribution, and brought these skills to bear for the benefit of all the Grupo Chaski projects.
2013 •
Within the context of contemporary globalization, the concept of ‘Latin American cinema’ has become increasingly problematic, particularly since such geographically based terms (such as ‘national’, ‘continental’, ‘transnational’, ‘regional’, ‘local’, ‘rural’ and/or ‘metropolitan’) invoke intense cultural, ideological, political and economic references and debates that are often cloaked in nostalgic references to the period of militant film-making from 1960s and 1970s. This article therefore highlights the multiple methodological approaches that must be taken into account when narrating ‘place’ with contemporary Latin American production, whether the contexts be international (e.g. through transnational funding and exhibition opportunities in Europe, especially Spain, and the United States) or intranational (e.g. encouraging one kind of production for domestic audiences and another to negotiate the international film festival circuit).
A trail of fire for political cinema (Javier Campo and Humberto Pérez-Blanco, eds.)
Tracing the winding road of The Hour of the Furnaces in the First World2018 •
In the last fifty years an extensive bibliography has discussed The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) and the inseparable proposal of Third Cinema (1969). In this chapter I will focus on a less explored aspect: the film’s journey in non-commercial, alternative or militant circuits linked to the student and workers movement in the first world throughout 1968 and the immediate following years. The Hour of the Furnaces and the manifesto Towards a Third Cinema can be inscribed, as it is well known, within a wider period, the so-called long 60s. After the pioneer essay by Fredric Jameson (1984) on this period – that according to him could be tracked back to sometime in the second half of the 1950s and could be extended until 1972-1974 – many other authors used the same concept and proposed different periodizations. As far as I am aware, the ‘widest’ locates the origins of the long 60s at the beginning of the Algeria War (1954) or the Bandung Conference (1955) and its ending in the Sandinist Revolution (1979). Of course, it is a periodization that takes into account also the idea of the global 1960s inasmuch as the 1960s account for the expansion of a common sensibility at an international level that tries to cover a wide range of processes of rebellion, revolt, insurrection and revolution in a number of countries around the world. That temporal extension (long 60s.) and geographical (global 60s.) is quite apt to think about The Hour of the Furnaces in its national and international context. Although its world premiere took place amidst the revolts of 1968, at the same time, it is possible to find the conditions that made the film possible as far back as the middle of the 1950s. And this not only because its third worldism dialogues with Algeria and Bandung, but also because 1955 is the year of the civic-military coup against the government of General Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina and the beginning of the so-called “Peronist resistance” against successive governments. The whole of the second part of the film, sometimes disregarded by academic accounts, concerns itself precisely with Peronism and “the Resistance”. At the same time, we can extend its ‘sixties’ influence until the end of the 1970s. In this respect, we can take also as a significant fact the almost forgotten dossier organised in 1979 by Guy Hennebelle and the group CinémAction for the magazine Tiers Monde (1979) about the influence of the film and the manifesto in several countries around the world. As it is well known, in the 1980s, and even in later periods, the film and the document were revisited in new manifestos, events and proposals in different places. Although, from my perspective, the historical period of The Hour of the Furnaces (and of Third Cinema) had already concluded even in those years, its ideas (cinematic, political) could still dialogue without a doubt with oppositional and confrontational to power initiatives in many countries. In an important essay on the “changing geography” of Third Cinema, Michael Chanan (1997) reconstructed, among other questions, the history of the film and of Solanas and Getino’s manifesto; some misinterpretations and modifications of the original definitions of the three types of cinema; the connections of the film with parallel movements in different countries; and the “transnational function” of Third Cinema. The author also addressed the subsequent recuperation of the thesis put forward by the film and the manifesto and their dialogue with other perspectives more or less similar in the 1980s. In particular, he wrote of the pioneer recuperation by the scholar Teshome Gabriel in his works at the beginning of the decade. He also focused on the well-known Third Cinema Conference held in Edinburgh in 1986, organised by Jim Pines and Paul Willemen that focused on the relevance of the concept of Third Cinema for the oppositional practices in film and video in the 1980s in the metropolitan centres of First World countries. In what follows, I will return over some of the testimonies and ideas included in those two moments of the debate around Third Cinema. (the CinémAction dossier of 1979 and the meeting in Edinburgh of 1986 ) and I will survey other less well known sources and documents such as catalogues from parallel distributors, letters, testimonies or press notes from those days. From there, I aim to look at the place that The Hour of the Furnaces occupied in the circuit of political and militant cinema in the first world, the debates it sparked, the polemics in which it took part . Of course, it will probably be an incomplete journey but I do not think it is a question of summarising that history but of continuing to explore it. (...) Published in the book A trail of fire for political cinema (Javier Campo and Humberto Pérez-Blanco, eds.), Intellect, 2018; pp.135-158.
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies
Manifesting La Historia : Systems of 'Development' and the New Latin American Cinema Manifesto2004 •
Observatorio Journal
Cinema and/as Revolution: The New Latin American Cinema2013 •
The New Latin American Cinema has been traditionally defined as a political cinema committed to the transformation of the social conditions that characterized Latin America in the 1960s. The notion of revolution has been placed in the core of this movement. Deeply influenced by the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and by several political movements throughout the continent, a group of filmmakers proposed an aesthetic transformation of what they described as a colonized culture. Our aim in this essay is to explain what these filmmakers understood by a cinematographic “revolution” that could be the condition for a broader political and social transformation. It is not our intention to stand up for the concept of revolution in the New Latin American Cinema, but to try to avoid the stereotypes around this concept and to understand what this notion involved within a particular context.
PhD: Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia
Chapter 5 - Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema2005 •
Journal article by Michael Chanan; Screen
The changing geography of Third Cinema1997 •
Nicaragua and the Politics of Utopia
Cultural Warfare II, Film Exhibition and the New Spectatorship (in Revolutionary Nicaragua)2015 •
2011 •
International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics
New Ecuadorian Cinema: Small, glocal and plurinational (final draft)2017 •
New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film
From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee (197374)2002 •
The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema, Marvin D'Lugo, Ana M. Lopez, and Laura Podalsky, editors
The Interlocking Dynamics of Domestic and International Film Festivals: The Case of Latin American and Caribbean Cinema2017 •
Communication Cultures in Africa (CCA)
African film in the 21st Century: some notes to a provocation2018 •
2017 •
Nations and Nationalism: A Global Historical Overview. (eds.) Guthram Herb and David Kaplan. ABC-CLIO.
Cinema and National Identity2008 •
International Journal of Communication
P2P in the Networked Future of European Cinema2012 •
Latin American Studies Association
Against (In)equality: Bad Latin American LiteratureWorld Congress of Korean Studies
Transnationalism in Korean-Argentine cinema: international co-productions and cinematic representation2018 •
Social Identities
The worker's voice in post-1968 Argentine political documentary2013 •
Studies in European Cinema
World cinema at Soviet festivals: cultural diplomacy and personal ties2020 •