Introduction

  • Laura Podalsky
Chapter

Abstract

In the midlate 1990s, Latin American cinemas began to experience a renaissance. Box-office sensations like O Que É Isso, Companheiro? / Four Days in September (Brazil-United States, Bruno Barreto, 1997), El Chacotero sentimental / The Sentimental Teaser (Chile, Cristián Galaz, 1999), Amores perros (Mexico, Alejandro González Iñárruti, 2000), Y tu mamá también / And Your Mother, Too (Mexico, Alfonso Cuarón, 2001), and Cidade de Deus / City of God (Brazil-France, Fernando Mereilles, and Katia Lund, 2002) broke records on the domestic market. Popular success at home often coincided with critical (and, on occasion, commercia l) successa broad. El Chacotero sentimental won audience awards at the Chicago Latino Festival (2000) and the Toulouse Latin American Film Festival (2000). Nominated for an Oscar, Amores perros won at Cannes (Critics Week Grand Prize and Young Critics Prize, 2000), the Montréal Festival of New Cinema (Screenplay), and the Tokyo International Film Festival (Best Director; Grand Prix). Nominated for an Oscar two years later, Cidade de Deus won top prizes at the Marrakech International Film Festival (Best Director, 2002), New York Film Critics Circle (2003), and Vancouver (2004). The controversial Tropa de Elite / Elite Squad (Brazil, José Padilha, 2007) won the top prize at the 2008 Berlin Film Festival.1 Such success on the international film circuit has encouraged film critics to stress the ambition and artistic innovation of these films.

Keywords

Gated Community Emotional Appeal Film Critic Film Festival Sensorial Appeal 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Notes

  1. 2.
    Randal Johnson notes that “[a]fter experiencing one of the most severe crises of its history in the early 1990s …, [the Brazilian industry] recaptured the rhythm of the 1980s, with [the production of] 20 to 30 films per year” (“Departing Central Station,” The Brazil e-Journal (a publication of the Brazilian Embassy in Washington, DC). http://www.brasilemb.org/br_ejournal/cinebras.htm/br_ejournal/cinebras.htm (accessed on September 28, 2000). For a similar discussion of the other industries, see Horacio Bernades, Diego Lerer, and Sergio Wolf, eds., New Argentine Cinema: Themes, Auteurs and Trends of Innovation / Nuevo cine argentino: temas, directores y estilos de una renovación (Buenos Aires: Tatanka/FIPRESCI, 2002); Tamara Falicov, “Latin America: How Mexico and Argentina Cope and Cooperate with the Behemoth of the North,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, eds. Pau l McDonald, et al. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 266, 272. For a compara-tive treatment, see Luisela Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47.3 (Spring 2008), 49–51.Google Scholar
  2. 4.
    Stephen Hart, A Companion to Latin American Film (Woodbridge, UK: Tamesis. 2004), 13. Randal Johnson and Tamara Falicov are more nuanced in their assessment of the new financing structures in Brazil and Argentina, respectively. However, they laud the new arrangements for ending the stultifying nature of the state-supported film industries. For their part, Alberto Elena and Mariana Díaz López situate the contemporary cinema as a watershed, recapturing the utopic promise of the NLAC [The Cinemas of Latin America (London: Wallflower Press, 2004), 11]. On the other end of the spectrum are critics like Diego Batlle who have been quite vocal about who benefits from the new industrial arrangements. In his essay, Batlle reflects on the shifts that occurred in the Argentine industry from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s and notes, among other things, that Argentine films were still at a disadvantage as the new multiplexes favored Hollywood imports (even when certain Argentine films had greater box-office appeal). See “From Virtual Death to the New Law: The Resurgence” in New Argentine Cinema: Themes, Auteurs and Trends of Innovation / El Nuevo cine argentino: temas, directores y estilos de una renovación, eds. Horacio Bernades, et al. (Buenos Aires: Tatanka/FIPRESCI, 2002), 24.Google Scholar
  3. 5.
    The notable exception is Cuba. The changes that are occurring in that industry have been less spectacular and less noted outside of Cuba until recently. See Ana López, “Cuba,” in The Cinema of Small Nations, eds. Mette Hjort, et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008);Google Scholar
  4. Ann Marie Stock, On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), andCrossRefGoogle Scholar
  5. Cristina Venegas, Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual, and Digital Media in Cuba (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010).Google Scholar
  6. 11.
    Paul Gormley, The New-Brutality Film: Race and Affect in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema (Bristol: Intellect, 2005), 8. Gormley cites Linda Williams’s pioneering essay “Film Bodies, Gender, Genre, Excess” originally published in Film Quarterly VXLIV.4 (1992).Google Scholar
  7. 16.
    Franco, “Obstinate memory: Tainted History,” in The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 240.Google Scholar
  8. 19.
    Richard, “Cites/Sites of Violence: Convulsion of Sense and Official Routines,” in Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 17.Google Scholar
  9. 22.
    Michael Hardt, “Foreword: What Affects Are Good for,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough, et al. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), ix.Google Scholar
  10. 23.
    See, for example, the studies of Ann Douglas and Jane Tompkins on Anglo-American fiction. Christine Gledhill’s Home Is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film (London: BFI, 1987) is one of the founda-tional critical works on film melodrama.Google Scholar
  11. 24.
    See, for example, Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996);Google Scholar
  12. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001); and (in terms of film)Google Scholar
  13. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, “Introduction: From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity,” in Trauma and Cinema: Cross-Cultural Explorations (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004).Google Scholar
  14. 25.
    Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 18–19.Google Scholar
  15. 28.
    Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 22–24, 35, 44–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  16. 35.
    Among other things, the cognitivists attack psychoanalytic theory for its inadequate account of the process of identification, its relatively exclusive focus on the visual, and, most pertinent to this study, its inattention to the question of filmic emotion and film’s emotional appeal in favor of the issues of desire and pleasure. See Greg Smith [Film Structure and the Emotion System, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 5, 85, 102] and Murray Smith [Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 73–79]. Greg Smith also presents a lucid critique of the limitations of cognitivist approaches to emotion in film, including his own (65–81, 171–72).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  17. 40.
    Carroll, “Film, Emotion, and Genre,” in Passionate Views: Films, Cognition, and Emotion, eds. Carl Platinga, et al. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 21–22.Google Scholar
  18. 49.
    For a more developed discussion of Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of subjectivity in relation to the cinema, see Barbara Kennedy, Deleuze and Cinema: The Aesthetics of Sensation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 90–91.Google Scholar
  19. 53.
    Laura Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 185.Google Scholar
  20. 57.
    The few essays on Latin American cinema that take a Deleuzian perspective share this tendency with Marks and Gormley. See the work of Christian Gunderman, “Entre observación desprendida y dinamización emocional: algunos comentarios sobres los Nuevos Cines latinoamericanos en Argentina, Brasil y Cuba,” Estudios Interdisclipinarios de América Latina y el Caribe. 22.1 (2007), http://www1.tau.ac.il/eiai (accessed on December 29, 2009) and “The Stark Gaze of the New Argentine Cinema: Restoring Strangeness to the Object in the Perverse Age of Commodity Fetishism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 14.3 (2005); and Hermann Herlinghaus, “Affectivity beyond ‘Bare Life’: On the Non-Tragic Return of Violence in Latin American Film,” in A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture, ed. Sara Castro-Klaren (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).Google Scholar
  21. 60.
    Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 1–3, 14–24.Google Scholar
  22. 64.
    Martín Hopenhayn, No Apocalypse, No Integration: Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America, translated by Cynthia Margarita Tompkins and Elizabeth Rosa Horan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 11. See the epigraph to this chapter for the original in Spanish taken from Martín Hopenhayn, Ni apocalípticos ni integrados: aventuras de la modernidad en América Latina (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1994), 29.Google Scholar
  23. 65.
    Jesús Martín Barbero, Al sur de la modernidad: comunicación, globalización, y multiculturalidad (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Universidad de Pittsburgh, 2001), 173–75.Google Scholar
  24. 69.
    Martín Barbero, “La ciudad que median los miedos,” in Espacio urbano, comunicación y violencia en América Latina, ed. Mabel Moraña (Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2002), 26. See also “Mediaciones urbanas y nuevos escenarios de comunicación,” in Las ciudades latinoameri-canas en el nuevo [des]orden mundial, eds. Patricio Nava, et al. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2004), 80–82.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© Laura Podalsky 2011

Authors and Affiliations

  • Laura Podalsky

There are no affiliations available

Personalised recommendations