Abstract
Mobile children, often traversing the national territory, sometimes on shorter journeys , are a recurrent image in Latin American cinema. This chapter examines the most commercially successful of Latin American child-films, the Brazilian road movie Central Station (Salles, Brazil), which contrasts a corrupt, adult-aligned urban modernity with an uncontaminated rural cultural infancy, a binary embodied by travel companions Dora and Josué. Central Station offers the viewer the very conventional pleasures associated with Western cinematic codes of both road movie and child-film; it invites and constructs a dominant, nostalgic, and adult viewing subjectivity. Central Station and ¡Viva Cuba! (Cremata 2005) both depict journeys in search of the father, and both imply a simultaneous look to the (spectator’s) past, memory and tradition, and to the future, presenting the child as a spontaneous, authentic being, close to nature and cultural traditions. ¡Viva Cuba! understands the child romantically in this way, as closer to generations of past Cubans, and to ‘authentic’ or unmediated parts of Cuba, such as the never-before-filmed Punta de Maisí, the children’s ultimate destination. The final film discussed in this chapter, Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán’s Cochochi (2007), is the tale of a journey undertaken by two Rarámuri brothers to deliver a package of tablets to a sick relative on the other side of the valley. Cochochi, which has echoes of Marcela Fernández Violante’s En el país de los piés ligeros/ Niño rarámuri (1983), like the other films discussed, uses the trope of childhood journeying to represent rites of passage. However, in its choice of a small (but all-encompassing) journey, it avoids the totalising sweep of the journeys across the nation undertaken in the films previously mentioned. Instead, it deconstructs the binaries that inform journey narratives (home/road, origin/destination), and avoids making the landscape a pleasurable object of mobile vision, instead emphasising the experiential aspects of childhood mobility and its dangers and pleasures.
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Filmography
Alice in the Cities. 1974. Dir. Wim Wenders. West Germany: WDR.
Alicia en en pueblo de las maravillas. 1991. Dir. Daniel Díaz Torres. Cuba: ICAIC.
A Time for Drunken Horses. 2000. Dir. Bahman Ghobadi. Iran: Bhaman Ghobadi Films, MK2 Productions.
Buddha Collapsed Out of Shame. 2007. Dir. Hana Makhmalbaf. Iran, France: Makhmalbaf Film House, Wild Bunch.
Central do Brasil. 1998. Dir. Walter Salles. Brazil, France: Audiovisual Development Bureau, Ministerio da Cultura.
Cochochi. 2007. Dirs. Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán. Mexico, UK, Canada: Alcove Entertainment, Buena Onda Pictures, Canada World Cinema Project.
Diarios de motocicleta. 2004. Dir. Walter Salles. Argentina, USA, Chile, Peru, Brazil, UK, Germany, France: Film Four, Wildwood Enterprises, Tu Vas Voir Productions.
En el país de los piés ligeros/Niño rarámuri. 1983. Dir. Marcela Fernández Violante. Mexico: Conacite Dos.
Fresa y chocolate. 1993. Dirs. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabio. Cuba, Mexico, Spain, USA: ICAIC, IMCINE, TeleMadrid.
Habanastation. 2011. Dir. Ian Padrón. Cuba: ICRT, ICAIC.
La cámara oscura. 2008. Dir. Marís Victoria Menis. Argentina, France: Sophie Dulac Productions, Todo Cine S. A.
La rabia. 2008. Dir. Albertina Carri. Argentina, Netherlands: Hubert Bals Fund; INCAA; Matanza Cine.
Los rubios. 2003. Dir. Albertina Carri. Argentina, USA; INCAA; Fondo Nacional de las Artes; Universidad del Cine.
Madagascar. 1994. Dir. Fernando Pérez. Cuba: ICAIC.
Miel para Oshún. 2001. Dir. Humberto Solás. Spain, Cuba. El Paso Producciones Cinematográficas, ICAIC.
Mutum. 2007. Dir. Sandra Kogut. Brazil, France. Ravina Films, Gloria Films.
On the Road. 2012. Dir. Walter Salles. France, USA, UK, Brazil, Canada, Argentina: MK2 Productions, American Zoetrope.
Pixote, a lei do mais fraco. 1981. Dir. Héctor Babenco. Brazil: Embrafilme.
Postales de Leningrado. 2007. Dir. Mariana Rondón. Venezuela: Sudaca Films.
Sertão das memórias. 1997. Dir. José Araujo. Brazil: Ganesh Produçoes, Tupa Films.
The Boy That Changed America. 2017. Dir. Tim Golden. UK: BBC.
Vidas secas. 1963. Dir. Nelson Pereira dos Santos. Brazil: Luiz Carlos Barreto Produções Cinematográficas.
Viva Cuba. 2005. Dir. Juan Carlos Cremata. France, Cuba: Quad Productions. DDC Films.
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Martin, D. (2019). Children’s Journeys: Central Do Brasil, Viva Cuba and Cochochi. In: The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-52822-3_3
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