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Yearly Archives: 2014

Force and Meaning Political Hauntings in Two Contemporary Brazilian Films (film review)

By: Kristi M. Wilson (full story - click here) According to Avery Gordon, sociological hauntings can take a range of forms, from lost personal artifacts to decaying archival material to people living in the wake of dispossession and repression. Two Brazilian films from 2012, Neighboring Sounds/O som ao redor, a fiction film directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, and Elena, a documentary directed by Petra Costa, explore this idea of hauntings from different moments of the political past: colonialism and the last dictatorship, respectively. They represent collisions between the force of the past and its meaning in the present across a range of Brazilian chronoscapes—historical changes and recurrences that impact race, gender, and class relations and speak to the widening chasm of social inequality, continually reinventing itself for the times. Neighboring Sounds was featured at the 2013 Latin American Studies Association film festival. Neighboring Sounds explores notions of past and present violence under the surface of the increasingly privatized and policed urban landscape of Recife, a Portuguese colonial settlement with a painful history of slavery and sugar barons. Elena is a poetic documentary about loss, memory, and exile (from home and self). Born at the tail end of the dictatorship to [...]

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El edificio de los Chilenos (featured film)

Macarena Aguiló’s debut documentary The Chilean Building (Magic Lantern Films, 2010) takes up an often neglected aspect of the organized struggles against the Pinochet dictatorship. The film reminds us that when young militants went underground to organize armed resistance, they made enormous sacrifices to protect their children (often targets of the repression) that sometimes entailed a radical challenge to their roles as parents. Aguiló tells the story of a group of more than 60 children who were put in the care of surrogate parents, first in Europe and then in Cuba. The biological parents belonged to the same political organization, the MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionario), and, as the film discloses, had lengthy debates about the pros and cons of leaving their children temporarily while they carried on the struggle. The film interviews reveal profound meditations on familial responsibilities and political commitment and thoughts about the damaging role of conservative institutions and practices on the education of children. They also deal with the profound disappointment of the revolutionaries and their children upon returning to a politically divided Chile. The fact that this remarkable story is told from a first-person perspective generates rich historical readings. As a small child, Macarena Aguiló was kidnapped [...]

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The Outsiders Pathways of Migratory Experience in Latin American Films (film review)

In the past several decades the theme of migration has continually recurred in the cinema of and about Latin America, and it is not difficult to see why it is a popular topic in a region characterized by rapid upheavals in political, economic, and cultural circumstances. In the midst of flux and change, movement is transformed into something more than an urgent necessity. It is a reflex; it becomes one of the few ways that one can make sense of the ever-shifting world. Indeed, we can even speak of the aesthetics of migration itself and suggest that cinema is well suited to depicting and contemplating that experience of traversal within and across national borders; the medium is capable of capturing grand vistas and broad swaths of space and time, along with attending to the minute details of daily life and daily struggle. The more familiar manifestations of this theme come with the cycle of films, almost a subgenre unto themselves, that chronicle the danger-filled journeys of migrants toward the global North. In films like El norte (1983) and Sin nombre (2009) the border between Mexico and the United States serves as a kind of finish line at the end of a perilous [...]

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Migration, Regional Traditions, and the Intricacy of Documentary Representation in Cuates de Australia and La chica del sur (film review)

By: Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli Approaches to telling a story are, of course, abundant. Latin American filmmakers borrow from all kinds of artistic traditions—literature, pop music, the plastic arts, home movies, etc. What makes this borrowing both draining and stimulating is that the web offers an excess of examples to draw from. Further, digital production and online distribution are cultivating a new kinship among filmmakers, visual traditions, and viewers across the world. This is a daunting realization that the current crop of young filmmakers is trying to grapple with. Two recent documentary films from Mexico and Argentina bring the topic of social and cultural migration into focus, giving international audiences the opportunity to enter otherwise inaccessible worlds. Cuates de Australia (Drought) from Mexico and La chica del sur (The Girl from the South) from Argentina display contrasting approaches to portraying the hardships of relocation. Both documentaries follow their protagonists’ journeys from the place they call home to an unfamiliar land and their bittersweet return. Cuates de Australia, directed by Everardo González, is an enigmatic film. It goes out of its way to remain removed from its subject, but it cannot help but become enamored of its own rendition of it. This essential quality works in the film’s favor, since it creates sequences of great tenderness and anguish. [...]

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Latin American Perspectives, founded in 1974, is a theoretical and scholarly journal for discussion and debate on the political economy of capitalism, imperialism, and socialism in the Americas. Most issues focus on a single problem, nation, or region, providing an in-depth look from participants and scholars throughout the Americas.

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