Latin America's cinema, since the arrival of the first projectors and films at the turn of the century, was completely dominated from abroad. Screens soon filled with images from the United States, while the continent's indigenous producers generally opted for competition by imitation. Tango musicals and cangaceiro Westerns used elements of varied national cultures, but bastardized them by adaptation to imposed genres. Some stand-out directors, like Argentina's Leopoldo Torre Nilsson (1924-1978) or the Brazilian Humberto Mauro (1897-1983) embarked on treating themes by genuinely deriving from the surrounding societies, but in general such exploratory techniques were few. Although Mauro was not able to garner a substantial audience for his films (though these vivid social documents influenced future Brazilian auteurs), Torre Nilsson managed to earn an international respect. The son of the director Leopoldo Torres Rios, Torre Nilson would make his debut feature Dias de Odio (Days of Hatred) in 1954. He would achieve a worldwide acclaim for his La Casa del Angel (House of the Angel, 1957) - the story that centered on a girl who was unable to break free from the man who has 'raped' her. This would be the first of several releases that Torre Nilsson would make in tandem with his wife, writer Beatriz Guido. The subsequent features in their canon would be hybrids of high dramatic visual styles and lugubrious humor with an affinity for social critique - with La Mano en la Trampa (The Hand in the Trap, 1961) and Piel de Verano (1961, Summer Skin) being of particular acclaim. In the 1960s, Torre Nilsson became involved in several anti-climactic international co-productions and a number of costly historical sagas, made with governmental assistance. However - a myriad of literary adaptations produced the following decade - including Los Siete Locos (The Seven Madmen, 1972) straight off the pages of Roberto Arlt's work, and Piedra Libre (Free For All, 1976), which came courtesy of a novella by Beatriz Guido - re-birthed his reputation shortly before his death.
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A new kind of cinema would emerge in the Fifties and Sixties. An instrumental part of the nationalist and revolutionary political tide that was turning for the continent, this new cinema aimed to convey an authentic Latin American vision of the world, to affirm the continent's own cultural lineage and to provide an ideological tool that would contribute directly to the uphill battle for political and social liberation. Its subjects would be the continent's dispossessed majorities, while its language would only take that which was of use to it from traditional cinema, with an objective look at the continent's cultural traditions for new resources. The relationship with the audience - intended to be these same dispossessed majorities - would be didactic and hands-on, breaking down the passive receptivity that was inspired by 'industrial' cinema.
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| Religion is color-coordinated courtesy of Rocha. |
The filmmakers of Brazil were among the first to feel the need for a progressive cinema, which they donned Cinema Novo, The main impetus for early Cinema Novo was Italian neo-realism which did itself imply a critical realist method based in economically technical resources. Although the movement would flower in the early and mid 1960s, the foundation was laid by films such as Alex Viany's Agulha no Palheiro (Needle in a Haystack, 1953) and Nelson Periera dos Santos' documentaries on the lives of everyday people in Rio de Janerio, with Rio 40 Degrees and Rio Zona Norte (Rio, North Zone, 1956).
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| The dog's days of summer. |
Cinema Novo would draw from a broad range of resources by the early 1960s, and it would ever be on a pilgrimage for a renovated aesthetic that would represent a Brazil proper. Including the real accounts of their contemporaneous financial crises, starvation, violence and the gross concentration of wealth in the hands of the few. Styles would range from the critical realism of Nelson Pereira dos Santos' Vidas Secas (Barren Lives, 1963) to the baroque prose of Glauber Rocha's films, notably Terra em Transe (Earth in Revolt, 1967). Both popular history and mythology were what earthed the movement. Films such as Rocha's Barravento (1962), Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1963) and Antonio-das-Mortes ( Antonio of the Dead, 1969) were based on the imagery and ritual of popular culture, proposing these as the base source for a renewed Brazilian culture, but consequently defining them as insufficient to confront the harsh realities of mid-twentieth century exploitation and hunger. Carlos Diegues' Ganga Zumba (1964), about seventeenth-century slavery revolt, would make its expedition to the past for it's reasoning for the present and Ray Guerra's Os Fuzis (The Guns, 1964) would illustrate the violent yearning for a better life that this culture expressed.
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| Cinema Novo was Latin America's answer to the New Wave. |
In the later Sixties, Cinema Novo's motif would veer away from the sertao (the brutal north-east) and the favela (shanty-town) to examine up-close and personal the urban middle-class culture. This reflected a desire not to fall into the trap of romantic privitism, but to investigate the failures of Brazil's body politic after the military coup of 1964. Films such as Paulo Cesar Saraceni's O Desafop (The Challenge, 1965), Gustavo Dahl's (The Brave Warrior, 1967) and Carlos Diegues' Os Herdeiros (The Inheritors, 1969) to explore this latter theme.
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| Glauber Rocha was one of Brazil's most acclaimed directors of all time. |
However by the time the late Sixties arrived, namely after the intensification of a repressed government circa 1968, Cinema Novo declared itself at an end. Filmmakers like Glauber Rocha and Ruy Guerra would now go into exile, whilst others found their films facing violent military censorship, as well as the prejudices of commercial distributors.
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| Three lads of the Condor. |
Brazil's Cinema Novo served as a sporadic muse for other Latin American countries. In Bolivia during the mid-Sixties, a sustained attempt began to relate cinema to one of the continent's oldest cultures - that of the Quechua and Aymara Indian peoples. In a six-film sequence that would consist of Yawar Malku (Blood of the Condor, 1969) El Coraje del Pueblo (Courage of the People, 1972) and others - director Jorge Sanjines (b.1936) and the Ukamau Group production company made less and less concessions to orthodox structure as they attempted to build a film language from the patterns of Quechua/Aymara culture.
Sanjines would spend ten years making shorts and documentaries before he founded the Bolivian National Film Institute and became its director. He was dismissed from his post, however, after the completion of his first feature length film Ukamau (1966), which was also focused on the sufferings of the Indians, because the government would deem his film ' too negative.' His second feature, Blood of the Condor, was inspired by a reportage of a sterilization program carried out by a group of American physicians on Indian women in a Bolivian mountain region without their consent, or knowledge of being filmed. It would be banned until a press campaign and endless street demonstrations would force a change of policy. In its first year of release, it was seen by more Bolivians than any film previously produced Some of its audiences in fact, had never seen a film before.
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| From 1969's Yawar Mallku (Courage of the People) |
Sanjines and his colleagues would take to remote country villages where they set up specifically prepared presentations. A narrator would recite the story in the age-old village tradition, albeit with the modern aid of photographic imagery. The audiences were encouraged to ask questions and to form discussions on the implications of the events. Then they would be shown the film.
Rapport between film audiences and filmmakers is vital to Sanjines working technique. Within the general flowering of revolutionary cinema in Latin America, he has pioneered the new way of creating and utilizing film by involving communities entire, in its preparation. Blood of the Condor, which does feature the population of the rural Kaata area, was by part, financed by teachers, students, workers, technicians and peasants. In his subsequent release, Courage of the People, a whole mining town, survivors of a massacre by the hands of Bolivia's army in 1967, would re-enact faithfully, their own true story.
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| Littin it all hang out. |
In the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Chilean new cinema movement declared itself with the appearance of four films made in 1969. Raul Ruiz's portraiture of urban petty bourgeoisie Tres Tristes Tigres (Three Sad Tigers, 1969); Miguel Littin's El Chacal de Nahueltoro (The Jackal of Nahueltoro, 1970) about the capture and trial and ultimate execution of a notorious killer; Aldo Franacia's Valparaiso, Mi Amor (Valpraiso, My Love, 1970), entailed the family of a poor worker who is incarcerated for the act of stealing meat; and Charles Elsesser's Los Testigos (The Witnesses, 1971), about a murder in an impoverished section of the capital. Between 1970 and 1973 such filmmaking would flourish under Chile's Allende government.
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| The Promised Land, one of several films edited in exile. |
During the military coup of September, 1973 documentarians such as Partricio Guzman - whose La Bantalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile 1975-9) had to be edited in exile - immersed themselves in current events in order to capture history as it was being made. By way of film, it was then returned to the ordinary people who had made it for the sake of their reflection, discussion and profound understanding. Directors such as Miguel Littin mobilized the resources of the feature film for a similar end. In his La Tierra Prometida (The Promised Land, 1973) also edited on the lam, past events were reconstructed by using the language and myths of popular memory so as to redeem them from 'official' interpretation and restore them to the people of whose living history they are a part.
Fernando Solana's La Hora de los Hornos (Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) would be the best known product of Argentina's new cinema. It was clandestinely filmed during the dictatorship of General Ongania, the film is a compendium of film essays that explored aspects of Argentine history and society, not precluding Peronism, the political movement that was founded by Juan Peron. Strongly inspired by the Algerian scribe Frantz Fanon, the film calls for revolution violence as being both the only viable political choice for liberation and a cathartic cultural necessity.
In all the above countries, right wing military governments had suffocated the new cinema by the mid-Seventies, killing and imprisoning its practitioners, or forcing them into a life in exile. Only in Cuba, where it would grow up rather than before a social and political revolution, has it continued intact.
In 1959, the new revolutionary government which was led by Fidel Castro set up the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) only three months after overthrowing the Batista regime. The swiftness of this action shows the importance that was given to cinema in the rebuilding of Cuban society. ICAIC churned several feature releases and documentaries in addition to weekly newsreels throughout the 1960s. The political outlook of progressive Cuban cinema is particularly obvious in the documentaries of Santiago Alvarez and in Julio Garcia Espinosa's Tercer Mundo, Tercera Guerra Mundial (Third World, Third World War, 1970), a documentary shot in North Vietnam with a specific target for a politically militant audience.
Third World filmmakers were concerned with the role of cinema in contrast to the audience; they wanted to counterbalance the consumer-oriented model of the passive spectator established in Euro-American cinema. Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas wildly acclaimed monumental film-essay, Hours of the Furnaces, conveys a Marxist historical analysis of neo-colonialism and oppression in Argentina in the form of chapters and notes - the captioned divisions in the film were designed to form the basis for political discussions with the audience.
Adopting a progressive political perspective would mean questions would be raised regarding history, as in Hour of the Furnaces. In a much different vein, Humberto Solas' Lucia (1968) potently dramatized three epic historical moments in Cuba's struggle of liberation and spotlighted the participation of Cuban women in each period. But very few films set out, as Hour of the Furnaces did, to activate a critical engagement with the historical process. Most political films were of an agitprop kind and infinitely more concerned with agitation and its propaganda than with that of analysis.
There would be great promise in a cinema of the late Sixties, exemplary films of the juncture were Tomas Gutierrez Alea's Muerte de un Burocrata (Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966) and Memorias del Subdesarollo (Memories of Underdevelopment 1968), Pastor Vega's De la Guerra Americana (On the American War, 1970) and Octavio Gomez's La Primera Carga al Machete (The First Charge of the Machetes, 1969).
And shortly after, this impetus seemed lost as official attitudes would become decidedly less liberal. Among the few important films of later years was Pastor Vega's Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa, 1979), which considered the difficulties of women fulfilling their potential in a society that, although communist, was still in domination by Latin machismo.