In March of 1973 the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha, interviewed in the Uruguayan weekly Marcha, put forth an optimistic prognosis for the future of the New Latin American Cinema, calling it “the most organized cultural form in Latin America”: “The prospects could not be better: we now have the experience of the sixties, familiarity with internal and international markets, a greater ‘decolonization’ of world critical opinion, a more concrete knowledge of the public taste in Latin America, a more profound mastery of our own cinematographic technique and a de-mystification of the techniques of imperialistic cinema, and above all, we have new political conditions in Argentina, in Chile, in Peru.”
The films which certified the importance of this incipient film movement in the eyes of the world—e.g., The Hour of the Furnaces, The Jackal of Nahueltoro, Memories of Underdevelopment, Lucia, Antonio das Mortes—have received little exposure or serious commentary in this country. In the intervening months since Rocha predicted that Latin American cinema was soon to become the most interesting and active in the world, the political situation on the continent has changed to such a degree as to call the very survival of the film movement into question. Given the paucity of available material on the topic, it is difficult for the Latin Americanist to evaluate the past achievements and attempt to chart the future prospects of this cultural phenomenon or to appreciate its significance. Fortunately, three recent books in Spanish provide essential historical, critical, and theoretical background to the field.
From an historical point of view, the most comprehensive is Nuevo cine latinoamericano by two young Spanish film critics, Augusto Martínez Torres and Manuel Pérez Estremera. The authors, who have traveled widely in Latin America and contribute frequently to such Latin American film journals as the Peruvian Hablemos de cine, trace the development of cinematography from its inception in nine Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela) with some brief concluding notes on the situation in some less cinematographically developed nations.
Faced with two possible models for their awesome task of compiling the first panoramic presentation of the history and evolution of cinema throughout Latin America, they chose a compromise between cinematographic historiography and critical appraisal. They take care to situate film, filmmakers, and film movements in their specific historical and social context before offering critical evaluations of the films themselves. This hybrid approach, though of necessity somewhat mechanical and schematic at times, recognizes the importance of the social and political roots of this cultural manifestation and facilitates its comprehension by a wider audience.
Though much of their commentary centers on politically committed or expressly revolutionary cinema, Martínez Torres and Pérez Estremera set themselves a course of political “objectivity” and a “sincere and rigorous critical posture.” The chapter on Cuban cinema, due perhaps to this enforced divorce of ideological sympathies and critical integrity, appears to be somewhat overcritical, yet it also provides significant new data and an original analysis.
The book would have benefitted from the inclusion of a strong concluding chapter, an attempt to summarize (more broadly and conclusively than the often vague prognoses scattered throughout) this incipient movement’s prospects for survival, development, and continuing impact on Latin American society. The inclusion of schematic filmographies (principal directors, film titles, and dates) at the end of each chapter provides a useful aid, but the book short-changes the serious scholar by omitting index and bibliography, and by failing to identify the sources of statistics and quotations. These omissions, however, diminish in importance when weighed against the extremely significant achievement of the book: the concise compilation and skillful analysis of heretofore highly dispersed and often inaccessible data.
Two other books, from Mexico and Argentina, effectively complement the Spanish critics’ historical-critical overview by providing concrete documentation in the form of manifestoes, interviews, and theoretical statements representing many of the most significant new Latin American filmmakers and film movements.
Alberto Hijar’s Hacia un tercer cine offers selections from numerous Latin American film journals, several of which are now unavailable. In his two introductory chapters, the editor discusses the obstacles and inherent contradictions in the attempt to develop a genuinely revolutionary cinema, and he gives an overview of the history of the movement up to 1971. The anthology begins with the famous essay “Hacia un tercer cine” by the Argentine Grupo Cine Liberación. There follows an interview with the Uruguayan director Mario Handler, conducted by the Hispano-Argentine filmmaker Octavio Getino, and three short pieces by Glauber Rocha (“Estética de la violencia, Manifiesto, and “No al populismo”). The “Informe del Grupo Cine Liberación is followed by a manifesto from another Argentine group, Cine Rojo. An interview with the Colombian filmmaker Carlos Alvarez precedes a short piece by the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés and an anonymous letter directed to the Bolivian authorities protesting the “deferred” showing of Sanjinés’s Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor). A short Statement by the Chilean director Miguel Littín is followed by selections on Senegalese and Vietnamese filmmaking, and the anthology concludes, after a long mutual interview between the Argentine director Solanas and the French filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard, with a theoretical piece on the absence of a “Third Cinema” movement in Mexico. Despite its loose organization and the unevenness of some of the material, Hijar’s anthology is to date the only attempt to bring together documentary material from all the Latin American countries directly engaged in making the New Cinema. As such, it provides valuable initial exposure to a diverse (and disperse) movement.
Similar in format, but more unified in content, is Cine, cultura y descolonización by the founders of the Argentine Cine Liberación group, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. The selections trace the activities and theoretical-artistic development of the group from its early work beginning in 1966, through its first manifesto in May of 1968 and subsequent theoretical statements. The chronological span of the book concludes with an analysis of the group’s experience up to 1972.
As co-directors of the marathon documentary La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces), completed in 1968, the authors have earned a special place among Latin American filmmakers. The three-part film essay on colonialism and neo-colonialism, Peronism, and the post-Perón period, violence and repression and the need for liberation— of necessity filmed, assembled, and distributed clandestinely in Argentina—has had a tremendous impact on subsequent documentary film production all over Latin America. This film, and the theoretical writings of its directors—especially the 1969 essay “Hacia un tercer cine” which appears in both this and the Hijar collection—have established Solanas and Getino as among the foremost theoretical spokesmen of the New Latin American Cinema.
It is the experience of The Hour of the Furnaces that provides the unifying motif for this anthology of interviews, articles, and manifestoes, which are directed specifically toward an exploration of the role of film and film workers in the liberation struggle of dependent countries, with particular emphasis, of course, on the Argentine situation. The continuing nature of the search begun with La hora de los hornos is underlined by the theoretical evolution apparent in the selections in this collection. This very inconclusiveness is, in the view of the authors, the virtue and the greatest potential of the anthology, which in their minds is destined primarily to those engaged in a similar search, but is of deep import to those with a more passive interest as well.
In defining the search of the Latin American filmmakers for new forms of filmic expression, new levels of popular cultural participation, and new methods of social impact, these three books are also inconclusive, but together they provide an essential basis for the eventual formulation of the entire picture.
