Fusco - About Locating Ourselves and Our Representations

Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.
7
FltAW'WOIK
No
36
ABOUT LOCATING
OURSELVES AND OIJB
REPRESENTATIONS
,
"
Though I confess that I have not read the entire essay by Adrienne Rich which has
been cited here as an organising framework for discussion, I will address myself
in this presentation to the quote I received. Before doing so, or perhaps as a way of
first locating myself, I should note that what I do in addition to writing critidsm
informs the nature of that writing. As a person involved in exhibition and distri..
bution of independent cinema, I am almost inevitably sensitised. to questio reception and presentation of films, not simply the productions themselves. As a
bureaucrat in a granting agency, I am involved in the censorship process that in a
sense preselects the films that critics then choose from.
Despite the fact that I am somewhat familiar with some of the cultural
debates here, my point of reference is the United States, and there are some very
important differences in the ways that multicultural policies are carried out here
and there. There is a tremendous amount of multinational corporate investment in
multiculturalism in the US, a symptom of political agendas we have not yet fully
explored. And it is that involvement that underlies and underwrites what is
perceived in the mainstream media as our current Latino boom and our new sense
of national culture as enriched" by "diversity".
In this presentation, I will focus my attention on Latinos and the New Latin
American Cinema, in part because these are areas I am particularly interested in,
but also because I wanted to address what New Latin American Cinema has to do
lI
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AGE
Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.7
THIRD
SCENAIIO:COtO
FLS(O
with third cinema as it is now used in cultural debates here. The difference between "third cinema" as it was originally conceptualised and how it is currently
deployed is not the only difference in terminology I must underscore. In the
United States, Black refers to Afro-Americans exclusively, unlike in Britain, where
the question of whether to include other people of colour within the term is at
least discussed. Given the political nature of most multicultural endeavours in the
US, I am becoming increasingly wary of employing terms that on the surface refer
exclusively or specifically to race and/or ethnicity. In an attempt to avoid this
tendency, I will work here with the term subaltern, which will, I hope, retain a
sense of the politi~allocation of ethnic categories in relation to film and to cultural
policy.
In preparing this presentation, I went over the questions we were given
several times to try to figure out what a politics of location might be. My current
area of iftterest is in how subaltern media is poSitioned, absorbed and consumed.
As an historically Euro-American film culture takes on post-colonial discourse,
the issues of race and representation, and the contexts of those debates, become
the focus of increasing attention, conflict and commodification. It is because of the
intensified commodification of subaltern experience that we speak of crossover
successes in North America and Europe. And it is within the context of this
activity that we must examine practices which mayor may not be channelled into
the "crossover", or which mayor may not contest this process.
Independent, non-commercial, supposedly non-exploitative film culture
has long depended on maintaining a strict distinction between itself and the commercial sector. As funding sources and political agendas overlap more and more,
we can no longer afford to uphold such distinctions. These areas function as disjointed echoes of each other. The non-commercial sector is subjected to increasing
pressure to be more like the commercial sector, and the commercial sector dips
frequently into the non-commercial sector for source material.
Which brings me to Adrienne Rich. Her quote is somewhat of an odd beginning for this conference. Her allusion to the priviledged location of the white
Euro-American subject, while emphasising the limits of white middle-class feminism, seems to be caught between being an admission of guilt and an invitation to
analyse the balance of power in the presentation and consumption of subaltern
texts in the US. Though it has taken an extraordinarily long time in North America, longer than in England, the hegemony of Eurocentric, feminist psychoanalytic
film theory is slowly unravelling. The forces bringing that change about are more
fragmented there than here, as they come from within academia and the art world,
both of which are particularly open to imported post-colonial debates, more so
than they seem to be to local counterparts.
These developments parallel mainstream social engineering in the Reagan

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era, an important aspect of which is the commodification of ethnicity. Media production has a primary role in maintaining a regime of multicultural diversity. In
this depoliticised version of the '60s', ethnic identity becomes the focus of ongoing
spectacle and aestheticisation, and subaltern popular memory is its terrain. This
simulation of ethnic diversity keeps each group in a fixed place, since we each
have the spotlight only for as long as we express our difference. This process
harnesses nationalist separatism, with its ahistorical notion of race, for the needs
of the marketplace. While the statistics indicate that "minority" groups constitute
the fastest growing sector of the population, it is also clear that political and economic interests outside these groups are at stake in the resurgence of ethnically
oriented marketing and corporate efforts to support and exert control over third
world material. This cultural project extends into educational polides a. American High Schools, particularly those in inner city areas, begin to revise curricula to
Haccommodate" I'differenr' students.
I do not mean to suggest that all forms of multiculturalism are essentially
insidious, but simply that the seemingly benign attempts to equate democracy
with diversity need to be constantly questioned. Within subaltern media practices
and their theorisation, there are many key areas that must also be subjected to
scrutiny. Reflecting on recent conferences both in England and the US on third
cinema, black cinema and post-colonial discourse, there runs through them a
desire to define our relationship to politically engaged cinematic practices from
the 1960s, largely from subaltern cultures, and to salvage them as the least corrupted vestiges of new left radicalism. This path is supposed to help us develop a
framework for critical discourse on film in the present. Within this desire to
define, however, there are several postulated notions of what the object of that
practice and critical reflection on it should be. And with each proposal, several
problems emerge. Conceptual difficulties arise when one attempts to create movements retroactively. In much of the scholarship on third world cinema that has
been produced in recent years, there are frequent attempts to define in theory
what was never made clear in practice or commentary.
Looking from the outside, from the first world, we have a tendency to take
individual films as representative of Latin America, even though Latin American
history is marked by conflict and fragmentation. This lack of unity explains to
some extent why the cultural identity debates of the 408, 50s and 60s were so romanticised. The now classical texts of the New Latin American Cinema movement
- essays and manifestos such as Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's TOWARDS
A THIRD CINEMA, Julio Garcia Espinosa's FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA, Glauber
Rocha's AESTHETICS OF HUNGER, Jorge Sanjines' LANGUAGE AND POPULAR CULTURE,
etc. -these were and are fragments, responses to the conditions of a moment, some
more reflective, some more polemical. The so-called independent film production
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Fusco
of the 1%0& and early 70s that these people were involved in was extremely
varied, and joined more by conditions of production than by style or theme. They
were loosely connected to a larger political project of decolonisation, and for third
cinema they were very closely tied to Peronist politics in Argentina in the late 60s
and early 70s which soon afterwards proved to be disastrous.
The films and the manifestos, Ilfilm acts", guerilla film units, quasi-mystical and auteurist projects that are all part of the New Latin American Cinema involved men, for the most part, who were from middle and upper class elites of
their countries. Their sense of oppression was largely global and political, not
microaoda1 or sexual. Their films became known through auteurist venues in
large part, particularly in Europe, despite their proclamations that their work was
for the oppreued, the masses, or whoever else they designated as their ideal
audience. ThII dGelll't chanse the value of their films, but it nonetheless bears
pomting out as a caveat against attempts to constitute a singular third cinema for
any essentia1ltt, neo-colonial, or formalist end.
Some very significant ways of thinking about cinema did come out of this
period. The film-makers and critics were acutely aware of the need for a multidimensional critique that could account for film and media's function in neocolonial societies, and the doubly alienating effect of Hollywood's dominance
outside America's borders. They addressed questions of race through class, and of
class through race, understanding how colonialism and capitalism had inextricably bound the two. They almost always forgot about gender. They thought about
dnema in relation to audience. One of the most important elements of Solanas and
Getino's TOWARDS A THIRD CINEMA was their concept of how to exhibit their work
as "film acts" in which audiences, primarily labourers and trade unionists, would
discuss what they saw with the directors, thereby contributing to it and transforming spectatorship from passive experience to active encounter.
The New Latin American film-makers often produced in a context where
the priviledge of being able to afford to attend the cinema with any regularity was
enjoyed by a small part of the population. They thus confronted the ethical
dilemma of exposing one sector of society's experience to another. These filmmakers espoused a variety of attitudes towards mainstream narrative as a viable
form and about the rhetorical power of many commercial films, carefully avoiding
conOating the forms with Hollywood as an institution. The calls for an imperfect
cinema were in a sense a reaction to pressures to produce media within the
conditions of underdevelopment, and then measure the results against an externally produced model which constituted an impossible ideal. In its place was
proposed an approach to film-making that could be tendentious, openly polemical, adaptable to immediate needs and the resources available, and that could be
judged in relation to context as well as aesthetic standards. This is not an apologist
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stance, but rather a kind of relativist pragmatism that accounts for cinema as it is
affected by resources and political imperatives, analysing how these factors in
turn affect visual strategies .
The reception of non-commercial cinema produced by subalterns has
changed somewhat since the 1960s. Given the lack of knowledge about other cinema produced in Latin America before or since the New Latin American Cinema
movement, and the lack of critical writing on that material, the revival of interest
in the 1960s forefathers furthers the illusion that they are the sole point of origin.
The limitations of international exhibition produce selective canons and genealogies. The cultural policies of the present effect our categories and the terms of
debate, as much as those canons ... to put it simply, third cinema is now something
quite different from what it was imagined to be 20 years ago. And yet this need to
establish a tradition connects with a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes apparent, to conceive of the aim of critical discourse as the locating of third cinema's
essence in a particular text, or kind of text. Sometimes the evaluation of a fUm's
relation to third cinema relies on the ethnicity and sexuality of the film'. director
more so than on addressing third cinema as a network of relationships between
conditions of production, visual strategies, subject matter, audience, and the
larger political context, a network that shifts as the film travels from one place to
another. We get stuck trying to fix the meaning of a text and that text to a certain
maker. This kind of enquiry participates in the old, and quite futile ,search for the
truly radical film produced by the truly radical subject which is supposed to
catalyse the truly immanent revolution.
An industrially based creative medium that very often relies on international investment and distribution, and aspires to mass audiences, cannot be comprehensively examined through a critical lens that isolates anyone aspect of the
process, from production to reception. Critical discourse around subaltern media
must be able to address the many interrelated areas that the production and
reception of those works bring together. I will bring my presentation to a close by
outlining what I perceive to be several of the key issues. The first is the function of
criticism in relation to subaltern cinemas. Several factors have contributed to a
perpetually unstable critical dialogue on subaltern film-making in the U.S. In
general, the status of film criticism has degenerated throughout this decade as the
role of marketing increases, even for independent films, and as grants for critical
writing have disappeared. These present conditions aggravate an already existent
tension concerning the role of the subaltern and / or sympathetic critic in subaltern
film sectors. The history of attitudes and beliefs that have contributed to distrust
of intellectual labour and metaphorical ambiguity, which are apparent in debates
on third world national culture, social realism and political cinema must be analysed. What, we might ask, are the factors that prevent the politically committed
PAC E

11
p
ticultural
interpolation
multicultural
another
policies. How and
we must
or
positioned by dominant cultural
called upon to function as testimonial to our
stream? Who and what
questions, we can begin to
to its
of subaltern works. How
when so much subaltern media
interpretive community, for example,
designa ted as having been targetted to a
as opposed to a
in different
What
audience? How are different
makes ethnicity attractive and marketable at a particular moment such as ours?
Within this discussion of cinematic reception we can situate the theorisation of subaltern spectatorship and the
of watching subaltern cinema
these areas, while they overlap, are not conlpletely contiguous,
third world
cinema
rarely if ever produced solely for third world
Which direction can we take to prevent ourselves from conceiving of audience as a unified
community? How can we look at the promotional mechanisms around films that
presuppose or engineer audiences into
And within that field of questioning, how can we avoid reducing spectatorship to a singular category of
tence?
It would seem that this is the point where the contributions of feminist psychoanalytic criticism are most obviously instrumental and most clearly limited by
the isolation and priviledging of gender. The theorisation of subaltern spectatorship, rather than replacing one fetishised term for another in the equation (in this
case race for sexuality), must be able to analyse how different films draw on the
psychic resources of several experiential
How does a filnl, we must
ask, call upon your ethnic identity, or your racial identity or your
position,
or your profession, or your sexuality so as to generate identification? What happens when one category of your
is pit against another?
How do questions of power figure into this problem?
there a difference
between the pleasure of the touristic
of an outsider and the sense of loss or of
misrecognition of one who overwhelnled by cultures that are not his/her own?
What is the psychic impact of a nledia culture that denies racial and ethnic
difference, and how does this differ from one that fetishises those differences?
How does a film address a racially specific spectator? rlow is the desire to identify
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manipulated or directed within a film so as to produce an identification with a

desired form of ethnicity? The dilemma of the Black American spectator has, up to
now, largely been described as having to choose between denial of that which
does not include you, and the pleasure of seeing oneself. And yet, this binarism
does not account for certain cultural realities in the US. Nearly everyone, at one
point or another, is part of the "general" audience that attends mainstream Hollywood films. It may be fashionable to speak of ethnic markets and marginal
audiences, but the dearth of representations of people of colour in mainstream
cinema hardly deters subaltern audiences from attending. How, then, do we begin
to understand these cross-over acts of spectatorship? How can we incorporate
psychoanalytic notions of ambivalence and of internalised repression to under.taDd bow desire is channelled even when there's a concommitant process of
deNal taking place?
My last set of questions pertain to subjectivity in relation to political cinema. The theorisation of subjectivity within debates on political cinema and more
specifically New Latin American Cinema have demonstrated underdeveloped
concepts of individual agency and desire. It is often assumed that these films must
be designed to create within the spectator a desire to change reality, having'seen
the world "differently". This can be reduced easily to a mechanical formula - the
spectator sees a film, has a discussion and leaves with his/her mind changed. The
same tendencies that foreclose discussion of symbolic ambiguity within the filmic
texts also preclude reflection on ambivalences that inform and / or emerge from
one's cinematic encounters. As we begin to understand these ambivalencies, we
also begin to locate the individual experiences of watching films in a continuum of
spectatorial moments that impact on each other.
What I have attempted to indicate through this myriad of questions is that
a politics of location regarding our film practices involves opening issues for
debate, rather than fixating themes and works. I may have reacted negatively at
first to relating location to subaltern practices because the notion of diaspora and
dislocation have for such a long time functioned as metaphors for post-colonial
experience. One of the effects of diaspora, it seems, is that a sense of history, and
of popular memory have to be pieced together with fragments, with remnants and
with documents that we did not always produce. We are not drawing on unified
traditions, but partial objects and partial truths. As we engage in this critical
historiography and theorisation, we must remember not to believe, as some would
have it, that we are "emerging" for the first time. Dominant institutions did not
ignore subaltern experience "before". What changes constantly are the methods of
structuring and controlling those experiences, and the memories of our individual
and collective pasts. Cinema fits quite neatly into this project as the most powerful
tool for structuring our sense of self and our sense of history.
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Fusco, Coco, About locating ourselves and our representations , Framework, 36 (1989) p.

Copyright (c) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

Copyright (c) 2006 ProQuest Information and Learning Company

manipulated or directed within a film so as to produce an identification with a

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