INTRODUCTION: CHANGING GENDER PERSPECTIVES IN LATIN AMERICAN FILM

Author(s): JULIANNE BURTON-CARVAJAL

Source: Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 44, No. 3/4, Latin American Cinema: Gender
Perspectives (Fall 1992 and Winter 1993), pp. 3-7
Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video
Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687979
Accessed: 21-06-2016 04:31 UTC

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 INTRODUCTION: CHANGING GENDER
PERSPECTIVES IN LATIN AMERICAN FILM
JULIANNE BURTON-CARVAJAL
Over 10 years ago, Randal Johnson and
Robert Stam, joint editors of the first book
on Brazilian film published in English,
argued (somewhat polemically) that the
Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and
1970s had given way to the more diffuse
phenomenon of Brazilian cinema, and
made this the title of their anthology.
Arguably, in the interim, Brazilian cinema
has itself given way to the even more
diffuse phenomenon of a mass-mediated
visual culture dominated by televisual and
electronic imagery, a process more accel
erated but no more inexorable than else
where in Latin America. Like Brazil's
Cinema Novo, the New Latin American
Cinema that encompassed it and other
"new cinemas" throughout the region,
has given way to the even more indefinite
Latin American cinema, a continental en
deavor to which various national and re
gional contributions rise and fall according
to a complex set of globally affected cir
cumstances.
This special double issue of the Journal of
Film and Video focuses on Latin Ameri
can cinema, acknowledging it as an evolv
ing rubric that increasingly and necessar
ily is being expanded to include Latino
media production in the United States and
Canada (and elsewhere), the contribution
of people of Hispanic origin in the devel
Julianne Burton-Carvajal is coordinator of the
Latin American Program at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. She is also the editor of
Cinema and Social Change in Latin America:
Conversations with Filmmakers (U of Texas P,
1986) and The Social Documentary in Latin
America (U of Pittsburgh P, 1990).
Copyright ? 1993 by J. Burton-Carvajal
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 43.3^ (Fall-Winter 1992-1993) 3
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opment of Hollywood cinema, and that
the many national cinemas considered to
make up this continental amalgam are
themselves increasingly intranational, in
ternational, and transnational.
The most newsworthy national exponent
of Latin American cinema at the moment,
consonant with the impetus to ratify and
implement the North American Free
Trade Agreement, is the Mexican. Al
fonso Arau's Como agua para chocolate
{Like Water for Chocolate, 1991) is cur
rently enjoying unequaled commercial
success in America. Over the past year,
Maria Novaro's Danz?n (1991) and
Nicolas Echevarria's Caheza de Vaca
(1990) also enjoyed limited commercial
runs in major cities. The fall 1991 Tribute
to Recent Mexican Cinema, organized by
the Toronto Festival of Festivals, was
both a recognition of and an impetus to the
renewed prominence of Mexican filmmak
ing on North American and international
screens. In his introduction to that selec
tion of 16 features and 2 documentaries,
David Mclntosh cited several internal fac
tors responsible for the production, in a
three-year period, of so many notable fea
tures. These ranged from more rigorous
professional training to the development
of several production cooperatives and
changes in government-sponsored and pri
vate financing (Program, 1991 Toronto In
ternational Festival of Festivals, 273).
During this period, Mexico has also en
joyed a period of prosperity relative to
many other Latin American economies.
From the mid to late 1980s, Argentina was
where the action was on the Latin Amer
ican film front, but chroniclers of that
cinematic resurgence agree that it was
effectively squelched by 1989 for a combi
nation of economic and political reasons
(Foster 1992; Barnard 1992). Argentina
and Mexico share a long and sometimes
competitive tradition as the premier Latin
American film producers, but other coun
tries have enjoyed intermittent periods of
high-quality production, including, in the
1980s and earlier, Cuba and Venezuela,
both of which have struggled unsuccess
fully to achieve a degree of extra-national
distribution commensurate with the inter
est of their cinematic product. Brazil,
Latin America's largest country, which
has seen a decline in annual production
from more than 100 to less than 5 features
in barely a decade, boasts, on the one
hand, the fourth largest television network
in the world (Teleglobo) and, on the other,
regional film-producing enclaves such as
the Casa de Cinema de Porto Alegre that
have consistently produced short, often
experimental, or otherwise innovative
works of the quality evidenced by Jorge
Furtado's Isle of Flowers (First Run/
Icarus).
If contemporary production is erratic and
imperiled, it is also tenacious and stub
born. The widespread cultivation of a
technically and critically grounded film
culture has encouraged not only high-level
production but also preservation and ar
chivization (Colombia's Patrimonio Film
ico in Bogota is a leading example), his
torical scholarship and publishing, and a
new crop of festivals and expositions.
Colombia's Cartagena Festival has, under
the active involvement of Gabriel Garcia
M?rquez, taken on a Latin American em
phasis. The same funding source enabled
Fundavisual Latina to mount the first
Latin American and Carribean Short Film
Festival in Caracas in 1992.
In the United States, New York's Festival
Latino's 1993 season has a major Mexican
component; the summer 1993 Flaherty
seminar features Latin American pro
4 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 43.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992-1993)
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gramming by Margarita de la Vega Hur
tado and Latino programming by Chon
Noriega, with attendant guests; the Uni
versity of New Mexico at Albuquerque is
sponsoring its second summer festival of
Latin American cinema; the UCLA Film
and Television Archive has inaugurated a
Mexican collection that will continue to be
expanded; and the Latin American pres
ence continues to be felt at major festivals
in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Fran
cisco, and elsewhere.
Since the 1990 publication of John King's
important Magical Reels: A History of
Cinema in Latin America, a wealth of new
titles have appeared or are about to ap
pear, among them Charles Ramirez Berg's
Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of
Mexican Film, 1967-1983 (1992), Chon
Noriega's anthology Chicanos and Film:
Representation and Resistance (1992),
David William Foster's Contemporary Ar
gentine Cinema (1992), Paul Lenti's trans
lation of Jose de la Colina's and Tomas
Perez Turrent's Objects of Desire: Con
versations with Luis Bunuel (1993; re
viewed in this issue), Rosa Linda Frego
so's The Bronze Screen (1993), Zuzana
Pick's The New Latin American Cinema:
A Continental Project (1993), John King's
and Ana Lopez's Mediating Two Worlds
(1993), A Critical Filmography of Latin
American and Caribbean Cinema, under
the editorship of Timothy Barnard and
Peter Rist (1994), and my own The Social
Documentary in Latin America (1990).
Two journals have recently dedicated is
sues to Latin American film: #12 of Iris: A
Journal of Theory on Image and Sound,
under the editorship of Kathleen New
man; and #46 of Review: Latin American
Literature and Arts, under the editorship
of Jerry W. Carlson.
Unlike the issues listed above, which en
compass a varied topical landscape, all the
articles and interviews included in this
issue of the Journal of Film and Video
share a common though by no means
exclusive focus on gender as a defining
category of cinematic and cultural dis
course. This shared focus plays itself out
in the following pages in multiple ways. In
the first three articles, it constitutes itself
as part of the continuing historical interro
gation and supplementation of women's
role in the film medium, as in Adrienne
McLean's intriguing contribution to the
growing literature on how stardom inter
acts with ethnicity, in which she traces
how Margarita Haworth Cansino was
shaped into Rita Hayworth; in Eduardo de
la Vega Alfaro's and Patricia Torres San
Martin's essay on the little-known career
of Mexican film pioneer Adela Sequeyro;
and in Karen Schwartzman's painstak
ingly documented "Descriptive Chronolo
gy" of 40 years of filmmaking by women
in Venezuela.
Next, two of Latin America's most impor
tant women filmmakers discuss their ca
reers. The name Margot Benacerraf is
unlikely to be recognized by English
speaking readers, but for anyone versed in
the history of Latin American cinema, this
Venezuelan's "interrupted" career is leg
endary. Two "documentary" films, both
as thoroughly scripted and intricately
structured as any fictional counterpart,
won major prizes in Europe upon their
release. (Her second film, Araya, shared
first prize at Cannes in 1959 with Alain
Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour.).
Karen Schwartzman's interview, the first
to appear in English and the most exten
sive to date in any language, reveals that,
though Benacerraf has made no subse
quent films, her activity in the field has
continued unabated and she remains today
one of the pillars of Venezuela's impres
sive (and underrecognized) film culture.
Argentine feature filmmaker Maria Luisa
Bemberg is well known among English
speaking audiences because of the success
of her historical epic romance Camila
(1984), the first of the "films of national
reconstruction" to bring international at
tention to the newly resurgent, post
dictatorship Argentine film industry. Her
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 43.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992-1993) 5
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more recent film, Yo, la peor de todas (7,
the Worst Woman of All), based on Oc
tavio Paz's account of the life and work of
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 17th-century
Mexican nun of unrivaled erudition and
creative genius, has not yet been widely
seen in North America. In her interview,
Zuzana Pick concentrates on these two
important and very distinct works, each of
which raises intriguing questions about the
representation of women as historical ac
tors.
The next group of articles provide close
readings of a diverse group of films. In a
multifaceted essay that sets out several
directions for future research, Sergio de la
Mora analyzes Arturo Ripstein's El lugar
sin Umites {Hell Has No Limits, Mexico,
1977, based on the eponymous novel by
Chilean Jose Donoso) within the context
of the Mexican prostitution melodrama
and the subsequent genre of the cabaret
film, which in turn evolved in the 1970s
into the fichera variant, with its invariable
inclusion of the male transvestite or
"queen." De la Mora argues that, while
this inclusion makes male homosexuality
visible in a culture where it is otherwise
largely hidden, it is a visibility based on
the most misogynistic, homophobic ste
reotyping. Arguing for the sociocultural
interdependency of the terms homosexual
and heterosexual, de la Mora stipulates
the necessity of "the scandalous differ
ence of the queen" to the heterosexual
male's ability to fix his gender identity.
"Fascinating Machismo" is the first pub
lished portion of an ambitious project that
investigates the constructions of (homo
sexual) masculinities in Mexican and Chi
cano culture encompassing the fields of
literature, film, and the linguistic and ges
tural exchanges of daily life. The project
begins with El lugar sin Umites because "it
is the first Mexican film to take homosex
uality seriously," investing its queen/
protagonist with the subversive power to
"unmask the conventionally understood
as-monolithic concept of (hyper)
masculinity."
Susana Conde's essay attends to the mul
tiple layers of discourse, enunciation,
identification, and agency in the decep
tively precious fm-de-siecle period piece
Cartas del parque (Letters from the Park,
1988), a collaborative project between Ga
briel Garcia M?rquez and Cuba's premier
director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea. For
Conde, the figure of the letter writer rep
resents "the personification of the ex
hausted, beleaguered patriarchy" and an
assertion of the regressive dominance of
an authoritarian past against a modernity
premised on the primacy of airplanes over
poetic phrases. This "innocent" and
"apolitical" love story, with its triangula
tion of old and young, archaic and modern
suitors, revolves around an overdetermi
nation of gender roles and, Conde argues,
an unexpected assertion of female agency.
S. Travis Silcox uses the potentially oxy
moronic category "political melodrama"
to situate Lejania (Parting of the Ways,
1985), the first Cuban feature to confront
the ideological, material, and emotional
implications of the long-deferred return to
the island of Cubans who chose to live in
"el norte." Arguing for the subversive
potential of melodrama via a dual register
of Anglo-American theoretical construc
tions (Peter Brooks, Christine Gledhill,
Janice Radway) and Cuban as well as
Latin American critical and cinematic
practice, Silcox recognizes the logic of a
return, in an "embattled and marginal
ized" country like Cuba, to the melodra
matic mode so ardently rejected in the
early years of the development of that
national cinema. Emphasizing the oscilla
tion inherent in melodramatic forms, she
argues that a film like Lejania defuses sites
of conflict and reinscribes traditional val
ues while at the same time preparing view
ers to cope more effectively with actual
processes of social change. Her essay
makes an important contribution to the
growing literature on nationalities and sex
ualities, on the one hand, and on the
multiple cultural manifestations of the
melodramatic mode, on the other.
6 JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 43.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992-1993)
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Chris Holmlund's essay, focused on two
films by the Costa Rican filmmaker Patri
cia Howell, asks how female voices and
feminist points of view are (to be) ex
pressed in traditionally patriarchal cul
tures. She seeks to articulate both the
specificity and the generality of such ex
pressions through her description of the
differences between a more conventional
documentary on women's work and moth
ering roles and a more experimental, evoc
ative "rewriting of] the trope of rape at
the heart of the Latin American 'master'
narrative," which adds a female, indige
nous enunciation as counterpoint to the
"unrooted" and disconnected discourse
of the exogenous male conquistador.
Holmlund ultimately reads the function of
gender in Howell's films as the expression
of a postcolonial state, exposing "how
much national and regional identities are
forcibly conditioned by and through gen
der" through the unmasking of "the ex
tent to which Woman as Mother is set up
to be simultaneously victim and goddess."
One of the important features of this issue
is that it brings forth the research of a new
crop of scholars. Of the authors assembled
here, only Zuzana Pick, Patricia Aufder
heide, and I can be considered "old
guard." Chris Holmlund has published
widely on a variety of film-related topics,
but this is her first piece on a Latin Amer
ican filmmaker, a focus area of her teach
ing. Patricia Torres San Martin and Edu
ardo de la Vega, though widely published
in Mexico, are making their first appear
ance in an English-language journal. The
remaining authors?Susana Conde, Sergio
de la Mora, Adrienne McLean, S. Travis
Silcox, and Karen Schwartzman?are at
the threshold of what one hopes will be
illustrious careers as interpreters and the
orists of film within and across the various
cultures that make up our ever more inter
connected Americas.
I am grateful for the patient collaboration
of all the authors listed above in the al
ways already overlong process of bringing
a collaborative publication into being, and
would like to acknowledge as well the
many authors whose work is not repre
sented here, much as I wish it could have
been, because deadlines intervened.
One concluding and clarifying note. The
call for contributions for a special issue
with a Latin American focus had been out
for more than a year before I was invited
to come on board as guest editor. When I
received the batch of accumulated submis
sions, authors' names removed as befits a
blind review process, I was disconcerted
to realize that I recognized the majority of
the essays and that three potential contrib
utors had been students of mine. Fortu
nately, the three manuscripts that were
products of my graduate seminar in Latin
American film had already won favorable
reviews by an earlier set of referees, en
abling me to accept the guest editorship
without the constraint of potential "con
flicts of interest"?but not exempting me
from the embarassment of being too often
acknowledged in the pages that follow.
Works Cited
Barnard, Timothy. "After the Military:
Film in the Southern Cone Today."
Review: Latin American Literature and
Arts 46 (Fall 1992).
JOURNAL OF FILM AND VIDEO 43.3-4 (Fall-Winter 1992-1993) 7
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Barnard, Timothy, and Peter Rist, eds. A
Critical Filmography of Latin American
and Caribbean Cinema. New York:
Garland, 1994.
Berg, Charles Ramirez. Cinema of Soli
tude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film,
1967-1983. Austin: U of Texas P, 1992.
Burton, Julianne. The Social Documen
tary in Latin America. Pittsburgh: U of
Pittsburgh P, 1990.
de la Colina, Jose, and Tomas Perez Tur
rent. Objects of Desire: Conversations
with Luis Bunuel. New York: Marsilio,
1993.
Foster, David William. Contemporary Ar
gentine Cinema. Columbia: U of Mis
souri Press, 1992.
Fregoso, Rosa Linda. The Bronze Screen.
Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993.
Johnson, Randal, and Robert Stam. Bra
zilian Cinema. Rutherford, NJ: Fair
leigh Dickinson UP, 1982.
King, John. Magical Reels: A History of
Cinema in Latin America. New York:
Verso, 1990.
King, John, and Ana Lopez. Mediating
Two Worlds. London, BFI, 1993.
Noriega, Chon. Chicanos and Film: Rep
resentation and Resistance. New York:
Garland, 1992.
Pick, Zuzana. The New Latin American
Cinema: A Continental Project. Austin:
U of Texas P, 1993.