NEW CINEMAS IN LATIN AMERICA

This seminar will analyze the historical similarities and differences between the two major “New Wave” periods of Latin America cinema. The first part of this course will examine the emergence of the 1960s nuevos cines in Mexico, Brazil, Cuba, Argentina, and Chile through an in-depth analysis of landmark films such as Jomi García Ascot’s and María Luisa Elío’s "On the Empty Balcony" (1962), Glauber Rocha’s "Entranced Earth" (1967), and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s "Memories of Underdevelopment" (1968). Some key concepts in Benedict Anderson’s book "Imagined Communities" will help us to understand why “national identities” played such a primordial role among Latin American film intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s. Special attention will be paid to the manifestos written by Julio García Espinosa, Fernando Solanas, and Octavio Getino, and to how they confronted Hollywood’s hegemony in order to create an auteurist film tradition in the region. In the second part of the seminar, we will study the global success of the Latin American cinemas of the 2000s from a transnational perspective: features such as Alfonso Cuarón’s "Y tu mamá también" (2001), Lucrecia Martel’s "The Swamp" (2001), and Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s "City of God" (2002) will be examined in relation to the political and aesthetic traditions discussed in part one. We will explore how these contemporary Latin American filmmakers have shifted their interests from national identities to questions of gender, race, class, and sexuality. The critical interpretation of these films will allow us to redefine the idea of "national cinemas" and to reexamine the historical tensions between state control, commercialism, and independent cinema in Latin America.