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Latin American Film

Course Syllabus – SPA 390 - Spring 2000

Fridays, 3:00 - 5:30 PM. PL- M205

Course description:

A survey of Latin American film from the 1980s and the 1990s. This Third-year level course, taught in Spanish, is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural emphasizing the socioeconomic-economic and political issues that gave rise to a specific movement. This course is designed to introduce the students to the cinematic work of a number of Latin American film artists, and to develop a more detailed and creative reception of each film.

Aims of the course:

To aid the student who has a strong desire to:

1.  
2. cultivate a deep-rooted understanding of filmmaking in Latin America;

    

3. equip her or him with a wide range of ideas and a vocabulary to talk and write about these modes of filmmaking with confidence;

    

4. show how the films are studied--thematic analysis--, and related to other art forms;

    

5. gain an understanding of these films' integral relationship to the Latin American social, economic, and political context.

Prerequisites:

None

Course materials:

• Pick, Susan. The New Latin American Cinema. A Continental Project. Austin, Texas UP, 1993.

and a reader with a series of articles related to the films and the themes of the course.

• Guide For Writing About Film

   

Evaluation:

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• A one-page report for each film (40%): A weekly typewritten report, involving a short detailed technical analysis, and its relation to the main themes of each film viewed in class. Please, avoid plot summary. Reports will be graded based on content and quality of expression. Students must turn in 10 reports.

   

• Oral discussions (20%): Ask questions and give your opinion about each film. Also a question to prepare in small groups evolving from the film under discussion. We will use these group discussions because the time left after each screening will be too short.

   

• A research paper on one film (40%): Students will prepare, upon consultation with the instructor, a term paper topic (8-10 pages). On February 4^th students will turn in their topic, the film that they want to analyze (there are some available from rental video stores), and the bibliography they will use. The term paper will due on April 28^th.

Methodology:

The discussions and the analyses will center on sociocultural and historical priorities in relation to themes such as films by women and the representation of genre, identity, exile, emigration, the transnational, and the intercultural. We will discuss some cinematic proposals shaped by their identity politics, in the frame of globalization and the implosion of the modern states in diverse local and cultural practices in Latin America. Our approach deals with methods of reading cultures that are always changing in complex and conflictive situations.

Adapted by Cuban filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea from Edmundo Desnoe's novel Inconsolable Memories, this 1968 film portrays the alienation of a bourgeois intellectual caught in the warp of a rapidly changing social reality. A thoroughly mature and original creation, Alea's film does not caricature Sergio--a 28-year-old living off reparations from his nationalized property--but rather strikingly portrays the existential contradictions of a man living in a vacuum, in a mixture of past and present. He is always an observer, for example during the missile crisis Sergio watches it through binoculars while his more intellectually authentic (if less well schooled) countrymen respond with action. A mix of documentary, flashback, and present time footage, it depicts Sergio and his separation from society through several relationships, including that of his wife and a young working class woman who wants to be an actress, Elena. His family and wife leave for America, strengthening his isolation. He cannot come to terms with the new "revolutionary" Cuba, and instead prefers to dwell on the past and fantasy. Director Alea chose to stress Sergio's isolation visually with magnificent composition (he has a cameo appearance as a filmmaker friend of Sergio). As the first film from post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the United States, this had a widespread impact unequalled in the history of Third World cinema. A critique of revolutionary society (the "underdeveloped" extends to many levels), a critique of that critique, and a remarkable demonstration that artistic subtlety, political commitment and entertainment are not incompatible.

Camila

(Argentina, 1984, Directed by María Luisa Bemberg, 90 minutes)

January 28, 2000

"Tell me, do you like love stories?" says the wealthy, condemned Argentine woman to her granddaughter. It's the mid-19th century; a bloody dictator, General Juan Manuel de Rosas, is in power; and, for unnamed reasons, the woman has been exiled to her home country for life. As it turns out, this is just the prologue to CAMILA, which promptly skips 10 years to concentrate not on this character's house arrest but the indiscretions of the granddaughter, who grows up to fall in love and run away with a Jesuit priest. The true story of the defiant, doomed affair of Camila O'Gorman and Father Ladislao Gutiérrez has become legend in 20th-century Argentina, and it could be told on film only after the democratic government of Raúl Alfonsín lifted censorship in the early 80s. The movie became such a hit there that there has been a run on Argentine baby girls named Camila. Buenos Aires in the mid-19th century was the sort of society in which booksellers risked public decapitation if their books displeased the church, and a single woman was considered "a disorder of nature." Director Bemberg gives her film a guarded, cerebral quality that forces you to watch it without tears. Bemberg is herself a grandmother of nine, and she may just be too experienced to take the idea of a deathless passion completely seriously, yet the film communicates genuine anger about the consequences of the lovers' indiscretions. The movie's triumph is in its unusual perspective: The "crime" of these two giddy people carries less weight than the hideous gathering of institutional forces that punish it.

Mexican artist and revolutionary Frida Kahlo has been the object of much fascination and obsession for artists and art lovers alike since her death in 1954. This proud woman with her hasty expression and her paintings that explored the primal, primitive and tormented urges that she encountered throughout her life, has also remained enigmatic and perhaps one of the most passionate and surreal women artists of our times. This film captures facets of this woman's vivid and flamboyant personality and life, recreating some of the defining moments that shaped the artist she was. Frida is dying, remembering snapshots of her life. That’s it. Through Leduc’s camera we experience Kahlo's stormy relationship with muralist Diego Rivera, and many relevant events of her life. We see her comradeship and sentimentality with the exiled Leon Trotsky, her struggle for acceptance as an artist, her patriotism and love for Mexico, her affairs with David Siqueiros and the horrors of her miscarriage and the amputation of her leg. We are also taken into the colorful confines of her home where we see the most haunting and memorable side of Kahlo. Propped up in bed, surrounded by mirrors which she would stare into for long periods of time, reflects not only her pain and suffering but her hunger to capture her own soul in her paintings. Actress Ofelia Medina who portrays Kahlo bears not only an uncanny resemblance, but shares her mannerisms, her dignity and her feverish passion, while Leduc's camera roves silently across the parchment of her sacred paintings capturing the ambience and atmosphere of those troubled and turbulent times in which she lived. FRIDA, NATURALEZA VIVA is a raw canvas devoid of intellectualism and vanity, that has the feel and sensory resonance of buried treasure that has been languishing in some dusty orifice and suddenly resurrected to be savored by future generations.

Quilombo

(Brazil, 1984, Directed by Carlos Diegues, 114 minutes)

February 11, 2000

QUILOMBO has charm and dynamism. It's the story of Palmares, the most famous of the mountain villages (quilombos) formed by runaway slaves in 17th-century, in the forests of northeastern Brazil. No doubt by now the legend of Palmares has been liberally rewritten in fantasy and myth - it is presented in this movie as a sort of democratic utopia - but it remains an important symbol in the history of a nation that claims to be color-blind. Diegues combines matter-of-fact battle scenes with a world that looks inspired by some of the sword-and-sorcery movies. The film starts with the revolt of some slaves, who kill their Portuguese masters and flee to an isolated corner of the nation, which they place under their control. Other escaped slaves and various disenfranchised and disenchanted whites join them, and under the leadership of a charismatic leader named Ganga Zumba, they begin to create their own society. The Portuguese try everything they can to crush the rebel nation, but for a long time, nothing works. Their cumbersome suits of armor and European-style weapons are useless against the snares, traps and arrows of the free men of Quilombo. Finally, they roll in their cannons to train against a jungle fort made of red mud, a fort that looks almost like a dream vision. The effect is of a society making up its own rules in a time before men thought they knew all the answers. The implication is that Brazil is still experimenting with that process.

Winner of the Grand Prize at the San Sebastian Film Festival, this powerful drama is one of the finest films to emerge from Latin and South America in recent years. LA BOCA DEL LOBO is a study of a bloody encounter between the Peruvian Army and the Maoist Shining Path in Chuspi, a small isolated village in the Andes in the early 80s. The striking thing about this film is that the events that you are going to see are based on true facts. Tormented by unseen communist guerillas, the stressed-out soldiers reach the breaking point. This film does not show the enemy’s face (The Shining Path), but the perpetrated cruelties by the Army against innocent people who try to live between two fires. It is a tale of a violent dichotomy between the city culture (Western model) and the countryside (The Andean cultures). Vitin Luna (Antonio Vega) and the other young soldiers must face an invisible, perhaps superior force. They also must to face their own devils. A brutal lieutenant who declares the entire village guilty of treason commands their unit. In the face of this crisis, Vitin must choose between blind obedience and his own conscience.

Danzón.

(México, 1991, Directed by María Novaro, 99 minutes)

February 25, 2000

This film does not have one single machine gun in it. Rather, it tells the story of Julia, a divorced Mexico City telephone operator whose life has come to revolve around the danzón contests at a local hall every weekend where she and her long-time partner Carmelo have become quite the winning combination. When he disappears, she searches for him and in the process finds herself emancipated from her mediocre dependency on "Danzón." The film then becomes almost an epic quest, though through a very different forest than most epics. She goes to Veracruz, where she's gradually welcomed into a strange new world of prostitutes, female impersonators and lovers. As it happens, however, this world isn't debauched and lustful but surprisingly compassionate and supportive. It gives her the nurture that her former life completely lacked. The movie is truly a parable of healing. It recounts the slow and gentle ways that people who care about people can save them from the worst monsters in the world -- the ones inside. Danzón is a fine ballroom dance that originated in Haiti, where the people tried to recreate the French cotillion dances. It became popular in Cuba in the middle of the 19^th century, and arrived in the port of Veracruz a few years later. The best orchestras, the most virtuoso instrumentalists and the highest regarded dancers have their roots in danzón. Director María Novaro explains: "Danzón is a ritual, an act of love; the film is a nostalgia for a Mexico that we’re losing."

This film is an imaginative, fictional reflection of the director’s relationship with his own children, inspired by a short story "Beatles versus Duran Duran" by Mirta Yáñez. Laurita, the teenage daughter of Laura, stops going to school. She stares at the wall, stays with hippie friends, and decides to travel to Madagascar. Mother and daughter do not understand each other, and the situation becomes more difficult every day. What kind of allegory is this story? Mother and daughter change their faiths, dreams, and destinations. Both move on because they are dissatisfied with the private and public paralysis in their lives. MADAGASCAR is a portrait of Cuban society that shows contradictions between political awareness and personal preoccupations. The film painfully depicts the hopelessness of Cuban youth in a prevailing atmosphere of uncertainty. Recurring actions and some locations have a distinctly dreamlike and at times nightmarish quality, but the way that they are presented responds to a search for ways and forms to "absorb" contradictory Cuban realities. It won many awards, including Sundance festival.

Transparent Woman (5 short films)

(Cuba, 1991, Héctor Veitía, Mayra Segura, Mayra Vilasís, Mario Crespo, Ana Rodríguez, 114 minutes)

March 10, 2000

An interesting composite film by five young Cuban directors from the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos [ICAIC] was coordinated by Humberto Solás focusing on questions of women's identity. This film encourages freedom and autonomy of filmmakers. Its critical treatment of gender reformulates the traditional ways of identity representation. ISABEL is a film of a woman coming into a "different image of herself." A powerful exploration of a woman in middle age reflecting on career, love, and marriage seeking to be a "ventriloquist for herself" rather than speaking through cultural expectations. ADRIANA is a lyrical meditation on time, aging, and desire. A woman's memory of the past, set against the world of passing events. JULIA is a sad story of relationships breaking up and the acting one does in marriage and affairs. Julia vacillates between feeling "It is hard to resist in a country where people look straight into your eyes" and liking to be alone. ZOE is a stylized film about an art, ennui, education, and politics: a noir reflection about sexuality and authority. LAURA is the story of a reunion between friends in the lobby of a tourist hotel in La Havana. Reminiscent of One Sings, the Other Doesn't and Julia, the film looks at memory, politics, and the depth of friendship across time and difference.

This Chicano film follows the lives of a South Texas family of migrant farm workers during the 1950s. It is an unusual window into the migrant world and we can appreciate the Mexican-American experience Traveling from page to screen: A Mexican American family is struggling to survive, working in fields from Texas to Minnesota. The younger son, Marcos, is a sensitive 12-year-old who is forced to confront the ineluctable facts of his life - grinding poverty, back-breaking work, racism, hopelessness. There are moments that transcend a realistic depiction of suffering people; there are also moments of joy and discovery. Marcos manages to pull himself out of his miserable life, eventually becoming a professor and author of a landmark work of Chicano literature. Rivera's novel, first published in 1971, is widely considered a modern classic, and is taught in literature courses around the country. Perez's quiet, yet powerful film beautifully evokes the substance and spirit of the novel, and it has won international acclaim, including top honors at several film festivals. Most or many Americans have little direct contact with migrants, or the contact they do have is limited and doesn't really enable them to look into the world where these people live. That's what this film does.

Wild Horses

(Argentina, 1995, Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro, 128 minutes)

March 31, 2000

With a screenplay by Aida Bortnik ("The Official Story", "Old Gringo," "Tango Feroz"), "Wild Horses" has enjoyed the same amazing success as "Tango Feroz" that had with Argentinean audiences, pulling in more viewers than "Batman Forever." It is a story of four days in the life of José, Pedro, and Ana. José is an old anarchist against injustice. Pedro is young and believes he is where he should be and is doing what he is supposed to do; he is a successful yuppie lawyer, working for a bank in Buenos Aires. One day like any other day, an event changes his life and beliefs in just a few hours. His world collapses like a castle of cards. This film is the tale of a robbery that is not a robbery, and a suitcase full of money that is not supposed to exist. There are car chases, gunshots, bad cops, and murders. From Buenos Aires to Patagonia WILD HORSES gallops along at breakneck speed maneuvering twists of plot with agility and turns of character with grace. This is a road film that celebrates sudden radical change, unlikely friendships, motion, and the startling Argentine landscape. In showing how the media creates popular heroes WILD HORSES is a shrewd and deft satire, a tale about human heart, solidarity, and corruption.

The movie script is set in the old downtown section of the Mexico City of today. It is adapted from the novel of the Egyptian Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfuz, which takes place in the Cairo of the 1940's. The self-consciously literary structure finds the storyline constantly folding back to the same starting point: a game of dominoes among a group of regulars at a Mexico City neighborhood cantina. From here, branches run in multiple directions, First we follow Rutilio (Ernesto Gomez Cruz), the cantina proprietor, a stocky, sixtyish fellow with a mercurial temper. His loving wife (Delia Casanova) of 30 years still desires him, but Rutilio is bored and seeks his pleasure among young men. A second interconnecting branch shows the travails of Alma (Salma Hayek), a local beauty desired by one and all, especially the young barber Abel (Bruno Bechir), who is eventually persuaded to sneak across the border into the United States so he can earn enough money to marry her. Will Alma wait for her beloved to return?

Part soap opera, part superb character study, it does get a viewer involved its seductive web. The most remarkable aspect of 'Midaq Alley' is that the film makes you love and care for these diverse and desperate people. All of the inhabitants of the neighborhood dream grand dreams, but all of them soon realize that the dreams are well beyond their reach. It is a wonderful morality tale of how life circles and recreates itself, told from a point of view that neither vindicates nor abdicates it's character actions. These are the kind of people we have all known, people we have all loved, people we have all hated. In other words, they are us.

Buenos Aires Vice Versa

(Argentina-Holland, 1996, Directed by Alejandro Agresti, 122 minutes)

April 14, 2000

In Argentina an entire generation has been ripped out of history, orphaned by the systematic destruction and "disappearance" of their families and friends during the military dictatorship. A boy and a girl, just out of adolescence, whose parents disappeared during the military dictatorship, involved with a series of characters representing the multiple aspects of a big City like Buenos Aires. They try to understand what happened to their parents, but the only answer the City has to offer comes as an allegory: Stories intertwine through encounters and non-encounters but are all linked by confusion, solitude and the nostalgia of the city's inhabitants. Denizens of Buenos Aires, of all kinds, each with his or her own story. Anecdotes which include happiness and sadness. Stories which end up linked by life itself and determine a unique way of being. Buenos Aires. . . Any film student could identify with Daniela, who has her degree in film and is having trouble finding work. She thinks she's very lucky when an older couple, living in recluse, hire her to film Buenos Aires for them - an hour for $500. She goes out and documents the city. Her patrons, however, are outraged. This is not the Buenos Aires they remember, and their reason for this tape is strictly nostalgia. Daniela is hurt at their rejection of her honest esthetic, but she faces a larger reality - the rent - and shoots a reel of tourist-type shots. Her pain is palpable, and her lack of family makes the misunderstanding with the older couple even more appalling: Their daughter was killed, her parents were killed, and yet the only link between them is this lie that denies the true city. It builds toward a very powerful ending that reminds us of all urban disaster, but the problem that has made Buenos Aires a metropolitan orphanage is undeniable.

Based on a true story, FOUR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER is a moving account of the kidnapping in September, 1969 of the American Ambassador to Brazil, played by Alan Arkin. The drama unfolds as a group of young and often naive idealists join together to plot and carry out an act of terrorism, their only means of giving voice to their progressive dreams and visions in a military regime. It is not a tale about why people get involved in armed struggle. It’s about the personal ground of that kind of political decision so common in Latin American countries. An exploration of the consequences of their amateurish undertaking, FOUR DAYS IN SEPTEMBER delves candidly into the lives and emotions of each of the young terrorists as they begin to question the depth of their allegiance to the group and to second-guess the motives of their comrades. Fernando Gabeira, a journalist and a Congressman for Brazil’s Green Party, wrote the autobiographical book upon which director Bruno Barreto ("Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands") based this film.

Who the Hell is Juliette?

(Cuba-México, 1997, Directed by Carlos Marcovich, 90 minutes)

April 28, 2000

Is it a documentary or is it fiction? Who the Hell Is Julietter? is one of the most innovative fusion in film forms you can ever see -- and clearly the most fun -- comes from Mexico. Following two fatherless models -- one professional from Mexico, Fabiola Quiroz, and one picked off the streets of Havana who become very good friend of Fabiola during the shoot for a music video, the film is hysterically funny, painfully poignant -- and constantly leaves you guessing as to whether or not you should believe anything the characters (or the camera) is telling you. One of its premises is Let's find a really colorful, unique 16-year-old girl and follow her around with a camera for a while. The hormonal collisions involved in being a "woman-child" come to life in Yuliet Ortega, the spellbinding subject of director Carlos Marcovich's schizophrenic documentary. Ortega, who lives in La Havana, grew up without parents (her mother committed suicide after her husband went to America); she had a tough childhood and makes her living as a prostitute with turists. The documentary offers a distilled look at her life, but its soul is the girl herself, whose exuberant spirit is matched by Marcovich's inventive camera work and editing. This film won the Latin American Cinema Prize at Sundance 1998. Background: Two years after his meeting with Yuliet, Marcovich returned to Cuba in 1995 with $5,000 and a three-man crew to make this gem.

Rarely will you see an actress in her late 60s star opposite a young boy, but that's exactly the odd couple that drives this thought-provoking Brazilian film. You will see real people tell their lives to Dora, in the station. Illiterate people try to reach distant people with words; and Dora make them think she delivers. She is the one who writes the letters. They have faith, Dora does not believe in others. But Dora changes: Dora, a retired schoolteacher, teams up with Josué, a recent orphan, to try to find the boy's natural father. Their journey takes place largely on a bus ride, where they lose all of their money chasing after Josué's ideal of his parent. The ordinariness of these characters and how they handle their crises is compelling and well told through visual details such as drab clothing and bleak surroundings, and narratively via slow pacing and an overall lack of drama. Central Station is a slice-of-life tale that's best enjoyed when you have the patience and energy to sympathize with imperfect yet resonant characters who struggle within modest destinies, discovering the great value of solidarity. This film was awarded more than 50 times all over the world.