Cinematic Journeys In Latin America

This book critically examines how movies that feature real or imagined explorers and expeditions creatively feature the geography of Latin America. It focuses on how locales are scripted into film plots and artistically depicted, and demonstrates that place is as important as any character in a film, especially in this genre. Nineteen key films are analyzed. Some, like Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Fitzcarraldo, The Other Conquest, Embrace of the Serpent, and The Lost City of Z are based on the exploits of real explorers. Others are fictional, including Apocalypto, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Dora and the Lost City of Gold. The author also discusses the evolution of exploration-discovery films, including trends that will likely be found in forthcoming movies.

This volume explores the ways films made by Latin American directors and/or co-produced in Latin American countries have employed the road movie genre to address the reconfiguration of the geographical, sociopolitical, economic, and cultural landscape of Latin America.

This engaging book explores some of the most significant films to emerge from Latin America since 2000, an extraordinary period of international recognition for the region's cinema. Each chapter assesses an individual film, with some contributors considering the reasons for the unprecedented commercial and critical successes of movies such as City of God, The Motorcycle Diaries, Y tu mamá también, and Nine Queens, while others examine why equally important films failed to break out on the international circuit. Written by leading specialists, the chapters not only offer textual analysis, but also trace the films' social context and production conditions, as well as critical national and transnational issues. Their well-rounded analyses provide a rich picture of the state of contemporary filmmaking in a range of Latin American countries. Nuanced and thought-provoking, the readings in this book will provide invaluable interpretations for students and scholars of Latin American film. Contributions by: Sarah Barrow, Nuala Finnegan, David William Foster, Miraim Haddu, Geoffrey Kantaris, Deborah Shaw, Lisa Shaw, Rob Stone, Else R. P. Vieira, and Claire Williams.

Many South American films that use the popular road movie format to examine regional culture and attitudes, especially in Argentina and Brazil. Pinazza performs a careful cultural analysis of the films and investigates how road movies deal with narratives on nationhood whilst simultaneously inserting themselves in a transnational dialogue.

Examining the vast breadth and diversity of contemporary documentary production, while also situating nonfiction film and video within the cultural, political, and socio-economic history of the region, this book addresses topics such as documentary aesthetics, indigenous media, and transnational filmmaking, among others.

Addressing the appeal of the journey narrative from pre-cinema to new media and through documentary, fiction and the spaces between, this collection reveals the journey to be a persistent presence across cinema and in cultural modernity.

This book offers a comprehensive and systematic overview of the flourishing genre of the contemporary Latin American road movie, of which Diarios de motocicleta and Y tu mamá también are only the best-known examples. It offers the first systematic survey of the genre and explains why the road movie is key to contemporary Latin American cinema and society. Proposing the new category of “counter-road movie,” and paying special attention to the genre’s intricate relationship to modernity, Nadia Lie charts the variety of the road movie through films by both renowned and emerging filmmakers. The Latin American (Counter-) Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity engages with ongoing debates on transnationalism and takes the reader along a wide range of topics, from exile to undocumented migration, from tourism to internally displaced people.

Twenty essays by major filmmakers and critics provide the first survey of the evolution of documentary film in Latin America. While acknowledging the political and historical weight of the documentary, the contributors are also concerned with the aesthetic dimensions of the medium and how Latin American practitioners have defined the boundaries of the form.