South American Cinema

This book charts a comparative history of Latin America’s national cinemas through ten chapters that cover every major cinematic period in the region: silent cinema, studio cinema, neorealism and art cinema, the New Latin American Cinema, and contemporary cinema. Schroeder Rodríguez weaves close readings of approximately fifty paradigmatic films into a lucid narrative history that is rigorous in its scholarship and framed by a compelling theorization of the multiple discourses of modernity. The result is an essential guide that promises to transform our understanding of the region’s cultural history in the last hundred years by highlighting how key players such as the church and the state have affected cinema’s unique ability to help shape public discourse and construct modern identities in a region marked by ongoing struggles for social justice and liberation.

From El Megano and Black God, White Devil to City of God and Babel, Latin American films have a rich history. In this concise but comprehensive account, Stephen M. Hart traces Latin American cinema from its origins in 1896 to the present day, along the way providing original views of major films and mini-biographies of major film directors. Describing the broad contours of Latin American film and its connections to major historical developments, Hart guides readers through the story of how Hollywood dominance succumbed to the emergence of the Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano and how this movement has led to the “New” New Latin American Cinema of the twenty-first century. He offers a fresh analysis of the effects of major changes in film technology, revealing how paradigm shifts such as the move to digital preceded new cinematographic techniques and visions. He also looks closely at the films themselves, examining how filmmakers express their messages. Finally, he considers the decision by a group of directors to film in English, which enhanced the visibility of Latin American cinema around the world. Featuring 120 illustrations, this clear, cogent guide to the history of this region’s cinema will appeal to fans of Central Station and Like Water for Chocolate alike.

A Companion to Latin American Cinema offers a wide-ranging collection of newly commissioned essays and interviews that explore the ways in which Latin American cinema has established itself on the international film scene in the twenty-first century. Features contributions from international critics, historians, and scholars, along with interviews with acclaimed Latin American film directors Includes essays on the Latin American film industry, as well as the interactions between TV and documentary production with feature film culture Covers several up-and-coming regions of film activity such as nations in Central America Offers novel insights into Latin American cinema based on new methodologies, such as the quantitative approach, and essays contributed by practitioners as well as theorists

The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema is the most comprehensive survey of Latin American cinemas available in a single volume. While highlighting state-of-the-field research, essays also offer readers a cohesive overview of multiple facets of filmmaking in the region, from the production system and aesthetic tendencies, to the nature of circulation and reception. The volume recognizes the recent "new cinemas" in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico, and, at the same time, provides a much deeper understanding of the contemporary moment by commenting on the aesthetic trends and industrial structures in earlier periods. The collection features essays by established scholars as well as up-and-coming investigators in ways that depart from existing scholarship and suggest new directions for the field.

Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America examines how cinema forged cultural connections between Latin American publics and film-exporting nations in the first half of the twentieth century. Predating today's transnational media industries by several decades, these connections were defined by active economic and cultural exchanges, as well as longstanding inequalities in political power and cultural capital. The essays explore the arrival and expansion of cinema throughout the region, from the first screenings of the Lumière Cinématographe in 1896 to the emergence of new forms of cinephilia and cult spectatorship in the 1940s and beyond. Examining these transnational exchanges through the lens of the cosmopolitan, which emphasizes the ethical and political dimensions of cultural consumption, illuminates the role played by moving images in negotiating between the local, national, and global, and between the popular and the elite in twentieth-century Latin America. In addition, primary historical documents provide vivid accounts of Latin American film critics, movie audiences, and film industry workers' experiences with moving images produced elsewhere, encounters that were deeply rooted in the local context, yet also opened out onto global horizons.

Pushing Past the Human in Latin American Cinema brings together fourteen scholars to analyze Latin American cinema in dialogue with recent theories of posthumanism and ecocriticism. Together they grapple with how Latin American filmmakers have attempted to "push past the human," and destabilize the myth of anthropocentric exceptionalism that has historically been privileged by cinema and has led to the current climate crisis. While some chapters question the very nature of this enterprise—whether cinema should or even could actualize such a maneuver beyond the human—others signal the ways in which the category of the "human" itself is interrogated by Latin American cinema, revealed to be a fiction that excludes more than it unifies. This volume explores how the moving image reinforces or contests the division between human and nonhuman, and troubles the settler epistemic partition of culture and nature that is at the core of the climate crisis. As the first volume to specifically address how such questions are staged by Latin American cinema, this book brings together analysis of films that respond to environmental degradation, as well as those that articulate a posthumanist ethos that blurs the line between species.

The Cinema of Latin America is the first volume in the new 24 Frames series of studies of national and regional cinema. In taking an explicitly text-centered approach, the books in this series offer a unique way of considering the particular concerns, styles and modes of representation of numerous national cinemas around the world. This volume focuses on the vibrant practices that make up Latin American cinema, a historically important regional cinema and one that is increasingly returning to popular and academic appreciation. Through 24 individual concise and insightful essays that each consider one significant film or documentary, the editors of this volume have compiled a unique introduction to the cinematic output of countries as diverse as Brazil, Argentina, Cuba, Mexico, Bolivia, Chile and Venezuala. The work of directors such as Luis Buñuel, Thomas Guiterrez Alea, Walter Salles, and Alfonso Arau is discussed and the collection includes in-depth studies of seminal works as such Los Olvidados, The Hour of the Furnaces, Like Water For Chocolate, Foreign Land, and Amoros Perros.

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.