Utopia And Neoliberalism In Latin American Cinema

The topic of the crisis and recovery of utopia, at both a global and regional level, stands out in these melancholic times in which the capitalist era can no longer legitimize itself as an irreplaceable form of social existence. This book reflects upon the place of utopia, moving from classic Greece to the neoliberal era, specifically as manifested in Latin America. It studies utopia as a political and literary device for paradigmatic changes. As such, it links with the literary mode of the travelogue and its supporting role in the consolidation and perpetuation of the modern/colonial discourse. The book reviews critical approaches to modernity and postmodernity as a philosophical enquiry on the role of symbolic languages, particularly the one played by the image and the theories of representation and performance. With that, and by using decolonialist theory to inform an audio-visual text analysis, it contributes to film philosophy with a model of analysis for Latin American cinema: namely, “the allegory of the motionless traveler”. This model states that Latin America millennial cinema possesses a significant aesthetic-political power achieved by enacting a process of utopic re-narration. This book will appeal to students and academics in the humanities and social sciences and readers interested in film culture, as well as those searching specifically for new perspectives on socio-symbolic decolonialist dynamics operating at the crossroads of cultural politics and political culture in Latin America.

The Question of Class in Contemporary Latin American Cinema responds to the renewed interest in class within and outside academia by examining the aesthetics and politics of class in a representative selection of films from the contemporary cinemas of Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. It explores the relationship of cinematic practices to conflicting socio-political transformations taking place in these five countries such as the intensification of neoliberalism, the Turn-to-the-Left, and the growth of the middle classes in the period from 2003 to 2015. Utilizing a critical comparative method , it sheds a critical light on the presumed depoliticization (or new, aestheticized politicization) of contemporary Latin American cinema. The combined textual and industrial analyses of films from strikingly different cinemas and directors through the lenses of class allows for a contextualization of this trend and the observation of its limitations. Furthermore, this book distinguishes cinematic figurations that correspond to new conceptualizations of class introduced in social studies from figurations of class that have yet to be conceptualized.

This edited collection explores how contemporary Latin American cinema has dealt with and represented issues of human rights, moving beyond many of the recurring topics for Latin American films. Through diverse interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches, and analyses of different audiovisual media from fictional and documentary films to digitally-distributed activist films, the contributions discuss the theme of human rights in cinema in connection to various topics and concepts. Chapters in the volume explore the prison system, state violence, the Mexican dirty war, the Chilean dictatorship, debt, transnational finance, indigenous rights, social movement, urban occupation, the right to housing, intersectionality, LGBTT and women’s rights in the context of a number of Latin American countries. By so doing, it assesses the long overdue relation between cinema and human rights in the region, thus opening new avenues to aid the understanding of cinema’s role in social transformation.

Cavernous, often cold, always dark, with the lingering smell of popcorn in the air: the experience of movie-going is universal. The cinematic experience in Mexico is no less profound, and has evolved in complex ways in recent years. Films like Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Mariachi, Amores Perros, and the work of icons like Guillermo del Toro and Salma Hayek represent much more than resurgent interest in the cinema of Mexico. In Screening Neoliberalism, Ignacio Sanchez Prado explores precisely what happened to Mexico's film industry in recent decades. Far from just a history of the period, Screening Neoliberalism explores four deep transformations in the Mexican film industry: the decline of nationalism, the new focus on middle-class audiences, the redefinition of political cinema, and the impact of globalization. This analysis considers the directors and films that have found international notoriety as well as those that have been instrumental in building a domestic market. Screening Neoliberalism exposes the consequences of a film industry forced to find new audiences in Mexico's middle-class in order to achieve economic and cultural viability.

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.

Cinema and Inter-American Relations studies the key role that commercial narrative films have played in the articulation of the political and cultural relationship between the United States and Latin America since the onset of the Good Neighbor policy (1933). As a result, it reveals the existence of a continued cinematic conversation between Anglo and Latin America about a cluster of shared allegories representing the continent and its cultures.

Through a textual analysis of six filmmakers (Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro, Fernando Meirelles, Walter Salles and Juan José Campanella), this book brings a new perspective to the films of Latin America's transnational auteurs.

During the past twenty years, Latin American cinema has experienced an enormous upsurge, prompting film critics and scholars to hail the onset of a new era. What this signals, more than thriving financial or production infrastructures, is a renovated cinematic vision connected more closely to everyday experience and social and cultural concerns. The films analyzed in this new collection reflect and examine contemporary lives in their diversity and singularity, through their focus on identity politics, sexuality, the body, the family, and/or community. Drawing especially on Jean-Luc Nancyʹs notion of inoperative community and Enrique Dussel's critique of modernity, the essays here weave together a progression that stresses the breakdown of the nation-state in Latin America and the search for new communal settings. The nation-state's breakdown is linked to modernity's homogenizing project and its concomitant hierarchies that, in seeking to impose order and progress, have alienated those who do not conform to conventional norms. In response, Nancy offers the concept of inoperative community, which questions current forms of operative' communities that do not allow for individuation, and implies instead the recognition of plurality and singularity and replacement of hierarchies by horizontal and transversal connections. -- Back cover.