Latin American Documentary Film: Artistic Innovation and Political Commitment

From Cuba to the Southern Cone, Latin America has been fertile territory for significant theoretical and aesthetic advances in documentary film, as politically committed filmmakers have recognized culture as a major front in the struggle for human rights and social justice in which they engaged as creative artists in powerful and innovative ways. Despite these films’ political impact and international influence, few books in English have focused exclusively on the Latin American documentary. An important contribution to filling that gap is Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America, edited by Antonio Traverso and Kristi M. Wilson, presenting material they originally compiled for a special issue of Social Identities (19 [3-4], 2013).

This valuable collection traces pivotal moments in documentary history and examines recent work that addresses a wide range of social issues. Four chapters highlight Argentina as a key site of documentary development, moving from the groundbreaking work of Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary School starting in the late 1950s through the militant Third Cinema of the Cine Liberación group and others a decade later to the present postdictatorship era. These are followed by contributions on Brazil, Chile, and Cuba (two chapters each,) Jamaica (one), Mexico (three), and Venezuela (one), including three chapters on the work of the diaspora filmmakers Lourdes Portillo, Esther Figueroa, and Alex Rivera. Most chapters focus on one or two films or a single director. Others consider a broader body of work such as the documentaries on the Venezuelan coup of 2002 analyzed by Nilo Couret, Misha MacLaird’s account of the upsurge in documentary filmmaking in Mexico from 2000 to 2009, and grassroots videos by the Homeless Workers’ Movement in São Paulo in the 2000s in the chapter by Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco.

Even when returning to the early decades when Latin American documentary first became a force in world cinema, the contributors offer fresh perspectives. For example, Tire dié (Throw Me a Dime, 1960), Birri’s landmark depiction of marginality, is interpreted by Isis Sadek as a rejection of the false promises of the capitalist developmentalist discourse that was dominant at that time. Mariano Mestman uses the political, philosophical, and technical issues involved in incorporating the worker’s voice to provide the unifying theme for discussing La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), Ya es tiempo de violencia (Now Is the Time for Violence, 1969), and other influential documentaries during that conflictive time in Argentina. The rapid photo montages of Santiago Alvarez, whose filmmaking was as revolutionary as the Cuban context in which he worked, are examined in Now! (1965), about the civil rights struggle in United States (set to Lena Horne’s song of the same name), and LBJ (1968). Kristi Wilson analyzes Alvarez’s use of techniques such as image remix, music sampling, copyright violation, and textual interplay that prefigure contemporary work.

Not surprisingly, the trauma of human rights abuses, disappearance, and exile during the dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s is a major theme of postdictatorship filmmakers exemplified by this volume’s chapters on the Argentine Carlos Echeverría and the Chilean Silvio Caozzi. Paola Margulis uses Echeverría’s Cuarentena: Exilio y regreso (Quarantined: Exile and Return, 1983) and Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido (Juan, As If Nothing Had Happened, 1987) as bookends to the period from the fall of the Argentine dictatorship to passage of the Full Stop Law that ended trials of human rights violators. The films trace the movement from the optimism that justice could be achieved exemplified by the returning Argentine historian, author, and scriptwriter Osvaldo Bayer to the quashing of those hopes when it became clear that the perpetrators had been granted impunity in the case of the disappeared law student Juan Herman and others like him.

Caozzi has also examined the horrors of dictatorship through a single case of disappearance, that of the Chilean leftist militant Fernando de la Cruz Olivares Mori. Tomás Crowder-Taraborrelli’s chapter discusses the filmmaker as a participant in the process of denouncing crimes and confronting personal and social trauma. Caozzi, a friend of Fernando’s family, treats its ordeal through the forensic identification of remains from the infamous Patio 29 mass grave in two films, Fernando ha vuelto (Fernando Is Back, 1998) and ¿Fernando ha vuelto a desaparecer? (Has Fernando Disappeared Again? 2006). In the first, the camera’s close-up examination of the bones and painful revelation of the injuries suffered by Fernando before his death is mitigated by the family’s relief at finally knowing his fate and being able to bury him in a known grave. The second deals with the renewed trauma when it was discovered that the remains had been misidentified. The importance of memory sites is emphasized in the photo essay by Antonio Traverso and Enrique Azúa on their documentary-in-progress about the building of a memorial to 70 men from the small town of Paine who were executed or disappeared in September 1973, after the coup against the Allende government.

Lourdes Portillo’s approach to trauma from gendered violence—the murders of 50 or more young women in Juárez, Mexico—is considered in Jillian Sandell’s chapter highlighting Señorita extraviada (Missing Young Woman, 2001). Portillo’s work, emphasizing testimony from the families, moves beyond investigation to elegy and demonstrates the power of documentary to bring silenced crimes to national and international attention.

The U.S.-Mexico border is the focus of the Peruvian-American Alex Rivera’s work challenging dominant narratives celebrating free trade and neoliberalism. His “undocumentaries,” which range from short videos to full-length science fiction features such as Sleep Dealer (2008), are discussed by Amy Sara Carroll. She highlights the experimental nature of his work, citing his Papapapá (1995), and the porous boundaries between documentary and fiction.

The blending of documentary with fiction is the focus of Erin Aldana’s analysis of Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna’s Iracema, uma transa amazônica (Iracema, 1974), in which actors portray an indigenous teenage prostitute and the truck driver who gives her a ride and then abandons her as they travel Brazil’s Trans-Amazonian Highway during the military dictatorship. The film’s documentary dimension lies in its unsparing view of the reality underlying the supposed Brazilian economic miracle exemplified by the new highway.

Antonio Gomez emphasizes stylistic innovations in the work of the Argentine Martín Rejtman, whose film Copacabana (2006) challenges the narrative of Buenos Aires as a harmonious, multicultural, multiracial social space by focusing on Bolivian immigrants and their Copacabana festival. Made for television, the film violates conventions by having no commentary or voiceover and offering no context for or explanation of its visuals.

Fernando Pérez’s Suite Habana (2003) intensively examines the details of daily life for 12 Havana residents over a 24-hour period. Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky argues that the film belongs to two traditions: the city symphony, in which the sounds of the city as a living entity blend together like a score, and the “ruin,” in which nature overcomes human work. However, it departs from genre conventions in a number of ways: close-up focus on the presence and activity of individual people, revelations about surprising dimensions of their lives, and the depiction of Havana as a postcolonial city, offering an alternative vision of modernity. Its ambiguities leave room for the viewer to interpret the difficulties faced by everyday Cubans at this stage of the revolution.

In a different look at the contemporary Caribbean, E. S. Martens employs an interview format to delve into the transnational career of the Jamaica-born activist and filmmaker Esther Figueroa following the release of her critique of the tourist industry Jamaica for Sale (2009–2010). The chapter offers a revealing look at the process of becoming a filmmaker as Figueroa moves from Jamaica to Puerto Rico at age 13, then to the mainland United States to attend college (ultimately obtaining a Ph.D. in linguistics), and then to Hawaii, where she became an indigenous rights and environmental activist and created the first women-owned media production company before returning to Jamaica in 2006. It also explores the difficulties of funding independent films and producing them on extremely limited budgets in the face of opposition by powerful political and economic interests.

For those without a background in Latin American documentary film this collection offers an overview that effectively links current filmmaking to its historical roots. For all readers it provides insightful and thought-provoking analysis of theoretical and technical issues in contemporary documentary across a wide range of countries, themes, and styles.