{"id":3451,"date":"2024-08-27T16:52:42","date_gmt":"2024-08-27T16:52:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/?p=3451"},"modified":"2024-09-09T08:47:55","modified_gmt":"2024-09-09T08:47:55","slug":"latin-american-womens-filmmaking-redefining-the-political-genealogies-aesthetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/reframe.sussex.ac.uk\/mediatico\/2024\/08\/27\/latin-american-womens-filmmaking-redefining-the-political-genealogies-aesthetics\/","title":{"rendered":"Latin American women\u2019s filmmaking: redefining the political; genealogies; aesthetics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

We continue this SLACextras takeover<\/a> of Medi\u00e1<\/span>tico with a piece by Deborah Martin<\/a>, <\/strong>which takes as its starting point B Ruby Rich’s ” ‘revisionist history’ of the male-associated New Latin American Cinema” \u2018An\/Other View of the New Latin American Cinema\u2019<\/em> (1997) and the ways Rich\u2019s ideas have emerged and are continuing to emerge in the work of contemporary scholars of Latin American women\u2019s filmmaking and Latin American filmmakers, particularly Lucrecia Martel. Deborah Martin is Professor of Latin American Film and Culture at University College, London<\/em>. Her most recent book <\/em>The Child in Contemporary Latin American Cinema <\/a>was published in 2019. In 2016 she published <\/em>The Cinema of Lucrecia Martel<\/a>, a detailed study of the films of the Argentine director, and in 2017, together with Prof Deborah Shaw (Portsmouth University), she published a co-edited volume of essays, <\/em>Latin American Women Filmmakers<\/a>: Production, Politics, Poetics<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Latin American women\u2019s filmmaking: redefining the political; genealogies; aesthetics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Deborah Martin<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  1. \u2018An\/Other View of the New Latin American Cinema\u2019 (Rich)<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

    Whilst editing our book Latin American Women Filmmakers<\/a><\/em> (Martin and Shaw 2017) Ruby Rich\u2019s field-defining essay \u2018An\/Other View of the New Latin American Cinema\u2019 (1991) became central in the evolution of our overarching considerations. Rich\u2019s text also came up as a reference point for several of our contributors independently of the editorial process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Rich writes a \u2018revisionist history\u2019 of the male-associated New Latin American Cinema, and constructs an alternative canon of films which, unlike the accepted canon, \u2018share a refusal to attribute \u201cotherness\u201d to subjects formerly marked as such, accompanied by a commitment to the narrative inscription of an \u201cother\u201d selfhood, identity and subjectivity\u2019 (280). In this alternative canon she includes Matilde Landeta\u2019s La negra Angustias <\/em>(1950), Fernando Birri\u2019s Los inundados\/Flooded out <\/em>(1962) and Sara G\u00f3mez\u2019s De cierta manera<\/em>\/One Way or Another <\/em>(1977). Rich identifies a shift, in women\u2019s filmmaking, from a public and overt politics towards the personal and the private, \u2018away from the epic toward the chronicle, a record of time in which no spectacular events occur but in which the extraordinary nature of the everyday is allowed to surface. [\u2026] a shift from \u201cexteriority\u201d to \u201cinteriority\u201d (281).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

    Some features of this new filmmaking are, according to Rich:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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    1.  it \u2018began to incorporate women\u2019s struggles for identity and autonomy\u2019 (279) as a necessary part of a truly contemporary Latin American cinema;<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    2. in it, \u2018Politics\u2019 equals a shift away from \u2018agrarian struggles and mass mobilizations\u2019 towards \u2018banality, fantasy and desire\u2019 (281);<\/li>\n\n\n\n
    3. the films \u2018strengthen the case for seeing emotional life as a site of struggle and identity equal to those more traditional sites by which the NLAC was once [\u2026] defined\u2019 (286).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n

      Rich talks about \u2018a corresponding shift in aesthetic strategies\u2019 (281) but she doesn\u2019t say a huge amount in the essay to elucidate what these aesthetic strategies are. This piece therefore seeks to comment on some of the ways Rich\u2019s ideas have emerged and are continuing to emerge in the work of contemporary scholars of Latin American women\u2019s filmmaking, and I will go on to comment on the interlinked cases of producer Bertha Navarro and of Lucrecia Martel, whose work, and whose effects \u2013 especially aesthetic effects \u2013 on the women\u2019s filmmaking scene in Argentina I have studied in my own work, proposing some aesthetic tendencies I see as enacting the shifts Rich outlines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      2. Overview of how Rich\u2019s ideas emerge in Latin American Women Filmmakers: Production, Politics, Poetics<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Rich\u2019s approach \u2013 i.e. the redefinition of canon and what counts as political filmmaking, influenced our approach in Latin American Women Filmmakers<\/em>. We argued that the landscape of Latin American (political) filmmaking looks very different \u2013 even unfamiliar vis-\u00e0-vis<\/em> dominant critical understandings of the field \u2013 when we shift our focus to women\u2019s filmmaking, and that this is a critical imperative. Rich was writing in 1991, but her theory of women\u2019s cinema\/alternative new Latin American cinema is, I propose here, relevant to today\u2019s filmmaking. The delegates at this conference, at the Latin American women\u2019s filmmaking conference in 2017, and at the forthcoming Madrid event constitute part of the new generation of critics for which her essay calls. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

      2.1. The redefinition of the political<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      As highlighted in Deborah Shaw\u2019s manifesto, how we define the political has consequences for the inclusion or exclusion of women\u2019s cultural production; political filmmaking doesn\u2019t necessarily have to focus on landmark revolutionary processes. Rich\u2019s shift from \u2018exteriority\u2019 to \u2018interiority\u2019 seems pertinent to many cases. She writes: \u2018In today\u2019s NLAC, the old phrase \u201cthe personal is political\u201d can almost be heard, murmuring below the surface. Its expression, however, is not a privatizing one at all but very much social, political, public\u2019 (281).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Many films by Latin American women including many of the case studies looked at in our edited volume foreground intimate and private spaces for their dissections and analyses of the political. Sarah Barrow, for example, looks at Garc\u00eda Montero\u2019s Las malas intenciones<\/em> \/The Bad Intentions<\/em> (2011) which she argues \u2018renders private citizens as political subjects and centres the political within intimate spaces\u2019 (Barrow 2017, 62).  Las malas intenciones <\/em>is further notable in that its protagonist is a child, and it uses the intimate, private spaces of childhood and the child\u2019s imagination to reflect on Peru\u2019s civil conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Deborah Shaw\u2019s work has focused on the servant-employer dynamics which are central to films including Luc\u00eda Puenzo\u2019s El ni\u00f1o pez\/The Fish Child <\/em>(2009) and Lucrecia Martel\u2019s La mujer sin cabeza\/The Headless Woman <\/em>(2008), and how they function to \u2018reveal the political heart of nations and deep structural inequalities\u2019. As yesterday\u2019s panel on the topic of domestic service in Latin American cinema attests, this is a topic of increasing scholarly interest, perhaps due in part to the release of the high-profile Roma <\/em>(2018); yet Martel, Luc\u00eda Puenzo, Anna Muylaert, Sebasti\u00e1n Silva and others have been producing cinematic meditations on the topic for some time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      A second major site of the political in the work of Latin American women filmmakers is the transgression<\/em> of gender and sexual norms, echoing Rich\u2019s discussion of the gradual incorporation of \u2018women\u2019s struggles for identity and autonomy\u2019 (279) in the work of women filmmakers. Aside from the filmmakers\u2019 own transgressive presence in a male-dominated film world (in particular for those filmmakers working, like Bertha Navarro and Marcela Fern\u00e1ndez Violante, 40-50 years ago), often these transgressions are figured through transgressive female characters \u2013 we might think of characters Alex in Puenzo\u2019s XXY<\/em> (2007), Llosa\u2019s Madeinusa<\/em>, (2006) Bemberg\u2019s heroines \u2013 and are precipitated by desire. To return to Rich, she states, echoing Claire Johnston\u2019s 1976 essay \u2018Women\u2019s Cinema as Counter-Cinema\u2019, that women\u2019s political filmmaking must focus on \u2018fantasy, and desire\u2019. In my work on Martel\u2019s films I argue that they demonstrate possibilities of rupture and escape through the cinematic depiction of rebellious young girls\u2019 forbidden desires. Despite the fact that her films depict structures of social and political oppression, desire acts as an uncontrollable force which can overcome these structures. The understanding of desire in Martel\u2019s work \u2013 as well as in the other films mentioned, strongly echoes its figuring by Deleuze and Guattari in the Anti Oedipus. <\/em>They write:<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      If desire is repressed, it is because every position of desire, no matter how small, is capable of calling into question the established order of society: not that desire is asocial, on the contrary. But it is explosive: there is no desiring machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. [\u2026D]esire is revolutionary in its essence<\/em> [\u2026] (1983, 116, my emphasis).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      2.2 Politics and poetics<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      As mentioned earlier, a way we have sought to build on Rich\u2019s work is to elaborate on the kinds of aesthetic strategies which support or enact the redefinitions of politics which we are seeing here. In Latin American cinema, the aesthetic and the political have been explicitly and purposefully linked since influential texts of the New Latin American Cinema demanded formal enactment of political agendas: an imperfect cinema or an aesthetics of hunger. This raises the question of whether and how new forms and sites of political engagement incorporate the aesthetic and how they innovate aesthetically. A number of contemporary scholars address this relationship, with the focus of discussions ranging from traditional analysis of gaze dynamics and hermeneutic readings of film, to the use of phenomenological film theories. My own discussion of Lucrecia Martel\u2019s work in my contribution to the volume (Martin 2017) foregrounds her aesthetic experimentation and shows how this is taken up in the work of her female contemporaries. I will turn shortly to this discussion of Martel\u2019s effects on the filmmaking scene in Argentina.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      3. Martel in context: antecedents, mentors, contemporaries, effects<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

      But before that, I want to take a moment to consider her own cinematic lineage, in terms of a female or feminist genealogy echoing Deborah\u2019s comments earlier about looking beyond the exceptional figure \u2013 in this case Martel, who has been highly acclaimed and is well-known \u2013 to the context within which they are operating, which we advocate as a model of scholarship because it furthers our understanding of the conditions for women\u2019s filmmaking success. Martel has worked with two of the most significant producer-auteurs in Latin American cinema, Lita Stantic and Bertha Navarro. Stantic is famous for her work on Mar\u00eda Luisa Bemberg\u2019s films, and thus associated with a feminist tradition of filmmaking in Argentina. Martel refers to the importance of role models in an interview where she recalls having seen Stantic and Bemberg on TV promoting their latest film, and thus concluding, as a young person, that film was something women did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Stantic later became associated with major filmmakers of the New Argentine Cinema, producing Martel\u2019s first two films, La ci\u00e9naga<\/em> and La ni\u00f1a santa<\/em>. She encouraged Martel to attend a Sundance scriptwriting workshop led by Mexican producer Bertha Navarro, who Marvin D\u2019Lugo proposes has been a significant force behind, and creative influence on Latin American filmmaking since the 1970s. As Deborah Shaw has argued, we need more research into the role of Latin American women producers like Stantic and Navarro.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Stantic also was also instrumental in La ci\u00e9naga<\/em>\u2019s winning of funding and eventual realisation. On Stantic\u2019s recommendation, Martel attended Navarro\u2019s talleres<\/em>, and her work there led to the script for La ci\u00e9naga<\/em>. Elements of Navarro\u2019s methodology are evident in Martel\u2019s work, from her emphasis on the creation of a strong script and on adhering closely to it during shooting, to her films\u2019 attention to the everyday, the intimate and the private, and the way they tease out the relationship between the intimate and the private and wider social power structures.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      Cosas insignificantes<\/em> (Insignificant things<\/em>, 2008) which is discussed by Marvin D\u2019Lugo in his chapter for our volume (D\u2019Lugo 2017) is a good example of Navarro’s methodology.  This film, produced by Navarro, and directed by a fellow attendee of her talleres<\/em>, Andrea Mart\u00ednez Crowther, focuses on the intimate and the private and their relationship with wider social and political issues, as D\u2019Lugo argues. D\u2019Lugo\u2019s main argument centres around Navarro\u2019s career in production as enabling the emergence of a Latin American transnational cinema. Yet he also points out that her transnational workshops \u2018helped break down gender barriers\u2019 (D\u2019Lugo, 224) and produced outstanding female filmmakers such as Martel, Spain\u2019s Lola Salvador, and Mexico’s Patricia Riggen and Mart\u00ednez Crowther.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      The very title of Cosas insignificantes<\/em> recalls Rich\u2019s theory. D\u2019Lugo argues that, of the many films Navarro has produced \u2018Cosas insignificantes<\/em> comes closest to Navarro\u2019s own philosophy of scripting\u2019 in that \u2018the film\u2019s attention to mundane objects collected by [its protagonist] Esme recalls Navarro\u2019s 1986 talk at the Havana Film Festival\u2019s symposium on women and audio-visual media [\u2026] where she discussed \u2018la realidad cotidiana\u2019 (Navarro, cit. D\u2019Lugo, 233),  aligning this, \u2018with women\u2019s work, which is generally presented as a series of seemingly inconsequential tasks [\u2026] that are nonetheless the cornerstone of society\u2019 (D\u2019Lugo, 233).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

      This focus on the apparently insignificant, on the everyday, on the eventless, is central to Martel\u2019s filmmaking, and to the forms of politics it pursues. Though I\u2019m mainly talking about her \u2018Salta Trilogy\u2019, my comments are also relevant to her more recent Zama<\/em> (2017). Like La ci\u00e9naga<\/em>, Zama<\/em> is about waiting, about tedium. Martel\u2019s films are often described as ones in which little happens; in Rich\u2019s words, chronicles rather than epics: \u2018a record of time in which no spectacular events occur but in which the extraordinary nature of the everyday is allowed to surface\u2019 (281).  <\/strong>Zama<\/em> subverts the epic mode with which historical filmmaking is often associated through a number of devices. In one instance this subversion happens where we hear a child’s voice, who whilst being carried aloft in a chair, whispers about the ‘greatness’ of the film’s main character, Don Diego de Zama, as if he were a historical character in a story. The soundtrack, which uses the synthesized musical device of the Shephard tone, and the boy’s deadpan delivery undercuts any epic quality of the language.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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