Key Issues and Texts: The Politics of Representation in Latin American Visual Culture

Primary texts (films, books or catalogues) are listed for each weekly seminar. You will be expected to have viewed or studied all of the texts set for each seminar, together with some of the secondary reading suggested in each of the bibliographies.

Some suggestions for general reading on Film Theory, Visual Culture and Latin American cinema are available here and you are advised to dip into as many of the books suggested here as possible, in order to gain familiarity with the terminology and concepts associated with the analysis of film.

Some ‘key issues’ relating to each seminar are identified – you may wish to focus on one or more of these in a seminar paper or an essay.

Lent 2024

Seminar 1: Early Cinema and the Politics of Modernity (Maite Conde)

Key issues

• Early Cinema and the Aesthetics of Attractions
• Actuality Films
• Projecting Order and Progress
• The Uneven Global experience of Modernity
• Cinema and the City

Films

Selection of actuality films from DVD box set (also available on Youtube) Resgate do cinema silencioso

See:

• A Broca do Café 1925
• Veneza Americana 1925
• O novo governo da República 1922
• O instituo Butantã 1920
• São Paulo. A sinfonia da metrópole (dir 1927 Adalberto Kemeny and Rodolfo Kustig)

Bibliography
 

Seminar 2:  Film and the Politics of Domestic Labour in Latin America (Maite Conde)

Key Issues

• Affective, immaterial and reproductive Labor
• Representations of Labour
• The labour of filmmaking
• Slavery, Intimacy, Cordiality
• The Production of Space

Films

• Roma (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)
• Doméstica (dir. Daniel Máscaro, 2013)
• Que Horas ela Volta? (The Second Mother; dir. Anna Muylaert, 2015)
• Babás (dir. Consuelo Lins, 2010)
• Santiago (dir. João Moreira Salles, 2007)

Other Films:

• Aquarius (dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2016)
• O som ao redor (Neighboring Sounds; dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho, 2012)
• Três verões (Three Summers; dir. Sandra Kogut, 2020)
• Todos os mortos (All the Dead Ones; dir. Marco Dutra and Caetano Gotardo, 2020)

Bibliography
 

Seminar 3: Afro-Futurism in Brazilian Cinema (Maite Conde) 

Key Issues

• Race in Brazilian Cinema
• Science Fiction in Latin American Cinema
• Afro Pessimism
• Utopia / dystopia
• African diaspora

Films

• Branco Sai, Preto Fica (dir. Adireley Queiroz, 2015)
• Marte Um (dir. Grabriel Martins, 2022)
• Medida provisória (Execitive Order; dir. Lázaro Ramos, 2020)
• Bom dia, Eternidade (dir. Rogério de Moura, Rogério 2010).
• Yansan (dir. Carlos Eduardo Nogueira, 2006)

Other Films

• Space is the Place (dir. Sun Ra, 1974)
• The Last Angel of History (dir John Akomfrah, 1995).
• The Brother from Another Planet (dir. John Sayles, 1984)

Bibliography
 

Seminar 4: Science, Nature, and Indigenous Cultures  (Joanna Page)

Films

• El abrazo de la serpiente (Ciro Guerra, Colombia, 2015)
• Nostalgia de la luz (Patricio Guzmán, Chile, 2010)
• Calafate, zoológicos humanos (Hans Mülchi, Chile, 2011)

Key issues

• representations of nature
• the relationship between European science and indigenous knowledge
• the ethnographic gaze in cinema and photography
• colonial, decolonial and neocolonial histories of science

Bibliography
 

Seminar 5: Contemporary Documentary Film and the Law (Oliver Wilson-Nunn)

Key issues

• Documentary reflexivity, performance, and observation
• Cinematic evidence, defence, and accusation
• Structural relationships between law and cinema
• Documentary ethics
• Judicialization and juridification
• Human rights
• Criminalisation
• Race, class, and the law

Films

• Los cuerpos dóciles (dir. Diego Gachassin, Argentina, 2016)
• Presunto culpable (dir. Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith, Mexico, 2008)
• Juízo (dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, Brazil, 2008)

Bibliography
 

Seminar 6: Sovereignty and Resistance in Contemporary Mexican Cinema  (Liesbeth François)

Key Issues

• Violence and the state of exception
• Sovereignty and post-sovereignty
• Authoritarianism
• Precarity and vulnerability
• Revolution and insurgency
• Spatial articulations of power
• Affect, ethics and aesthetics

Films

• Rojo amanecer (Fons, 1989)
• La ley de Herodes (Estrada, 1999)
• Nuevo Orden (Franco, 2020)
• La civil (Mihai, 2021)

Bibliography