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

The Politics of Representation in Latin American Visual Cultures 

Room 204, ARB 

Lent term, Tuesdays 11:00 am - 1:00 pm.

Reading lists and Filmography on Leganto

Week 1 - Early Cinema and the Politics of Modernity (Prof. 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

Week 2 - Film and the Politics of Domestic Labour in Latin America (Prof Maite Conde)*


*Please Note: This session will take place in room 138, ARB.

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

Week 3 - Sex and Scandal: Exploitation Cinema in Latin America (Dr Oliver Wilson-Nunn) 

Films 

  • Intimidades de una cualquiera (dir. Armando Bó, Argentina, 1974)
  • Correccional de mujeres (dir. Emilio Vieyra, Argentina, 1986) 
  • Carne sobre carne (dir. Diego Curubeto, 2008)

Content warning 

These films contain multiple references to and sometimes explicit images of sexual violence and trafficking. 

Key issues 

  • Exploitation, sexploitation, ‘latsploitation’ 
  • ‘Negative’ images 
  • Hetero/Bi/Homo-sexual spectatorship 
  • Pastiche, parody, and self-reflexivity 
  • Sex symbols  
  • Sex work and trafficking 
  • Sexuality, dictatorship, and democracy 
  • Victimhood, revenge, and agency 
  • Archives and recuperative readings

Bibliography

Week 4 - Contemporary Documentary Film and the Law (Dr Oliver Wilson-Nunn)

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)

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

Bibliography

Week 5 -  Questioning Past Utopias: Race and Genre in Contemporary Brazilian Cinema
Afro-Futurism in the Brazilian Context (Prof Maite Conde)

Key Issues

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

Films

  • Branco Sai, Preto Fica (dir. Adireley Queiroz, 2015)
  • Marte Um (dir. Grabriel Martins, 2022)

Other films

  • Bom dia, Eternidade (dir. Rogério de Moura, Rogério 2010)
  • Yansan (dir. Carlos Eduardo Nogueira, 2006)
  • 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

Week 6 - Jogo bonito: Representations of Football in Latin American Cinema (Dr Will Huddleston)

Films

  • Garrincha, Alegria do Povo (dir. Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Brazil, 1963)

  • Pelota de trapo (dir. Leopoldo Torres Ríos, Argentina, 1948)

Key issues 

  • The ‘star’ and the construction of celebrity
  • Urbanisation and social class
  •  National identity and imagined communities in Latin American cinema
  • The ‘Golden Age’ of Argentinian cinema
  • Development of Cinema Novo
  • Biopower, social control and bodily discipline

Manifestos

  • All available in Randal Johnson and Robert Stam (eds.). 1995. Brazilian Cinema, New York: Columbia University Press.

o    Carlos Estevam, ‘For a Popular Revolutionary Art’: 59-63.
o    Carlos Diegues, ‘Cinema Novo’. 64-67.
o    Glauber Rocha, ‘An Esthetic of Hunger’. 68-71.
o    Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, ‘Cannibalism and Self-Cannibalism’. 81-84.

Bibliography