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