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 2023

Seminar 1: Violent Materialities: Conflict, Victimhood and the Documentary Body (Geoffrey Maguire)

Primary texts

• Teatro de guerra (dir. Arias, Argentina)
• La memoria de los huesos (dir. Beraudi, Argentina)
• Réquiem NN (dir. Echavarría, Colombia)

Key issues

• Reflexivity and the documentary genre
• Testimony as performance, performance as testimony
• Trauma, victimhood and the autobiographical body
• The archive and the repertoire
• Materiality, loss and the desaparecido
• Violence and the production of space

Bibliography
 

Seminar 2:  Sexuality, Cinema and the Transnational Queer (Geoffrey Maguire)

Films

• XXY (dir. Lucía Puenzo, Argentina, 2007)
• Praia do Futuro (dir. Karim Aïnouz, Brazil, 2014)
• Taekwondo (dir. Marco Berger, 2016)

Key Issues

• Queer corporeality in Latin American film
• Filmic embodiment and the haptic
• Representations of sex, sexuality and nature
• Cinematic sexualities and masculinities
• Transnational queer cinema and the ‘global gaze’

Bibliography
 

Seminar 3: Waste Not Want Not ( Geoffrey Kantaris) 

This seminar looks at some key documentary films from Brazil (and optionally one from Mexico) dealing with the representation of waste, pollution and garbage.

Primary texts

• Jorge Furtado et al. Ilha das Flores (Brazil, 1989) (short)
• Eduardo Coutinho, Boca de Lixo (Brazil, 1992)
• Marcos Prado, Estamira (Brazil, 2004)
• Lucy Walker et al., Lixo Extraordinário (Waste Land, Brazil and UK, 2010)
• Eugenio Polgovsky, Resurrección (Mexico, 2016) - optional extra

Key issues

• Ethics of waste, garbage and “refuse”
• The “aesthetics” of garbage and representational economy
• The relationship between commodities and garbage
• The waste cycle: what leaks out?
• The human-waste interface: people as garbage
• Can garbage speak?
• Recycling garbage into art / film
• Garbage and space

Bibliography
 

Seminar 4: Screening Domestic Labour (Maite Conde)

Key Issues

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

Films:

• Roma (dir. Alfonso Cuarón, 2018)
• La Nana (dir. Sebastián Silva, dir. 2009)
• 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 5: The Representation of Politics in Brazilian Cinema: Crisis, Nostalgia, Hope, Defeat (Maite Conde)

Key Issues

• Cinematic and Political Modernism
• Self-reflexivity
• The crisis of cinematic and political modernism
• The role of the Intellectual / Filmmaker and of the People/ Spectator
• Nostalgia and its discontents
• Temporality and Historicity
• Cinema verité

Films:

• Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth; dir. Glauber Rocha, 1967)
• O ABC da Greve (dir. Leon Hirszman, 1979/90)
• Cabra Marcado Para Morrer (Twenty Years Later; dir. Eduardo Coutinho,1984)
• Peões (Workers; dir. Eduardo Coutinho, 2004)
• Demoracia em vertigem (The Edge of Democracy; dir. Petra Costa, 2019)
• O Processo (The Trial; dir. Maria Augusta Ramos, 2018)

Other films

• Eles não usam blacktie (The Don’t Wear Blacktiedir. Leon Hirszman, 1981)
• Linha de montagem (dir. Renato Tapajos, 1982)
• Greve (dir. João Batista de Andrade, 1979)
• Alvorada (dir. Anna Muylaert, 2022)

Bibliography
 

Seminar 6: Afrofuturism in Brazilian Cinema: Pessimism and Dystopia (Maite Conde)

Key Issues

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

Films

• Branco Sai, Preto Fica (dir. Adireley Queiroz, 2015)
• Marte Um  (dir. Grabriel Martins, 2022)
• Rapsódia para o Homem Negro (dir. Gabriel Martins, 2015.
• 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)
• Black Panther (dir. Ryan Coogler, 2022)
• The Last Angel of History (dir John Akomfrah, 1995).
• The Brother from Another Planet (dir. John Sayles, 1984)

Bibliography