/ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ LATIN AMERICA: Cinema Without Compassion

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Dec 31 1996 (IPS) - What’s wrong with Latin American cinema?

All around, it seems, desolation, violence and desperation are the only themes being explored. Hateful characters parade across the screen in the thousands of metres of film currently being produced in Latin America.

Some say the cinema reflects life on the continent.

“There is no compassion,” Colombian critic Hugo Chaparro told IPS, speaking about the situation in most Latin American societies. “The current situation is so brutal that the directors pick up on it”. It is reflected in works marked by desolation, violence and desperation.

In “Profundo Carmesi”, which won the Coral prize at the recent Havana Film Festival, Mexican Arturo Ripstein appeared to surpass the limits of morbidity with a story which cannot decide which is its most valid element: love, money or crime.

And in “Bajo la piel” (Under the skin), by Peruvian Francisco Lombardi, the viewer is left “almost without words” by the bitter taste of a chain of murders and the final happiness of a lead character who is killed for no apparent reason.

Citing these factors, some critics say regional cinema is in a crisis. Others believe it is living through one of the most difficult moments in a world dominated by new technologies and images imposed by U.S. studios.

Argentine critic Alejandro Lingenti says the outlook is “pretty bleak” in a region where neoliberalism denies cultural values. German critic Peter Schumann said the situation was contradictory “but hopeful by any means”.

A hundred years of Latin American cinema has not managed to create myths around, say, the Amazon, the Pampas or a city as gigantic as Mexico City — like Hollywood did with New York, San Francisco or New Orleans.

Thirty years after the Brazilian, Glauber Rocha, and the birth of the so-called “new Latin American cinema,” little is left of a movement which tried to dynamite the pillars of commercial cinema in the fifties.

Uruguayan critic, Jorge Ruffinelli, who is writing an encyclopedia of Latin American cinema, said the appearance of Rocha in Brazil, Tomas Gutierrez Alea in Cuba or Sergio Cabrera in Colombia coincided with a real boom in regional arts.

“The decade of the sixties was a privileged period. Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “One hundred years of solitude” came out, Julio Cortazar’s “Rayuela” (hopscotch), and Jose Lezama Lima’s “Paraiso” (Paradise), authors still writing, but whose best works were produced in the sixties,” he told IPS.

According to Rufinelli, as time has passed, the same thing has happened to cinema and literature in the region. “They continue to be created, with great quality, but never so astonishing, so novel,” he said.

Survival appears to be the main aim of the realisation that, as Lombardi puts it Latin American cinema “still depends greatly on the economy, and the tyranny of money, and especially of the cultural importance cinema has for each country.”

Rocha’s faithful followers file in front of the public. But they also like detective movies, melodramas and the comedies which hold an intermediate position between box-office success and the acclaim of cinema clubs, far from the demands of both the great public and critics.

For Latin American film-makers the approach of a new century is replanting the challenge of keeping up cinema production of a high artistic value, far from the Hollywood schemes and, at the same time, capable of occupying a space in the commercial cinemas.

“The fundamental dilemma of our films is its character of industry and art at the same time,” said Colombian film-maker Jaime Osorio in an interview during the XVIII Festival of New Latin American Film in Havana.

A total of 378 films, 131 fictional, 36 documentaries and 13 cartoons, competed from Dec. 3 to 13 in the Havana festival, resurrecting the argument over whether it is still possible to talk of the “new Latin American cinema” as an existing phenomenon.

“Maybe there will be elements which unify creation, like truculence, which has become common currency, and is increasingly notorious in the cinema, but to label such a rich continent in such general terms impoverishes it,” said Chaparro.

“I am scared by any type of grouping. Grouping people is nearly always dangerous,” said the Argentine Lingenti, while for the Cuban Jose Antonio Garcia Borrero it is “unsustainable to keep pressing the thesis that there is a new Latin American film genre.”

The critics all appear to believe that films made in the region cannot be looked upon in a unitary way either sylistically or conceptually.

“Latin American diversity is reflected in its films,” said Rufinelli, remembering the productions of the regional nations are peripheral projects which, when up against the monopolies, have been unable to impose their own imagery.

“We have to recover the lost Latin American cinema,” he said, declaring he would like to rescue all the films made in Latin America for the cinemas and festivals. “Our imaginations are full of US, European and Japanese films, but also Latin American cinema, and this makes us richer in our poverty.”