Globalization and Latin American Cinema

Globalization and Latin American Cinema Toward a New Critical Paradigm SOPHIA A. McCLENNEN

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN GLOBALIZATION, CULTURE & SOCIETY

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society Series Editors Jeroen de Kloet Centre for Globalisation Studies University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands Esther Peeren Centre for Globalisation Studies University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society traverses the boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences to critically explore the cultural and social dimensions of contemporary globalization processes. This entails looking at the way globalization unfolds through and within cultural and social practices, and identifying and understanding how it effects cultural and social change across the world. The series asks what, in its different guises and unequal diffusion, globalization is taken to be and do in and across specific locations, and what social, political and cultural forms and imaginations this makes possible or renders obsolete. A particular focus is the vital contribution made by different forms of the imagination (social, cultural, popular) to the conception, experience and critique of contemporary globalization. Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society is committed to addressing globalization across cultural contexts (western and non-western) through interdisciplinary, theoretically driven scholarship that is empirically grounded in detailed case studies and close analyses. Within the scope outlined above, we invite junior and senior scholars to submit proposals for monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave Pivot format. Please contact the series editors for more information: [email protected] / [email protected] More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15109

Sophia A. McClennen

Globalization and Latin American Cinema Toward a New Critical Paradigm

Sophia A. McClennen Pennsylvania State University State College, PA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society ISBN 978-3-319-57059-4 ISBN 978-3-319-57060-0  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017950401 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Still from Sleep Dealer, dir. Alex Rivera Printed on acid-free paper This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Stefan Kaspar and René Castillo, who both shared their love of Latin American cinema with me And for my aunt Stephania, who loves to think outside of the box

Preface

I have been writing this book forever. Or at least it feels that way. Over the past years, when having a post-panel drink at conferences and discussing this book project, I’ve often joked with colleagues that I’ve been working on this book since they’ve known me. And it’s usually not an exaggeration. The research on this project goes back to my time as a graduate student in the 1990s at Duke University when I considered working on a topic connected to Latin American film for my dissertation only to have Fred Jameson counsel me to write on “books” for the diss and save films for a later project. Luckily I took his advice. Because despite the fact that I was gathering research and tracing trends related to globalization and Latin American films beginning in the mid-1990s, the truth is that in those early days after the fall of the Berlin Wall we were still largely speculating about what the global era would really mean for the culture industry. As this book shows, a lot of our speculations were, if not hyperbolic, then flatly wrong. Letting this book simmer while working on other projects means that I now have the benefit of hindsight and of 25 years’ worth of data, much of which dispels the 1990s worries that globalization would end up leading us all toward one homogenous culture. As I argue throughout this book, beginning in the 1990s we bundled worries about cultural homogenization and cultural imperialism with worries about what neoliberal capitalism would mean to communities across Latin America. What this book shows is that neoliberalism has been just as devastating as we imagined, but that it has had an uncanny effect on the culture vii

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industry, actually making it possible for a number of Latin American nations to develop some of their strongest film markets ever. It has also opened the door for a number of films that take neoliberalism and its effects directly as their topic, films that have often been huge successes internationally, at awards ceremonies, and also at home. That synergy is historic. This is the first time in Latin American history that a socially significant cinema has been successful in global markets, at home, and with awards. It has never been true until the global era and it embodies a key dialectical tension: Global capital upends the daily lives of Latin Americans at unprecedented levels at exactly the same time that Latin American filmmakers have the most success telling that story to the world. Trying to make sense of that is what this book is all about. Because the research for this book spanned so many years, I had the benefit of multiple research trips to gather material, screen films, and make connections. I was able to attend the Chilean film festival in Viña del Mar in 1993 when Johnny cien pesos (Johnny One Hundred Pesos, 1993) was featured. I sat in the audience with Cuban acting legend Daisy Granados and witnessed firsthand the rebirth of one of the most important film festivals in Latin America. The festival had helped launch the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement in 1967 only to be shut down in 1970. It reopened in 1990. I will always be grateful to Chilean writer Carlos Franz for helping to get us tickets to the premiere. I next visited the Guadalajara Film Festival twice in the late 1990s and was able to see films like La ley de Herodes (Herod’s Law, 1999) and Todo el poder ([All the power], 2000), which, like Johnny cien pesos, combined an entertaining aesthetic with a socially significant cinema. These were not the gritty, edgy, political films of the 1960s, but they weren’t total fluff either. I then visited the San Sebastián film festival in 2016 and was able to see the extremely complex ways the festival is working to promote cinema in the Spanish language at the same time that it supports Basque culture. I held a Fulbright Scholarship to Lima, Peru in 2003, where I had the good fortune to meet Stefan Kaspar. He had been a founding member of Grupo Chaski and helped connect me with the entire team as well as lead actors Marino León (Gregorio, 1982) and Rosa Isabel Morfino (Juliana, 1989). The various conversations I had with the directors and film professionals connected to Grupo Chaski greatly shaped my approach to this book. Stefan had a fiery passion for Latin American film and a generous spirit. He will be sorely missed.

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I was awarded a Fulbright Research Chair in Globalization and Cultural Studies at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, 2005–06, which allowed me to spend concentrated time wading through considerable material and continuing to craft the core theses of this book. In 2010, I had a research trip supported by the Penn State Institute for the Arts and Humanities to Tijuana, Mexico where I again had the benefit of an industry insider taking me under his wing. René Castillo, who worked at the film school of the Universidad de las Californias Internacional, helped arrange a series of meetings and interviews that allowed me to study the filming of Titanic and the runaway film industry in general. He and his colleague, Carlos Carrillo, were exceptionally supportive. But it would be René’s tireless commitment to the film industry, similar to Stefan’s, that would most deeply inspire me. Dedicating this book to their memories is a small gesture toward two men who were real forces of nature in Latin American cinema. They each taught me that the boundaries between national cinema and Hollywood that framed my early research made no sense in their daily context. In 2013, I had a sabbatical that allowed me to spend a semester in Buenos Aires, Argentina and really advance my work on this book. Before leaving, Tamara Falicov, Sergio Waisman, and Idelber Avelar all graciously helped give me useful contacts. Tamara helped connect me with Adrián Muoyo at the Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales (INCAA). I was able to find considerable material of value in their archives. On that trip I was also able to interview director Martín Rejtman, Patagonik producer Juan Vera, and indie producer Hernán Musaluppi. I connected with scholars like Gonzalo Aguilar and Silvia Schwarzböck and I met with folks engaged with advancing MERCOSUR cultural projects as well as the director of Ventana Sur. It was an immensely productive trip that proved—at least for me—why humanities professors need sabbaticals to travel for their work. In the summer of 2015 I traveled to Madrid to connect with Ibermedia and to Rome to visit the Centro Sperimentale and Cinecittà. There, as I walked through sets that had been built to film Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002), I was able to confirm some of my thoughts on runaways that I had begun to develop in Tijuana. Penn State brought Alex Rivera, director of Sleep Dealer, out twice while I was working on this project. It would not be an understatement to say that his film literally framed the ideas in this book. As I told him when we met, Sleep Dealer is a “perfect” example of what I am describing. I am extremely grateful for his support.

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Many of the ideas in this book are the result of work I developed over a number of years. Some of the ideas expressed here appeared in articles in journals and books previously.1 This book has had the benefit of a literal army of research support by graduate students, who helped over many years track down sources, synthesize core arguments, and type up notes and quotes. Many thanks to Germán Campos Muñoz, Laura Ariza, Marcela Velez, Natalie Hanson, Leisha Santiago, and Alexis Rodriguez. I am forever grateful for their patience with me and their attention to detail. This book also had the benefit of the camaraderie and careful editing of Leisa Rothlisberger, who worked with me on Mexico’s NAFTA culture for her dissertation. We traveled to Tijuana together and she is the one who initially helped us connect with René Castillo. Leisa was one of those dream students whose work inspires and teaches you. She has been an invaluable source of support in preparing this manuscript for press. When you take forever to write a book, you have a lot of people to thank, but you also have to contend with the messiness of memory. So I ask forgiveness in advance of anyone I miss. I thank Peter Hitchcock for his productive, critical prodding. Once when we were talking about this project, he suggested that cinema was a dead cultural form. I hope that this book helps to persuade him I was right to stick with it. He also gets credit for putting me in touch with Esther Peeren, one of the editors of this series, whose work is an inspiration. Lee Medovoi offered early support as I grappled with the overall thesis of the book. His suggestion to think in terms of biopolitics was extremely valuable. Chris Breu was a constant source of support over the years and was generous with his time at a rough moment in his life. Marc Bousquet helped me think through some of the questions I had about labor and was a great sounding board. Jeffrey Di Leo has been a tremendous source of insight and support. He models what it truly means to be a colleague and he is a great friend. I had the good fortune to meet Toby Miller while working on this project. I had long been a fan of his work, but it was especially helpful to have the chance to connect face to face and talk through some of the ideas in this book. I had similar experiences with both Michael Denning and William Robinson who each visited Penn State as I was working out my ideas. Special thanks to Tanner Mirrlees who offered valuable cyber support.

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Many thanks to Debra Castillo, who is one of those people who has heard me talk about this book forever. George Yúdice was one of my mentors going back to my time at Duke. His work has been a great source of insight and helped me develop a number of my core arguments. Idelber Avelar not only gave me contacts in Argentina but he was exceptionally warm in his support of this project. Thanks also to Jeffrey Middents whose wisdom about Latin American cinema is matched only by his passion for it. Special thanks to him for introducing me to Ignacio Sánchez Prado, whose scholarship is one of this book’s most significant text partners. The friendship I developed with Claire Fox and Deb Cohn years ago sustained this project in many ways, especially when they each offered me a chance to deliver lectures on it at their universities. Thanks too to Kerry Hegerty for her support when I spoke at Miami University of Ohio. I’ve also been grateful to a number of Latin Americanist film scholars who have shared their research, insights, and advice, especially Tamara Falicov, Miguel Fernández Labayen, Kathleen Newman, Deborah Shaw, and Dolores Tierney. Jon Abel, José Alvarez, Liz Anker, John Beasley-Murray, Angela Dadak, Greg Dawes, James Dawes, David Downing, Hoda el-Shakry, Carmelo Esterrich, Alex Fattal, Keith Feldman, John Gastil, Henry Giroux, Susan Searls Giroux, Robin Goodman, Sean Grattan, Christian Haines, Matt Jordan, Luz Kirschner, Dennis Jett, Flynt Leverett, Bill Mullen, Brantley Nicholson, David Palumbo-Liu, John Protevi, Jennifer Reimer, John Riofrio, Tracy Rutler, Nicole Simek, Claudia SadowskiSmith, Ali Schultheis-Moore, Cindy Simmons, Joey Slaughter, Rosa Tapia, Jeffrey Williams, Santiago Vaquera, Hap Veeser, Zahi Zalloua, and many others have been valued sources of engaged critique and friendship. Special mention must go to the staff with which I have had the good fortune to work this past year. Thanks to Taren Smith and to Christie Persio who were both a joy to work with. Thanks also to Sarah LyallCombs and Mary Price for being such wise leaders of the Center for Global Studies that I could spend days writing and know things were in good hands. Thanks to Wyatt Dubois and to Michael Garrett for their media and publicity support at PSU. I am grateful for the work of the staff at Palgrave who helped steer this book to press.

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This book took decades to research but I wrote the manuscript over one academic year. That meant that I had to lean a lot on friends and family to get me through it. I have had the benefit of many friends who have helped create a warm and supportive environment to live and work and raise a family. Special thanks to Regan Takac and Vanessa McLaughlin. Continued thanks to Nancy Chiswick for all the many ways she supports me. And to Bradley Ennis and Sean Holt for literally keeping me in motion. Shout out to Kinetik and to Berta Dedonato and Missy Quick for giving me my absolute favorite place to let off steam and stay fit. Remy Maisel was writing a book the same time I was—and even though it was much more fun to write a book together—it was a constant comfort to see her moving along as I was too. She has a loyalty and generosity and kindness that I treasure. Remy is also my best comrade in sarcasm and snark. I am grateful for all of the experiences we have had—and look forward to many more adventures. I also thank her for leaving us her English Setter, Jake, to provide us with dog therapy when we needed it most. I have been fortunate to have the support of a great network of family, who catch me when I need it and push me when I need it too. Thanks especially to my uncle Roy and his wife Darla. I have dedicated this book to my aunt Stephania; she and my uncle Jamie have been two of my biggest sources of support and some of my most fun interlocutors. Warm thanks, too, to my grandmother Mim, who is a model of how to live life to the fullest. Edgar and Linda are lifelong sources of guidance and friendship. I am extremely grateful for my close connection with my brother, Peter, who is one of the best uncles I could have ever hoped to have for my children. His wife, Michelene, has been extremely generous with her time and energy and I thank her for the many ways she keeps things together for the family. Their son Ryan is off to a great future and I’m thankful to have had the good fortune to watch his life launch. Every summer I get the benefit of reconnecting with Doug, Amy, Andrew, Michelle, Krystyana, James, Peter, and Kathy and I am most grateful for that. While I see her rarely, my BFF, LeAnn, is still always in my heart. Eric played a crucial role in helping reduce the craziness of this year. From car rides to school, to food pickups, to understanding a frenetic work schedule, he was a major source of support. He constantly pushes boundaries, questions assumptions, and challenges definitions—traits

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that were mirrored in some of the work I was doing. He offered me countless chances to talk through ideas. I am grateful for his patience, support, and care. Over the course of this last year, I probably told my kids, Isabel and Henry Sebastian, that they needed to “wait one more minute” because I had to finish something I was writing altogether too many times. But luckily they have taken it all in stride. During the year I’ve written this book I’ve grown increasingly amazed at how sharp and inquisitive and analytical they are. I remember picking my daughter up from school once and mentioning something I was thinking only to hear her retort, “that’s anecdotal evidence, Mom. That’s not a good argument.” My son likes to say, “Sarcasm is the body’s natural response to stupid.” I often feel like I’m running in front of the train with these two kids as their intellects blossom. It’s a real privilege to have a role in helping them thrive. They are also my number one source of fun and laughter. I’m lucky that my son still wants hugs throughout the day and I’m certain that his warmth played a big role in helping me finish this book. I spent much of the time writing this book thinking about my mom, who broke her hip in the fall. She died as we were preparing the final manuscript. As I write this I feel the loss more than words can describe. She was an amazing source of strength and wit and showed great resilience in the face of way too many challenges. When I first wrote this I had hoped she would have an easier time forward, but now that she’s gone at least I am sure she is not suffering anymore. We used to joke that the one part of my books she was certain to read was the acknowledgements and it’s hard to imagine not getting a chance to laugh about that with her again. I know I am supposed to envision her reading these words some day in some other way, but so far that doesn’t make up for my deep sense of loss. My mom had little patience for self-pity and I’m certain she would tell me to pull it together, if she could. So I’ll close these comments by promising to honor her by continuing to be the feisty, strong, passionate scholar she raised me to be. State College, PA, USA

Sophia A. McClennen

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Note 1. “Where is Latin American Culture? From the Location of Culture to the Ethics of Culture,” Alter/nativas 1, no. 1 (Spring 2013): http:// alternativas.osu.edu/en/issues/autumn-2013/essays/where-is-latinamerican-culture.html. “Cultural Studies and ‘Latin America’: Reframing the Questions,” in Renewing Cultural Studies, ed. Paul Smith (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2011), 188–195. “From the Aesthetics of Hunger to the Cosmetics of Hunger in Brazilian Cinema,” symploke 19, no. 1–2 (2011): 73–84. “Life in the Red Zone; Or the Geographies of Neoliberalism,” in Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas, ed. Debra A. Castillo and Kavita Panjabi (Kolkata: Worldview Press, 2011), 165–190. “The Theory and Practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski,” Jump Cut 50 (2008): http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/Chaski/index. html. “The World According to Miramax: Chocolate, Poetry and Neoliberal Aesthetics,” in American Visual Cultures, ed. Dave Holloway and John Beck (London: Continuum, March 2005), 241–248.

Contents

1 Introduction: Toward a New Critical Paradigm for the Study of Culture and Globalization 1 Part I:  Process

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2 Coproduction 73 3 Distribution 141 4 Exhibition 195 Part II:  Place

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5 Argentina 261 6 Brazil 329 7 Mexico 383

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8 CODA: On Location—Is Titanic a Mexican Movie? 451 Works Cited 479 Index 527

List of Tables

Table 1.1 Table 1.2 Table 2.1 Table 2.2 Table 2.3 Table 3.1 Table 3.2 Table 3.3 Table 3.4 Table 4.1 Table 4.2 Table 4.3 Table 4.4

Yes to American popular culture—except in Muslim world. Source Pew Research Center Spread of American culture still generates concerns. Source Pew Research Center Latin American films released in Europe, 2000–2009. Source Data extracted from Buquet, “Inserción internacional del cine latinoamericano” MERCOSUR’s film markets, 2002–2005. Source Octavio Getino National film versus MERCOSUR, 2002–2005. Source Octavio Getino Top ten distributors in Latin America and their market share, 2016. Source Box Office Mojo Contributions of the movie and TV industry. Source Motion Picture Association América Latina (MPA-AL) US and global box office for successful Latin American and Latino films. Source Luisela Alvaray Peranson’s comparison of festival stakeholders: “Interest Groups and Their Importance at Film Festivals.” Source Mark Peranson Breakdown of ticket sale revenue allocation. Source Paola Reategui Breakdown of the 45% that goes to Chaski. Source Paola Reategui Argentina—movie theater data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics Brazil—movie theater data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics

29 30 102 126 127 150 151 152 175 212 212 216 216 xvii

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List of Tables

Table 4.5 Table 4.6 Table 4.7 Table 4.8 Table 5.1 Table 5.2

Table 6.1 Table 6.2 Table 6.3 Table 7.1 Table 7.2 Table 7.3 Table 7.4 Table 7.5 Table 7.6 Table 7.7 Table 8.1 Table 8.2 Table 8.3

Mexico—movie theater data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics Argentina—exhibition data. Source Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Aires Argentina—spectators by exhibitor, 2014. Source Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Aires Argentina—screens by exhibitor. Source Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Aires Total films released compared with Argentine national films released. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales Argentina—spectator data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, Sistema de Información Cultural de la Argentina, and Cinenacional.com Brazilian film market share. Source ANCINE, Cinema 10, and Octavio Getino Brazil—spectator data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ANCINE, Danielle Dos Santos Borges, Estadão, Fabio Sá Earp Ranking of the top ten most seen national films in Brazil, 2000–2010. Source Octavio Getino, Roque González, Marta Hernández Salván, and Freya Schiwy Private and state funding for Mexican film production. Source IMCINE Mexican release market share. Source IMCINE Spectators of Mexican national films. Source IMCINE Mexican film market share. Source IMCINE Mexican film attendance as percentage of total box office revenues. Source CANACINE Mexican film attendance compared with total film tickets sold in Mexico. Source CANACINE Top ten Mexican films in 2016. Source CANACINE International share of 108 surveyed films, 2013. Source Film L.A. Comparison between Mexico and Britain of estimated budgets of Hollywood films in US$ millions and percentage of overall runaway market. Source Toby Miller Tijuana Film Commission statistics, 2002–2016. Source Tijuana Film Commission, email communication with author

217 218 219 219 287

288 357 358 359 411 416 417 417 418 418 419 460 462 467

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Toward a New Critical Paradigm for the Study of Culture and Globalization

On August 30, 2013, the historical connection between Latin American cinema and the United States underwent an unprecedented shift. For the first time in the history of US–Mexican film exchange, a Mexican film was released in the US market before ever being released inside Mexico. Not only were viewers from the north able to see the film before viewers in the national market from which the film ostensibly hailed, but US viewers flocked to see the film. In only eight weeks, No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included, 2013) was ranked as the fourth most successful foreign language film in the US box office and it is currently the all-time top-ranked Spanish language film in the US market. Beyond the obvious appeal to Spanish speakers living in the United States, the film received significant support from the non-Spanish speaking market as well. This is an especially noteworthy fact since the film is a comedy—a genre traditionally considered not to cross borders well. In addition, it epitomizes the new global order of filmmaking: with Mexicans writing, directing, and performing; the US–Mexican film production company Pantelion Films producing1; US-based, Canadianfounded Lionsgate distributing; and Chinese-owned AMC theaters (among others) screening it. While obviously trendsetting, this film symbolizes a process that has been a long time in the making. It shows that we are now in a phase of globalization that demands entirely new critical frameworks through which to think about the key dilemmas that have preoccupied scholars of © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_1

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cultural globalization for decades.2 Focusing on the period from 1990 to 2016, this book studies Latin American cinema in the global era in order to offer a new critical paradigm for understanding the effects of global economies on national cultures. One of my core arguments is that the 1990s ushered in a new era of globalization that could not be interpreted according to previous critical paradigms. This new phase of globalization is best thought of as specifically tied to neoliberal capitalism and to the market-oriented policies it demands. Despite increasing calls to populist nationalism, previously in Latin America and now in the United States and Europe, the reality is that even the most populist governments are still deeply committed to a global exchange economy and a state structure with minimal commitments to social welfare. Neoliberal policies that demand deregulation and privatization are operating in most states across the globe. Thus, what I am calling millennial globalization begins in the twenty-first century and represents the era when neoliberal policies put in place in the 1970s operate on a truly global level. One of the key shifts brought on by millennial globalization is the spatial framework within which we understand it. If at one time it made sense, for instance, to think of Latin America as a “loser” in the global economy, the neoliberal era upends that status as certain economies and specific corporations in the region rise to global prominence. As David Harvey puts it in The Enigma of Capital, “the creation and re-creation of ever newer space relations for human interactions is one of capitalism’s most signal achievements.”3 Thus, in the precise moment when practically every economy across the globe participates in the capitalist marketplace, the geographical frameworks through which capital circulates begin to destabilize the traditional axes of power. This book argues that these changes demand new ways of understanding the connections between culture, politics, and place. Most importantly, this shift makes it possible to disentangle the longstanding association of the west with capitalism. For instance, economies like that of Brazil or Mexico surge to global prominence, while those of Spain and Greece nosedive. These economic realities demand that we recognize the decline in power of the west alongside the increased strengthening of capitalism as a way of life. These changes also explain why the critical oppositions that have tended to frame analysis of globalization’s effects on culture need revision in the current context. As we cluster the sorts of questions that have structured most research on culture and globalization—especially from the perspective of postcolonial scholars—we can note that they offer

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political oppositions and antagonisms that are significantly destabilized by the neoliberal market economy. Consider the following list of traditional categories used to study film culture and globalization: • Cultural Homogenization vs. Cultural Heterogeneity • Cultural Imperialism vs. Local/Autochthonous Culture • US Market Dominance vs. “Emerging” Markets • Hollywood Aesthetic Dominance vs. “Local” Aesthetics • Consumption of Other Cultures Influences One’s Identity and Ideas about Other Cultures • Global (American) Culture vs. National Culture While it must be said that postcolonial approaches to these issues often stressed deconstruction and hybridity rather than stark oppositions, it is still true that many of the debates about culture and globalization tended to trope on the above list of antagonisms. In a section below I will analyze the various ways that these oppositional categories no longer hold in the era of millennial globalization. But even more important, I will show how the study of these antagonisms often rested on implicit value judgments, which were often more connected to identity categories than to political power. Think, for example, of the tension over homogeneity and heterogeneity, which was a common category of concern for cultural globalization scholarship in the 1990s. That earlier research often rested on the implicit assumption that heterogeneity was “better” in the face of a global homogenizing trend where all cultures copied the west and embraced capitalism. Recall, for example, one of the most famous lines of 1990s research on globalization and culture, that of Arjun Appadurai, who wrote that: “The central problem of today’s global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization.”4 In a similar vein, Roland Robertson, the critic responsible for transferring the term “glocal” from Japanese business theory to cultural theory, emphasized the interlinking qualities of the local and the global: It is not a question of either homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both of these tendencies have become features of life across much of the late-twentieth-century world. In this perspective the problem becomes that of spelling out the ways in which homogenizing and heterogenizing tendencies are mutually implicative.5

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For Robertson, writing in the 1990s, sorting out the connections and interactions between cultural heterogeneity and cultural homogeneity was the key problem scholars needed to solve. These approaches were based on the expectation that the cultural effects of neoliberal globalization would mimic cultural imperialism. Thus, scholars like Robertson and Appadurai mapped their research according to imperial era power structures that had bundled economic, political, and cultural power into predictable constellations. The critical response to the imperial model of globalization also assumed that cultural resistance should take the form of protection of diverse identities and the defense of difference. But those 1990s interventions into the cultural impact of globalization could not fully predict what would really happen under millennial globalization. They were unable to foresee the effects of the incorporation of previously postcolonial societies into market capitalism, which led to postcolonial states working with multinational corporations to market “national” culture on a global scale. Nor did they anticipate the fact that neoliberal practices would actually encourage market diversification and would profit from the desire for difference. In fact, as John Tomlinson points out, the homogeneity of globalization may well be best understood as the rendering of all culture into commodity, not the creation of a uniform monoculture.6 As the following analysis will show, too often our inherent critique of the cultural effects of global capitalism was shrouded by what appeared as overt arguments for diversity and the local. For a variety of reasons the ethical critique of the effects of a global capitalist market economy was embedded within arguments that such practices would create a homogenous culture and would eradicate local specificity. This angle worked, in part, because there was a homology between the source of the dominant culture, imperialist practices, and capitalist power. It worked because the “winners” and “losers” of globalization could mostly be mapped according to an imperialist geography. This book will explain how in the era of millennial globalization those structures have shifted, rendering many of the critical approaches that used to work to analyze the consequences of globalization ineffective. There is another way that this book contributes to debates on the impact of globalization on culture. Rather than speculate about what would happen to national film industries after the imposition of neoliberal policy, this book draws on actual data. As the various empirical sources offered throughout this book prove, many of the outcomes

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scholars imagined did not pan out. For instance, national industries did not die out and states did not stop investing in film. And neoliberalism did not consolidate culture; it diversified it. This means that, as scholars fought to protect cultural practices, neoliberal policies sought a variety of markets to enter and commodities to sell. Today, for instance, there is far more Latin American film across a range of styles and aesthetics available to viewers than ever before. While some of the 1990s worries did not come to pass, that does not mean that neoliberal globalization did not bring significant shifts to the film industry and the culture economy. For these reasons, studying cinema culture from across Latin America offers a unique opportunity to trace broad sweeping patterns caused by neoliberalism; it also offers an ideal case study through which to think through a new critical paradigm for understanding the power dynamics and political issues that govern cultural production in the era of global free trade. The story of Latin America’s cultural response to the onset of global neoliberalism is indicative of larger global trends where state after state was pressured to deregulate, privatize, and abandon any commitment to the public good. The impact on culture industries—like that of cinema—that depended on state subsidies, quotas, and other legal protections was immediate and devastating. Across the board, the national cinemas of Latin America nosedived during the imposition of neoliberal policies in the 1990s, only to later rebound in a few key markets as certain film industries adapted to privatization, global markets, and adjusted forms of state support. These changes were caused by free market policies that heralded a new state role in supporting cinema—one that was more entrepreneurial in spirit and globally capitalist in practice. As the following chapters will show, millennial globalization, then, does not mean the end of state involvement in the film industry, nor does it signal a complete turn to market mentalities. Instead, what we witness is an odd double-speak where state investment is publicly lauded according to the rhetoric of development and nationalism, while its actual practice becomes more and more a sign of the defense of market niche and the desire to participate in the global economy. Early speculations about the impact of free trade policy on Latin American film industries assumed that the global era would signal the end of national industries. We now know that is not what happened. Rather, it has been during the neoliberal era that Latin American cinema has grown to its most significant global presence, both in terms of

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box office numbers and international awards. Even more interesting is the fact that the resurgence of Latin American cinema in the neoliberal era has been defined by films that are often critical of the neoliberal system. In general, the most commercially successful films from the region are socially progressive, politically engaged, and, in some cases, directly critical of capitalism. In fact, only two out of the ten top-rated, Latin America-connected, international films at the US box office do not have a fairly clear political message.7 While the commercial style of these films often softens, perhaps even whitewashes, their political edge, it would be a mistake to miss the very real ways that these films have opened up public dialogue on major social issues. Moreover, as I’ll argue, when all culture is created within capitalist economies, celebrating the local, the subaltern, or the independent cultural form because it seems to have been created outside of and/or against the system may be silly, since in many of these cases the “smaller” project was still a direct recipient of capitalist investment. The ubiquitous presence of capital is only one part of the story. It is also important to note the specific ways that neoliberal capitalism has operated outside of traditional capitalist ideologies. Neoliberalism’s principal goal is profit and that reality has led to the greatest economic inequality of the modern era. But it also means that neoliberal capital will invest in cultural forms that critique capitalism, if those stories can be profitable. That uncanny reality calls for new critical frameworks to analyze the political potential of cinema. What do we do with films that were funded by Disney but that offer an anti-Disney view of the world? In one clear example, the anti-big bank film, The Big Short (2015), which examined the disastrous effects of the mortgage crisis, was distributed by “big six” media conglomerate Paramount Pictures. Meanwhile Paramount has a partnership with Quicken Loans, which has come under scrutiny for questionable mortgage lending tactics.8 The point is that neoliberal corporations are often more than willing to invest in films if they see profit potential, regardless of the fact that the films may be directly critical of their exact business practices. Many of the films analyzed in this book operate in that same sort of ambivalent space. One of the key questions I ask is whether it is time to recognize the political potential of Latin American examples of films like The Big Short, which use capitalist investment to critique capitalism. In the case of Latin America, these sorts of patterns are even more overt since the ratio of commercial-quality political-issue films is far

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higher than that found in Hollywood. For a range of reasons, which will be analyzed in the chapters to come, those films that do cross the border and that gain a broad global release are generally social-issue films that carry political critique. Thus, studying the case of Latin American cinema in the global era allows for the development of a new theory of political culture in the age of global neoliberalism. While there are multiple arenas of Latin American political culture—both on the ground and in media— cinema offers a unique chance to study the intersections between trade policy, state investment, transnational networks, national ideology, public culture, cultural tourism, and global cultural flows. There simply is no other regional cultural form that both crosses borders and influences mass national audiences to the same degree. The process of production, distribution, and exhibition reveals a host of ways that films must navigate the neoliberal market. While the goal of this book is to offer a new critical paradigm, it builds on the work of a number of scholars. In particular, my work takes insight from two film studies books that take a similar approach to mine. The first is Ignacio Sánchez Prado’s Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012. His volume takes up roughly the same timeframe as my book, but its focus is on Mexico rather than Latin America more broadly. Sánchez Prado and I agree that neoliberalism renders the notion of national cinema more an idea than a practice. But even more important, we also agree on the notion that in the age of neoliberal globalization it is time to rethink our definition of a political film. Referring to the legacies of the “third cinema” movement and its overdetermined purchase on designating truly political filmmaking, Sánchez Prado explains that “these notions feel outdated in the context of a global film industry that has effectively commoditized both ‘Second Cinema’ and ‘Third Cinema’ into a single continuum of cultural capital.”9 He goes on to explain that “the construction of an entirely new set of institutions of cinema in Mexico, with complex networks interconnecting the State, private investment, and individual filmmakers, requires an understanding of political film in a new way.”10 This new way recognizes that political films today have an “organic and problematic relationship with the politics and economics of neoliberalism.”11 One key focus of interest for Sánchez Prado is the way that the Mexican films from the period he studies sympathetically reflect the challenges and political issues of the middle class—a topic that was strictly avoided in the radical political films of the 1960s and 1970s.

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The second volume, New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, edited by Cacilda M. Rêgo and Carolina Rocha, while an edited volume, offers essays that are tightly organized around the changes in the film industries in Argentina and Brazil after 1990. As explained in the overview of their book, there is a parallel trend across all of the major film industries in the region of industries nosediving after the implementation of neoliberal policies and then rebounding but within a far more overtly commercial framework at the turn of the millennium. Their volume gives important comparative insight into these trends and each of the essays analyzes the impact of new socioeconomic policies on the films from the two MERCOSUR (Mercado común del sur, [common market of the south]) nations. Again, in keeping with the insights of Sánchez Prado, the editors argue that the films from this period redefine political filmmaking and take up the issue of neoliberalism as a central concern. The editors note that despite the commercial nature of many of the post1995 films, they “have not given up on showing the political, economic, and cultural dimensions of a perverse socio-economic system.”12 My work builds on these approaches and adds a comparative view of cinema from throughout Latin America. Taking cues from this earlier work, Globalization and Latin American Cinema has three main goals as it enters into critical conversations across three fields of study. First, it engages the debate on the cultural effects of globalization and offers a new critical paradigm through which to understand the impact of neoliberal economics and globalized networks of communication on cultural production. Second, it adds to the theoretical debates at the heart of Latin American cultural studies work, and calls for heightened attention to what I describe as the “ethical turn” in Latin American studies. By foregrounding issues of ethics over nationalism, I am able to suggest that the political imperatives at the heart of Latin American cultural studies are best served by recognizing that the neoliberal market economy requires rethinking the idea that geographically based struggle is an effective antidote to the effects of global power structures. Third, contributing to the field of global film and media studies, this book offers an analysis of the ways that Latin American cinema exemplifies the cultural response to neoliberal economic policies and global communication networks. My research shows that Latin American cinema in the neoliberal era is characterized by a deep ambivalence to neoliberal politics that can’t be understood according to starkly oppositional logics. Instead, these films

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require a dialogic and dialectical analysis of the contradictory practices that simultaneously turn local culture into reified commodity while also creating spaces for meaningful cultural resistance.

The Historical Context The arguments in this book pivot around three key turning points in the study of globalization, film culture, and politics. While framed as an intervention into contemporary debates, this book dialogues with the critical frameworks, aesthetic practices, and political struggles of the 1960s and 1990s in order to analyze the period from 1990 to 2016. The 1960s provide an essential backdrop to my arguments, since it is in this phase that Latin America fully participates and actively influences the postcolonial debates and political actions of the time. A key feature of my argument is that much of the critical work done in the 1990s took its cue from the dynamics put in play by postcolonial resistance movements in the 1960s. In fact, one might argue that it would simply be impossible to study the politics of Latin American cinema today without attention to the groundbreaking work of a number of filmmakers from across the region who worked together in the 1960s to foster the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement. These filmmakers were also actively involved with what later came to be called “third cinema.” During this period filmmakers from across Latin America conceived of cinema as a political act, specifically geared toward raising consciousness and inspiring revolution. While the filmmakers from Brazil, Bolivia, Cuba, Argentina, Chile, and other parts of the region varied in the exact ways they approached the issue, they all agreed that film was a form of public culture that had political impact. They called for a filmmaking practice that was collective, politically engaged, and openly hostile to Hollywood. For them, a rejection of Hollywood required a rejection of Hollywood aesthetics. And they imagined that their highly experimental films would reach the public and change the way they saw the world. At the heart of the Latin American third cinema movement was a belief in the deep connection between cultural, political, and economic imperialism, and the filmmakers of the movement worked in conversation with economists and political theorists. At the time, the message was clear and consistent—the way out of dependency was autonomy and protectionism. Thus, films were understood within the broader logic of

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import-substitution industrialization, meaning that, even in this era, films were seen as part of a market and also as an art form capable of shaping public perception. Interestingly, this era saw an increase in state oversight in cinema. One of the first acts of post-revolutionary Cuba, for instance, was to found a national film agency, ICAIC [Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry], in 1959; Argentina founded its Instituto Nacional de Cine [National Film Institute] in 1957; and Brazil founded Embrafilme [Empresa Brasileira de Filmes, Brazilian Film Company] in 1969. While the political filmmakers of the region had complex relationships with these state institutions, the establishment of national bodies responsible for supporting a national industry was a noteworthy and significant development. The third cinema movement was further fueled by the excitement and intensity of Latin American left politics and its connection to broader postcolonial political movements. Across the global south, there was considerable concern over the long-term legacy of cultural imperialism. Latin American scholars like Ángel Rama, Roberto Fernández Retamar, and Fernando Ortiz worked on the notions of transculturation and cultural counterpoints as ways of understanding how cultures could retain expressive power in the face of foreign influence. At the time, the trend was to argue for both strengthening the social role of autochthonous culture and for becoming “Caliban,” that is, learning the master’s language in order to curse him. The argument either favored the local or the political appropriation of western, imperialist culture or both strategies at the same time. The idea of working within the western system was considered an act of bad faith. This conceptual framework would largely remain in play during the 1990s as scholars adjusted the Cold War logics of empire to the advent of global neoliberalism. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse explains, “Most globalization literature took shape during the 1980–2000 phase of globalization when neoliberalism and American hegemony were the overriding trends.”13 The added complexity to the critical discourse at the time was the predominance of postmodern, poststructural, and deconstructionist approaches to the study of global culture and politics. The consequence was that many of the oppositional categories that had framed social critique in the 1960s remained central, but as deconstructions. Nederveen Pieterse, for instance, argues for a notion of cultural hybridity:

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The most common interpretations of globalization are the idea that the world is becoming more uniform and standardized, through a technological, commercial, and cultural synchronization emanating from the West, and that globalization is tied up with modernity. These perspectives are interrelated, if only in that they are both variations on an underlying theme of globalization as westernization. The former is critical in intent while the latter is ambiguous. My argument takes issue with both these interpretations as narrow assessments of globalization and instead argues for viewing globalization as a process of hybridization that gives rise to a global mélange.14

The 1990s interventions rested on implicit ideas about how to challenge existing structures of power, especially in the context of postcolonialism. And, even though they advocated for destabilizing meaning, they depended on a geography of power that had already begun to shift. They were also often clouded in a negative politics, one that shied away from explicit, constructive intervention. That said, though, the clear intent of left-oriented studies of globalization and culture remained political. And the main approaches to the issues still depended on the critical sense that “culture mattered,” and that through cultural resistance other forms of political change would become possible. It is interesting to note that at exactly the same time that neoliberal free-market capitalism started to put pressure on states to deregulate, to abandon the notion of the common good, and to privatize, poststructural theorists also called for an abandonment of master narratives, metatheory, and grand ideas of the collective. While many theorists, like Fredric Jameson, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri attempted to navigate the awareness that structures of power were in flux while holding to utopian political desires, albeit from different angles, this was an era when both neoliberalism and poststructural cultural theory dovetailed in their denigration of the public sphere, the common good, and the idea of social justice. The problem, though, was that the cultural studies scholars working in the 1990s were still attached to ideas linked to import substitution, while they were also highly suspicious of the role of the state in cultural policy. This led to a disconnect between economic policy and cultural studies work. Whereas the 1960s was an era of synergy across cultural theorists and political economists, the 1990s brought a period of conflict. As Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi explain, for Latin American

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political theorists, “the import substitution model . . . slowed fatally in the 1960s and 1970s.”15 They further point out that “an enhanced role for transnational capital and the introduction of transnationalized neoliberal ideas about ‘good’ policies on governance and development codified in what came to be known as the Washington Consensus.”16 Thus, at exactly the same time that left-oriented cultural studies scholars were suspicious of the role of the state, neoliberalism was seeking to fundamentally displace it with the market: “The primary goal of the neoliberal orthodoxy was to reform the relationship between the state and the market.”17 The privatization of public assets, cuts in public expenditures, and the move to market-driven competitive exchange coincided with the eschewing of master narratives and the poststructural critique of ­organized politics. But the real disconnect happened over the role of the market itself. Grugel and Riggirozzi point out that in Latin America “all political groups that have won office have made their peace with capitalism. They are not, in a serious way, anticapitalist—in marked contrast to some of their historical forerunners.” They further explain that “all governance projects in Latin America acknowledge, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the importance of the market.”18 As William Robinson explains, the era of structural adjustment had three key facets: (1) liberalization of trade and finances, which opens the economy to the world market, (2) deregulation, which removes the state from economic decision-making, and (3) privatization of formerly public spheres. Rather than develop national industry, this period offers a “new definition of development as participation in the world market.”19 Whereas “development” once signaled economic sovereignty, even if in practice it brought on dependency, in the neoliberal era the notion of economic independence completely erodes. At exactly the same time, though, media scholars debating the connections between culture and trade continued to focus on the effects on national markets. John Sinclair analyzes the New World Information and Communication Order debate of the 1970s and 1980s: “the protection of national cultural integrity against foreign influence was a major issue, and third world countries were encouraged to develop their own communication and cultural policies.”20 While attention was drawn to protecting vulnerable national markets, some media industries were already crossing borders in the other direction. Sinclair notes that “Televisa’s operations in the United States constituted ‘reverse media imperialism,’” and acknowledges “the pivotal role played by Mexico

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(Televisa) and Brazil (Globo) within a broad shift in the region away from U.S. programs and toward Latin American telenovelas.”21 These changes meant that “by the 1990s the blindspots in ‘the American hegemony paradigm’ of cultural imperialism and its variants were clear.”22 The destabilization of traditional hegemonic flows affected the entire globe. Jennifer Holt explains that the 1990s affected media worldwide. She points out that the Telecommunications Act of 1996 was the ultimate deregulatory initiative and it completed the structural convergence of the media industries that began in the 1980s: It was “the outgrowth of fifteen years’ worth of dismantling regulatory structures, the ascendance of neoliberal ideological values in economic and political spheres, and the latest triumph of media oligopolies over marketplace diversity and the public interest.”23 The impact of this law was the rise of six vertically and horizontally integrated entertainment conglomerates that would shape global media. If Latin America needed to protect its market, so too for those US media players who wished to operate outside the dominion of these media monopolies. The point is that deregulation created far more convergence for those outside of the media power structure than opposition. Suddenly the north–south geography was replaced by a class system where the “winners” and “losers” were more closely connected to the size of their corporate capital than to any clear geography. To muddy the waters even more, the 1990s saw the rise of ethnicity as a marketing category and identity as a commodity. This meant that where identity struggles in the 1970s and 1980s may have been understood as acts of resistance against the world capitalist system and against the lingering racial biases of imperialism, their political potential was now tempered by the commodification of those struggles. Suddenly the “authentic” was not only a political subject-position; now it was a unique source of market value. This era saw postcolonial societies purposefully use identity as a means to compete in the world market. As Jean and John Comaroff explain in Ethnicity, Inc., this practice can be described as “ethno-preneurialism”: “the management and marketing of cultural products and practices, qua intellectual property, as sources of value—indeed, as monopoly capital—inseparable from the being-and-bodies of their owner-producers . . . has displaced the sale of labor power, conventionally conceived, in yielding the means of material life.”24 Because neoliberalism encourages the entrepreneurial development of all people, we see marginalized cultures market identity as a development strategy and an axis point into the

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neoliberal market economy. While clearly as much a survival tactic as willful entry into the market, the reality that identity itself is now a commodity certainly reframes the political potential of films, which already had their own complex connection to the production of identity for financial gain. Thus, a number of shifts take place in the 1990s: the north–south axis is destabilized as culture from the south finds a successful foothold in the north and as the entire globe begins to feel the effects of media monopolies; identity becomes a market category and not simply a space of political resistance; and nations protect their culture industries as a means to protect their markets as well as develop national identity. The trick is that many scholars of cultural globalization have still often relied on the idea that defending cultural diversity, analyzing cultural hybridity, and protecting the “local” in the global marketplace are useful critical gestures. Yet none of these critical moves takes seriously the complex web of corporate connections that now go into creating cultural products for the world market.25 If the critical approaches of the 1990s depended, in part, on a deconstruction of the 1960s, it is now possible to see that millennial globalization requires a new geography and a new vocabulary of cultural globalization. Cultural hybridity, for instance, no longer works as a useful political concept in an era of neoliberal market diversification. As the centers of capital have shifted to seriously include the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), we need to recognize what Walter Mignolo calls the decolonization of western paradigms. The challenge, though, is that just as capital is decolonized, cultural hierarchies connected to western imperialism appear to be holding steady.26 This means, following the work of William Robinson, that decolonization may mean nothing more than a shift in the central powers of capital. For him, global capital may mean a move away from western dominance, but it does not mean a reduction in capitalism’s force or ideology. Another key feature highlighted by both Robinson and Harvey is the end of primitive accumulation. The presence of capitalism virtually everywhere means that nostalgia for some pristine space outside of capital from which to challenge it actively no longer exists. Of even greater interest to me in this book is how to contend with the changed geography of capitalist power and the seemingly similar cultural hierarchies that derive from western imperialism. My main argument is that neoliberal capitalism creates a whole new set of dialectical tensions around culture and political power. This newest phase

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of capital reveals that some of the most politically powerful cultural responses to structural injustice are often highly ambivalent—they are most often produced within neoliberalism: they help drive neoliberal profit while fighting against it at the same time.

Toward a New Critical Paradigm Flaws in the Identity/Place-Based Model In Spaces of Global Capitalism: Toward a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, Harvey writes: “A central contradiction exists within capitalism between territorial and capitalistic logics of power. This contradiction is internalized within capital accumulation given the tension between regionality and territorial class alliance formation on the one hand and the free geographical circulation of capital on the other.”27 For Harvey “accumulation through dispossession” signals the shift in wealth, during the late twentieth century, to scales beyond those of the nation-state. “Accumulation through dispossession” describes a process where economic operations that used to facilitate the growth of wealth within a nation-state now facilitate the accumulation of wealth by transnational elites. Thus, accumulation through dispossession depends on the idea of accumulating across borders. Interestingly, though, the transnational elite is no longer easily mapped onto “the west.” The accumulation of wealth, while still markedly linked to the United States and Europe, is a global phenomenon. Aliko Dangote, a Nigerian businessman, is ranked in the top 50 wealthiest individuals and is worth $14.3 billion. Dilip Shanghvi owns Indian pharmaceuticals and is worth $16.4 billion. Mexican media mogul Carlos Slim has a net worth of $23.5 billion. Brazilian Jorge Lemann, who founded the 3G investment company, is worth $25 billion.28 These few examples signal a transnational capitalist elite that is not confined to traditional geographies of economic power. And while it might be tempting to read these billionaires as solely an example of postcolonial creoles who have benefited by colonial patronage structures, that view would be overly limited. As the Comaroffs argue in Millennial Capitalism, “The new transnational capitalist elite—its frequent-flier executives, financiers, bureaucrats, professionals, and media moguls—may appear to be the planetary version of those older cosmopolitan bourgeoisies, its cadres centered in

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the imperial capitals of the world. But, as Leslie Sklair (1998: 136–137) argues, this new elite is distinctive.”29 One key difference is that this elite often operates in national contexts without any interest in national concerns: “Above all, its interests are vested primarily in globalizing forms of capital . . . Hence, while its business ventures might loop into and out of national economies, this does not, as Saskia Sassen (n.d.) stresses, make them ‘national’ enterprises.”30 The key is that what may appear as a national industry actually functions as a global one: “The entrepreneurial activities of this class are conceived in terms of markets, monetary transactions, and modes of manufacture that transcend national borders. They seek to disengage from parochial loyalties and jurisdictions, thus to minimize the effects of legal regulations, environmental constraints, taxation, and labor demands.”31 Such realities signal only one of the most obvious ways that the rise of neoliberal globalization requires a new critical paradigm to understand the intersections of globalization and culture. As Tanner Mirrlees argues, another key reason to seek a new paradigm is that the “rival” paradigms of cultural imperialism and cultural globalization are too simplistic. The cultural imperialists focus narrowly on “communication and media entertainment as an instrument of one nation-state’s economic, geopolitical, and cultural power over others.”32 In contrast, the cultural globalization paradigm, according to Mirrlees, is too centered on cultural flows and on the contacts between people and cultures hastened by the global era. But Mirrlees points out that this flow-based paradigm misses the reality of global power structures: “The attempt to excise the discourse of cultural domination from communication theory, and the deconstruction of the culturally dominant/culturally dominated dichotomy, risks flattening the global field of power of relations and disavowing the fact that the world continues to be a systematically and fundamentally unequal place.”33 He contends that “the insights of both paradigms are relevant and useful” and that “a cultural materialist middle-ground paradigm mobilizes the best of the radical political-economy and critical cultural studies approaches of the CI [cultural imperialism] and CG [cultural globalization] paradigms in a complimentary fashion.”34 While I agree that the overly skeptical and overly celebratory aspects of these two views are too narrow, I also draw attention to the ways that neoliberal globalization has both reinforced and destabilized geographies of power. While the world’s poor are still overwhelmingly mapped to former colonies, wealth is going global and poverty is on the rise in

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the former “first” world. Lee Artz’s study of global entertainment media confirms my point that for those of us that study the intersection between media and globalization, the maps are changing. His book argues that it is a mistake to simply celebrate the rise of BRICS economies as a sign of positive change: “Pieterse and others perceiving the displacement of dominant nations or dominant media by China, Brazil, India, or localized community media need to look over the table, over the wheel, down the road, and over the horizon. The economic and political drivers of globalization have won allies and partners from every nation and every culture, forming a new, energetic, and politically powerful transnational capitalist class.”35 Artz focuses his critical gaze on the neoliberal goals of maximizing profits and expanding audiences, a move that he proves requires active collaboration from formerly colonized nations as these companies seek to attract their citizens. Néstor García Canclini’s research on culture and globalization has also explained that postcolonial binaries are not enough to analyze this new phase: “During the age of imperialism one could experience the struggle of David against Goliath, but one knew that politically Goliath lived partly in the capital of one’s own country and partly in Washington or London, that media-wise Goliath was in Hollywood, and so on for all the other Goliaths. Today Goliaths are disseminated in thirty locations and migrate easily from one country to another, from one culture to many, within the networks of a polymorphous market.”36 This book, then, joins a long line of scholars who have sought new models for studying the links between globalization and culture. I follow their lead in advocating for a more nuanced, dialectical approach to the dichotomies that structured earlier studies of globalization, but where I differ is in my more overt call to place the ethical dilemmas of globalization more openly at the center of our work, displacing identity and place in favor of politics and social justice. Many of the scholars I’ll rely on in my arguments have begun this work. García Canclini argues, for instance, “I do not think that the main options today are to defend identity or to globalize. The most illuminating studies of the globalizing process are not those that lead us to review questions of identity in isolation but those that lead us to understand the benefits of knowing what we can do and be in relation to others, like dealing with heterogeneity, difference, and inequality.”37 And Mirrlees also points out that even if globalization has shifted the map, it doesn’t mean it has reduced the possibility of using power to great advantage and great

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harm: “Some states and corporations have greater power at their disposal to get what they want from others. The world system underlying the ‘global cultural economy’ is not flat, equal, or socially just.”38 Another key part of my argument is the idea that much scholarship on culture and globalization highlights oppositional categories that don’t help advance our understanding. Even more important, these categories tend to foreground identity over politics—even when they are arguments for “identity politics.” The next sections break down the flaws in the identity/place-based models of cultural globalization studies. Cultural Homogenization vs. Cultural Heterogeneity It would be difficult to overestimate the degree to which this critical paradigm has dominated conversations about the impact of globalization on culture. I’ve already referenced famous quotes by Appadurai and Robertson that were field-defining on this topic. The framework of homogeneity versus heterogeneity also took the form of debates over the universal and the particular. Writing in 1992, Robertson highlighted the centrality of the universal–particular debate: “the relationship between the universal and the particular must be central at this time to our comprehension of the globalization process and its ramifications.”39 He further argued that in the late twentieth century we are “witnesses to—and participants in—a massive twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism.”40 This paradigm was driven by the worry that the concentration of cultural power would lead to a homogenous global society where all groups consumed the same culture. These worries led to a range of theories that focused on determining the source of cultural practices. Much attention was focused on the ways that local cultures consuming globally homogenous products would develop “hybrid” identities. Writing in 2000, for example, Jan Aart Scholte argued that globalization creates hybrid identities: the different trends suggest “a general structural shift in the construction of identity under contemporary conditions of intense globalization, namely, toward increased hybridization. A hybrid identity draws from and blends several different strands in substantial measure, so that no single marker holds clear and consistent primacy over others.”41 As I’ll further argue below, the emphasis on the local, the global, or the hybrid concentrated critical

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attention on the ontological and identity-based features of culture. Not only did this approach miss the reality that neoliberalism depends on sustaining diversity (of commodities), it also creates a distraction from analysis of the political and ethical consequences of global neoliberalism. As my analysis of Latin American cinema in the global era proves, the neoliberal market economy has embraced the production of “local” products. Once diversity is a marketing category it complicates the longstanding view that diversity is inherently a progressive, political, and powerful tool to fight imbalances of power. The homogeneity vs. heterogeneity debate focused on the identity features of culture over the neoliberal ones, but, as Tomlinson explains, the homogeneity brought on by neoliberalism is not in terms of cultural identities and cultural commodities; it is in terms of a unified interpellation into the global market economy. George Yúdice further reminds us that capitalism “makes a profit on the new wares of diversity.”42 And Artz explains that celebrating hybridity as a form of resistance to global capital is delusional: “Cultural hybrids flourish. Variations draw from rich and diverse traditions, as in Brazilian telenovelas and rap, Nigerian juju videos, and Islamic and green pop in Turkey. Yet, when controlled and represented by corporate media, most advance and none challenge the basic individualist, consumerist tenets of the capitalist market.”43 The point is that attention to hybridity, syncretism, creolization, the local interpretation of the global, and so on, sidesteps the issues of power and politics that most of us find troubling about the neoliberal global economy. García Canclini has been clear that the global versus local debate is not a useful one: “There are socioeconomic reasons why the global cannot do without the local, or why the local or national cannot expand, or even survive, disconnected from globalizing movements.”44 Cultural Imperialism vs. Local/Autochthonous Culture A related, yet separate, issue is connected to the notion that one way to challenge geopolitical inequity is through the valorization and appreciation of the local and the autochthonous over the foreign, ­ ­especially when the “foreign” is associated with a neoimperial source. It is difficult to disentangle the arguments against cultural imperialism from those of homogenization, but the one clear dividing line is that those that study the problem of globalization from the imperialist viewpoint are always attentive to geopolitical power structures. From

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this view, cultural imperialism is simply the “soft” power of imperialism. And for many Latin American cultural theorists the power was not so soft at all. The filmmakers of the NLAC movement, for instance, saw the battle over the movie screen to be as significant as the battle for political sovereignty. As Mike Wayne explains in his study of political film, the first wave of third cinema theory and practice was influenced by the larger critical paradigms of dependency theory and notions around cultural imperialism that were dominant in the 1960s and 1970s: “These paradigms attempted to explain the unequal political, social and economic dynamics that structure relations between the west and the rest, while cultural imperialism concerned itself specifically with the importance of culture within those relations of force.”45 In fact, throughout the struggles for decolonization that swept Latin America, Africa, and Asia in the 1960s, there was a twin impulse to fight for cultural independence alongside political and economic independence.46 The fears that true independence required cultural independence were buttressed by the reality that the United States was fighting a cultural war for control over other regions as well. Mirrlees reminds us that the cultural sovereignty of postcolonial states was further undermined by US propaganda agencies such as the United States Information Agency (USIA), the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (BECA), and the Voice of America Radio (VOA). Complemented by violent CIA counter-insurgency incursions, these state propaganda agencies promoted US capitalism and liberal democracy as “modernization” in postcolonial states throughout the 1950s and 1960s as “an ideological counterpart to Marxist–Leninist theories about imperialist attempts to dominate the new nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”47 The cultural battle for independence was real. But, most importantly, the connection between the battle over cultural imperialism and global cultural power later skewed our ability to analyze what happens when one of the sources of cultural power is actually located within the global south. The postcolonial framework created an axis of power that has held sway in many areas of scholarship to date. Similar to the argument for diversity as an antidote to cultural domination, this argument values the postcolonial over the west. The problem, though, is that in the era of neoliberal globalization the oppositional force of these two categories gets extremely muddy: it simply isn’t possible to divide the political power of what was understood as the postcolonial from the neoimperial in geographic terms.

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As Robinson points out, the rise of the BRICS economies has signaled a real shift in the traditional axis of economic power, one that demands a rethinking of the postcolonial map. Brazilian film industry expert Steve Solot further points out that the BRICS nations “represent a growing proportion of the entertainment and media market, reflecting the growth rate of their economies and a narrowing gap between themselves and western countries with respect to broadband, mobile access and digital spending.”48 Whereas Latin American nations may have been limited in the past to economies focused on the export of natural resources, Solot explains that there is significant advancement in growth and power over the media market. Referencing the strength of the Brazilian media industry he points out that, “The entertainment and media market in each of the BRIC countries is anticipated to grow at more than ten percent over the next five years.”49 Robinson further points out that media in the region is largely dominated by only four companies: Televisa (Mexico), Globo (Brazil), Cisneros (Venezuela), and Clarín (Argentina).50 This means “protecting” the local media market may mean simply strengthening these four mega corporations. This reality certainly puts a crimp in the cultural imperialism critical strategy. Another challenge to the cultural imperialism line of thinking for film scholars has been the reality that films are often made with input from people that hail from a range of origins. If the directors of the NLAC movement had input and training from Europeans, does that dilute the political force of their films? If tracing these affiliations was messy in the era of decolonization, it is especially so now. As Misha MacLaird explains in her study of Mexican film: “The tendency to categorize cinema based on the geopolitical identities of (some but not all of ) those who create the films and on (some but not all of ) the spaces in which the films are created has become less useful in an era of increased mobility among filmmakers.”51 So the cultural imperialist argument gets thwarted by the new geographies of media power and by the global exchanges that go into making films. But there is one more hitch in this strategy: it rests on the notion that culture created within Latin America will be “better” since it isn’t from the former empire. That, of course, is a terrible simplification and even the filmmakers of the NLAC movement knew such divisions made no sense. They explained the mess by suggesting that much culture produced within the former colonies had assimilated the logics of empire: it may have been made within the region, but it actually replicated the

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ideology of empire. But again, under the logic of neoliberal globalization, axes of solidarity against global capital are not only mapped according to those of former empires. This also means that the “location” of a film is far less likely to signal its political stance toward the injustices of global capital. What happens, for instance, when we compare films such as Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s highly political film Children of Men (2006), shot in Great Britain, starring Clive Owen, and produced by Universal Pictures, or Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005) produced by Focus Features, starring Ralph Fiennes, and shot in Berlin and Kenya, alongside Mauricio Walerstein’s Mexican-funded, gratuitously violent, narco film Travesía del desierto ([Voyage in the desert], 2012). The point is that the markers of autochthonous and foreign (that is, western) do not always demarcate a clear hierarchy between films with content supportive of or damaging to Latin American identities. If autochthonous at one time signaled a cultural form that was inherently more valuable, more progressive, and more critical of postcolonial power imbalances, that is no longer true. US Market Dominance vs. “Emerging” Markets The worry over Hollywood and US domination of the media industry has driven concerns about market access for non-US based companies for decades. Again, the correlation between Hollywood, the United States, and a global system of structural inequity meant that those fighting for media access often packaged their critiques in a geographical framework that intertwined the United States with a closed commercial system. Toby Miller et al. remind their readers that Henry Kissinger once said that “globalization is really another name for the dominant role of the United States.”52 And within the film world, it is Hollywood that holds the trademark for globalization. As Miller et al. put it: “Hollywood both animates and is animated by globalization.”53 The arguments that take this tack, as seen in the debates over the New World Information and Communication Order during the 1970s and 1980s, focus on how to protect market share for “emerging” markets. The idea was that protecting the market would naturally lead to protecting cultural diversity. In these contexts, cultural diversity was often—but not always—linked to a notion of protecting market access for products that could offer meaningful worldviews that would contrast the dominant ideology of the Hollywood/global system. Almost all

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of the Latin America-based media scholars of the last quarter century recognize the importance of protecting access to the market. For them, protecting quotas for national films is an essential strategy in fending off Hollywood. And all scholars of cultural globalization recognize that limiting media monopolies is essential. But where scholars differ is in what they think a protected market might mean. Is it simply market protectionism or does such a move protect truly diverse viewpoints? Beyond the real ways that it is both urgent to protect markets and also critically limiting, since one can’t be certain what will emerge in the “local” marketplace, a further complication is the ever-changing ways that media markets work. While much of the legal framework that privileges US product in the global marketplace still remains in place, it is increasingly the case that the top media providers globally are not US-based. For instance, UNESCO’s study of globalization and cultural trade clearly notes Chinese dominance: “China’s exponential growth in cultural exports began in 2009, and within one year, it overtook the United States as market leader. By 2013, the total value of China’s cultural exports was more than double that of the United States, representing US$60.1 billion and US$27.9 billion respectively (WTO, 2014).”54 It is also noteworthy that in the top ten cultural exporters, there are a few other non-western nations: “India . . . moved to fifth position, with its cultural exports tripling from US$3.8 billion in 2004 to US$11.7 billion in 2013. Singapore was the third South and East Asian country in the top 10. From 2004 to 2013, the value of its cultural exports doubled to US$6.3 billion. Turkey, which ranked 22nd in 2004, appeared in the top 10 list of exporters for the first time in 2013, with US$4.2 billion worth of cultural exports.”55 These references are to cultural products writ large and not specifically to the film industry, but it is worth noting that the Dalian Wanda group owns AMC theaters, the largest theater chain in the United States, and it recently purchased Legendary Entertainment, the production company that made the Batman trilogy.56 The point is that Chinese power over Hollywood is increasing daily. These developments point to the need to privilege attention to global capital over attention to the central power of Hollywood/the United States. There is another hitch in this critical framework, and that is that the United States exports culture to the “developed” world more than it does to “emerging” markets. UNESCO reports that “In 2013, 77% of cultural exports from the United States went to its top 10 trading partners, which were concentrated in three regions: Europe (35%), North

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America (22%) and Asia (20%). Canada remained the first destination country for cultural exports.”57 The fact that Canada imports more US culture than Mexico complicates the use of the postcolonial paradigm for analyzing market access and market share. There is a further complexity to the market approach and that is that tracking the “value chain” in film is increasingly difficult, in part because of the complex nature of film production. Films are often made across the globe with talent from across the globe and with investment from across the globe, so drawing connections between a film and a nation-state-based economy is increasingly difficult. The problem is that we have a situation where certain “Hollywood” films clearly dominate the world market. As UNESCO reports, “at least one-half of the top 10 movies seen in 2012 and 2013 were the same movies in 71% of the countries surveyed.”58 But tracking whom to target in this media monopoly is increasingly harder, and harder to fix geographically. As Mirrlees explains, of the big six media conglomerates five are based in the United States (Sony is Japanese). But audio-visual production companies are based elsewhere too, such as Cuatro Cabezas (Argentina), Crawford Productions (Australia), Globo Filmes (Brazil), Brightlight Pictures (Canada), Orange Sky Golden Harvest (China), and Film4 Productions (United Kingdom).59 Artz further points out that while approximately ten companies dominate the global media landscape, “hundreds provide essential complementary support.”60 To trace the example with which I opened this chapter, the production company for No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included)—Pantelion Films—is a collaboration between Mexican Televisa and Canadianfounded Lionsgate—the number one “independent” film production company and the seventh most profitable film studio in the world. So is the film an “emerging” market film or a Hollywood production? In a recent ranking of global media groups, Mexico’s Televisa ranked eighteenth and Brazilian Globo ranked seventeenth, with the top spot going to Google.61 Argentine Grupo Clarín ranked thirtieth alongside the Finnish Sanoma corporation. While the top five spots in global media production are still occupied by US-based companies, that hegemony has been destabilized completely in the realm of movie theater chains. As mentioned, Chinese-owned AMC is the top chain in the world. But even more interesting for the purposes of this book is that the fourth largest theater chain in the world is Mexican-based Cinépolis, which was the first international company to open theaters in India. Again,

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the point here is that the overlap among Hollywood, the United States, and the exercise of economic power is being strained by the realities of a neoliberal market that has made it possible for major players to emerge from regions that had previously been marginalized. Hollywood Aesthetic Dominance vs. “Local” Aesthetics If there is one dividing line between media studies analyses of culture and globalization and those of cultural studies, it is attention to aesthetics. Here we are talking about the close reading of the language of film, of how it tells its story, and of its relationship to genre conventions. This is not simply a debate about mimicking Hollywood form; it is a question of whether the art form is unencumbered by the aesthetic hegemony of Hollywood. Does the film have an innovative style? And if it is “hybrid,” what are its aesthetic influences? For scholars of Latin American cultural studies the question of aesthetics has long been paramount. Whether textual or visual, there have been robust debates about the idea of aesthetic independence. Consider, for example, the anxieties of influence related to the writings of Gabriel García Márquez, whose Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude) is hailed by many as a magnificent example of a Latin American autochthonous literary style—magical realism. Others, though, see traces of William Faulkner, thereby questioning claims of aesthetic originality. It would be fair to say that the issue of aesthetics has haunted conversations about truly effective political culture in Latin America since these debates began in the colonial era. From the outset, though, it was generally thought that there were two key options—do something local and new or manipulate aesthetic influence so that you could use the master’s weapons to attack him. Debates over cultural politics in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s connected a Hollywood aesthetic with capitalist ideology and with filmmaking that served as a distraction rather than as a way to raise audience awareness of major social issues. The idea at the time was that truly political films needed a new aesthetic—one that did not replicate Hollywood styles. The films that emerged in that time period as antidotes to Hollywood were often highly complex, layered films. And, ironically, in their efforts to resist Hollywood aesthetics they often mirrored the film practices of the French nouvelle vague, Italian neorealism, and Soviet montage. As we look back on those aesthetic innovations we note that, regardless of the intent of the filmmakers, their films were largely

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unintelligible to their intended audiences. Instead, they were primarily consumed by Latin American, US, and European elites—contributing, in their own way, to a global phenomenon of artistic and political films. Yúdice has analyzed this romanticized version of a local aesthetic and its ironic detachment from the very constituencies it hopes to serve. Discussing the case of Latin American political culture, he highlights the dichotomy between disadvantaged groups and aesthetic forms of “distancing” that are meant to shock the audience into greater social consciousness. He points out the contradictions in the “Latin American Subaltern Studies Group, who on the one hand is concerned about the exclusion of subalterns from national consolidations and state-oriented cultural critique, and yet abstracts away the lived presence of subalterns by construing them as a force of negation (the ‘unveiling’ or rejection of Eurocentrism).”62 Today, in contrast to the anticommercial practices of the 1960s and 1970s filmmakers, there is a new generation of filmmakers that is both aesthetically innovative and commercially successful. In many of these films the aesthetic innovations never stray too far from audience expectations and comfort zones. While many of the art house films that came out in the 1990s and the new millennium were extremely innovative, this book focuses more on those films that had wide commercial release, because it is this group of films that has most vexed critics. As Laura Podalsky explains in her study of affect in contemporary Latin American cinema it is possible to find critics that hail films like Y tu mamá también ([And your mom too], 2001) as an example of stylistic novelty and others, like Mexican cultural critic Carlos Monsiváis, who describe the film as aesthetically shallow and derivative. She explains that one problem for Latin American cultural studies scholars has been the deep dislike of films that harness emotional responses. But the films Podalsky studies use film affect to connect deeply with the audience. And they often do so with a political project in mind. Her “goal is to offer a richer understanding of how films ‘touch us’ and to suggest the political potential of certain films regarded as apolitical and sensationalistic by the majority of critics.”63 Her work builds on recent interest in affect and politics and complements the work of Stephen Duncombe, who argues that left politics abandoned affect and ceded its persuasive sway to the right.64 Both Podalsky and Duncombe make the case that left traditions have been overly suspicious of cultural forms that summon political feeling and commitment through emotional connection. Critics of their

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views, however, state that the neoliberal era is one of sensation, “a means to fuel consumerism and depoliticize the citizenry.”65 They condemn any cultural form that heightens the cult of narcissistic hedonism. The rebuttal Podalsky offers, following Zygmunt Bauman, is that affect can be both a tool of indoctrination into consumer society and a way to encourage meaningful engagement: the goal is to understand how and why affect is engaged.66 When we consider the commercial films that will be analyzed in the pages to come, though, we can see that this is more than a conflict over affect and politics; it is also about the question of whether one can use Hollywood-associated modes of storytelling to make a politically powerful film in Latin America. Films like Brazilian Fernando Meirelles’s Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002), while criticized for using a sensationalist aesthetic, were instrumental in raising Brazilian attention to problems of poverty and crime, and much the same was true for Argentine Pablo Trapero’s Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012). MacLaird offers the insights of Luisela Alvaray who “argues against the assumptions that the wide-reaching Latin American films of the last decade (e.g., Y tu mamá también, Cidade de Deus) are simply ‘Hollywood gone south,’ analyzing them instead as culturally relevant to their place of origin.”67 To further complicate matters, what we often consider to be a Hollywood aesthetic has been created by artists from outside of the United States—a fact that has historically plagued the use of the term. If there ever was a Hollywood aesthetic that one could connect to directors associated uniquely with US culture, that connection is even harder to draw now. When we strip away the geographical metaphors used to engage in aesthetic debates, we are able to let go of the idea that commercially successful, visually slick cinema is solely produced in Hollywood. And we can begin to appreciate the ways this aesthetic has been marshaled in support of anticapitalist films. Consumption of Other Cultures Influences One’s Identity and Ideas About Other Cultures A related idea to the aesthetic debate discussed above is the notion that cultural consumption of foreign cultures can affect local culture. The argument interestingly works two ways. On the one hand is the worry that vulnerable cultures will be diluted, if not lost, by consuming dominant culture. On the other hand, there is the commonly held idea that

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consuming diverse cultures can lead to greater respect for those of other cultures: it can help create a cultural mosaic. Let’s start with the first side of the argument: the side that worries that the overwhelming presence of a dominant culture will affect a vulnerable one. Basically, the facts are in on this one and the answer is that, yes, overwhelming presence of a dominant culture—like Hollywood culture—will affect a local culture. In all of my research throughout Latin America, I never encountered anyone other than scholars and intellectuals as interested in Latin American cinema as I was. That’s the anecdote. But the numbers back it up. Hollywood-style cinema wins in every market it’s allowed to enter. From Toronto to Paris to Lima, the top grossing films are almost always from Hollywood. There are the occasional breakthrough films, but they are the exception that proves the rule. So we know that the global market has led to far more homogenous patterns of consumption, but what is less clear is what that practice does to those other cultures. The Pew Research Center has studied this issue and they have found that generally speaking, outside of the Muslim world, other cultures have a favorable view of consuming US culture. They found that: “Ratings for U.S. popular culture have generally increased in Europe, and solid majorities across the European Union nations in the survey say they like American music, movies and television, including more than seven-in-ten in Spain (79%), Italy (74%) and France (72%).”68 It is not just Europe that holds favorable views of the United States. Table 1.1 shows that there is also considerable support for consuming US pop culture from outside of the “west.” But here’s the catch: Those surveyed were able to indicate a distinction between consuming culture and adopting western ideas, a fact that might go further than we’d expect in overturning the idea of the “cultural dope,” who passively consumes culture and adapts to its ways. The Pew data on the acceptance of “American ideas and customs” is substantially distinct from the data on whether the people surveyed like consuming US pop culture (see Table 1.2). If we focus on the data from Mexico, we see that in 2012, 69% of Mexicans had a favorable view of US pop culture, but only 38% thought it was good to see US ideas and customs spread in their nation. Thus, almost half of the respondents that consume US pop culture reject US ways. This data certainly suggests conscious audience consumption patterns.

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Table 1.1  Yes to American popular culture—except in Muslim world. Source Pew Research Centera

Italy Spain France Britain Czech Rep. Germany Russia Turkey Pakistan Jordan Egypt Lebanon China Japan India Mexico Brazil

2002

2007

2012

% 63 – 65 76 59 66 42 44 4 30 – 65 55 74 – 60 –

% 66 72 65 63 58 62 38 22 4 40 39 71 42 70 – 53 –

% 74 79 72 69 64 67 48 30 8 39 36 65 43 69 19 69 69

29

2007–2012 change % +8 +7 +7 +6 +6 +5 +10 +8 +4 -1 -3 -6 +1 -1 – +16 –

Percentage that like American music, movies, and television a“Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas,” in Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, June 13, 2012), accessed December 9, 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/13/chapter-2-attitudestoward-american-culture-and-ideas/.

Yet, as Miller et al. explain, a number of scholars take the view that the public simply isn’t aware of this process. As Martín-Barbero explains, though, if the presence of US culture were going to eradicate Latin American cultural difference, that process would have been complete long ago.69 In contrast to the “cultural dope” argument, some scholars argue that the process is far more dialectical: there is some influence but it is not full-blown indoctrination. Miller et al. note, following the work of Herbert Schiller, the tension between the “cultural dope and the active audience,” where the reality is far more nuanced than either of the two extremes.70 Mirrlees also takes insight from Schiller, who argued, “that US media corporations are ideologically influential and powerful” but that does not render “all local viewers as passive, helpless, gullible, or apolitical dupes.”71 Mirrlees further points out that the debate over the active or indoctrinated audience often breaks down along the lines of cultural imperialist

30  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 1.2  Spread of American culture still generates concerns. Source Pew Research Centera

Italy Britain France Spain Germany Czech Rep. Russia Turkey Lebanon Pakistan Egypt Jordan Japan China India Mexico Brazil

2002

2007

2012

% 29 39 25 – 28 34 16 11 26 2 – 13 49 – – 22 –

% 25 21 18 16 17 20 14 4 38 4 13 12 42 38 – 23 –

% 40 32 29 25 23 25 19 10 41 5 11 10 58 43 26 38 49

2007–2012 change % +15 +11 +11 +9 +6 +5 +5 +6 +3 +1 -2 -2 +16 +5 – +15 –

Percentage that say it’s good that American ideas and customs are spreading here a“Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas,” in Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, June 13, 2012), accessed December 9, 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/13/chapter-2-attitudestoward-american-culture-and-ideas/.

scholars and cultural globalization scholars: “CG scholars say that media products are not necessarily transmission belts for monolithic images of America and consumer-capitalist ideologies. CG scholars take issue with the CI paradigm’s static view of ‘The American Way of Life’ which is supposedly exported to the world by TV shows and films.”72 He points out that one part of the argument rests on the idea that there is not one unified US culture exported. He also highlights the fact that the cultural imperialist view often seems to have a fairly low opinion of the postcolonial audience member: “CG scholars scrutinize the notion that local viewers are dominated, victimized, or coerced by global entertainment media.”73 Artz takes the point further and dismisses the idea that the cultural origin of a product necessarily involves a process of cultural indoctrination: “Sony is not ‘Japanizing’ the United States or India through its media mergers any more than Disney ‘Westernizes’ Argentina or India with its joint ventures. Transnational capitalist investors and managers are

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reorganizing media production across borders and cultures to improve their net profits by lowering production costs and increasing consumer activity in new locales.”74 For Artz the “cultural” shift is in the experience of labor and the ways that neoliberal practices change everyday life, not in the adoption of “foreign” cultural norms. Mirrlees also touches on the tension between the culture of capital versus the culture of the west, explaining that the “CI paradigm states that the content of US corporate and/or state-produced entertainment represents American nationalist and/or consumerist-capitalist ideologies.”75 Based on the Pew research, and on the ability to document over twentyfive years of a global free-market economy, we can see that the impact of this cultural consumption points more toward the acceptance of market capitalism as a way of life than to the adoption of “American” values. As a point of proof, the increasing power of China and Japan in the media industry has not carried with it the same anxieties as worries over Hollywood’s potential to “westernize.” Yet it does remain true that critical studies of resistance to cultural influence are often aimed solely at the pernicious affects of Hollywood culture. My argument is that those efforts may be better served focusing on the ideology of capital and the biopolitics of neoliberalism. When we reverse the trend and look at US attitudes toward the consumption of “foreign” culture we have an interesting shift. US culture may be welcomed abroad but the hospitality does not reciprocate in equal measure: “When Americans are asked whether they like foreign music, movies and television, 53% say they do, while 39% respond that they do not. Americans have warmed a bit toward foreign popular culture over the last five years—in 2007, they were almost evenly split, with 45% saying they like it and 44% saying they dislike it. There is a strong partisan divide on this question—most Democrats (59%) and independents (56%) like music, movies and television from other countries, but only 41% of Republicans agree.”76 Beyond the unsurprising gap between Republicans and those on the center-left regarding respect for other cultures, we find another complexity to this issue. Much of the push for cultural diversity in the 1980s and 1990s was linked to the idea that consumption of diverse cultures would lead to cultural tolerance, acceptance of others, and generally a less xenophobic and racist world. The idea was that exposure to other cultures would help create a greater sense of global connectedness, respect for diversity, and multicultural appreciation. Some thirty years after the push

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for multiculturalism of the 1980s and fifty years after struggles for civil rights we are now able to assess the consequences of these projects. What we can now find is that diverse cultures are consumed but not necessarily valued. This is why the rise in the consumption of salsa, which has overtaken ketchup as the top selling condiment in the United States, does not indicate a rise in respect for Latinos.77 Or why the increase in public visibility of people of color, most notably in the election of Barack Obama, has not translated into income equity across the racial divide.78 Or why more diverse reading lists in college courses have not led to less racism on campus.79 On the contrary, despite the success of cultural diversity as a cultural project, these gains have not transformed social inequity in the era of neoliberal biopolitics. Robinson notes that we have increasing data on disenfranchised US citizens. He points to the rising infant mortality rates for African American children and notes that African Americans in Washington, D.C. have a higher infant death rate than babies born in Kerala, India.80 The facts are overwhelming: we have more ethnic conflict than at any other time since the turn of the twentieth century; we have greater income disparity across people of color, more antiimmigrant violence, and higher rates in the United States of incarceration of blacks and Latinos. Ethnocultural conflict is not limited to the United States either. Attacks on Bolivian immigrants in Argentina, tensions between Venezuelans and Colombians, and ethnic struggles in Chiapas, Mexico point to the persistence of ethnic conflict south of the border. As Will Kymlicka points out, it is a trend with a global footprint. Kymlicka worries at the increase of ethnocultural conflict concurrent with the rise in identity politics. Working with data on the global escalation of cultural violence he contends that, “Since the end of the Cold War, ethnocultural conflicts have become the most common source of political violence in the world, and they show no sign of abating.”81 Robinson further explains that “globalization fragments locally and integrates select strands of the population globally.”82 So we have both increased consumption of major Hollywood blockbusters worldwide and increased access to culturally diverse products, but we also have increased ethnic conflict suggesting a break between ideas about cultures and consumption of culturally connected products. This indicates that the problem is less a result of the cultural origin of the product and more likely a consequence of the biopolitical vulnerability caused by neoliberal practices that place life in increasingly

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more precarious positions. Thus, if the force of the market has overtaken many of the structural categories previously used to advocate for the democratizing and empowering gestures of cultural diversity, this does not mean that pre-neoliberal struggles are no longer relevant. While the idiom of the approach has to adapt, the inequities it addresses are as much in evidence, if not more so. Culture may be a resource and cultural products may be symptoms of a market-based economy, but the groups these cultural products attach to are as precarious as ever. This is why attention to an ethical critique of neoliberalism offers some useful perspective and critical tools. Foucault reminds us that racism under neoliberalism emerges as a powerful weapon of social containment. He explains that race divides life into categories: “It is a way of separating out the groups that exist within a population. . . . This will allow power to treat that population as a mixture of races, or to be more accurate, to treat the species, to subdivide the species it controls, into the subspecies known, precisely, as races. That is the first function of racism: to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum.”83 As this book will show, a number of films made within the neoliberal system go a long way in exposing the exact ways that the market economy fragments human life. Global (American) Culture vs. National Culture While many of the frameworks I’ve been analyzing overlap, they each hold their unique perspective. This is especially true of the case of the tension over “national” culture and globalization. Early debates over the effects of globalization worried that national culture would evaporate. This position differs from the one interested in cultural diversity, since in this instance the issue relates to the projection of a national identity through cultural forms. Ever since the groundbreaking work of Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities, it has generally been held that nationalism depends on cultural forms to develop, sustain, and advance a sense of national identity. Scholars of film culture have maintained that a cinematic tradition has often played a key role in fostering a sense of national unity. In fact, in the field of film studies, it would be fair to say that the question of national versus global cinema has been a constant source of inquiry. Texts such as Theorising National Cinema (edited by Valentina Vitali and Paul Willeman), Neoliberalism and Global Cinema (edited by Jyotsna Kapur and Keith Wagner), World Cinemas,

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Transnational Perspectives (edited by Natasa Ďurovičová and Kathleen Newman), and National Identity in Global Cinema (by Carlo Celli) are only a few of the works that take up this issue from a global perspective.84 Despite the fact that only a handful of Latin American nations had film industries robust enough to develop a truly national cinema, scholars of film have long held an interest in tracing the connection between national films and national identity. One excellent example of this sort of work from a smaller film industry standpoint is Jeffrey Middents’s Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru.85 While scholars of Latin American cinema often drew attention to the role the cultural form played in developing national identity, it was also true that from the mid-1960s there was considerable attention to the idea of a “regional” cinema. Recognizing that national markets alone would not sustain a sizable enough audience for the development of a strong industry, a number of filmmakers called for advancing regional integration. The Viña del Mar International Film Festival held in 1967 that launched the NLAC movement was not only the starting point for a collective political film movement, it was also key in thinking outside the borders of the nation-state. That festival led to “founding regional associations such as the Comité de Cineastas Latinoamericanos (Committee of Latin American Filmmakers, 1974) in Caracas, Venezuela.”86 Importantly, regional alliances were not considered a threat to national identity. As I’ll explain in the chapters to come, those same arguments continue today with even more critical awareness that developing regional markets is an essential tool in developing alternative marketing strategies in the global economy. Scholars that study film culture and nationalism in Latin America further contend with the complexity of developing a postcolonial national identity over and against that of their former colonizer. It could be said that the overriding concern of much cultural criticism from within the region is the question of cultural autonomy and innovation. The stakes are higher in postcolonial contexts but they are in play in all modern nation-states. Robertson points out, following the work of Ernest Gellner, that “there is much to suggest that the development of the modern state has also entailed the ‘nationalization’ of culture—in the sense that the modern state is impossible without its becoming heavily involved in the production of a ‘high culture’ which is necessary not merely in order for the state to undertake its internal-administrative affairs but also to deal with its ‘identity problems.’”87

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With the sense that globalization—both in terms of a market economy and in terms of heightened contact across cultures due to technological innovation—would challenge the sovereignty of national cultures, it was commonplace in the scholarship of the 1990s to surmise that eventually the nation-state and its national identity would give way to a more homogenous sense of global identity. There were scholars, however, who rejected that idea from the start. Mike Featherstone, writing in 1990, contended that it was “misleading to conceive a global culture as necessarily entailing a weakening of the sovereignty of nation-states which, under the impetus of some form of teleological evolutionism or other master logic, will necessarily become absorbed into larger units and eventually a world state which produces cultural homogeneity and integration.”88 When we analyze the case of cinema as an example of national culture we have the further challenge that all cinemas outside of Hollywood hold fairly specific national markers, whereas Hollywood is a marker for the United States, for the west, and for its own unique brand of fantasy production. John Ford famously said: “Hollywood is a place you can’t define geographically. We don’t really know where it is.”89 Not only is the idea of Hollywood hard to fix, the talent connected to its idea has also been truly global. The slippery geographic fixity of the notion of Hollywood has complicated those cinemas that attempt to define themselves against it on national terms. It has also meant that most often films that travel abroad are marketed as examples of national, often exotic, culture. Thus, the national branding holds tighter outside of Hollywood. It becomes a marketing category and a limiting factor in terms of content. All of the ways that it is hard to define a national cinema get harder under neoliberalism. Harvey explains that neoliberalism requires firms to expand markets, seek efficiencies, and maximize return on investment. The result is a shift in the spatial configuration of production. There is, following the insights of Karl Marx, the need to “annihilate space with time” via centripetal tendencies in the sphere of production and centrifugal tendencies in distribution.90 According to Michael Curtin, when we apply this concept to contemporary media “this insight suggests that even though a film or TV company may be founded with the aim of serving a particular national culture or a local market, over time it must redeploy its creative resources and reshape its terrain of operations if it is to survive competition and enhance profitability.”91

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The research in the edited volume in which Curtin’s essay is published, in particular Cristina Venegas’s work, traces the various ways that media companies create what might be best understood as “shell” companies that may seem national but are actually global. In the wake of regional trade pacts across Latin America, big six film companies have increasingly coproduced and distributed Latin American films: “Buena Vista International for example, has distributed domestically and internationally Fabian Bielinsky’s Nine Queens (Argentina, 2000) and Columbia and Sony Pictures Héctor Babenco’s Carandiru (2003) to very successful box office revenues (Alvaray 2008).”92 These films are often considered to be shining examples of national film, yet their success is dependent on the global media industry. As Artz explains, “transnational corporations have no national home per se and certainly no national allegiance.”93 Simultaneously most “national” films have reached audiences directly as a result of these transnational corporations. Global corporations focus on profit and take no stance on whether that profit develops global or national consciousness. Artz quotes former Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who claimed that “‘to make money is our only objective,’” and he references Thomas Middelhoff, chairman of Bertelsmann, who remarked when his German company took over US-based Random House in 1998 that “‘There are no German and American companies. There are only successful and unsuccessful companies.’”94 As Leslie Sklair puts it, the global capitalist elite “seeks to accumulate profit on a global scale and . . . has no particular interest in destroying or sustaining local cultures apart from the drive for increased profitability.”95 He goes on to explain that if profitability is threatened, the capitalists will certainly fight to destroy any national barriers to their success, just as colonizing powers did previously. The key difference is that, as long as profit can continue unabated, the neoliberals don’t engage with the national question the way the colonizing forces did. This has been the reality that has vexed film scholars and scholars of cultural globalization. The neoliberal goal is not the destruction of the local; it is profit. As we move away from a model that links profits to ideology, we can begin to understand how it is possible for a big six corporation to market films that are not only critical of global capital but that also work to develop national identity. Such was the case, for instance, with Trapero’s Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012), which focused on a community decimated by neoliberal policies and was produced with funds from both Disney and from the Argentine national film institute (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, INCAA).

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As a final wrench in the global/American versus national paradigm it is important to note that some of the most quintessentially “American” products are manufactured and produced by non-US corporations. Brazilian Jorge Lemann’s 3G Capital owns Heinz ketchup, perhaps one of the most “American” brands of all time. His company also owns Burger King and “Canadian” Tim Horton’s and has hinted at goals of acquiring Kraft Foods. Mexican food conglomerate Grupo Bimbo owns Sara Lee.96 In the realm of media we have the increasing global presence of Chinese-owned AMC. As Artz explains, even “American Idol” is owned by Bertelsmann, a German transnational media company.97 Given these examples, it is hard to dispute the obvious failure in the traditional opposition between “national” and global. Thus, the ties between economic domination and cultural domination don’t easily map to the geographies that framed debates in the 1960s and 1970s, or the deconstructions that shaped much critical rethinking of those geographies in the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, today neither the postcolonial maps nor the poststructural unmappings seem to adequately account for the key struggles shaping cultural production. If at one time it was possible to use a core–periphery model for both cultural and economic power, we now find that model won’t work. Similarly, if at one time deterritorializing culture seemed like a progressive act, such unmoorings have now been shown to serve capitalist power. Take for example the case of Argentina: “Argentine” Patagonik films is partially owned by Disney and was also previously part-owned by Spanish media conglomerate Telefónica. One of their most internationally successful films was Oscar-nominated El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001), which was directed by Juan José Campanella, a graduate of the NYU film school who regularly works for US TV, often shooting episodes of House. So, given these realities, do we consider the Oscar-nominated film an example of national or global culture? And what if that question is not the one we should be asking after all?

From the Location of Global Culture to the Ethics of Global Culture I am certainly not the first scholar to point to a series of unproductive binaries that have been used to study the effects of globalization. In addition to the work of Mirrlees, we have that of Featherstone, who argues that “the binary logic which seeks to comprehend culture via the

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mutually exclusive terms of homogeneity/heterogeneity, integration/ disintegration, unity/diversity, must be discarded.”98 My work builds on that of a number of scholars who have attempted to push past the stark divisions that govern these paradigms. While I take insight from scholars who have sought nuance between overly skeptical and overly celebratory versions of the effects of globalization, my point of interest is more openly invested in developing a new critical paradigm that recognizes that the terms of reference may have shifted but that the need for an ethical and political critique of globalization is still great. If all of these critical structures no longer work as guiding frameworks through which to think about the central concerns of globalization and culture, what are we to do? Because, despite the fact that I have drawn out examples of how many of the critical guides we used to use are no longer valid, I do not mean to suggest that we are living in an era where questions of access, equity, dignity, and value are no longer at stake. My research shows that the historical convergence between both a geography and a politics of power has often led to efforts to provide more accurate mappings and ethnographies, while also often deconstructing or destabilizing those same maps. But both gestures—better, more nuanced maps and deconstructed geographies—don’t really help get at the heart of the questions that many of us find most troubling about globalization and culture, and as I’ve shown—they don’t hold up against its actual realities. Consequently, I argue that a turn to ethics, especially one that derives from a critique of neoliberal biopolitics, reveals a need to move from an emphasis on the location of culture to the ethics of culture. What happens if the questions we ask about culture and globalization begin from an ethical critique of neoliberal free-market policies and ideologies rather than from efforts to find ever more accurate geographical mappings? Such an approach allows us to avoid the pitfalls of making claims that attach the location of culture to its redemption or that envision hybridity, transculturalism, or other sorts of re-graphings as antidotes for social inequity. In what follows, I will turn to the theoretical questions that underpin my project by explaining the critical context that forms the backdrop for my argument. In a certain sense all cultural studies work has thought through the connection to culture in terms of a geography and a constituency. In most cases, the “who” of culture was a disenfranchised group within a state. The culture that mattered was “where” the people that mattered lived.

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This framework takes on another layer for cultural studies scholars dealing with postcolonial societies in the world-system. For those scholars, there are at least two important spatial frames that have tended to shape the ways we think about culture and its potential role in transformative justice. The first of these is the global–local dynamic, which privileges the local, the authentic, and the diverse over and against the hegemonically global. The second of these is the intersection between Westphalian notions of state sovereignty and postcolonial notions of neoimperialist geopolitics. What I hope to have shown by now is that each of these frameworks offers wholly inadequate structures within which to address the social grievances at the heart of a politically motivated cultural studies critique of globalization. This is so because these frameworks, even when nuanced and troubled, become overdetermined, reified categories of containment that eclipse the ethical dilemmas and political problems they are meant to address. Scholars working in postcolonial cultural studies were all influenced at some level by the global–local framework for considering relations of culture and power. And almost all of the main theories of culture and globalization relied on the organizing idea that culture is either local, global, or some hybrid thereof (cf. Robertson, Scholte, Appadurai, and Barber). And the distinction between global/unified and local/diverse was often drawn along party lines. As Yúdice puts it, “conservatives and cultural leftists are locked into a reciprocal fantasy, with the right presumably seeking to reimpose a common culture and the left brokering the validation and enfranchisement of diversity.”99 But, of course, that is not all, since—as I mentioned—neoliberals are not opposed to diversity when it is of the market and when it leads to more varied patterns of consumption. Despite the fact that the reality of local versus global does not necessarily demarcate oppositional political positions, leftist scholars working on cultural globalization have largely focused on the degree to which a cultural product embodies a local, minority culture, or reflects a dominant, globally powerful one. This framework does not work, though, since, as I’ve shown, the actual geographies of media production, consumption, and profit no longer hold to Westphalian structures. The positions of power are muddy and the “location” of the film does not always explain its content or its stance on global neoliberalism. My second reason for suggesting a retreat from the global–local paradigm is that almost all scholars of globalization and culture worry

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about the power structure of the global market and its implications for less commercially viable cultural forms. And yet rather than explicitly focus on globalization as a problem of access, equity, and power, they have framed their debates in terms of the local versus the global, understanding the local to stand in for the less powerful. But this corollary does not always hold. For instance, Mexico may be dominated by US media, but within Latin America it functions as a major cultural exporter, serving as a prime source of television and other media to a number of Latin American nations. Rather than the local–global paradigm, a better measure of resistance to or ratification of global cultural hegemony is the degree to which a given cultural product or process reinforces or challenges global relations of power. In this way, questions of power, access, and cultural rights are disentangled from an emphasis on identity struggles as antidotes to global inequities. But, perhaps even more importantly, the new global media industry requires us to recognize that some of the most powerful sources of neoliberal capitalism produce some of the most critical films of the neoliberal condition. While not a true dialectical condition, that reality certainly is one of the deep contradictions of neoliberal globalization. So what we have then are a series of models that come from a complex history of the politics of the 1960s and those of the 1990s, each of which no longer offers useful strategies for thinking about the crises caused by globalization. We can map these into four main strategies: market think, quota think, geography think, and deconstruction think. Many of these strategies are used in overlapping and intersecting ways— but what they all have in common is a retreat from ethics as the ground for critical inquiry and its replacement by ontologies, sub-ontologies, and antiontologies. Market think is the idea that an increased market share can change the political impact of globalization. But struggle for market share is just that. It is struggle for a larger share of a capitalist pie. It might help a weaker economy have more power, but that gesture is not an inherently ethical act. Even worse, we now have ample evidence that we simply can’t trace market share on national lines, since the lines of global investment are too tangled. So, in some cases what might appear as increased market share is actually a cover for even greater wealth accumulation by transnational corporations. Quota think is the idea of protecting a share of the national market so that there is access to national product. While most scholars of

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globalization and film culture will argue that protecting a quota system is important, they all realize that the move carries no special antidote to the problem of film culture inequity. So the problem with the quotabased model is that the struggle to ensure cultural diversity and national identity without an ethical ground can lead to tokenism. Protecting a screen quota only marks the “national” brand of the film, but doesn’t mean that the film isn’t crass, sexist, or racist. One excellent example is the Argentine film Mala (Evil Woman, 2013) directed by Adrián Caetano, which was effectively a sexist soap opera, brought to the big screen. Even so, the film received state support and received the benefits of the national quota system. That means that when we protect the quota we have to be prepared for the reality that we are only protecting the national in its own market; we are not necessarily opening up a space for politically meaningful cinema. Geography think is the lingering sense that the problems caused by global capital can be resolved according to a geographic map. Yúdice points to the tricky incompatibilities with globalization as promoting a market of diverse cultures and globalization as cultural ­imperialism.100 He mentions that the “cultural imperialism” argument has been ­criticized for three flaws: (1) It overlooks “the subordination of i­nternal minorities that takes place within the nationalism of developing ­countries as they gird themselves to stave off the symbolic aggression of i­mperial powers”; (2) “Migrations and diasporic movements generated by global processes have complicated the unity presumed to exist in the nation”; and (3) “The exchange of ideas, information, knowledge, and labor ‘multiplies the number of permutations and in the process creates new ways of life, new cultures’ often premised on elements from one ­culture sampled into another” and “it is no longer viable to argue that such hybrid cultures are inauthentic.”101 I would add that as primitive accumulation ends, it is no longer possible to romanticize spaces ­ outside of the global trade network. The point is that the struggle to value the local, the global south, or Latin American culture does not help us address the deep injustices caused by neoliberal capital and it does not necessarily help to reverse any of the structural inequalities caused by the global system. Deconstruction think is the idea that attention to hybridity, third spaces, and other moves critical of master narratives and totalizing gestures are sufficient to combat the social damage caused by globalization. As Wayne explains, “postcolonial theory has been influenced by poststructuralism

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(a linguistic theory which argues that meaning is generated by difference) and postmodernism (which argues that culture, with all its plastic, malleable, and shifting qualities, is the all-powerful and embracing force and model of the (post)modern era).”102 For Wayne as for me, the major problem is that “both influences are highly relativistic, providing little foundation on which to organise a politics of progressive change, and both are profoundly idealist in the philosophical sense that it is ideas, values, beliefs, or (to use the preferred term) discourses that constitute the ultimate horizon of explanation.”103 Wayne points out that this attention to particularity and difference has served to fetishize difference rather than offer a productive political platform. I’d further add that one of the key problems with deconstruction think is the fact that many of the practices considered radical deconstructions are now used by the market logics of neoliberalism. In this sense, I take cues from the work of Rasheed Araeen who argues that “the triumph of the hybrid is in fact a triumph of neo-liberal multiculturalism, a part of the triumph of global capitalism.”104 I also follow the work of Ella Shohat, who argues that, “a celebration of syncretism and hybridity per se, if not articulated in conjunction with questions of hegemony and neo-colonial power relations, runs the risk of appearing to sanctify the fait accompli of colonial violence.”105 In response to these trends, I would like to suggest that cultural globalization is best studied in terms of ratification of and resistance to neoliberalism and its production of biopolitical categories, rather than the ontologies of the local and the global. If we think about culture and globalization through a critical framework attentive to the ways that identities either support or challenge global power structures, we are then able to perceive wholly different lines of connection across communities. If we think this way, then films like Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), and Guillermo del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006)— which were each directed by Mexicans outside of Mexico—become cultural products that can offer us a new model for thinking about how culture engages with globalization. While the term “ethics” has been discredited as both bourgeois ideology and master narrative, I argue, following cues from Terry Eagleton, that the term is worth rescuing and redefining as we consider a political response to the social struggles tied to millennial globalization that take place in the cultural sphere.106 And yet, as I’ve pitched the

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thesis of this book to various colleagues, I’ve often encountered a knee-jerk rejection of the term ethics. This has been so mainly due to the association of ethics with bourgeois morality, western values, and an ­antiradical “liberal” position. The rejection of the idea of ethics is mounted from both Marxist and neo-Marxist views and also from those scholars influenced by deconstruction and poststructuralism. It is important to note that the retreat from critical positions emphasizing ethics had its own logic and historical context. In its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s during the postmodern turn it made sense, framed as it was as an answer to the rejection of the master narratives of western hegemony that were seen to be at the heart of most inequity and injustice. But after a period of much-needed questioning of epistemic frameworks and of ideas often negatively associated with Enlightenment ideologies, we can note today a return to the discourses of justice, rights, remedies, and ethics, since these put the question of how best to achieve social transformation at the heart of critical work. Moreover, it is important to note that the more left-favored term of “politics” is often used to describe an ethical politics—a politics advocating for positive change—not simply a set of policies relating to government. Those that favor “politics” over “ethics” often draw a distinction between the former as a collective condition and the latter as related to the individual, but such a distinction again is a false dichotomy. Every critical position connected with leftist cultural studies has its own ethics, but the presence of ethical agendas in 1980s and 1990s cultural studies work was often subtended to other more visible markers of cultural advocacy, such as those associated with identity categories. The problem is that when one advocates for identity politics without making the ethics of such a move apparent, the position eventually loses its ethical ground. To put it in stark terms, multiculturalism without the ethical push for recognition of the unjustly disenfranchised can lead to arguments about the need to protect neo-nazi culture. Similarly, a defense of the “local” without an ethical argument about why such a defense is important for a just society, and without an explanation of how one determines which local cultures to preserve, can unwittingly lead to policy that justifies the protection of US culture in free trade agreements. And in another example, a defense of “local” culture without a clear sense of ethical practices can lead to a fight to keep the confederate flag flying in South Carolina. The only way to resolve the competing claims of two groups that have opposing views on the flag is to engage

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ethics. In much 1980s-influenced cultural studies work, epistemic and ontological claims (or more precisely antiepistemic and antiontological claims) were made over ethical ones, despite the fact that those gestures carry their own implicit ethical imperatives. But the latency of these corollary ethical positions did more than hide them; in some cases it erased them, allowing them to be too easily coopted into reactionary practices that were all too eager to take advantage of an ethical void. Ethical responses to neoliberal biopolitics seek not only remediation—the righting of wrongs, many of which are based in biopolitical racism—but also redistribution and just division of resources. While the global–local dynamic is outdated, it is not the case that there should be no consideration of the place of culture. Instead, if we focus on the idea that the ethics of culture ranks primary, then it follows that its politics requires a venue. This returns us to the role of the state, since it is the bargaining agent that signs trade agreements and it is the legislative unit that sets state policy. John Beverley suggests a rethinking of the state as a necessary next step in Latinamericanist work, but where we differ is in his focus on state-level remedies and my interest in layering these within a post-Westphalian framework.107 While a redefined and reinvigorated theory of the state is essential for any Latinamericanist left project today, a state-focused solution will not be able to account for the extra-national factors that contribute to inequity. Nancy Fraser argues that “the idea that state-territoriality can serve as a proxy for social effectivity is no longer plausible. Under current conditions, one’s chances to live a good life do not depend wholly on the internal political constitution of the territorial state in which one resides. Although the latter remains undeniably relevant, its effects are mediated by other structures, both extra- and nonterritorial, whose impact is at least as significant.”108 The answer lies in returning to the biopolitical factors at work in structuring global inequity and human disposability. The state—especially if it is a Latin American state—does not encompass the territory in which these injustices begin and end. As Fraser explains, “the structural causes of many injustices in a globalizing world,”—including “financial markets, ‘offshore factories,’ investment regimes . . . global media and cybertechnology,” bioethics, global health, and the climate—are not confined to the territory of the nation-state.109 State borders often serve to divide members that share grievances, further frustrating any potential for them to be adequately represented by any political process. Such a redefined location for political action, though, should not conjure up

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images of an amorphous “multitude,” but rather should frame a practical, layered view of the spaces within which biopolitical struggles must be fought and won. It has been the success of globalization, or neoliberalism, and of arguments for cultural diversity, that now make it possible to see these frameworks as outdated and in need of adjustment. Fraser notes that, “just as globalization has made visible injustices of misframing, so transformative struggles against neoliberal globalization are making visible the injustice of meta-political misrepresentation.”110 And when we imagine that the movie screen is one of the prime ways that identity struggles are “framed,” we can begin to see that the critical framework within which we think about the ties between culture and politics need to adapt to current political realities.

The Book The rest of this book is divided into two parts with three chapters each and a coda. The parts are purposefully designed to offer comparative views on the connections between globalization and Latin American cinema. Part I covers an array of processes—production, distribution, and exhibition—effectively the full life cycle of filmmaking. Rather than focus on directors, actors, storylines, and audience reception, Part I looks at a series of processes that expose the role that neoliberalism has played in shaping the ways that films from the region are made and consumed. Part II highlights the three primary national markets for Latin American cinema: Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Given that each nation has only one chapter, I do not pretend to offer a comprehensive study of these national contexts as would happen in a monograph dedicated to the topic, but rather a detailed snapshot of the way that new trends in these national markets indicate a range of ways that Latin American cinema is participating in and challenging neoliberal globalization. The division of the book into two parts that cover process and place is also meant to resonate with the way that globalization studies tend to focus on globalization as process or globalization as redefining space. Manfred Steger points out that globalization can be understood as “a process, a condition, a system, a force, and an age” and we could add to that an ideology, a policy, and a practice.111 But, it would be fair to say that the breakdown of process and place encompasses the bulk of these approaches, since in the end the issue is the extent to which globalization

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redefines how things are done and how we understand the link between those things and notions of identity, all of which connect culture to place either narrowly or globally. The focus on both process and place allows me to compare the impact of thinking of globalization outside of traditional antagonisms and oppositions and further offers me the ability to analyze globalization as both ideology and practice. The structure of the book also allows me to develop my critical paradigm. Part I focuses largely on discrediting the prevailing analytical models used to study the ethical and political consequences of millennial globalization on culture. Part II allows me to analyze three contexts and offer a revised model—one that depends on seeing the neoliberal era as one that is deeply ambivalent and one that offers a new dialectics of cultural responses to political struggle. The concluding coda on runaway productions, with a focus on the film Titanic (1997), turns the study of globalization and place on its head and considers how some of the most extreme forms of capitalist hegemony and western appropriations of the global south can offer unintended opportunities for political resistance as well as conformity. Throughout the book I explore what it means to replace a geography-based model of globalization and culture with one that foregrounds an ethical approach to political struggle in the millennial era. One of the key questions I consider is, what happens when neoliberalism is the shared political condition of people across the north and the south? And how do commercial films made within the neoliberal system offer audiences potent critiques of that very same system? I further explore whether these critiques are legible outside of the markets within which they were made. One key argument is that these films both build anticapitalist alliances across borders while simultaneously commodifying Latin American culture for western consumption. Local identity functions as a value of profit extraction at the same time that global identity offers imaginary political potential. Highlighting these tensions is a core part of my argument.

Notes

1. “Pantelion Films is the first major Latino Hollywood studio and the new face of Hispanic entertainment. It is a synergistic partnership between Lionsgate Entertainment and Grupo Televisa.” See “About Us,” Pantelion Films, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www. pantelionfilms.com/about-us.html.

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2. Let me point out what I mean by globalization. The term can be taken to signify shifts in technology, increased human interaction, and greater global connectedness. But, for my purposes, the term is mainly a reference to the shift in the global economy toward neoliberal, marketoriented capitalism. It signals the dominance of one economic policy and practice that largely dictates activities across the globe. Thus, I make interchangeable reference to global capitalism, neoliberal globalization, and to globalization writ large. When I use the term “millennial globalization,” I am signaling the phase of globalization that begins in the year 2000, when many of the neoliberal policies put in place in the 1970s and later really hit high gear. 3. David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 189. 4. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity At Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32. 5.  Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and HomogeneityHeterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. M. Featherstone, S. Lash, and R. Robertson (London: Sage, 1995), 27. 6. John Tomlinson, Globalization and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 85. 7. The two are Instructions Not Included and Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992). See “Foreign Language,” Box Office Mojo, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/ genres/chart/?id=foreign.htm. 8. See “Quicken Loans and Paramount Pictures Announce Partnership for Launch of New Movie ‘STAR TREK BEYOND,’” Quicken Loans, June 29, 2016, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.quickenloans. com/press-room/2016/06/29/quicken-loans-paramount-picturespartnership-launch-star-trek-beyond/ and Alain Sherter, “Mortgage Mess: Why Quicken Loans May Not Be as Squeaky Clean as It Claims,” CBS Moneywatch, February 8, 2011, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mortgage-mess-why-quicken-loansmay-not-be-as-squeaky-clean-as-it-claims/. 9.  Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 106. 10. Ibid., 107. 11. Ibid., 108. 12. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha, eds. New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 9. 13.  Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: Global Mélange (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), ix.

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14. Ibid., 67. 15.  Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi, “The End of the Embrace? Neoliberalism and Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Latin America,” in Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America, ed. Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 4. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid., 6. 18. Ibid., 17. 19. William Robinson, Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change and Globalization (New York: Verso, 2003), 159. 20.  John Sinclair, “Culture and Trade: Some Theoretical and Practical Considerations,” Mass Media and Free Trade: NAFTA and the Cultural Industries, ed. Emile G. McAnany and Kenton T. Wilkinson (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 33. 21. Ibid., 48. 22. Ibid. 23. Jennifer Holt, Empires of Entertainment: Media Industries and the Politics of Deregulation, 1980–1996 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 165. 24.  Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Ethnicity, Inc. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 51. 25. As Toby Miller explains, the effects of global media practices on human life require greater attention; to the horrific workplace conditions used to create the film stock and cameras that make films, regardless of their nation of origin and narrative complicity with capitalism. Yet we have far more articles and books that look at the monopoly of Hollywood product on Latin American screens than we have on the sweatshop conditions that created those very same screens. See Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2005). 26.  Walter Mignolo, “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,” Theory, Culture, and Society 26, no. 7–8 (2009): 1–23. 27. David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development (London: Verso, 2006), 107. 28. Melissa Stanger, Emmie Martin, and Tanza Loudenback, “The 50 Richest People on Earth,” Business Insider, Jan. 26, 2016, accessed December 19, 2016, http://www.businessinsider.com/50-richest-people-on-earth-2016-1. 29.  Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 13. 30. Ibid. 31. Ibid.

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32. Tanner Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2013), 21. 33. Ibid., 56. 34. Ibid., 57. 35. Lee Artz, Global Entertainment Media: A Critical Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 5–6. 36.  Néstor García Canclini, Imagined Globalization (Latin America in translation/en traducción/em tradução), trans. George Yúdice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 10–11. 37. Ibid., 13. 38. Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media, 56. 39. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 97. 40. Ibid., 100. 41. Jan Aart Scholte, Globalization: A Critical Introduction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 252. 42. George Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 160. 43. Artz, Global Entertainment Media, 11. 44. García Canclini, Imagined Globalization, 28. 45. Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 112. 46.  It is important to note that most Latin American nations were independent by the 1830s. Thus, their participation in “decolonization” was connected to a desire to achieve full postcolonial sovereignty and to resist western capitalism. 47. Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media, 34. 48. Steve Solot, ed., The Brazilian Audiovisual Industry: An Explosion of Creativity and Opportunities for Partnerships (Rio de Janeiro: Latin American Training Center, 2012), Kindle Locations 275–280. 49. Ibid. 50.  William Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 181. 51. Misha MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 164. 52. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 50. 53. Ibid., 51. 54.  L ydia Deloumeaux, “The Globalisation of Cultural Trade: A Shift in Consumption: International Flows of Cultural Goods and Services 2004– 2013” (Report for UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2016), accessed December 19, 2016, 33, http://en.unesco.org/creativity/sites/creativity/ files/pdfglobalisation_of_cultural_trade_a_shift_in_consumption.pdf.

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55. Ibid. 56. See Michael Cieply, “AMC Is Set to Become the Biggest Movie Theater Company in the U.S.,” The New York Times (New York, NY), March 7, 2016, accessed December 19, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/ interactive/2016/03/07/business/media/amc-biggest-movie-theaterchain.html?_r=0 and Neil Connor, “Wanda Group, Run by China’s Richest Man, Buys Hollywood Film Studio for £2.4 Million,” The Telegraph, January 12, 2016, accessed December 19, 2016, http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/12094786/ Wanda-Group-run-by-Chinas-richest-man-buys-Hollywood-film-studiofor-2.4-million.html. 57.  Deloumeaux, “The Globalisation of Cultural Trade: A Shift in Consumption,” 58. 58. Ibid., 77. 59. Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media, 65. 60. Artz, Global Entertainment Media, 10. 61. Jonathan Marie, “Globo Is 17 and Televisa 18 in the World’s Media Ranking,” NexTV News Latin America, June 19, 2013, accessed December 19, 2016, http://nextvlatam.com/globo-is-17-and-televisa18-in-the-worlds-media-ranking/?lang=en. 62. George Yúdice, “Translator’s Introduction: From Hybridity to PolicyFor a Purposeful Cultural Studies,” in Consumers and Citizens by Néstor García Canclini, translated by George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), xiv. 63. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 64. See Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy (New York: New Press, 2007). 65. Ibid., 18. 66. See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2000). 67. MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 67. 68. “Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas,” in Global Opinion of Obama Slips, International Policies Faulted (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, June 13, 2012), accessed December 9, 2016, http://www.pewglobal.org/2012/06/13/chapter-2-attitudestoward-american-culture-and-ideas/. 69.  See Jesús Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: from the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London: Sage, 1993). 70. Miller et al. Global Hollywood 2, 38. 71. Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media, 31.

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72. Ibid., 50. 73. Ibid. 74. Artz, Global Entertainment Media, 72. 75. Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media, 28. 76. “Attitudes Toward American Culture and Ideas.” 77. For how The New York Times reported the shift from ketchup to salsa, see Molly O’Neill, “New Mainstream: Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Salsa,” The New York Times, March 11, 1992, accessed December 9, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/1992/03/11/garden/new-mainstream-hotdogs-apple-pie-and-salsa.html. The recent immigration laws contrast the notion that US salsa consumption has led to greater acceptance of Latinos in the United States. 78.  The election of a black president has not improved the income of African Americans (see “Distribution of Household Income by Race,” Infoplease, accessed December 10, 2016, http://www.infoplease.com/ ipa/A0104552.html). CNN reports that in the recent economic recession, income inequity across race has widened severely (see Tami Luhby, “Worsening Wealth Inequality by Race,” CNN Money, June 21, 2012, accessed December 9, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2012/06/21/ news/economy/wealth-gap-race/index.htm). 79. Despite the fact that almost every college in the United States has a diversity requirement for students, this has not translated into any better life conditions for people of color. Currently, one in three African American men will spend some time in prison. And in a startling show of how this affects college campuses, the Department of Education reports that 70% of all students arrested on campuses are either black or Latino. (See Sophia Kerby, “The Top 10 Most Startling Facts About People of Color and Criminal Justice in the United States,” Center for American Progress, March 13, 2012, accessed December 10, 2016, http://www.americanprogress.org/ issues/race/news/2012/03/13/11351/the-top-10-most-startling-factsabout-people-of-color-and-criminal-justice-in-the-united-states/). 80. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, 43. 81. Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1. 82. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism, 44. 83. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 255. 84. See Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, eds. Theorising National Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2006), Jyotsna Kapur and Keith B. Wagner, eds. Neoliberalism and Global Cinema: Capital, Culture, and Marxist Critique (New York: Routledge, 2011), Natasa Ďurovičová and

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Kathleen E. Newman, eds. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2010), and Carlo Celli, National Identity in Global Cinema: How Movies Explain the World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 85. See Jeffrey Middents, Writing National Cinema: Film Journals and Film Culture in Peru (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2009). 86.  Cristina Venegas, “Thinking Regionally: Singular in Diversity and Diverse in Unity,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Chichester, West Sussex: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 123. 87. Robertson, Globalization, 69. 88. Mike Featherstone, “Global Culture: An Introduction,” in Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization and Modernity, ed. Mike Featherstone (London: Sage, 1990), 1. 89. See Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 1. 90. See David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001), 327. 91. Michael Curtin, “Thinking Globally: From Media Imperialism to Media Capital,” in Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method, ed. Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren (Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 112. 92. Venegas, “Thinking Regionally,” 125. 93. Artz, Global Entertainment Media, 27. 94. Ibid., 27–28. 95. Leslie Sklair, The Transnational Capitalist Class (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001), 256. 96. See Artz, Global Entertainment Media, 30. 97. Ibid. 98. Featherstone, “Global Culture,” 2. 99. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 163. 100. Yúdice, The Expediency of Culture, 28. 101. Ibid., 29. 102. Wayne, Political Film, 115. 103. Ibid. 104.  Rasheed Araeen, “A New Beginning: Beyond Postcolonial Cultural Theory and Identity Politics,” Third Text 14, no. 50 (Spring 2000): 3–20. 105. Ella Shohat, “Notes on the ‘Post-Colonial,’” Social Text 31/32 (1992): 109. 106.  See Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990). 107. See John Beverley, Latinamericanism after 9/11 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 24.

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108. Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” New Left Review 36 (2005): 82–83. 109. Nancy  Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 23. 110. Fraser, “Reframing Justice,” 85. 111. Manfred B. Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 7.

PART I

Process

Scholars that focus on globalization as process emphasize the idea that globalization is about heightened relationships, connections, exchange, and interaction. All of this can still seem entirely too abstract to offer meaningful insight into the effects of millennial globalization on Latin American culture. Thus, the goal of Part I is to analyze the process of producing, distributing, and exhibiting films from the region in order to offer empirical evidence of the complex ways that neoliberalism has affected the film industry. Attention to the specific ways that films are made, moved, and seen reveals that the closed market for filmmaking— where states offered significant resources, protected avenues of access to screens, and guaranteed exhibition—are long gone, if they ever existed at all. Today, these processes are directly influenced by changes in state policy, funding, and business practice brought on by neoliberal market capitalism. Taken together, they offer clear evidence that the standard paradigms for studying globalization need adjustment. Part I breaks down three ways that capitalism in the era of millennial globalization has produced value through the film commodity: production value, distribution value, and exhibition value. But it also plays on these ideas and suggests that there is more at stake than the mere creation of commodity value in a supply chain. I’ll analyze how these processes offer the potential political impact of creating, providing, and screening films that give viewers a chance to reflect on the global condition. Oddly, this new phase of global capital has welcomed opportunities

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to profit on stories that reveal its dark side. Similarly, though, this process has created convergence in the ways that films are made, moved, and seen. Globalization has not brought a flattened identity to films, but it has brought a shared process that highlights the power of the global media industry to shape the ways that films reach viewers. Part I will show how globalization has meant that spaces outside of the neoliberal market system are virtually non-existent, even in the case of state-supported “art.” This has led to the odd outcome that neoliberal capital profits from films that offer critical views of neoliberal capital. What do we make of films that might start conversations about the global condition while serving to strengthen that same condition? One of the core ideas behind Part I is that any real analysis of the effects of globalization on “national” film culture has to go beyond studying the ratio of national to Hollywood films screened in a given country, and it has to do more than study the various “foreign” influences on “national” cinema. Marx may have emphasized that capitalists own the means of production—but in film they own the means of distribution and exhibition too. This means that it is important to notice the ways that globalization has meant increased concentration of power over the media industry in the hands of a few multinational corporations that work vertically to control the full process of filmmaking. Similarly, globalization has led to a series of alliances and collaborations among a variety of “independent” film producers and distributors that are trying to offer alternatives to mainstream Hollywood product. The fact that some of those alliances are actually formed with “indie” subsidiaries of the big six media megacorporations only further serves to show the complex web of connections brought on by global media flows. Analyzing these various processes reveals both the continued power of capital to control the cultural products available to the public as well as the new geographic alliances through which that power flows. One pattern that emerges when we study production, distribution, and exhibition in the region is that there is a three-tiered structure: one that involves state support, intervention, and active negotiation; one that is about multilateral, multinational collaborations; and another that is wholly corporate. Thus, while it may be true that funding for almost all commercially aimed films in the region involves some level of cross-national coproduction, we can note a difference between Disney investment in the Argentine production company Patagonik and the cross-national film-funding alliance Ibermedia, which funds films from

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member states via direct contributions from partner countries. Similarly, we find that theaters are often divided between state-funded art houses and multiplexes run by foreign corporations. The chapters in Part I trace out five key arguments: (1) The era of millennial globalization has brought on a significant shift in the way globalization works. Most importantly, it has signaled the end of primitive accumulation, meaning that there are no longer pristine spaces outside of the market. (2) One of the most noteworthy changes is the new ways that the previous distinctions among local, global, and transnational signify. In today’s market reality, for instance, the transnational and the local can be mutually reinforcing, especially when the local is marketed as the surplus value of exotic fetish in the global market and as identityreinforcing at home. (3) The new reality of the power of Hollywood product to dominate the globe, not only in the developing world but virtually everywhere, means that alliances have been formed between former colonizers and colonies in ways that both continue and disrupt patterns of colonial hegemony. Thus, for example, the ties between Europe and Latin America are not simply an extension of neoimperialism, since both regions have a common “enemy” in Hollywood. Hollywood has also developed its own “indie” and “foreign” market niches, meaning that there are examples of times when a film may seem to have support from independent media, but it is actually getting support from a subsidiary of a Hollywood major. (4) Despite the turn toward market mentalities this era has seen a number of commercially successful, socialissue films, what some have pejoratively dubbed “issuetainment” films, that I argue can’t be analyzed as simply the whitewashing of politically significant filmmaking. Interestingly, in fact, these sorts of films have come to define the market niche for the bulk of Latin American cinema screened outside national borders, meaning that with the ability to make socially significant films also comes the limitation of being constrained to a genre. And (5) One of the best ways to disentangle the new web of connections brought on by millennial globalization is to think critically about how this new constellation of connections calls for revised approaches to assessing ethical and political critique. As many of the films analyzed in Part I show, there is a significant body of films that directly critique neoliberalism and its ideologies. It is important to think of ways that they may be contributing to political awareness of these issues at home and abroad, even if they don’t have the militant nature of earlier forms of political cinema.

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As a brief way of introducing the core themes of Part I, let’s consider two films that epitomize some of the shifts I’m tracing. The first, Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), is arguably one of the most globally successful “Latin American” movies of the neoliberal era. The cast, crew, and funding were truly cross-regional in nature. It received production support from eight different nations, was directed by a Brazilian, starred a Mexican, and was based on the life of an Argentine. The film was produced by a multinational array of sources including British Film4, Robert Redford’s Wildwood Enterprises, and Argentine BD Cine, as well as production companies based in Peru, Chile, and Germany. It was distributed by Universal Pictures via its “indie” arm Focus Features. And yet, in Argentina it was distributed by Disneyowned Buena Vista pictures.1 Complicating neat breakdowns between “local” and “global” media companies, the film benefited by working with a range of production and distribution units. It won an Oscar (for best achievement in music) and won 35 more awards in competitions in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.2 It also went on to become the most profitable of all Latin American films at the time with a gross box office of $57.6 million—almost doubling the gross box office earnings of Spanish Academy Award winner Pedro Almodóvar’s film La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004), which starred the same lead actor as Diarios de motocicleta and was released that same year.3 Diarios de motocicleta certainly exemplifies the new era of “global” Latin American cinema that can successfully navigate the neoliberal market. This is made all the more interesting by the fact that the focus of the film is on the early days of the life of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, perhaps the most iconic figure of anticapitalism in the region. Based on Che’s memoirs written when he was only 23, the film covers a 1952 road trip he took with a close friend that began in Argentina and ended in Venezuela. More importantly, it traces the development of Che’s persona from a hedonistic young man to a politically engaged activist. Is the film simply an example of cultural tourism that panders to audiences that see Latin America as a hotbed of left politics? Is it revolutionary “porn”? Or does the film give us a glimpse of the highly ambivalent contradictions at the center of marketing left culture in the era of millennial globalization? Its New York premiere at a Lowes Theater—a chain that was subsequently purchased by the Chinese-owned AMC—certainly held all of the glitz of a Hollywood-style event. Besides drawing Brazilian star Sonia Braga, the premiere was even attended by Tatum O’Neal.4 It is

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this contradiction between glitz, market success, global connections, and the story of a Latin American leftist revolutionary that makes analyzing this film so vexing. The second film, También la lluvia (Even the Rain, 2010), offers another angle on the global film about globalization. Financing for the film came from Mexico, Spain, and France. It was shot in Bolivia and most of the talent for the film (both on- and off-screen) was Latin American. And yet it was Spain’s nomination for an Academy Award that year. To add to its global patina, También la lluvia was written by Scottish-born Paul Laverty, who is best known for his screenwriting collaborations with leftist filmmaker Ken Loach. Directed by Spaniard Icíar Bollaín, who is married to Laverty, the film covers the story of Mexican director, Sebastián (played, yet again, by Gael García Bernal) and Spanish executive producer Costa (Luis Tosar), who travel to Bolivia in order to take advantage of cheap labor opportunities to shoot a film depicting Christopher Columbus’s conquest. Upon selecting a local indigenous cast to appear in the film alongside the Spanish actors depicting the conquistadores, they get caught up in the middle of a crisis over water privatization. Tracing in fairly accurate detail the Cochabamba “water war,” the film recounts how the town, in response to World Bank recommendations, attempted to privatize water and increase the cost by approximately 35% for local residents to $20/month—an amount simply unsustainable for a population that earns $100/month on average.5 With the clear intent of offering a “people’s” account of history, the film is dedicated to the memory of Howard Zinn and it overlays the story of how Columbus and the conquistadores subjugated the indigenous population with the neoliberal realities of how global capital has ushered in a new phase of economic oppression. The third storyline is the making of the film about Columbus itself and the contradictory positions occupied by the intellectual elitist filmmakers, who often care more about their “political” film than about the people right in front of them. Like Diarios de motocicleta, También la lluvia is an example of a film that crosses a lot of the types of boundaries we have tended to use to understand the filmmaking process. También la lluvia, though, gives us a glimpse of the global art film. Unlike Diarios de motocicleta, it was not funded and distributed by companies tied to the big six media multinationals. Instead, También la lluvia had state funding from Spain and regional funding from Eurimages—the European Cinema Support Fund that strives to promote the European audiovisual industry. It also

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had TV station support from Spanish TVE, French Canal +, and more. Apart from a wide range of European art house-connected distributors, También la lluvia is available for viewing on Netflix, thereby giving North American audiences easy access to viewing it. The film also worked the film festival circuit, attracting festival viewers and connecting with potential distributors, yet another facet of non-Hollywood film in the global era that will be analyzed in Part I. When it was screened outside of festivals, those screenings have tended to be in art house cinemas and college campuses.6 Perhaps more than any other film, it was produced by the new cross-regional alliances that have developed between Spain and Latin America, while also telling the story of how complicated those alliances actually are. As Tamara Falicov points out, the reality is that Spain still has asymmetrical cultural power in the Latin American film industry, but that power is not always a clear example of neoimperialism.7 Films like También la lluvia are not simply examples of efforts by Spaniards to control and profit from Latin American culture. As evidenced by a scene in the film where a local indigenous actor overhears the Spanish producer, Costa, bragging to his European backer that they can get extras there for $2 per day, the film really pulls no punches when it comes to exposing the economic realities caused by neoliberalism. As revealed in the story within the film, there is a power imbalance between Spain and Latin America, and yet there is also a story of mutual benefit. As Falicov explains, a film, like the one depicted in También la lluvia, may be shot in Bolivia to save labor costs, but it still remains true that that project benefits the local Bolivian film industry as well.8 Not only does the film project depicted in the film offer a number of indigenous locals a short-term economic boost, Costa later uses his white privilege—and his white SUV—to get medical help for one of the young indigenous actors in the film after she is hurt in the water protests. The friendship he develops with the family may reek of liberal guilt, but there is little doubt that his role in the life of that family had moments of real sincerity and impact. In addition to the fact that both of these films have been scrutinized for their “foreign” funding and their support by transnational media alliances, they have further come under criticism for their style. Both films share a fairly accessible aesthetic structure that builds emotional tension and plays on classic tales of discovery, challenge, and personal growth. In each film the lead characters develop greater awareness of their privilege and of the political struggles of others as the plot develops. Also, in each case, the resolution is toward greater political consciousness and a deep

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awareness of structural inequalities that can only be remediated through real struggle. There is no point at which the films rest on self-satisfied visions that they themselves have solved any problems; rather, they reveal them to be deep, complex, and in need of collective engagement. But, for some reason, it particularly seems to madden some critics that a film would use an “easy” style to recount a story about political awareness and social struggle. For instance, Diarios de motocicleta director Walter Salles has been criticized for his reliance on nostalgia and his Hollywood aesthetic. Darlene J. Sadlier emphasizes this point when she notes that “he breaks no rules of classical film style.”9 Writing on También la lluvia, Michelle Hulme-Lippert explains that critics largely dismiss the film as an example of “issuetainment” cinema, which she defines as “mainstream films that attempt to foster global awareness regarding particular social issues, but actually reify conservative values and hegemonic powers given their dependence on a global free-market economy and entertainment-focused conventions.”10 I’ll argue, in agreement with Hulme-Lippert, that such critiques of commercially successful and aesthetically moving films are stuck in a framework that understands the potential of political filmmaking according to outdated rubrics. It’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how bizarre it is for these commercial films to have socially critical topics as their main focus. If we take for granted the notion that a commercial film is inherently a product that supports the capitalist system that created it, then it has come to be assumed that the stories in such films reinforce the system that produces them. But these two films, like many others that will be analyzed in this book, expose the fallacy of that assumed relationship. How exactly did it come to be that global capital funds films that expose its very own injustices? The reality is that in many cases these films get funding because they are seen as an “investment”—at times a philanthropic investment in art, at others an investment with potential financial return, and at others a combination of the two. As Naomi Klein puts it in a different context, “capitalism is stupid.”11 In this case, its stupidity is its willingness to fund storylines critical of itself, if it perceives there is the chance to accumulate profit. This contradiction is at the heart of a number of the films analyzed in this book. While film critics have long debated the merits of using an accessible style to relate a political narrative, it is interesting to note that rather than herald these films as accomplishments—as films that used

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neoliberal resources to critique neoliberalism—they are often understood as examples of “bad faith,” of bourgeois culture that offers a light and meaningless glimpse at social problems. Films like these are typically dismissed as nothing more than an example of “liberal” whitewashing that ultimately reinforces the very hegemonic structures that they seek to critique. But why is it that those very directors that attempt to bring issues of social significance to the big screen in a format that has the potential to reach a wide audience are so roundly rejected as sell-outs that are profiting from pain and poverty porn? Why are these films held, again and again, to the standard of the experimental films connected with the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) of the 1960s and 1970s? Why do those films still define the notion of political film even after it has been shown that they had extremely limited impact? As I explained in the introduction (Chap. 1), scholars interested in the political potential of filmmaking in Latin America have all been influenced by the success and visibility of the NLAC. Paul Schroeder Rodríguez highlights two key phases to the movement. The first is mapped to the early 1960s and was an era of militant filmmaking that sought to use film to enable political, cultural, and social liberation. That period is the one that is most often held up as the standard for “real” political filmmaking from the region. It was the era when political films matched political movements and worked together to advance a leftist project. But Schroeder Rodríguez reminds his readers that that phase took a turn in response to the wave of dictatorships that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s.12 In reaction to these historical shifts and the horrors they brought with them, the filmmakers of the NLAC adapted. Schroeder Rodríguez explains that they began to see their “work as part of a more complicated project of developing the cinematic equivalent to the emergent civil society’s pluralist political discourse, capable of countering the authoritarianism and discursive monologism imposed by the authoritarian regimes that had taken hold throughout the region.”13 The result was films that had a far more experimental and baroque style. These were often films that had state support, but were not seen or appreciated by any significant portion of the local population. If they were consumed, it was by intellectual elites at home and abroad. While the films of this era, like the ones preceding it, were highly invested in cultural nationalism, they were increasingly out of step with their intended national audiences. This was the context for one of the

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most significant public ruptures between the new generation of filmmakers working in the 1980s and those of the NLAC. Both Schroeder Rodríguez and Pat Aufderheide describe a signal moment when veteran NLAC director Fernando Birri of Argentina was in Cuba to receive the first Félix Valera Order for intellectual merit in 1985. As Birri was speaking about his sense that the themes and mission of the NLAC were still alive, he was interrupted by an unnamed Colombian student from the School of the Three Worlds, which had just been inaugurated on the outskirts of Havana: “I don’t even understand this talk of the legacy of New Latin American Cinema. I haven’t seen most of these films; they’re not my model. My job is to figure out how to make something that will reach people today.”14 The interruption signaled much more than a generational gap; it showed that younger filmmakers interested in making politically meaningful films were not fetishizing the NLAC as their role model—even if film critics and cultural studies scholars still did. And it marks a substantial departure from the political filmmaking projects of the NLAC—one that bears the marks of other significant shifts in the structure of global capital. The 1980s brought on the wave of austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank leading to intense income disparities, economic collapse, and a disappearing middle class. Called the “lost decade,” this era brought a punishing capitalism that forced most nations to open markets or perish. It also saw a sharp decline in filmmaking across the region as states defunded programs that had supported national cinema. This period of decline was then followed by the 1990s, which brought international market expansion, international trade agreements, and multinational companies. Luisela Alvaray explains that “eventually, albeit in different forms and rhythms, film productions throughout Latin America were caught up in such a wave.”15 Schroeder Rodríguez points out that these changes meant that almost nothing connected to the NLAC remained in the filmmaking of the 1990s. The commercial, emotional, character-driven aspects of films like Diarios de motocicleta and También la lluvia are for Schroeder Rodríguez an example of what he calls “melorealism”—a combination of realism and melodrama, and in no way reminiscent of the films of the NLAC: “melorealist cinema rarely calls attention to its own cinematic construction, as the NLAC often does, but rather self-consciously crafts seamless narratives in homogeneous styles in order to exploit audiences’ willingness and desire to be swept by emotionally charged narratives set

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in realistic settings.” Schroeder Rodríguez pays special attention to the shifting ways this new set of films appeals to affect: “In contrast to the NLAC, where emotions are generated by political and social upheaval, melorealist cinema focuses on emotions that are framed but not determined by the represented social and political context.”16 Laura Podalsky, though, takes another tack—one that does not roundly reject films like Diarios de motocicleta and También la lluvia. While she recognizes the break between the films of the NLAC and the commercially successful films of the 1990s, she disagrees with Schroeder Rodríguez’s critique of the role of affect in this new wave of cinema. Her book on affect and the films of the 1990s argues that one of the key historical breaks is the new use of affect for political filmmaking. One of the goals of her book “is to offer a richer understanding of how films ‘touch us’ and to suggest the political potential of certain films regarded as apolitical and sensationalistic by the majority of critics.”17 In agreement with Podalsky, Part I will also show a number of ways in which the films of the millennial era shared filmmaking ideals that were a key part of the political project of the NLAC, even if their styles were clearly different from the previous era. It is also worth noting that these debates over aesthetics and affect are not only limited to conversations about a Latin American film’s political potential. Interestingly, in scholarship on “national” cinema we can see some of those same breakdowns at work as well. But, in this case, the idea is that Hollywood films are entertaining, whereas “national” films whether from France or Brazil are non-commercialized art. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader argue that Hollywood is the cinema of “entertainment (i.e., a commodity that people are willing to pay for), while other cinemas are sites of instruction or edification (a non-commercial art form to which people submit, with varying degrees of reluctance, or at best, a sense of cultural duty, in the classroom or the heavily subsidized specialist cinema).”18 One cinema you pay for and enjoy; the other cinema the state subsidizes and may never be seen. While they admit that this breakdown is flawed and that there are signs of commercially successful aesthetics emerging from across the globe, they point to a tension that still seems to hold when analyzing films from markets outside of Hollywood—one that produces bias against films that are both entertaining and invested in socially meaningful cinema. The legacy of that breakdown also influences our ability to analyze films like Diarios de motocicleta and También la lluvia.

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The historical breaks brought on by millennial globalization are not only in relation to issues of politics, aesthetics, and affect in films; they are also directly related to the common categories used to analyze a film’s relationship to identity. The chapters in Part I unpack the tendency to read globalization as either a threat to national culture or as a new phase of globalized national culture. As explained in the introduction most film scholarship on nationalism, transnationalism, or world cinema holds to binaries, oppositions, and categories that are muddied by the realities of truly global capitalism. For instance, Ezra and Rowden argue that “in its simplest guise the transnational can be understood as the global forces that link people or institutions across nations. Key to transnationalism is the recognition of the decline of sovereignty as a regulatory force for global coexistence.”19 But we know that the argument that pits sovereignty against the transnational is false, since it is often the case that participation in transnational networks is exactly how nation-states retain economic power of any kind. While the new model greatly differs from the Bretton Woods version of international trade, it still holds to the idea that international exchange does not necessarily destroy the role of the nation-state. The fact that transnationalism does not signal the end of the nation-state is especially true in the case of postcolonial nations, like those of Latin America, which have had limited national sovereignty—especially regarding cultural policy—since their inception. This reality affects our ability to process the geographic affiliations of films like Diarios de motocicleta and También la lluvia. It is tempting to consider these films as a sign of a truly “global” cinema—a “transnational” wave of films whose content matches the countries that invest in it. And yet, Alvaray quotes Diarios de motocicleta director Walter Salles describing the fact that films can be made across a range of geographic signifiers: “I believe that there is not just one Latin American cinema, just as there is no single Brazilian cinema. There are cinemas; made of sometimes contradictory currents that often collide, yet come together in a desire to portray our realities in an urgent and visceral manner.”20 Darlene Sadlier quotes Brazilian film scholar Randal Johnson who further critiques the idea that Brazilians need to make films about Brazil: “‘Brazilians obviously have the right to make films about whatever they choose. . . . It is not necessarily un-Brazilian to engage in a cinematic dialogue with American cinema. Given the realities of international film exchange, it is perhaps unrealistic to do otherwise.’”21

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Stephanie Dennison studies Euro-Latin American coproductions to interrogate whether these collaborations are signs of neoimperialism. She concludes that we are witnessing new patterns of transnational collaborations between Europe and Latin America, but these can’t be read according to traditional markers of colonizer and colonized. Writing about También la lluvia, she concludes that “with the emergence of new patterns of migration in the Hispanic world, and new forms of expression of antiglobalization, we should avoid the reductionist, binary trap of essentializing Latin America as Europe and the United States’s other, whether we are discussing social issues such as the nature of violence, or documenting international co-productions.”22 So, while it may be true that Spain is the largest investor in Latin American film coproductions, these collaborations can’t be read as simply a fetishization of “porno miseria.” As Dennison points out, “for Latin American filmmakers and producers, the main impetus for collaborating with producers from Spain, for example, is to increase a film’s chances of entering both/either the Spanish TV market, and/or the European cinema circuit.”23 It’s hard to characterize that market strategy as one that only benefits the former empire. Andrew Higson tries to ask what “national cinema” means anyway. For him, a clear definition is elusive, but we can trace state policy meant to protect it: “if the concept of national cinema is considered troublesome at the level of theoretical debate, it is still a considerable force at the level of state policy.”24 Higson explains, though, that in the new era of neoliberal capitalism, state protections will not result in any sort of real cultural sovereignty: “One of the problems with legislating for a strong and healthy national cinema untroubled by foreign interlopers is that national legislation can rarely have more than a cosmetic effect on what is really a problem of the international capitalist economy.”25 Thus, as the next chapters show, states have adapted as well. They now protect a national film industry that can both compete in an international market while also helping to develop a local market. As Part I explains, there is a disjuncture between cultural policy attached to developing geographically specific (national, regional, etc.) product and the actual practices of global capitalism that has found multiple ways to work around these labels and the regulations that sustain them. This reality returns us to the two films I’ve highlighted. Diarios de motocicleta can’t be said to be a “national” film in any sense, but it clearly positions itself as a film about Latin America. On multiple occasions, “Fuser,” the nickname given to the younger “Che,” speaks about the

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multiple ways that the nations of Latin America are connected in similar struggles. The fact that a film about a leftist revolutionary’s political coming of age was released at exactly the same time that global capital was challenging economic sovereignty in the region, yet again, can’t be overlooked. While the film might be a bit sappy and overly earnest for those of us familiar with the story of Che, it’s worth noting that those who actually know Che’s story are not its intended audience anyway; instead, the target audience is those that have forgotten or never learned his story. In contrast to Diarios de motocicleta’s pan-Latin American story, También la lluvia is quite deliberately a film that layers the inequities and oppression of the colonial era up against those of neoliberalism. The fact that the water privatization company is partly owned by the UK and the United States is a key reference point that adds on to the traditional Hispanic nexus of power between the old and new worlds. While Diarios de motocicleta recounts suffering and injustice via the historical distance of a 50-year gap, También la lluvia is about as blatantly a film about the current crisis of neoliberalism as can be. Comments like that of the actor who plays Columbus, who rebuts the town of Cochabamba’s mayor as he dismisses the legitimacy of the water wars, are a clear indictment of neoliberalism. He tells the mayor, who is rationalizing the increasing cost of water, that he would “love to see how the IMF assholes would feed their own families on $40/month.”26 But the filmmakers are not painted as heroes either; their internal contradictions, bourgeois anxieties, and privilege are put on full display. For instance, Mexican-born Sebastián, who has seemed to side with the struggles of the indigenous from the start, tries to keep his Spanish producer, Costa, from helping an injured indigenous girl. Worried that if Costa helps the girl, it will mean they can’t finish the film, Sebastián argues that the water struggle will be over soon, but their film will be timeless. Similarly, the actor who proudly plays Bartolomé de las Casas, the Spanish conquistador credited with fighting for indigenous rights, is one of the first to beg to leave the film project and fly home to safety. Perhaps even more poignantly, the shots of the indigenous actors running through the scenes where the conquistadores openly pronounce their goals to oppress them are especially intense: the extras remain quiet but their eyes reveal a deep frustration and anger triggered by the reenactments. These scenes offer a clear and direct denunciation of intellectual elitism, bourgeois sentiment, and neoliberal privilege.

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The key issue is that these films trouble the traditional axis points used to analyze the ability of a film to have an ethical and political message of significance. Most importantly, they show how a new wave of films not only participates in transnational media circuits; they also benefit from transnational capital while offering an anticommercial message. It has meant that these films have oddly advanced certain features of the NLAC. In fact, Hulme-Lippert argues that También la lluvia furthers some of the tenets of the NLAC through its overt and clear reference to its own “imperfections”: “Rather than shying away from its colonizing tendencies, then, También la lluvia self-critically draws attention to the potential for violence present within its own project.”27 Even though the NLAC directors rejected Hollywood aesthetics and sought to create “imperfect” art, they were often aware that there was no “perfect” aesthetic practice. Hulme-Lippert analyzes many of the self-reflections of the NLAC directors and notes that these directors recognized that they often objectified the very cultures they sought to represent. Referring to the work of Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés, for example, she explains that he admits to becoming “deeply dissatisfied” with many of the aesthetic strategies he used with his film collective, Grupo Ukamau. The catch, though, was that many of these directors openly critiqued the idea of participating in the world film market, which they described as “‘destined to satisfy only the ideological and economic interests of the owners of the film industry, the lords of the world film market.’”28 This, then, is the real criticism of films like También la lluvia since they have, in fact, participated in the world film market, even if they are by no means Hollywood blockbusters. It is that odd, contradictory status that makes analyzing these films such a challenge. It’s even muddier when we recognize that the funding structure isn’t only assumed to transmit capitalist ideology; it is also assumed to carry with it markers of geographic allegiance. These films were financed transnationally and with investments by multinational media corporations, a fact which, as mentioned above, is often taken to mean that they are creating a new transnational identity. While they are often read as a sign of a new era of “global” post-national cinema, Part I shows how transnational capital funds films that often have clear “national” markers. As the following chapters show, many films that seem intensely national are also the recipients of transnational funding and media circuits. In fact, Michael Chanan reminds us, “cinema was transnational from the very

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start, and global in reach and operation by the 1930s.”29 Dennison continues the argument by pointing out that “from early on in the history of Latin American film industries Italians, for example, were working in Brazil and North Americans were working in Mexico. Popular Latin American genre films such as melodrama and exploitation films were distributed throughout Latin America, with (Golden Age) Mexican cinema dominating the Latin American film market in the 1940s. Spain and Portugal were co-producing short films together as early as 1919, with the first feature film co-production between the two countries being made in 1936.”30 This all means that the transnational is nothing new and it shows no necessary signs of diluting the national. Even more, it suggests that we should avoid romanticizing the national as the source of politically meaningful cinema since national culture can just as often be conservative, if not reactionary. Mette Hjort argues, “there is nothing inherently virtuous about transnationalism and there may even be reason to object to some forms of transnationalism.”31 She goes on to explain that it is not the tensions between the transnational and the national that point to the ethics of a film; rather, she values films that exhibit “a resistance to globalization as cultural homogenization; and a commitment to ensuring that certain economic realities associated with filmmaking do not eclipse the pursuit of aesthetic, artistic, social, and political values.”32 Following this cue, the chapters in Part I unpack the tendency to read globalization as either a threat to national culture or as a new phase of globalized national culture. It shows the increasingly complex web of geographic connections that define the global media industry and demonstrates that these connections don’t always yield the outcomes we used to imagine. Transnational media alliances don’t lead to films with transnational content. Coproductions across nations don’t necessarily signify the end of national cinema; in some cases these alliances preserve the national. Global distribution deals don’t necessarily mean that Latin American films are packaged for “foreign” consumption; they may mean that the global art film market is being protected instead. And local ownership of film theaters may not mean that viewers are given more access to “local” films. Instead it may be European-funded art house theaters that offer better screening venues for national films. Tracing the full life cycle of the Latin American film experience from 1990 to 2016, the next chapters study the complex processes of film coproduction, distribution, and exhibition in the era of millennial globalization.

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Notes 1. Buena Vista was renamed in 2007 as Walt Disney Motion Pictures. See “Buena Vista Film Distribution Co,” Buena Vista Film Distribution Co. - LC Linked Data Service | Library of Congress, accessed December 21, 2016, http://id.loc.gov/authorities/names/nr2001005729.html. 2. “The Motorcycle Diaries: Awards,” IMDb, accessed December 20, 2016, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0318462/awards?ref_=tt_awd. 3. See Luisela Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 3 (2008): 49. 4. “‘Motorcycle Diaries’—New York Premiere,” Gettyimages, accessed December 20, 2016, http://www.gettyimages.com/event/motorcyclediaries-new-york-premiere-75216609#sonia-braga-during-motorcyclediaries-new-york-premiere-at-loews-19th-picture-id109965462. 5. ““Cochabamba Water War,” Wikipedia, last updated December 13, 2016, accessed December 20, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Cochabamba_Water_War#Rate_hike. 6. See “Tambien La Lluvia (Even the Rain) Movie USA--Events | Facebook,” Facebook, accessed December 20, 2016, https://www.facebook.com/EventheRainMovie/events. 7. Tamara Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions: Transnational Cinema, Spain’s Public Relations Venture or Both?,” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2013), 84. 8. Ibid. 9. Darlene J. Sadlier, “Leaving Home in Three Films by Walter Salles,” symploke 15, no. 1 (2007): 138. 10. Michelle Hulme-Lippert, “Negotiating Human Rights in Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 25, no. 1 (2016): 106. 11. Sarah Jaffe, “Naomi Klein on Cause of Climate Crisis: ‘Capitalism Is Stupid,” Truth Out, September 24, 2014, accessed December 24, 2016, http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/26369-naomi-klein-oncause-of-climate-crisis-capitalism-is-stupid. 12. Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, “After New Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (2012): 90–91. 13. Ibid., 90. 14. Ibid., 106 and Patricia Aufderheide, “New Latin American Cinema Reconsidered,” in The Daily Planet: A Critic on the Capitalist Culture Beat (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 245.

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15. Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global,” 49. 16. Schroeder Rodríguez, “After New Latin American Cinema,” 108. 17. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 7. 18. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden, introduction to Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2006), 3. 19. Ibid., 1. 20. Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global,” 48. 21. Sadlier, “Leaving Home,” 27. 22. Stephanie Dennison, “Debunking Neo-imperialism or Reaffirming Neo-colonialism? The Representation of Latin America in Recent Co-productions,” Transnational Cinemas 4, no. 2 (2013): 193. 23. Stephanie Dennison, “National, Transnational and Post-national: Issues in Contemporary Film-making in the Hispanic World,” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2013), 14. 24. Andrew Higson, “The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema,” in Transnational Cinema: The Film Reader, ed. Elizabeth Ezra and Terry Rowden (London: Routledge, 2006), 20. 25. Ibid. 26. Dialogue from the film También la lluvia (Even the Rain, 2010). 27. Hulme-Lippert, “Negotiating Human Rights,” 106. 28. Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema,” in Movies and Methods: An Anthology, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), 44, quoted in Hulme-Lippert, “Negotiating Human Rights,” 114. 29. Michael Chanan, “Latin American Cinema: From Underdevelopment to Postmodernism,” in Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison and Song Hwee Lim (London: Wallflower Press, 2006), 41. 30. Dennison, “National, Transnational and Post-national,” 23. 31. Mette Hjort, “On the Plurality of Cinematic Transnationalism,” in World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives, ed. Natasa Ďurovičová and Kathleen E. Newman (New York: Routledge, 2010), 15. 32. Ibid.

CHAPTER 2

Coproduction

Coproduction simply designates films produced by two or more entities from different nations. And they are nothing new. In fact, the practice “first emerged with the Film Europe movement of the 1920s and early 1930s.”1 Generally, coproductions are thought to solve two key dilemmas for filmmakers since they help raise financial resources and leverage incentives and tax breaks across a range of nations, and they further facilitate distribution in multiple markets. In essence, the idea is that the film benefits from a connection to the markets and resources of more than one nation. At a very basic level, film coproductions epitomize the global impact on local filmmaking, since these arrangements always involve interactions across states. Among the key issues at stake in studying them is the extent to which such arrangements lead to an erosion of local creative control, develop a global aesthetic, and strengthen international market economies. Coproductions are generally thought to carry with them hegemonic implications for the simple reason that states with more funds to invest in culture send those resources to those with less, thereby reinforcing a core–periphery model of film investment and allowing states with more resources to control which films get made in “developing” economies. The pattern for coproduction in Latin America began as a direct replica of the colonial project. As Libia Villazana points out, “Latin American international film coproduction begins with a Spanish intervention, as does a large part of Latin American history. Thus, it started in 1931 © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_2

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with the establishment of the First Congress of Hispano American Cinematography (Primer Congreso Cinematográfico Hispanoamericano) held in Madrid, Spain.”2 Beginning in those early years, the practice was fairly common but it would experience a tremendous upsurge in the 1990s when film industries across Latin America lost state support and began to find creative ways to participate in the global market. Coproduction, given those realities, was a logical response to a vulnerable and unsupportive home market. Of course it is not just the region of Latin America that has undergone these changes. Scholarship on coproduction has studied these trends globally. In a special issue of Spectator dedicated to the topic, Hyung-Sook Lee points out that “the current practices differ from those of the past in terms of the frequency of instances of co-production, the diversified mediums and technologies involved, the wide ­geographical span that is interconnected through such cultural convergences, the widely multidirectional flow of capital, and the gradual d ­ecentrality of powers and influences among collaborators.”3 Lee explains that the looming presence of Hollywood has created a wide variety of ­creative responses across the globe as filmmakers seek alternatives to the Hollywood model: “In fact, all recent regional media co-productions can be interpreted as a response to the unsurpassed power and influence of Hollywood in one way or another.”4 Lee explains that coproductions tend to either favor outright corporate models or intra-regional alliances. Thus the trends we see taking place across Latin America are by no means unique to the region. The current coproduction model includes four basic practices: (1) coproductions with television stations from other nations (2) multilateral coproduction bodies involving Latin American countries, Canada, and/or funds from European nations (such as the Dutch Hubert Bals fund) (3) corporate agreements and collaborations across film companies from Europe, the United States, Canada, and Latin America financed by multinational capital, and (4) coproductions “that receive direct public support” via transnational treaties.5 Miller et al. refer to the last two models as equity and treaty coproductions. As they point out, “international co-production policies simultaneously inscribe and destabilize national descriptors of cultural value.”6 One of the benefits of treaty coproductions is that the films can be considered “national” in more than one market. In contrast to “official” coproductions where there is a treaty in place, many films are internationally coproduced

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without a treaty or direct state investment. The fact that these various models coexist, at times within the same film, further complicates our ability to analyze the impact of the process. Often a film is coproduced transnationally with the goal of creating a film product that conforms to viewer expectations of the cultural life in the nation filmed. At times, the most globally produced film is actually the most local in cultural reference, functioning as just another vehicle for cultural stereotyping. Miller et al. explain that coproductions can be both border erasing (in terms of economic flow) and border defining (in terms of content).7 And yet, it is precisely the multinational production of a film that is most likely to ensure that the film will have a multinational audience, thereby allowing directors the chance to develop films that can appeal beyond a local audience. Both Villazana and Miller et  al. point out that the rise of coproductions in the 1990s was directly tied to efforts to resist ­ Hollywood domination in the era of global markets, trade agreements, and state deregulation of culture industries. But Miller et al. also point out that “co-production results often surprise,” since in some cases what appears to be a European film company is actually a shell for a large Hollywood studio.8 Primary concerns have been the ways that ­coproductions could interfere with creativity. There are numerous cases of producers insisting, for instance, on a set of actors or scenes that ­connect with the nation investing in the film. Such was the case in a number of Cuban films that received support from the Spanish television station TVE, which demanded the inclusion of actors who would be familiar to their viewers. Funding from transnational film funds can be even more manipulative, since these bodies often have explicit ­ideological motives behind their organizations. This means, then, that at times purely corporate coproduction may be preferable and less manipulative since the goal is simply to make a profitable film. Given the fact that political films from the region sell, it has meant that many corporate coproductions support films that ­criticize the very global economic system that produced them. This was the case with Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004). As Steve Solot explains, in a piece designed for Latin American audiovisual professionals, “Today the economic reality is that co-productions are used predominantly to compete in a global market and, therefore, focus on popular narratives that sell audiences to advertisers. In many cases, they do not reflect local cultural expressions or current political and

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economic changes.”9 In this way, coproductions create highly ambivalent funding models that support market realities but may not necessarily help develop creative opportunities for local film development. As Michael Chanan explains, “a significant part of recent Latin American cinema has depended on international coproduction, a ­mechanism whose methods and effects are poorly understood.”10 And Stephanie Dennison concludes that the one element of coproduction ­different today is its sheer volume, since the recourse to transnational film funding is nothing new.11 Thus, this chapter maps out the series of issues that arise when we “follow the money” and study the sources of funds for Latin American feature films. The goal is to understand how the neoliberal market has changed the funding structures for films and to analyze the impact those shifts have had on their content, audience access, and reception. At stake are the ethical implications of these new funding models and their potential impact on the political messaging of these films. In some cases, it will be clear that there is a disconnect between funding practices and the political impact of a film; in others there will be more overt and obvious forms of influence. After an opening section on the major issues and context, the chapter has sections that: • Study the role of coproduction in Cuba before and after 1989. It will show that the advent of the neoliberal model “saved” the film industry from almost complete demise. The results, as may be imagined, are highly ambivalent when we consider the impact on the development of local culture of social significance. • Analyze the rise of multilateral and altruistic film coproduction bodies that invest in and support Latin American filmmaking: ­ Fonds Sud, now named World Cinema Support [“Aide aux ­cinémas du monde”] (a French fund, 1984), Hubert Bals (a Dutch fund, 1988), SØRFOND (a Norwegian fund, 2012), and Programa Ibermedia (an Ibero-American Aid Fund, conceived in 1989 and ratified in 1997). The section compares their different ideologies and initiatives and suggests that in some cases the sources of film funding that ostensibly have the most socially progressive agendas may be the most limiting in terms of creative scope. • Examine the upsurge of production companies that seem locally based but are financed by transnational media capital such as Disney-funded Patagonik in Argentina or the newly founded Pantelion Films, “the first major Latino Hollywood studio and the

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new face of Hispanic entertainment. It is a synergistic partnership between Lionsgate Entertainment and Grupo Televisa.”12 • Assess the role of treaty coproductions especially via MERCOSUR and in separate Brazil–Argentina treaties. Here the desire is to create a shared film market to bolster the development of the ­ ­common market of the South American nations of MERCOSUR.

Context and Overview To understand the critical context within which coproductions are assessed, we have to return to the critical views of the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) directors and their allies in third cinema. For the third cinema filmmakers, coproductions represented a real threat of imperialism. The Committee on People’s Cinema met on December 11–13, 1973, in Algiers, under the chairmanship of Lamine Merbah, to discuss the role of cinema in the third world and to offer a combined ­challenge to imperialism and neocolonialism. A number of Latin American ­directors were present, including Argentine Fernando Birri. One of the key issues they addressed was the problem of coproductions. The conclusions of the committee were clear. In a statement issued as a result of their deliberations, they declared that “coproductions must, first and foremost, be for the countries of the third world, a manifestation of anti-imperialist solidarity, although their characteristics may vary and cover different aspects.”13 Regarding the role of foreign investment from first world nations, the filmmakers were adamant: “We do not believe in coproductions in which an imperialist country participates, given the following risks: the imperialist country can shed influence through production methods which are foreign to the realities of our countries, and the examples of coproductions have given rise to cases of profit and the cultural and economic exploitation of our countries.”14 Following the legacies of cultural imperialism, the third cinema filmmakers were highly sensitive to the idea that their communities had been “invaded” by “foreign” films. And they had valid points since in almost every postcolonial context—especially within Latin America— Hollywood films were dominant in 1973. The problem, though, was that in their zeal to remove the force of global capital from their local culture industries, they failed to acknowledge one of the tricky realities of feature filmmaking: it requires vast investment. Thus their statement even ignored the realities within which

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these very same directors had to work. In fact, the story of the financing for the films of the NLAC reveals that the filmmakers were often put into situations where they had to receive funding from capitalist ­backers. In his study of the Brazilian film industry, Randal Johnson explains that “production financing has traditionally been problematic in the under-­ capitalized Brazilian film industry, and Cinema Novo represented no exception to this rule. Its directors therefore devised collaborative forms of financing in which all actors and members of the crew participated in a share system.”15 Even more interesting to note, he explains that many of the most political filmmakers adopted a pragmatic attitude toward film financing—and they showed little discretion for funding sources, provided that they did not make ideological demands on them. This strategy meant that “a number of early Cinema Novo films, paradoxically, were financed by the National Bank of Minas Gerais, owned by the family of Magalhães Pinto, one of the civilian conspirators in the 1964 coup d’état. The cinema lent a certain amount of cultural prestige to the bank, which, in turn, made filmmaking possible.”16 In a similar case, Argentine NLAC director Fernando Solanas explained that they had to do corporate commercials to make the money to fund the iconic political film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968): “El presupuesto es, por ello, uno de los principales problemas, y fuerza a la búsqueda de alternativas. Por ejemplo, para la filmación de La hora de los hornos se tuvo que realizar comerciales en el sentido más convencional y capitalista para conseguir los fondos necesarios para rodar la película” [budget is, for that reason, one of the principal problems, and it forces a search for alternatives. For example, for the filming of La hora de los hornos, it was necessary to make ­commercials— in the most conventional and capitalist sense—to secure the funds necessary to film the movie].17 So in one example we have funding coming from a Brazilian capitalist who had supported a bloody coup and in another case the director made capitalist commercials to earn funds for his films. In addition, the resources to make films were, in fact, often from foreign sources of support. Such alliances show that filmmakers in the region have long had to create a break between the political project of their films and the funding sources used to make them. What’s interesting, though, is that analysis of the films of the NLAC almost never draws a link between the funding sources of the films and their political impact. Meanwhile, the source of coproduction funds is a constant worry in analysis of films produced in the global era.

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Thus, there is a longstanding legacy of film projects that are overtly political in nature yet have had to engage the capitalist system to get funding. The concern over the impact of financing, though, is a newer facet of analysis that has emerged in response to the increase in the practice of coproductions and its synchronicity with the rise of the global economic order. It is worth noting that the anxiety over coproduction is also present in the case of smaller film markets that worry that they must defend themselves against “Americanization.” For instance UNESCO’s (2005) “Convention on Cultural Diversity” was signed globally by 148 countries and was based on the principle that culture cannot be reduced to a commodity and should therefore be exempt from free trade deals such as those of the World Trade Organization (WTO).18 Yet, “the treaty has also been criticized as a ‘thinly disguised attempt [. . .] to offer a shield against the spread of American culture [and] in particular Hollywood movies.’”19 As we study efforts to protect against “Americanization” we note the active role that Europe plays in fostering film coproduction. One of their key strategies has been to create cross-national funding alliances and agencies. Norbert Morawetz et al. point out that “in 2005 there were a staggering 182 of these support bodies in Europe (31 countries), ­providing a total amount of more than EUR 1.3 billion of public support (excluding tax incentives).”20 Thus the Europeans may be pouring more money into this problem than the Latin Americans, but there seems ­little doubt that the goal is an alternative market to that of Hollywood. Morawetz and his team further point out that in common with the global south, the Europeans had “also suffered a cycle of market failure and state intervention.”21 Coproductions, then, were a successful way to ensure that small markets were able to maintain some local production. They also help the larger markets. UNESCO reports that the top coproducing nation is France and that almost half of all French films were coproductions in 2012 and 2013.22 Spain ranks around fifth with about 30% of its films in those years as coproductions. Mexico, in ­contrast, had only 20% of its films coproduced in 2012 and 7% in 2013.23 In Argentina they coproduced 17.7% in 2012 and 12.5% in 2013.24 Looking at the third largest film market in the region, Brazil, we can note that they coproduced 9.6% in 2012 and 15.5% in 2013. Colombia ­carries numbers that are fairly close to those of France.25 Thus the idea that coproductions are a danger to the global south simply doesn’t match up with the numbers. If we were to analyze these percentages as signs

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of influence, then the French would arguably have greater worries over cultural integrity than the nations of Latin America. UNESCO points out in their study that some nations only have any cinema at all due to ­coproductions.26 The anxiety over coproductions, though, is not entirely in vain. In some cases, coproductions carry with them fairly specific ­content expectations. There has been further concern that c­ oproductions soften cultural difference, creating cultural hybrids that have no ­geographical reference. As Sharon Stover explains, one example was the rise of the “euro-pudding”—the pan-European film funded by a variety of nations and aimed at a broadly defined European audience.27 In coproductions between Spain and Latin America this same practice has translated into concerns over what Dennison refers to as “hispano-­ puddings.”28 For example, coproduction alliances have often led to the casting of Spaniards in Latin American movies. Falicov notes that the economic imperatives of coproductions do carry with them ­ content impact: “by delineating the various ways in which Spaniards enter into specific Latin American narratives, we find how it is that economic imperatives of funding can shape film narratives in specific ways.”29 Teresa Hoefert de Turégano studies the case of Spanish ­coproduction policy in Latin America and concludes that there has been a clear incidence of Spanish influence in the region that has led to a “cer­ tain type of cinema”; “Many of these films simultaneously emphasise national and local identities along with a determinate universalising appeal, ­seemingly aware of the international market and its hegemonic trends.”30 She explains that, after the United States, Spain is the s­econd most important foreign power in the region, especially with regard to the ­ telecommunications and culture industries. She points out that from 1986 to 1992, “Spanish television alone invested more than US $20 million in coproductions with Latin American countries. This is more than the Latin American governments combined invested in film production during those same years.”31 While Spain may have a smaller GDP than both Mexico and Brazil, it remains true that its influence in the region outmatches its global economic prominence. It is important to note that the two primary ­ vehicles for cinematic coproduction between Spain and Latin America are via television or via Ibermedia. The Conference of Iberian-American Cinematographic Authorities (CICA) approved in November 1997 a new funding scheme named Ibermedia. The first signing countries were Spain, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Portugal,

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and Colombia. Its annual budget reaches $3.7 million. Between 1998 and 2004, Ibermedia, which will be studied below, invested in 160 coproductions.32 Mar Binimelis Adell studies a decade of coproductions between Spain and Latin America (1997–2007) and notes that the ­relationship is not simply a flow of Spanish influence south.33 She points out that the dominant role of the Spanish television station TVE has to be understood in context. The upsurge of coproductions coincides with ­transitions in the media industry in the wake of the death of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 and the advent of democracy in Spain in 1976, and a new constitution in 1978. While the Franco regime had held tight control over the media industry, the transition to democracy brought radical change. This was especially true in the case of TVE, which had formerly been under the direct control of the Ministry of Information and had effectively functioned as a propaganda arm for the government. In 1980, the Organic Law “established new ‘democratic’ mechanisms for regulating state-owned broadcasting media.”34 This was the context for the new directorship of Pilar Miró, who had herself been a film director, of TVE from 1986 to 1989. Miró launched a series of coproduction initiatives between the TV channel and film projects both within Spain and in Latin America.35 Adell further notes that these coproductions have to be read in conjunction with the European Union’s efforts to strengthen their hold over their media industries. She explains that the implementation of European audiovisual regulations that required public television channels to invest in film revitalized an interest in Latin America.36 She further notes that the coproduction relationship between Spain and Latin America has strengthened Spain’s ability to export media content in the region. She sees the relationship as the development of a regional trade exchange rather than a purely neocolonial enterprise.37 In her overview of the various critical responses to the idea of Spanish coproductions in the region, Hoefert de Turégano shows that the c­ ritical responses are quite varied. Podalsky suggests that “coproductions have no inherent morphology.”38 Similarly, former NLAC director and media scholar, Octavio Getino mostly considers coproductions as a ­ vehicle for intercultural exchange and creative enterprise. Julianne BurtonCarvajal questions whether it makes sense to analyze the withering away of national cinemas in nations that were always dependent on US and European collaborations to create cinema anyway. In contrast, “Néstor García Canclini discusses cinematographic coproduction as

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part of a transnational, globalising process and its complication to the expression of national identity.”39 Hoefert de Turégano further notes that Kathleen Newman stresses the reality that Latin American films are always conscious of the need to “address an international audience.”40 After surveying this range of critical approaches to the issue, Hoefert de Turégano concludes that the key to understanding coproductions is the reality that the market for these films depends on the potential to sell diverse cultural identities. For these reasons homogenization is not a worry. Rather, the opposite: “this stipulation of cultural identity can be an enabling source, but it can also be limiting.”41 Dennison suggests that the analysis of coproductions bifurcates between those examples where “it is possible to read the films as a self-referential critique of the constraints placed upon filmmakers by twenty-first-century film-making practices” and those where transnational, multilingual or multi-accented films display “an off-putting social decontextualization.”42 In her study of two coproductions, one of which is También la lluvia (Even the Rain, 2010), she concludes that stark binaries are not useful for understanding the impact of the coproduction process: “we should avoid the reductionist, binary trap of essentializing Latin America as Europe and the United States’s other.”43 Alejandro Pardo attempts to offer a typology of the impact of Spanish-international collaborations and identifies four basic models: 1. (Inter)national Coproductions are those films with a genuine national or local flavor (a strong taste of “Spanishness”). 2. Foreign Financial Coproductions would be exactly the opposite kind of movies to the previous ones. Here the investment is purely financial. 3. Multicultural Coproductions represent the quintessential spirit of coproductions, because they are based on a real cultural exchange. 4. Internationally Oriented Coproductions would be those films ­primarily designed for the international marketplace. What’s interesting to note is that after Pardo’s significant overview of the various types of coproductions he concludes that overall these alliances are more about money than cultural influence. He notes that, “almost 75% of Spanish international co-productions during the last five years have been designed on a strictly financial basis, without demanding necessarily a creative or cultural exchange.”44 This leads him to conclude

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that worries over the connection between Spanish/Latin American coproductions and adjusted cinematic content are overblown, given the fact that the “more frequent motivation to set up a co-production ­project has been economic or financial rather than multicultural.”45 It’s worth noting that Pardo’s conclusions are shared by many others who study the connections between film financing and the production of identity. Morawetz offers a slightly different but similar typology of coproductions.46 He highlights three key models: 1. Coproduction driven by creative reasons (e.g., road movie). 2. Coproduction driven by search for finance (industry driven). 3.  Coproduction driven by international capital (capital market driven).47 He concludes that the least common model is the one that has a creative cross-national link. Similarly Manuel Palacio offers three key models: 1. Strictly financial coproductions “‘where two or more production companies join their financial resources to reach a better position in the international markets.’” 2.  International-flavor coproductions, “‘which try to delete any kind of trace from the national point of view in search of an ­international style.’” 3. Multicultural or hybrid coproductions, “the ‘only’ co-production in a proper sense, . . . not limited by an economic deal among partners, [but] reflecting the ambivalence in the construction of a collective identity . . . [as well as] breaking down the ‘official’ stereotypes.”48 In general, though, scholars have noted that certain films are indeed influenced by these processes, even though the bulk of coproduced films are increasingly market driven rather than content limited. Perhaps the most market-oriented study is the one offered by Stuart McFadyen, Colin Hoskins, and Adam Finn, who find that there is little evidence to support the claim that cultural distinctiveness is influenced by c­ross-national commercial investment.49 The problem, though, is that their pro-market approach misses some of the subtle ways that the global film industry is, in fact, creating broad aesthetic models. Hoefert de Turégano notes one persistent trend in Latin American/Spanish

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coproductions: the “emphatic tendency to both entrench national and cultural identities is infused with universalising references, to an increasingly formulaic degree.”50 This pattern is a difficult trend for scholars unskilled in aesthetic analysis to identify, but it is a trend that is difficult to dispute. She goes on to explain that “What is problematic is that within this particular context of independent production . . . many films seem to resemble each other, albeit seasoned with distinct cultural flavours, reflecting the dual homogenizing/differentiation process necessary to globalised cultural production through which capital expansion operates.”51 This means that the role of Spain may be less a sign of neoimperialism and more a sign of a globalizing trend where the foreign is marketed in globally recognizable ways. Marvin D’Lugo notes a similar aesthetic trend in his study of coproductions between Pedro Almodóvar’s company, El Deseo, and ­ Latin America. He describes the ways that these projects have ­created a pan-Hispanic audience: “This new sense of a culturally-defined yet deterritorialized audience is further reflected in the logic ­ ­ underlying these coproductions.”52 The question for D’Lugo is whether these projects have truly developed a transnational Spanish-speaking community that shares a similar transborder identity. If the new model for Latin America is the coproduction, and if the bulk of these alliances are between Spain and Latin America, D’Lugo wonders whether the creation of a trans-Hispanic-film consuming market has had any ­material impact on local identities.53 In contrast with Hoefert de Turégano, D’Lugo sees the process of developing a transnational audience as less a clear sign of hegemony and more a sign of a new shared identity. But, before we jump to concluding that coproductions yield a new set of imagined communities, it is worth pausing to reflect on the bigger picture of film consumption. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) notes that globally film consumption is on the rise. Data from 2015 show an 18% increase in box office revenue in the global market.54 But the bulk of this increase is related directly to the consumption of Hollywood product. The top ten films in Latin America in 2011 were almost all Hollywood blockbusters and these same ten films accounted for between 35 and 40% of all spectators in the world at large.55 A UNESCO study showed that the most-viewed feature films in theaters globally during 2012 and 2013 revealed the strong dominance of blockbusters from large Hollywood production and distribution companies. These films are almost entirely in English.56 The study

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further points out that five of the top films had budgets of $200 million or more and 60% had budgets over $100 million. A 2016 article in The Hollywood Reporter shows that the Mexican box office brought in $892 million and local films accounted for 6% of that market. In Argentina, local market share was about 13%. Discussing Brazil, the article points out that the nation “continues to grow in film production (more than 130 films in 2015), audiences (up 20%), theaters (250 new screens) and market share for local product (from 12% in 2014 to 13% in 2015).”57 Despite that promising information, they quote a Brazilian producer who explains, “We only get to see lots of blockbusters in theaters. Then, when you make one art house film and try to enter these places, it seems as if the two don’t combine.”58 Similarly, “Argentina produces 100 features a year but most don’t surpass 10,000 admissions or even get a commercial release, limiting market share at 10%, in line with indie imports.”59 Given those market realities it is hard to grasp why the rise of the coproduction has brought such a strong critical response. In many ways coproductions exist to protect a small market share in a media economy that grossly favors the major media monopolies. I’ve also given some historical perspective on the situation and shown that the practice of coproductions and of capitalist funding for political films is nothing new. If the NLAC directors also had to make deals with the capitalist devil, why are the directors of the 1990s and later considered to be such sell-outs? As Vivek Chibber notes in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, there are “multiple channels through which a u ­ niversalizing capitalism generates a diversity of social forms.”60 While Chibber’s account may overly gloss the politics of race and identity for many ­postcolonial critics, he is right to note that the current era witnesses the capitalist production of identity. He explains that “capitalism is not only compatible with social difference, but systematically produces it.”61 A fact that challenges our sense that foreign capitalist coproductions would necessarily lead to a flattening of content. Chibber takes the argument further, though, and asks about the fetishization of social difference and the left tendency to reify it, “insofar as a great deal of what we take to be social difference is in fact causally related to capitalist reproduction, it follows that the analysis of that diversity must, of necessity, draw on the universalizing categories of post-Enlightenment theories.”62 Thus he goes on to argue that capitalism can display great “indifference to ­existing heterogeneity” as long as that heterogeneity does not clash with its logic of reproduction.63 This is a very important point for the logic

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of foreign investment in cinema: the economic system is not challenged by making a film that markets difference for consumption. Investment in coproductions reveals capitalism’s desire to market and profit from ­difference, but it also reveals a great normalizing tendency, one which highlights the prevalent models for seeking funding as well as the degree to which different models carry with them different generic content boundaries. The differences in these models will be analyzed in the ­sections to come.

Coproducing Cuba The first cultural law Fidel Castro enacted after the 1959 revolution was the creation of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC). Coming on the heels of a commercialized film industry, the idea was to found a film institute that could help support the goals of the revolution while also rejecting capitalist ideology and investment. For many filmmakers, scholars, and intellectuals, the case of Cuba ­represented a shining example of a film project that could take place outside of capitalist circuits of production. The films of ICAIC, especially those of the early years after the revolution, are considered to be some of the finest examples of the NLAC. In addition, many of the most influential filmmakers/theorists of the movement were Cuban. Two of the most widespread theories of third cinema were penned by Cubans who helped found ICAIC: Julio García Espinosa argued for an “imperfect ­cinema” that would contrast the “perfection” of Hollywood, and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea theorized what he called the “viewer’s dialectic.” The Cuban film industry is an example of one of the most successful experiments in state-funded political filmmaking. Estimates suggest that prior to the revolution the Cuban film industry produced no more than 150 features in six decades.64 Cuban film prior to 1959 was characterized by “the exploitation of the Cuban market by foreign concerns, the cinematic interpretation of Cuban sociopolitical life by foreigners for their own interests, and the commercialization of all aspects of national production.”65 In comparison, in the first 17 years “ICAIC produced 74 full-length and 12 medium-length films, some 600 documentary shorts—educational, scientific, and technical as well as animated and fictional films—and more than 800 weekly newsreels.”66 Rebounding from the lack of films caused by the post-revolutionary US embargo, the Cubans rushed in the early days to get content on screens. Many of these

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films were documentaries, but by the late 1960s Cuban directors were releasing some of the most important political films of all time. Gutiérrez Alea’s Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968) and Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968) are considered to be some of the best examples of left filmmaking. Even more important, Cuban post-revolutionary film was thought to be an active participant in the construction of a national identity. When ICAIC was founded, Castro explained that he considered that cinema was first “an art” and second an “instrument of opinion and formation of individual and collective consciousness.”67 In On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition, Ann Marie Stock explains the relationship between ICAIC films and the construction of Cuban identity: “Culture workers have, for the past half- century, documented and participated in the construction of cubanía.”68 She goes on to cite Solás on the role of film in creating national identity: “‘Artistic culture is an essential element in the configuration of the idea of nationhood.’ . . . Within the realm of culture, cinema would lead the charge to promote the new ideology and shape cultural practices. . . . Over the past half-century, film has to a great extent defined what it means to be Cuban.”69 A significant feature of this identity was connected to the idea of a revolutionary collective, radically distinct from capitalist individualism. Gutiérrez Alea described his sense of collective creative freedom this way: “We [at ICAIC] feel united around an idea and involved in implementing it together . . . This sense of freedom which we feel in working together is a completely different experience from the purely individual creative freedom so precious to people in capitalist society.”70 Given the strength of the Cuban film industry, it offers an excellent opportunity to trace the shifting realities of coproductions and the extent to which they help or hamper cultural expression. In the 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cuban economy buckled and film ­production almost ground to a halt. The era, known as the “Special Period,” was characterized by shortages across the island. The film industry was ­especially hard hit. At the height of its film industry support, Cuba had the third highest number of theater screens in the region, behind Mexico and Argentina. Today it has a total of 39 screens for the entire island.71 According to Cristina Venegas, “In the decade between 1991 and 2001 approximately 31 features were completed, at an average of three per year. Gone were the earlier levels of production when yearly output reached ten features and fifty documentaries.”72 In 1996, there were no feature films

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released at all.73 The economic crisis caused by the loss of Soviet support led filmmakers to seek the support of international capital. Thus, in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, it would be European producers who would help finance the next wave of Cuban films. This period saw coproduced films such as Gutiérrez Alea’s Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), Juan Carlos Tabío’s Lista de espera (The Waiting List, 2000) and Fernando Pérez’s Suite Habana (Havana Suite, 2003). Coproduction became the only way the Cuban film industry survived. Understanding the transitions in Cuban filmmaking and foreign investment also requires tracking the transitions at ICAIC. In 1992, Alfredo Guevara returned to take over the helm at ICAIC, but he later stepped down in 2000 to direct the International Havana Film Festival. Then in 2000, Omar González became the first non-filmmaker to ever run ICAIC. Venegas explains that the “shift in leadership is s­ignificant since filmmakers had lobbied for a type of ‘autonomy’ within the centralized structure.” González brought a far more ­ ­ entrepreneurial approach to filmmaking: “Under González, who has appointed other non-filmmakers to the staff, the Institute focuses on generating ­revenue.”74 In its earlier phases ICAIC’s centralized structure linked its state support with a “larger social project.”75 But by the 1990s the centralized control of media and the fragile political climate began ­ to crack. During this phase, only foreign investment allowed ICAIC to remain functioning. Venegas explains that it wasn’t only foreign ­investment that changed the nature of ICAIC; it was also a new way of understanding the media industry: “ICAIC’s leadership confronted and survived economic collapse, material setbacks and political controversies while facing the new realities of film industries as cross media synergies and social networking sought to create new audiences.”76 Thus, the difficult irony of the Cuban film industry was that one of the most politically revolutionary cinemas is only alive today due to ­capitalist investment. Stock also points to the changes brought on in 2000 with new leadership of ICAIC that led to more coproductions, more collaboration with RTC (Cuban television), and more digital projects. Stock stresses the continuity of ICAIC’s cultural project in ­ this newer phase: “The cultural project that began a half-century ago— wielding a camera to help construct a new nation—has continued into the present. In recent years, however, it has changed markedly.”77 She notes that the most significant change has been in the realm of

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production: “No longer would state funds underwrite the costs of ­making features, documentaries, and animated films. Financing through coproductions, involving at least one partner from another country, would help stretch the institute’s limited resources.” She points out that another shift was the goal of appealing to an audience beyond the island: “no longer would the principal goal be to serve domestic audiences. From now on the tastes and expectations of international viewers would have to be factored in.”78 Developing modes of financing outside of government funding began in 2002 with the Festival of New Filmmakers showcasing projects created by young people outside the ICAIC system. According to Sydney Levine, “As a result of the 2002 event, five years later, a funding mechanism called Hacienda [sic] Cine was created by pulling productions from ICAIC Cuban television into centers and foundations that have other areas for audiovisual production.”79 Since Fidel Castro retired in 2008, handing the reigns to his brother Raúl, coproductions have become a standard part of the film scene: “In 2014 there were 14 productions and coproductions made, compared to 7 in 2009 and 4 in 2000.”80 Even after the economic opening afforded by the transition into power of Raúl Castro, funding a film, renting equipment, and shooting in Cuba still need to be approved by ICAIC. This has changed somewhat as other players have come to take a role, like RTV Commercial, which is the production company of Cuban National Television. Stock points to the ways that the crisis of the 1990s led to “street filmmaking” and efforts to produce films outside of traditional networks: “this new generation of Cuban filmmakers is connected to global communication networks; they rely extensively on YouTube and other sites for uploading their work.”81 But she explains that these experimental projects are often either lost in the barrage of content on the internet or their creators return to ICAIC to seek distribution help: “the internet . . . has not replace[d] the importance of cinemas, festivals, and television for circulating their films.”82 Stock further explains that the nature of coproduction agreements shows all the signs of capitalist leverage: the agreements may help films get made, but the profits don’t come back to Cuba.83 The catch is that Cuba has become so desperate that these agreements are still seen as a boon rather than a limit. She quotes one filmmaker who explains, “In this country right now, where there are difficulties distributing gasoline and buying powdered milk, the fact that films are made is a miracle.”84

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Verena Berger explains that Cuba has a long history of coproductions. Before the 1959 revolution Cuba coproduced with nations across Latin America, especially with Mexico. Since 2000, though, most coproductions are with Spain: “Faced with the loss of markets in former socialist countries and the tightening of the blockade by the U.S. (Torriceilli Act 1992; Helms-Burton Act 1996), the country plunged into the lack of financial funds.”85 She points out that from 1995 to 2003 only two ­feature films were made without external funding. Berger explains that the influence of foreign capital has helped the industry survive but has also meant that filmmakers have to “confront both external dependencies that affect film production, as well as a process of adaptation to the demands of other markets.”86 She explains that in general these projects are seen as an unwelcome compromise between artistic freedom and the market. For instance, she quotes Daniel Díaz Torres, who expresses concern that internationalizing films to appeal to external markets “will take away their soul.”87 Berger analyzes two German–Cuban coproductions and proposes the idea of “accented co-productions,” where they are not just about money: “co-operation has an impact beyond the mere economical aspect, and can be appreciated in the narrative, iconography and sound of the films.”88 But she admits that these content influences are the less common mode of coproduction. As explained in the introduction to Part I of this book, when a young film student questioned the lingering power of the NLAC, it is true that the post-1990 Cuban films have shifted aesthetics, but it isn’t clear that those changes can be wholly attributed to coproductions and foreign influence. Instead, they may well be linked to the new sensibilities of younger filmmakers who are less influenced, if at all, by third cinema aesthetics. While we often are accustomed to thinking of coproductions as ways of marginalizing a smaller cinema, that is not exactly true in the case of Cuba. Proportionately, Cuba has received greater support from the ­ multilateral funding agency, Ibermedia, which will be discussed in the next section of this chapter.89 Cuban coproductions also have a much larger market share in Europe than those of larger nations. After Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, Cuba is in the second tier a­longside Colombia and Chile with an average of two feature films entering the European market annually and reaching an average of 47,000 ­spectators.90 From 2000 to 2009, there were 24 Cuban films that were released in Europe. Almost all of these reached the Spanish market and Spaniards represented 85% of the European spectators reached.91

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Interestingly only 15 of the 24 were actually coproduced with Spain, but those films were the ones to have the greatest success at the box office. The connection between Spain and Cuba is generally considered to be a reiteration of the colonial dynamic, where the Spaniards ­appropriate Cuban culture for their own ends. But the reality is a bit more complex. As Jaume Martí-Olivella explains, “theoretically, the persistence of ­ current Spanish cinema’s transatlantic gaze towards Cuba must be ­ analyzed as the imaginary articulation of two historical phenomena: the nostalgic reinscription of the Spanish imperial subject and the touristic commodification of the island as an erotic and ‘archeological’ ­paradise.”92 He further adds that the complicated immigration patterns both to and from the island have influenced a number of filmic narratives. In addition, he explains that Spanish leftists have felt real solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. He cites the fact that almost twenty Spanish universities have agreements with Cuba that offer “‘a very important gesture of Spanish solidarity.’”93 Martí-Olivella explains that these webs of connection don’t mean that the Spanish–Cuban connection is not a neoimperialist articulation after all. He explains that one of the reasons Cuban films do so well in Spain is because Cuba occupies a distinctly nostalgic space in the Spanish imaginary. But here’s the odd thing: One of the films that Martí-Olivella highlights is the Cuban–Spanish coproduction Lista de espera (The Waiting List, 2000), which was directed by Juan Carlos Tabío. The film also received production support from Ibermedia, French Canal +, Mexican Producciones Amaranta, and German Road Movies Filmproduktion. While much is made about the fact that Spanish support led to a Spanish actor appearing in the film, the reality is that his role is extremely minor and narratively logical. The film centers on how a group of Cubans waiting for a bus to be repaired adapt to the situation. At the center is the story of Emilio who flirts with Jacqueline and eventually wins her affections. Her boyfriend, whom she is trying to go visit, is a Spaniard waiting for her in Havana. From the perspective of coproductions and content, the appearance of the Spaniard is logical and not very intrusive at all. Most importantly it would be hard to read the role of the boyfriend as an example of neoimperialism. In this film the anxieties over Spanish influence seem like much ado about nothing. In fact, it is hard to find a substantial body of films where these influences are as nefarious as the critical literature would suggest.

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Perhaps most importantly we have to wonder why the Spain–Cuba connection is always held in contempt while other forms of influence are given a pass. It’s worth recalling that the ICAIC filmmakers all described significant influence from abroad both in training and in aesthetics. Even more important, Cuba’s dependency today on capitalist coproduction is not entirely different from its earlier dependency on Soviet support. Is the difference between Soviet-supported Cuban cinema and capitalist-­ supported cinema so drastic? From the perspective of aesthetic influence it’s important to recall that both García Espinosa and Gutiérrez Alea were trained at the Italian Centro Sperimentale in Rome. There they became highly interested in Italian neorealism. It is also important to note that while Cuban revolutionary cinema avoided contamination by Hollywood, it still was influenced by a “foreign” cinema—that of the “other Europe” associated with the Soviet bloc. Vladimir Alexander Smith Mesa explains that Cuban films after the revolution were influenced by “different waves that arrived in Cuba from ‘the other’ Europe, which were born at the same time as the first films that were co-produced in the 1960s, particularly from the unique experience of Mikhail Kalatozov’s masterpiece Soy Cuba.”94 Smith Mesa argues that while much attention has correctly focused on how ICAIC created socially and politically powerful films that rejected Hollywood commercialism, most western scholars have omitted studying the influence of the Soviet bloc.95 He explains that those that trace outsider influence focus largely on Italian neorealism, French nouvelle vague and cinema vérité, and US independent cinema with no mention of the role of Soviet influence. He cites Cuban filmmaker Pastor Vega speaking about the seminal role that Soviet aesthetics offered his own political filmmaking. After tracing other examples he explains that “there is a significant body of evidence which points to the verifiable and significant impact of Soviet and East European film on opinion-formers as well as film directors in Cuba during the 1960s and beyond.”96 Of interest is the array of Cuban–Soviet coproductions from the 1960s. Smith Mesa explains that these collaborations were not examples of one-way influence, but they are certainly examples of the ways that Cuban filmmakers were neither autonomous nor aesthetically independent in the 1960s.97 What perhaps is most important is that Smith Mesa covers a series of coproduced films between Soviet nations and Cuba that are rarely even understood as coproductions. Aside from the well-known collaboration with Soviet cineastes in Soy Cuba ([I Am Cuba], 1964), we rarely even

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hear about the coproduced nature of these films, even though some of them are well known. He lists “Octavio Cortázar’s El brigadista (The Literacy Teacher, 1977), Julio García Espinosa’s La sexta parte del mundo (The Sixth Part of the World, 1977), Pastor Vega’s Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa, 1979), Jesús Díaz’s Polvo Rojo (Red Dust, 1981)” as just some of the examples of Soviet era coproductions.98 Smith Mesa’s research begs the question of why it is only the specter of capitalist western influence that worries us. This is especially noteworthy given the fact that the filmmakers of ICAIC themselves described the ways that their creativity was limited by the connection to the Soviets. In a 2001 interview, Solás explained that during the 1970s, “because of the country’s economic problems and the political leadership’s alignment with world socialism . . . we were dependent on the assistance of other countries. The socialist bloc offered to help and support Cuban cinema. While it is true that there were positive cultural influences from abroad, especially those from the socialist countries that opposed social realism, there were also negative ones from European socialist countries.”99 Solás goes on to explain that coproduction since 1989 can pose challenges for filmmakers, since within Cuba there is no longer an ­ ­economic base for film production. He explains that the only films that get state support are operas primas—first features. Veteran ­ filmmakers like himself, then, must rely on coproductions: “if a film project is not co-produced, it will not be made. Cuban filmmaking could very well disappear if not for co-productions.”100 He further notes that ­capitalist coproductions, contrary to most assumptions, do not necessarily ­undermine the concept and practice of a political, national cinema. He ­mentions films like Cecilia (1982), which was coproduced with Spain, as an example of how coproductions don’t have to limit national filmmaking. Even more important, it is worth wondering why the ideological influence of capitalism is highlighted at the expense of paying attention to the real ways that cultural production on the island was limited to those projects that were seen to support the revolution. As one dissident filmmaker put it, “The Cuban revolution controls all aspects of your life. If you don’t toe the party line they really cut off the rest of your life at the knees. There is an artistic freedom within the revolution, and only within the revolution.”101 Again, the point is that when we trace anxieties of influence it’s worth noting the inherent bias in the influences that are analyzed. While those of us that celebrate the critical potential of left culture are rightly concerned about the intrusion of capitalist

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hegemony following capitalist investment, the data on coproductions shows that the relationship between resources and content is far more complicated than a simple reiteration of colonialist practices. I’ll close this section by considering a coproduction that has all of the elements one would expect to find in an example of hegemonic filmmaking practices. What I’ll suggest is that rather than ratify the impression that coproductions are contemporary vehicles of ­colonialist control, the reality is far more ambivalent. Buena Vista Social Club (1999) tells the story of a 1996 trip by US blues guitarist Ry Cooder to connect with the Havana music scene. The documentary was shot by German filmmaker Wim Wenders and it received Ibermedia support as well as that of ICAIC. It also had funds from French Canal + and German Road Movies Filmproduktion. It won a series of awards for best documentary in the United States and in Europe. It also was nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary. A film financed largely by European funds and directed by a German, it tells the story of a famous US musician going to Cuba to “discover” a group of Afro-Cuban musicians. Focusing on son music that is associated with the big band era of Cuban music in the 1940s and 1950s, Cooder locates some of the musicians that were connected with the original Buena Vista Social Club that had been closed since before the revolution. Capitalizing on the temporal bookend of pre-revolutionary Cuba and post-Soviet-support Cuba, the film depicts Cuba as an “island that time forgot.”102 Cooder is “featured as an explorer who travels through space and time to find a musical ‘lost world’ in Havana.”103 The film also covers the moment when a number of the musicians travel to New York to perform at Carnegie Hall. Many of them had never left the island and the film was able to capture their wonder in the big city, window-shopping, and visiting tourist sites. US-based film reviews referred to these moments of “innocents abroad” as the film’s most moving moments.104 Setting up a stark contrast between the impoverished life on the island and the excess of New York, the film reaffirmed the notion that, when given the chance, even the most anticapitalist artists will succumb to the lure of the big city. The film thereby reifies not just the music, but also the musicians. It offers them and their music up for exoticized consumption. It’s difficult to imagine a film that could replicate capitalist colonial power structures better. That view has plenty of truth to it. But it isn’t the whole story. First of all, the film itself troubles the gap between the musicians and Cooder

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by slowly showing how they develop meaningful connections through music. As Geoffrey Baker explains, “the first images of the film underline the political division of the early 1960s; the last images show Cooder bridging the divide through music.”105 When interviewed, Wenders has also expressed how the project began as an effort to capture the connections between Cooder and the musicians but slowly developed into far more than an impersonal documentary. He’s described the film as a “true character piece.”106 In another interview, Wenders explains of the film: “I don’t think that approach or technique defines a film. What counts is the attitude of the people behind the camera towards those in front. I hope it shows because we loved them.”107 Then there is the fact that the subjects of the film had, indeed, ­effectively disappeared from the Cuban cultural scene. Not only was their type of music no longer central to the cultural landscape, the musicians themselves were quite old and were mostly ignored at home. As Cooder explains, the goal of the film was to connect with a form of music that was literally dying off on the island. When asked why the musicians had been neglected, Cooder doesn’t answer with a critique of the post-Soviet Cuban state. Instead, this is his answer: Well, because old people all over the world are very often marginalized right out of their life, I mean, in a sense. Also because this song form, this older style, had—had kind of fallen away from popularity in Cuba. And there just isn’t much of a musical scene down there in the sense of work. They don’t record. There’s no record industry there. There’s barely a nightclub scene, you know? And these folks in their 80s and 90s and 70s, they just didn’t have anything to do anymore.108

So, in a simple sense, if the film had not been made, these musicians would have likely died in obscurity. Instead, the album and film reignited interest in their music. As Helen Oakley explains, the success of the film and album allowed a number of the musicians to rejuvenate their careers and many released subsequent solo albums.109 She further explains that the film and album had “far-reaching global impact in the United States, Europe, and Latin America.”110 Not only did it help lead to a resurgence in popularity of the Afro-Cuban son, it also helped develop global respect and admiration for Cuban music. Oakley explains that one of the features of the film is that it draws attention to the art of Compay Segundo, who invented the seven-string guitar. She notes that a number of the

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musicians featured in the project went on to gain great international attention to their art. Perhaps the most obvious way that the film encapsulates the deep ambivalences that derive from neoliberal era coproductions is that it can be traced directly to a rise in tourism. Oakley notes that the film generated interest in Cuban music to such an extent that it boosted the Cuban tourist industry.111 Chris Gibson and John Connell explain that the fact that the film came out exactly at the same time as Cuba was opening up to foreign interests—although not yet US ones—gave it a unique ability to draw tourism to the island.112 They note that by the 1990s “tourism was the single most important source of foreign exchange” and that “tourist numbers grew faster than anywhere else in the world until September 2001.”113 They note, though, that the tourist boom was equally about cultural fetishization as it was about genuine appreciation for a rich cultural heritage. Perhaps more importantly it reminds us that the market protects cultural diversity as a marketing category—but that those protections do, indeed, have material effects on the lives of those that create that culture. The film may well be a definitive example of cultural appropriation, but it also projects a joyful love for music and recuperates a forgotten, yet dynamic, group of Cuban artists in a way that can’t simply be dismissed as pure commodification.

Multilateral and Altruistic Film Coproduction While coproductions have a long history, the reduction in state ­funding brought on by neoliberal deregulation led directly to the growth of multilateral and altruistic coproduction bodies. At exactly the same time that states reduced their investment in national film industries, a series of coproduction bodies emerged on the scene beginning with the pan-­ European Eurimages, which was founded in 1989. As we will see in the specific language and structure of these funding bodies, they are directly conceived of as a response to the era of globalization. The idea that the global era has brought reduced borders for cultural exchange, that it has served to develop cross-cultural alliances, and that it depends on developing cross-national markets is a consistent feature of the mission ­statements for these agencies. In most cases, these bodies imagine themselves as rescuing Latin American cinema from oblivion—a move that is both patronizing and largely true. One hitch, though, is the fact that the bulk of these

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European bodies coproduce with those Latin American nations that are the least in need of film industry support—Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. Those three nations accounted for 78% of the Latin American films screened in Europe between 2000 and 2009, and they captured 90% of the European spectators that saw a Latin American film.114 The concentration of support for nations that already have well-developed film industry opportunities begs the question whether these are funds that are saving the cinematic culture of “developing” countries. While the next section will look more specifically at the idea of cofinancing rather than coproducing, there is a real tension between understanding these projects as collaborative creative efforts or as vehicles of foreign direct investment wrapped up as altruistic financing. For the most part, these new transitions in film funding have brought significant anxiety that the local or the national will be forced to ­succumb to the content requirements and aesthetic impositions of the global market. In reality, though, it turns out that the global market requires diversity. While it is true that one finds less experimental ­cinema funded by multilateral bodies, and while there is a certain “global” film aesthetic common to many multilaterally coproduced films, it is not entirely certain that these shifts are due to the coproduction funding agencies I’ll describe below. Ever since the media industry transitions of the 1990s, it has become increasingly clear that films need to reach beyond national markets to thrive—even if they reach these markets as national stereotypes. The point is that noticing these aesthetic shifts does not necessarily implicate these funding bodies as the source of these style shifts. Rather, it is more likely that we need to read this as a larger ­consequence of the global media economy. In what follows, I’ll briefly cover eight examples of these sorts of funding bodies in order to give a sense of the scope of coproduction arrangements that have emerged in the era of global coproductions and have helped finance the making of Latin American films. I’ll begin with the least likely example—that of Eurimages—the pan-European film funding agency that Ibermedia is modeled after. Almost all analysis of the challenges of coproductions for Latin American cinema centers on Ibermedia, and I will discuss it next, but it is valuable to begin our understanding of this issue from within Europe itself, since this view allows us to remember that Europe is also a very vulnerable film market. Too often, the alliances between Europe and Latin America are read solely as reiterations of the colonial dynamic when they are also—if

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not mostly—a response to the hegemony of Hollywood. In fact, as Sophie De Vinck argues, Eurimages was created solely as a response to Hollywood domination of European screens.115 The case of Eurimages also allows us to remember that the Europeans have grappled with the tensions between national identities and a pan-­ European one in ways not entirely dissimilar to anxieties between national and pan-Hispanic identity. In a structure quite similar to Ibermedia, Eurimages’ member states contribute to a central pool. A q ­ualifying coproduction must include at least three independent ­ producers from the fund’s member states and a European must direct it. The European Convention on Cinematographic Co-Productions (1992) further stipulates that each coproducer’s technical and artistic contribution ­ should be approximately equal to their financial contribution—but Angus Finney explains that 10 to 25% of the contribution can be purely ­financial.116 He also explains that qualifying European coproductions use a point system to determine if the film is sufficiently European, but that some films can get by if they reflect a “European identity.”117 The fund is designed to facilitate a film’s entry into more than one European market—but the goals of Eurimages are also ­ cultural: “‘Eurimages’ first objective is cultural, in that it endeavours to support works which reflect the multiple facets of a European s­ociety whose common roots are evidence of a single culture. The second one is economic, in that the Fund invests in an industry which, while ­concerned with commercial success, is interested in demonstrating that cinema is one of the arts and should be treated as such.”118 De Vinck explains that as idealistic as the fund may have been, there is evidence that it has failed both culturally and financially. Twenty years after its founding, it turns out that the distribution of films outside of their home markets has been marginal.119 In general, she explains, national films don’t travel well outside of their home markets.120 So Eurimages suffers from some of the same issues we will see with Ibermedia—but here’s the catch: unlike Ibermedia which is always ­supporting films from Latin America, Eurimages funds have also funded projects based largely in the south. For instance, Bolivian-based También la lluvia received Eurimages funding. While some have dismissed the film as pure issuetainment, as explained in the introduction to Part I of this book, that view is a bit simplistic. What is interesting to note from the perspective of coproduction funding is that a film dealing with the Cochabamba water crisis was funded by a European funding body dedicated to supporting

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films that offer a view of Europe as a “single culture.” While the film was directed by a Spaniard and certainly stars a number of Spanish actors, including Luis Tosar in a lead, it also stars Mexican Gael García Bernal. Perhaps most importantly, the European identity projected in the film is certainly inflected by the Spanish legacy of colonialism—an identity hard to envisage as the ideal European identity supported by Eurimages. It’s also valuable to think about the inversion where a fund designed to support and promote a pan-European identity may have supported a pan-Hispanic one—even if that one is considered problematic. This is all to show that the rhetoric of these funding agencies may not always match up with the projects they support. In fact, there are also cases of films receiving funding from Eurimages and Ibermedia, such as the Spanish–French–Cuban coproduction Habana Blues (2005). That film tells the story of two Cuban musicians who travel to Spain for a ­recording contract and it openly engages with the question of Spaniards producing and consuming Cuban culture. Rather than blend these ­cultures into a bland cross-cultural identity, the film shows the friction points. But scholars still worry that these regional funding bodies will result in a Euro or Latino “pudding” that erases difference. In fact, if Europuddings have haunted the notion of a regional European film market, the same is especially true in the case of the pan-Hispanic coproduction fund Ibermedia. Founded in 1997, Ibermedia (Programa Ibermedia) is sponsored by Spain, Portugal, and 18 member nations from Latin America. Each member nation contributes what they can, but at least $100,000, to the fund. Spain gives about $2 million and also supports the offices in Madrid. In 2008, Spain put in $3.3 million, or about 50% of the fund’s resources.121 Similar to Eurimages’s desire to produce films aimed for the pan-European market, Ibermedia seeks to promote and develop ­projects for the Ibero-American market. They described their mission at the 1996 Summit of the Americas this way: “‘The question is how one could contribute to the development of an Ibero-American film and television industry that is competitive in the world market, that is oriented towards the technological future, that is capable of projecting its own culture, and in addition, will contribute to creating employment and reducing the commercial deficit.’”122 It’s interesting to note that this description largely emphasizes the development of a market and industry over the development of a common culture. In fact, Falicov notes that Ibermedia has two types of funding, one that is “technical-artistic” and carries with

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it a connection between a nation’s investment and the percentage of actors and technicians that work on the film, and another that is purely financial.123 Alberto Elena explains that Ibermedia functions on a “purely industrial model and gives priority to the economic prospects of the projects beyond any other consideration,” a fact that imposes “severe aesthetic limitations in favour of conventional narrative cinema that ­follows the habitual industry formulas.”124 Yet, rather than focus on the way that the films of Ibermedia conform to industry standards, it is more common for these films to be studied as examples of Spanish hegemony. Moreover, despite the fact that the financial coproductions mean that the profits go toward the nation with the economic leverage to invest, thereby reinforcing the core–periphery model of the global economy, it turns out that most scholars worry more over coproductions that are technical-artistic, since these have more visible markers of potentially forced cultural affiliations. Elena cautions that before one dives straight into critiques of Ibermedia it is important to recall that since the 1990s it has been engaged for the first time in the region’s history with an authentic program of transnational coproductions with governmental support ­ between Latin America and Spain. It is currently the best example of an effort to develop a common audiovisual space in Latin America. Falicov notes that another benefit of the program has been its relative stability. She also points out that for smaller film industries, like that of Uruguay or Cuba, it is often the main source of resources. In Uruguay, for instance, for every $100,000 they contribute, they receive about three times more resources from Ibermedia—a sum that literally salvages their film i­ndustry from oblivion.125 The films of Ibermedia also win awards. Mexican director Arturo Ripstein announced back in 2008 that Ibermedia had supported a significant amount of the “buen cine” [good films] of the region.126 Latin American coproductions are still largely dominated by Spain, even though, as will be discussed below, other international and regional associations are on the rise. This means that it is the role of Spain—and specifically Spaniards—that most scholars key into in their research on Ibermedia. Villazana explains that the issue is related to the presence of Spanish artistic participants in coproduced films.127 She goes on to explain that the clause stipulating the role of artistic talent in coproduced films has undergone a series of revisions. The problem, she argues, stems from the reality that the bulk of these films are made in Latin America but must include Spanish talent: “this compulsory

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cooperation has brought to the fore the multiple inequalities that exist between Latin American countries and Spain.”128 Falicov focuses on four tropes of Spaniards that affect Ibermedia narratives: “the ­ sympathetic Spaniard, the Spanish anarchist, the evil or racist Spaniard, and the Spanish tourist.”129 Villazana further points out that in many of these cases the presence of the Spanish actor is awkward or, as in the case of Juan José Campanella’s Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda’s Moon, 2004), completely unexplained.130 Miriam Ross tries to understand the role of Spaniards in Ibermedia-funded Latin American films according to contact zones that bring transnationality to the foreground.131 Elena, in contrast, studies the role of Ibermedia in producing “hispanidad”: “It is safe to say that the main theme of all of these coproductions has been and continues to be the recomposition of the great, albeit ­fractured, Hispanic family, a metaphorical, transoceanic and symbolically ­transhistoric recovery.”132 For Villazana, the failure of Latin American nations to vigorously support their national film industries paved the way for Spanish domi­ nation133; “Spain has become a faultless example of what the term neocolonialism embodies. Spain marches into Latin America with its economic and cultural troops.”134 Yet, Elena points out that such concerns overstate the significance and presence of Ibermedia coproductions. In fact, the realities of the limited reach of these films mean that the “impact on the region itself cannot be considered significant.” And yet, he then qualifies his statement by saying that Ibermedia “with all its defects and shortcomings has been the lifeline of film production in different countries of the region.”135 So which is it? Is Ibermedia keeping Latin American film alive, is it crushing it beneath the weight of Spanish neoimperialism, or is it unimportant? Before we decide, it is worth getting a sense of the scope of its funding. Ibermedia loans for production, which are ideally to be repaid, are not to exceed $200,000 nor exceed 50% of the total budget.136 In 2008, Ibermedia distributed a total of $6.5 million and 25 coproductions. In its first ten years of existence Ibermedia supported the production of about 250 films, an average of 25 per year.137 So in practical terms we are not talking about excessive resources. Despite ­ the fact that we often hear that the reason Spain is investing “heavily” in Latin American cinema is so that it can have content for European release, those numbers don’t quite match up. Gustavo Buquet explains that between 2000 and 2009 there were 311 Latin American films released in the European Union.138 Spain screened 237 of these films,

102  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 2.1  Latin American films released in Europe, 2000–2009. Source Data extracted from Buquet, “Inserción internacional del cine latinoamericano”a

Argentina Brazil Mexico Cuba Chile

Total films

Nationally funded

Spain-coproduced

Ibermedia-funded

148 58 59 24 31

34 22 13 0 7

84 0 23 15 7

29 5 12 10 1

aGustavo Buquet, “Inserción internacional del cine latinoamericano en mercados de la Unión Europea,” in Estudio de producción y mercados del cine latinoamericano en la primera década del siglo XXI, ed. Octavio Getino (Habana, Cuba: Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, 2012), 185–197, accessed January 7, 2017, http://cinelatinoamericano.org/assets/docs/Cuaderno%207%20WEB.pdf.

an average of 24 per year. Of these, 86 were nationally funded films and the rest were coproductions, most of them with Spain.139 Of note is the fact that the films that were most successful were coproduced with the United States, not solely with Spain. Examples of these films were Babel (2006) and El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006). But here’s the real catch: Buquet shows that Ibermedia-funded films are not really the bulk of Latin American films that reach Europe—a fact that upends the idea that Ibermedia is making films that dominate the way that Europeans, especially Spaniards, think about Latin America.140 (See Table 2.1). Ibermedia funded 167 of the films in the period studied by Buquet. Of these, only 47 actually circulated beyond the country of origin. Falicov notes that one of the other criticisms of Ibermedia has been favoring production support over distribution. The fund only allocates 30% toward supporting distribution. She details the development of Ibermedia TV (2010) as a response to this crisis.141 Of course, the irony is that if these films are not distributed and, when they are, they are not seen outside of the country of origin, it certainly begs the question of whether they are playing a major role in creating a pan-Hispanic or transnational Hispanic identity. These same concerns relate to a cluster of film support agencies that pair a European partner with a Latin American film project. While each of these initiatives has significant differences, they all share a model where a film project from a “developing” nation receives funding and technical support from a European benefactor. Four noteworthy

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examples of these projects are the Hubert Bals fund (founded in 1989), which is connected to the Rotterdam Film Festival and calls for films to have a Dutch Partner; the World Cinema Fund (founded in 2004), which requires a German partner; SØRFOND (founded in 2011), which stipulates a Norwegian partner; and Aide aux cinémas du monde (founded in 2012, replacing Fonds Sud created 1984), which calls for a French partner. Again, as with Ibermedia, it would be easy to focus on all of the patronizing and insulting ways that these film funds purport to “save” projects from the global south. But at heart these funds exemplify the deep ambivalences produced in the era of globalized media. They are a valuable resource for small film industries that are struggling to survive, while they also reinforce core–periphery models. These exact tensions are present in the commentaries by filmmakers and film industry leaders from Latin America. In a piece in the Spanish newspaper El Diario on a Latin American film festival in Toulouse, Argentine filmmaker Efe Agüero explained that coproductions are the positive side of globalization and the only way to resist the US monopoly on the industry: “Las coproducciones son la única manera de resistir al monopolio mundial de EEUU y un aspecto positivo de la globalización” [Coproductions are the only way to resist the US world monopoly and a positive aspect of globalization].142 Similarly, the same piece cites Manoel Rangel, who emphasizes that the real hegemonic force in the film ­business is that of the United States. He expresses hope that the Media Mundus program, which encourages partnerships between European and third party countries, will offer further avenues for projects. While it is common to find filmmakers clamoring for more state support, there is a common thread that alliances between Latin America and Europe are valuable ways to help fend off Hollywood domination. But in most of the cases described here, there is more to it. These funds are seeking to “develop” underdeveloped film cultures and their practices follow many of the same types of errors of benevolent altruism that have shaped the European relationship to the global south. In the absence of local support, the European caretakers sweep in with aid. Unlike Ibermedia, which has an uneasy relationship to producing a pan-Hispanic identity but which in the end funds films in relation to contributions from member states, these Euro-altruistic funds explicitly reinforce the idea that film projects from Latin America need European subventions to exist. The funds reenact all that is wrong with the global economy while also attempting to work beyond those dynamics. Each of these funds

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emphasizes the creative benefits of cross-national collaboration as well as the need to pair Europeans with more industry experience with those of the global south in need of further training, capital, and expertise. The German World Cinema Fund “works to develop and support cinema in regions with a weak film infrastructure, while fostering cultural ­diversity in German cinemas. The World Cinema Fund supports films that could not be made without additional funding: films that stand out with an unconventional aesthetic approach, that tell powerful stories and transmit an authentic image of their cultural roots.”143 The French Aide aux cinémas du monde “chooses the projects based on their artistic quality, their ability to present different points of view and new ideas to the general public, as well as the relative weakness of the foreign professional network on which the projects would depend.”144 It is interesting to note the pattern where these funds emphasize a commitment to cultural diversity while also acknowledging that they ­ exist to support projects with weaker film industry infrastructure. It is hard to avoid seeing these projects as paternalistic efforts to counteract the legacies of colonial cultural imbalances. The Norwegian SØRFOND emphasizes the fact that its goal is to support film as a form of artistic expression and a source of identity and community. One main goal is to strengthen film as a diverse form of creative expression. They explain that they “have recognised that it is difficult for filmmakers in developing countries to realise film projects that are locally based, despite the great demand for such productions. Filmmakers in developing countries have the need for both production capital and international professional networks.”145 They also explain “the purpose of SØRFOND grants is to stimulate the production of films in developing countries where such production is limited by political or economic causes.”146 All film projects selected must come from a list of developing economy countries. In a self-assessment of the success of the fund, fund organizers concede that “a support scheme of this kind will always be at risk of propping up Eurocentric attitudes.”147 They note two worries, in particular. First, that the panel that assesses these projects has the uncomfortable task of determining what is “authentic.” Second, they note that the fund is designed to encourage filmmakers to develop projects on “local or national” topics, a move that limits their ability to make films with a more “universal” or a more commercial angle. They recognize fully that their fund might support marginal cinemas but also

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implements policies that ghettoize. It’s valuable to note, then, that those operating these funds are by no means naïve about their limits and flaws. The fund that has received the most attention as an “altruistic” European source of support for Latin American projects is Hubert Bals (HBF), which is connected to the Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR). It is the longest running and the most robust. Between 1998 and 2010 the fund supported 900 cinema projects.148 Given its longer run as an “altruistic” festival-connected source of funding, many scholars have wondered if Hubert Bals fosters “poverty porn,” since so often the films supported depict the “developing” world as a place of poverty, crime, and violence. Ross notes that one of the icky consequences of Hubert Bals support is the way that the films are promoted to emphasize their country of origin: “Press releases from HBF and the IFFR highlight the Latin American country attached to the film, and in this way downplay transnational elements that are involved in the film’s production. This emphasis on a ‘developing country’ identity is reconfirmed by the need for filmmakers to work explicitly within their national space.”149 Films selected by Hubert Bals were to be “original, authentic and rooted in the culture of the applicant’s country.”150 However, the 2017 ­competition states that they are rethinking those criteria.151 Ross explains that one real limit of the Hubert Bals films is the fact that they may have transnational funding but they depend on national or local content. ­ Even worse, the national images depicted often confirm the worst in the European audience member’s imaginary and reaffirm expectations that the third world is undeveloped and unstable. She mentions one example, Argentine Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, Cigarettes, 1998), a film that centers on a group of marginalized and impoverished youth. Another Hubert Bals film is Pablo Trapero’s Mundo grúa (Crane World, 1999), a film that allows for similar stereotyping. It’s worth noting, though, that these films are two of the most important films of the New Argentine Cinema—and they are each the first works of two Argentine directors who continue to play a major role in the rejuvenated Argentine film scene. These funds have literally helped launch careers. Alternatively, as with Ibermedia, it is common for these funds to support films that might not really need this sort of boost, thereby reinforcing the idea that these funds are often more show than substance. In one ­example, Lucía Puenzo’s film about the Nazi doctor, Mengele, living in Patagonia, Wakolda (The German Doctor, 2013), got funding from the national

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Argentine INCAA, Ibermedia, SØRFOND, Aide aux cinémas du monde, the Spanish government, and Spanish TVE, among other sources. It was the third feature for Puenzo, who is the daughter of Luis Puenzo, one of the few Argentines to win an Academy Award. While the film is stunning and artfully intense, it is hard to think of it as a film that exemplifies the category of “weakness” that these agencies tend to value. Two other funding bodies attempt to move out of the developing/ developed dynamic. Cine en Construcción and the Global Film Initiative were both founded in 2002. Cine en Construcción is a joint initiative by the San Sebastián International Film Festival and Rencontres de Toulouse that aims to facilitate the completion of Latin American feature films. The fund is aimed solely at the post-production stage. Rather than only offer funds, Cine en Construcción sets up a twice-yearly meeting between filmmakers and industry professionals. While they offer funds, the key to this initiative is that filmmakers screen films to professionals who offer tips on how to edit the film for a successful release. This may mean encouraging a filmmaker to cut a film to a standard length, but these industry “tips” are by no means limited to a north–south dynamic. The Global Film Initiative is US based. It gives grants to filmmakers but it also supports a traveling feature-length film series. With board members such as Lita Stantic, Carlos Reygadas, and Pedro Almodóvar, the Global Film Initiative hopes “to spread the organisation’s message of cross-cultural understanding” and to introduce US audiences to the “rich texture of life” offered by international films.152 The program director explains the project this way: “‘We’ll go out and support filmmakers and filmmaking communities around the world by giving them grants to produce their films . . . and afterward we will bring those films here into the United States and give them a platform by which we can have some better vision of the world as a whole, look at ourselves as a group of people rather than as us and them or East versus West or American versus Mexican. That was the general idea.’”153 But do these projects develop a sense of a common human culture or do they reinforce otherness? Ross explains: “HBF is an undeniably useful resource for filmmakers from Latin America, but the criteria attached to the fund mean that it is hard to escape the view that third-world c­ ountries are producing cultural artefacts for their first-world benefactors.”154 The reality is that these funds are caught in the deep contradiction that wealthy nations are investing, supporting, and developing the film ­culture of “weaker” nations. With protectionist economies and state-funded

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support of the arts on the decline in the neoliberal era, it is not surprising that these bodies have sprung up to offer alternative forms of support. Given the fact that in many cases these funds themselves get state s­ upport from Europe, it remains impressive that these resources continue in the neoliberal economy of privatization and corporatization. These sorts of fragmented and imperfect sources of support are the logical consequence of deregulation and privatization. And while they carry with them the marks of neoimperalism and they further all that is wrong with altruism, they are also always evolving in their efforts to respond to charges of paternalism. While they remain tied to the global imbalance of power, it is worth remembering that they carve out a valuable space for non-­ commercialized, non-Hollywood cinema. The next section will look at the other side of coproduction—cofinancing by big business. As we grasp the full extent of corporate investment in producing global Latin American cinema, we may well find ourselves nostalgic for these funds.

Foreign Investment; or, the Global Taken for the Local If the examples highlighted above seem to create overdetermined ­markers of nation, where the “developing” country is on parade and the developed one congratulates itself for its altruism, the examples in this section erase almost all signs of coproduction influence. What’s more, we will see that when we compare the impact of altruistic funding and ­scholarly attention to that funding, the numbers are wildly out of sync. The altruistic and multilateral coproductions are a small drop in the bucket in comparison with the commercial side of foreign investment in the Latin American film industry. The curious outcome of studying these two types of investment comparatively is that the scholarship focuses almost entirely on Spanish investment (both commercial and “artistic”) and on the European film funds. For those of us studying the effects of globalization on the film industry and on the production of ­identity, this disparity is noteworthy. It overestimates the continued colonial structures of power in the global era and misses the reality that capital investment in the cultural production of Latin America is ­increasingly untethered from traditional geographic models of power. But, as this section will show, studying the purely financial side of coproduction ­ does not yield the expected story of capitalist malfeasance. While it’s true that the investments are expected to yield profits and to reinforce the power of the multinational corporation doing the investing, the content

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expectations can and do surprise. Thus, as with the section above, it is wise to avoid quick conclusions on the ethics of these arrangements. The continuing trend is a deep ambivalence brought on by the realities of how the millennial global economy has affected the film industry. While foreign investment in the Latin American culture industry has a long history, the global era brings significant changes. With the drop in trade barriers, local subsidies, and other forms of state protection, foreign access to local markets has exponentially increased. One of the key changes has been new laws and regulations—or the lack thereof—that have opened the gates for foreign investment. In an article on conglomerate Hollywood’s strategy of flexible localization for the global market, Courtney Brannon Donoghue focuses on the role of the Japanese multinational corporation subsidiary of Sony in Brazil. She points out that the 1990s signaled the era when local film production decreased to zero as state-supported film mechanisms were removed: “In the following years, the Brazilian congress passed key legislation to alleviate these audiovisual funding problems, namely Lei do Audiovisual (Audiovisual Law, Lei Federal No. 8.685/93). The law’s article 3 operates as a mechanism of investment and encourages film coproduction. . . . Specifically, article 3 permits foreign distributors with local subsidiaries, such as Sony or Warner Bros., to invest up to 70% of their local taxed income from their English-language products in Brazilian independent audiovisual projects.”155 Brannon Donoghue explains that the law increased privatized investment in Brazilian cinema, which led to a retomada [rebirth] of national cinema, with thirty to fifty films annually. This example from Brazil was replicated across the region as free-­ market policies replaced state support for the culture industries. The result was a rush of foreign direct investment that often was hidden behind what seemed to be local production. What’s more, the presence of these investors often appeared to be “silent.” Thus, unlike the film funds described above, there were no overt rules about which projects would get support. As Sylvia Harvey explains in the introduction to Trading Culture, “the concept of ‘foreign’ cultural commodities has changed in the post-colonial period.”156 She further points out that “in response to the development of trade barriers or of local subsidies to cultural ­producers—designed by national governments to enhance their d ­ omestic cultural industries—powerful foreign investors have entered into either international co-productions or other forms of local investment, and this has masked the location from which control of content may have come.”157

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But as we will see, the content for these coproduced films is not easily categorized. Foreign investment has zero interest in marketing a homogenous culture and the varieties of cultural production it invests in do vary widely. Even in the example of Hollywood investment the picture is complex. As the majors have opened international production divisions across the globe, their goals have largely been to develop a local—and lucrative—film market. As Ali Jaafar writes in Variety, some of these projects are remakes of Hollywood films in a local idiom, but all of the companies “emphasize that they are looking for pics that click in specific territories as opposed to generic titles that may travel.”158 He quotes Christian Grass, head of Focus Features International, owned by Universal, as saying: “It’s a global business now. . . . There is no clear distinction anymore between domestic and international.” Then there’s the insights of Jason Reed, executive VP of Walt Disney Studios motion picture production, who is heading Disney projects in a number of non-US locations: “Just look at India. . . . You have an 80% market share for local content. Indians like their own stories. Just doing a Hindi version of ‘Enchanted’ doesn’t translate into success. We really want to emphasize the localization element.”159 Unlike the idea of the “glocal” where the global is locally inflected, many of these projects are totally local: the only “sign” of the global is the money. Because tracing the patterns of foreign investment in Latin American film production is a story that changes on a daily basis, this section attempts to give an overview of the types of patterns of these ­connections. I’ll cover a series of examples of foreign money flowing into the Latin American film industry—most of it entirely invisible to the untrained eye. As we will see, what makes this pattern of c­ oproduction especially interesting from the perspective of the cultural effects of the global era is that these funds often go directly toward developing a heightened sense of the success of the local industry. While much of the profits go back to the foreign backers, the investors take the money but not necessarily the glory. This pattern follows the neoliberal model where investment is entirely about profit and less obviously about cultural image making. The only image to protect is the image of capitalist ­success. In the era of millennial globalization, people and politicians may need a national identity, but transnational corporations and financial investments don’t. There’s another side to this story, though. While foreign investment seeks profit, it can be the case that the local productions appropriate

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foreign capital and use it on their own terms. If one postcolonial model for resistance follows the idea of Caliban learning the master’s language to curse him, then in the neoliberal era we need to read this through the reality that the language of the master is money itself. Thus, when local producers take the money of foreign investors to curse the neoliberal system, they offer us a revised version of the Caliban ­strategy. The local is used to further generate capital for the foreign investor, but local producers use that capital to generate cultural productions that would otherwise not exist. Even more important, it is often the case that the most significant political films from the region have funding from a foreign multinational. Thus, in a modernized twist on colonial relations of power, there is mutual appropriation. Following the overall thesis of this book, this section will show that overarching definitions of “good” and “bad” coproduction practices can’t be mapped easily onto ­traditional categories. They have to be assessed case by case. I’ll begin with the example I used in the introduction of this book, Pantelion Films, since it’s an example that inverts many assumptions. Pantelion was created in 2010 as a partnership between Mexican multimedia corporation Televisa and Canadian Lionsgate. It is based in California and its goal is to produce movies aimed at Latino audiences—one of the fastest growing sectors of the economy.160 In 2009, “37 million [US] Hispanic moviegoers bought 300 million tickets . . . a per-moviegoer rate of more than eight tickets a year, the highest of any ethnic group.”161 Pantelion is not the first Hollywood-based company to market to a Latino audience: previous efforts included a project between Gregory Nava and New Line Cinema, Universal tried and gave up in 2003, Samuel Goldwyn Films gave it a shot and failed with Tortilla Soup in 2001. Variety reports that “at the time, Meyer Gottlieb, Samuel Goldwyn’s president, told The Los Angeles Times, ‘When it comes to filmed entertainment, they don’t view themselves as Latinos. They want to see it because everybody else wants to see it.’”162 The founders of Pantelion rejected that idea of ethnic identity “cleansing” and maintained that moviegoers do indeed like to see films where their cultural identity is represented. Emilio Azcárraga Jean, CEO of Grupo Televisa explained the idea for Pantelion this way: “‘If we tell emotionally resonant stories and explore the roots of Spanishspeaking people, there is a very attractive opportunity here. . . . People like to see themselves represented on the screen.’”163 Because Pantelion was able to secure exhibition deals with three main movie exhibitors (Regal Entertainment, AMC Cinema, and Cinemark), which together

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represent over 50% of US movie screens, they had an immediate edge on the market for their product. Even though the idea for the company was to produce content that moved past stereotypes, the company’s first film From Prada to Nada (2011), which tells the story of two wealthy Latinas who have to learn to live modestly, didn’t really get beyond superficial images. But the film was successful at the box office and it began a pattern for the ­company that continues today. This was the context for the largest box office success for a Spanish-language film in US history—the comedy, No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included, 2013), which grossed $44.4 million in the United States and $85 million worldwide.164 As the company grew in success it followed the traditional path of diversification. Next it began to release films in English, then it moved into animation with Un gallo con muchos huevos (Huevos: Little Rooster’s Egg-cellent Adventure, 2015). Even though its production company is US based, the film is considered to be the first example of a “Mexican” animated feature enjoying a wide release in the US market. It also topped the charts when it was released within Mexico. With a production budget just over $5 million, its worldwide gross was $25.6 million. Pantelion also acts as a US distributor for films they acquire, such as Casa de mi Padre ([House of my father], 2012) with Will Ferrell, which was the studio’s highest grossing title to that point with a $5.9 domestic box office total. Shot in Spanish, the film was described as “‘homage to classic westerns and telenovelas.’”165 And with Ferrell basically reading lines in Spanish he couldn’t completely understand, it became a great example of the odd ways that globalization has adjusted Hollywood identities. To make the language-play even odder, Ferrell’s love interest in the film, Genesis Rodríguez, explained that Ferrell often managed the Mexican accent better than she did, since she is Cuban-Venezuelan. She explained that it was actually “confusing for me, because he really dominated the cadence of the Mexican accent. . . . I’m Cuban-Venezuelan, so I had to change my speech in that sort of way, because I played a Mexican part. So for someone who does not dominate the language and does not really understand what he’s saying, to pinpoint that sing-song way of saying things is extremely impressive.”166 It’s also a sign of how neoliberal globalization fosters the performance of identity rather than its meaningful representation. Working the labor market created by NAFTA, much of the work for Pantelion Films is done south of the border. Even though the

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target market has been US Latinos, most of the films have been made in Mexico, replicating a labor structure that has often hurt the very viewers watching the films. As Variety explains, “tapping Mexican incentives is also key to Pantelion’s low-budget strategy, with most of its releases sporting budgets of around $3 million each.”167 But the production company has no deep affection for Mexican labor; it will film in other locales if it can save money. Another of their films, Ladrones ([Thieves], 2015), was one of two films “shot in the Dominican Republic under a multipicture deal with Lantica Media, formerly Indomina,” which takes advantage of the Caribbean nation’s “generous film incentives and makes use of the Pinewood Dominican Republic Studios.”168 Pantelion’s most recent success story points to its increasing mastery of the global media industry. Its most recent film, No manches Frida ([No way, Frida], 2016) opened to the third highest box office numbers in Mexican history. It will next be rolled out in a 12-country staggered release in Central and South America. The film is no surprise content-­ wise: It is a story about a criminal who poses as a substitute teacher to try to recover money buried beneath a school. Critics have referred it to as an “insipid comedy.”169 And one review attacked the film for “an extremely vulgar sense of humor where women are target of mockery, body-shamed and presented as dumb, bimbos or prostitutes.”170 The film reinforces the idea that movies made outside of the Hollywood majors system don’t necessarily have any positive content. It also reminds us that cultural production funded by Mexicans has no necessary link to positive images of Mexicans. It certainly reinforces the idea that funding from within Mexico may not necessarily be preferable to funding from a Spanish-funded agency like Ibermedia. If we were to compare the films made by Pantelion to those funded by Ibermedia, we would have to conclude that in the aggregate there is literally no comparison between the representational quality of the films each body supports. But there’s even more to the story of No manches Frida. The film is actually a remake of a German film, Fack ju Göhte (Suck Me Shakespeer, 2013). Should we read this as a Hollywood remake? Or a Latin American one? While such questions may be of interest to scholars of cultural globalization, it is clear that issues of identity are of no interest to the industry insiders. As the German producer of the film explained, “Local product is now taking huge market shares. It is easier to produce a local remake and the potential is higher in revenue terms than a German-language movie could ever have. This is a success story for everyone and it’s not stopping yet.”171 That, of course, is the point. It is

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not a success story for everyone, even if it is marketed that way. The case of Pantelion shows us a pattern where the geographies of p ­ roduction may be shifting and the audience market changes, but the reality is that most of these films are just superficial Hollywood-style fare blended with Mexican telenovela stereotypes marketed as fluff entertainment for a Spanish-speaking audience. What makes Pantelion different is that it is an incursion into the US market from the culturally weaker NAFTA partners. It is a sign that in the era of millennial globalization the ­ ­traditional winners and losers in the free market are shifting. My next example returns us to the neocolonial framework through the example of Telefónica, Spain’s largest multinational company and the fourth largest in Europe. Because production investment in feature films is often aimed at eventual release on television or internet portals, there are a whole host of television networks with interests in the Latin American film industry. I covered a bit about the role of TVE above, but I only scratched the surface. For instance, TVE owns 25% of Vía Digital, a digital pay-television platform, which entered the market in September 1997. Vía Digital became an important investor in Spanish film production, providing $54,000,000 over a four-year period—a sum that dwarfs the production support offered by Ibermedia. But here’s the catch: The ­principal shareholder of Vía Digital is Telefónica Media, which holds all of Telefónica’s communications assets and audiovisual services (production, ownership, distribution, and broadcasting) in the Spanish- and Portuguesespeaking market.172 Telefónica is also Spain’s largest phone operator and the leading provider of telecom services in that market. Telefónica promotes the idea that it is helping to support and develop the Spanish language through media. For instance, it signed a $30 million deal with Spain’s Cervantes Institute to help foster the Spanish language.173 As Hoefert de Turégano explains, “Telefónica’s strategy of multimedia convergence should be some cause for concern given their control of communications networks and their aspiration to control content. Of course the United States is undoubtedly still the hegemonic power in Latin America; however, Spain is strategically positioning itself, using the inherent advantages it has in that market, with an eye toward long term benefit.”174 Hoefert de Turégano points out that the story of Telefónica’s involvement in Latin American media is the other side of the story to Ibermedia, which invests to support art cinema and protect a niche market. Telefónica’s involvement reveals the role of privatization, deregulation, media convergence, and commercialization. It may be protecting the Spanish language but it is doing so through the logic of the neoliberal market.

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In fact, researching the various business deals of Telefónica suggests that it is profit over some sort of commitment to Spanish language and culture that drives its business. Telefónica has partnered with virtually all of the major media organizations in Latin America and it has also developed deals with Hollywood companies. The most noteworthy example is Telefónica’s investment alongside that of Disney in Patagonik, a production company co-owned with Argentina’s Grupo Clarín. Between 1996 and 2000, Telefónica and Disney (through Buena Vista) proved that making films in Latin America could be profitable. Patagonik coproduced such internationally successful films as Evita (1996), Cenizas del Paraíso (Ashes of Paradise, 1997), El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001), and Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, 2000). Villazana considers Patagonik to be an example of a hegemonic production house due to the combined investments of Disney and Telefónica and the fact that Patagonik films have also received Ibermedia support: “The configuration of Patagonik is exemplary of the aforementioned battle between Europe—especially Spain—and the United States to dominate the Latin American market. However, this is a friendly battle—as demonstrated by the case of Patagonik—thanks to the presence of Buena Vista International and Telefónica Media. It seems that there is a concealed partnership between Ibermedia and Patagonik.”175 Villazana rightly points out that technically Patagonik films should not compete for Ibermedia funds since these are supposed to be earmarked for independent production companies, not projects linked to a Hollywood major. While Villazana has a good point about Ibermedia’s support of Patagonik films, the story of Patagonik is far more complex. Apart from the five films she identifies as unfairly receiving Ibermedia funds, the production company has been instrumental in reviving the Argentine film industry. It has released a series of films that have been of extremely high quality and have had high aesthetic values as well. While Patagonik also released a local version of High School Musical,176 which was both awful and clearly a consequence of Disney investment, many of its films are some of the best examples of a commercial-friendly, yet aesthetically rich, new era in Argentine cinema. A major reason for this, as will be discussed further in the chapter in Part II dedicated to Argentina (Chap. 5), is the connection between Patagonik and Pablo Trapero—a director that emerged as part of the New Argentine Cinema with his first feature, Mundo grúa (Crane World,

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1999). Beginning with Leonera (Lion’s Den, 2008), Trapero made three major films with Patagonik, all of which took up significant social issues within a more mainstream aesthetic. Leonera focused on the story of an incarcerated mother—a social justice issue that was not uniquely limited to the case of Argentina but that raised important issues while not being overbearing and didactic in its treatment of the problem. The ­second film Carancho ([Vulture], 2010) delves into the dark side of i­njuries from traffic accidents. There are 8,000 deaths and 120,000 people injured on Argentinian roads annually.177 But rather than take this up in a morally heavy way, the film approaches the problem by focusing on two marginalized figures: an ambulance chaser and a nurse who has to work extra shifts to make ends meet. The third film, Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012), follows two priests and a social worker who work in a marginalized slum in Buenos Aires. The film’s title refers to a ­hospital project that never was completed, leaving a trail of corruption and the empty husk of a building. The empty building serves in the film as a symbol for corruption and its production of misery, but the symbolism avoids being overly heavy-handed, focusing equally on the challenges of the “outsiders” as on those of the community. Trapero’s films with Patagonik were examples of a more commercial aesthetic that takes up serious issues in a way that is nuanced and complex. Juan José Campanella also produced El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001) with Patagonik, which was nominated for an Oscar. The irony was that the film was nominated as an Argentine film even though more than half of the funds that made the film came from outside of Argentina. Thus, it also shows another way that millennial globalization has complicated traditional geographies of power. The film also does a good job of straddling a highly personal story of a son dealing with a midlife crisis and a mother with Alzheimer’s against a story of the way that foreign capital is affecting Argentine local businesses. The common thread among these films is an aesthetically pleasing narrative that blends a personal relationship with a larger social concern. These films connect highly Argentine stories with tales that reveal the impact of the global economy. So while it would be convenient to dismiss Patagonik as nothing more than a shill for multinational media investment, there is more to the story. These films are an excellent example of a way that foreign investment can be appropriated to support sophisticated and meaningful “local” culture.

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The odd catch is that Telefónica’s capitalist investment can’t be connected in any clear way to certain types of content. While the story of Patagonik is mixed, where foreign investment has led to both fluff films as well as those of national significance, Telefónica has also invested in projects that participate fully in the Hollywood model. In 2000, Telefónica announced its $100 million investment plan in IberoAmerican coproductions. The announcement was then followed by a pan-regional merger with Disney through a new production company, Miravista.178 Miravista was conceived of as a project to locally produce films and TV programs with worldwide appeal and it landed coproduction deals in Mexico, Brazil, and Chile. Diego Lerner, Disney’s CEO for Latin America, explained that the partnership with Telefónica was “because of the company’s dominant position in telecommunications in the region and its control over different platforms across Latin America.”179 As the neoliberal era led to incentive laws across the region, Disney sought to take advantage of these benefits to produce films at lower costs. Gabriela Martínez explains that Disney was able to produce films in the region for an average of $1.5–2 million in 2002. The partnership with Miravista was a way to take advantage of these favorable production circumstances. Martínez also explains that Disney’s investment in Miravista allowed them to invest “in local talent to ­create quasi-local productions” and generate “good regional revenues.”180 While it would be easy to see these projects as an appropriation of cheap local talent, as will be explained in the concluding chapter of this book on runaway productions, it is generally true that the wages received by local talent on these types of projects exceed wage levels on entirely local-funded projects. But the benefits of Miravista are not only limited to creating local jobs; some of the films were actually highly significant examples of ways that these partnerships can move beyond standard Hollywood formulas. For instance, O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation, 2006) was nominated for an Academy Award representing Brazil. Similar to the Argentine film Infancia clandestina (Clandestine Childhood, 2011), the film focuses on the ways that military repression affects the lives of children. The film takes place during the military government in Brazil in 1970 and tells the story of a boy who must try to survive while his parents are detained. The protagonist, Mauro, is taken in by his father’s Jewish community after the grandfather suddenly dies the day he arrives to stay with him. The film delves into a number of complex identity issues and certainly

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is another example of a way that multinational funds have been used to produce films of significance. Miravista’s films are examples of what are called “local-language productions” or LLPs in industry lingo. Brannon Donoghue explains that “local-language productions (LLPs) are a fairly recent phenomenon of the conglomerate Hollywood era, during which cross-media and cross-­ company convergence as well as increased importance of international markets have shaped the post-1989 period.”181 These LLPs are a visible sign of the way that capitalism doesn’t care about borders. In a 2009 article in Variety, the executive VP of Warner International Richard Fox highlighted the significant growth of these efforts: “We entered this business in 1999 in just two markets, handling just four local productions. . . . This year we’re scheduled to handle 44 films in 12 countries, with a total of over 210 to date, so you get a sense of how the business has grown.”182 Frank Rose points out, though, that a lot of these transitions were due to the fact that US pop culture was not able to conquer the global market in ways that multimedia corporations desired. They realized that they needed to “think globally, script locally.”183 As Rose explains, “This wasn’t part of Hollywood’s plan, of course: The world was supposed to keep consuming Baywatch episodes as eagerly as it does Big Macs and (at least until recently) Cokes. But as the studios morphed into global entertainment conglomerates, with cable and satellite operations and music and publishing interests the world over, they started to discover something no one ever expected: a limit to the appeal of American pop culture—just as the international market became crucial.”184 While the idiom of the major blockbuster continues to be English, the majors now realize that there is a lot of profit to be made in lower-budget films for local markets. This realization that there is a limit to the amount of Hollywood blockbuster fare a given audience will tolerate has also opened the window not just to films in local languages, but also to projects with local aesthetics. The one constant is Hollywood majors are looking to be the ones to reap the profits—but now those profits come from both the global and the local. Rose explains that Hollywood hides within the local as well, but that this shift does not change its control of the industry: “Hollywood, with its vast corporate resources, can call the shots in both tiers.”185 For example, Focus Features International has largely concentrated on Europe, Latin America, and Asia, including deals with Cha Cha Cha (the joint venture of Mexican directors Guillermo del Toro,

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Alfonso Cuarón, and Alejandro González Iñárritu), Russia’s Timur Bekmambetov and Brazil’s Fernando Meirelles. Universal’s first project in its deal with Mexican production company Cha Cha Cha, Rudo y cursi (2008) became the third highest grossing Mexican film of all time at the country’s box office.186 The film, while adopting a silly comedic mode, tells an interesting story about the lure of the material as it follows two half-brothers that acquire fame and fortune playing soccer. Perhaps more importantly, the film, directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s brother Carlos, seemed quintessentially Mexican, yet largely profited a Hollywood major. In 2009, Jaafar reported that: • Sony has projects in development in Russia, India, China, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, India, and the UK. • Warner Bros. is mixing acquisitions—many just for specific international territories—alongside self-funded and self-produced ­ local-language pics. Germany, Japan, and India are at the forefront of the studio’s plans, although it also has pics in the pipeline elsewhere. • Fox is targeting Japan, Brazil, Russia, and India. • Disney is concentrating on areas including Russia, China, and India.187 While this is largely a story of Hollywood market expansion it has unexpected consequences. Sanford Panitch, head of Fox International, explained that “we’re finding talent at an embryonic stage. . . . Some of the most exciting filmmakers now are in the international arena. The modern director today makes good films in any language.”188 While the idea of Hollywood majors “gestating” talented directors is clearly offensive, the reality is that these directors welcome the support and funds in a market reality that leaves them with few options. Six years later, Panitch would head over to Sony to lead the same initiatives for them, where he would reiterate that his goal was not to simply flatten out aesthetic styles. Despite those assurances he makes it clear that he considers these film projects as “resources” he can mine for profit, thereby replicating colonialist ideology: “It’s not about remaking Hollywood films. . . . It’s about organically sourcing local material.”189 One of the oldest examples of this sort of initiative is Sony do Brasil, previously known as Columbia Pictures do Brasil. Brannon Donoghue explains that since the 1950s Columbia Pictures had maintained a historical position in partnering with local companies to produce projects.

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But she argues that it was only in the 1990s that Sony had developed a consistent coproduction effort that became part of the local-language production strategy. She explains that following the case of Sony do Brasil we can appreciate how the Brazilian film industry “has undergone a pivotal restructuring from a nationally focused, state-supported enterprise to a more globalized, commercialized, incentive-driven system.”190 Sony do Brasil has been one of the key players in foreign investment in the local industry, producing about 2 to 3 films annually. But its involvement has been far more significant than one might imagine: it has been behind more than half of the popular and commercially successful local films released since the 2000s. Some of the films include: Deus é brasileiro (God Is Brazilian, 2003), Carandiru (2003), Cazuza: O Tempo Não Pára (Cazuza: Time Doesn’t Stop, 2004), and Dois filhos de Francisco (Two Sons of Francisco, 2005). Brannon Donoghue explains the centrality of Sony this way: “Since Sony do Brasil was the only filmed entertainment division of a transnational media conglomerate producing LLPs, it had complete control of the selection of projects and the flexibility to move into development.”191 As a sign of its ability to profit from the production of the local, in 2004, Sony do Brasil made more than 45% of its revenue from local productions. Given the enormous market share occupied by Sony do Brasil, it has had to answer the question of whether or not its presence in Brazil is a further sign of Hollywood hegemony. In 2007, Sony’s chief executive officer Michael Lynton wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal titled, “Globalization and Cultural Diversity,” where he defended Sony’s expansion of English-language media and localizing strategies, arguing that these twin activities “are not signs of Hollywood’s homogenizing effect on the world. They are signs of the world changing the way Hollywood works. It makes sense to marry our production, marketing, and distribution experience with the growing global appetite for entertainment tailor-made by and for a variety of cultures.”192 Lynton’s protests about Hollywood’s control are easy to reject, given that he is a mouthpiece for a Hollywood giant, but the films that Sony has been behind do tell a complicated story. Hector Babenco’s Carandiru, for instance, can hardly be dismissed as nothing but a vehicle for Hollywood profit. The film is a highly sophisticated retelling of the massacre at the Carandiru prison and, given the fact that it was directed by a well-regarded political filmmaker, it also serves as an example of how to merge a political film with commercial success. So while Lynton

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and his cronies might tout their investment in Brazil as an example of the celebratory side of globalization, it is not clear that they are entirely wrong. Brannon Donoghue points out that if we analyze these foreign investments purely from an economic and corporate institutional perspective the conclusions are clear: the “two-tier system furthers Hollywood’s historically hegemonic position.”193 The absence of local regulations limiting their investments has meant that Hollywood is in a position to expand its market share from 90% of the theatrical market to ­something close to 100%, a goal she notes was openly expressed by the Latin American head of the MPAA. She points out that “from the point of view of media scholars such as Miller and Wasko, Sony’s or Warner Bros.’ growing resources, expanding locations, and controlling media distribution across the globe continue to resemble earlier definitions of media imperialism.”194 I’d argue that evaluating this system requires more nuance. It is clear that these economic circumstances further Hollywood’s hegemonic control of film financing. But it isn’t clear that their involvement has severely limited local film production in terms of content. In fact, given its support of films like Carandiru, one could argue that it has enabled an ongoing tradition of politically meaningful cinema in Brazil. While the conventional narrative styles of these films might spark controversy for some critics, as I’ve explained previously in this chapter, it isn’t clear that these aesthetic transitions are the result of Hollywood hegemony or the rejection of the alienating tendencies of third cinema aesthetics. My last example really flips the model and describes the investment by an indie company, Participant Media, in a multilateral partnership with three Latin American production companies: Mexican Canana, Chilean Fabula, and Colombian Dynamo. Founded by Jeff Skoll in 2004, Participant Media focuses on documentary and n ­ on-documentary feature films, television, publishing, and digital content about “the real issues that shape our lives.” It describes itself as “the leading media company dedicated to entertainment that inspires and compels social change.”195 For each of its projects, Participant creates social action and advocacy programs to transform the impact of the media experience into individual and community action via a program called TakePart. Thus it tries to motivate an active transition from spectator to social agent. Some of Participant’s films include: The Kite Runner (2003), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Good Night, and Good Luck

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(2005), Food, Inc. (2009), The Cove (2009), Fair Game (1995), The Help (2011), Contagion (2011), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), Lincoln (2012), and Promised Land (2012). Without doubt Participant is offering a model for an alternative film production company that can reap success at the box office while raising attention to significant social issues. Mexican Canana productions was founded by Diego Luna, Gael García Bernal, and Pablo Cruz in 2005. It has also tried to be an innovative and socially meaningful source of media. In 2009, the ­ ­company launched Canana OnDemand, which is a digital distribution arm working with nine digital platforms in Latin America. They also launched Ambulante, which is Canana’s traveling d ­ocumentary film festival in Mexico. It has brought over 300 documentaries to ­communities across the country over the last seven years and received more than 100,000 admissions in its latest edition. Canana has also teamed up with “Hollywood film financing and sales company IM Global to found Mundial, a worldwide sales company focusing exclusively on Latin and Ibero-American cinema. Mundial provides a full service international distribution platform for Latin American filmmakers, handling sales on 8–10 pictures from across the region per year.”196 Thus the pairing of Participant with Canana seems to embody the very best of cross-national partnerships aimed at supporting socially significant content in a commercially accessible format. They recently partnered, for instance, on No (2012), the Chilean Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language film, which Canana distributed in Mexico, which told the story about the “no” campaign to oust Augusto Pinochet as dictator of Chile in 1989. The deal with Participant is a multi-year agreement to develop and finance Spanish-language films through Participant PanAmerica. And yet, echoing the desires of a major like Sony to expand its reach, Participant CEO Jim Berk said, “Participant PanAmerica enables us to increase our film output and expand our reach into the dynamic and fast growing Spanish-speaking market. By joining forces with Canana, Fabula and Dynamo, who are among the most accomplished production companies in their respective markets, we now have access to the region’s talent pool of fresh and highly creative filmmakers who are looking to explore important contemporary issues in exciting ways.”197 Berk’s ­language about expanding their market and increasing film production is almost identical to that of his Hollywood major competitors. But

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Canana’s CEO Julian Levin explains another angle of the partnership: “Outside of the studios Latin American films rarely have the o ­ pportunity to access this kind of equity and U.S. participation. Having c­reative partners on board, such as Participant, Fabula and Dynamo, who ­ ­understand the nature and demands of Latin American cinema is truly invaluable.”198 The point is that given the fact that films are expensive to make, filmmakers do seek to have more funds for higher production value—whether the film is about a prison massacre or a family vacation. Levin rightly acknowledges that as long as Latin American filmmakers have to create films on much lower budgets it hurts their competitive advantage to attract an audience. What makes the Participant foreign investment plan distinct from that of Sony is the company’s commitment to films of social significance and to creating an alternative to the fluff entertainment of most Hollywood movies. While it would be a mistake to see this as an alliance among equals, the reality is that this is the sort of cooperative agreement that acknowledges unequal access to capital while partnering in a film project with shared aesthetic goals. So what do we make of foreign investment in local film production? Is this simply a story of increased Hollywood hegemony? Have these investments destroyed local film culture? The answer is not simple. On the one hand, there is little doubt that these investments have increased the reach and power of the majors and other Hollywood firms. But the issue of whether these alliances have greatly affected content is trickier. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith points out in “Trade Wars, Culture Wars” that the parent company’s point of origin often has no discernible impact on the film produced. Sony buys Columbia and MGM, News Corp. buys Fox, and so on; “This has not led to Columbia mass-producing Japanese movies, or Universal French movies, or Fox a peculiar ­amalgam of Anglo-American-Australian movies appropriate to ownership by Rupert Murdoch. On the contrary these companies produce for the international market as they always did.”199 Add to that the reality that the media industry increasingly has powerful players from outside the traditional centers of power. Beyond the complicated role of Spain, we need to recognize the role of Japan’s Sony as well as China’s Wanda group. And it is a m ­ istake to dismiss the rising power of companies from within Latin America like Televisa and Globo. For Alvaray, “the intricate net of alliances and mergers among production companies in Europe, the United States, and Latin America have generated an ever-changing infrastructure that

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challenges the discursive and theoretical architectures over which Latin American cinemas have been conceptualized.”200 This section has shown that global capital has worked to develop Latin American film ­industries and it has profited from these projects, but how do we understand these developments in terms of the production of identity? Can we attach these changes to a measurable impact on national and regional i­dentities? There is no easy answer, but we can note a few key patterns. While it is true that the top films across the globe continue to be fairly constant, signifying a condensed media culture, there is now significant evidence to show that foreign capital does go directly to developing a sense of local identity. The overriding ideology of this relationship is profit— but beyond that there are few limits imposed. While the flow of capital ­troubles the practical realities and profit structures of national cinemas, the growing presence of a national industry attracting significant market share proves that neoliberal globalization disengages capital from identity.

Treaty Coproductions, Regional Alliances, and the Case of MERCOSUR The concluding section of this chapter looks at efforts to develop regional alliances and a common market through treaty coproductions in the MERCOSUR. Ever since the political manifestos of the NLAC, filmmakers have recognized that one of the great limits to developing a counter cinema to Hollywood in the region is the lack of a common market. Understood as both a way to develop import substitution and to offer an alternative trading block, these efforts focused on making it easier and more effective for films to cross borders within Latin America. Alvaray explains that when Hollywood imagined Latin America as one single market for export from the Golden Age of the 1940s through the 1970s, “the notion of an integrated continent was adopted by filmmakers and cinema activists in the 1960s and 1970s; in their case, unity was part of a political consciousness or the need to document injustices and inequalities overriding Latin American countries.”201 The late Argentine filmmaker and theorist Octavio Getino was one of the most vocal advocates for developing a regional film market and set of alliances. In 2007, he explained that this notion was not new: “Las tentativas de integración de las cinematografías latinoamericanas estuvieron presentes en numerosas declaraciones y acuerdos, suscritos entre nuestros

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países a lo largo de más de seis décadas” [The attempts to integrate the different cinemas of Latin America have been presented in numerous declarations and agreements, signed by our countries over the course of six decades].202 He refers to the 1931 Congreso Hispanoamericano in Madrid as the first effort to create regional agreements. He then points to the fact that it was not until 1989 in Caracas that Latin American nations agreed to integration, coproduction, and the development of a common market through the creation of CACI (Conferencia de Autoridades Cinematográficas de Iberoamerica), which administers Programa Ibermedia.203 And yet, as explained in the section above on Ibermedia, it is still the case that Ibermedia-funded films rarely cross borders within Latin America. Getino points out that in response to these failed efforts the MERCOSUR nations tried a different tack. MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur), or the Common Market of the South, was formed in 1991 out of a series of meetings that resulted in the “Tratado de Asunción” (Treaty of Asunción [Paraguay]) being signed by four South American nations: Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay. Today it also includes Venezuela. Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and Colombia are ­associated states.204 MERCOSUR arose out of a desire to e­stablish a common market as a response to growing global trends in trade. Responding to NAFTA and the EU, the nations of MERCOSUR imagined that they could create a stronger regional economy by creating an alternative trading bloc that could defend their local economies and develop a regional identity: The “alliance would assist in ­fostering economic, political, and cultural integration in the region to r­ealize ­ increased productivity and economic stability.”205 The early results showed significant success since with the “free trade zone,” the combined market for these countries amounted to more than 220 million p ­ eople and experienced 400% trade growth from 1990 to 1997.206 Falicov explains that MERCOSUR adapted the economic free trade zone of NAFTA and also modeled themselves after the EU “in terms of emphasizing the integration of the languages spoken in the region and bolstering cultural identities rather than ignoring differences.”207 Of course the idea of a unified region dates back to the era of independence in the nineteenth century and the theories of Simón ­ Bolívar, who sought to connect a “patria grande” across the region, and to Cuban José Martí, who wrote of “nuestra América.” While there has been a long history of developing pan-Latin American identity,

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in the global era of free trade economics, reduced trade barriers, and deregulation, a number of regional efforts developed to offer a regional alternative to the global system. The various regional alliances from MERCOSUR to ALBA (The Bolivarian Alliance, which links 11 nations) to CARICOM (the Caribbean community which links 20 states) have all sought to develop regional integration and offer an alternative to the power block of the WTO. But not all of these alliances have been equally committed to the idea of developing a common culture to go with a common market. ALBA, given its ties to left governments, ­ perhaps has taken the idea of a common Latin American consciousness most ­seriously. It funds the TV channel TeleSur, which states that its mission is to “desarrollar una nueva estrategia comunicacional para Latinoamérica. Una que promueva el derecho a la información y asuma la veracidad como principio. Una que estimule la producción, promoción y difusión de contenidos propios de la región, fomentando así el reconocimiento del imaginario latinoamericano” [develop a new communication ­strategy for Latin America. One that promotes the right to information and accepts truth as a principle. One that stimulates the production, promotion, and dissemination of regionally specific content, thereby encouraging recognition of the Latin American imagination].208 It has recently begun to promote cinema, with the first film festival dedicated to regional cinema launched in Bolivia in 2014. It is too soon to tell whether these efforts will yield productive results. Thus far the regional alliance most invested in developing a regional film market wholly within Latin America has been MERCOSUR. The coordination of cultural policies for MERCOSUR was an explicit feature of the Cultural Integration Protocol by the end of 1996, but that measure did not directly address the audiovisual industry. In 2003, the MERCOSUR nations created RECAM (La Reunión Especializada de Autoridades Cinematográficas y Audiovisuales del Mercosur [Special Meeting of Cinematic and Audiovisual Authorities of Mercosur]), with the goal of “crear un instrumento institucional para avanzar en el proceso de integración de las industrias cinematográficas y audiovisuales de la región” [creating an institutional tool to advance the process of integrating the cinematic and audiovisual industries of the region].209 The plan rests on three pillars: reciprocity, complementarity, and solidarity. Of their main goals they highlight a desire to implement policies that defend the cultural diversity of the region: “Garantizar el

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derecho del espectador a una pluralidad de opciones que incluyan especialmente expresiones culturales y audiovisuales del Mercosur” [to guarantee the spectator’s right to a plurality of options that especially include cultural and audiovisual expressions from MERCOSUR].210 Getino explains that these efforts came on the heels of the NAFTA agreements and he emphasizes the notion that one of the goals of MERCOSUR was the development of a “regional identity.”211 Grugel and Riggirozzi in Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America explain that MERCOSUR “came to represent an alternative vision of regionalism based on a combination of ‘Latinness’ and state-controlled market integration. . . . , [but] its vision of an alternative model of integration has dwindled over time.”212 Falicov studies the case of Uruguay under the film policy of MERCOSUR prior to the establishment of the RECAM, and points out that by 2002 the idea that MERCOSUR was creating a cultural trading bloc seemed like a failure. The economic reports were impressive with 72% growth from 1992 to 1997, but the cultural results were less inspiring. As Falicov notes “one finds that the situation has been more of a dream than actual material practice.”213 She faults the lack of success of developing an integrated film market on four key reasons: “(1) market inequalities (2) state film finance disparities (3) inadequate film exhibition and distribution, and (4) lack of political will by lawmakers.”214 Some of these issues were addressed with the establishment of the RECAM; not only were there regional film festivals, but RECAM worked to advance awareness of a regional film industry. The same year that RECAM was established in 2003, the national film organizations Table 2.2  MERCOSUR’s film markets, 2002–2005. Source Octavio Getinoa Year

Spectators of MERCOSUR National MERCOSUR Total Percentage MERCOSUR films that were films with a coproduction films of market films not strictly MERCOSUR (MERCOSUR national coproducer film spectators / total spectators)

2002 1,279,704 2003 283,374 2004 1,515,339 2005 573,912 aGetino,

13 12 21 19

7 2 7 14

1 1 3 1

“Aproximación al Mercado cinematográfico del MERCOSUR,” 5–7.

21 15 31 34

0.96% 0.19% 0.796% 0.43%

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Table 2.3  National film versus MERCOSUR, 2002–2005. Source Octavio Getinoa Country

Non-national MERCOSUR MERCOSUR MERCOSUR coproductions films released films

Spectators reached

National films released

Argentina 15 non-­ national MERCOSUR films: – 11 Brazilian – 3 Chilean –1 Uruguayan

15

30

20 of these films did not attract more than 10,000 spectators, and 8 did not reach 900.

205 national films released, reaching 17 million spectators.

Brazil

23 non-­ national MERCOSUR films: – 21 Argentine – 2 Chilean

14

37

22 of these films did not reach more than 25,000 spectators. 9 did not exceed 10,000.

151 national films released, reaching 55 million spectators.

Chile

30 non-­ national MERCOSUR films: – 24 Argentine – 5 Brazilian –1 Uruguayan

9

39

26 of these films did not reach more than 5000 spectators. 8 did not exceed 1,000.

51 national films released, reaching 3.7 million spectators.

aGetino,

“Aproximación al Mercado cinematográfico del MERCOSUR.”

of Brazil and Argentina, ANCINE and INCAA respectively, signed an agreement to support development and distribution between the two nations. That agreement built on prior efforts to develop cross-border alliances in the film industry and it resulted in an increase in the quantity of cross-national film exchanges. For instance, five of the eight Argentine films that screened in Brazil in 2004–2005 had the support of the codistribution agreement. Similarly, six of the seven Brazilian films that circulated in Argentina in those same years were supported by the deal.215 Getino notes, though, that Argentine films were more successful in Brazil than vice versa in 2003.216

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Nevertheless, as of 2005 the results were still mixed. A study of the MERCOSUR film market focusing on Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, conducted by Getino and focusing on 2002–2005 showed that the total number of MERCOSUR films that circulated in the region were minimal (see Table 2.2). We can note a trend toward more films and more viewers and we can see the effects of the 2003 agreements, but these numbers are still largely insignificant to the total market. To get a sense of the MERCOSUR market share consider the data in Table 2.3. This data shows that the ratio of MERCOSUR films to national films is still incredibly low. Most importantly it shows that those films that do reach screens attract very few spectators. The next chapter on distribution analyzes the Ventana Sur project which attempts to ­create alternative distribution networks in the region, and the last chapter in Part I on exhibition (Chap. 4) will discuss further initiatives within MERCOSUR to develop a regional film culture through the Red de Salas chain of art house theaters across the region. As both Getino and Falicov note, it is not enough to make films that are connected to the region; distribution and exhibition policy also have to be coordinated to support the project. And it is to those aspects of the film industry that the next two chapters of this book now turn.

Notes









1.  Huw D. Jones and Andrew Higson, “UK/European Film Co-Productions” (presentation, 2014 European Network for Cinema and Media Studies (NECS) Conference, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, June 19–21, 2014), 2, accessed December 30, 2016, http://mecetes.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Jones-HigsonUK-European-Film-Co-productions.pdf. 2. Libia Villazana, “Hegemony Conditions in the Coproduction Cinema of Latin America: The Role of Spain,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49, no. 2 (2008): 65. 3.  Hyung-Sook Lee, “Hybrid Media, Ambivalent Feelings: Media Co-Productions and Cultural Negotiations,” Spectator 27, no. 2 (2007): 7, accessed December 30, 2016, https://cinema.usc.edu/ assets/054/10909.pdf. 4. Ibid., 9. 5. Toby Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 177.

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6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 209. 8. Ibid., 178. 9. Steve Solot, “The New International Co-Production Scenario,” LATC— Latin American Training Center, November 4, 2011, accessed December 26, 2016, http://www.latamtrainingcenter.com/?p=2685&%3Blang=en. 10. Michael Chanan, Review of Transnational Financial Structures in the Cinema of Latin America by Libia Villazana, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.libiavillazana.com/index-2.html. 11.  Stephanie Dennison, “National, Transnational and Post-national: Issues in Contemporary Film-Making in the Hispanic World,” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2013), 23. 12. “About Us,” Pantelion Films, accessed December 18, 2016, http:// www.pantelionfilms.com/about-us.html. 13.  “Resolutions of the Third World Filmmakers Meeting, Algiers, December 5–14, 1973,” Black Camera 2, no. 1 (2010): 163. 14. Ibid. 15. Randal Johnson, Cinema Novo x 5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984), 8. 16. Ibid. 17. Fernando Solanas, interview by James Roy Macbean, Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1970): 37. 18.  See “The 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions,” UNESCO, October 20, 2005, accessed January 5, 2017, http://en.unesco.org/creativity/sites/creativity/files/passeport-convention2005-web2.pdf. 19.  Norbert Morawetz, Jane Hardy, Colin Haslam, and Keith Randle, “Finance, Policy and Industrial Dynamics--the Rise of Co-Productions in the Film Industry,” Industry and Innovation 14, no. 4 (2007): 427. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22.  Luis A. Albornoz, “Diversity and the Film Industry: An Analysis of the 2014 UIS Survey on Feature Film Statistics,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Information Paper no. 29, March 2016, 24, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.uis.unesco.org/culture/Documents/ ip29-diversity-film-data-2016-en.pdf. 23. “Data to Transform Lives,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.uis.unesco.org/DataCentre/Pages/ country-profile.aspx?code=COL&%3Bregioncode=40520.



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24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. See Albornoz, “Diversity and the Film Industry.” 27.  Sharon Strover, “Coproductions International,” The Museum of Broadcast Communications—Encyclopedia of Television, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.museum.tv/eotv/coproductions.htm. 28.  Stephanie Dennison, “National, Transnational and Post-national: Issues in Contemporary Film-Making in the Hispanic World,” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2013), 20. 29. Tamara Falicov, “Programa Ibermedia: Co-Production and the Cultural Politics of Constructing an Ibero-American Audiovisual Space,” Spectator 27, no. 2 (2007): 24. 30. Teresa Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction: Spanish Policy in Latin America,” Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 34, no. 2 (2004): 15. 31. Ibid., 17. 32. See Programa Ibermedia, accessed January 5, 2017, http://www.programaibermedia.com/. 33.  Mar Binimelis Adell, “La Geopolítica de las Coproducciones Hispanoamericanas,” (doctoral thesis, Universitat Rovira I Virgili, 2001), accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.tdx.cat/bitstream/ handle/10803/51762/TESIS_DEF_COMPLETA.pdf. 34. Richard Gunther, José Ramón Montero, and José Ignacio Wert, “The Media and Politics in Spain: From Dictatorship to Democracy,” Institut de Ciències Polítiques i Socials (1999), 20, accessed December 27, 2016, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.540.2656 &rep=rep1&type=pdf. 35. Adell, “La Geopolítica de las Coproducciones Hispanoamericanas,” 159. 36. Ibid., 163. 37. Ibid., 166. 38.  Laura Podalsky, “Negotiating Differences: National Cinemas and Co-productions in Prerevolutionary Cuba,” Velvet Light Trap 34 (1994): 59–70, quoted in Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction,” 16. 39.  Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “South American Cinema,” in World Cinema: Critical Approaches, ed. John Hill and Pamela Church Gibson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 194–210 and

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Néstor García Canclini, Hybrid Cultures: Strategies for Entering and Leaving Modernity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 63, quoted in Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction,” 16. 40.  Kathleen Newman, “National Cinema after Globalization: Fernando Solanas’s Sur and the Exiled Nation,” in Mediating Two Worlds, ed. John King, Ana M. López, and Manuel Alvarado (London: BFI, 1993), 243, quoted in Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction,” 16. 41.  Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction,” 16. 42.  Stephanie Dennison, “Debunking Neo-imperialism or Reaffirming Neo-colonialism? The Representation of Latin America in Recent Co-productions,” Transnational Cinemas 4, no. 2 (2013): 186. 43. Ibid., 193. 44.  Alejandro Pardo, “Spanish Co-Productions: Commercial Need or Common Culture? An Analysis of International Co-Productions in Spain from 2000 to 2004,” in Zoom In, Zoom Out: Crossing Borders in Contemporary European Cinema, ed. Sandra Barriales-Bouche and Marjorie Attignol Salvodon (Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 110. 45. Ibid. 46. Morawetz, “Finance, Policy and Industrial Dynamics,” 426. 47. Ibid. 48.  Manuel Palacio, “Elogio posmoderno de las coproducciones,” Cuadernos de la Academia 5 (1999): 231–232, quoted in and translated by Pardo, “Spanish Co-Productions,” 98–99. 49.  Colin Hoskins, Stuart McFadyen, and Adam Finn, “The Effect of Cultural Differences on the International Co-production of Television Programs and Feature Films,” Canadian Journal of Communication 23, no. 4 (1998): 523–538. 50.  Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction,” 23. 51. Ibid. 52.  Marvin D’Lugo, “Almodóvar, El Deseo and the Co-Production of Latin-American Space,” Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe 24, no. 1 (2013): 137. 53. Ibid., 138. 54.  “Theatrical Market Statistics 2015,” Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 2015, 4, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www. mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MPAA-Theatrical-MarketStatistics-2015_Final.pdf.

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55. Roque González, “Mercados latinoamericanos de cine (2007–2012),” El Abordaje de Ideas Prensa, May 29, 2013, accessed December 29, 2016, http://elabordajedelasideasprensa.blogspot.mx/2015/02/­mercadoslatinoamericanos-de-cine-2007.html?view=timeslide. 56. Albornoz, “Diversity and the Film Industry,” 28. 57.  Agustin Mango and John Hecht, “Latin America’s Film Industry Paradox: 5 Countries with Loud Fest Titles (and Quiet Box Office Payoffs),” The Hollywood Reporter, February 13, 2016, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/latinamericas-film-industr y-paradox-864913/item/latin-americabrazil-864923. 58. Ibid. 59. Charles Newbery, “Argentina Puts Up Barriers on Foreign Films,” Variety, August 30, 2011, accessed December 29, 2016, http://variety.com/2011/ film/news/argentina-puts-up-barriers-on-foreign-films-1118042031/. 60. Vivek Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (London: Verso, 2012), 243. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 245. 64. Julianne Burton, “Revolutionary Cuban Cinema,” Jump Cut 19 (1978): 17–33, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/onlinessays/JC19folder/CubanFilmIntro.html. 65.  Minna Jaskari, “Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and the Post-Revolutionary Cuba,” Artikkelit Marraskuu, November 1997, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.helsinki.fi/aluejakulttuurintutkimus/tutkimus/ xaman/articulos/9711/9711_mj.html. 66. Burton, “Revolutionary Cuban Cinema.” 67.  “Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos,” Wikipedia, last modified December 25, 2016, accessed December 29, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instituto_Cubano_del_Arte_e_Industria_ Cinematogr%C3%A1ficos. 68. Ann Marie Stock, On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 7. 69. Ibid. 70. Julianne Burton, “Individual Fulfillment and Collective Achievement: An Interview with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea,” Cineaste 8, no. 1 (Summer 1977), quoted in Burton, “Revolutionary Cuban Cinema.” 71.  Sydney Levine, “LatinoBuzz: Cuba Update: An In-Depth Look at Cuba’s Film Business,” IndieWire, November 19, 2015, accessed

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December 29, 2016, http://www.indiewire.com/2015/11/latinobuzz-cuba-update-an-in-depth-look-at-cubas-film-business-168366/. 72.  Cristina Venegas, “Cuban Filmmaking: Assessing Challenges and Opportunities,” Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, accessed January 4, 2017, https://cri.fiu.edu/research/ commissioned-reports/cubanfilmmaking-venegas.pdf. 73. Ibid., 1. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 2. 76. Ibid., 1. 77. Stock, On Location in Cuba, 10. 78. Ibid. 79. Levine, “LatinoBuzz.” 80. Ibid. 81. Stock, On Location in Cuba, 281. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid. 84. Cuban “street filmmaker” quoted in Stock, On Location in Cuba, 287. 85.  Verena Berger, “‘Accented Co-Production’: ‘Glocal’ Strategies in Transnational Cuban Cinema,” Transnational Cinema in Europe, ed. Manuel Palacio and Jörg Türschmann (Berlin: Lit, 2013), 159. 86. Ibid., 160. 87. Quoted in Berger, “‘Accented Co-Production,’” 160. 88. Ibid., 162. 89. Gustavo Buquet, “Inserción internacional del cine latinoamericano en mercados de la Unión Europea,” in Estudio de producción y mercados del cine latinoamericano en la primera década del siglo XXI, ed. Octavio Getino (Habana, Cuba: Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, 2012), 193, accessed January 7, 2017, http://cinelatinoamericano. org/assets/docs/Cuaderno%207%20WEB.pdf. 90. Ibid., 187. 91. Ibid., 193. 92. Jaume Martí-Olivella, “Cuba and Spanish Cinema’s Transatlantic Gaze,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 5 (2001): 162, https:// dialnet.unirioja.es/descarga/articulo/2577577.pdf. 93.  Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, quoted in Martí-Olivella, “Cuba and Spanish Cinema’s Transatlantic Gaze,” 164. 94. Vladimir Alexander Smith Mesa, “KinoCuban: The Significance of Soviet and East European Cinemas for the Cuban Moving Image,” (doctoral thesis, University College London, 2011), 3, accessed January 7, 2017, http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1336532/1/1336532.pdf.

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95. Ibid., 20. 96. Ibid., 24. 97. Ibid., 29. 98. Ibid., 35. 99. Michael T. Martin and Bruce Paddington, “Restoration or Innovation? An Interview with Humberto Solás: Post-Revolutionary Cuban Cinema,” Film Quarterly 54, no. 3 (2001): 16. 100. Ibid., 9. 101. Steve Persall, “Dissident Filmmakers Dare to Explore Cuba’s Issues,” Tampa Bay Times, August 25, 2006, accessed December 27, 2016, http://www.sptimes.com/2006/08/25/Floridian/Dissident_filmmakers_.shtml. 102. Geoffrey Baker, Buena Vista in the Club: Rap, Reggaetón, and Revolution in Havana (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2. 103. Ibid., 3. 104. Peter Curran, “Buena Vista Social Club Review,” Sight & Sound 9, no. 10 (October 1999): 40. 105. Baker, Buena Vista in the Club, 3. 106. Charlie Rose, “Interview with Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders,” PBS, September 17, 1999, accessed January 7, 2017, http://www.pbs.org/ buenavista/film/crose.html. 107. Phyllis Stuart, “Wim Wenders Invades Cuba to Capture the Buena Vista Social Club,” International Documentary Association, March 1, 2000, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.documentary.org/feature/ wim-wenders-invades-cuba-capture-buena-vista-social-club. 108. Rose, “Interview with Ry Cooder and Wim Wenders.” 109.  Helen Oakley, “Buena Vista Social Club,” in Encyclopedia of Latino Popular Culture, volume 1, ed. Cordelia Chávez Candelaria (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004), 96. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. Chris Gibson and John Connell, Music and Tourism: On the Road Again (Clevedon, UK: Channel View Publications, 2005), 77. 113. Ibid. 114. Buquet, “Inserción internacional del cine latinoamericano,” 187. 115.  Sophie De Vinck, “Europudding or Europaradise? A Performance Evaluation of the Eurimages Co-Production Film Fund, Twenty Years after its Inception,” Communications 34, no. 3 (2009): 257. 116. Angus Finney, The International Film Business: A Market Guide beyond Hollywood (London, UK: Routledge, 2010), 104. 117. Ibid., 105.

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118. “Partners,” Europa Cinemas, accessed December 29, 2016, http:// www.europa-cinemas.org/en/Network/Partners. 119. De Vinck, “Europudding or Europaradise?,” 258. 120. Ibid., 261. 121. Tamara Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions: Transnational Cinema, Spain’s Public Relations Venture or Both?” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2013), 68. 122. Quoted in Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions,” 68. 123. Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions,” 71. 124. Alberto Elena, “Family Affairs: Coproduction Policies between Spain and Latin America,” Transnational Cinema in Europe, ed. Manuel Palacio and Jörg Türschmann (Berlin: Lit, 2013), 153. 125. Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions,” 80. 126. Quoted in Elena, “Family Affairs,” 153. 127. Villazana, “Hegemony Conditions in the Coproduction Cinema of Latin America,” 71. 128. Ibid., 73. 129. Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions,” 73. 130. Villazana, “Hegemony Conditions in the Coproduction Cinema of Latin America,” 76. 131. Miriam Ross, South American Cinematic Culture: Policy, Production, Distribution and Exhibition (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 120. 132. Elena, “Family Affairs,” 154. 133. Villazana, “Hegemony Conditions,” 77. 134. Ibid., 80. 135. Elena, “Family Affairs,” 153. 136.  Anna Villarroya, “Ibermedia Programme,” Mobility Matters, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.mobility-matters.eu/web/files/33/ en/Ibermedia_Programme.pdf, 1. 137. Ibid., 2. 138. Buquet, “Inserción internacional del cine latinoamericano,” 185. 139. Ibid., 188. 140. Ibid. 141. Falicov, “Ibero-Latin American Co-productions,” 79. 142. “La coproducción entre Latinoamérica y Europa, una fórmula que se afianza,” El diario.es, March 19, 2016, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.eldiario.es/cultura/coproduccion-Latinoamerica-­Europaformula-afianza_0_496250779.html.

136  S.A. McCLENNEN 143.  “World Cinema Fund,” Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin, accessed December 29, 2016, https://www.berlinale.de/en/branche/world_ cinema_fund/wcf_profil/index.html. 144. “Aide aux cinémas du monde,” Centre national du cinéma et de l­’image animée, accessed January 7, 2017, http://www.cnc.fr/web/en/ aide-aux-cinemas-du-monde. 145. “About Sørfond,” Sørfond: Norwegian South Film Fund, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.filmfrasor.no/sorfond/about. 146. Ibid. 147. Åsne Dahl Haugsevje, “In a Position to Tell: Evaluation of Sørfond--the Norwegian South Film Fund,” Telemark Research Institute, Report No. 357 (2015): 38, accessed December 29, 2016, https://www.telemarksforsking.no/publikasjoner/filer/2735.pdf. 148. Miriam Ross, “The Film Festival as Producer: Latin American Films and Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund,” Screen 52, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 261. 149. Ibid., 263. 150. Daniel Steinhart, “Fostering International Cinema: The Rotterdam Film Festival, CineMart, and the Hubert Bals Fund,” Mediascape: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 1, no. 2 (2006): 10, accessed January 7, 2017, http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/archive/volume01/number02/reviews/steinhart.htm. 151. “HBF Post-production Support,” IFFR, accessed December 29, 2016, h t t p s : / / i f f r. c o m / e n / i f f r- i n d u s t r y / h u b e r t - b a l s - f u n d / hbf-post-production-support?device=1. 152. Jeremy Kay, “Almodóvar, Trier among Heavyweights on GFI board,” Screen Daily, October 17, 2005, accessed December 29, 2016, http:// www.globalfilm.org/pdfs/ar_ScreenDaily_FilmBoard.pdf. 153.  Robert Avila, “Global Film Initiative: Funding the Bigger Picture,” Global Film, August 12, 2008, accessed December 29, 2016, http:// www.globalfilm.org/articles/SF360_Article_Avila. 154. Ross, “The Film Festival as Producer,” 267. 155. Courtney Brannon Donoghue, “Sony and Local-Language Productions: Conglomerate Hollywood’s Strategy of Flexible Localization for the Global Film Market,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 15. 156. Sylvia Harvey, Trading Culture: Global Traffic and Local Cultures in Film and Television (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2006), 2. 157. Ibid. 158. Ali Jaafar, “Hollywood Biz without Borders,” Variety, April 17, 2009, accessed December 29, 2016, http://variety.com/2009/film/features/ hollywood-biz-without-borders-1118002564/. 159. Ibid.

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160. Ben Fritz, “Hollywood Takes Spanish Lessons as Latinos Stream to the Movies,” The Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2013, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142412788732 4049504578545812929816462. 161. Brooks Barnes, “Lionsgate and Televisa Unite on Films,” The New York Times, September 13, 2010, accessed December 29, 2016, http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/09/14/business/media/14hispanic. html?_r=0. 162. Ibid. 163. Quoted in Barnes, “Lionsgate and Televisa Unite on Films.” 164. “Pantelion Films,” Wikipedia, November 26, 2016, accessed December 29, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantelion_Films. 165.  Dave Itzkoff, “Distributor Says ‘Sí’ to Spanish-Language Will Ferrell Film,” The New York Times, November 3, 2011, accessed December 29, 2016, http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/ distributor-says-si-to-spanish-language-will-ferrell-film/?_r=0. 166.  Rick Marshall, “The ‘Casa de mi Padre’ Cast Weighs in on Will Ferrell’s Spanish-Language Skills,” IFC, March 30, 2012, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.ifc.com/2012/03/casa-de-mipadre-will-ferrell-spanish. 167.  Anna Marie de la Fuente, “Pantelion Films Sets English-language Thriller ‘Tapes’ for July Release,” Variety, May 5, 2015, accessed December 29, 2016, http://variety.com/2015/film/global/pantelionfilms-sets-english-language-thriller-tapes-for-july-release-1201486989/. 168. Ibid. 169. “No Manches Frida,” Rotten Tomatoes, accessed December 29, 2016, https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/no_manches_frida/. 170. Ibid. 171.  John Hopewell, “‘No Manches Frida’ Scores Third-Best Opening Ever for a Mexican Movie in Mexico,” Variety, September 19, 2016, accessed December 29, 2016, http://variety.com/2016/film/global/ no-manches-frida-opening-mexico-1201865163/. 172.  Hoefert de Turégano, “The International Politics of Cinematic Coproduction,” 20. 173. Ibid. 174. Ibid. 175. Villazana, “Hegemony Conditions in the Coproduction Cinema of Latin America,” 69. 176. High School Musical: El desafío (Viva High School Musical, 2008). 177.  Philip French, “Carancho--Review,” The Observer, March 3, 2012, accessed December 29, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/film/ 2012/mar/04/carancho-pablo-trapero-review.

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178. Gabriela Martínez, Latin American Telecommunications: Telefónica’s Conquest (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008), 92. 179. Ibid. 180. Ibid. 181. Brannon Donoghue, “Sony and Local-Language Productions,” 4. 182. Quoted in Jaafar, “Hollywood Biz without Borders.” 183. See Frank Rose, “Think Globally, Script Locally,” Fortune 140, no. 9 (November 8, 1999): 156–160, Business Source Premier, EBSCOhost, accessed December 29, 2016, http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/ fortune/fortune_archive/1999/11/08/268531/index.htm. 184. Ibid., 156. 185. Ibid., 160. 186. This title has not been officially translated into English; the Englishlanguage publicity uses Rudo y cursi. 187. Jaafar, “Hollywood Biz without Borders.” 188. Quoted in Jaafar, “Hollywood Biz without Borders.” 189.  R yan Faughnder, “U.S. Studios Seek to Satisfy Foreign Audiences’ Desire for Locally Made Films,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2015, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-local-language-film-20151212-story. html. 190. Brannon Donoghue, “Sony and Local-Language Productions,” 15. 191. Ibid., 19. 192. Michael Lynton, “Globalization and Cultural Diversity,” The Wall Street Journal, September 4, 2007, accessed December 29, 2016. 193. Brannon Donoghue, “Sony and Local-Language Productions,” 10. 194. Ibid. 195. “Participant Media,” Participant Media, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.participantmedia.com/. 196. “Participant Media to Launch PanAmerican Film Initiative,” Participant Media, February 2013, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.participantmedia. com/2013/02/participant-media-launch-panamerican-film-initiative. 197. Ibid. 198. Ibid. 199.  Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “Trade Wars, Culture Wars,” in Trading Culture: Global Traffic and Local Cultures in Film and Television, ed. Sylvia Harvey (Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2006), 17. 200. Luisela Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 3 (2008): 56.

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201. Ibid., 57. 202. Octavio Getino, “Los desafíos de la industria del cine en américa latina y el caribe” [“The Challenges of the Cinema Industry in Latin America and the Caribbean”], Zer: Revista de Estudios de Comunicación 22 (2007): 179, accessed December 29, 2016, http://alcazaba.unex.es/ asg/117242/Cine.pdf. 203.  “CACI Iberoamérica—Conferencia de Autoridades Cinematográficas de Iberoamérica,” CACI Iberoamérica, accessed December 29, 2016, http://caci-iberoamerica.org/. 204. “Países del MERCOSUR,” MERCOSUR, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.mercosur.int/innovaportal/v/7823/2/innova.front/ paises-del-mercosur. 205.  Tamara Falicov, “Film Policy under MERCOSUR: The Case of Uruguay,” Canadian Journal of Communication 27, no. 1 (2002), accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.cjc-online.ca/index.php/ journal/article/view/1270/1282. 206. Ibid. 207. Ibid. 208. “teleSUR es…,” Telesur, accessed December 29, 2016, https://web. archive.org/web/20080819145249/http://www.telesurtv.net/ noticias/canal/. 209. “¿Qué es la RECAM?” RECAM, accessed December 29, 2016, http:// www.recam.org/?do=recam. 210. Ibid. 211.  See Octavio Getino, “Aproximación a un estudio de las Industrias Culturales en el Mercosur (Incidencia económica, social y cultural para la integración regional),” Seminario Internacional “Importancia y Proyección del Mercosur Cultural con miras a la Integración,” Santiago de Chile, 3, 4 y 5 de mayo de 2001, Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.oei.es/historico/cultura2/getino.htm. 212.  Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi, “The End of the Embrace? Neoliberalism and Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Latin America,” in Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America, ed. Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 14. 213. Falicov, “Film Policy under MERCOSUR.” 214. Ibid. 215.  Octavio Getino, “Aproximación al Mercado cinematográfico del MERCOSUR: Período 2002–2005,” RECAM, 12, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www.recam.org/_files/documents/aprox_al_mercado_cinemat_del_mercosur.pdf.

140  S.A. McCLENNEN 216.  Octavio Getino, “Producción, mercados y proyectos de ­ integración cinematográfica en los países del Mercosur,” Congreso de la República Perú (2007): 11, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www2. congreso.gob.pe/sicr/cendocbib/con3_uibd.nsf/507E3B7434995344052579250060AAC8/$FILE/PRODUCCI%C3%93N_ MERCADOS_INTEGRACI%C3%93N_CINEMATOGRAFICA.pdf.

CHAPTER 3

Distribution

Film distribution may be the least studied feature of Latin American cinema, but it arguably has the greatest role to play in determining the social impact of a film. It becomes an even more central concern when we recognize that only about half of all Latin American films produced are ever distributed. In simple terms, film distribution is the process of making a film available to a viewing audience. Film distributors determine marketing, promotion, release venues and media (theaters, DVDs, VOD services, etc.), and release dates. They also typically take about one-third of the revenue after deducting the cost of their services. While distributors are often connected to both production companies and theaters—what is called vertical integration—tracing the unique role of distribution in the era of global Latin American cinema reveals a number of key ways that distributors have both enhanced the global circulation of Latin American films and dominated the Latin American market with Hollywood product. Even though distribution is the second step in the film supply chain, it is often referred to as “the invisible art.” The British Film Institute explains that it is “a process known only to those within the industry, barely written about and almost imperceptible to everyone else. Yet arguably, distribution is the most important part of the film industry, where completed films are brought to life and connected with an audience.”1 The catch, as we will see in Latin America, is that the invisibility of distribution as a key part of the business meant that many nations © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_3

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neglected to build a robust distribution industry—a move that left Latin American filmmakers especially vulnerable to Hollywood. Because, even though markets outside of Hollywood were slow to control the distribution market, Miller et al. report that “Hollywood realised early on that its dominance of the world market depended on owning the means of distribution.”2 This means that for Marxist filmmakers who focused on the connections between culture and political ideology it was the “means of distribution” not the “means of production” that would ultimately determine the political potential of a film. As Ana López explains, “distribution has also been the most neglected sector in Latin America; foreign companies, especially Hollywood ones, have dominated Latin American distribution, and national or regional distributors have rarely thrived.”3 In fact, the story of distribution may be the key to understanding the ongoing role of cultural hegemony in the region. Distribution may be the most invisible part of the supply chain, but it is also the most lucrative. The “cultural” domination, then, is the monoculture of capitalist circuits of production, not the content value of the objects circulated. In fact, the legacy of Hollywood domination of Latin American screens can be traced directly to the problem of distribution. The Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA) made sure to secure “blind bidding and block booking” in Latin American markets in the 1920s when the US State Department set up a motion picture section to aid Hollywood and its developing industry.4 According to Miller et al., “this enabled an international distribution cartel for the next forty years.”5 From the outset, Latin America was one of the primary markets for Hollywood cinema and it allowed the Hollywood industry to operate in ways that were outlawed on US soil. Block booking—the bundling of packages of films where a blockbuster is tied to a number of B films—was outlawed in the US in 1948, but was permitted in Latin America. The practice often forces exhibitors “to take pictures they do not want and sometimes have not seen in order to get the ones they do want.”6 The dominance of Hollywood distribution in the region has remained fairly constant throughout the history of sound cinema, but there are a number of shifts that do change in the 1990s. First is the interest in distributing Latin American cinema outside of the region. The trend really takes off with the rise of Miramax, the production/distribution company that played a major role in creating a market for international/art house films in US markets in the 1990s, especially through the marketing of

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Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992). Prior to the 1990s, distribution of Latin American cinema outside of the region was extremely limited and often went straight to video through companies like New Yorker Films. The success of Miramax, though, radically changed this dynamic and led to similar efforts across the media industry as Hollywood majors recognized a growing and lucrative market. Another major shift has been the advent of the film festival as a key site for securing distribution agreements. And for those festivals held within Latin America, they also serve as important ways that viewers see films—many of which would never get a proper theatrical release. As Bill Nichols argues, the rise of film festivals as central locations for defining global cinema ties in directly with the era of neoliberal globalization: “Never only or purely local, festival films nonetheless circulate, in large part, with a cachet of locally inscribed difference and globally ascribed commonality. They both attest to the uniqueness of different cultures and specific filmmakers and affirm the underlying qualities of an ‘international cinema.’”7 While the study of film festivals has been well taken up in film studies, my goal will be to understand the role that festivals have played in the specific case of distributing Latin American cinema both at home and abroad. A further interesting development in the market adjustments of Latin American cinema in the era of millennial globalization is the rise of entrepreneurial practices that take advantage of new technologies and attempt to bypass both Hollywood domination and film festival politics. For instance, Jorge Sánchez, the head of IMCINE, the Mexican Film Institute, created a video on demand (VOD) service to make Mexican films accessible to a broader audience, a move designed to short-circuit piracy and open access for films to their home market.8 Even more significant is the founding of Ventana Sur, a collaboration between INCAA, the Argentine film commission, and the Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film, held in Buenos Aires annually since 2009. Now in its eighth year, it has become the primary market for Latin American film. Thus, this chapter traces the way that 1990s market practices affect distribution. While the dominance of Hollywood remains relatively steady, a number of shifts emerge that reveal a growing global presence for Latin American cinema in the film market as well as an increased ability to use technology and film festivals to bypass traditional circuits of distribution. Again, it is of interest that neoliberal diversification leads

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directly to greater marketing opportunities for Latin American films, thoroughly refuting the notion of globalization as cultural homogeneity. Assessment of these shifts reinforces the notion that neoliberalism has brought deeply ambivalent practices—leading to a complex ethical situation where films depend on market realities at the same time that they critique those same realities. In order to analyze the ways that distribution of Latin American films can reveal new shifts in the politics of cultural globalization, this chapter offers an overview of the context and sections that focus on: • The role of Miramax in creating a US market for international and art house films in the 1990s. The story of Miramax (independent, then Disney-owned, then independent) production/distribution is an essential case study for tracing the ambivalent space of neoliberal practices in the global culture market. Beginning in the early 1990s, Miramax distributed a series of Latin American films, such as the wildly popular Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992) and Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993), the first Cuban film to have an Oscar nomination. • The rise of film festivals as distribution sites for Latin American film. The section begins by studying the way that the political filmmaking movement of third cinema used the Festival de cine de Viña del Mar in Chile (established in 1967) as a way to reach audiences, collaborate, and support fellow filmmakers from the region. It then moves to study the contemporary role of festivals, especially those of Cannes, Sundance, and San Sebastián, since each of these has played a significant role in gaining attention for Latin American films. • The last section looks at the rise of alternative distribution venues, including digital releases and the aforementioned Ventana Sur initiative. On the one hand, these initiatives exemplify the ways that the digital era and technological advances allow emerging markets to have greater access and market impact outside of the major distribution companies. On the other hand, while these practices open up markets, there is no evidence that they do anything more than shift distribution power to the south. In this sense they are an excellent example of how decolonization does not necessarily represent a meaningful challenge to neoliberal capital.

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Context and Overview The political filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America fully recognized that one of the most important areas of struggle in the regional film industry was with regard to film distribution. Bolivian New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) director, Jorge Sanjinés in his third cinema theory manifesto explained that “La principal debilidad del cine revolucionario latinoamericano ha sido, y es aún, su imposibilidad práctica de llegar cuantitativamente a sus destinatarios” [The main weakness of revolutionary Latin American cinema has been, and is still, its practical inability to quantitatively reach its intended audience].9 As head of the Bolivian Grupo Ukamau, Sanjinés had been central in one of the most ambitious examples of alternative distribution: Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor, 1969) “was brought to the countryside using a portable generator and equipment in order to screen it in villages that were without electricity.”10 Similarly Octavio Getino describes how the NLAC epic film La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) was distributed “through decentralized parallel circuits” because it was part of a popular resistance movement.11 Many of the filmmakers from this generation favored the idea of informal circuits of distribution—focusing on reaching rural villages by physically bringing their films there or establishing film clubs in cities where communities could gather to watch and debate their work. This is the story of film distribution that is most emphasized by scholars that study the films of the NLAC today. We get a romanticized view of films that reach audiences outside of capitalist circuits of distribution. And that image then is put into stark contrast with the highly commercialized and centralized system dominated by Hollywood majors today. The reality, though, is far more complex. While the NLAC directors were, indeed, highly utopic in the ways they imagined their films reaching audiences, they, too, had a practical and pragmatic side. Getino and Fernando Solanas were clear about the key role of distribution: “Production, distribution and economic possibilities for survival must form part of a single strategy.”12 And while they preferred the idea of working outside of commerce, they were well aware of the practical realities of working in a medium that was expensive: “A film can be made, but if its distribution does not allow for the recovery of the costs, it will be difficult or impossible to make a second film.”13 Brazilian cinema

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nôvo director Glauber Rocha echoed their sentiment, “Because cinema is a business, the secret lies in the distribution.”14 NLAC directors were far less naïve about the business of distribution than utopic left analysis of their work might suggest. Despite the fact that they attempted to create alternative distribution outlets, Randal Johnson speaks of the way that the cinema nôvo directors “formed a distribution cooperative as a strategy for placing their films more easily in the market.”15 López reminds us that Cuban ICAIC did all of its own distribution after 1959—which worked on the island but had no traction off of it.16 She further notes that Mexico is a case of a country that worked to develop its own national distribution enterprise, but that project did not really work. In the 1940s, they launched three key businesses that were all put under state control in 1954. As López explains, this “isolationist, anti-innovative attitude within the industry . . . froze the national cinema for more than twenty years and did not, in fact, change the dominance of US films, still profitably distributed by the [US] majors (between 57 and 70% of all films exhibited in Mexico in this period were from the USA).”17 In another example, Columbia Pictures dominated the distribution of films released by Vera Cruz Studios in Brazil in the 1940s and 1950s. Rocha suggests one reason Vera Cruz collapsed was because it outsourced distribution and did not develop that aspect of the industry.18 The weak distribution system within Brazil meant that experimental, political third cinema films were up against two sets of challenges: Hollywood domination and a real lack of national infrastructure. The absence of national state support was only part of the complicated relationship that the NLAC directors had with the industry overall. Their radical stance and experimental style often put them at odds with local theater owners, who preferred to screen films that were entertaining and popular. As Brazilian film scholar Randal Johnson notes, “exhibitors argued that Cinema Novo films were too intellectual for success in the market. The production of more popular films thus became imperative if Cinema Novo was to continue its cultural and political trajectory.”19 Johnson explains that at the same time that the cinema nôvo filmmakers were attempting to create a political cinema that could encourage social engagement, there also was a struggle for the market within Brazil as Hollywood films were entering with greater and greater strength. Thus, he notes that political filmmakers became increasingly aware that one of their main priorities had to be thinking through the issue of “making popular films.” He explains that “Cinema Novo took a number of steps

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to ameliorate the problem of reaching a broad audience. First, together with producer Luis Carlos Barreto, producers and directors formed the distribution cooperative Difilme as a strategy for placing their films more easily in the multinational-controlled market.”20 Then in 1973 Embrafilme took seriously the need for a central distributor for Brazilian films. As Johnson notes, during this phase political filmmakers increasingly turned to the state as the only entity capable of fending off the highly organized foreign distributors.21 While filmmakers sought to develop viable distribution networks, it remained clear that just getting a film on a screen was not enough to ensure that the film would reach an audience. Rocha emphasizes the idea that distribution can’t make people go to a bad film and can’t “enable them to understand a good art film. But distribution can via intelligent and persistent programming and via efficient control, market a film throughout the Brazilian territory and stand a very good chance to recover production/distribution costs and even make a profit.”22 Little did he know that this would in fact happen in the 1990s—but that distribution would still be in the hands of Hollywood companies, which meant that Brazilian films would circulate, but the profits they reaped would largely go back to Hollywood. The notion of state protectionism would almost entirely disappear by the 1990s, as states reduced their regulations and commitment to protecting national markets. The irony is that as state protectionism waned, circulation and access to national film often increased. The other complexity for distribution is the fact that it is the less overtly “nationalist” part of the process. As Toby Miller, Freya Schiwy, and Marta Hernández Salván argue, “when discussing options for creating an inclusive film sector, it is conceptually easy and publicly palatable to support production as opposed to other sectors of the industry.”23 They discuss the fact that producing movies is easily articulated to the idea of building local, national, and regional culture through the work of art: “By contrast, other parts of the cycle—circulating, promoting and showing movies—lack glamour and artistry even as they are extremely profitable.”24 This means that one of the reasons why national cinemas were not fully developed was because investment in the film industry focused on creating film product, not moving it to screens for audiences to see. During the 1990s, Getino would also argue that the failure to develop active distribution networks had been a fatal flaw for the Latin American

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film industry. He explains that real growth in the film industry does not merely take place by making more films; it takes place when it is possible to sell them more effectively.25 He notes that, rather than thinking of the film “market,” states focused solely on production. Under protectionist practices states became obsessed with “screen quotas” and “obligatory exhibition” for national films—but none of these policies seriously affected the relations of power in film markets, which meant that they therefore allowed Hollywood companies to continue to gain market strength.26 One of Getino’s greatest insights is that he explains that this lack of attention to distribution and exhibition is something that wouldn’t take place in other industries: other industries take great care in protecting the entire supply chain process. It is only in film where production is overemphasized at the expense of distribution and consumption. The result was a great shift in power to major distributors and large theater chains.27 And yet, as will be discussed later in this chapter, we can note that some of these power imbalances have begun to shift now that Latin American film professionals are more fully navigating the global market. The 1990s then saw filmmakers faced with a drastic reduction in state support and an opening of national markets. Whatever the situation for national cinema had been in previous decades, it was now measurably worse in almost every national context. The result was that film industry professionals had to regroup and readjust their ideas about how best to support national films. While Sanjinés’s political commitment to promoting socially meaningful films within Latin America didn’t wane, by the 1990s he realized that simply getting a film on screen in the region with local heroes and characters was itself a political act. In a turn from the former hardline of his generation, he suggested that it was preferable to have Latin American audiences consume a crappy, commercial Argentine or Mexican film than a Hollywood one: “Un problema importante [de nuestro cine] es la incapacidad actual para ocupar espacios en la pantalla latinoamericana . . . podría no gustarnos la calidad de las antiguas películas argentinas y mexicanas, pero era inobjetable un hecho: la incuestionable presencia de ese cine en los participantes, que estaban afirmando una identidad latinoamericana . . . los norteamericanos son los héroes de los niños latinoamericanos” [An important problem for our films is the incapacity to occupy space on Latin American screens; it could be that we don’t like the quality of old Argentine and Mexican films, but one fact is indubitable: the unquestionable presence of those films in

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the participants; they were affirming a Latin American identity. North Americans are the heroes of Latin American children].28 The difference between the statement I quoted at the start of this section and this one underscores the very real ways that filmmakers had to deal with the overwhelming success of Hollywood in home markets. For Sanjinés by the 1990s it was politically powerful simply to see a locally produced film, regardless of the content or style. And he had a point. As explained in the previous chapter, the overwhelming dominance of the same top ten Hollywood films globally is impossible to dispute. Miriam Ross explains that despite the extraordinary success of the NLAC directors, their longstanding battle to achieve regional distribution continues.29 It is important to note, though, that this is not a problem unique to Latin America: Europe suffers the hegemony of Hollywood distributors as well. A 2014 study by UNESCO showed that the world’s most successful films were distributed and promoted by companies belonging to the US majors: Buena Vista (now Walt Disney Motion Pictures), Sony Pictures Releasing, 20th Century Fox, Universal Pictures, Warner Brothers, and Paramount Pictures. What’s more, they explain that “these companies have a dominant position in several countries of the world (in Latin America and Western Europe, for instance) and rule the distribution of both Hollywood blockbusters and locally produced films that are likely to become commercial hits in their respective markets.”30 One key element UNESCO highlights is the way that major distributors demand a greater share of the ticket revenues. Walking through the example of a ticket sale in Spain they note that, if the typical ticket sells for $8.54, 21% is VAT, 3% goes for intellectual property right management entities, 33% for the theater and 43% for the distributor. But US major distributors often demand 55–60% of the ticket revenue, leaving less profit for the theater owners.31 They further point out that “U.S. majors operate in foreign markets in a coordinated fashion, to the detriment of local productions and independent distributors.”32 This coordinated effort often means that if a nation commits resources to produce national cinema, but does not commit resources to ensure distribution, then its efforts to sustain and enhance a national film culture are wasted (see Table 3.1). One of the interesting facets of the presence of US major distributors in Latin America has been their role distributing national films within their home markets. Much of this activity, if not all, is directly linked to the role of the Latin American branch of the Motion Picture Association

150  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 3.1  Top ten distributors in Latin America and their market share, 2016. Source Box Office Mojoa

Distributor Buena Vista 20th Century Fox Warner Bros Universal Paramount Sony/Columbia Lionsgate Focus Features Open Road Films Weinstein Company

Market share (%) 31.5 17.7 12.9 8.4 7.5 6.2 4.9 2.5 1.5 1.1

a“Studio

Market Share, 2016,” Box Office Mojo, accessed January 13, 2017, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/studio/?view=company&view 2=yearly&yr=2016&p=.htm.

(MPA): “The MPA-AL [América Latina] protects and defends the interests of its member companies in each distribution sector—theatrical, television, pay TV, home entertainment, and new technologies—through activities aimed at the improvement of market access and the protection of intellectual property rights.”33 Because the MPA is geared primarily toward protecting US products in a global free trade economy, one key function it performs is to “promote regulatory frameworks that foster the expansion of film industry activities and coproduction of national films.”34 In the 1990s, the MPA immediately seized the opportunities opened up by the deregulated film industry and sought to control the distribution sector. Jack Valenti, who was then president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA, the domestic wing of the MPA), made their efforts clear: The distribution of American movies and TV programs in foreign markets is important to the health of our industry and our nation’s economy. Therefore, it is vital that any trade agreements with our trading partners include commitments to protect our products from theft and to allow our products to move freely in the marketplace.35

While its primary goal is to protect US business interests, Luisela Alvaray notes that since the 1990s “the MPA companies set in motion a new dynamics of coproduction with producers from Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, and distribution networks that have served as unprecedented international outlets for Latin American works.”36 The MPA website

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Table 3.2  Contributions of the movie and TV industry. Source Motion Picture Association América Latina (MPA-AL)a

Brazil Mexico

Job growth in 2012

Revenue generation in 2013

110,000 jobs 42,000 jobs

19.8 billion reais 11.9 thousand million pesos

a“The Movie and TV Industry,” Motion Picture Association América Latina, accessed January 18, 2017, http://mpaamericalatina.org/en/.

touts the positive role they have played within the Latin American economy (see Table 3.2). While it would be easy to dismiss these figures as an example of the new international labor economy, that wouldn’t be the full picture. Many of the people employed in those jobs also are involved in indie or local projects. These MPA-connected jobs often offer training and stability in a sector that is largely plagued by the instability of the film industry’s dependence on casual labor. Alvaray notes the unparalleled success of a range of Latin American films in the United States and abroad—a new phenomenon for the region. One of the significant shifts, as will be described in more detail in the next section on Miramax, is the substantial number of Latin American films that now have a major US distributor supporting and promoting them. (See Table 3.3). The catch is that while it would be easy to look at this chart and simply chalk it up to the trade imbalances caused by the global market economy, it remains true that these large distribution companies do a better job of getting Latin American films into theaters. Because there had not been an alternative industry option, filmmakers were often delighted to have the chance to work with a major to get their films on screens. Hollywood-major-distributed Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004) became, at the time, the second most watched Latin American film in history. What perhaps is even more important to note is the fact that this hegemonic distribution network has worked to promote and distribute films critical of the capitalist economy, the world system, and other forms of social injustice. If we look at the films listed below, effectively all of them are social-issue films. While it might be convenient to dismiss them as issuetainment cinema, these films are a far cry from silly, frivolous Hollywood blockbuster fare. The point, as Alvaray makes it, is that “U.S. companies have benefited from business agreements

152  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 3.3  US and global box office for successful Latin American and Latino films. Source Luisela Alvaraya Film

Production

Distribution in US

Distribution companies, US and local

US box office

Worldwide box office

Central Station

Brazil, 1998

1998–1999

Sony Pictures Classics

$5,595,428

Approximately $21,000,000

Amores Perros

Mexico, 2000

2001

Lions Gate Films, Nu Vision

$5,383,834

$20,908,467

Y tu mamá Mexico, también 2000

2002

IFC, 20th Century Fox

$13,622,333

$33,616,692

Nine Queens

Argentina, 2000

2002

Sony Pictures Classics, BVI

$1,221,261

$12,413,888

The Son of the Bride

Argentina, 2001

2002

Columbia TriStar, Argentina VH

$624,153

N/A

The Crime of Father Amaro

Mexico, 2002

2002–2003

Sony Entertainment, Samuel G

$5,709,616

$26,996,738

Real Women Have Curves

US, 2002

2002–2003

Home Box Office

$5,844,929

$7,777,790

2003–2004

Miramax, Buena Vista International

$7,563,397

$27,387,381

2004

Sony Classics, Columbia

$213,954

$10,781,635

2004

Fine Line Features

$6,517,198

$9,383,264

City of God Brazil, 2002 Carandiru

Brazil, 2003

Maria, Full US/ of Grace Columbia, 2004 The Motorcycle Diaries aLuisela

Argentina 2004 et al., 2004

Focus Features, $16,756,372 Buena Vista International

$57,641,466

Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global,” 53.

with Latin American producers and exhibitors, but, in a different sense, so have some of the regional recipients of the exchanges.”37 Alvaray covers the story of Carandiru (2003), coproduced and distributed by

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Columbia and Sony, which was a US box office failure, but collected over $10 million just in Brazil, making it the biggest national gross profit for a Brazilian film at that time. This has meant that US distributors have played a role in getting Latin American films screen time globally, but nationally as well. What’s more, Carandiru was directed by an NLACassociated director, Hector Babenco. Despite the fact that the film adopts narrative features more commonly associated with Hollywood fare, it still is an example of potent political cinema, given its complex treatment of the tragedy of a brutal prison massacre. While the majors have an almost complete lock on the distribution market, there are some examples of strong national distributors. Frederick Aldama explains that “Mexico does have its own production and distribution companies, including Altavista, Galavisión, Univisión, and TVAzteca, among others.”38 And yet in 2009, movies controlled by the major distributors made up 73% of box office earnings in Mexico. Mexican independent film distributors, like Videocine and Corazón, then compete with Mexican TV outlets to share among themselves the remaining 27% of box office earnings in Mexico.39 In Brazil, we have the example of Lumiere, which partnered with Miramax to distribute within Brazil. Founded in 1990, Lumiere began as a distributor of independent and international titles for theatrical, home video, and television rights. Then from 1996 to 2003, it maintained an exclusive output deal with Miramax for the territory of Brazil. Titles released during this period include The English Patient (1996), Chicago (2002), and the Scary Movie franchise (2000, 2001, 2003). By 2002, Lumiere was the market-leading independent distributor in Brazil.40 But based on the films listed above, it isn’t clear that there is any real advantage to the presence of a “national” distributor if what they distribute is Hollywood films. Lumiere is but one example of many nationally-based companies whose primary goal is profit and not necessarily the promotion of nationally relevant cinema. As the distribution landscape was increasingly dominated by Hollywood majors and as national distributors worked to gain a foothold in the industry, there was also an upsurge in bypassing distribution to theaters and working solely toward digital distribution. Miriam Ross explains that “towards the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, there was hope that digital-screening technology would make direct distribution and access to films from small industries easier.”41 The idea was to bypass traditional circuits of distribu­ tion in favor of a far more accessible, and flexible, digital platform. And yet, according to Ross, “distribution in South America continues to be

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tied up with notions of commercial ownership and traditional routes of circulation.”42 Building on the arguments of Saskia Sassen, Ross concludes that despite efforts to offer alternative distribution venues there is a continuous reiteration of cities (particularly established metropolises) as financial centers in which hierarchical and spatial inequalities are reaffirmed. She explains that this process is “highlighted by one of the main issues of film distribution: the fact that Hollywood continues to dominate the global sphere and the majority of DVD sales in foreign countries pertain to US films.”43 The idea that digital distribution would open up a far more equitable network has yet to pan out. The powerful routes of circulation continue to be dominated by select multinational corporations that have the power and ability to saturate the market. Miller echoes this argument when he highlights the fact that most ideas about the role of the internet in film distribution are overly utopic: “We are often told that the Internet has broken down barriers to new and economically marginal entrants to the screen, whether via YouTube or YouPorn, to the point where traditional media and corporations are losing audiences and power. These unproven, utopic predictions prove vulnerable when they are examined empirically.”44 Peter Bosma argues that even in the digital age, “film distribution still largely determines which films are to be seen where, by whom and under what circumstances.”45 Oddly, as Ross points out, when nation-states intervene to protect distribution networks, their goals seem to focus more on defense of a market than on defense of national culture.46 These transitions reveal a significant shift in state attitudes toward national culture brought on by neoliberal market economics.

Miramax and the Neoliberal Aesthetic This next section focuses on how the distribution practices of Miramax, once a subsidiary of Disney and a “major independent” studio, are indicative of the role of visual culture in a pro-globalization, transnational consumer society.47 While there are arguably four phases to the story of Miramax—its founding in 1979, its acquisition by Disney in 1993, the departure of its founders Bob and Harvey Weinstein to form a new company in 2005, and its post-Disney era of 2010—this section focuses on the second period when indie Miramax blended with Hollywood powerhouse Disney.

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Miramax is credited with making independent film mainstream, but Alisa Perren in Indie, Inc. argues that Miramax also had a “wide-ranging impact on film festivals, acquisitions, production budgets, distribution, marketing, exhibition, talent development, and multimedia exploitation, along with its influence on critical and cultural discourses about ‘independence’ and the ‘mainstream.’”48 Rather than survey the full range of ways that Miramax affected the film industry, this section focuses specifically on its role in developing a market for foreign cinema, namely Latin American cinema, in the United States. By analyzing three key Miramax films distributed in the United States that represent Latin American culture—Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992, US release 1993), Il Postino (The Postman, 1994, US release 1995), and Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate, 1993, US release 1995)—I argue that Miramax and its success is a symptom of the changing role of national culture and the increasing presence of a neoliberal aesthetic within the neoliberal economy. Founded in 1979 by Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Miramax began as a distributor of independent and foreign films. Famous for their marketing abilities and for targeting audiences beyond art house venues, Miramax radically changed the landscape of independent cinema in the United States. With the success of films such as Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), The Crying Game (1992), and The Piano (1993), Miramax proved that independent and foreign films could be highly profitable investments. These successes dispelled the notion that quality cinema was anathema to profitable cinema. As proof of the Weinstein’s ability to back successful films, the company had earned 83 Oscar nominations by 1997.49 And yet, in addition to a vast library of films with Oscar nominations, Miramax films have been notorious for their scandals. According to Justin Wyatt, “Miramax has thrived due to its marketing savvy, particularly the ability to apply ‘exploitation’ techniques to art house product.”50 For instance, they arranged for Claudia Ohana, the actress who plays a young girl forced into prostitution in Eréndira (1983), to pose for Playboy, and they played on the “secret” of The Crying Game in the film’s publicity.51 This combination of controversy and quality reveals a central component of Miramax’s innovative marketing. Whereas independent films traditionally tracked according to two distinct categories (exploitation and art house), Miramax habitually combined these categories, promoting their films as entertainment for both types of audiences. As a result, they expanded

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the market and built the financial success of the films they distributed. Bob and Harvey Weinstein maintained that there was no reason why “so-called art house movies cannot be mass-market, and play in local neighbourhood theatres.”52 Another key feature of their marketing was an emphasis on their own role as an independent distributor, outside of the domain of major Hollywood Studios. Originally based in the trendy Tribeca district of New York City, Miramax promoted its own image as a scrappy, feisty, risk-taking company that did not have the bureaucratic apparatus of the major studios. Even after their acquisition by Disney in 1993, Miramax continued to exploit its image as an independent film company. Miramax took great interest in marketing foreign cinema to US audiences. Interestingly, the Weinsteins were first exposed to foreign cinema when they went to see François Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows, 1959) (thinking it was a porn film). The experience “clued them up to America’s neglect of foreign cinema.”53 The Weinsteins determined early that foreign cinema was an excellent source of quality product that could succeed in the United States with the right marketing techniques to support it. They also turned to English-language foreign films, such as My Left Foot (1989), which allowed them to widen their audience to include viewers reluctant to read subtitles. The company was a virtual powerhouse in the US distribution of foreign films: box office statistics credit Miramax with distributing the five top-grossing foreign films in the United States during the 1990s.54 Nevertheless, the widespread closing of art house theaters threatened the market for foreign films. For instance, despite the fact that Ju Dou (1990) had received an Oscar nomination, Miramax had to postpone its release due to a shortage of screens.55 In response, Miramax began to market foreign films as “mainstream independents,” moving away from the language of “art house,” which often signified a small, elite audience.56 One consequence of this was that Miramax set a high standard for the success of foreign films that few could match, leaving many quality foreign films unable to compete. Another consequence was that films that were too “foreign” (i.e., not easily accessible to mainstream audiences) were passed over since they were less likely to draw major audience interest. As Miramax tailored its marketing to a broader and broader audience, and as it attempted to move foreign films into mainstream cineplexes, the entire geography of the US film business was in flux. The 1980s and 1990s signaled a rise in the globalization of Hollywood with a wave of

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mergers between US interests and between Hollywood and foreign media companies.57 During this period, the Weinsteins found that constraints on their capital limited their successes. They often had to sell video distribution rights to films they acquired, as in the case of Reservoir Dogs (1992), which greatly reduced their return on investment.58 Their available capital also restricted how many films they could release in a given year. Simultaneously, Disney wanted to expand into new markets beyond the family-oriented. By the mid-1990s, Disney was a highly diversified company with strong holdings across the media spectrum and yet some areas of the entertainment business remained outside of their domain.59 Taking note of the success of foreign and independent films, Disney began to look into acquisitions, purchasing Miramax in 1993 and Merchant Ivory Productions in 1994. Disney purchased Miramax for $80 million, acquiring all the films in the Miramax library. In return, the Weinsteins gained the ability to produce their own films (albeit with certain budget restraints) while maintaining their creative autonomy (as long as they didn’t release NC-17 films). In addition, their films were given the support of Disney’s enormously successful video distribution company, Buena Vista Home Entertainment.60 This access to Disney’s distribution facilities greatly affected Miramax’s acquisition of foreign titles, since the company could subsequently market their films globally.61 For instance, Harvey Weinstein claims that “Il Postino [would not] have done the kind of ‘record business’ it did overseas if it hadn’t been released through Disney’s Buena Vista International.”62 The relationship between Miramax and Disney became a model for other Hollywood majors, who also wanted to break into the “indie” market. Perren notes that “by the start of the new millennium, each major studio had developed at least one division modeled largely on Miramax’s production and distribution strategies.”63 Thus the rise of indie, art house, and foreign film options in the US market was far more a sign of the ways industry conglomerates sought market diversity than it was of a truly alternative system outside of Hollywood. As explained in the previous chapter on coproduction (Chap. 2), in the 1990s conglomerates began to realize that there were profits to be had in the development of films that would appeal to niche markets. While these efforts did, in fact, offer viewers a chance to see culturally specific films, the films also often depended on fetishizing the cultures that were on screen. Yet not all of these “indie” companies were the same. Sony Pictures Classics, for instance, “typically distributed films from around the world that were much more formally experimental and

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politically charged than those released by any other indie company.”64 Their emphasis, according to Perren, was “profits over revenues.” Miramax, in contrast, “wanted its films to move beyond a specific demographic group and appeal to multiple niches.”65 One of the ways they sought to do that was by choosing films where they could “deemphasize the films’ ‘foreignness.’”66 If in the past a foreign film was marketed as something different from Hollywood, now Miramax sought to emphasize the ways that the films were similar to English-language films and broached “universal” human themes. These strategies embody what I call a “neoliberal aesthetic”—a style that creates a market-friendly view of the other that is easy to consume and enjoy. There is a significant body of scholarship dedicated to the effects of globalizing media on markets outside of the United States and ever since Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s seminal work, How to Read Donald Duck, much attention has been paid to the role of Disney as a cultural imperialist.67 In the global era, debates related to trade agreements, such as GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, implemented in January 1995) and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement, implemented in January 1994), have generated concern over the ability of national markets to restrict imports from the United States.68 But when we study the case of Miramax we can also understand a reverse trend: the increasing influx of non-US products into the United States. Just as globalization has altered the cultural consciousness of global consumers who purchase US commodities, reducing the consumption and consideration of local and national products, US consciousness of the cultural identity of its global neighbors has shifted. This shift has been particularly noteworthy in the case of US reception of products from Latin America. One of the most significant shifts relates to the way that the identity of Latin America was transformed in the 1990s into that of a trade partner for the United States rather than a volatile, unruly set of nations that need guidance and intervention. Ever since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, which warned Europe to stay out of the affairs of the Americas or risk US retaliation, and the Roosevelt Corollary of 1904, which claimed that the United States could resort to “the exercise of an international police power” in situations of “wrongdoing or impotence,” the United States has characterized its relationship to Latin America as one of a big brother who must guide and control the other nations of the Americas.69 The media during the Reagan and Bush years (1981– 1992) repeatedly characterized Latin America as a land of human rights

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violations, barbaric politics, and dangerous people. As Douglas Kellner explains, “The Reagan era was one of aggressive military intervention in the Third World. . . . Hollywood film nurtured this militarist mindset and thus provided cultural representations that mobilized support for such aggressive policy.”70 While films such as Costa Gavras’s Missing (1982), Oliver Stone’s Salvador (1986) and Roger Spottiswoode’s Under Fire (1983) were critical of the role of the United States in Latin America, major mainstream productions tended to support the image of the United States as justified in using military force to control the region. Blockbuster movies such as Romancing the Stone (1984), where a romance novelist has to rescue her sister from Colombian kidnappers, and Die Hard 2 (1990), where Bruce Willis has to save his wife from South American terrorists, served to reinforce the impression of Latin America as a land of barbarians and criminals. Without question, these images persist in US media culture following the Reagan-Bush era, but at the same time the increasing entrenchment of neoliberal economics in the region signaled a new wave of images that depict the region as non-threatening and commodity-friendly. Logically, these shifts in economic and social policy also resulted in aesthetic shifts. Paving the way for free trade, the neoliberal aesthetic diminishes the borders between nations. These borders are both literal (i.e., the US– Mexico border), and figurative, since the borders between national histories and conflicts are also erased. Under neoliberal aesthetics the nation is empty of history, struggle, or international threat. Instead, the nation is only meaningful as a source of commodities and exchange. These aesthetics are necessary in order to persuade the public that free trade will not result in international aggression, but rather in the peaceful exchange of goods and services among people who desire common commodities. This trend in marketing Latin America builds on earlier practices in US reception. In this sense it is not new, but rather an intensification and refocusing of marketing tools used by the US culture industry since the mid-twentieth century. We might think of examples like the Hollywood films of Carmen Miranda in the 1940s and Disney’s classic The Three Caballeros (1945) as earlier examples of similar kinds of representations that package Latin America as “pure spectacle.”71 The difference in the cases I will analyze below is that these films were not made in Hollywood. Miramax, both before but especially after its acquisition by Disney, was at the forefront of marketing foreign films with what I am calling a “neoliberal aesthetic.” Whether or not the films have a political message

160  S.A. McCLENNEN

or reflect social struggle, Miramax’s distribution practices led to marketing plans that obscured the political elements of these films in favor of a focus on the superficial and the sensual. The spin provided by Miramax casts the film as foreign (i.e., exotic), but also universal, insofar as the stories can be consumed in a way that is not tied to regional specificity. The intense commodification of these films and of the issues represented in them reveals Miramax’s neoliberal agenda, since the company was exemplary in expanding the market for their films and of transforming cultural elements into market properties—all at the service of increasing profits and audience. Both Il Postino and Fresa y chocolate were advertised as comedies, for instance, even though neither film is particularly funny. In order to trace Miramax’s role in distributing films north of the border, I trace three key examples where Miramax distributed and promoted a film about Latin America within the United States. Each of these films has in common a highly romanticized and depoliticized view of Latin America. Como agua para chocolate provides a sensual and romantic view of Mexican life on the border, Il Postino depicts Chilean Pablo Neruda as the poet of love, and Fresa y chocolate dramatizes the problems of tolerance and free expression in Cuba. It is more than noteworthy that all three of these films were released during moments of reconsideration of the economic relationships between the United States and Mexico, Chile, and Cuba. Released in 1993, Como agua para chocolate hit US screens during the era of NAFTA debates that worried about an influx of Mexican immigrants that might threaten US culture; Il Postino, released in mid-1995, coincided with a push to include Chile in NAFTA; and Fresa y chocolate, released in early 1995, came in the middle of renegotiations of the US embargo of Cuba. The neoliberal view of these countries is furthered in each of these films through the characterization of Latin American culture as highly sensual and sexual: increasing the appeal to US audiences, all three have a central love story accompanied by a significant dose of sexual images. Despite these similarities, all three of these films project the neoliberal aesthetic in different ways and to different degrees. Como agua para chocolate “After 63 consecutive weeks in theatrical release Como agua para chocolate has entered the history books as the most successful foreign language film of all time. Miramax Films is proud to have shared in this

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extraordinary achievement.”72 Grossing $21.7 million in its US release, Como agua para chocolate was the most profitable foreign film in history. Presenting the tale of Tita, a woman who is forbidden to be with the man she loves by a family tradition that requires the youngest daughter to serve her mother and not marry, the film is a clear example of neoliberal aesthetics where Mexican national identity is reduced to easily consumable products empty of history and struggle.73 In fact, as in the case of all three films I am highlighting, the promotional publicity on the video/DVD jacket does not even mention the national location of the film at all. A number of features of the film contributed to its enormous success in the United States—the eroticized love story between Tita and Pablo, the depiction of Mexican culture (especially food) as sensual and exotic, and the apolitical treatment of the Mexican Revolution and the border region. The DVD/video jacket touts the film as a “passionate tale of forbidden love,” quoting Playboy’s review of the film as “erotic and delectable.” In this way, we note that Miramax’s marketing chiefly viewed the film as sensual and sexual. The “feminine” but not “feminist” perspective of the film depicts a woman’s struggle to be with the man she loves in a context that is not threatening to patriarchy or traditional gender roles.74 One of the most significant departures from the original novel by Laura Esquivel is that the film version, even though it was adapted for the screen by Esquivel herself, conveys a patriarchal agenda that is in contrast with the original.75 The film supports a long tradition of eroticizing Latin Americans, both male and female, and it presents a popularized magical realism that contributes to the image of Latin America as exotic: for example, Tita is able to breastfeed Pedro and Rosaura’s baby even though she has never been pregnant, her food magically conveys her emotional state to all who eat it, and she dies by eating matches that consume her life spirit. Certain scholars have noted that the film is about more than “magical realism and food,” but Harmony Wu points out that “this is the level at which a majority of U.S. filmgoers consumed the movie.”76 For the US filmgoer the focus on Mexican food was a serendipitous choice. At a time when NAFTA had many worried about the effects of Mexican culture on the United States, a film about Mexican sensuality and food was certain to ease tensions, given that Mexican food is perhaps the one facet of Mexican culture that is regularly consumed in the United States without fear of cultural contamination. Further allaying

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fears of cross-cultural contact, the representation of the border as a non-violent, peaceful region of exchange further helped the film’s appeal. Taking place in the Rio Grande/Eagle Pass area, the repeated long shots of the isolated ranch house where the family lives contrast contemporary images of the border as teeming with Mexicans anxious to cross the border. The complete isolation of the house conforms to the time of the film, which, apart from the frame, begins in 1895 and ends in 1934—a period when the border between the United States and Mexico was not the barrier that it became after World War II. Border crossings take place throughout the film and in each case the result is innocuous and non-confrontational. In fact, if border crossing is seen as a threat, it is to Mexicans, since when Pedro and Rosaura cross to live in Texas their son dies because he is unable to eat any of the food given to him. When Tita falls into despair after hearing the news, she is taken to Dr. John Brown’s house to live. As she slowly recovers, he proposes marriage to her, but ultimately she cannot marry him because of her love for Pedro. Once again, a negative image of border crossing is rewritten: Tita’s refusal to marry Brown overshadows the image of the Mexican who wants to come to the United States and find a spouse in order to gain citizenship. This makes the later marriage between Esperanza and Brown’s son, Alex, read more like a happy-ending of free trade and international collaboration. Esperanza’s principle family legacy is the cookbook that has been passed down from Tita—hardly a sign of cultural resistance to free-market economics. Significantly, Dr. Brown’s voice-over narrates the last moments of Tita’s life as she consumes matches and burns up all of her passion, providing a frame to Tita’s sensual life that is controlled by Brown’s US-style reason and pragmatism. A further feature of the film’s neoliberal aesthetics is its superficial treatment of Mexican history. In fact, as Ignacio Sánchez Prado notes in his analysis of the film’s reception within Mexico, the film’s director Alfonso Arau constructed “a nationalism that clearly engaged with the values and expectations of a conservative middle class whose cultural ideologies remained in place regardless of the process of modernization brought about in the early years of the neoliberal project.”77 Sánchez Prado notes that one of the successes of the film was its focus on the middle class and the elite—a move which helped bring those classes back to the theater to see national cinema within Mexico. He notes the interesting ways that the film analyzes national identity without critiquing state power—a further sign of the rise of neoliberal values within Mexico.

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Set during the Mexican Revolution of 1910, the film avoids dealing with any of the significant historical and social issues surrounding the Revolution by concentrating on female, domestic spaces. This means that viewers within Mexico and within the United States could enjoy the film without concerning themselves with larger political issues. Gertrudis, Tita’s older sister, is the key link between the ranch house and the Mexican Revolution. Fleeing on horseback after devouring a passion-provoking meal, Gertrudis becomes the lover of a Villista soldier. After spending time in a brothel quenching her thirst for sex, Gertrudis becomes a general in the Revolution. Her involvement, though, never seems to connect to the class struggles that were at the heart of the conflict and her return to the family’s ranch never leads her to equate the issue of land redistribution with her family’s property. Summing up her apolitical engagement with the Revolution, near the end of the film she visits Tita and states: “Revolution wouldn’t be bad if you could eat at home.” Such statements aided the US viewer in disregarding Mexican history: “as these images are bought and eaten with US dollars, they are digested and become just another ingredient in the mess of the melting pot, drained of any residual Mexican specificity.”78 Il Postino “An irresistible treat about love, letters and laughter.”79 Il Postino was yet another Miramax success story, topping the US box office gross of Como agua para chocolate by $100,000. Based on a Chilean novella, with French and Italian actors, and a British director, Il Postino is a tale of friendship between Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, and an Italian postman, Mario. Through the transnational crew and its cross-cultural product the film loses ties to territorial specificity and gains the gloss of the global. A substantial revision of the original work by Antonio Skármeta, Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience, 1983), Il Postino displays the neoliberal aesthetic by manipulating and misrepresenting the historical events around Pablo Neruda’s life, toning down his leftist politics and playing up his reputation as the poet of love.80 The opening shots in the film reveal Mario sitting in bed fondling a postcard of a yellow convertible in front of a suspension bridge, perhaps the Golden Gate or Brooklyn Bridge, while his father returns from a night of fishing. Mario tells his father that the card has come from his friends in “America” who say they are going to buy a car like the

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one shown. Complaining that whenever he goes fishing he gets a cold, Mario longingly remarks that “America” is a rich country of opportunity. This opening sequence provides a facile entrance to the film for the US filmgoer. The United States is not referred to again, leaving the viewer with the positive image of the nation as a land of plenty. Subsequent national references to Italy and Chile retain a transnational patina that allows the US viewer to disengage from history and social struggle. Unlike Como agua para chocolate, whose diegesis is a willing accomplice to the erasure of Mexican history, Il Postino offers the viewer multiple options varying from political engagement to sensual passivity. And yet, similar to Como agua para chocolate, Miramax’s marketing stressed the film as an apolitical, romantic comedy, highlighting the “Latin” sensuality of the women loved by the two leading men. While there are many departures from the original, the most significant modifications are the setting, historical period, and friendship of the main characters. As Nathan Wolfson explains: “This attitude of post-modern indifference to matters of politics and economics is a frightfully pervasive, implicit, rightist theme underlying many interludes in the film.”81 Skármeta’s original tale of Neruda and his friendship with a postman was uniquely Chilean.82 Set in Chile, before and during Pinochet’s 1973 coup that ousted elected president Salvador Allende, the novella explored the connection between history, art, and personal relationships through the friendship between Pablo Neruda and his teenage postman. The remake takes place, not as Neruda is being asked to run for president in Chile in the late 1960s, but rather as he is fleeing political persecution in his homeland (Neruda left Chile after a call for his arrest in February of 1949 and returned in August, 1952).83 The depiction of Neruda as an exile, unwanted in his native land, suggests the notion of Neruda as a “landless” poet—ratifying the neoliberal depiction of Neruda as a “poet of love” whose global identity is absent of local ties. In fact, even though the film presents two visions of Neruda, the poet loved by the people and the poet loved by women, it favors casting him as the poet of romantic love. For Mario, Neruda is a celebrity who has seduced women across the globe—a truly transnational lover— and Mario’s friendship with Neruda is predicated on his desire to enlist Neruda’s help in seducing Beatrice. In contrast with the remake, in the original it is Neruda who dies at the end as his friend reads telegrams offering asylum while the sounds of tanks and guns roar outside his home. The friendship between the two

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men has grown into real respect and solidarity. In the Miramax remake, it is Mario who, disillusioned by his friend’s abandonment, is killed at a political demonstration before he was scheduled to read a poem in honor of Neruda. Unlike the original, Mario’s loyalty to Neruda suggests male weakness and his friendship becomes a form of suicide. In this way, the Miramax film reverses the camaraderie between Neruda and Mario depicted in the novella. The neoliberal version of Neruda reduces his life’s works to romantic poetry and an ethic of individual self-interest. Whereas Mario in the novella gains a friend, a love of poetry, a family, and a sense of politics, in the remake he aspires to all of these but dies a naïve idealist. Fresa y chocolate “A fun-filled celebration of life at its entertaining best!”84 Miramax marketed the Cuban film, Fresa y chocolate, as a comedy. Analysis of this film facilitates an exploration of the scope and limits of the neoliberal aesthetic since, contrasting the previous two examples and despite an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Film, Fresa y chocolate was not a huge US box office success, grossing only $2.08 million. Portraying the friendship between two male Cubans, one a young member of the party and the other a thirty-something homosexual, the film explores issues of tolerance in Cuba. Produced during the special period of extreme financial crisis in Cuba, many viewers unfamiliar with Cuban politics and history tended to view the film as “evidence that perestroika had reached the island and the Castro brothers were finally releasing their grip on dissidence.”85 Set in 1979, another period of crisis in Cuban history that culminated in the Mariel boatlift of 1980, the film could be viewed, on the one hand, as heralding the end of hardline Cuban policies. On the other hand, the film could be seen as the latest version of Castrist propaganda.86 Directed by Cuba’s most famous director, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, in conjunction with Juan Carlos Tabío, the film is a complex combination of neoliberal aesthetics and revolutionary film. Senel Paz adapted his short story, “El lobo, el bosque, y el hombre nuevo” [the wolf, the forest, and the new man], for the screenplay. Apart from a title change that substitutes Che Guevara’s call for a new revolutionary society with ice cream flavors, the addition of female characters is the most significant change from the original. The film centers on a university student, David, who meets Diego, a gay artist frustrated with

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the treatment of the gay community by the Cuban state. The film opens with David misreading his fiancée’s coyness as they are about to consummate their relationship, which leads her to marry another man. It closes with David’s successful initiation into the world of heterosexuality by Diego’s friend, Nancy. Paul Julian Smith remarks that the film “carefully frame[s] the gay action within a hetero narrative which safely contains it for nervous straights.”87 The nude images of three women, a rarity in Cuban films, and the addition of heterosexual sex undoubtedly helped create appeal for a US market. A further advantage was the characters’ fetish of foreign commodities: Nancy deals products on the black market, Diego’s apartment is filled with contraband, and David, the good revolutionary, enjoys drowning his sorrows with the scotch of the “enemy”— Johnnie Walker. In keeping with earlier Miramax films (e.g., The Crying Game), Fresa y chocolate confronts the “scandal” of homosexuality “while reinforcing ‘traditional’ and discriminatory views.”88 In unison with Miramax publicity, both directors stressed in interviews with Dennis West that the film’s main theme was tolerance and that homosexuality was merely an example of this universal problem. Be that as it may, the film never honestly engages the oppression of homosexuals in Cuba or the crises of the Cuban gay community. Favoring the heterosexual gaze of David, the film presents Diego as a stereotypical loca or queen.89 This approach and the film’s easy stylistic accessibility help its appeal to an international audience, while preventing the film “from being radical either esthetically or politically.”90 These neoliberal aesthetics suggested that the film would be a success in the United States and, in fact, it was the most successful Cuban film in US history. Nevertheless, the film pales in comparison with the economic success of Como agua para chocolate and Il Postino. There are a number of possible reasons for this difference. One key difference is that the film does not have the same production quality as the other two. Moreover, even though the film may be a watered-down, heterosexualized view of homosexuality and intolerance, it is still a film with a gay main character and such films had yet to be welcomed by the US mainstream at that time. Another key reason is the fact that the film is “Cuban.” Unlike the other two, which are stripped relatively easily of their politiconational referents, this film centers on Cuba and its political crises. Diego, although he has been discarded by the regime, remains a Cuban nationalist and he constantly refers to Cuban cultural icons, teaching David

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about his cultural heritage. References to José Martí, Che, José Lezama Lima, and others likely distanced viewers unfamiliar with Cuban history. Even though the film was marketed as a lighthearted comedy about a young man’s initiation into sex by Nancy and into the intellectual world by Diego, the film’s representation of a nation in crisis may have thwarted foreign viewers’ desires to savor the flavors of Cuba. Both Como agua para chocolate and Il Postino were marketed along with tie-in products, whereas Fresa y chocolate had fairly limited promotion. Interestingly, Miramax was critiqued for favoring certain films in its promotional strategies. Critics saw the uneven marketing support of Miramax as indicative of its major-studio style, where profits are more important than supporting small, quality films.91 These practices can also be read as further evidence of their neoliberal economic modus operandi. In an unprecedented marketing strategy Miramax Films and Doubleday Publishing jointly promoted Como agua para chocolate in their film and book versions—the first time a hardcover book was released simultaneously with a feature film.92 Like the film, the book was tremendously profitable hitting top ten lists of both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.93 This cross promotion, coupled with a publicity tour where Esquivel did interviews and appeared in restaurants, increased the consumers for both products. Similarly, Il Postino received cross promotion with the release of an English version of Antonio Skármeta’s original text and a compact disc of music from the film, which included popular icons like Sting, Madonna, Julia Roberts, Glenn Close, and Wesley Snipes reading Neruda poems; “The company didn’t use burger-chain tie-ins or Massimo Troisi dolls to merchandise the picture, but it did sell 30,000 copies of the 1985 Antonio Skármeta novel on which the film is based, and another 25,000 books of Neruda poetry.”94 Since Massimo Troisi died twelve hours after filming wrapped, “marketing masters Miramax capitalized on that poignancy”—selling Il Postino as a film that records the last moments in an actor’s life.95 The consequences of the hyper-commodification of films that represent foreign cultures are considerable given that US filmgoers often rely on films and other mass media for the bulk of their information about other cultures. There is, of course, another side to the story of Miramax during this phase and that is the fact that it indisputably changed the US movie industry for the better because it played a tremendous role in providing a space for foreign and “independent” films, especially those dealing with Latin America, in major movie venues. In 1996, Miramax

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released ten foreign films, making it the largest distributor of such films in the United States.96 As a sign that the work of the Weinsteins was appreciated by foreign cinemas, they received an award in January 2001 from the French Ministry of Culture for their cultural services to French cinema.97 In addition, the films Miramax released are often aesthetically ambivalent, as in the case of Il Postino and Fresa y chocolate, thereby facilitating a potential political and historically attentive viewing. By 2005, the Weinstein brothers had left Miramax in the hands of Disney amid complaints that Disney had “sucked the spirit right out of it.”98 Then in 2010 Disney unloaded what had ceased to be a profitable venture for them. Many speculate that the decline of Miramax was precisely due to its connection to the Hollywood behemoth. The corporate Disney culture simply destroyed the spirit of the “indie” filmmaking mission. The fall of Miramax certainly draws attention to one of the deep ambivalences I’ve highlighted in this book. While it is clear that Miramax marketed their films with a profit-driven goal that often stripped films of local connections and political passion, they also did offer an alternative to the sort of films typically offered by a major like Disney. They may have built a niche market within the neoliberal economy—but that market itself was a real alternative to the blockbuster business. And while it is easy to criticize the hegemony of Miramax, just as it is easy to critique Ibermedia, it is important to note that these initiatives have carved out important avenues for screening films with Latin American content. The reality that Miramax helped develop a US market for foreign film can’t be overlooked, and the legacy of that reality continues today. Meanwhile Miramax has gone back to marketing mostly its existing catalog. In 2011, they entered into a deal with Netflix to stream Miramax movies in Latin America: “Netflix members in countries such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina will be able to stream more than 140 Miramax movies on multiple platforms, including TV, tablets, computers and mobile phones.”99 Miramax CEO Mike Lang explained that the deal was a great way for Miramax films to reach the Latin American market: “The robust Netflix platform will provide a proven avenue to reach Latin American audiences and take advantage of strong subscriber growth prospects. We look forward to growing the international audience for the Miramax library through many more partnerships like this around the world.”100 So in the latest twist on Miramax’s relationship to Latin American film, audiences across Latin America may now have access to

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some of the more successfully distributed Latin American films at the US box office.

The Festival Film The rise of the role of film festivals as central sites for the circulation and distribution of “world” cinema has been taken as a prime example of the global exchange of film culture. Festivals have been studied for the various ways they create spatial and temporal dimensions that influence how filmgoers understand and appreciate films in a globalized network. Festivals both reinforce and trouble core–periphery relations, they recreate the cinematic spectacle, and they offer alternative film spaces that challenge Hollywood. As Mark Peranson argues, “film festivals in the current political economy of cinema exist as an alternative distribution network; their most significant purpose is providing audiences with opportunities to enjoy commercially unviable films projected in a communal space—films that most communities, even the most cosmopoli­ tan, otherwise would not have the opportunity to see.”101 Given that many festivals highlight a range of “global films,” they are often taken to symbolize the odd ways that there is both a convergence in particular ways of storytelling and a diversity of cultural referents for filmgoers to consume and appreciate. Designed to promote independent alternatives to blockbusters, festivals offer cultural-territorial referents that reflect a complex flow of people, goods, money, ideology, and power. Given their usual cosmopolitan location, festivals have also become sites for a new cosmopolitan “global” identity. Festivals are also not all created equal. A-list festivals, such as Toronto and Cannes, are places where the big players go to promote their films and secure deals. Other B-list festivals, such as Chicago Latino or BAFICI in Buenos Aires aim to offer a film event absent the big business angle, attracting filmgoers to films that are unlikely to get commercial screenings. Latin American films in the global era have played a role in both types of festivals. Any discussion of the connections between film festivals and Latin American cinema, though, needs to begin in a very local context: the festival held in Viña del Mar, Chile. The Chilean film festival was first launched in 1962, when the Viña del Mar Film Club was created by a group of film lovers, who felt that it would be valuable to find a way to screen and discuss important films. The efforts of this film club morphed

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and by 1967 Chile’s first international film festival was inaugurated by Aldo Francia. The Primer Festival de Cine y Encuentro de Cineastas Latinoamericanos [First Film Festival and Meeting of Latin American Filmmakers] was more than an effort to create a film society along the Chilean coast: Francia was a vibrant part of the NLAC movement, and the festival was as much about networking as it was about screening political films from the region. As Francia explains it in a 1990 book dedicated to the importance of the festival, Viña del Mar was effectively the birthplace of the NLAC movement.102 Prior to that the political filmmaking of the region was isolated and nationally based. The merit of Viña del Mar “fue reunir a los realizadores y sus películas, dando inicio a un nuevo cine latinoamericano que planteaba una temática diferente, una nueva técnica para filmar y, sobre todo, una enorme ansia de unificación” [was to bring together the filmmakers and their films, initiating a new Latin American cinema that set out a different theme, a new filming technique, and, above all, an enormous eagerness to unify].103 He goes on to explain that the goal was to work on the unification of Latin America through film. The first feature film to win an award at the festival was the classic NLAC film Manuela (1966) directed by Humberto Solás, who had helped found the Cuban ICAIC.104 Iconic Chilean political filmmaker Miguel Littín has an essay in Francia’s volume that describes the seminal role that the festival had on building alliances, networks, and relationships among the filmmakers from across Latin America who were all dedicated to creating a politically potent cinema. Coming on the heels of the success of the Cuban Revolution, these filmmakers were inspired to use film as a weapon of change and a spark to raise consciousness. In addition to meetings about the political role of film and the ways that filmmaking can support revolution, there were also meetings dedicated to the challenges Latin American filmmakers faced regarding distribution. Littín explains that they first debated the role of state laws and that they also discussed the idea of a common film market within the region. Their discussion of distribution further debated how to get films into foreign markets.105 The festival was suspended in 1970 when the political climate was tense in the wake of the election of Salvador Allende, but it reopened in 1990 as dictator Augusto Pinochet was finally stepping down. The renewed festival, though, did not have the political edge of the founding version. While it remained true to promoting the cinema of Chile and of Latin America, it had become a far glitzier event with attendees

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on opening night among the nation’s top dignitaries. When I attended the festival in 1993, I was able to participate in the opening night festivities as the Chilean film Johnny cien pesos (Johnny One Hundred Pesos, 1993) premiered. Directed by Gustavo Graef Marino, the film paved the way for a series of Chilean films that moved away from the experimental aesthetics of the NLAC while still holding true to the idea that films should reflect issues of social relevance. The film was one of the first among many from Chile to blend an entertaining aesthetics with a social message. While the film straddles a more conventional aesthetic with a social message about youth culture, class, and post-Pinochet Chile, it is a far cry from the aesthetically rich and politically pointed NLAC film Manuela, which tells the story of a female guerrilla fighter. Manuela pits the personal against the collective and drives the point that all must set aside personal concerns for the revolution. Meanwhile Johnny cien pesos has a far less didactic message and a far less obvious ethical angle. In this way, the story of these two films from the Viña del Mar film festival offers a perfect example of the trends I’ve been outlining where the political filmmaking of the NLAC was adjusted and adapted in the 1990s. While the political edge is mitigated in this newer phase, it isn’t absent either. Research on the important role that festivals are playing in the global era has been building momentum. Studies of specific festivals, of a new type of festival spectator, festival film aesthetics, and the hybrid identity of global and local references cover the various ways that festivals are growing in prominence as a central source of the production, distribution, and exhibition of Hollywood alternatives. My focus in this brief section, though, is on festivals as sites for distribution deals. As Dina Iordanova explains, “there seems to be a growing consensus on festivals as an ‘alternative distribution network’ for world cinema beyond Hollywood.”106 She cites film festival directors who echo the idea that the role of the festival is to provide an answer to “what is lacking in the current cultural scene.”107 But as she notes, there is a real tension today between the festival as a site of local tourism, the festival as the site where films go to get “real” distribution, and festivals as a site for screening films that won’t be seen otherwise. Ragan Rhyne focuses on the idea that the festival emulates neoliberal cultural policy. From the role of corporate sponsorship to the way that the festival spectator is a visual entrepreneur, festivals highlight cultural economic policy in the global era. Blending state support, corporate sponsorship, and the consumption of celebrity, the festival works across

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the local tourist economy and global neoliberal market diversification. As Rhyne puts it, “if the goal of neoliberal cultural policy has been to create subjects that uphold the circuits of global capital while simultaneously taking on the responsibility for securing their place within it, then understanding the ways in which the often conflicting interests of these subjects are negotiated through festival institutions is crucial.”108 While the festival currently plays a key role as a backstop against Hollywood blockbusters, it has a long history. Marijke de Valck explains that “Europe is the cradle of the film festival phenomenon.”109 But she points out that Hollywood became highly influential early on which “makes it impossible to consider film festivals without considering the dynamics between cinema in Europe and cinema in Hollywood.”110 For de Valck many of the traits we note in contemporary festivals were present from the start: The tension between Hollywood and alternative films and the tensions between the festival as a site for developing national identity while also creating a global film culture begins with the first festival in Venice in 1932. After Venice a number of European nations followed suit developing their own festivals: “the post-war European nations began to organize film festivals as events where films were exhibited as an expression of national identity and culture.”111 Festivals were also always a place where the business of cinema bumped up against its role as a source of identity formation. It became clear after the founding of the Marché du Film in 1959 at Cannes that festivals were key sites for the economic development of the film industry. De Valck argues that it is a mistake to see festivals as a true alternative to Hollywood. Instead she finds that “film festivals are central sites within a global, influential film system that both counters and complements the Hollywood hegemony.”112 De Valck explains that there were always global–local tensions, where many directors realized that their best chance to promote their films was abroad at a festival rather than at home in a local theater: “Directors from Argentina to Zimbabwe realized they had a better chance of building a career through the international ‘art’ forums of festivals, than via commercial success at home.”113 Bill Nichols’s article, “Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism,” takes up a central concern of film festival research, the global–local dynamics: “The festival circuit allows the local to circulate globally, within a specific system of institutional assumptions, priorities, and constraints.”114 But as Daniel Dayan

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notes, this local–global dynamic is not a free flow. In fact, “‘a film festival is mostly spent answering questions about self-definition, identity, and character. This definitional activity is on the minds of all involved: organizers, jury-members, candidates, audiences, buyers and storytellers or different sorts.”115 For Dayan, who studied the case of Sundance, the key is that the festival requires the performance of identity, since it is identity as much as the film itself that will be the commodity distributed. From promotional material to panels with directors, the entire festival is organized around the film’s performance of identity. This means that festivals may play a role in helping define art cinema or “world” cinema by adding cultural value to films and helping develop an aura around screen culture, but at the same time festivals are the places where films enter into the marketplace. Again, we see that the tension between culture as commodity and culture as art breaks down into a messy overlap, since as Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong explains, “however strong cinephilia may be, films mean little if they are not seen.”116 While the Cannes Marché du Film dates back to 1959, today’s festivals offer not only markets, but also coproduction fora, funding competitions, producer platforms, roundtable discussions, and master classes. Wong points out that “these opportunities attract filmmakers, stars, producers, distributors, investors, exporters, publicists, lawyers, journalists, and film commissions from different countries . . . These agents, in turn, form networks in which film production, finance, and distribution are negotiated beyond the festival world.”117 The film sales and distribution activities of festivals have increased not as a counter to Hollywood, but as a sign of the proliferation of niche markets within neoliberal capital. In this way, festivals are not outside of the multinational film market, but rather one of the many pieces in a multilayered industry that has created multiple tiers for film marketing. But what is most relevant for the purposes of this study is the fact that this new role for festivals is easily dated back to the global economic shifts of the 1990s. Wong notes that the 1990s were a real pivot point in the development of the festival as a site for film business: In the 1990s, “many film festivals have advanced the symbiosis of market and festival as a way of ensuring programming, participation, and publicity.”118 So how does the business of distribution work at a festival? As Wong explains, markets share spaces at festivals, but they don’t sell the film rights or even the tickets. The three key players are the producers

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(who are selling a film), the distributors (who want the rights to a film), and the sales agents, who can be either distributors or producers. Sales agents can buy the rights to distribute the film from the producers, only then to find distributors for different regions and formats. Wong explains that “when the media report that deals are made at Sundance or Cannes, generally they are talking about distribution companies such as then Artisan Entertainment that acquired The Blair Witch Project (1999).”119 The festival offers the nexus where a film can get into the hands of a distributor. The festival also plays an aesthetic role since, when it awards a film, the film then has a far higher chance of securing a deal. Wong explains that festivals straddle financial frameworks that are altruistic, neocolonial, and neoliberal, and she argues that it is a mistake to break down the pros and cons of festivals in terms of simple dichotomies.120 As I’ve explained throughout this book, festivals are part of a neoliberal economy that profits from cultural forms that criticize neoliberalism itself. Positioned as they are as an alternative to Hollywood blockbusters, festival films offer alternatives to mindless fluff films. But that alternative is still part of the neoliberal market. Festivals carve out a tiny space in a global film economy that protects a niche market that offers films of substance but doesn’t directly challenge the system. Peranson explains that one of the key ways to understand the business side of festivals is to recognize that there are roughly two types of festivals: business festivals and audience festivals. Generally most A-list festivals are business festivals, but that is not always true as in the example of the festival at Mar del Plata, Argentina, which was founded in 1954 and is the oldest Latin American film festival, and the only one with FIAPF (Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films [International Federation of Film Producers’ Associations]) “A” status. The festival is a showcase for global film, not only Argentine or Latin American film, but it does not represent a major film market.121 (See Table 3.4). Peranson’s analysis offers a valuable way to suss out the complicated ways that festivals accommodate and develop different stakeholders. What he shows, though, is that the “business festival” caters first and foremost to distributors/buyers and nearly last to the audience, whereas the “audience festival” places the audience first. In what follows, I’ll briefly look at three examples of “business festivals” for Latin American film, then I’ll look at three examples of audience festivals from within the region.

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Table 3.4  Peranson’s comparison of festival stakeholders: “Interest Groups and Their Importance at Film Festivals.” Source Mark Peransona Interest group

Business festival

Audience festival

Distributor/Buyer 1. Domestically, use as a launching pad for soon-to-be-released films, take advantage of festival/ presence of talent to hold press junkets. Buyers attend festivals looking to acquire new films (leading to the need for a premiere-heavy lineup).

4. If distributor believes in good word of mouth creating audience, use to launch newer releases. May attend to acquire in specialty areas (i.e., if festival is strong in documentaries, particular national cinemas . . .)

Sales Agent

2. A place to promote and sell films to distributors.

5. Used as a revenue stream to fund their presence at business festivals.

Sponsors

3. Need to be appeased, often with presence of celebrities.

2. Need to be appeased, with “sponsor films,” more commercial films with stars or audience-friendly.

Government

5. Promotion of national cinema. 3. Promotion of national cinema.

Audience

4. Lesser concern, belief is they will see anything that has been branded by the festival and not complain.

1. Major concern, but also underlying truth that tastes often vary from programmer to general public.

Critics

6. Junkets for mainstream critics, “artier” films for special press.

6. Need to concern themselves with local critics’ reactions as they are promotional tools for selling tickets.

Filmmakers

7. Attend because of work, a chore, do major publicity.

7. Not as much work, more like vacation, engage with audience, meet other filmmakers. Often younger filmmakers.

aMark Peranson, “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals,” Cinéaste 33, no. 3 (2008): 39.

Cannes The Cannes film festival was founded in 1932 and it is known as a central source for promoting European and art films. Cannes represents the perfect business festival. It creates a spectacle of film and is the place where deals happen. In 1944, Mexican director Emilio Fernández’s María Candelaria (1944) won the Palme d’Or. The film was a key example of Mexican golden age cinema. But what is perhaps less known

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is the fact that Brazilian political NLAC filmmaker Glauber Rocha had three films nominated for a Palme d’Or, including Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth, 1967), which was awarded the FIPRESCI (Fédération Internationale de la Presse Cinématographique [International Federation of Film Critics]) award in 1967. Rocha won the Prix de la mise en scène [Best Director Award] in 1969 for O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes, 1969) and the 1977 Special Jury Prize for Best Short Film, Di Cavalcanti (1977). Cannes has also played a role in helping launch distribution deals for Latin American films and this has especially been so in the post-1990 era. In 2000, Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros (2000) secured an international distribution deal with Lionsgate after being selected for Critic’s Week at Cannes. In fact, after it took the top prize in its competition that year the film “provoked a ‘buying frenzy’ and was sold to France, Italy, Spain and Israel.”122 González Iñárritu went on to screen his third film, Babel (2006), at Cannes where he won the Best Director Award (Prix de la mise en scène), becoming the first Mexican-born director to win the award. In 2014, Argentine director Damián Szifrón’s Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales, 2014) secured deals as a result of Cannes. The film was even described by Cannes Festival chief Thierry Fremaux as a “very unique, personal and different cinema that should wake up the Croisette.”123 More recently, in 2016 Participant Media-coproduced Neruda, directed by Chilean Pablo Larraín and starring Gael García Bernal, closed European distribution deals after screening at Cannes. Wild Bunch Distribution closed a deal to distribute the film in France, Piffl Medien for Germany/Austria, Good Films rights to Italy, and Network Distributing for the UK. While not the edgy, experimental cinema of thrice awarded Rocha, each of these films has their own socially critical angle. Thus, one of the most visible features of Cannes is its market. Cannes describes its Marché du Film as involved with “promoting the dual cultural and economic nature of cinema.”124 In 2016, the Marché attracted over 11,902 registered participants, including 1,747 buyers, for a total of 5,201 companies. The year 2016 also saw a significant increase in attendees from China (+32% with 494 participants) and Brazil (+39% with 147 participants), a jump that reflects the increasing global media power of China and Brazil. In 2016, 3,450 films were presented at the Marché du Film. Of these, 1,426 films had screenings, 790 of which were market premieres.125 Without question the Marché is the world’s leading market

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for non-Hollywood film and it can be credited with creating a truly global market where major players may dominate, but smaller players can and do have success. Sundance Founded in 1978, Sundance is the largest independent film festival in the United States. Originally “the goal of the festival was to showcase strictly American-made films, highlight the potential of independent film, and to increase visibility for filmmaking in Utah.”126 Sundance began as a low-profile venue for small-budget, independent creators from outside the Hollywood system. In the 1990s, Sundance was a place where independent filmmakers like Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, or Robert Rodriguez could land distribution deals with companies like Miramax and Fine Line Features. But after gaining more visibility under the leadership of Robert Redford, the festival morphed to a media spectacle for “Hollywood celebrity actors, paparazzi, and luxury lounges set up by companies not affiliated with Sundance.”127 Many US-based filmmakers have complained that Sundance is now dominated by Hollywood majors, sponsoring corporations, and glitz. They argue that the event has lost any real link to independent filmmaking.128 Despite the fact that Sundance has, like Cannes, become more spectacle than indie alternative, it still remains a place where filmmakers can land distribution deals. A number of Latin American films have gotten their launch through Sundance. Among them is José Padilha’s Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010), which went on to break box office records in Brazil.129 In one interesting example, Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), which depicts a dystopian future to explore ways in which technology both oppresses and connects migrants, landed a key distribution deal at Sundance after winning the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best feature film that focuses on science or technology. The film also won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. Due to its success, Rivera had two distribution offers, one with IFC and another with Maya Entertainment Group, who had also distributed A Day Without A Mexican (2004).130 Rivera ultimately decided to work with Maya, only then to have the company go out of business. Six years later, though, the film had a second shot at a release through Sundance’s #ArtistServices Initiative.131 The initiative is aimed at navigating a changing distribution market for independent film: “Through

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online resources, live workshops, and a network of allied organizations, the program provides support and insights on creative funding, marketing, and distribution. For Institute alumni, #ArtistServices offers a wide array of digital distribution opportunities, promotion and consultation for Kickstarter campaigns, and strategies for audience engagement.”132 Understanding the increasing significance of digital distribution deals, the #ArtistServices initiative means that every past, current, and future Institute-supported film is eligible for a distribution deal that allows preferred and direct access to the leading online digital retailers. Highlighting the complexities of the neoliberal entrepreneurial system, #ArtistServices gives filmmakers far more control over their films while also placing them in the role of distributor of their own work. Filmmakers that enter into an #ArtistServices deal have complete control over their films’ distribution plans. What perhaps is most interesting for the purposes of this book is that Rivera’s film is a not-so-subtle critique of neoliberalism, militarization, racism, and the violence of the border. In the film, a fortified wall has ended unauthorized Mexico–US immigration, but it hasn’t stopped the US need for cheap labor. So now migrant workers are replaced by robots, remotely controlled by the same class of would-be immigrants who plug in on the other side of the border. Meanwhile drones attack Mexicans who attempt to hack into digital communications. The film may be futuristic, but it covers many key issues with a clear political message meant to provoke the audience to engage critically with the themes presented. San Sebastián Located on the northern coast of Spain, in the Basque region, the San Sebastián film festival has been an important venue for Latin American cinema. An “A” category festival, it was founded in 1953 and was originally intended to focus on Spanish-language films but it opened to films in other languages in 1955. It hosted the international premiere of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and the European premiere for Star Wars (1977). While San Sebastián can’t compete with the film markets of Cannes and Sundance, it has a strong record of helping to launch Latin American films into European markets. In the last years, there has been increasing news of major distribution companies acquiring titles via the San Sebastián festival.133 As Wong points out, San Sebastián does not run its own market; instead, it functions as a gathering spot for industry

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professionals ready to cut deals. According to Wong, it boasts that “1,171 industry professionals from fifty-eight countries used the services of the sales office.”134 Wong further cautions, though, that “its claims for hegemony in a Spanish-language market raise important postcolonial questions.”135 And yet a straight analysis of San Sebastián as an example of postcolonial hegemony misses the real ways that it serves as a gateway into theaters for many Latin American films that simply don’t have other options. San Sebastián has developed a three-pronged approach to facilitating distribution deals. First, since it comes on the heels of the Toronto film festival San Sebastián allows sales agents to announce deals and garner European press coverage of titles world premiering at Toronto, then continuing on to competition in Spain. Second, and of more signifi­ cance for Latin American films, San Sebastián hosts Films in Progress and a Europe-Latin America Co-Production Forum, both of which work as springboards between European industry professionals and Latin American filmmakers. San Sebastián also works to facilitate access to international markets, especially for its own Basque cinema. When we think about the issues of Spanish hegemony in relation to Latin American film, it’s worth remembering the far more marginalized status of Basque cinema. A recent San Sebastián deal further muddies efforts to trace the global flow of power along traditional lines. At the 2016 festival, HBO and Sony picked up US and Latin American rights to Chilean director Pepa San Martín’s Rara (2016), winner of this year’s LGBT SebastianeLatino Award at the festival.136 Told through the eyes of an adolescent, the film narrates a father’s battle to win custody based on the fact that the mother is a lesbian. Sony took theatrical rights for Mexico, Colombia, and Brazil and television rights for all of Latin America. HBO bought the US rights to the film sold by Madrid-based Latido Films. So in the latest twist on global media exchange a Spanish coproduced film, directed by a Chilean, landed distribution for the United States and Latin America via a film festival in the Basque country. Guadalajara, Rio, and Buenos Aires As I’ve explained, the festival circuit used to have clear distinctions between business and audience festivals. But for national/regional festivals like Viña del Mar there is an increasing trend where these local

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festivals also serve as opportunities for distribution deals. Some of these festivals, like the ones held in Rio, Guadalajara, and Buenos Aires, work to promote national cinema as well as regional cinema while also attempting to promote the local film market. In this way they blend the audience and business festival models. For example, the Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival launched in 1999 as a merger of two previous film festivals, the Rio Cine Festival and the Mostra Banco Nacional de Cinema. The festival has a special section for Brazilian film, but it also hosts a film market. The market hosts seminars and symposia and works as an opportunity for professionals to network.137 The Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI) was also launched in 1999. In 2013, the festival attracted more than a million spectators, so it clearly works as an audience festival.138 BAFICI also hosts an “área profesional” [professional area] that serves to connect producers, agents, directors, and distributors. The focus is to help support Argentine and Latin American films, some of which are having their premieres at the festival.139 The Guadalajara International Film Festival launched in 1986 and it self-promotes as the most important festival in Latin America. The festival describes itself as a “cultural event of great importance for Guadalajara and Mexico” and having attended the festival twice in the mid-1990s I can personally attest to the fact that the screenings draw huge crowds and attract members from the community. It also attracts a significant amount of industry professionals—a reality that balances it between a festival that creates an event for the community and a market opportunity for film distribution. Their film market offers a video library with the latest Ibero-American titles, preview booths, and meeting areas.140 As these three festivals reveal, the new trends are increasingly moving toward digital release and streaming services over theatrical releases. Variety reported early in 2016 that “the biggest story to emerge on the festival circuit this year—from Sundance to SXSW—is how the market has been upended by Amazon and Netflix.”141 They report that the streaming services now have the financial resources to acquire almost any project. Amazon bought Manchester by the Sea (2016) for $10 million, for instance. The trends suggest that streaming distribution is no longer a secondary option, nor is it an alternative to the commercial industry. In some cases Netflix or Amazon acquires films for both theatrical and streaming release; “‘Netflix and Amazon are making it more challenging

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for other distributors to compete,’ says Jessica Lacy, head of international and independent film at ICM. ‘They’re coming in very strong and making a good argument for their models.’”142

Alternative Distribution Models As we consider the increasing rise of digital technologies and streaming services in the film industry the key question is how will the increase of streaming releases for films affect the relationship between Latin American films and the production of identity? As I’ll discuss in the next chapter, the move away from communal screening practices in cinemas is clearly one consequence. But if we admit that DVD and television screenings of films have been increasingly important in the last decades, we can recognize that home screenings and theatrical ones are not necessarily a zero sum game. More importantly, regarding the issue of distribution, streaming technologies allow for the possibility that films that may have limited box office appeal can capture an alternative home market. If viewers currently watch Netflix, then options to screen film from the region via the platform have some merit. Recently Televisa launched Blim, which is meant to function as a rival to Netflix in the region: “Blim’s subscription model and price are similar to that of Netflix’s, but with about 20% of Blim’s catalog consisting of Hollywood fare, the content is more Latin American-centric than the streaming giant.”143 Like Netflix and Amazon, Blim plans to offer original content on an exclusive basis. But given the fact that Blim holds the exclusive first-run rights to the James Bond film Spectre, it remains to be seen exactly how the regionally based streaming content provided will be functionally different from Netflix or Amazon, both of which have also developed content aimed for Latin American audiences like Netflix’s Narcos (2015–). What we see, again, is that the shifts in technology afforded by globalization don’t always translate into easy-to-analyze consequences for the connections between local content and communal identities. We can note the increased presence of digital technology, but mapping those changes onto either a more “global” identity or a “local” one simply makes little sense. This chapter opened by describing the ways that Hollywood majors overwhelmingly dominate distribution networks. Referring back to the initiatives of the NLAC directors, I highlighted the fact that distribution has been an especially weak link in the film-industry supply chain

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throughout the region. As Latin American nations ceded control of distribution networks, Hollywood majors were able to step in and profit from successful national cinema—a reality that complicates our understanding of how national cinema can help build national identity. Noting the role that Miramax played in distributing Latin American cinema in the United States further underscores the deep ambivalence of the neoliberal era, where market niches allow for alternative cinemas to have a second life, but are moderated through a neoliberal aesthetic that tends to soften the political potential of Latin American films. Next, I looked at the role of film festivals as avenues for distribution and the complex ways that different types of festivals package films for the market. As I’ve stressed throughout this book, though, globalization has both reinforced and destabilized the traditional axes of economic and cultural power. As we see a deepening concentration in the hands of a few major film distributors, we can also note that new technologies, market niches, and other features of the global neoliberal economy have opened up opportunities for alternative, “entrepreneurial” players to enter into the distribution market. The reality is that since the era of the NLAC, directors have sought alternative models, but it is only now in the era of millennial globalization that some of those alternatives are truly viable. As Stephanie Dennison notes, there are numerous examples of “alternative” distribution networks across the region, ranging from travelling cinema initiatives led by well-intentioned industry professionals (the Mexican Ambulante project linked to Gael García Bernal and his Canana production company, for example) to Brazil’s Vídeo nas Aldeias project and Peru’s Caravana Documental, the purpose of which is to take film (making and viewing) to indigenous communities. Brazilian company RAIN is leading the way in digital cinema and cinema on demand (COD) in the region, with the express purpose of doing away with the need for expensive 35 mm film copies; Brazilian Carlos Gerbase’s 3 efes (3 Fs, 2007) was the first feature film to be simultaneously released on digital and DVD formats and simultaneously screened in cinemas (via RAIN), on television and on the internet.144

Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez further notes the examples of non-­ Hollywood distributors such as the MERCOSUR Film Market (2005), the Ibero-American Film Market (2006), and in television, Venezuela’s TeleSur and Brazil’s Globo TV International.145 These are only a tiny

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sample of the vast range of projects that are taking advantage of streaming technologies and alternative avenues for distribution. In fact, the increasing presence of alternative distribution networks is so vast that it would be impossible to cover all of these initiatives. So this last section will simply highlight one key example: Ventana Sur. Based in Buenos Aires, Ventana Sur is a Latin American film market created in November 2009 by the Argentine film commission, INCAA, and the Marché du Film/Festival de Cannes with the support of Creative Europe (European Commission). According to its own self-promotion: “After eight successful editions, Ventana Sur has indisputably become the main Latin American Film Market. Each year, it receives more than 2,000 accredited members, among whom there are more than 300 buyers and sellers from across the five continents.”146 Ventana Sur is a novel idea since it is not linked to a film festival. While it does host large screenings on eight screens and offers panel discussions and other opportunities for group networking, the novelty of Ventana Sur is that it offers 40 individual stalls where potential distributors can access a large database of content. The last market had over four hundred films in the video library and offered 167 theater screenings. Moreover, the idea of Ventana Sur is to give films that are not “festival films” a shot at a release. As Ventana Sur’s Bernardo Bergeret explained to Página 12 newspaper “LatAm films that travel to festivals and compete are well known, but people aren’t aware that there’s also a vast production that doesn’t circulate through festivals, but do have quality and audience appeal. . . . Lots of them aren’t festival films, but they do belong in the theaters.”147 Besides offering a venue to showcase Argentine, MERCOSUR, and Latin American films, Ventana Sur hosts a genre-focused program, Blood Window, which was created as a way to showcase the expanding production of horror, gore, and sci-fi films in the region. While it would be easy to dismiss the Blood Window initiative as pandering to the basest side of Latin American film production, it is worth remembering that Latin American culture has a vibrant, autochthonous fantasy and gore culture. Rather than ignore the “dark” side of this culture, Ventana Sur has decided to embrace this feature of Latin American filmmaking and promote it. We might speculate that Jorge Luis Borges would be troubled by the commercialization of these fantasy films, but there is little doubt that some of the films marketed in this venue have been inspired by his legacy. It will be worth watching to see if Blood Window succeeds in

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mainstreaming some of this content and helping to associate it with a Latin American fantasy aesthetic. While the focus of Ventana Sur is on Latin American content, the market is clearly aimed at developing a relationship with European producers, distributors, and related film professionals as well. The market is not only built with support and guidance from the Marché du Film; it attracts about 350 European film professionals annually in an effort to build the market as a collaborative space between Europe and Latin America. For example, in 2015, Ventana Sur offered some 30 European screenings to enhance circulation of European cinema within Latin America. Recognizing that Europe and Latin America share the “common enemy” of Hollywood when it comes to building an alternative market, Ventana Sur has built on the idea that its goal is to work productively with European counterparts to help get films from both regions on screens—both large and small. Certainly, Ventana Sur is not solving the problems brought on by the global exchange of films. But it does represent yet another example of the ways that the free-market economy created by neoliberalism offers spaces for alternative ventures. Nothing about Ventana Sur challenges neoliberal economics; rather, what it does is use neoliberal flexible markets and entrepreneurial strategies to open up opportunities for film exchange that were unavailable before. The reality is that Ventana Sur has helped a number of films reach viewers. Because it supports films that do not already have major media backing and that would not make it onto film festival programs, it also offers a new model that works outside of the existing film hierarchy. It opens up a useful alternative to the Latin American blockbuster and the festival film. And yet, as I mentioned in this book’s introduction (Chap. 1), the creation of a niche market is just that. It is still a market and carries no intrinsic good, even if it is a market housed within Latin America. Moreover, these various distribution models show us that the market for Latin American films with political content and progressive potential is strong, even if the idea of marketing films with a political edge seems contrary to the idea of what “real” political cinema should be. As we’ve seen from the example of the NLAC directors, filmmakers—no matter how political—want their films seen. While it is clear that the ideal screening venue for engaged cinema is not the commercial multiplex, it remains true that the first step for most filmmakers is getting a deal in place that allows their film

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to get out into the public. Thus, the next chapter looks at the issue of exhibition and analyzes how the spaces for film viewing have changed in the neoliberal era.

Notes











1.  David Sin, “Distribution: Introduction: What is Distribution?,” BFI Screenonline, accessed January 3, 2017, http://www.screenonline.org. uk/film/distribution/distribution1.html. 2. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 296. 3. Ana M. López, “Film Distribution,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures, ed. Daniel Balderston, Mike Gonzalez, and Ana M. López (London: Routledge, 2002), 573. 4. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 61. 5. Ibid. 6.  Michael Chanan, “The Economic Condition of Cinema in Latin America,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 192. 7.  Bill Nichols, “Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism,” East-West Film Journal 8, no. 1 (1994): 68. 8. Andrew S. Vargas, “Mexico’s Film Institute Launches a (Sorta) Free Site to Stream Indies, Cult Classics and More,” Remezcla, July 13, 2015, accessed January 3, 2017, http://remezcla.com/film/ mexicos-imcine-launches-new-video-on-demand-platform/. 9. Jorge Sanjinés and Grupo Ukamau, Teoría y práctica de un cine junto al pueblo, 2nd ed. (México D.F.: Siglo Veintiuno, 1979), 82. 10.  Jorge Sanjinés, “Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Richard Schaaf (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 68. 11. Octavio Getino, “Some Notes on the Concept of a ‘Third Cinema,’” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Timothy Barnard (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 101. 12. Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Julianne Burton and Editor (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 51.

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13. Ibid., 53. 14.  Glauber Rocha, “History of Cinema Novo,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume Two: Studies of National Cinemas, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Jon Davis (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 281. 15. Randal Johnson, “Rise and Fall of Brazilian Film: 1960–1990,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume Two: Studies of National Cinemas, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 387. 16. López, “Film Distribution,” 574. 17. Ibid., 573. 18. Rocha, “History of Cinema Novo,” 281. 19. Randal Johnson, Cinema Novo x 5: Masters of Contemporary Brazilian Film (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1984), 8. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 10. 22. Rocha, “History of Cinema Novo,” 282. 23. Toby Miller, Freya Schiwy, and Marta Hernández Salván, “Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema,” Transnational Cinemas 2, no. 2 (2012): 197, accessed January 13, 2017, https:// sites.ualberta.ca/~vruetalo/Sarli-Bo%20Research/73987417.pdf. 24. Ibid. 25. Octavio Getino, “Las diversas caras de la imagen,” in Globalización y monopolios en la comunicación en América Latina: Hacia una economía política de la comunicación, ed. Guillermo Mastrini and César Bolaño (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Biblos, 1999), 192. 26. Ibid., 193. 27. Ibid., 194. 28.  Yoel Mesa Falcón, “Entrevista a Jorge Sanjinés,” El onceno Festival Internacional del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de La Habana: Tres Opiniones, Temas, Suplemento 2 (La Habana: Ministerio de Cultura, 1990), 2–3. 29. See Miriam Ross, South American Cinematic Culture: Policy, Production, Distribution and Exhibition (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 52. 30. Luis A. Albornoz, “Diversity and the Film Industry: An Analysis of the 2014 UIS Survey on Feature Film Statistics,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Information Paper no. 29, March 2016, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.uis.unesco.org/culture/Documents/ip29-diver­ sity-film-data-2016-en.pdf, 13. 31. Ibid., 14. 32. Ibid., 9. 33. Luisela Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 3 (2008): 51.

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34. Ibid. 35.  “Directors, Writers Guilds and IATSE Join Entertainment Industry Coalition for Free Trade,” Entertainment Industry Coalition for Free Trade, March 27, 2013, accessed January 14, 2017, http://www.iftaonline.org/sites/default/files/EIC.pdf. 36. Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global,” 51. 37. Ibid., 54. 38. Frederick Luis Aldama, Mex-Ciné: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 83. 39. “Resultados Definitivos, 2015,” Canacine, accessed January 14, 2017, http://canacine.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ResultadosDefinitivos-2015-ATI-1-1.pdf. 40. “Lumiere (Brazilian Film Company),” Wikipedia, accessed January 12, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lumiere_%28Brazilian_film_company%29. 41. Ross, South American Cinematic Culture, 11. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid. 44.  Miller, Schiwy, and Hernández Salván, “Distribution, the Forgotten Element in Transnational Cinema,” 208. 45. Peter Bosma, Film Programming: Curating for Cinemas, Festivals, Archives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 35. 46. See Ross, South American Cinematic Culture, 8–9. 47. The term “major independent” comes from Justin Wyatt. See Justin Wyatt, “The Formation of the ‘Major Independent’: Miramax, New Line and the New Hollywood,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (New York: Routledge, 1998), 74–90. 48. Alisa Perren, Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2012), 4. 49.  Claudia Eller, “Miramax’s Patient Approach,” LA Times, March 21, 1997, D4, accessed January 20, 2017, http://articles.latimes. com/1997-03-21/business/fi-40645_1_english-patient. 50. Wyatt, “The Formation of the ‘Major Independent,’” 83. 51. See Perren, Indie, Inc., 21–22. 52.  Andrew Pulver, “Miracle of Miramax,” The Irish Times, March 28, 1997, accessed January 13, 2017, http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/ miracle-of-miramax-1.57201. 53. Ibid. 54. Perren, Indie, Inc., 189.

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55. Glenn Collins, “More Screens, but Fewer Choices to Choose From,” The New York Times, March 18, 1991, C11, accessed January 20, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/1991/03/18/movies/more-screens-butfewer-movies-to-choose-from.html. 56. Perren, Indie, Inc., 92. 57.  Tino Balio, “‘A Major Presence in All of the World’s Important Markets’: The Globalization of Hollywood in the 1990s,” in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema, ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 64. 58. Perren, Indie, Inc., 103. 59. See Janet Wasko, “Is It a Small World, After All?,” in Dazzled by Disney? The Global Audiences Project, ed. Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), 3–28. 60. Wasko states that Buena Vista had been the top video company in the US for seven years (1993–2000), making it twice the size of its nearest rival. See Wasko, “Is It a Small World, After All?,” 19. 61. Claudia Eller, “On Screen Chemistry: The Synergy between Unlikely Partners Miramax and Disney Has Surprised Many--Including Miramax and Disney, Los Angeles Times, December 1, 1995, D1, accessed January 20, 2017, http://articles.latimes.com/1995-12-01/business/ fi-9181_1_disney-connection/2. 62. Ibid. 63. Perren, Indie, Inc., 4. 64. Perren, Indie, Inc., 189–190. 65. Ibid., 191. 66. Ibid., 194. 67.  On Disney in Latin America see José Piedra, “Pato Donald’s Gender Ducking,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Loren Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 148–168 and Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney,” in Disney Discourse: Producing the Magic Kingdom, ed. Eric Loren Smoodin (New York: Routledge, 1994), 131–147. See also Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, How to Read Donald Duck, trans. David Kunzle (New York: International General, 1975). 68. On GATT see Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), Chap. 6. On NAFTA, see Claire Fox, The Fence and The River: Culture and Politics at the US-Mexico Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), Chap. 1. 69.  “Theodore Roosevelt’s Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (1905),” www.ourdocuments.gov, accessed January 14, 2017, https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=56.

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70. Douglas Kellner, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern (New York: Routledge, 1994), 75. 71. Burton-Carvajal, “‘Surprise Package’: Looking Southward with Disney,” 141. 72.  Promotional ad cited in Harmony H. Wu, “Consuming Tacos and Enchiladas: Gender and the Nation in Como agua para chocolate,” in Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, ed. Chon A. Noriega (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 178. 73. Seen within Mexico, the film engages intertextually with a number of Mexican film genres, such as the revolutionary melodrama, particularly films about soldaderas (Mexican female soldiers), and the carbaretera (fallen women films). See Wu, “Consuming Tacos and Enchiladas”; Claudine Potvin, “Como agua para chocolate: ¿parodia o cliché?” Revista canadiense de estudios hispánicos 20, no. 1 (1995): 55–67; Julianne Burton-Carvajal, “Mexican Melodramas of Patriarchy: Specificity of a Cultural Form,” in Framing Latin American Cinema: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, ed. Ann Marie Stock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 186–234; and Patricia Hart, “The Deconstruction of the ‘Soldadera’ in Laura Esquivel’s Como agua para chocolate” Cincinnati Romance Review 14 (1995): 164–171 for more analysis of these connections, most of which would be lost on the average US spectator. 74. See Potvin, “Como agua para chocolate: ¿parodia o cliché?” and BurtonCarvajal, “Mexican Melodramas of Patriarchy: Specificity of a Cultural Form.” 75. Clara Román-Odio, “From Writer to Producer: Conflicting Voices in Like Water for Chocolate,” in Cine-Lit III: Essays on Hispanic Film and Fiction, ed. George Cabello-Castellet, Jaume Martí-Olivella, and Guy H. Wood (Corvallis: Oregon State University, 1998), 84. 76. Wu, “Consuming Tacos and Enchiladas,” 186. 77.  Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 19. 78. Wu, “Consuming Tacos and Enchiladas,” 188. 79. From the DVD Jacket of Il Postino. 80. While my analysis here is brief, in an article in Mediations I compare the original text and the film remake in detail. See Sophia A. McClennen, “Chilex: The Economy of Transnational Media Culture,” Mediations 22 (1999): 86–111. 81. Nathan Wolfson, “Poetry, Politics and the Postman: Michael Radford’s Il Postino (The Postman),” The News (Eureka, California), 1995, accessed January 14, 2017, http://www.nathanwolfson.com/scholarship/postman.htm.

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82. While in exile from Pinochet, Skármeta also directed a film version of the story in 1985 that has been virtually absent from discussions of the remake. See Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience, 1983). 83. Many of these changes may be attributable to Massimo Troisi’s purchase of the film rights and his desire to play the role of Mario. 84. Quotation from the video jacket. 85.  Enrico Mario Santí, “Fresa y Chocolate: The Rhetoric of Cuban Reconciliation,” MLN 113, no. 2 (1998): 407. 86. Ibid., 408. 87. Paul Julian Smith, “The Language of Strawberry,” Sight and Sound 4, no. 12 (1994): 31. 88. Wyatt, “The Formation of the ‘Major Independent,’” 81. 89. Smith, “The Language of Strawberry,” 31. 90. Dennis West, “Strawberry and Chocolate, Ice Cream and Tolerance: Interviews with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío,” Cineaste 21, no. 1–2 (1995): 16. 91.  Elaine Dutka and John Clark, “Miramax Finds Success Breeds Admiration, Envy; Movies: The Company Revolutionized the Indie World, but It’s Now Accused of Operating Like a Major Studio,” The Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1997, 1. 92. Jane Galbraith, “Book, Film Tie-In Whetting Appetites for ‘Chocolate,’” Los Angeles Times, May 29, 1993, F3. 93. Ibid. 94.  Richard Corliss, “A SPECIAL DELIVERY: Oscar Nominations Go to the Sweet Italian Film The Postman and its Heroic Star, Massimo Troisi,” TIME Magazine 147, no. 9 (February 26, 1996), accessed January 23, 2017, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0, 9171,984181,00.html. 95. Ann Oldenburg, “Miramax Maximized ‘Postman’ Potential,” USA Today, February 14, 1996, D4. 96.  They released twice as many in English. See Claudia Puig, “Independents Take Bite Out of Foreign Market,” The Los Angeles Times, May 12, 1996, 31. 97. During the ceremony Pierre Buhler, cultural counselor to the French Embassy in New York, stated: “I am particularly pleased to add that since its creation Miramax has played an invaluable role in increasing the presence of foreign cinema in the United States. The innovative marketing skills developed within your company have been instrumental in making foreign movies popular among the general public.” Pierre Buhler, Medal Ceremony Chevaliers of the Order of Arts and Letters, French Embassy, New York, January 15, 2001, accessed October 11, 2002, http://www. frenchculture.org/people/honorees/weinstein.html.

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98. Alissa Walker, “The Crying Game: How Disney Killed Miramax, Now with Weinstein Co. Layoffs!” Liberty Newspost, January 29, 2005, accessed January 14, 2017, https://www.scribd.com/document/26129307/ Liberty-Newspost-Jan-30-10-Edition. 99. Lucas Shaw, “Netflix, Miramax Expand Streaming Deal to Latin America,” Reuters, September 6, 2011, accessed January 12, 2017, http://www. reuters.com/article/us-netflix-miramax-idUSTRE7854DR20110906. 100. Ibid. 101. Mark Peranson, “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals,” Cinéaste 33, no. 3 (2008): 37, accessed January 17, 2017, http://www.scifilondontv.com/FFA/Dekalog3/ Dekalog3_02Peranson.pdf. 102. Aldo Francia, Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano en Viña del Mar (Santiago: CESOC Ediciones ChileAmérica, 1990), 17. 103. Ibid., 17. 104. “Historia Festival Internacional de Cine,” Festival Internacional de Cine Viña del Mar, accessed January 12, 2017, http://www.ficvina.cl/seccion/2/historia.html. 105. Miguel Littin, “Discurso Inaugural de Miguel Littin,” in Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano en Viña del Mar (Santiago: CESOC Ediciones ChileAmérica, 1990), 24. 106.  Dina Iordanova, “The Film Festival Circuit,” in The Film Festival Reader, ed. Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews, Scotland: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013), 109. 107. Ibid. 108. Ragan Rhyne, “Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders,” in The Film Festival Reader, ed. Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews, Scotland: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013), 143. 109.  Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 14. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 92. 112. Ibid., 87. 113. Ibid., 94. 114.  Bill Nichols, “Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism,” in The Film Festival Reader, ed. Dina Iordanova (St. Andrews, Scotland: St. Andrews Film Studies, 2013), 29. 115.  Daniel Dayan, “Looking for Sundance: The Social Construction of a Film Festival,” in Moving Images, Culture and the Mind, ed. Ib Bondebjerg (London: University of Luton Press, 2000), 45, quoted in Marijke de Valck, Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007), 32.

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116. Cindy Hing-Yuk Wong, Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 129. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid., 138. 119. Ibid., 142. 120. Ibid., 158. 121.  “History: 31th [sic] Mar del Plata International Film Festival from November 18th to 27th, 2016,” Mar del Plata Film Fest, accessed January 26, 2017, http://www.mardelplatafilmfest.com/en/seccion/ festival/historia. 122. Paul Julian Smith, Amores perros (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 13. 123.  John Hopewell and Leo Barraclough, “Cannes: Warner Bros. To Distribute ‘Wild Tales’ in France, Spain and Latin America,” Variety, May 12, 2014, accessed January 12, 2017, http://variety.com/2014/ film/global/warner-bros-to-distribute-wild-tales-in-france-spain-andlatin-america-1201178166/. 124. “About the Festival: About Us,” Festival de Cannes, accessed January 26, 2017, http://www.festival-cannes.fr/en/about/whoweare.html. 125. “Key Figures,” Marché du Film, accessed January 12, 2017, http:// www.marchedufilm.com/en/chiffres. 126.  “Sundance Film Festival,” Wikipedia, December 17, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundance_Film_ Festival. 127. Ibid. 128. For more see “Official Rejection,” Shut Up and Shoot, accessed January 10, 2017, http://officialrejectiondocumentary.com/MAIN.html. 129. David Salazar, “Top Latin American Films at Sundance,” Latin Post, January 28, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.latinpost. com/articles/112146/20160128/latino-films-succeed-sundance-filmfestival-recent-years.htm. 130.  Alex Rivera (director of Sleep Dealer), interview with the author, October 15, 2016. 131. “Sleep Dealer,” Sundance Institute, accessed January 10, 2017, https:// www.sundance.org/social-events/now-playing/sleep-dealer. 132. “About #Artistservices,” Sundance Institute, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.sundance.org/programs/artist-services. 133. “Latin America, Post-Toronto News, A Basque Surge, and Studio Coin,” San Sebastián Film Festival, September 24, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, http://sansebastianfestival.com/2016/festival_diary/1/6315/in.

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134. Wong, Film Festivals, 138. 135. Ibid. 136. Pamela Rolfe, “San Sebastian: HBO Takes U.S. Rights, Sony Buys Latin America for LGBT Drama ‘Rara,’” The Hollywood Reporter, September 20, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter. com/news/san-sebastian-hbo-sony-rara-930985. 137. See RioMarket, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.riomarket.com. br/. 138. “Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema,” Wikipedia, November 10, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Buenos_Aires_International_Festival_of_Independent_Cinema. 139. “Presentación,” BAFICI [18], accessed January 10, 2017, http://festivales.buenosaires.gob.ar/2016/bafici/es/profesional/presentacion. 140. “15th Guadalajara Film Market,” FICG (Festival Internacional de Cine en Guadalajara) Industria, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www. industriaguadalajara.com/en/mercado-de-cine/. 141. Brent Lang and Ramin Setoodeh, “Cannes Preview: Security Concerns, New Distribution Models Dominate Pre-Festival Talk,” Variety, May 10, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, http://variety.com/2016/biz/news/ cannes-film-festival-preview-security-distribution-models-1201769306/. 142. Ibid. 143. John Hecht, “Televisa Launches Netflix Rival,” The Hollywood Reporter, February 22, 2016, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/televisa-launches-netflix-rival-868385. 144.  Stephanie Dennison, “National, Transnational and Post-national: Issues in Contemporary Film-Making in the Hispanic World,” in Contemporary Hispanic Cinema: Interrogating the Transnational in Spanish and Latin American Film, ed. Stephanie Dennison (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Tamesis, 2013), 17. 145. See Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, “After New Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 51, no. 2 (2012): 87–112. 146. “About Ventana Sur,” Ventana Sur, accessed January 30, 2017, http:// www.ventanasur.com.ar/en/portfolio/about-ventana-sur/. 147. Quoted in Agustin Mango, “Ventana Sur Film Market Begins Dec. 3 in Buenos Aires,” The Hollywood Reporter, December 2, 2013, accessed January 10, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ventanasur-film-market-begins-661085.

CHAPTER 4

Exhibition

As Ana López explains, exhibition is the “crucial final link in the film business.”1 It completes the production process and brings the film to an audience. More importantly, she points out that in Latin America film exhibition was, in the early days, “the only indigenous aspect of a phenomenon that was first and foremost an import.”2 She explains that theater owners have long been in the business of directly dealing with the intricacies of trade agreements and market fluctuations. As Hollywood product began to dominate Latin American screens, theater owners often found themselves at the mercy of US studios. Then when nations imposed film quotas, theater owners found themselves battling to attract viewers to films with lower production quality—thereby setting up a struggle between film producers and theater owners, each of which sought to profit from the business of film. Thus, from the outset, the case of exhibition in the region reveals a number of tensions central to the story of capitalism and the culture industry. This traditional dynamic between local entrepreneurs and cultural imperialism would be challenged by the political filmmaking that swept the region in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the main concerns of the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement was the question of how best to screen films so that they would open up avenues for productive political dialogue, debate, and action. The appeal of film as political culture was its inherently collective form of delivery. Like plays, films are consumed in the company of the community and the goal of the © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_4

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directors of the 1960s and 1970s was to seek ways to adapt a screening into what the Argentines Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas called a “film act.”3 The idea was to convert the passive spectators of Hollywood films to active participants who saw films as a way to open up meaningful political dialogue in a context of crisis and repression. As they explain: This person was no longer a spectator; on the contrary, from the moment he decided to attend the showing, from the moment he lined himself up on this side by taking risks and contributing his living experience to the meeting, he became an actor, a more important protagonist than those who appeared in the films. Such a person was seeking other committed people like himself, while he, in turn, became committed to them.4

Thus, unlike in first (Hollywood) and second (European art house) cinema, a third cinema film was seen not as a spectacle but as a “detonator or a pretext.” Third cinema was meant to move the audience toward social change: spectators become actors; they became the authors of history: “The film act means an open-ended film; it is essentially a way of learning.”5 While it is difficult to generalize across the third cinema movement since the contexts varied so much—from post-revolutionary Cuba to a repressive government in Argentina, for example—it is still possible to note in hindsight that, despite the popular, collective, revolutionary spirit of these filmmakers, their highly experimental aesthetics were difficult for their intended audiences. The Bolivian film collective Grupo Ukamau, who took their films to villages for local screenings in community spaces, soon found that they needed to have someone explain their films to audiences before they even watched them, since the film language tended to be completely opaque to the communities of indigenous peoples where they were screened. Thus, the filmmakers sought alternative, non-commercial screening sites, but often failed at appealing to an audience that was more accustomed to Hollywood-style film narrative or, as in the case of some indigenous communities, completely unfamiliar with film language. Back in the era of the NLAC movement, though, exhibition still remained focused on reaching as wide an audience as possible in order to use film to launch significant political action. But, because the filmmakers shunned any sort of commercial release in their home countries, they tended to reach US and European art houses more than local audiences. They were often more popular among elite intellectuals than the working

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class and rural indigenous communities that they most sought to reach. Thus began an exhibition dichotomy where the films most meant to influence local populations failed to inspire them but had global impact. In the 1980s and 1990s, exhibition in Latin America took a nosedive as movie theaters were run-down, unattractive, and often overpriced for locals, and most feature film viewing happened via DVD or cable television. As Ignacio Sánchez Prado points out, “going to the movies in Mexico City in the mid-to-late-1980s was a unique—and uniquely surreal—experience.”6 Many theaters were old art deco designs that had not been renovated since they were built in the 1940s and 1950s. Néstor García Canclini also notes that the 1980s brought a substantial reduction in Mexican options for screening films in theaters as viewers shifted to home viewing.7 To give a sense of the drastic reduction of movie screens, Paola Reategui, one of the key organizers of the Chaski Microcines project, explains that from 1990 to 2007 Peru went from 240 movie theaters spread out across the country to 35 multiplexes (with 150 screens), of which 30 were in Lima with only 5 movie theaters in the rest of the country.8 Thus, when the market shifts of neoliberalism fully hit in the 1990s, exhibition venues for Latin American films in the region had been drastically cut. The current era has seen a rise in foreign-owned multiplexes, typically situated in malls or in close proximity to the affluent upper middle class. As Sánchez Prado points out, the first foreign-owned multiplexes began to pop up in Mexico in the mid-1990s: “In 1994, the U.S.based exhibition company Cinemark opened four multiplexes in cities like Monterrey and Aguascalientes, followed in 1995 by a twelve-screen theater in Mexico City.”9 The screen experience is far more pleasant than the days of run-down theaters, but the ticket prices are too steep for the majority of the population. At the same time, though, these fancy multicines attracted middle-class Mexicans back to theaters. And a similar pattern took place throughout Latin America, especially in major cities. Australian-linked Hoyts, for instance, dominates upscale multiplex screens in Buenos Aires. All of these changes due to market liberalization and privatization, where states cease to regulate ticket prices or run state theaters, seem to signal the success of global capital in controlling the film experiences of Latin Americans. Certainly the rise of foreign-owned multiplexes drawing middle-class spectators on their way to and from shopping seems to indicate the end of the era of political potential for Latin American

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films. And yet, that conclusion would be too narrow. While it is true that we can note major forms of foreign control of film exhibition, there is another side to the story—one that proves the ongoing ambivalence inherent in millennial globalization. Thus, this chapter studies three examples of exhibition practices that complicate our understanding of collective film viewing in the region: • The first section looks at the microcine movement founded by the Peruvian Grupo Chaski. As they explain it, “the microcine is a meeting place and a space for community participation where films are shown that promote values, reflection, and healthy entertainment. They are organized by community leaders who are trained as cultural promoters. The goal is to empower them to be able to sustain the projects on their own.”10 Taking advantage of technological innovation, the microcines movement was designed to transform community spaces into theater spaces. • The second section gives an overview of the current amount of theater screens and ticket sales in the three largest markets. It also studies the rise of the multiplex as a way that film spectators see films collectively in the region. It analyzes the case of the Mexican film theater chain, Cinépolis, now the fourth largest film theater chain in the world. Mirroring the success of the Mexican television station Televisa, Cinépolis offers an example of Latin America “winning” at global capitalism. • The last section studies the return of the art house theater, which has experienced a comeback since the 1990s. It also presents the example of the MERCOSUR Red de Salas initiative. These theaters mimic the earlier state-supported art house theaters. But rather than promote national films, they are meant to promote films from the MERCOSUR nations. Funded in part with money from the EU, these cinemas signal a new trend in film exhibition that is regionally based.

Grupo Chaski and the Microcines Initiative The Peruvian cinema collective Grupo Chaski was formed in 1982 by María Barea, Fernando Barreto, Fernando Espinoza, Stefan Kaspar, and Alejandro Legaspi. Growing to over sixty members by the late 1980s, the group is part of a long history of filmmakers from Latin America

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who have practiced collective filmmaking. Beginning with the work of the Argentine Fernando Birri, who founded the Santa Fe documentary school in the 1950s and who made a number of socially significant documentaries that traced the lives of the lower classes, the Latin American practice of collective filmmaking incorporates two main features: a commitment to making films with and for a marginalized community and a desire to alter mainstream commercial filmmaking practices. If commercial cinema conceives of film as a team project where there is a clear division of labor, and auteur cinema conceives of film as the product of the director’s creative will, then collective filmmaking, in its desire to differentiate itself from these trends, understands filmmaking as a collaborative practice whose process is organically tied to its product. Despite the fact that the practice of collective filmmaking enjoys a rich history in Latin America, especially with regard to documentary projects, the ideals of the practice are often grander than the realities. Similar to the history of testimonial literature in the region, the practice of collective filmmaking is always necessarily engaged in a complicated power relationship with the subject of the films. Moreover, the nature of filmmaking means that at certain stages in the film process, especially during editing, an open, democratic decision-making process necessarily gives way to the aesthetic vision of only a few—at most—of the group’s members. What perhaps is most significant about the practice of collective filmmaking in the case of Grupo Chaski is the way that they balanced the ideals of the theory with the challenges of the practice.11 There are a number of ways in which their work represents both an expansion and an innovation of the Latin American practice of collective filmmaking. One clear example of their singular achievement is their tireless efforts to combine socially relevant filmmaking with circuits of distribution. From their inception, they have consistently worked on creating alternative modes of exhibition at the same time that they have sought to make their films available to the public via commercial releases, television screenings, videos, and other more mainstream distribution outlets. An important aspect of this effort includes their commitment to promoting cinema in solidarity with (or at least with a connection to) their vision made by different directors. For example, they managed the Peruvian commercial releases of Francisco Lombardi’s La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs) in 1985 and Alberto Durant’s Malabrigo in 1986 and their catalog for distribution includes films from across Latin America. This commitment to creating a public space for Latin American cinema

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so that Latin Americans can see themselves reflected on screen reveals the ways that their project has been characterized by a politics of inclusion and a practice of flexibility, where no component of the film process is overlooked, ignored, or repudiated in the struggle to facilitate film experiences of social relevance and potential political impact. The work of Chaski is noteworthy, then, for its multipronged approach to politically progressive filmmaking that includes production, distribution, and exhibition. In addition, their three most well-known films had tremendous success both within Peru and in the international community. Their first film, Miss Universo en Perú (Miss Universe in Peru, 1982), is a documentary that juxtaposes the 1982 Miss Universe pageant in Lima with the lives of lower-class Peruvian women. Their first feature film, Gregorio (1984), traces the effects of urban migration on a young boy from the Andes who joins a group of street kids only to be rejected by them later. Their second feature film, Juliana (1988), focuses on the life of a 13-year-old runaway girl who disguises herself as a boy in order to be part of a gang that performs music for money. Each of these films attracted a massive audience relative to other similar types of film projects. For example, by 1990 Gregorio reached over 1 million viewers on the big screen in Peru, 7.5 million had seen it on Peruvian television, and dozens of millions had seen it on television worldwide.12 Their films continue to run on US television on channels like IFC and they also screen regularly on the pan-national channel Cine Latino that is distributed in the United States via Direct TV. Unlike many of the films associated with the NLAC, which attracted larger audiences outside of their home countries than within them, Chaski’s films captured the attention of both a Peruvian and an international audience. For these reasons, Chaski offers an interesting example of a film collective that bridges the political filmmaking goals of the NLAC and the shifting realities in the film industry brought on by globalization. The group’s name is in Quechua, the native language of the Incans, and it means “messenger.” During the Incan empire the chaskis were messengers that carried information between communities. Oswaldo Carpio, one of the key early members of the group, gives this explanation for their choice of name: “Por hacer películas desde adentro, asume el nombre de los antiguos comunicadores del imperio de los incas, los Chaskis, sistema que funcionó y que puso la COMUNICACIÓN al servicio de todo un pueblo” [Because we make films from within, we use the name of the ancient communicators of the Incan empire—the Chaskis. The

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Chaskis were an efficient system that put COMMUNICATION at the service of an entire people].13 Without question, one of the primary goals of Chaski has been to make films that communicate about Peru to Peruvians. Building on the long legacy of intellectuals like José Carlos Mariátegui and José María Arguedas, who vigorously worked to defend the rights and improve the social status of Peru’s indigenous communities, Chaski politically confronts the long history of racism and exploitation that has characterized the status of Peru’s indigenous cultures. One important aspect of their films, though, is their focus on urban spaces and their interest in a broad, heterogeneous demographic of oppression that dismantles the indigenous as a monolithic category of Peruvian social concern. This reconsideration of the identity politics attached to Peruvian marginal communities may be accounted for, in part, by the variety of perspectives and experiences of the founding members: Stefan Kaspar studied communications in Biel and Bern, Switzerland, where he also worked as an independent journalist until 1978. He then traveled to Peru to work on a film project on urban migration. Four years later he participated in the foundation of Chaski. Fernando Espinoza was one of the energetic forces behind the creation of Chaski. Prior, during, and after his work with Chaski, he struggled for the rights of Afro-Peruvians. His dedication to highlighting the marginalization of Afro-Peruvians added an important perspective to Chaski’s approach to filming the challenges of urban life. Espinoza was instrumental in recruiting Alejandro Legaspi to Chaski. Legaspi arrived in Peru from Uruguay in 1974 when he was forced into exile by the Uruguayan dictatorship. As a boy he had worked on a number of films and had been influenced by the work of the NLAC, especially that of the Argentine directors Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. Serving as one of the main directors for Chaski’s films, he brought to the group a poetic vision combined with a clear commitment to politically relevant filmmaking. Another key perspective was added by María Barea, who had worked as a producer with Luis Figueroa, one of the founding members of the Cine Club Cuzco, and also with Jorge Sanjinés and Grupo Ukamau on El enemigo principal (The Principle Enemy, 1972). Prior to forming Chaski she had directed Mujeres del planeta (Women of the World, 1982) and had already established herself as a director committed to filming women’s issues from a feminist perspective.14 The founding members of Chaski brought together a rich background in filmmaking and a dynamic interest in merging progressive politics with a social commitment to the

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disenfranchised. This vision required Chaski to rethink the traditional parameters that had guided identity struggles in Peru prior to the massive urban migrations. The contrast of the rural with the urban and of the indigenous with the criollo elites that had shaped decades of debate about Peruvian identity politics no longer obtained in the hybrid, complex societies that were emerging as a consequence of massive waves of migration. As Jesús Martín-Barbero notes, Lima presents one of the most extreme examples of urban migration in the 1980s.15 The rapidly changing social landscape called for new ways of thinking about progressive action, political resistance, and the politics of national identity. Afro-and Asian-Peruvians and Andean highlanders struggled together in the land grabs that would eventually result in new communities like that of Villa El Salvador, which was formally established as a district of Lima in 1983. Sensitive to the integral role that women were playing in these social movements, Chaski’s films attempted to reflect the changing nature of what José Matos Mar calls “a new pattern of solidarity.”16 In a 1990 document intended to reevaluate the successes and failures of Chaski, Carpio noted that Chaski’s work was a direct response to the population explosion of Lima. Even if they had wanted to focus solely on the problems of Andean cultures, he explains, they would have been unsuccessful because they did not have the knowledge base. Carpio indicates two key points of interest for Chaski regarding the urban explosion of Lima. First, the group was interested in the extraordinarily intense degree of change that was affecting the city, placing the mestizo in the center of Lima’s new identity. Holding to the notion that cinema is one of the most significant forms of culture capable of reflecting and shaping national identity, Chaski hoped to intervene in the historical marginalization of the majority of Peruvians by challenging the hegemony of dominant Peruvian culture and offering an alternative cinematic narrative of identity.17 According to one document defining their goals, they wanted to “servir de canales de expresión de aquellos sectores excluidos del sistema de comunicación” [serve as a channel of expression for those sectors excluded from the system of communication].18 Their work was dedicated to “el desarrollo de una conciencia cívica en los sectores populares, sobre la problemática nacional” [the development of civic consciousness among the marginalized majority in order to promote attention to the problems of the nation].19

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In addition, the waves of migration pointed to significant social problems that demanded a critique beyond questions of ideology and identity. The migrations were a direct consequence of political violence and a global economic crisis that was devastating the agricultural economy. Caught between the violence of the Sendero Luminoso, the state violence in response to Sendero, and the neoliberal economic practices of the Peruvian government, many Andean members of rural communities fled for the cites. In the context of the increasing authoritarianism of everyday life, Chaski advocated for democracy, the development of civic agency, and the opening of spaces for the cultural expression of marginalized sectors. They were opposed to “toda forma de autoritarianismo e intolerancia” [all forms of authoritarianism and intolerance].20 Chaski, then, had two major themes that dominated their work—a constructive effort to reshape the historically hegemonic narrative of national identity and a politically progressive project dedicated to exposing the sociopolitical structures that ruled Peru. Chaski explains that they are committed to cinematic works that reflect the economic, social, and cultural reality of Peru with the participation of the marginalized sectors as both actors and protagonists.21 Throughout their documents they return to the idea that their work is connected to developing protagonists for the people whose cinematic protagonism and similarity with the characteristics of the community will lead the audience to recognize themselves in the characters on screen and then engage in civic action. Chaski’s commitment to intervening in the politics and ideologies that were shaping Peruvian society in the 1980s and their firm belief that culture and communications play an essential role in the shaping of social consciousness necessarily led them to confront the politics and practices of the Peruvian media industry. At the time that Gregorio was released in the mid-1980s, 99.5% of all films screened in Peru were foreign. Chaski indicates one of their primary goals is developing an alternative politics of commercialization “frente a la hegemonía transnacional” [in order to challenge transnational hegemony].22 This goal led them to work with distribution (commercial and alternative), trade unions, and other areas of film training, legislative advocacy, promotion and marketing, and film production. Chaski’s approach to the culture industry is noteworthy given that they have simultaneously attempted to change the laws governing media communications in Peru, while also trying to function within them and around them.

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Unlike Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, Peru has never developed a strong national cinema. Consequently, there is no state-sponsored legacy of nationalist films, like the Mexican nationalist melodramas of the 1930s to 1950s. This point is central to understanding Chaski, since as we analyze the effects of globalization on national cinemas, we need to recognize that in a number of Latin American nations there were no significant national cinemas to begin with. The key difference is that cinema history in the case of Peru is not linked to the state but rather to the role of foreign films, many of which were Mexican, in national theaters. In fact the contemporary invasion of Hollywood in Peruvian theaters was preceded by the dominance of Mexican films in Peru during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1960s.23 The lack of a strong national cinema industry ties directly to the absence of state support for feature-length films. Ricardo Bedoya explains that it was not until 1972 that the Peruvian government passed Law 19327 in support of the development of a cinematographic industry. Prior to this law, Bedoya points out, there was a tradition of cinema in Peru, but it had been sporadic and constantly overshadowed by foreign imports.24 Key precursors to the law for the work of Chaski were the directors associated with the Cine Club Cuzco, founded in 1955.25 The Cuzco school combined film production focusing on the rural themes of the campesinos with the establishment of a film club to show their films. Manuel Chambi and Luis Figueroa, members of the Cuzco school, formed part of the executive committee of the Peruvian Society for Cinematography established in 1967 that lobbied for the passage of a law to promote state support for Peruvian filmmaking. In a clear sign of the connections between state cultural policies and the development of the communications industry, Law 19327 heralded a growth in Peruvian film production. The specificities of the law, however, created an unusual pattern of production. The law decreed that any foreign feature film had to be preceded by a Peruvian short of up to ten minutes. The obligatory screening of the short resulted in a 25% return of the tax charged on theater tickets to the production company. If the theater screened a feature-length Peruvian film, the entire sum of the ticket tax was given to the production company. The result was a “big bang,” to use Bedoya’s term, in the production of shorts, which were often referred to as “cortos de la ley” [shorts from the law]. Companies sprang up instantly to take advantage of this law and COPROCI, the state body that managed the law, immediately began to favor shorts that promoted a self-congratulatory,

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stereotyped, didactic view of Peru.26 Nevertheless, the law opened a space for filmmaking practice that had otherwise been absent and a number of directors emerged as a consequence. For instance, Francisco Lombardi, perhaps the most internationally recognized Peruvian director, began his career making shorts. And, even though the law favored the production of shorts, the number of Peruvian features increased during this period as a consequence of the tax revenues as well.27 Chaski understood their role in filmmaking to grow out of this tradition.28 While Chaski read Law 19327 as supportive of Peruvian filmmaking, they also took a critical stance, making a point of releasing their first film Miss Universo en Perú (40 minutes) in a format that would challenge the existing practice of showing a ten-minute short before an imported feature. In practice, the early years of Chaski indicated the ways that they both worked within the system, producing themselves a number of ten-minute shorts, and outside of it. In a move that parallels García Canclini’s argument that state support is both essential and problematic for the development of local culture industries, they consistently considered public advocacy for state support of filmmaking as a central part of their work, at the same time that they always were suspicious of state interference and wary of state ideology.29 Their work with a number of philanthropy groups like Ashoka and organizations like UNESCO, and their collaborations with European funding sources like the German television channel ZDF, further indicates the ways that they seek funding according to the structures available. In the neoliberal model, support for national culture comes not from the state but from private organi­ zations. In keeping with their refusal to depend on the state, Chaski has received funding from international groups and also local Peruvian philanthropists. Grupo Chaski and Grupo Ukamau When I began this section, I indicated that Grupo Chaski’s choice of name linked their work with the history of Incan forms of communication and community building. Those familiar with Latin American film history, however, will hear in their name another obvious intertext that reveals an additional line of significant influence on their work. The name “Grupo Chaski” seems like a Peruvian revision of the Bolivian Grupo Ukamau, which was named after the Aymara expression for “that’s the way it is”—the title of their first film. One of the most significant film

206  S.A. McCLENNEN

groups connected with the NLAC movement, Grupo Ukamau was founded in 1966 by Jorge Sanjinés, Oscar Soria, Ricardo Rada, and Alberto Villapando. Later joined by Antonio Eguino and others, they made three feature-length films—Ukamau (That’s the Way It Is/And So It Is, 1966), Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor, 1969), and El coraje del pueblo (The Courage of the People, 1971)—which progressively moved from fiction to documentary and which also progressively became more and more the product of collaborative work with the communities they were filming.30 One of the key initiatives of Ukamau was its desire to reach its intended audience. Because rural areas had no theaters, Sanjinés and the Ukamau collective toured the Latin American countryside with a portable generator in order to show Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor) in villages that had no electricity. Mike Wayne reports that according to Sanjinés their films reached an impressive audience: “Based on statistics we collected and taking into account the work of distributing our films among the peasants in the countryside, we calculate that in just one year approximately 340,000 workers, peasants and students came to see the films of our group.”31 Ukamau was not the only NLAC group interested in finding creative ways to reach an audience outside of the commercial system. Getino sought “‘parallel distribution circuits’ . . . through trade unions and community organisations” for La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968).32 Without question, Chaski was influenced by their precursors in the NLAC. Legaspi begins a document reflecting on his experience with Chaski referring to his admiration for the Brazilian cinema nôvo directors Nelson Pereira dos Santos and Glauber Rocha in addition to Jorge Sanjinés. In an interview he mentions La hora de los hornos, the groundbreaking documentary by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, as the film that probably influenced him the most.33 As mentioned earlier, Barea had worked directly with Sanjinés. Despite these links, though, there are a number of ways in which the work of Chaski differentiates itself from the political filmmaking practices of the New Latin American cineastes of the 1960s and 1970s and signals an important transition for politically engaged filmmakers working in the neoliberal era. Both Chaski and Ukamau worked closely with the populations they filmed, leaving their scripts open to adaptation by their social actors and following in the practice of the Italian neorealists who sought non-professional actors. Like Ukamau, Chaski used a number of non-professional actors who helped produce their scripts. In an example of their

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collaborative process, the group originally wanted Gregorio to have a happy ending, with the protagonist spending the money he has at the end of the film in a socially useful way, but Marino León de la Torre— the street child who played Gregorio—said that ending was ridiculous and that no one in his position would give away money. So the group allowed him to script his own ending where he takes his stolen money and treats himself to a feast that includes steak and ice cream. The differences between Chaski and Ukamau largely reflect the differences in their sociohistorical and cinematic contexts. Ukamau considered imperialism to be “the principle enemy,” and set out to attack all identity markers and socioeconomic structures that derived from the long history of oppressing the indigenous population in the Andes. The political context for Ukamau stems from the 1952 coup by the Nationalist Revolutionary Movement (MNR), which led to one of the first genuinely social revolutions in the region. Then from 1966 to 1971, the timeframe for Ukamau’s first three films, right-wing generals exercised more and more significant power in Bolivia. Simultaneously, the revolutionary efforts of Che Guevara’s guerrilla movement were extinguished when Che was murdered in Bolivia in 1967. The filmmakers of Ukamau, consequently, were working in a moment of heightened revolutionary consciousness and their view of the social role of filmmaking was militant. Such revolutionary clarity was not possible for Chaski, since the urban spaces and the neoliberal economics that were the focus of their work did not permit clear-cut notions of good and evil, enemy and ally. By the time that Chaski had begun working the revolutionary politics of the NLAC, directors like those of Ukamau had entered a stage of transformation away from the call to militancy of the 1960s and 1970s and toward a call to civic agency and democracy.34 Chaski’s project also holds to the idea that cinema plays a direct role in the formation of identity and the struggle for social change. In that sense they continue the project of the NLAC. Where they differ, though, is in their less confrontational, less militant approach that takes a more inclusive view of the types of films they support and a more flexible view of media activism. Chaski realized, for instance, that while they might not make films like those of Francisco Lombardi, promoting his work was essential in the fight to defend Peruvian cinema.35 If film for Ukamau in the 1960s and 1970s was a weapon in militant revolutionary struggle, then for Chaski it was conceived as a tool for

208  S.A. McCLENNEN

democracy and empowerment. In 1988, their magazine Chaski Informa described their main goal as: “forjar un cine nacional que exprese los sentimientos populares, que afirme la cultura nacional y contribuya a democratizar al país” [forging a national cinema that expresses the feelings of the people, that affirms national culture, and that contributes to democratizing the country].36 In contrast to the call to arms that accompanied the films of Ukamau, Chaski’s films aimed their militancy in a different direction, one that never advocated violence of any kind. In an internal document, they described their cinematic militancy in these terms: El cine que el Grupo ha pretendido hacer es militante en la lucha por alcanzar la independencia y la identidad histórica y cultural. Es militante porque se forja en la lucha contra una cinematografía dominada por las transnacionales de la comunicación, contra una forma establecida de hacer cine que prescinde de las particularidades nacionales, que manipula al espectador, que tiene cánones rígidos de creación, que tiene como objetivo esencial la ganancia o el lucro, y no la liberación del hombre. [The cinema that the Group has tried to make is militant in its struggle to achieve independence and to reflect historical and cultural identity. Our films are militant because they struggle against the dominant filmmaking of transnational communication companies. Our films are militant because they challenge the established forms of filmmaking that disregard national specificities, manipulate spectators, and seek profit rather than the liberation of man].37

The transitional nature of Chaski’s politics is evident here. The continuation of 1960s leftist thinking emerges in their obviously radical sense of film as an essential part of social struggle and their emphatic desire to combat capitalist media. And yet unlike their counterparts in the 1960s, Chaski’s films also acknowledge that the lure of consumer society and the attraction of mass media are often far more seductive for the disenfranchised than social commitment. Perhaps one of the most significant differences between Chaski and Ukamau lies in their commitment to using both alternative and mainstream forms of distribution. Ukamau and Chaski were each concerned with their access to the public and their ability to compete with alienating forms of mass media. Ukamau had begun the early practice of screenings accompanied by members of the group who led

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after-screening discussions—a practice that Chaski also used as a way to disseminate their work and provide communal spaces for debate and reflection on their films. Similar to accounts by Ukamau of their experiences in these screenings, Chaski’s René Weber recounts a story of a screening in a small rural village where later the community referred to “la pared que habla” [the talking wall].38 In addition to bringing cinema to spaces that had no experience with film, Chaski also set up screenings in urban shantytowns, showing films in public squares and community centers. Where their interest in distribution radically differs from Ukamau has been in their work with mainstream formats. Their participation in commercial avenues of distribution signals a difference in approach from that of the early period of the NLAC that considered any contact with commercial media to be a form of bourgeois contamination. Chaski’s films have appeared on television in Peru and in the United States and Europe and they have extensive distribution on video and DVD. Further, they have taken advantage of the low cost and easy access provided by digital technology and they have worked in digital video since the 1990s and use digital technology for screenings. In contrast, Sanjinés’s suspicion of media imperialism kept Ukamau’s films from distributing on video and DVD, and Ukamau has not used the internet as fully as they might have to reach the public.39 Chaski didn’t just take advantage of a more nimble approach to distribution and exhibition; they also recognized that their aesthetics had to appeal to their intended audience. According to Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage, who saw Chaski’s films in 1986 at the Havana Film Festival: All of this kind of narrative development and characterization might distress a critic stuck in the standard Marxist political and aesthetic categories of fifty years ago. . . . As Grupo Chaski has analyzed it, the models of fully developed capitalism have to be rethought to account for the Third World. This implies a different aesthetic as well, one which doesn’t simply see the poorest people as desperate or as a negative example, but which acknowledges the unemployed poor’s strength in the face of harsh circumstances and their role as an essential component of revolutionary transformation.40

Chaski’s films reflect a new political aesthetic that heralds a transition in the ways that progressive filmmakers imagine their work. Rather than shock their spectators, Chaski took a gentler approach.

210  S.A. McCLENNEN

The Microcines Project Chaski was highly successful in the 1980s and then went through a period of relative inactivity only to make a comeback at the turn of the millennium. Their most recent phase of activity has focused on the microcines project (2004) and on continuing to produce films such as the documentary Sueños lejanos (Distant Dreams, 2006). From the perspective of changing exhibition practices, the microcines project offers a valuable alternative to the rise of multiplexes and the narrow niche of art house theaters. The microcines project is community-based and aimed at circulating Latin American film classics as well as newer releases within local communities. According to their website, “El microcine es un espacio de encuentro y participación donde se exhiben películas que fomentan valores, reflexión y sano entretenimiento. Es gestionado por líderes de la comunidad que son capacitados para desempeñarse como promotores culturales que buscan la autogestión y la sostenibilidad” [the microcine is a meeting place and a space for community participation where films are shown that promote values, reflection, and healthy entertainment. They are organized by community leaders who are trained as cultural promoters. The goal is to empower them to be able to sustain the projects on their own].41 In the first ten years of the microcines initiative, 960 films were seen by 80,000 spectators and 300 young community leaders were trained. In addition, 950 thematic screenings were organized for schools and other organizations. Since 2011, the microcines project has also produced 92 shorts as part of their community film project.42 There are currently 32 microcines in 10 regions of Peru: Puno, Cusco, Ayacucho, Apurímac, Lima Norte, Lima Sur, Ancash, La Libertad, Piura, and Loreto. The microcines project expands on Chaski’s earlier work with alternative forms of distribution and exhibition while also taking advantage of advances in digital technology. It is an excellent example of an effort to offer an alternative exhibition structure that holds true to some of the key features of the third cinema directors’ aspirations for a “film act,” where the film serves as the starting point for community action. As Miriam Ross explains it in her study of Chaski’s microcines initiative: “Although Solanas & Getino’s experiments with the filme-acto were restricted to their time with the political Cine Liberación group in the 1960s and 1970s, the emphasis they placed on spectator agency bares traces in the contemporary work of Grupo Chaski. The way in which the

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Group creates time for spectator interaction suggests the person in the audience is as important as the visual moment on the screen.”43 As Reategui explains in her 2007 document describing the early years of the microcines project, the viewing practices and possibilities of the Peruvian public have radically changed the screening opportunities for Latin American cinema.44 Neoliberal economic policy has resulted in a national film industry controlled by an increasingly smaller number of transnational corporations. The biggest change, one that García Canclini notes in relation to Mexico as well, regards the reduction in movie-house screens and the shift in their location.45 As mentioned in the opening of this chapter, Reategui notes that from 1990 to 2007 Peru went from 240 movie theaters spread out across the country to 35 multiplexes. The location of these theaters is typically close to supermarkets and malls and 95% of tickets sold are for US films. Ticket prices have risen making them out of reach for the majority of the population and many lower-class communities have completely abandoned the custom of attending public film screenings, favoring instead home screenings of television or video. Film viewing has been reduced to “centralismo, exclusión, discriminación, consumo pasivo, dominación económica y cultural” [centralism, exclusion, discrimination, passive consumption, economic and cultural domination].46 Alongside these increasingly dire prospects for Peruvian filmmaking and socially committed media, though, the rise in digital technology and the lowering costs of projection equipment opened a space for intervention. Seizing this opportunity and building on their years of experience with distribution and exhibition, Chaski conceived of an innovative way to reconnect progressive films with marginalized communities via microcines. In a transition from Chaski’s earlier work with exhibition and distribution, the microcines project envisions far greater collaboration with communities and far greater local initiative. The goal is to establish throughout Peru, and eventually throughout Latin America, small, local screening locations where it is possible to see films by and about Latin Americans at reasonable prices. These screening sites are already-existing community spaces that can be converted into theaters easily. Tickets are purchased for about two soles or less than one US dollar and audiences typically range from 50 to 200. Proceeds go to the local microcine organizers, to pay local taxes, to pay modest exhibition rights for the films screened, and to support Chaski.47 (See Tables 4.1 and 4.2.)

212  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 4.1 Breakdown of ticket sale revenue allocation. Source Paola Reategui

Table 4.2 Breakdown of the 45% that goes to Chaski. Source Paola Reategui

Category Local taxes Microcine (exhibitor) Chaski (distributor)

Category Producers and Screening Rights Distribution (Chaski)

Percentage (%) 10 45 45

Percentage (%) 70 30

Key to the success of the microcines is the development of local organizers. While Chaski is pleased to organize local screenings, the microcine project is interested in developing a more integral notion of film and community—one that depends on the microcine as a locally driven cultural space. Their goal is not only to reacquaint Peruvians with Latin American cinema and with the practice of attending public screenings, but also to promote the film experience as a moment of reflection, debate, and critical exchange. To this end, they organize workshops to train community organizers that cover a range of issues including how to promote screenings, how to use screenings as a means to discuss and debate topics of importance to the community, and how to develop critical media literacy skills. The outside funding they have received has helped to cover the costs of buying projection equipment, organizing initial screenings, and running workshops. Another major component of the project relates to their dedication to expanding their catalog of films for distribution and to working to develop “kits” that package groups of films together. Each “kit” includes one short, one feature, one documentary, and one film for children. It is accompanied by a copy of their magazine “Nuestro Cine” [Our Cinema] with information about the films, a guide to promoting the screenings, and a screening license. By 2007, they had developed seven “kits” and had over 60 films for digital distribution. The array of films available varies from gritty documentaries to more mainstream-styled features like those of Lombardi, but the common thread that links all of these films is that they each exemplify their goal of “cine latino para gente latina” [Latin American film for Latin American people]; “El Grupo Chaski defiende desde sus inicios, una actitud y una metodología ante un cine

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responsable, inmerso en lo cotidiano, con personajes auténticos y con la experiencia social compartida de todos los días” [since its founding Grupo Chaski has maintained an attitude and a methodology of responsible cinema, one that is immersed in the everyday, that has authentic characters and that reflects the shared social experience of daily life].48 In some ways globalization has had an ironic effect on the success of Chaski. After over twenty years of working to reach a Peruvian audience, by the turn of the twenty-first century the possibilities for alternative filmmaking seemed grimmer than ever. When Chaski began the microcines project there were only 35 movie theaters in the country and the experience of watching films on the big screen was reserved for a small minority of the population. But just as globalization has meant the homogenizing of media culture, it has also brought technological innovation that has opened a space for alternative media access. Digital technologies and flexible distribution rights have allowed Chaski to match in numbers the exhibition venues (but not yet the screens) of commercial theaters. Chaski currently supports 32 microcines throughout Peru and six more in Latin America. The microcines project has proven that it is possible to circumvent the centralization of media access, creating a true alternative to the neoliberal model. The microcines project has also considerably expanded the local participation of communities, who now take an active role in their film experience from the moment of promotion. And it has effectively spilled beyond the borders of Peru, most notably to Bolivia, which now has four microcines in operation.49 In an article describing the successes of the Bolivian wing of the microcines project, Marcelo Cordero explains that since 1987 only between 8 and 10% of Bolivians have even seen a movie in a theater.50 Thus, the microcines project is one of the only ways that the population is even able to see a film. And the choice of films is deliberately aimed at a productive blend of entertainment and enrichment. Lo anterior hace posible que el audiovisual active un mercado generador de recursos a favor de productores, distribuidores, exhibidores y, lo más importante, de las mismas comunidades donde se implemente un punto microcine. De esta forma se equilibran potenciales culturales, educativos y sociales con el aspecto económico, algo que el circuito y método tradicional no logra, ni le interesa abarcar. [The foregoing makes it possible for the audiovisual to activate a market that generates resources supporting producers, distributors, exhibitors, and, most importantly, the

214  S.A. McCLENNEN communities where microcines are present. In this way, they equalize cultural, educational, and social potentials with economic aspects, something that traditional circuits and methods do not achieve, and are not interested in attempting].51

As a further sign of the ways that political filmmakers are navigating neoliberal economics, the microcines in Bolivia—as well as Peru—operate on a microfinance level that facilitates a decentralized exchange of resources to support film screenings.52 In this way, the microcines do not pretend to compete with traditional exhibition practices and multiplexes. Chaski isn’t only crossing national borders with its projects; it is also working to exhibit films via digital means. The considerable exposure that Chaski has on the internet via its own website, on video sites like YouTube, and through bloggers and Peruvian film sites further indicates the way that the project has benefited by the development of internet technologies that were unavailable in the 1980s.53 Ross notes that these initiatives are an important way to continue some of the core goals connected to the political filmmaking of the NLAC. But she also notes that the alternative screening practices offered by the microcines initiative is not likely to alter fundamentally the dominance of foreign theater chains: “Although I would argue that Grupo Chaski’s activities are unlikely to alter the continual domination of cinematic exhibition and distribution by international companies in Latin America, they do offer small revolutionary moments in which local communities are engaged.”54 Charles Acland in Screen Traffic references the larger picture of how screening practices influence and construct a sense of shared community: “Cinema complexes are hubs of community and public life. They do not situate conditions of spectatorship alone; they also construct relations between public and cinema practices.”55 The microcines project is one alternative way of creating a screening community that is not ruled by neoliberal multinational corporatized consumption patterns.

Multiplexes and the Mexican Cinépolis The earliest exhibition practices in Latin America and across the globe were traveling exhibition sites. These slowly gave way to fixed theaters. In Mexico, for instance, between 1905 and 1910, the large producers at that time (Loew, Zukor, and Fox, among others) built the first permanent movie theaters, which gradually became large, luxurious spaces

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of up to 3,000 seats.56 While the rise of the movie theater would quickly overtake traveling exhibition, in Latin America there is a long and ongoing history of alternative communal viewing practices, as evidenced by the initiatives of Grupo Ukamau’s traveling exhibition. Even today the idea of a “teatro ambulante,” or traveling theater, appeals. In 2005, Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal launched a roving documentary film festival. In 2015, the project screened 28 documentaries and 15 short films in 21 locations. “The goal, says Christine Davila, who serves as director of Ambulante California, is to take documentary film to new audiences in unexpected locations.”57 This means that while the rise of the commercial movie theater may be the dominant way that Latin Americans consume films in public spaces, we would do well to note that there is an ongoing effort to offer alternative venues for collective film viewing. As Acland puts it “cinemagoing, by its very nature, requires some condition of public spectatorship.”58 But clearly the range of ways in which viewers consume films can vary widely—from glitzy, high-end theaters to outdoor screenings in rural settings, there is much about the way that a film is seen that can have an impact on the experience of cinema. And as Acland further notes “even as cinema complexes invite dreams of collectivity and agency, they are sites that survey, police, and discipline public comportment.”59 The distinction between the cinema as a space of collective engagement and as a reinforcement of class hierarchies is especially apparent in the rise of the high-end multiplex in Latin America. Before the high-end multiplex left its imprint on the Latin American viewing experience, the region experienced a nosedive in available cinemas for screenings. As Argentine film scholar Getino notes, during a 15-year span dating from 1984 to 1999, 50% of all movie theaters in Latin America closed.60 When the region neared the end of the millennium, and more theaters shut down as viewers opted for home viewing, many wondered if the cinemagoing experience was doomed in the region. García Canclini also notes that many Latin American theaters closed their doors in the 1980s when attendance fell by 50%. He goes on to point out that in Mexico $410 million in ticket sales in 1984 had dropped to $170 million by 1991.61 The rise of easy access to home viewing options, anxieties about violence, and declining quality in theaters all combined to suggest that theatrical screening of films might have died out.

216  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 4.3  Argentina—movie theater data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statisticsa

Number of indoor digital screens Screen per capita (per 100,000 inhabitants) Percentage of monoscreens Percentage of cinemas with 2–7 screens Percentage of multiplexes (8+)

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

1 2.3 58.5 30.2 11.3

35 2.3 55.4 32.5 12.1

108 2.2 59.5 27.7 12.9

153 2.2 57.9 28.6 13.5

167 2.4 59.6 29.7 10.7

253 2.4 58.1 31.1 10.8

a“Argentina,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed February 2, 2017, http://uis.unesco.org/en/ country/ar?theme=culture.

Table 4.4  Brazil—movie theater data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statisticsa

Number of indoor digital screens Screen per capita (per 100,000 inhabitants) Percentage of monoscreens Percentage of cinemas with 2–7 screens Percentage of multiplexes (8+)

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

180 1.3 46.3 45.6 8.1

274 1.2 37.7 51.9 10.4

262 1.2 36.4 53.3 10.3

467 1.3 35.3 54.7 10.1

784 1.4 32.5 56.6 10.8

898 1.5 30.5 58.1 11.4

a“Brazil,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed February 2, 2017, http://uis.unesco.org/en/ country/br?theme=culture.

This would all change at the turn of the millennium as a number of countries witnessed a growing investment in commercial theaters. To give a sense of the shift, in the 1970s there were 2,000 movie theaters in Argentina; in 1992 there were 280, but by 2000 they had climbed back up to 1,000.62 Ross notes that in Latin America today the trend is toward cinemas in shopping malls and multiplexes that are more expensive—“elitizando” the experience.63 She further notes a significant breakdown between rural and urban viewing options, with most commercial screens located in cities. Today urban Latin Americans who see films publicly go to commercial movie theaters and, as noted by the data presented below, the multiplex—a cinema with more than one screen—is on the rise. The Motion Picture Association reports that in 2015 there were 11,710 movie screens throughout Latin America.64 In 2012, there were 10,315.65 But in 2009 there were less than 5,000.66 The data in Tables 4.3, 4.4, and 4.5 is instructive in a number of ways. Besides revealing a notable increase in available screens, it shows

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Table 4.5 Mexico—movie theater data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statisticsa

Number of indoor digital screens Screen per capita (per 100,000 inhabitants) Percentage of monoscreens Percentage of cinemas with 2–7 screens Percentage of multiplexes

2008

2009

2010

15 4.4 5.8 41.9 52.3

317 4.4 4.3 36.5 59.2

662 4.7 5.2 33.1 61.7

2011 2012 985 4.8 5 32 63

2,676 4.9 4.4 30.2 65.4

2013 4,438 5 3.5 30.5 66.1

a“Mexico,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed February 2, 2017, http://uis.unesco.org/en/ country/mx?theme=culture.

the deep differences between the screen communities in the three largest film markets in the region. Argentina still has a fairly significant number of single-screen theaters, whereas Mexico has a majority of multiplexes with more than eight screens. The 2–7 screen theater is a common theater experience across the region. Mexico has the highest number of screens per capita and Brazil the lowest of the three. In all three cases the relative explosion of indoor digital screens is a sign that the poor technology in theaters during the 1980s has been more than overcome. Scholars have paid a lot of attention to the rise of the multiplex. Joanna Page in her study of Argentine cinema notes that “cinemagoing in Buenos Aires and other cities has been dominated since the late 1990s by the presence of new and lavish megaplexes owned by North American and Australian companies, chiefly Hoyts General Cinemas and Warner Village. Their location within ultramodern shopping malls is symbolic of cinema’s transformation into a middle-class leisure activity, becoming increasingly associated with the First World aspirations of wealthy Argentines.”67 The reality, though, is that the high-end megaplex cinemagoing experience is relatively elite and thus does not “dominate” the cinemagoing of the region. For instance the two most popular multiplexes in Argentina, Hoyts Unicenter and Hoyts Abasto, both located in malls, the first a high-end one and the second more middle-class, accounted for only 8.63% of all spectators in 2014. And while there is an upsurge in film viewing in Argentina, with 38.6 million viewers in 2010 and 45.6 million in 2014, the average per capita is only 1.07 films per person annually. While clearly this data is skewed, with many Argentines not going to theaters at all, it is worth understanding the bigger picture of how much (or more to the point, how little) the multiplex experience

218  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 4.6  Argentina—exhibition data. Source Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Airesa

Spectator total Spectators for Argentine film Revenue in millions ARS ($) Released titles National titles released (includes coproduction, short films, documentaries) Feature films produced Theaters Screens Average ticket price in ARS ($)

2012

2013

2014

Var. 2014/2013 (%)

47,312,416 4,731,241 1.297 336 136

48,339,739 7,458,365 1.679 367 142

45,648,799 8,145,272 2.009 404 172

-5.57 9.21 20 10 21.13

35 269 829 28.14

47 288 866 35.85

55 280 867 45.33

17 -2.8 0.11 26

aRaquel Rodriguez Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina, Noviembre 2015,” Estudios de Mercado: Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Aires, 2015, 4, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.clag.es/sites/default/files/servicios_de_informes/descargas/2015/12/04/el_mercado_del_cine_en_argentina_noviembre_2015_icex.pdf.

is part of everyday life for most Argentines. This is all to say that, while it is certainly true that the glitzy shopping center cinema associated with the rise of global capitalism is a noteworthy trend in the region, it may not be the dominant force some scholars worry over. Perhaps more importantly, prior to the availability of these multiscreen theaters, Argentines simply didn’t have many public screening venues at all (see Tables 4.6, 4.7, and 4.8). As seen in Table 4.7, the top theater chains in Argentina are Hoyts, Village, and Cinemark. Together these three companies attract 50% of all Argentine spectators. But here is the catch: These chains might seem like signs of foreign investment, thereby signaling the continu­ ation of cultural imperialism in the region, but tracing actual ownership of these theater chains is a slippery slope. For example, Hoyts in Argentina was originally an Australian company until Linzor Capital, owned by Argentines, Chileans, and Venezuelans, bought it in 2007. It then transferred in 2011 to US-owned Cinemark.68 This means that tracing a link between ownership of a theater chain and its connection to national culture is difficult, if not impossible. In the case of Argentina it

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Table 4.7  Argentina—spectators by exhibitor, 2014. Source Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Airesa Exhibitor

Spectators

Hoyts General Cinema of Argentina S.A. Village Cinemas S.A. Cinemark Argentina S.R.L. N.A.I. Internac.II Inc. Suc. Arg. (Showcase) Riocin S.A. Cine Sunstar S.A. Cinema Center S.A. Honfleur S.A. San Martin Company S.R.L. Deno S. A Cinemas Boulevard Shopping S.A. North Cinematographic Exhibit S.A. Dinosaur S.A. 222 other exhibition companies

10,824,293 5,809,535 5,779,272 4,499,473 1,055,964 920,878 904,392 836,463 790,743 750,047 727,295 723,954 676,059 11,350,431

aRodriguez

Percentage of total (%) 23.71 12.73 12.66 9.86 2.31 2.02 1.98 1.83 1.73 1.64 1.59 1.59 1.48 24.87

Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina,” 8.

Table 4.8  Argentina—screens by exhibitor. Source Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Airesa

Hoyts Village N.A.I Cinemark Sunstar Honfleur Riocin aRodriguez

Number of screens

Percentage of total screens (%)

97 79 75 71 29 28 25

11.19 9.11 8.65 8.19 3.34 3.23 2.88

Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina,” 8.

is even messier, since there are also nationally owned theater chains such as Riocin, which, along with other national chains such as Cinema Center and Sunstar, accounted for 63% of all screens and 41% of all spectators in 2015.69 This suggests that while the top theaters are connected to “foreign” multinational ownership, there is still significant national market share in the theater business.

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But here’s the even more important reality: There is no distinguishable difference between the way theaters owned by foreign corporations or national interests operate. We can’t, for instance, note that Cinemark theaters treat national films differently from Hollywood fare. Instead, the more commercialized theaters market the film experience in fairly similar ways, attempting to create an entire aura around the moviegoing experience and luring the spectator into doing more than simply buying a ticket. From concessions to restaurants to tie-in merchandise, these chains follow similar patterns of attempting to commercialize the film experience. They all commodify the experience as much as possible in an effort to draw the most profit from each spectator. Perhaps even more importantly, these commercialized chains have been the venues for significant box office successes for national films. There is no antinational cinema agenda in the commercial theaters as long as the film can fill seats. In 2014, the top-grossing film in Argentina was Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales, 2014), which drew almost 3.5 million spectators. Juan José Campanella’s animated film, Metegol (Underdogs, 2013), held the fourth spot in box office revenue in 2013, drawing 2.1 million spectators.70 The rise of the multiplex hasn’t meant that national cinema can’t get seen, but it has meant that the common denominator in films screened at commercial shopping mall theaters is profitability. In the case of Brazil, there was a similar drop in theaters with only 1,033 theaters in 1995 jumping up to 1,635 in 2002.71 As in Argentina, the Brazilian movie theater industry is largely dominated by foreign-owned companies with Cinemark holding the top spot. Steve Solot’s industry study released with data from 2011 explains that “only 7% of Brazilian municipalities have movie theaters.”72 Some of this is due to very low population density in certain parts of Brazil, but it is also connected to the fact that in some communities in Brazil very few people have the habit of cinemagoing. According to official ANCINE records, “by the end of 2010, Brazil had 2,206 screens, in 662 theaters operated by approximately 415 companies. The two largest exhibition circuits in Brazil, Cinemark (a U.S. multinational) and Grupo Severiano Ribeiro (a Brazilian company), accounted for almost half the revenue of movie theaters in the country, which in 2010 exceeded US $1.2 billion.”73 As seen in the case of Argentina, there is no measurable distinction between the way that Cinemark and Grupo Severiano Ribeiro treat national cinema. Their overriding goal is profit, so if a national film can yield high box office returns it is featured on the best screen in the house. If not, it

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takes a back seat to Hollywood. Again the realities of global economics in the neoliberal era reveal that the profit model has disentangled business practice from earlier models of cultural imperialism. Now the only ideology is the market. Mexico has the largest cinemagoing public of all of the Latin American nations. As Misha MacLaird notes, “the most substantial changes to Mexico’s film industry since 1990 have been to its distribution and exhibition sectors, once state run and now in the hands of multinational corporations, and these changes to the exhibition infrastructure have shifted the film-going audience in Mexico to target a higher socioeconomic stratum.”74 By 2009, Mexico was fifth worldwide in terms of movie attendance, with 180 million tickets sold. That puts Mexico only behind India, the United States, China, and France in terms of movie audiences. In Latin America, it is the largest box office market, beating out Brazil (113 million tickets sold), despite having approximately half the population.75 Two key developments greatly affected the theater business in Mexico in the global era: the deregulation of staterun theaters and the advent of NAFTA. These developments brought an entrepreneurial edge to the theater business in the region, since selling movie tickets became far more profitable after the passing of a 1992 law that deregulated ticket costs.76 In 1994, tickets were on average 9.8 pesos. By 2010, they had surged to 48. But interestingly those increased costs did not lead to a reduction in attendance. In 1994, there were 82 million tickets sold. In 2010, there were 189.2 million.77 Despite charging almost five times as much per ticket, the overall attendance in theaters more than doubled in the same timeframe. Industry analysis of these developments attributes these changes to the fact that the deregulation of the industry led to innovation spurred by the fact that theaters became a profitable business. Critics suggest that these changes simply reinforce class boundaries by making theatergoing an experience limited to the upper and middle class. But this breakdown is too simplistic. Sánchez Prado points out that prior to the deregulation of the theater business no one was really going to theaters at all. In the 1980s, most film theaters were part of a state-owned conglomerate named Compañía Operadora de Teatros S. A. (COTSA), largely made up of huge single-screen venues scattered all over the city.78 Some of these venues were in working-class neighborhoods. And yet, the theaters were largely empty by the time of the 1992 deregulation. Sánchez Prado cites data that between 1989 and 1991, “992 movie theaters were

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closed and 10,082 video clubs had opened” in the country and, perhaps more importantly, most of the closed cinemas “had exhibited primarily Mexican films.”79 The point is that prior to 1990 it was indeed possible to go to theaters in working-class neighborhoods and see a national film. The problem is that there was no audience for it, a reality that meant that these local exhibition sites were financially unsustainable. Perhaps even more importantly, Sánchez Prado notes that the fact that “the shutdown screens had been showing primarily Mexican films was not . . . a cause but rather a consequence: a clear sign that audiences were simply not going to see Mexican movies.”80 This view argues that the decline of these local viewing venues took place because the theaters themselves had become run-down and the films they showed were not appealing to the public. MacLaird points out that the head of Mexico’s film institute, IMCINE, blamed the state system for the decline of the local movie theater: “the bureaucratic systems controlling distribution and exhibition were outdated, dysfunctional, and consequently, costly.”81 After this period of decline, Mexican film attendance rebounded with force and theatergoing in Mexico continues to grow. In 2015, 296 million tickets were sold—an increase of 15% over 2014.82 On average the Mexican population goes to see a film 2.46 times per year, although these numbers are skewed since the bulk of moviegoers are located in urban spaces. As will be discussed below, besides having the largest film-attending population in the region, Mexico is also the only country where the top theater chain, Cinépolis, is a national corporation. It pulls 57.3% of Mexican moviegoers.83 Similar to Argentina and Brazil, rural areas in Mexico are underserved by theaters and only 20% of the Mexican population with higher earnings regularly goes to see films in theaters.84 IMCINE reports that in 2013, about 150 municipalities had movie theaters for 6% of the total. These account for 56% of the population.85 The urban, middle-to-upper class status of cinemagoers has, along with the increase of glitzy theater venues, led scholars to worry over the privilege connected with the theater experience. The lack of theater options in rural and lower-class neighborhoods and the prohibitive ticket prices exclude substantial segments of the Mexican population from seeing films in theaters. MacLaird explains that “the exclusion of the lower classes from these spaces and from market participation is, like in other inflated markets, held in place by a black market that makes lower-quality goods available at 25 to 50% of the price: DVD piracy.”86 The class

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stratification and urban/rural split is not unique to Mexico, nor to Latin America in general. In the United States, for example, home viewing, the costly transition to digital projection, and the rise of multiplex cinemas has also led to a number of single-screen theaters closing.87 Some 10,000 theaters or 20% of all locations closed in the United States during the digital projection transition.88 This data reminds us that under global neoliberal policies the cultural divide is between those who “win” and “lose” in the global economy and less a boundary between nations. While the theatergoing class gap has drastically widened under millennial globalization, there is another side to the story. The rise of comfortable, well-appointed theaters has brought middle-class viewers back to theaters. In the 1990s, this was the segment of society that had decided largely to watch at home, via DVD, cable, or other home-viewing options. Marina Moguillansky writes about the eliticization of film consumption and cites MPAA data that shows that 57% of spectators in Argentina are from the upper classes.89 Similar trends are true throughout the region. As Sánchez Prado explains, “before 1988, cinema was predominantly a form of entertainment geared toward the lower classes. Today, the development of the VIP experience, and the fact that the average ticket still costs the equivalent of a full day of work at minimum wage, show that the market remains firmly rooted in attracting the middle and upper classes.”90 Sánchez Prado argues, though, that this shift is not entirely a sign of a neoliberal class divide, since many of the national films that drew substantial Mexican audiences were, indeed, films that sparked reflection on critical social issues. This was true, as he explains it, due to the fact that a number of successful Mexican films focused on the way that neoliberalism was affecting the creative middle class. When Sexo, pudor, y lágrimas (Sex, Shame and Tears, 1999) was released in 1999 it broke box office records and became the highest grossing Mexican film at the time. But more importantly, according to Sánchez Prado, the era heralded a new phase in Mexican film that would appeal to the middle class by depicting the neoliberal realities they had to face. As he explains, “Sexo, pudor y lágrimas ultimately is about the ways in which the middle class defines its affective sphere, in the space between the cultural ideals of a left-of-center creative class and the social realities of neoliberalism.”91 Sánchez Prado explains that many critics chastised the film for apparently reinforcing neoliberal values and the bourgeois order. But he claims that view is too simplistic. He points to the way that Sexo, pudor y lágrimas set trends in production quality and in displacing the traditional

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state structure for film financing: “Sexo, pudor y lágrimas operates at the level of neoliberal cultural economics as well as in the construction of a new form of emotional capitalism.”92 It occupies an ambivalent space characterized by neoliberal commercialized cinema, where the film both reinforces neoliberal culture, but also represents successful engagement with Mexican, middle-class audiences. The rise of Mexican films drawing Mexican middle-class audiences reminds us that the national market share of film viewing in Mexico is still quite low. Despite the fact that Mexicans have a higher cinemagoing culture and despite having a national company as the top theater chain, Hollywood still dominates at the box office. IMCINE data from 2012 showed that of the 319 features screened, 143 (45%) were from the United States, but these films drew 89% of all viewers. Mexican films attracted only 4.79%.93 In 2015, all top ten films in Mexico were from Hollywood. The top-grossing Mexican film that year, the animated feature, Un gallo con muchos huevos (Huevos: Little Rooster’s Egg-cellent Adventure, 2015) pulled 4.1 million viewers, considerably behind the tenth-place film that year, Ant Man, which drew 5.2 million, but reinforces the fact that the biggest box office draws are consistently aimed at children and adolescents.94 That year, 85 national films were commercially screened for 18.5% of the total screening market. But those films only drew 5.3% of all viewers.95 Thus, one of the complex issues that continues to haunt the notion of national cinema in the region is the difficulty in attracting viewers to see films from their home countries. In general, one of the primary explanations for a lack of success for national cinema has been a lack of access to screens, but current data suggests that may not be the whole story. In 2010, more than 100 national films were released in Argentina but around 80 of these did not attract even 10,000 spectators; some of them reached less than 2,000. Getino explains that this trend is true across the region.96 In 2014, 55 features were released in Argentina but only nine national films reached over 100,000 viewers.97 Andrew Higson explains that “most scholars simply equate ‘national cinema’ with the body of films produced in a given country, while patterns of film consumption (which invariably involve an international range of product) are neglected.”98 In fact, in only a very few nations, such as the United States and India, are the majority of films screened from the home country. In Argentina, between 2010 and 2012, only 10–12% of all films consumed were national. The number jumped to 18% in 2014—a significant

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gain. And yet, when we recall that the national average is a bit over one film viewed in a theater per year per inhabitant, that number underscores the reality that most Argentines are not watching Argentine cinema in a movie theater ever. Similarly, in 2014 national films claimed 10% market share in Mexico and 12.2% in Brazil. As a point of comparison, in Spain national cinema took 25.4% in 2014.99 While Spain might claim a larger market share for national cinema than Mexico, it is still true that the majority of films seen in that nation in theaters are from Hollywood. This means that the idea of connecting the origin of the film with the national experience of cinema is somewhat fraught. Research by UNESCO explains that “studies on the diversity of cultural expressions generally draw a distinction between diversity supplied or offered by the agents in various cultural industries—whatever their position in the successive phases of production, distribution and screening—and diversity accepted or actually consumed.”100 While it is common to worry that national films are not getting released, it is more often the case that films hit the big screen only to attract very few viewers. This contradicts the idea that the major problem for national films is access to screens. For instance, Argentine NLAC director Fernando Birri once wrote that “exhibitors and distributors justify their permanent blocking of nationally produced films by appealing to the spectator’s right to choose what films he or she wishes to see. But this free-market sophism omits one small detail: that for an audience to choose a film, it must first be exhibited, which generally does not happen with national films, or does so only in appalling conditions.”101 In today’s context Birri is no longer right. Yes, national films are often given the smaller screen in the multiplex and yes those films lack the promotion and marketing of Hollywood fare, but it is simply not the case that these films are not available. Viewers who go to see national cinema are often in theaters with virtually no accompanying audience. As someone who has spent decades seeking out national films in local theaters throughout the region, I can personally attest to the reality that I am often one of the only people in the theater. It is interesting to note how the tensions between national cinema production and national cinema consumption also seem to pit the exhibitor against the producer. The tendency is for national producers to blame exhibitors for the lack of success of their films at the box office. In return, exhibitors rail at producers for making poor-quality films that don’t appeal to audiences. For example, MacLaird recounts how

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in October 2011, in response to the Mexican film community’s lobbying in favor of screen quotas for national cinema, “Alejandro Ramírez, CEO of Mexico’s largest theater chain, Cinépolis, and also president of CANACINE, declared to the press that most Mexican cinema was ‘garbage’ and that Mexican filmmakers ought to make better films if they want to succeed.”102 The reality, though, is far more complex. On the one hand, it is true that there are production-quality differences between national and Hollywood films, but on the other hand, we can note an increase in the consumption of national cinema since the millennium with national films in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico topping the box office with regularity. Also, it is true that many Hollywood films, especially those tied to comic or action series, are supported by multimilliondollar advertising campaigns, but despite far smaller promotion budgets, national films can and do draw viewers, albeit typically on a smaller scale. Thus, it would be easy to look at the transitions in the theater industry in the region and see those trends as an example of how the global neoliberal economy has both marginalized national cinema and commercialized the filmviewing experience. But that wouldn’t be the whole story. In fact, the rise of the multiplex has taken place simultaneous to an increase in market share for national films. The data presented above also adds one more caution to our sense of the impact of the multiplex on the filmgoing experience. Despite our sense that the issue of Hollywood versus national cinema can have a significant impact on identity formation, and despite concerns that the commercialized screening experience of the multiplex is a harbinger of neoliberal culture, the relative infrequency of film viewing in movie theaters suggests that concerns that its role as definitive in the creation of national identity may well be overblown. As UNESCO reminds us, the majority of film consumption takes place outside of the traditional cinema circuit: “Televisions, streaming media players, computers, tablets and smartphones are popular platforms for watching and enjoying feature films for a major portion of the world’s population. However, the theatrical release of a feature film continues to be a major effort visà-vis commercial exploitation in the rest of the film consumption windows (free-to-air and pay television, DVD, online platforms).”103 The data presented above shows us that many communities in even the most developed economies in Latin America simply have no access to cinemas at all—a point that further suggests that the multiplex phenomenon can’t really have that great an impact on identity construction. The

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realities of who goes to see which films in what types of venues are only part of the story, of course. As Acland points out, “box office receipts tell us nothing of how the film was enjoyed, ridiculed, or made sense of in any manner.”104 Cinépolis The case of the Mexican film chain Cinépolis adds another wrench to the traditional paradigms that have been used to understand the impact of globalization in Latin America, since the film chain is not only a dominant force; it is also at the forefront to innovating the filmgoing experience. The key takeaway from the case of Cinépolis is the fact that Mexican ownership of one of the most powerful film theater chains in the world may be a sign that the geographies of power are shifting under globalization, but those shifts in geographic ownership do not invert any of the class dynamics caused by neoliberal practices. For example, as mentioned above, Cinépolis was the first foreign movie chain to open theaters in India. These theaters, though, are in no way measurably different from similar multiplex theater operations like AMC or Cinemark. There is nothing specifically “Mexican” to the theater experience, other than the fact that the film chain signals its Spanish-language ties through the use of an accented name. And yet, in keeping with my thesis about the deep ambivalences at the heart of neoliberal effects on the Latin American film industry, the following section will show that Cinépolis is not simply a sign of a market-driven neoliberal corporation. In fact, there are a number of concrete ways that the multinational theater chain has supported Mexican cinema, and, in particular, political films. The history of Cinépolis dates back to 1971 when the Ramírez family founded Organización Ramírez and opened the La Raza theater in Mexico City, followed by several others. The family then sold the company to the government only to start back up later in 1994. As CEO Alejandro Ramírez Magaña explains, the chain is very much a family business.105 Ramírez took over leadership of the company in 1996, leaving a post in economic development at the United Nations. As Ramírez explains, their brand depends on constant innovation: In the 1970s, we introduced the multiplex concept in Mexico, followed by stadium seating in the 1990s. In 1999, we developed and pioneered in the Western hemisphere the luxury cinema concept and have since

228  S.A. McCLENNEN become the largest VIP operator in the world. In the early 2000s, we introduced the first IMAX screens into commercial multiplexes in Mexico at the same time as we also developed our own large-format screen concept, Cinépolis Macro XE. We were leaders in digital deployment and 3D; and we were the first—and still remain the only one in Latin America—to offer enhanced 4D experiences. Cinépolis also invested an equal amount of time and effort to make it easier for our customers to purchase tickets, including online access and on mobile devices. Recently, reserved seating was expanded throughout all of our cinemas.106

As of June 2015, the company operates 3,934 screens at 469 theaters, 327 of which are in Mexico. The company operates theaters in eleven different nations, including the United States and India. They have theaters in 98 cities throughout Mexico, 9 in Central America, 48 in South America, 27 in Asia, and 2 in the United States. They drew 65.12% of the filmgoing market in Mexico in 2015 and reached over 201 million viewers in all of their theaters combined.107 One of the key features of the Cinépolis trademark is the development of the VIP experience, where patrons can sit in reclining seats, order from a catering service, and take advantage of a seat-pick system that allows them to choose their seats ahead of time. They have also opened 4DX theaters using South Korean technology. The hallmark of Cinépolis theaters is luxury and the common feature is amenities. Allleather individual recliners with side tables, pre-assigned numbered seats, a full bar, an extensive food menu (which can be ordered through waiters summoned by a button next to the seat), and a comfortable lobby that resembles a hip café are all regular features of Cinépolis. Frederick Aldama describes Cinépolis as a sort of “lifestyle cinema,” noting that it even publishes its own glossy magazine, advertising Armani handbags, Chanel shoes, and “world-class” spas and restaurants. He further explains that “the chain offers a range of theater experiences: for an extra fifty pesos beyond the regular hundred-peso ticket, you may enter a variety of VIP screening rooms variously identified as the Sala del Movimiento [movement room], the Sala de la Imaginación [imagination room], the Sala 3D [3D room], the Sala Inspiracional [inspirational room], the Sala Interactiva [interactive room], and the Sala de Música [music room]. For that elite experience—and yet another hundred pesos—it offers patrons the experience of the VIP room called La Cúspide [the peak].”108 This lavish experience is easy prey for those

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that want to call attention to the widening class divides caused by neoliberal economics. As Aldama explains, around twenty million Mexicans are forced to live on five pesos a day (about fifty cents). The luxury and extravagance of a night out at the Cinépolis is more than extravagant; it is a sign of the grotesque side of an extreme free-market economy. Similar to what we have seen with neoliberal market trends, many major multinationals are actively involved in philanthropy and other forms of corporate social responsibility. One initiative of their philanthropic foundation, “Vamos Todos a Cinépolis,” focuses on bringing cinema to people that do not have access to cinema. Ramírez explains, “every year, we offer at least four free screenings for underprivileged children at all of our screens. We do this in a great partnership with our distributors. They have been very, very generous in lending us films in order to share them with children in Latin America. With Ruta Cinépolis, we actually bring inflatable screens, projectors, speakers and everything else to small towns where we don’t have any multiplexes.”109 While it would be easy to dismiss this as a gesture that assuages bourgeois guilt or as a strategy to lure young members of the lower-class to spend money on films later on in life, other major chains like Cinemark are not following these same practices. In another initiative of the foundation, the theater chain invests in visual health by financing cataract surgeries in rural areas. Ramírez explains that Cinépolis has enabled more than 16,000 operations for people that helped them recover their sight: “We wanted to work on something that has some emotional link to our vision as a company. Of the five senses, sight is the most important one in enjoying the movies. Secondly, we had learned that cataract is the number-one cause of blindness in Latin America. Yet it is a very cost-effective intervention. It costs us about $500 to give back the possibility of seeing, so the socioeconomic returns of these interventions are immense.”110 Again it would be easy to dismiss these initiatives as merely part of the way that the neoliberal system encourages corporate social responsibility as a way to cover over economic exploitation and ameliorate the retreat of state support and social services demanded by the free market. Certainly that is true. But that is not all. Ramírez was recently recognized with a prize at the Telluride Film Festival for promoting “film as an agent of social change.”111 For instance, Cinépolis is a main backer of the Morelia International Film Festival whose “mission is to promote new talents in Mexican

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cinema.”112 Cinépolis has also coproduced and then distributed documentaries throughout its theater network. One of them, Presunto culpable (Presumed Guilty, 2008), “‘shows how dysfunctional the judiciary system is in Mexico,’ Ramírez explains. ‘It was nominated for three Emmys and won for Best Investigative Reporting three years ago,’ in addition to receiving the 2010 Humanitas Award from the International Documentary Association and the Human Rights Film Network Award in Dubai.”113 Presunto culpable “‘also became the most successful documentary in history with 1.75 million admissions in Mexico.’”114 Prior to that, Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) was the top documentary with about 120,000 tickets. But there’s more: the film also helped change some of Mexico’s laws and led to reforms in the Mexican judicial system. Cinépolis has also supported national films that have faced criticism from the Mexican government. For instance, the film chain supported Luis Estrada’s La dictadura perfecta (The Perfect Dictatorship, 2014), a satirical film about corrupt politicians bribing the media to advance their careers that had all too obvious references to the current state of affairs in Mexico.115 Televisa withdrew its support of the film after originally agreeing to coproduce it.116 Despite the controversy surrounding its depiction of the news media as a corrupt tool of dishonest politicians, the film received significant support from Mexican theaters, eventually reaching 1,500 screens simultaneously throughout Mexico. Estrada explained that “tanto Cinépolis como Cinemex nos han ofrecido un apoyo excepcional” [both Cinépolis and Cinemex have offered us exceptional support].117 Did Cinépolis just profit from the scandal? Certainly their support of films like La dictadura perfecta has to be read at least partially in that way. But again that isn’t the whole story. In yet another twist on their cultural agenda, Cinépolis has partnered with Alejandro González Iñárritu to offer an art cinema with the Zaï cultural center. Cinépolis explains that the alliance with González Iñárritu aims to “create a cultural center with rooms for documentary, independent, and experimental film, which will also have an area of multiple uses.”118 The project will be located in Mexico City and the project advisory board includes Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna, and Carlos Reygadas, among others. Zaï “is a word that comes from a traditional farming technique particularly useful in infertile land for cultivation.”119 In an ironic twist, the project rescues the practice of the small, local art theater that was among the hardest hit by the global era. The idea is to offer screenings for films that have

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a difficult time accessing the public. According to González Iñárritu, “este proyecto nace de una frustración hace algunos años cuando la Cineteca Nacional estaba en remodelación. Entonces no había un espacio para quienes gozan de cine alternativo y poco accesible, como ofrecen varios festivales de cine” [this project is born from a frustration from years ago when the National Film Archive was being remodeled. Then, there wasn’t a space for those who enjoy alternative and less-accessible film, like that offered by various film festivals].120 The structure of the Zaï space is organized around the desire to generate a community of exchange. Resuscitating some of the very same ideas that were embedded in the notion of the “film act,” the Zaï initiative hopes not only to bring films to viewers, but also to spark discussion, debate, and engagement: “Esperamos que con Zaï, ese cine que amamos se disemine a la mayor cantidad de gente possible” [We hope that with Zaï, this cinema that we love can be disseminated to as many people as possible].121 All of this combines to complicate the traditional paradigms we have used to understand the multiplex as a symbol of foreign domination and imperialist commodification of the viewing experience. Cinépolis both inverts the traditional north-south capitalist power dynamic and it embodies the ambivalent nature of those few multinationals that exert undue power in the marketplace while also advancing an agenda of corporate social responsibility. Perhaps most importantly it is an example of a profit-driven theater chain that also has supported and advanced socially significant political films in Mexico.

Art House Theaters and the MERCOSUR Red de Salas The rise of the multiplex and the demise of the small, community theater could have signaled the fall of all single-screen venues. But the global era for film exhibition has shown us that market diversity trumps a homogenous viewing experience. This is at least partially why a multinational like Cinépolis would invest in an art house project like Zaï. After the initial spate of cinema closings that marked the 1990s, we can now note a significant upsurge of art house theaters that screen both national and foreign films that have an independent, non-commercialized aesthetic. These venues, similar to film festivals, offer viewers a chance to see smaller, more intellectually oriented productions. The venues, like festivals, also promote the aura of the culturally rich cinema event. While they can suffer from all of the highbrow attributes of such spectacle, they

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do offer an important alternative to the commercialized venues of the multiplex, which promotes mainly Hollywood blockbusters. Instead, many of these venues specifically promote national cinema, and as will be discussed below, the MERCOSUR Red de Salas [art house network] initiative aims at promoting regional cinema. Many films find access to audiences through these small venues. Recall, for instance, the story of Sleep Dealer (2008), Alex Rivera’s film about immigration, technology, drones, and a surveillance society. After winning awards at Sundance in 2008 and landing a distribution deal, the film’s distributor went out of business, and it never got a sustained commercial release. As David Montgomery explains, “it fell to bootleggers and academics to cherish and share the film.”122 Rivera pointed out that, “it’s been the pirates and the professors who have kept this film alive for the last half-decade.”123 Prior to landing the digital distribution deal described in this book’s chapter on distribution (Chap. 3), the film circulated in small art house spaces and on university campuses. For instance, it was screened at the Montalbán Theater in Los Angeles. Founded in 1926, the theater features a variety of performances with an emphasis on Hispanic artists. With help from Nike the theater was renovated in 2004.124 These collaborations epitomize the deep contradictions at the heart of the global free-market era for film exhibition. It is certainly ironic to have Nike help support a film that is directly critical of exactly the sort of sweatshop economics that has made Nike such a powerful corporation. The reality, though, is that many of these local art house venues do depend on corporate philanthropy and state funding to survive. In Mexico City, the Cineteca Nacional is one of the most important art house venues. It first opened in 1974 and its mission from day one was to “preservar la memoria fílmica tanto nacional como mundial” [preserve the national filmic memory as much as the global filmic memory] and “promover la cultura cinematográfica en nuestro país” [to promote cinematic culture in our country].125 In 2011, Mexico’s National Council for Culture and Art (CONACULTA) funded a renovation and expanded the Cineteca to 10 screening rooms. It now holds 2,200 seats and includes an open-air screening facility. The Cineteca distributes films throughout Mexico: “Its distribution circuit in Mexico City includes 16 venues and, in the states, it has 154, located in 26 entities, covering almost all of the national territory.”126 It has also launched several national films with success. As IMCINE reports, “among the reasons for its good box office draw are promotion on social networks, the

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programming profile, the kind of public attending regularly, as well as the emphasis on cultural dissemination, backed up by quality information on the subject matter of each film, the director and awards won; gatherings are also organized with members of the production and audiences, giving greater publicity to the event and the film.”127 In addition to art house venues, IMCINE further reports that there are about 300 film clubs that offer alternative exhibition networks throughout Mexico. These spaces include film screenings on college and university campuses. These alternative spaces are a significant venue for national and independent film. As IMCINE explains it, “due to this alternate viewpoint to mainstream exhibition, film clubs are one of the best windows Mexican cinema has to make its works known. In addition, they offer directors the opportunity to converse with audiences. Most have some affiliation and/or dependence on educational institutions, cultural foundations, civil society organizations or trade groups, with varying infrastructure.”128 IMCINE reports that there are film clubs in every geographic zone, filling the gap left by absent commercial cinemas. These clubs do not only offer opportunities to see national films; they also help preserve the culture of community film viewing practices. In Rio de Janeiro, the Universidade Federal Fluminese (UFF) is home to one of the most important art house theaters in Brazilian history. The Cine Arte UFF was founded in 1969 by Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Fabiano Canosa, Luiz Alberto Sanz, Roberto Duarte, Cosme Alves Neto, and Manoel Barretto Netto. During the dictatorship it closed down only to reopen in 1982. Beginning in 1983 the Cine Arte UFF has hosted a weeklong retrospective of national films: “Programado por ex-alunos do curso de Cinema, continua privilegiando títulos com pouca visibilidade no circuito comercial, mostras temáticas, festivais, como o Araribóia Cine, e cineclubes, como o Sala Escura, bem como parcerias com a Aliança Francesa e outras instituições culturais internacionais” [Planned by former students of the film course of study, it continues to privilege titles with low visibility and no commercial distribution, thematic showings, festival appearances, like Araribóia Cine, and film clubs, like Sala Escura, as well as partnerships with French Alliance or other international cultural institutions].129 The space also hosts exhibits and plays and is visited by an average of 120,000 people annually.130 Buenos Aires is also the home to a number of art house venues including Cine Club Mon Amour, the screening venue at the modern art

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museum MALBA, and the Gaumont/Espacio INCAA. Espacio INCAA, as it has become known since its takeover by Argentina’s National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA), is considered the best place in Buenos Aires to see national cinema. Given that it is connected to the national film institute, it is the primary exhibition space for the varied array of films funded or supported by the INCAA. The Gaumont is also the home of Cine Club Núcleo, the city’s most famous cinema club, which was founded in 1952 and has been running at various locations around the city ever since. Its long history and the high regard for its selections led it to be declared as a site of cultural interest by the city government.131 These alternative venues offer consistent screen opportunities for less commercial national films, but they do still undergo criticism and scrutiny. In an article for Página 12, Mariano Blejman argued that these spaces are important, but they don’t solve the problem of the screen domination of Hollywood via multiplexes: “Los espacios INCAA pusieron un aire fresco frente a la avalancha de tanques hollywoodenses, pero se corre con dos riesgos: convertirse en un ghetto y no satisfacer la calidad de proyección que requieren también las películas argentinas” [the INCAA spaces provide fresh air in the avalanche of Hollywood tanks, but it runs two risks: to become like a ghetto and not meet the projection quality that Argentine films also require].132 These spaces don’t solve the problem of the Hollywood onslaught, but they do provide valuable alternatives. Perhaps one of the most innovative efforts to support art house venues is the MERCOSUR Red de Salas. Launched in 2016, the Red de Salas was founded when INCAA joined forces with other Latin American film bodies across MERCOSUR—Argentina, Chile, Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay—to create a non-commercial 30-location network of alternative screens, the Red de Salas Digitales (RSD).133 There are ten venues each in Argentina and Brazil with five in Paraguay and five in Uruguay. As the website for the initiative explains, “La RSD nace en el marco del Programa MERCOSUR Audiovisual (PMA), una iniciativa de la Reunión Especializada de Autoridades Cinematográficas y Audiovisuales del MERCOSUR (RECAM) conjuntamente con la Unión Europea. Su objetivo primordial es fortalecer la circulación de películas propias en la región” [The RSD (Digital Network of Theaters) was born in the framework of MERCOSUR’s audiovisual program, an initiative of the Specialized Meeting of Cinematographic and Audiovisual Authorities (RECAM) together with the European Union. Its fundamental objective

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is to strengthen the circulation of regional films].134 Their goals are to reach new audiences and to promote a cross-national film community that screens films from across the MERCOSUR nations. While it is too soon to assess whether the initiative achieved its goals, it certainly is yet another sign of the complex ways that global exchange is influencing film exhibition. From the community-based film collectives of Grupo Chaski to the multiplexes of Cinépolis to the art theater of the Espacio INCAA, the regional exhibition realities in the global era demonstrate that many of the assumptions we have used to understand the collective viewing opportunities in the region need to be reassessed. Due to the resurgence of a range of viewing opportunities, spectators across the region have a greater chance to see national films and independent projects than ever before. Meanwhile, across Latin America the same ten Hollywood films at any one time command a dominant market share that highlights the reality that the blockbuster film, often based on a comic book character, has only increased its market share in the neoliberal era. The fact that neoliberalism supports the development of commodity diversity and small market niches has created an incongruous reality where the system both advances the power of a very few market players while also opening up meaningful spaces for alternative projects. There have never been more chances to see political, independent films in theaters in Latin America. And there have never been more Latin Americans spending their hard-earned resources to see a frivolous Hollywood movie at a multiplex. We have both one of the most unethical and pro-corporate models combined with an era of some the most pervasive politically progressive viewing opportunities in Latin American history. These deep contradictions are at the heart of the complexities caused by global neoliberalism.

Notes







1. Ana M. López, “Film Distribution,” in Encyclopedia of Contemporary Latin American and Caribbean Cultures, ed. Daniel Balderston, Mike Gonzalez, and Ana M. López (London: Routledge, 2002), 574. 2. Ibid. 3. See Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One:

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Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Julianne Burton and editor (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 33–58. 4.  Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema,” Documentary Is Never Neutral, accessed January 26, 2017, http://documentaryisneverneutral.com/words/camasgun.html. 5. Ibid. 6.  Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 1. 7. See Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 99. 8. Paola Reategui, “Red de microcines: Los primeros años,” May 2007, unpublished. A number of the documents referenced in relation to Grupo Chaski were obtained during a research visit to Lima in 2003. Stefan Kaspar gave me full access to the archives of unpublished, internal Chaski documents. Quoted in Sophia A. McClennen, “The Theory and Practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski,” Jump Cut 50 (2008), accessed January 26, 2017, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/ Chaski/4.html. 9. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 79. 10. “Red de microcines,” Grupo Chaski, accessed February 6, 2017, http:// grupochaski.org/red-de-microcines/. Quoted and translated in Sophia A. McClennen, “The Theory and Practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski,” Jump Cut 50 (2008), accessed January 26, 2017, http:// www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/Chaski/4.html. 11. When I was in Lima in 2003, all former members of Chaski whom I interviewed considered the group to no longer exist. In contrast, their website states that they have worked continuously since 1982 (http:// www.grupochaski.org/index.php?id=576,0,0,1,0,0). In a sense, both versions are true, since no film projects carried the group’s name from 1991 to 2003, but Kaspar’s work regarding distribution and production continued tirelessly. In 1992, after the waning of Chaski, he founded Casablanca Latin Films, a project that focused on distributing Latin American (largely Peruvian) features and documentaries. He also worked as a producer during this period, most notably associate-producing the award-winning documentary Choropampa in 2001 that traces the devastation wrought by a mercury spill on a small rural town in Peru. In 2003, he started the Fundación Cine Latino, which later led to the resurgence of Chaski and the microcines project. Legaspi had also continued to work in documentary films during this period. His

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reconnection with Kaspar for the documentary Sueños lejanos (Distant Dreams, 2006) indicates Chaski’s return to the full range of its former activities. 12.  Oswaldo Carpio, “Cine Comunicación y Cultura: La experiencia del Grupo Chaski,” 1990, unpublished, 6. 13. Ibid., 2. Translations mine. 14. Barea has continued to be an active feminist filmmaker and has worked with Women Make Movies. In 1989, she co-founded the women’s film group “WARMI Cine y Video,” with which she produces and directs documentaries. Her films include Andahuaylas—suenen las campanas (1987), Porcon (1989/92), Porque quería estudiar (1990), Barro y Bambu (1991), Antuca (1992) and Hijas de la guerra (Daughters of War, 1998). 15. Jesús Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London: Sage, 1993), 198. 16. José Matos Mar, Desborde Popular y Crisis del Estado (Lima: IEP, 1984), 78, quoted in Martín-Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony, 198. 17. Hegemony and subalternity are concepts that flow throughout Chaski’s texts. 18. Grupo Chaski, “Grupo Chaski,” 1986, unpublished, 3. 19. Ibid. 20. Grupo Chaski, “Grupo Chaski,” 3. René Weber mentions that Chaski members needed to take additional security measures in April of 1989 after two articles published in the Sendero paper El Diario accused Chaski of producing a bourgeois culture for export that was not dignified to be consumed by the masses. According to Weber, after these two articles appeared the members often worked in fear. See René Weber, “La pared que habla: La fascinante experiencia de la difusión popular del Grupo Chaski,” Butaca Sanmarquina 1.2 (1987): 9. 21. Grupo Chaski, “Grupo Chaski,” 3. 22. Ibid., 4. 23. Ricardo Bedoya, 100 años de cine en el Perú: Una historia crítica (Lima: Universidad de Lima, 1992), 165. 24. Bedoya, 100 años de cine en el Perú, 187. 25. Another important influence on Peruvian cinema was that of Armando Robles Godoy, but his auteur style had less impact on the work of Chaski. 26. Bedoya, 100 años de cine en el Perú, 190–191. 27. From 1972 to 1985, Peru averaged about two feature films and 66 shorts per year. Their film production was one of the lowest in Latin

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America. See Ricardo Bedoya, “Hacia una historia del cortometraje peruano,” Páginas del diario de Satán, September 10, 2010, accessed March 9, 2017, http://paginasdeldiariodesatan.blogspot. com/2010/09/hacia-una-historia-del-cortometraje.html. 28. In an internal document written in 1986 that explains why they were formed, Chaski specifically references the impact of Law 19327 and the way that the films supported by the law were precursors to their work. See Grupo Chaski, “Grupo Chaski,” 1. 29. For more on this line of argument, see García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens. 30. While Sanjinés and Rada were editing El coraje del pueblo in Italy, Bolivia suffered a coup that forced them into exile, split the group, and censored the film. Once in exile, Sanjinés continued to work on collective film projects under the banner of Ukamau and his most recent film was released in 1995, but the continuity of the film collective was disrupted by the fact that within Bolivia another group, also using the name Ukamau, continued to work as well. 31.  Jorge Sanjinés, “Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 62–70, quoted in Mike Wayne, Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001), 78–79. 32. Octavio Getino, “Some Notes on the Concept of a ‘Third Cinema,’” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Timothy Barnard (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 103. 33.  Alejandro Legaspi, interview by Rafael Arévalo, Cinencuentro (Lima, Peru) September 11, 2007, accessed February 8, 2017, http://www. cinencuentro.com/2007/09/11/entrevista-con-alejandro-legaspi/. 34. Sanjinés identifies two major moments in Ukamau’s filmmaking: first a period of denunciation and political confrontation and second, after the opening of democracy, a moment for films that explore problems of identity. See Jorge Sanjinés, interview by Diego A. Mondaca, Rebelión, December 21, 2003, http://www.rebelion.org/cultura/ 031221cb.htm. 35. Legaspi specifically mentions the work of Lombardi as an example of the types of films he has no interest in making. See Alejandro Legaspi, “Reflexiones sobre el cine,” 1990, unpublished, 2. 36.  Chaski Informa 1 (1988): 1. 37. Grupo Chaski, “Experiencia de siete años de trabajo del Grupo Chaski,” 1989, unpublished, 2.

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38. Weber, “La pared que habla,” 9. 39. Karen Ranucci of the now-defunct Latin American Video Archive (or LAVA) explained in a conversation with me that she had long tried to convince Sanjinés to distribute his work on video, but that he was reluctant to do it. 40.  Chuck Kleinhans and Julia Lesage, “Havana Film Festival Report: New Latin American Cinema,” Jump Cut 31 (1986): 70–71, accessed February 9, 2017, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/ JC31folder/CubareportJLCK.html. 41. “Red de microcines,” Grupo Chaski, accessed February 6, 2017, http:// grupochaski.org/red-de-microcines/, quoted and translated in Sophia A. McClennen, “The Theory and Practice of the Peruvian Grupo Chaski,” Jump Cut 50 (2008), accessed January 26, 2017, http:// www.ejumpcut.org/archive/jc50.2008/Chaski/4.html. 42. Ibid. 43. Miriam Ross, “Grupo Chaski’s Microcines: Engaging the Spectator,” eSharp Journal 11 (2008): 7, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www. gla.ac.uk/media/media_81277_en.pdf. 44. Reategui, “Red de microcines: Los primeros años,” 45. García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens, 99. 46. Reategui, “Red de microcines: Los primeros años,” 6. 47. Ibid., 16. 48. Ibid., 10. 49. “Microcine Chaski,” Centro Cultural Yaneramai, April 2, 2012, accessed January 26, 2017, https://yaneramai.wordpress.com/ microcine-chaski/. 50. Marcelo Cordero, “Red de microcines: Bolivia--Hacia la construcción de una industria audiovisual propia,” Cinémas d’Amérique Latine 19 (2011): 135. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., 136. 53. See, for example, the site for Cinencuentro (Filmencounter) (http://www. cinencuentro.com/) and the blog for the independent movie house, the Cinematógrafo, in the Barranco district of Lima, (http://elcinematografodebarranco.blogspot.com/), both of which regularly cover the activities of Chaski. There is a two-part interview with Alejandro Legaspi posted by Cinencuentro on the Daily Motion site: http://www.dailymotion.com/ videos/relevance/search/alejandro+legaspi/1. View their promotional video about the microcines project here: http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PX2ErN5dqLs. 54. Ross, “Grupo Chaski’s Microcines: Engaging the Spectator,” 16–17.

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55.  Charles R. Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 119. 56.  Jorge Mario Martínez Piva, Ramón Padilla Pérez, Claudia Schatan Pérez, and Verónica Vega Montoya, “The Mexican Film Industry and Its Participation in the Global Value Chain,” CEPAL Serie: Estudios y perspectivas (October 2011): 34, accessed February 2, 2017, http:// archivo.cepal.org/pdfs/2011/S20111039.pdf. 57.  Carolina A. Miranda, “Why Diego Luna and Gael Garcia Bernal’s Ambulante Film Festival Avoids Regular Movie Theaters,” Los Angeles Times, August 12, 2015, accessed January 26, 2017, http://www. latimes.com/entertainment/arts/miranda/la-et-cam-ambulante-filmfestival-california-documentaries-20150811-column.html. 58. Acland, Screen Traffic, 71. 59. Ibid., 246. 60. Octavio Getino, “Las diversas caras de la imagen,” in Globalización y monopolios en la comunicación en América Latina: Hacia una economía política de la comunicación, ed. Guillermo Mastrini and César Bolaño (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Editorial Biblos, 1999), 195. 61. García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens, 99. 62. Miriam Ross, South American Cinematic Culture: Policy, Production, Distribution and Exhibition (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 78. 63. Ibid., 81. 64.  “Theatrical Market Statistics 2015,” Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 2015, 6, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www. mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/MPAA-Theatrical-MarketStatistics-2015_Final.pdf. 65.  “Theatrical Market Statistics 2012,” Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 2012, 6, accessed February 5, 2017, http://www. mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/2012-Theatrical-MarketStatistics-Report.pdf. 66.  “Theatrical Market Statistics 2009,” Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 2009, 14, accessed February 5, 2017, http://www. womeninfilm.ca/_Library/docs/MPAATheatricalMarketStatistics2009. pdf. 67. Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 11. 68. “Hoyts--Portfolio,” Linzor Capital Partners, accessed February 5, 2017, http://www.linzorcapital.com/portfolio/hoyts/. 69. Rodriguez Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina,” 7. 70. Ibid., 14–15.

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71. Randal Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema,” in Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity, ed. Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 19. 72.  Steve Solot, ed., The Brazilian Audiovisual Industry: An Explosion of Creativity and Opportunities for Partnerships (Rio de Janeiro: Latin American Training Center, 2012), Kindle Edition Locations 2665–2675. 73. Solot, The Brazilian Audiovisual Industry, Kindle Locations 2684–2687. 74. Misha MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 2. 75. Martínez Piva et al., “The Mexican Film Industry and Its Participation in the Global Value Chain,” 34. 76.  “Efectos de la Regulación en la Industria Cinematográfica en México: Un Análisis Retrospectivo,” Comisión Federal de Mejora Regulatoria, October 2011, accessed February 5, 2017, http:// www.cofemer.gob.mx/Varios/Adjuntos/21.10.2011/Efectos%20 de%20la%20Regulaci%C3%B3n%20en%20la%20Industria%20 Cinematogr%C3%A1fica%20en%20M%C3%A9xico.pdf. 77. Ibid., 37. 78. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 1. 79. Ibid., 2. 80. Ibid. 81. MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 25. 82. “Resultados Definitivos, 2015,” Canacine, accessed January 14, 2017, http://canacine.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ResultadosDefinitivos-2015-ATI-1-1.pdf. 83. Martínez Piva et al., “The Mexican Film Industry and Its Participation in the Global Value Chain,” 35. 84. Ibid. 85. “Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2013,” México, D.F.: Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 79, accessed January 30, 2017, http:// www.imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_ entry56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/56e3451b9d72792dff003e25/files/ Anuario_Estadi_stico_de_Cine_Mexicano_2013.pdf. 86. MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 64. 87. Michael Crumb, “A Dim Projection for Rural Movie Theaters,” The Ames Tribune, June 9, 2012, accessed January 27, 2017, http://www. amestrib.com/sections/news/ames-and-story-county/dim-projectionrural-movie-theaters.html. 88. Michael Hurley, “We’re About to Lose 1,000 Small Theaters That Can’t Convert to Digital. Does It Matter?” IndieWire, February 23, 2012,

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accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.indiewire.com/2012/02/ were-about-to-lose-1000-small-theaters-that-cant-convert-to-digitaldoes-it-matter-49209/. 89. Marina Moguillansky, “¿Un cine global? Las transformaciones recientes en el mercado cinematográfico,” VII Jornadas de Sociología (2007): 11, accessed January 30, 2017, http://cdsa.aacademica.org/000-106/338. pdf. 90. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 209. 91. Ibid., 90. 92. Ibid., 93. 94. “Resultados Definitivos, 2015,” Canacine. 95. Ibid. 96.  Octavio Getino, “Producción, mercados y proyectos de integración cinematográfica en los países del Mercosur,” Congreso de la República Perú (2007): 23, accessed December 29, 2016, http://www2. congreso.gob.pe/sicr/cendocbib/con3_uibd.nsf/507E3B7434995344052579250060AAC8/$FILE/PRODUCCI%C3%93N_ MERCADOS_INTEGRACI%C3%93N_CINEMATOGRAFICA.pdf. 97. Rodriguez Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina,” 4. 98. Alan Larson Williams, introduction to Film and Nationalism, ed. Alan Larson Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 4. 99. Rodriguez Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina,” 21. 100.  Luis A. Albornoz, “Diversity and the Film Industry: An Analysis of the 2014 UIS Survey on Feature Film Statistics,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Information Paper no. 29, March 2016, 13, accessed December 18, 2016, http://www.uis.unesco.org/culture/Documents/ ip29-diversity-film-data-2016-en.pdf. 101.  Fernando Birri, “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 91. 102. MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 35. 103. Albornoz, “Diversity and the Film Industry: An Analysis of the 2014 UIS Survey on Feature Film Statistics,” 28. 104. Acland, Screen Traffic, 3. 105. “Global Family: Cinepolis’ Alejandro Ramirez Discusses Outreach and Opportunity,” Film Journal International, April 12, 2013, accessed January 29, 2017, http://www.filmjournal.com/content/global-family-cinepolis-alejandro-ramirez-discusses-outreach-and-opportunity. 106. Ibid.

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107. “Nuestra Historia,” Intranet Cinépolis, accessed January 29, 2017, https://intranet.cinepolis.com/SitePages/Historia.aspx. 108. Frederick Luis Aldama, Mex-Ciné: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 85–86. 109. “Global Family: Cinepolis’ Alejandro Ramirez Discusses Outreach and Opportunity.” 110. Ibid. 111.  Paulina Suárez-Hesketh, “Morelia Film Festival: Narrative and Documentary Features Focus on the Personal to Reimagine a Fraught Social Contract,” Film Quarterly 67, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 69. 112. “Presentation,” Festival Internacional de Cine de Morelia, accessed January 30, 2017, http://moreliafilmfest.com/en/presentacion/. 113. “Global Family: Cinepolis’ Alejandro Ramirez Discusses Outreach and Opportunity.” 114. Ibid. 115. Mario Martell, “Luis Estrada Desnuda a los Presidenciables,” Intolerancia Diario: El Político Informado, October 7, 2014, accessed January 30, 2017, http://intoleranciadiario.com/detalle_noticia/125818/espectaculos/ luis-estrada-desnuda-a-los-presidenciables. 116.  “‘La Dictadura Perfecta,’ una crítica al gobierno que llega desde el cine,” Expansión, August 21, 2014, accessed January 30, 2017, http://expansion.mx/entretenimiento/2014/08/21/la-dictaduraperfecta-una-critica-al-gobierno-que-llega-desde-el-cine. 117.  Lucero  Calderón, “‘La Dictadura Perfecta,’ con estreno masivo,” Excelsior, October 15, 2014, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www. excelsior.com.mx/funcion/2014/10/15/986981. 118. Valeria Bigurra Peñavera, “Cinépolis and Iñárritu Bet on Art Cinema,” Mexico News Network, July 6, 2016, accessed January 27, 2017, http://www.mexiconewsnetwork.com/ar t-culture/cinepolisinarritu-bet-art-cinema/. 119. Ibid. 120. “Anuncian Zaï, espacio en el DF para la difusión del cine alternativo,” IMCINE, October 18, 2014, accessed January 27, 2017, http:// www.imcine.gob.mx/comunicacion-social/comunicados-y-noticias/ anuncian-zai-espacio-en-el-df-para-la-difusion-del-cine-alternativo. 121. Ibid. 122. David Montgomery, “Alex Rivera’s Lost Cult Hit ‘Sleep Dealer’ about Immigration and Drones Is Back,” The Washington Post, July 7, 2014, accessed January 30, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/07/07/alex-riveras-lost-cult-hit-sleepdealer-about-immigration-and-drones-is-back/?utm_term=.f5dcfcc24169.

244  S.A. McCLENNEN 123. Quoted in Montgomery, “Alex Rivera’s Lost Cult Hit ‘Sleep Dealer’ about Immigration and Drones Is Back.” 124. “History of Our Theater,” The Montalbán Theater, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.themontalban.com/history-of-our-theater/. 125. “Información,” Cineteca Nacional de México, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.cinetecanacional.net/controlador.php?opcion=contexto. 126. “Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2013,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2014, 73, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www. imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_entry 56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/56e3451b9d72792dff003e25/files/ Anuario_Estadi_stico_de_Cine_Mexicano_2013.pdf. 127. Ibid., 73. 128. Ibid., 87. 129. “Cine Arte UFF,” Centro de Artes UFF, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.centrodeartes.uff.br/cinearteuff/. 130. “Quem Somos,” Centro de Artes UFF, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.centrodeartes.uff.br/institucional/quem-somos/. 131.  Alex King, “Top 5 Alternative Cinema Venues,” The Argentina Independent, April 27, 2011, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www. argentinaindependent.com/top-5/top-5-alternative-cinema-venues/. 132. Mariano Blejman, “El cine argentino pierde pantallas,” Página 12, June 13, 2004, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www.pagina12.com.ar/ diario/espectaculos/6-36624-2004-06-13.html. 133. John Hopewell, “Mar del Plata: Argentina Plans Latin American Cinema Screens Network,” Variety, November 7, 2015, accessed January 30, 2017, http://variety.com/2015/film/global/mar-del-plata-argentinalatin-american-cinema-screens-network-1201636013/. 134.  “La Red de Salas Digitales del MERCOSUR,” MERCOSUR Audiovisual, accessed February 14, 2017, http://www.recam.org/ pma/noticias/la-red-de-salas-digitales-del-mercosur.

PART II

Place

Part I of this book focused on a series of filmmaking processes that underwent change in the global era: coproduction, distribution, and exhibition. What my analysis showed was that many of the worries that governed research on globalization and culture in the 1990s did not bear out. The binaries, dichotomies, and antagonisms we anticipated defining the global era did not hold true. Let’s return to the series of globalization and culture antagonisms I outlined in the book’s introduction (Chap. 1): • Cultural Homogenization vs. Cultural Heterogeneity • Cultural Imperialism vs. Local/Autochthonous Culture • US Market Dominance vs. “Emerging” Markets • Hollywood Aesthetic Dominance vs. “Local” Aesthetics • Consumption of Other Cultures Influences One’s Identity and Ideas about Other Cultures • Global (American) Culture vs. National Culture The considerable data I’ve offered and the numerous case studies I’ve analyzed reveal that these oppositions don’t hold in the global era. Rather than a tension between cultural heterogeneity and homogeneity, for instance, we find that the global era has actually heightened both. There is far more market convergence globally for the exact same top ten blockbuster films across the world market—a clear sign of homo­ geneity. At the same time, the desire for niche markets and the investment in diverse commodities meant that this was an era that saw a great

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deal of national films from Latin America available in theaters. In fact, by most metrics the national cinemas of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico are stronger and more diverse today than they were in the early 1980s. I also noted that the contrast between Hollywood and “emerging” markets could no longer be mapped, since local-language productions and the investment of big six media in local production companies made it virtually impossible to draw clear lines between local and global capital. Perhaps even more importantly, Part I showed how the worries over European neocolonial investment in Latin American film missed the reality that Europe and Latin America were also allies in their fight to resist Hollywood. In addition, analysis of how production companies like Participant Media enter into partnerships with Latin American colleagues revealed the fact that the geographies of film alliances are not simply about north-south divides. Meanwhile, I noted that, despite strengthening film industries in Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil, the concentrated distribution market meant that as national films succeeded at the box office, often it was Hollywood that reaped the profit. I also touched on the complicated question of aesthetic independence, especially in the chapter on coproduction (Chap. 2), which analyzed how we overestimate the Spanish influence on Cuban films and underestimate the role of the Soviets. These are only a few examples, but they reveal a range of ways that the 1990s concerns over the impact of globalization did not bear out 25 years later. Taken together, the chapters of Part I also showed that the worries of the 1990s skewed some of the research questions that formed the basis of analysis of Latin American film in the global era. We studied the role of Spain in the Latin American film industry, for instance, far more than we studied the role of Japanese-owned Sony Pictures, despite the fact that Sony invested far more capital and made far more films that were seen by far more Latin Americans. We worried over the role of film in creating national identity despite the fact that in most nations seeing a film in a movie theater is a luxury the majority simply can’t afford. For example, in Brazil, box office earnings may be on the rise but in 2011 only 7% of Brazilian municipalities even had a movie theater.1 In Mexico in 2013, only 6%, or 150 municipalities, had movie theaters. That meant that only 56% of the population could see a film in a commercial theater.2 Analysis of Argentina showed that in 2014, spectators saw 1.07 films per person annually. When we recall that Argentine films accounted for about 10% of that market it is hard to see the theater experience as a tremendous influence on national identity.3 Meanwhile, though, this

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period saw the rise of a number of powerful media conglomerates in the region—not the least of which is Mexico-based theater chain Cinépolis. Mexico-based media conglomerate Televisa is the largest media company in the Spanish-speaking world, broadcasting considerable content within the United States.4 And these are only a few examples of global media power emanating from within Latin America. The rising media dominance of China and Japan further adds another layer of complexity to the story. Our connection of globalization with western imperialism meant that we often missed the various ways that media geographies were shifting. While globalization has broadened the gap between its winners and losers, increasingly concentrating power in the hands of a tiny power elite, the geographical location of that power has undergone some sig­ nificant changes from the western imperial paradigm. Part II now turns to the question of the intersections between national film industries, a global market, place-based identities, and political potential. While 1990s predictions of the effects of neoliberal policy imagined that the opening of markets, deregulation, privatization, and lack of state support would herald the end of national cinema, we are now able to recognize that the actual result has been far more ambivalent. Scholars today are noting the way that national cinema is imagined, projected, and created as a marketing tool to attract audiences at home and abroad. As Ignacio Sánchez Prado points out, and as Part I explains, by the 1990s “the cultural economy of so-called national cinema had faded away.” Thus, he argues that “national cinema” is “a cultural genre that acts around the idea of ‘national culture,’ as a repository of those signs that define the polity, and as a site of contestation for definitions of national sensibilities.”5 When we study the current ways that films participate in nationalism, we are met with a series of core issues that change radically in the era of neoliberalism. For instance, in today’s economies it is not clear that the development of a postcolonial national identity is any sort of signifi­ cant challenge to the reigning structures of global hegemony given the fact that the development of those identities takes place wholly within the capitalist marketplace. Moreover, given the developments in technology and media forms, cinema, especially via a theater, is increasingly less a source of the cultural content consumed on a daily basis. It is worth remembering that Mexican media giant, Televisa, acquired its global force through the marketing of telenovelas, which are consumed at a rate that far outpaces that of national cinema. While cinema did have a central

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role in certain contexts in crafting national narratives and reflecting national identity, it is increasingly difficult to make the claim that films are a central feature of national-identity production today, in any nationstate, even the United States. This means that we may have crafted a nostalgic and overblown link between national films and national identity in the global era, given the practical data that films simply aren’t consumed in collective ways as they were in the 1950s. While some of the shifts are a consequence of the rise of global-capital formations, many of these changes are attributed to new availability of media forms. The rise of television, cable, and internet-based streaming services has given viewers far more choice in viewing options, and made it far harder to craft a narrative of the connection between specific media content and identity formation. In addition, the types of national narratives offered by films have shifted. Neoliberalism’s favoring of the 1%, for instance, drastically changes the privilege previously connected with bourgeois nationalism, since in the current context the middle class is also precarious vis-à-vis the neoliberal marketplace— a fact made abundantly obvious by a number of films from the region that depict the economic fall of middle-class characters, such as Todo el poder ([All the power], 2000), El mismo amor, la misma lluvia ([The same love, the same rain], 1999), and Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998). Moreover, many films that explore national identity do so in relation to global interconnections as seen, for example, in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006) or Icíar Bollaín’s También la lluvia (Even the Rain, 2010). Part II looks at the three largest film industries in the region— Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico—and notes the mostly synchronous ways that each nation responded to the advent of neoliberal cultural policy. In each case, national cinema took a sharp downturn in the 1990s only to revive at the turn of the century as local filmmakers began to adapt to new market conditions. The result was a series of films that had great success in both home markets and international markets—and even more interestingly, almost all of these were social-issue films. For example, films like Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002) or Carandiru (2003) did well at the box office in Brazil and captured a significant international market. What’s more, they sparked major public debate in relation to the themes of poverty and class struggle shown in the films. While they depart radically from the anti-Hollywood, anticommercial stance of the

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New Latin American Cinema (NLAC), they may well exemplify some of the movement’s goals better than any of the movement’s films ever did. Film scholar and NLAC director Octavio Getino points out that the region’s filmmaking has always been dominated by the same three countries—Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina—and that throughout the twentieth century they represented 90% of the production of films, numbers of spectators, and profits.6 In the European market the same three countries dominate—representing 78% of the films screened and appealing to 90% of all European spectators that watch a Latin American film.7 As of yet, though, Latin American films don’t cross Latin American borders in the same way that television and music does, so this data does not mean that these three nations export their films throughout Latin America. Where these three nations have consolidated regional media power is in the growth of their own media conglomerates. As Getino explains, in Argentina, Mexico, and Brazil one can find the region’s most powerful media conglomerates, such as Globo in Brazil, Patagonik/Clarín/ Telefónica/Walt Disney in Argentina, and Televisa and Azteca in Mexico, all of which have played a role in developing the region’s film industry.8 Thus, Part II looks at the various ways that the region’s three major national film industries have protected their national market share by becoming more commercially savvy, while also breaking into the global market at a level that no other Latin American film generation ever has before. Recall, for instance, that in 2007 three Mexican directors were simultaneously up for Oscar awards. Then in 2015, Mexicans again swept Oscars, winning Best Director for two years running (Cuarón for Gravity in 2014, González Iñárritu for Birdman in 2015) and winning a second award for cinematography with Emmanuel Lubezki taking his second Oscar after seven nominations. In 2016, Mexico made Oscar history yet again with González Iñárritu winning his second consecutive Best Director Award and Lubezki becoming the first cinematographer to win three Oscars in Academy history. And it is not just Mexicans who are getting international recognition: filmmakers from Brazil and Argentina are also winning more international awards than ever. Argentine director, Juan José Campanella has been nominated twice for Best Foreign Film and won in 2009 for El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, 2009). While it has always been true that Hollywood has been made up of immigrants, this new generation of filmmakers is noteworthy for the way that they have enjoyed great commercial success and worked in

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Hollywood, but continue to support filmmaking in their home countries. While some would simply suggest that this trend implies that these filmmakers are making global films that have become detached from their national contexts, such a view would be far too simplistic. Perhaps one of the trickiest questions to answer is whether globalization has affected the range of aesthetic opportunities for filmmakers in the region. Has globalization meant a flattening out of aesthetic styles to conform to either a Hollywood or an art house model? Are filmmakers forced to adapt to a global, world cinema look? Or are they ghettoized and stuck into styles that conform to fetishized notions of national cinema? The simple answer, which will be fleshed out in detail in the chapters to come, is yes and no. Yes, we can note a constriction of aesthetics where films are expected to conform increasingly to Hollywood or art house models. This can be noted especially in terms of production value, where national films are expected to have higher production budgets in order to reach theaters and attract audiences. But also no, we can note that the global media market has made a certain degree of experimentation not only possible but also profitable. As evidenced by the fact that the most celebrated cinematographer in Oscar history hails from Mexico, we can note that at a certain level it is Latin American creative talent that may well be crafting the aesthetic paradigms that others seek to imitate. It is also important to note that when we discuss the potential for aesthetic creativity in the global era, we need to recall that in the 1980s films from across the region had some of the basest aesthetic value. The crisis that hit the film industry in the 1990s was not solely about a lack of state support; it was also about a real aesthetic and creative breakdown. As Luisela Alvaray explains, “many of the films sponsored by Brazilian EMBRAFILME and Mexican IMCINE in the 1980s manifested a qualitative, rather than quantitative, crisis. Along with a few critically acclaimed films, hard-core porn dominated Brazilian national production, while formulaic and mediocre comedies populated Mexican screens. So, if there was an initial collapse in terms of numbers during the 1990s, the subsequent reemergence of cinematic production also attested to a renaissance of diverse aesthetic approaches.”9 This reality forces us to break down our nostalgia for a romanticized national cinema threatened by the global era. It also reminds us that a defense of the nation may well defend films that have almost no positive aesthetic value of any kind. National films may have been made locally but they also may reflect a series of reactionary, racist, sexist, and conservative values.

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This means that the rise of neoliberalism in the region coincided with a downturn in cinematic aesthetic quality. State protections of the film industry had closed down aesthetic experimentation and disincentivized attention to production value. While it is still true that there is overwhelming consensus that the film industries of Latin America need state support to thrive, it is clear that the type of state support in place prior to deregulation wasn’t working. Meanwhile the rise of neoliberal leaders in the region—Carlos Salinas de Gortari (Mexico, 1988–1994), Carlos Menem (Argentina, 1989–1999), and Fernando Collor de Mello (Brazil, 1990–1992)—led to a series of reforms in the film industry, most notably the end of state-owned enterprises and the rise of privatization, foreign investment, and deregulated markets. These developments were generally condemned and led to concerns that the film industries would wither. As we now know, that was not the outcome, but the range of worries that emerged in that period revealed some interesting discoveries. One of them, as noted by Randal Johnson, was that scholars of Latin American cinema were deeply suspicious of films that were commercially successful. He explains that “economic profit is normally disavowed” but that this leads to a dependency on the state, which will push its own agenda and forces the “independent” filmmaker to rely on the state.10 What’s more, one of the reasons for a lack of success is precisely a lack of contact with the very population a political film presumably wants to reach. Johnson notes that the films of the 1990s have largely “broken free of the aesthetic and ideological legacy of Cinema Novo, and they have charted new directions for Brazilian cinema in consonance with the personal, political, and social issues confronting contemporary Brazil.”11 He further notes that state investment has revealed the breakdown between dirigisme and laissez faire approaches to state support for cinema. Thus, today we can note a bit of a swing back to state control, with a series of film laws meant to protect the industry and encourage growth. But one shift remains in place: the state is no longer considered as the protector of the national film industry. Instead it is understood more broadly as a catalyst to help develop and sustain a market and as an investor in promoting and supporting national culture. Misha MacLaird explains that one sign of the way that the state mediates the tension between cinema as national art and cinema as entertainment commodity is the fact that on the top of each news bulletin of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (Mexican Film Institute, IMCINE), runs

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the motto: “‘El cine no sirve para cambiar el mundo, sino a los que cambian el mundo’ (‘Film cannot change the world, but can change those who change the world’).”12 Many of the films that will be analyzed in the next chapters have high production value and a slick aesthetic—traits that have been used to suggest that these films represent Latin American filmmakers selling out to Hollywood style. Laura Podalsky explains that the international and local success of this “new” cinema has “met with skepticism from a variety of quarters that point to its excessive preoccupation with stylistic innovation and its inadequate grasp of past traumas and current socioeconomic problems.”13 She cites Brazilian film critic, Ivana Bentes who has critiqued the box office successes of Brazilian social-issue films as lacking an authentic political project and attempting to “dress up Brazil’s poverty in order to attract the eye of foreign consumers.”14 This notion takes us back again to the overdetermined role that the NLAC has played in setting the terms for what meaningful cinema in the region should look like. As explained in Part I, too often the NLAC has been narrowly represented to offer the quintessential blueprint for truly political filmmaking. Even iconic NLAC filmmaker, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea recognized that films should also entertain viewers: “it’s good to remember that cinema, in the well-intentioned process of shaping its objectives to aptly fulfill its social function, can neglect its function as spectacle. If it appeals exclusively to reason or to the viewers’ intellectual efforts, it noticeably reduces its efficacy because it is forgetting one of its essential aspects, pleasure.”15 Similarly, Brazilian director Carlos Diegues explained that films should not be “theoretical tracts”: “I don’t think that the movie theater is a classroom, nor is it a torture chamber.”16 Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez further notes that too often the aesthetic range of the NLAC directors is overlooked, since they moved away from the “militant” styles of the 1960s and 1970s in their later work. He focuses on the neobaroque styles of the 1980s films by these directors: “By drawing on genres that the militant NLAC had shunned because it considered them intrinsically conservative, neobaroque NLAC effectively expanded the militant NLAC’s narrow political/aesthetic horizon.”17 And yet, one key area where the new social-issue films of the global era differ from their NLAC counterparts is precisely in the frame of their political critique. Many of the films from the era of millennial globalization recognize that political struggle that addresses the effects of global capital can’t be national in scope. In contrast, Schroeder Rodríguez

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points out that despite a range of aesthetic projects, the NLAC directors did indeed consider the nation-state as the political venue for struggle in ways that contemporary political filmmakers simply do not: “This is a very different cinematic landscape from the 1960s, the 1970s, and even the 1980s in terms of production and distribution, not to mention the fact that filmmakers of the New Latin American Cinema always saw their work as part of a larger project of cultural nationalism and autonomy.”18 Podalsky further highlights this global perspective, explaining that Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro attribute their success to their ability to develop an independent style outside of the circuits of state financial support that had, until recently, sustained national film production: “By situating themselves globally and deemphasizing national commitments, these filmmakers contribute to the characterization of contemporary Latin American cinema as a willing participant in the depoliticized, pro-market atmosphere that emerged in the region in the late 1980s and early 1990s as neoliberal administrations took power throughout the region.”19 And yet, I’ve argued, the global frame is more adequate to the global crisis caused by millennial capital. Moreover, as the analysis in the next chapters will show, these directors can and do hold to highly national narratives. They just do so within a global framework. The filmmakers of this era have also expressed frustration over the expectation that their films should conform to a national model and a specific political aesthetic. Mexican director Santiago Cendejas has explained that the obsession with national cinema misses the point in the global era: “I sometimes have a problem with the category ‘Mexican film,’ . . . . I think in some ways it ghettoizes the films and it’s something I would like to escape from.”20 The problem with imposing an expectation of “national” cinema is not just an issue of ghettoizing Latin American films and expecting them to be about the local; it also reduces the aesthetic range open to a filmmaker from the region. As explained in my analysis of coproductions, funds like Hubert Bals that seek to fund films that are “authentic” and express a local culture may do more aesthetic harm to a film than the corporate investments of Disney. In addition, these expectations have relied on the notion that if a film attracts viewers, then it has lower creative merit and less political commitment. The filmmakers that will be analyzed in the chapters to come have thoroughly rejected those assumptions. Stephen Hart quotes González Iñárritu as saying he loathes the maxim “if nobody understands and nobody goes to see a movie, then it must mean it’s a masterpiece.”21

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Thus, the global era for Latin American filmmaking has broken down the dichotomy between cultural versus commercial, successful versus intellectual, stupid or serious. For instance, Hart refers to the films from 2000 to 2014 as “slick grit”—a “new” version of the NLAC; “with the release of Amores perros (‘Love’s a Bitch’) by Alejandro González Iñárritu in 2000 that Latin American cinema had embarked on a new course which combined the political grit of its 1960s Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano roots with slick editing and acting performances that converted it into one of the major players of World Cinema in the new millennium.”22 In addition, Podalsky’s research on the role of affect and the rise of the political middlebrow film in Latin America depends on rescuing the role of emotion in political filmmaking in the region. She points out that the rejection of emotion was a consequence of the way that NLAC directors eschewed the emotive, melodramatic nature of commercial cinema in the region in the 40s and 50s, but reminds us that they too recognized the potential for a populist, popular cinema.23 Her work tries to reverse the association of political filmmaking with an experimental, militant, film form: “There is a prevailing tendency among film scholars to draw a distinction between the politicizing potential of such shock tactics (designed to roust the spectator into political action) and the apolitical (if not depoliticizing) effects of genre films’ emotional appeals.”24 She further notes that the breakdown between politics and affect has meant that scholars have missed the ways that neoliberalism calls for a politics of affect: “the contemporary culture of sensation is a necessary counterpart to neoliberal reforms.”25 To ­illustrate her claims she analyzes José Padilha’s Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, 2007), a film that directly engages with issues of police brutality, political corruption, and systemic poverty. The film draws in the viewer by focusing on the struggles of its main character, military police captain Beto Nascimento, who attempts throughout the film “to detach himself from the elite squad that he leads.”26 Podalsky notes that critiques have condemned the film for its focus on a main character and slick, violent aesthetics—traits, it has been argued, that detach the narrative from any political potential. But Podalsky counters that the film “has encouraged the audience to question facile moralizing about society’s ills, most notably, assertions that policemen are all good (or all bad) and that corruption is the result of self-serving individuals.”27 She explains, then, that the films of the neoliberal era can and do marshal affect for political purpose.

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If the relationship between affect and politics has vexed scholars working on Latin American film in the global era, so too have we seen scholars struggle with placing the representational geographies of these films. As explained above, these directors are often chastised for not being national enough. Other scholars have sought to identify the uniquely transnational qualities of films produced in a context of global capital. In still other examples scholars suggest that films retain ties to the national despite their apparently global aesthetic. For instance, Hart refers to Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles’s The Constant Gardener (2005) as an example of a film with clear Brazilian cultural references. He writes, “though the dialogue [of the film] is English, the language of the film is Brazilian.”28 Similar claims have been made about Alfonso Cuarón’s installment in the Harry Potter series. Whether or not we agree that such cultural cataloging is even possible, the bigger question we need to ask is why it matters. What is gained by showing the presence of Brazilianness or Mexicanidad in an English language film? As reiterated throughout this book, too often these questions were taken to stand in for some larger political critique about the local versus the global, but we now know that that is not the relevant framework with which to interrogate the political response to global capital. Scholarship on culture and globalization has paid too much attention to globalization as a process that changes the location of identity. Defending the links between culture and place, then, became one of the battles scholars waged. Now, 25 years hence, we can see that those are not the core struggles caused by globalization. We now know that global capital profits from keeping local culture local and selling it globally. So the persistence of Latin American referents in a global film like The Constant Gardener—if they exist—may well be helping produce profit for a global media conglomerate. Instead, the key question is whether global capital makes it possible to produce films that critique global capital, analyze its local effects, and reach the public in ways that open up the possibility for debate and dialogue. If we consider the extent to which these films address issues related to biopolitical realities caused by neoliberal capital, then we can move away from worrying about the battle between marking films as national or global. Perhaps more importantly, the analysis in the chapters to follow will show that these films do take up these issues largely in a national context—although many of the directors analyzed move across national and global contexts. But that sense of place is less important than the question of whether or not these films

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offer us an opportunity to consider the biopolitical injustices caused by neoliberalism in the Latin American context. Do these films reflect neoliberalism as their subject and not simply as their condition of production? Do these films help us to imagine the “scales of justice” needed to think through the crisis of global capital? If globalization didn’t do what we thought it would to national culture, then the next chapters of this book ask: What did it do instead? One common consequence of the global era has been the production of a series of deep ambivalences that are rarely, if ever, dialectical in nature. The global era of Latin American film production has produced a series of opposite extremes: increased market diversity and increased market consolidation, increased aesthetic homogenization and increased aesthetic experimentation. It has also created deep ambivalences within specific film projects, where highly political films are also highly commercial, or where films that are highly national in scope are highly global in success. One of the key issues I’ll explore is the upsurge of commercially successful social-justice films. The commercial nature of these films doesn’t mean that they are stripped of potential political efficacy but it does mean that they are uncomfortably intertwined with the very system they seek to critique. The global era has meant that any film with the production quality to cross borders is unlikely to have been produced, distributed, or exhibited outside of the global system. This means that its political project, if it has one, may well be compromised, but it does not follow that it is irremediably contaminated. This stark reality offers us valuable insights since earlier assessments of political NLAC films typically sought to imagine the film as being created outside of capital. And yet, as the first part of this book has shown, such a situation rarely, if ever, existed. Today it is no longer possible. The question then isn’t whether the film meets some political, anticommercial litmus test; it is whether it offers viewers the chance to contemplate and debate the neoliberal condition and the injustices it causes. So, as this book moves to consider films that were produced in the three largest Latin American markets, it will question the extent to which these films offered viewers a chance to appreciate and critically engage with the ways that globalization has affected the biopolitical realities in these three nations and also across the globe. What is of interest is the extent to which neoliberalism is, indeed, the critical subject of many of these films. To trope on Nancy Fraser’s work, cited in the

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introduction to the book, the key question these next chapters will ask is whether these films help to “make visible” the injustices of globalization.29 And if they do, what do they help us see? Given that there are nationally oriented monographs dedicated to the ways that these three industries have navigated the effects of globalization, the goal of these next chapters is to study films from the three strongest national industries in the region in order to develop a new critical paradigm for understanding the intersections between national culture and global exchange in the era of neoliberal capitalism. The chapters offer less of a general overview of the entire film market in each country (since much of that data appeared in the first half of this book) and more of a close reading of the work of a few key directors (and one actor) who have played roles in defining Latin American film in the global era. The chapters flow from the most locally oriented to the most globally oriented national contexts. Thus I begin with Argentina, move to Brazil, and close with a study of Mexico.

Notes   1. Steve Solot, ed., The Brazilian Audiovisual Industry: An Explosion of Creativity and Opportunities for Partnerships (Rio de Janeiro: Latin American Training Center, 2012), Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 2665–2675. 2. “Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2013,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2014, 79, accessed January 30, 2017, http://www. imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_entry 56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/56e3451b9d72792dff003e25/files/ Anuario_Estadi_stico_de_Cine_Mexicano_2013.pdf. 3. See Raquel Rodriguez Sánchez, “El Mercado del Cine en Argentina, Noviembre 2015,” Estudios de Mercado: Oficina Económica y Comercial de la Embajada de España en Buenos Aires, 2015, accessed February 2, 2017, http://www.clag.es/sites/default/files/servicios_de_informes/ descargas/2015/12/04/el_mercado_del_cine_en_argentina_noviembre_2015_icex.pdf. 4. “About Us,” Televisa Internacional, accessed February 19, 2017, http://www.televisainternacional.tv/. 5.  Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 4.

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6. Octavio Getino, Cinema latinoamericano: Producción y Mercados en la primera década del siglo XXI (Buenos Aires: DAC Editorial, 2012), 12. 7. Ibid., 40. 8. Ibid., 4. 9. Luisela Alvaray, “National, Regional, and Global: New Waves of Latin American Cinema,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 3 (2008): 51. 10. Randal Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema,” in Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender and National Identity, ed. Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 16. 11. Ibid. 12. Misha MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 7. 13. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 2. 14. Ibid. 15.  Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, “The Viewer’s Dialectic, part 1,” trans. Julia Lesage, Jump Cut 29 (February 1984, 2005): 18–21, accessed February 22, 2017, http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC29folder/ ViewersDialec1.html. 16.  Carlos Diegues, “The Mind of Cinema Novo,” Cinema and Social Change in Latin America: Conversations with Filmmakers, ed. Julianne Burton (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010), 174. 17. Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 241. 18. Ibid., 247. 19. Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, 3. 20.  Boyd van Hoeij, “Does the Success of ‘Birdman’ Impact Other Mexican Filmmakers?” IndieWire, October 30, 2014, accessed February 19, 2017, http://www.indiewire.com/2014/10/does-thesuccess-of-birdman-impact-other-mexican-filmmakers-68531/. 21. Stephen M. Hart, Latin American Cinema (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), 108–109. 22. Ibid., 108. 23. Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema, 30. 24. Ibid., 62. 25. Ibid., 18. 26. Ibid., 82.

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27. Ibid., 82. 28. Hart, Latin American Cinema, 149. 29. See Nancy Fraser, “Reframing Justice in a Globalizing World,” New Left Review 36 (2005): 69–88.

CHAPTER 5

Argentina

Beginning in the 1990s with Martín Rejtman’s Rapado (Cropped Head, 1992), the Argentine film industry experienced an aesthetic rebirth with a number of filmmakers asserting unique styles that radically departed from the didactic political films that focused on the repression of the Dirty War (1976–1983). As Gonzalo Aguilar notes, the films of the mid-1990s ceased reproducing allegorical narratives of the nation’s past and avoided the postcolonial imperative to tell the nation’s story to the world.1 Rejecting Fredric Jameson’s claim that postcolonial cultural logic necessarily led to national allegory, this new wave of films told stories that were both local and global. Given their art house sensibilities, these were largely films that appealed to a small, elite crowd of film consumers both at home and abroad, but their aesthetic innovations caught the attention of film critics and scholars from across the globe. Then amid the cultural innovations of the 1990s, Argentina suffered a major economic collapse in the late 1990s, but as Jens Andermann points out, cinema bounced back fairly quickly, given the fact that it had already begun adapting to neoliberal market realities “thanks to a reconfiguration of film distribution and access to new funding sources abroad.”2 This relatively quick recovery was a consequence of the neoliberal policies of President Carlos Menem (1989–1999) who had opened doors to market-oriented filmmaking by deregulating, reducing state support, and encouraging foreign investment when he first assumed office. One of the consequences of his privileging of the commercial over the cultural was the © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_5

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development of a stronger commercial filmmaking industry in Argentina. Unlike the films of the New Argentine Cinema, these films may have been low in narrative quality and aesthetic innovation, but they had high production values in comparison with earlier Argentine films and they attracted local audiences at higher rates than previously seen for national films. By the end of 1997, three out of the four top box office hits in the country were Argentine productions, but as Tamara Falicov notes, each of these were coproductions that actually yielded more in revenue for foreign investors than they did for the local economy.3 These nationally consumed blockbusters were then joined by a new wave of films that succeeded both at home and abroad, especially the recent films of Juan José Campanella, El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001) and Oscar-winning El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, 2009), and those of Pablo Trapero, Leonera (Lion’s Den, 2008) and Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012). One additional feature of the Argentine film industry is especially noteworthy. Unlike other nations in the region, Argentina has tended to have some of the most protectionist film legislation—at least on the books. This is due, in part, to the fact that two directors from the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) movement—Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas—remained active in the industry and in promoting legislation. Getino was especially dedicated to passing laws and regulations that could protect local production and screening. This advocacy led to the New Cinema Law of 1994, which Getino called “‘the most protective film policy in Latin America, and most probably the world.’”4 And yet, despite legal protections, the reality is more complex. Argentine economists refer to the post-Menem policies as “neo-desarrollismo,” which could be translated as “new development” economics, but which actually refers to a combination of neoliberalism and protectionist/populist/development economics. Other scholars refer to these economic policies as “open markets nationalism,” which signifies an uncomfortable marriage between supporting social projects and opening up the nation to foreign investment and trade. Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi explain that another phrase used to describe this economic model is “growth with equity”: “All the new Lefts in Latin America seek, in one way or another, to redirect capitalist development away from the paradigm of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ into a more socially cohesive model of ‘growth with equity.’”5 As Diana Tussie in the same edited volume further describes it, “efforts to push forward a social agenda have, however, been accompanied by macro policies that have benefited the financial

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sector.”6 The Argentine film industry displays some of the exact sorts of contradictions one would expect by pairing such seemingly incompatible policies. Thus, this chapter takes up a number of themes as it traces filmmaking during and after the Argentine economic crisis of 1998–2002. It looks especially at the ways that the films from this period intersect with some of the central tenets of the NLAC’s notion of political film—especially since two of its key figures remained active during the period. And it also analyzes the different ways filmmakers navigate corporate realities while attempting to find funding and markets for their work. The chapter compares a selection of films from three directors, each of whom offers different models for Argentine filmmaking in the neoliberal era: • Israel Adrián Caetano began as one of the key figures in the New Argentine Cinema (NAC) and has since departed both aesthetically and commercially from his early films, going on, for instance, to direct an episode of Playboy TV. Looking at his early career, I focus specifically on his first two films Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, 1998), which he codirected with Bruno Stagnaro, and his first solo feature Bolivia (2001). Analyzing these early films in light of the later shifts in Caetano’s career also allows me to question whether there was a true “New Argentine Cinema” after all, since in hindsight it appears that the synergies across the “corpus,” as Joanna Page puts it, seem to have been pegged more to the circumstances of film production available at the time than to any shared filmmaking commitment.7 • Pablo Trapero was also one of the key figures in the NAC, but, unlike other figures such as Martín Rejtman and Lucrecia Martel, who stayed true to art house experimental aesthetics, his later work moved more squarely into a commercial aesthetic and corporate funding. What interests me as I compare his second film El bonaerense (2002) to his later film, Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012), is the way that Trapero held on to his interest in social-issue filmmaking while adjusting his style to appeal to a commercial market. • Juan José Campanella has been the most globally recognized player in the renovated Argentine Cinema—as the only Oscar winner of the bunch—but he was never a figure associated with the NAC. Trained at NYU and a regular director for episodes of the TV show “House,” Campanella has always had a commercial sensibility.

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Despite the fact that he has received far less scholarly attention and has generally been dismissed for his commercial aesthetic, I argue that it is Campanella who may be the director who most closely narrates the Argentine crisis of neoliberalism. I look at three key films in Campanella’s trajectory—especially since they each trope on a similar concern: the loss of community space caused by neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism and the New Argentine Cinema: Adrián Caetano’s Pizza, birra, faso and Bolivia Precisely at the time that the IMF decided to pull its loan support of Argentina in 2001, thereby sending the economy into a tailspin, Argentine cinema was enjoying a relative boom. During the 2002 Rotterdam Film Festival, several attending Argentine filmmakers issued a statement expressing their collective concerns: “Due to the lack of honesty and talent of the governing class . . . a richly endowed country was brought down at the very same moment that the Argentine cinema started to bear the fruits of the changes in the industry.”8 Not only were the total number of films released on the rise in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but Argentine films had greater audience success both locally and internationally. That this took place simultaneous to an economic crisis that led to reduced state funds to support cinema, limited theater venues for national films, and high unemployment or underemployment, which restricted disposable income for ticket purchases, seems especially noteworthy. Alternatively, though, it may very well be, to trope on Joanna Page’s study of Argentine cinema, the “crisis of capitalism” that was at the heart of this renewal.9 While the late 1990s led to an upsurge of Argentine filmmaking across various seemingly unrelated cinematic modes—among them the new Argentine blockbuster, revised genre films, industrial auteur films, and independent auteur films—thus making it difficult to generalize about “national” filmmaking during the period, it was the independent auteur films associated with the NAC that garnered the most critical attention. But even this motley crew of aesthetically innovative directors is hard to define as a coherent “movement,” since the styles and stories of the most well-known figures of the NAC varied greatly. Where they did largely converge was in their use of lower production budgets, variations on realist aesthetics, and use of actors.

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One of the filmmakers most commonly associated with the Argentine auteurist cinema boom is Uruguayan-born Israel Adrián Caetano, whose first films revealed the crisis of capitalism both in terms of film production methods and film content. These next sections focus on two early films by Caetano: Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, 1998), which he codirected with Bruno Stagnaro in 1997, and his first solo feature Bolivia (2001). It is of critical value to note how Caetano’s early films relate to the NLAC movement. Caetano’s work appears to adapt the criticism of political, economic, and cultural imperialism central to NLAC theory to the Argentine experience of neoliberalism. And yet, as this chapter develops, I’ll also show how these early films proved anomalous for the future direction of his career. Given the hindsight of twenty years since the release of Caetano’s first film we are now able to recognize that what seemed like an innovative political filmmaking project may have simply been the creative efforts of a young filmmaker who was exploring a range of styles. In his recent work Caetano has favored more commercial productions and he has directly rejected the notion of filming subjects of social significance.10 But before turning to the later stages of Caetano’s career, let’s consider why his early work offered critics and scholars a chance to connect his filmmaking with a revised political response to the effects of neoliberalism on Argentine society. Caetano’s codirected feature, Pizza, birra, faso, is credited with reviving Argentine cinema and is often cited as the breakout film of the NAC.11 Produced with a budget of $400,000 and featuring a cast of non-professional actors, the film won a series of awards and received much critical praise. Focusing on a group of marginalized youths who turn to crime to supply their basic needs, the film critiques the urban catastrophe caused by neoliberal economics. Caetano artfully shows how those who cannot participate in the market, either by producing or by consuming, are unable to insert themselves into Buenos Aires society other than as criminal threats and disposable life. Bolivia takes another view of the debacle of neoliberalism by tracing the life of a Bolivian immigrant to Buenos Aires who is forced to leave his home when the United States burns the coca fields he works. He arrives in Buenos Aires and lands a job as a cook in a modest diner, whose owner and clients are similarly suffering from job insecurities and economic woes. In this film, Caetano traces the impact of global economic and migratory flows through a focus on the local context of Buenos Aires. The central theme of Bolivia is that nationalism, classism, and racism prevent social sectors

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that share an equally precarious class status from recognizing their common struggles. Here the pro-privatization ideology of neoliberalism results in the privatization of struggle. Caetano’s early work makes it possible to appreciate the ways that neoliberal economic practices and their corresponding ideologies logically resulted in an adaptation of the theories and practices of the NLAC. In what follows, I briefly reference the NLAC’s core ideas and then move to link the moment of the NLAC to economic theories of dependency and development. The next section offers an analysis of Argentina in the 1990s and after—focusing again on the ties between economic practices, social perspectives, and counter-cinema. Then I analyze Pizza, birra, faso and Bolivia. Through a close reading of their opening scenes, I argue that each film offers differing, yet compatible, critiques of the social crises caused by the Argentine experience of global capitalism. This section ends by revisiting the idea of the coherence of the NAC and the role of Caetano in defining it. New Latin American Cinema and Dependency Theory In contrast to the openly Marxist, pro-revolution, and highly class-conscious framework common to the theory and practice of the NLAC, Caetano’s first two films present categories of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” (i.e., those who exist within a state but have been denied the protections of the state) and thus do not even have access to the political projects of the working class.12 In fact, in each film the dreams of the protagonists are precisely to enter the visible—and in their eyes privileged—status of the working class. The young criminals of Pizza, birra, faso dream of jobs, but end up picking the pockets of other more privileged, but also unemployed, Argentines rather than getting jobs themselves. And Bolivia’s Freddy leaves his home country in order to find a job as an undocumented immigrant in Buenos Aires, a city already overflowing with unemployed locals. Page notes that many of the NAC films reveal how the uncertain status of work under neoliberalism has had a profound impact on the construction of identity: “fiction film has focused almost exclusively on the increasing instability of work and the failure of traditional modes of collective activism.”13 Not only does this shift in the status of work alter the ways that Caetano’s characters relate to questions of class, but it also has a profound effect on their notion of time. The absence of a sense of collective from which one struggles also

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leads to an absence of a sense of shared history and a vision for a better future. David Harvey explains in Spaces of Hope that neoliberalism influences the geographies and the temporalities through which individuals imagine their relationship to struggle, and Henry Giroux claims that the biopolitical practices of neoliberalism yoke state-sanctioned violence to state policies that “relegate . . . entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability.”14 Caetano’s early films mark these transformations through a representation of neoliberal biopolitics, where struggle is often concentrated on physical survival in ways that make the collective action envisioned in many NLAC films unthinkable. For instance, Pablo of Pizza, birra, faso suffers from asthma and has to spend recently stolen money on hospital care; Bolivia’s Freddy uses his hard-earned pesos to buy coffee at a diner (ironically similar to the one where he works) so that he can sleep at the table and avoid being harassed by cops on the street. And where these sorts of individual woes were also visible in films of the NLAC, in the search, for instance, for money to pay for hospital care for a wounded brother in Grupo Ukamau’s Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor, 1969), the difference is that Caetano’s films do not translate these private struggles into collective action as was common to political films of the earlier moment, many of which ended with long shots of masses in protest.15 Instead, Caetano’s films end emphasizing the inevitable death of the biopolitically disposable. Both films close with the main characters dead or dying, alone and unnoticed. All of the members of the young gang in Pizza, birra, faso, save the pregnant girlfriend of El Cordobés, die in a botched robbery and the last sounds are a police radio calling for an ambulance to pick up the boys’ bodies.16 At the end of Bolivia, Freddy is shot in the back after a fight with one of the diner’s patrons. As the diner owner and a customer pull his body into the diner the film is completely silent. Merging a documentary sensibility with narrative cinema in ways reminiscent of the radical aesthetics of the 1960s and 1970s, Caetano’s films thus represent a significant and provocative elaboration of the earlier practices of the NLAC. Rather than determine whether or not his films are faithful to the parameters of third cinema, thereby reifying theories that emerged in a specific context, my interest is in understanding how Caetano’s early films represent their own cultural logic of political filmmaking—one that ironically reveals its difference from the theories and practices of the NLAC as its most obvious sign of its debt to them.

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Argentina was a significant center of intellectual and cinematic contributions to the NLAC. Two of the most emblematic films of the movement are Fernando Birri’s Tire dié (Throw Ten, 1960), a documentary about street children who risk their lives to beg for ten cent coins, and Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas’s La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968), a three-part documentary that critiques neocolonialism and calls for liberation struggles. Each of these three directors also published manifestos that offered theories to support their radical filmmaking practices. Birri is famous for his elaboration of “cinema and underdevelopment.” He describes a cinema that will raise consciousness and encourage revolutionary struggle: “Our purpose is to create a new person, a new society, a new history, and therefore a new art and a new cinema. Urgently.”17 Perhaps the most internationally known manifesto of the movement is that of Getino and Solanas, whose term “third cinema” continues to be widely used and refers to a style of filmmaking made with the people, for the people, and that “directly and explicitly set[s] out to fight the System.”18 Opening with an epigraph from Frantz Fanon, their text is framed within a radical postcolonial optic, one that demands a revolutionary culture to inspire revolutionary change. Each of these texts is directly concerned with both the invasion of Hollywood films on Argentine screens as well as the impoverished conditions for making films in Argentina, where funds, equipment, and technical training are all lacking. For them, third cinema and a cinema of underdevelopment become rallying cries to embrace the perspective of the global south. Eschewing the Argentine history of postcolonial mimicry, these filmmakers call for a cinema that refuses imperialist cultural codes, practices, and influences. Caetano has not penned anything like these manifestos, but he did write a short manifesto published by El Amante de Cine [film lover] in 1995 entitled “Agustín Tosco Propaganda” (referencing a leftist trade union leader and symbol of the Cordobazo uprising in 1969). The manifesto issues a somewhat ironic call-to-arms “‘against the so-called Argentine cinema, in favour of the people and the cinema as such.’”19 In an almost direct citation of his NLAC predecessors, Caetano wrote “we prefer honesty, austerity, simplicity. We claim the heads of the pompous hypocrites and lackeys who pretend that cinema is the property of someone or of some country.”20 While Jens Andermann notes that the direct reference that Caetano is citing is the industrial auteur filmmakers from the 1980s, such as Eliseo Subiela, who purported to represent the

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national on screen and to adapt universal genres to the local, it is worth noting that as Caetano rejects the aesthetics of the 1980s directors; he cites similar language to that of militant cinema from the 1960s. Caetano’s early interviews further suggest that his filmmaking is directly concerned with questions of class in ways similar to Birri, Solanas, and Getino.21 For instance, in an interview after the filming of Un oso rojo (Red Bear, 2002), he remarked, “Me molestan el doble discurso, la injusticia, así que trato de meterme en problemas cuando puedo” [The double speak, the injustice bothers me, so I try to get involved in problems when I can].22 Nevertheless, his films overtly differ from those of his Argentine predecessors in regard to the spirit of revolutionary change that was characteristic of the earlier generation.23 Reflecting the sensibilities of a post-postmodern perspective, the films of Caetano’s generation are more hesitant to offer clear paths to political action, preferring to avoid what some see as the moralizing tone of the earlier films. Falicov notes for instance that these films are not as ideological and polemical as those of the NLAC: “many in this new generation embodied the aesthetics of cine pobre signification, but rather than create overtly polemical statements or march under the banner of a political movement, they are working to expand the notion of Argentine citizenship to include subjects and characters who have traditionally been invisible or excluded from Argentine screens.”24 That said, one of the most visible ways that Caetano’s early work dialogues with that of Birri, Solanas and Getino, and other NLAC directors, is through his adaptation of neorealist aesthetics. A number of NLAC directors, like Birri and the Cuban filmmakers Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa, were trained at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome where they were directly influenced by neorealist directors like Vittorio de Sica. Italian neorealism was known for its stories of the poor working class, its location shooting (as opposed to studio), its use of non-professional actors, and its open, non-scripted dialogue. As Page notes, “the relationship between New Argentine Cinema and Italian neorealism has been repeatedly averred by critics but rarely explored in any depth. . . . The historical analogy breaks down, of course, when we remember that what was innovative in Italy of the 1940s and 1950s cannot, logically speaking, be innovative in Argentina fifty years later.”25 She considers the presence of neorealist techniques in these films as a form of postmodern “citation,” most manifestly apparent through their conceptualizing of film as an anthropological or sociological project.26 She further notes

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that these films refuse the “epistophilic desires” usually associated with the neorealist production of social knowledge.27 Neorealism’s typical narrative arc, which offers the viewer the pleasure of critical judgment, is frustrated in the films of the NAC due to the fact that the viewer is constantly denied sufficient context, remaining stuck along with the film’s characters in an endless present. It is worth noting, though, that the use of neorealism as a way to document and reflect an unpleasant, unacknowledged, and undisclosed reality via a simple aesthetic that attempts to reproduce the vernacular of the disenfranchised remains throughout each version of the aesthetic form. Birri wrote in “Cinema and Underdevelopment” that our goals should be “to confront reality with a camera and to document it, filming realistically, filming critically, filming underdevelopment with the optic of the people.”28 Contrasting the false images offered to Argentine viewers, according to Birri, requires not only a challenge of Hollywood, but also a refusal of Argentine films that merely replicate the neocolonial gaze. Commercial Argentine cinema according to Birri “presents no real image of our people at all, but conceals them.”29 As evidenced by the fact that Pizza, birra, faso and Bolivia portray segments of Argentine society that had been hitherto neglected, Caetano’s version of neorealism certainly remains true to many of Birri’s imperatives. The films associated with the early years of the NAC had other aesthetic battles to wage though. As Page notes, the new independent Argentine cinema rejected Hollywood and also the auteurist approach: “in New Argentine Cinema we rarely see explicit denunciations of the dictatorship or of Menemist policies pursued during the 1990s or, indeed, any appetite for unrooting past causes or laying blame at a particular door. The youths of Pizza, birra, faso are not simply victims: the film clearly shows their position within a larger chain of exploitation. . . . The psychological explanations of behavior advanced in Hollywood cinema are denied to us here.”30 Falicov further adds that this generation breaks away from the longstanding practice of looking toward Europe for aesthetic guidance.31 Aguilar registers a different tendency toward aesthetic innovation that differentiates this generation from earlier ones: “Two major refusals are written in invisible ink in the scripts and stories of the new movies: of the political imperative (what to do) and of the identitarian imperative (what we are like)—that is, of pedagogy and of self-accusation.”32 For Aguilar, one key difference is a move away from obsessions with both identity and the political found in the work

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of well-known Argentine directors such as María Luisa Bemberg, Eliseo Subiela, and Luis Puenzo. Central to my argument that Caetano’s work logically transforms the practices of his predecessors is the idea that the theories of the NLAC, especially Solanas and Getino’s notion of third cinema, were linked to economic theories of development and dependency. Inasmuch as the theory and practice of third cinema imagined filmmaking as a direct intervention in social structures, especially economic and ideological ones, third cinema concepts are deeply connected to the debates about global economic practices that were circulating in the 1960s and 1970s. In many ways, there is a through line between dependency and development theory and today’s theories of antiglobalization and neoliberalism, but it is worth pausing for a moment to highlight some of the features of this earlier moment. Development theory, largely put into practice via the World Bank and the IMF after World War II, maintained that all countries were necessarily on a path of development. Already-developed nations, according to the theory, could identify developing nations and aid them in their development and entrance into the market and modernity. Dependency theorists, in contrast, rejected the development model arguing that “development and underdevelopment are produced by the core-periphery relationships of the capitalist world-system.”33 Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch is credited with launching the critique of development theory and suggesting the core–periphery model that explains the persistence of dependent economies. Developing his structuralist theories in the 1950s, Prebisch would go on to influence generations of economists concerned with the ways that the debt programs of the IMF and World Bank created economies dependent on Europe and the United States.34 Central to this theory was the rejection of the developmentalist idea of a nation as an autonomously developing entity, which was contrasted by the dependency theory that nations were always, already imbricated in a world economic system of powerful developed nations and dominated dependent nations. According to Ramón Grosfoguel, “the dependentista school was a radical version of the protectionist program in Latin America. Their solution for dependency was to delink from the capitalist world system and to organize a socialist society insulated from the influence and control of metropolitan capitalism.”35 Thus, both the dependency theorists and the third cinema theorists believed that a revolutionary process at the national level could insulate a nation from the global capitalist system. The idea was that a socialist

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protectionist state could opt out of the world-system. But the third cinema theorists went further, in a sense, since they wanted to insulate cinema itself from commerce. What they advocated was not an example of import-substitution industrialization, where national cinema would replace Hollywood, but rather a plan that isolated cinema from economic exchange altogether. Of course, as I’ve shown throughout this book, the films of the movement could not be separated from commercial practice entirely and one of the most significant discrepancies between the theory and the practice of third cinema revolves precisely around this dilemma. Third cinema films, it was hoped, would make possible a cinema that was non-commercial, anticapitalist, revolutionary, nationalist, and that represented a new state. Such a film culture, while ideally non-commercial, would still depend on the state’s support through trade protections, screen quotas, funding, and regulation of exhibition venues. The socialist protectionist state would defend local film culture, since it would be understood as a right of its citizenry to have access to such forms of public culture.36 If we couple these ideas with theories of postcolonial resistance, we can begin to see a pattern. Linking the ideas of Fanon with those of Prebisch and those of Birri, for instance, reveals a common vision that the only way for countries that are less powerful politically, economically, and culturally to truly “develop” is to refuse to engage with global circuits of trade and influence since these are always dominated by first world nations intent on maintaining countries like Argentina in a subordinate role. And while these structures of power and influence surely persist today, the neoliberal moment has served to question both the core–periphery model and the developmentalist theory of the relationship between the state and the citizen. While the post-World War II dominant economies remain in place, this book has shown that neoliberalism’s focus on free trade serves to destabilize the traditional core–periphery model. Today enclaves of the hyper-rich who control multinational corporations are found across the globe, just as pockets of extreme poverty are visible in places such as the United States that have all but abandoned the social welfare programs of the development-­ inspired New Deal.37 Rather than focus on core–periphery, then, critiques of neoliberalism now look to a model based on the market, where the division is between those that control it and those that suffer from it. One of the key shifts signaled by global neoliberal practice is a changed idea of the state’s responsibility to the citizen. Developmentalist

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economics expected, for instance, that the state would be the primary force of structural development, not only building roads and bridges, but also supporting education and culture. Dependency theory expected even more from the state, since it was to achieve such programs without either the aid or interference of economically dominant nations. Neoliberalism, however, “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”38 The state’s principal role under neoliberalism is to protect the “rights” of the market. Translating these notions into the realm of film culture, one finds that neoliberalism demands the end of quota protections for national cinema, the end of tariffs on imported films, the deregulation of film distribution, and the end of state investment in cinema. As will be explained in more detail below, Argentina would implement a number of these policies as it more fully embraced the tenets of neoliberalism during the presidency of Carlos Menem (1989–1999). Eventually, though, it landed on a hybrid model that has been called “open markets nationalism”—a model that is pro-free trade but plays lip service to a certain degree of nationalist protectionism. As Tussie explains, “some policies of post-neoliberalism are pragmatically repackaged economic principles associated with the previous model but now presented as questions of national constraints and opportunities. There is no strong sense of a return to protectionism and the fiscal and monetary policies espoused by newly Left governments show a deep awareness that . . . world markets . . . cannot be ignored.”39 Neoliberalism and the New Argentine Cinema The political struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, both in terms of economic and cultural practices, were profoundly revolutionary, influenced as they were by the success of the Cuban Revolution, the election of Salvador Allende in Chile, and the guerrilla struggles of Che Guevara, but they were soon tempered by the wave of dictatorships that moved across the region beginning with the Brazilian coup of 1964. Argentina would enter full-blown military rule in 1976. Before long, the constant state of terror led many on the left to focus on the most visible signs of state brutality: the torture, the disappearances, the exiles, etc. Correspondingly, a number of third cinema-influenced filmmakers, most of whom were in exile, made films that critiqued these militarized states.

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Argentine filmmaker Héctor Olivera’s No habrá más penas ni olvido (Funny Dirty Little War, 1983) was released, for instance, in 1983, the last year of the junta and much post-junta Argentine cinema of the 1980s and 1990s was dedicated to rescuing the repressed past. Falicov notes that “during the transition to democracy, film production was encouraged by the state and supported by private sources of funding” thereby almost doubling national film production from “approximately 15 films during the dictatorship era to up to 25 films until 1989.”40 The films of the transition were greatly influenced by Manuel Antín, who headed the Instituto Nacional de Cine (INC; National Cinema Institute) from 1983 to 1989, and who has been lauded as the force behind the Argentine cinema boom. Falicov notes that the films of this era, though, were often aimed at an international middle class and “geared for prestigious film festival exhibition rather than a broad national audience.”41 While the films often dealt with the recent past, recovering traumatic memory after a period of censorship, they often were “art house” in style. Antín supported such high-brow products to purpose, since both he and then-president Raúl Alfonsín (1983–1988) saw Argentine cinema as a way of changing the international view of Argentina and encouraging foreign trade and investment. Alfonsín “often brought a set of Argentine films on video as a gift when visiting other foreign heads of state.”42 And Antín explicitly referred to the US motto that “trade follows film” from the 1920s as a motive for exporting images of Argentina abroad.43 The “New” Argentine Cinema that emerged in the late 1990s after the release of Pizza, birra, faso marked a significant shift from this earlier phase in that the films were less overtly committed to reconsiderations of the past, and the context for these films was no longer a transition government, but rather the more openly neoliberal moment of Menem’s presidency (1989–1999). Within the first two years of Menem’s presidency, Argentina became the country with the largest number of privatizations in the world.44 In addition to privatization, Menem followed the IMF mandate to reduce state spending, drastically cutting the budgets for education and culture. The Menem administration immediately cut funding for the arts significantly. Menem’s administration favored the private sector and the commercial business world over artistic and cultural territory that had attempted to operate outside of the laws of the market.45 Menem liberalized media ownership, allowed vertical integration, attempted to restrict unions, dropped film quota laws, and allowed

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“block booking” of Hollywood films in national theaters. These film industry-related policies went in tandem with economic adjustments made throughout the Argentine economy that emphasized free trade over protectionism. The culture that was supported was a commercial one, and Falicov notes that it is during this period that Argentina produced its first blockbuster films.46 These are films, like the hugely successful Comodines (Cops, 1997), that use a Hollywood aesthetic to tell an Argentine story. They appeal to a broad national audience but have limited international appeal, thereby revealing a shift from the internationally successful but locally unsuccessful art house fare of the transition films. Even more important is the explicit shift in state policy away from the support of national, non-commercial culture: films during the Menem era were expected to follow the laws of the market, not transcend them. According to Falicov, “the emphasis on commercial culture over unique, auteur-inspired work led critics to call the cultural policy of the Menem administration the ‘culture of the shopping mall.’”47 The rejection of state-subsidized national cinema was not a solely neoliberal move. Getino headed the Argentine National Cinema Institute (INC) from 1989 to 1990, and his main goal was to reduce the dependence of the industry on the state and to help support the development of the industry. As Falicov describes it “the new director tried to move away from a ‘high culture’ model of a cultural industry to more of an industrially based, popular form of film production.”48 Writing in 1996, Getino criticized filmmakers’ dependence on state subsidies, since that model had meant that they lost a connection to their public.49 Thus, the economic necessity caused by neoliberal privatization forced the film industry to seek more autonomy from the state, a move that was not entirely unwelcome to third cinema founder Getino. Nevertheless, by 1991 the situation for filmmaking was dire with only 17 films released and the worst audience attendance in a decade.50 The worst year for Argentine film production was 1992 when only ten films were released. In response, in 1994 a new film law was passed. Falicov notes that the bipartisan passing of this law was unusual and allows us to see two opposing views of the connection between film and national identity: “the Radicals tended to see the state’s role in supporting the film industry as one of upholding and confirming national identity; the Radicals also tended to believe that this national identity should be exported.”51 They compare their legacy to that of the French:

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“The Peronist view of culture, while not discounting the value of international recognition, stressed the importance of creating and preserving national (popular) culture for a broad sector of the population.”52 Critics agree that the “Ley de Cine” [Cinema Law], which came into force in 1995, was an essential factor in the growth of Argentine cinema. As Page notes, “the new law granted a degree of protection to the national film industry in terms of exhibition and provided significant funds for filmmaking, administered through the INCAA.”53 In addition to the new film law, Page highlights a number of other key trends that had an impact on the changing industry: the explosion of new film schools, from which a number of NAC’s most successful directors emerged; the revival of international film festivals held in the country (The Mar del Plata Festival was held in 1996 for the first time in 26 years and the Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente (BAFICI) was launched in 1999); and the rise in film criticism in Argentina during the 1990s, both in film journalism and in academic studies, and particularly the major contribution made by film journals such as El amante cine and Haciendo cine.54 Neoliberalism and Caetano’s Early Films Neoliberal policies were first implemented in Argentina during the junta. And, even though leftist critics of the regime such as Rodolfo Walsh pointed out the direct links between state violence and violent economic policies during this period, it was not until after the fall of the junta and after the Menem government’s policies of privatization and deregulation were initiated in 1989 that the focus of left critique fully engaged with the economic consequences of the neoliberal world-system. It became immediately clear that the debt burden of developmentalist economics had ushered in a new phase, where the pressure to service foreign debt forced weaker economies to sell national assets and privatize almost all government functions. When the junta began its rule of Argentina in 1976 foreign debt was $7.5 billion, by 2001 it had reached $142.3 billion, and interest owed between 1992 and 2001 amounted to $83.2 billion. The impact of these policies was an extreme economic crisis, two features of which Caetano chooses to focus on directly: the first is the impact to the Argentine middle class, which became the “new poor” and which constituted half of the Argentine population living below the poverty line in 2001. The second is the effect of unemployment,

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underemployment, and undocumented immigration on the class configurations of Argentine society. From 1998 to 2002, Argentina suffered what has been referred to as their “Great Depression.” Following economic crises in Russia and Brazil, the Argentine economy went into a tailspin and eventually defaulted on its foreign debt. In late 2001, the economy plunged even further into decline and President Fernando de la Rúa froze savings accounts, leading to massive protests across class lines. The cacerolazo [banging pots] created a unique political moment as Argentines from a range of economic backgrounds recognized a common enemy in neoliberal economics. By the end of that year, de la Rúa had fled the country and Eduardo Duhalde stepped in. His first move was to abandon the fixed exchange rate that had pegged the Argentine peso to the dollar. He further converted all dollar-based bank accounts into pesos. These moves caused unemployment and inflation to drastically worsen. By 2003, when Néstor Kirchner took over as president, he led the economy to slowly recover. Caetano’s first two films literally bookend this crisis with Pizza, birra, faso appearing in 1997 and Bolivia in 2001. Caetano represents two severely disenfranchised communities in his films. In Pizza, birra, faso the focus is on the lower-class, unemployed youths who have no hope of entry into the working class. Giroux claims that one of the most serious social casualties of neoliberalism is the criminalization of youth. He explains that “if youth once symbolized the moral necessity to address a range of social and economic ills, they are now largely portrayed as the source of most of society’s problems.”55 In contrast with the case of the United States, in Argentina the youth have been regarded as a threat to the public since the junta categorically classified young Argentines as subversives. What changes in the era of the economic crisis is that their threat derives not from their politics but from their inability to participate in and support the market economy. Caetano illustrates this problem when the film’s protagonists Pablo and El Cordobés utter typical 1960s-era language in seemingly inappropriate moments. In one scene, as they complain about the fact that the taxi driver that arranges heists for them is not giving them enough work and money they state: “Nos tenemos que independizar” [We have to become independent]. Caetano emphasizes, through their misdirected complaint, their total inability to grasp their current crisis. In another moment analyzed by Page, El Cordobés claims that he will no longer work the trains since they have become privatized, offering another

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example of 1960s-style politics absent a proper context. For Page, “such language highlights the painful gap between these aspirations to coherent action and the miserable ineffectiveness of the boys’ attempts to take control of their own lives.”56 The disenfranchised community that is the focus of Bolivia is undocumented immigrant labor, a social category incomprehensible without a sense of neoliberal international economic policy. We are told that Freddy, the Bolivian who immigrates to Buenos Aires, does so because the US war on drugs has burnt the coca fields he used to work. As Naomi Klein notes, though, the assault on the coca industry by the US government in 1985 came precisely at the moment when Bolivia was unable to service its foreign debt and on the brink of the country’s first democratic elections in years.57 After the elections, Bolivia launched a new economic plan orchestrated by Jeffrey Sachs, which depended on “shocking” the economy via price increases, deregulation, privatization, and wage freezes. By the early 1990s, Bolivian unemployment had risen drastically and jobs that had formerly held benefits had been replaced with precarious employment that had no protections at all. In some respects, then, the neoliberalization of Bolivia simply foreshadowed events in Argentina. Caetano’s film links the economic devastation of Bolivia to that of Argentina, not only through the migratory pattern of Freddy, but also through the title of the film itself. The viewer is left to wonder whether this is a film about Bolivia or about Argentina, or whether neoliberal policies will eventually make these nations indistinguishable. Consequently, Caetano’s film indicates that a struggle at the national level will be of no use against a global economic system, reflecting a post-­ dependency model of resistance to global capital. As Grosfoguel explains: it is impossible to transform a system that operates on a world scale by privileging the control/administration of the nation-state (Wallerstein 1992b). No “rational” control of the nation-state would alter the location of a country in the international division of labor. “Rational” planning and control of the nation-state contributes to the developmentalist illusion of eliminating the inequalities of the capitalist world-system from a nation-state level. . . . Therefore, a global problem cannot have a national solution.58

Caetano emphasizes the need for cross-national collaboration via the tensions between a Bolivian immigrant and a group of economi­ cally disadvantaged Argentines whose suffering has all been caused by

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neoliberal policies. The film makes it clear that any Argentine resistance to neoliberalism will have to be extra-national, and he indicates the very real limits to such post-national resistance when he highlights the ways that Argentine national prejudice frustrates the possibilities of global alliances. As Aguilar notes, Bolivia sparked a debate about stereotypes, with some critics suggesting the film reaffirmed them, and some suggesting that it offered viewers a chance to debate them. He points out that the film forced Argentines to think about the way they treat “Bolivians, or, as they are derogatorily referred to, bolitas [marbles]. . . . These are widespread social stereotypes that tend to play an active role in the imaginary, linguistic, and perceptive configurations of the average Argentine.”59 Caetano ends the film with Enrique, the diner owner, posting a “help wanted” sign again, creating a temporal loop of circular history. The ending suggests that until the Argentines of the film are able to recognize fellow Latin Americans like Freddy as human beings with rights and with valid struggles similar to their own, there is little hope of constructing an alternative to the neoliberal global market. Page further emphasizes the ways that even the Argentine characters’ struggles remain disconnected: “The financial difficulties the characters share—Héctor is forced to return to live with his mother in Córdoba because he can’t find work in Buenos Aires; Enrique, the bar manager, works long hours to keep his head above water; Oso owes money to everyone and may lose his taxi and his livelihood—do not produce any sense of solidarity.”60 So it is not simply a lack of cross-national solidarity that is lacking. Both films also reveal how these marginalized groups interact with the precarious middle class. In a move reminiscent of the political filmmaking of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), where bourgeois identity impedes meaningful social alliances, Caetano shows how the residue of class privilege coupled with middle-class poverty has created a social group that is extremely hostile to those who share their social status. Speaking about Bolivia, Caetano says, “the film’s main theme is the collision among people of the same social class, they are workers about to be left out of any class at all, and thus they are intolerant of each other.”61 Racism, nationalism, and classism impede the underemployed and unemployed lower middle-class white taxi drivers who eat and drink at the diner from noting any connections between themselves and the Bolivian immigrant, Freddy, who, like them, simply wants to earn a wage and be treated with a minimum level of respect. Similar to Bolivia, the young protagonists of

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Pizza, birra, faso come into direct conflict with the impoverished middle class. The young gang, though, still imagines this group to have a certain superior status. They refer to the taxi driver who arranges their robberies of his passengers as “jefe” [boss]—a sign of their desire actually to have a boss. Later, as they flee the scene of a robbery, they have an intense exchange with a cop, who they later learn is simply looking for a bribe. Both films are full of signs of a suffering middle class that both is and is not like the marginalized protagonists. Framing the Crisis: Establishing Shots in Pizza, birra, faso and Bolivia At the level of content, then, the two films survey the neoliberal landscape in Buenos Aires through attention to the most vulnerable sectors of society. But it is through their cinematic language that they most reveal the ways that they represent a revision of the NLAC tradition. In addition to the use of non-traditional actors to create a neorealist edge to the films, Caetano created a unique dialectical aesthetic that juxtaposes neorealism with cinematic spectacle, and that often uses a counterpoint between sound and image to produce political meaning. Both of these techniques are present in the opening sequences of each film and, even though Pizza, birra, faso was codirected, the similar strategies of these sequences reveal aesthetic continuity between the two films. Each segment, more importantly, establishes critical information for the spectator that is meant to shape the rest of the viewing experience. In Pizza, birra, faso, the opening sequence juxtaposes a series of sounds with crosscutting images of people in motion in the city of Buenos Aires. An immediate class structure emerges via forms of transportation—the lower classes walk and hitchhike and drive taxis while the privileged travel in comfort. Another important set of images links the different disenfranchised groups in Buenos Aires. While the focus of the film is specifically the threat of a disposable youth culture, the opening sequence ties this group directly to other subaltern segments of society, including the disabled, the elderly, and the unemployed. But Caetano does more than establish a dialectic between the biopolitics of different social sectors; he also creates a dialectic between the neorealism of the film and its artifice by mixing documentary-like images with intercutting black frames that carry the film’s opening credits. This subtle technique takes place in Bolivia as well and it provides an alienation-effect that prohibits the viewer from getting lost in the film spectacle.

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The most important element of the opening sequence of Pizza, birra, faso, though, is the use of sound and the combination of the sounds of the street, of the state, of the media, and of the film itself. For the most part the sounds of the main characters, which the viewer is yet to recognize as such, are silenced by the sounds of the city, by the sounds of police radios, and by the sounds of the news radio. Most importantly the characters are silenced by the music, which at once creates the spectacle of the film and a certain pleasurable energy, one that will eventually be paired with the pleasurable energy of the young gang’s linguistic banter. We hear the sounds of car horns and other traffic mixed with police radio and news reports as they bump against the energetic music of the soundtrack. The speed of the camera movements and the cutting techniques presents a reality without the depth or context of traditional feature films and documentaries that commonly open with establishing shots. There is no voice-over or metacommentary either. Everything comes at the viewer in fragments of images and sounds that, although disjointed, are all clearly connected. In typical third cinema style the connections must be made by the viewer. Unlike some of the more experimental third cinema work, however, these techniques are neither overbearing nor didactic and they are even potentially pleasurable. The one classic third cinema moment, when a man shouts into a bullhorn “Hay que luchar para tener una historia” [You have to fight to have history] is mediated by its brief passing and distant location. If the opening of Pizza, birra y faso is frenetic in ways that Geoffrey Kantaris reads as symptomatic of postmodern time–space compression, then the opening of Bolivia is slow.62 The opening has two sections: an interview between Freddy and the diner owner where he will eventually work and images of a televised soccer game between Bolivia and Argentina. In both segments the use of sound is key: in the first segment the interview takes place against images of the tools of labor and the workspace that will soon be Freddy’s. Images of Freddy and Enrique are absent, replaced by inanimate objects, among them especially a clock that will mark the repressive time of labor, and the knives and other implements that Freddy will use in his work. This contrast makes an especially powerful point about the biopolitics of neoliberalism, since to a certain extent the objects have more value than the people who use them—a point emphasized by the image of the “help wanted” sign that is posted again at the end of the film after Freddy is murdered. The viewer knows that it will only be moments before another immigrant appears to take

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the murdered Freddy’s place and use the objects that had been his to work with only a day before. The second segment establishes another value system that will affect Freddy’s life—that of Argentine nationalism specifically as it is cultivated through sports and media culture. We see televised images of a soccer game between Argentina and Bolivia as it is broadcast for Argentine viewers. The sportscasters refer to the Bolivian defense as weak and desperate, displaying the types of traditional hypernationalism that accompanies these types of games. This opening would come off as heavy-handed if it weren’t for the musical backdrop, a song by the widely popular Bolivian group Kjarkis. The song, aptly titled “Bolivia,” is similarly nationalistic, using in this case Andean instruments and rhythms to back up lyrics that idolize the Bolivian nation. The effect is again subtle, but no less powerful. Freddy may be entering a world of Argentine hypernationalism, racism, and capitalist exploitation, but he is entering it with his own nationalist baggage. Even though the music plays a counterpoint to the sportscaster’s commentary, the song is overshadowed by the images of the soccer game—a point that suggests that while both Freddy and the Argentines are nationalists, there is a power differential between them that will have violent consequences. It is also noteworthy that the first image of Freddy is of his back as the diner owner and a customer refer to Peru as a Central American country. The film sets up a link between Freddy and the Argentines of the diner, but it also clearly marks Freddy’s difference and vulnerability. As Page explains, “with an ignorance bred of arrogance, the Argentine bar owner and customers continually misaddress Freddy as Peruvian or Paraguayan; Enrique mistakes Peru for a Central American country and assumes that Freddy won’t know how to operate the television remote control.”63 As evidenced by these opening segments, these films use a sparse aesthetic to capture the Argentine economic crisis. Avoiding moralizing, these films allowed viewers to consider the ethical dilemmas and political problems caused by the neoliberal era. In Pizza, birra, faso, the poor, disaffected youths decide that their best option is a heist. A decision the viewer knows is doomed even before it starts. We witness the real lack of choices before the gang, and we witness their predictable demise. Similarly Freddy is doomed before his face is even framed by the camera. Bolivia makes it clear that he is bare life, disposable and forgettable. Freddy is also completely alienated by the bigoted Argentine community he enters that refuses to recognize his common humanity and shared

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economic plight. While the characters can’t make these connections, the film does not allow the viewer to ignore this reality. As with Pizza, birra, faso, Caetano does not offer an easy political fix. The ethical intervention of both films, such as it exists, is to insert these stories into the public narrative. What the public does with these stories is up to them. Was There Really a “New Argentine Cinema”? And Is Caetano Really Part of It? As I mentioned earlier, the boom of Argentine film ranged across a variety of styles and production values. There were Hollywood-like local-language productions, many of which were by Pol-Ka Productions, which was founded in 1994 by Argentine heartthrob Adrián Suar, and Patagonik projects, which was founded in 1996. Both companies received funding from multinational media conglomerates such as Disney and Grupo Clarín. There were also the films of the established auteurs such as Eliseo Subiela, Marcelo Piñeyro, Luis Puenzo, and others, who were often favored for state support. The common feature of the NAC was its connection to a group of new directors who all worked within low-budget models and created films of great aesthetic interest in the mid-1990s. The group included Caetano, Pablo Trapero, Lucrecia Martel, Daniel Burman, and Martín Rejtman, who all directed their first features in roughly the same timeframe. There was considerable critical energy surrounding the idea that these directors had managed to launch filmmaking careers in the midst of a major financial crisis. Page refers to “a renaissance in Argentine cinema” based on accolades, prizes, and other forms of critical praise: “That national production should show such a dramatic increase—from fourteen feature films in 1994 to sixty-six in 2004—is remarkable; that it should do so at a time of severe economic crisis is quite extraordinary.”64 But Page’s numbers are not limited to the experimental films of the NAC—those increased production numbers referred to the full range of cinema choices at the time. The reality is that most scholars that focus their analysis on the NAC have a difficult time drawing the line between the “truly” independent directors. Would one include Lucía Puenzo, whose father was already an established member of the film elite? Does Fabián Bielinsky get included, since his Nueve reinas (Nine Queens, 2000) depicted the economic crisis through a con? Usually neither Puenzo nor Bielinsky are in the group

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despite launching careers in roughly the same timeframe, because their films had higher production values and better funding. Thus, the films that are most often lauded as launching a new era in Argentine filmmaking share a similar low-budget aesthetic. As Page explains it, “the major success of films made during the Crisis lay, however, in their ability to make aesthetic virtue out of economic necessity.”65 Such shared conditions of production led Argentine scholar Aguilar to note: “Thus, although it is true that there are profound differences within the poetics of the new cinema, from other perspectives it is absolutely justifiable to point out that a new creative regime was constituted through the movies of recent years and that this regime could be denominated, without hesitation, ‘the new Argentine cinema.’”66 But now, with almost 20-year hindsight, it is worth asking if this “regime” really existed. Unlike the NLAC, the directors of the NAC did not embrace each other’s work, did not write essays and manifestos to call for a new aesthetic, and perhaps even more importantly, many of them did not continue to create gritty, low-budget films that focused on the marginalized, once their careers were more established and they had other funding options. Both Rejtman and Martel were experimental, artistic directors who have continued to maintain a similar aesthetic mode. In another trajectory, as I’ll explain in the next section, Trapero moved toward higher-budget productions with similar sorts of social-­ issue story lines. But Caetano, the one director most associated with the NAC, completely abandoned anything resembling the project of the NAC. This leads Jens Andermann, who also wrote his book with the benefit of hindsight, to describe the NAC as a “critical fiction.”67 Early on, Caetano did indeed seem committed to politically inflected filmmaking. He followed Bolivia with the well-received western-inspired Un oso rojo and later with Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an Escape, 2006), which offered a gritty view of a group of young detainees during the dictatorship coordinating an escape. In reference to Bolivia, Caetano remarked: “Estamos viviendo un panorama desperanzador. La impotencia económica, la crisis que estamos sufriendo, se traduce también en mi película, pero no por eso perdió su grosor dramático” [We are living a hopeless panorama. Economic impotence, the crisis we are suffering, appears in my film, but it didn’t lose its dramatic weight because of it].68 But later in that same interview Caetano revealed another side that was less purist: “También me interesaría hacer televisión, ficción sobre todo, una miniserie o un telefilme . . . Lo bueno que tiene la televisión es que

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la ve muchísima gente” [I would also be interested in working in television, fiction above all, a miniseries or a made-for-TV movie. The good thing about television is that so many people watch it].69 Over time, Caetano increasingly turned away from the idea of using film to represent a social reality and he became increasingly caustic. In one interview he stated: “Creo que somos más famosos por baratos que por otra cosa” [I think we’re more famous for being cheap than for anything else].70 He later explained “yo me metí en el cine porque me divertía filmar. Ahora no me divierto. No sé qué película hacer con el país así. ¿Una comedia? Me cagarían a tiros. ¿Una película realista para retratar la miseria de la gente? Paso. Además, hicieron bolsa la industria del cine. Y a mí lo único que me interesa es ser popular” [I got involved in cinema because I liked filming. Now it’s not fun for me. I don’t know what film to make with the country like this. A comedy? They’d shoot me. A realistic film to depict the misery of the people? I pass. What’s more, the film industry has to scrounge. The only thing that interests me is to be popular].71 In 2007, Caetano directed an episode of Playboy TV called “Sexo Seguro” [safe sex]. In an interview about that project he explained that it was a way to play with his own fantasies, “Quién no querría en algún momento de su vida filmar una porno?” [Who, in any moment of his life, wouldn’t want to film a porno?].72 By the time I arrived in Buenos Aires in February 2013 to research the state of the NAC, it was clear that Caetano had left anything resembling a political filmmaking project behind. His newest film Mala (Evil Woman, 2013) was in theaters and scholars who had previously written about the power of his work were calling the film “verdaderamente mala” [really bad].73 The film had four soap-opera-styled women interchanging in the same role as a female assassin. Including gratuitous scenes of heroin-induced female masturbation, there was nothing in the film that had any connection whatsoever to the gritty filmmaking of Pizza, birra, faso or Bolivia. This, of course, does not mean that Caetano’s early work is not indicative of filmmaking connected to the Argentine crisis. Nor does it mean that his early films don’t give us valu­ able insight into the effects of neoliberalism on Argentine society. But it does suggest that critics and scholars may have reified a moment and imagined an aesthetic bond that was more due to economic necessity than to cinematic ideals. Research by Carolina Rocha helps put the NAC in perspective. She reports that Pizza, birra, faso attracted only 101,709 spectators and

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Bolivia drew a mere 52,272 spectators to the theater in Argentina.74 In fact, she shows that the 13 most-watched films of the NAC collectively attracted 1.5 million spectators or an average of about 115,000 spectators per film. Trapero’s El bonaerense had the highest spectators of the group at 215,784. This data leads Rocha “to question Joanna Page’s assertion that New Argentine Cinema films ‘are consciously produced as much for an international market as a domestic one.’”75 She also points out that Bolivia received considerable scholarly attention despite attracting very few viewers, a fact that is almost entirely absent from any critical assessment of the film. The lack of viewers does not mean that the film is not of aesthetic interest, but it does call into question its ability to make a socially meaningful statement if it didn’t reach Argentine society in any significant way. If these films are not seen in their local contexts, how can they be lauded as redefining social identity? The dissonance between the critical attention to these films and their limited access to the public they purport to represent is the same problem that plagued the NLAC. Too often the independent filmmakers have complained that their films are not seen because the system does not permit it, but there is mounting evidence to suggest that in the case of these newer directors that is not entirely true. As Tables 5.1 and 5.2 show, there is a significant discrepancy between the total number of national films that hit theaters in a given year and the number of spectators these films attract. As a general trend the market share for releases is larger than the national market share of spectators. Perhaps more importantly we can note upticks in both total national films released to theaters and total spectators for national films. But the fact that in 2015 over 40% of the films in theaters were national but they only drew just over 14% is noteworthy. At a very simple level this data does suggest that the perception that national films don’t get into theaters is simply not true. Rather, the reality is that national films don’t draw spectators in a corollary fashion to Hollywood. The lack of viewers for the NAC films is hotly contended with many directors and producers faulting the system. And while it is true that the question of the total number of screens where a film appears and the continuity of projection alongside the marketing and advertising budgets for nationals films are major issues that can and do affect the total number of spectators that will attend a film, the issue of why certain films bomb at the box office is not simply a question of independent cinema being marginalized by the market. Argentine laws are some of the most

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Table 5.1  Total films released compared with Argentine national films released. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics and Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisualesa Year

Total films released

Total national films

Percentage of national films (%)

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

117 178 178 172 214 257 254 226 202 221 231 245 252 265 290 279 299 329 340 390 404 428

13 8 24 37 28 35 38 45 37 46 54 65 58 68 71 77 84 128 146 167 172 182

11.11 4.49 13.48 21.51 13.08 13.61 14.96 19.91 18.31 20.81 23.37 26.53 23.01 25.66 24.48 27.59 28.09 38.90 42.94 42.82 42.57 42.52

aBased on data from “Spectators,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed March 1, 2017, http:// data.uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx# and “Anuario de la Industria de Cine, 2009,” Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, accessed March 1, 2017, http://fiscalizacion.incaa.gov.ar/images/ Anuarios/Anuario_2009.pdf.

protectionist in the region and by 2004 Argentina had passed a new law stipulating a “continuity average,” which obliges exhibitors to keep national films in theaters if they have between 6 and 25% capacity that week.76 As Rocha notes, Argentine film reviewers in La Nación, Clarín, Página 12, and Ámbito Financiero—the most widely circulated and significant newspapers in Argentina—strongly supported the work of the NAC directors.77 Moreover, these directors won a considerable number of international awards in Latin America and Europe. These awards and the success of these films at international film festivals attracted further investment in future projects of these directors. But those efforts did

288  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 5.2  Argentina—spectator data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, Sistema de Información Cultural de la Argentina, and Cinenacional.coma Year

Total spectators (in thousands)

Total for national films (in thousands)

Percentage of national films (%)

1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

21,348 25,623 32,400 31,800 33,500 31,300 31,800 33,300 44,508 37,427 35,757 34,303 34,350 32,662 38,448 42,608 47,321 48,466 45,819 52,126

1,699 3,843 4,212 4,770 5,933 3,756 3,247 3,064 5,853 4,659 4,185 3,367 4,056 5,116 3,555 3,497 4,629 7,488 8,176 7,553

7.96 15 13 15 17.71 12 10.21 9.2 13.15 12.45 11.70 9.82 11.81 15.66 9.25 8.21 9.78 15.45 17.84 14.49

aData for the years of 1996–2013 derived from Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha, eds. New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). Other data in the table from “UIS Statistics,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed February 9, 2017, http://data. uis.unesco.org/Index.aspx#; “Anuario de la Industria de Cine, 2009,” Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, accessed March 1, 2017, http://fiscalizacion.incaa.gov.ar/images/Anuarios/ Anuario_2009.pdf; “Estadísticas Culturales,” Sistema de Información Cultural de la Argentina, accessed February 9, 2017, http://sinca.cultura.gov.ar/sic/estadisticas/; and “El Cine Argentino,” Cinenacional.com, accessed February 9, 2017, http://www.cinenacional.com/.

not reach the local audiences. For Rocha “the lack of a sizable national audience seems to be the weakness of the NAC.”78 Rocha shows that, in general, the local public prefers films with a less heavy aesthetic. Rocha points out that the films that have failed most often at the box office are precisely the same ones analyzed the most by scholars.79 Rocha further notes that the lack of audience for these films has led to debates about accountability, since these films receive state funds to support Argentine cinema and yet they don’t succeed in reaching an Argentine audience.

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Falicov further points out that the rise of the Argentine blockbuster may seem an aesthetic affront but that these films have, in fact, opened up the Argentine public to the idea of watching national films: “Although advocates for Argentine art cinema have complained about the new blockbuster phenomenon, this new presence has helped to expand the somewhat reified notion of what is defined as ‘Argentine cinema.’ This has helped draw in audiences who ordinarily would have dismissed national cinema as inferior to US filmed entertainment.”80 The higher production values and slicker look of these films has drawn in a public who then may be inclined to think more favorably about going to see another Argentine film in the future. And yet, Gustavo Aprea notes that the question of audience in Argentina is complex since there is not one single model of a typical spectator that could consume films about national issues.81 What is of interest is the way that some filmmakers take a hostile view of the distribution and exhibition system, but at heart they are also hostile toward their intended audiences who are not choosing to see their films. In an interview in 2013, Caetano complained about his difficulty attracting an audience for Mala but then he went on to confess that he himself rarely supports national films by going to see them in theaters: “No, no tuve tiempo. Estoy yendo poco al cine. Eso habla mal de mí. De lo nuevo veo poco, no me atrae mucho lo nuevo” [No, I didn’t have time. I’m not going to the movies very often. This speaks poorly of me. Of the new films I see little; the new films don’t interest me much].82 This of course is the greatest irony of Caetano’s career. He confesses that the newer films don’t interest him, but then seems surprised that his own films don’t interest others. At a simple level this lack of solidarity with his fellow filmmakers is a sign of one of the greatest differences between the so-called NAC and the NLAC.

Pablo Trapero: Indie or Industry? Andermann calls on us to look beyond the binary of independent auteur and industrial auteur to think through the importance of middlebrow films.83 And yet Falicov rightly notes that within Argentina there is a real perceived gap between industrial auteurs and independent filmmakers.84 The work of Pablo Trapero offers an excellent opportunity to think through this issue. Trapero seems to have found a way to walk the tightrope between the aesthetic value of the NAC and the commercial appeal

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of industrial cinema. As Andrea del Rio explains in a recent article that covers Trapero’s 2015 release, El Clan (The Clan, 2015), Trapero’s success is exceptional because his crude portrait of everyday violence has not confined him to the cult circuit that tends to plague auteurs. She says he was one of the few that has managed to break spectator records and earn prizes at international festivals.85 By looking at two films that signal his changing commercial appeal, El bonaerense (2002) and Elefante blanco (White Elephant, 2012), this section analyzes how the transition to a more commercial aesthetic affects Trapero’s ability to make films of social significance. The trajectory of Trapero’s career also allows us to trace economic and political shifts in Argentina since the crisis. Trapero’s first film, Mundo grúa (Crane World, 1999), was released after the passage of the 1994 film law and on the dawn of the economic crisis. Its low-budget feel was both a necessity and an aesthetic choice. His second film, El bonaerense, was released in 2002 and straddled the economic crisis. Made under the difficult economic conditions of the crisis, the film then had an unexpected economic break when it hit theaters in 2002, just as the peso–dollar convertibility plan was dropped. Rocha notes that when the Argentine peso was delinked from the dollar, movie ticket prices dropped by 30%, a fact that may have played a role in helping El bonaerense draw over 200,000 spectators.86 Thus, the economic crisis had unexpected economic benefits for the Argentine film industry. Not only did ticket prices drop, but so too did production costs. By 2003, Argentine films represented over 20% of the total theatrical releases for that year and that number has only risen. In 2002, as President Eduardo Duhalde ordered the repeal of the Convertibility Law, he also granted INCAA financial autonomy and increased the budget by approximately 8 million pesos, or $2.2 million.87 This means that at exactly the same time that the Argentine economy was heading for a tailspin, the Argentine film industry was actually on an uptick. The impact of this disconnect cannot be overstated. More money was invested, production costs were lower, and theater tickets were more afford­ able at the exact same time that Argentina itself was suffering a severe crisis. In addition to the economic crisis, Argentines suffered an identity crisis, as the nation had to deal with its fall from regional superiority and imagined ties to Europe. This meant that ironically there were national resources available to help support films about the national crisis. Just as the nation itself was undergoing redefinition, the state-supported films reflected that process.

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Another significant shift in this time period was that Jorge Coscia replaced José Miguel Onaindia as the director of the INCAA until 2005.88 Coscia, a graduate of the INCAA film school and an experienced film director, implemented a number of changes that advanced the Argentine film industry. Coscia helped recuperate the autonomy of INCAA, he implemented the screen quota and the continuity law, and he focused on helping to open INCAA theaters throughout the country and abroad. As Falicov notes, by the end of 2003 the INCAA had opened more than ten theaters outside of Buenos Aires in the provinces and they had opened theaters in Europe, hoping to help attract audiences from the provinces and abroad.89 Coscia was also instrumental in signing coproduction agreements with Spain, France, and Italy and in working on distribution agreements with other Latin American nations.90 In addition, Coscia spearheaded the investment of INCAA funds across a range of aesthetic projects, no longer reserving INCAA funds for only art house fare. Falicov points out that state support took place across the Argentine film industry even in the case of private production companies like Pol-Ka, Aries, Patagonik, and Argentina Sono Film.91 Trapero’s films benefited from the opening up of these funding practices. Mundo grúa had funding from Hubert Bals and from INCAA. El bonaerense had resources from Ibermedia, INCAA, Pol-Ka, and the French CNC. Elefante blanco had support from INCAA, Patagonik, Trapero’s production company Matanza, and also from Spanish and French television, TVE and Canal+ respectively. Over his career Trapero has expanded the financial sources of support he has for his films, but in each case he has had support from INCAA. Perhaps most importantly, Trapero’s recent films may have European sources of support but they all take up stories that have deeply national ties. El bonaerense In 1996, Eduardo Duhalde, then mayor of Buenos Aires, referred to the Buenos Aires police as “la mejor del mundo” and set off a round of critique. Aguilar states in his critical study of El bonaerense ([The Buenos Aires policeman], 2002) that at the time Trapero was preparing his film the cases of abuse and “gatillo fácil” [easy triggers] were widespread.92 When Trapero announced the subject of his second film, Aguilar explains, everyone expected him to focus on the corruption of the Buenos Aires police. But instead, he notes, Trapero chose a completely

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different angle: “La película muestra un caso de ‘gatillo fácil’ pero desde el punto de vista de la policía y no de las víctimas” [the film shows a case of an “easy trigger” but from the point of view of the police, and not of the victims].93 Trapero’s film doesn’t have a “good cop” and he doesn’t focus the film from the point of view of victims of police brutality. He even avoids digging into a crisis of conscience for his protagonist: his protagonist’s interior thoughts are mostly inaccessible to the audience. Rather than focus his film on stark and obvious ethical rubrics of good and evil, the film centers on the institution of the police force itself and on how average men are interpellated into it. As Aguilar puts it, by the time of El bonaerense the public was well aware of the corruption and transgressions of the police force and they were aware of the political power structures that allowed them to operate outside the law. What they were not seeing was the way that the ­institution worked. James Scorer explains that as Trapero was preparing his film, “La Bonaerense [the Buenos Aires police force] had become an organization more preoccupied with running itself as a private business than with protecting the citizens of Buenos Aires.”94 Already implicated in human rights violations associated with the dictatorship of 1976–1983, the police force of the 1990s revealed the social impact of neoliberal economics, which included reduced oversight and state support. Scorer notes that Trapero’s film was shot during the crisis of 2001, which allowed Trapero to create a direct link between the state’s financial difficulties and its inability to police and protect its citizens.95 Under Menem, state investment in public services, including the police, drastically dropped, while foreign investment was encouraged and social services were privatized. As Trapero’s film shows us, the police force literally had to finance its own operations through criminal activity. Moreover as Scorer points out, El bonaerense illustrates the fact that “the police’s apparent ‘independence’ is only possible precisely because of its fundamental tie to the state: it can only act with impunity because its violence is ultimately sanctioned by the state”96—a theme that reappears in Trapero’s 2015 film, El Clan. To capture the ethical consequences of a state that profits from citizens rather than protects them, Trapero avoids obvious moralizing. Trapero does not offer viewers a hero and he does not offer a clear path to make everything right. This way, according to Aguilar, the film is far more than a movie of political denunciation: “es una historia que utiliza el realismo. . . . de un modo muy estilizado y con una gran capacidad para observer cómo un hombre cualquiera puede

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transformarse en miembro de una corporación funesta y en una figura escandalosa que la realidad ha vuelto possible: el policía delincuente” [it is a story that uses realism in a very stylized way and with a great capacity to observe how an everyman can transform into a member of a terrible corporation and become a scandalous figure that reality has made possible: the delinquent police].97 One of the key features to the story of Enrique Mendoza, “Zapa,” the protagonist of El bonaerense, is that he enters into the police force because he is accused of committing a crime. He lives in a village outside of the city and is a locksmith. One day his boss sends him off to help two men break into a safe—but Zapa is unaware that he is committing a crime. After the men take off with the money, Zapa is arrested. To avoid going to prison, his uncle arranges for Zapa to move to the city and join the police force. As Aguilar notes: “Zapa no entra en la policía por vocación o porque quiere hacer cumplir la ley, sino porque cometió un delito y entrar a la policía es la única manera de zafar” [Zapa doesn’t enter the police force by choice nor because he wants to enforce the law, but because he commits a crime and entering the police force is the only way to get out of punishment].98 Besides the avoidance of clearly marked ethical or unethical characters, Trapero’s approach refuses to offer a bird’s eye view that gives the viewer a vantage point from which to judge. As Aguilar puts it, “the ethical character does not speak from within the story but has the privilege of being able to judge it from without. . . . In Trapero’s El bonaerense there is no character through whom a judgment can be passed on the actions of the police.”99 Rather Trapero’s film conveys the international crisis caused by neoliberalism through an intense focus on the local. The space of the story feels tight, just as the shots are almost never long enough to offer viewers much context. In fact, in the one tense shoot-out that Zapa participates in we never see the criminals shooting at him at all. Page explains, though, that this tight focus on the local does not mean that films like El bonaerense avoid engaging with the larger global problem of how neoliberal economics demands that states withdraw support from their citizens. She explains that in these films there is a breakdown between the “nation” and the “state”—where the state has increasingly become a tool of international influence: “Crucially, the nation is not associated here with the state but is most often invoked in criticism of a state in cahoots with global neoliberalism, which has sold off the country’s assets and burdened it with intolerable levels of debt.”100

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Trapero’s approach to capturing the effects of corruption, neoliberalism, and cronyism on the police force is to look from the inside out, focusing on the story of how an outsider to the force is initiated into it involuntarily. Scorer notes that Trapero departs from standard formulas for representing the police in Argentine films.101 Rather than depict them negatively or as entirely absent, the film takes a far more complex view of the police force. Aguilar notes that the film intersects at least three main genres: the crime film, the police procedural, and the bildungsroman. The trick, according to Aguilar, is that none of the facile moralizing of those genres is available in this film: “If it is necessary to turn to approximate models that are incompatible with each other, such as the police procedural and the crime film, it is because the reading against the grain of these genres explains the paradoxical initiation that determines Zapa’s entry into the institution.”102 Zapa enters an institution designed to combat crime by committing one. But he is not the classic corrupt policeman. His entire identity refuses to follow traditional scripts that identify forces of good and evil in the crime world. As Zapa rises in the police force, having earned the trust of his superior, Gallo, he is faced with a chance to get revenge on the man who set him up back in his hometown. The “Pole” who had initially contracted him to open the safe finds him in Buenos Aires and asks him to help in a robbery. The opening allows Zapa a chance to ask Gallo if he will help him betray the Pole and take the money. Gallo agrees. But things don’t go as Zapa plans. As Gallo kills the Pole, Zapa looks at him incredulously and Gallo asks him, “You trust me, don’t you?” then Gallo shoots Zapa in the leg, maiming him but giving him a chance to go up in the ranks. As Aguilar explains, “Officer Mendoza [Zapa] wanted to get revenge on his ex-‘boss’ (as he calls him) but he was not able to see that his actual ‘boss’ could be worse.”103 Zapa has ascended in the police force just as he has diminished physically and morally. The last shot of the film shows Zapa walking back toward Buenos Aires after visiting with friends and family, limping, wounded physically and emotionally. Despite the fact that Zapa cuts an unconventional mold for a policefilm “hero” he does evoke sympathy on the part of the audience. While we are not privy to his internal monologue, the sense that he has become a pawn in a larger system that he can’t control is quite clear. The film may not offer an easy moralizing framework, but it is not apathetic about the corruption and crime in the police force, nor is it unconcerned about how the sequence of events took a gentle locksmith from the countryside

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and forced him into a violent urban context absent almost all meaningful human connections. Nevertheless, the film frustrated many left-oriented viewers who were disappointed in its lack of militant spirit. As Aguilar notes, it was met with criticism at the Havana Film Festival when critics and spectators “expressed dissatisfaction with a narration that at no point offers the comfort of a condemnation of what takes place.”104 This, of course, is the complicated ambivalent nature of political filmmaking in the global neoliberal era. For NAC directors the moralizing of the 1960s and 1970s seems overwrought and didactic. Instead, these filmmakers offer viewers a chance to enter their films’ stories and then form their own views. As Falicov, Page, and Aguilar all note the films associated with the NAC refuse to preach to the spectator and offer closure. As Aguilar puts it, “this is one of the points in which the new cinema has distanced itself most radically from earlier film: in its relationship to the spectator. Open endings; the absence of emphasis and of allegories; more ambiguous characters; the rejection of thesis films; a rather erratic trajectory in the story; zombie characters immersed in what happens to them; the omission of national, ­contextualizing information; the rejection of the identitarian and political imperatives—all those decisions that, to a greater or lesser extent, can be detected in these films account for the opacity of their stories.”105 In the end, though, these multiple interpretive possibilities may, in fact, open up the exact sort of opportunity for ethical reflection that the viewer needs. Certainly Trapero himself imagined his film as a political act meant to provoke a productive critical response in the viewer. In an interview with Aguilar about the film, Trapero explains why he wanted to make El bonaerense: “Yo creo que el cine es un hecho político. Todos somos personas políticas en nuestra vida cotidiana. Y hacer cine es un hecho político independientemente de que hagas cine de denuncia, de arte o de entretenimiento o de cualquier variante que elijas. Yo interpreto el cine como una herramienta de movilidad social y por eso pretendo que mis filmes ­cumplan cierta función” [I think that film is a political act. We all are political people in our daily lives. And to make film is a political act independent from making a film that denounces, or one that’s art or entertainment or whatever variant you choose. I interpret film as a tool of social mobility and I hope my films fulfill a certain function].106 Trapero then goes on to explain that for him the idea is not to create a militant cinema made for those that think like him; rather, he tries to make films that have a social impact and that reach an audience wider than just the intellectual elite.107

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At the heart of this revised political aesthetic is also the desire to create films with the ability to marshal an affective response in the viewer. While the viewer is not offered an easy melodramatic script in Trapero’s films, there is a clear desire to build an affective connection between the protagonist and the viewer. This process was even true in the sparse Mundo grúa that follows the efforts of Rulo, a middle-aged man, as he tries to find work. Rulo is an immensely likable character who has a deep affection for the machines and tools that he uses both during and after work. Zapa similarly shows great affection for the tools of his trade, yet seems completely alienated from the gun he is expected to carry as a policeman. While Rulo is compelled to force his teenage son to move out and move on, he is a kind soul who clearly derives his identity from his affective relationships. Zapa is more detached and his most intense human connection is the sexual one he has with fellow police officer Mabel. Their last sexual encounter, while perhaps the most emotional moment we see from Zapa, borders on rape, and calls into question Zapa’s ability to have a meaningful connection with anyone. In a sense, though, the distinction between Zapa and Rulo lies in their respective age and the fact that Rulo hails from an earlier pre-neoliberal moment. Much of his identity in Mundo grúa is connected to his own youth as a bass player in a band that had a well-known hit song. As he continues to seek work, there is a deep nostalgia for the past in Rulo unavailable to the younger Zapa who has not known adulthood under anything other than the alienating effects of neoliberalism. Zygmunt Bauman has diagnosed the social effects of neoliberalism on collective sensibilities, describing them as “the passage from the ‘solid’ to a ‘liquid’ phase of modernity.” For Bauman “liquid modernity” means that “social forms (structures that limit individual choices, institutions that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behaviour) can no longer (and are not expected) to keep their shape for long.”108 It also heralds the “separation and pending divorce of power and politics.”109 As he describes it, “much of the power to act effectively that was previ­ ously available to the modern state is now moving away to the politically uncontrolled global (and in many ways extraterritorial) space.”110 And yet, he explains that the political ability to decide the direction and purpose of action remains local: “Abandoned by the state, those functions become a playground for the notoriously capricious and inherently unpredictable market forces and/or are left to the private initiative and care of individuals.”111 The third outcome is that the withdrawal of state

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support for communal networks means that collective action is deprived of its past attraction. This transition describes, for instance, Zapa’s indifference to the protest that passes by him as he is commuting to work. Human connections are increasingly temporary and “individual exposure to the vagaries of commodity-and-labour markets inspires and promotes division, not unity.”112 While Rulo still holds the affective bonds of the working class, Zapa is completely disconnected from them. With a tight focus on the ways that power influences the lives of everyday Argentines outside of a larger grand political scheme, Trapero’s first two films mirrored much of the gritty attention to neoliberal forms of alienation found in Caetano’s first two films. Beatriz Urraca explains that Trapero’s and Caetano’s early films “examine the consequences of displacement among the marginalized and disenfranchised working class in the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area.”113 She also notes that the effects of globalization have meant that Buenos Aires now has more visible links to other Latin American metropoles and that the economic crisis forced Argentines to confront a breakdown in their imag­ ined exceptional ties to Europe. Urraca further points out that one of the key shifts in these films is that they reveal that globalization and modernization have challenged the national and the individual as the “axes around which identities are fixed.”114 One of the constants in these films is the question of the role of the city itself in defining the possibilities for human existence. From the taxis and diners of Caetano’s first two films to the cranes and crime-filled streets of Trapero’s first films the city refuses the characters any sort of nostalgic connection with a larger identity. As we will see in my section on Campanella, his work reverses that trend and imagines the city as the place through which collective communal resistance might form. But for the edgier directors associated with the NAC, such seemingly sappy affect was unavailable. Social-Issue Films Go Big In his first films Trapero was able to create an affective cinema that does not moralize or romanticize—and it’s a mode that he develops in his later work as well. Unlike Caetano, who eventually abandoned any sort of meaningful cinema project entirely, Trapero has continued to make films that offer viewers a socially complex story within an aesthetic that has become increasingly more commercial and less gritty. After El bonaerense, Trapero released Familia rodante (Rolling Family, 2004), a road

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trip film where a family travels to a wedding. Trapero’s next two films, Leonera (Lion’s Den, 2008) and Carancho ([Vulture], 2010) returned to the edgy aesthetic of El bonaerense, but the overall style was increasingly more commercial in tone. What is interesting to note, though, is that these later films may have higher production values and may use a cin­ ematic mode that is more crowd pleasing, but they continue to hold to a filmmaking project invested in using films to convey stories of social significance. Urraca describes Trapero as a “star director with a reputation built on socially conscious dramas.”115 He is also one of the few directors of the NAC to have thrived in the commercial filmmaking world. Thus, his career seems to embody all of the deep contradictions that tend to frame the way that we understand politically progressive filmmaking in Latin America. He is commercial and socially conscious. He receives international funding and awards, but remains very committed to telling stories with local resonance. As I’ve argued throughout this book, the trend in film scholarship has been to read these qualities as fundamentally oppositional. Trapero’s work, though, proves that those binary frameworks are in need of adjustment. In fact, Trapero’s later films have done more than just cover social problems; they have actually led to social change. Leonera tells the story of a mother who gives birth in prison and must raise her son in jail. The film led to a 2009 law that offered house imprisonment as an alternative for pregnant women and mothers of very young children. Carancho covers the story of ambulance chasers who exploit the suffering of their clients. Urraca explains that, “as a direct result of his depiction of the unscrupulous exploitation perpetrated by ambulance chasers in Carancho (2010), the anticarancho law was enacted one year later to protect accident victims from unethical lawyers.”116 What’s more, these films also led to robust public debate on these issues. In a certain sense they functioned as the ideal “film act” as envisioned by Argentine NLAC theorists and directors Getino and Solanas. Recall that they wrote that third cinema opposed the idea of “movies as shows” and instead favored the idea of a “film act” which would not allow the spectator to absorb images passively, but would rather change the way that the spectator engaged with the world after screening the film.117 While Trapero’s commercial aesthetic has virtually nothing in common with the third cinema aesthetic advanced by Getino and Solanas in their early work, the social impact of his films does, in fact, achieve much of what they envisioned for truly political cinema. The clear measurable impact of Trapero’s

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films, where a film actually leads to real social change in the form of new laws, goes a long way toward dismissing the classic knee-jerk response to ­larger-budget films that take up political themes. As Trapero explains it: “He tenido la suerte que en películas anteriores, la reacción ha ido más allá del cine. Tras mi última película se promulgó la ‘ley anti-Carancho’ y con ‘Leonera’ también salió una ley. Es muy estimulante saber que con cada la película la gente no sólo va a los cines sino que reflexionan sobre lo que acaban de ver. Me alegra que mis películas hayan provocado tanto debate” [I have had the luck that for my previous films, the reaction has gone beyond the theater. After my last film the “anti-Carancho” law was enacted and with Leonera a law also came out. It is very invigorating to know that with each film people don’t only go to the theaters, but they also reflect on what they have just seen. It makes me happy that my films have provoked so much debate].118 Trapero’s next project after Carancho, Elefante blanco, was his most ambitious to date. Made in the midst of the Kirchner years, the film reflects the way that Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) and later Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015), ushered in an era of Argentine politics, which were publicly antineoliberal but practically pro-business. As Arlene Dávila explains, the Kirchner governments offered the public antineoliberal rhetoric, which was purportedly aimed at reversing the social effects of Menem’s neoliberal reforms and rescuing the country’s economy. But Dávila notes that the rhetoric did not match their actual policies: “Kirchner’s policies have also been accompanied by a rise in entrepreneurial and consumption-based developments and by the continued privatization of natural resources, which have consolidated neoliberal class inequalities of the past.”119 Elefante blanco is a highly ambitious film that weaves together a series of major social issues and attempts to locate the current crisis within a longer history. The film takes its name from a major building project. What is referred to today as “El elefante blanco” began as a project to build a treatment center for tuberculosis. As is explained in the film, the project was the idea of Alfredo Palacios, known as the “first socialist legislator in Latin America.”120 It was started in 1935, but stalled in 1939 due to lack of funds after only building the skeleton of the building. The project was restarted in 1948 during the first presidency of Juan Perón. Perón sought to convert the building into the largest hospital in Latin America, but that effort stalled again in 1955. During the 1960s the neighborhood where the building is located grew in size and over

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time hundreds of economically stressed families took up residence inside the hollowed out building. Referred to as “Ciudad Oculta” [hidden city] or “Villa 15,” the building is located in one of the toughest slums in Buenos Aires. As the film makes clear, government after government has promised to improve the living conditions in villas like Ciudad Oculta, but in the end very little concrete happens. As reported in La Nación: “Las promesas de construcción de viviendas se sucedieron, gobierno tras gobierno, pero nadie se encargó de la urbanización de esa zona ni del ‘plan integral de viviendas’” [the promises of building apartments have come, government after government, but no one took charge of the urbanization of this zone, nor of a comprehensive housing project].121 In fact, rumor has it that the real energy was spent attempting to hide the neighborhood behind large walls when Buenos Aires hosted the World Cup in 1978, leading to the name of the villa: Ciudad Oculta [hidden city], a name made ironic by the fact that the looming husk of the abandoned hospital building could not be hidden. A film that centers on an abandoned social project that successive governments have been unable to address would have had enough material to offer a potent story about the ways that the state has repeatedly neglected to protect its citizens, but Trapero’s film layers in more to the core of the story. The film also recalls the legacy of Padre Carlos Mugica, who was referred to as a “cura villero” or “slum priest,” because he chose to live his life among the poor and was credited with modeling a form of engagement with struggling communities for other priests in the Catholic Church. Mugica, though, is far more than a socially engaged priest. He was also involved in internal political battles within the Peronist movement and was assassinated in 1974, shortly before Argentina was overtaken by a military dictatorship. As Hugo Vezzetti explains, Padre Mugica already had a very visible role in the public sphere well before Trapero began working on his film.122 The film is dedicated to Padre Mugica’s memory: “A la memoria del Padre Mugica, asesinado el 11 de mayo de 1974. Su crimen todavía no se ha esclarecido” [to the memory of Father Mugica, assassinated May 11, 1974. His crime still has not been solved].123 Mugica’s iconic figure is referenced throughout the film. His likeness is visible in the local chapel, his words are quoted during the film, and his picture is visible at various times. Elefante blanco does more, though, than link the successive failures to revive the social project of the Elefante blanco building to the unsolved murder of a socially committed priest; it also attempts

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to situate these crises in the present moment and a contemporary context. Throughout the film the main character, Padre Julián, references Mugica’s teachings and insights. At one point he tells his parishioners that things are different than they were in Mugica’s era. Not only are there more people living in the villa, but the violence they endure is different as well. Julián then tells everyone that while the violence might be different, the love that guides them is the same. While that sort of line might seem sappy and a bit overdone, the film avoids painting the priests as perfect. The film has three main characters: Padre Julián—a figure that takes after the legacy of Mugica, Padre Nicolás—a young Belgian priest, whom Julián rescues from a massacre in the Amazons and brings to Argentina to help him, and Luciana—a social worker who ends up in a sexual relationship with Nicolás. While the figure of Padre Julián depicts a priest who has moved well beyond traditional roles, and while Luciana works tirelessly for the community, even the main characters are complicated. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Julián has brought Nicolás to Ciudad Oculta because he hopes he will take over for him when he dies. (We learn in the opening sequence that he has a terminal illness.) But as Julián is working to train Nicolás, it is clear that the larger systems he is fighting require more than dedicated, selfless people committed to helping the villa acquire a basic level of dignity. Much of the film shows Julián fighting with senior members of the church who come up with endless excuses for why he can’t get the money to finish a housing project in the community. The endless battles have exhausted Julián and his frustrations are clear. At one point he ­confesses to Nicolás: “Estoy cansado. Muy cansado. A veces tengo ganas de mandar a todos a la mierda. . . . Estoy lleno de ira. Estoy cada día más enojado. Tengo miedo. No quiero terminar odiando a todo el mundo” [I am tired. Very tried. Sometimes I want to tell everyone to go to hell. . . . I am filled with rage. I am angrier every day. I am afraid. I don’t want to end up hating the whole world]. Julián faces a terminal disease, an endless cycle of violence, and a battle with church authorities. While much of the film focuses on his extraordinary strength, determination, and compassion, he is not painted as a perfect hero. Nicolás, for his part, is not reflected as a hero either. Aside from his obvious transgression of sleeping with Luciana, he is also in a battle with his own ego. He is shown to be reluctant to listen to his mentor about how to navigate the complex world of the villa drug trade, a move that may be responsible for Julián’s later death. And he also seems reluctant to accept his mentor’s request to take

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over for him in the villa after he dies. Similar to Trapero’s earlier films, Elefante blanco does not offer a simple moral code and a clear division between good and evil. The flaws of the priests serve to humanize figures that would often otherwise be portrayed as saintly martyrs. Nevertheless the film came under a good deal of critique. Criticism of the film included the fact that it was shot in two villas—Ciudad Oculta and Villa 31—a fact that only those familiar with those neighborhoods would necessarily catch, but one that suggested to Guillermo Ravaschino that the film had a clear global audience in mind: “Llama un poco la atención que una película de 4 millones de dólares no haya reparado en semejante gaffe (¿habrá estado tan pensada en función del ‘mercado extranjero’?)” [It stands out a little that a 4 million-dollar film didn’t correct such a mistake (Have they focused so much on the foreign market?)].124 He goes on to criticize the film as an example of porno miseria that leaves out any meaningful political message. As he puts it: “De partidos políticos, ni hablar” [Political parties, forget about it]. Ravaschino also took offense at the role of well-known French actor Jérémie Renier in the role of Padre Nicolás—a nod, in his view, to the foreign investment in the film and one which had no logic within the plot. This, of course, is all a fairly classic line of criticism for a high-budget, foreign coproduced film that is shot in slums and attempts to raise attention to the public crisis of poverty. Ravaschino is certainly right that the continu­ ity of including iconic images from two villas could be disconcerting to local viewers—but he misses the idea that for the film these spaces are both literal and figurative. As Vezzetti explains, Elefante blanco references a number of film genres in ways reminiscent of Trapero’s work with El bonaerense. He notes its documentary-like style with hand-held camera work shot on location and with non-professional actors. He also notes the references to action crime films and police dramas, as seen in the scenes dealing with the drug trade. Padre Julián does die, after all, in a shoot-out with the police. Vezzetti further considers the story of the three main characters to have melodramatic components, but I’d argue that it would be more accurate to describe those elements as straight drama. The combination of these different genres, then, denies the viewer a predictable arc of storytelling. It also, though, reminds viewers that this is not a documentary; it is a stylized representation, one which, as Urraca points out, casts one of the most famous actors in Argentina, Ricardo Darín, in the role of Padre Julián.

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Urraca explains that the film directly led to a “rediscovery” of these shantytowns and sparked a flurry of articles on the social challenges facing the villas. She especially keys into the role that Darín played in using his celebrity to give interviews about his experience with the film and his hopes that it would spark productive change: “Many journalists explicitly sought to elicit Darín’s personal views about the slums based on his experiences filming there, an opportunity the actor did not squander. For example, he confessed that he would be satisfied if the film ‘genera un movimiento de sensibilización’ [generates a movement to increase awareness].”125 For Urraca, the appearance of all of these “extrafilmic texts” needs to be read as part of the film’s larger impact on Argentine public debate.126 Urraca further notes that there was a clear distinction between the public debate fostered by Elefante blanco in comparison with other high-profile films such as Ezio Massa’s Villa (2008, 2013), which went largely unnoticed.127 Elefante blanco didn’t just succeed in drawing attention to the social crisis in the villas; it was also a massive box office hit. After only two months it had been seen by over 700,000 Argentines and was the most successful national film that year.128 But the public impact of Elefante blanco goes further. One of the key components of the film is the fact that it is shot on location in Ciudad Oculta and that it used a lot of local residents in the film. While some would be quick to suggest that this practice took advantage of local residents, using them as cheap labor, interviews with them suggest otherwise: “Estaba sin trabajo y me eligieron para dos días y medio de rodaje. Mi hijo trabajó un día y le dieron $150 y me los regaló. Hasta a los bebés les pagaron; el barrio está recontento, se portaron rebien con nosotros” [I was out of work and they chose me for two and a half days of filming. My son worked one day and they gave him $150, which he gave to me. They even paid the babies; the neighborhood is happy, they treated us well].129 In the end, over 500 local residents were hired for the film, many of whom had never even seen a film in a theater. Trapero described the experience of filming on location as something that affected the professionals as well as the members of the community: “La filmación hizo que pasaran cosas dentro de la villa. Las mamás de algunos adolescentes nos decían que sus hijos hacía quince días que no consumían porque estaban enganchados con la película. Todos los que entramos allí salimos con algo. Fue una experiencia que nos dio mucho y es un proceso que recién empieza. Siento que la película va a generar muchas cosas más allá de lo cinematográfico”

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[Filming made things happen in the villa. Mothers of some ­adolescents told us that their children went 15 days without drinking because they were obsessed with the film. All of us who went there left with ­something. It was an experience that gave us a lot and it is a process that is just beginning. I feel that the film is going to generate a lot of things beyond the cinematographic].130 And, of course, he was right. While the film was not able to radically change the quality of life in the villas, it did lead to far greater attention to the need for sustainable living conditions in the villas and it brought the public project of Elefante blanco back into the public eye. A 2016 study of the Elefante blanco building noted the fact that neoliberal policies had vastly increased the populations in the villas. They noted that in the 1980s and 1990s—and, especially as a consequence of neoliberalism—the vulnerable neighborhoods of Buenos Aires returned to being inhabited by displaced workers as a result of the process of deindustrialization and work precariousness deployed by the state.131 The study also found that between 2007 and 2012 the population living inside the abandoned hospital project doubled: In 2012, the Department of Environmental Health estimated that around 200 families were residing in the vicinity of the building, in awful living conditions.132 By taking both the Elefante blanco building and the story of Padre Mugica as iconic references, Trapero’s film tries to show how the struggles connected to both of them continue in the present. Of interest is the fact that both the building and the story of the assassination of Mugica themselves cannot be contained within simplistic ethical frameworks. Political administrations on the left and the right have played a role in ignoring the needs of the people living in the villas. And Mugica was murdered due to internal fighting within the Peronists, which places his death outside of the traditional stories of human rights violations in Argentina, a fact Trapero emphasized in interviews.133 Thus, despite accusations that Trapero romanticized the issues depicted in the film, in actuality the film denies the viewer an easy ethical framework through which to judge events. Trapero explained that one of his goals with the film was to depict life in the villas outside of the conventional narratives found in the media. In an interview where he emphasized how important it had been for the crew to spend considerable time in Ciudad Oculta, he went on to say that “en la villa pasan muchas más cosas que las que muestran las noticias policiales. Hay que ver también que para mucha de la gente que está

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allí la villa significa progreso, porque vienen de lugares donde estaban peor” [A lot more happens in the villa than what appears in the news. For a lot of people that are there the villa means progress, because they came from places that were worse].134 This is why, for instance, there are many scenes of everyday life in Elefante blanco. In one scene just after the arrival of Padre Nicolás we see Padre Julián and the community working to help recover from a massive rainstorm. The images are of people working together in a way that is neither romanticized nor desperate. In another scene where Luciana and Nicolás are talking with youth from the community we hear a number of the young kids speak about why they like living in Ciudad Oculta. They talk openly about how they might be teased and ridiculed in school but still have a lot of pride in their neighborhood. These shots go beyond images of drug violence or tragic shots of misery and allow viewers to see a more complex picture of life in Ciudad Oculta. One of the core questions in the film is how it presents the moral dilemma of the poor living conditions in the villa. The film clearly condemns successive governments for not working to improve the quality of life for the inhabitants. And it takes a hard look at the leaders in the Catholic Church who refuse to see the crisis in Ciudad Oculta as urgent. In one scene, when Padre Julián is being chastised by the Bishop for pushing for help supporting the housing project, he yells in frustration: “en una situación como ésta no podemos ser solo sacerdotes” [in a situation like this we can’t only be priests]. Thus, the film dives into the blurred lines created by curas villeros [slum priests] who find their commitment to their community often to be stronger than their commitment to the institution of the church. But Trapero’s film takes a different angle than is normally seen in a film on this topic. While he condemns the state and the church, he doesn’t paint Julián as perfect and he doesn’t represent the community as simply poor victims. But more importantly, the film depicts Julián as a man who is literally deteriorating in the face of the constant struggles he has to wage. As his body declines and his spirit weakens, the film reflects the stress and anxiety produced by the neoliberal state. Each day is a fight and each day there are new forms of struggle. When members of one of the drug cartels tell Julián that they blame him for a snitch that led to a police raid, he becomes noticeably rattled. Later, as he is attempting to drive Monito, a young member of the drug gang, to the hospital, in an effort to save his life and to restore the community’s faith in him, he is shot and killed by the

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police. Trapero’s Julián battles Goliath and loses. Unlike Mugica, Julián is openly murdered. The culprits are visible. And unlike Mugica, Julián is not murdered due to political infighting. His death is simply a reminder that the state may not protect its citizens, but it will destroy any barriers to its biopolitical control of the population. The scene closes with a shot of Julián dead on the ground as police car lights reflect in his glasses. The reflected lights are a clear symbol that even priests are not immune from state violence. In this way the film captures the sense of fear and anxiety that accompanies the economic precarity caused by the neoliberal state. Arjun Appadurai has highlighted the way that the twenty-first century ushered in an era of fear and uncertainty. In Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Appadurai describes the negative effects of globalization. His claim is that globalization has not only affected politics, economics, and social organization; it has also had a deep effect on how people understand their relationships to one another and the world at large. For Appadurai the key dilemma is the rise of violence—state violence against the population, but also violence within communities.135 Trapero taps into this climate of fear in his film. Despite the faith of the priests and the social commitment of Luciana, there is a real sense that they are up against insurmountable odds. Even though Trapero conceived of the film as a uniquely local story, he later explained that he realized that the story had a far greater global resonance: “En el proceso de hacer la película y de acompañarla pude ver que esa realidad sucede en muchas ciudades. En esta etapa de crisis global, empieza a pasar en ciudades que uno no imaginaba. . . . En España, presentamos la p ­ elícula en estos barrios y se sintieron identificados. Yo pensaba que era un fenómeno más local y, tristemente, es algo mucho más universal” [In the process of making the film and accompanying it I could see that the same reality happens in a lot of cities. In this stage of global crisis, it begins to happen in cities that one couldn’t imagine. . . . In Spain, we showed the film in similar neighborhoods and they could identify with it. I thought that it was a more local phenomenon, but, sadly, it is something much more universal].136 One of the key points he makes is that the misery of Ciudad Oculta can be found in Spain, a reality that breaks down the old division between “first” and “third” worlds. Thus, the politics of the film depart from traditional third cinema aesthetics, but that does not mean that the film does not have a clear political goal of telling an entertaining story about important social issues.

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As Trapero puts it, “El cine es un hecho político: está en la calle, cuenta una historia, la gente la ve. No puede cambiar las cosas, pero puede provocar cambios” [Film is a political act: it is in the street, it tells a story, people see it. It can’t change things, but it can provoke change].137 Unlike the third cinema directors of the NLAC, Trapero argues that films are not responsible for social change, but they can provoke debates and spark actions that lead to it. He also departs from the NLAC in his open interest in appealing to his spectator’s emotions: “For me, a film story is mainly told through the emotional impact it causes on the audience that is listening and watching.”138 While Trapero openly appeals to the senses in an effort to make a film that moves his audience, Juan José Campanella relies on the deeply emotional aspects of melodrama to create films that reconnect his audience with a spirit of Argentine nationalism and a desire to rebuild the affective bonds of community.

Juan José Campanella: Affect and Neoliberalism Juan José Campanella is both the most successful director of the era of the NAC and the director least likely to be studied as an example of the NAC. Despite the fact that, as I’ve shown, there really was no coherent generation for filmmakers that made up the NAC, Campanella’s Hollywood style and access to larger budgets has meant that his films share none of the aesthetic components seen in the early, edgy films of the 1990s. While he made films in the same timeframe, his films are generally considered to be a whole other aesthetic project entirely and he is often categorized as an “industrial auteur.” I will argue, though, that ignoring the role of Campanella’s films in offering the Argentine public an opportunity to rethink Argentine identity in the era of global neoliberalism is a mistake. Rocha echoes my point: “While top-grossing films should not necessarily be equated with meaningful cultural productions—in fact, most of them are produced for the entertainment and consumption of local audiences—some of these top-grossing films such as Nine Queens, Son of the Bride and Moon of Avellaneda have effectively captured the zeitgeist of Argentine culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century and have been rightfully recognized for this achievement, both nationally and internationally.”139 In fact, Campanella’s films may well be the most significant in this regard, not only because of their ability to attract a wide audience, but also because of their creative blend of melodrama, comedy, and political critique. Andermann

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describes Campanella’s style as reminiscent of Frank Capra: “Campanella expertly wields elements of melodrama and comedy to forge a mode of social commentary at the same time as promising us that, however grave the problems society faces, they can still be emotionally resolved within a classical genre framework.”140 And yet, as he points out, Campanella’s genre framework includes comedic and realistic elements that complicate seeing these films as stereotypically generic. Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this book, Campanella may be the one internationally recognized Argentine director who openly explores the question of how globalization affects Argentine identity. Campanella was born in Buenos Aires and initially studied engineering until he dropped out of the program in 1980 and enrolled in NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. After he graduated from NYU he directed two films in the United States: The Boy Who Cried Bitch (1991) and Love Walked In (1997). He also worked extensively in US television, shooting episodes of Strangers with Candy, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, and 30 Rock. He was awarded two Daytime Emmy Awards (1995, 1997) for outstanding directing in HBO children’s specials in the Lifestories: Families in Crisis series. Having largely established his directing career in the United States, Campanella decided to return to doing work in Argentina in 1998. He now generally splits his time between Argentina and New York. As he explains it, in the United States his work was largely television and advertising—visual modes that are highly different from cinema. After almost twenty years he realized that he would never be happy in New York and when he had the chance to return to Argentina to make a film, he jumped at it: “Entonces, la vuelta resultó productiva: salió la oportunidad para filmar, para filmar cine, mi verdadero amor. Y así nació El mismo amor, la misma lluvia” [So, the return was productive: the opportunity to film movies, my true love, arose. And that’s how El mismo amor, la misma lluvia was born].141 El mismo amor, la misma lluvia ([The same love, the same rain], 1999), Campanella’s first postgraduate school film shot in Argentina (he had two shorts earlier), centered on a love story between a young writer, Jorge, and Laura, a waitress. While one part of the narrative focuses on their relationship, the film is also very much about Argentine history. Luis Brun explains that one clear line of the narrative “es la de combinar con la historia central la historia de un país (en este caso, Argentina)” [is to combine the central story with the country’s history (in this case, Argentina’s)].142 The film starts

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at the end of the 1970s and ends in the 1990s and it covers the histori­ cal transitions from the dictatorship (1976–1983), to the war between Argentina and England in the Falkland Islands, and the reemergence of democracy in the 1980s. The creative mode of telling the story of the nation alongside that of a romance is in fact a highly Latin American narrative trope. As Doris Sommer notes in her seminal work, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America, throughout Latin American literary history there has been a close relationship between patriotism and hetero­ sexual relationships.143 Throughout Campanella’s films we can appreciate Sommer’s thesis that there is a narrative synergy between passionate love and a commitment to building the nation. But what is interesting in Campanella’s treatment of this theme is that while his male protagonist tends to lose his love at precisely the same time that the nation is in crisis and the community is disintegrating, the resolution in these films depicts an interesting breakdown in the presumed connection between romance and nation. For Campanella the “nation” cannot be the nation-state. It is only by building a series of connections outside of the official state structure that the protagonist can recuperate a meaningful life. This theme is especially visible in Campanella’s second Argentine feature, El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001), which was nominated for an Oscar in 2002. El hijo de la novia features Ricardo Darín in the role of Rafael Belvedere, a middle-aged divorced restaurateur with a young daughter who lives with him part-time. His mother, played by Norma Aleandro, has Alzheimer’s, and his father, played by Héctor Alterio, wants his son to help him arrange a church wedding for him since they had only had a civil marriage. Throughout the first part of the film Rafael is grouchy and difficult. He hasn’t seen his mother in a year, tells his father the idea of the wedding is crazy, is testy with his daughter, yells at his staff, and is unappreciative of his much younger girlfriend. But then he suffers a heart attack, and yet, rather than give him perspective, at first the event causes him to fantasize about selling the restaurant and moving to Mexico to raise horses. He also asks his girlfriend for space. But once he has to face the reality of a truly solitary life, he reverses course. One of the key components of the story in El hijo de la novia is Rafael’s struggle to run his restaurant business. Early in the film he receives an offer to sell the restaurant to foreign buyers. As they pitch the sale, they suggest that with the crisis he may want to sell. Rafael rejects

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the offer, saying that in Argentina there is always a crisis. This brief exchange provides the neoliberal context for the film. Campanella inserts the reality that during the economic crisis in Argentina many assets were sold off to foreign interests and family-owned business suffered as corporate chains increasingly became the model. As William Robinson explains in his study of Latin America and global capitalism, the same period also saw the rise of corporate control of supermarkets and other forms of local retail business. But these processes were not a simple example of foreign takeover of domestic capital. As seen in El hijo de la novia foreign investment is often passed through a local business via a strategy of “global scale and local focus.” The result, though, is that across the board we witness the “disappearance of artisans, local merchants, and small producers—the ‘old’ middle classes and petty bourgeoisie.”144 Robinson notes that between 1984 and 1993, 65,000 small shops went out of business in Argentina—a fact that would have dire consequences for small business owners.145 Campanella’s films tend to focus directly on this class of people, a trend that Ignacio Sánchez Prado also notes in the global era of Mexican film, which also depicts the effects of neoliberalism on the middle class.146 As El hijo de la novia ends, Rafael has sold off the family business, but rather than move to Mexico he has bought another restaurant, this one more of a diner, in the same neighborhood as his family’s restaurant. The message is that he may not have been able to fight against neoliberal trends and keep his family business, but he has found a way to continue to run his own business on a smaller scale. Often misread as a happy ending, the resolution of the film is actually a story about compromise under the neoliberal order. Given the fact that most Argentine auteur cinema has focused on the more marginalized classes of people, such as the inhabitants of Ciudad Oculta in Trapero’s Elefante blanco, Campanella’s attention to the middle class led to critique of his work as apolitical. Or as Dona Kercher puts it in Latin Hitchcock, Campanella’s films have often been considered to offer a “simplification of political events.”147 Campanella, though, rejects that position. In an interview about whether his next film after El hijo de la novia, Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda’s Moon, 2004) was an example of cinematic realism he explained, “en un sentido, sí. La gente del club leía el guión y sentía que habíamos captado todo. Pero el término ‘realismo’ se identifica con los peores aspectos de la sociedad. ¿Sólo es realista lo marginal? No; esa no es la única parte de la realidad”

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[in one sense, yes. The people from the club read the script and felt that we had captured everything. But the term “realism” is associated with the worst aspects of society. Is only the marginal realistic? No; that’s not the only part of reality].148 Luna de Avellaneda focuses on the story of Román Maldonado who was born during a carnival fair held at “Luna de Avellaneda,” a sports and social club in a province of Buenos Aires, making him a member for life. In its heyday the club had over 8,000 members, but after the economic crisis hits Buenos Aires membership has dropped to only about 300. The club is struggling economically since almost all of its members are having hard times financially. Román, along with two of his close friends who also work at the club, struggles to keep it open, while a local politician who also is a club member tries to convince the club members to sell the club to foreign investors who want to turn it into a casino. Meanwhile Román’s marriage is also in crisis and his son is planning to emigrate to Spain. The film follows Román as his life spirals out of control, but again, similar to El hijo de la novia, Luna de Avellaneda does not have a perfectly happy ending. Despite a passionate speech by Román, the club votes to sell and Román’s son does leave, but just as Román is set, too, to leave the country he chooses a different path. Having reconciled with his wife, he decides to work with his friends to open up a new club. The ending of Luna de Avellaneda is almost an exact parallel to El hijo de la novia: The protagonist is tested by the individualism, cynicism, and market pressures of neoliberalism, but rather than win or lose, he finds a way to compromise and rebuild affective connections to his community. Writing about El hijo de la novia, Andermann explains that “it is precisely the larger-scale, socio-economic crisis of Argentine society as a whole which precipitates the Darín character’s personal crisis.”149 Campanella’s male protagonists have to hit rock bottom before they can appreciate affective bonds of friendship and love. Campanella, himself, has openly explained that one of his central themes is the recovery of community in the face of global capital­ ism. Asked about what seems like nostalgia for the past in his films, Campanella responds that he is not simply dreaming of a bygone era: “No creo que todo tiempo pasado fue mejor. De hecho, prefiero esta época a la época de la dictadura, por ejemplo. De ninguna manera pienso que antes estábamos mejor porque algunos índices económicos nos daban mejor. Lo que sí había, y hay que recuperar para formar algo nuevo, era la esperanza de que luchando se podían cambiar las cosas”

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[I don’t believe that everything in the past was better. In fact, I prefer this era over the dictatorship, for example. In no way do I think that we were better off before because some economic indexes were better. What did exist, and we have to recuperate it somehow, was the hope that by fighting one could change things].150 Campanella explains that the belief that social change is possible is what he seeks to recuperate in his films: “hemos caído en el cinismo. Estamos con la moral baja. . . . Eso es lo único que tenemos que recuperar. Con respecto al presente, me obsesiona mucho la comunidad, el hecho de volver a tender los lazos entre nosotros mismos. Hay que dejar el individualismo que marcó los ‘90 para pasar a algo más comunitario. Unos de los temas que más tocamos en la película es la relación del individuo con la comunidad y de ésta con el individuo” [We have fallen into cynicism. We have low morale.  .  .  . That is the only thing we have to recuperate. With respect to the present, I am obsessed with community, the effort to return to caring for the bonds among ourselves. We have to abandon the individualism that marked the 90s to get to something more community-oriented. One of the issues that we touch on the most in the film is the relationship of the individual with the community and of the community with the individual].151 The community that Campanella is seeking to rescue is not the collective of the proletariat. It is not the mass of workers taking over factories, but rather the middle and lower middle class, which has also been gravely threatened by new global market realities. Campanella’s focus on the social club, a place of recreation and community allows him to depict a story of social degradation as important as the one told in Trapero’s Elefante blanco. Similar to Trapero, Campanella and his team spent considerable time in social clubs in order to write their script. They also used members of the social clubs as the extras in the films. In an almost direct parallel to Trapero’s comments about the filming process in Ciudad Oculta, Campanella explains that, “la gran mayoría de los extras que intervinieron en el film, así como la coreografía, es del club Juventud Unida. El nivel que tienen es impresionante. No embellecimos nada. Todos los elementos que se usan en la escenografía se pueden encontrar en cualquier club” [the majority of the extras that participated in the film, even in the choreography, are from the club “Juventud Unida,” or “youth united.” Their level is impressive. We didn’t embellish anything. All of the components used in the staging can be found in any club].152 Not only did the film seek the input of actual social club members, it also

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led to a robust public debate about how to preserve social clubs and protect their role in the community. Campanella’s films, then, key into the fragmentation of social connections caused by neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies demand not only privatization and deregulation, but they also require a breakdown in the common good. This means that the deterioration of the social role of the neighborhood club is a perfect avenue through which to explore these shifts in narrative cinema. Thus, another way that Campanella departs from the other directors associated with the NAC is through his overt use of national allegory. Aguilar explains that one common feature of the NAC directors is their “avoidance of allegorical stories.”153 Campanella, in contrast, openly uses national allegories as the narrative basis for his films. The colors of the club in Luna de Avellaneda, for instance, are the exact colors of the Argentine flag. As Andermann explains “the political allegory carved out by both films [El hijo de la novia and Luna de Avellaneda] is hardly subtle: in reconnecting with the plight of others (‘the poor’), the self-estranged middle-class hero rediscovers his mission in life, which is none other than to save the couple, the family, and the nation through love, trust and patriotism.”154 What is interesting to note, though, in Campanella’s use of allegory is that it is not an example of what Fredric Jameson referred to in “Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism.” Jameson, writing in 1986, argued that “Third World texts . . . necessarily project a political dimension in the form of national allegory: the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third-world culture and society.”155 In contrast, the context of first and third world is entirely absent in Campanella’s project. Rather, the battle, such as it is, is between neoliberal fragmented society and anticorporate (but not anticapitalist) communal relations. At one point when Rafael of El hijo de la novia is talking to his father, he expresses frustration that their struggles for a more efficient world had ended up with a corporate system that makes individual entrepreneurship impossible. The reference to efficiency should be read as marking the desire to move from third to first world. Later, though, his father corrects him under his breath, saying they had not fought for a more efficient world; they had fought for a better one. The fact that Campanella is anticorporate but not anticapitalist is certainly his greatest weakness as a political filmmaker. While his films do much good work to rescue affective stories that help the public envision productive forms of collective resistance, and while his films

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do offer utopic visions of ways to push back on the alienating effect of global capital, they offer no real pushback on the free-market system. This trend was especially visible in Campanella’s animated hit, Metegol (Underdogs, 2013). Metegol centers on the story of Amadeo who is great at foosball but mostly a loser in life. One day he is able to beat the town bully, Flash, who then vows he will return for revenge. Ten years later he returns, now an international superstar soccer player who has just bought the entire town where Amadeo lives. Amadeo is then forced to fight for his town—and his foosball players—by organizing an actual soccer game against Flash. In typical Campanella fashion, Amadeo loses the game— because David can’t beat Goliath in Campanella’s films. But he does win the affection of the entire crowd, which refuses to cheer for Flash and honors the hard work and tenacity of Amadeo and his ragtag set of teammates. Campanella’s film was a not-so-subtle indictment of narcissistic greed. His “hero” doesn’t win, but he is an ethically moral character. He also is deeply committed to defending his community. Perhaps most importantly, he realizes that he can only fight by building a collective, a move that clearly rejects the capitalist individualism of Flash. As we recall that this is a children’s film, after all, it is hard to read that ethical framework as pernicious. Launched on the eve of the World Cup in Brazil, and with the soccer players sporting identical colors to those of the Brazilian team, Campanella’s film expands its allegorical range to refer to all of those in small communities fighting corporate takeovers. Of interest is the fact that Flash is not the foreign investor of other films; instead, he is a local boy who grows up to embody a corporate, narcissistic mentality. Marcos Vieytes calls the film Campanella’s best, alluding especially to the way that it manages to cite Argentine specificity within a clearly globally oriented film project.156 And yet he criticizes the ways that the characters function as toys more than as actual people: “Campanella trató desde siempre a sus personajes como juguetes en lugar de personas” [Campanella has always treated his characters as toys instead of as people].157 These criticisms, of course, point to the very real political limits to a commercially oriented filmmaking project such as Campanella’s. There is much whitewashing of complex issues as they are allegorized into romances and summed up in almost-happy endings. But, as I’ve argued, the work of Campanella does, in fact, deserve to be included among the body of Argentine films we study to understand the ways that filmmakers

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are responding to the effects of globalization on Argentine society. Moreover, while it is easy to call out Campanella for his penchant for ­melodrama, it is worth remembering the larger context for film culture in Argentina, much of which has absolutely no deeper point other than frivolous entertainment. In fact, as the Argentine cinema industry has surged forward, many of the most successful films have not had any substance. In 2016 Me casé con un boludo ([I married a jerk], 2016) starring Adrián Suar was released and quickly made box office history.158 The romantic comedy tells the story of two actors who marry, but during the honeymoon the wife realizes that her new husband is a jerk. He spends the rest of the film trying to woo her to love him. When we realize that Campanella’s films are part of this larger context, we can see that the facile moralizing of his narratives and the commercial treatment of complex politics in his films may not be Argentine film culture’s greatest enemy in the larger scheme. As I hope to have shown, the Argentine films of the global era offer a range of responses to the effects of neoliberal capitalism on Argentine identity. None of them offers the perfect response, but some of these films do offer viewers a chance to reflect on and debate major social issues. Rather than end the conversation, they start it. And that is why filmmakers like Campanella are indeed very important in this story. Every time a critic asks the public to consider whether the ethical context for the film is adequate, they are offering the public a chance to dialogue about the role of film art in raising awareness of social issues. And often, they also lead, as they did in the case of Luna de Avellaneda, to important public debate about social changes; in this case, the demise of the community-based social club. Perhaps more importantly, the global financing of films like Campanella’s and Trapero’s allows us a chance to recognize that global investment in Argentine cinema has not led to the end of national cinema. In fact, foreign funding and foreign distribution arguably have had a positive impact on the ongoing strength of the Argentine film industry. This trend, of course, should not lead us to celebrate global capital. Far from it. Rather, it shows the deep ambivalences caused by a system that profits from cultural forms that are critical of that very same system.

Argentine Film Industry Timeline 1983–2016 1983—Manuel Antín takes over as head of INC—plays a big role in t­ rying to promote film as a vehicle for national identity.159 He referenced the Hollywood idea from the 1920s that “trade follows film”160—the

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idea was to export an image of Argentina that would be attractive to foreigners. 1989—Veteran filmmaker and actor René Mugica is named head of the INC along with Octavio Getino as vice director.161 Getino takes over in October of 1989 until November 1990. Carlos Menem takes office as president during a period of civil unrest due to economic hardship (1989–1999).162 Inflation goes to nearly 200% in July, and food riots break out in May.163 Menem then proceeds to privatize nearly all “stateowned enterprises.”164 1990—Argentina’s economic crisis begins, and state funds are cut for the INCAA (National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts).165 12 national films released. 1991—Argentina links the peso to the US dollar. Only 17 films are made this year. 1992—Only ten films are made. There are only 278 screens in the entire country, with 110 of the screens being located in the state capital. 1993—13 national films released. 1994—Only four films are made. Law 24,377 is passed, which amends the Cinematography Promotion Law and stipulates that the INCAA will be under the Ministry of Culture and Education.166 According to Getino, the 1994 new film law gives Argentina the most protective film policy in the region, probably the world.167 The first head of the newly renamed INCAA, Antonio Ottone, also steps down due to disagreements over production standards, with Culture Minister Mario O’Donnell taking his place.168 1996—The Argentinian government removes the INCAA’s financial autonomy.169 1997—Three of the four highest box office gross hits were Argentine.170 The Conference of Ibero-American Film and Audiovisual Authorities (CAACI) establishes Ibermedia.171 1998—President Menem signs a pledge to spare a $28 million film subsidy.172 Release of Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes, dir. Caetano, Stagnaro). 1999—38 nationally produced films are released. 920 theaters are open throughout Argentina. First Buenos Aires International Film Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI) is held. Mundo grúa (Crane World, 1999), directed by Pablo Trapero, released.

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2000—39 nationally produced films are released. 356 theaters are open throughout the country. 2001—El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride, 2001), directed by Juan José Campanella is nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.173 President Fernando de la Rúa cuts funding for INCAA to prevent massive debt default and economic collapse.174 Bank withdrawals are restricted to a maximum of 1,000 pesos/dollars. This is known as the “corralito” and leads to massive social unrest. Caetano releases his second film, Bolivia. 2002—President Eduardo Duhalde orders the repeal of the Convertibility Law pegging the peso to the dollar and adopts a new, provisional exchange rate. He also grants INCAA financial autonomy, increasing the budget by approximately 8 million pesos, or $2.2 million.175 Jorge Coscia replaces José Miguel Onaindia as the director of the INCAA.176 Trapero releases his second film, El bonaerense (The Policeman). 2003—Néstor Kirchner elected President (until 2007). 2004—New Screen Quota Law goes into effect, stating that each theater must show one national film per quarter. 54 nationally produced films are released, and 290 theaters are open. New law stipulates a “continuity average,” which obliges exhibitors to keep national films in theaters if they have between 6 and 25% capacity that week.177 2005—65 nationally produced films are released. 2006—INCAA introduces new measures to show national films on “more screens, and larger and longer releases for Argentine cinemas.”178 58 nationally produced films are released. 2007—265 nationally produced films are released. Cristina Fernández de Kirchner is elected president (until 2015). 2009—El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes, dir. Campanella) wins Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.179 77 nationally produced films are released. 2010—Los Labios (The Lips, dir. Iván Fund and Santiago Loza) wins “Un Certain Regard—Best Actress” at the Cannes Film Festival. INCAA TV launches.180 Total national films released: 84. 2011—Elefante blanco (White Elephant, dir. Trapero) is nominated for a Cannes Film Award.181 Resolución No. 2114/2011 is passed, stipulating that proposals have to include the amount of screens and where the film will be exhibited.182 104 nationally produced films are released.

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2012—Los salvajes (The Wild Ones, dir. Fadel) wins the ACID award at the Cannes Film Festival.183 Subsidy caps are practically doubled to 5.5 million pesos ($650,000) per film, and plans to build a studio-office complex in Buenos Aires are revealed.184 2013—Los dueños (The Owners, dir. Ezequiel Radusky and Agustín Toscano) wins the Critics Week Award and receives a Special Mention at the Cannes Film Festival, in addition to being nominated for the Golden Camera. It was also nominated for the Academy Award, “Best First Work.”185 2014—172 nationally produced films are released. Law 26.522 is introduced, which states its purpose to be “the regulation of audiovisual media services throughout the Argentine territory and the development of mechanisms for the promotion, deconcentration and promotion of competition for the purposes of cheapening, democratization and universalization of the use of new information and communication technologies.”186 2016—La larga noche de Francisco Sanctis (The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis, dir. Francisco Márquez and Andrea Testa) nominated for Golden Camera and Un Certain Regard Awards at the Cannes Film Festival.187 Alejandro Cacetta, former producer with Patagonik and Pol-Ka, named director of INCAA.

Notes





1. Gonzalo Aguilar, Other Worlds: New Argentine Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 16. 2. Jens Andermann, New Argentine Cinema (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), xiii. 3. Tamara Falicov, The Cinematic Tango: Contemporary Argentine Film (London: Wallflower Press, 2007), 96. 4. Octavio Getino quoted in Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 93. 5.  Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi, “The End of the Embrace? Neoliberalism and Alternatives to Neoliberalism in Latin America,” in Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America, ed. Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19. 6.  Diana Tussie, “Economic Governance after Neoliberalism,” in Governance after Neoliberalism in Latin America, ed. Jean Grugel and Pía Riggirozzi (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 74. 7. Joanna Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 3.

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8.  Anthony Kaufman, “Argentina’s Next Wave Struggle Sustains Momentum Amid Economic Collapse,” indieWIRE, March 20, 2002, accessed February 23, 2017, http://www.indiewire.com/article/ world_cinema_report_argentinas_next_wave_struggles_to_sustains_ momentum_ami/. This quotation is also included in the liner notes to Caetano’s Bolivia. 9. Two recent books on Argentine cinema offer extremely detailed information and background on this moment. Tamara Falicov’s The Cinematic Tango is an analysis of the cinema industry and its relations to the state. Joanna Page’s Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema offers readers a theoretically nuanced critique of the connections between the economic crisis and the cinema boom. Both books are indispensable reading for anyone interested in this period of Argentine filmmaking. My arguments here build on the work of both of these scholars. 10. For example, in an interview with Juan Pablo Álvarez, he explains that he had become “bored” with making films about marginalized subjects—saying that others could do it. See Juan Pablo Álvarez, “El amor es una porquería,” Haciendo Cine, February 13, 2013, accessed February 23, 2017, http://www.haciendocine.com.ar/node/40956. 11. For more on Pizza, birra, faso as the inaugural film of “New Argentine Cinema” see Falicov, The Cinematic Tango and Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema. 12. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998). Generalizing about any cultural movement is always tricky terrain and the theories and practices of the NLAC are difficult to summarize. For insight into the complexity of this movement, see the works by Zuzana Pick, Michael Chanan, and Michael Martin in the Works Cited section. Despite the complexities of this movement, it is important to emphasize that they share the context of the 1960s—a moment of extraordinary revolutionary energy in Latin America. 13. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 58. 14. Henry Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 21. 15. See, for instance, almost all of the films from Grupo Ukamau. 16. El Cordobés’s pregnant girlfriend is the only member of the gang that is alive at the end of the film. While she is not injured, the film does not suggest an easy future for her either. 17.  Fernando  Birri, “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 87.

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18. Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” in New Latin American Cinema, Volume One: Theory, Practices and Transcontinental Articulations, ed. Michael T. Martin, trans. Julianne Burton and ed. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 42. 19. Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 144. 20. Ibid. 21. See, for instance, his quotations on the Bolivia DVD liner notes. 22. Adrián Caetano, “El mundo está patas para arriba,” interview by Judith Gociol, El monitor, accessed February 23, 2017, http://www.me.gov. ar/monitor/nro5/entrevista.htm. 23. It is worth noting that Solanas, Getino, and Birri continued their cultural activities and also adapted their earlier radical 1960s positions to the contemporary social landscape. Getino, who died in 2012, was especially concerned with ensuring that there is a viable Argentine cinema industry. His commitment to preserving Argentine cinema led him to support popular filmmaking practices that are less overtly political than those of his early career. Solanas has been more specifically involved in politics and was a presidential candidate for the Socialist party in 2007, in addition to making films. For more on the later activities of Birri, Solanas, and Getino, see Falicov, The Cinematic Tango. 24. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 133. 25. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 34–35. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Ibid. 28. Birri, “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” 94. 29. Ibid., 93. 30. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 40. 31. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 133. 32. Aguilar, Other Worlds, 16. 33. Ramón Grosfoguel, “Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America,” Nepantla: Views from South 1, no. 2 (2000): 360. 34. See Raúl Prebisch, “Proposals for the Creation of the Latin American Common Market Submitted to the Governments of Latin America in 1965,” Journal of Common Market Studies 5 (1966): 83–110. 35. Grosfoguel, “Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America,” 356. 36. This form of state support did take place in postrevolutionary Cuba. 37. For more on the way that neoliberalism has created entirely disposable populations in the United States, see Giroux, Stormy Weather.

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38. David Harvey, A Brief History to Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 39. Tussie, “Economic Governance after Neoliberalism,” 86. 40. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 47. 41. Ibid., 73. 42. Ibid., 54. 43. See Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 54. 44. See Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 76. 45. See Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 77. 46. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 96. 47. Ibid., 77. 48. Ibid., 80. 49. Getino quoted in Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 79. 50. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 80. 51. Ibid., 90. 52. Ibid., 91. 53. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 2. 54. Ibid., 2–3. 55. Henry Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics Beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), 90. 56. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 57. 57. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 142. 58. Grosfoguel, “Developmentalism, Modernity, and Dependency Theory in Latin America,” 362. 59. Aguilar, Other Worlds, 147. 60. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 126. 61. See the DVD liner notes of Bolivia. Also quoted in Joanne Laurier, “The Pain You Go through in this Country to Start a New Life . . . ,” World Socialist Web Site, November 12, 2005, accessed February 23, 2017, https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2005/11/ciud-n12.html. 62.  Geoffrey Kantaris, “Argentina: Pizza, Birra, y faso,” Violent Visions: Representations of Violence in Contemporary Latin American Urban Cinema, November 18, 2002, accessed February 25, 2017, http:// www.latin-american.cam.ac.uk/culture/violence/violence4.html. 63. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 127. 64. Ibid., 1. 65. Ibid., 2. 66. Aguilar, Other Worlds, 8. 67. Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, xii. 68.  Adrián Caetano, “La tragedia de los seres sin glamour,” Río Negro Online, April 26, 2002, accessed February 25, 2017, http://www1. rionegro.com.ar//arch200204/c26j01.html.

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69. Ibid. 70. Adrián Caetano, “El nuevo cine argentino se hizo famoso por lo barato,” Diario Hoy, October 2, 2002, accessed February 25, 2017, http://pdf. diariohoy.net/2002/10/02/pdf/19.pdf. 71. Adrián Caetano, “Lo único que me interesa es ser popular,” interview by Mariano del Mazo, Clarín, May 5, 2002, accessed February 25, 2017, http://edant.clarin.com/diario/2002/05/05/c-00811.htm. 72. Emanuel Respighi, “¿Quién no querría en algún momento filmar una porno?” Página 12, March 7, 2007, accessed February 25, 2017, https://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/suplementos/espectaculos/8-5586-2007-03-07.html. 73. Confidential communication with an Argentine film scholar, February 20, 2013. 74.  See Carolina Rocha, “Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism,” in New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 25, 27. 75. Rocha, “Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism,” 26. 76. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 153. 77. See Rocha, “Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism,” 27. 78. Ibid., 28. 79. Ibid., 26. 80. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 98. 81. Gustavo Aprea, Cine y políticas en Argentina: Continuidades y discontinuidades en 25 años de democracia (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca Nacional, 2008), 94, accessed February 25, 2017, http://www.elortiba.org/pdf/ Cine_y_politicas_en_Argentina_Aprea.pdf. 82. Álvarez, “El amor es una porquería.” 83. Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, xiii. 84. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 142. 85. Andrea del Rio, “Pablo Trapero: ‘El cine es político, pero no me gusta que baje una idea,’” Apertura, July 30, 2015, accessed February 27, 2017, http://www.apertura.com/lifestyle/Pablo-Trapero-El-cine-es-politicopero-no-me-gusta-que-baje-una-idea-20150730-0003.html. 86. Rocha, “Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism,” 19. 87.  Charles Newbery, “Argentine Film Org Gets Fiscal Autonomy,” Variety, August 25, 2002, accessed March 1, 2017, http://variety.com/2002/film/ markets-festivals/argentine-film-org-gets-fiscal-autonomy-1117871827/. 88. Charles Newbery, “Film Institute Gets New Head,” Variety, February 14, 2002, accessed March 1, 2017, http://variety.com/2002/film/ news/film-institute-gets-new-head-1117860754/.

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89. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 138. 90.  See “Jorge Coscia,” Wikipedia, accessed March 2, 2017, https:// es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jorge_Coscia. 91. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 3. 92. Gonzalo Aguilar, Estudio crítico sobre El bonaerense (Buenos Aires: Picnic Editorial, 2008), 7–8. 93. Ibid., 9. 94.  James Scorer, “Trigger-Happy: Police, Violence and the State in El bonaerense/The Policeman,” in New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 163. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 166. 97. Aguilar, Estudio crítico sobre El bonaerense, 12. 98. Ibid., 17. 99. Aguilar, Other Worlds, 19. 100. Page, Crisis and Capitalism in Contemporary Argentine Cinema, 6. 101.  Scorer, “Trigger-Happy: Police, Violence and the State in El bonaerense/The Policeman,” 163–164. 102. Aguilar, Other Worlds, 111. 103. Ibid., 113. 104. Ibid., 114. 105. Ibid., 20. 106. Aguilar, Estudio crítico sobre El bonaerense, 64. 107. Ibid., 65. 108. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 1. 109. Ibid., 1. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid., 2. 112. Ibid. 113. Beatriz Urraca, “Transactional Fiction: (Sub)urban Realism in the Films of Trapero and Caetano,” in New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 147. 114. Ibid., 150. 115. Beatriz Urraca, “Rituals of Performance: Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco,” Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 48, no. 2 (2014): 356. 116. Ibid. 117.  See Getino and Solanas, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” 33–58.

324  S.A. McCLENNEN 118. “‘Para Darín, ir a filmar a una villa era un riesgo,’” Diario El Popular, September 14, 2012, accessed March 2, 2017, http://diarioelpopular. com/2012/09/14/para-darin-ir-a-filmar-a-una-villa-era-un-riesgo/. 119. Arlene Dávila, Culture Works: Space, Value, and Mobility across the Neoliberal Americas (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 7. 120. “La historia detrás del Elefante Blanco: de un hospital de avanzada a un predio ocupado que reveló Trapero en un film,” La Nación, November 3, 2016, accessed March 2, 2017, http://www.lanacion.com. ar/1952968-breve-historia-del-elefante-blanco-edificio-de-villa-lugano. 121. Ibid. 122. Hugo Vezzetti, “Archivo y memorias del presente: Elefante Blanco de Pablo Trapero: el padre Mugica, los pobres y la violencia,” A contracorriente 12, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 179–190. 123. Quoted in Vezzetti, “Archivo y memorias del presente,” 184–185. 124. Guillermo Ravaschino, “Elefante Blanco,” Cineismo, accessed March 2, 2017, http://www.cineismo.com/criticas/elefante-blanco.htm. 125.  Urraca, “Rituals of Performance: Ricardo Darín as Father Julián in Elefante blanco,” 355. 126. Ibid., 356. 127. Ibid., 357. 128. Ibid., 354. 129. “Ciudad Oculta por dentro, la villa que se revela en el cine,” Clarín, May 27, 2012, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.clarin.com/ciudades/ciudad-oculta-dentro-villa-revela_0_BJNf5om2D7x.html. 130. Ricardo Marín, “Pablo Trapero: vivir en la villa; Con Elefante blanco intenta reflejar lo que les pasa a las personas reales de esos barrios,” La Nación, May 16, 2012, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.lanacion. com.ar/1473485-pablo-trapero-vivir-en-la-villa. 131.  Alejandro Lorences, “Elefante Blanco: Una Historia de Abandono y Exclusión,” Revista Institucional de la Defensa Pública de la Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires 6, no. 8 (2016): 126, accessed March 3, 2017, https://mpdefensa.gob.ar/biblioteca/pdf/revista8.pdf. 132. Ibid., 127. 133. See “‘Para Darín, ir a filmar a una villa era un riesgo.’” 134. Marín, “Pablo Trapero: vivir en la villa.” 135. See Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). 136. “‘Para Darín, ir a filmar a una villa era un riesgo.’” 137. del Rio, “Pablo Trapero: ‘El cine es político, pero no me gusta que baje una idea.’” 138. “Pablo Trapero,” in 2015 Yearbook of Argentina’s Film and Audiovisual Industry, Dir. Verónica Sanchez Gelós (Buenos Aires: Instituto Nacional

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de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales, 2016), 110, accessed March 3, 2017, http://fiscalizacion.incaa.gov.ar/images/Anuarios/Anuario_2015.pdf. 139. Rocha, “Contemporary Argentine Cinema during Neoliberalism,” 23. 140. Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 40. 141. Pablo Chacón, “Entrevista con Juan José Campanella,” Letras Libres, June 30, 2005, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.letraslibres.com/ mexico-espana/entrevista-juan-jose-campanella. 142.  Luis Brun, “El mismo amor, la misma lluvia: La misma historia, la misma sensación,” Cinemas Cine La Revista 9, accessed March 3, 2017, http://www.cinemascine.net/criticas/critica/El-mismo-amor-lamisma-lluvia-La-misma-historia-la-misma-sensacin. 143. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 144. William Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 192. 145. Ibid., 193. 146. See Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014). 147. Dona Kercher, Latin Hitchcock: How Almodóvar, Amenábar, De la Iglesia, Del Toro and Campanella Became Notorious (New York: Wallflower Press, 2015), 333. 148. Julia Montesoro, “Juan José Campanella: Homenaje a los clubes de barrio,” La Nación, January 24, 2004, accessed March 6, 2017, http://www.lanacion.com.ar/566675-juan-jose-campanella-homenaje-a-los-clubes-de-barrio. 149. Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 41. 150.  Carlos Schilling, “Hay que dejar el individualismo,” La Voz, May 18, 2004, accessed March 6, 2017, http://archivo.lavoz.com. ar/2004/0518/Espectaculos/nota242928_1.htm. 151. Ibid. 152. Montesoro, “Juan José Campanella: Homenaje a los clubes de barrio.” 153. Aguilar, Other Worlds, 16. 154. Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 42. 155. Fredric Jameson, “Third World Literature in an Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text 15 (1986): 69. 156. Marcos Vieytes, “Metegol, de Juan José Campanella,” Hacerse la crítica, July 18, 2013, accessed March 7, 2017, http://hacerselacritica.blogspot.com.ar/2013/07/metegol-de-juan-jose-campanella.html. 157. Ibid. 158. “El cine argentino se quedó con casi el 20% del mercado entre enero y abril,” Otros Cines: Noticias, May 9, 2016, accessed March 7, 2017, http://www.otroscines.com/nota?idnota=10920.

326  S.A. McCLENNEN 159. See Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 54. 160. Ibid. 161.  Peter H. Rist, Historical Dictionary of South American Cinema (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), 334. 162. See Andermann, New Argentine Cinema, 1. 163.  Daniel Treisman, “Cardoso, Menem, and Maciavelli: Political Tactics and Privatization in Latin America,” Studies in Comparative International Development 38, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 95. 164. Ibid. 165. Paul A. Schroeder Rodríguez, Latin American Cinema: A Comparative History (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 245. 166.  “Cinematografía Ley 24.377,” Información Legislativa: Ministero de Justicia y Derechos Humanos Presidencia de la Nación, September 28, 1994, accessed April 8, 2017, http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/0-4999/767/norma.htm. 167. See Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 93. 168. “Argentine Gov’t Oks Aid,” Variety, March 26, 1995, accessed April 18, 2017, http://variety.com/1995/scene/markets-festivals/argentine-govt-oks-aid-99128376/. 169. Newbery, “Argentine Film Org Gets Fiscal Autonomy.” 170. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 96. 171. John Hecht, “Ibermedia Pivotal in South American Market,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 6, 2010, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ibermedia-pivotal-south-american-market-23350. 172. Beatriz Goyoaga, “Argentine Prez Spares $28 mil Film Subsidy,” Variety, May 11, 1998, accessed April 14, 2017, http://variety.com/1998/ film/news/argentine-prez-spares-28-mil-film-subsidy-1117470653/. 173.  “Son of the Bride (2001): Awards,” Internet Movie Database, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0292542/ awards?ref_=tt_awd. 174. Tamara Falicov, “Argentine Cinema and the Crisis of Audience,” in The Argentine Film, ed. Daniela Ingruber and Ursula Prutsch (Zurich: LIT Verlag, 2012), 207. 175. Newbery, “Argentine Film Org Gets Fiscal Autonomy.” 176. Newbery, “Film Institute Gets New Head.” 177. Falicov, The Cinematic Tango, 153. 178. Charles Newbery, “Argentina Measure Has Legs,” Variety, September 17, 2006, accessed April 14, 2017, http://variety.com/2006/film/ news/argentina-measure-has-legs-1117950184/. 179. “The Secret in Their Eyes (2009),” Internet Movie Database, accessed April 14, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1305806/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1.



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180.  Charles Newbery, “Argentine Net Champions Pix,” Variety (Buenos Aires), March 28, 2010, accessed April 14, 2017, LexisNexis. 181. “White Elephant (2012): Awards,” Internet Movie Database, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2132324/awards?ref_=tt_awd. 182.  “Resolución N 2016/04/INCAA-Incorporación,” Información Legislativa: Ministerio de Justicia y Derechos Humanos Presidencia de la Nación, accessed March 12, 2017, http://servicios.infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/verNorma.do?id=186104. 183. “The Wild Ones (2012),” Internet Movie Database, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2336361/. 184. John Hopewell and Anna Marie de la Fuente, “Ventana Sur Fires Up Biz,” Variety, November 17, 2012, accessed April 14, 2017, http://variety. com/2012/film/markets-festivals/ventana-sur-fires-up-biz-1118061984/. 185. “Los dueños: Awards,” Internet Movie Database, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2860276/awards?ref_=tt_awd. 186.  “Ley 26.522: Regúlanse los Servicios de Comunicación Audiovisual en todo el ámbito territorial de la República Argentina,” Información Legislativa: Ministero de Justicia y Derechos Humanos Presidencia de la Nación, October 10, 2009, accessed March 12, 2017, http://servicios. infoleg.gob.ar/infolegInternet/anexos/155000-159999/158649/ norma.htm. 187. “The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis (2016): Awards,” Internet Movie Database, accessed March 12, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/ tt5623224/awards?ref_=tt_awd.

CHAPTER 6

Brazil

Brazil has one of the, if not the, most developed film and media industries in all of Latin America. Its history, though, is one of a continual rise and fall. As Lúcia Nagib puts it, one constant feature of Brazilian cinema is that “it undergoes periodical births and rebirths and, after brief peaks, it is afflicted by sudden deaths and prolonged silence.”1 Well before the era of neoliberal globalization Brazil had one of the most developed commercial film industries in the region, epitomized by the studio era of Vera Cruz in the 1940s, the chanchada musicals of the 1950s, and the political filmmaking of the cinema nôvo movement, which had a strong presence in Brazilian film from the 1960s to early 1970s. And yet by the early 1990s Brazilian film production was in a nosedive. After twenty years of dictatorship, Fernando Collor de Mello took office in 1990 and closed down Embrafilme [the Brazilian Film Institute]. By 1992, only two feature films were released. Collor was impeached in 1992, leading to the presidency of Itamar Franco, who supported film production by creating the Brazilian Rescue Award that helped produce 56 feature-length projects.2 Then in 1993 a new Audiovisual Law (Law no. 8685) helped spark a boom in film production, known as the retomada do cinema brasileiro, or the “rebirth of Brazilian Cinema.” From 1994 to 2000, Brazil produced nearly 200 feature-length films, an astonishing number considering the fact that only years prior the entire film industry was in shambles. Nagib explains that what is perhaps most impressive is not the sheer number of releases, but rather the success of these films: “despite the serious © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_6

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problems of film distribution and exhibition, several of the films received an immediate and enthusiastic response from critics and audiences.”3 In 1998, Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998) won a series of international awards, among them the Golden Bear in Berlin, and was nominated for an Academy Award. Two other Brazilian films were nominated for Academy Awards in the 1990s. Thus, the 1990s saw Brazilian film rebound to international and national prominence for the first time since the heyday of cinema nôvo in the 1960s. Interestingly, despite the fact that the Brazilian film industry experienced a rebirth in the 1990s simultaneous to that of Argentina, scholars did not see the retomada as an aesthetically cohesive generation in the same way they did in the Argentine case. This is likely due to the fact that the rebirth of Brazilian films was not marked by the low-budget aesthetic that characterized the New Argentine Cinema (NAC). Central do Brasil, for instance, had a production budget of approximately $2.9 million and grossed over $22.4 million.4 This is a far cry from the strippeddown budget and small box office take of a film like Martín Rejtman’s Rapado (Cropped Head, 1992). Nevertheless, both the films of the NAC and the retomada shared the combined success of drawing national and international attention. Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison make the case that despite the fact that Brazilian film has always been deeply connected to a larger international and regional network, there remains a uniquely national framework for the industry: “Brazil’s national language (Portuguese) sets its cinema clearly apart from the dominant international cinema (Hollywood), and unlike, for example, British and Spanish cinema, and despite Brazil’s size (the fifth largest country on the planet), Brazilian cinema operates almost exclusively in that language.”5 Meanwhile, Randal Johnson’s study of the film industry in Brazil argues the opposite: “The Brazilian film industry is not monolithic, nor is it particularly united on any given issue other than its own survival. ‘Brazilian cinema’ exists only in the abstract.”6 He further maintains that there is not one Brazilian cinema, but many—a fact that makes analyzing it as a single unit a mistake. Withdrawing from the polemics of this argument, this chapter will argue, along with the thesis of this book, that the debate over the extent to which these films are national or international is not the key question. Given the increasing international source of funding for national films, the overwhelming dominance of distribution by Hollywood majors, and the reality that Brazilian films capture less than

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a quarter of all viewers within Brazil itself, drawing the lines between the national and the global is not only messy, but not necessarily instructive. Rather, the more pressing issue is the extent to which Brazilian filmmakers are able to make films of significant social resonance in the context of global neoliberal economics. Thus, one of the key questions this chapter traces is the changing relationship of the state to the film industry. During the Embrafilme years, the state had a fairly patronizing role in supporting and sustaining national films. From 1964 to 1984, state-­ sponsored support for the arts was at its highest. The Embrafilme years saw a consolidation of state control over the film industry and the film institute was “responsible for the distribution of over 30% of Brazilian films in the 1970s, and for between 25 and 50% of annual film production. As a result, the market share of Brazilian cinema increased from 15% in 1974 to more than 30% in 1980.”7 But as Shaw and Dennison remind us, those numbers include Embrafilme’s support for pornochanchada or soft porn films.8 The height of state support for culture also coincided with the dictatorship and led to the ironic reality that a military government was helping fund erotic comedies.9 Nevertheless, over time it became the cinema nôvo movement that dominated programs of assistance in the film industry.10 This also led to the second ironic outcome that a military government was funding filmmakers who were openly critical of their regime. Johnson explains that the military government’s support for cinema nôvo has to be read as part of a larger effort to gain legitimacy and control cultural hegemony.11 Regardless of how we interpret these gestures, the key consequence of this state support was that the filmmaking industry depended almost entirely on the state. Thus when Embrafilme was disbanded, the film industry literally had to reinvent itself in order to survive. Brazilian film industry expert Steve Solot explains that in the 1990s, “a series of new federal laws and incentive programs, and the boost in the economy have converged to generate multiple opportunities in film, broadcast TV, Pay-TV, VOD, Internet, and wireless industry sectors for investors, licensors, entrepreneurs, distributors and producers in all platforms.”12 Alongside a retomada of the film industry, Brazil has become a major player in global media. Grupo Globo [Global Group] is the largest media conglomerate in Latin America and the fourteenth largest media company in the world and it launched Globo Filmes in 1997—a move that had a major impact on the national film industry.13 In addition, as explained in this book’s Chap. 2 on coproduction, article three of the Audiovisual Law of 1993 allowed

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foreign distributors with local subsidiaries, such as Sony or Warner Bros., to invest up to 70% of their local taxed income from their Englishlanguage products in Brazilian independent audiovisual projects—a move that infused significant resources into producing local-language products.14 These changes have led to what Cacilda Rêgo calls the “internationalization of the Brazilian film industry.”15 The liberalization of the film industry created increased opportunities and diversity of funding sources for filmmakers in keeping with the overall global trend toward neoliberal economics. But another key shift under this model is the more obvious role of the market in determining which films are funded and seen. Even though the Embrafilme years did in fact include what Ruy Guerra called “economic censorship,” the 1990s signaled a significant shift in that regard.16 Thus, as filmmakers were no longer dependent on the state, they became more openly dependent on the market and public appeal—a fact that can frustrate filmmakers who prefer to imagine their work as art that operates outside of market mentalities. The political impact of these shifts has been highly ambivalent but one outcome is clear: these changes led to a series of films that had both national and international impact. Again, as with Argentina and Mexico, this ability to appeal at home and abroad with films of social significance is an industry first. By the start of the twenty-first century Brazilian film had further increased its importance on the global stage. Although three Brazilian films were nominated for Academy Awards during the 1990s, none of the earlier nominees garnered as much international attention as the high-grossing productions of Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002), Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, 2007), and Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010). Gabriela Antunes notes that there is one common feature to these films: “successful Brazilian films present a strong taste for social criticism. Themes such as criminality, poverty, and favelas are being explored (not to say exploited) to exhaustion and slums have become the geographic center of Brazilian film production.”17 Combining a more commercial aesthetic with stories tied to social issues, these films have also been recognized in festivals and international competitions. José Álvaro Moisés notes that Brazilian films won “almost 100 prizes between 1998 and 1999 in international competitions.”18 And yet, unlike the cinema nôvo films that often were applauded abroad but ignored at home, these films have also drawn Brazilians back to theaters to watch national content that is more substantial and socially

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critical than the fluff of the pornochanchada. According to Álvaro Moisés, in 1998 as the retomada was hitting its stride, Filme B (a company specializing in the statistics of the Brazilian film market), reported that there were around 3.6 million admissions for films produced in Brazil, more than 50% above the number of the previous year. The next year “more than 5.2 million people watched Brazilian films in the cinema and, in 2000, the number climbed to 7.2 million, 12 times more than the rest of the film market had grown in the country.”19 The increased market share for national films, of course, includes a large range of genres, but as this chapter will explain, a number of the most successful box office returns were, in fact, for social-issue films that not only drew Brazilian audiences to the theaters but also led to vigorous public debate. Thus, this chapter analyzes the boom in Brazilian social-issue films that emerged in the mid-1990s and helped build a film industry that was attractive to both a Brazilian and an international public. I reassess the tenets of the political cinema nôvo to consider the ways that this new crop of films does, in fact, live up to some of the goals of the cinema nôvo movement, while simultaneously helping to create profit for global capital. I argue that this ambivalence has always been a key part of filmmaking in the region: the difference is that the cinema nôvo directors sought a utopic space outside of capital within which they could work, whereas the current directors are not so idealistic. Instead they realize that audiences desire films that offer a balance between social reflection and pleasurable entertainment. I consider the complex ways that this new wave of political cinema navigates the impact of globalization by focusing on the work of three directors who have each followed slightly different trajectories, but have all taken up themes of violence and hunger. • Fernando Meirelles is possibly the most globally recognized Brazilian director—along with Walter Salles, director of Central do Brasil (Central Station, 1998) and Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004). Certainly Meirelles has had the most success as a director in Hollywood and Europe. Thus, this section traces his career from Cidade de Deus (City of God, codirected with Kátia Lund, 2002) to his Hollywood “indie” release, The Constant Gardener (2005), which was coproduced by Focus Features (the art house arm of NBCUniversal) and the UK Film Council, starring Rachel Weisz and Ralph Fiennes.

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• Hector Babenco’s work came on the heels of cinema nôvo, but carried many overt references to their aesthetics. His breakout film was Pixote (1981), a gritty, neorealist film about delinquents in a juvenile prison. I compare this Embrafilme-supported film to Carandiru (2003), a film about a prison massacre that was funded by Globo Filmes and Universal. • José Padilha broke onto the Brazilian film scene with a documentary, Ônibus 174 (Bus 174, 2002), which tells the story of a ­lower-class, unstable man who takes a busload of passengers hostage for four hours. Padilha then went on to direct two films that focus on BOPE, the elite police force: Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, 2007) and Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010), both of which topped Brazilian box office records. In fact, Tropa de Elite 2 was the all-time highest box office success in the nation’s history—beating out Avatar.

Aesthetics of Hunger or Cosmetics of Hunger in Cidade de Deus In 1965, Glauber Rocha presented his political film manifesto “Eztétyka da fome” [“Aesthetics of Hunger”] in Italy.20 A leading figure in cinema nôvo, Rocha was one of the third cinema filmmakers in Latin America who understood cinema as a central weapon in revolutionary struggle. Key to Rocha’s theory was the idea of hunger as a complex, contradictory cinematic mode of cultural practice. According to Rocha, films with an aesthetic of hunger “aroused the themes of hunger: characters eating dirt, eating roots, characters stealing to eat, characters killing to eat, characters fleeing to eat.”21 For Rocha hunger in the region has been caused by economic and political circumstances: “Economic and political conditioning [has] led us to philosophical emaciation and impotence. . . . Latin hunger is not, then, just an alarming symptom: it is the very nerve of its own society.”22 While Rocha was one of the most well-known members of the Brazilian cinema nôvo movement, and while his theories purported to describe a deeply local condition, his work had global impact and went on to influence directors from across the global south. He won two awards at Cannes, the Prix de la mise en scène in 1969 for O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes, 1969) and the

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Special Jury Prize for Best Short Film for Di Cavalcanti (1977). What’s more, the combination of neorealism and experimental filmmaking in Rocha’s cinema had direct ties to filmmaking from Italy and France. The point is that one of the most intensely “local” moments in Brazilian filmmaking was also intensely “global.” Aesthetically, cinema nôvo was directly opposed to any sort of commercial filmmaking, seeking instead to create films that were politically subversive. And yet, their highly unusual aesthetic often made them unappealing to average Brazilian filmgoers. Over thirty years after the heyday of cinema nôvo, Brazilian film once again had international impact, but the circumstances were almost wholly reversed. One of the breakthrough films of this boom was Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002), which broke box office records in Brazil for a national film and had a major worldwide distribution. Using an aesthetic that borrows from television, advertising, and music videos, the film presented a graphic look at urban violence and was quickly criticized for its cosmetic, slick view of the tragedies of Brazilian daily life. One of the harshest critiques of the film was leveled by film critic Ivana Bentes who compared Cidade de Deus to the work of Rocha and suggested that Meirelles and Lund’s film replaced Rocha’s “aesthetics of hunger” with a “cosmetics of hunger.”23 Meirelles countered, though, that the film’s success had to be measured not only by the work itself, but also by the debates that it provoked and by the way that it broke down the supposed antagonism of entertainment versus social critique that had governed Latin American approaches to filmmaking: “if you ask some journalistic film critics, they will tell you that it is just a film made to sell popcorn. It’s amazing how dialectics ruins people’s minds. They are unable to conceive of entertainment, emotion, and reflection in the same package. They always think in an exclusive or an antagonistic way: it’s either art or entertainment. It’s sad.”24 Meirelles drew attention to the fact that the film had generated hundreds of articles and debates, a detail that suggested to him that Cidade de Deus had, indeed, been successful at engaging the Brazilian public to reflect on the social themes central to the film. By tracing this trajectory in Brazilian cinema, this section theorizes the idea of hunger as a troping mechanism for politically engaged filmmaking and compares Rocha’s revolutionary aesthetic of hunger with Meirelles’s cosmetics of hunger.25 Central questions to consider are whether it is ever possible to depict hunger on the big screen in ways

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that avoid the fetishizing of poverty. And, if some measure of spectacle is always already part of the aesthetics of hunger, then how to reconcile the cosmetic with the critically reflective? In this sense, a cinema of hunger is a cinema invested in the biopolitical realities that construct hungry communities while denying the very right of these communities to claim their hunger as a problem of national concern and civic responsibility. This section also wonders if it is possible to consider the work of avant-garde, experimental filmmakers such as Rocha alongside, rather than in opposition to, more commercial filmmakers like Meirelles. If the hunger that drives Brazilian filmmakers is tragic and visceral as well as metaphoric, utopic, and theoretical, and, if that hunger is a hunger to use cinema as a tool for social change, then wouldn’t it follow that such a cinema would require multiple aesthetic practices? Revolutionary Hunger: Rocha’s Radical Aesthetics Understanding the aesthetics of Cidade de Deus requires attention to the film practices of Rocha, since his aesthetic has been commonly understood as a counterpoint to Meirelles’s style. Rocha was a major figure in the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC). While there were differences between the directors, especially inasmuch as they were engaging with their own unique national contexts, they shared a number of common goals. As I’ve explained throughout this book, NLAC and its Brazilian iteration, cinema nôvo, were focused on promoting an autochthonous, anti-Hollywood, anti-European film form that was dedicated to reflecting the harsh realities of Latin American life in ways that would promote social change. At the core of their aesthetic theories was the idea that cinematic storytelling in and of the region had to have its own, unique aesthetic. It had to be a non-commercial, local storytelling form that aggressively confronted the legacies of colonial and neocolonial power structures. In the case of Brazil, political films dedicated to reflecting social realities had to contend with the history of mass-produced spectacle-heavy film forms like the chanchada—musical comedies that surpassed Hollywood in their silly, sensual frivolousness. The Brazilian filmgoing public was accustomed to films that served as distractions from everyday life, not reminders of its challenges. And, while the tension between film as distracting spectacle or as vehicle for social critique has been present since the beginning of the cultural form, the Brazilian context was

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complicated by the conditions of postcoloniality. Not only did the public consume frivolous cinema, but much of that cinema originated in the United States, making the ideological damage of its consumption even more pernicious from the perspective of the revolutionary left. Another challenge related to film industry production, distribution, and exhibition practices. While post-revolutionary Cuba was able to restructure the film industry via a state system that supported the use of film for a left project, the bulk of NLAC directors faced significant obstacles as they sought funding for projects and venues for screenings while working in hostile national contexts. One of the interesting complexities to this trajectory, though, was that conservative goals for protecting national culture and developing national economies opened up spaces for some filmmakers that would otherwise not have been possible. In 1930s Brazil, the state developed a series of protectionist policies that would also support national cinema. The state’s investment in and protection of national cinema paved the way for the socially critical films of cinema nôvo from the 1960s to reach the big screen. There, as in Cuba, the support of the state was always a double-edged sword, since with support came ideological pressures to reinforce state policies. And the aggressively critical optic of films like Rocha’s inevitably sparked critiques of antinationalism. As he explains it, “It was this gallery of the hungry that identified Cinema Nôvo with the miserabilism so condemned by the government, by criticism at the service of anti-national interests, by producers and by the audience, who can not bear images of its own wretchedness.”26 As Johnson explains, in its initial phase from 1960 to 1964, Brazilian cinema nôvo was intimately connected to the state’s goals of “formulating a national ideology of development.”27 Cinema nôvo was dedicated to exposing the extent to which underdevelopment limited the possibilities of social transformation. By using a radical aesthetic, viewers would finally be able to see the “true” face of their nation and would be inspired to struggle for social change. As was common with many of the politically committed filmmakers from Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s who had been influenced by the experimental aesthetics of the French nouvelle vague, Rocha’s cinema, despite its call to urgency, and despite its desire to communicate revolutionary ideals to the Brazilian public, was extremely stylized, highly symbolic, and slow-paced. Rocha commonly used cinema in highly metaphorical ways, blending classical myth, local folklore, and contemporary politics. His filming of violence

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and suffering was often operatic and grand. Scenes of violence from Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil, 1964) contrast image and sound in ways that can be highly disconcerting to the viewer. And, in that film, movements, especially those of violence, are shown at an excruciatingly slow pace, with cinematography that favors large, circular, off-kilter camera shots. The aesthetic project in films such as Rocha’s was to defamiliarize and intensify images of violence, producing a sense of fear and disgust in the viewer. Overblown images of almost melodramatic suffering blended with uncanny attention to the details of everyday life found in nouvelle vague films, making each movement, each action, each utterance strange and disturbing. Almost all features of standard narrative cinema are entirely absent, forcing the viewer to work to link scenes and follow the plot. Neoliberal Hunger: Cidade de Deus’s Market Aesthetics In contrast to the less widely accessible aesthetics of Rocha’s cinema, Meirelles and Lund’s film drew a tremendous audience in Brazil and internationally. In the period from 1994 to 2003, Cidade de Deus attracted the second largest Brazilian audience for a national film, with 3.1 million spectators watching the film in theaters. Its fast-paced editing, use of popular music, and slick look combined to appeal to a broad range of spectators. The combination of its hip aesthetic, with its large box office success, and its topic of violence and suffering in Rio caused a flurry of commentary on whether the film had used images of Brazilian suffering to create a spectacle for public consumption or whether it had opened up much-needed public attention to Brazilian social crises. Based on a homonymous novel by Paulo Lins, who had lived in the favela himself, the film Cidade de Deus spans over two decades and delves into the lives of a group of young boys who grow up in the planned project-cum-slum named, ironically, Cidade de Deus [city of God]. Meirelles has said that the real protagonist of the film is the slum itself, as it houses a community that suffers and inflicts greater and greater degrees of violence.28 A repository for the bare life of the city of Rio, the film’s Cidade de Deus stands in for all of the favelas, shanty towns, camps, ghettos, and projects that populate the globe separating disposable, precarious life from those with privilege. When signs of the state appear in the film in the form of the police, they are disinterested in protecting the lives of the inhabitants, choosing instead to murder, accept

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bribes, and encourage drug violence indiscriminately. By focusing on the partitioning of Brazilian society, the film displays the biopolitical realities of lower-class Afro-Brazilians, who not only are denied the rights and protections of a state, but who are also denied even the recognition of their precarious status. Despite its provocative topic and its multilayered aesthetic, the film’s plot is fairly simple and reductive. It weaves together the lives of two boys from Cidade de Deus, the non-violent, thoughtful, attractive, and kind narrator who becomes a photographer for a major newspaper, Buscapé, and the psychopathically violent, amoral, and ugly drug lord, Li’l Zé. The binary structure to these two characters and the lack of larger context to explain the realities that shape their lives create substantial limits on the film’s ability to foster critical reflection on the themes of poverty and violence. The fact that both characters are shown to be predisposed to either aggression or non-violence from an early age suggests that the cause of violence in slum communities may be more genetic than socially produced. In effect, both characters are hungry, both want their lives to change, both want security and respect, but they choose radically different paths. The film’s presentation of these two alternative paths runs the risk of suggesting that those members of Cidade de Deus who do not achieve Buscapé’s success simply didn’t try hard enough or were basically inclined to live a life of violence, squalor, and drug consumption. And while one of the main characters, Knockout Ned, experiences a transformation from an upstanding, moral, good guy to a gangster, and while the violence of the “Tender Trio”—the preceding gang made up of an older generation—is vastly different from that of Li’l Zé, the film seems largely disinterested in providing a broader social explanation for the ubiquitous presence of violence in the community. When we combine the film’s slick aesthetic, morally reductive plot, and lack of context for Cidade de Deus’s poverty, violence, and drug culture, it is easy to see why the film came under such critical scrutiny. It is also easy to see why few, if any, critics would see any parallels between Meirelles and Lund’s film and the work of cinema nôvo directors such as Rocha. My argument, however, is that the superficial features of the film are only part of its larger aesthetic project—that, in fact, the commercially oriented features of the film are used strategically to expose a large audience to a film experience that combines pleasure with social critique through a very specific mode of montage and shot construction.

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Upon closer examination it becomes apparent that each reductive element of the film has a reflective counterpart. For instance, the slick aesthetic pleases at the same time that it is so readily apparent as to call attention to itself and to its own artifice, thereby constantly reminding the viewer that they are experiencing produced images. The contrast between the good Buscapé and the bad Li’l Zé is complicated by other secondary characters that trouble that binary, such as the benevolent drug lord, Benny, and the aforementioned Knockout Ned. But perhaps the most interesting counterpoint is with the way that the film presents the problem of the lack of context. The neighborhood of Cidade de Deus may be the protagonist of the film, as Meirelles says, but the film’s ongoing critical trope, if not central theme, is in fact the problem of context, of how to tell a story of a marginal community in a way that recognizes that cinema can never provide adequate context. To address this dilemma the film offers an aesthetic technique of layering, parataxis, and juxtaposition, where images only make sense when compared and connected to others. Taken alone the images lack significance; they only acquire meaning as the viewer connects them to others. This problematic is made evident in the opening scene, which only becomes intelligible at the end of the film, when it is screened again. Not only do we have to watch the whole film to understand the dynamics that structure the last scene, but the actual montage and shot construction emphasize the fact that films can only capture part of the picture. The first image after the opening credits is of a knife sliding over a sharpening stone. The image is violence absent context. After five images of the knife intercalated with black screen we are given extreme closeups of a series of images: dancing feet, chickens being slaughtered, and preparations for a stew. The only onlooker to the scene is another chicken that awaits its own slaughter and slowly manages to escape. As it flees, a group follows in hot pursuit. Again the images favor the extreme close-up, often with the main image off center, providing the viewer little background for what is being seen. We only get medium shots when we see Buscapé walking with a friend and discussing his new job as a photographer. In these shots the Samba music and quick cutting techniques we have been watching disappear and the sound is limited to the dialogue of the boys. Eventually these two worlds collide as Buscapé comes face to face with his nemesis Li’l Zé, who brandishes a pistol as he asks him to grab the escaped chicken. As an anxious Buscapé faces the gang,

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a van of police pulls up behind him. The camera does a 360-degree circle around Buscapé: he is caught between the guns of the gang and those of the cops. The swooping camera works like a device of entrapment, underscoring the border that has been drawn around Cidade de Deus itself. But just as the movie camera encircles Buscapé, his vulnerability is offset by the still camera that he has around his neck. He may be the object of image production but he himself is able to produce images. The extreme close-ups that deny the viewer context, the 360-degree swoop around Buscapé, the offset between the movie camera’s visual effects and the camera held by Buscapé, and the cross cutting between Buscapé and the gang’s pursuit of the escaped chicken all combine to create a highly intense and visually stimulating opening sequence. And, while the effects might be consumed as nothing more than Matrix-like visual antics, there is a marked difference between the way these effects work in a film with no larger critical point and one that gestures toward social commentary. In fact, one might argue, the non-realist filming strategies used in the opening sequence draw even greater attention to the difficulties of using commercial cinema as a vehicle for representing harsh realities. It is worth remembering that the film opens with a scene of hunger, where a community that suffers hunger engages in violence to satisfy it. Hermann Herlinghaus in Violence without Ethics writes about the difficulties for filmmakers who attempt to create images of violence that elude common tropes. He describes an aesthetic shift in recent Latin American films. And, while he doesn’t consider Cidade de Deus necessarily as a good example of these changes, I think that the film can be read according to his theory of how Latin American films have developed an aesthetic of bare life.29 The epistemic changes described by Herlinghaus read interestingly alongside Henry Giroux’s theories of the ways that the mass media teaches society to accept the disposability of massive sectors of a given state’s population. As Giroux argues, the mass media has created a barrage of images of bare life that function as a form of pedagogy—“Mass and image-based media have become a new and powerful pedagogical force, reconfiguring the very nature of politics, cultural production, engagement, and resistance.”30 Herlinghaus and Giroux analyze how cultural representations of contemporary forms of bare life must be read within the context of neoliberalism. Under the free market, pro-privatization practices of neoliberalism, the geographic boundaries that had marked the postcolonial criticisms

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of 1960s and 1970s revolutionary culture are no longer functional. Recall that Rocha’s cinema was involved in a complex relationship to the pro-nationalist protectionist policies of the right in the 1960s in Brazil that created, for instance, state mechanisms to protect national cinema. The left project, though, sought not only to develop autochthonous cultural forms and sovereign economic practices, but it also framed these goals within a larger power struggle that emphasized the need to reject the legacies of colonial practices and epistemes. Within this logic, it makes sense, then, for filmmakers to be extremely invested in the creation of a local aesthetic, one that emerges from the space of the nation in order to offer a critical view of it. And, even though that aesthetic was itself inspired by extranational practices like Italian neorealism, the French nouvelle vague, and Soviet dialectical montage, these influences were cannibalized, adapted, and altered in the Latin American context. By the time of Cidade de Deus’s debut in 2002, however, the investment in the production of a local aesthetic had radically shifted. First, the postcolonial core–periphery model that governed most Cold War-era theories of culture and economy had been replaced by attention to the ways that free-market economics called for new understandings of geographic spaces. And second, the new global economy for filmmaking brought with it an entirely different context within which to make non-Hollywood cinema. By the 1990s, when neoliberalism enjoyed a global surge, most state systems that protected national cinemas had been adjusted for the global market, feature films were made with an eye to recuperating costs, and the prevalence of internet video, television, and other media forms made it possible for citizens of any nation to access culture across national borders. The idea of a contained national culture no longer made sense. This means that the MTV culture-inspired aesthetic elements of Cidade de Deus cannot be assessed according to cinema nôvo criteria. It means that when Brazilian film critic Bentes constructs a dichotomy between an aesthetics of hunger and a cosmetics of hunger, she is assessing a twenty-first century film that emerges under neoliberalism according to cultural models that date back to the 1960s. By the late 1990s, the idea of a Latin American autochthonous film style had been the subject of significant debates, and critics like Néstor García Canclini and Jesús Martín-Barbero argued for understanding Latin American media as hybrid mediations, where local practices of reading intertwined with extranational cultural products. If we think of

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the opening scene of Cidade de Deus with its images of hunger and violence, we can recognize that the film opens up the question of hunger, or consumption, and of violence within an aesthetic that is both pleasurable and critical while also participating in the neoliberal marketplace. Just placing the story of Cidade de Deus on the big screen and opening up the injustices screened there to public debate has to be understood as a political act, even when, or especially when, that act includes reinvigorating Brazilian cinema for Brazilian audiences. While it is clear that such an aesthetic risks objectifying the very population it seems committed to serve, it is also clear that when a Brazilian film about hunger and violence is commercially consumed in the global marketplace, it serves to destabilize the neoliberal practice of distracting the public from social inequities. Giroux claims that the biopolitical practices of neoliberalism yoke state-sanctioned violence to state policies that “relegate entire populations to spaces of invisibility and disposability.”31 At the very least, Cidade de Deus’s focus on the way that the construction of housing projects for lower-class Brazilians instituted a politics of bare life, where segments of the population were violently separated from civic society, draws attention to social practices that border on apartheid. What is more, the film traces the trajectory of this community over time, where any semblance of civic protections increasingly erodes as Cidade de Deus’s inhabitants become more and more the subjects of drug gangs and police brutality rather than citizens of the state. But, as mentioned above, it is the film’s inability to offer viewers the larger social context for these inequities and injustices fully that begs the question of what it means to offer viewers a film about hunger that is exciting and pleasurable to watch. Thus, one of the key shifts that takes place between the revolutionary aesthetic of Rocha and the neoliberal one of Meirelles is connected to the question of whether politically provocative cinema can also be successful at the box office and whether it can co-opt the language of Hollywood in order to make a film about important social issues. It seems that the choice between an art film for an elite and a mainstream film for the masses is a false choice, since neither can be imagined as a perfect vehicle for politically relevant art. Both types of films are consumed—and when the films are of hunger, that consumption is even more disturbing. One of the most significant features of Cidade de Deus that differentiates it from the work of directors such as Rocha was its ability to project its subject matter into the public sphere as the film

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became the subject of debate and the film spun into a television series that led to even more public dialogue on the topic. Meirelles and Lund created a miniseries, entitled Cidade dos Homens (City of Men, 2002– 2005), that attracted over 35 million viewers of Brazilian TV and was later released on DVD in 2004. Because of new technologies and the increasing ease with which stories cross over between media forms, the cultural resonance of projects like Cidade dos Homens goes beyond the theater experience in ways that were unthinkable in the 1960s. In today’s context, a commercial film can open spaces for critical reflection through DVD extras, websites, book tie-ins, and other media forms that allow for greater viewer engagement with the film’s subject. Not only did the film draw a sizable Brazilian population to the theater, not only did it spark a significant amount of public debate, but even President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who attempted to implement a “Zero Hunger” policy after his election in 2002, called the film a cry for change: “We are going to create the conditions so that everyone in our country can eat a decent meal three times a day, every day, without needing donations from anyone,” Lula stated at the launching ceremony for his “Zero Hunger” plan in Brasilia.32 At the time of Cidade de Deus’s release, Brazil, with a population of 170 million, had 46 million inhabitants that lived on less than a dollar a day.33 With about one-third of the population living in poverty, hunger was an urgent national crisis. Clearly a nation that suffers from such extreme problems of poverty requires public acknowledgment of the crisis as a first step to addressing it, and Cidade de Deus, despite its potentially problematic aesthetics, undeniably assisted in that process. Locating the National and the Global in The Constant Gardener and the Brazilian Olympic Opening Ceremony Lula’s “Zero Hunger” plan drew important attention to the economic crisis in Brazil, but his presidency incorporated deep contradictions that were visible as well in other left-oriented governments in the neoliberal era. As William Robinson explains in Latin America and Global Capitalism, at first the Lula government sent significant anxiety throughout the global markets.34 Over time, though, it became apparent that the Lula government was not only an example of a more centrist left project, it was actually quite favorable to neoliberalism. Robinson explains that his government was able to “push forward a new wave of capitalist

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globalization with greater credibility than [his] orthodox neoliberal predecessors.”35 Thus, the complicated reality of the Lula presidency was that it promoted social programs like the “Zero Hunger” plan while it advanced practices that were entirely in keeping with the needs of global capital markets. One of Lula’s leftist causes was his effort to fight the pharmaceutical industry over AIDS medication. In 1996, Brazilian federal law ensured that all patients infected with HIV who needed antiretroviral therapy (ART) would receive it free of charge. In order for Brazil to offer patients needed medication, they relied on generic drugs—a move that put them directly in conflict with “Big Pharma.” In order to keep drug costs down, Brazil broke drug patents to manufacture its own generics, leading to a bitter international trade dispute. Then in 2007, Lula signed a compulsory license that overrode Merck’s patent on the AIDS drug Efavirenz, so that Brazil could import a generic version of the drug from India.36 The move put Lula in direct conflict with the entire global market, leading the United States to threaten that it would sever ties with Brazil if he followed through. This story of the fight over generic drugs is not only instructive because it reveals the complicated and compromised ways that left-leaning governments in the neoliberal era have walked a tightrope between social programs and the demands of global capital, but also because it offers a backdrop to Meirelles’s first English-language film. Meirelles’s next major project after Cidade de Deus was The Constant Gardener (2005), an adaptation of the homonymous novel by John le Carré. Meirelles explained that when he was approached about the project, he already was working on another film, but the idea of making a film that went after Big Pharma was especially appealing, since he had already been watching these issues unfold at home for years. In an interview on The Constant Gardener, he explains that he saw the film as a way to bring the social issues of the pharmaceutical industry to the big screen: “I’ve been reading about this for the past few years—on Oxfam’s website, for example—and I realized that making a film is a good opportunity to prod them.”37 In another interview he explained that he was drawn to make a film in Kenya, but he also liked the script because of the role of the pharmaceutical industry: “I thought they were very good villains.”38 The film stars Ralph Fiennes as Justin, a somewhat stuffy, reserved Englishman assigned to the British High Commission in Kenya who occupies his free time in his garden while his young, beautiful wife Tessa

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(Rachel Weisz) risks her life doing dangerous AIDS relief work, fearlessly making a number of enemies. When she is murdered, Justin is forced to abandon his detached lifestyle to find out the truth of what happened to her. Told in a series of flashbacks, the film also explores their unusual love story. The key to the success of the film is the intricate weaving between Justin’s story as both a clueless husband and a disconnected world citizen. Rather than offer a heavy-handed indictment of the drug industry, the film is just as much a story about the costs of being unaware of the realities of the world in which we live. As Meirelles explains, Justin “lives by a code. He lives in this garden, his own cocoon. He lives in Africa, but he really doesn’t touch Africa. He doesn’t see Africa.”39 His love for Tessa, though, forces him to understand the social issues that drove her life. It’s the sort of romantic-political formula common to Hollywood-funded social-issue films that both drives left-oriented critics nuts and appeals to those in the mainstream. Justin receives his political education via bourgeois motives. His awe at the inhumane system in which he had been living in Kenya is testimony to his privilege. And yet, it is exactly these sorts of palatable Hollywood-style stories of cominginto-consciousness that do in fact often lead naïve spectators to learn more about the issues raised by the film narrative. The film also offers a chance to explore the trajectory of Meirelles’s career. It was not surprising to see an Academy Award-nominated director from the global south given the chance to make a Hollywood film with A-list actors as a next step. But it would be a mistake to see the transition for Meirelles as one that meant that he was moving beyond or leaving behind his ties to Brazil. Rather, Meirelles’s optic in the film displays a global sensibility that understands that the world health crisis is not limited to one nation. While Brazil is never referenced in the film, there is little doubt that Meirelles considered the plot to revolve around a global crisis that was not limited to a single nation-state. Meirelles, who often refers to himself as from the third world, distinguishes between the experience of Brazil with Big Pharma and that of African nations like Kenya. Meirelles had witnessed Brazil push back on Big Pharma and win. But he also noticed the vicious ways that the drug companies and state governments colluded to protect profits over people: “I’ve been reading about pharmaceuticals for a long time. That’s why I was so interested, because they’re so powerful. When the government says, ‘No, we’re going to pay 70 cents for the pill, not six dollars,’ immediately you have

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pressure from the State Department here. They really put all the machine against [you]. They really know how to pressure.”40 As Tessa works with German activists and uncovers a Canadian drug company with British ties testing a new treatment for tuberculosis in Kenya, the viewer is able to see the global web of connections that drives the pharmaceutical market. When she uncovers the fact that the drug is being tested in Kenya precisely because the test subjects are unaware that they are trying an experimental drug, the viewer appreciates two key features of the neoliberal system: disposable life and a global transnational corporate elite that operates outside the bounds of almost any legal system. In the opening of the film during the first flashback, we see Tessa meet Justin for the first time as he delivers a speech about the benefits of diplomacy. Justin is operating with a post-World War II Foreign Service mentality. Tessa, however, is a feisty political activist who asks him to explain how the British role in the invasion of Iraq can be explained by diplomacy. She passionately reminds him that the invasion is a violation of United Nations’ norms in a confrontation that eventually clears the room of all of the audience members and leaves Justin alone with Tessa. Moments later they are in bed. The formula of a sexy, passionate leftist and a stodgy, British diplomat may seem predictable, but the reality is that the film uses their relationship to explain that Justin’s diplomacy and Tessa’s United Nations are outdated structures in the world of Big Pharma and neoliberal capital. The film clearly displays the ways that the profiteering impulses of global capitalism are aided by both the diplomacy and trade policy of Western governments. By the end of the film, Justin has lost all of his naïveté as he prepares to be murdered in the same place where Tessa was assassinated. The last scene, though, has Tessa’s cousin read a letter from a British official revealing his involvement in the drug scheme and his plans to stop Tessa while the press covers the story. The closing message seems to suggest that while state systems are not likely to protect the lives of the people being used by the drug company in Kenya, political activists and the media are still able to fight for justice. It may seem naïve, but at heart the story also clearly reveals what Nancy Fraser describes in The Scales of Justice as a new global arena for understanding the crimes of capital.41 Meirelles drives this optic home by favoring shots that are off-kilter. From the opening sequence that shows the overturned Jeep where Tessa was killed to the last shots of Justin sitting on a rock as he awaits his murderers, the camera often shoots its subjects on an angle.

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These angled shots subtly suggest that the ethical system in which these deaths take place is not only skewed, but imbalanced. The film is not a documentary, nor is it tracing the story of a specific case. Rather it treats the issue of drug testing on African populations in a fictionalized way. Meirelles explains that the film focuses on the reality of the exploitation of populations by drug companies: They are using Africans as guinea pigs, which really happens. The plot in this film is based on something that happened in Nigeria four years ago. It was the same thing. In this case there was an American company [that] went to Nigeria to test a drug, and people would sign informed consent, supposedly knowing that they were testing a drug. In exchange they would have free treatment for their families for all other diseases, like insurance. But after four or five months, some of the people who were testing the drugs started having problems with their legs. They couldn’t walk.42

The key to this backstory is the fact that the film expands on this one case to describe an overall policy whereby drug companies abuse human life while claiming to protect it. The film plays with this tragic irony by screening ads of the drug company KDH, with the motto “The World is Our Clinic.” What should read as a motto about protecting and caring for the world is reversed to a macabre claim that the company is able to use the world to run tests on experimental drugs. The closing credits of the film include the following quote: “Nobody in this story, and no outfit or corporation, thank God, is based upon an actual person or outfit in the real world, but I can tell you this: as my journey through the pharmaceutical jungle progressed, I came to realize that, by comparison with the reality, my story was as tame as a holiday postcard.” The text appears over John le Carré’s name. Meirelles’s second film encapsulates all that is good, all that is bad, and all that is risky about making a big-budget Hollywood film about a social issue. As one critic put it, “it uses the misery of the developing world as an exotic backdrop for a story about the travails of white people.”43 Despite the fact that one of the key roles is the Kenyan doctor who works with Tessa, the reality is that the entire film is driven by white characters. Almost all speaking lines in the film are by whites. And then there is the love story between Tessa and Justin, played by two Hollywood stars. All of this combines to create a saccharine-sweet coating to a bitter story. And yet, as the same reviewer explains, “it is

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precisely the moral failures and obligations of the wealthy world that are at issue here.”44 The point is that the movie is as much about white privilege as it is about “disposable people taking disposable drugs,” to quote a line from the film. And yet, as one reviewer noted, you simply won’t see such a beautiful, breathtaking film about this issue shot by an African director: “look to films made by Africans, and none of them indulge in this sensationalized, sun-scorched hyperbole. A middle-classer from Rio, Meirelles is just as dedicated to pounding home a lurid idea of dangerous African otherness as any commercial Brit filmmaker.”45 This view is, of course, absolutely right. And yet, it misses the point that there is some positive political work in raising issues among those who are simply unaware of these abuses. Recall that the film came out in the height of the George W. Bush post-9/11 era, a time when the public was hearing of “rogue states” and “failed states” and when the discourse of hegemony argued that identifying evil was a simple task. Taking that context in mind, one positive review remarked that The Constant Gardener “actually bothers to say something about global politics. . . . In pointedly applying President Bush’s phrase ‘axis of evil’ to multinational corporations rather than to rogue states, the movie shows a willingness to risk didacticism in the service of encouraging discussion.”46 This of course brings us back to Meirelles’s comments about Cidade de Deus. For him, a political film starts a conversation and opens up an ethical debate; it doesn’t moralize. But that doesn’t mean it has no political edge; the drug company as villain in The Constant Gardener is clear. Even more, as evidenced by the news reports on the film, it clearly led to public debate of the issue. And yet, for those bothered by Cidade de Deus, The Constant Gardener was sure to be even more bothersome. Like Cidade de Deus it also was nominated for four Academy Awards. While Cidade de Deus was produced in part by Globo Filmes, The Constant Gardener was produced by Focus Features, a subsidiary of NBCUniversal on a far larger budget. After The Constant Gardener, Meirelles’s next two projects seemed to suggest that he was indeed moving away from working in Brazil. Both Blindness (2008) and 360 (2011) were Hollywood-connected projects with a global aesthetic and a lack of substantial political edge. And yet, proving, once again, that old models of non-US directors gaining access to Hollywood and never looking back no longer apply in the global era, Meirelles’s next major project

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was directing the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Olympic Opening Ceremony. The opening ceremony sparked the typical flurry of comments, especially because Meirelles chose to use it to tell the story of the diverse cultural history of Brazil, a task that was sure to leave certain critics disappointed. Meirelles, though, showed that he remains a filmmaker interested in using his work to drive a political point. Before the ceremony aired he took to Twitter in August 2016 to say that two political candidates were not going to be fans of the show: Donald Trump and Brazil’s ultra-right presidential candidate, Jair Bolsonaro. His tweet to Trump and Bolsonaro stated: “A cerimônia de hoje terá índios, empoderamento dos negros e das mulheres, transgêneros e um alerta contra os riscos do uso de petróleio” [The ceremony today will be Indians, empowerment of blacks and women, transgenders, and a warning against the risks of using up oil]. He then added: “Bolsanaro vai odiar a cerimônia. Trump também. Pelo menos nisso acertamos” [Bolsanaro will hate the ceremony. Trump too. At least we nailed it].47 Meirelles clearly conceived of the opening ceremony as starting a global dialogue about the rise of the ultra-right and the global threats to diversity and inclusion. The opening ceremony directed by Meirelles was also noteworthy for being fiscally responsible. It was produced with a significantly lower budget compared to preceding years, reportedly costing only 10% of London’s $42 million ceremony in 2012. In 2008, China spent over $100 million. Meirelles explained that it would have been irresponsible to spend such a lavish budget in the midst of a major economic recession: “We are in a financial crisis, everybody knows. . . . It wouldn’t be fair to spend money that London spent in their ceremony.”48 Meirelles explained, “Athens was about the classics, Beijing was grandiose and muscular, London was smart, and ours—ours will be cool.”49 Still, the organizers claimed that one of its noteworthy distinctions would be that it was sexy.50 Objectifying the sexiness of Brazilian culture for foreign consumption, while also making a statement about the global obsession with oil, perfectly epitomizes the deep contradictions at the heart of large-scale commercially oriented political visual culture in the neoliberal era.

State Institutions and Social Violence in Hector Babenco’s Films Hector Babenco was one of the few directors to have straddled both the heyday of the Embrafilme era of Brazilian film in the late 1970s and early 1980s and its reconstruction after the onset of neoliberalism. Babenco is

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considered a post-cinema nôvo director and he is credited with making one of the most important social-issue films of the 1980s, Pixote (1981). For George Csicsery, Babenco was the most important post-cinema nôvo director: “his films are chronicles of intolerable brutality in the lives of outlaws and outcasts spawned by the unforgiving squalor which is the lot of Brazil’s poor.”51 Argentine-born Babenco made a range of films, including the English-language version of Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) based on the novel by Manuel Puig, which led to Babenco being nominated for best director at the Academy Awards, a first at the time for a Latin American, and it landed William Hurt an Oscar for best actor. Babenco made films within Hollywood and in Latin America, but this section focuses on two films that bookend his career and that offer a glimpse of the complex ways that his filmmaking navigated Brazilian institutions. In 1978, Brazilian cinema received its largest market share at the time, drawing 61.8 million spectators and capturing 29.2% of the market. In 1980, it did even better and drew its largest market share yet, 30.8%. As Johnson explains, from 1978 to 1980 the Brazilian film industry was at its apex, averaging around 100 films per year.52 Johnson argues that this surge was due to the robust involvement of Embrafilme in distribution and coproduction alongside a compulsory exhibition quota.53 While the film industry was on an upswing, the country remained ruled by a military dictatorship. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla explains that the context for the filming of Pixote was highly complex: “Este periodo histórico se caracteriza por sus profundas contradicciones sociales e ideológicas, como resultado de la dictadura militar en Brasil, la cual llegó al poder en 1964 mediante un golpe militar y devino mucho más rígida y violenta después de 1968” [This historical period was characterized by its profound social and ideological contradictions, as a result of the military dictatorship in Brazil, which took power in 1964 through a military coup and became much more rigid and violent after 1968].54 Pixote appeared during the late stages of the dictatorship during the presidency of João Baptista Figueiredo (1979–1985). When Figueiredo was appointed president by the military government in 1979, the country was heading toward a severe economic crisis and there were substantial public protests calling for a return to democracy. Figueiredo continued the trajectory started by his predecessor and moved the nation toward redemocratization.

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The year that Pixote was released was a true pivot point for the film industry and the nation as a whole. The economic crisis hit the film industry as well and also brought down spectatorship drastically. Those films that were produced in Brazil were of increasingly poor quality, and Johnson notes that between 1981 and 1985 “pornographic films accounted for an average of almost 73% of total production.”55 Thus, when Pixote was released the industry was on the brink of a crisis. To complicate matters, the film was originally meant to be a documentary about children in a reform school. Babenco recounts in an interview that his vision for the film was to work with about 200 children filming their stories, “but after ten or twelve visits to the reform school the authorities closed the door on me, stopping me from working in real reformatories.”56 While Babenco had initially hoped to take advantage of the more liberal environment of the waning military dictatorship, his visits to the reform school revealed the limits of state tolerance for his project. Since Babenco couldn’t do a documentary, he decided to fictionalize the story: “I very excitedly decided to write a script and do a fiction film—to try to make another reality like the reality they wouldn’t permit me to show.”57 Thus, he worked around the indirect censorship of his project by fictionalizing it. In these ways Pixote is a film at the crossroads of many transitions in Brazil: the aesthetic move away from cinema nôvo, the last years of Embrafilme, the process of redemocratization, the brink of a financial crisis, and the persistence of state censorship and repression. GutiérrezAlbilla further explains that “Brasil estaba pasando de ser un régimen represivo totalitario a un sistema neoliberal que estaba marcado por el predominio de una sociedad conformista y consumista” [Brazil was going from a repressive totalitarian regime to a neoliberal system that was marked by the predominance of a conformist and consumerist society].58 Of interest is the fact that at exactly the same time that the film industry had some of its strongest state support Babenco set out to make a film about how the state neglects the young. Pixote begins with a rather didactic opening monologue by Babenco explaining to the viewer that there is a serious social crisis in the lowerclass neighborhoods of São Paulo where many young children are abandoned, left alone during the day, and neglected. Panning to a shot of Fernando Ramos da Silva who plays the lead character in the film, Babenco explains that Fernando lives with eight other siblings and that all of them are left unattended during the day. Babenco’s opening is

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meant to offer a harsh fact-check on the ways that the Brazilian state has left these children to fend for themselves, a reality that then leads to a culture of delinquency and violence, which the state will later have to police. Careful to avoid calling out the military government directly, Babenco opens the film simply offering the facts about this large underclass of young people, who are treated within the social structure as both disposable and threatening. Troping on Michel Foucault, Babenco treats the reform school as part of a larger “carceral system,” a network of disciplinary bodies that both controls human life and creates the very delinquency it then needs to punish.59 Babenco’s attention to disciplinary society allows him to sidestep a direct confrontation with the military government and offers him a chance to explore the ways that modern Brazil depends on creating lower-class youth as a biopolitical class that exists only to be detained, repressed, and discarded. The narrative of Pixote begins with a police sweep of São Paulo streets, where Pixote (which means pipsqueak), an abandoned ten-yearold boy, Lilica, a trans adolescent, and a number of other boys are taken to a juvenile detention center. The initiation into a world that allows the boys to be treated entirely as objects of repression is immediate. Within the first ten minutes of the film, Pixote witnesses a brutal rape of a very young child at the hands of older detainees. The scene is brutally graphic. Shot with almost no light we simply see indiscriminate bodies struggling and hear the muffled cries of the boy. The only discernible image is that of Pixote’s face as he looks on, terrified. Then when the adult supervisor encounters the raped boy, we see him lying face down with a white, bloodied towel covering his backside. It is only the beginning of a series of highly graphic images that Babenco uses to force the viewer to acknowledge the extreme violence that governs the lives of these boys. The film focuses on the reality that the boys simply attempt to survive in an atmosphere of police brutality, sexual violence, and murder. The culture of violence spills well beyond the disciplinary body of the state and the film refuses to allow us to paint a rosy picture of innocent boys being taken advantage of by a cruel system. Instead, it shows how the system produces the very delinquency it polices. When Pixote and his friends witness a boy murdered within the detention center, they seek to escape. And yet, once “free” they are equally trapped in a world of crime, poverty, drugs, and prostitution that threatens them constantly. What is most disturbing is the way that the film slowly shows how Pixote

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becomes almost completely detached from emotional affect. From his wide-eyed watching of rape at the start of the film, we see him lose almost all ability to show expression. Near the end of the film, Pixote and his friends have become pimps to Sueli, an older prostitute suffering from the effects of a botched abortion. In a scuffle with an American john, Pixote shoots not only the john, but also his friend Dito. Pixote seeks comfort from Sueli, reverting momentarily to a child-like state and attempting to breast feed on her. She indulges him briefly and even entertains the idea of leaving with him to a rural area, but in the end she rejects him and the last shot of the film is Pixote walking along a railway line, back to the camera, holding a gun. This is not a film that offers viewers an easy moral code, nor does it offer any single character who is not morally compromised. This lack of judgment distances it from much of the aesthetics of cinema nôvo, but I would argue that the shifts are a logical consequence of making the film at the tail end of a dictatorship that had lasted almost a quarter century and at the advent of the implementation of neoliberal policy in Brazil. That said, the film sparked mixed reviews of its political potential. For Robert Stam, the film was a far cry from cinema nôvo. His review of the film claimed that one of its key flaws was that it lacked a “deeper political analysis”: “Unlike cinema nôvo films Pixote makes no global statement about Brazilian society. Babenco seems to blame institutions, as ghettoized scenes of local abuse, rather than the social system that makes such institutions, and such abuses, virtually inevitable.”60 For Stam, the focus on the institutions themselves, absent a larger political context, localizes the social violence depicted. I would argue, in contrast, that the focus on the institution follows Foucault’s thinking that understanding the larger social system of neoliberal society depends on recognizing the fact that the disciplinary apparatus of the state is in fact the source of the larger system. For Gutiérrez-Albilla, Pixote departs most deeply from cinema nôvo in its more commercial aesthetic.61 He does note, though, that the edgy realism of the film offers a form of social protest as it depicts the most socially and politically oppressed individuals of 1980s Brazilian society.62 Babenco, of course, was well aware of these criticisms and he knew that his work bothered those on the right and on the left. He explains that the film was not invited to the Havana Film Festival:

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They said the same thing that the moral conservatives tell me. Extreme left-wing people and extreme right-wing people are in exactly the same position on this film. The left-wing people say, ‘You show the dirt in society, but you don’t say who is at fault.’ Left-wing people want a theorem. They want a formula. I know the kinds of films being made in all the countries of South America, and I’m sure that my films and not the leftist films are the most socially powerful. I don’t believe in the solution proposed by the left.63

Echoing the same sort of arguments used by Meirelles in response to criticism of Cidade de Deus, we see Babenco make the same case two decades prior. While the exact perfect formula for a political film is up for endless debate, one thing is certain: Pixote became one of the most important films in the post-cinema nôvo transition. Ten years after the release of Pixote, Fernando Collor de Mello, the first democratically elected president in Brazil in over 30 years, terminated state investment in the film industry as part of a neoliberal economic plan. Johnson explains that the shift ended a federal cultural policy that “had developed irregularly since the 1930s.”64 The effects for the film industry were dire since it had “become almost entirely dependent on the state for production financing.”65 While Embrafilme and the National Film Institute (INC) had originally focused on regulating market forces, by the 1980s, it had become an active agent in film production, distribution, and exhibition. When Embrafilme was shut down, the domestic Brazilian film industry had to reinvent itself to survive. That reinvention notably took a far more market-oriented turn. Similar to policies that were implemented in Mexico after the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, Brazil created film policies that were based on offering corporations incentives for investing in films. The 1991 Rouanet Law offered a tax credit for investments in national films. And the 1993 Audiovisual Law allowed businesses an opportunity to invest a portion of their income tax into audiovisual projects. Even more importantly, the 1993 law allows foreign-film distributors a chance to invest up to 70% of their income tax in national film projects. Johnson explains that the idea behind these laws was to develop a more self-sustained film industry and to foster better relationships between the film industry and the private sector.66 The impact of these laws cannot be overstated: Almost all Brazilian films since 1993 have received at least partial funding as a result of these two laws.67 In addition, the Brazilian film industry has expanded

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its share of the market up from only 3.35% in 1995 to 12.72% in 2015. The following two charts tracing national film production and its share of the market and spectators for Brazilian films help illuminate the shifts in the industry since the implementation of these laws (see Tables 6.1 and 6.2). Tables 6.1 and 6.2 also illustrate the dramatic growth of the Brazilian film economy overall. Spectators jumped from 75 million in 1994 to 172.9 million in 2015, making Brazil one of the largest film economies in the world. Roque González, Courtney Brannon Donohue, and Johnson all point to another major shift that influenced the commercial uptick of Brazilian films and their market successes in this period—the combined investment of Globo Filmes and coproductions with members of the Motion Picture Association (MPA), which represents the majors.68 Brannon Donohue notes that by the early 2000s, Sony do Brasil had invested in more than half of the popular and commercially successful local films, including Deus é brasileiro (God Is Brazilian, 2003), Carandiru (2003), Cazuza: O Tempo Não Pára (Cazuza: Time Doesn’t Stop, 2004), and Dois filhos de Francisco (Two Sons of Francisco, 2005). She further notes that in 2004, “Sony do Brasil made more than 45% of its revenue from local productions, which today includes an average of three productions per year.”69 González notes that Globo—the fourth largest television network in the world and the largest in Latin America—began investing in the feature-film market in the late 1990s and in 1997 Globo Filmes was created.70 He points out that the top box office successes in Brazil from 2000 to 2010 were all produced with Globo support (see Table 6.3). Similarly, Johnson notes the rising presence of the MPA in Brazilian box office successes and he points to the fact that two of the three Brazilian films that were nominated for Academy Awards in the 1990s were coproduced with MPA firms.71 Brannon Donohue sees the role of Globo as a marker of a highly commercialized filmmaking project that follows a model that uses high-concept filmmaking to create local content.72 Globo invests in projects that can lead to spin-offs, sequels, and reboots and follows what Justin Wyatt describes as the “pre-sold premise,” “which is a remake or adaptation of a best-selling novel as well as a concept that taps into national trend, sentiment, or media event.”73 It is hard to square the notion of making socially significant films within this overall strategy. And yet, that is the structural ambivalence of neoliberal film investment.

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Table 6.1  Brazilian film market share. Source ANCINE, Cinema 10, and Octavio Getinoa Year

Total films released

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

45 57 43 68 115 95 100 151 196 225 300 273 330 326 325 317 303 337 327 397 393 446

Total national films 7 14 18 21 23 28 23 30 29 30 49 46 71 78 79 84 74 100 83 129 114 129

Percentage of national films (%) 15.55 24.56 41.86 30.88 20.00 29.47 23.00 19.86 14.79 13.33 16.33 16.84 21.51 23.92 24.30 26.49 24.42 29.67 25.38 32.49 29.00 28.92

aData from 1994–2001 from Octavio Getino, “Cine Argentino: Entre lo possible y lo deseable,” accessed February 19, 2017, http://www.panoramadelarte.com.ar/archivos/Discurso%20Audiovisual/ Getino_CINE_ARGENTINO.pdf. Data from 2012–2015 from “Anuário Estatístico do Cinema Brasileiro 2015,” ANCINE, accessed February 19, 2017, 10, http://oca.ancine.gov.br/sites/default/ files/cinema/pdf/anuario_2015.pdf. Data for total films released, for 1994–2001, from “Estréias do Cinema no ano de 2017,” Cinema 10, accessed February 19, 2017, http://cinema10.com.br/estreias. All data from 2002–2015 from “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro–2002 a 2015,” ANCINE, accessed February 19, 2017, http://oca.ancine.gov.br/sites/default/files/mercado_audiovisual/pdf/mercadoaudiovisualbr.pdf.

We note a constant balance between market mentalities, production of diverse commodities, and openings for socially significant culture that appeals to consumers. For some, these new institutional arrangements are too deeply implicated within capitalism to produce anything remotely resembling political culture. Johnson reminds us, though, that while the new institutional arrangements opened up opportunities for blockbuster social-issue films, it

358  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 6.2  Brazil—spectator data. Source UNESCO Institute for Statistics, ANCINE, Danielle Dos Santos Borges, Estadão, Fabio Sá Earpa Year

Total spectators

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015

75,000,000 93,000,000 96,000,000 52,500,000 70,000,000 70,000,000 80,000,000 68,000,000 74,000,000 104,600,000 115,600,000 83,900,000 90,200,000 89,316,290 89,109,595 112,671,404 134,836,600 143,886,208 146,593,494 149,513,322 155,600,000 172,900,000

Total for national films – 3,123,508 1,070,852 3,750,913 4,329,026 6,092,101 6,341,269 7,948,065 7,058,713 22,381,282 15,080,031 9,300,000 10,000,000 10,310,965 8,820,706 16,076,171 25,687,247 17,869,385 15,649,980 27,787,085 19,100,000 22,000,000

Percentage of spectators for national films (%) – 3.35 1.11 7.14 6.18 8.70 7.92 11.68 9.53 21.39 13.04 11.08 11.08 11.54 9.89 14.26 19.05 12.41 10.67 18.58 12.27 12.72

aData for total spectator, 1995–2000 and 2005–2013, and total for national films, 2005–2013 from “UIS Statistics,” UNESCO Institute for Statistics, accessed February 9, 2017, http://data.uis.unesco.org/Index. aspx#. Data for Total Spectator, 1994 and 2001–2002, from Fabio Sá Earp, “O Espectador Eventual Notas Sobre a Demanda por Cinema No Brasil,” accessed February 19, 2017, http://www.ie.ufrj.br/ oldroot/hpp/intranet/pdfs/o_espectador_eventual.pdf. Total for national films from Danielle Dos Santos Borges, “A Retomada do Cinema Brasileiro: Uma Análise da Indústria Cinematográfica Nacional de 1995 a 2005,” 2007, accessed February 19, 2017, http://eptic.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/a_ retomada_do_cinema_brasileiro.pdf. Data for 2014–2015 Total for National Films from “Taxas de Crescimento do Mercado de Cinema de 2015 São as Maiores dos últimos cinco anos,” ANCINE, January 25, 2016, accessed February 19, 2017, http://ancine.gov.br/sala-imprensa/noticias/taxas-de-crescimento-do-mercado-de-cinema-de-2015-s-o-maiores-dos-ltimos-1. Total Spectator data from Jotabê Medeiros, “Cinemas Brasileiros Atraíram 155 Milhões de Espectadores em 2014, Informa Ancine,” Estadão, January 22, 2015, accessed February 19, 2017, http://cultura.estadao.com.br/noticias/ cinema,cinemas-brasileiros-atrairam-155-milhoes-de-espectadores-em-2014-informa-ancine,1623378.

is worth remembering that seven of the top ten and 13 of the top 20 films from 1994 to 2003 were comedies, many of which were aimed at children or adolescents.74 Only three of the top ten box office successes

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Table 6.3  Ranking of the top ten most seen national films in Brazil, 2000– 2010. Source Octavio Getino, Roque González, Marta Hernández Salván, and Freya Schiwya Ranking in national films

Year

#1 (In both national and all films) #1

2010 Tropa de Elite 2/Elite Squad 2 Globo

#1 (In both national and all films) #1 #1 #1 #2 #1 #2 #3

Title

2009 Se eu fosse voçê 2/If I Were You 2 2005 Dois filhos de Francisco/Two Sons of Francisco 2003 Carandiru 2006 Se eu fosse voçê/If I Were You 2002 Cidade de Deus/City of God 2003 Lisbela o e prisioneiro/ Lisbela and the Prisoner 2004 Cazuza. O temp não pára/ Cazuza: Time Doesn’t Stop 2004 Olga 2003 Os normais/So Normal

Participating Spectators producer 11,000,000

Globo

6,112,851

Globo

5,319,677

Globo Globo Globo Globo

4,693,850 3,644,950 3,370,870 3,174,640

Globo

3,082,520

Globo Globo

3,078,030 2,996,460

aOctavio Getino, Roque González, Marta Hernández Salván, and Freya Schiwy, Producción y Mercados del Cine Latinoamericano en la Primera Década del Siglo XXI (La Habana: Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, 2011), 136.

for Brazilian films offered viewers films that were both entertaining and socially critical. Thus, as we look at the larger framework, it may be valuable to consider that the market share carved out by these social-issue films is itself vulnerable. This newly privatized neoliberal film economy was the backdrop to Babenco’s 2003 film Carandiru, based on the memoir Estação Carandiru by Dr. Drauzio Varella, a physician and AIDS specialist, who narrated his experiences working at the Carandiru Penitentiary in São Paulo from 1989 to the 1992 Carandiru massacre that left 111 inmates dead. The film had funding from Globo, Columbia Pictures, and from the Brazilian petroleum company Petrobras. Sony distributed it in the United States. At the time of its release it was the most successful Brazilian film at the box office in history, drawing almost 4.7 million viewers. While the film offers all of the internal contradictions and political ambivalences of the cohort of neoliberal-era commercial films I’ve been analyzing, by

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focusing on a prison massacre led by military police in the early years of Brazil’s return to democracy it also offers viewers a chance to consider the role of disciplinary institutions in the neoliberal era. By choosing to focus on the prison system, Babenco was able to offer a deep social commentary without delving directly into the realm of post-dictatorship electoral politics. All research on the Brazilian penal system agrees that the transition to democracy had no measurable impact of any kind on Brazilian policing of the civilian population; “By any measure, the Brazilian penal system is enormous.”75 Brazil has a higher prison rate than any other Latin American country and Human Rights Watch reports that in the late 1990s it had more prison staff than most countries have prisoners.76 The growth in the prison population was largely attributed to two factors: the increasing arrest of drug users and the imprisonment of detainees who have not yet been formally charged. Babenco’s film covers an event from 1992, but it was shot in 2003, as the prison situation became increasingly worse. Current statistics show no sign of change, other than the growth of privatized prisons. A 2017 study showed that drug-related crimes accounted for 28% of the prison population: “This population has increased by 339% since Brazil’s 2006 Drug Law, which criminalizes the possession of even minuscule amounts of illegal substances. In addition to criminalizing drug laws that feed youth of color into a for-profit prison system, Brazil’s legal system is so weak that 40% of its entire prison population hasn’t yet had the right to a proper trial.”77 While Babenco disliked the idea of considering Carandiru to be Pixote 20 years later, there is little doubt that Carandiru makes the case that the disciplinary mechanisms of state institutions were no better in Brazil after the military stepped down. The military dictatorship officially ended in 1985, but many felt that the Carandiru massacre of 1992 showed the limits of the democratization process. Not only did the military police open fire on the prisoners of Carandiru who had already surrendered to them, but by the time Babenco made his film, there still had not been any formal accountability for the human rights crimes committed by the police. One study argued that the massacre revealed the “incapacity of the Brazilian judicial system to control public servants and hold them accountable for irresponsible and illegal actions,” a fact that exposed “grave defects in the rule of Brazilian law and democracy.”78 That report describes the impunity enjoyed by the repressive mechanisms

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of the state, specifically, the military police, none of whom were treated according to the penal code applied to the prisoners.79 Even though the film itself offers almost no larger context for the police motives in the massacre, we do hear that the violent response of the military police is connected to the fact that São Paulo was on the eve of municipal elections. At the time the political trends were increasingly conservative. In addition, Governor Luís Antônio Fleury Filho, Governor of São Paulo from 1991 to 1995, had presided over an administration marked by the inability or unwillingness to fight police brutality and the unjustified use of lethal force. From 1990 to 1992, civilian deaths by military police in the city increased 132%, up from 585 per annum to 1,359 per annum.80 Thus, unlike Pixote, which offered little in the way of a moralizing context, Carandiru clearly portrays the military police as assassins. Meanwhile, it also shows how the prison population operates with its own ethical codes. Narrated from the point of view of Doctor Varella, who tells the viewer that he is not there to judge the inmates, we learn that the prisoner count is about double what the space can serve, with over 7,000 inmates in a prison meant for 4,000. Because the actual prison population can’t be policed, it is the inmates themselves who determine how things largely work in the prison. Not only do the prisoners police themselves, determining when someone is to be punished, they also run a complete economy. When one new inmate arrives, for instance, we see him look for a bed and learn that he must pay to have a space. The more he can pay, the better his space will be. Some inmates are forced to share a bed. The film balances between humanizing the lives of the prisoners and displaying the harsh living conditions of prison life. There to help educate the population about how HIV is spread, the doctor listens to stories about his patients. One, dubbed “Highness,” is in prison because his wife tried to set his mistress and him on fire. Another decided to kill the men who raped his sister, since he had no faith that the police would pursue the crime. And yet another is hoping to get to have some time to visit with one of his eighteen children who has told her father that she no longer remembers his face. Despite the fact that some of the inmates are indeed there because they are criminals, the film goes a long way to suggest that the majority of those imprisoned are not threats to society. Even more importantly, it reveals prison society as operating by a fairly well-regulated code of ethics. This ethical code directly contrasts that of the state, which not only lacks a functional penal code, since many men

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are in Carandiru without even being charged, but also murders innocent men with impunity. Babenco’s film sets up this dichotomy, though, in a highly subtle way. It focuses almost exclusively on the life of the prisoners and their stories and offers none of the didactic moralizing used to open Pixote. In fact, the ending of the film seems even more ambiguous than the ending of Pixote, where the young boy walks off holding a gun. The last shots of the film are those of the Carandiru prison being demolished in 2002. These images of the prison being razed might suggest that that chapter is over in Brazilian history, when nothing is farther from the truth. It isn’t clear whether these last images are meant to suggest that a chapter has closed, or that a new one is about to open.

From Ônibus 174 to the Tropa de Elite Films: José Padilha and the Exploitation of Neoliberal Spectacle The neoliberal era didn’t only usher in new forms of financing for films and new structures to state support; it also led to a new generation of filmmakers. As Johnson notes, this new generation “brought new aesthetic approaches to Brazilian cinema” and they were “often influenced by the language of video clips and advertising.”81 He explains that “these filmmakers have by and large broken free of the aesthetic and ideological legacy of Cinema Nôvo, and they have charted new directions for Brazilian cinema in consonance with the personal, political, and social issues confronting contemporary Brazil.”82 What is most significant for the thesis of this book is the fact that these films are not politically disconnected from the core social issues that affect Brazilian society, but they are aesthetically distinct from cinema nôvo. Moreover, in keeping with the filmmakers connected with New Argentine Cinema, these filmmakers are also reluctant to make films that offer reductive moralizing. But despite their distance from the ethically engaged political models of the 1960s and 1970s, these films are still invested in the idea of socially conscious filmmaking. While Cidade de Deus’s Meirelles belongs to this group, it may well be the work of José Padilha that most defines it. Padilha began his film career shooting one of the most significant documentaries of the retomada, Ônibus 174 (Bus 174, 2002). Padilha’s first film draws on the structure of another important documentary, Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (News from a Personal War, 1999), which Padilha had edited.

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As Esther Hamburger explains, “both films articulate conflicting elements of a tragic situation in an attempt to express complexities which resist easy explanations.”83 According to Hamburger one of the innovations of Notícias was the way that it blended the perspectives of the police, the drug dealers, and reports by favela inhabitants. Padilha’s Ônibus 174 adds the further perspective of the media. Like Notícias, Ônibus 174 attempted to show the public a different view of favela life from that offered by the media, and it was released amid a range of documentaries and feature films that each attempted to create a more complex picture of life in Brazil’s favelas. Using a combination of television footage and interviews, Ônibus 174 revisits a story that was well known to most Brazilians. On July 12, 2000, Sandro do Nascimento, a young Afro-Brazilian from the Rio favelas, led a bus robbery that turned into a televised hostage s­ituation for four hours. Because the offices of Globo were not far from the site where the police first detained the bus, television crews were on the scene almost instantly. Millions in Brazil tuned in to watch or listen to the events via television and radio—a fact that radically shifted the hostage situation into a media spectacle. Fully aware that he was now a media “star,” Nascimento made sure to shout for his entire media public. Emphasizing that this was “real” and that he was serious, Nascimento also apparently “directed” the hostages for the cameras, telling them, for instance, that they should pretend that he hit them.84 At the end of the standoff, Nascimento was killed along with one of the hostages, twomonth pregnant Geisa. Viewers saw the deaths live. Everything about the film is meant to paint a deeper, more complex picture of the events than what had been shown on Globo TV. Beginning with an aerial shot that starts almost as a tourist promo and then shows the underbelly to the beauty of Rio with overhead images of the condensed living of the favelas, the aerial shot then moves to Zona Sul [south zone], where the hijack takes place. The opening is a notso-subtle metaphor for offering viewers a bigger picture of what happened in the hijacking. As Loraine Leu points out, Ônibus 174 revisits not one but two traumatic events: the hijacking and also the massacre by military police of seven street children and one young adult outside the Candelária church in August 1993.85 Key to the story of Nascimento is the fact that he not only witnessed the murder of his mother when he was six; he also witnessed the Candelária massacre. Thus, unlike the treatment of Nascimento in the news media, which painted him as a

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crazed criminal, Padilha’s film works hard to create a larger context for the violent act he commits. The film also attempts to draw attention to the biopolitical realities of neoliberal Brazil, which conceives of lives like those of Nascimento as entirely disposable. Leu explains that “one of the film’s chief concerns, therefore, is to make Sandro’s life real and his death grieveable.”86 Contrasting the Globo footage, which focuses wholly on the hostage situation, the film forces viewers to look beyond the confines of the bus Nascimento hijacks to see the larger context of the world that raised him. Thus, the film makes visible the favela of Rato Molhado where Nascimento saw his mother stabbed to death in front of him when he was six, it shows footage of the tragic aftermath of the Candelária massacre, and it offers images inside juvenile detention centers and prison cells. According to Leu, “the film marks out a geography of mourning, for Sandro’s personal tragedies, for the stolen childhoods of young people on the street or abused in detention centres who later come to fill the cities’ prisons, and for the forgotten victims of Candelária.”87 In this way, the film maps a global geography that renders certain spaces in the city invisible and that depicts the inhabitants in those spaces as nothing but bare life. For Padilha, the key to the film was the need to establish Nascimento’s motives for the hijack and his refusal to negotiate with the police.88 Thus, the second key element of the film is explaining Nascimento’s reluctance to surrender to the police. By offering viewers a clear picture of the institutionalized abuse that is at the core of Brazil’s penal system, Padilha suggests that Nascimento would rather die than be imprisoned. Another key element of the film is the way that Padilha portrays the role of media spectacle in creating a sense of Brazilian identity. Recognizing the role that media plays in creating an image of the nationstate, both for citizens and for tourists, Padilha compares the visible beauty of Rio with the invisible lives of those from favelas. The hypervisibility of Nascimento once he commits the hijacking is counterposed with his invisibility on every day of his life prior to that moment. For Amy Villarejo, Padilha “frames television, then, as a national medium, but he also draws attention to its mediatized effects and functions beyond or beside it.”89 Padilha’s film blends all of these issues together: the bare life of Brazilian neoliberalism, the hostile geography of Rio, the institutionalized violence of Brazil’s penal system and police, and the role that mass media plays in decontextualizing and sensationalizing human life.

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As Villarejo puts it, “Bus 174 remains vigilant about its national location as it probes the failed state institutions (law, social service, penal, educational, media) that can provide no justice for its young citizens such as the hijacker.”90 Thus, even though Hamburger points out that the film doesn’t “play with goodies and badies,” it does clearly offer viewers an opportunity to think through the ethical consequences of a social system that characterizes entire categories of human life as either threats to be contained or refuse to be eradicated.91 In this regard, its political message is not subtle and its accusation of the Brazilian state for failing Nascimento is clear. When Padilha then moved to feature-film directing, the ethical structure that frames Ônibus 174 would become even more complex. While Padilha’s next two feature films also investigate the abuses of the penal system, especially via police corruption, he creates a far more complicated picture of Rio crime by also including the violent role of the drug trade that is housed within the favelas. Thus, unlike Ônibus 174, which portrays Nascimento as both victim and perpetrator, Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, 2007) and Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010) cast favela organized crime and drug trade as key perpetrators of Brazilian violence. Both Tropa de Elite and Tropa de Elite 2 feature Roberto Nascimento, a captain of the elite police squad, Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais [Battalion forSpecial Police Operations], or BOPE. BOPE was created in 1978 when the government decided it needed a Special Forces group to handle crisis situations.92 Padilha’s film is loosely based on the book Elite da Tropa, written by the sociologist Luiz Eduardo Soares and two former BOPE captains, André Batista and Rodrigo Pimentel. Given their focus on violence from the perspective of a member of the police, the Tropa de Elite films were immediately controversial, sparking a great deal of public and critical debate. As Karen Backstein remarks in her review of Tropa de Elite, one’s approach to the film is entirely connected to how the viewer sees the protagonist.93 Both films include a great deal of voiceover narrative by Nascimento, and Backstein argues that the key question is whether the viewer is meant to be sympathetic or critical of Nascimento’s views. She explains that those who don’t like the film tend to think that the audience is “positioned to embrace Nascimento’s view” and those that think that “the audience is meant to question, even reject, the Captain’s actions have a more sympathetic perception of the work.”94 The controversy sparked because the film does not only tell

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the story from Nascimento’s view; it also shows him and other members of BOPE to be the only ethical characters—even if their ethics are clearly shown to be flawed. Set in Rio in 1997, Tropa de Elite opens by explaining that BOPE has been tasked with cleaning up the Rio favela near the Bishop’s house because the Pope is coming to visit and wants to stay there. This means that BOPE needs to go after the organized drug trade—a move that will certainly lead not just to the deaths of a number of those involved in the drug world, but civilians, and possibly BOPE members as well. The irony, of course, is that the pope’s show of solidarity is going to lead directly to a great deal of violence. Given its fast editing, intense soundtrack, constant images of violence, and focus on Nascimento’s point of view, it is hard not to see the film as glorifying the vicious tactics used by BOPE. Nascimento explains that the police have three choices: become corrupt, shut up, or go to war. He, of course, chooses the latter, justifying to himself that this is the only way to help protect innocent favelados from the scourge of the drug trade. Even though we hear that the BOPE members refuse to accept bribes, they regularly practice torture, kill with impunity, and basically terrorize anyone they come near. So the viewer is left with a deep dilemma: the only remotely ethical characters are pretty unethical, which leaves little in the way of role models or imperfect heroes. And yet, Nascimento, as Backstein argues, is clearly meant to provoke sympathy in the viewer. Not only is his voice the point of view for the film, but his anxiety attacks and remorse over setting up a mother’s only son paint him as vulnerable. All of this led many critics to condemn the hypermasculine, aggressive tone of the film. In one particularly scathing review, Jay Weissberg wrote in Variety that “Brazil’s powerful military police are elevated to Rambostyle heroes in The Elite Squad, a one-note celebration of violence-forgood that plays like a recruitment film for fascist thugs.”95 Padilha, of course, bristled at the use of the “F” word for his film and in an interview with Roda Viva explained that, even though Nascimento chooses war, that is not what the film endorses.96 He also goes on to say that Tropa de Elite could be viewed as the other side of Ônibus 174: not only do both films feature main characters with the same last name, but both feature characters who resort to violence when they feel they have no other options. Backstein further explains that Padilha noted “that the scenes of torture should make the audience think about the social processes that lead someone to such behavior.”97

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Another layer of controversy in Tropa de Elite revolves around the second featured character, André Matías, Nascimento’s protégé at BOPE. Matías is Afro-Brazilian and grew up in the favelas. In the film he is training for BOPE and also pursuing law school. At law school he hides his connection to the police force, befriending the lefty students who get high, read Foucault, and volunteer with NGOs in favelas. When Matías is called on to summarize Foucault’s Discipline and Punish for a law school class, he eventually breaks down and confronts his classmates over their naïve leftism. He yells to them that their own drug habits are directly responsible for the need to police the drug dealers. Telling them that they all have a very superficial idea of reality, he argues that sometimes repression is needed. When Nascimento narrates the story, he explains that at the time, Matías did not yet know how corrupt the police truly were. Nevertheless, his outburst distances him from his law school friends and the last shot of the film has him preparing to shoot a drug dealer in the face. While Matías may well have some valid points about the privileged luxury of white Brazilian leftists, his decision to murder in cold blood certainly hypes a military mentality and smacks of reactionary responses to social unrest. Similar to the controversy over Cidade de Deus, it was the public debate of the issues depicted in the film that may be the greatest sign of the film’s political impact. Backstein reports that public comments showed many Brazilians fed up with the violence of the favelas shared Nascimento’s point of view. As she puts it, clearly the film started a “larger debate.”98 In fact, the debate may be one of the largest in relation to a film in Brazilian history. José Carlos Avellar explains that Tropa de Elite may well have been the first film in Brazilian history “a tomar como protagonista um dos personagens mais controversos e presentes no cotidiano das grandes cidades brasileiras: o policial” [to have as protagonist a figure that is one of the most controversial and most present in the daily life of the great Brazilian cities: the police].99 Even more noteworthy, according to Avellar, is the fact that it was “certamente o primeiro filme brasileiro a ser visto por um público muito maior do que o possível de conseguir no mercado antes de chegar às salas de cinema” [certainly the first Brazilian film to be seen by a much larger audience than had been possible previous to being in theaters].100 This was due to the fact that the public was able to get pirated copies of the film three months before it hit theaters. Estimates suggest that 11 million

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people had seen the film before it hit theaters, a fact that may have even helped the film at the box office.101 At the time that Tropa de Elite was released, Brazil’s economy was starting to boom and yet it was heading into its fourth decade of escalating violence. The dictatorship had ended, and between 2001 and 2011 16 million new jobs had been created. Unemployment was on the decline and the middle class was growing.102 Despite all of the positive economic indicators associated with Brazil’s entry into the global economy, it remained one of the most unequal nations in the world and its burgeoning cities had multiple regions lacking basic public goods. The neoliberal economy was creating intense pressure on those segments of society left out of the system and there was a growing problem with organized crime. Meanwhile police violence was out of control and deaths caused by the Rio police force grew 40% from 2013 to 2014. As Paula Miraglia explains, “This combination of weak state presence, spatial segregation, and territorial control by non-state actors is essential for understanding the characteristics and behavior of organized crime groups as well as the structure of the illicit drug market in Brazil today.”103 Miraglia also explains that the growing violence in Brazil was a direct consequence of the global economy. One key factor was the global drug trade, which positioned Brazil as a central port to move drugs coming from Colombia, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Peru to Africa and Europe. She notes that over time, as Tropa de Elite makes clear, the drugs simply stayed in Brazil.104 She further notes a second factor: the presence of illegal weapons, a theme covered in even more detail in Tropa de Elite 2. Tropa de Elite opens by explaining that Rio is infected by the presence of military-grade weapons whose bullets can rip through cars, a fact that turned the policing of basic drug crimes into war zones. While the bulk of arms are still mainly pistols, the presence of high-caliber weapons was on the rise. A 2014 study by São Paulo-based Instituto Sou da Paz showed that more than 35.6% of the high-caliber weapons in the city originated in the United States.105 Thus, the already violent context of life in Brazil’s cities may well account for the public appreciation of the film. The sequel to Tropa de Elite, Tropa de Elite 2, clearly tries to nuance the more reductive features of Tropa de Elite. When it was released it broke box office records and reached 11 million viewers in Brazil. It topped the box office that year, beating out Avatar, and was the most successful film, national or foreign, that year. Similar to Tropa de Elite, Tropa de Elite 2 is dominated by Nascimento’s voiceover, except this

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time the viewer is given far more clues to see him as a biased narrator. In the first major sequence, Nascimento is brought in to deal with a prison uprising. He tells us that many consider him a fascist, but he doesn’t care. If he had his way, he would lock up all of the drug cartels and let them kill each other. Then the film cuts to Diogo Fraga, a professor lecturing on the Brazilian penal system. Fraga tells his students that the penal system is out of control. In 1996 it had 148,000 prisoners. In 2006 that number was 400,000. He then suggests that if that pattern continues, at some point all of Brazil will be imprisoned. Echoing Matías’s condemnation of the privileged and naïve left in Tropa de Elite, Nascimento tells us that “left intellectuals make a living out of scumbags.” As Fraga is flown in to help negotiate peaceful resolution to a prison riot, we learn that he is now married to Nascimento’s ex-wife. As Fraga expresses outrage over the fact that BOPE opened fire when he was close to working out a deal, he accuses Nascimento of being nothing more than an assassin. He then capitalizes on his moment of fame to run for office. The standoff between a human rights activist and a hyperaggressive policeman could set us up for yet another fairly reductive plot line, but Tropa de Elite 2 is a much more complicated film. Nascimento starts the film hating Fraga, but he later admits that his dislike for him kept him from recognizing when Fraga was right. And by the end of the film they have teamed up together to fight the real culprits—the state. Like Tropa de Elite, Tropa de Elite 2 had connections to real world events. The Fraga character was actually based on real-life human rights activist, Marcelo Freixo, who helped front an investigation in 2006 to expose mafia-style militias operating in Rio. Freixo was a member of Justiça Global, a human rights NGO, before being elected to state parliament in 2006. His investigation into militias led to 225 indictments and resulted in local politicians being sent to prison for connections to militias operating in Rio de Janeiro. Tim Potter reports that in November 2011, “Freixo and his family had to flee Brazil with the support of Amnesty International after reports had emerged of a plot to have him assassinated.”106 According to Potter in October 2011, “before Freixo went into exile, both José Padilha and the actor Wagner Moura appeared at a talk organized by the Brazilian Bar Association to speak out in defense of Freixo’s life.”107 After the scene at the prison, Nascimento’s career is in jeopardy but when he goes to a restaurant to track down the police commander

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poised to fire him he is applauded by everyone there. The fact that the public applauds that he led a mission that murdered a drug dealer lands Nascimento a government job as State Subsecretary of Intelligence. There, he tells viewers he plans not just to fight the drug trade; he plans to fight the system. At the start of his new job, Nascimento still focuses on the idea that his problem is the drug trade and he expands BOPE, but he quickly learns that the real problem is in the organized crime being committed by police and supported by politicians. Nascimento becomes aware of a complex network that actually uses the drug dealers as pawns to produce profit for the police and corrupt politicians. As Nascimento gets closer to the truth, so too does Fraga who is continuing to build evidence on the militias. When the police decide to execute Fraga, they miss him and shoot Nascimento’s son, Fraga’s stepson, who is taken to the hospital critically wounded. The act bonds the two men, Nascimento and Fraga, and leads Nascimento to decide to testify in Fraga’s case. We then see images of politicians entering prison in a mirroring of the scenes that opened the film. But the film refuses to allow the viewer to think that Nascimento’s act will close a chapter of corruption. Despite the fact that some of the culprits end up in jail, the governor manages to get reelected and another ringleader actually moves up in his career and is elected state representative. As Fraga protests, we see an overhead shot of Brasilia, a complement to the overhead shot that Padilha uses to open Ônibus 174. As the film pans across the state buildings in Brasilia, we hear the voice of Nascimento who asks, “who do you think pays for all of this?” He then explains that he started off thinking that the problem was the drug dealers, then he thought it was the corrupt cops; he now sees that the problem is much bigger and more complex than he had ever thought. Both Tropa de Elite and Tropa de Elite 2 had a range of financial backing, including state support from ANCINE, commercial funding from Globo Filmes, and investment by Petrobras via its cultural initiatives. Tropa de Elite was produced by the Weinstein Company and distributed in the United States via IFC. What is of significant interest for the thesis of this book is that all three of the Padilha films analyzed here were produced by Zazen Productions, which was founded by Padilha and Marcos Prado. Zazen explicitly states that its main objective is to develop and produce “films and documentaries that discuss important social issues.”108 In describing its business model, Zazen claims its “main assets are the creativity, honesty and the transformative impact of our

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films in the society.”109 In this way, Zazen works within the neoliberal business formula that supports the creation of social-issue films for mass consumption. After Tropa de Elite 2, Padilha went on to direct the Hollywood release RoboCop (2014), but in 2015 he returned to working with Tropa de Elite star Wagner Moura, who played Nascimento, on the Netflix series Narcos (2015), a project that allowed the two to return to their interest in the role that the drug trade has played in Latin American violence. Padilha only directed the first two episodes, but he produced the entire series. While the series could also be accused of reducing a complex story to a more reductive formula, there is little doubt that Narcos is a sign of a new global model for visual culture production. Falling between television and film, the episodes generally run about one hour and have much higher production quality than standard television fare. The project then led to a second Padilha-connected Netflix series based on Brazilian corruption. The series, O Mecanismo (The Mechanism), premiered on Netflix March 2018. It charts the judicial corruption probe which led to the 2014 arrest of over 100 politicians, including senators, construction magnates, senior public officials, and top executives at Brazil’s state-owned oil company Petrobras. As John Hopewell reported for Variety, “they are charged with alleged involvement in a massive and extended kick-back scheme where companies would accept bribes to overcharge Petrobras for contracts.”110 Describing the project Padilha explained, “this project will follow the judicial investigators in their journey to unveil the largest corruption scheme that Brazil has ever witnessed. It was fundamental for the series to be produced in an impartial way, and I have no doubt that Netflix is the best partner for the project.”111 While we might question the notion of Netflix as impartial or even the best partner for the series, Padilha’s latest project confirms the twenty-first century pattern of Brazilian directors working within the new global media economy on projects that attempt to raise awareness of major social issues and spark meaningful public debate.

Brazilian Film Industry Timeline 1985–2016 1985—Brazil “bans foreign ownership of companies that produce, distribute or exhibit motion pictures in [Brazil].”112 1988—Brazil passes the Federal Constitution.113 1990—Fernando Collor de Mello is elected. Embrafilme is disbanded.

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1991—Rouanet Law offers a tax credit for investments in national films. Law 8.389 establishes the Social Communication Council.114 Law 8.313 reinstates the principles of Law 7.505, establishing the National Program of Support to Culture (Pronac).115 1992—Fernando Collor de Mello impeached. Itamar Franco assumes presidency, establishes the Brazilian Rescue Award that helps produce 56 feature-length projects.116 1993—The Audiovisual Law (Law 8.685) is passed.117 1996—Law 9.323 is passed, changing the deduction limits for the Audiovisual Law, which creates mechanisms for the promotion of audiovisual activity.118 1998—Walter Salles’s Central do Brasil wins numerous awards, is nominated for an Academy Award, and succeeds at the box office. 2001—Provisional Measure 2.228 is established, creating ANCINE.119 2002—Law 10.454 is passed, “provid[ing] for the remission of the Contribution for the Development of the Cinematographic Industry— CONDECINE.”120 Brazil releases 29 films, which make up 14.8% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 167 foreign launches.121 José Padilha’s Ônibus 174 released. Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund’s Cidade de Deus released (3.1 million spectators). 2003—Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva elected president (2003–2011). Brazil releases 30 films, making up 13.33% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 195 foreign launches.122 Hector Babenco’s Carandiru is released (4.6 million spectators). 2004—Brazil releases 49 films, making up 16.33% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 251 foreign releases.123 2005—Brazil releases 46 films, making up 16.85% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 227 foreign releases.124 2006—Brazil releases 71 films, making up 21.52% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 259 foreign releases.125 Law 11.437 is passed, which creates Fondo Sectorial del Audiovisual, which is administered by ANCINE to support production, distribution, and exhibition.126 The Sindicato de la Indústria Audiovisual de São Paulo with the Agência Nacional de Promocion y Desarollo ([National Agency for Promotion and Development], APEX in Portuguese acronym) creates the Cinema do Brasil program to support the distribution of Brazilian film outside of the country. 2007—Dilma Rousseff elected president.

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Brazil releases 78 films, making up 23.93% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 248 foreign releases.127 José Padilha’s Tropa de Elite released (2.1 million spectators). 2008—Brazil releases 79 films, making up 24.31% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 246 foreign releases.128 Law 11.646 is passed, amending Law 8.313 to “extend the fiscal benefit to donations and sponsorships for the construction of movie theaters in municipalities with less than 100,000 (one hundred thousand) inhabitants.”129 2009—Brazil releases 84 films, making up 26.50% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 233 foreign releases.130 2010—ANCINE announces Cinema Perto de Você (the Cinema Near You program), a project designed to create 600 theaters in small towns.131 Brazil releases 74 films, making up 24.42% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 229 foreign launches.132 José Padilha’s Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro released (11 million spectators). 2011—Law 12.485 is passed, providing “the audiovisual communication of conditioned access.”133 Brazil releases 100 films, making up 29.67% of the Brazilian cinematic market. It also has 237 foreign releases.134 2012—Brazil releases 83 films, making up 32.49% of the total releases. It also has 244 foreign launches.135 Law 12.599 is passed, establishing the Cinema Near You program.136 2013—Brazil releases 129 films, making up 18.6% of the total releases. It also has 244 foreign releases.137 2014—Brazil releases 114 films, making up 29.01% of the total releases. It also has 279 foreign releases.138 2015—Brazil releases 129 films, making up 28.92% of the total releases. It also has 317 foreign releases.139 Law 13.196 is passed, “provid[ing] for the Contribution for the Development of the National Film Industry (Condecine) and to extend the validity of fiscal incentive under the Financing Funds of the National Cinematographic Industry (Funcines).”140

Notes

1. Lúcia Nagib, “Death on the Beach—The Recycled Utopia of Midnight,” in The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London: I.B. Tauris 2003), 157.

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2. See Lúcia Nagib, Editor’s Introduction in The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London: I.B. Tauris 2003), xvii–xviii. 3. Lúcia Nagib, Editor’s Introduction in The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), xviii. 4.  André Piero Gatti, “A Comercialização de um Filme Internacional: Central do Brasil.” Sessões do imaginário 17, no. 23 (2010): 24. 5.  Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema (London: Routledge, 2014), 1. 6. Randal Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil: Culture and the State (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 13. 7. Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw, Popular Cinema in Brazil, 1930– 2001 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 171. 8. Shaw and Dennison, Brazilian National Cinema, 33. 9. Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil, 144. 10. Ibid., 161. 11. Ibid., 163. 12. Steve  Solot, ed., The Brazilian Audiovisual Industry: An Explosion of Creativity and Opportunities for Partnerships (Rio de Janeiro: Latin American Training Center, 2012), Kindle Edition, Kindle Locations 49–51. 13.  Lara O’Reilly, “The 30 Biggest Media Companies in the World,” Business Insider, May 31, 2016, accessed March 23, 2017, http:// www.businessinsider.com/the-30-biggest-media-owners-in-the-world2016-5/#14-grupo-globo--483-billion-in-media-revenue-17. 14. Courtney Brannon Donoghue, “Sony and Local-Language Productions: Conglomerate Hollywood’s Strategy of Flexible Localization for the Global Film Market,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 15. 15. Cacilda Rêgo, “The Fall and Rise of Brazilian Cinema,” in New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 36. 16. Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil, 130. 17. Gabriela Antunes, “How To Be a Good Brazilian: The Image of Brazil in Contemporary American Cinema,” in Brazil in Twenty-First Century Popular Media: Culture, Politics, and Nationalism on the World Stage, ed. Naomi Pueo Wood (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. 2016), 15. 18. José Álvaro Moisés, “A New Policy for Brazilian Cinema,” in The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 4. 19. Ibid. 20. See Glauber Rocha, “Uma Estética da Fome,” Cineclube de Compostela, accessed April 1, 2017, http://cineclubedecompostela.blogaliza.org/ files/2006/11/esteticafome.pdf. Also Glauber Rocha, “Aesthetic of

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Hunger,” Tempo Glauber, accessed March 23, 2017, http://www.tempoglauber.com.br/english/t_estetica.html. 21. Rocha, “Aesthetic of Hunger.” 22. Ibid. 23. Ivana Bentes, “‘Cosmética da Fome’ marca cinema do país,” Jornal do Brasil, July 8, 2001, accessed March 25, 2017, http://jbonline.terra. com.br/destaques/glauber/glaub_arquivo4.html. 24. Quoted in Randal Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Contemporary Brazilian Cinema,” in Latin American Cinema: Essays on Modernity, Gender, and National Identity, ed. Lisa Shaw and Stephanie Dennison (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 13–14. 25. While Cidade de Deus was directed by Meirelles and Lund, Meirelles has been more outspoken in terms of his aesthetic project and has also directed films like The Constant Gardener (2005) and Blindness (2008), making it possible to see a connection among the aesthetic projects of his films. 26. Rocha, “Aesthetic of Hunger.” 27. Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil, 89. 28. Cited in Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Contemporary Brazilian Cinema.” 29. Hermann Herlinghaus, Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South (New York: Palgrave 2009), 169, 170. 30. Henry Giroux, Beyond the Spectacle of Terrorism: Global Uncertainty and the Challenge of the New Media (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2006), 26. 31. Henry Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006), 21. 32. “Brazil Launches Anti-Poverty Drive,” BBC News, January 30, 2003, accessed March 25, 2017, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2710797.stm. 33. Ibid. 34. William I. Robinson, Latin America and Global Capitalism: A Critical Globalization Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 266. 35. Ibid., 292. 36. Erin Coe, “Brazil Breaks Patent On Merck’s AIDS Drug,” Law360, May 4, 2007, accessed March 25, 2017, https://www.law360.com/ articles/24114/brazil-breaks-patent-on-merck-s-aids-drug. 37. Emanuel Levy, “Meirelles, Fernando: Director on Constant Gardener, Starring Oscar Winner Rachel Weisz,” Emanuel Levy: Cinema 24/7, August 3, 2005, accessed March 25, 2017, http://emanuellevy.com/ interviews/meirelles-on-constant-gardener-3/.

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38.  Carlo Cavagna, “Interview: Fernando Meirelles,” AboutFilm.com, September 2005, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www.aboutfilm. com/movies/c/constantgardener/meirelles.htm. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41.  See Nancy Fraser, Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 42. Cavagna, “Interview: Fernando Meirelles.” 43. A.O. Scott, “Digging Up the Truth in a Heart of Darkness,” The New York Times, August 31, 2005, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www. nytimes.com/2005/08/31/movies/digging-up-the-truth-in-a-heartof-darkness.html?_r=1. 44. Ibid. 45. Michael Atkinson, “Cold Comfort Pharm,” Village Voice, August 23, 2005, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www.villagevoice.com/film/ cold-comfort-pharm-6402480. 46. Scott, “Digging Up the Truth in a Heart of Darkness.” 47.  Jackie Strause, “Donald Trump Will ‘Hate’ Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony, Says Show’s Director Fernando Meirelles,” The Hollywood Reporter, August 5, 2016, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/donald-trump-will-hate-rio-opening-ceremony-olympics-2016-fernando-meirelles-917691. 48. Tariq Panja, “Rio Olympics Ceremony to Cost 10% of London’s Lavish Event Open,” Bloomberg, September 22, 2015, accessed March 22, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-22/ rio-olympics-ceremony-to-cost-10-of-london-s-lavish-event-open. 49.  Mary Milliken and Brad Haynes, “On Tight Budget, Opening Ceremony Adopts ‘MacGyver’ Approach,” Reuters, August 5, 2016, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/article/ us-olympics-rio-opening-idUSKCN10F2FR. 50. Strause, “Donald Trump Will ‘Hate’ Rio Olympics Opening Ceremony.” 51.  George Csicsery, “Individual Solutions: An Interview with Hector Babenco,” Film Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1982): 2. 52. Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Contemporary Brazilian Cinema,” 18. 53. Ibid. 54. Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla, “Filmar niños marginales: Marginalidad social y sexual y el poder subversivo de la ‘imagen tiempo’ en ‘Pixote’ de Héctor Babenco,” Revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana 37, no. 73 (2011): 184. 55. Johnson, The Film Industry in Brazil, 172. 56. Csicsery, “Individual Solutions: An Interview with Hector Babenco,” 3.

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57. Ibid. 58. Gutiérrez-Albilla, “Filmar niños marginales,” 190. 59. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 271. 60. Robert Stam, “Reviewed Work(s): Pixote by Sylvia B. Naves, Hector Babenco and Jorge Duran,” Cinéaste 12, no. 3 (1983): 44. 61. Gutiérrez-Albilla, “Filmar niños marginales,” 184. 62. Ibid., 186. 63. Csicsery, “Individual Solutions: An Interview with Hector Babenco,” 8. 64. Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Contemporary Brazilian Cinema,” 17. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid., 20. 67. Ibid. 68.  See Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema” and Roque González, “Cine Latinoamericano. Entre las Pantallas de Plata y las Pantallas Digitales. Producción y mercados en América del sur y México,” in Estudio de producción y mercados del cine latinoamericano en la primera década del siglo XXI, ed. Octavio Getino (Habana, Cuba: Fundación del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano, 2012), 55–144, accessed March 26, 2017, http://cinelatinoamericano.org/assets/docs/ Cuaderno%207%20WEB.pdf. 69. Courtney Brannon Donoghue, “Sony and Local-Language Productions: Conglomerate Hollywood’s Strategy of Flexible Localization for the Global Film Market,” Cinema Journal 53, no. 4 (2014): 19. 70.  González, “Cine Latinoamericano. Entre las Pantallas de Plata y las Pantallas Digitales. Producción y mercados en América del sur y México,” 135. 71. Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema,” 22. 72.  Courtney Brannon Donoghue, “Globo Filmes, Sony, and Franchise Film-making: Transnational Industry in the Brazilian Pós-retomada,” in New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, ed. Cacilda Rêgo and Carolina Rocha (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 60. 73. Justin Wyatt, High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), 376, quoted in Brannon Donoghue, “Globo Filmes, Sony, and Franchise Film-making,” 60. 74. See Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema,” 24. 75. Joanne Mariner and James Cavallaro, Behind Bars in Brazil (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998), 1. 76. Ibid.

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77. Katherine Jinyi Li, “Brazil Needs Fewer Prisoners, Not More Prisons,” Plus55, January 9, 2017, accessed March 25, 2017, http://plus55. com/brazil-culture/news/2017/01/brazil-fewer-prisons. 78. “Massacre at Carandiru Prison,” The Commission to Observe Carandiru Trials, June 19, 2001, accessed March 25, 2017, http://www.observatoriodeseguranca.org/files/Carandiru%20Prison%20Massacre.PDF. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 3. 81. Johnson, “TV Globo, the MPA, and Brazilian Cinema,” 19. 82. Ibid. 83. Esther Hamburger, “Wired Up to the World: Performance and Media in Contemporary Brazil,” in Brazil and the Americas: Convergences and Perspectives, ed. Peter Birle and Sergio Costa (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008), 207. 84. Ibid., 212. 85. Lorraine Leu, “Spaces of Remembrance & Representation in the City: José Padilha’s Ônibus 174,” Luso-Brazilian Review 45, no. 2 (2008): 178. 86. Ibid., 179. 87. Ibid., 180. 88. See the extra features on the DVD. 89. Amy Villarejo, “Bus 174 and the Living Present,” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 115. 90. Ibid., 117. 91.  Hamburger, “Wired Up to the World: Performance and Media in Contemporary Brazil,” 214. 92. Cristina Neme and Viviane Cubas, “Elite da tropa,” Estudos Avançados 20, no. 58 (2006): 323–328, accessed March 27, 2017, http://www. scielo.br/pdf/ea/v20n58/26.pdf. 93.  Karen Backstein, “Film Reviews: ‘Elite Squad,’” Cinéaste 33, no. 4 (2008): 56. 94. Ibid., 56. 95.  Jay Weissberg, “Review: ‘The Elite Squad,’” Variety, October 14, 2013, accessed March 25, 2017, http://variety.com/2008/film/ markets-festivals/the-elite-squad-1200548140/. 96.  Bruno S. Melo, “Roda Viva José Padilha 24 02 2014 Entrevista Completa,” filmed February 2014, YouTube video, 1:23:12, posted May 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rH5huhE2dto. 97. Backstein, “Film Reviews: ‘Elite Squad,’” 56. 98. Ibid., 56. 99. José Carlos Avellar, “Três Filmes Vistos por José Carlos Avellar/Trois Films Vus par José Carlos Avellar,” Cinémas D’Amérique Latine 17 (2009): 93.

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100. Ibid. 101.  Marcelo Cajueiro, “‘Elite’ Stirs Controversy, Box Office,” Variety, October 19, 2007, accessed March 22, 2017, http://variety.com/2007/ biz/box-office/elite-stirs-controversy-box-office-1117974360/. 102.  Paula Miraglia, “Drugs and Drug Trafficking in Brazil: Trends and Policies,” Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence Latin America Initiative, Foreign Policy at Brookings, 2015, accessed March 22, 2017, 2, http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Research/Files/ Papers/2015/04/global-drug policy/Miraglia--Brazil-final.pdf. 103. Ibid., 3. 104. Ibid. 105. Gerardo Lissardy, “De dónde vienen las armas del crimen en Sao Paulo,” BBC Mundo, January 9, 2014, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www. bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2014/01/140106_americalatina_armas_ del_crimen_sudamerica_mxa.shtml. 106. Tim Potter, “Slick Thriller with a Message,” Socialist Lawyer 60 (2012): 38. 107. Ibid. 108. “About,” Zazen Produções, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www. zazen.com.br/new-page-1/. 109. Ibid. 110. John Hopewell, “‘Narcos’ Director José Padilha Reteams with Netflix,” Variety, April 18, 2016, accessed March 22, 2017, http://variety. com/2016/tv/global/narcos-director-jose-padilha-reteams-netflix1201755465/. 111. Nancy Tartaglione, “Netflix & ‘Narcos’ José Padilha Reteam on Brazil Corruption Scandal Series,” Deadline, April 18, 2016, accessed March 22, 2017, http://deadline.com/2016/04/netflix-jose-padilha-operation-car-wash-original-series-brazil-1201739423/. 112. Juan de Onis, “Law Surprises Distributors, Movie Studios Brazil Bans Foreign Ownership of Film Firms,” Los Angeles Times, April 1, 1985, accessed March 22, 2017, ProQuest. 113. Igor Utsumi, “Introduction to the Brazilian Constitution,” The Brazil Business, July 22, 2014, accessed March 22, 2017, http://thebrazilbusiness.com/article/introduction-to-the-brazilian-constitution. 114. “Leis e Medidas Provisórias,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, accessed March 22, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/leis-e-medidas-provisorias?page=1. “LEI Nº 8.389,” Presidência da República Casa Civil, December 30, 1991, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www. planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/Leis/L8389.htm. 115. “LEI Nº 8.313,” Presidência da República Casa Civil, December 23, 1991, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/ leis/L8313cons.htm.

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116. Luiz Zanin Oricchio, “The Sertão in the Brazilian Imaginary at the End of the Millennium,” in The New Brazilian Cinema, ed. Lúcia Nagib (London: I.B. Tauris, 2003), 143. 117. “LEI Nº. 8.685.” Presidência da República Casa Civil, July 20, 1993, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/LEIS/ L8685.htm. 118. “LEI Nº 9.323,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, December 5, 1996, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/leis-emedidas-provisorias/lei-n-9323-de-5-de-dezembro-de-1996 and “LEI Nº 9.323,” Presidência da República Casa Civil, December 5, 1996, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/LEIS/ L9323.htm. 119. “Medida Provisória Nº 2.228-1,” Presidência da República Casa Civil Subchefia para Assuntos Jurídicos, September 6, 2001, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/mpv/2228-1.htm. 120.  “LEI Nº 10.454,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, May 13, 2002, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/ leis-e-medidas-provisorias/lei-n-10454-de-13-de-maio-de-2002. 121. “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro,” Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual—Ancine, accessed April 2, 2017, http://oca.ancine.gov. br/node/54. 122. Ibid. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid. 125. Ibid. 126.  “LEI Nº 11.437,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, December 28, 2006, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/ leis-e-medidas-provisorias/lei-n-11437-de-28-de-dezembro-de-2006. 127. “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro.” 128. Ibid. 129.  “LEI Nº 11.646,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, March 10, 2008, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/ leis-e-medidas-provisorias/lei-n-11646-de-10-mar-o-de-2008. 130. “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro.” 131. “Leis e Medidas Provisórias.” 132. “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro.” 133.  “LEI Nº 12.485,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, September 12, 2011, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/ leis-e-medidas-provisorias/lei-n-12485-de-12-setembro-de-2011. 134. “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro.” 135. Ibid.

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136.  “LEI Nº 12.599,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, March 23, 2012, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/legislacao/leis-emedidas-provisorias/lei-n-12599-de-23-de-mar-o-de-2012. See also the program’s website: http://cinemapertodevoce.ancine.gov.br/. 137. “Brazilian Film Statistical Yearbook 2013,” Observatório Brasileiro do Cinema e do Audiovisual—ANCINE, October 2014, accessed April 2, 2017, https://issuu.com/oca_ancine/docs/brazilian_film_statistical_yearbook. 138. “Mercado Audiovisual Brasileiro.” 139. Ibid. 140. “LEI Nº 13.196,” Agência Nacional do Cinema, December 1, 2015, accessed April 2, 2017, http://www.ancine.gov.br/node/19627.

CHAPTER 7

Mexico

The Mexican film industry is a case of contrasts. Arguably it is globalization’s biggest winner and biggest loser from the region. On the one hand, it has a long history of attempting to resist the hegemony of its northern neighbor, while, on the other hand, it has often functioned hegemonically within Latin America. Much attention has been paid to Mexico’s efforts to protect itself from the cultural influx of US products, but there has been less focus on Mexico’s role as an exporter of culture to other Latin American nations. Robert McKee Irwin and Maricruz Castro Ricalde argue that during its cinematic Golden Age (1930–1950) Mexico positioned itself as Latin America’s cultural center.1 And Ana López argues that “Mexican cinema has been the only Latin American cinema to have successfully and consistently exceeded the limits of its national borders.”2 The Peruvian film industry was dominated for decades, for instance, by melodramas from Mexico’s golden age of cinema from the 1930s to the 1950s. And the Mexican television station Televisa not only leads the local Mexican market, but is also a major exporter of programs, especially telenovelas, throughout the region. By the late 1960s, Televisa became the top-ranked Latin American exporter of television to Latin America. It also provides content to, and formerly owned part of, the US Spanish language television station Univisión. Mexico has also played a dominant role in the region as an exporter of music, literature, and video games. Mexico, then, provides a rich context through which to think about issues of cultural globalization, since it has simultaneously resisted cultural imperialism and practiced it. © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_7

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Mexico also holds the unique position of being the first nation from the region that had a free trade agreement with the United States, and the only one with a multilateral agreement with the United States: the North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA, which was ratified in 1992 and implemented in 1994. Following on the wave of concern caused by the issue of whether culture constituted a commodity or a service during the GATT talks in Europe, intellectuals in Mexico and Canada in the early 1990s worried that NAFTA would effectively lead to the end of their nation’s culture industries. And their worries were valid since well before NAFTA both Canada and Mexico were already saturated with US cultural products. A 1992 study found that the United States controlled 93% of Canada’s movie and video business. It was estimated that at the same time 62% of movies on Mexican screens were from the United States and in 1993 87% of Mexican ticket sales were for US productions.3 Prior to the wave of free trade agreements during the 1990s, 50% of Latin American countries had film quotas that protected national cinema, and Mexico was one of them.4 The move to deregulate the Mexican film industry and to end state support of filmmaking began in 1988 with the presidency of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who implemented a series of neoliberal policies that would radically alter the Mexican economy. Deregulation of the film industry in Mexico would have immediate and dire consequences. The end of the quota system and of local-friendly distribution policies sent a shock wave to the local industry. Added to the neoliberalization of the film industry, the peso crisis of 1994 dealt another blow, since producers were unable to find funding for projects. Production fell from one hundred films in 1989 to 17 in 1995, to 16 in 1996, and to 13 in 1997; “In 1998, with only 10 films produced, national production fell to its lowest point since 1932.”5 García Canclini notes that in Mexico post-NAFTA, 85% of all films shown in theaters were from the United States and 80% of all videos in video rental stores were from the United States. Only 10% of video rentals available were Mexican films. If this were the end of the story we would seemingly have ineradicable proof that deregulation of media markets and absence of state protection inevitably result in the destruction of local cultures. But the demise of the Mexican film industry was also accompanied by the rise of a number of internationally successful Mexican filmmakers and by the foreign box office successes of a number of Mexican films. Prior to the Salinas government, the state-owned enterprises involved in filmmaking had become inefficient and bureaucratic. Many films were produced, but

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never distributed, and the “quality” of the state-produced films was uneven at best. The Salinas government’s focus on profitability and coproduction changed the nature of the industry.6 These changes in government policy dovetailed with a number of extraordinary events in Mexican cinema history. In 1992, as the United States and Mexico were heavily engaged in debates about NAFTA and as the film industry was rapidly declining, Mexico released Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate, 1992), which grossed $21.7 million in the US box office, making it the most profitable foreign film in US history at the time. This success was followed by others, including the US distribution of El Callejón de los Milagros (Midaq Alley, 1995), which launched the career of Salma Hayek. With the release in 2000 of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros, and in 2001 of Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también and Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone), a trio of Mexican directors emerged on the world stage.7 Each would go on to direct Hollywood films, including del Toro’s Blade II (2002) and Hellboy (2004), González Iñárritu’s 21 Grams (2003), which starred Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, and Cuarón’s contribution to the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), which grossed almost $800 million worldwide. The culminating moment, though, which not only solidified the international success of these three directors, but also highlighted the achievements of a number of Mexican film professionals, was the 2007 Academy Awards when González Iñárritu’s Babel (2006), Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006), and del Toro’s El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006) were nominated for sixteen awards and ten Mexican film professionals were nominated in various categories including acting, cinematography, screenwriting, and musical score. Two of that year’s five nominees for best cinematography were Mexican. Alfonso Cuarón then became the first Latin American director to win Best Director in 2014 for Gravity (2013). González Iñárritu then bested him by winning the same award the next two consecutive years, making Oscar history, yet again.8 Dubbed by the US media “The Three Amigos,” the success of these directors set off a buzz of excitement. Were the Mexicans invading the film industry to the north? Of course the moniker “The Three Amigos” was noteworthy for its obvious stereotyping and its reference to earlier Hollywood films, specifically The Three Caballeros (the Disney film of 1944) and ¡Three Amigos! (1986), both of which were notorious examples of the negative effects of imperialist and racist cultural

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image production. What was perhaps most interesting about the use of the term at the time was the fact that none of the three films nominated for the 2007 awards was ostensibly “Mexican.” González Iñárritu’s Babel only travels to Mexico for one part of a four-part story and the other two films are set in England and in Spain, respectively. Each film had a global crew and attracted a global audience. There seemed to be an odd desire to remind the public of the Mexicanness of the directors that was out of synch with both the global reach and the practical realities of their work. While some in the media focused on whether the trio’s achievements were a sign of a new turn in Mexican cinema or had its roots in the rich history of Mexican culture, others claimed that their work was an example of a new global culture that erased and escaped national borders. Much attention focused on the degree to which these directors displayed Mexicanness or transcended it. It is easy to point to the ways that the public debate immediately attempted to ghettoize these three directors via a condescending nickname and an obsession with their Mexican identities; it is less easy, though, to make sense of how the intellectual community failed to take seriously these events as a sign that theories about the relationship between local identities and global economic practices were long due for radical rethinking. The emergence of these directors as highly marketable in a global context, coupled with the fact that all three remain committed to helping build the Mexican national film industry while creating films which had social messages, seemed finally to prove that the stakes had changed. And yet, Ignacio Sánchez Prado explains that thus far it has been extremely difficult for scholars of Mexican cinema to move away from the paradigms of earlier decades. He explains that there “continues to be a problem across the academic landscape, both in Spanish and English, as critics remain committed to the study of Mexicanness and Mexicanism.”9 His Screening Neoliberalism argues that it is “imperative to overcome Mexicanism as the predominant form of approaching Mexican cinema, and to read Mexican film production in ways that do not echo the ideological agendas of the critic.”10 Sánchez Prado argues that twenty-first-century film in Mexico is no longer a vehicle for national identity and no longer envisioned as playing a role in advancing cultural and social democratization. Moreover, he points to the importance of middlebrow films aimed at the middle classes, which are not necessarily connected to any significant progressive or artistic impulse.

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One of his core arguments is that Mexican film in the neoliberal era contradicts many tenets developed by scholars of cultural studies. As we go back and review the parameters of the debates that have shaped concerns about cultural policies in the era of global economics, new technologies, and mass diasporas, it is astonishing to note the extent to which concerns over the connections between identity and culture industries hold to a contained set of questions that revolve around the local and the global, the heterogeneous and the homogenous. If we think outside of these oppositional binaries we can begin to note that Mexico offers us a case of both the most global and the most national film industry in the region. Alongside the global success of the three amigo directors, this era has also seen the rise of a highly successful group of art house directors like Carlos Reygadas, Amat Escalante, and Fernando Eimbcke, who explore questions of Mexican identity in highly complex ways. In addition, we have to note the extraordinary success of Emmanuel Lubezki, now hailed by some as the best cinematographer in the business today and the only cinematographer in history to win three Academy Awards. On the other side of the camera a number of Mexican actors have participated in the global presence of Mexico in the global film arena, most notably Gael García Bernal. Thus the goal of this chapter is not to provide depth and detail into all of these changes, since Sánchez Prado covers the same time period in his monograph dedicated entirely to Mexican cinema in the neoliberal era. Instead, this chapter delves into three key examples of how the case of Mexican filmmaking and film artists calls for a new critical paradigm that moves beyond the national versus transnational model. Rather than follow the model of analyzing the “three amigos,” my three key examples cover only two of the three directors, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, while adding a section on the work of Gael García Bernal, since his work as an actor has to be read in the larger context of his efforts to support filmmaking in Mexico through production support. • Alfonso Cuarón is the global Mexican director most easily connected to a critique of neoliberalism. Analyzing Y tu mamá también and Children of Men, the section shows how Cuarón’s work both connects with Mexico in the global era and imagines a new geography of globalization. After analyzing the way that these films offer a critique of global neoliberalism, the section closes with a

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brief mention of Gravity, which won Cuarón his first best director Academy Award. • The second section looks at selected films by Alejandro González Iñárritu and assesses how González Iñárritu both worked within and outside of established Mexican media frameworks. Because I read González Iñárritu as an outsider both within and outside of Mexico, I also use this section to outline the various key changes in the Mexican film industry. • The third focus of this chapter moves away from analysis of directors to the case of a Mexican actor who has also played a significant role in advancing a global view of Mexico (and Latin America) while working hard to protect and sustain the local Mexican film industry. Having had a successful career as a teen with Mexican telenovelas, Gael García Bernal began his film-acting career working with González Iñárritu in Amores perros and then with Cuarón on Y tu mamá también. García Bernal may well be the most globally recognized face of Latin American cinema, having starred in films like Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), No (2012), and Rosewater (2014).

Alfonso Cuarón and the Geographies of Neoliberalism The Green Zone, also known as the “International Zone of Iraq,” was founded in April of 2003 during some of the most intense fighting in Baghdad, when the bulk of those affiliated with Saddam Hussein fled the heavily fortified area that had housed successive Iraqi governments. Protected to the south and east by the Tigris River and from the north and west by walls, and home to military facilities, ministries, and a number of Hussein’s palaces, the zone offered itself as the logical new home to the Coalition Provisional Authority administrators who were searching for a base of operations. As Naomi Klein explains in The Shock Doctrine, the Iraqi Green Zone is only one of the most visible examples of what she calls “Disaster Apartheid,” where the world is increasingly divided into red and green zones, into spaces of comfort and leisure and spaces of hardship and want.11 What Klein argues is that the conditions of neoliberal capitalism demand such divisions. Not only does neoliberalism privilege profit over people, not only does it transform government so that its sole function is to protect the freedom of the market rather than the wellbeing of the citizenry, but it also fosters a culture of fear and demands social reorganization.

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Klein’s vision of a world divided into green and red zones connects deeply with the work of Alfonso Cuarón whose filmmaking delves into these same themes. Although Jonás Cuarón (Alfonso’s son) receives the official directing credit, the short film The Shock Doctrine (2007) was cowritten and codirected by Jonás Cuarón, Alfonso Cuarón, and Naomi Klein. Acting as a teaser for the book, the short presents Klein’s idea of disaster capitalism, where neoliberal capitalism feeds on natural disasters, war, and terror to establish its dominance. Cuarón’s work with Klein on the short for her book is a prime example of the sorts of transnational collaborations that have emerged in the global neoliberal era. Certainly, intellectuals and artists have collaborated across borders for all recorded history, but what is of interest here is the way that the cross-border connection between Klein and Cuarón is precisely dedicated to reimagining the configuration of space and the structure of human life as a consequence of neoliberal policies. Troping on this connection, this section looks at two key films in Cuarón’s film career: Y tu mamá también (2001) and Children of Men (2006) since they both directly engage the question of how neoliberalism reshapes geographic space and alters human connections. Y tu mamá también considers these issues almost wholly within a Mexican context as it follows two young Mexican men on a road trip that forces them to encounter various ways that neoliberalism is changing Mexican society. In contrast, Children of Men is a dystopian film set in the near future where children can no longer be born and refugees overwhelm cities, landing in camps and detention centers. In contrast to the nationally specific context of Y tu mamá también, Children of Men frames the issues in a post9/11 context of increasing displacement and the enhanced vulnerability of human life. As I’ve explained throughout this book, theories of globalization initially imagined a world with fewer borders and a free flow of exchange. This idealistic view was immediately challenged by the biopolitical realities that neoliberal capitalism depends on creating categories of bare life that are not acknowledged as true subjects of the state. Thus, rather than erode state borders, neoliberalism offers a new geography of life that is more closely tied to positions of privilege. This is what William Robinson refers to as the transnational elite in his analysis of Latin American and global capitalism. Both Klein and Cuarón focus on the way that neoliberalism creates green zones and red zones that divide life both across and within national borders. Their critique of global capital shows that

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attention to the north versus the south may not be as valuable a method for mapping the geographies of neoliberalism. The global era has brought a world that is far more starkly divided, but those divisions are more clearly of privilege than of national identity. Many economists tout the benefits of free trade agreements, especially NAFTA, but these improvements are almost entirely limited to a very small sector of society. For instance NAFTA led to improvements in a number of economic indicators: employment, foreign investment, economic activity, and exports; “According to statistics of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, open unemployment in Mexico [was only] 2% of the economically active population [in 2000], while Mexico’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew 7% in 1997, 4.9% in 1998, 3.7% in 1999, and 7%” in 2000.12 Focusing on these numbers allows neoliberal policy makers to argue that their projects of opening borders to trade benefit everyone. But those numbers only tell part of the story. In fact, after NAFTA, poverty and malnourishment rose in Mexico, especially as local farming economies became almost completely unsustainable: “Annual reports by United Nations agencies indicate that the number of Mexicans living in poverty climbed from 32 to 43 million between 1990 and 1998, while the number of malnourished Mexicans—half of them under 5 [years of age]—rose from 4.4 to 5.1 million.”13 The increase in employment was almost entirely in the precarious maquiladora sector where workers have no labor rights, health protections, or job security. A 2004 study showed that there was a 500,000 job increase in manufacturing jobs, but a loss of 1.3 million jobs in the agricultural sector. Real wages in 2004 were lower than before NAFTA, and NAFTA did not positively affect undocumented immigration either. In fact, despite increased policing of the border, undocumented immigration rose after NAFTA.14 While studies suggest that NAFTA was neither the nightmare some predicted nor the economic savior described by free trade economists, one thing is clear: post-NAFTA society has become more starkly divided and has led people on both sides of the border to be more clearly separated between green and red zones. The green zones of Mexico and the United States are often most visibly linked to gated communities, a global phenomenon that indicates the ways that neoliberalism has led to the construction of safe enclaves within states.15 In the United States, the rise in gated communities coincides directly with NAFTA (1994): “The number of people estimated to be

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living in gated communities in the United States increased from four million in 1995, to eight million in 1997 and to sixteen million in 1998.”16 While Mexico had long had a tradition of divided enclaves of privilege, the increase of gated communities in the United States correlates to the postNAFTA and post-9/11 narratives that US communities were under threat by criminal immigrants and terrorists. Jon Coaffee explains that the pervasive atmosphere of panic and insecurity led to a radical reallocation of social life within the United States: “By the middle of 1990 it was reported that in many parts of the United States one-third of new communities are incorporating such fortifying principles into their design because ‘terrified by crime and worried about property values, Americans are flocking to gated enclaves in what experts call a fundamental reorganization of community life.’”17 Klein calls these communities “suburban Green Zones.”18 Zygmunt Bauman has followed the case of refugee populations that have also been produced by the same neoliberal practices. These are communities who also find themselves forced into ghettos, cordoned off, and contained—a theme Cuarón openly investigates in Children of Men. The number of refugees recorded by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has grown disproportionately from 2 million in 1975 to more than 27 million in 1995. In 2015, the number of displaced peoples hit 65.3 million. According to reports from the UNHCR, these numbers mean that 1 in every 113 people globally in 2015 was either an asylum-seeker, internally displaced, or a refugee— a level of risk for which UNHCR had no precedent. In all, there were more forcibly displaced people in 2015 than the combined populations of the UK, France, and Italy. Bauman describes the lives of Palestinians who are born and die in camps, who never know anything other than camp life.19 He calls attention to the way that these camps dismantle the social commitment to togetherness, to seeing ourselves as linked to others. Instead these camps become the basis for the construction of “wasted” lives that offer nothing more than a security threat.20 The camp, the prison, and the ghetto, then, are the contrary social formations to the gated community. For every green zone there is a red zone. How do green and red zones relate to national borders, specifically the US-Mexican border? As David Harvey explains in Spaces of Hope, the geographies of neoliberalism are not limited to the borders and boundaries between states.21 Under neoliberal policy and cross-border agreements, there is a direct connection between the increased movement of capital and goods across national borders, the policing and militarization

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of national borders, and the construction of green and red zones within national borders. In general, but especially in the context of US–Mexico relations, neoliberalism provides a real challenge to the previous models that we have used to think about the ways that populations are categorized and contained. On the one hand, national borders, such as the one between the United States and Mexico, have become more materially divisive than ever, more militarized, and more violent. On the other hand, the structuring logic of the security state that accompanies the social imperatives of neoliberalism have created and exacerbated social divisions so much that the border becomes only one of the many ways that communities are divided. In what follows, I’ll examine more closely the role of neoliberalism in remapping the spaces of social life, especially with regard to the US–Mexican border, then I’ll offer a brief analysis of two films by Cuarón, Y tu mamá también and Children of Men, which offer viewers an opportunity to visualize the geographies of neoliberalism, and then I’ll explore the extent to which the more recent work of Cuarón continues to explore these issues. When Is a Border a Partition? NAFTA and the US–Mexico Border The difference between a border and a partition may be more semantic than practically functional. While both terms indicate the division of land, “border” can also mean edge, margin, limit. Technically a border can be occupied, whereas a partition cannot. Partition signifies the division of property or other goods, a division of shares, a distribution across parties. It is a term that resonates more specifically with the allocation of resources, a harsh line dividing assets—a term that can be used for divorce. Borders are both lines of division and the larger spaces around those lines of division. They can refer to an edging of flowers around a garden or the decorative limits of a garment. Borders, as a result, more readily lend themselves to poetic conceptualizations of liminality, border gnosis, and contact zones. In contrast, the concept of the partition brings with it a rigidity and impermeability absent from the idea of the border. It bears repeating that, despite these lexical distinctions, it seems clear that when we discuss territorial borders and partitions, we often are speaking of the same thing, or at least of things that share virtually the same function. I do not mean to romanticize the border and literalize

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the partition. But for the sake of what follows I do want to use these terms in slightly different ways, suggesting that the term “partition,” because of its resonance with a division of assets, more readily conjures up the logics of neoliberalism’s market mentality, whereas “border” is a far more slippery term, one that offers a lyricism and spatial fluidity unavailable to the idea of the partition. This distinction between borders and partitions describes the division between the United States and Mexico, since the physical territorial line between the nations has become more forcefully a partition, a militarized wall, at the same time that the borders between Mexico as a culture, an idea, an identity and the United States have become even more difficult to locate. In the midst of these two oppositional tendencies—forceful separation versus increased hybridity and porosity—we find the red zones and the green zones. These zones encompass both the border and the partition—they are both places easy to locate on a map, gated communities, ghettos, and squatter towns and places that have no territorial fixity, places that gain power through their epistemic force as well as through their lines of demarcation. Thus, they are visible and invisible. These tensions have always marked the complex realities of US– Mexican border culture, but it would be fair to say that the implementation of NAFTA and the post-9/11 security state were events that had a significant impact on the concept and materiality of the border. The nearly 2,000 miles that separate the United States from Mexico, and the gross economic inequities between the states, have marked this border as a focal point for attention over issues of undocumented immigration, the policing of frontiers, and questions of national security. With the implementation of NAFTA in 1994, the physical boundary between the United States and Mexico began to occupy an even more prominent place in national debates about immigration and US identity. As Peter Andreas has found, though, the effects of NAFTA were to open borders to goods and capital, but not to people: Even as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) promotes a de-territorialization of the economy, U.S. border control initiatives reinforce state claims to territorial authority. Thus, the apparent paradox of U.S.-Mexico integration is that a barricaded border and a borderless economy are being created simultaneously.22

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And yet, if we understand that neoliberalism depends on the construction of green and red zones, we can see how the varied function of the border, where it operates violently for some, but ceases to exist for others, makes perfect sense. It is those in the red zone, whose border-crossing has become more dangerous, who increasingly have to turn to coyotes to cross, and who too often die in the process, that find the post-NAFTA border to be a partition, a wall, a division almost impossible to pass. As Andreas puts it, “economic and military barriers may be falling, but police barriers are rising.”23 But, ironically, just as the border became a partition, an impossible divide, a wall between resources, there was a greater need to cross than ever. Neoliberal economics all but devastated traditional agricultural opportunities in Mexico leading more and more to need to cross to find work. Andreas reminds us that “Mexico depends on exporting part of its unemployment problem, which in turn generates as much as $4 billion in remittances; and U.S. employers depend on the cheap labor provided by illegal Mexican workers.”24 This fact has led many scholars of the border to recognize that the post-NAFTA rise in militarization is more show than substance. When we factor in the detail that the enhanced policing of the border has not led to a drop in immigration, but only to an increase in the dangers of it, we can begin to recognize the ways that neoliberal economics have redefined both the reality and the idea of the border. In keeping with the transformation of government functions under neoliberalism, post-NAFTA expenditures on border protection have surged at a time when social welfare programs have been increasingly gutted. The budget for the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS)—the parent agency of the Border Patrol—nearly tripled between 1993 and 1999, making it one of the fastest growing federal agencies. Andreas explains that “part of what makes the rapid expansion of the INS so remarkable is that it is occurring in an era of government down-sizing . . . [T]he positions of border patrol agent and immigration inspector are now listed as two of the top-ten job growth areas in the federal government.”25 Full appreciation of the neoliberal economics of the border, though, requires attention not only to the increased funds used to police the border, but also to the larger picture that includes the workplaces that hire immigrants, as well as the contractors that are hired to build walls or to provide infrared equipment. Saskia Sassen explains that the militarizing

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of the border constructs a series of “winners” (i.e., occupants of the green zone), who profit from these changes. The winners include arms manufacturers, large corporate employers, various lobbies, employers of undocumented immigrants generally, and the growing numbers of smugglers whose fees and business have expanded as government policies make border-crossing more difficult and risky.26 Lest there be any doubt as to the real purpose of policing the border, it is worth noting that while the budget for border patrol and border infrastructure has increased, the budget for workplace sanctions has not. The megafarms located just on the US side of the border are not investigated, nor are the Walmarts or other large employers of undocumented immigrants. Only 2% of the 1996 INS budget was allocated to employer sanctions enforcement. According to Andreas, “among advanced industrialized countries, the United States has the toughest penalties for immigrant smuggling and related activities, yet it ranks among the lowest in terms of sanctions against employers of illegal immigrants.”27 Thus, the border has become a partition, in the sense of a harsh division that derives from a need to divide assets and to protect the interests of neoliberal capital. Rather than function as merely a line in space, it has become more markedly a line between those that benefit from neoliberalism and those that suffer as a consequence of it. Both the Mexican government and the US government have manifestly transformed their sense of commitment to their citizens, favoring instead a commitment to protecting the interests of big business. And while these competing interests have characterized the modern nation-state, neoliberalism has meant a more mercenary commitment to capital over community. David Harvey explains that under neoliberalism, “The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.”28 Consequently, the state does not necessarily use a smaller budget, but resources are reallocated away from schools and social services and toward police and defense. Less money is spent on regulation and more money is spent on pushing policies of deregulation in the global marketplace. Sassen reminds us that nothing about US border policy is actually at the service of its citizenry: “If there is a contradiction in excessively concentrating on militarising the border while deciding to overlook workplace regulation, it is less between citizens and immigrants than between those with resources and those without—or those who have powerful lobbies versus those with none.”29 She goes on to explain that

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“the difference is actually not where the limits of walls make themselves visible. The wall and the weaponised border function in a vaster ecology.”30 That ecology is the ecology of green and red zones. This means that after crossing a treacherous border, immigrants find themselves in the face of an even more hostile environment, one happy to profit from their labor, but patently unwilling to recognize them as human beings deserving of even the most basic rights or the most minimal level of respect. So, in addition to a hypermilitarized border, we have the far more insidious development of neoliberal biopolitics that categorize particular forms of life as valuable and others as disposable. All people are disposable under these policies, since neoliberal practices target the very idea of community, of the public sphere, and of civic agency. And, as Subcomandante Marcos reminded the world, these crises were happening on both sides of the border. The year that NAFTA went into place, Mexico suffered an economic crisis and the Zapatistas emerged as a social force critical of neoliberal policies, among them the concentration of wealth and the rise of poverty, the globalization of exploitation, and the social trauma of forced economic migration. As Marcos explained in his manifesto, “The Fourth World War has Begun”: “The objective of neoliberalism’s migration policy is more to destabilise the world labour market than to put a brake on immigration.”31 Without question, the national frontier between Mexico and the United States continues to be a real geographical divide, but only for some. US citizens, US investments, and US goods travel south at will. And more than ever, Mexican products and culture are consumed in the United States. Moreover, visas for middle- and lower-middle-class Mexicans have gone up since NAFTA. US residents flock to see movies like No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included, 2013), go out drinking to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, plan vacations in Cancún, and study Spanish more than any other “foreign” language in US universities. It would seem to be an ideal picture of global exchange. How to square this free flow with the other side of the story?—the story of the border as a militarized zone, of families separated, of immigrants who lack access to a public sphere or any form of social support. How is it possible for Mexican telenovelas to be watched by more gringos than ever, while US citizens still balk at the idea of offering Mexican immigrants a path to citizenship? Giroux explains that the answer lies in the biopolitical realities of neoliberalism, which make it increasingly difficult

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to translate the private into the public and which depend on cordoning off large sectors of the population as imminently valueless.32 As Néstor García Canclini has shown, neoliberalism directly links the consumer and the citizen, leading to the rationale that, if one can’t consume, then one has no right to be a citizen.33 This logic creates the most devastating social partition possible, since, according to Bauman, neoliberalism makes the bonds between humans more frail than ever, but it especially fosters a divide across privilege.34 It dismantles togetherness and kindles xenophobia, racism, prejudice, and intolerance. When it comes to capital and consumption the border is open, but when it comes to community it is more closed than ever. Looking Across the Threshold: Two Films by Alfonso Cuarón It should come as no surprise that Cuarón’s work visualizes the ways that neoliberalism restructures social relationships, since his work analyzes neoliberalism both in respect to the specific case of Mexico, but also in a broader geopolitical sense. Analysis of his work helps make my argument that the best way to understand Latin American cinema in the global era is to look beyond traditional paradigms. Cuarón has enjoyed an immensely successful film career including numerous awards and box office hits. But, perhaps more than any other Latin American director of his stature, he has also blatantly been a critic of neoliberal policies. As mentioned, he worked on the short film to accompany Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, and the DVD release of Children of Men (2007) includes a documentary commentary, “The Possibility of Hope,” on neoliberalism and environmental damage that includes interviews with figures like Slavoj Žižek, Saskia Sassen, and Tzvetan Todorov. The links between his work and a critique of neoliberalism, consequently, are far from subtle. After his sex comedy debut film Sólo con tu pareja ([Only with your partner], 1991), Cuarón was immediately courted by Hollywood, working for Showtime and directing A Little Princess (1995) and Great Expectations (1998). But he returned to Mexico for his next film, Y tu mamá también (2001), a road film that used the interactions between two friends and an older woman to explore the neoliberal era in Mexico. His next political film was Children of Men (2006), which was loosely based on a novel by P.D. James. Like Babel for González Iñárritu, Children of Men was Cuarón’s response to 9/11. The real theme of the

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film, according to Slavoj Žižek, is “the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history, or to use another political term, biopolitics. . . . The basic problem in this society as depicted in the film is literally biopolitics: how to generate, regulate life.”35 Two of Cuarón’s films, Y tu mamá también (2001) and Children of Men (2006), engage in this critique specifically through the use of space as a larger metaphor for the fragmentation of society. Y tu mamá también focuses more specifically on the context of Mexico post-NAFTA and analyzes the rupture between a hedonistic youth culture and a society wracked by economic inequities. It links these two realities, though, through a play on its title which references the idea of someone having sex, literally “fucking,” someone else’s mother. In the film, sexual, hedonistic, pleasurable “fucking” is contrasted with the use of the term to indicate damage, destruction, or breaking apart, (i.e., the neoliberal “fucking” of society). The film follows two teenage narcissists—upper-class Tenoch, and middle-class Julio—from Mexico City, who entice an older Spanish woman, Luisa, to take a road trip with them to an imaginary beach named “Boca del cielo.” While the boys obsess about sex and hedonistically plot their days, they ignore anything that does not lead to their personal gratification. By the end of the film, even the possibility of a personal utopia has been shattered: they have lost their friendship and the woman that brought them together has died of cancer. Their quest for personal gratification has ended tragically. But the film refuses to allow the story simply to be about the personal desires of the boys and contrasts the sexual sense of “fucking” with its broader social meaning. For instance, in an early scene, after the boys have left their girlfriends at the airport, they get caught in traffic and guess that it is probably due to a demonstration. They show no interest in the political purpose of demonstrating, but concentrate, rather, on the fact that “en las manifestaciones hay rebuenos culitos” [you can find really good ass at demonstrations].36 Then one of them farts. Meanwhile, a narrator informs us that while there were three demonstrations that day, the traffic they encountered was due to the death of a pedestrian, Manuel Escutia, an immigrant bricklayer from Michoacán, who chanced crossing the road since the closest overpass was two kilometers out of his way. Thus, one of the key dynamics of the film is the constant counterpoint between social violence in post-NAFTA, neoliberal Mexico, and the frivolous, base interests of the two young men. What

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the film asks is how these two worlds can occupy the same physical space, the same national borders. If the boys can’t see the damage of neoliberalism when it is literally in their faces, then what chance is there of raising social awareness of these problems? Scholars like Juli Kroll have read this film as an expression of Mexican identity, keying into the fact that Tenoch is short for Tenochtitlan, a clear reference to Mexico’s indigenous past, and his last name, Iturbide, is a reference to Mexico’s first post-Independence leader.37 Meanwhile Julio’s last name is Zapata, a reference to the revolutionary. The Spanish woman they are chasing after, Luisa Cortés, clearly points to the famous conquistador. But Sánchez Prado considers this reading far too literal. For him, the choice of the names is so blatantly a reference to Mexican history, that it suggests the opposite: Cuarón is playing with the idea of authenticity and national identity: “The point is, in my view, precisely the opposite of Kroll’s reading: national identity is so irrelevant in the formation of the characters’ identities that their being named after historical characters is, at most, an ironic comment on a superficial trait . . . and in most cases meaningless.”38 For Sánchez Prado, these name games show how Cuarón is dismantling the idea of cinema as a vehicle for national identity. Instead, the focus of the film is the complex social stratification that has created classes that are heterogeneous, but still clearly separated. The friendship between Julio and Tenoch is doomed because they neglect the realities of their social status in the same way that they can’t see that their nation is shifting as a result of globalization. Y tu mamá también highlights what the characters neglect and ignore through the use of two key techniques: the voice of an omniscient narrator and the practice of wandering camerawork. In an obvious example of the technique of distanciation, the narrator consistently interrupts the playful joking of Tenoch and Julio to reveal information they either disregard or keep secret. Visually, the camerawork often moves away from the main characters to show aspects of Mexican social life that contrast with the carefree life of the boys. The camera is constantly looking across thresholds, especially through doorways and windows, in a move that reinforces the idea that there is a painful distance between the characters and the world in which they live. Both the narrator and the camera supplement, literally and theoretically, the representation of the boys. In one instance, as the boys ogle Luisa at a family wedding, the camera leaves them and follows, instead, a woman who carries food out to the many bodyguards and chauffeurs who await the wedding guests in the parking

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lot. In the same scene, we learn from the narrator that after the Mexican President appeared at the wedding he went to a meeting to decide the candidates for the next election and that the next day: “manifestaría su indignación por la masacre en Cerro Verde, negando la participación del Gobernador del estado. Después de dar las condolencias a los familiares de los víctimas, saldría a Seattle a un congreso mundial sobre globalización” [he would express indignation at the massacre in Cerro Verde, denying the participation of the Governor of the state. After giving his condolences to the victims’ families, he would leave for a world conference on globalization in Seattle].39 These interruptions and detours call on the viewer to reassess what constitutes the center of the story, thereby forcing a reconsideration of who exactly is referenced by the phrase “y tu mamá también” [and your mother too]. The most telling scene to establish the ethical foundations of their actions and their conflict with social relations comes when the boys get drunk with Luisa and forgive each other for having slept with each other’s girlfriends. They begin toasting to things like oral sex and masturbation, and Julio asks Chuy, the fisherman who is tending bar for them, to join them. Each time Julio asks him to toast with them, in a superficial sign of camaraderie, Chuy shakes his head “no.” Chuy, unlike the hedonist boys, has his own worries, since government appropriation of the ejido—a government land grant to the local community—that he and his ancestors have fished will lead to the development of a resort and the loss of his livelihood. Meanwhile, the boys have no idea of what Chuy and his family face. If these boys represent the future of Mexico, the film suggests, then the chances for any sort of collective response to Mexico’s problems of social inequity seem more fragile than ever. While the neoliberal state is the hidden character that drives Y tu mamá también, it is a looming presence in Children of Men. The most overtly political of Cuarón’s films, Children of Men links a militarized state, the destruction of the environment, and the biopolitics of global diaspora, camp communities, and an infertile and aging population. Loosely based on the dystopian novel by P.D. James, the film takes place in 2027 in the United Kingdom when the world has suffered two decades of infertility. The Britain of the film is an authoritarian police state that is simultaneously regulating an endless wave of refugees, various terrorist groups, and the rest of the disaffected, self-absorbed population. The art of the film begins with the specific way that Cuarón created its science fiction atmosphere as a world that is at once futuristic and more

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real than the real. He explains that when he first met with the art designers they presented him with mock-ups of futuristic cars, buildings, and more. But Cuarón explained “‘this is not the movie we’re doing. The movie we’re doing is this.’ And inside I had my own file of photographs from Iraq, from Sri Lanka, Northern Ireland, the Balkans, Somalia, Chernobyl, and I mean this is the movie we’re doing.”40 The immediately apparent surface story centers on biological infertility and the impending end of the human race. The lead character, Theo, who has wandered around in total alienation since the death of his three-year-old son to influenza, is offered a chance at redemption. If he can safely deliver the pregnant African refugee, Kee, to a utopic community, he will save the future and himself. But behind the surface story of a fallen humanity and its possible salvation the film offers a far more complex critical commentary. As mentioned above, for Žižek, the real theme of the film is “the ideological despair of late capitalism. Of a society without history.”41 The lack of history is not only a consequence of the lack of a future caused by biological infertility; it is also a result of a state of neoliberal commodification that has turned democracy into a product for export, has converted the citizen into a consumer, and has replaced civil society with a militarized society that polices bare life. This is a world where there is no sense of time because there is no sense of the possibility of political change. The film references this absence in a brilliant use of long tracking shots often done with a hand-held camera. The technique simulates the look of a documentary or a news report, except that the subject of the images is unaware of the camera. Most interesting, though, is the way that these long takes draw attention to the absence of history. The timing of the shots, then, offers the viewer a productive counterpoint to the flow of time within the world of the characters. This practice takes place throughout the film, but I would like briefly to analyze the opening sequence, since it establishes a key set of viewing codes. The camera follows Theo into a coffee shop as we hear news reports in the background. The futuristic news reports sound like only slight exaggerations of the present and the interest in the overdetermined life of Baby Diego, the youngest person in the world who has just been murdered, is reminiscent of other media spectacles. The long tracking shot that follows Theo does not even follow him perfectly, as if, perhaps, his life were not worthy of our attention. As he leaves the coffee shop the camera turns away from Theo to pan the street and picks his figure up again after the distraction of a passing moto-taxi. As Theo

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walks away from the café, a bomb explodes inside. Everyone, or practically everyone, that Theo has just seen, is now dead. The camera circles Theo but then, leaves him behind to run toward the wounded. After the explosion the structures of viewing have been shattered and the grim, alienated world of Theo gives way to a shot of a woman emerging from the rubble holding her severed arm. The tracking shot has drawn attention to the lack of connection between Theo and those with whom he lives. All of the people we have just seen were more interested in media images of a pop icon than in the people standing next to them. Their collective disinterest is revealed for all of its horror when they become the victims of a terrorist attack, which will likely get less attention than that of the media spectacle they were just consuming. Even though the camera has panned across their faces, linking them, as it were, Theo’s society has been revealed as fundamentally fragmented, broken, dismantled. As the opening sequence, this long tracking shot establishes the problem of space and social barriers as one of the central concerns of the film. The entire landscape of the film is broken down into segregated populations. The use of this shot, then, contrasts those spaces with a fluid camera style that crosses barriers in unexpected ways. At times, the practice creates intimacy and community; at others, it draws attention to their absence. In this way, the long tracking shot in Children of Men contrasts with the threshold shot and the wandering camera work of Y tu mamá también, but in both cases the use of the camera draws attention to social metaphors of space under neoliberalism. In Y tu mamá también, the film draws attention to barriers: between bodies that have sex, but are never really connected; between populations that live in the same country, village, even house, but remain fragmented; and between friends, whose yearning for personal gratification will eventually outweigh any real spirit of camaraderie or social commitment. All of these social barriers come together to establish a series of borders—green and red zones, made even more tragic because the protagonists are largely unaware of them. The hope of the film, though, lies in the way that it juxtaposes these barriers and draws ties between them. Children of Men, despite its dystopic patina, is similarly hopeful. Again the film structures all social space across a series of barriers, this time more violent and blatant than in Y tu mamá también. Unlike the threshold shots and the wandering camerawork of Y tu mamá también, Children of Men draws attention to social divisions by using long tracking

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shots that elongate time and cross space, linking social sectors that the state has divided. In Children of Men the refugee, the immigrant, and the displacements of global diaspora form the ongoing backdrop. The immigrants in the film are truly global and transhistorical with scenes carefully constructed to refer to the concentration camps that have polluted human history. Images that have the feel of the Holocaust bump up against those that could be Afghans in Pakistan or Cubans in Miami, creating a bizarre sense of both the historical continuity and the extreme synchronicity of a world that has repeatedly categorized vulnerable communities as threats. Cuarón grafts his own intimate interest in Mexican economic policy into a global non-state-specific context—a move that allows him to explore the logical consequences of the contemporary politics of the other. In Children of Men, the state does not only divide society into enclaves; it distracts society into focusing on these enclaves rather than on the state itself. The Big Picture: Cuarón Goes Planetary Cuarón’s next project after Children of Men was Gravity (2013), a film that took years to develop due to its extremely complex special effects. The film focuses on the story of Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a biomedical engineer on her first space shuttle mission for NASA. On a spacewalk to service the Hubble Space Telescope, Ryan and her team are warned that they need to abort their mission because a Russian missile strike on a defunct satellite has set off a chain reaction of space debris. The debris strikes the space shuttle and also damages Hubble, leaving Stone and her colleague, Matt Kowalski (George Clooney), detached and hurtling through space. After a series of calamities, Stone finds herself alone in a Soyuz capsule and eventually begins to resign herself to the idea of not making it back to Earth. She turns off the oxygen supply to the capsule and prepares to die, but as she begins to lose consciousness, Kowalski returns to the capsule and begins coaching Stone on how to maneuver to a nearby Chinese space station. She ultimately realizes that Kowalski has been only a hallucination, but she nevertheless persists in trying to get to safety. After yet another series of close calls she finally makes it to Earth and emerges from the water slowly finding her way to walk on land. As Cuarón puts it, the film is about Stone’s journey once all of her connections to humanity and the Earth have been severed.42

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On the surface, the film seems to be the farthest possible from any sort of political commentary on neoliberalism. At heart it is a highly metaphorical film that has a series of themes that are not necessarily contextualized to a specific historical moment. While it would be convenient to consider the film a commentary on planetarity versus globalization, such a reading would be forced. And yet, on closer look a number of the central themes in the film develop tropes from Cuarón’s earlier work. Cuarón has explained that for him the core of the story is the question of adversity. Stone’s character is an unlikely hero, not only because she is female, but also because she has basically lost the will to live since the accidental death of her four-year-old daughter. She simply is not the sort of character we have ever seen helm a complex sci-fi film. One of the first thematic links between the film and Cuarón’s earlier investigations of neoliberal geography is the notion of chain reactions and global connections. The fact that the crisis in space is precipitated by the Russians shooting down a satellite is an obvious sign of the way that nations can no longer act without potentially influencing others. Then Stone’s use of Chinese equipment to save herself takes the other view where global interactions are necessary for human survival. This narrative line is reminiscent of Bauman’s claims that neoliberalism sets in motion competing and conflicting spatial arrangements. He explains that “much of the power to act effectively that was previously available to the modern state is now moving away to the politically uncontrolled global (and in many ways extraterritorial) space; while politics, the ability to decide the direction and purpose of action, is unable to operate effectively at the planetary level since it remains, as before, local.”43 While the film has no deep ethical grievance to resolve, it does make Bauman’s point that on “a planet criss-crossed by ‘information highways’” there is no “terra nulla, no blank spots on the mental map, no unknown, let alone unknowable lands and peoples.”44 And yet, while the people and places and capital can be mapped, Stone’s story is of severe isolation and solitude. Her isolation can be read as a potential reference to the privatization of affect under global neoliberalism or merely as a stark portrayal of how humans can shut themselves off from others when in a state of grief. Given the complete absence of any mention of the material economy, the latter seems more likely. This means that the film’s corollary to the trope of adversity, the theme of resilience, is less overtly a story about the ways human lives are responding to this particular historical moment of suffering and is

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instead more broadly a commentary about the ways that humans find the will to persist. Stone may well be a female scientist who has lost a daughter and gone hurtling into space because of a Russian missile, but the film is careful to leave the grief and fear and frustration of the protagonist at a broad level that removes identity politics and social politics out of the plot. And yet, Cuarón specifically suggested that the film’s themes of adversity and resilience emerged from the current moment: “I think there’s definitely something about the individual in adverse circumstances. . . . There’s a big sense of adversity that’s happening right now in the world, and it’s how we can cope with it.”45 As he explained in another interview, nearly everything in Gravity is a metaphor for the main character. The character and the background are equally important: “Sandra Bullock is caught between Earth and the void of the universe, just floating there in between. We use the debris as a metaphor for adversity. She’s a character who lives in her own bubble, and in the film she’s trapped in her space suit. She’s a character who has trouble communicating, and here she literally starts having communication problems. She’s a character who needs to shed her skin to move on, and in the film she needs to get out of her astronaut suit because it’s suffocating her. In the end, the story is about rebirth as a possible outcome of adversity.”46 There are no green zones or red zones in this film, but there is an extreme sense of space. The film alternates between creating both a highly claustrophobic sense of space as Stone is confined to the tight quarters of her capsule and an atmosphere of acrophobia as she hurtles off into space with literally no grounding elements of any kind. Her sense of being both tightly bound and freely floating create a highly intense environment. Some critics have gone so far as to say that space is the real antagonist in the film.47 Others, though, argue that space is actually a stand in for solitude. As her journey progresses, Stone craves any possible human contact. Disconnected from NASA, she finally makes contact with a ham radio operator only to realize that they don’t speak the same language. In a fairly overt reference to both the biblical tale of Babel and González Iñárritu’s film based on the myth, she can hear him but can’t communicate. The film uses two specific techniques to play with the counterpoint between broken connections, adversity, and solitude, on the one hand, and resilience, rebirth, and contact on the other. It also plays with the contrasting sensations of gravity—being grounded—and being in zero gravity—completely untethered and floating. The opening sequence

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made cinema history, not only for its single, 17-minute long take, but also for the complexity of the camerawork. The shot opens with a bright view of the Earth. It then allows us to begin to connect with the film’s characters. The mood is calm and beautiful. But when mission control tells them to abort, things quickly shift. Debris begins to hurtle past and then Stone is seen spinning in space as the arm that tethered her has broken. The camera retreats from her but then moves back to reveal her terrified face. As the shot ends the camera has retreated again and we see her tumble into space becoming smaller and smaller. The effect is complex because the continuity shot does not create a sense of connection and does not work to connect objects, but rather reinforces the idea of Stone’s separation from Earth, from the space station, and from her colleagues. The shot begins with a view of Earth and an astronaut flying above it, but it ends with a shot of dark space and a helpless astronaut spinning out of control. The unbroken shot, then, emphasizes what is breaking down in Stone’s life. It is a complex visual dialectic. This effect takes place throughout the film as it uses a series of long, unbroken shots. Running around two hours, Gravity has only 156 shots total (an average of 46 seconds/shot), including several that run “six, eight, ten minutes long.”48 On top of using unbroken shots to trace breakdowns, Cuarón also uses a dynamic point-of-view where he alternates from looking at Stone and looking at the world as though we were Stone. As one reviewer put it, “Cuarón plays daringly and dexterously with point of view: at one moment you’re inside Ryan’s helmet as she surveys the bleak silence; then in a subtle shift you’re outside to gauge her reaction.”49 This technique is used throughout the film and it is a subtle, yet brilliant, way to explore the issue of subjectivity, perspective, and the power of the gaze. When we look at Stone, the conventional power relationship of the gaze on a female form is set into motion. As Laura Mulvey explains in “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” the cinematic gaze on the female form has tended to reproduce a patriarchal structure of power and pleasure.50 When the film looks at Stone, her beauty and grace are on display for the viewer to consume. But Cuarón refuses to obey these scopophilic codes and alternates those takes with a point-of-view that not only takes the perspective of the female, but also departs completely from visual codes of pleasure and consumption. In interviews, Cuarón explained that he was encouraged to develop a romance between Stone and a mission control commander who is in love with her. He also explains that

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“studio nervousness got to the point where one executive asked him to ‘pump up the action value, like having an enemy, like a missile strike.’ And finally, to ‘finish with a . . . rescue helicopter, that would come and rescue her.’”51 By refusing the viewer the traditional Hollywood codes of action, desire, and narrative development, Cuarón creates a film that forces the viewer to confront their discomfort at a visual story that refuses to conform to conventional expectations. This then may be Cuarón’s greatest achievement thus far in breaking down the categories of existence. Gravity doesn’t depict a geography that highlights privilege and pain across and within borders, but it does break down borders between accepted cinematic narratives, especially for directors who hail from the global south. Gravity won Cuarón the Oscar for best director, a first for a Latin American. His win untethered Latin American directors from needing to make films about Latin America in order to gain international attention for their work. The film received ten Academy Award nominations and won seven. Moreover, it drew a large and diverse audience, breaking “box office records by appealing to young and old, men and women, art-movie fans, sci-fi geeks and even evangelical Christian reviewers.”52 With a budget of $110 million, it grossed $716.4 million worldwide and $17.8 million in Mexico.53 Sánchez Prado reads Cuarón’s success with Gravity as a sign of his easy circulation between Mexican commercial cinema, global art cinema, and Hollywood. For him the success of Gravity is “the result of a transformational operation at the core of post-1990 Mexican cinema: the ability of film to reflect on its own ideological and identitary limits.”54 For Sánchez Prado, Cuarón’s success with Gravity marked a seminal moment for Mexico because it opened “the door for a properly post-national cinema—one that, beyond the acknowledgment of the limits of the nation, fully deterritorializes and undermines the codes of the national.”55 Cuarón’s role in opening up filmmaking to the post-national is undisputed, but reading his work on a trajectory from the local to the global to the planetary would be a mistake. In keeping with my argument that these filmmakers defy traditional critical paradigms, Cuarón’s next project after Gravity challenged all expectations. In 2016, he began filming a movie that chronicles a year in the life of a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 1970s. The film is part of Cuarón’s project to work with the progressive, commercial production house Participant Media. Cuarón explained his choice to work with Participant this way:

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“This film is close to my heart and my first in Mexico since Y tu mamá también. I am thrilled to be making it with the Participant team.”56 This next chapter in Cuarón’s career, then, further makes my case that the paradigm of local versus global no longer holds and it shows that directors like Cuarón who have made large-budget Hollywood films can and do return to their home nations to work. While we know little at this time about the nature of the project, we can guess based on the involvement of Participant Media that the film will also have a social message and critical perspective, while also being visually compelling. The core question will be whether it continues Cuarón’s practice of telling stories that make us rethink the human relationship to space.

Alejandro González Iñárritu: The Outsider as Neither Global Nor Local Alejandro González Iñárritu may be the most flamboyant and most outspoken of “the three amigos.” Having begun his career in radio, he initiated his film career by founding a production company, Zeta Films, which helped launch the careers of seven other directors, but he has always seemed like an outsider to the national industry. Because he has worked outside of the Mexican system, he has often found himself responding to questions about the extent to which he is or is not a Mexican director. For instance, in a 2010 interview with Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona, they asked González Iñárritu if he saw himself as an atypical director in the history of Mexican cinema, to which González Iñárritu replied, “Yes, I think I started off in the left lane and without a license. I was always an outsider. Nobody from that industry saw me coming.” He then explains his efforts to work within the system at an early age: My first contact with Mexican cinema was when I was twenty. I was at the university studying cinema and media. A friend of mine had a production company that made very bad films, what we call in Mexico ficheras films, films about prostitutes. I wanted to be on a set. I asked my friend to ask his uncle, José Díaz, the company owner, to give me anything, a job carrying cables, whatever. And he sent me this message: “If you don’t have relatives in Mexican cinema, go and find some.” That was his literal answer. It was very tough, but that’s how it worked. It was controlled by four or five families. The unions were also very difficult to get into. You had to belong

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to a family. So, I was always on the wrong side, and I had to do it my way and I’m grateful for that.57

González Iñárritu explains the tightly closed and cronyist system that governed the Mexican film industry. But he also points out that being forced to work outside of the system had great benefits for him. Thus, this section traces how González Iñárritu has consistently resisted the traditional paradigm of coding a director as national or Hollywood. It also reads the trajectory of González Iñárritu within the larger context of the post-NAFTA Mexican film industry. Thus, I also use this section to offer an overview of the various ways that the film industry in Mexico adapted to trade liberalization and adjusted versions of state support. González Iñárritu’s directorial debut, Amores perros (2000), was an immediate hit both in Mexico and abroad. A 2010 study listed it as the most-liked recent Mexican film among Mexican filmgoers.58 Told in four parts that intersect through a car crash, the film offered a standard, but edgy, postmodern tale of lives in various degrees of connection and contact. The politics of the film, though, were highly ambivalent—as would be the case with his next two projects, both of which are often considered to be Hollywood productions, 21 Grams (2003) and Babel (2006). Given the global spin of Babel, this section focuses on the way that the film offers a theory of identity and political struggle in the post-9/11 era. It then closes with analysis of Biutiful (2010), a film shot in Spain that explores the neoliberal destruction of the Spanish economy and the effects of global diaspora within a story about loss and human suffering. Throughout, though, this section will also try to trouble the recurring need to read González Iñárritu as an example of a Mexican director, a global director, a Hollywood director, or as a transnational one. It is astonishing to note the degree to which González Iñárritu consistently has to contend with questions that ask him to map the geographic affiliations of his work, when he has constantly tried to resist those categories. For instance, Deleyto and Azcona asked him if he likes being described as a Mexican or a Latin American filmmaker. González Iñárritu replied that he thinks “art should have no nationality.” He further explains that for him, When a work of art is reduced to a geographical territory, often with a nationalistic sense, it’s always diminished. This is a conflict or a misinterpretation that filmmakers like myself, who are always wandering from one

410  S.A. McCLENNEN place to another and making films all over, are often subject to. I am very proud of being Mexican, and I do believe that the point of view in my films is influenced by my nationality. As Baudelaire said, My childhood is my country. And it’s true, my childhood and an important part of the rest of my life took place in Mexico, and this is something that will always impregnate my life and my work, everything I do and everything I say. . . . Nationalist cinema as a concept does not interest me.59

What is of interest is the fact that despite his protestations that his work should not be judged according to these categories, it often continues to be read against preconceived geographic containers that, for him, make no sense at all. He also rejects the idea of Hollywood cinema and makes the important point that “Hollywood” is often used in a monolithic way that fails to capture the complexity of films made in connection to major Hollywood-linked corporations: “I do not consider myself part of Hollywood cinema, which is again too general a term. In the United States about seven hundred films are produced every year, and that’s only the ones we hear about. Any film in English is immediately seen as a Hollywood film. It’s a childish generalization.”60 Reassessing the State of the Film Industry Despite the fact that there are many pattern matches between the film industries of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico in the neoliberal era, Mexico offers a number of unique features. Not only was it a major exporter of films and other media, but it also had to contend with its proximity to the United States. This meant that Mexico was at one and the same time one of the most powerful film industries in the region and also one of the ones most saturated with Hollywood product. One way, though, that it follows a similar path to that of Argentina and Brazil is in the transition from a developmentalist-nationalist state structure to one that was based on neoliberal privatization. Interestingly, though, the transition to a privatized system predated the NAFTA agreement. The Mexican government was already privatizing cinema well before the NAFTA negotiations put pressure on state protections for the industry. In 1977, under the presidency of José López Portillo, Mexico released 45 stateproduced films and 29 privately produced ones. By 1982, over a decade prior to NAFTA, the effects of privatization and reduced state support were clear. That year only 3 films had state support and 92 were privately

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Table 7.1  Private and state funding for Mexican film production.a Source IMCINEb

100% privately funded films Films with state support Total

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

12 17 29

11 25 35

11 42 36

30 34 64

29 41 70

13 57 70

aNot

all of these films were released Bonfil, ed., Cinema México: Producciones/Productions: 2007–2009 (Distrito Federal, México: Consejo Nacional Para la Cultura y las Artes, 2009), 341, accessed April 13, 2017, http://www.imcine. gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_entry537f86cf93e05abc5500009f/537f881793e 05abc550005d4/files/catalogo_2007-2009sin_spanda.pdf. bJudith

produced.61 In fact, as Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía ([Mexican Film Institute], IMCINE) data shows, when state support dropped initially in the early 1980s, private funding kept production relatively high. It was only after the ending of the screen quota that overall Mexican film releases drastically dropped. Then, beginning in 2003, state funding picked back up and it is now greater than private.62 This means that in the global era, privatization has not been as complete in the film industry as it initially appeared it would be (see Table 7.1). This data is essential to keep in mind as we consider the role of the state in protecting the culture industry. In the case of Mexico, it was not only NAFTA that led to adjusted forms of state support. Moreover, the simple fact that data is tracked dividing privately funded from state-funded cinema as far back as the 1970s shows the vast difference between the role of private capital in the Mexican film industry compared to that of other Latin American nations, where almost all national releases have some measure of state investment. This reality reinforces the idea that it is a mistake to think that the presence of privatization in Latin America is wholly due to pressure from the global north. Mexican capitalists were already advancing the neoliberal agenda without necessary pressures from the north. As evidenced by the powerful role of the privately owned Cinépolis and Televisa, it is clear that Mexico is by no means a global media underdog. Another of the core differences between the cases of Brazil and Argentina and that of Mexico was Mexico’s distance from the third cinema movement. Not one of the major figures in the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) hailed from Mexico and not one of the many third

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cinema theories was penned by a Mexican filmmaker. Perhaps more importantly, with a few exceptions, the socially critical films supported by the Mexican state were not radically leftist. Many scholars overlook this fact when they assess the political potential of Mexican film. For instance, Hester Baer and Ryan Long read Cuarón’s film Y tu mamá también in relation to the theories of Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas, two Argentine left film theorists who had virtually no footprint in the Mexican context.63 Sánchez Prado emphasizes my point that there is a significant gap between the leftist NLAC and Mexican political film in his study of the Mexican film industry: “continental readings of the cinema of the period show the ways in which Mexican filmmakers fell short in the wave of political and aesthetic renovation identified with trends such as ‘Third Cinema.’”64 As Sánchez Prado explains, the real critical friction between filmmakers and the state was over the depiction of Mexicanidad: “the central problem at the level of production was the fact that the ideologies of the Mexican self—or Mexicanidad—that were instrumental in the emergence of national cinema and national culture at large in the 1930s and 1940s no longer carried the same social significance, particularly with middle-class movie audiences.”65 He explains that because filmmakers were not responding to the sorts of brutal dictatorships that governed much of Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, it meant that Mexican films did not have an urgent need to move “beyond inherited models of representation.”66 Thus, the first step in creative expression for Mexican directors involved a reassessment of their connection to the state. Baer and Long rightly note that state support for the film industry in Mexico, similar to the case of Argentina and Brazil, had an uneasy connection to films that critiqued the state, especially in the context of repressive regimes. Thus, Sánchez Prado argues that a key feature of the commercialized rebirth of Mexican cinema was freeing its production from the nationalist imperatives that had defined the industry since its inception in the post-revolutionary period.67 Privatization, then, was not only about a different relationship to capital; it was also about a different relationship to state ideology. These changes meant that with privatization of the industry came increased freedom to rewrite the narrative of Mexican identity. Thus, the shifts in the Mexican film industry brought on by the advent of neoliberalism are not only in reference to an outdated state structure that no longer appealed to the nation’s citizens. For Sánchez Prado, these changes also “involved the decline of

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the hegemonic codes of culture that still shaped Mexican cinema both aesthetically and ideologically, and the economic and intellectual exhaustion suffered by Mexican film at large.”68 This fact then problematizes the tendency to read privatization as a threat to the film industry, given the reality that state control often held far more limits on creativity than private funding. As already noted, González Iñárritu found the state systems oppressive and cronyist and preferred working with private capital. The Carlos Salinas de Gortari presidency (1988–1994) is credited with ushering in the wave of trade liberalization that would deeply affect the film industry, although, as noted above, that process was started before his tenure as president. Even still, his administration brought significant changes. In 1992, the Mexican film industry was deregulated and a new film law removed the requirement where theaters reserved “half their screen time for Mexican movies and ticket prices were fixed at three pesos, then about $1.”69 Then in 1997, Mexican film production dropped to 11 films, the lowest in Mexican film history. That same year FOPROCINE [Fund for Quality Film Production] was established in December.70 The goal of FOPROCINE was to promote “artistic, educational, and cultural value, regardless of risk.” As Leisa Rothlisberger explains, FOPROCINE principally supports “cine de autor y experimental” [“auteur and experimental film”] and can provide up to 80% of the production budget for films that are culturally focused. These are films where the state investment is in art, not profit. They do not expect the budget to be recovered.71 And yet, a number of FOPROCINEsupported films have also been successful at the box office. The most noteworthy example was El crimen del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Padre Amaro, 2002), which broke the box office records for a national film, bringing in US$16.5 million in 2002.72 In 1998, the Ley Cinematográfica was passed, establishing several key mechanisms to help support the Mexican film industry, including FIDECINE (Fondo de Inversión y Estímulos al Cine [Film Investment and Stimulus Fund]) via a combination of funds from both government and private sources; it provided “better stimulus and conditions for the production of Mexican films in Mexico and abroad.”73 According to Rothlisberger, FIDECINE is the neoliberal counterpoint to FOPROCINE, because it focuses on competing within the commercial market and potentially generating profits. She also notes that neither FOPROCINE nor FIDECINE has any distribution requirements. That same year, the Mexican Senate rejected a key part of the film law that

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sought to reinstate the requirement forcing theaters to reserve 10% of their screen time for Mexican movies, claiming that the law was a violation of foreign treaties.74 The next year FOPROCINE had a budget of $16.7 million, but there were no state protections to ensure that the films supported would get to screens. In December 2004, Mexico passed new income tax legislation to encourage another model for investment in film production: Article 226 of the Ley del Impuesto Sobre la Renta (Income Tax Law). Officially referred to as EFICINE (or Article 226), the fund allows “a 10% credit toward a payment on Income Tax to any person who individually or as a business invests money in Mexican cinema, provided that this investment does not surpass, in its entirety, a maximum sum of 500 million pesos annually.”75 The EFICINE project was further connected to the ongoing problems Mexican films have had in gaining exhibition deals. Of the 87 full-length films IMCINE helped produce between 1998 and 2002, only three recuperated their production costs and only five were viewed by more than 3 million people.76 EFICINE went into effect in 2007, thereby offering a third model of state support for film funding. Rothlisberger notes that one of the other key differences with EFICINE is the fact that it requires the film supported to be distributed commercially in order to benefit from its incentives. MacLaird argues, though, that EFICINE represents a further way that the state is involved with controlling the development of film content, since EFICINE films are still reviewed by a government committee. It thus straddles private and public funding by depending on private funding and also state approval. For MacLaird, the public–private gap is actually mutually reinforcing, since both the state and private funding tend to favor pro-neoliberal narratives: “The prevalence of neoliberal ideology within the narratives of recent cinema . . . illustrates that the state, to some extent, has been successful in generating self-legitimizing audiovisual content in an era of increasing economic disparity.”77 Rothlisberger also explains that the bureaucratic nature of these funding bodies still favors industry insiders with ties to Mexico City: “The application process for each of the funds requires a lot of paperwork and perseverance, and some argue that the administrators favor traditional productions from central Mexico, rather than projects from disparate parts of the nation.”78 For Rothlisberger, the three-tiered funding system operated via IMCINE acknowledges a range of potential types of films, and works to

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support development in multiple areas. Mexico’s state system is the only one of the national cases analyzed in this book that attempts to bracket out art films from commercial ones. And it is also one of the only ones where tax rebates are still connected to state approval. Rothlisberger explains that, regardless of the criticisms of these projects, “the funds have increased the number of films being produced in Mexico and the fact that there are three types of funding mechanisms shows the government overseers of the film industry acknowledge the importance of different types of film making.”79 The neoliberal era, then, has not ended the role of the state in the industry, but it has changed it. Perhaps now more than ever, the state is more openly acknowledging the fact that film also has a sociocultural and political role. Cinesecuencias, the news bulletin of the Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía (IMCINE), uses the phrase: “El cine no sirve para cambiar el mundo, sino a los que cambian el mundo” [“Film cannot change the world, but can change those who change the world”].80 MacLaird suggests that this phrase mediates “the tensions between the various expectations placed on cinema as art, as cultural-political expression, and as entertainment.”81 I would argue, in addition, that it may well also signal the fact that the Mexican state recognizes that there is a marketing value in promoting films with a social message. Most of the Mexican films that have had any sort of international recognition have, indeed, been films dealing with social issues. The increasing capitalist interest in profiting from this trend further adds to the deep ambivalences at the heart of global-era political filmmaking. As evidenced by the fact that Mexico established its Film Commission right after NAFTA to encourage film projects to choose Mexico as a location, the neoliberal era may have adjusted state involvement in producing a national narrative, but it certainly didn’t change the state’s interest in developing its footprint in the film economy. As will be explored more in the concluding coda to this book, Mexico has increasingly seen filmmaking as an industry where they can enhance their share of the market, whether making films about Mexico or not. This may perhaps be the best sign of the fact that for the state Mexicanidad may be more of a marketing platform than a national project in the way that it was during the modern era. As Sánchez Prado makes clear, by the NAFTA era the notion of films unpacking Mexicanidad was an outdated critical model. This was true, in part, based on the relatively limited reach of Mexican films in the

416  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 7.2  Mexican release market share. Source IMCINEa Year 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Total films released 271 290 290 320 296 306 242 250 260 280 278 279 298 305 326 307 313 321 319 364 330 414 407

Total Mexican films released 54 39 20 16 8 11 16 19 17 25 18 25 33 43 49 54 56 62 67 101 68 80 90

Percentage of national films (%) 19.93 13.45 6.90 5.00 2.70 3.59 6.61 7.60 6.5 8.93 6.47 8.96 11.07 14.10 15.03 17.59 17.89 19.31 21.00 27.75 20.61 19.32 22.11

a“Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2016,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2016, 308–311, accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_ entry56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/58c56cab9d7279400e00114c/files/Anuario_estadistico_de_cine_ mexicano_2016.pdf.

Mexican marketplace. As the data on total national releases and spectator market share of national films shows, the post-NAFTA era led to a drop in market share for Mexican films when screen quotas were lifted (see Tables 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6). But by 2006 those numbers were actually on the rise. Similar to the case of Brazil and Argentina, it can’t be said that national films don’t make it to screens. Sure there are different promotional budgets and continuity requirements, but there are still a fairly substantial amount of national releases, with national films representing over 20% of all releases in a number of years. But the spectator data tells another story. Again, in keeping with similar data from Argentina and Brazil, we can note a difference between total spectators for national

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Table 7.3  Spectators of Mexican national films. Source IMCINEa Year 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

National film ticket sales 11,100,000 11,900,000 14,700,000 7,500,000 9,000,000 7,100,000 11,000,000 13,400,000 13,200,000 12,400,000 11,500,000 13,500,000 10,900,000 30,100,000 24,000,000 17,500,000 30,500,000

a“Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2016,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2016, 308–311, accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_ entry56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/58c56cab9d7279400e00114c/files/Anuario_estadistico_de_cine_ mexicano_2016.pdf, 90.

Table 7.4  Mexican film market share. Source IMCINEa Year 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Total spectators 190,000,000 205,000,000 228,000,000 248,000,000 240,000,000 286,000,000 321,000,000

Total spectators for national films 11,500,000 13,500,000 10,900,000 30,100,000 24,000,000 17,500,000 30,500,000

Percentage for national films (%) 6.05 6.59 4.78 12.14 10.00 6.12 9.50

a“Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2016,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2016, 308–311, accessed March 14, 2017, http://www.imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_ entry56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/58c56cab9d7279400e00114c/files/Anuario_estadistico_de_cine_ mexicano_2016.pdf, 85.

418  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 7.5  Mexican film attendance as percentage of total box office revenues. Source CANACINEa Year

Percentage of box office revenues (%)

2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

5.5 5.6 7.0 4.5 10.9 8.5 5.3 8.9

a“Resultados Definitivos, 2016,” Canacine (Cámara Nacional de la Industria Cinematográfica), 15, accessed April 19, 2017, http://canacine.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ResultadosDefinitivos-2016-1.pdf.

Table 7.6  Mexican film attendance compared with total film tickets sold in Mexico. Source CANACINEa Year 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Total film tickets sold (in millions) 180 189 205 229 257 257 296 331

Attendance at Mexican films (in millions) 9.2 10.5 13.7 10.3 28.7 23.4 17.2 31.6

Percentage (%) 5.1 5.6 6.7 4.5 11.2 9.1 5.8 9.5

a“Resultados Definitivos, 2016,” Canacine (Cámara Nacional de la Industria Cinematográfica), 15, accessed April 19, 2017, http://canacine.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ResultadosDefinitivos-2016-1.pdf, 3, 14.

films and market share for national films. In Mexico, the percentage of spectators attending national films rarely, if ever, tops 10%. To complicate matters further, in general the top grossing national films in Mexico are comedies, many of which depend on sexist stereotypes and crass characters. There are also no examples of a national film topping the box office and beating out Hollywood fare, as was seen in both Argentina with Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales, 2014) and Brazil with

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Table 7.7  Top ten Mexican films in 2016. Source CANACINEa #

Film

Box office

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

¿Qué Culpa Tiene el Niño? No Manches Frida Treintona Soltera y Fantástica La Leyenda del Chupacabras Un Padre no tan Padre Compadres Busco Novio para mi Mujer Qué Pena Tu Vida Kilómetro 31–32 Desierto

$277.8 $222.3 $135.7 $100.1 $89.5 $80.3 $52.7 $40.5 $38.3 $38.2

Total spectators in millions

Distributor

5.89 5.09 2.95 2.59 1.98 1.96 1.28 0.90 0.92 0.86

Diamond Videocine Videocine Videocine Cinépolis Videocine Videocine Cinépolis Videocine Cinépolis

a“Resultados Definitivos, 2016,” Canacine (Cámara Nacional de la Industria Cinematográfica), 15, accessed April 19, 2017, http://canacine.org.mx/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ResultadosDefinitivos-2016-1.pdf, 13.

Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within, 2010). As evidenced by Table 7.7, of the top ten national releases in Mexico in 2016, only one, Desierto (2015), directed by Alfonso Cuarón’s son Jonás, is a film of any real substance and it reached fewer than one million viewers. The rest are comedies, children’s movies, thrillers, and other sorts of fluff entertainment. This, again, complicates the idea of quota think and market think, described in this book’s introduction (Chap. 1), that imagine that protecting the national industry holds progressive political impact. Often the films “protected” by national laws and investment are just as morally bankrupt as Hollywood fare. For some directors, all types of state involvement, even via a threepronged system, are a fraught enterprise. González Iñárritu has criticized “the hogging of limited government film funds by mature directors who continue to receive federal funding despite the fact their films have almost no impact at the [box office].”82 For some of the most globally visible directors from Mexico, state funding is more a limit than a boon. González Iñárritu and Guillermo Arriaga, screenwriter for González Iñárritu on his first three films, criticized the state model that segregates auteur films from films that will appeal to viewers: They “loathe the government-financed movie-making that seems to operate by the maxim: ‘If nobody understands and nobody goes to see a movie, that must mean it’s a masterpiece.’”83 González Iñárritu, then, embodies a director who never was fully “Mexican” even before his international success. Always

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seen as an outsider to both the state system and auteur culture, he has found himself incessantly having to explain his connection to Mexican cultural identity. Amores perros González Iñárritu’s first film, Amores perros (2000), broke the mold in numerous ways. As Frederick Aldama explains, González Iñárritu received the bulk of his funding from Altavista, but his privately funded production company, Zeta Films, and others also contributed substantially. Media mogul Carlos Slim contributed 14% of the film’s total budget of $2.4 million.84 Paul Julian Smith, in his book on Amores perros, mentions that the film was made possible by two central decisions: private funding (signaling a move away from Mexican film’s reliance on IMCINE funds) and a carefully crafted marketing campaign aimed at overseas settings—most notably the Cannes Film Festival.85 Thus, Amores perros would be a groundbreaking film, not only because it would derive from a totally privatized funding model (a practice that while not exactly new became more established after this film), but also because it would offer a wholly unique aesthetic. Its urban aesthetic and creative use of contemporary Mexican rock music immediately gave it an edge that hadn’t been seen yet in the industry. Because González Iñárritu had not been trained in the traditional Mexican film circles, he unapologetically broke with what Sánchez Prado calls the traditional “provincial” codes of Mexicanist cinema: “Its representation of Mexico, in the context of the 2000 transition to democracy, marks the exhaustion of the nostalgia for 1960s form of political articulation . . . and decidedly engages with the complexities of neoliberalism in Mexico.”86 The film combines three distinct stories that are all connected by a car accident in Mexico City. Each story also features a dog, thus allowing the viewer to compare how the humans treat each other and the animals in their lives. One thread features the story of Octavio and Susana, young and lower class. Octavio decides to enter his beloved dog in a dogfight in order to earn enough money to run away with his sister-in-law, Susana, thereby rescuing her from his abusive brother. The second part of the film focuses on Valeria, a Spanish model who is hit by Octavio while driving in her car. As she convalesces she moves in with her married lover, Daniel. As her body deteriorates, and she loses one of her legs, she also loses her life with Daniel. The third story centers on El Chivo, a political

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activist from the 1960s who has become a hit man. When El Chivo witnesses the car crash, he saves Octavio’s dog and brings it to live with him and his other strays. Octavio’s dog ends up killing all of El Chivo’s pets, and he closes the film attempting to reconnect with his estranged daughter. The layered story offers a host of themes and lends itself to a number of interpretive angles. But many viewers simply focus on the gritty aesthetic created by quick cuts, intense sound effects, and a hip soundtrack. What is of interest, though, for my argument is that well before González Iñárritu was filming in Hollywood with major stars, he was being criticized for not fitting into the typical prescribed cultural categories for filmmaking in Mexico. Amores perros was perceived as an outsider film not only for its private funding structure, but also for its ambivalent politics. Sánchez Prado notes that the film stimulated intense debates: “some essays point out that the film represents either a conservative viewpoint that subjects Mexico’s social problems to the ideological gaze of the neoliberal middle class and to an understanding of society based on ideas of the family (Sánchez Prado, “Amores Perros”) or as a literal embodiment of a right-wing ethics that allegorizes the penetration of capitalism at all levels of the social in Mexico (Kraniauskas, “Amores perros”).”87 Ayala Blanco called the film an instance of “neotremendismo chafa” [tacky neotremendism] that achieves little more than the scandalous presentation of the poor.88 Other scholars such as Deborah Shaw have claimed that the film focuses on love, which is interrupted by the interference of power, desire, and other obstacles that derive from neoliberalism.89 Laura Podalsky argues that the film offers an “affective register” that conveys “an epistemological crisis that has destabilized the subject’s understanding of contemporary society and, perhaps, more importantly, his or her ability to make substantive proposals for a better future.”90 Herlinghaus reads the film through Giorgio Agamben’s notion of bare life.91 Dierdra Reber reads the character El Chivo as undergoing a process of “moral healing” that offers utopic potential.92 As Sánchez Prado argues, these multiple and conflicting readings prove one key point: “the true underlying phenomenon is the ideological undecidability of the film, which allows for plausible readings in different parts of the ideological spectrum.”93 Dolores Tierney has referred to González Iñárritu as a “director without borders.” For her, this suggests that a “Third World authorial specificity can survive the border crossing between Mexico and the United States.”94 But that reading is off, because all of González Iñárritu’s films

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represent a fairly ambivalent political position, one that has literally nothing in common with either third cinema or a third world perspective. Sure his films have a gritty edge and sure they have a complex and interesting aesthetic, but González Iñárritu goes to significant lengths in his first three films to offer almost no political angle, no critical hook, and no didactic social critique. The social context for Amores perros is just a backdrop for a film that wonders about the depth of human connections. Unlike Cuarón, for instance, González Iñárritu is not offering viewers a clear ethical dilemma. In fact, when he does, as in the case of the story of Valeria, who is having an affair with a married man, or Octavio, who is trying to take his brother’s wife, the film often seems to suggest that those characters that threaten the nuclear family are to be punished or sacrificed, hardly a politically progressive reading. Thus, González Iñárritu truly represents an outsider director, one who resists preconceived narrative codes as well as industry models. Sánchez Prado claims that the success of González Iñárritu “lies precisely in his ability to translate the paradigm change of post-1988 Mexican cinema into the logics of transnational film, thus inscribing Mexican cinema into the core of the formal and critical conversation surrounding global cinema.”95 While I agree completely with Sánchez Prado that González Iñárritu represents a paradigm change, I think that the impact of that shift goes beyond a refusal of traditional Mexican paradigms. As I have argued, the tension between the global and local is less of interest in these films than the question of whether they open up the possibility for critical reflection about the global and local effects of the global capitalist economy. To consider that question, the next section takes up González Iñárritu’s most globally ambitious film, Babel. After Amores perros González Iñárritu shot 21 Grams, starring Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, which immediately led to predictable attacks on his decision to work in the United States with Hollywood stars. González Iñárritu was accused of forsaking his “Mexicanness” to which he replied, “I am a very proud Mexican and I feel even more Mexican the further I go from my country. . . . It is a great thing for an artist to travel, because it gives an even greater perspective of oneself and one’s country. . . . Why is it that painters and writers can go and live and work in other countries but film-makers cannot?”96 As Deleyto and Azcona explain in relation to González Iñárritu, Cuarón, and del Toro, what differentiates this generation of globally successful Mexican directors is the fact that they “see no contradiction between their national identity and the nationality

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of their films, which to them is largely irrelevant.”97 The global range of González Iñárritu’s next film, Babel, would greatly test this theory since it seemed to take the issue of global identity as its main theme. Babel Babel was coproduced by González Iñárritu’s company, Zeta, but it also received funding from the specialty wing (Paramount Vantage) of a major Hollywood studio. In fact, given its wide range of partners, Babel characterizes the new global model for film production. It is best described as an international equity coproduction and it received backing from: Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage, Anonymous Content, and Media Rights Capital (United States), Zeta Films (Mexico), and Central Films (France). The film included location labor from Japan, Morocco, Mexico, and elsewhere, and was shot in numerous cities: Tokyo, Ibaragi, and Tochigi (Japan); Casablanca and Ouarzazate (Morocco); Sonora, Tazarine, Tijuana, and Tecate (Mexico); and San Diego and San Ysidro (California, United States). The film incudes dialogue in English, Arabic, Spanish, Japanese, Japanese sign language, Berber, and Russian and it stars an ensemble multinational cast: Brad Pitt (United States), Cate Blanchett (Australia), Peter Wright and Harriet Walter (United Kingdom), Claudine Acs and Driss Roukhe (Morocco), Adriana Barraza and Gael García Bernal (Mexico), and Rinko Kikuchi, Kōji Yakusho, and Satoshi Nikaido (Japan). As with his earlier films, Babel led to questions about González Iñárritu’s relationship to Hollywood and Mexican film. And yet, according to him, “I have never worked in Hollywood. My first film was totally independent, and so have been the other three.” He goes on to explain what he means by independent: “I’ve developed my projects with total freedom and have financed them in different ways. I’ve conceived, written, or developed each of my scripts for a couple of years with no one around, and then I’ve financed the research, scouted the locations, and cast the films myself. Then I would present it to different possible backers saying, ‘This is the script, this is the cast, this is the cost. . . . Are you interested?’ Not a word can be changed by contract, and I have had final cut since my first film.” He further explains his frustrations at being pigeonholed into filmmaking categories: “Even Babel, which at the core is a tough, deconstructed, foreign-language film with a high percentage of nonactors and new actors, gets distribution in the English-speaking

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territories by a company like Paramount and is then misjudged as a Hollywood film.”98 As Deborah Shaw puts it, Babel is a “film of great scale and global ambition.”99 Babel is a multi-protagonist, asynchronous story that takes place across time zones, nation-states, languages, and human experiences. Its overlapping, yet also discrete, narratives play with the idea of human connections, dependencies, and disconnections. It also explores the idea of interdependence in a globalized world, where one action on one continent can affect the lives of others across the globe. Playing with the idea of a sequence of events spurred by an accident (a theme present in both Amores perros and 21 Grams), Babel tells four interlocking stories that are all tied to a gun. In Morocco, an uppermiddle-class US couple is on a holiday trying to repair their marriage when the wife is accidentally shot by a Moroccan herder boy who has borrowed his father’s rifle. The accident almost sets off an international crisis. Meanwhile, in Japan, police seeking the original owner of the gun visit a depressed deaf girl dealing with the recent death of her mother. Then, on the other side of the globe, a Mexican nanny based in southern California, who is caring for the children of the mother wounded in Morocco, decides to take the two children with her to Mexico to her son’s wedding, only to encounter trouble as she tries to cross the border back into the United States. It is a highly layered narrative structure that resists facile attempts to connect all of the pieces and make sense of all of the ways that each narrative line is influenced by and influences the other narratives. For Tanner Mirrlees, Babel is an example of the way that “the most interesting co-produced entertainment media conveys bi-national, trinational, and multi-national experiences and aesthetics which destabilize the presumed naturalness of nation-ness and showcase the complex connections and cultural disjuncts appropriate to the contemporary world.”100 Similar to Cuarón’s Children of Men, González Iñárritu’s Babel provides us with a new model for thinking about how culture engages with globalization. Both directors participated in the global economics of the shifting film industry at the same time that they released films that offered interesting challenges to the ideologies of neoliberalism, militarization, and the post-9/11 global war on terror. They each also used the contemporaneous debates about post-9/11 global culture as a way to market their films. Babel’s tagline is if you want “to be understood, listen”—a clear reference to the chorus of “why do they hate us”

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that followed the attacks of 9/11/2001. Children of Men’s tagline was “No children. No future. No hope”—again a reference to destruction and war. Babel engages directly with the question of a local versus a global culture. Drawing on biblical mythology about the division of humanity across languages, the film takes place on three continents and in four countries as it intertwines four storylines. The film takes place over five days and the information arrives at the viewer in non-chronological pieces that juxtapose the stories. Like Children of Men this film offers a readily accessible surface story. The apparent story centers on the fact that a Moroccan boy accidentally shoots a tourist in a bus, which sets off a global chain of events that reveal how accidents and lapses in judgment can have tragic consequences. What is of interest is the fact that each of the narrative lines is highly tragic in nature. In each case, the film emphasizes the fragility of human life and the ease with which lives can be lost due to either a miscommunication or a complete lack of communication. Each tragedy is triggered by the difficulty people have in communicating across cultures and within them, between strangers and between loved ones. If we read the film primarily as a commentary on cross-cultural communication in a global society, it is almost impossible not to feel that each segment depends on stereotypes as much as it hopes to allay them. As Rothlisberger explains, the stereotypes in the film are so heavy that they can’t be missed—a fact that is of particular concern when it is Mexicans themselves offering stereotypes of Mexicans: “Though Babel ostensibly shows the negative consequences of the way neoliberal policies, like NAFTA, preferentially treat commodities over individuals and U.S. citizens above all others through depicting the consequences of different types of movement across borders, the way the film reinforces national labels and stereotypes contradicts that critique.”101 Read for stereotypes, each narrative line seems almost to depend entirely on expected cultural behaviors: the shy Japanese girl, the crazed Mexican, the primitive Moroccan, and the self-absorbed American. Digging beyond the surface reveals, however, a far more complex story about human contact in an era of globalization and an era of terror. The context of terror explains a number of the seemingly stupid decisions made by the characters in the film. In fact, if you don’t watch the film imagining people making decisions under duress, then their actions are often wholly illegible. The tourists who abandon a wounded tourist and her husband in

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a remote village of Morocco, the US husband who seems paralyzed by his wife’s shooting, the Moroccan police who shoot at a father and his boys before even trying to ask them questions, and the Moroccan boy who responds by shooting back, the Mexican who panics at the border and decides to abandon his aunt and two children in the desert, and the Japanese girl who ridiculously throws herself at a number of uninterested men—all of these actions could appear to make the characters seem like complete idiots except when we remember that they are all operating in a world of fear where affective affiliations have been replaced by militarization, alienation, and consumption. They are all living in a world where compassion for others is almost non-existent. An interview with González Iñárritu gives key insight to the context of the film: “There’s no question that this movie was my reaction to the war in Iraq. This war cannot help but impregnate you with strong feelings. There was so much fear after 9/11, and that fear caused people to make the wrong decisions. People are dying by the thousands, and the American TV does not want to show the photographs, so I have to show it in my own way.”102 But the context of Babel is more than the war; it is also the neoliberalism behind the war. As Henry Giroux explains, neoliberalism’s corporate ethic, market-based fundamentalism, and everyday authoritarianism have led to a form of civic indifference “in which it becomes more difficult to translate private woes into social issues and collective action.”103 Thinking about the film in this context reveals a number of aesthetic practices that call for seeing the links across communities not at the level of homogenous or heterogeneous global identity but at the level of collectively relevant social issues. The lack of connection among people is emphasized by the intercalated segments that disrupt time and space in ways that mirror global forms of communication and miscommunication. This disconnect is the obvious aestheticization of globalization. It is easy to focus on the way that the film offers a view of a globalized space where characters are both separated by borders, many of which are imaginary, and by partitions that structure lives according to class and privilege. The sense of space is both wholly interconnected and filled with divisions, many of which appear within the borders of the same nation-state. Amores perros told overlapping and intersecting stories within the framework of a Mexican urban society. 21 Grams also similarly focused on intersecting lives in the same town. Babel traces human connections

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across continents and nations and takes the multi-protagonist structure of González Iñárritu’s first two films to a global level. For Deleyto and Azcona “Babel is not interested in simultaneity but in the networked nature of human life; therefore, the film crosscuts between the stories regardless of their chronology to emphasize the links between them.”104 This complex mode of intersecting stories requires the viewer to do a lot of work to see what common threads appear in each narrative line. It is a strategy that offers the viewer the chance to think through a wide range of connections, but it is also a risky move. Each line, for instance, includes gratuitous scenes of female sexuality offered up for male consumption, such as the moment when Amelia has her breast grabbed while trying to speak on the phone. In other scenes we are presented with Chieko trying to kiss her dentist and flashing boys, showing them her lack of underwear. Then there is the even more disturbing scene of Yussef spying on his sister in the shower. The fact that each narrative line has a similar element of these sorts of base objectifications of women is hard to ignore. These common threads add to the fact that in each line there are people who simply refuse to listen to those right in front of them. At a certain level it is hard not to see the film suggesting that human beings are not just disconnected; they are profoundly unscrupulous, unkind, and unethical. There seems to be little doubt that the film could leave us with a great sense of despair, but it also attempts to reverse those conclusions. In fact, the real aesthetic art of the film lies in the way that the segments are linked via fragile, yet perceptible, associations. Each segment connects to the next one by a particular form of match editing, sometimes through color, sometimes through action, and so on, but I would like to focus on one series of transitions across scenes. There is a crucial moment in the film that offers a link between the deportation of Amelia back to Mexico, the mourning of Yussef crying over his dead brother, and the arrival of help for Susan who lies wounded in a Moroccan village. Each of these scenes is connected via a sound bridge that tentatively unites all three stories. González Iñárritu has explained that for him the sound in a film is an essential element of his filmmaking technique. Recall that he began his career as a DJ who was famous for linking the songs he played into a narrative arc. He explains that he has a better ear than eye: “When I make a movie, I’m very interested in the transitions, and not only in the visual ones. When I’m working on the script, I’m already thinking about how I’ll cut from one scene to the next.” He further points out

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that “every single sound that takes place in the transitions of my movies is absolutely deliberate.” And in the case of Babel he was “very interested in the transitions between different geographical locations.”105 This is why this particular sound bridge is of such importance in unpacking the themes of the film. It is the only time in the entire narrative arc that one score crosses three of the four narratives. As we see Amelia arrive in Mexico, deported, the film then pans to a desert that connects the geography of both Mexico and Morocco. We then see the scene of the shooting of Ahmed only to transition to seeing the helicopter arrive to transport Susan to a hospital. As she is placed on the helicopter, Richard tries to hand the guide who has been helping them a tip, which he refuses. The linking is subtly emphasized through the shifting rhythms of Gustavo Santaolalla’s Oscar-winning score. What begins as a sorrowful Latin inspired guitar score moves to a Middle Eastern rhythm that includes the sounds of the Persian Ud—an instrument played in both Morocco and Iraq. As Shaw explains “the predominant instrument in the soundtrack is the oud, described by Iñárritu as ‘the musical DNA of the picture.’”106 As the instruments blend, the rhythm is haunting, agitated, but also hesitantly hopeful. The shift in the rhythm and instruments of the song emphasizes the differences between the experiences of the characters and yet these differences are placed within a context that allows the viewers to see all three contexts interconnected by the music. The film links the fears of the nanny, of the boy, and of the husband, but where it is at its most political is when it exposes the extent to which this suffering is caused by the state: the nanny is deported because of hostile US immigration policies, the boy suffers because the Moroccan state is more keen to protect the tourist business than its own citizens, and the husband suffers because the United States’s desires to turn the event into a terrorist attack caused the Moroccans to stall the flight of a helicopter. These links are not easy to perceive and the film makes you work to see them, but once this line of connection is drawn, the film leaves on a message of hope, a message sealed in the moment when the Moroccan tour guide refuses the husband’s money and receives an unheard thanks. This scene alongside the closing shots of the film, which show Chieko embraced by her father as she is naked on their balcony considering suicide, emphasize the film’s romantic notion of the hopeful possibility of human contact in a global society characterized by indifference, disconnection, and outright violence. Deleyto and Azcona explain that the final images of the film suggest that “reconciliation, redemption, and

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consolation may seem to be out of reach in an increasingly fractured world, but beauty and hope can still be found in our common humanity and in our ability to circumvent the obstacles that separate us.”107 It has been tempting for critics to read these elements as signs of González Iñárritu’s influence by Mexican melodrama. Shaw writes that, “in a sense, the project of the film is a challenge to God; it is an attempt to construct a cinematic Tower of Babel, built upon a universal language of film to unite the scattered audiences of the globe.”108 This then is both the ambition and the risk of González Iñárritu’s trilogy, which in the end is united in its exploration of human suffering, resilience, and forgiveness, themes which are by no means unique to Mexican or Latin American culture. Biutiful The setting for Biutiful (2010) is Barcelona, specifically the lower class neighborhood of El Raval. As González Iñárritu explains in the production notes to the film, Barcelona is the “queen” of Europe, but there is a dark side to her “bourgeois beauty.” The location for the film was specifically chosen to emphasize the human displacements caused by globalization. González Iñárritu points out that one of the key elements of the film was trying to represent the various and diverse communities that live on the outskirts of “beautiful” Barcelona: “Every year, hundreds of African people die from drowning trying to get to the coast of Spain. The images are hard to watch. Also, almost every day you see in the newspapers articles about Chinese immigrants being abused or exploited all around Europe.”109 Those that make it to cities do so trying to survive and also send resources back home. Integration is not their desire. Yet they all find themselves sharing similar struggles to survive. The proximity of these marginal societies to the splendor of Barcelona was central for the location of the film, which zeroes in on a gritty, grimy, and gray life and shows tourist sites like the Sagrada Familia [Gaudí’s Basilica of the Holy Family] only from a distance. In an interview González Iñárritu emphasized the issue of closeness yet absolute separation between these communities: “Esta supervivencia que están llevando estas comunidades chinas y africanas, por poner algún ejemplo, es una supervivencia que se está llevando a tres minutos de los barrios residenciales más exquisitos de Europa” [The survival of these Chinese and African communities, to give an example, is a struggle that they are

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fighting three minutes away from the most exquisite residential neighborhoods of Europe].110 In the same interview, he explained the choice of Barcelona as essential for driving home the impact of the global economy. He explains that everyone is fully aware of the human cost of global neoliberalism in the third world and even in the United States, but that less attention had been paid to the existence of undocumented immigrants in Europe: “esta película retrata ese desequilibrio, esa injusticia que supone la explotación humana” [this film portrays the disequilibrium, the injustice that human exploitation poses].111 Thus, this film directly addresses the gross economic inequality caused by globalization within Europe itself. As Kathleen Connolly puts it, “if ‘beautiful’ Barcelona is modern, shiny, wealthy and controlled, ‘biutiful’ Barcelona is, if not its opposite, then its twisted twin of poverty, darkness, distress, and chaos. That both cities—beautiful and biutiful—co-exist, and that, in fact, the latter represents the human cost of the former, is part of the critique that the director mounts of the city.”112 This all combines to make Biutiful the González Iñárritu film that most directly engages with neoliberal globalization. But, in keeping with González Iñárritu’s penchant for exploring the complexity of the human condition, it is only one part of a larger exploration about life and death. Biutiful opens to reveal its protagonist, Uxbal (Javier Bardem), undergoing a prostate exam and blood test. We quickly learn he has terminal cancer and only has months to live. Uxbal is the father of Ana and Mateo who both live with him since their mother, Marambra, suffers from alcoholism and bipolar disease. Uxbal’s only living extended family member is his brother Tito, who works in the construction business. Uxbal mostly makes his living as a middleman, procuring work for undocumented immigrants, including Chinese who produce forged designer goods and African street vendors who sell them. He is also able to talk to the dead and is sometimes paid to pass on messages from the recently deceased at wakes and funerals. Most of the film focuses on Uxbal’s efforts to make arrangements for his children given his impending death, but he also struggles to work to help the immigrant community, while still profiting from it. He works with Tito, for instance, to broker a deal to put the Chinese immigrants to work at a construction site. However, almost all of them die while asleep in the basement of their sweatshop due to malfunctioning gas heaters installed by Uxbal, who had purchased the cheapest ones possible in order to pocket the rest of the money. In another scene, the group

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of Africans is arrested and Uxbal’s friend, Ekweme, faces deportation to Senegal. Uxbal decides to offer Ekweme’s wife, Ige, and their baby, Samuel, a room in his apartment, and, after a failed attempt at reconciliation with Marambra, Uxbal then asks Ige to take the money he has saved and help care for his children after he dies. She first considers taking the money and going back to Senegal, but later decides to return to the apartment to help. Uxbal dies shortly after. As he crosses over into death he encounters his father for the first time, since his father had died in Mexico having fled the Franco regime when Uxbal’s mother was pregnant with him. The key to understanding the layered story of Uxbal’s death and the story of global immigration is the fact that Uxbal is a medium, or vidente in Spanish. His role is as a mediator, a conduit, a “go-between,” among not just different groups of people but also between the living and the dead. In this way he is a border crosser, connecting planes of existence. He has a gift that allows him to see connections that others can’t. According to Connolly, “Uxbal transgresses these dualities, in his various roles as a medium and intermediary, shuffling between spheres and crossing the borders between those living in the shadows, and those in the light.”113 For Azcona, Uxbal’s centrality in the various border narratives found in the film turns him into an embodiment of the concept of the border. She explains that he is the catalyst through which we receive the various stories, experiences, and suffering of the precarious lives he comes across in his wanderings; “He is both the node that joins the rest of the characters and the line that separates them. He also represents the intrinsic ambivalence of the border itself: nurturing and destructive, ripe for both transnational exchanges and ethnic violence.”114 Uxbal then becomes a metaphor for the violence and hope of this marginalized community. Uxbal’s decaying body is offered in direct connection to the decaying segments of Barcelona that he travels. As the camera follows him through the city it often focuses on refuse, grime, and other signs of neglect and decline. But it is Uxbal’s role as a border crosser that makes this González Iñárritu’s most ambitious film about globalization to date. Because González Iñárritu refuses to allow this film to be only about the suffering of migrants and the challenges these communities face, he makes another bold statement about the new geographies of neoliberalism. Rather than tell the story of a tough, tenacious victim of globalization, he tells the story of the medium, of the liminal

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figure who links everything and keeps everything separated. Uxbal is not a hero, but he is not a victim either. He is the most empathetic character in the film, yet all of his relationships are coded via money that changes hands. He is a singular protagonist because his character refuses all expectations. In an interview on the film with Deleyto and Azcona, González Iñárritu explained that one of the things that distinguishes Uxbal from most other characters in films about immigration is that what he does for a living is quite questionable. He explained that he had shown the film to a friend who had reacted to it saying that he felt confused by Uxbal. When González Iñárritu asked why, his friend said, “I don’t know whether he is good or bad.” To which González Iñárritu replied, “to me that’s the best compliment, because it’s precisely what I’m looking for. I try to create three-dimensional characters. We’re all like that. We are many things at the same time, and it’s impossible to categorize people as just good or bad.”115 Not only does Uxbal choose the cheapest heaters he can find, ones he knows might be dangerous, but he also mourns deeply when the Chinese immigrants he has worked with die. Unlike the Chinese sweatshop manager who quickly works to dump the bodies, Uxbal is terribly shaken. Uxbal also profits from his gift as a medium and makes money from those seeking information about their dead loved ones. But perhaps most importantly, despite thinking of himself as ethical, he also makes money from work that the undocumented migrants do in his dealings as a black-market broker. He profits from them at the same time that he tries to live an ethical life. It is this bind that makes Uxbal a fascinating character through which to think not only about the revised borders created by the global condition, but also about the complex ethical dilemmas such a condition creates. As Uxbal looks out for his children, he profits from others. And when he offers Ige and Samuel sanctuary, he does so expecting help in return. Connolly references the work of Robert Sinnerbrink, who describes a process by which films try to create an “ethical experience” for the viewer; to “disclose, via cinematic means, the complexity of that world in ways that elicit sympathy and understanding while inviting a critical questioning of their alienating conditions of social existence.”116 Uxbal is a thief and a trader in the black market, but he also elicits deep sympathy from the viewer, not as a simple victim but as a three-dimensional character who is extremely vulnerable in a hostile world, while also working hard to effect as much agency as possible as his life comes to

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an end. Multiple scenes show him simply being a regular dad, helping with homework, passing on family stories, or making dinner. It is these scenes of everydayness that help create a complex portrait of Uxbal’s life. What makes this film most interesting, in light of my previous analysis of Cuarón’s creation of green and red zones, is the way that González Iñárritu creates a film that delves into life in the red zone, the communities threatened by neoliberalism. Yet rather than tell a story of hopeful resilience or tragic loss, González Iñárritu tells a story of an imperfect, yet sympathetic man trying to die as best as he can. Despite the fact that this film defied any traditional conceptions of borders and identities, it didn’t keep González Iñárritu from continuing to be hounded about whether it was “Mexican.” In an article announcing the collaboration between González Iñárritu, Cuarón, and del Toro founding Cha Cha Cha, which coproduced Biutiful, the collaborative work of these directors was still read according to tired geographies. As the new production house was being announced, David Linde, a chairman of Universal Pictures, said of the “Three Amigos” that he coded them as Mexicans with a global perspective: “These guys are Mexican through and through and embrace their heritage and everything that comes with that. But they have a global perspective, much as I hate that phrase. It fascinates them to tell stories in Mexico, Spain, the U.K. and the United States because what drives them, quite simply, is an interest in what it means to be human.”117 Larry Rohter notes that as the three directors were launching a production company which would work outside of the traditional model of Mexican versus Hollywood, they still encountered needless questions about whether they were being true to their roots, a line of questioning made even more ironic by the fact that the first film they produced was Rudo y cursi (2008), a film about two young Mexican soccer players. When González Iñárritu was asked to explain whether working in Hollywood meant he had sold out, he replied, “that’s an infantile argument, a really simplistic concept that is often used to defend limits and mediocrity. Yes, I am a Mexican, and I have a past and a culture. But what matters is the film itself, not where it was financed or cast. Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports.”118 González Iñárritu’s next two films Birdman (2014) and The Revenant (2015) further prove his point, since they take place in wholly different contexts that expand the content and geographies for his work. Those films further showed how González Iñárritu was breaking the mold, not only because he continued to pursue the story

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of outsiders operating beyond traditional borders, but also because they landed him a Best Director Oscar two years running, allowing him to make Academy history.

Gael García Bernal and the Global Face of Mexican Cinema Most studies of globalization and film analyze the careers of directors. Those studies that do look at stars often study the trajectory of a star’s work from the local to the global. Mexican-born Gael García Bernal is a unique figure, though, because he has not only been a hugely successful actor both in Hollywood and in Mexico, but he has also played a range of roles in films from across the region of Latin America. In fact, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to claim that he has been the lead in almost half of the films discussed in this book. Similar to the figures of Cuarón and González Iñárritu, García Bernal exemplifies the new geographies of Latin American cinema in the global era. García Bernal began his career as a soap opera star and his first film role was as Octavio in Amores perros. He then played the role of Julio in Y tu mamá también. Thus, García Bernal helped launch the postNAFTA rebirth of the Mexican film industry and he played a role in advancing the careers of both Cuarón and González Iñárritu. García Bernal then went on to play the role of Padre Amaro in El crimen del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Padre Amaro, 2002), which broke box office records at the time for the most successful Mexican film in national history. In 2004, he headlined two major films in the story of global Hispanic cinema: Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004) directed by the Brazilian Walter Salles about the younger years of Che Guevara and La mala educación (Bad Education, 2004) directed by Academy Award-winning Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar, which delves into the effects of Franco-era religious schooling and sexual abuse of boys. In 2010, he played the role of Sebastián in Spanish director Icíar Bollaín’s film, También la lluvia (Even the Rain, 2010), about a film crew shooting a movie about the Spanish conquest during the Bolivian Cochabamba water crisis. Then in 2015 he starred in the Jonás Cuarón film Desierto (2015) about what happens when a group of migrants encounter an angry racist as they try to cross the border into the United States. He has shot two films with Chilean director Pablo Larraín: the 2012 film No, about the ad campaign used to defeat Augusto Pinochet

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in 1988, and Neruda (2016) where he starred as a man investigating Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda. He has also worked in numerous English-language films, including working with Fernando Meirelles in Blindness (2008) and playing the Iranian journalist Maziar Bahari in Jon Stewart’s film Rosewater (2014). In addition, from 2014 to 2017, he played a Mexican orchestra conductor working in New York in the Amazon series “Mozart in the Jungle.” While I won’t go into detail about the strength of his performances in this range of films, I do want to call attention to their impressive scope. Few, if any, actors can say that they have worked for the very top directors working in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, and Spain. Apparently Almodóvar told García Bernal that he had to perfect a Castilian accent and learn how to carry his body like a Spaniard before he would promise him the role in La mala educación. So he took flamenco lessons to help prepare him.119 This means that while García Bernal may well be the ultimate pan-Hispanic star, he works hard in his roles to be as authentically local as possible. While not all of his roles are in social-issue films, it is also noteworthy that García Bernal has been in a number of them. And yet, what may best signal the ways that he has supported a new cinematic paradigm is what he has done off-screen. In 2005, he teamed up with costar Diego Luna from Y tu mamá también to found Canana Films. Canana, which means “bandolier” in English, was founded with the goal of making “socially minded stories that offer an authentic take on Mexico.”120 While it is not unusual for successful actors to venture into production, Canana has been a singularly important production house, one that has played a major role in helping support films outside of the traditional Hollywood model—and yet with Hollywood support. In fact, Universal Pictures subsidiary Focus Features signed on early as a partner with Canana, buying worldwide rights to distribute its films.121 And while García Bernal has appeared in a number of Canana films, including No and Rudo y cursi (which featured both García Bernal and Luna as leads), it is of note that most of the films have not traded on the star power of either García Bernal or Luna. Canana coproduced Sin nombre ([Without name], 2009), for instance, which was directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga and which won multiple awards for its depiction of the harsh realities of border-crossing from Central America to the United States. They also worked on ¿Quién es Dayani Cristal? (Who is Dayani Cristal?, 2013), a film that traces the life of a border-crossing migrant who dies trying to reach the United States.

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One of the most interesting early Canana projects was its work in helping bring the film El violín (The Violin, 2005) to screens in Mexico. El violín was the debut feature by writer-director Francisco Vargas, and it received a range of state support in the post-NAFTA framework, including funding from the Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC) and FIDECINE. It also received more than 46 accolades at international film festivals, including the best actor award at Cannes for the 81-yearold violinist who stars as the lead.122 Carmen Aristegui, a prominent Mexican journalist, said it ranked among “the most important movies that have been produced in our country in the last several years.” But despite its international and national accolades it was not receiving distribution within Mexico. This led to a great deal of outcry in the Mexican film community, including from “three amigos” director Guillermo del Toro who blamed NAFTA for keeping it off of screens.123 As Reed Johnson explains, Mexican screens at the time were almost entirely dominated by Hollywood product.124 And, as explained above, the lack of a vibrant distribution network for FIDECINE films meant that films got financial support but did not get state support in reaching screens. Canana decided to step in and work on a distribution deal, which eventually got the film to 18 screens in Mexico City. Luisela Alvaray argues that Canana is a prime example of a local, socially conscious production house that is working outside of state support while also collaborating internationally.125 She argues that one of the key features of Canana is the way that it has decentralized and diversified Mexican film projects through both production and distribution: “the distribution arm of Canana has become an established channel for first-time filmmakers. These facts, as much as other risk-taking decisions, most certainly show the company’s commitment to promote innovation, yet with national and regional ties.”126 She also notes the involvement of Canana in films throughout Latin America. For Alvaray, the key takeaway is not only that Canana is engaged in promoting culturally relevant content, but that it is purposefully redefining the parameters of national culture. As explained in this book’s chapter on exhibition (Chap. 4), García Bernal founded the Ambulante Documentary Film Festival, which works to bring documentary films to places in Mexico where documentaries are rarely shown. He also helped create the Amnesty International Short Documentary Series “Los Invisibles.” For this work, he was awarded the Washington Office on Latin America’s Human Rights Award in 2011. He is clearly a part of the new generation of celebrity activists,

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who marshal their public personas in the name of social causes. And, while, it is common to criticize these entertainers for fluff politics, there is significant proof that these socially committed entertainers can indeed make material political differences.127 When announcing the award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 2017 Academy Awards, García Bernal took aim directly at Donald Trump’s call for a border wall between the United States and Mexico: “Flesh-and-blood actors are migrant workers; we travel all over the world, we build families, we construct stories, we build life, and cannot be divided. As a Mexican, as a Latin American, as a migrant worker, as a human being, I’m against any form of wall that wants to separate us.”128 This brings me back to the question of how neoliberal globalization requires new models of thinking about borders, since now the nationstate both is and is not a major source of social division. Neoliberalism as an ideology, or what Giroux calls a “public pedagogy,” carries with it an especially pernicious comparative logic: that of the irreducible difference of identities and that of the extreme privatization of everyday life.129 In the first instance, we note the uncanny, yet devastating, connections between neoliberal market mentalities and the politics of difference. Suddenly groups of people are incomparably other. Bauman notes that the left and the right today agree on a celebration of difference: “postmodern times are marked by an almost universal agreement that difference is not merely unavoidable, but good, precious and in need of protection and cultivation.”130 Such thinking leads to what I’ve called a “tyranny of comparison,” an episteme that leads inexorably to the construction of incomparable identities.131 Even though these incomparabilities may have initially emerged through the desire to valorize specific identities like those of Mexicans or those of Latin@s, the frightening result is that the commitment to maintaining lines of difference, as ontological constructions, between these groups makes it increasingly possible to construct difference as a barrier to solidarity and as a threat to community. In the age of neoliberalism, the other, the stranger, the disposable, and those without rights, who have historically constituted those who lack, yet haunt, comparative potential, have entered a new stability of otherness. In other words, we have entered a moment where those who live in red zones seem entirely incomparable to each other, and impossibly disconnected from those in the green. The failure to link the struggles of one disenfranchised group to those of others is tantamount to creating partitions where there should be fluid borders.

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Considered this way, such ideological “borders” can be seen to frame much scholarship on cultural globalization that often seems more intent to categorize, partition, label, and divide types of cultural production than to look at how these stories do and don’t help us make sense of the crisis of global neoliberalism. What happens when article after article focuses on whether a director is national, global, Hollywood, or transnational? I have argued that that work has actually distracted us from the real effects of global capital on the film industry. And I have suggested that it has also made it hard for us to read the complicated reality that neoliberal capital has created market opportunities in Latin America that have opened up spaces for a range of film production never seen before. Even more interestingly, it has allowed a number of commercially successful films to offer the public films critical of the effects of neoliberalism. While these films should not be overly celebrated, nor summarily dismissed, they do signal what I have described as the deep ambivalences brought on by the global era. Seeing the through lines in these practices from Cuba to Argentina to Mexico to Spain and even the United States has been a core part of this project. I have asked us to think beyond traditional geographies and borders so that we can notice a different set of communal connections. Nancy Fraser points to the decline of the nation-state and the Westphalian framing of justice: “Today, accordingly, justice claims are increasingly mapped in competing geographical scales.”132 She further notes that “the Keynesian-Westphalian frame is losing its aura of selfevidence. Thanks to heightened awareness of globalization, and to postCold War geopolitical instabilities, many observe that the social processes shaping their lives routinely overflow territorial borders. They note, for example, that decisions taken in one territorial state often impact the lives of those outside it, as do the actions of transnational corporations, international currency speculators, and large institutional investors.”133 This observation is especially true in the case of Mexico, whose border with the United States is a perfect example of a dividing line and a concept that is not easily contained within traditional notions of the nation-state. When asked what borders mean to him, González Iñárritu answers that “borders are ideological and nationalistic territories that make us smaller. It’s the same with artistic borders. The most dangerous borders are the ideological, not the physical ones. That’s a very serious problem. Those are the borders that really scare me.”134 While this is clearly a romanticized, artistic view, his point that the ideological borders are

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more troublesome is apt. As I’ve argued throughout this book, it is the conceptual frames we have used to understand the effects of globalization that have often made it harder to analyze its effects. One of my key arguments is that neoliberal globalization has created deep divisions, what we might call partitions, that separate those in the red zone from those in the green, but those divisions don’t map to north-south or across national boundaries in the ways that they might once have. Perhaps even more interestingly, the work of the Mexican film professionals analyzed in this chapter offers us an excellent starting point for reframing these new critical paradigms. If we redrew the borders that matter in Latin American film according to the work of these filmmakers, what would that map look like?

Mexican Film Industry Timeline 1926–2016 1926–1989—The Mexican film industry produces 4,609 movies.135 1991—Alfonso Cuarón releases Sólo con tu pareja. 1992—Mexican film industry is deregulated and a new film law removes the requirement where “theaters have to reserve half their screen time for Mexican movies and ticket prices were fixed at three pesos, then about $1.”136 1993—The Mexican parliament ratifies NAFTA with the United States and Canada. 1994—Luis Donaldo Colosio, the favored presidential candidate, is assassinated. Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León is elected president.137 Colosio’s assassination causes an economic slump as confidence in Mexico’s ability to enact political and economic reforms successfully wanes.138 54 Mexican films released. 1995—The Mexican Film Commission (COMEFILM) is founded. Former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari flees to the United States after reaching an agreement with current President Ernesto Zedillo to leave the country.139 His brother was found to be connected to Colosio’s murder. Alfonso Cuarón releases A Little Princess. 39 Mexican films released. 1997—“Film production dropped from an average of 87 films per year in the 1980s to 11 films in 1997, the lowest in Mexican film history.” FOPROCINE (Fondo para la Producción Cinematográfica de Calidad [Fund for Quality Film Production]) is established in December.140 1998—Ley Cinematográfica is passed, establishing several key mechanisms to help support the Mexican film industry, including the

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establishment of FIDECINE (Fondo de Inversión y Estímulos al Cine [Film Investment and Stimulus Fund]) via a combination of funds from both government and private sources; it provided “better stimulus and conditions for the production of Mexican films in Mexico and abroad.”141 Even though the Mexican Congress passed the law with a requirement forcing theaters to reserve 10% of their screen time for Mexican movies, the Senate chose to re-vote and eliminate that key part of the film law, attributing the rejection to the policy’s violation of foreign treaties, which prohibited protectionist policies.142 Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, released. 8 Mexican films released. 1999—Mexican Senate passes the new film law without the screentime requirements that sought to reserve 10% of screen time for Mexican films.143 FOPROCINE has a budget of $16.7 million. 11 Mexican films released. 2000—Mexico produces a total of 28 films: 17 are state-supported and 11 are privately funded. Vicente Fox wins the presidential election.144 Alejandro González Iñárritu releases Amores perros. 16 Mexican films released. 2001—Mexico produces a total of 21 films: 7 are state-supported and 14 privately funded. The amendment to the 1992 Mexican Film Law is finally implemented; it requires national theaters to preserve 10% of screen time for Mexican movies, guarantees commercial releases for all Mexican movies, and sets up the FIDECINE trust fund with an initial 100 million pesos (US$10 million).145 Alfonso Cuarón releases Y tu mamá también. 19 Mexican films released. 2002—17 Mexican films released. 2003—25 Mexican films released. Alejandro González Iñárritu releases 21 Grams. 2004—18 Mexican films released. Alfonso Cuarón releases Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. FIDECINE gets enough funds to make up to ten films.146 2005—25 Mexican films released. Mexican Senate approves an incentive that allows any person or legal entity to deduct up to 10% of income tax for investments in the domestic industry made the same year. The same bill made FIDECINE and FOPROCINE gatekeepers for up to 500 million pesos per year in rebates. FOPROCINE splits approximately $10 million with FIDECINE.147 2006—33 Mexican films released. Felipe Calderón is elected president.148 A bill is passed providing tax incentives for Mexican filmmakers:

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“Under the Mexican incentive, private individuals or companies can use investments in domestic films to deduct up to 10% of their annual income tax obligation.”149 Alejandro González Iñárritu releases Babel and Alfonso Cuarón releases Children of Men. Marina Stavenhagen is appointed the new general director of IMCINE.150 2007—43 Mexican films released. 2008—49 Mexican films released. FIDECINE acquires 3 new committee members to oversee production, distribution, and exhibition: Monica Lozano for production development, Daniel Birman for distribution, and Fernando Collado for exhibition.151 2009—54 Mexican films released. 2010—56 Mexican films released. The Federal Law on Cinematography is updated. Alejandro González Iñárritu releases Biutiful. 2011—62 Mexican films released. 2012—67 Mexican films released. Enrique Peña Nieto wins the presidential election.152 2013—101 Mexican films released. Alfonso Cuarón releases Gravity. The state approves a budget of 500 million pesos for EFICINE (Estímulo Fiscal a Proyectos de Inversión en la Producción y Distribución Cinematográfica Nacional [Fiscal Stimulus to Investment Projects in the Production and Distribution of National Cinema]).153 2014—68 Mexican films released. Alejandro González Iñárritu releases Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), which also wins an Academy Award for Best Picture. The state approves a budget of 650 million pesos for EFICINE.154 Discussions begin regarding passing a new Cinema Law.155 2015—80 Mexican films released. Alejandro González Iñárritu releases The Revenant. 2016—90 Mexican films released. The new Cinema Law proposal is put on hold pending the passing of a new Ley General de Cultura [general culture law].156 Mexico’s digital video market grows by 39%, making Mexico the “second-biggest online video content distribution market.”157

Notes

1.  Robert McKee Irwin and Maricruz C. Ricalde, eds., Global Mexican Cinema: Its Golden Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 3. 2. Ana López, “A Cinema for the Continent,” in The Mexican Cinema Project, ed. Chon Noriega and Steven Ricci (Los Angeles: UCLA Film

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and Television Archive, 1994), 7, cited in Irwin and Ricalde, Global Mexican Cinema, 15. 3. Claire Fox, The Fence and The River: Culture and Politics at the USMexico Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 17. 4.  Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 98. 5.  Jennifer Liu, “A New Golden Age for the Silver Screen,” ReVista, accessed March 29, 2017, http://revista.drclas.harvard.edu/book/ new-golden-age-silver-screen. 6. The creation in 1983 of the Instituto Mexicano de la Cinematografía (IMCINE), whose role it was to manage Mexico’s film policy, was hailed as a significant breakthrough for Mexican cinema. However, while IMCINE helped to finance and promote a few independent films, it had a very small budget and could only support one or two films per year. The Institute’s first director, filmmaker Alberto Isaac, reorganized the state-run production and distribution companies and the state film school but proved to be a poor manager, and the tenure of his successor, Enrique Soto Izquierdo, was riddled with corruption. Soto Izquierdo failed to implement a workable state film policy and, as a result, most of the films that saw any kind of fiscal success were lowbudget “quickies” funded by private investors. Ignacio Durán Loera, the new director of IMCINE, attempted to increase state financing of production through the creation of the Fondo para el Fomento de la Calidad Cinematográfica (Fund for the Promotion of Quality Film Production). While Durán was able to solicit coproduction financing from Spain and other foreign investors, it was not enough to keep the industry afloat as state-owned studios and movie houses shut down at the same time that private investors withdrew from the industry. Film production dropped from one hundred films in 1989 to thirty-four in 1991. 7. Amores perros won the Oscar for best foreign-language film in 2000. 8.  Eliza Berman, “Here’s How Alejandro Iñárritu Just Made Oscar History,” Time, February 28, 2016, accessed April 6, 2017, http://time. com/4240789/oscars-2016-alejandro-inarritu-best-director-twice/. 9.  Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema, 1988–2012 (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2014), 226. 10. Ibid. 11. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 413.

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12. Marcela Valente, “The Lessons of NAFTA,” WorldPress, April 20, 2001, accessed March 29, 2017, http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/148.cfm. 13. Ibid. 14.  John Audley, Demetrios Papademetriou, Sandra Polaski, and Scott Vaughan, “NAFTA’s Promise and Reality: Lessons from Mexico for the Hemisphere: Introduction,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2004, 6–7, accessed March 6, 2017, http://carnegieendowment. org/files/nafta1.pdf. 15.  For more on the rise of gated communities globally, see Gated Communities: Social Sustainability in Contemporary and Historical Gated Developments, edited by Samer Bagaeen and Ola Uduku. 16.  Setha M. Low, Behind the Gates: Life, Security, and the Pursuit of Happiness in Fortress America (New York: Routledge, 2003), 15. 17. Jon Coaffee, Terrorism, Risk and the City: The Making of a Contemporary Urban Landscape (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 2003), 32. 18. Klein, The Shock Doctrine, 420. 19. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2003), 143. 20. Ibid. 21.  See David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 22.  Peter Andreas, “The Escalation of U.S. Immigration Control in the Post-NAFTA Era,” Political Science 113, no. 4 (1998–1999): 593. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 610. 25. Ibid., 595. 26. Saskia Sassen, “Migration Policy: From Control to Governance,” openDemocracy, July 13, 2006, accessed April 6, 2017, www.opendemocracy. net/people-migrationeurope/militarising_borders_3735.jsp. 27.  Andreas, “The Escalation of U.S. Immigration Control in the PostNAFTA Era,” 603. 28. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 29. Sassen, “Migration Policy: From Control to Governance.” 30. Ibid. 31. Subcomandante Marcos, “The Fourth World War Has Begun,” trans. Ed Emery, Le Monde diplomatique, September 1997, accessed April 6, 2017, mondediplo.com/1997/09/marcos. 32.  See Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism: The New Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2002).

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33. See Néstor García Canclini, Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). 34. See Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 35.  Jodi Dean, “Zizek and Children of Men,” I cite, December 29, 2006, accessed April 6, 2017, http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_ cite/2006/12/zizek_and_child.html. 36. Carlos Cuarón and Alfonso Cuarón, Y tu mamá también: A Screenplay (Mexico City, Trilce, 2001), 73. 37. See Juli A. Kroll, “The Cinergetic, Experimental Melodrama: Feminism and Neo-Machista National Consciousness in Mexican Film,” Studies in Latin American Popular Culture 26 (2007): 27–46. 38. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 192. 39. Cuarón and Cuarón, Y tu mamá también, 97. 40. Rebecca Murray, “Director Alfonso Cuarón Discusses Children of Men,” about.com: Hollywood Movies, 2, accessed April 12, 2017, movies.about. com/od/childrenofmen/a/childac122006.htm. 41. Dean, “Zizek and Children of Men.” 42. Rudie Obias, “Alfonso Cuarón Talks Gravity’s Visual Metaphors, And George Clooney Clarifies His Writing Credit,” Giant Freakin Robot, October 9, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www.giantfreakinrobot.com/scifi/alfonso-cuarn-talks-gravitys-visual-metaphors-georgeclooney-clarifies-writing-credit.html. 43. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 2. 44. Ibid., 5. 45.  Marlow Stern, “Alfonso Cuaron Explains the Darwinian Ending of ‘Gravity,’” The Daily Beast, October 8, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/10/08/alfonso-cuaronexplains-the-darwinian-ending-of-gravity.html. 46. Caitlin Roper, “Why Gravity Director Alfonso Cuarón Will Never Make a Space Movie Again,” Wired, October 1, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2013/10/center_of_gravity/. 47.  Scott A. Lukas, “5 Deeper Sides Of Gravity,” WhatCulture.com, November 9, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, http://whatculture.com/ film/5-deeper-sides-gravity?page=3. 48.  Sandy Schaefer, “Alfonso Cuarón’s ‘Gravity’ Features a 17-Minute Opening Shot,” Screen Rant, April 11, 2012, accessed April 6, 2017, http://screenrant.com/alfonsco-cuaron-gravity-opening-shot-long-takes/.

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49.  Richard Corliss, “Gravity: The Glory of Cinema’s Future,” Time, October 3, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, http://entertainment.time. com/2013/10/03/gravity-the-glory-of-cinemas-future/. 50.  Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure in Narrative Cinema,” Luxonline, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/visual_ pleasure_and_narrative_cinema(printversion).html. 51.  Andrew Pulver, “Gravity Director Alfonso Cuarón Reveals Studio Pressure to Change Story,” The Guardian, October 9, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/oct/09/ gravity-alfonso-cuaron-studio-pressure. 52. Ben Fritz and Don Steinberg, “Why the World Is Watching ‘Gravity,’” The Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2013, accessed April 6, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1000142405270230368040457914 1302947341272. 53. “Mexico Box Office for Gravity (2013),” The Numbers: Where Data and the Movie Business Meet, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Gravity/Mexico#tab=summary. 54. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 195. 55. Ibid. 56.  “Participant Media Partners With Oscar-Winning Director Alfonso Cuarón,” Participant Media, September 8, 2016, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www.participantmedia.com/2016/09/participant-mediapartners-oscar%C2%AE-winning-director-alfonso-cuar%C3%B3n. 57. Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona, “Interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu,” in Contemporary Film Directors (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 123–124. 58. “Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2010,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2010, accessed April 7, 2017, 124, http://www. imcine.gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_entry 537f86d593e05abc55000247/53ce9ce49d727985f20002be/files/ ANUARIO_IMCINE_2010_2.pdf. 59.  Deleyto and del Mar Azcona, “Interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu,” 122. 60. Ibid. 61. Hester Baer and Ryan Long, “Transnational Cinema and the Mexican State in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” South Central Review 21, no. 3 (2004): 154. 62.  Jorge Mario Martínez Piva, Ramón Padilla Pérez, Claudia Schatan Pérez, and Verónica Vega Montoya, “The Mexican Film Industry and Its Participation in the Global Value Chain,” CEPAL Serie: Estudios y

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perspectivas (October 2011), 25, accessed February 2, 2017, http:// archivo.cepal.org/pdfs/2011/S20111039.pdf. 63.  Baer and Long, “Transnational Cinema and the Mexican State in Alfonso Cuarón’s Y tu mamá también,” 152. 64. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 4. 65. Ibid. 66. Ibid. 67. Ibid., 4–5. 68. Ibid., 5. 69. Antonio de la Cova, “Mexican Senate Rejects Key Part of Film Law,” CNN, December 16, 1998, accessed April 6, 2017, http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/mexico/film.htm. 70.  Mary Sutter, “Film: Mexico Fires Up Film Fund,” Variety (Archive: 1905–2000), March 23, 1998, accessed April 6, 2017, ProQuest. 71.  Leisa Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture: Trade Policy and Cultural Exchange in the Global Era” (PhD Dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University, 2012), 242. 72.  Anna Marie de la Fuente, “Alameda Films Preps TV Spinoff of ‘El Crimen del Padre Amaro,’” Variety, October 23, 2016, accessed April 7, 2017, http://variety.com/2016/film/news/ alameda-films-tv-spinoff-of-el-crimen-de-padre-amaro-1201898258/. 73.  David R. Maciel, “Cinema and the State in Contemporary Mexico, 1970–1999,” in Mexico’s Cinema: A Century of Film and Filmmakers, ed. Joanne Hershfield and David Maciel (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 227. 74. de la Cova, “Mexican Senate Rejects Key Part of Film Law.” 75.  Quoted in MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 32. 76. Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture,” 226. 77. MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 40. 78. Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture,” 243. 79. Ibid. 80. “38 Cine-Secuencias,” Atajo a Baja.com, accessed April 7, 2017, http://atajoabaja.com/detail.asp?id=1867. 81. MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, 7. 82.  Michael O’Boyle, “Mexican Biz on Notice,” Variety 406, no. 2 (February 26, 2007): Arts Module, accessed April 6, 2010, ProQuest, quoted in Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture,” 241–242. 83. Jeff Menne, “A Mexican Nouvelle Vague: The Logic of New Waves under Globalization,” Cinema Journal 47, no. 1 (Fall 2007): 74, quoted in Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture,” 242.

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84. Frederick Luis Aldama, Mex-Ciné: Mexican Filmmaking, Production, and Consumption in the Twenty-first Century (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2013), 67. 85. Paul Julian Smith, Amores perros (London: British Film Institute, 2003), 11–13. 86. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 171–172. 87. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 175. See also Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado, “Amores perros: Exotic Violence and Neoliberal Fear,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 15, no. 1 (2006): 39–57 and John Kraniauskas, “Amores perros y la mercantilización del arte (bienes, tumba, trabajo),” Revista de crítica cultural 33 (2006): 13–20. 88.  Jorge Ayala Blanco, La fugacidad del cine mexicano (Mexico City: Océano, 2001), 482. 89. Deborah Shaw, Contemporary Cinema of Latin America: Ten Key Films (New York: Continuum, 2003), 67. 90. Laura Podalsky, The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema: Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 89. 91. Hermann Herlinghaus, Violence without Guilt: Ethical Narratives from the Global South (New York: Palgrave, 2009), 180–181. 92.  Dierdra Reber, “Love as Politics: Amores Perros and the Emotional Aesthetics of Neoliberalism,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 19, no. 3 (2010): 295, cited in Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 175. 93. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 175. 94. Dolores Tierney, “Alejandro González Iñárritu: Director without Borders,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 7, no. 2 (2009): 103. 95. Sánchez Prado, Screening Neoliberalism, 172. 96.  Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona, Contemporary Film Directors: Alejandro González Iñárritu (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 8. 97. Ibid. 98.  Deleyto and Azcona, “Interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu,” 123. 99. Deborah Shaw, “Babel and the Global Hollywood Gaze,” Situations: Project of the Radical Imagination 4, no. 1 (2011): 13. 100. Tanner Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2013), 164–165. 101. Leisa Rothlisberger, “Babel’s Mexican Frames,” Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media, accessed April 5, 2017, http://ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc54.2012/RothlisbergerBabel/4.html.

448  S.A. McCLENNEN 102. L ynn Hirschberg, “Directors Without Borders,” The New York Times, March 10, 2007, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.nytimes. com/2007/03/11/style/tmagazine/11tdirectors.html. 103. Henry Giroux, Stormy Weather: Katrina and the Politics of Disposability (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2006), 25. 104. Deleyto and Azcona, Contemporary Film Directors, 53. 105.  Deleyto and Azcona, “Interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu,” 132. 106. Deborah Shaw, The Three Amigos: The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón (New York: Manchester University Press, 2013), 140–141. 107. Deleyto and Azcona, Contemporary Film Directors, 53. 108. Shaw, The Three Amigos, 142. 109.  Alejandro González Iñárritu, “Biutiful Production Notes,” Cinema Review, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.cinemareview.com/production.asp?prodid=6298. 110.  Manuel Cuéllar, “Biutiful es un vómito espiritual,” El País, August 3, 2010, accessed March 29, 2017, http://cultura.elpais.com/ cultura/2010/08/03/actualidad/1280786403_850215.html. 111. Ibid. 112. Kathleen Honora Connolly, “Spirits and Those Living in the Shadows: Migrants and a New National Family in ‘Biutiful,’” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 39, no. 3 (2015): 548, http://www.jstor.org/ stable/24717396. 113. Ibid., 550. 114. María del Mar Azcona, “‘We are all Uxbal’: Narrative Complexity in the Urban Borderlands in Biutiful,” Journal of Film and Video 67, no.1 (2015): 3. 115.  Deleyto and Azcona, “Interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu,” 137. 116. Robert Sinnerbrink, quoted in Connolly, “Spirits and Those Living in the Shadows,” 551. 117. Larry Rohter, “The Three Amigos of Cha Cha Cha,” The New York Times, April 25, 2009, accessed March 29, 2017, http://www.nytimes. com/2009/04/26/movies/26roht.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&. 118. Ibid. 119. “Bad Education (2004) Trivia,” Internet Movie Database, accessed March 29, 2017, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0275491/trivia?ref_ =tt_trv_trv. 120.  John Hecht, “Canana Films Aims to Keep it Real,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 16, 2007, accessed March 29, 2017, http://www. hollywoodreporter.com/news/canana-films-aims-keep-real-155245.

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121. Ibid. 122. Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture,” 214. 123. Carmen Aristegui quoted in Rothlisberger, “NAFTA Culture,” 214. 124.  Reed Johnson, “Internationally Acclaimed ‘El violín’ Finally Makes It Home,” Chicago Tribune, July 11, 2007, accessed April 14, 2017, http:// articles.chicagotribune.com/2007-07-11/features/0707090163_1_ violin-don-plutarco-mexican. 125. Luisela Alvaray, “Are We Global Yet? New Challenges to Defining Latin American Cinema,” Studies in Hispanic Cinemas 8, no. 1 (2011): 75, https://sites.ualberta.ca/~vruetalo/Sarli-Bo%20Research/74549772. pdf. 126. Ibid., 74. 127. Olga Martinez, “16 Admirable Celebrities Who Are Actively Changing the World for the Better,” The Epoch Times, April 28, 2016, accessed April 5, 2017, http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2040191-16-admirable-celebrities-who-are-actively-changing-the-world-for-the-better/. 128.  Lilia Lalaoui, “Classic Quotes from Oscar Night 2017,” RTÉ, February 27, 2017, accessed April 5, 2017, https://www.rte.ie/ culture/2017/0227/855792-10-classic-quotes-from-oscar-2017/. 129.  See Henry Giroux, The Terror of Neoliberalism The New Authoritarianism and the Eclipse of Democracy (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press, 2002). 130. Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 31. 131.  Sophia A. McClennen, “The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination,” Special Issue, CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture, “Representing Humanity in an Age of Terror,” ed. Sophia A. McClennen and Henry James Morello, 9, no. 1 (2008): 11, accessed April 14, 2017, docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol9/iss1/. 132. Nancy Fraser,  Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 2. 133. Ibid., 13. 134. Deleyto and Azcona, “Interview with Alejandro González Iñárritu,” 126. 135. Rodrigo Gómez García, “El impacto del Tratado de Libre Comercio de América del norte en México, 1994–2002” (PhD Dissertation, Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona, 2006). 136. de la Cova, “Mexican Senate Rejects Key Part of Film Law.” 137.  Linda Diebel, “Mexican Ruling Party Claims ‘Free, Fair’ Win,” The Toronto Star, August 23, 1994, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis. 138.  Mark Memmott and Del Jones, “Standing by Mexico /U.S. Firms Maintain Commitments,” USA Today, March 25, 1994, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis.

450  S.A. McCLENNEN 139.  Douglas Farah, “Salinas Departs Mexico; Reportedly in U.S. Exile; Salinas, Criticized by Zedillo, Reportedly Takes Up U.S. Exile,” The Washington Post, March 13, 1995, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis. 140. Sutter, “Film: Mexico Fires Up Film Fund.” 141. Maciel, “Cinema and the State in Contemporary Mexico, 1970–1999,” 227. 142. de la Cova, “Mexican Senate Rejects Key Part of Film Law.” 143.  Mary Sutter, “Mexican Senate Alters Film Law,” Variety, January 4, 1999, accessed April 19, 2017, LexisNexis. 144. Jo Tuckman, “Election Surprise: Mexicans Vote Out Old Regime: 71 Years of ‘Perfect Dictatorship’ End as Former Coca-Cola Executive Crushes Ruling PRI,” The Guardian (London), July 4, 2000, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis. 145. Simeon Tegel, “Mexico Filmmakers Cheer Amendment to Film Law,” Daily Variety, April 2, 2001, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis. 146. Ken Bensinger, “Mexico Chipping In,” Daily Variety, June 14, 2004, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis. 147.  Michael O’Boyle, “Coin & Producer Resources,” Daily Variety, September 7, 2005, accessed April 19, 2017, LexisNexis. 148.  Jay Root, “It’s Official: Mexico’s Calderón Declared Victor,” Star Tribune, September 6, 2006, accessed April 3, 2017, LexisNexis. 149. O’Boyle, “Coin & Producer Resources.” 150. Ibid. 151.  John Hecht, “Fidecine Gets Three Committee Members,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2008, accessed April 10, 2017, LexisNexis. 152.  Mark Stevenson and Katherine Corcoran, “Mexico’s Former Ruling Party Voted Back to Office,” The Salt Lake Tribune, July 4, 2012, accessed April 19, 2017, LexisNexis. 153. Ivett Salgado, “Eficine, panacea fílmica mexicana,” Milenio, May 27, 2014, accessed April 3, 2017, http://www.milenio.com/hey/cine/ Eficine-panacea-filmica-mexicana_0_306569353.html. 154. Ibid. 155.  “La nueva Ley de Cine está en el cajón,” Pulso, April 2, 2016, accessed April 3, 2017, http://pulsoslp.com.mx/2016/04/02/ la-nueva-ley-de-cine-esta-en-el-cajon/. 156. Ibid. 157.  John Hopewell, “Mexico’s Digital Video Market Grows 39% in 2016,” Variety, January 18, 2017, accessed April 3, 2017, http://variety.com/2017/ digital/global/mexico-digital-video-market-grows-39-2016-1201962795/.

CHAPTER 8

CODA: On Location—Is Titanic a Mexican Movie?

In 1995, one year after the implementation of NAFTA began, Mexico dropped its national cinema quota system and founded the Mexican Film Commission (Comisión Mexicana de Filmaciones, COMEFILM), a body dedicated to encouraging foreign filmmaking projects to choose Mexico as a production location. The purpose of the Mexican Film Commission was to attract runaway productions—Hollywood and other international film projects shot on location outside of the United States. The Film Commission reports that from 1995 to 2002 almost 3,000 foreign productions were shot in Mexico.1 So in the early years after NAFTA Mexico still made movies, they just didn’t make Mexican movies. By 1998, Mexico had attracted $269 million in expenditures and captured almost five percent of the runaway market.2 While runaway productions are nothing new, they have taken off since the 1990s as globalization has transformed the economics of film production. In fact, by 2006 it was reported that more than half of all “Hollywood” films are not shot in the United States. One study showed that since 2000 runaways have cost the United States 47,000 jobs per year and $23 billion in economic benefits.3 To give a sense of the scope of these shifts, out of the 85 films nominated for a Best Picture Oscar since 1990, only 40 have been wholly or predominantly produced within the United States.4 In order to attract revenue from film projects, nation-states offer subsidies, tax incentives, and lower labor costs than those found in the Hollywood, CA marketplace. Given the wide-ranging changes to © The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0_8

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national film industries that I’ve documented throughout this book that began when neoliberal policies were implemented across Latin America, scholars logically took the increase in runaway production as a sign of all of the nefarious ways that the global economy was destroying local cultures and using developing economies as nothing more than a source of resource extraction. The outsourcing of film-project labor seemed to be part of a larger shift in labor practices. This shift had been described by Folker Fröbel, who developed a theory of the New International Division of Labor (NIDL) to describe the 1970s transition when developing economies were no longer a source of raw materials, but were now a resource for cheap labor for the global capitalist market.5 Media scholars, especially Toby Miller and the team that worked on Global Hollywood, then adapted Fröbel’s theories to the film and media industry, thereby describing what they termed as the New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL). Runaway film production epitomized these transitions and suggested that the cultural capitals of the world would now produce their cultural products on the margins. Because films are a special sort of product—both commodity and art—the idea that Hollywood films would be made by those outside of Hollywood created special anxieties. Outsourcing of traditional commodities, like toasters or socks, caused anxiety about new labor relations, but didn’t lead to worries that this process would radically change cultural identity. Not so with film. Questions emerged about what it meant to have Hollywood no longer making Hollywood product. And, as I will explain below, some of these questions mirrored American-exceptionalist rhetoric, overemphasizing the loss of jobs in the United States and ignoring the potential benefits to workers abroad. Thus, this concluding coda looks at the impact of runaways on filmmaking in the global era. Were these practices yet another sign of the muddy relationship between the local and the global? Did this mean that “global Hollywood” was eradicating local cultural production? Or did the rising presence of runaways in the global film economy suggest yet another shortcoming to the frameworks we have tended to use to analyze the cultural impact of neoliberal globalization? Misha MacLaird notes that, despite the long history of runaway productions shooting in Mexico, NAFTA brought on a new era facilitated by the fact that the trade agreement made it easy for equipment and film stock to cross the border tariff free.6 These conditions led to a number of major projects shooting in Mexico including Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000), Twentieth Century Fox’s Man on Fire (2004), and

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Mel Gibson’s epic tale of the fall of the Mayan civilization, Apocalypto (2006), which was shot in the jungles of Veracruz. The paradigmatic case of a runaway production to Latin America, though, was the filming of the blockbuster Titanic (1997) in Fox Baja Studios located in Rosarito, Mexico—just 60 miles south of the border. The Fox Baja studio, now under Mexican ownership, was actually built specifically to film Titanic and it remains the most extensive underwater filming studio in the world. Other major films like Master and Commander (2003), Pearl Harbor (2001), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), and Deep Blue Sea (1999) used the facilities. While Baja Studios represents only a tiny portion of Mexico-located film projects, Titanic remains Mexico’s most famous runaway project. On its release, it was the most expensive film ever made and the most successful. It broke the record for the top-grossing film of all time, bringing in $1.84 billion and becoming the film that most epitomized Hollywood’s incursion into a global market since two-thirds of its revenue came from outside the United States. Miller and Marie Claire Leger cite Rupert Murdoch’s rosy view of the project as an example of “new joint ventures between the Hollywood majors and both public and private broadcasting.”7 They mention that Murdoch points to the “invisible” numbers of European workers employed in the making of Titanic: “this cross-border cultural co-operation is not the result of regulation, but market forces. It’s the freedom to move capital, technology and talent around the world that adds value, invigorates ailing markets, creates new ones.”8 The Mexican government was so pleased to host the project that they awarded its director, James Cameron, the Mexican Order of the Aztec Eagle in 1998 for his confidence in and support of Mexican workers. When Cameron accepted the award he stated: “Titanic is as much a Mexican movie as a product of Hollywood; and since it is [sic] has obtained the most Oscars—a total of eleven—in the history of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, we might say that we have made history together.”9 But is Titanic a Mexican movie? And, if so, in what ways? If I can correctly assume that most of my readers had no clue that the film was shot in Mexico and had no idea that it was made by a majority of Mexican labor—from producers to casting to carpenters to extras—then what does the location of Titanic in Mexico teach us about the new global era of filmmaking? Certainly no one is likely to attribute the eleven Oscars the film won to Mexican talent. In

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fact, those scholars that do study the relationship of Titanic to Mexico tend to see it as an example of either resource extraction or cultural imperialism. Miller and Leger describe the decision to film Titanic in Mexico as a sign of Hollywood’s desire to take advantage of “docile labor, minimal bureaucracy, a dismal peso, and a new film commission to provide liaison services.”10 Miller has described shooting in Mexico as “maquila” productions.11 In reference to the story of the sinking of the Titanic, he even quips, “How ironic that the workers submerged at the end of the credits (or not listed at all) should ‘owe’ their livelihood to a boat sunk by invisible ice and business hubris.”12 This chapter asks how the story of Titanic helps us question the connection between the location of filmmaking and a film’s perceived cultural identity. If asking whether Titanic is a Mexican movie seems almost silly, then why does its Mexicanness so easily disappear? How does that invisibility match up with our perception that Hollywood is visible everywhere? What does the case of Titanic teach us about globalization, cultural affiliations, and cinema? And did the filming of Titanic mean that Mexico was supporting Hollywood at the expense of their own national industry? The best way to begin to answer these questions is to tell the story of my research trip in 2011 to Tijuana and Rosarito, where I planned to learn more about Titanic and the effects of the runaway market on local production. I arrived in Tijuana with a set of questions. I planned to ask folks who had worked on Titanic and other runaways how they felt about working for Hollywood, specifically how it felt to use their talents for Hollywood instead of a Mexican project. I also prepared questions about labor conditions, wages, and treatment on the set. But more importantly, I went armed with questions that assumed a set of relations that were mostly organized around the opposition of Hollywood versus Mexico. Pretty much everyone I asked, from producers, to casting, to carpenters, to drivers, didn’t even understand my questions. This was partially due to the fact that in Tijuana “Mexican” cinema is associated with Churubusco Studios and Mexico City, so my ideas of a standoff between Mexico and Hollywood didn’t make sense to them since they consider their cultural projects outside of the “Mexican” mainstream anyway. But even more importantly, I went to Tijuana looking to confirm my assumptions that the story of Titanic was a story of Hollywood taking advantage of cheap labor and less stringent regulations. I could not get one of the over twenty people I interviewed to say one negative

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thing about working on Titanic. Sure, everyone did confirm that James Cameron was a megalomaniac who yelled constantly, but they chalked that up to his style as a director, and didn’t read his behavior as part of a larger sign of north-south relations. I had gone down to Tijuana with my own script only to find that it simply didn’t fit the reality of the impact of runaway work in the region. Perhaps most interestingly, almost everyone I interviewed who worked on Titanic began their careers in film on that project and many of them had been able to sustain their careers in the industry. So as I listened and was forced to adapt my questions I realized that the story of Titanic demanded a new critical paradigm for understanding the impact of globalization on the Tijuana film industry. As I deepened my research I realized that the story of runaways was a whole lot more complicated than I had originally thought. My experiences in Tijuana helped lay out the groundwork for the thesis of this book—that the oppositional categories that have framed much of the analysis about the effects of globalization on culture don’t work. Following similar insights by Tanner Mirrlees, I have found that the typical opposition between cultural imperialists and cultural globalists doesn’t line up with the data and doesn’t offer us a good basis for theorizing these shifts.13 The cultural imperialist model analyzes the effects of globalization in wholly negative terms and according to geographies of power that don’t hold in the neoliberal era. The celebratory notion of the free flow of capital, similar to the statements quoted by Murdoch above, also misses the truly pernicious effects of neoliberal globalization. Considering the specific case of runaways, though, we can note the ongoing tendency to frame these issues as “either/or” binaries, where one position is “good” and the other “bad.” For instance, in the first chapter of Janet Wasko’s edited volume, Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization?, Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan explain that scholarship on runaways has been framed by an either/or question: Is cross-border production either economic runaway or globalization? They explain that at heart runaways have been understood as leading to two distinct propositions: “The first implies that international production is basically an extension of a primarily U.S.-grounded and American-centric industry that now operates internationally.”14 One of the keys to this view is the idea that runaways are shot in other locations not for creative reasons but for wholly economic ones, a fact that perverts the system “by unfairly influencing producer decisions on production locations and postproduction by appealing to

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producers’ baser commercial interests.”15 Goldsmith and O’Regan explain that “the second view, by contrast, implies that international production is a natural consequence of globalizing film and television industries and markets.”16 From this view, the increasing globalization of production locations, “far from being an unnatural distortion, is instead the expression and entailment of emerging natural markets for film and television production.”17 They also note that one of the interesting consequences of the negative view of runaways is that the position “tends to ignore or downplay both the benefits that international production brings to American cinema and the variety of perspectives on, motivations for, and experiences of international collaboration outside the United States.”18 Oddly, then, the traditional models used for analyzing runaways either celebrate global exchange or hold to rather rigid US-centric ideas of labor and markets. And they strangely hold to a set of nationalist assumptions. In what follows, I analyze the typical arguments we have used to think about the rise of runaways since the 1990s and read these questions against a more complex reality. As this coda concludes, I will return to one of the central questions that has driven this book: What are the possibilities for politically and socially significant Latin American filmmaking in the era of neoliberal globalization? To help answer that question I’ll highlight a film that has appeared throughout this book as well as on the cover: Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer (2008), which was shot in Tijuana and which even more importantly offers viewers a complex and creative view of labor and borders. But first let me offer a larger overview of runaways and a deeper sense of their history because the reality is that while they clearly became a far more common practice beginning in the 1990s, they have a far longer history. Paul Thomas reminds us that the trend toward runaways really begins after World War II when, despite the booming US economy, Hollywood “underwent a series of crises, retrenchments and realignments” and domestic “attendance at the movies plummeted from eighty million in 1946 . . . to forty-five million in 1960.”19 Meanwhile, overseas receipts soared. In 1948, 72% of all films shown in Europe were made in the United States. Robert R. Shandley explains that the term “runaway” dates back to the 1950s and derives from Hollywoodbased union leaders who considered non-US locations as an “an illicit flight from home.”20 But Eric Johnston, head of the Motion Picture Association of America at the time, defended overseas production by

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claiming that three-quarters of Hollywood films did not cover their costs in the domestic market. Johnston pointed out that foreign-made films had a better chance of recovering costs and that trade protections limiting foreign-made films would hurt the overall domestic film economy. Johnston noted that in 1953 the motion picture industry “brought back $165,000,000 from abroad, and American pix still occupy almost 70% of the total screen playing time of the world.”21 Shandley notes that this argument helped provide Hollywood producers with “a model for capturing world markets and remaining profitable by outsourcing labor.”22 The trend to runaways begins in the 1950s, then, and really takes off in the 1960s when US films financed abroad “rose from an estimated 35 to 60 percent of the total output of U.S. producers.”23 While many of these projects went to Europe, it is important to note that Mexico also has a long history as a runaway site. In fact, “Mexico City’s Churubusco Studios were constructed by RKO, Emilio Azcarraga (founder of Televisa) and Harry Wright in the 1940s as a place where RKO could invest in the local industry and reap the benefits of the continental hispano-hablante market.”24 Tamara Falicov also notes that apart from Hollywood help training technical crews and actors, a number of Mexican actors like Dolores del Río and Ramón Navarro crossed the border to the north and worked in Hollywood only to cross back, becoming truly transnational stars and helping to launch Mexican cinema’s “golden age.”25 She explains that both industries collaborated in a shared fight against communism.26 Miller et al. remind us that the state of Durango was the main location for Westerns throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and several now-classic genre films were shot there in the 1980s.27 For Falicov, the real era of Hollywood using Mexico as a “backlot” takes place when John Huston shoots Night of the Iguana (1964) in Puerto Vallarta and transforms the town into a tourist destination. Falicov notes that it wasn’t until the shooting of Titanic that big-budget summer blockbusters returned to Mexico. Of course, one key difference between the Huston film and Cameron’s project is the fact that Night of the Iguana was what is called a “creative” runaway—that is, a film shot on a foreign location for creative reasons. Most of the early runaways were, in fact, creative runaways. This was the case for a film like Roman Holiday (1953) as well. But Thomas also points out that in the early years of runaways, some projects left US soil in order to work with film talent that had been blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Over the years, runaways

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moved increasingly toward “economic” runaways, which shift the location solely for economic reasons. The dominance of Hollywood majors in the domestic and global film industries is directly linked to decades of tax credit schemes, strong US Government representation and financial support, discriminatory copyright laws and regulations, oligopolistic manipulation of all the modes of production, and even specific federal aid programs like the Informational Media Guaranty Program.28 Susan Christopherson notes that as late as the 1980s, runaways typically referred to locations, but by the 1990s other parts of the filmmaking process were being “outsourced,” such as “sound stage production, postproduction editing, and special effects production, as well as location shooting, that are taking place in international production ‘satellites.’”29 As noted throughout this book, the 1990s brought on a wave of changes that radically shifted the geographies of the film market. Miller and Leger explain that the 1990s really mark a significant turning point: runaway film and TV film production from the United States amounted to $500m in 1990 and $2.8bn in 1998: “By the end of the 1990s, it was allegedly costing LA another $7.5bn annually in multiplier effects, plus 20,000 jobs. Hollywood’s proportion of overseas productions went from 7% of its total to 27%.”30 Miller et al. also note that during the 1990s, 31 national film commissions were set up to attract runaways.31 A 2006 study by The Center for Entertainment Data and Research noted that runaway productions accounted for 53% of the revenue of domestic theatrical releases.32 Anthony Frampton argues that what appears “to be unprecedented in this current era of Hollywood hand-outs are the ubiquity, scale, depth, and frequency of the assistance that governments splurge to attract Hollywood film productions to their jurisdictions, an almost axial turn from Hollywood producers being the pursuers to becoming the pursued.”33 This all seems like a clear sign of the negative effects of the global economy on film production. If Hollywood is lured to non-US locales to produce films, US labor suffers. And if these nations are offering outrageous incentives and low labor costs simply to draw these projects, then there are negative effects for local economies too. Hollywood no longer makes Hollywood; instead, it imprints its brand and practices everywhere. But there’s a catch. The geography of runaways does not conform to the standard labor map of outsourcing. In fact, the bulk of Hollywood runaways go to Canada, hardly an economy one would think of as developing. One study, the Monitor Report, surveying the rise of runaways in

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the 1990s showed that almost all runaways go to Canada, the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and other parts of Europe.34 Canada attracted 81% of all runaways in the 1990s and Australia and the UK drew a combined 10%. Canada hosted 63 productions in 1990; by 1998 that amount was up to 232 productions. Of interest is the fact that the Monitor Report found that generally countries other than Canada, Australia, and the UK have a small share of US runaways, a fact that upends the normal outsourcing geography. They further explain that the high-profile runaway production in Mexico of Titanic highlights the need to “monitor developments in selected other countries on an ongoing basis.”35 While the Monitor Report framed this issue solely from the vantage point of protecting US labor, it certainly does make one ponder whether the “runaway” issue is actually a “first world problem” rather than a true sign of extortionist labor policy. Vincent Mosco explains that “to the surprise of some, the recipients of most outsourcing of knowledge work are developed countries in Europe and North America.”36 Mosco notes that while some of the film projects go to India, in reality the story of runaways does not follow the typical trajectory for labor patterns in the global economy, a fact that makes Mexico’s ability to draw runaways more a story of technical success than one of a maquiladora labor market: “So while India and increasingly China are singled out as the ‘bad boys’ of outsourcing, it is Canada, Ireland, Israel, and other places that have taken the bulk of the knowledge industry jobs.”37 He further points out that the English language has much to do with the choice of location for many runaway projects but the bigger point is that this is not simply a story of projects moving to the lowest-wage economies. Despite the fact that Mexico has, indeed, been successful at drawing runaways, it simply is not a major player in the runaway market. Data from 2013 shows that the breakdown of runaways that go largely to English-speaking nations still holds true (See Table 8.1). This more recent data also shows that the shift away from California as the location for film is on the rise: “In 1997, 64 percent of the top 25 live-action movies at the worldwide box-office were wholly or ­primarily produced in California. By 2013, California’s share of the top 25 liveaction movies had fallen to just 8 percent.”38 Another twist on the geographies of film production is that by the twenty-first century, runaways were not simply leaving the United States for other nations; instead, they were more often leaving California for other states. Thus, while the 2013 study noted that 65% of the 108 films surveyed were made in the United

460  S.A. McCLENNEN Table 8.1  International share of 108 surveyed films, 2013. Source Film L.A.a Country United States Canada UK New Zealand Australia Europe—Non-UK India

Percentage of international shares 65 14 11 2 2 5 1

a“2013 Feature Film Production Report,” Film L.A., 5, accessed April 11, 2017, https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/sites/default/files/custom/Embeds/2013%20Feature%20Study%20Corrected%20 no%20Watermark%5B2%5D.pdf.

States, only 14% of the films were primarily produced in California, causing the state to slip behind Louisiana in total tracked projects: “Louisiana, which some have taken to calling ‘Hollywood South,’ is now outpacing the real Hollywood by a key measure of film production volume.”39 While New York has long been a filming location, today Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Florida, and Illinois also attract a couple of films a year. Miller’s theorization of these shifts as a NICL took into account the fact that the bulk of runaways go to industrialized market economy countries or IMECs. Clearly, this is a different form of outsourcing since it can’t be argued that extremely low labor costs are the primary part of the equation. Instead, the shifts are largely due to tax incentives and other forms of state subsidies that draw these projects. And yet, for Miller, the pattern match between the NICL and the NIDL is the fact that these practices produce economic insecurity, “because companies move on when tax incentives or other factors of production beckon.”40 The reality, though, is that while that may be true in manufacturing, there has not been the same degree of location shift for creative economy jobs. The Canadian, Australian, and British strengths in the runaway economy have been holding for decades. Sure, a creative runaway to a Caribbean island, as was the case with The Pirates of the Caribbean (2003), is an unsustainable market over time, but that shift can’t be read as a “flight” of jobs since it is more specifically a temporary boon. From a labor standpoint, though, the association of runaways with a post-Fordist economic labor model doesn’t quite hold, especially when we note that much of the work on outsourced films is being done in nations with fairly high labor rates.

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Miller and Leger also do note that there is “a second, palimpsestic model of the NICL. In an era when US network television is desperately cutting costs, there are opportunities for outsiders.”41 Another ironic twist is the idea that under the runaway model nations that overwhelmingly consume Hollywood may now actually be producing it. This then leads to the next big question we should ask about how scholars have tended to study runaways. Do we really want to “protect” the Hollywood labor market? While there is little doubt that the story of runaways is an interesting and complicated feature of the new global economy and while the labor loss for the state of California is certainly real, it is worth noting that for the most part the antirunaway argument is highly nationalistic and in some cases downright xenophobic. It is certainly interesting to see scholars, especially those that align with a global left, making an argument to protect “American” culture. The protectionist rhetoric coming from pro-US labor often smacks of xenophobia, American exceptionalism, and hyperpatriotism. As Catherine McKercher explains, the antirunaway initiatives of the Screen Actors Guild have “drawn on a range of discursive strategies, casting the problem as an economic, cultural, and patriotic issue, as well as a matter of traditional workplace jurisdiction.”42 This pushback is framed as a combination of protectionist economics and nationalism. As McKercher points out, these runaway counterarguments are often reactionary and culturally conservative: “Led by SAG, the Hollywood unions have combined an appeal to prevent runaway production on economic grounds with an appeal to protect American culture on patriotic grounds, a mix that has resonated particularly well in the years since the September 11, 2001, attacks.”43 She notes that as far back as 1959 the Hollywood American Federation of Labor’s Film Council called on Congress for a full-scale investigation of runaway production and cited that runaways made by US producers in foreign countries “give employment to known Communists and thus give aid and comfort to the Communist conspiracy against the free world.”44 Today the protectionism commonly reeks of creepy nationalism. Antirunaway campaigns have isolated films shot outside of the United States and told viewers to boycott them since they weren’t made in America. This happened with projects like Cold Mountain (2003) and USA Network’s film Rudy (2003), the story of New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, which was filmed in Toronto. Given the combination of xenophobia and nationalism that is often used to argue against runaways, it’s

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worth wondering whether those of us concerned with the labor impact of global capitalism want to find ourselves protecting the US economy. This leads me back to Mexico and to the question of whether runaways are really a sign that Mexico has become a movie maquiladora. The filming of Titanic coming on the heels of the Mexican government’s abandonment of many of its own protectionist practices certainly sent shock waves. In the late 1990s, as the Mexican film industry was limping along, it was easy to imagine that Mexico would transition to making Hollywood films on the cheap and would lose their local industry completely. But as the three chapters in Part II showed in great detail, the global era for filmmaking did not eradicate national film production across the three major markets in Latin America. While there was media consolidation in terms of distribution, the presence of majors in local-language productions, and convergence of spectators for the top ten Hollywood blockbusters, the neoliberal era also ushered in a phase of great cinematic diversity. And by many metrics the national industries are stronger today than ever. This means that the advent of runaways has not negatively hurt local production in Mexico because local production numbers are on the rise. Again, it is crucial to note that from a broader perspective runaways to Mexico and to Latin America more generally are a minuscule part of the global film economy. Scholars often treat the story of Titanic as a metaphorical tip of the iceberg, but the reality is that overall the Mexican economy attracts a very small percentage of runaways. The key question we should ask is: Why are runaways to Mexico considered more of a sign of exploitative labor practices than runaways to Canada, Britain,

Table 8.2  Comparison between Mexico and Britain of estimated budgets of Hollywood films in US$ millions and percentage of overall runaway market. Source Toby Millera Site

1998

Britain Market share of all Hollywood runaways Mexico Market share of all Hollywood runaways

$486.0 $450.0 8.7% 8.9% $269.0 $85.0 4.8% 1.7%

aMiller

et al., Global Hollywood 2, 139.

1999

2000

2001

$245.0 4.5% $3.0 0.1%

$414.0 7.4% $65.0 1.2%

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or Australia? As Table 8.2 shows, there simply is no comparison between even Britain and Mexico in terms of the overall runaway market. And yet in all of my searching I could not find one article that studied runaways to Britain as a sign of movie maquiladoras. The disparity between how Mexico is treated when it attracts these projects versus Canada or the UK is noteworthy and suggests a lingering colonialist cognitive mapping that is radically out of synch with actual practice. The issue of runaways, then, gets far messier when we appreciate the fact that wages in non-US markets may be lower but that the top runaway markets don’t offer radically lower wages than the United States. In fact, runaways are often connected to weak currencies against the US dollar, subsidies, and other incentives. Miller and Leger explain that “Vancouver and Toronto are the busiest locations for North American screen production after LA and New York, thanks to a weak Canadian currency and tax rebates of up to 22% on labor costs.”45 Frampton also found that “foreign film producers received unprecedented levels of concessions and amassed huge savings from their ability to manipulate governmental authorities and local elites and exploit the weak institutional capacity of the state and its poor systems of accountability.”46 In fact, data on Canada suggests that labor rates remained steady. The real shift was in relation to the implementation of Canadian Production subsidies in late 1998 that led to a dramatic increase in production the following year (as reflected by the 144% increase in dollar volume for the 2000 release-year films). Of key interest is the fact that there were no appreciable changes in exchange rates or labor rates to justify this dramatic shift from one year to the next, other than the subsidy programs.47 When Canada began its film tax credit program, nations around the world followed suit. The Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research found that, “without exception, every competing production center that hosted primary production on one or more films offered significant, uncapped, film incentive programs. The most common form of film incentive is refundable or transferable tax credits that can offset a large portion of total project spend.”48 It would be a mistake to miss these trends as a sign of the way that the neoliberal market economy demands that states reduce taxes to attract business. But the NICL is not the NIDL and the labor piece of the story is quite different. Moreover, the case of runaways reminds us that the global economy is, indeed, global. Whereas California used to have the benefits of US protectionism as it flexed its global muscles, that is no

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longer true. Thus, in keeping with my thesis, the global film economy requires us to use new maps, ones that don’t replicate traditional northsouth patterns of colonialism, but rather ones that chart red zones and green zones and map global winners and losers. In the most extreme cases, locations prostrate themselves economically in an effort to draw film projects. In one disturbing example of this trend, Louisiana’s governor, Kathleen Babineaux Blanco, stated in 2005 that Louisiana’s $73 million growth in tax revenues in 2004 would be unavailable for teacher raises because it would, instead, fund the $70 million film tax credit program.49 Louisiana may well be a better example of a movie maquiladora, given the fact that it is one of the poorest US states in terms of the per capita poverty rate and median income and that it also outpaces Hollywood film shooting in other countries, including Canada and Ireland.50 This then proves that the neoliberal economy of filmmaking holds many examples of economic abuse and exploitation, but those examples simply don’t track according to earlier geographical trends. The other catch in the NICL story is the fact that wages for Hollywood film projects pay more in Mexico than those for local projects. And they are also substantially higher than wages for actual maquiladora work. While there can often be cases of long hours and arduous set work, it is a real mistake to conflate working on a film set with working in a maquiladora. And yet this is the common angle taken. Miller et al. compare the wage of a union carpenter in Hollywood at roughly US $35/ hour to a union carpenter in Mexico earning less than US$ 4/ hour. They also compare the US$12/ hour wage of construction workers on the San Luis Potosí set of The Mexican (Gore Verbinski, 2001) to Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts’s US $40 million salaries.51 Seen that way the comparison in income is an outrage. But the really important question is how those pay rates compare within the Mexican economy. In another example, a sensationalist Vice article on how the town that made Titanic is “sinking” interviewed three people who worked as extras on the film.52 Those interviewed complained about the working conditions, but here’s the catch: the three people they interviewed were all well outside of the “maquiladora” worker class. The three they interviewed were: Sergio Sotelo, a hospital worker who was born and still lives in Rosarito; Aislinn Puig, a hotel concierge who now lives in San José del Cabo; and Liza Ampudia, a housewife who moved to Bonita, California. These “workers” are not of the lower-working class in Mexico. And yet the Vice piece is committed to showing worker exploitation. At the end of the

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article they ask the extras what they were paid. Puig states that she made US$40 per day plus food and transportation. Ampudia, who was paid as a US citizen, made US$80–120 plus food and transportation. Ampudia, then, was basically paid according to SAG union rates, since according to 2017 numbers a SAG extra makes about $148.53 Meanwhile Puig clearly was paid less, a factor certain to save production costs. In fact, she was paid about 50% less. But before we read this as exploitation we need a larger comparative map. In January 1998, shortly after the filming of Titanic, Mexican wages were, on average, one-tenth of US wages. In 1996, according to the US Department of Labor, the hourly compensation of Mexican production workers was $1.50 an hour compared to $17.74 for workers from the United States.54 This means that while the Titanic budget might have paid half as much for a Mexican extra as for a US extra, they were actually paying far more than other industries comparatively. Actual maquiladora labor was paid at far lower rates. Recall that the late 1990s was the real boom in maquiladoras. A University of California-Davis study shows that there were about one million Mexicans employed in 3,700 maquiladoras in December 1997, according to the National Maquiladora Exporting Council (CNIME), up dramatically from 330,000 workers and 1,120 plants in 1987.55 They report that CNIME found the average maquiladora wage was 70 pesos per day (US$8.50). So given those comparative numbers it is hard to read being paid US$40/day plus food to be an extra on a movie set to be an example of labor exploitation. In fact, all of the people that I interviewed in Tijuana concurred that they made more money on Hollywood projects than on local ones. Perhaps more importantly it is crucial to recall that the sorts of jobs found in maquiladoras are stagnant. As the UC-Davis study shows, “Mexicans complain that, although maquiladoras produce jobs, in thirty years they have produced very few homegrown spin-off industries or entrepreneurs.”56 As I’ll explain below, that is not the case with creative economy jobs. While many extras on Titanic did the film as a one-time experience, many skilled jobs from the film led to ongoing work. This is not to downplay the real labor abuses caused by capitalist globalization. Rather, my point is that exaggerating the labor on runaways as similar to maquiladora work dilutes the force of arguments committed to fighting capitalist inequities. For example, in a passage critical of the presence of runaways in Mexico, MacLaird writes:

466  S.A. McCLENNEN United States and European audiovisual industries’ unapologetic exploitation of production labor in developing nations is one segment of neoliberalism’s broader labor-outsourcing trend across industries, including both overseas and domestic subcontracting as a way of large corporations to downsize by cutting full-time or long-term contractual positions. . . . Without employee status within media corporations or union representation, film laborers remain invisible and voiceless as contributors to cultural production. This is exacerbated if producers hire workers who do not speak the same language, for a short period of time, in a distant location: after a shoot, connections to the site and the workforce are easily dissolved and forgotten.57

So going off of MacLaird’s assessment, the question is whether runaways hurt Mexican labor and whether they are an overall detriment to the economy. The simple answer is no. While it is true that the infrastructure was built for Titanic, and that it languished as Fox sold the Baja studio to Tijuana businessman José Galicot in 2011, the film business in the border area remains strong overall. One of the first post-Fox Baja films shot in the studio was Little Boy (2015; shot in 2011). The film was produced by Metanoia Films, which is based in Los Angeles but was founded by Mexican actor and filmmaker Eduardo Verástegui. Sparked by a new incentive program that gives foreign filmmakers a 17.5% rebate of what they spend in Mexico, Little Boy was set to generate an estimated $14 million investment to the state. “We can call it the reactivation of the film industry in Baja,” said Juan Tintos, the state’s tourism secretary.58 The next year, Robert Redford came to Rosarito to shoot All is Lost (2013; shot in 2012). Unlike many Hollywood types who often commute when shooting on location in Baja, Redford chose to spend the shoot in Rosarito. Speaking about Baja California, Redford said, “I think it’s unfortunate that the media being the way it is, it focuses on sensational issues and danger is more sensational than happiness. . . . So I hope us being here, talking about the fact that there are wonderful parts of Mexico that are wonderful to visit, that people will come.”59 In 2017, the second season of AMC’s zombie series “Fear the Walking Dead” began shooting in Baja. One of the core questions according to Miller et al. is: Do jobs on runaways help develop ongoing cultural capacity?60 As the data provided by the Tijuana Film Commission shows, it does, in fact, seem that the film economy in the border region is strong (see Table 8.3). There is also

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Table 8.3  Tijuana Film Commission statistics, 2002–2016. Source Tijuana Film Commission, email communication with author Year 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 TOTAL

Number of productions 44 52 60 64 64 86 80 67 73 61 81 65 78 66 97 1,038

Nights in hotels 45,571 4,627 5,441 15,303 6,232 777 1,219 1,490 2,466 17,158 12,563 4,020 3,878 4,313 63,969 189,027

Jobs generated 810 687 384 843 461 1,395 1,042 839 724 2,105 1,163 799 964 839 1,578 14,633

Income to the state $38,799,800.00 $8,841,000.00 $8,120,000.00 $9,575,000.00 $10,330,000.00 $7,111,221.00 $3,612,800.00 $1,386,902.00 $1,001,168.00 $15,337,233.00 $10,141,200.00 $3,194,005.00 $3,211,082.00 $3,202,219.00 $23,097,419.00 $146,961,049.00

Note: “Number of Productions” column includes all types of productions: features, shorts, TV programs, videoclips, commercials, and documentaries.

a clear uptick after the 2011 incentive program was established. A report from the Universidad de las Californias Internacional (UDCI) found that between 2002 and 2010, the Baja film industry generated approximately US$88.7 million and created 7,185 jobs.61 The dynamic film industry in Baja led to the founding of the region’s first cinematography school in 2008 as part of the UDCI. It is also the only film school in Mexico outside of the Mexico City region. Prior to that, in 2004 UDCI created the first film festival in Baja California, the Corto Creativo UDCI Short Film Festival, which showcases the work of young filmmakers to the general public in an open-format festival. Students affiliated with the UDCI film school have worked on projects like “Fear the Walking Dead” (2015 TV Series) and Spectre (2015). And, in keeping with my research on film workers in the region, many move seamlessly across Hollywood projects and “local” ones. Students from the UDCI film school have had shorts screened at major festivals, including “Baja Taste” (2015), at the San Sebastián film festival; “Tiza” (2017), an official selection for TIFF Kids; and “Memín, crónica de un boxeador” (2014), an official selection for the San Diego Film

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Festival. Some students have also gone on to open their own production houses.62 But as ProMéxico points out, these gains are not limited to the Tijuana area. A 2017 report found that: • Creative industries are the country’s fifth strategic industrial sector. • Creative and media industries account for 7% GDP. • Mexico is the world’s eighteenth largest exporter of creativity goods and the only Latin American nation in the top 20. • Mexico produces over 100,000 hours of TV—exported to over 100 countries in more than 30 languages.63 Similarly, a 2015 IMCINE report found that the GDP of the film industry grew 9.1% between 2012 and 2013. The average increase during the period from 2008 to 2013 was 6.7%, which is above that of the culture sector and even the total national GDP, which was 1.4%. In other words, the economic performance of cinema is almost seven times more dynamic than the overall Mexican economy.64 Cristina Velasco, director of film-production support at IMCINE, makes it clear that one of the reasons for increased productions are new incentive laws that help draw foreign productions: “Last year, the Mexican Film Commission provided services to more than 130 international productions, which includes TV series, documentaries, feature films, commercials etc.”65 IMCINE reports that the economic performance of cinema is almost three times more dynamic than the Mexican economy overall. IMCINE also reports an increase in average annual compensation in the film industry: from 104,334 pesos in 2013, it rose to 106,366 pesos in 2014. They also reveal that the average annual compensation of the film industry in 2014 was similar to that for the printing of books, newspapers, and magazines.66 This all helps support my claim that while neoliberal globalization has led in extreme ways to economic precarity, it’s overstated to see runaways as a strong example of those trends. In fact, the laborer that is most clearly abused in the media industry is not the laborer on the film set; it is the laborer who creates the film stock, cameras, and technologies used on the film set. The working conditions in technology factories in China are the real ground zero of the story of labor abuse and global media.67 It is in Chinese factories producing technology for western markets that we can note the painful ways that the neoliberal market economy has changed the terms of work and

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rendered the human body nothing but a resource from which to extract energy. Interestingly, a runaway film shot in Tijuana offers us an excellent opportunity to think through the way that neoliberal globalization is changing the terms of work and its connection to the human body. Peruvian-born, California-based director Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer, according to Samantha Kountz, “envisions a dystopian world where technology is used by various corporations to extract labor without the ‘hassle’ of supporting their laborers.”68 Sleep Dealer is a complex, multilayered film that asks viewers to imagine a future world where the laboring body is completely detached from the object of their work. At the center of the film is the complicated ways that technology both oppresses laborers and helps keep them connected. Sleep Dealer takes place in a near-future Mexico, where Memo Cruz (Luis Fernando Peña) lives in a village in Oaxaca, Mexico with his family. Their daily life is a struggle organized around access to water since a US-based company has built a dam that has privatized the region’s water supply, charging them at a rate of $85 for 35 liters. Memo’s father would like him to learn to farm their family milpa but Memo dreams of becoming a hacker. He builds a makeshift radio and works on intercepting calls to the village and other radio signals. There he listens to people who have gone to Tijuana to become cyberbraceros—workers who connect via nodes implanted in their backs and arms so that they can control robots doing the actual labor on the other side of the border. In one call he hears an excited new cyberbracero brag that now he is a waiter in New York, only to correct himself and say “Well it seems like New York, but it could be L.A.” Rivera’s sci-fi border film brings up the exact labor issues I’ve been delving into in this final coda. As Memo later says in relation to the cyberbraceros: “This is the American Dream. We give to the United States what it has always wanted: all the work without the workers.” Cyberbraceros can work endlessly, often falling asleep at the job—hence the factories are called “sleep dealers.” The exhausted worker is then quickly replaced by another ready to plug in. The factory doesn’t worry about shift length or health care or safe working conditions. Bodies don’t have to cross borders to find work because their energy can be transmitted via technology. The process Sleep Dealer describes is only a slight exaggeration of the existing use of human labor in contemporary factory work. In this way, it takes the classic Marxian concepts of alienation and enhances them for the global economy. Recall that Marx identifies four types of alienation

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in labor under capitalism.69 First, the worker is alienated from the design of the product, then from work itself as it becomes repetitive and fragmented. Then the worker is disconnected from their “species being,” from their own existence as a human organism. Marx then describes the worker as alienated from other workers. Sleep Dealer imagines all of these levels of alienation in stark terms, but it also adds alienation from the location of their work. In the global economy of Sleep Dealer the worker is nothing but a source of energy that becomes work elsewhere. Memo’s radio signal gets intercepted, which allows the film to think about another way technology is used in the global era: surveillance and punishment. The radio is assumed to be linked to aquaterrorism and it catches the attention of the military. But in this Orwellian universe the punishment must be public. So the target is announced on a reality game show Drones. For Dale Hudson the opening shots of Drones “convey power and conflate security with corporate privatization.”70 The key is that the attack will also be assisted by the technology of “nodes.” This time, though, the one with the nodes is working on the other side of the border as a drone operator. Rudy Ramírez is a Mexican-American military contractor and Drones shows him zeroing in on Memo’s father and killing him. Overwhelmed with guilt over the fact that his radio led to the death of his father, Memo flees to Tijuana and hopes to get his own nodes so that he can work and send money home. Memo explains how the coyotek business has replaced the traditional coyotes who used to help people cross the border. Now that the border is sealed, workers simply hook up to their jobs without needing to be present physically. As the film trailer puts it: “Mexico . . . the near future. The border is closed . . . but the network is open. . . .” On the bus to Tijuana, Memo meets Luz Martinez (Leonor Varela), who sells her memories via her nodes to a program called TruNode, described as the “world’s number one memory market.” The program appears to be US-centered since the prompts are in English, a fact that also suggests that Luz works for the pleasure of those in the north. Luz plugs in and crafts short “memories” or stories that are then purchased by viewers across the border. It is telling that even the creative class in this film needs to submit to the node system. Luz can only make a living by “extracting” the stories of others. And, as her affection for Memo grows, she becomes increasingly uncomfortable about the way that she is lying to him so that she can tell TruNode his story. Later, she will apologize to him by giving him back his story on a disk, as though physically

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holding his story could compensate for the way she extracted profit from it earlier. Rivera uses this layer of the narrative to ask questions about who should profit on the stories of whom, especially since almost all of Luz’s subjects are lower-class farmers or workers whose lives are offered up as products to buy. Luz’s mining of their stories for profit creates a parallel with the other various ways the film shows that resources are pulled from within Mexico to sustain the north. When Luz decides to upload the story of meeting Memo, she attracts the attention of Rudy, who has been suffering from the guilt of killing Memo’s father. Rudy then begins to ask her to upload more about Memo, eventually figuring out how to find him. As Rudy enters Mexico, a robot border guard tells him he is entering at his own risk, a scene that is only slightly different from what the border is like today. When Rudy finds Memo he explains that he has been overwhelmed by guilt and that he was just following orders but wants to make things right. Memo, Luz, and Rudy hatch a plan that gets Rudy into the cyberbracero factory where he hooks up to the drone technology and manages to take out the dam that has been keeping water out of Memo’s village. Kountz notes that again technology “breaks a literal barrier.”71 What’s interesting is that this is a sci-fi film that does not craft the conflict as man versus technology; instead it is clearly class struggle that drives the tensions. While technology has made it easier for the cyberbraceros to “connect their [nervous] system[s] . . . to the global economy,” the nodes also allow for deep and meaningful connections, and they facilitate the rebellion that leads to the destruction of the dam.72 Thus, the problem isn’t the technological advancements of globalization and it is not the border-crossing; it is the increasing division of human life between those that serve and those that are served. The dystopian neoliberal world that has fragmented people and that attempts to extract every last resource from their bodies is reminiscent of the similar world constructed in Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006). Sleep Dealer, though, frames these issues entirely as a problem of the way global capitalism understands the working body. Memo sees a river flowing and thinks: “What happened to the river was happening to me. Sending my energy far.” Perhaps most importantly, as we think through the effects of globalization on locations and labor, it is worth analyzing how this film conflates the fact that it is both outsourcing and robotics that are deeply affecting the working class. And yet, the film refuses to allow either outsourcing or robotics to be the problem.

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Instead, it emphasizes that the problem is treating human lives as disposable, expendable, and interchangeable. This point is well taken in light of my analysis of labor and runaways. Sleep Dealer suggests that treating labor as a border issue misses the deeper ways that the neoliberal economy is reorganizing human life, redefining the nature of work, and reducing our ability to recognize common humanity. When Rudy heads south to atone for his “work” killing Memo’s father, Sleep Dealer utopically imagines a world where a drone operator can recognize that his target is a human being. While it may not yet be true that runaway film projects abuse labor on location, there is little doubt that the momentum is headed in that direction. As Miller et al. point out, the ethics of global Hollywood require attention to issues of labor reform: “To humanize the NICL, we need institutionalised labour standards that will maintain and develop the situation of workers across the global North and South.”73 Perhaps more importantly the decreasing power of labor and the declining work conditions in below-the-line film jobs even within the United States remind us that it is no longer a matter of the location of the project; rather, it is about the conditions of labor. This is why the story of Louisiana overtaking Hollywood as a site of film labor is a stark reminder that attention to labor does not hold to traditional borders. As Sleep Dealer imagines it, interest in defending labor is no longer an issue about borders; it is an issue about bare life in an economy that understands the human form as nothing but material to mine. Miller and Leger key into this issue when they suggest that cultural imperialism may not be the best approach for understanding labor in the global film economy: “If cultural imperialism has lost intellectual cachet (even as it has gained diplomatic and political adherents) perhaps the left should go back to where we began, to the person as laborer. The model of citizenship will have to deal with dedomiciled workers, with all the dispossession entailed in that status.”74 There is no better film to think through the notion of the dispossessed, dedomiciled worker than Sleep Dealer. Greg Elmer writes about the interchangeable nature of film locations and their effect on the runaway industry. He cites promotional materials from the Brazilian Film Commission that say “New York, Tokyo, London, Los Angeles, Havana and Tahiti are all in the same place: Brazil . . . All this in a country with an immense diversity of landscapes, rhythms and races, giving the impression that it is several countries rolled into one.”75 Similarly, The Puerto Rico Film Commission calls on producers to “Shoot all your locations in Puerto Rico.” And then offers a

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set of shot-location photos to signify their interchangeability with all the continents: “Africa, Asia, America, Australia, Europe.”76 And, of course, as we now know, even Baja California can seem like the Northern Atlantic filled with icebergs. The authentic location shoot may well be on the wane, especially given the reality that more and more films will likely be done with green-screen technologies and other computer-generated imaging. One day we may find ourselves nostalgic for the days when films were shot on any actual locations, runaway or not. Despite these changes, though, it still ruffles feathers to think of locations departing from the “real.” But is that the true problem caused by the globalization of film industry locations? I went to Tijuana asking all the wrong questions and focusing on all the wrong problems. This book has argued that it is time to change the questions we ask, the binaries we rely on, and the cognitive maps we privilege. If our interest is really focused on labor and not on protecting the Hollywood economy then we need to frame our worries over the labor consequences of runaways differently. Miller and Leger note that protectionism has not helped labor in many of the struggles over the media economy; it has only benefited corporate interests.77 In fact, as Sleep Dealer makes clear, while we worry about national borders, the corporate system may be eliminating the significance of the border as a dividing line for labor entirely. Sleep Dealer also suggests the utopic possibility that once the borders are no longer our fascination, then we might more readily appreciate lines of connection and solidarity. Just as the film enhances and elaborates on Marxist ideas of alienation, it also shows the persistent ways that those struggling find common ground, even if that “ground” is largely metaphorical. One of the most powerful features of the film is the way that it insists on how lives stay connected, even within a dystopic world where the human body has to be hooked up to nodes to produce value. Throughout the film there are moments of warmth and connection: in the phone calls Memo intercepts, in the family stories Memo’s father tells him, in Memo’s connection to Luz, and in the alliances Memo forms with other workers. This is not a film of complete social fragmentation and it ends with a utopic depiction of collective resistance. Sleep Dealer is a film about labor that was shot using runaway labor, but that isn’t the important part of the story. What makes Sleep Dealer such a noteworthy example of Latin American film in the era of globalization is the fact that it allows us to ask deep ethical questions about the neoliberal era and it frames those questions according to an entirely new critical paradigm.

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Notes























1. Toby Miller, Nitin Govil, John McMurria, Richard Maxwell, and Ting Wang, Global Hollywood 2 (London: British Film Institute, 2005), 138. 2. Ibid., 139. 3.  Dave McNary, “Runaway Drain?” Variety, July 31, 2006, accessed April 11, 2017, http://variety.com/2006/film/features/ runaway-drain-1200338692/. 4.  Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan, “International Film Production: Interests Motivations,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? Ed. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 39. 5. Folker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, and Otto Kreye, The New International Division of Labour: Structural Unemployment in Industrialised Countries and Industrialisation in Developing Countries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 8. 6. See Misha  MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 7.  Toby Miller and Marie Claire Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” in Television: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, Vol. 3, ed. Toby Miller (London: Routledge, 2003), 38. 8. Ibid. 9. “President Ernesto Zedillo Decorated Canadian Movie Director James Cameron: Press Release 1124,” Presidencia de la República: Sistema Internet de la Presidencia, October 26, 1998, accessed April 11, 2017, http://zedillo.presidencia.gob.mx/welcome/bulletins/b1124.htm. 10.  Miller and Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” 37. 11. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 165. 12. Ibid. 13.  See Tanner Mirrlees, Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization (New York: Routledge, 2013). 14.  Ben Goldsmith and Tom O’Regan. “International Film Production: Interests Motivations,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization?, ed. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 17. 15. Ibid. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid., 18. 18. Ibid., 15.

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19. Paul Thomas, “Runaways,” Film Quarterly 63, no. 2 (2009): 86. 20.  Robert R. Shandley, Runaway Romances: Hollywood’s Postwar Tour of Europe (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2009), 1. 21. Eric Johnston, quoted in Shandley, Runaway Romances, 17. 22. Shandley, Runaway Romances, 17. 23. Thomas Guback, “Hollywood’s International Market,” in The American Film Industry, ed. Tina Balio (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 479, quoted in Shandley, Runaway Romances, 17. 24.  Toby Miller and Richard Maxwell, “Film and Globalization,” in Communications Media, Globalization, and Empire, ed. Oliver BoydBarrett (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2007), 47. 25.  Tamara Falicov, “Hollywood in Latin America: How Mexico and Argentina Cope and Cooperate with the Behemoth of the North,” in The Contemporary Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul McDonald and Janet Wasko (Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008), 265. 26. Ibid. 27. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 164. 28. Ibid., 96. 29. Susan Christopherson, “Behind the Scenes: How Transnational Firms are Constructing a New International Division of Labor in Media Work,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? Ed. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 65–66. 30.  Toby Miller and Marie Claire Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” Emergences: Journal for the Study of Media & Composite Cultures 11, no. 1 (2001): 104. 31. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 138. 32. M.S. Katz, “The Global Success of Production Tax Incentives and the Migration of Feature Film Production from the U.S. to the World,” The Center for Entertainment Industry Data and Research, 2006, 7, accessed April 17, 2017, http://www.ceidr.org/2005CEIDRReport.pdf, quoted in Anthony Frampton, “Cross-Border Film Production: The Neoliberal Recolonization of an Exotic Island by Hollywood Pirates” (PhD Dissertation, Bowling Green State University, 2014), 2. 33. Frampton, “Cross-Border Film Production: The Neoliberal Recolonization of an Exotic Island by Hollywood Pirates,” 1. 34.  “U.S. Runaway Film and Television Production Study Report,” Association of Film Commissioners International, accessed April 11, 2017, http://www.afci.org/sites/default/files/document-library/monitorreportonrunawayprod.pdf. 35. Ibid., 3.

476  S.A. McCLENNEN 36.  Vincent Mosco, “Creative Differences: The Problems of Outsourcing Knowledge and Media Labor,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? ed. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 94. 37. Ibid., 94. 38. Ibid., 2. 39. Ibid., 5. 40.  Miller and Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” 102. 41. Ibid., 105. 42. Catherine McKercher, “Hollywood Unions and the Fight for Work,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? ed. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 118. 43. Ibid., 125. 44. Ibid. 45.  Miller and Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” 106. 46. Frampton, “Cross-Border Film Production: The Neoliberal Recolonization of an Exotic Island by Hollywood Pirates,” iii. 47.  Katz, “The Global Success of Production Tax Incentives and the Migration of Feature Film Production from the U.S. to the World,” 4. 48. “2013 Feature Film Production Report,” 2. 49.  Christopherson, “Behind the Scenes: How Transnational Firms are Constructing a New International Division of Labor in Media Work,” 68. 50.  Vicki Mayer, “The Production of Extras in a Precarious Creative Economy,” in Precarious Creativity: Global Media, Local Labor, ed. Michael Curtin and Kevin Sanson (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016), 64. 51. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 165. 52. Gabby Torres, “The Town that Built the Titanic Is Sinking,” Vice, May 4, 2012, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/ the-town-that-built-the-titanic-is-sinking-0000187-v19n4. 53. Daniel Trump, “Salary Per Hour for a Movie Extra,” Chron, June 22, 2013, accessed April 12, 2017, http://work.chron.com/salary-perhour-movie-extra-22563.html. 54.  “Mexico: Wages, Maquiladoras, NAFTA,” Migration News 5, no. 2 (February 1998), accessed April 12, 2017, https://migration.ucdavis. edu/mn/more.php?id=1451. 55. Ibid.

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56. Ibid. 57. Misha MacLaird, Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 181. 58. Sandra Dibble, “Film Set in World War II Being Shot in Baja California,” San Diego Union Tribune, September 2, 2016, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-film-set-world-war-ii-being-shot-baja-california-2011aug01-story.html. 59. “All is Lost,” Baja Studios, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.bajafilmstudios.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id= 149%3Aall-is-lost&catid=34%3Ablog&Itemid=173. 60. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 139. 61. Carlos Carrillo (UDCI Director de Desarrollo Cinematográfico), email communication with author, April 8, 2017. 62. Ibid. 63. “México Creative Industries,” ProMéxico: Trade and Investment, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.promexico.gob.mx/documentos/folletos-sectoriales/creative-industries.pdf. 64.  “Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2016,” Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía, 2017, 33, accessed April 12, 2017, http://www.imcine. gob.mx/sites/536bfc0fa137610966000002/content_entry56e33f9f9d72792dff003a13/58c56cab9d7279400e00114c/files/Anuario_estadistico_de_cine_mexicano_2016.pdf. 65.  Anna Marie de la Fuente, “Film, TV Shoots in Mexico on the Rise,” Variety, March 13, 2017, accessed April 12, 2017, http://variety.com/2017/film/festivals/shooting-mexico-filmtv-production-rise-1202007628/. 66. “Anuario Estadístico de Cine Mexicano 2016,” 30. 67. Michael Blanding and Heather White, “How China Is Screwing Over Its Poisoned Factory Workers,” Wired, April 6, 2015, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.wired.com/2015/04/inside-chinese-factories/. 68. Samantha Kountz, “The Other Side of the Wall: Technology and Borders in Sleep Dealer,” International Journal of Humanities and Cultural Studies 1, no. 4 (March 2015): 287. 69.  See Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” Marxists.org, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/preface.htm. 70. Dale Hudson, “Race and Labor, Unplugged: Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer,” Flow, December 5, 2011, accessed April 12, 2017, https://www.flowjournal.org/2011/12/race-labor-unplugged/. 71. Kountz, “The Other Side of the Wall: Technology and Borders in Sleep Dealer,” 297. 72. Ibid., 299.

478  S.A. McCLENNEN 73. Miller et al., Global Hollywood 2, 346. 74.  Miller and Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” 108. 75. Greg Elmer, “Global Locations in Los Angeles: The Promotion of New Cinematic Spaces,” in Cross-Border Cultural Production: Economic Runaway or Globalization? ed. Janet Wasko and Mary Erickson (Youngstown, NY: Cambria Press, 2008), 150. 76. Ibid., 153. 77.  Miller and Leger, “Runaway Production, Runaway Consumption, Runaway Citizenship: The New International Division of Cultural Labor,” 108.

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Venegas, Cristina. “Cuban Filmmaking: Assessing Challenges and Opportunities.” Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. Accessed January 4, 2017. https://cri.fiu.edu/research/commissionedreports/cubanfilmmaking-venegas.pdf. Venegas, Cristina. “Thinking Regionally: Singular in Diversity and Diverse in Unity.” In Media Industries: History, Theory, and Method. Edited by Jennifer Holt and Alisa Perren. Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009. 120–130. Vezzetti, Hugo. “Archivo y memorias del presente: Elefante Blanco de Pablo Trapero: el padre Mugica, los pobres y la violencia.” A contracorriente 12, no. 1 (Fall 2014): 179–190. Vieytes, Marcos. “Metegol, de Juan José Campanella.” Hacerse la crítica. July 18, 2013. Accessed March 7, 2017. http://hacerselacritica.blogspot.com. ar/2013/07/metegol-de-juan-jose-campanella.html. Villarejo, Amy. “Bus 174 and the Living Present.” Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2006): 113–118. Villarroya, Anna. “Ibermedia Programme.” Mobility Matters. Accessed December 29, 2016. http://www.mobility-matters.eu/web/files/33/en/Ibermedia_ Programme.pdf. Villazana, Libia. “Hegemony Conditions in the Coproduction Cinema of Latin America: The Role of Spain.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 49, no. 2 (2008): 65–85. Project MUSE. Vitali, Valentina, and Paul Willemen, eds. Theorising National Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 2006. Walker, Alissa. “The Crying Game: How Disney Killed Miramax, Now with Weinstein Co. Layoffs!” Liberty Newspost. January 29, 2005. Accessed January 14, 2017. https://www.scribd.com/document/26129307/ Liberty-Newspost-Jan-30-10-Edition. Wasko, Janet. “Is it a Small World, After All?” In Dazzled by Disney? The Global Audiences Project. Edited by Janet Wasko, Mark Phillips, and Eileen R. Meehan. London: Leicester University Press, 2001. 3–28. Wayne, Mike. Political Film: The Dialectics of Third Cinema. Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2001. Weber, René. “La pared que habla: La fascinante experiencia de la difusión popular del Grupo Chaski.” Butaca Sanmarquina 1.2 (1987): 8–9. Weissberg, Jay. “Review: ‘The Elite Squad.’” Variety. October 14, 2013. Accessed March 25, 2017. http://variety.com/2008/film/markets-festivals/ the-elite-squad-1200548140/. West, Dennis. “Strawberry and Chocolate, Ice Cream and Tolerance: Interviews with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Juan Carlos Tabío.” Cineaste 21, no. 1–2 (1995): 16–20.

520  Works Cited “White Elephant (2012): Awards.” Internet Movie Database. Accessed March 12, 2017. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2132324/awards?ref_=tt_awd. “The Wild Ones (2012).” Internet Movie Database. Accessed March 12, 2017. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2336361/. Williams, Alan Larson. Introduction to Film and Nationalism. Edited by Alan Larson Williams. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. 1–22. Wolfson, Nathan. “Poetry, Politics and the Postman: Michael Radford’s Il Postino (The Postman).” The News (Eureka, California). 1995. Accessed January 14, 2017. http://www.nathanwolfson.com/scholarship/postman.htm. Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk. Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011. “World Cinema Fund.” Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin. Accessed December 29, 2016. https://www.berlinale.de/en/branche/world_cinema_fund/wcf_ profil/index.html. Wu, Harmony H. “Consuming Tacos and Enchiladas: Gender and the Nation in Como agua para chocolate.” In Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video. Edited by Chon A. Noriega. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. 174–192. Wyatt, Justin. “The Formation of the ‘Major Independent’: Miramax, New Line and the New Hollywood.” In Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. Edited by Steve Neale and Murray Smith. London: Routledge, 1998. 74–90. Wyatt, Justin. High Concept: Movies and Marketing in Hollywood. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Yúdice, George. The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Yúdice, George. “Translator’s Introduction: From Hybridity to Policy–For a Purposeful Cultural Studies.” In Consumers and Citizens by Néstor García Canclini. Translated by George Yúdice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. ix–xxviii.

Filmography 3 efes (3 Fs). Directed by Carlos Gerbase. 2007. 21 Grams. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2003. 360. Directed by Fernando Meirelles. 2011. A Day Without a Mexican. Directed by Sergio Arau. 2004. A Little Princess. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 1995. All is Lost. Directed by J. C. Chandor. 2013. Amores perros. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2000. Andahuaylas—suenen las campanas. Directed by María Barea, Grupo Chaski. 1987. Antuca. Directed by María Barea, Grupo Chaski. 1992.

Works Cited

  521

Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience). Directed by Antonio Skármeta. 1983. Avatar. Directed by James Cameron. 2009. Babel. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2006. “Baja Taste.” Directed by Roberto Nájera. 2015. Barro y Bambu. Directed by María Barea, Grupo Chaski. 1991. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. Directed by John Madden. 2012. The Big Short. Directed by Adam McKay. 2015. Birdman. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2014. Biutiful. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2010. Blade II. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. 2002. Blindness. Directed by Fernando Meirelles. 2008. Bolivia. Directed by Adrián Caetano. 2001. The Boy Who Cried Bitch. Directed by Juan José Campanella. 1991. Buena Vista Social Club. Directed by Wim Wenders. 1999. Carancho. Directed by Pablo Trapero. 2010. Carandiru. Directed by Héctor Babenco. 2003. Casa de mi Padre. Directed by Matt Piedmont. 2012. Cazuza: O Tempo Não Pára (Cazuza: Time Doesn’t Stop). Directed by Walter Carvalho and Sandra Werneck. 2004. Cecilia. Directed by Humberto Solás. 1982. Cenizas del Paraíso (Ashes of Paradise). Directed by Marcelo Piñeyro. 1997. Central do Brasil (Central Station). Directed by Walter Salles. 1998. Children of Men. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 2006. Cidade de Deus (City of God). Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. 2002. Cidade dos Homens (City of Men). Directed by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund. TV Miniseries. 2002–2005. Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate). Directed by Alfonso Arau. 1992. Comodines (Cops). Directed by Jorge Nisco and Daniel Barone. 1997. Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an Escape). Directed by Israel Adrián Caetano. 2006. Deep Blue Sea. Directed by Renny Harlin. 1999. Desierto. Directed by Jonás Cuarón. 2015. Deus é brasileiro (God Is Brazilian). Directed by Carlos Diegues. 2003. Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil). Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1964. Di Cavalcanti. Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1977. Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries). Directed by Walter Salles. 2004. Dois filhos de Francisco (Two Sons of Francisco). Directed by Breno Silveira. 2005. El bonaerense. Directed by Pablo Trapero. 2002. El brigadista (The Literacy Teacher). Directed by Octavio Cortázar. 1977.

522  Works Cited El callejón de los milagros (Midaq Alley). Directed by Jorge Fons. 1995. El Clan (The Clan). Directed by Pablo Trapero. 2015. El coraje del pueblo (The Night of San Juan, The Courage of the People). Directed by Jorge Sanjinés. 1971. El crimen del Padre Amaro (The Crime of Padre Amaro). Directed by Carlos Carrera. 2002. El enemigo principal (The Principle Enemy, Jatun auka). Directed by Jorge Sanjinés. 1972. El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone). Directed by Guillermo del Toro. 2001. El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride). Directed by Juan José Campanella. 2001. El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth). Directed by Guillermo del Toro. 2006. El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (Same Love, Same Rain). Directed by Juan José Campanella. 1999. El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes). Directed by Juan José Campanella. 2009. El violín (The Violin). Directed by Francisco Vargas. 2005. Elefante blanco (White Elephant). Directed by Pablo Trapero. 2012. Erendira. Directed by Ruy Guerra. 1983. Fack ju Göhte (Suck Me Shakespeer). Directed by Bora Dagtekin. 2013. Fahrenheit 9/11. Directed by Michael Moore. 2004. Familia rodante (Rolling Family). Directed by Pablo Trapero. 2004. “Fear the Walking Dead.” Created by Dave Erickson and Robert Kirkman. TV Series. 2015. Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate). Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. 1993. From Prada to Nada. Directed by Angel Gracia. 2011. Gravity. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 2013. Great Expectations. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 1998. Gregorio. Directed by Fernando Espinoza, Grupo Chaski. 1982. Habana Blues. Directed by Benito Zambrano. 2005. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 2004. Hellboy. Directed by Guillermo del Toro. 2004. High School Musical: El desafío (Viva High School Musical). Directed by Eduardo Ripari. 2008. Hijas de la guerra (Daughters of War). Directed by María Barea, Grupo Chaski. 1998. Il Postino (The Postman). Directed by Michael Radford. 1994. Infancia clandestina (Clandestine Childhood). Directed by Benjamin Ávila. 2011. Johnny cien pesos (Johnny One Hundred Pesos). Directed by Gustavo Graef Marino. 1993.

Works Cited

  523

Juliana. Directed by Fernando Espinoza and Alejandro Legaspi, Grupo Chaski. 1989. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Directed by Hector Babenco. 1985. La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs). Directed by Francisco Lombardi. 1985. La dictadura perfecta (The Perfect Dictatorship). Directed by Luis Estrada. 2014. La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces). Directed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino. 1968. La larga noche de Francisco Sanctis (The Long Night of Francisco Sanctis). Directed by Francisco Márquez and Andrea Testa. 2016. La ley de Herodes (Herod’s Law). Directed by Luis Estrada. 1999. La mala educación (Bad Education). Directed by Pedro Almodóvar. 2004. La sexta parte del mundo (The Sixth Part of the World). Directed by Julio García Espinosa. 1977. Ladrones. Directed by Joe Menendez. 2015. Leonera (Lion’s Den). Directed by Pablo Trapero. 2008. Les quatre cents coups (The 400 Blows). Directed by François Truffaut. 1959. Lista de espera (The Waiting List). Directed by Juan Carlos Tabío. 2000. Little Boy. Directed by Alejandro Monteverde. 2015. Los labios (The Lips). Directed by Iván Fund and Santiago Loza. 2010. Los salvajes (The Wild Ones). Directed by Alejandro Fadel. 2012. Love Walked In. Directed by Juan José Campanella. 1997. Lucía. Directed by Humberto Solás. 1968. Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda’s Moon). Directed by Juan José Campanella. 2004. Mala (Evil Woman). Directed by Adrián Caetano. 2013. Malabrigo. Directed by Alberto Durant. 1986. Man on Fire. Directed by Tony Scott. 2004. Manuela. Directed by Humberto Solás. 1966. María Candelaria (Xochimilco). Directed by Emilio Fernández. 1944. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. Directed by Peter Weir. 2003. Me casé con un boludo. Directed by Juan Taratuto. 2016. “Memín, crónica de un boxeador” (“Memin: Portrait of a Boxer”). Directed by Rodrigo Alvarez Flores. 2014. Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment). Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. 1968. Metegol (Underdogs). Directed by Juan José Campanella. 2013. Miss Universo en el Perú (Miss Universe in Peru). Directed by Grupo Chaski. 1982. “Mozart in the Jungle.” Created by Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Paul Weitz. Amazon TV Series. 2014–2017. Mujeres del planeta (Women of the World). Directed by María Barea. 1982.

524  Works Cited Mundo grúa (Crane World). Directed by Pablo Trapero. 1999. Narcos. Produced by José Padilha. Netflix TV Series. 2015–. Neruda. Directed by Pablo Larraín. 2016. Night of the Iguana. Directed by John Huston. 1964. No. Directed by Pablo Larraín. 2012. No habrá más penas ni olvido (Funny Dirty Little War). Directed by Héctor Olivera. 1983. No manches Frida. Directed by Nacho G. Velilla. 2016. No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included). Directed by Eugenio Derbez. 2013. Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (News from a Personal War). Directed by Kátia Lund and João Moreira Salles. 1999. Nueve reinas (Nine Queens). Directed by Fabián Bielinsky. 2000. O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation). Directed by Cao Hamburger. 2006. O Dragão da Maldade contra o Santo Guerreiro (Antonio das Mortes). Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1969. Ônibus 174 (Bus 174). Directed by José Padilha. 2002. Pixote. Directed by Hector Babenco. 1981. Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes). Adrián Caetano and Bruno Stagnaro. 1998. Polvo rojo (Red Dust). Directed by Jesús Díaz. 1982. Porcon. Directed by María Barea, Grupo Chaski. 1989, 1992. Porque quería estudiar. Directed by María Barea, Grupo Chaski. 1990. Presunto culpable (Presumed Guilty). Directed by Roberto Hernández and Geoffrey Smith. 2008. ¿Quién es Dayani Cristal? (Who is Dayani Cristal?). Directed by Marc Silver. 2013. Rapado (Cropped Head). Directed by Martín Rejtman. 1992. Rara. Directed by Pepa San Martín. 2016. Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales). Directed by Damián Szifrón. 2014. Retrato de Teresa (Portrait of Teresa). Directed by Pastor Vega. 1979. RoboCop. Directed by José Padilha. 2014. Roman Holiday. Directed by William Wyler. 1953. Rosewater. Directed by Jon Stewart. 2014. Rudo y cursi. Directed by Carlos Cuarón. 2008. Scary Movie franchise. Directed by Keenen Ivory Wayans, David Zucker, or Malcolm D. Lee. 2000, 2001, 2003, 2006, 2013. Sexo, pudor, y lágrimas (Sex, Shame and Tears). Directed by Antonio Serrano. 1999. Sin nombre. Directed by Cary Joji Fukunaga. 2009. Sleep Dealer. Directed by Alex Rivera. 2008.

Works Cited

  525

Sólo con tu pareja (Only With Your Partner). Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 1991. Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba). Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. 1964. Sueños lejanos (Distant Dreams). Directed by Alejandro Legaspi, Grupo Chaski. 2006. Suite Habana (Havana Suite). Directed by Fernando Pérez. 2003. También la lluvia (Even the Rain). Directed by Icíar Bollaín. 2010. Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth). Directed by Glauber Rocha. 1967. ¡Three Amigos! Directed by John Landis. 1986. The Constant Gardener. Directed by Fernando Meirelles. 2005. The Revenant. Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. 2015. The Shock Doctrine. Directed by Jonás Cuarón. Short Documentary. 2007. The Three Caballeros. Directed by Norman Ferguson. 1944. Tire dié (Throw Ten or Toss Me a Dime). Directed by Fernando Birri. 1960. Titanic. Directed by James Cameron. 1997. Todo el poder. Directed by Fernando Sariñana. 2000. Travesía del desierto. Directed by Mauricio Walerstein. 2012. Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad). Directed by José Padilha. 2007. Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within). Directed by José Padilha. 2010. Ukamau (And So It Is). Directed by Jorge Sanjinés, Grupo Ukamau. 1966. Un gallo con muchos huevos (Huevos: Little Rooster’s Egg-cellent Adventure). Directed by Gabriel Riva Palacio Alatriste and Rodolfo Riva-Palacio Alatriste. 2015. Un oso rojo (Red Bear). Directed by Adrián Caetano. 2002. Wakolda (The German Doctor). Directed by Lucía Puenzo. 2013. Y tu mamá también. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón. 2001. Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor). Directed by Jorge Sanjinés. 1969.

Index

0–9 21 Grams (González Iñárritu), 385, 409, 422, 424, 426, 440 360 (Meirelles), 349 A Academy Awards, 58, 59, 94, 106, 116, 121, 249, 317, 318, 330, 332, 346, 349, 351, 356, 372, 385, 387, 388, 407, 434, 437, 441, 453. See also Oscars Aesthetic(s) of Hunger, 334–350, 375. See also Rocha, Glauber Agamben, Giorgio, 266, 319, 421. See also Bare life Agência Nacional do Cinema. See ANCINE Aguilar, Gonzalo, ix, 261, 270, 279, 284, 291–295, 313, 318, 320, 321, 323, 325 Aide aux cinémas du monde (World Cinema Support), 76, 103, 104, 106, 136

ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America/Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América), 125 Aldama, Frederick Luis, 153, 187, 228, 229, 243, 420, 447 Alfonsín, Raúl (Argentine President, 1983–88), 274 Aliança Francesa (French Alliance), 233 A-list Film Festivals, 169, 174. See also Cannes Film Festival; Toronto Film Festival Almodóvar, Pedro, 58, 84, 106, 131, 136, 325, 434, 435 El Deseo, 84, 131 Altavista, 153, 420 Altruism, problems with, 103, 105, 107, 174 Alvaray, Luisela, 27, 36, 63, 65, 70, 71, 122, 123, 138, 150–152, 186, 187, 250, 258, 436, 449 Amaranta. See Producciones Amaranta Amazon (esp. streaming service), 180, 181, 435

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018 S.A. McClennen, Globalization and Latin American Cinema, Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57060-0

527

528  Index Ambulante Documentary Film Festival, 121, 182, 240, 436 Ambulante California, 215 AMC Cinema and Theaters, 1, 23, 24, 37, 50, 58, 110, 111, 227, 466 Americanization of films, 79 Amores perros (González Iñárritu), 152, 176, 192, 254, 385, 388, 409, 420–423, 424, 426, 434, 440, 442, 447 ANCINE (Agência Nacional do Cinema–Brazil), 127, 220, 357, 358, 370, 372, 373, 379, 380, 381 Andermann, Jens, 261, 268, 284, 289, 307, 311, 313, 318, 320–322, 325, 326 Anderson, Benedict R., 33 Anonymous Content, 423. See also Babel Antiglobalization, 66, 271 Antín, Manuel, 274, 315. See also INC (Instituto Nacional de Cine) Appadurai, Arjun, 3, 4, 18, 39, 47, 306, 324 Araribóia Cine, 233 Ardiente paciencia (Burning Patience; Skármeta), 163, 190 Argentina Sono Film, 291 Argentine Dirty War, affect on films, 261, 274 Arguedas, José María, 201 Aries, 291 Arriaga, Guillermo, 419 Art house theaters, 26, 57, 60, 69, 85, 128, 142, 144, 155, 156, 157, 196, 198, 210, 231–235, 250, 261, 263, 274, 275, 291 Article 226 of the Ley del Impuesto Sobre la Renta [Income Tax Law], 414. See also EFICINE Artz, Lee, 17, 19, 24, 30, 31, 36, 37, 49, 50, 51, 52

Ashoka, 205 Auteur, 199, 237, 264, 265, 268, 270, 275, 283, 289, 290, 307, 310, 413, 419, 420. See also Individual filmmakers’ names Avatar (Cameron), 334, 368 Azteca, 153, 249 B Babel (González Iñárritu), 42, 102, 176, 248, 385, 386, 397, 405, 409, 422, 423–429, 441, 447 Babenco, Hector, 36, 119, 153, 334, 350–362, 372, 376, 377 BAFICI (Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema), 169, 180, 193, 276, 316 Barber, Benjamin, 39 Bardem, Javier, 430 Bare life, 266, 282, 319, 338, 341, 343, 364, 389, 401, 421, 472. See also Agamben, Giorgio Barreto, Luis Carlos, 147, 198 Bauman, Zygmunt, 27, 50, 66, 296, 323, 391, 397, 404, 437, 443, 444, 449 BD Cine, 58 Bedoya, Ricardo, 204, 237, 238 Bemberg, María Luisa, 271 Benevolent altruism, 103. See also Altruism, problems with; Colonial cultural imbalances; Hegemony; Neoimperialism; Postcolonial Bentes, Ivana, 252, 335, 342, 375 Beverley, John, 44, 52 Bielinsky, Fabián, 36, 283 The Big Short (McKay), 6 “Big Six” media megacorporations or mega media corporations, 6, 24, 36, 56, 59, 246. See also Comcast;

Index

Disney; Fox (NewsCorp); Sony; Warner International Biopolitics, x, 31, 32, 38, 44, 267, 280, 281, 396, 398, 400. See also Foucault, Michel biopolitical, 32, 42, 44, 45, 255–256, 267, 306, 336, 339, 343, 353, 364, 389, 396 Birdman (González Iñárritu), 249, 258, 433, 441 Birri, Fernando, 63, 77, 199, 225, 242, 268, 269, 270, 272, 319, 320 Santa Fe Documentary School, 199 Biutiful (González Iñárritu), 409, 429–434, 441, 448 Blade II (del Toro), 385 Blim, 181. See also Netflix; Televisa Blind bidding, 142 Blindness (Meirelles), 349, 375, 435 B-list festivals, 169. See also BAFICI, for example Block booking, 142, 225, 274–275 Blood Window, 183. See also Ventana Sur Bolívar, Simón, 124 Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America/Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América. See ALBA Bolivia (Caetano), 263, 264–267, 270, 277–279, 280–282, 284– 286, 317, 319, 320, 321 Bollaín, Icíar, 59, 70, 248, 434 BOPE (Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais), 334, 365– 367, 369–370 Borges, Jorge Luis, 183 The Boy Who Cried Bitch (Campanella), 308 Brannon Donoghue, Courtney, 108, 117–120, 136, 138, 356, 374, 377

  529

BRICS nations, 14, 17, 21 British Film Institute (BFI), 48, 51, 128, 131, 141, 185, 192, 447, 474 Buena Vista Pictures, 36, 58, 70, 114, 149, 150, 152, 157, 188. See also Disney Buena Vista Social Club (Wenders), 94, 134 Buenos Aires Festival de Cine Independiente (Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema). See BAFICI Burman, Daniel, 283 Burton, Julianne, 81, 130, 132, 185, 188, 189, 236, 258, 320 C CACI (Conferencia de Autoridades Cinematográficas de Iberoamerica), 124, 139. See also Programa Ibermedia Caetano, Israel Adrián, 41, 263, 264–289, 297, 316, 317, 319, 320–323 Caliban analogy, 10, 110 Cámara nacional de la industria cinematográfica. See CANACINE Campanella, Juan José, 37, 101, 115, 220, 249, 262–264, 297, 307–315, 317, 325 CANACINE (Cámara nacional de la industria cinematográfica), 226, 418, 419 Canal +, 60, 91, 94, 291 Canana films, 120–122, 182, 435, 436, 448. See also Ambulante Documentary Film Festival; García Bernal, Gael; Luna, Diego Canana OnDemand, 121

530  Index Cannes Film Festival, 143, 144, 169, 172, 174, 175–177, 183, 192, 193, 317, 318, 334, 420, 436 See also Ventana Sur Palme d’Or, 175, 176 Prix de la mise en scène (Best Director), 176, 334 Carancho (Trapero), 115, 137, 298, 299 Carandiru (Babenco), 36, 119, 120, 152, 153, 248, 334, 356, 359, 360, 361, 362, 372 Caravana Documental, 182 CARICOM (Caribbean Community), 125 Carpio, Oswaldo, 200, 202, 237 Casa de mi Padre (Piedmont), 111, 137 Cecilia (Solás), 93 Cendejas, Santiago, 253 Cenizas del Paraíso (Ashes of Paradise; Piñeyro), 114 Central do Brasil (Central Station; Salles), 152, 248, 330, 333, 372, 374 Central Films, 423. See also Babel Centro de Capacitación Cinematográfica (CCC), 436 Centro Sperimentale in Rome, ix, 92, 269 Cervantes Institute, 113 Cha Cha Cha, 117, 118, 433, 448. See also Cuarón, Alfonso; del Toro, Guillermo; González Inárritu, Alejandro Chanan, Michael, 68, 71, 76, 129, 185, 319 Chanchada musicals, 329, 336 Chaski. See Grupo Chaski Che Guevara, 58, 66–67, 165, 167, 207, 273, 434

Children of Men (Cuarón), 22, 42, 385, 387, 389, 391, 392, 397, 398, 400, 402, 403, 424, 425, 441, 444, 471 Churubusco Studios, 454, 457 Cidade de Deus (City of God; Meirelles and Lund), 27, 248, 332–350, 355, 359, 362, 367, 372, 375 Cidade dos Homens (City of Men; Meirelles and Lund), 344 Cine Arte UFF, 233, 244 Cine Club Cuzco, 201, 204 Cine Club Mon Amour, 233 Cine Club Núcleo, 234 Cine en Construcción, 106 Cine Latino, 200, 212, 236 Cinema Center, 219 Cinema Nôvo, 78, 129, 146, 186, 206, 251, 258, 329–337, 339, 342, 351, 352, 354, 355, 362. See also Pereira dos Santos, Nelson; Rocha, Glauber Cinema on demand (COD), 182 Cinemark, 110, 197, 218–220, 227, 229 Cinema vérité, 92. See also Nouvelle vague Cinépolis, 24, 198, 214, 222, 226–231, 235, 242, 243, 247, 411, 419 Ruta Cinépolis, 229 Vamos Todos a Cinépolis (their philanthropic foundation), 229 Clarín, 21, 24, 114, 249, 283, 287, 322, 324 Cochabamba Water Crisis, 59, 67, 70, 98, 434 Colonial cultural imbalances, 22, 60, 104, 107. See also Hegemony; Neoimperialism; Postcolonial colonizer and colonized, traditional markers of, 66

Index

colonial dynamic, re-iteration of the, 91, 97 paternalistic efforts to counteract the legacies of colonial cultural imbalances, 104 replica of the colonial project, 73 Colonialist ideology, 118, 463. See also Neoimperialism Columbia Pictures, 36, 118, 122, 146, 150, 152, 153, 359 COMEFILM (Comisión Mexicana de Filmaciones/Mexican Film Commission), 439, 451, 468 Common market, 8, 77, 123–125, 320 Como agua para chocolate (Like Water for Chocolate; Arau), 47, 143, 144, 155, 160–164, 166, 167, 189, 385 Comodines (Cops; Nisco and Barone), 275 Comaroff, Jean and John, 13, 15, 48. See also Ethno-preneurialism Ethnicity, Inc., 13, 48 Millennial Capitalism, 15, 48 Compañía Operadora de Teatros S. A. (COTSA), 221 Compay Segundo, 95 Conferencia de Autoridades Cinematográficas de Iberoamerica (Conference of Iberian-American Cinematographic Authorities). See CACI Congreso Hispanoamericano (1931), 73–74, 124 The Constant Gardener (Meirelles), 22, 255, 333, 344–350, 375 Convertibility Law, 290, 317 Coproduction bodies that invest in and support Latin American filmmaking, 74, 76, 96. See also “Aide aux cinémas du monde”

  531

(World Cinema Support); Fonds Sud; Hubert Bals Fund; Programa Ibermedia; SØRFOND;World Cinema Fund Corazón, 153 Corporate Philanthropy, benefit to art house theaters, 232 CORTO CREATIVO UDCI Short Film Festival, 467 Creative Europe (European Commission), 183 Crónica de una fuga (Chronicle of an Escape; Caetano), 284 Cuarón, Alfonso, 22, 42, 118, 230, 249, 253, 255, 385, 387–392, 397–408, 412, 419, 422, 424, 433, 434, 439–441, 444, 445, 446, 448, 471 Cuarón, Jonás, 389, 419, 434 Cuban films. See also ICAIC Castro, Fidel, 86, 87, 89, 165 Festival of New Filmmakers, 89 Propaganda, Castrist, 165 RTV Commercial, 89 Soviet influence in Cuban film, 87, 88, 92–95, 133, 246 Cuban Revolution, 10, 86, 90, 91–93, 94, 130, 132, 134, 170, 196, 273, 337 Cultural homogeneity, vii, 3–4, 18–19, 28, 35, 38, 63, 69, 82, 84, 109, 119, 144, 213, 231, 245, 256, 387, 426 refuting the notion of globalization as, 144 Cultural tourism, 7, 58, 96 D Darín, Ricardo, 302, 303, 309, 311, 323, 324 da Silva, Fernando Ramos, 352

532  Index Dávila, Arlene, 299, 324 A Day Without a Mexican (Arau), 177 de Kirchner, Cristina Fernández (2007–2015), 299, 317 de la Rúa, Fernando (President of Argentina in 2001), 277, 317 del Río, Dolores, 457 del Toro, Guillermo, 42, 117, 230, 253, 325, 385, 422, 433, 436, 448 de Mello, Fernando Collor (Brazil, 1990–92), 251, 329, 355, 371, 372 Dennison, Stephanie, 66, 69, 71, 76, 80, 82, 129, 130, 131, 182, 193, 330, 331, 374 Dependency theory, 9, 11, 20, 266–273, 278, 320, 321 de Sica, Vittorio, 269 Desierto (Jonás Cuarón), 419, 434 Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (Black God, White Devil; Rocha), 338 Developmentalist economics, 12, 262, 266, 271–273, 276, 278 development theory, 266, 271, 272 Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries; Salles), 58, 59, 61, 63–67, 70, 75, 151, 152, 333, 388, 434 Di Cavalcanti (Rocha), 176, 335 Difilme, 147 Direct TV, 200 Disney, 6, 30, 36, 37, 56, 58, 70, 76, 109, 114, 116, 118, 144, 149, 154, 156, 157, 158, 159, 168, 188, 189, 191, 249, 253, 283, 385. See also Buena Vista Pictures; Merchant-Ivory; Miramax Donostia-San Sebastián International Film Festival. See San Sebastián International Film Festival

Doubleday Publishing, 167 Duhalde, Eduardo, 277, 290, 291, 317 Duncombe, Stephen, 26, 50 Dynamo, 120–122 E EFICINE (Article 226 of the Ley del Impuesto Sobre la Renta [Income Tax Law]), 414, 441, 450. See also Article 226 Eimbcke, Fernando, 387 Ejidos, 400 El amante cine, 268, 276 El bonaerense (Trapero), 263, 286, 290, 291–297, 298, 302, 317, 323 El callejón de los milagros (Midaq Alley, Fons), 385 El Clan (The Clan; Trapero), 290, 292 El coraje del pueblo (The Night of San Juan, The Courage of the People; Sanjinés), 206, 238 El crimen del Padre Amaro (Carrera), 413, 434, 446 El Deseo. See Almodóvar, Pedro Elefante blanco, 299, 300, 304, 324 Elefante blanco (White Elephant; Trapero), 27, 36, 115, 262, 263, 290, 291, 299, 300, 302, 303, 305, 310, 312, 317, 323, 324, 327 El enemigo principal (The Principle Enemy, Jatun auka; Sanjinés), 201 El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone; del Toro), 385 El hijo de la novia (Son of the Bride; Campanella), 37, 114, 115, 152, 262, 307, 309–311, 313, 317, 326

Index

El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth; del Toro), 42, 102, 385 El mismo amor, la misma lluvia (Same Love, Same Rain; Campanella), 248, 308, 325 El secreto de sus ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes; Campanella), 249, 262, 317, 326 El violín (The Violin; Vargas), 436, 449 Embrafilme (Empresa Brasileira de Filmes/Brazilian Film Company), 10, 147, 250, 329, 331, 332, 334, 350–352, 355, 371 Escalante, Amat, 387 Espinosa, Julio García. See García Espinosa, Julio Ethical turn in Latin American cultural studies, 4, 8, 17, 43–44 Ethno-preneurialism, 13 EU (European Union), 28, 81, 101, 124, 198, 234 EU Media Mundus Program, 103 Eurimages, 59, 96–99, 134 Euro-altruistic funds, 103, 105 European Cinema Support Fund, 59 European Convention on Cinematic Co-productions (1992), 98 European Union. See EU (European Union) Europe-Latin American Co-Production Forum, 179. See also Rencontres de Toulouse F Fabula, 120–122 Falicov, Tamara, ix, xi, 60, 70, 80, 99–102, 124, 126, 128, 130, 135, 139, 262, 269, 270, 274, 275, 289, 291, 295, 318–323, 326, 457, 475

  533

Familia rodante (Rolling Family; Trapero), 297 Fanon, Frantz, 268, 272 Fernández Retamar, Roberto, 10 Ferrell, Will, 111, 137 Festival de cine de Viña del Mar in Chile. See Viña del Mar Film Festival Festival do Rio. See The Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata. See Mar del Plata Film Festival FIAPF (Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Films [International Federation of Film Producers Associations]), 174 FIDECINE (Fondo de Inversión y Estímulos al Cine/Film Investment and Stimulus Fund), 413, 436, 440, 441, 450 Figueroa, Luis, 201, 204 Filme B, 333 Film4, 24, 58 Filmproduktion, 91, 94. See also Road Movies Filmproduktion Films in Progress, 179. See also Rencontres de Toulouse Fine Line Features, 152, 177 First Cinema, 196 Focus Features, 22, 58, 109, 117, 150, 152, 333, 349, 435. See also NBCUniversal Fonds Sud, 76, 103 FOPROCINE (Fund for Quality Film Production–Mexican), 413, 414, 439, 440 Foreign direct investment, 97, 108 Foucault, Michel, 33, 51, 353, 354, 367, 377. See also Biopolitics Fox Baja Studios, 453, 466, 473, 477

534  Index Fox International, 117, 118. See also News Corp. Francia, Aldo, 170, 191 Fraser, Nancy, 44, 45, 53, 256, 259, 347, 376, 438, 449 Fresa y chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate; Gutiérrez Alea), 88, 144, 155, 160, 165–168, 190 From Prada to Nada (Gracia), 111 G García Bernal, Gael, 59, 99, 121, 176, 182, 215, 230, 240, 387, 388, 423, 434–437 García Canclini, Néstor, 17, 19, 49, 50, 81, 131, 188, 197, 205, 211, 215, 236, 238, 239, 240, 342, 384, 397, 442, 444 García Espinosa, Julio, 86, 92, 93, 269 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), 158, 188, 384 Getino, Octavio, 71, 81, 102, 123, 124, 126–128, 133, 139, 140, 145, 147, 148, 185, 186, 196, 201, 206, 210, 215, 224, 235, 236, 238, 240, 242, 249, 258, 262, 268, 269, 271, 275, 298, 316, 318, 320, 321, 323, 357, 359, 377, 412 Giroux, Henry, xi, 267, 277, 319, 320, 321, 341, 343, 375, 396, 426, 437, 443, 448, 449 Global Film Initiative, 106, 136 Global south, 10, 20, 41, 46, 79, 103, 104, 268, 334, 346, 375, 407, 447 Globo Filmes, 24, 331, 334, 349, 356, 370, 377 Globo TV, 182, 241, 258, 363, 375–378 Golden Bear in Berlin, 330

González Iñárritu, Alejandro, 42, 118, 176, 230, 231, 243, 248, 249, 253, 254, 385–388, 397, 405, 408, 409, 413, 419–424, 426, 427, 429–434, 438, 440, 441, 442, 445, 447–449 Good Films, 176 Gravity (Alfonso Cuarón), 249, 385, 388, 403, 405–407, 441, 444, 445 Great Expectations (Alfonso Cuarón), 397, 440 The Green Zone, also known as the “International Zone of Iraq”, 388–391, 393, 395, 405, 464 Gregorio (Espinoza), viii, 200, 203, 207 Grupo Chaski, viii, 197, 198–214, 235–239 Grupo Clarín, 21, 24, 114, 249, 283 Grupo Severiano Ribeiro, 220 Grupo Televisa, 46, 77, 110 Grupo Ukamau, 68, 145, 185, 196, 201, 205–209, 215, 238, 267, 319 Guadalajara International Film Festival, viii, 179–180, 193 Gutiérrez Alea, Tomás, 86–88, 92, 132, 165, 190, 252, 258, 269, 279 H Habana Blues (Zambrano), 99 Haciendo cine, 276, 319 Hardt, Michael, 11 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Alfonso Cuarón), 255, 385, 440 Harvey, David, 2, 14, 15, 35, 47, 48, 52, 267, 321, 391, 395, 443

Index

Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development, 15, 48 Spaces of Hope, 15, 48, 267, 391, 443 Hegemony, 10, 13, 24, 25, 40, 42, 43, 46, 50, 57, 84, 94, 98, 100, 119, 120, 122, 128, 135, 137, 142, 149, 168, 172, 179, 202, 203, 237, 247, 331, 349, 383. See also Colonial cultural imbalances; Neoimperialism; Postcolonial Hollywood’s hegemonic position, 119–120 Spanish, 100, 179 US, 10, 13, 24 Hellboy (del Toro), 385 Herlinghaus, Hermann, 341, 375, 421, 447 Hollywood dominance, 3, 22, 25–27, 84, 142, 143, 146, 149, 204, 245, 330, 458 Hollywood majors, 57, 112, 114, 117, 118, 121, 143, 145, 151, 153, 157, 177, 181, 182, 330, 453, 458. See also Buena Vista; Disney; Sony; Fox; Universal; Warner and Paramount Holt, Jennifer, 13, 48, 52 Homogeneity, refuting the notion of globalization as cultural. See Cultural homogeneity Hopewell, John, 137, 192, 244, 327, 371, 379, 450 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), 457 Hoyts General Cinemas, 197, 217–219, 240 Hubert Bals Fund, 74, 76, 103, 105, 136, 253, 291 Hulme-Lippert, Michelle, 61, 68, 70, 71 Hussein, Saddam, 388

  535

I Ibermedia, ix, 56, 76, 80, 81, 90, 91, 94, 97–103, 105, 106, 112–114, 124, 130, 135, 168, 291, 316, 326. See also Programa Ibermedia Ibero-American Film Market, 70, 99, 116, 121, 135, 180, 182 ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos/ Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry), 10, 86–89, 92–94, 132, 146, 170. See also RTV Commercial Castrist propaganda, 165 Castro, Fidel, 86, 89 Festival of New Filmmakers, 89 IFC, 137, 152, 177, 200, 370 Il Postino (The Postman; Radford), 155, 157, 160, 163, 164, 166–168, 189 IMCINE (Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía/Mexican Film Institute), 143, 185, 222, 224, 232, 233, 241, 243, 244, 250, 251, 257, 411, 414–417, 420, 441, 442, 445, 468, 477 IM Global, 121 Import substitution, 10–12, 123, 272 import-substitution industrialization, 10, 272 Iñárritu. See González Iñárritu, Alejandro INCAA (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales/ Argentine Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts), ix, 36, 105–106, 127, 143, 183, 233–235, 276, 287, 288, 290, 291, 316–318, 325, 327. See also Ventana Sur Incentives to participate in film process, 73, 79, 108, 112, 116, 119,

536  Index 204–205, 331, 355, 373, 414, 440, 441, 451, 458, 460, 463, 466–468, 475, 476 policies that were based on offering corporations incentives for investing in films, 355, 475, 476 tax rebates, 415, 440, 463. See also Tax credits INC (Instituto Nacional de Cine/ Argentine National Film Institute), 10, 36, 274, 275, 315–316. See also INCAA INC (Instituto Nacional do Cinema/ National Film Institute–Brazil), 10, 355 “Indie” films, 56–58, 85, 120, 151, 154, 155, 157–158, 168, 177, 185, 289, 333 Infancia clandestina (Clandestine Childhood; Ávila), 116 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry). See ICAIC Instituto Mexicano de Cinematografía/Mexican Film Institute (IMCINE). See IMCINE Instituto Nacional de Cine/Argentine National Film Institute (INC). See INC Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Audiovisuales/Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA). See INCAA Instituto Nacional do Cinema/ National Film Institute–Brazil (INC). See INC Instructions Not Included. See No se aceptan devoluciones International Monetary Fund (IMF), 63, 67, 264, 271, 274

Issuetainment films, 57, 61, 98, 151. See also Social-issue films Italian neorealism, 25, 92, 206, 269, 342. See also Neorealism J Jameson, Fredric, vii, 11, 261, 313, 325 Johnny cien pesos (Johnny One Hundred Pesos; Graef Marino), viii, 171 Johnson, Randal, 65, 78, 129, 146, 147, 186, 241, 251, 258, 330, 331, 337, 351, 352, 355–357, 362, 374–378 Juliana (Espinoza and Legaspi), viii, 200 Justiça Global, a human rights NGO, 369 K Kirchner, Néstor (Argentine president 2003–07), 277, 299, 317 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Babenco), 351 Klein, Naomi, 61, 70, 278, 321, 388–389, 391, 397, 442, 443 L La ciudad y los perros (The City and the Dogs; Lombardi), 199 La dictadura perfecta (The Perfect Dictatorship; Estrada), 230, 243 La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces; Solanas and Getino), 78, 145, 206, 268 La ley de Herodes (Herod’s Law; Estrada), viii La mala educación (Bad Education; Almodóvar), 58, 434–435 Lantica Media, formerly Indomina, 112 Larraín, Pablo, 176, 434 Latido Films, 179

Index

Legaspi, Alejandro, 198, 201, 206, 236, 238, 239 Leonera (Lion’s Den; Trapero), 115, 262, 298, 299 Ley Cinematográfica, 413, 439 Lezama Lima, José, 167 Lima, Peru, viii, 28, 197, 200, 202, 210, 236, 239 Linzor Capital, 218, 240 Lionsgate, 1, 24, 46, 77, 110, 137, 150, 176 Lista de espera (The Waiting List; Tabío), 88, 91 A Little Princess (Alfonso Cuarón), 397, 439 Local characteristics and how marketed, 8–9, 14, 18–19, 21, 23, 35–36, 46, 57, 112–113, 115, 118–120, 143, 168, 172–173, 247, 253, 255, 306, 436 Local-language productions (LLPs), 117–119, 136, 138, 246, 332, 374, 377, 462 Lombardi, Francisco, 199, 205, 207, 212, 238 López, Ana, 131, 142, 146, 185, 186, 195, 235, 383, 441 Lost decade, 63 Love Walked In (Campanella), 308 Lowes theaters, 58 Lubezki, Emmanuel, 249, 387 Lucía (Solás), 87 Lumiere, 153, 187 Luna de Avellaneda (Avellaneda’s Moon; Campanella), 101, 307, 310, 311, 313, 315 Luna, Diego, 121, 215, 230, 240, 435 M MacLaird, Misha, 21, 27, 49, 50, 221, 222, 225, 241, 242, 251, 258, 414, 415, 446, 452, 465, 466, 474, 477

  537

Major Independent Studio, 154, 187, 190 Mala (Evil Woman; Caetano), 41, 285, 289 Manuela (Solás), 170–171 Marché du Film, 143, 172, 173, 176, 183–184, 192. See also Cannes Film Festival Mar del Plata Film Festival (Festival Internacional de Cine de Mar del Plata), 174, 192, 244, 276 María Candelaria (Xochimilco; Fernández), 175 Mariátegui, José Carlos, 201 Martel, Lucrecia, 263, 283, 284 Martí, José, 124, 167 Martín-Barbero, Jesús, 29, 50, 202, 237, 342 Maya Entertainment Group, 177 Me casé con un boludo (Taratuto), 315 Media Mundus Program. See EU Media Mundus Program Media Rights Capital, 423. See also Babel Meirelles, Fernando, 22, 27, 118, 255, 333, 335, 336, 338–340, 343–350, 355, 362, 372, 375, 376, 435 Melorealism, 63–64. See also También la lluvia and Diarios de motocicleta Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment; Gutiérrez Alea), 87, 279 Menem, Carlos (Argentine president, 1989–99), 251, 261, 262, 270, 273, 274–276, 292, 299, 316, 326 Mercado Común del Sur/ Common Market of the South (MERCOSUR). See MERCOSUR Merchant Ivory, 157

538  Index MERCOSUR (Mercado Común del Sur/Common Market of the South), ix, 8, 77, 123–128, 139, 140, 182, 183, 198, 231, 232, 234–235, 242, 244 Cultural Integration Protocol, 125 Mercosur Film Market, 128, 182 Metanoia Films, 466 Metegol (Underdogs; Campanella), 220, 314, 325 MGM, 122 Middents, Jeffrey, xi, 34, 52 Mignolo, Walter, 14, 48 Millennial globalization, 2–5, 14, 42, 46, 47, 55, 57, 58, 65, 69, 109, 113, 115, 143, 182, 198, 223, 252 Miller, Toby, x, 22, 29, 48, 52, 74, 75, 120, 128, 142, 147, 154, 185, 186, 187, 452, 453, 454, 457, 458, 460–466, 472–473, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478 Global Hollywood 2, 48, 49, 50, 52, 128, 185, 462, 474, 475, 476, 477, 478 Miramax, 142–144, 151–161, 163–168, 177, 182, 187, 188, 190, 191 Miravista, 116, 117 Mirrlees, Tanner, x, 16, 17, 20, 24, 29, 31, 37, 49–51, 424, 447, 455, 474 Global Entertainment Media: Between Cultural Imperialism and Cultural Globalization, 49, 50, 51, 447, 474 Miss Universo en el Perú (Miss Universe in Peru; Grupo Chaski), 200, 205 Monroe Doctrine, 158, 188 The Montalbán Theater, 232, 244 Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). See MPAA

Motion Picture Export Association of America (MPEAA), 142 “Mozart in the Jungle” (Coppola, Schwartzman, Weitz), 435 MPA-AL (Latin American branch of the Motion Picture Association), 150–151 MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), 84, 120, 131, 150, 223, 240 MPA (Motion Picture Association), 149–150, 151, 216, 356, 375 Mugica, Padre Carlos, 300, 301, 304, 306, 324 Multiplex or megaplex, 57, 184, 197, 198, 210, 211, 214–217, 220, 223, 225–229, 231, 232, 234, 235, 240 Mundial, 121 Mundo grúa (Crane World; Trapero), 105, 114–115, 290, 291, 296, 316 Murdoch, Rupert, 122, 453, 455 N NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement), 48, 111, 113, 124, 126, 158, 160, 161, 188, 221, 355, 384, 385, 390–394, 396, 398, 409, 410, 411, 415, 416, 425, 434, 436, 439, 443, 446, 449, 451, 452, 476 Nagib, Lúcia, 329, 373, 374, 380 Narcos (Padilha), 181, 371, 379 Nava, Gregory, 110 Navarro, Ramón, 457 NBCUniversal, 333, 349 Negri, Antonio, 11 Neoimperialism, 57, 60, 66, 84, 91, 101. See also Altruism, problems with; Colonial

Index

cultural imbalances; Hegemony; Paternalism; Postcolonial; Subalternity global imbalance of power, 19, 22, 60, 107, 148 Neoliberal aesthetic, 154–155, 158–166, 182 Neoliberalism, 5–8, 10–13, 15, 19, 31, 33, 35, 39, 42, 45, 46, 55, 60, 62, 67, 126, 139, 144, 174, 178, 184, 197, 223, 235, 247, 248, 251, 254, 256, 264–267, 371–273, 276, 277, 279, 281, 285, 293, 294, 296, 304, 307, 310, 311, 313, 318, 320–322, 341–344, 349, 364, 387–397, 399, 402, 404, 412, 420, 421, 424, 426, 430, 431, 433, 437, 438, 466 neoliberal agenda, 159–160, 411 neoliberal globalization, 4, 5, 7, 16, 20, 22, 40, 45, 47, 111, 123, 143, 329, 430, 437, 439, 452, 455, 456, 468, 469 Neoliberal market, 3, 7, 8, 14, 19, 25, 55, 56, 58, 76, 113, 154, 172, 174, 229, 248, 261, 343, 437, 463, 468 characteristics of the (privatization, deregulation, media convergence, and commercialization), 113 Neorealism, 25, 92, 269, 270, 280, 335. See also Italian neorealism Neruda (Larraín), 176, 435 Neruda, Pablo, 160, 163–165, 167, 435 Netflix, 60, 168, 180, 181, 191, 193, 371, 379 Network Distributing, 176 New Argentine Cinema (NAC), 105, 114, 262, 263, 264, 269, 270,

  539

273, 274, 283, 284, 286, 318, 319, 320, 321, 322, 325, 326, 330, 362 New Cinema Law of 1994 (Argentine), 262 New International Division of Cultural Labor (NICL), 452, 460, 461, 463, 464, 472 New International Division of Labor (NIDL), 452, 460, 463 New Latin American Cinema (NLAC), viii, 9, 20, 21, 34, 62–64, 68, 77, 78, 81, 85, 86, 90, 123, 145, 146, 149, 153, 170, 171, 176, 181, 182, 184, 196, 200, 201, 206, 207, 209, 214, 225, 249, 253–254, 256, 262, 263, 265–269, 271, 280, 284, 286, 289, 298, 307, 319, 336, 337, 411, 412. See also Third Cinema New Line Cinema, 110 News Corp, 122. See also Fox New Yorker Films, 143 Nichols, Bill, 143, 172, 185, 191 Nike, 232 NLAC. See New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) No (Larraín), 434 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). See NAFTA No se aceptan devoluciones (Instructions Not Included; Derbez), 1, 24, 111, 396 Notícias de uma Guerra Particular (News from a Personal War; Lund and Moreira Salles), 362 Nouvelle vague, 25, 92, 337, 338, 342, 446. See also Cinema vérité Nueve reinas (Nine Queens; Bielinsky), 114, 283

540  Index O O Ano em Que Meus Pais Saíram de Férias (The Year My Parents Went on Vacation; Hamburger), 116 Ônibus 174 (Bus 174; Padilha), 334, 362–366, 370 Ortiz, Fernando, 10 Oscars, 249, 442, 453. See also Academy Awards P Padilha, José, 177, 254, 334, 362– 366, 369–371, 372, 373, 378, 379 Page, Joanna, 217, 240, 263, 264, 266, 269, 270, 276, 277, 278, 279, 282, 283, 284, 286, 293, 295, 318, 319, 320, 321, 323 Pantelion Films, 1, 24, 46, 76, 110–113, 129, 137 Paramount Pictures, 6, 47, 149, 423 Paramount Vantage, 423. See also Babel Participant Media, 120–121, 122, 138, 176, 246, 407–408, 445 TakePart, 120 Participant PanAmerica, 121 Patagonik, ix, 37, 56, 76, 114–116, 249, 283, 291, 318. See also Disney Paternalism, 107. See also Neoimperialism Pereira dos Santos, Nelson, 206, 233 Perón, Juan, 276, 299, 300, 304 Petrobras, Brazilian petroleum company, 359, 370–371 Piffl Medien, 176 Pinewood Dominican Republic Studios, 112 Piñeyro, Marcelo, 283 Pinochet, Augusto, 121, 164, 170–171, 190, 434

Pixote (Babenco), 334, 351–355, 360–362, 376, 377 Pizza, birra, faso (Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes; Caetano and Stagnaro), 105, 263, 264–267, 270, 274, 277, 280–283, 285, 316, 319, 321 Pol-Ka production company, 283, 291, 318 Pornochanchada, 331, 333 Porno miseria, 66, 302. See also Poverty porn; Revolutionary porn Portillo, José López, 410 Postcolonial, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 15, 17, 20–22, 24, 30, 34, 37, 39, 41, 49, 52, 65, 77, 85, 110, 132, 179, 247, 260, 268, 272, 337, 341, 342. See also Benevolent altruism; Colonial cultural imbalances; Hegemony; Neoimperialism center/periphery relationships, holdovers or postcolonial analysis of, 271 postcolonial center-periphery model, 37, 73, 100, 103, 169, 271, 272, 342 Poverty porn, 62, 105. See also Porno miseria; Revolutionary porn Prebisch, Raúl, 271–272, 320 Primer Festival de Cine y Encuentro de Cineastas Latinoamericanos, 170 Producciones Amaranta, 91 Programa Ibermedia. See Ibermedia Protection of films, 5, 9–10, 12, 23, 43, 66, 96, 106–107, 108, 147, 148, 150, 251, 262, 272–273, 275, 276, 287, 337, 342, 384, 410, 414, 440, 457, 461, 462, 463, 473 Puenzo, Luis, 106, 271, 283 Puenzo, Lucía, 105, 283

Index

Q ¿Quién es Dayani Cristal? (Who is Dayani Cristal?; Silver), 435 Quota systems, 5, 23, 40–41, 148, 195, 226, 272, 273, 274, 291, 317, 351, 384, 411, 416, 419, 451 R Rama, Ángel, 10 Rapado (Cropped Head; Rejtman), 261, 330 Reagan, Ronald, 158 Reagan-Bush era, 159 RECAM (La Reunión Especializada de Autoridades Cinematográficas y Audiovisuales delMercosur [Special Meeting of Specialized Cinematic and Audiovisual Authorities of Mercosur]), 125, 126, 139, 234 Red de Salas chain of art house theaters, 128, 198, 231, 232, 234, 244 Redford, Robert, 58, 177, 466 Wildwood Enterprises, 58 Regal Entertainment, 110 Rêgo and Rocha, eds., New Trends in Argentine and Brazilian Cinema, 8, 47, 288, 322, 323, 332, 374, 377 Rejtman, Martin, ix, 261, 263, 283, 284, 330 Relatos salvajes (Wild Tales; Szifrón), 176, 220, 418 Rencontres de Toulouse, 106. See also Europe-Latin American Co-Production Forum; Films in Progress Renier, Jérémie, 302 Retomada do cinema brasileiro [rebirth of Brazilian cinema], 329, 330, 331, 333, 358, 362, 377

  541

The Revenant (González Iñárritu), 433, 441 Revolutionary porn, 58. See also Porno miseria; Poverty porn Reygadas, Carlos, 106, 230, 387 Riocin, 219 The Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival (Festival do Rio), 180 Rivera, Alex, ix, 177–178, 192, 232, 243, 244, 456, 469, 471, 477 RKO, 457 Road Movies Filmproduktion, 91, 94. See also Filmproduktion Robertson, Roland, 3, 4, 18, 34, 39, 47, 49, 52 Robinson, William, x, 12, 14, 21, 32, 48, 49, 51, 310, 325, 344, 375, 389 RoboCop (Padilha), 371 Rocha, Carolina, 8, 47, 285–288, 290, 307, 322, 323, 325, 374, 377 Rocha, Glauber, 146, 147, 176, 186, 206, 334, 335, 336–338, 342, 343, 374, 375 Rodriguez, Robert, 177 Roosevelt Corollary, 158, 188 Ross, Miriam, 101, 105, 106, 135, 136, 149, 153, 154, 186, 187, 210, 214, 239, 240 Rothlisberger, Leisa, 413–415, 425, 446, 447, 449 Rotterdam Film Festival, 103, 105, 136, 264. See also Hubert Bals Fund RTC (Cuban television), 88 RTV Commercial, 89 Rudo y cursi (Carlos Cuarón), 118, 138, 433, 435 Runaway Productions, ix, 46, 116, 451–478 Creative Runaway, 457, 460 Economic Runaway, 455, 458, 474–476, 478

542  Index S Sala escura, 233 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos (Mexican president, 1988–94), 251, 384–385, 413, 439 Salles, Walter, 61, 65, 70, 330, 333, 372, 434 Samuel Goldwyn Films, 110 Sánchez Prado, Ignacio, ix, 7–8, 47, 162, 189, 197, 221–223, 236, 241, 242, 247, 257, 310, 325, 386, 387, 399, 407, 412, 415, 420, 421, 422, 442, 444, 445, 446, 447 Screening Neoliberalism: Transforming Mexican Cinema 1988–2012, 7, 47, 189, 236, 241, 242, 257, 325, 386, 442, 444, 445, 446, 447 Sanjinés, Jorge, 68, 145, 148, 149, 185, 186, 201, 206, 209, 238, 239 San Sebastián International Film Festival, viii, 106, 144, 178–179, 192, 193, 467 Santa Fe documentary school, 199. See also Birri, Fernando Santaolalla, Gustavo, 428 Sassen, Saskia, 16, 154, 394, 395, 397, 443 Scholte, Jan Aart, 18, 39, 49 Schroeder Rodríguez, Paul A., 62, 63, 64, 70, 71, 182, 193, 252, 258, 326 Screen Actors Guild (SAG), 461 Second cinema, 7, 196 Sendero Luminoso, 203, 237 Sexo, pudor, y lágrimas (Sex, Shame and Tears; Serrano), 223–224 Shaw, Deborah, xi, 421, 424, 428, 429, 447, 448 Shaw, Lisa, 241, 258, 330–331, 374, 375

Shell companies, 36, 75 The Shock Doctrine (Jonás Cuarón), 321, 388, 389, 397, 442, 443 Sin nombre (Fukunaga), 435 Sleep Dealer (Rivera), ix, 177, 192, 232, 243, 244, 456, 469–473, 477 Slim, Carlos, 15, 420 Smith, Kevin, 177 Smith, Paul Julian, 166, 190, 192, 420, 447 Social-issue films, 7, 52, 151, 248, 263, 297, 333, 346, 351, 357, 359, 371, 435. See also Issuetainment films Solanas, Fernando, 71, 78, 129, 131, 145, 185, 196, 201, 206, 210, 235, 236, 262, 268–271, 298, 320, 323, 412. See also NLAC (New Latin American Cinema); Third Cinema Solás, Humberto, 87, 93, 134, 170 Solot, Steve, 21, 49, 75, 129, 220, 241, 257, 331, 374 Sony, 24, 30, 36, 108, 118–119, 120, 121–122, 136, 138, 149, 150, 152–153, 157, 179, 193, 246, 332, 356, 359, 374, 377 Columbia Pictures do Brasil, 118, 146, 359 Sony do Brasil, 118, 119, 356 Sony Pictures Classics, 152, 157 SØRFOND, 76, 103, 104, 106, 136 Soviet dialectical montage, 25, 342 Soy Cuba (I Am Cuba; Kalatozov), 92 Stagnaro, Bruno, 263, 265, 316 Stock, Ann Marie, 87–89, 132, 133, 189 Suar, Adrián, 283, 315 Subalternity, 6, 26, 237, 280. See also Benevolent altruism; Colonial

Index

cultural imbalances; Hegemony; Neoimperialism; Postcolonial Subiela, Eliseo, 268, 271, 283 Sueños lejanos (Distant Dreams; Legaspi), 210, 237 Summit of the Americas (1996), 99 Sundance Film Festival, 144, 173, 174, 177–178, 180, 191, 192, 232 Alfred P. Sloan Prize, 177 Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award, 177 Sunstar, 219 T Tabío, Juan Carlos, 88, 91, 165, 190 TakePart, 120. See also Participant Media También la lluvia (Even the Rain; Bollaín), 59–61, 63, 64–68, 70, 71, 82, 98, 248, 434 Tarantino, Quentin, 177 Tax credits, 355, 372, 458, 463, 464. See also Incentives to participate in film process Telefónica, 37, 113–114, 116, 138, 249 Telefónica Media, 113, 114 TeleSur, 125, 139, 182. See also ALBA; Blim Televisa, 12, 13, 21, 24, 46, 50, 77, 110, 122, 137, 181, 193, 198, 230, 247, 249, 257, 383, 411, 457 Terra em Transe (Entranced Earth; Rocha), 176 Third Cinema, 7, 9–10, 20, 49, 71, 77, 86, 90, 120, 144–146, 185, 196, 210, 235, 236, 238, 267–268, 271–272, 273, 275, 281, 298, 306, 307, 320, 323,

  543

334, 411, 412, 422. See also New Latin American Cinema (NLAC) “Three amigos” directors, 385, 387, 408, 433, 436, 448 Tierney, Dolores, xi, 421, 447 Tintos, Juan, 466 Tire dié (Throw Ten or Toss Me a Dime; Birri), 268 Titanic (Cameron), ix, 46, 453–455, 457, 459, 462, 464–466, 476 Todo el poder (Sariñana), viii, 248 Tomlinson, John, 4, 19, 47 Toronto Film Festival, 169, 179 Tourism, 7, 58, 96, 134, 171, 466 Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad; Padilha), 177, 254, 332, 334, 362, 365–369, 370, 371, 373, 378 Tropa de Elite 2: O Inimigo Agora é Outro (Elite Squad: The Enemy Within; Padilha), 177, 332, 334, 359, 365, 368, 369, 370, 371, 373, 419 Trapero, Pablo, 27, 36, 105, 114– 115, 262, 263, 283, 284, 286, 289–307, 310, 312, 315–317, 322, 323, 324 Matanza, production company of Trapero, 291 Trump, Donald, 350, 376, 437 TVE, 60, 75, 81, 106, 113, 291 change following death of Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, 81 U UDCI (Universdad de las Californias Internacional), 467, 477 Ukamau (And So It Is; Sanjinés), 206 Ukamau. See Grupo Ukamau UK film council, 333 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and

544  Index Cultural Organization), 23, 24, 49, 79, 80, 84, 129, 149, 186, 205, 216, 217, 225, 226, 242, 287, 288, 358 United Nations (UN), 227, 347, 390, 391 Universal Pictures, 22, 58, 109, 110, 118, 122, 149, 150, 333, 334, 433, 435. See also Focus Features Universidade Federal Fluminese (UFF), 233, 244 Un oso rojo (Red Bear; Caetano), 269, 284 Urraca, Beatriz, 297, 298, 302–303, 323, 324 V Venegas, Cristina, 36, 52, 87, 88, 133 Ventana Sur project, ix, 128, 143, 144, 183, 184, 193, 327. See also Cannes Film Festival; INCAA Vera Cruz Studios, 146, 329 Vía Digital, 113 Videocine, 153, 419 Vídeo nas Aldeias project, 182 Villazana, Libia, 73, 75, 100–101, 114, 128, 129, 135, 137 Viña del Mar Film Club, 169, 171 Viña del Mar Film Festival (Festival de cine de Viña del Mar in Chile), viii, 34, 144, 169, 170, 171, 179, 191 W Wakolda (The German Doctor; Puenzo), 105 Walsh, Rodolfo, 276 Wanda Group, 23, 50, 122 Warner Bros., 108, 117, 118, 120, 149, 150, 192, 332 Warner Village, 217

Wayne, Mike, 20, 41–42, 49, 52, 206, 238 Weinstein Company, 150, 154–157, 168, 191, 370 Whitewashing political films by commercialization, 6, 57, 62, 314 Wild Bunch Distribution, 176 Wildwood Enterprises, 58. See also Redford, Robert WTO (World Trade Organization), 23, 79, 125 World Bank, 59, 63, 271 World Cinema Fund, 103, 104, 136 World Cinema Support. See Aide aux cinémas du monde World Trade Organization (WTO). See WTO Wyatt, Justin, 155, 187, 190, 356, 377 Y Yawar Mallku (Blood of the Condor; Sanjinés), 145, 206, 267 Y tu mamá también (Alfonso Cuarón), 26, 27, 152, 385, 387, 388, 389, 392, 397–400, 402, 408, 412, 434, 435, 440, 444, 445, 446 Yúdice, George, xi, 19, 26, 39, 41, 49, 50, 52, 188, 236, 442, 444 Z Zaï cultural center, 230, 231, 243 Zapatistas, 396 Zazen Productions, 370, 371, 379 ZDF (German television channel), 205 Zeta Films, 408, 420, 423. See also González Iñárritu, Alejandro; Babel Zinn, Howard, 59 Žižek, Slavoj, 397–398, 401, 444