hispanic research journal, vol. 9, No.

2, 2008, 147163

New Latin American Cinema and

Authorship: Old Wine in New Bottles?
CONSTANZA BURUCA
University of Warwick

STEPHEN HART
University College London

M J WOOD
Universidad Nacional Autnoma de Mxico

By analysing the recent work of three of the mainstays of the New

Latin American Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s the Argentine Fernando
Solanas, the Cuban Julio Garca Espinosa, and the Bolivian Jorge Sanjins
, this article focuses on the notion of film authorship to question these
filmmakers uses of it as a means of lending historical depth and narrative
continuity to their careers, which are indissolubly linked to their respective
political and ideological agendas. In parallel, and given the persistence of a
socially committed Latin American cinema that is manifest not just in the
films of such classic directors but also in those of a new generation of
Latin American filmmakers, this paper ponders the possibilities and the
reach of reading such a cinema from an auteur-oriented critical perspective.
Furthermore, given the prominence and importance of film authorship
throughout the history of Latin American cinema, the article asks to
what extent these directors recent productions and indeed the whole
New Latin American Cinema project itself really do constitute a clean
break with their previous work, or whether they are simply recycling
tried-and-tested strategies.

Introduction
As radical social movements and political upheavals have taken on an increasingly
high profile in Latin America in recent years, the political, economic and aesthetic
problematics raised by the Third, Imperfect, Hungry, and New cinemas of the
1960s and 1970s have acquired a new relevance. The continents presence on the
global cinematic marketplace has been dominated since the early 1990s by an
Queen Mary, University of London 2008

DOI 10.1179/174582008X272842

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energetic and iconoclastic new generation of filmmakers, such as Mexicos Alejandro

Gonzlez Irritu and Brazils Fernando Meirelles, who combine social commentary
with a pragmatic commercialism. Yet at the same time many of the old guard of
directors who held aloft the continents cinematographic banner some three to four
decades ago have retained or renewed their urge to create a cinema truly committed
to its surrounding reality, seeking once more to harness the medium first and foremost as a tool for social change. The present article looks at recent productions by
the Argentine Fernando Solanas, the Cuban Julio Garca Espinosa, and the Bolivian
Jorge Sanjins, asking what these stalwarts of the New Latin American Cinema of
the 1960s and 1970s still share. What is the present-day relevance of the strategies
they employed in years gone by to overcome the financial and practical vicissitudes
of producing socially committed cinema? How have they revisited and/or reworked
previous approaches to film production and aesthetics? What are the relations
between a new and changing Latin American reality and their recent production
strategies?1
For all that Solanas, Garca Espinosa and Sanjins have rejected the notion of the
visionary auteur with its hierarchical connotations of individual artistic genius, their
films financing, circulation, promotion, and critical acclaim since the 1960s owe
much to the authorial gravitas that has accumulated around their public personas.2
Underlying this article is a recognition that the notion of film authorship is of
considerable value and relevance to these directors work, in practical, economic,
analytical and aesthetic terms, but also a belief that the assumptions surrounding the
sometimes mystical figure of the auteur must be interrogated and historicized. While
the politique des auteurs was conceived in 1950s France as a retroactive operation
of decipherment performed by critics on existing films in order to reveal [. . .] a core
of meanings, or thematic motifs, thereby elevating the filmmaker from craftsman to
artist (Wollen 1998: 51), in Latin America it was reconverted as Julianne Burton
has perceptively observed (1985: 3) into a political manifesto that justified the
appropriation of the film medium to non-commercial ends and [. . .] the consequent
transformation of the modes of filmic production.3 We set out here to analyse the
various uses that these directors have made of film authorship as they seek to lend
historical depth and narrative continuity to their political agendas. Furthermore,
we ask how an auteur-oriented critical perspective an analysis attributing the
1

For Ana Lpez (1997), the notion of the 1960s-1970s New Latin American Cinema as a political and aesthetic
vanguard is an attempt to impose unity on a number of diverse cinematic practices, and she challenges its
claim to being a radical break with the past by pointing out its interlocking interests with existing and developing national cinema traditions in the continent. Other good studies of the New Latin American Cinema include
Chanan 1983 and Pick 1993. A useful compilation of writing by practitioners and theorists of the New Latin
American Cinema is Martin 1997.
Solanas and Sanjins screened their latest films Memoria del saqueo / A Social Genocide and Los hijos del
ltimo jardn / Sons of the Last Garden, respectively as part of career retrospectives in the 2004 Discovering
Latin America Film Festival, in London. The following year Garca Espinosa visited University College London
as a guest of honour to deliver a series of talks on contemporary Cuban cinema.
Key texts in the formulation of the politique des auteurs and theories of authorship include Truffaut 1954,
Bazin 1967, Astruc 1968, Comolli & Narboni 1969, and Wollen 1998. For a wide selection of critical and
theoretical writing on the subject, see Caughie 1981. For comprehensive overviews of authorship theories, see
Cook & Bernink 1999: 235318.

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meaning of the filmic text to the vision of an individual can help or hinder an
understanding of the nature of their recent work.
As Marvin DLugo points out (2003: 103), authorship has always been a highly
influential category in the international circulation of the continents cinema: auteurs
have traditionally acted as mediators between the business and the art of Latin
American film who are forced to negotiate their own political and artistic visions in
accordance with the commercial demands of global film finance arrangements. We
consider here the specific ways in which three filmmakers have used their authorial
personas strategically to promote specific political agendas while legitimating their
own voices as commentators on the realities portrayed, and ask to what extent this
process upholds the creative artistic energy of the New Latin American Cinema of the
1960s and 1970s. Thus, we ask, what are the current-day uses of an auteur-status
earned some three to four decades in the past? How has the figure of the auteur at
the political and aesthetic vanguard of filmmaking altered in tune with a changing set
of social realities? How does the continuing presence of such directors in the international cinemascape affect global perceptions of Latin America? Can a study of such
directors signal a shift in the notion of film authorship?
The three cases studied here suggest that global marketing and social commitment
are (and always were) interdependent, not mutually exclusive, categories for these
filmmakers. The New Latin American Cinema thus appears less as the clean break
with the past that Solanas & Getinos utopian Third Cinema would have had us
believe (Solanas & Getino 1983) than as a historically-determined variation on an
age-old set of themes and problems regarding authorship that have characterized
Latin American cinema. As Solanas, Garca Espinosa, and Sanjins in their own
ways reformulate their radical positions of the 1960s and 1970s, this article asks, are
they still offering something new to global cinematic dialogue, or are they merely
repackaging old strategies as they strive to remain relevant to todays world?

The Hour of the Social Genocide (by Constanza Buruca)

Fernando Solanass status as an auteur, although not new, can be thought of as
having been fully legitimized and consecrated at the 2004 edition of the Berlin
International Film Festival, where the Argentine filmmaker was awarded an honorary
Golden Bear for lifetime achievement. The prize accompanied the world premiere of
Memoria del saqueo / A Social Genocide (2004), a film that marked the return of
the director of the canonical La hora de los hornos / The Hour of the Furnaces (1968)
to documentary. Since its release, Solanass latest film has been concomitant with
the acknowledgement both national and international of its directors long
trajectory as a filmmaker committed to both his country and his craft.
To better understand Solanass position as a Latin American auteur, or more
specifically, as an Argentine one, it seems pertinent to begin by bringing in here some
of Marvin DLugos ideas in this respect. In DLugo 2003, he argues that
While seeming to exploit or promote the cultural capital of their respective national
cinemas as globally marketable commodities, some Latin American film auteurs have over
the last decade sought to resist mere standardization of global film patterns by channelling
some of the territorial dynamics [. . .] into a new form of identity politics. (2003: 112)

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Thus, after portraying the position of Latin American film auteurs as cultural
and commercial mediators between Latin American and international film interests
(2003: 107), DLugo describes Solanass reputation as deriving from the effort by the
filmmaker to promote the national politics of redemocratization through the
self-conscious foregrounding of his own auteurist practices (2003: 110).
Following these ideas, the aim of this piece is to focus on Memoria del saqueo as
a means of throwing some new light on this controversial filmmakers career and its
characteristic thematic and stylistic trademarks. As Solanas himself likes to say,
Memoria del saqueo is the continuation of La hora de los hornos, for his latest
film picks up the thread of history approximately where his first one left it, adopting
the same episodic structure as the 1968 documentary, sharing with it some visual
elements, such as the black and white explicative captions between sections, and
perpetuating Solanass acknowledged talent for sequences constructed upon the
classic principles of ideological montage. Yet both the director and the country have
changed between the late 1960s and 2004 and, more or less involuntarily, the film
evidences this fact. Thus, for example, far from being exhibited in clandestine meetings as La hora de los hornos was in the late 1960 and the early 1970s, Memoria del
saqueo was not just commercially released in Argentina on 18 March 2004 but it
also got strong support from the national government, which sponsored special
projections of the film for secondary school students.
Thanks mainly to Tangos, el exilio de Gardel / Tangos, the Exile of Gardel (1985)
and Sur / The South (1988), which were followed by El Viaje / The Voyage (1992)
and La Nube / The Cloud (1998), Solanas established his authorial persona by becoming the spokesperson of the redemocratization process that marked Argentinas
political scene after the return of democracy in 1983 and which is conflated, in his
films, with the revitalization of Peronist ideology (Newman: 1993) and its associated
and characteristic blend of nationalist and populist politics. After those four fiction
films, the social upheaval that accompanied Argentinas 2001 economic crash inspired
Solanas to return to the documentary format as a means of denouncing the consequences of neo-liberal democracies and their corresponding economic policies as they
translated onto a local level.
Whereas in La hora de los hornos there were three different narrating voices, one
of them Solanass, Memoria del saqueo is entirely narrated by its director. In this
sense too, then, the same voice has become a different voice: having been legitimized
both as the national auteur par excellence and as a committed political actor within
Argentine politics, Solanas has gained the right to have his voice heard more loudly.
Thus, after a ten-minute long sequence in which the events of the 20 December 2001
are presented in all their violence, Solanas clearly expounds the films main thesis:
[Argentina] has been devastated by a new type of aggression, executed in peace and
democracy, by means of a quotidian and silenced violence that has left more social
victims, more migrs and dead people than State terrorism and the Malvinas War.

The gravity with which he pronounces this statement is further accentuated by the
image in close-up of a child who is losing his capacity to breathe while dying of
malnutrition at a public hospital.
Following such a strong prologue, the film begins to expose the historical roots of
Argentinas economic dependency in a way that remains dependent upon Solanass

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Manichean vision of history, already evident in La hora de los hornos (King 1990:
87). In Memoria del saqueo, for example, complex historical processes are read in
terms of a polarization of social actors, who are either good (the worker, the poor,
what the director broadly catalogues as the people) or bad (the military, former
finance minister Domingo Cavallo, former president Carlos Menem). Hence, despite
the empathetic appeal that some sequences may raise (i.e. children being nourished
from waste in a country that was once proudly called the granary of the World; the
corrupt privatization of the oil industry and other key economic sectors) and the
numerous, and at some points confusing, statistics with which Solanas aims to sustain
his arguments, the film still delivers an oversimplified version of history.
It is in this respect that the film exposes its flaws. On the one hand, although
promoting debate in a country not used to it and which throughout the 1990s suffered
a kind of historical amnesia (partly as a cultural consequence of the successive
amnesty laws granted to the military between 1986 and 1990), Solanass film is still a
monological text. With no confronting or challenging voice included, the director
seems to have all the answers to the questions he poses, while his interviewees are all
people who manifestly agree with his point of view. On the other hand, by focusing
on the damaging social impact of neo-liberal policies, for which the last military
regime is partly held responsible, Solanas keeps aside from his historical analysis the
thousands of people that disappeared during the last military dictatorship.
This last point would not be particularly problematic if it was not that we are
dealing here with the work of a director who, while promoting himself as an
authoritative voice of the national vicissitudes for more than three decades, has systematically avoided articulating any kind of critical discourse about the fate of those
who opposed the military regime. After openly encouraging young left-wing militants
to take death as an option in the last section of La hora de los hornos, in Tangos and
Sur Solanas sidestepped the question of the disappeared by concentrating on external
and internal exile respectively. Thus, while in these two films Solanass self-referential
allusions to both his life and films become something of a signature trademark, the
reticence to assume historical responsibility himself can also be taken as a defining
feature of his work.
Yet Memoria del saqueo should still be acknowledged for its achievements. Firstly,
although the epicentre of the 2001 riots was Buenos Aires, the film offers a detailed
portrayal of how the crisis affected the most impoverished regions of the country.
Despite a tendency in Argentine cinema to neglect the interior of the country, Solanass
work has generally tended to portray the nation as the unequal whole that it is. Thus,
whereas in La hora de los hornos he dealt, for example, with the living conditions
of aboriginal tribes and in El viaje he alluded to the impact of Menems economic
policy by ironically representing a vastly flooded country, in his latest film Solanas
turns to the interior of the country to show the areas that were worst affected by
what he calls the neo-liberal genocide of the 1990s.
In section nine, entitled The social genocide, Solanas presents some of the most
striking images of the film, which come from the province of Tucumn. Among these
images, perhaps the most difficult to watch are those of a dying child at a public
hospital (a different one from that previously mentioned) and the helpless mother,
who silently sits by his bedside unable to do anything but wait for the worst to

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happen. The sustained image in close-up of this suffering child, accompanied on the
soundtrack only by the sound of the machines around him, manages to provoke in
the spectator a visceral emotion. Much has been said about the difficulties of representing horror, and the arguments in this respect have been associated primarily with
the representability of the Holocaust and/or torture. Yet throughout this scene of the
child, one gets the feeling that Solanas is pushing such questions to a different level.
Thus, it is in this regard that, even if the viewer disagrees in some respects with the
directors political standpoint and with his interpretation of history, the mastery with
which he manipulates the film medium in order to make his point should still be
recognized. There could not have been a stronger, and more effective, image than that
of this vanishing little life to illustrate what he means by social genocide.
In this same section, Solanas also retrieves one of the motifs with which the film
opens that of children looking for food among mountains of waste to visually
strengthen his arguments. As Robert Stam argues in relation to the redemption of
detritus (2003: 35), Memoria del saqueo seems to interpret debris as an allegorical
text to be deciphered, a form of social colonics where the truth of a society can be
read in its waste products (2003: 45). Thus, the vast amounts of garbage on which
children play while trying to find something to eat becomes a clear visual translation
of the impoverishment of the country. As Solanas has commented on those images,
the levels of poverty that La hora de los hornos denounced in the 1960s were only
the precursor of the neo-liberal genocide of the 1990s.
Although the diagnosis of the country that Memoria del saqueo postulates does not
differ very much from the one La hora de los hornos delivered, this 2004 film shows
how and why the current state of things seems to have worsened. Following this line
of thinking, then, Memoria del saqueo can be thought of as completing Solanass first
documentarys assumptions. Hence, whereas La hora de los hornos was to some
extent misleading in its portrayal of Argentina as a Third World country in the
context of the 1960s, as Nissa Torrents perceptively observed (1988: 94), Memoria
del saqueo seems to demonstrate almost four decades later that Solanass
earlier analysis has in fact become a sad historical prediction.
However, there is one key aspect that clearly differentiates these two documentaries and it concerns their respective endings. While La hora de los hornos closed on
the static image of a dead Che Guevara, an emblematic figure that the film used to
promote death as a glorifying option for those who opposed the system, Memoria
del saqueo finishes on a much more optimistic and dynamic note. In the films last
section, The beginning of the end, Solanas declares that Argentinas implementation
of the neo-liberal model finished in hecatomb. Historically aligning 20 December 2001
with 17 October 1945 the date of birth of Peronism and with the 1969 popular
insurgency known as El Cordobazo, he proclaims that another history is being
written, hence perpetuating his fondness for proposing his own interpretation of
history as counter-history.
The violent images of the December 2001 episode are commented upon by Solanas
who, after acknowledging the thirty-four fatalities caused by the street riots, proudly
announces that those events marked the first Argentine victory against globalization.
But perhaps more interesting is the aural montage of the films last sequence. The

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images of the riots, now in slow motion, are accompanied by two women singing
an enraged rap about peoples limits of tolerance having been surpassed; then those
images fade into a desolate Plaza de Mayo, the historical focus of political demonstrations, while a sad tune composed for the films soundtrack by Gerardo Gandini is
alternated with the recorded shouting of people: El pueblo no se va. The last sounds
of the film are a batucada, a popular musical manifestation associated with festivities
(mainly carnival), which consists of a rhythmic beating of drums.
While condemning death instead of encouraging it, therefore, Solanas this time
seems to propose that reality can be changed by different means. His vindication of
forms of popular resistance, both in visual and aural terms, which reaches its climax
in this carnivalesque ending note, demonstrates to some degree the directors renewed
confidence in what he so broadly understands as the people. Unfortunately, though,
and despite the overall sympathy that the film manages to provoke in the spectator,
by the time it finishes, those who have been following Solanass career will probably
leave the theatre with an unsettling sense of anachronism. Although a crude and
effective statement about the powerful impact of neo-liberalism in developing
countries, Memoria del saqueo still appears more as a hard and overly ideological
documentary of the 1970s than as the mature oeuvre of Argentinas best-known film
auteur. Franois Truffaut used to say that a good film should simultaneously express
an idea of the world and an idea of cinema (1980: 6). Thus, whereas Solanass first
film offered new insights into the potential of the film medium to depict an until then
unrepresented world, and the lives of people living in it, his latest film does make
some interesting points about our unequal world, but it hardly manages to say
anything we did not already know about cinema.

The New Aesthetics in Julio Garca Espinosas Reina and Rey (1994)
(by Stephen Hart)
Julio Garca Espinosa is perhaps best known for his formulation of the theory of
imperfect cinema in the 1960s in the afterglow produced by the Cuban Revolution
(see Chanan 1983, Hart 2004: 711). His espousal of a set of factors which had been
forced upon the nascent Cuban film industry low budgets, non-professional actors,
the hand-held camera, low-quality production, very basic post-production, lowbudget advertising, promotion and distribution, etc. thereby in effect making a
virtue of necessity, led to a formula which caught the imagination of film directors in
the so-called developing world, and was adapted to fit the local context. Film directors in Africa, in India, in Palestine, saw that the imperfections of the medium could
be used as a means of making a political point, namely, the signifier could itself be a
political signified. As Garca Espinosa recalled, he and Gutirrez Alea went to Italy
in the 1950s and immersed themselves in neo-Realism: In the 1950s, when Italian
neo-Realism was at its height, a number of Latin American film directors, including
myself, went to study film in Rome. Imbued with the neo-Realist vogue which
favoured the creation of an unadorned cinema, namely one which did not need film
stars or expensive sets, we went back to our respective countries (Garca Espinosa
2005). Garca Espinosa, along with Toms Gutirrez Alea and many others, set about
creating a cinematic idiom which could express the new revolutionary reality which
was opening up before their eyes:

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During that magnificent decade of the 1960s some of the best film directors in the world
came to visit us [including Cesare Zavattini] and we had the opportunity to open ourselves up to a plural world. Those were really innovatory years. Colonialism seemed to
come crashing down. The world was changing and Latin America was as well. The struggle for a definitive emancipation seemed to be knocking at our doors. It was thus that
what we could call New Latin American Cinema was born. (Garca Espinosa 2005)

Garca Espinosas contribution to the New Latin American Cinema of those years
his documentary, El mgano / The Charcoal Worker (1955) and his humorous
feature film, Las aventuras de Juan Quin Quin / The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin
(1967) strove to express the culture of the people, and this was their revolutionary
flag, as it were. The cabaret, anti-authority humour, music, dance all were used
to express the irrepressible culture of every people. Here I intend to analyse a more
recent film by Garca Espinosa, and assess the ways in which the old aesthetics
of imperfect cinema have been reformulated in order to express the radical
transformation of Cubas political trajectory in the 1990s.
Garca Espinosas Reina y rey / Queen and King (1994), a low-budget film inspired
by one of the classics of Italian neo-realism, Humberto D. (1952), co-directed by
Vittorio de Sica and Cesare Zavattini, and dedicated to the latter, manages to offer
an allegory of post-Perestroika Cuba through the simple story of the friendship of an
elderly woman, Reina, with her dog, Rey. There is hardly any criticism on this film;
as far as I am aware there are only two short reviews, one in The New York Times
by Sandra Brennan, and the other for Variety by Lisa Nesselson.4 As the first half of
the film unfolds, it becomes clear that the main dilemma Reina faces is whether she
is able to keep her dog. There is so much poverty in Havana that everyone has had
to give up their dogs and cats: Reina takes Rey to the asilo canino, but, horrified by
what she sees the gas chamber where the dogs are sacrificed she cannot bring
herself to hand her dog over. In a touch of black humour, the chamber cannot be
used because the kennels have run out of gas. It soon becomes clear that these apparently accidental or realist details are being used to build up a sense of modern-day
Cuba as a concentration camp where people are dying.5 As one character says to
Reina when she is worried that Rey has not returned in the evening: dogs are like
human beings. Underscoring the parallelism between human beings and dogs,
we note the title in which Rey functions as almost the surrogate husband of Reina.
The world of the dogs which seems in many ways a re-writing of Vargas Llosas
novel La ciudad y los perros throws light on human society in a number of ways.
Garca Espinosa thereby manipulates a topos which is common in Latin American

Sandra Brennans review for The New York Times is available at http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/
movie.html?v_id=133932 [20 February 2006]. See also Lisa Nesselson, Queen and King, Variety, 357.5 (28
November 1994): 97. Strangely, neither of these reviews refers to Part II of the movie, focusing exclusively on
Part I, perhaps for political reasons. In Part II, Carmen returns from Miami to Havana to reclaim her home
from her servant, Reina.
It was not the directors intention, however, to make any reference to the gas chambers of World War II. As
Garca Espinosa has pointed out: In fact, it can be taken as an allegory to the 1990s but the gas chamber has
nothing to do with the Nazis gas chamber; at least that was not my intention (email to author, 15 July
2005).

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art and film, as the recent film Bombn el Perro (2004), directed by Carlos Sorn,
eloquently suggests. Apart from at the asilo canino, we see stray dogs around
Havanas streets or fighting for food on the local rubbish tip (this scene in particular
seems to have taken a leaf out of Vargas Llosas book). It is important to note that
Rey is fed on two occasions by jineteras (prostitutes) who are walking along the
Malecn, as if to suggest that the only way they can be fed is via the illicit earnings
of prostitution.
Yet Rey is not simply a synecdoche of the human condition, although he does have
this role in the film. In many ways he is redolent of the cockerel in Gabriel Garca
Mrquezs story El coronel no tiene quien le escriba. Like Garca Mrquezs
cockerel, Garca Espinosas dog comes to acquire a mysterious depth of symbolic
significance.6 Reina will not let him go and she would rather starve than give him up
(again like the Colonel in El coronel). When Rey disappears, Reina becomes very
distraught, so distraught that, as a neighbour mentions, she would never even think
about leaving Cuba if there was the slightest possibility that Rey would come back.
It is only once Reina finally accepts that Rey will not be coming back that she is
enticed by her boss Carmens offer to leave Havana and go and live with them in
Miami. When walking through Havana with Carmen and the husband, just as she
has made her mind up, Rey suddenly appears; Reina turns back but does not see him
since her view is blocked by some passers-by. Indeed Reys symbolic function within
the plot is underscored at the end of the film. Inexplicably, Reina refuses at the last
moment to go back with Carmen, and they drive off in their red Nissan Sentra to the
airport and thence to Miami without her. A young man on a bike then asks her if she
is waiting for Rey, and she says she is. The word esperndolo is the concluding word
of the film, which makes it clear that Rey is a symbol of Cubas future Utopia. Reina
the film seems to be telling us is waiting for a better future and, in this, she
becomes paradigmatic of all Cubans.
It is important to underscore that this longed-for future does not include the
Americanization of Cuba. When Carmen and her husband arrive, they turf Reina out
of the bedroom, re-claim their former house, and do all the touristy things such
as drink champagne while going to the Tropicana club. When they visit the club,
Carmen gets extremely drunk while the husband goes off with a black prostitute. To
cap the colonialist metaphor, they attempt to take Reina back to Miami since they
know they will be able to exploit her good habits (hard work with little complaint).
This is the point at which the film becomes an allegory of the feared future invasion
of Cuba after Castros death. The thought does not even cross Carmens mind that
Reina might not want to return. Carmen and Reina fall out when Reina says that her
real name is Yolanda at which point Carmen blows her top. The scene can be
interpreted as the anagnorisis scene in which Reinas true Cuban revolutionary self is
revealed. No longer the submissive maid, kowtowing to her rich superiors, Reina
becomes Yolanda, the authentically Cuban and revolutionary woman.
Reina y rey can, as suggested above, be seen as an allegory of the dilemmas faced
by modern-day Cuba, or more particularly those of the 1990s. In a witty use of the
language of film to make a semantic point, the first half of the film is filmed in black
6

For a good discussion of symbolism in Garca Mrquezs novel, see Box 2000: 5882.

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and white, in order to underline the drabness of Cuba with its poverty and endless
queues, while the second half, from the point at which the bosses arrive from Miami,
is filmed in colour. As Garca Espinosa has pointed out:
The use of black and white is motivated by the interest in portraying the dullness of old
age; colour appears when the couple coming from Miami show up, to give the sensation
of their fake colourful life. (Email from Garca Espinosa to author, 15 July 2005)

Indeed, by breaking one of the cardinal rules of Hollywood filmmaking, Garca

Espinosa is able to make a clever point about how Cuban reality is schizoid. As one
character says: All people in Miami do is think about people over here, while all
people here do is think about people in Miami. Nobodys happy. It is of course
imperfect cinema, but imperfect cinema with a difference since the signifier of the film
the decision to film in an unadorned black and white becomes a new political
signified. What better way of expressing the poverty of communism and the glitz of
capitalism than to film in black and white first and then in colour? But there is of
course more to this than meets the eye. The technique was clearly inspired not only
by The Wizard of Oz but also by the more subtle play between black and white and
colour in Steven Spielbergs Schindlers List, which came out the previous year (1993);
the only object filmed in colour is the little girls red coat as she is led off to her
premature grave. However, Garca Espinosas use of colour, unlike Spielbergs, has a
political function; rather than an aestheticizing cinematography, Garca Espinosa
seeks to use the shuttle between colour and black-and-white to indicate the contrast
between First and Second Worlds.
As always occurs in Garca Espinosas films, there is a self-reflexive component to
this artistic choice. Garca Espinosa essentially deconstructs the positive value we
normally associate with colour, for it becomes representative of the exploitative
language of US capitalism. Miami, as it were, invades in colour. Thus, in the last
scene when Reina decides not to go to Miami with her bosses, the colour of Cuba
changes. Filmed with a blue lens, Reinas residence is now somewhere in between the
black and white of Part I and the Technicolor of Part II. It is a chiaroscuro of Cuba,
waiting and hoping; esperndolo. We may recall that the anagnorisis scene occurs
during the power blackout. In effect, when the lights go out we are left with black
and white. Colours recede from the films mental screen. It is significant, too, that
Reinas moment of defiance occurs when we see her in the shadows; we see her
silhouette swaying backwards and forwards in the rocking chair, an image perhaps
of dialectical rebellion. In effect, in the penultimate scene of the film there occurs a
tense merging of two cinematic codes black and white versus colour for it is
not quite the black and white of Part I or the Technicolor of the beginning of Part II.
Rather it offers a concrete embodiment of the dialectical tension of Cuba in the mid1990s, caught between two discourses and two ways of being. Indeed the chiaroscuro
as filmic signifier suddenly turns into political signified before our very eyes.
While Reina y rey can, at a primary level, be seen as a homage to Italian neorealism, on closer inspection it reveals itself to be an artful interrogation of the
different codes black and white realism versus glitzy Americanism which moves
it beyond the dead-end rhetoric of neo-Realism. It is here that the stamp of Garca
Espinosas arresting filmic vision its dialectic chiaroscuro may be divined.

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Jorge Sanjins: The Uses and Limits of Film Authorship

(by David M. J. Wood)
In a world that demands that movies be easily classifiable into types and genres to
facilitate production pitches, distribution deals, publicity drives and DVD sales, the
recent films of the Bolivian director Jorge Sanjins and his Ukamau Group are somewhat hard to pin down.7 Firmly rooted in Bolivian history and society, they speak
neither the Hollywood-inflected idiom of many of the continents productions that
currently tour the global festival circuit, nor the international art-house language that,
for Marvin DLugo, draws on national issues and stereotypes while being carefully
calculated to appeal to the transnational markets of auteur cinema (2003: 111). Yet
for all their solemn commitment to sociological analysis and political change, they
perhaps aim for a wider audience reach than do the expository, observational, and
participatory documentaries made recently by some of Sanjinss fellow travellers
from the New Latin American Cinema, such as Marta Rodrguez (Colombia) and
Patricio Guzmn (Chile).
The Ukamau Group has always been run on a shoestring, and its films production
values vary considerably from the relatively high-budget Para recibir el canto de los
pjaros / To Hear the Birds Singing (1995, starring Geraldine Chaplin) to the latest
movie Los hijos del ltimo jardn / Sons of the Last Garden (2004), hastily shot,
edited and distributed on a digital DV-CAM format. Yet for the cash-strapped
Bolivian industry Sanjinss standards are high. For any Bolivian filmmaker, funding
sources, exhibition spaces and critical attention are elusive, yet in recent years the
Ukamau Group has (not without considerable struggle) been able to access such trappings. Undoubtedly this is in part an upshot of the authorial niche that Sanjins has
carved out at home as the doyen of Bolivian cinema, and abroad, as an aesthetically
creative and politically aware artist who speaks the reality of Bolivian society, counteracting the lies of mainstream media. Sanjinss apparently contradictory status as
auteur at the head of a radical collective has repeatedly been denied or downplayed
by the director, but in practice it has acted as a low-intensity marketing strategy [. . .
with] an understandable attraction, both to agents of the national cinema (local producers, state agencies, cultural critics), as well as to certain international audiences
(DLugo 2003: 111). Both Bolivian and foreign criticism of films directed by Sanjins
tends to consider them a coherent and developing body of work, taking the Sanjins
label as a guarantee of both aesthetic quality and a certain political position.8 While
such an approach has its uses, I will argue here, the Ukamau Groups production and
exhibition practices signal the limitations of an auteurist reading of its films (that for
better or for worse, might partly undermine the collectivist aims of the groups
activities), and may prompt us to re-think some assumptions regarding the authorship
of politically-oriented cinema.
An auteurist approach, drawing out structural, narrative and stylistic motifs
across Sanjinss oeuvre, might shed light on the consistencies and advancement of
7

The Ukamau Group is the name of the militant filmmaking collective directed by Sanjins since its formation
in Bolivia in the 1960s.
This is true, for instance, of national cinema studies such as Gumucio Dagrn 1983 and Mesa 1985, as well as
the 1970s coverage by French magazines such as Cinma, Cahiers du Cinma, and cran.

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his thinking about Bolivian politics or aesthetic approaches to representing indigenous protagonists on celluloid. It therefore justifies the directors status as a key
Latin American intellectual worthy of scholarly and critical attention, as well as
furthering his own promotional strategies. Sanjinss work encourages such an
approach. Para recibir el canto de los pjaros (1995), for instance, immortalizes on
celluloid a cultural misunderstanding between an urban mestizo film crew and a
remote Quechua community and its eventual resolution a personal experience
that occurred during the Ukamau Groups shooting of Yawar Mallku / Blood of the
Condor (1969), narrated by Sanjins in countless articles and interviews. Stylistically,
Para recibir el canto makes wide use of the integral sequence shot which Sanjins
gradually developed to maintain the spatial and temporal unity of indigenous thought,
after the protagonists of Yawar complained that the films use of Western techniques
such as flashbacks and close-ups was culturally alien to them (Sanjins 1989). By
filtering the society-wide issue of cultural misunderstanding through an oft-recounted
personal experience, and by showing how that experience improved the groups
working relationship with indigenous Andean communities, Para recibir el canto
constitutes a piece of the Ukamau Groups internal folklore that underpins Sanjinss
status as a committed and developing auteur.9
In this vein, we might ask how narrative and formal devices in Sanjinss latest
feature, Los hijos del ltimo jardn, revisit, develop, or depart from themes that
appear throughout the directors work, such as class and ethnic relations, and the
causes of and solutions to injustice. Prior to Los hijos, most of Sanjinss features
took an indigenous community as the locus of action, in which external imposition
from white/mestizo society brings about a problem which is eventually solved by
armed retaliation and/or a (re-)discovery of the true values of indigenous culture.
From the rape avengement drama Ukamau / And So It Is (1966), to the militant filmdebate El enemigo principal / The Principal Enemy (1973) and the poetic reflection
on Indian identity in La nacin clandestina / The Secret Nation (1989), Sanjinss
pictures often draw a Manichean division between the idealized, rural, victimized
indigenous community and the distant, threatening, vice-ridden city; the films are
didactic texts designed to help Indian peasants devise effective retaliation.
Los hijos, on the other hand, is centred around a group of youths in Bolivias
capital La Paz, allowing Sanjins to examine more closely the attitudes and values of
various urban social classes rather than simply dismissing them out of hand. The
suggestion now is that for progress to be made, it is in the city that change really
needs to take place. The main character Fernando, like many of Sanjinss protagonists, identifies an injustice: a corrupt politician accumulates enormous wealth while
the majority both remote indigenous communities and Fernandos own urban
lower-middle-class family live in humiliating poverty. His solution, to steal the
money and distribute it, Robin Hood-style, to the masses, lacks a social or political
vision much like the villagers action in Enemigo who capture their abusive landlord under their own steam only to suffer repression from the authorities; or like the
villagers in Para recibir el canto who violently attack the urban film crew without
9

Hart 2003 gives parallel readings of Para recibir el canto and Yawar Mallku. For Sanjinss version of cultural
difficulties while shooting Yawar Mallku, see Sanjins 1986: 4347.

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considering the potential benefits they might bring. In each case the problem is solved
when the (individual or collective) protagonist bridges the seemingly unbridgeable
gulf between indigenous and non-indigenous spheres to find the hope for a new
society to come. In Los hijos, after the indigenous community of Pankar Marka
rejects Fernandos ill-gotten offering due to its dishonest origins, the young paceo
learns the true democracy of Aymara society, and vows to enrich his leftwing idealism with indigenous values. Los hijos is set against the backdrop of the mass protests
that swept through Bolivia in 2003 and ultimately led to the ejection of the neoliberal president Gonzalo Snchez de Lozada. In this context, the political sentiment
that underlies all of Sanjinss films seems as appropriate as ever: Bolivians, and
Latin Americans in general, must carry on the struggle from the depths of [their]
nationality, from the roots of [their] identity (Sanjins & Ukamau Group 1989: 82),
while proudly upholding both their class and ethnic identities.
As DLugo reminds us, the New Latin American Cinema rearticulated individualistic authorship through the democratic filter of the production collective (2003: 110).
As such, Sanjinss project is almost diametrically opposed to the reactionary attempt
to remove film from the realm of social and political concern of which John Hess
accused the auteur theorists of Cahiers du Cinma (1974: 19). Hess argued that
Godard and company read a film as a textual realization of a directors timeless and
transcendental spiritual vision, so that in spite of the noise of producers, actors,
screenwriters and the like, the director becomes the camera which records his perceptions (1974: 21). Yet for Sanjins, who generally works with non-professional casts,
the noise of the historical actors is precisely what gives his cinema its artistic
validity. In the 1970s he sought to make a film made by the people through the
mediation of an author, wherein the director was simply the interpreter or vehicle
of the people (Sanjins & Ukamau Group 1979: 61).10 In Los hijos such utopian aims
have been jettisoned, but the tone of documentary authenticity, one of Sanjinss
authorial stamps, is expressed in a different way. The film ostensibly uses the
fictional idiom of a thriller, but some acted scenes fuse into documentary images of
the 2003 protests: scripted and choreographed episodes coalesce into the uncontrollable, whether through the actors (semi-)improvizations or through live filming of
historical events external to the fictional world of the film.
For the Ukamau Group, true militancy can be assured only through independence
in both production and exhibition, and Sanjins has always fiercely fought off politically-motivated interference from both Bolivian and foreign producers. Recently he
has resorted to foreign co-production only when absolute autonomy has been assured
(as in deals with Spanish and UK television for La nacin clandestina), and the use
of an economical digital format for Los hijos points to a return to 1970s-style
self-sufficiency. In terms of distribution and exhibition, he has largely refrained from
releasing his films on video or DVD, and has even managed mostly to evade Bolivias
all-pervasive pirate market. Sanjins tries his utmost to ensure that his films are
viewed in the proper context: screenings in indigenous communities, factories,
10

Richard Schaafs translation of this text renders autor as screenwriter (Sanjins & Ukamau Group 1989: 40).
Given the relatively unimportant role Sanjins has usually assigned to screenplays, and his conception of the
versatile cineaste as a translator of the peoples voice, I have translated it more literally, as author.

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schools, Bolivian cinemas or international film festivals, preferably with a representative of the Ukamau Group present to anchor discussion. The films themselves are not
thought to have an intrinsic meaning; rather, meaning derives from contact with
their audiences. The Ukamau Group aims to reach relatively wide audiences while
bypassing, so far as possible, the global regime of capital that structures the international cinema industry, and maintaining the collective and participatory nature of
filmmaking and film viewing.11
Yet at the same time, by effectively limiting access to his films (which are well
known in Bolivia) to relatively rare occasions, such practices also go some way
towards maintaining Sanjinss authorial mystique. Thus for all that the Ukamau
Group insists that a film becomes meaningful only through contact with its audience,
analyses of its films risk, in Coco Fuscos words (1989: 11), getting stuck trying to
fix the meaning of a text and that text to a maker, resulting in the quite futile search
for the truly radical film produced by the truly radical subject. By labelling a film
simply as a Sanjins film we shut out the multiple voices that speak out from the
texts; by looking only at the finished product we ignore any altercations between
director and protagonists that might suggest that Sanjinss vision is not precisely that
of the pueblo. We also pass over the innumerable and unique personal, historical,
cultural and social junctures from which their spectators view and relate to the
films.
Admittedly, Sanjins has taken great interest in spectators reactions to their films,
which have frequently led to alterations in their methodology. But such audience
comments as the Ukamau Group has published tend merely to shore up stated authorial intentions; as politically committed filmmakers advancing an agenda, they have
not (nor necessarily should they) favoured aberrant readings.12 How, for instance,
might an urban working-class woman react to Los hijos del ltimo jardn, which
foregrounds ethnic and class predicaments through its male protagonists but largely
marginalizes female voices? How do present-day members of indigenous communities
regard a film that portrays them as structurally separate from (albeit superior to)
urban society?
Authorship thus stands in a rather ambiguous relationship to the study of
Sanjinss work. On the one hand, Sanjinss status as a still-politicized auteur is
crucial to the independence that makes the promotion, circulation, and impact of the
Ukamau Groups films so effective. Yet to approach them solely from an auteurist
critical perspective is to overlook one of the collectives central tenets: that each films
meanings are multiple, fragmented, in constant performance, and as such lie far
beyond the text.

Conclusion
As pointed out earlier in this article, despite its different nuances and multifaceted
manifestations across the region and throughout time, film authorship can be taken
11

12

Conversation with Csar Prez (cinematographer for Sanjinss three most recent films, Los hijos, Para recibir
el canto and La nacin clandestina), London, 30 November 2004.
For audience comments, see Sanjins & Ukamau Group 1979: 910, 7173; Gamboa 1999: 23941.

NEW LATIN AMERICAN CINEMA

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as a category against which the history of Latin American cinema might be read and
understood. Reconverted into a political project during the 1960s, notions concerning
authorship have blended with others related to questions of socially committed
cinema in the work of directors who shaped what we know today as the New Latin
American Cinema. While throughout the agitated 1960s and 1970s ideas of authorship and political cinema were used strategically to promote both these directors
films and their ideological agendas, the shift away from revolutionary filmmaking
towards a more democratized form of authorship during the following decades
seems to have been followed by a more personal type of authorship in the latest films
of some of the already classic Latin American directors. As each section of this
article reveals, the study of recent films by Solanas, Garca Espinosa, and Sanjins
suggests that different and coexisting models of authorship are being played out as
a means to promote both their films and the strong political stands they still
articulate.
Solanas has operated in recent decades as an internationally-acclaimed director of
socially-aware art-house fiction films, but as Constanza Burucas contribution here
proposes, his latest films return to a documentary format reminiscent of La hora de
los hornos signals an increasingly monological idiom that legitimates his authorial
presence as an international spokesman on Argentine affairs. In the case of Garca
Espinosa, suggests Stephen Hart, the imperfect cinema that the Cuban director
promoted in the 1960s is now continued and stylistically revamped to reflect the new
and increasingly fragile social and political reality of post-Cold-War Cuba. David
Woods piece examines the thematic and aesthetic continuities between Sanjinss
latest film and his earlier productions, yet ultimately argues that Sanjinss own
notion of a cinema with the people urges us to question the authorial aura that has
emerged around his oeuvre.
But whereas in years gone by their work formed part of a continental movement,
with a more or less organic ideological project and within which each directors
personal expression was contained, the common ground shared by their present-day
productions can be articulated rather in terms of this subsisting category of authorship. This has proven to be an excellent marketing tool not just for the films of these
veterans of Latin American cinema but also for the work of a whole new generation
of rising directors who perpetuated their predecessors ability to convey and comment
upon the variety of Latin American realities in aesthetically innovative films which,
unlike most of the foundational texts of the New Latin American Cinema, have
become box-office hits both in their countries of origin and abroad.
To conclude then, the renewed urge of directors like Solanas, Garca Espinosa and
Sanjins to produce committed films, and their ideas about cinema as a tool for social
change, should be looked at in a context in which global marketing and social commitment are categories which are becoming increasingly interdependent, rather than
mutually exclusive. Read against this background, in which these directors films are
avidly consumed by a new generation of spectators that conflate their work into the
counter-hegemonic discourses of the anti-globalization movements, it seems pertinent
to suggest that whereas the value of ideas of equality, social justice, and the need for
change are certainly as relevant to todays world as they were some forty years ago,
films like the ones we have discussed in this article do not necessarily articulate such

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ideas through the formally and aesthetically groundbreaking visual strategies that
characterized La hora de los hornos, Yawar Mallku or Memorias del subdesarrollo,
just to mention some paradigmatic examples. Contemporary scepticism towards the
notion of a homogeneous continental movement prevents us from drawing generalizations about any latter-day style shared by these revolutionary auteurs. It can be
said, however, that they broadly differ from newer generations of Latin American
cineastes in the greater emphasis they lay on social commentary than on pragmatic
commercialism, although both terms undoubtedly inform the work of all the filmmakers in question. The question of which combination of the two is more effective
surely depends on the varying social, political, and cultural dynamics of different
audiences, and is an issue very much open to debate.

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Hart, Stephen, 2003. Mama Coca and the Revolution: Jorge Sanjinss Double Take, in Contemporary Latin
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Sanjins, Jorge, 1986. Revolutionary Cinema: The Bolivian Experience, in Cinema and Social Change in Latin
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A travs del anlisis del trabajo reciente de tres pilares del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano de los Sesenta y Setenta el argentino Fernando Solanas, el cubano
Julio Garca Espinosa y el boliviano Jorge Sanjins este artculo se centra en
la nocin de autor cinematogrfico para cuestionar el uso que estos directores
han hecho de sta como un medio para otorgarles profundidad histrica y continuidad narrativa a sus carreras, indisolublemente vinculadas con sus respectivas
posturas polticas e ideolgicas. Al mismo tiempo, y dada la persistencia de un
cine latinoamericano socialmente comprometido, que se manifiesta no slo en
las pelculas de directores clsicos como los aqu trabajados, sino tambin en
las de una nueva generacin de directores latinoamericanos, el artculo evala la
posibilidad y la pertinencia de leer tal cine desde una perspectiva crtica centrada
en la nocin de autor. Asimismo, dada la preeminencia y la importancia de la
figura del autor a lo largo de la historia del cine latinoamericano, nos preguntamos aqu hasta qu punto las producciones recientes de estos directores y el
proyecto mismo del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano constituyen realmente un
corte neto con sus pasados cinematogrficos o simplemente un reciclaje de sus
antiguas estrategias.

Notes on Contributors
Address correspondence to: Professor Stephen Hart, Constanza Buruca, & David M.
J. Wood, Department of Spanish and Latin-American Studies, University College
London, Gower Street, London wc1e 6bt, UK; [email protected]