FLM 400-820: New Latin American Cinema
FLM 400-820: New Latin American Cinema
“The New Latin American Cinema is today a reality,” writes Argentinian filmmaker Fernando Birrí in 1985, “but… but… but twenty-five years ago it was utopia.” This course takes as its point of departure the emergence of cinematic new waves in Latin America beginning in the 1950s up to the contemporary moment. We will examine key films, figures, and ideas in the continental project that came to be known as the “New Latin American Cinema” in 1967. The course will provide a broad survey of regional, national, and transnational reverberations of a film movement loosely united by a militant opposition to Hollywood and commitment to a politics of liberation, with a particular focus on the countries of Cuba, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. Readings will survey a variety of key texts in Latin American film and cultural studies, placing the films against the continent’s rich history of nationalist movements, armed revolution, neocolonialism, underdevelopment, debates in national identity, decolonization, organized labor, and aesthetic proposals. This survey returns us to the moment of utopia to ask how the New Latin American Cinema movement came of age, how it grew old, and where it is today.