Latin American Documentary Film: Artistic Innovation and Political Commitment

• Date: 01 May 2018
• Published date: 01 May 2018
• Author: Rosalind Bresnahan
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18765790
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 220, Vol. 45 No. 3, May 2018, 291–293

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X18765790

© 2018 Latin American Perspectives

291

Book Review

Latin American Documentary Film

Artistic Innovation and Political Commitment

by

Rosalind Bresnahan

Antonio Traverso and Kristi M. Wilson (eds.) Political Documentary Cinema in Latin

America. London and New York: Routledge, 2014.

From Cuba to the Southern Cone, Latin America has been fertile territory for sig-

nificant theoretical and aesthetic advances in documentary film, as politically commit-

ted filmmakers have recognized culture as a major front in the struggle for human

rights and social justice in which they engaged as creative artists in powerful and inno-

vative ways. Despite these films’ political impact and international influence, few books

in English have focused exclusively on the Latin American documentary. An important

contribution to filling that gap is Political Documentary Cinema in Latin America, edited

by Antonio Traverso and Kristi M. Wilson, presenting material they originally compiled

for a special issue of Social Identities (19 [3-4], 2013).

This valuable collection traces pivotal moments in documentary history and exam-

ines recent work that addresses a wide range of social issues. Four chapters highlight

Argentina as a key site of documentary development, moving from the groundbreaking

work of Fernando Birri and the Santa Fe Documentary School starting in the late 1950s

through the militant Third Cinema of the Cine Liberación group and others a decade

later to the present postdictatorship era. These are followed by contributions on Brazil,

Chile, and Cuba (two chapters each,) Jamaica (one), Mexico (three), and Venezuela

(one), including three chapters on the work of the diaspora filmmakers Lourdes Portillo,

Esther Figueroa, and Alex Rivera. Most chapters focus on one or two films or a single

director. Others consider a broader body of work such as the documentaries on the

Venezuelan coup of 2002 analyzed by Nilo Couret, Misha MacLaird’s account of the

upsurge in documentary filmmaking in Mexico from 2000 to 2009, and grassroots vid-

eos by the Homeless Workers’ Movement in São Paulo in the 2000s in the chapter by

Marina Cavalcanti Tedesco.

Even when returning to the early decades when Latin American documentary first

became a force in world cinema, the contributors offer fresh perspectives. For example,

Tire dié (Throw Me a Dime, 1960), Birri’s landmark depiction of marginality, is inter-

preted by Isis Sadek as a rejection of the false promises of the capitalist developmental-

ist discourse that was dominant at that time. Mariano Mestman uses the political,

philosophical, and technical issues involved in incorporating the worker’s voice to pro-

vide the unifying theme for discussing La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces,

1968), Ya es tiempo de violencia (Now Is the Time for Violence, 1969), and other influential

documentaries during that conflictive time in Argentina. The rapid photo montages of

Santiago Alvarez, whose filmmaking was as revolutionary as the Cuban context in

Rosalind Bresnahan has a Ph.D. in mass media and communication and is a coordinating editor

of Latin American Perspectives.

765790LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X18765790Latin American PerspectivesBresnahan / BOOK REVIEW

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