A \critical moment for Latin American self-awareness\: modern Latin American film and literature

Author(s)

Maria Alzuguir Gutierrez

• Document type: Doctoral Thesis
• Press: São Paulo.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Escola de Comunicações e Artes (ECA/SBD)
• Defense date: 2014-11-17

Examining board members

Rubens Luis Ribeiro Machado Junior; Eduardo Victorio Morettin; Ana Cecilia Arias Olmos; Marcos Cesar de Paula Soares; Ismail Norberto Xavier

• Advisor: Rubens Luis Ribeiro Machado Junior

Abstract

This research seeks to understand how modern Latin American cinema articulates itself with the literature of the same period and with Latin America literary tradition in building a nationalcontinental project. To achieve this goal we have the analysis of three modern Latin-American movies and their links with literature. The films are Glauber Rocha\'s Cabezas cortadas (1970), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea\'s Una pelea cubana contra los demonios (1971) and Jorge Sanjinés\' La nación clandestina (1989). In the case of Cabezas cortadas, what interested me the most was the idea of analyzing the movie as something akin to the \"dictator novels\" that were published around the 1970s, same time as the movie was produced; also, by attempting to be a \"Borgean\" appropriation of Shakespeare the movie inserts itself in a broad revision of the playwright\'s work within the Latin American panorama, as it was produced at a time in which The Tempest was being revisited by Caribbean writers. With Una pelea cubana contra los demonios, Gutiérrez Alea has adapted Fernando Ortiz\'s historical investigation published in 1959. In the movie we see a broader dialogue with Ortiz\'s work, beyond the historical research that inspires it. As for La nación clandestina and the development of Sanjinés\' work, these may be understood from a comparison with the so-called literary neo-indigenism of the Andes region. If Brazilian cinema has found themes and forms in literature, as states Jean-Claude Bernardet, the present thesis states that the same may be said about modern Latin American film in general: the moviemakers have created in literature the foundation for a \"Latin American Cinema\", the field in which a Latin American consciousness had spread its roots the furthest at the time. (AU)