Cine En Emergencia: National Identity in Post- Dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay

Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post- Dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay

Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation

Authors Romero, Eva Karene

Publisher The University of Arizona.

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Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/265372

CINE EN EMERGENCIA: NATIONAL IDENTITY IN POST-DICTATORIAL AUDIOVISUAL PRODUCTION IN PARAGUAY

Eva Karene Romero

______

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF SPANISH AND PORTUGUESE

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WITH A MAJOR IN SPANISH

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

2012 2

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Eva Karene Romero entitled Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

______Date: 04/23/12 Dr. Laura Gutiérrez

______Date: 04/23/12 Dr. Laura Briggs

______Date: 04/23/12 Dr. Abraham Acosta

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the Candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

______Date: 04/23/12 Dissertation Director: Dr. Laura Gutiérrez

STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED: Eva Karene Romero

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This dissertation project is a result of my academic preparation and research completed during both the MA program and the PhD program in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona.

I would like to thank all of my professors and fellow graduate students for their contributions to my intellectual growth, both inside and outside of the classroom. I would especially like to thank my dissertation committee: Laura Gutiérrez, Laura Briggs and Abraham Acosta and fellow-students Lucy Blaney-Liable, Andy Guzmán, Andrew Rajca, Olimpia Rosenthal and Jamie Wilson. I would also like to thank the peers and friends who took part in our Dissertation Support Group: Rosario Hall, Roberto Mendoza, Elizabeth Phillips, Maisa Taha and Wasilia Yapur.

I also cannot go without thanking the following people, whose support, loving kindness, help, encouragement and labor have all gone into this project in one way or another: Carlos, Alba, Adriana, Andy and Victoria Valdovinos, thank you for welcoming me into your home and family every time I return to Paraguay. Lidia, Isabel and Elba, thank you for feeding me, washing my clothes, cleaning my room and helping me with Guaraní translations. Sonia, Rosanna, and Norita Bruke, thank you for being there for me, primas. Mario Franco, Hugo Biedermann, Belén Herrero, and Belén Perez nuestro amor va más allá del tiempo-espacio. Aníbal Ríos, Mariana Vázquez, Fredi Casco, Marcelo Martinessi, Paulo Meileke, Patricia Aguayo, Paz Encina, Renate Costa, Juan Carlos Maneglia, Tana Schémbori, Ramiro Gómez, Manuel Cuenca, Claudia Rojas, Hugo Cataldo, Agusto Netto, Pablo Lamar thank you for sharing your knowledge with me. Thank you to those who attended conferences, institutes and talks that helped shape my work, particularly Laura Gronewold, Marlowe Daly-Galeano, Araceli Masterson, Rafael Climent-Espino, and everyone who attended the Tepoztlán Institute for the Transnational History of the Americas 2011. Thank you to Guillermo Martínez-Sotelo for assisting me with my understanding of soccer rules.

Endless thanks to Andrew Haberbosch for so much support that I could not begin to describe it here.

DEDICATORIA

A tod@s l@s paraguay@s

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ...... 7 INTRODUCTION ...... 8 On the (Trans)national Frame ...... 8 Locating Paraguayan Film ...... 14 Points of Departure ...... 17 Contributions to the Field ...... 19 Overview of Chapters ...... 21 CHAPTER 1: FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY? FROM LITERATURE TO FILM? ...... 25 Latin American Film Studies and the Nation ...... 25 Historical Contextualization: A Particular History of Dictatorship ...... 39 ¿Qué es el audiovisual? ...... 49 Paraguayidad ...... 52 A History of Audiovisual Production in Paraguay and the Foreign/Male Gaze ...... 61 CHAPTER 2: HAMACA PARAGUAYA: BETWEEN RESISTANCE… ...... 69 Hamaca’s Formal Resistance ...... 75 Representation as The Counting of Those Who Don’t Count ...... 83 A Record of Violence ...... 87 The Mechanics of Allegory, Mourning and Temporal Marks ...... 90 Allegory and Gender ...... 94 Noche Adentro ...... 95 Karai Norte ...... 100 CHAPTER 3: … AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY ...... 105 The Campesino Protagonist and the Rural Space ...... 105 Temporalization, Racialization, and Gendering ...... 115 CHAPTER 4: FRANKFURT: AUTHENTICITY, TRANSNATIONALITY, HISTORICAL BORDER WARDS AND GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM .. 127 “Authenticity” and Transnationality ...... 127 Frankfurt ...... 136 Historical Border Wars and Contemporary Global Neoliberal Capitalism ...... 143 The Market, the State and the Church ...... 148 Melancholia and Politics ...... 156 Affect and Structures of Feeling ...... 158 CONCLUSION ...... 166 Summary of the Study………………………………………………………………….166 Methodology……………………………………………………………………………169 Major Findings………………………………………………………………………….171 Conclusions and Implications ...... 182 REFERENCES ...... 185

ABSTRACT

“Cine en Emergencia: National Identity in Post-dictatorial Audiovisual Production in Paraguay,” is an academic study of narrative and documentary film from Paraguay. Cinematic production in Paraguay has “boomed” only with the last decade in part due to the censorship of the long-standing Stroessner regime and in part because new digital technologies have made audiovisual production more accessible. This study explores the dominance of a particular essentialized national identity in narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. This iconic protagonist and space (the campesino in the rural setting) is not the site of “true Paraguayan authenticity,” but rather, the product of competing national and transnational forces. Inside Paraguay, rural icons become the grounds from which to express political resistance and frustration with the status quo. Outside of Paraguay—particularly in the European power center of film festivals, funding and awards—a homogeneous and uncontested set of representations of national identity becomes the paradigm that satisfies the “first world” need to essentialize and orientalize the “third world.” In the introduction I make my methodology clear, stressing that I am focusing my critical apparatus on circulating discourse regarding what it means to be a citizen of that Paraguay. I also grapple with the difficulty of dealing with a film archive that is classified as national while trying to dislodge the national frame as the paradigm for analysis and provide a problematization of the relationship between film and nation that has been so widely and uncritically accepted. In Chapter 1 I provide a historical contextualization for the relationship between film and the nation and provide important details in regards to the history of the moving image in Paraguay. In Chapter 2 I explore Hamaca Paraguaya’s (2006) potential for resistance through formal subversion, historical revisionism, self-reflexivity and political denunciation. Using a double-register, in Chapter 3 I describe the transnational power structure as a palimpsest against which Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a cultural product. In Chapter 4 I analyze Frankfurt (2006) as a documentary that creates parallels between Paraguay’s historical border wars and present-day global neoliberal capitalism.

INTRODUCTION

My father is from Paraguay and I was raised there. Whenever I came back to the

United States (where I was born) and told people “I live in Paraguay,” no one knew where or what I was talking about. In fact, most of the times I heard Paraguay mentioned in the U.S. media, it was a stand-in for “a place no one has ever heard of.” Paraguay’s history of dictatorship, isolation, geography and size could all be cited to explain its invisibility. Having not had much of a film history, no one would have even seen a film shot in Paraguay—until now.

When friends1 began their involvement in the production of narrative and

documentary film in Paraguay, I paid attention. Who was involved? What would these

“early” films look like? What would they be about? Could I watch them? Who else

would watch them, and how? What would people think about Paraguay when they

watched them? These simple questions were my point of departure.

On the (Trans)national Frame

As a student interested in transnational studies, my first problem was: how do I

write about film specifically from Paraguay without privileging the national frame? I see

transnationalism as a category of analysis that does not privilege the perceived fixity of

1 My dear old friend, Roberto Andrés Valdovinos, was doing audio production for Tierra Roja (2006) when I started discussing possible ideas for this dissertation with him. I thank him for bringing Paraguayan film projects to my attention that I, at that time, otherwise would have known nothing about. Since then my research has come to encompass works authored by people other than my personal friends, of course.

the national frame, but rather, resists the tradition of making the nation the framework from which things can be studied. Transnationalism should always depart from the assumption of nationalism as ideology. As an approach, it must integrate an acknowledgement of the force of nationalism, imperialist aggression and their linkage with capitalist formation. Transnationalism involves actively visibilizing the moments of slippage that reveal how the nation is always contested and shot through with contradictions. 2

Take for example the work of Gareth Williams in The Other Side of the Popular.

He argues that the transition from the national to the postnational involves a re-definition

of the nation, and not its demise, as some scholars such as Arjun Appadurai have

postulated.3 This change in the way scholars understand the nation coincides with a

change of focus. Leftist revolutions (Nicaraguan, Mexican, Cuban) were the site of hope

for the nation's “coming into its own” to borrow a phrase from Ranajit Guha, but this

desire was never fulfilled. Why? Theorists shifted towards a study of global accumulation

in order to approach an answer. It became evident that foundationalism and totalizing

narratives would no longer work to think about Latin America after transition.

The transition from national to postnational requires a change of frame in which

the nation can no longer be the primary referent for scholars who desire a

counterhegemonic approach. Conceptualizations of the nation require a pairing of

economic and cultural frameworks. Upon studying how the structure of the nation is

2 See Briggs, McCormick and Way’s “Transnationalism: a Category of Analysis.” 3 Appadurai, Arjun (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

related to the universal development of capitalism, theorists such as Williams point out that the formation of the modern nation-state was necessary for global capitalist flows that present themselves as intrinsic to uneven accumulation and perpetuation of global poverty under neoliberalism.

My interest has always been to talk about how discourses on the national function in tandem with the market through cultural products. What better cultural product with which to explore discourses on the nation than film? The relationship between the nation and film has been widely and uncritically accepted, according to Vitali and Willemen, much in the same way the nation itself has been widely and uncritically accepted as its own category of analysis. In their book, Theorising National Cinema, they go on to describe how “‘foreign-ness’ was foisted upon . . . films by competitors as [they] sought to monopolise a market by defining it as a ‘national’ one. . . . xenophobia was mobilized against certain competitors to drive them out of a geopolitically bounded market” (1). In order for film companies to achieve a monopoly, they needed to first develop and unify a national market. The relationship between nation and film was in fact forged by the market. Ana López also writes about how:

[I]n Latin America, the importance of nationality in the cinema has been a

hotly debated issue almost since the birth of cinema. In the face of what has

always been perceived as the dominating and stifling presence of other

cultures and ideologies, the cinema was identified early on as a crucial site for

the utopian assertion of a collective unity identified as the nation. (141)

Therein lays a question: if national film was in fact forged by the market, can it possibly operate in favor of oppressed classes (such as the rural poor) in name of “the collective unity identified as the nation” or has cultural analysis proven that no relationship forged by the market can meaningfully work toward reversing the order of the market? Can nationalism be operationalized in favor of equality and redistribution? Vitali and

Willemen go on to describe how:

The most common way of forestalling questions about the ways in which

economic arrangements shape cultural issues and modes of thinking, while

appearing to solve the problem of that interaction, has been to invoke the

metaphor of the national body and its organic formation in a myth-like

‘natural’ past. (2)

In light of this concept, I find it is absolutely necessary for any scholar taking national film as the object of study to explore ways in which the nation is represented by film as the natural result of an evolutionary trajectory and how that representation is related to economic arrangements. To write about film history using essentializing views of national cultural formations is to be complicit with the market.

So why pair film and nation at all? Vitali and Willamen’s words are helpful for addressing this question:

[C]inema can be thought of as pertaining to a national configuration because films,

far from offering cinematic accounts of ‘the nation’ as seen by the coalition that

sustains the forces of capital within any given nation, are clusters of historically

specific cultural forms the semantic modulations of which are orchestrated and

contended over by each of the forces at play in a given geographical territory. . . .

films can be seen not to ‘reflect’ but to ‘stage’ the historical conditions that

constitute ‘the national’ and, in the process, to ‘mediate’ the socio-economic

dynamics that shape cinematic production, along with the other production sectors

governed by national industrial regulation and legislation. (8)

Indeed, ignoring the specificity of a given nation and how it particularly sustains the forces of capital would be to disavow the conditions that create inequality, much in the way the terms “postracial” and “postfeminist” do. Ignoring the nation would not strip it of its power, but rather, would obscure its power by placing it under erasure. Any scholarship that attempts to ignore the nation would inevitably be haunted by the nation in other ways that it would not be able to account for.

How then to responsibly account for national cinema? In his chapter in Theorising

National Cinema, “History, Textuality, Nation: Kracauer, Burch and Some Problems in the Study of National Cinemas,” Philip Rosen defines national cinema as “a large group of films, a body of textuality. This body of textuality is usually given a certain amount of historical specificity by calling it a national cinema. This means that issues of national cinema revolve around an intertextuality to which one attributes certain historical weight”

(17). In the case of Paraguayan film, to account for the national also requires accounting for the transnational. I insist that Paraguayan culture has been historically criss-crossed by “foreign” influences, and the Paraguayan tradition includes transformative integrations of many “foreign” practices. As Rosen states “. . . the intermediate and open term

‘transnational’ acknowledges the persistent agency of the state . . . At the same time, the

prefix ‘trans-‘ implies relations of unevenness and mobility” (x). Through the case-study represented by Paraguayan film, I find myself asserting that every national approach must also be a transnational one in order to adequately account for the nation.

In the case of Latin American film, perhaps this need is even more urgent. As

Andrew Higson makes clear in “The Limiting Imagination of a National Cinema,” “The cinemas established in specific nation-states are rarely autonomous cultural industries and the film business has long operated on a regional, national and transnational basis” (67).

The historically transnational movements of finance capital, films and film-makers are only intensified today with modern digital technologies and the internet. “[S]pecific transactions and interconnections are part and parcel of the history of Latin American cinemas” (Noriega, xiv).

I decided to take on the “national” in film from a very specific angle: that of national identity. This approach involves analyzing discourses on the nation that have been and/or are in circulation. This does not involve turning my critical apparatus on

Paraguay as some sort of isolated whole. In fact, I am not certain how or if that could be done in any effective way. When I look at nationalistic discourses, I do so not only to talk about Paraguay, but more broadly, to shed a light on nationalism as it has been manufactured as a “problem” for the “developing” world. Willemen describes nationalism as such in The Third Cinema Question:

In fact, the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of imperialism as

nation-states extended their domination over others, creating at one and the same

time the hegemonic sense of the “national culture” and the “problem” of national

identity for the colonized territories. The issue of national cultural identity arises

only in response to a challenge posed by the other, so that any discourse of

national-cultural identity is always and from the outset oppositional, although not

necessarily conducive to progressive positions. (239)

Let it be understood that when I write about Paraguay here, I write about it as a collection of discourses that are forged and bounded by a public sphere “… as the public debate that gives the nation meaning, and [as] media systems with a particular geographical reach that give it shape. . .” When I say Paraguay, I am not limiting myself to that which exists within the geopolitical borders of the nation, but rather, I am including the discourses of

“the diasporic communities, uprooted from the specific geo-political space of the nation or the homeland, [that] still share a common sense of belonging, despite—or even because of—their transnational dispersal” (Higson, 64). How could I exclude such voices?

The loudest of them, in this work, is my own. In the words of Néstor García Canclini,

“...identity, as a narrative we constantly reconstruct with others, is also a coproduction.”

(xv), and to that I would add, a co-production that takes place on both sides of national geopolitical borders.

Locating Paraguayan Film

Although virtually nothing has been written about Paraguayan film, Latin

American Cinema at large has been written about extensively. In Chapter 1 I review the academic literature that has been written specifically about Latin American cinema and its relationship to the nation. This research demonstrates how film, the nation and the

market have direct, economically-driven relationships. Scholars have also described

Hollywood’s role in Latin American film; in some instances Hollywood constitutes a model, while in others, it is exactly what “Third Cinema” should seek to rebel against.

Politically-influenced manifestos from the 60s, 70s and 80s sought to give film in Latin

America a particular direction, purpose and aesthetic. Since then, scholars have pointed out the problems with approaches that were embraced as the darlings of these manifestos, such as emphasis on nationalism and realism: “the nation” is more equitable with the market than with the people; “realism” is more equitable with ways of seeing than what is seen. Today, Ana López writes about “New New Latin American Cinema” which arguably does less to subvert Hollywood and more to compete with it for box office profits. How does Paraguayan film, now showing, fit in (or not fit in) to these equations?

How does the new production of narrative and documentary film in Paraguay construct, maintain and challenge discourses surrounding paraguayidad? How do representations of national identity and citizenship intersect with representations of class, gender, and race that could fracture any sort of homogeneity? What are the recurrent stories that Paraguayan film tells about Paraguayans and their history? How is national identity constructed in particular global conditions (i.e. neoliberal capitalism) and particular local conditions (i.e. post-dictatorship) and how do these relate to the changing role of the nation-state? What is nationalism in Paraguayan film a response to?

“Development discourse?” What is the meaning of historical border wars as a referent for present day audiovisual production in Paraguay?

In this dissertation I analyze the national/transnational context, form and content of an archive of narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. This analysis illuminates the economic lives of cultural products produced in an effort to define national identity, revealing that these cultural products do not represent a preexisting, assumed nation, but rather, rely on identitarian politics to construct the very discourse that is the nation. Here national identity maintains a national and transnational imbalance of power and uneven distribution of wealth. Through my analytical process I demonstrate how cultural voids in

Paraguay are filled with an apparent hypernationalism that under scrutiny is not evidence of any national essence, but is rather another face of transnational capital.

There is no nation beyond discourse. But there are people. And another result of this cultural process I call Paraguayan film is a negation of the very difference on which global capital depends through a Paraguayan disidentification with a discourse on modernity in the Latin American context, development discourse and perceived parameters of progress. Paraguayan film simultaneously reifies difference and reveals the fallacy of difference.

In order to explore these concepts I have watched most short, feature-length narrative and documentary films produced between 2000 and 2011 by Paraguayan directors. I have paid special attention to dominant trends in films that have participated at international film festivals. I try to address these trends by writing specifically about the following films: Hamaca Paraguaya (2006), Noche Adentro (2009), Karai Norte

(2011), and Frankfurt (2008). I also write tangentially about Soberania Violada (2007).

Points of Departure

“Why study film?” is a valid question, and one I hear often being that my degree is in Hispanic Literature. Canclini’s words are helpful for illustrating a response:

This literary gaze at patrimony, including visual culture, contributed to the

divorce between the elites and the people. In societies with a high rate of illiteracy,

documenting and organizing culture chiefly through written means is a way of

reserving memory and the use of symbolic goods for the few…Being cultured has

implied repressing the visual dimension in our perceptive relationship with the

world and inscribing its symbolic elaboration in a written record. (94-95)

Augusto Roa Bastos has long been upheld as “the father of Paraguayan culture” due to his success as a boom writer. The issue is, his brilliant post-modern, multilingual masterpiece, Yo El Supremo, has hardly been read by anyone, Paraguayan or otherwise.

Even academics shy away from writing about it due to its postmodern form and linguistic challenges. Especially in a society with a high rate of illiteracy, access to said novel is limited, and in the way Canclini describes, its cultural value is heightened by its status as a symbolic good for the few.

As I discuss in Chapter 1, Paraguay is still haunted by dictatorship’s penchant for squelching ideas, creativity and critical thought. “Culture” is still seen as something for the elite, that may mark status but otherwise has little practical value. Paraguayan film, in contrast with literature, is a form that is much more accessible for the masses, particularly now since the birth of TV Pública Paraguay in 2011, which is dedicated in

great part to broadcasting audiovisual pieces produced in Paraguay. The political movement away from the Stroessner regime and its remaining structure and the parallel rise of a more accessible form of “culture” in Paraguay is not merely a coincidence.

Rey Chow’s study of Chinese cinema, Primitive Passions, has been hugely influential for this dissertation, and in many ways this work takes her radical assumptions as its point of departure. One of those assumptions has to do with why film is important:

From the perspective of the world at large, film shares with other institutions such

as museums and art galleries the important function of exhibiting ethnic cultures.

But while museums and art galleries are still bound to specific locales, film is not.

Film therefore serves as a major instrument for making the visuality of exotic

cultures part of our everyday mediatized experience around the globe. Because of

this, film belongs as much with diciplines such as anthropology and ethnography

as it does with literature, women’s studies, sociology and media studies. (27)

Film’s unbound transnationality recalls Gaytri Spivak’s words on the “errancy” of rumor in “Deconstructing Historiography.” Film seems to have greater possibility for moments of substitution of the signification-function of signs that are already in broad circulation; even signs that have been put in circulation by the state or finance capital. In Spivak’s words, rumors are “errant, illegitimate, and accessible to the subaltern.” Similarly, the space between a visual text and its reception opens up more possibilities for more savage constructions of meaning that feed back into the way we make sense of the globe, especially in the case of geographies that may otherwise be unknown.

Contributions to the Field

In the process of this project certain critical and theoretical points have developed in my mind as central “emergencies”: particular points that I have since classified as my radical assumptions or points of departure, the answers to the “so what?” question of my work. I believe they deserve further attention in contemporary cultural criticism as it moves forward. Here I categorize them by the fields that they may impact most

specifically: Visual Studies: images that neatly place “third world natives” in their

“proper frames” lay claims to “modernity” (meaning development and enlightenment) by

having taken a “subaltern term” (toward the underprivileged) but are more accurately

described as products of cultural hegemony. Cultural Studies: 1. a cultural studies

analysis must add temporality to the axis of social structure inclusive of race, class and

gender; power relations are integrally linked to how peoples, places and products are

related to the past, present or future, and how that relates to their race, gender, nationality

and "ranking" in the evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of progress. 2. the transnationality

and political economy of film production must be analyzed with regards to power

structures implicit in funding mechanisms and how these echo historical colonial

relationships. Film Studies: A study of a national body of film must investigate the forces

at play in the conditions of cinematic production in order to shed light on why nationality

is treated like a genre (vs. horror, drama, comedy, etc.). Latin American Studies: In the

case of Paraguay, national identity is formulated in such a way that directly contributes to

ideologies that help justify/explain away radically unequal distribution of wealth and

power.

It is also important to mention that this is a comprehensive work on a new field

that has not received serious scholarly consideration. No scholarly works have been published on the topic of audiovisual production in Paraguay through the U.S. academy.

This work is the first in-depth cultural analysis of the field that fills a void in the field of

Latin American film studies. While over the past decade in the United States there has been an upsurge in academic work on Latin American film production from countries other than the big four (Argentina, Brazil, Cuba and Mexico), none of this work involves

Paraguayan film. My research addresses this specific lack.

Another goal of this study is to build upon critical theorizations produced on representation and national identity in audiovisual production in Latin America. I go beyond the scope of traditional film studies and Latin American studies to produce work that gets to the core of profound theoretical exploration integrating economic,

transnational, visual, cultural and feminist theory contextualized within a specific

moment of local and global transition: the present.

Putting the aforementioned audiovisual products and theoretical bodies into

dialogue allows me to not only identify slippages and traces produced in the process of

mediating ideology in regard to national identity, but also in regard to the theoretical

tools circulating in the academy and currently implemented for this kind of exploration.

Overview of Chapters

“Chapter 1: From Dictatorship to Democracy? From Literature to Film?” provides a review of studies that explore the relationship between Latin American film, the nation and national identity. It also explores some categorizations of the types of relationships that exist between national cinema and Hollywood. It reviews film manifestos from the

1960s, 70s and 80s and scholarship that demonstrates problems with certain aspects of the goals of those manifestos and what following them actually produces. The revolutionary politics behind the manifestos and their complicity with the market are explored.

Chapter 1 also provides a brief historical contextualization of the Paraguayan transition from dictatorship to so-called democracy and the coinciding transition from literature (or void?) to film as the referent for thought defining the nation. In this chapter

I also identify certain historical and contemporary discourses regarding dictatorship and the arts in Paraguay.

In this chapter I explain that the 35 year Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguay concluded with Andrés Rodriguez’s coup d’état of 1989, however, the process of apertura social (socio-cultural and artistic change in public discourse) was slow to take hold. From teachers to taxi drivers, many speculate that this is due to the fact that every president elected after the coup had close ties to the dictatorship until Nicanor Duarte’s election in 2003. Unfortunately, most concur that Duarte’s presidency was a monumental disappointment: more of the same cronyism and corruption of the past. When left-leaning

Fernando Lugo was elected in 2008, the mood was optimistic again: for the first time since 1948 a non-member of the Colorado party had risen to power.

Chapter 1 also provides some context regarding what it means to be a filmmaker in Paraguay today. It explores discourses of paraguayidad and citizenship while asking what are the constraints and guarantees of participation in Asunción’s society? How do these effect filmmaking?

Additionally, Chapter 1 includes a brief theorization of the effect of the “foreign gaze” in Paraguay being structured like the “male gaze” is structured in Laura Mulvey’s foundational text, “Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.”

“Chapter 2: Hamaca Paraguaya: Between Resistance…” analyzes the national/transnational context, form and content of Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes

2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could “be successful” on international screens. In the third chapter, however, I also demonstrate the problems with this film’s success in its entrenchment within a cultural, economic and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the building blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and transnational imbalances of power and wealth.

I use Hamaca Paraguaya as my foremost example not only because of the film’s status, but also because of how it exemplifies several dominant trends in Paraguayan film: setting the story in the rural space, campesino protagonism, Guaraní dialogue, a focus on loss as the historical referent.

In Chapter 2 I explore Hamaca Paraguaya’s (2006) potential for resistance through formal subversion (slowness, silence, absence), historical revisionism, self- reflexivity and political denunciation. I also use Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present,

Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning to explore connections between allegory, mourning, temporal marks and gender. Specifically in my exploration of allegory and gender, I bring in two short films, Noche Adentro (2010) directed by

Pablo Lamar and Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi.

Chapter 3:” …And its impossibility” follows Chapter 2 in a double-register.

Chapter 3 describes the transnational power structure as a palimpsest against which

Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a cultural product. It explores the potential problems with how the mestizo campesino protagonist par excelance of Paraguayan film is represented—an argument that extends itself into a discussion of the “right place” of cinemas of the “third world” and film festivals of the “first world.” This chapter relies heavily upon the work of Rey Chow in her book, Primitive Passions. Chapter 3 also includes a section entitled “Temporalization,

Racialization and Gendering” which explores the problematic marriage of otherness, identity, the past, race, nature and development discourse through certain conceptualizations of Walter Benjamin, Anne McClintock, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall,

Sigmund Freud, and Anne Cheng.

Chapter 4: “Frankfurt: Authenticity/Transnationality, Historical Border

Wars/Global Neoliberal Capitalism” argues that the preoccupation with cultural

“authenticity” in Paraguayan film can be read as the trace of the transnational nature of

film production; authenticity/transnationality enter into a double bind. Chapter 4 analyzes

Frankfurt (2006) in light of this, and also as a documentary that creates parallels between

Paraguay’s historical border wars and the effects of present-day global neoliberal capitalism. I also explore Frankfurt’s ambiguity frente a the relationship between the market, the state and the church. I include a discussion on what melancholia may mean for politics in Paraguayan film. Finally, I explore what Frankfurt represents about how affect operates through nacionalismo futbolero, producing specific results along racial lines and with specific market effects, a reading in which I rely on Lauren Berlant and

Jesús Martín-Barbero.

CHAPTER 1: FROM DICTATORSHIP TO DEMOCRACY? FROM LITERATURE TO FILM?

Latin American Film Studies and the Nation

This is a dissertation about audiovisual production in Paraguay, but more specifically, it is a study that seeks to de-center the national frame in current critical discourse, challenging assumptions about what a nation is, what its relationship to “its people” is and how “national” identity is constructed in cultural history and film studies.

In this dissertation I examine the relationship between the nation and film, while asking how this relationship became so widely and uncritically accepted and while examining what this relationship actually does.

Paraguayan film, both narative and documentary, in particular represents a special opportunity for exploring the relationship between nation and film given the small size of its production, the dominance of national symbols within this archive and current debates about what the role, purpose and direction of Paraguayan film should be.

Existing scholarship on Latin American Cinema explores the historic relationship between film and nation. In Theorising National Cinema, editors Valentina Vitali and

Paul Willemen demonstrate how film, the market and nationalism have direct, economically motivated relationships. Historically, in order for film companies to achieve a monopoly, they needed to first develop and unify a national market. While many theorizations of the nation are currently in circulation, the most commonly activated in transnational Latin American film scholarship are theorizations that take the

nation to be an “imagined community” along the lines of Benedict Anderson. In “The

National Revisited,” Willemen describes the nation as “a bounded geographical space that a particular powerbloc, in this case a coalition that constitutes a national bourgeoisie, can reasonably expect to restructure to its own benefit on a long-term basis” (29). Vitali and Willemen also note that the most common way of obscuring the manner in which economic relationships affect cultural issues at the level of production and consumption has been to invoke the “the metaphor of the national body and its organic formation in a myth-like ‘natural’ past” (2). This puts us at a starting point where the assumption is that the nation is imagined and usually activated rhetorically in order to benefit the bourgeoisie economically.

That said, even though the national, like the racial, may not materially “exist” it is dominantly regarded as if it does. In “Framing National Cinemas” by Susan Hayward, she states that “[t]he fact that these discursive concepts of the nation are based in a

‘fictional’ representation of the nation does not mean that they do not have real effects”

(99). More specifically, as Vitali and Willemen might put it, the “nation” does exist when defined as the confluence of forces that sustain capital through historically specific cultural forms at work in a particular geographic territory. Therefore, it is of utmost importance that film not be studied as a reflection of what constitutes the national, but rather, as a mediation of socio-economic dynamics taking place in the name of the national.

In “Vector, Flow, Zone: toward a history of cinematic translation,” Nataša

Durovicová describes how cinema has always provided an ideal representational scale for

the nation-state and goes as far as to say that. “. . . it is still today nearly impossible to imagine a state unless it can cast its own cinematic projection nationale” (92). She points out that before sound was developed for film in the late 1920s, many nation-states had already begun actively drafting cinematic production for “national service.” Films were already being conceptualized simultaneously as commercial products and evidence of national cultural uniqueness. Durovicová sees traces of this legacy in the fact that:

At the US local Blockbuster video store, ‘Foreign’ is now, for better and

worse, a genre-like category alongside ‘Drama’ or ‘Sci-Fi,’ a recalibration

still largely unthinkable in the US theatrical distribution and exhibition

system, where the alignment ‘foreign=translation=art’ for better part of the

twentieth century succeeded in establishing a negative borderline of

visibility for the world’s movies. (107)

In “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America” Ana López also points out an

“obsessive concern with nationness” specific to early Latin American cinema, proposing that perhaps an explanation could come by way of the fact that the majority of early filmmakers were first generation immigrants. I would postulate, however, that perhaps it was not the first-generation immigrants who linked film with the nation, but rather, they were simply attracted to what was already there: an aesthetic form that was well-suited for representing “the nation.”

To speak of the market, the nation and cinema, it is necessary to speak of

Hollywood as Stephen Crofts points out in “Reconceptualizing National Cinema/s”: “As

Hollywood sets the terms of national cinemas’ self marketing, so too does its market

power and pervasive ideology of entertainment limit the circulation of national cinemas”

(52). Crofts points out how at the moment when cinemas from outside the United States become national, (which arguably they always already are), they necessarily require specialist exhibit circuits distinct from those of Hollywood—circuits such as art house cinemas, film festivals, specialist television slots and other rarer types of exhibition modes such as community, workplace and campus screenings.

Crofts categorizes national cinemas into the following relationships with

Hollywood:

1) cinemas which differ from Hollywood, but do not compete directly,

by targeting a distinct, specialized market sector;

2) those which differ, do not compete directly but do directly critique

Hollywood;

3) European and Third World entertainment cinemas which struggle

against Hollywood with limited or no success;

4) cinemas which ignore Hollywood, an accomplishment managed by

few;

5) Anglophone cinemas which try to beat Hollywood at its own game;

6) cinemas which work within a wholly state-controlled and often

substantially state subsidized industry; and

7) regional or national cinemas whose culture and/or language take their

distance from the nation-states which enclose them. (44-45)

In the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, particularly the 1940s and early 1950s, Mexican film was successfully placing a dent in Hollywood’s revenues in Mexico. However, by the sixties, certain Latin American Cinemas were also defining themselves against the

Hollywood model. The concept was to, in a way, “forget” about the market and pick up social responsibility as a motivation instead. In a direct critique of Hollywood’s glamour and fantasy, realism was upheld as the guiding light of Latin American film. Even the aesthetic and technique of Hollywood were seen as facets of film to counter; using the technology available in “the third world” meant different results. “Alternative” cinema arose with what was called “author cinema” and the demand that filmmakers be free to express themselves in non-standard film language. Since this cinema was conceptualized as a social service of sorts, it was seen as congruous that it should be state-subsidized.

All of the previous observations come directly from a reading of New Latin

American cinema through the revolutionary goals of manifestos from the 60s, 70s and

80s. Take for example the manifestos of Fernando Birri. Birri was born and raised in

Argentina after his parents emigrated from Italy. He studied at the Centro sperimentale di cinematografia in Rome and was highly influenced by Italian Neorealism. He founded the

Escuela Documental de Santa Fe with the mission of depicting “Third World” national

identities with “realism”—the task for New Latin American Cinema. It was, he thought,

an inherently revolutionary goal, because it abandoned the fantasy and glamour of

Hollywood cinema and focused on the problems and struggles of “ordinary” people. One

of Birri’s main goals was to break with commercial cinema by incorporating new

working-class and peasant audiences in order to achieve what he thought would be a

more democratic cultural practice. Birri’s goals became the goals of Latin American

Cinema as Birri became an icon and achieved founding father status. After the downfall of Arturo Frondizi4 and the ensuing military censorship, Birri found himself escaping to

Brazil, then Italy, then Cuba,5 finally “reincarnated as the ‘pope’ of the new Latin

American cinema” as John King puts it in Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin

America (85).6

In “Cinema and Underdevelopment” (1962) Birri stresses the concept of concientización or pro-people consciousness awakening. He uses words like “anti- bourgeois,” “anti-colonial,” and “anti-imperialist” to define the mission of Latin

American Film and to describe the struggle against Hollywood cinematic monopoly. Birri also calls for governments to adopt protectionist measure to guarantee the distribution and exhibition of Latin American film: “[I]n the same way that a government can cancel an oil contract so, for the same reasons of the social good and with the same authority, that same government can and should regulate the prejudicial cultural and economic exploitation that comes with the uncontrolled flow of foreign films into its territory” (91).

4 Arturo Frondizi was an economics professor who led the “Insurgent Radicals” (UCRI) to victory in the 1958 elections. The centrist direction he once represented was completely derailed when he was thrown out of office by the military in 1962. By 1970 civil war had broken out between the revolutionary left and the military, leading to “the dirty war” during which the armed-forces used abduction, torture and murder to impose a bureaucratic-authoritarian “solution” (Skidmore and Smith). 5 I would like to note the importance of Cuba and the Cuban revolution in the foundation of Latin American Cinema. As Ana López has put it, “At the time the only socialist nation of Latin America, [Cuba’s] films have always been seen as contributing to the New Latin American Cinema project. . . . The role Cuba has played in fostering New Latin American Cinema has yet to be fully detailed: a listing of co-productions and Latin American exhibitions and distribution agreements is not enough to explain the influential role of the ICAIC and the Cuban Revolution itself through the continent” (151). Paul Willemen also stresses the importance of Marxist ideology in the Latin American Film Project, stating that “The Latin American manifestos must also be seen in the context of Marxist or Marxist- inspired cultural theories in general, where they mark a significant additional current with linkages passing both through Cuba and through Italy, as well as developing homegrown traditions of socialist and avant-guardist thought. The most direct connections in this respect, for a European reader, are with German cultural theory of the 1930s, with Brecht and also with Benjamin” (231). 6 Interestingly enough, at the time of this writing Birri is a visiting professor at Tufts University in Medford, Maryland (quite close to the heart of imperialism).

Besides calling for the unification of Latin American markets in order to sustain

Latin American film cinematic production and distribution (or exhibition), Birri also frames film as another vehicle for addressing underdevelopment, which he sees as a product of colonialism, “both external and internal” (93). He also criticizes the current state of Argentine film, affirming that “The cinema of our countries shares the same general characteristics of this superstructure” (93). His complaint is that Argentine people are not being represented accurately, and a “real image” must be the first function of documentary.

In 1969 Cuban filmmaker Julio García Espinosa writes another foundational manifesto for Latin American film: “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Written ten years after the Cuban Revolution, García Espinosa rejects the technical perfection and high production value of Hollywood and European cinema and calls for a more

“revolutionary” art, in which the focus is again, on “the ordinary people” as more active, participatory spectators now that they are being represented as the “raw material” of

“imperfect cinema.” García Espinosa desires a more democratic spectatorship and extends Birri’s tenants beyond production and representation. He also criticizes filmmakers for being too sensitive to the approval or disapproval of the European intelligentsia. García Espinosa goes on to discuss cinema of denunciation as a potential weapon in the struggle against imperialism and to describe the process of presenting a problem without providing commentary as “to submit it to judgment without pronouncing the verdict” (81). He echos Birri in many ways, but whereas Birri makes a case for building a mainstream exhibition circuit in Latin America, García Espinosa

rejects what he calls “exhibitionism;” a fixation with such circuits. “The only thing

[Imperfect Cinema] is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question:

What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the ‘cultured’ elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?” (82).

The same year, Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino publish “Toward a Third

Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the

Third World” in Argentina. In this manifesto, as in the aforementioned ones, the importance of de-lodging film from its U.S. models is paramount. Again, the struggle is framed as one of anti-colonization, in which freeing Latin American film (and, by extension, Latin America) from the ideology and world view of U.S. finance capital is the goal. Solanas and Getino point towards “author’s cinema,” “expression cinema,”

“nouvelle vague,” and “cinema novo,” as possible directions for breaking from

Hollywood, experimenting with non-standard language and achieving cultural decolonization. The direct influence of Franz Fanon reverberates in statements such as this one: “The decolonization of the filmmaker and of films will be simultaneous acts to the extent that each contributes to collective decolonization. This battle begins without, against the enemy who attacks us, but also within, against the ideas and models of the enemy to be found inside each one of us” (56).

It is important to note how in these manifestos “the people” become synonymous with “the nation.” For example, Solanas and Getino write “Culture, art, science and cinema always respond to conflicting class interests. In the neocolonial situation two concepts of culture, art, science, and cinema compete: that of the rulers and that of the

nation” (35). In “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema” Ana M. López describes how nationalism as a source of resistance becomes a key concept for Latin

American Cinema since nearly its inception: “In the face of what has always been perceived as the dominating and stifling presence of other cultures and ideologies, the cinema was identified early on as a crucial site for the utopian assertion of a collective unity identified as the nation” (141).

The irony here lies in the fact that the goal was to advocate in favor of the working class, but in the process of equating "the people" with "the nation" as the subject of film, the unity of the nation as a vehicle for participation in the global market is what is forwarded most powerfully. What follows is a national form that serves oligarchic sectors more lucratively than any others. Similarly, in the introduction to his edited volume, Visible Nations: Latin American Cinema and Video, Chon A. Noriega points out that ". . . while New Latin American Cinema became a 'staging ground' for political struggle, it did so within a region without a strong tradition of civic society, while the filmmakers themselves were quickly assimilated into the auteur-as-nation-as-genre sensibilities of the international art cinema" (xii). What would have, at inception, appeared to be a noble attempt at making the subaltern visible, turns out to perhaps be more accurately described as an erroneous collapsing of the filmaker’s position with the people’s “reality”—all in the name of “the nation.”

The fixation with “realism” in Latin American film manifestos lasts well into the

1980’s, as can be seen in texts such as “For a Nationalist, Realist, Critical and Popular

Cinema” (1984) by Fernando Birri and “The Viewers Dialectic” (1988) by Tomás

Gutiérrez Alea first published in Cuba. As Gutiérrez Alea proclaims, “[Filmmakers] need to be able to interpret and transmit richly and authentically reality’s image” (110).

In assessing the early films and theoretical writings of the New Latin American

Cinema, Ana M. López, describes how they “signaled a naïve belief in the camera’s ability to record ‘truths’—to capture a national reality or essence without any mediation—as if a simple inversion of the dominant colonized culture were sufficient to negate that culture and institute a truly national one” (18). In “Recent Developments in

Feminist Criticism,” Christine Gledhill describes how a desire for realism is a predictable first impulse for an oppressed group. However, she also effectively problematizes simplistic notions of the feasibility of unmediated realistic representation:

Realism in [the] general sense is the first recourse of any oppressed

group wishing to combat the ideology promulgated by the media in the

interests of hegemonic power. Once an oppressed group becomes aware

of its cultural as well as political oppression, and identifies oppressive

myths and stereotypes, . . . it becomes the concern of that group to

explore the oppression of such images and replace their falsity, lies,

deception and escapist illusion with reality and the truth …“Reality” as

a formal modality in film involves a complex interplay of technical and

human mediations; “the real” therefore cannot simply be discovered but

has to be constructed in order to be conveyed. Since “reality” is not

after all a self-evident given, there is no simple alternative reality to fill

the gap left by the displacement of the “false” reality which is being

denounced, so the counter or alternative (“true” reality) must also be

constructed in this second sense. (162)

What the aforementioned Latin American Film manifestos do not recognize is exactly what Gledhill points out: their own involvement in “constructing” reality as they see it. In these manifestos filmmakers are called to simply “make reality visible” and are not warned that every frame leaves something out, for example. It is in these kinds of choices that the trace of the director’s hand and the limitations of the technology at work can be examined.

López and Gledhill both point out the pitfalls of embracing inversion as an antidote to cultural imperialism. In “The Third Cinema Question: Notes and Reflections,”

Paul Willemen expands on the “impulse” to “invert the damage” by attempting to “go back” to a pre-colonial moment in cultural production. He describes how filmmakers seek to:

develop the antagonistic sense of national identity by seeking to

reconnect with traditions that got lost or were displaced or distorted by

colonial rule or by the impact of Western industrial-military power. . . .

The main [dangers in this] derive from the need to reinvent traditions, to

conjure up an image of pre-colonial innocence and authenticity, since

the national-cultural identity must by definition be founded on what has

been suppressed or distorted. The result is mostly a nostalgia for a pre-

colonial society which in fact never existed, full of idyllic villages and

communities people by “authentic” (read folkloric) innocents in touch

with the “real” values perverted by imperialism or, in the most naïve

versions, perverted by technology. Alternatively, particular aspects of

some culture are selected and elevated into essentialized symbols of the

national identity: the local answer to imperialism’s stereotypes.

Mirroring imperialism’s practices, such efforts mostly wind up

presenting previously existing relations of domination and

subordination as the “natural” state of things. (239-240)

In “The Third Cinema Question” Willemen not only points out the common pitfalls of seeking out national identity, but goes as far as to state that the mission to represent national realities and identities in film is doomed to be counterproductive in terms of

Latin American film’s revolutionary goals, despite the best intentions:

In fact, the West invented nationalism, initially in the form of

imperialism as nation-states extended their domination over others,

creating at one and the same time the hegemonic sense of the ‘national

culture’ and the ‘problem’ of national identity for the colonized

territories. The issue of national cultural identity arises only in response

to a challenge posed by the other, so that any discourse of national-

cultural identity is always and from the outset oppositional, although

not necessarily conducive to progressive positions. (239)

In essence, film studies on the topic of nationalism such as Willemen’s would point to the conclusion that the national is never a solution for cultural colonization. Why then is

Paraguayan film so fixated on national identity? Why is the exploration of Paraguay’s

condition as a nation the dominant theme of film and documentary production in

Paraguay? Does “difference” (i.e. from U.S. and French cinema) in Paraguayan film try

(and fail) to promote a return to pre-global neoliberal order “values” in service of “the people” or does it do something else entirely? These and questions of “authenticity,” primitivism, and Orientalism are precisely what the following chapters explore. It could be argued that in the Paraguayan context, an upholding of national identity and pride is a gesture that goes directly against the dominant class’s historical patterns of assigning value to cultural products; patterns in which the “traditional” and “folkloric” and

“essentially Paraguayan” exist for tourists and for country people perhaps, but definitely not for the consumption of the class that matters—they shop in Buenos Aires or Paris.

Particularly during the dictatorship years, foreign brands not only trump national brands, but become the only brands acceptable for use in public (by the consumers who can afford it).7

Historically, the majority of the scholarship on Latin American Cinema from the

U.S. academy has predominantly been presented within a national frame: most commonly the national frames of Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Argentina and most recently,

Chile. There has also been a tendency to concentrate on the Latin American cinema from

the 1960s to the present. Revolutionary film movements, such as Cinema Novo in Brazil,

the post-Castro cinema of Cuba, or the films about Allende's Chile have dominated the

scholarship, while productions outside of the context of revolutionary situations have

7 Looking at the oldest Paraguayan brand names provides a hint of the extremity of this phenomenon in the apparel business; traditionally major Paraguayan brands were always developed with an eyes towards privileging the foreign referent as much as possible: i.e. Martel (apparel brand named after Frankish ruler Charles Martel), Whaaldren, MacGregor, Manhattan, Bertolucci, etc.

been ignored. Thus, national productions in other countries (or in other periods) tend to be absent from the literature. Considering this and the recentness of the Paraguayan film production boomcito, (as Paraguayan directors modestly call it), it is not surprising that there is almost no academic literature published on Paraguayan film.

In Magical Reels, John King dedicates two pages to Paraguayan cinema, starting the section off with “ . . . Paraguay has not, until now, been able to sustain a national film culture” (100). In 2003 the French film journal Cinemas d’Amerique latine printed an interview with Paraguayan director Hugo Gamarra Etchverry titled “¿Existe el cine paraguayo?” and in 2006, the same journal printed a follow-up interview with Gamarra titled “A la espera del cine paraguayo.” Finally, in 2010, lack is no longer the only theme of publications on Paragugyan film—The Film Edge: Contemporary Filmmaking in Latin

America edited by Eduardo Angel Russo includes a chapter by Paz Encina, director of

Hamaca Paraguaya. Encina briefly describes her concern with silence, history, time, tempos, absence and distance and how she expresses these concerns in the film. The present work finally takes on Paraguayan film as a whole in an attempt to analyze dominant trends within the context of their production, one of the most important trends being a focus on national identity itself. This project aims to explore some of the different ways in which national iconography is operationalized in Paraguayan film: as a return to the origins, as a site for “authenticity,” as the ingredients necessary to satisfy the

“developed” world’s need to exoticize and save the “developing” world and also as the grounds from which to express political resistance and frustration with the status quo.

Historical Contextualization: A Particular History of Dictatorship

Paraguay’s independence from Spain and the Viceroyalty of La Plata (1810-1811)

is contiguous with the beginning of its history of dictatorship. Shortly after the

Paraguayan defeat of the Argentine army, a popular congress conferred the title of

Dictador on José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who remained in power until his death in

1840. Due to the radical restructuring of social, economic and political institutions during

this dictatorship, historians such as E. Bradford Burns and Richard Alan White qualify

this period the first autonomous revolution in the Americas. These historians recount

how with strong popular support, Francia was able to set up a socialistic regime in

Paraguay involving a planned economy with a state monopoly on foreign trade; import

and export prices were set by the government. Radical land reform was carried out,

taking power from Spanish and creole elites through the confiscation of most of their

property. Similarly, the government kept control over the Catholic Church, starting with

land confiscation. Allegedly, Paraguay created a diversified and self-sufficient economy.

Taxes were lowered, budgets balanced and sustainable development became the priority.

Dictatorship as revolution? I will not defend or dispute Burns’ position, however,

I present Burns idea as an invitation to rethink public sentiment regarding dictatorship,

particularly for the working class in Paraguay. Burns describes the Francia dictatorship in

the following way:

Nearly isolated from contacts with the outside world, the landlocked

nation changed and developed under the leadership of Dr. Francia to

emerge as the most egalitarian society yet known in the Western

Hemisphere…Paraguay offered a better life to more of its citizens than

any of the other American Nations. (77)

This dictatorship is still configured in the national imaginary as one of the wealthiest periods in Paraguay’s history and as a foundational moment. Francia may have been cruel, but unlike his predecessors, he was cruel without discrimination: “No admitía escusas ni reconocía privilegios. Ricos y pobres, militares o civiles, eran medidos con el mismo rasero” (62) writes Paraguayan historian Efraím Cardozo. Francia’s regime represents an origin; an imagined past previous to the moment in which the mestizo working class lose their dignity to Paraguay’s Europeanized elite.

Jump to the Fundación de Asunción holiday, Aug. 15, 2010. I take a taxi home from the port after a weekend cruise on the Paraguay River. On the topic of the holiday, democracy and free speech, the driver says “Antes no se podía decir nada pero se comía bien,” referring to the Stronato (the Stroessner dictatorship). His statement could be considered part of the “éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse, a popular attitude of nostalgia for the Stronato. The sentiment is clear: “democracy” may have brought new

“freedoms” to Paraguay, but at a cost that was not agreed upon by the masses: a worse economy, an increase in crime and arguably, an overall lower standard of living for working class Paraguayans. There is not unanimous agreement in Paraguay that dictatorship is a bad thing. In fact, Francia was immediately followed by populist caudillos Antonio Carlos López and Francisco Solano López (1863-70), father and son

whose reign was only ended by the Triple Alliance War; a war financed in part by British loans, in which Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay joined forces against Paraguay.8

The period after the Triple Alliance War and before the Stroessner regime, 1870

to 1954, is seen as a time of devastation and chaos in which Paraguay was ruled by 44

different men, 24 of whom were forced from office. The violence and instability related

to the struggle between political parties (specifically, the colorados and the liberales) are

the outstanding qualifiers of the period: a period seen as a limbo, a chaos, an in-between

moment; a moment that could only end with the beginning of a new dictatorship.

The histories of the foundational Francia dictatorship and the Stoessner regime

are written similarly. From a working class perspective, dictatorship is synonymous with

censorship and control, but also with stability and greater egalitarianism. From an elite

perspective, dictatorship is synonymous with terror, suppression and obstacles to the free

accumulation of wealth, particularly through international trade—unless, of course, one

was a personal friend of Stroessner’s.

The 35-year Stroessner dictatorship (1954-1989) concluded with Andrés

Rodriguez’s coup d’état of 1989, however, the process of apertura social (socio-cultural

and artistic change in public discourse) was slow to take hold. From teachers to

bricklayers, many speculate that this is related to the fact that every president elected

after the coup had close ties to the Stronato until Nicanor Duarte’s election in 2003.

Unfortunately, most concur that Duarte’s presidency was a monumental disappointment:

more of the same cronyism and corruption of the past. When left-leaning Fernando Lugo

8 Some, like Brazilian historian Julio José Chiavenatto, have referred to this war as a Paraguayan genocide resulting in the eradication of nearly all males between the ages of fourteen and sixty-five.

was elected in 2008, the mood was optimistic again: for the first time since 1948 a non- member of the Colorado party had risen to power.

This history of dictatorship in Paraguay created a counterproductive environment for certain types of cultural production. As audiovisual producer Augusto Netto Sisa explains:

La cultura era de gente rica…Si te tomaste un café en París eras culto o si no,

no… El arte fue dejado de lado. La dictadura hizo que la gente tenga menos

educación, que se cuestionen menos las cosas, y bueno, el arte y la cultura

tienen muchísimo que ver con eso…pero a través del Internet y de la nueva

tecnología la gente se da cuenta que el mundo es mucho mas amplio que salir

y compartir un asado y una cerveza….(personal interview)

Indeed, controlling audiovisual production was much more important to the Stronato than encouraging it to flourish, and this control was not difficult given the scarcity and expense of the technology that was needed to produce film. The few cine-clubs established during the sixties and seventies were squelched in the late 70s and 80s as

“subversive” under the Stroessner dictatorship. The only completely Paraguayan large- scale production (with a $600,000 USD budget) to come out of the period was Cerro

Corá (1977); a film financed by the state and widely regarded as political propaganda created to extend a fascist version of Paraguay’s history as promoted by the Strossner regime. As director Pablo Lamar explains, the Stronato’s control of cultural production produced a general attitude of irrelevancy towards artists in general: “El artista no está visto como una persona importante para la sociedad … Es una sociedad muy práctica y

funcional la nuestra. El artista sirve para decorar la casa [solamente]” (personal interview).

The sudden “boomcito” of Paraguayan audiovisual production and its transnational visibility parallels a political movement away from the old regime. Consider, for example, that Nicanor Duarte was the first president (2003-2008) to be elected since the coup d’état who did not have close ties to the Stroessner regime. In 2006, the feature- length fiction Hamaca Paraguaya was screened at the prestigious Cannes film festival among others, winning multiple awards and becoming a pivotal “antes y después” point for Paraguayan film. Ramiro Gómez’s pioneering documentaries, Tierra Roja (2006) and

Frankfurt (2008) won awards at various international film festivals during the Duarte presidency. Marcelo Martinessi’s documentary Los Paraguayos, produced for Brazilian oil company Petrobras as part of their Os Latinoamericanos series, was also released in

2006. This time line is remarkable in that it signals an upsurge in audiovisual production in Paraguay and an international visibility of Paraguayan film that never existed before.

Pablo Lamar describes the effect of Hamaca Paraguaya on film production in

Paraguay in the following way:

A partir de Hamaca Paraguaya yo creo que realmente se dijo “Esperá un

poco…” Hay un boomcito de gente que quiere estudiar cine. Hay una

motivación en la gente, ya hay algo que está sucediendo. Creo que el gobierno

tiene que ofrecer un presupuesto suficiente y espacios de proyección habiendo

este interés. Hay que potenciarla. Mi miedo es que eso quede en un lugar

decorativo. En Paraguay las artes son decorativas. De hecho lo que más se

venden son cuadros. (personal interview)

Lamar, like other directors, sees this moment as pivotal because not only does it indicate the emergence of Paraguayan film, but the emergence of a type of cultural product that can function as a referent for defining national identity on a popular level. While

Paraguay boasts the late Augusto Roa Bastos, a boom author, as a representative of paraguayidad, his works are not accessible in the same way that Paraguayan film is. In most cases, Paraguayan film is able to communicate certain messages universally through images and includes subtitles for non-Guaraní speakers. The most popular languages in which to subtitle Paraguayan films are Spanish, English and French.

Lamar expands on the importance of the film boom in Paraguay describing it as a new space for representation of and reflection on national identity:

Acá lo que pasa es que la identidad nacional es la hinchada del fútbol . . . No

hay una identidad nacional que tenga que ver con la vida. El fútbol es una

batalla, una guerra, un lugar mítico donde no hay una reflección. No es

necesario para el fútbol eso, pero sí es necesario para la identidad cultural del

Paraguay. Paraguay actualmente esta en un lugar súper critico para la

identidad nacional. Por eso me parece que el cine en Paraguay es un cine en

emergencia en doble sentido como se ha escrito. Es emergente pero al mismo

tiempo es una emergencia nacional. Porque es un nuevo medio que viene a

reflexionar sobre el Paraguay y cual es nuestra identidad… Por eso para mí

estamos en un momento muy radical. (personal interview)

Lamar’s comments illustrate the trend of conceptualizing Paraguayan film as a compromiso cultural; a responsibility to the nation at large. However, this trend is juxtaposed with a general erasure of overt politics in Paraguayan film; a topic I explore further in Chapter 4. It is from Lamar’s interview that I take the title of this dissertation.

This is a moment when tensions between classes in Paraguay are mounting, when the

Lugo regime’s promises of land reform makes some fearful and others hopeful, and when a practice of post-dictatorial civic engagement is budding and old ways of doing politics are being challenged. The iconography of the nation becomes the most contested site for the trafficking of images that could sway the masses. Reception becomes a new concern whereas previously, the way to receive an image was simply dictated to the public. That said, not only do I see Paraguayan film as emergent and urgent for the nation; I also see the study of trends in Paraguayan film as an important opportunity for understanding how representation is shaped by this cultural, economic and political moment in Latin

America at large.

The boomcito del audiovisual paraguayo continues viento en popa through the presidency of Fernando Lugo. Lugo is seen as a public figure of impact who came to the presidency at the same time as Barak Obama came to the presidency in the United States.

Parallels can be drawn between the two figures, as both represent a possibility for change and a radical departure from the profile of past presidential figures. Lugo is the first non- colorado to be elected president in 61 years. He identifies with the working class in that he is not a native of Asunción, but rather of rural Encarnación and has a working-class background. As an ex-catholic priest, he has a record of supporting the liberation

theology movement. Lugo’s professed politics are decidedly socialist. And it has been during his presidency that the first and only Paraguayan film to take on the Strossner regime in any way, shape or form made its debut. The documentary Cuchillo de Palo, directed by Renate Costa, tells the story of Renate’s uncle’s mysterious death and describes the State’s organized persecution of homosexuals best exemplified by the

“Lista 108:” the regime’s gay “blacklist.” Cuchillo competed at the prestigious Berlinale

Film Festival of Berlin among other festivals, and was screened in a mainstream

Paraguayan theater, Cine del Sol, for a record four weeks in 2010: the longest time a national film has played continuously in this shopping mall’s cineplex.

When asked about what the Lugo presidency might mean for Paraguayan film,

Lamar makes the connection in the following way:

A nivel político ocurre un cambio. Yo al gobierno de Lugo lo tomo como la

posibilidad de la palabra cambio. Que para él es una responsabilidad gigante

porque la palabra cambio es un estuche vacío donde todos proyectan lo que

quieren como cambio…Pero sería un momento, un quiebre, que por lo menos

es la negación de lo que venía antes simbólicamente hablando. Quizás no

hubo ningún cambio verdadero de estructura ni de paradigma de pensamiento

ni nada más allá de los discursos […] Pero simbólicamente me parece muy

fuerte.

Lugo’s presidency represents, if nothing else, the creation of a space in which signs, signifiers and symbols in circulation in Paraguay can be rearticulated in a way that gives them new meaning. When Gayatri Spivak theorizes rumors in “Subaltern Studies:

Deconstructing Historiography” she describes such utterances as errant, illegitimate and inaccessible. Mentioning that Plato associates speech (logos) and law (nomos), the errancy of rumor-speech defies the law and cannot belong to any one voice, therefore no individual can be punished for breaking the law and in this way rumor re-assigns meaning to symbols in circulation without being controlled by authority. Rumor then signals a potential for insurgency, or in Jacques Rancière’s terms, a possibility for “the taking part of those who have no part” or the miscount: “the account of the unaccounted for.” If the Lugo presidency then represents an opportunity to re-appropriate the law or status quo of symbol signification in Paraguay, what does this mean when the people who are reinvesting meaning are not “those who do not count,” but rather, the upper class?

The most common profile of the Paraguayan film director is the following: a person of privileged class status whose family has likely been able to assist financially in their film school training abroad. These individuals are mostly thirty-somethings who were born and raised in the capital city of Asunción. Almost none live off of their films alone, but rather, mostly those who live in Asunción find that in order to support themselves and pay for their film projects, they have to work in television and advertising as well. As Netto puts it, “Si querés ganar plata tenés que hacer televisión. No hay otra.”

Lamar also describes how the Paraguayan socio-economic context affects directors: “Acá son tan grandes las diferencias socioeconómicas que para tener el estilo de vida en que vos tenés acceso a las cosas que uno tiene en otros países uno tiene que ser de clase alta, y para ser de clase alta acá significa que tenés que trabajar de cualquier otra cosa que te rinda, que no es la cosa que nos interesa (a los cineastas).”

This link between commercial production and film and documentary in Paraguay certainly has aesthetic implications that are worth exploring, however, I am more interested in what the political movement away from dictatorship means for directors in

Paraguay as part of a specific class. While movement away from the old regime runs parallel with an increase in production and visibility of film products in Paraguay, what does it mean that this same movement runs parallel with increased crime and poverty as part of a daily reality for the working class? Could Paraguayan film be responding to exactly this crisis, this emergencia? The question of who national identity works for as it is employed through Paraguayan film and how is central to this study.

The events known as “Marzo Paraguayo” occurred in 1999. Then vice president Luís

María Argaña was assassinated on March 23 of said year. It was widely believed that the president Raúl Cubas Grau and his puppeteer, Lino César Oviedo, were responsible for this assassination. (Oviedo had previously been incarcerated for attempting a failed coup d’état and was freed by Cubas Grau once the latter won the presidency.) Crowds protested in the streets over the course of several days, demanding the end of the Cubas

Grau/Oviedo government immediately. Protesters were fired at by snipers located on downtown rooftops, causing deaths and injuries. The end result, however, was the creation of enough pressure to result in Cubas Grau’s resignation.

It is important to note that the violence of this event was not limited to exchanges between protesters and sharpshooters. At the same time, Federación Nacional Campesina del Paraguay had organized a manifestation with the purpose of lobbying for their own

interests not related to the political assassination. This group of campesinos was purportedly mobililzed by Cubas Grau and Oviedo, and instructed to attack the protestors.

Paraguayan audio producer Roberto Andrés Valdovinos was present at public protests that took place during Marzo Paraguayo. When asked why he felt the protest was worth risking his life, (a risk he was well aware of, being that a fellow-protester was hit by a bullet beside him during the second day of protest), he responded, “What I learned the most from Marzo Paraguayo was that we do have the power to affect things. If Cubas

Grau remained in the presidency it meant a step backwards. If Oviedo came to power we could be in a dictatorship again” (personal interview).

In light of the events of Marzo Paraguayo, one must ask if Federación Nacional

Campesina del Paraguay was manipulated as much as some accounts would have us believe, or whether their actions are completely congruous with the defense of a political model (authoritarian military dictatorship) under which the rural and working-class standard of living was better. One must also ask if the elevation of the Paraguayan campesino as the protagonist par excellance of Paraguayan film has to do with a need felt by young, urban directors. How can a “democratic” Paraguayan national project go on if the chasm between the urban elite and the campesino poor is not bridged somehow, at least rhetorically?

¿Qué es el audiovisual?

Frequently when discussing all genres and modes of representation in Paraguay

(i.e. Manuel Cuenca’s comprehensive history of film in Paraguay titled “Audiovisuales

en el Paraguay”) people do not use the word film, but rather, the more inclusive term audiovisual. Audiovisual has become a go-to term because it can include anything on film or video: 35 mm, digital, released, unreleased, distributed or never even screened. The term audiovisual forces a rethinking of how audiovisual production is classified into genres, and also, points us towards a more fundamental question: when does a fiction film or documentary “legitimately exist”? In the United States one may think a film exists if it can be found on the Internet Movie Database. In Cuenca’s record, as in much media coverage, a Paraguayan film or documentary is not less of a film or documentary if it has never been purchased, distributed or even screened. As a matter of fact, most of the

Paraguayan films that have won awards at foreign film festivals are unknown to the general population of Paraguay. Most have not been screened at mainstream theaters, and even if they were, a movie ticket between 10,000 and 20,000 guaranies (between $2 and

$4) is unaffordable for the majority of the working class, being that minimum wage in

Paraguay is 1,507,500 guaranies; about 335.00 USD at the time of this writing. (A noteworthy exception to this pattern is aforementioned Paz Encina’s Hamaca Paraguaya.

She took her film and screening equipment [cine móvil] to different rural locations where free screenings were well-attended.) With these specific conditions of (non)distribution in mind, one may ask who the audience or public of Paraguayan film really is.

Augusto Netto explains the dominance of the term audiovisual further, illustrating the shift from celluloid to digital in contemporary filmmaking processes:

El tema es que acá no hay fílmico … Nosotros hacemos video … entonces

usamos el término que uno es un realizador audiovisual. Un realizador

audiovisual es el que te puede hacer desde un casamiento, o sea que sabe un

poco donde poner la cámara y como editar . . . Acá también decir que sos un

director de cine o un cineasta no tiene casi ningún sentido. Ahora, cuando

vos decís “Soy un realizador audiovisual” eso te entiende. “Ah, dirige tele,

hace tele, hace comerciales” … Porque no puedo decir cine … porque no hay

cine …. Acá no hay ningún título de carrera universitaria tampoco. Nadie

tiene un titulo de director, editor ni nada. Inclusive, te puedo decir por

experiencia que afuera te piden o un titulo de carrera universitaria de cine o

un premio porque si vos le das un título de una universidad de Paraguay, es

como decirle nada … “¿Con que cámara filmaste si en Paraguay no hay

cámara de cine? Hay cámara de video!” Y lo otro que te piden es un

premio … Al ganar un premio le estas diciendo que “Sí conozco la imagen y

como se trabaja y sí sé qué es el producto final.” El premio [de Emunho] es

mi título de cine.

Netto’s response touches upon factors that are key to understanding the context in which film and documentary are produced in Paraguay: 1) Netto’s statement illustrates the close relationship between television and commercial production and film and documentary production. Many people who are involved in film and documentary got their start, training, and daily bread in publicity and television. 2) In terms of supporting oneself, only three out of the 13 directors I interviewed told me they are able to successfully live off of their film projects, and in those three cases, funding was coming primarily from extranational sources. 3) Formal film degrees are not available in Paraguay at this time,

although audiovisual degrees are. All the directors with film degrees I interviewed had received these degrees from institutions in other countries. Netto’s comment about credibility, status and awards is also key for understanding Paraguayan film. I explore the role of international film festivals further in Chapter 3.

When asked the question “How have you financed your films?” Netto’s response is typical: “Haciendo comerciales para pagar nuestras películas … pidiendo cámaras prestadas, dependiendo de la buena voluntad de los actores … Ese es el proceso para comenzar. O si no no hacés.” This is the way in which films are usually made in Paraguay; with scarce funding, favors, IOUs, borrowed equipment and volunteer labor. Even after a film has wrapped in

Paraguay, it may be lucky to get through post production stages, it may never be distributed by a company and even if it is purchased, it is unlikely to be distributed widely enough to recover its own costs. None of the filmmakers I interviewed would agree that wide distribution was a realistic part of their original goals. The most they would admit to hoping for were a few screening opportunities, a little more visibility and better chances of securing funding to help cover the costs of the next film.

Paraguayidad

What is paraguayidad? What does it mean to be paraguaya/o? Perhaps being

Paraguayan does not describe a citizenship as much as it describes an identity (and/or lack of identity). Paraguay is and mostly has been a country of porous borders. So much so that one could argue that the right to live in Paraguay is not limited to Paraguayans. In fact, there are so many Brazilians living in the Paraguay/Brazil border region that it is not

uncommon to hear Portuguese spoken on the radio, in churches, businesses, etc. The documentary Soberanía Violada, directed by Mariana “Malu” Vázquez, specifically takes on the fact that 80% of the lands on which soybean, Paraguay’s primary export, is planted, are owned by Brazilian investors.

Being that Paraguayan citizenship is, for practical purposes, not a requirement for residency, it seems ironic that Paraguayan citizenship does not guarantee the possibility of residency within the national borders considering the over half million Paraguayans who have emigrated in search of better financial, professional and political opportunities

(that is roughly one in twenty Paraguayans).9 Similarly, the right to vote seems devalued

given the history of corruption of the political system. Also, given the severe corruption

of the Paraguayan legal system, one could say that it does not concede rights based on

nationality, (or even based on law) but rather, through a manipulation of law based on

economic and political power.

This raises questions about the role of government. If government is responsible

for the rule of law, yet there is a state of near lawlessness, than how does government matter? It does provide some sort of structure, but generally speaking, the void produced by historic failure of the rule of law in Paraguay has been filled by nepotism, clans, and other family-centered behavior. As is usually the case in the absence of binding contractual agreements, business deals can only be guaranteed only by some kind of personal relationship. This helps explain the exceeding importance of “reputation” and conformity with social norms, especially heteronormative ones, among members of

9 This data comes from “Ampliando horizontes: Emigración Internacional Paraguaya,” a report produced by the Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el desarrollo in 2009.

Asunción society. Whereas the clothes one wears, the car one drives and the person one dates may seem like superficial concerns to a person living in the United States or in any perceived meritocracy, in Asunción these are status symbols that may help secure an individual’s next professional opportunity.

In a sense, one could argue that this same social structure of controls also offers protection. The fear of offending someone can protect that person from serious criticism.

This plays an especially pertinent role when it comes to reviews of Paraguayan films. As director Ramiro Gómez puts it, “Este es el país de los incombustibles.” If someone has enough money and/or political power, few will dare to criticize them, no matter how worthy of criticism the piece they have produced may be. In fact, Gómez published an

Op-Ed in a national newspaper on the topic of “softness” in Paraguayan film criticism

(“Paraguay y su Cine Z”).

Director Augusto Netto Sisa expands on this concept while answering the question, “Te parece que el cine paraguayo tiene un mensaje político?” His response:

No. Ese es otro error del cine paraguayo ... No le criticamos a nadie, si

le criticamos a no sé quién no nos va apoyar ni Itaipú ni Yacetretá

porque no le gusta lo que se dice. Si le criticamos a Fulanito nos va

odiar el partido colorado y el partido liberal, o no voy a decir el apellido

pero la familia de no sé quién no nos va a querer. Si tocamos temas gays

no le va gustar al pueblo. Hasta ahora el cine Paraguayo no se

comprometió con su sociedad.

Netto Sisa’s comment highlights the fact that at the time of this writing, Paraguayan film is nearly devoid of examples that directly take on the topic of Paraguay’s political regimes, including its dictatorial past. However, that does not mean that Paraguayan film is completely apolitical. In the following chapters I argue that Paraguayan film and documentary use allegory and symbolism to address political problems on a national and transnational level. The erasure of the overtly political is also something I address specifically in Chapter 4.

Specific interests and agendas shape legislature anywhere, but the fact that

Paraguay does not have film legislation, unlike its neighbors, it a noteworthy point.

Despite organization and pressures coming from the audiovisual community, the Ley de

Cine they have been lobbying for over the course of several years has gone nowhere.

Some would say that this is because it goes directly against television and movie theater interests. Netto Sisa addresses the problem:

Mientras al estado no le interese, no va entrar la Ley de Cine. Hay demasiados

intereses… de canales de televisión, del cine…hay mucha gente que no quiere

que se haga esa ley porque esa ley hace pagar impuestos altos a comerciales que

no son de acá. En el cine hay que pagar un derecho de butaca que es un fee que

tiene que ir a la producción nacional, pero no se puede hacer eso porque no hay

ley…no hay ley de cine paraguayo, porque no hay nadie que le defienda. Somos

nosotros no más.

The Ley de Cine seems to echo Fernando Birri’s protectionist attitude toward the role of national governments and film, as he states it in “Cinema and Underdevelopment.”

Government regulation is the way to guarantee distribution in name of the greater social good. What Birri’s manifesto cannot account for in the Paraguayan situation is that a.) many people are making large quantities of money on the “uncontrolled flow of foreign films” into the country and b.) at what point is does this type of “regulation” become censorship?

Returning to the concept of Asunción’s clannish social structure (as opposed to legal structure) it is important to note that there is recognition of the systematicity itself, that it is propped up and artificially sustained. Therefore, how people succeed outside of this system is seen with a certain amount of respect and admiration. This is why

Paraguayan filmmakers prefer to screen their films at international film festivals before screening them in Paraguay. If their films win awards abroad before they are even screened in Paraguay, these awards set the tone for viewers and reviewers at home once national screenings actually happen.

This constant “mirada hacia afuera” or looking outside the national borders to gain knowledge of what is quality and what is of value plays in to what director Pablo

Lamar refers to as a “crisis de identidad nacional.” The assumption that the real tests of quality exist outside national borders in systems that are independent of the artificially propped up Asunción societal system and are presumably more meritocratic, creates a desire for the individual to make herself/himself carry more signs from outside of the country and less Paraguayan national or identitarian symbols. Netto Sisa expands on this idea talking about his own experience:

Si los festivales de afuera dicen que está bien la película o tienen algún interés, la

gente recibe mucho mejor la película. Esa es la falta de identidad paraguaya…

Después de que Emunho ganó ese premio en Estados Unidos y vino, a todo el

mundo le gusta. Entonces viví eso en carne propia. Lastimosamente tenemos que

salir a festivales afuera, nos tienen que ver afuera, nos tienen que ver con otros

ojos y mirar realmente la película y no quién actúa, el apellido de quien es, quien

estuvo involucrado, quien fue el sonidista, de quien hablamos…Todo eso pasó

con Mangoré. Como hay tan poca formación de los críticos… Crítico paraguayo

dijo esto, crítico romano dijo esto, ¿quién vale más? El crítico romano. Hay poca

credibilidad en la formación del crítico paraguayo.

Certainly part of this lack of trust in the Paraguayan film critic has to do with the social system in which they are entrenched, but the lack of a filmic tradition and film schools may have more to do with the fact that critics in Paraguay are not prepared to publish

(somewhat) objective, formal analysis.

In an article self-reflexively titled “Is wi support of de nashonal sings?” published in Clip magazine’s June 2010 issue, “support of national things” is exactly the topic up for discussion. The article is made up of polls in which people are asked questions regarding how much they know about national cultural products and their opinions of such. The introduction to the article includes the following comments in Paraguayan urban speak:

¿Por qué lo que la gente piensa que un título en inglés es más picho? Qué manga

de p*LOt%ds [pelotudos], pero bueno, ese es otro tema … ¿Ser paraguayos es

para nosotros un orgullo? ¿Qué pensamos de nuestra paraguayidad? … No es que

siempre queramos ponerles en apuros, gente, es que a nosotros mismos nos da

verguencita el poco apoyo que damos a lo hecho acá. Y bueno, medio difícil

luego darle apoyo a algo de lo que conocemos casi nada. (14)

The first question in the poll is “¿Cuán orgulloso estás de ser paraguayo?” It is noteworthy that supporting national cultural products is framed as a matter of nationalism or national pride itself. The gaze, however, turns outside again in the question “Alguna vez usaste la frase ‘no parece Paraguay o ‘no parece hecho acá’?” to which 87% answered yes. I myself heard the phrase when I ran into a former classmate from high school at an upscale restaurant/bar/art space called El Club Francés. In expressing his appreciation for the place, as he was visiting for the first time, he said “Que lindo lugar.

Esto ni parece Paraguay.”

The author wraps up the article with the following comments: “Quizás está demás decir que nos falta una inyección de arte nacional y amor por nuestra patria … ¿Sólo por ser paraguayos serán buenos? Jamás, pero si ni siquiera le damos una oportunidad, seguiremos siendo un pueblo sin identidad ni voz propia.” The intersection between cultural production and nationalism is literal and direct. The concept that a nation could lack an identity is a fascinating concern of which I not certain what to make of yet. What

I have noticed, however, is that a popularly held belief is that cultural production in

Paraguay will give Paraguay a national identity. This concept is acutely present and in the foreground of statements made by Paraguayan artists and musicians.

In an interview published at cineparaguay.com, the highly active producer Tana

Schémbori answers the question “¿Comparado a lo que era antes, ustedes; cómo ven actualmente a nuestras producciones?” saying “…hay un movimiento de gente y que en cierta manera, estamos unidos por las ganas de que Paraguay tenga su identidad afuera, que antes no existía…” Juan Carlos Maneglia, her production partner, has also cited

Alberto Issac saying “A people without cinema is a people without an image.” In a similar sentiment, Paiko, one of the best-known rock bands in Paraguay, repeat this phrase in key places, such as on their website and on the signed guitar prominently displayed at Music Hall record store in Shopping Mariscal López: “Un país sin música, es un país sin sentimientos.” Both of these instances illustrate a responsibility that producers of Paraguayan cultural products believe pertains to them: they feel charged with creating a quality product that represents Paraguay. Paraguayan artists and musicians therefore are not only charged with being creative and expressing themselves on an individual level, but with defining paraguayidad itself while assuming a type of cultural ambassadorship. Lamar highlights the seriousness with which he and other directors take this type of compromiso social stating that “El cineasta tiene que tener el igual salario que el diputado porque hace un trabajo importante para la sociedad.”

This responsibility is reflected in Ramiro Gómez’s comments published in Última

Hora newspaper’s online edition under the title “En debate: Reflexiones sobre ‘un posible cine paraguayo.’” In his piece he argues for the “right” kind of film for Paraguay.

Film is not seen as simply an individual, creative process but rather as a contribution to an archive that defines Paraguay. If someone makes a bad film, they should, as in the

words of Netto Sisa, “watch it in their living room with their friends but not show that in the theater.” In the United States, if someone makes a bad film, the onus is on them. In

Paraguay, if someone makes a bad film they have marred national film as a whole.

Gómez, like Birri, is a director who sees one “correct” path for Paraguayan film; the kind of path he himself followed, one that includes formal training at a recognized film school, grit and determination. In his piece, Gómez argues against trying to produce “box office hits” in Paraguay, offering that not enough Paraguayans can afford to go to the theater, so the return on this kind of film is not worth it. "A un país pobre corresponde un cine austero." These comments indirectly refer to the upcoming release of Siete Cajas produced by Maneglia y Schémbori; the first contemporary Paraguayan film openly aspiring to be a future box office hit.

Returning to the question “what does it mean to be paraguay@?” it seems to mean less about citizenship and more about what Lauren Berlant calls an intimate sphere:

[I]ntimate spheres feel like ethical places based on the sense of capacious

emotional continuity they circulate, which seems to derive from an ongoing

potential for relief from the hard, cold world. Indeed the offer of the simplicity

of the feeling of rich continuity with a vaguely defined set of like others if often

the central affective magnet of an intimate public. (6-7)

Berlant elaborates further on the concept of intimate publics stating that:

[W]hat counts as collectivity has been a loosely organized, market structured

juxtapolitical sphere of people attached to each other by a sense that there is a

common emotional world available to those individuals who have been marked

by the historical burden of being harshly treated in a generic way and who have

more than survived social negativity by making an aesthetic and spiritual scene

that generates relief from the political. (10)

The sociopolitical and economic problems that influence people’s everyday lives in

Paraguay are frequently seen as a “hard, cold world” from which there is little relief to be found. Thus, the flip side or “cultural” side of Paraguayan nationalism represents a possible way to address the failings of the political reality of paraguayidad. Creating this cultural side is indeed a task taken on by directors as an ethical or even moral responsibility that the creative intellectual owes to the rest of the collectivity. Since el pueblo paraguayo has been collectively marked by the “historical burden” of oppression and violence through colonization; at the hands of its neighbors (as in the case of the

Triple Alliance War); through dictatorship and finally through the corruption of its present-day “democracy”—creating and sustaining a common emotional world, “an aesthetic and spiritual scene” that generates Paraguayan pride and relief, does indeed seem essential following Berlant’s logic of intimate publics.

This is something I explore further in Chapter 4.

A History of Audiovisual Production in Paraguay and the Foreign/Male Gaze

Paraguay’s history of dictatorship is related to a history of foreign relations that waver between isolationism and intense transnational cultural and economic exchange.

Francia’s policy was that of “enclaustramiento total del pais” to use one of Efraím

Cardozo’s phrases. “Ningún paraguayo pudo salir del país y nadie pudo ingresar a él, como no fuera en calidad de cautivo. El Paraguay se descuajó de la vida exterior” (63).

However, Francia himself was an “import” of sorts, his father was rumored to be

Brazilian or Portuguese. Francia’s ideology was heavily influenced by French philosphers Jean-Jacques Rousseu and Maximilien Robespierre. While political scientists such as Paul Sondrol have credited Stroessner’s popularity to his “typically Paraguayan”

characteristics of authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism and xenophobia, Stroessner himself

was also an “import” to the extent that Francia was: his father emigrated from Germany.

Even the history of the revered Francisco Solano López, who “gave his life for the

nation” in the Triple Alliance War, is tightly interwoven with the mythology surrounding

of his Irish lover, Madame Elisa Lynch. Together the couple represents unsurpassed

iconicity of Paraguayan hypernationalism and patriotism.

In Paraguayan history “el exterior” has been seen as a threat to Paraguayan

independence and/or the territory (in terms of border wars such as the Guerra del Chaco)

and/or a threat in terms of imperialist designs (in the case of British support of the Triple

Alliance Wars and more recently, a threat in terms of global neoliberal exploitation

embodied primarily by the United States and increasingly, Brazil). However, at the same

time “el exterior” is considered the only credible source for educational training and

technical expertise. For example, in pre-Guerra del Chaco Paraguay, modernization

projects contributed to the idealization of European institutional models over native ones,

(Cardozo, 129). In the case of Paraguayan filmmakers, formal training must come from

abroad but elements must be “Paraguayan.”

Manuel Cuenca’s unpublished history of Paraguayan film titled “Audiovisuales en el Paraguay” is not limited to film, but rather, extends to many different kinds of audiovisual production, including objects of more difficult classification such as snippets of video footage captured by foreign geography professors, anthropologists, missionaries, etc. This history of audiovisuales in Paraguay does not begin with Paraguayan production, but rather with foreign videographers representing Paraguay. In fact, the first twenty years that Cuenca accounts for (1905-1925) is entitled “Extranjeros filman durante dos décadas” which includes:

1920 – United States professor W. O. Runcie produces footage of Saltos del

Guairá for his geography classes.

1921/22 (?) - Count De Vauvrin, scientist and documentary maker from

Belgium, produces the following documentaries screened in Paris: En el

corazón de América del Sur desconocida, Entre los indios hechiceros, Los

indios del Gran Chaco, Las cataratas del Iguazú, La América exhotica and

El Paraguay.

1923/24 - Emilio Peruzzi, italo-argentine, produces the documentary Tribus

salvajes on the Maká tribe of Argentina and Paraguay. Screened in South

America and Europe.

1925 – German national Hans Krieg, director of a German zoo, directs a

documentary on his expedition to the Chaco, from Rio Pilcomayo near the

border with Bolivia up until Puerto Suárez on the Paraguay River, entitled

Expedition Paraguay. He also produces Los indígenas del Gran Chaco,

which includes a scene of a shaman “exercising” the illnesses from the body

of an elderly patient.

According to Cuenca, only after 25 years of foreign audiovisual production in Paraguay does one finally encounter the first example of a Paraguayan-produced audiovisual recording. In 1925 Alma paraguaya is completed; a documentary about the yearly peregrination in honor of the Virgen de Caacupé. How does knowing or imagining that the first images of Paraguay were anthropological films “captured” by foreigners affect the process of producing national film?

In discussing the fetishization of the Guaraní language in contemporary

Paraguayan film and documentary, Pablo Lamar had this to say: “En Paraguay se habla

Guaraní, pero yo no voy a hacer una película y hacer que hablen en Guaraní para que tenga un exotismo. ‘¡Ah, está hablada en lengua indígena!’ Al europeo, ya le veo con su camarita sacándole fotos como si fuera el europeo que vino a mirar los indígenas en no sé qué año.” Lamar’s statement illustrates the conflict between a desire to represent

Paraguay “faithfully” (“En Paraguay se habla Guaraní”) while also wanting to avoid being complicit with an exoticization of Paraguayan difference produced for the satisfaction of foreign eyes.

In Cuenca’s history of recorded images the foreign gaze is structured like the male gaze in Laura Mulvey’s foundational text, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”

Mulvey connects the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jaques Lacan to discuss the visual tradition of mainstream Hollywood cinema. “… In his Three Essays on Sexuality, Freud

isolates scopophilia as one of the component instincts of sexuality…associated with taking other people as objects, subjecting them to a controlling and curious gaze” (381).

In the relationship that Mulvey describes using Freud, the spectator gains control, possession and pleasure through the objectification of the other through the gaze.

Similarly, the anthropological curiosity that seems to drive the first recorded images taken in Paraguay are seen as a form of cultural colonization and domination.

Mulvey also refers to Jaques Lacan’s mirror phase as related to the process of the gaze; “the long love affair/despair between image and self-image” (382). Just as the development of the child’s subjectivity is based on recognition/misrecognition in the mirror, in Cuenca’s account, the titles connote a process through which U.S. and

European spectators are able to develop their identity though a process like Said’s

Orientalism; a process of recognizing that which is like them, but is also fundamentally different from them. Only through the construction of this exotic, mysterious, magical, savage, dangerous, ancient difference can the spectator construct their normal, rational, scientific, civilized, stable, modern identity. Mulvey, Claire Johnston and others might argue that this process, like the “scopophilic instinct” itself, are the mechanisms on which cinema’s formal attributes are constructed overall (388).

Mulvey also uses Freud to explore the anxiety related to difference through the metaphor of castration. Freud explains that the male’s anxiety surrounding recognizing woman’s difference (lack of a penis) is due to a fear that he, too could somehow be like her: penisless. As Mulvey explains:

The male has two avenues of escape from this castration anxiety:

preoccupation with the re-enactment of the original trauma (investigating

the woman, demystifying her mystery), counterbalanced by the

devaluation, punishment or saving of the guilty object…or else complete

disavowal of castration by the substitute of a fetish object or turning the

represented figure itself into a fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather

than dangerous (hence over-valuation, the cult of the female star). (386)

Similarly, the U.S. or European spectator’s anxiety may stem from the fact that he is more like the “savage” than he is comfortable with. This causes him to try to investigate and demystify by capturing the savage on film for study. Through film, the savage can be punished through the control and objectification of the gaze, or/and can be construed as a fetish object; something that is not even human, but rather, so other- worldly that it has powers, like the shaman, to exercise demons.

If we extend the relationship between the male spectator and the female object of the gaze to John Berger’s work, one can connect Mulvey’s female to-be-looked-at-ness to

Berger’s description of the female sense of self: “Her own sense of being in herself is supplanted by a sense of being appreciated as herself by another” (46). In light of

Cuenca’s record and the fact that contemporary Paraguayan films are mostly screened at film festivals outside of Paraguay, one must ask to what extent Paraguayan national identity or “sense of being in herself” is constructed through a reflexive gaze, a sense of being appreciated as herself by an other, powerful spectator.

Berger relates the spectator position to the market: “In the average European oil painting of the [always female] nude the principal protagonist is never painted. He is the spectator…the spectator-owner” (54-56). Seen through the market lens, the spectator owns the gaze and that which is the object of the gaze. “Oil painting did to appearances what capital did to social relations. It reduced everything to the equality of objects.

Everything became exchangeable because everything became a commodity” (87). At the intersection of Mulvey and Berger, the gaze has the capacity to control, own, objectify, reduce, fetishize, and commodify simultaneously and invisibly. Because a film, like an oil painting, can be presented as a work of art that “… suggests a cultural authority, a form of dignity, even of wisdom, which is superior to any vulgar material interest; an oil painting belongs to the cultural heritage; it is a reminder of what it means to be a cultivated European” (135). The constructed-ness of “the way things are” is hidden by the unquestionable purity and divinity of the artist’s muse.

Similarly, the backwardness of non-european peoples is secured as an unquestionable

“way things are” through dominant discourses on the linearity of time presented as self- evident truths, so obvious and natural, that they should not, in fact, cannot, be questioned.

It is precisely this “irrefutable nature” that makes the linearity of time such an effective discursive tool for the marginalization of racialized and gendered peoples placed within the temporal frame. One of the key theoretical frames of this study has to do with an exploration of how the present does not result from the past due to a logical and incontrovertible sequence of events, but rather, what we perceive as the past results from present hegemonic interests. A theoretical exploration of discourses on past/present

binaries reveals that this manicheistic form of thought functions as a melancholic stand-in for more overtly racist and sexist discourses. The naturalization of authority’s discourses on time and progress are in convenient correspondence with social class stratification and hierarchy. Some theorists whose work I explore in Chapter 3 for thinking through this gendered and racialized temporal construct are Walter Benjamin, Anne McClintock,

Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, and Anne Cheng.

CHAPTER 2: HAMACA PARAGUAYA: BETWEEN RESISTANCE…

In this chapter I analyze the national/transnational context, form and content of

Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes 2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could “be successful” on a world stage; a hugely meaningful moment for a small and impoverished nation that experiences invisibility as part of its national existence. In the third chapter, however, I also demonstrate the irony of this film’s success in its entrenchment within a cultural, economic and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the building blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and transnational imbalances of power and wealth.

When discussing Paraguayan film, it is necessary to speak of Hamaca first. Its characteristics are those that dominate the archive of Paraguayan audiovisual production.

For example, it won competitive funding and awards at international film festivals; it takes the campesino figure as its protagonist; the dialogue of this film (again, like the rest of the archive) is entirely in Guaraní, the indigenous language of Paraguay. The daily labor and banal routine that make up rural living constitutes the majority of the action of the film (as is also the case in most of the Paraguayan archive).

Hamaca begins with a dark space that is slowly lit to reveal a thick forest and a small clearing covered by leaves. It is dawn. The sounds of birds chirping, a rooster crowing, and a dog barking can be heard in the distance. Thunder rolls more faintly in the

distance, also. The elderly couple—Cándida and Ramón—are barely perceptible at first.

They enter the frame as if coming onto a stage.10 They seem to be about twenty to thirty

feet from the camera in a long shot. It is impossible to make out their faces with the

distance and the dark. At first the couple bickers about where to hang the hammock,

whether it will rain, whether or not to give water to the barking dog, etc., but

conversation promptly turns to the topic of their son, and how he might be, how they miss

him and want him to come home from the war. Ramón complains that the war is good for

nothing. They drink tereré.11 They talk about how their crops will not last much longer in

the drought. It is dark and cloudy, it seems it might rain, but it does not. In fact, it is

completely still. The audience gets the idea that these types of conversations have been

going on for a long time when Ramón says “¿Cómo estará nuestro hijo? Yo le extraño.

Quiero que venga,” and Cándida replies saying “Todos los días hablás de la guerra. No

querés hablar de otra cosa.” Bertolt Brecht’s verses come to mind: “What kind of times

are these/ when a talk about trees is almost a crime/because it implies silence about so

many horrors?” How could the couple talk about anything else? Indeed, their son haunts

them for the duration of the film.

The dog barking in the background is nearly constant. The audience knows it is a

female dog from the beginning (perra) and come to find out that it is their son’s dog, and

she is barking because she misses him. Her barking bothers the couple, and they discuss

10 This seems congruent with the actors’ theater experience. Most actors in Paraguay have had more experience in theater than in film. 11 Tereré represents a traditional Paraguayan way to drink yerba mate tea cold. The toasted leaves are placed in a hollowed bull horn or gourd with a metallic straw. Cold water is then added and sucked out repeatedly.

the possibility of giving her more water, or maybe giving her one of Máximo’s old shirts to comfort her.

When she finally stops barking, conversation turns to the possibility of rain again.

The couple goes back and forth between hope that it will rain and that their son will come home and hopelessness. The dog starts to bark again. Cándida complains that she is not comfortable. “No hay nada que hacer” she says repeatedly during their conversations, demonstrating a powerlessness and frustration with their situation. Yet finally, in this scene, it is she who gets up and walks away slowly, while fanning herself. Ramón follows, with a similar slow gait and short steps. The shot would seem to be one long take with the exception of only two shots of the sky: so dark and cloudy it is barely recognizable.

It is possible that by this point the audience may have noticed that during these

“conversations” neither character’s mouths are moving. The audience may be unsure if the protagonists are in fact communicating non-verbally, or if these are interior dialogues, or if these are the conversations they have had or would be having. Whatever the viewer’s speculations, it is clear this is not a traditional move on the director’s part. The entire rest of the film continues this way: the audience never sees a mouth pronounce a word.

In the next scene Ramón is cutting cane, very slowly and by himself. A voice speaks to him: it is his son, Máximo. Máximo tells his father he is afraid. Ramón encourages him to be quick on his feet and come home soon. They speak a little of war.

“Nosotros los pobres siempre estamos en guerra” Ramón says. Máximo tells his father he

wants to change his name so that his mother will not find out when he dies. Ramón tells

him, “No cambies de nombre. Tu nombre es mi nombre también.” When Máximo tells

his father that his mother does not want him to fight, Ramón responds, “Tu mamá es mujer mi hijo, no entiende de estas cosas. Pero te tenés que ir a defender tu patria—vos sos un hombre. Vas a estar bien mi hijo. Y pronto esta lluvia va a llegar al chaco.”

Máximo asks his father to take care of his mother. The camera comes in for a three

quarter close up from behind, showing the back of Ramón’s head and a small part of his

face when Máximo says he wants to say goodbye. Ramón does not want to hear this talk

of final goodbyes. “Ya me voy papá,” Máximo insists. “Andá mi hijo, despedite de tu

mamá también,” Ramón finally concedes.

The film resumes with Cándida washing clothes in a stream. Just as with Ramón,

Máximo’s voice “comes to her” also. He makes clear that he is there to say goodbye. She

protests: “¿Quién le va a cuidar a tu perra? ... ¿Mi hijo, porqué no te escondés? Muchos

se esconden en los árboles.” Máximo tries to give his mother some hope, “Parece que va

a llover, mamá.” “Siempre parece” she responds cynically. “Me tengo que ir” he insists.

Cándida lashes out against the war: “No me interesa la guerra. Para mí que se mueran

todos. . . . Esa guerra te va a quitar de nuestro lado. Es lo único que va a hacer.” Máximo

tries to calm her by promising to come home soon. She tells him “Metí adentro de tu

bolsa el poncho de tu abuelo.” The camera comes in for a three quarter close up from

behind, (as it did with Ramón in the previous scene), as Cándida tells her son how

heartbroken she is to lose him: “Este corazón, si fuera de piedra, ya se hubiera roto.”

Máximo tries to promise her he will come home soon.

The film cuts briefly to Ramón and three other men in the cane field, taking a break, then a group of four women and two children preparing the clothes they have washed.

In the following scene the hammock is hanging alone in the clearing. Ramón enters the frame and has a conversation about the hammock with Cándida’s voice. She says the hammock is not sturdy enough for the two of them, while he complains that it is not even that old. He tells her that she likes to complain about everything. Finally, as they are having one of their familiar conversations about the weather, her body comes into the frame. “Hace rato que ni tengo ganas de hablar, Ramón” she says. This statement does indeed cause the viewer to think further about the nature of their “conversations.”

Cándida and Ramón sit next to each other in the hammock. Again, the conversation turns to rain, their son and a back and forth between hope and hopelessness. The camera shows a sky that is very dark and cloudy, but still, no rain. “No le importamos a nadie Ramón”

Cándida states. The couple notes that the dog is not barking and bicker about whether it is dead or sick. Cándida confesses that she never gave the dog Máximo’s old shirt, as they had discussed. Their conversation continues in the same circles for a while until Ramón finally leaves to check on the dog. Cándida soon follows. The hammock is empty again.

The film cuts to Ramón sitting outside of a small building. We hear his conversation with a veterinarian (Don Jacinto) who tells Ramón that the dog is dehydrated. He asks how long since the dog has had water, to which Ramón responds that with the drought, there is no water for anyone, much less the dog. Ramón goes into the house to ask the vet if he knows anything about the war. Don Jacinto tells him that

Paraguay won the war two days ago. Ramón comes back out of the building and sits back in the chair. To him, the victory is a loss. “Hay que salvarle, Don Jacinto” he says, with a new determination to save his son’s dog. He explains that although the war is over, his son has not come home.

The next scene shows Cándida next to a tatakua,12 fanning herself. A young man’s voice comes to her, asking where he is. He states he is looking for the Caballero family, the parents of Máximo Caballero. He explains that he is a messenger, and that

Máximo died on the front lines. A bullet went through his heart. He asks her if she is

Máximo’s mother. She does not respond directly, but rather asks for the shirt Máximo was wearing when he was shot. She does not cry, she just sits next to the tatakua, rocking slightly. Finally she tells the soldier that all the men around here have the same name and probably Máximo was not her son. She then tosses something into the oven and tells the messenger to get rid of that old shirt.

The next scene begins in the clearing with the hammock again. Cándida and

Ramón are conversing, but their bodies are not present yet. The sky is still grey. They move into the frame and sit in the hammock. They talk about the sunset and the chance of rain. Ramón tells Cándida that the war is over. “Pero y de la guerra no sabés nada?” she insists. “No sé nada” Ramón replies, in an instance that reveals that for them, the war was never about Bolivia. Their war is only about their son. It gets darker. There is no dog barking this time. Ramón asks Cándida if she has heard any news. She hesitates, but finally tells Ramón that she found a dead butterfly that she threw in the tatakua. “Esa

12 A tatakua is a brick oven used traditionally in the Paraguayan countryside.

guerra hizo que se nos acaben las ganas de todo” Ramón declares. “Pero igual seguimos haciendo todo,” Cándida replies, “Para que así el tiempo pase más rápido.” When

Cándida asks Ramón if his chest is bothering him, he replies “Me duele mi hijo.” The dog

starts barking again. The couple bickers over whether they should have let her die. It gets

progressively darker, but they are slow to leave the hammock. They talk about getting up,

but it gets very dark indeed before they can actually overcome their pain and muster the

energy to move. In their speech they have changed roles somehow, Ramón is now the

cynical one who was lost hope and Cándida is the one who tries to cheer him up and

comfort him. She is now the one who offers to cover him in their bed. “Estamos

demasiado lejos y demasiado viejos. Ya me quiero ir a dormir. No nos vamos a llorar.

Todavía no nos morimos. Nos tenemos uno al otro. Estamos hechos el uno para el otro.

Estamos felices así,” they say to each other. It gets darker and darker. They have a little

lamp, but the viewer can barely see their silhouettes. They decide to go to bed without

eating, “Y porqué vamos a comer?” Ramón, says, defeated. They finally take the

hammock down and fold it up, now in almost total darkness. As they walk toward home,

the dog starts barking again.

Hamaca’s Formal Resistance

Possibly the first observation a viewer may make about Hamaca would have to do

with how it differs from the traditional Hollywood way of telling a story. It is worthwhile

to return to Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s manifesto, “Toward a Third Cinema:

Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third

World” to think about how this difference functions:

The placing of the cinema within U.S. models, even in the formal aspect, in

language, leads to the adoption of the ideological forms that gave rise to

precisely that language and no other. Even the appropriation of models which

appear to be only technical, industrial, scientific, etc., leads to a conceptual

dependency, due to the fact that the cinema is an industry, but differs from

other industries in that is has to be created and organized in order to generate

certain ideologies. . . . not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to satisfy,

in the first place, the cultural surplus value needs of a specific ideology, of a

specific world-view: that of U.S. finance capital. (41)13

Solanas and Getino go on to promote “alternative” types of cinema, within which they

include “author’s cinema,” “expression cinema,” “nouvelle vague,” “cinema novo,” and

more generally, “second cinema.” From Solanas and Getino’s viewpoint, alternatives to

Hollywood/U.S. finance capital are defined by the “freedom” the filmmaker may have to

express “himself” in non-standard language. This alone was seen as “an attempt at

cultural decolonization” (42). Similarly, in “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” Fernando

Birri also describes cinema as a tool to fight “external and internal colonialism” when it

rejects “the same general characteristics of the superstructure,” (93). In “For an Imperfect

Cinema” Julio García Espinosa describes imperfect cinema as a “cinema of

13 The insistence on the colonizing essence to be found in the very materiality of cultural imperialism produced in relation to the cinema is also a topic of discussion in feminist cinema studies. See for example "Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema" (1975) in: Claire Johnston (ed.), Notes on Women's Cinema, London: Society for Education in Film and Television, reprinted in: Sue Thornham (ed.), Feminist Film Theory. A Reader, Edinburgh University Press 1999, pp. 31-40

denunciation” and a potential weapon in the struggle against imperialism (80). He states that “the only thing imperfect cinema is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the ‘cultured’ elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?” (82).

Hamaca’s camera work employs many long shots, and makes few exceptions for close-ups, limiting closer approaches to come only from behind. Not only does this kind of camera work directly contrast U.S. models, but it engages with a specific trace:

Manuel Cuenca’s “Audiovisuales en el Paraguay;” an unpublished history of mostly foreign videographers representing Paraguay.14 The earliest historic role of celluloid in

Paraguay had to do with precisely what the aforementioned manifestos called cultural colonization and imperialism: they were orientalist instances of footage taken by light- skinned Europeans and U.S. citizens as anthropological examples of what Paraguayans are: dark-skinned, exotic, magical shamans; Others virtually beyond comprehension. The way Hamaca creates distance between the camera and the protagonist revises history on multiple levels. On the formal level, by using long, less invasive shots it undoes, or at the very least, does not repeat the violence of the first or “original” moments of film in

Paraguay by redeeming those who were taken as the anthropological objects/subjects of

film. On the textual level, Hamaca revises the official “glory” of the Chaco War, telling it

from the perspective of overwhelming loss, from the perspective of those who sacrificed

their loved ones.

14 See Chapter 1.

Another formal way in which Hamaca is markedly different from mainstream,

Hollywood cinema has to do with its tempo. For many viewers, it is a painstakingly slow film. When writing the description of the film above, I had difficulty deciding which details to include and which to leave out: this made me cognoscente of the fact that

Hamaca is not necessarily a film that lacks action, as I had initially thought. Rather, it is a film full of action but of a different kind: action that is done with speech. Extending John

L. Austin’s conception of linguistic speech acts may be helpful as a metaphor here: what if in the case of Hamaca we could refer to these instances as unspoken speech acts given the fact that no “speaker” ever moves their mouth? I return to the implications of how speech takes place in Hamaca further on.

The slowness of Hamaca frees it from conformity with mainstream Hollywood- style film in exactly the sense that Solanas and Getino saw cine de autor functioning.

Hamaca’s freedom from speed, action and close-ups creates a more intimate cinema, in which the protagonists continue to reserve a certain amount of privacy in which they can experience their profound grief. There are only two instances in the film in which the camera comes in for a three quarter close-up, and in both of those instances, the close up is limited to coming in only from behind, obscuring part of the character’s face. This occurs in one instance when Máximo says goodbye to Ramón and in the following scene when he says goodbye to Cándida. In the camera’s distance and refusal to zoom in on faces, something is kept from the viewer instead of being delivered to the viewer for consumption. It is a move that suggests intimacy: visually, something is kept sacred and separate for Cándida, Ramón and Máximo. Additionally, the slow tempo, like a hanging

hammock, suspends the gaze in a way that seems to say to the protagonist, “This is your moment and your grief. Don’t mind the viewer. Take your time and just be with this emotion. You don’t exist to entertain. You exist to be respected as a human being going through a tragic challenge.”

Slowness and repetition in the film also have the effect of representing uneven temporalities simultaneously in a way that resonates with the Paraguayan experience.15

While on one hand, as a medium, film is by definition a forward thrust—a march of frames imitating the arrow of time, progressing, one upon the other—on the other hand, the repeated shots coupled with the repetitive, circular conversation that continually returns to the same topics and words create a sense of time that stands still. Perhaps the sense of time moving while Paraguay is simultaneously “stuck” in time refers to multiple elements. In Chapter 3 I analyze a development discourse about Paraguay that continuously qualifies it as a place that is “fifty years behind the developed world,” but

Hamaca’s slowness and circularity refers to more than that. It recalls a type of melancholia that dominates Paraguayan History/Present; a state of being “stuck” in mourning for the massive losses Paraguay has gone through. I explore the implications of this cyclical whirlpool of time and mourning in Chapter 3, but first, I would like to explore another implication of Hamaca as a slow film.

15 Temporalities may be experienced differently as a matter of identity. See for example, Cornel University’s “What is a U.S. American?” . Designed to help foreign students understand U.S. culture, this webpage includes a section on American “Time Orientation:” “Americans place considerable value on punctuality. Because they tend to organize their activities by means of schedules, they may seem harried, always running from one thing to the next and unable to relax and enjoy themselves.” The fact that this section is immediately followed by a section entitled “Doing Rather Than Being” (i.e. Products over People) reinforces the connection between identity, nationality, capitalism and how a particular temporality can be experienced. I thank Laura Briggs for bringing this link to my attention.

The time of capitalism is produced, measured and controlled by and through productivity and labor. As Karl Schoonover explains in his paper on slow film, “Wastrels of Time: Slow Cinema and its Laboring Subjects,” a film’s lack of action has the potential to create a space for ambiguity by producing an actor/spectator labor reversal.

Whereas capital-driven film production creates action/labor for the audience to consume somewhat passively, the slow film does less of the labor for the audience, requiring the viewer to actively focus and make sense of the non-action, (or as in the case of Hamaca, the unspoken speech action.) This makes watching into work.16 The slow film is resistant

to capitalist production of action, and in this sense one could call it “unproductive.”

Schoonover argues that this slowing/diminishing of film action could point us towards a

“queer materialism of slowness.” Presented with this framing, I believe the metaphor

could be extended from “unproductive” to encompass a type of “non-reproductive”

element as well, particularly given that in the case of Hamaca, the couple’s only

offspring is killed/never visibilized.

Schoonover also discusses how in Italian Neorealism, the neorealist body does not

require a performance; its body is its performance (i.e. scars, gauntness from famine.)

Neorealism’s influence on Latin American film (through Fernando Birri and others) is

well documented. It follows, then, that Hamaca’s actors do less acting and more being:

Ramón’s wrinkles and Cándida’s white hair mark their bodies with the passage of time

while their stories highlight a state of being caught in a temporal whirlpool.

16 For an article on how for some, slow film is the no-fun equivalent of “eating your cultural vegetables,” see http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/05/movies/films-in-defense-of-slow-and-boring.html?_r=1

Returning to the formal element of Hamaca’s unspoken speech acts, what are the implications of the fact that no “speaker” ever moves their mouth in this film? In the vegetable-animal-human continuum of subjectivity, personhood is attained through proof of the cognitive capacity to speak. This reminds us of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can

The Subaltern Speak?” Spivak argues that the Other as Subject is inaccessible to the intellectual and extends her critique to the work of the Subaltern Studies Group. She problematizes their reappropriation of Antonio Gramsci’s term subaltern in order to identify a “voice” or “collective locus of agency” in postcolonial India. The problems with intellectuals re-presenting a collective subaltern speech are: a) a logocentric assumption of homogeneous cultural solidarity among a heterogeneous people and b) a legitimization of Western intellectuals as the “voice” of the subaltern condition. This positionality reifies the subaltern condition as subordinate. In this sense, the fact that

Hamaca’s characters are speaking and are not speaking at the same time could indicate the very situation that Spivak draws attention to. We might think of the plight that we see represented, but also, of what the Western intellectual’s work (a film, a dissertation) cannot say about the consciousness of the subaltern (campesino). In an attempt to make a film about Paraguayan national identity, by making it impossible for the protagonists to speak, the film calls attention to the fact of its own project’s impossibility: the attempt to present one family’s story as the story of a larger, heterogeneous people, and the attempt of a privileged intellectual to “voice” the subaltern condition.

The topic of speech/non-speech brings us to the issue of presence/absence around which Hamaca is formally constructed. Máximo is perhaps the most subaltern of the

three protagonists, being the one who is ultimately violently sacrificed for the nation. He is also the character whose body is never present. In a sense, by making Máximo invisible, Hamaca responds to violence against his body with a symbolic language of anti-corporeal gestures. As Megan Lorraine Debin argues in reference to Mexican performance artists who respond to violence in their work, “The trace of the absent body is where the trauma of physical violence is rendered most visible,” (2). Working off of

Peggy Phelan’s Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Debin builds upon Phelan’s assertion that “visibility is a trap” because it “summons surveillance and the law; it provokes voyeurism, fetishism, and the colonialist/imperialist appetite for possession,”

(65). By keeping Máximo invisible, through the power of the trace, Hamaca is able to highlight the violence to which he (and by allegorical extension, the Paraguayan people) has been subject in a less corruptible way.

As Ana M. López describes in “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American

Cinema”

When the term [New Latin American Cinema] is used today it always

implies a socio-political attitude that constitutes the principal source of

unity for these films and practices. That attitude can be summarized as a

desire to change the social function of the cinema, to transform the

Latin American cinema into an instrument of change and

consciousness-raising or concientización. (138-139)

Although today López discusses a New New Latin American Cinema with different characteristics, Hamaca definitely falls under the New Latin American Cinema category

in the way that López describes: it privileges concientización as a goal. Instead of producing scenes that are easily consumed, it in fact constitutes a film that can be qualified as difficult, challenging, or even unpleasant to watch, and in the process, force the viewer to invest more effort and critical thought into making sense of what they are watching. The slowness and the circularity of the actions/conversations (constant returns to talking about how the dog is barking or not, whether it will rain or not, how their son might be alive or not) potentially make the viewer experience frustration or even desperation and hopelessness. This is not the terrain of the box-office smash; this is an invitation to feel what it might be like to fight to keep hope alive for hope’s sake after everything else is gone.

Representation as The Counting of Those Who Don’t Count

In her chapter on “Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America,” Ana López comments on how the European elite minority, (not the majority indigenous population), controlled Latin America at the time that the cinematic apparatus arrived (as early as

1896). “Thus, it is not surprising that the ‘modernity’ of early cinema echoed more resoundingly—and lastingly—in Buenos Aires and Rio than in Lima, since even the simple films shown at these first screenings already exemplified a particularly modern form of aesthetics responding to the specificity of modern urban life,” (211). This story about the foundation of Latin American Cinema is congruous with audiovisual

production and broadcast tendencies in Paraguay, which have been traditionally dominated by urban, modernizing and white images. In fact, Paraguay’s first television station, Sistema Nacional de Televisión (SNT) was founded by the Stroessner regime as a populist arm that could transmit political messages to the nation—specifically, modernizing and whitening ones. Being that there was virtually no audiovisual production in Paraguay at the time of the founding of SNT, the majority of programming was foreign. As López explains:

The cinema experienced by Latin Americans was—and still is—predominately

foreign. This is a factor of tremendous significance in the complex development

of indigenous forms, always caught in a hybrid dialectics of invention and

imitation, as well as in the development of the form of experience—mass

spectatorship—necessary to sustain the medium. (213)

In this sense, Hamaca Paraguaya’s win at Cannes has meant something tremendous for the nation culturally: resistance to the Hollywood form, as I have discussed, but also the birth of “la primera película paraguaya” as director Ramiro Gómez qualifies it in his Op-

Ed: “No se descartan los esfuerzos anteriores por hacer cine. Ocurre que con ‘Hamaca

Paraguaya’ el 100% del elenco de actores, el guión, la dirección y parte del presupuesto son paraguayos. Dando origen a la primera película auténticamente paraguaya. A mi criterio.”17 What does finally having a place on international screens do for a national

17 Just as Gómez is committed to Hamaca’s paraguayidad, there are other directors, such as Pablo Meileke, who are equally adamant that Hamaca cannot constitute an “authentically” Paraguayan film because the art director, director of photography, producers, etc. are not Paraguayan nationals. The film is technically a coproduction between five countries: France, The Netherlands, Argentina, Germany, Paraguay and Spain. In Chapter 4 I problematize the rigidity of the foreign/Paraguayan film binary, making the case for audiovisual production in Paraguay as a dominantly transnational form.

conscience heavy with invisibility?18 In terms of invisibility, I couple national invisibility

on transnational screens with campesino/mestizo invisibility on national screens. While there have been some exceptions, historically, all types of media in Paraguay have dominantly featured urban, light-skinned protagonists. Referring specifically to 1890’s

Buenos Aires, López comments on the protagonism of urban, light-skinned elites:

Clearly invoking another kind of desire or ‘attraction’, these notices

posited spectatorial position predicated on identification and self-

recognition, which was but an embryonic form structure, the appeal was

not just that one would see ordinary Buenos Aires citizens but socially

prominent ones—metaphorical stand-ins for the nation itself. (218)

What Hamaca does differently is take the satisfaction of self-recognition to rural, brown- skinned people by making them protagonists and by allegorical extension, by making them the “metaphorical stand-ins for the nation itself.”19 This reversal of who gets to

represent the nation could be seen as powerfully subversive.20 In The Wrenched of the

Earth Fanon stresses the revolutionary potential of the campesino: “The peasantry is

systematically left out of most of the nationalist parties’ propaganda. But it is obvious

that in colonial countries only the peasantry is revolutionary. It has nothing to lose and

18 An example of Paraguay’s international invisibility can be read through this recent newspaper article heralding a few thirty second touristic spots on Paraguay programmed for broadcast on CNN International: http://www.abc.com.py/nota/paraguay-recorre-el-mundo-desde-la-senal-de-cnn/ 19 Encina was very concerned with making sure the film made it to rural Paraguayan audiences. She took a cine-móvil to three rural locations to conduct screenings. In an interview, she told me that she got her best feedback during these screenings: “Cuando llevé la película al interior, nadie se movió un pelo. Disfrutaron de la película y me dieron una de las críticas más lindas que recibí en mi vida que es: así somos.” 20 That said, I will challenge the reach of this possible subversiveness in Chapter 4 by historicizing what Gareth Williams refers to as a Latin American legacy of rhetorical inclusion structured to pacify and help maintain the status quo.

everything to gain” (23). Is there not something revolutionary about an archive of national film that features a brown population against a history of dominantly white protagonists? Seen from this perspective, where the campesino becomes the

“metaphorical stand-in for the nation itself,” Paraguayan film’s obsession with

“Paraguayan elements” could be seen not simply as some sort of feverish nationalism, but rather, as a site of defense against Hollywood imperialism, transnational corporations and even the corruption of the federal government itself. A “return” to the rural space takes the anti-modern as the point and constructs, with Hamaca at the helm, a potentially subversive archive of audiovisual production.

In Disagreement, Jacques Rancière defines democratic politics not as a regime, but rather, as the conflictual meeting of two heterogeneous logics: domination and equality. Politics occurs when there is the taking part of those who have no part, when there is an account of the unaccounted for (the miscount). Hamaca makes a film out of the struggle of the poorest people of Paraguay’s history while pointing towards their contemporary counterparts. This, in Rancière ’s sense, is the essence of democratic politics, as it causes “the poor,” those who were previously invisible, to be visible, to exist as entity, at least at the level of representation. This “naming of that which cannot be named” is what Rancière identifies as the heart of democratic politics, and is something that Hamaca’s aforementioned subversive formal techniques take even further.

By featuring unspoken speech acts, Hamaca demands consideration of the problem of language itself, which according to Rancière, is always potentially to analyze modes of subjectivization.

A Record of Violence

In the extras of the DVD version of Hamaca, the actor who plays Ramón—

Ramón del Río—is interviewed.21 He cites Paraguayan boom writer, Augusto Roa Bastos:

“El infortunio se enamoró del Paraguay.” He goes on to say “El Paraguay siempre ha sido

azotado, castigado históricamente por un oleaje de infortunio, ya sean por problemas

externos—invasores—tanto como internos: políticos, caciques, criollos de pésimo

gramaje humano.” One of Hamaca’s main accomplishments has to do with the record of

historic cultural violence it presents while allegorically denouncing present sociocultural

problems.

As I described briefly in Chapter 1, there are two main events in Paraguayan

history that have left such a mark on the national imaginary that Paraguayans speak of

them as if they had occurred only yesterday: the Triple Alliance War and the Stroessner

dictatorship. The Triple Alliance War was a devastating event in which nearly half of the

population perished. Historians such as Milda Rivarola and James Schofield Saeger agree

that the president of Paraguay during that time, Francisco Solano López, bore the brunt of

the responsibility for the war and its devastating mismanagement. Not surprisingly, the

second most devastating regime for Paraguay, the Stroessner regime, took on one major

film project: the film Cerro Corá—a film entirely dedicated to re-enforcing a historical

21 It is worth noting that Ramón del Río is most famous for his performance in the theater adaptation of Agusto Roa Bastos’s novel about the Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, Yo El Supremo. Paz Encina has admitted that she wrote the role in Hamaca Paraguaya thinking specifically about del Río, which suggests potentially productive comparisons between the two roles/works.

discourse about Francisco Solano López representing him as a national, or rather, the national hero. Perhaps the regime was hoping that if the people could see López as a hero beyond the trail of the dead he left behind, then people may also be able to uphold

Stroessner as a hero regardless of his crimes, as well.

The legacy of the Stroessner regime involves a sort of pessimism about the future and a sort of turning a blind eye toward the violence of the regime in a nostalgic reminiscence of better times when there was less crime and cheaper food. It is possible to hear echos of the deterministic attitude toward the future left in the wake of the dictatorship, and before that, the Triple Alliance War: in the dialogues between Cándida and Ramón: while people may hope that things can change, will change and perhaps are about to change in Paraguay, they waver between that hope and hopelessness. If things have really never changed for the better, how could they ever? The “transition period” from dictatorship to democracy never truly happened, being that so many of the same people who were in power during the dictatorship continue to own the majority of the nation’s wealth and hold political power.

In Hamaca, the constant comments about the rain that never comes represent a timeless, collective rural life intrinsically subjugated to nature’s indifferent, destructive force. The futility of fighting nature, however, produces a sense of hopelessness that is not unlike the dominant pessimism among Paraguayan youth. Professional opportunities are few in a nation that has an unemployment rate of nearly 20%. As Sonia Brucke of the

Senate’s Cámara de Género points out in a personal interview, Paraguay’s income inequality metrics are the highest in South America, comparable to those of Haiti. (Its

Gini Coefficient was a whopping 53.2 in 2009, ranking Paraguay as the 15th most

unequal nation in the world.22) 90% of the national territory is owned by about 5% of the population; roughly 12 families. Foreign and local investors alike are discouraged from attempting projects that would provide jobs because there is little security for their investments given the level of corruption of the police and the legal system. For people who are not already among the most privileged, waiting for opportunity to knock is indeed much like waiting in the dark for a desperately needed rain that never comes.

However, in Hamaca Paraguaya there is something even more pressing than the wait for rain; it is the wait for the couple’s son, Máximo, to return from war. In their dialogue the couple, Cándida and Ramón, go back and forth between hopefulness that

Máximo will return and hopelessness. In one conversation, Ramón says, “Doesn’t that seem odd to you? That we the poor are always at war?” And in this border war with

Bolivia, Cándida does not encourage Máximo to protect Paraguay; quite the contrary. She discourages him from fighting at all and pleads with him to hide, hoping to get him home alive. Although the film may aesthetisize rural labor as it constructs paraguayidad, it constructs a paraguayidad that is not uncritical of the ruling class and the national situation of extreme inequality. In fact, the plight of the poor is presented by Hamaca as a true tragedy for the couple, and by extension, it can be seen as a pessimistic forecast for

Paraguay’s future, given that Máximo does in the end, die at war. Their son—symbol of the future of the people—dies, while Paraguay the nation wins the war. Paraguay’s nation-form maintains its access to the global economy, but in 2012 this access benefits

22 See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html.

only a small, powerful minority while the “ordinary people” continue in poverty and in precariedad; a term that designates their limited access to functioning social services. It is popular opinion that Paraguay’s overall economy does not benefit from Paraguay’s involvement in MERCOSUR for example, but select people are making money off of this involvement. It is also true that while Paraguay’s macroeconomic improvement over the last decade has made it the least indebted nation in South America with an ever-growing

GDP thanks to booming exports such as raw soy bean, unemployment has risen and the minimum wage has not kept up with rising costs. There continue to be only a few low- functioning social programs. Generally speaking, as Paraguay the Nation gets richer,

Paraguay’s poor get poorer.

The Mechanics of Allegory, Mourning and Temporal Marks

Film and documentary production in Paraguay are no exception to the “rule” of

“third world” text and allegory read for national and ethnic content, a rule Fredric

Jameson describes in his classic essay, “Third-World Literature in the Era of

Multinational Capitalism.” In the case of Hamaca, the struggle of the entire pueblo paraguayo is told through the story of a couple and the son they lost at war. Is the use of this allegorical form indeed reifying the Western critic’s belief that the nation form is all third world texts can be about, or does it open a space for something else?

In Idelber Avelar’s The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning, he explores the possibilities of the allegorical form and how it

is related to the task of mourning. On one hand, Avelar privileges the allegorical form as

“a trope that thrives on breaks and discontinuities, as opposed to the unfractured wholeness presupposed by the symbol” (11). This description would seem to promise a fertile space of slippage for the allegory. On the other hand, however, Avelar describes allegory as “the aesthetic face of political defeat…Ruins are the raw material that allegory possesses at its disposal” (69). Certainly, Hamaca would seem to represent a classic case of ruins spun into art. If allegory is the language of defeat and “The language of defeat can only narrate the radical immanence of defeat” (74), how could Hamaca’s allegorical form signal any revolutionary potential?

One could argue that Hamaca’s allegorical form encourages us to read it against itself. The aforementioned unspoken speech acts that point toward the impossibility of the subaltern subject’s self-representation are in keeping with the allegorical form’s limitations as described by Avelar: “allegories of dictatorship narrate nothing but their powerlessness to read their object” (76). Perhaps allegory cannot say what anything is, but only what it is not, as Walter Benjamin points out in The Origin of German Tragic

Drama; “Allegory…means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.” In this sense,

Hamaca makes the only responsible move that a representation of a class can make: it signals its own impossibility through its form.

Through Benjamin, Avelar argues that to explore the allegorical form is also to explore mourning. Hamaca’s linking of allegory and mourning is evident in both its form and content. Parallel to the impossibilities of representation, Avelar argues that mourning also poses itself as an unrealizable task; as a process that is never completed (5). Perhaps,

for this reason, “The imperative to mourn is the postdictatorial imperative par excelance”

(3). If in a sense, the dictatorship in Paraguay has not ended, because the same individuals continue to exploit the nation (in the name of democracy now), then el pueblo’s mourning of their lot can only continue to be active and present in all art.

To take a very specific example of the connection between allegory and mourning in Hamaca, I choose to highlight the object as Avelar does through Benjamin: “The mournful subject who confronts the loss of a loved being displays a special sensitivity towards objects, articles of clothing, former positions, anything that might trigger the memory of the one who died” (3-4). In this sense, the object becomes the allegorical stand-in for the lost person. In Hamaca, Máximo’s dog becomes this object. She belonged to Máximo. When Ramón hears that the war has ended and the possibility that his son will not return becomes more likely, he urges the vet to save the dog that previously he did not even bother to give water. More explicitly related to Avelar, however, are the articles of clothing that are mentioned in the film. At one point Cándida

says that she has put Máximo’s grandfather’s poncho in Máximo’s bag to take to war. We

get an idea that the significance of including this poncho, even though it is very hot out,

has to do with creating some sort of presence or summoning of the dead grandfather—

perhaps for spiritual protection or company as Máximo moves into the afterlife. Articles

of Máximo’s clothing are important from the beginning of the film when the couple

discusses giving the dog one of Máximo’s old shirts in order to comfort her. Later, when

the messenger comes to announce Máximo’s death, Candida asks for the shirt he was

wearing when he was shot. But then she tells the soldier that all the men around here have

the same name and probably that Máximo was not her son. She then tells the messenger

to get rid of that old shirt. Candida does not want the substitute: she wants her son back.

In a way, Hamaca Paraguaya, the film itself, is activated like an object that

substitutes the lost objects. Its purpose is to trigger the memory of the people who died.

Avelar also explores how allegory maintains an essential relationship with time: “If

mourning is in a fundamental sense a confrontation with time and its passing, allegory, as

the trope that voices mourning, cannot but bear in itself unmistakable temporal marks.”

As I have discussed, temporal marks are a major component of Hamaca, being that it attempts to represent uneven temporalities simultaneously; a sense of time going by while

Paraguay experiences a state of being “stuck” in mourning for massive historical losses.

Avelar might describe Hamaca’s dual temporality as “a gesture that drags the past out of

its continuum and makes it interpellate the present” (153). If the past is present due to a

violent loss that is still being mourned, what could the future be? Avelar argues that this

interpellation itself creates the potential for the future to become “the arena where the

dead will get another chance to be redeemed” (160). Avelar introduces the question “Can

mourning be an affirmative practice? (138). If the excess displayed by this cinematic

display of grief defies the regulation and subduing of the people, perhaps.

Allegory and Gender

So far I have explored how Avelar links allegory, mourning and temporal marks.

In this section I explore how the aforementioned elements can be connected to gender.

Avelar describes the link in the following way:

The control over mimetic practices is thus coextensive with the development of a

number of official rites through which one attempts to curb the display of

mournful grief, primarily identified, in Greek thought and art, with women. As

mourning rituals are, according to Plato, progressively gendered in the feminine,

and women’s acts of mourning increasingly identified with potential disorder,

mimesis is convicted for its complicity with mourning and its refusal to maintain

mourning work within proper, that is, domestic boundaries. (113)

In the Greek discursive tradition that Avelar here describes, the excesses of mourning are related to women in a way that suggests a subversive threat. Similarly, in Hamaca,

Cándida is the one who encourages Máximo to hide. She cuts through the rhetoric of the war, saying “Lo único que va hacer esta guerra es quitarte de nuestro lado.” In the only instance that Ramón addresses gender explicitly, he responds to Candida’s attitude,

telling Máximo that “Tu mamá es mujer mi hijo, no entiende de estas cosas. Pero te tenés

que ir a defender tu patria, vos sos un hombre. Vas a estar bien mi hijo. Y pronto esta

lluvia va a llegar al chaco.” It is noteworthy that Ramón claims Cándida cannot

understand Máximo’s responsibility because she is a woman, when in fact, Cándida was

right and Ramón was wrong: their son did not survive, and the rain did not come. From this angle, it would seem Ramón’s is more susceptible to the falsity of official state discourse because of his gender position (the man’s role/relationship with his country).

The power of Cándida’s affect—the raw grief of a mother confronting the death of her son—makes masculinist loyalty to the nation seem foolish and misguided in comparison.

Noche Adentro

Subversion of a power block through an allegorical female character can also be explored through two short films from the Paraguayan archive: Noche Adentro (2010) directed by Pablo Lamar and Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi.

Noche Adentro begins with a black screen but a lively Paraguayan polka can be heard in off. The film cuts to an M.C. who makes reference to a bride and groom who are absent. “¿Quién sabe lo que estarán haciendo?” the M.C. announces coyly. He introduces a new polka, dedicated by the best men. This one is equally lively but a bit more dissonant. The musicians play and the wedding party happily dances to the polka, oblivious of what has transpired between the bride and groom. The film suddenly cuts to black for several seconds. There is silence. The next shot is a bloody vulva out of focus.

It slowly comes into focus: there is matted pubic hair encrusted with dried blood—and blood everywhere. The camera pans up the woman’s body. The wedding dress has been pushed up above her waist. We then see the groom standing nearby. His shirt is blood- stained.

In the following scene the groom drags the bride’s body down a staircase, then down a hall. The audience hears the groom’s heavy breathing and groaning as he struggles with the bride’s body. As he drags her, he falls backward, her body falling on him, his white shirt getting progressively filthier. Exhausted, he lays on the floor of the hallway with her dead body on top of him.

The next scene is the groom undressing completely at the bank of a river. As he turns and walks towards the camera/canoe on the river, the viewer sees his bloody genitals. The sound of the water lapping against the canoe is loud. The dead bride lies in the canoe. The audience sees the groom’s emotionless face as he pushes the canoe down the river. The camera pans to the dead bride’s face, then down her body, revealing a large blood stain on her dress, then the black water rippling in the moonlight.

Noche Adentro is a particularly interesting example of a national allegory inscribed onto a body that is gendered female. In certain ways, the violence of the

Stroessner dictatorship was more visible and overt, whereas the violence and oppression of the current, so-called democratic regime is less visible and more systemic. By using a rape allegory to explore the relation of the Paraguayan State to the Paraguayan people,

Noche Adentro makes systemic violence graphically visible and elicits a powerful, visceral response.

Teemu Ruskola explores the question of what is means to liken a state to a person and to liken its conduct to rape in his article, “Raping Like a State.” Ruskola describes the normative masculinity attributed to sovereign states and asserts that “Sexual, gendered, and racial metaphors continue to structure uneven global relations even today”

(1478). Ruskola stresses the impossibility of isolating discrete discourses of gender, sexuality and race given how they are historically constituted in relation to each other. He goes on to demonstrate how “… political communities in different parts of the world fell short of the European ideals of masculinity and homosocial honor, which in turn gave rise to distinct rhetorics of sexual violation” (1483), specifically exploring examples of how Oriental civilizations were viewed as effete and not masculine enough, and therefore,

“rapable.”

Although Noche does not constitute an example of state-on-state homoerotic violation, extending the question of what makes a state rapable to what makes a pueblo rapable provides us with productive allegorical results. In Noche’s “state on pueblo” heterosexual violation and homicide, Paraguay’s pueblo is the bride and the State (more specifically, the network of politicians and businessmen who run it) is the groom (and perhaps also the best men). Just as Ruskola demonstrates how trade, by definition, constituted a form of consensual “intercourse” between states, there is a “right of intercourse” between the state and its pueblo, just as there would be between a bride and groom. In Noche, however, instead of an exchange of pleasure, the groom’s “pleasure” seems to only be satisfied by the complete extinguishing of the bride. The romance script that describes the type of sexual exchange between partners on their wedding night might involve romance, affection, talk of love, and the giving and receiving of pleasure. It is assumed that intercourse on a wedding night would happen through mutual consent. In evoking the wedding night and the assumption of consent, the allegorical reading of

Noche echoes the neoliberal discourse of “personal responsibility” or even, “true

economic liberalism” which “requires a consent that is given voluntarily. Once obtained, consent in turn justifies anything, or as Hobbes put it, ‘Nothing done to a man by his own consent can be injury’” (1509). Similarly, the allegorical reading of Noche demonstrates how, because of this relationship of consent, the Paraguayan State has been able to exploit, oppress or “rape” the Paraguayan people without facing any consequences. This rape has been as normalized as heterosexual sex on a wedding night.

Somehow the rape and murder of the bride are made even more gruesome by the fact that the perpetrator is the groom and the crime is committed on their wedding night.

The situation seems to suggest that the State’s role to the people should be one of protection and service, and for that reason, the acts of violence and exploitation are even more heinous. The groom’s grunting as he drags the body down the hallway, a scene that finally ends with the groom collapsing under the weight of the bride’s corpse, is a macabre parallel to the type of moaning and coupling of bodies that the audience would otherwise expect. Night, or Noche, is everywhere: in the sky without light, the black water of the river that washes away the crime by carrying the evidence off into the night, but most importantly, inside—Adentro.

While attempting to create a type of record of violence in a manner similar to the way Hamaca constitutes a record of violence, Noche does more to highlight what we might interpret, allegorically, as the oblivion of the general populace. While the rape, murder and hiding of the evidence takes place, the wedding party happily dances to a polka. The only ones who seem to have some awareness of the situation are the best men; their complicity is suggested in the dedication of the dissonant, ominous tune. The best

men represent the behind-the-scenes corruption of nepotism, clans, and family-centered behavior that guarantee the majority of political and business deals in Paraguay.

The allegorical script about the Paraguayan State that is implicit, but less direct, has to do with the History of Paraguay. What would drive a groom to commit such a heinous act? Perhaps some abuse that he himself endured. Similarly, the Paraguayan

State’s historical relationship with its neighbors constitutes a homoerotic violation. In fact, in the case of the Triple Alliance War, it constitutes a gang rape between Brazil,

Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay. In this war over 300,000 Paraguayan civilians died— the largest amount of casualties reported in South American military history. (It is widely believed, although not supported, that 90% of the male population perished in this war.)

Seeing the war from this angle makes it a male (States)-on-male (State/populace) violation. The Paraguayan State’s wounded psyche and masculinity then in turn cause it, as a subjugated state, to want to become a violator itself. Paraguayan film illustrates the narrative construction of Paraguayan History as the haunting that Paraguayan corruption has never escaped. But if Paraguay has never escaped, does that mean it will never escape?

Does stressing a violent history create the expectation of a violent future? Ruskola insists that “[T]he rape script[s], or the narrative construction of certain entities as subjects of violation…did not simply reflect the material violence of colonial relations; they played a key role in enabling it” (1484). Does Paraguay’s rape script convince the resistant to abandon revolution before it can even begin? Does it teach us that defeat is always already here?

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Karai Norte

Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo Martinessi, is a black and white short film adaptation of a short story, “El arribeño del norte,” published in by Carlos Villagra

Marsal. It shares themes with Hamaca Paraguaya and Noche Adentro in the sense that it protagonizes an aesthetisized rural poor. In all three films poor protagonists are the victims of some grave injustice. Specifically in Noche Adentro and Karai Norte, an unlikely (and therefore all the more distasteful) rape takes place.

Karai Norte begins with a shot of dry, cracked earth and cuts to the back of an elderly woman’s head, her grey hair in a bun. It cuts then to a quick view of her little hut in the dry, windy landscape. The woman makes mate cocido at a fire. The wind blows noisily. The sound of a man arriving on horseback and calling out can be heard in off.

The woman is afraid, she hides. The next shot is her outside, holding her hands up. She tells the traveler to take whatever he wants. He tells her he is only hungry. Her hands tremble. He insists she must have something. She asks where he comes from, and he points north. She says she will see if she can at least find an egg. She looks north again; there is nothing to be seen but a clearing and a tree line in the distance. The next shot is the man resting in a chair, his saddle sitting nearby. He whistles a polka. The next shot is him asleep, fallen over in his chair. The doña gives his horse water and pets it. She wakes up the visitor to offer him the plate of food she has prepared. She asks him to eat outside, but he says it is better to eat indoors as the north wind is too strong. As he eats, we see the doña from above and behind again. She pulls the bobby pins out of her bun and lets down her long, grey hair to braid it. She apologizes for the food as the meat is a little

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“passed.” The man says the meat is fine like that. He would have hunted on the road, but he was busy. “Are you being chased?” she asks. He doesn’t answer, but freezes. He finishes his meal and offers to pay her something. She refuses to take it and explains that if he leaves money here, it will likely be stolen. She then describes how bandits came to steal the few things she had: her oil lamp, her clothes, and her machete among them. She also refers to how they pushed her on the bed and held her down. “Did they touch you?” he asks. She does not answer; she simply looks stoically over the dry landscape. “La revolución ya terminó ¿verdad?” she asks. “Ya terminó hace un mes,” he responds. “¿Y entonces por qué siguen persiguiendo y perjudicando así a los pobres?” she asks. “Esos que vinieron eran rebeldes o eran fuerzas del gobierno?” the stranger inquires, to which she replies “No sé, parece que fueron mis vecinos no más. . . . A media legua de aquí está el puesto de los Cuellar, gente mala como ninguna. Y a un poco más allá, tiene su chacra

Solano Chamorro, un arriero de la peor calaña. Se decía por ahí que yo tenía plata. Quién sabe si no fue por eso.”

The visitor rides off, and the woman watches him go, as stark as the landscape around her. There is a musical interlude, (light harp), and a fade used to indicate that some time has gone by. The next shot is of her hands folded, of her gnarly feet. The ring from his plate on the wood is still there. Then the stranger returns with her stolen belongings. She is pleased to recover her goods. “¿Cómo voy a agradecerle?” she says as he hands her the goods, one by one. “Y me parece que este es el que le robó,” the stranger declares as he throws a severed head onto the ground. The women lets out a blood- curdling scream and the man rides away.

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Like the bride in Noche Adentro, the frail, elderly woman is an unlikely victim of rape. In both cases, rape is only a part of the crime: Noche’s crime involves homicide and the rape in Karai seems to be an afterthought compared to the theft. The noteworthy difference in Karai Norte has to do with the ambiguity about who the perpetrators were.

This complicates possible allegorical readings. To begin with, it is unclear whether the man from the north is a “good guy” or a “bad guy.” He is evasive about where he comes from and what the conditions of his journey are. Yet despite being exploited/pillaged/raped by strangers, the woman decides to feed this new stranger.

Perhaps she finds the strength to trust again, but the more likely explanation is that she knows she has no real choice: the stranger is stronger than her and armed. Brute force reigns in this lawless, barren land, yet the empty landscape seems to denote a peaceful solitude. The woman’s hand and hair seem to hold the same stark and weathered beauty of the landscape and the rugged, rustic shack that sits on it.23

Not only is the stranger from the north’s background dubious, he becomes the

hero of the story through a crime: homicidal revenge on the rapist/thief. If we were to

liken him to the State, he would be most representative of the mano dura politics of past

dictatorships: an authoritarian figure who disregards the law himself, but dispenses rigid

and violent “justice” on people who threaten the dictatorship’s “order.” Making him into

the hero would be in line with the nostalgic “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse.

The ambiguity about the identity and motivation of the perpetrators is most

evident in the woman’s recounting of the crime. When the stranger asks her “Esos que

23 I explore the implications of narrative connections between the rural campesino and the land in Chapter 3.

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vinieron eran rebeldes o eran fuerzas del gobierno?” she replies “No sé, parece que fueron mis vecinos no más…” By allegorical extension, the “bad guys” are neither the

State (fuerzas del gobierno) nor those who would attempt to topple it (rebeldes), but rather, vecinos: her very countrymen, the pueblo itself.

A gender analysis of Hamaca Paraguaya, Noche Adentro and Kara’í Norte demonstrates the connections between gender, allegory, mourning, and temporal marks.

The body, gendered female, represents a site for potential disorder and systemic reversal.

In Hamaca, it is Cándida, as mother, who is able to cut through the rhetoric of war: her grief making masculinist loyalty to violence and the nation into a foolish, misguided and empty calling. Noche Adentro presents a bride’s body as the site in which systemic State violence is represented by a graphic and powerful visual allegory made all the more shocking through its juxtaposition with the romance script. Similarly, Karai Norte sparks outrage through the figure of an elderly, poor woman, who is raped by thieves. In this case, denunciation is not aimed strictly at the State, but rather, at everyone who is complicit with the oppression of the poor (she suspects locals were the perpetrators of the crime). Although these instances feminize victimization with powerful results, their resistant potential is ambiguous, given the tradition of situating gender within the domestication of national time. Anne McClintock describes how women have been represented as the “authentic body of national tradition” while men represent “the progressive agent of national modernity.” In this sense, one must ask if the use of the body gendered female for allegorical purposes is not in line with melancholic cycle that

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actually refuses the substitution of the historic position of inescapable exploitation and victimization.

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CHAPTER 3: … AND ITS IMPOSSIBILITY

Periodization is inevitable but never innocent. Teemu Ruskola, “Raping Like a State”

Thus far I have described Hamaca Paraguaya’s potential for resistance through formal subversion, historical revisionism, a self-reflexivity that acknowledges the problems of subaltern representation and political denunciation. In this chapter it is not my intention to downplay the importance of the aforementioned achievements, but rather, to describe the palimpsest against which Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how it bleeds through into this cultural product.24 Unfortunately, not even the most well-

intentioned director can keep their film from being the product of power negotiations

between local and national identities and transnational practices at the levels of

production and consumption.

The Campesino Protagonist and the Rural Space

Hamaca Paraguaya constitutes part of an archive of Paraguayan works that have

similar characteristics: it has won competitive funding or awards at international film

festivals; it takes the rural mestizo campesino figure as its protagonist; the dialogue of this

film is entirely in Guaraní, the indigenous language of Paraguay; and the daily labor that

makes up rural living constitutes the majority of the action of the film.

24 I thank Laura Briggs for applying this fitting metaphor to my work.

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When I began studying this archive, it struck me that so many young, urban, middle to upper class directors were taking the campesino as their protagonist. When I asked Paz Encina why she chose to set her film in the rural space, she responded that she had no family farm in the countryside or anything of the like. “No me preguntes cómo me involucré en el campo…es algo que me salió. Todos los paraguayos estamos metidos de alguna manera en el campo.”

I asked director Pablo Lamar, who also demonstrates a preference for the rural space in his works, a similar question: do you believe your work reproduces a

Paraguayan “essence”? He responded in the following way:

Una cosa que no me interesa es el folklorismo. Me parece una imagen

totalmente plana que sólo logra reproducir estereotipos . . . [pero en mi

trabajo] los tiempos son muy paraguayos. . . . Yo no sé si la representación

es de lo que somos hoy en día. Está muy ligada a esa imagen, que es muy

seductora, con un polvito del pasado. A mí una cosa que me molesta . . . es

una visión extranjera sobre nosotros otra vez . . . Esa visión extranjera se

queda en una extravagancia (i.e. La Burrerita) … a eso llamo

folklorismo . . . Para mí el folklore hace parte fuertísimo de la identidad

cultura paraguaya . . . pero siento que el arte ha sido relegado al folklore

nada más. No digo que el folklore sea algo menos, pero que haya algo más.

Lamar’s words reveal a tension. On one hand, he refers to not wanting to enter into a folk territory that John Mraz might describe as the picturesque. Lamar also alludes to the desire to evade the anthropological gaze (“una visión extranjera sobre nosotros otra vez”)

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and also, the nostalgic temporal mark of the past on Paraguayan cultural products (“ese polvito del pasado”). On the other hand, Lamar admits to wanting to achieve a

“Paraguayan time” in his work, and admits to the importance and value of Paraguayan folk production.

Néstor García Canclini’s work on national cultural patrimony in Hybrid Cultures is also useful for thinking about why Paraguayan directors demonstrate clear concern about stereotypes yet feel there are certain “Paraguayan elements” that must make up the raw material of their work. If we consider elements of Paraguayan rural life as part of the national patrimony, Canclini’s words resonate in a particular way:

Precisely because the cultural patrimony is presented as being alien to

debates about modernity, it constitutes the least suspicious resource for

guaranteed social complicity. The group of goods and traditional practices

that identify us as a nation or as a people is valued as a gift, something we

receive from the past that has such symbolic prestige that there is no room

for discussing it. . . . it occurs to almost no one to think about the social

contradictions they express. (108)

In Chapter 4 I include a more extensive exploration of the concept of “authenticity” in film in Paraguay, but parenthetically I would like to mention that in reading interviews with directors I was able to identify a concern with authenticity in regards to cultural purity. As Hybrid Cultures evidences, discourses of cultural purity are associated with the past and cultural “contamination” is associated with modernity. Perhaps directores comprometidos like Encina and Lamar feel they have no choice but to emplot their stories

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rurally. To enter the conversation about social problems in Paraguay necessarily means to enter into dialogue with the national patrimony, which is constituted, in part, by the rural space itself. Canclini states that “Faced with the ‘catastrophes’ of modernization … the countryside and its traditions will represent the last hope for redemption” (109). In the case of Paraguay, national “catastrophes” are as much a part of the past (the Triple

Alliance War) as they are of “modernity” (the Gini coefficient), but even so, it would seem that at the level of representation, post-dictatorial redemption somehow requires the rural space. That said, according to Renato Rosaldo in the foreword to Hybrid Cultures,

Canclini also contends that “Latin American nation-states … attempt to be both modern and culturally pure led to metaphysical versions of the nation’s historical patrimony that did more to justify present domination than they did to describe the past” (xiii). What are the effects of “being modern” (creating a new film archive) while being “culturally pure”

(insisting on Paraguayan “authenticity”)?

Who is this mestizo campesino figure the Paraguayan archive is so obsessed with?

Mestizo discourse in Paraguay does not have the type of history that was so important to

Mexico with José Vasconselos’s raza cósmica conception, for example. In fact, racial discourse is mostly absent from official Paraguayan politics: public discourses of race are substituted by language politics. As the language of 70-80% of the population, Guaraní earned its “rightful place” as an official language in 1992. According to linguists like

Tadeo Zarratea, however, the lack of real accommodations for Guaraní-speaking monolinguals (such as bilingual government employees or translators) "convirtió a los monolingües guaraní en el grupo menos desarrollado y en el más explotado

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económicamente" (Última Hora). It is noteworthy that dialogue for Paraguayan films is usually written in Spanish by urbanites who do not have the type of fluency required to produce natural-sounding Guaraní conversations. The dialogue is then translated into

Guaraní and Spanish subtitles are added. The second and third most popular subtitles to add, which are frequently required for film festival competition, are English and French.

What does it mean that Guaraní is the dominant language for Paraguayan film, but it can only be properly employed through translation? What does it mean that Paraguayan film exalts the Guaraní language, but Guaraní monolinguals are some of the most at-risk individuals in Paraguay today?

Instead of attempting to identify and define the “true” rural campesino here, I believe it is more productive to explore how this rural, mestizo, campesino figure is constructed in the archive at the level of representation. Hamaca Paraguaya and Karai

Norte, for example, construct the campesino icon as elderly, connected to nature, laboring and mystical. The couple, Cándida and Ramón, look like they might be in their late seventies, whereas the doña of Karai Norte looks to be in her eighties or nineties, perhaps.

The couple from Hamaca emerges from the forest to set up their hammock in a small clearing; they have come from nature and by nature they are framed. Their conversation is dominated by nature as they wait for rain and discuss the possibilities of it falling.

Similarly, Karai Norte’s doña is shot in a constant juxtaposition with the cracked, dry earth and the relentless winds that whip across the clearing on which she lives. Both films include shots of these characters practicing different sorts of aesthetisized labor.

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Paraguay’s otherness is constructed similarly to the way John Mraz describes the picturesque in representations of Mexican identity in Looking for Mexico. He describes the problems of the picturesque in the following way:

The picturesque is first of all a political problem, because it is a strategy

by which people whose skins are a bit darker are made to appear a little

less human; those who take the pictures, and see them published, are

somehow more human than those who are in them.… The second problem

with the picturesque is that it favors nature over history, essentialism over

action. People are portrayed as products of nature, passive and quiescent,

incapable of acting in the world, or simply irrelevant. Hence, better a

nostalgia for the past that never existed than efforts to construct a future.

(4)

Some parallels can be made between Mraz’s description of picturesque photography and film and documentary production in Paraguay. The directors, “those who take the pictures,” are generally urban and white. Their audiences at film festivals are generally also urban and privileged. The campesinos depicted in Hamaca Paraguaya, however, are arguably “less human” because they are hypernatural (so linked to nature at a mystical level that makes them nearly supernatural.) Hamaca’s characters are “less human” in a way that is perhaps not quickly recognizable because they are beyond human.

The passivity or incapacity for action is also a primary feature of Hamaca’s campesinos.

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In fact, much of their time is spent doing nothing; just sitting; suspended in the hammock and suspended in time.25

When asked about the inclusion of rural elements as obligatory for a “winning”

formula, particularly at international film festivals, director Augusto Netto described the

phenomenon to me as a type of identitarian polarity or Orientalism. As Netto states

recounting the French sentiment at a transcontinental film production meeting:

Europeans will tell you straightforwardly ‘We want to see certain topics

from you and we are not interested in seeing other topics from you. If you

try to make a film like one that the Americans or we do better, we are not

interested. Now, if you try to show me something that I as a viewer do not

have or do not know of, yes, that is interesting.’ Paraguayan cinema is

under pressure. There is no Paraguayan identity formulated from the

inside.

Netto’s anecdote echoes Rey Chow in her book on Chinese cinema, Primitive Passions:

“[W]e must prove ‘from within’ that we are worthy of that foreign gaze and that if we do

it properly, the foreign devil will look closely and deeply ‘inside’ us for our authentic

value” (156, italics mine). Mary Louise Pratt might refer to this phenomenon as

“autoethnography,” which “colonized subjects undertake to represent themselves in ways

that engage with the colonizer’s own terms,” and which constitutes “a group’s point of

entry into metropolitan literate culture” (Chow, 38). In “Time Zones and Jetlag: the

flows and phases of world cinema” Dudley Andrew describes how funds like Hugo Bals

25 I thank Araceli Masterson for encouraging me to think more about the materiality of the hammock itself.

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provide seed money for film projects Rotterdam has a stake in. In this sense, festivals are not only awarding films, but having a hand in commissioning the very films to be awarded. That said:

Even without direct festival support, producers and directors today are

tempted to shape their work to appeal to the taste of those deciding which

films get selected . . . Moreover, festivals find themselves in league with

advertising and distribution, since films that play well (or play at all) on

the festival circuit command better DVD deals. (81, Andrew)

While Paraguayan narrative and documentary film is currently about Paraguayan national identity, this identity can only be established and sanctioned by the “first world” gaze, whose owners already privilege certain ideas about what “third world” culture should look like.

The dominance of rural paraguayidad in contemporary Paraguayan film is, among other things, a sign of what Rey Chow calls cross-cultural commodity fetishism; a production of value between cultures. Because ethnic practices are theatricalized as archaic, Hamaca Paraguaya shows a Paraguay that is at once subalternized and exoticized by the West. The ‘ethnicity’ of the film can be seen as a type of exhibitionism that returns the gaze of orientalist surveillance, a gaze that demands mythical images and stories to which convenient, essentialized labels of otherness such as “Paraguay” or in

Chow’s cases, “China,” can be neatly attached.

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When I asked Pablo Lamar about European tastes for particular types of “third world” films, his response focused less on race and ethnicity and more on a class differentiation:

En Europa…la receta de la película latinoamericana exitosa de la pobreza y la

miseria y la violencia, a mí no me interesa para nada. Si los personajes son pobres,

bueno, son pobres pero son más que eso, son personajes. Muchas veces lo que se

hace es se estereotipa de una forma muy grande y el pobre parece no poder ser

más que pobre…Hay una cuestión de pornografía de la miseria que muchas veces

se ve con gran éxito afuera. No es de mí interés… En mi trabajo hay una ruralidad

como espacio, pero no pasa por ahí. Creo que la pobreza rural es diferente.

Lamar’s mention of pornografía de la miseria is a direct reference to Glauber Rocha’s warning about how the graphic effects of extreme poverty had become Brazil’s most successful filmic export. However, Lamar acknowledges rural poverty in the same sentence in which he insists on rural poverty’s “difference” from urban poverty. This demands the question: what makes rural poverty so “different”? Is it not as violent, just displaying a violence of a different type? Octavio Paz has asked if the Mexican national intellectual elite’s enchantment with the working people is “a waiver of its own liability to interrogate the value system that serves as the foundation to the edifice of the ruling classes” (Tejada, 148). Does Paz’s hypothesis address the question why the Paraguayan

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archive is virtually unanimous about keeping the stories of the ruling classes off the table?26

In the previous chapter I have described the dominance of the campesino

protagonist in contemporary national film as what Jacques Rancière might call a political

possibility: the counting of those who do not count. However, I would simultaneously

like to problematize possible claims for mestizo inclusion as a victory for a resistant

hybridity. Although Rosaldo describes the project of Hybrid Cultures as one that is

oppositional to a doctrine of evolutionism that would imply that “social formations at any single point in time can be ordered chronologically from ancient to modern in a way that

corresponds to a parallel moral ordering from inferior to superior” (xiii), Joshua Lund

makes a solid argument for how Canclini succumbs to exactly this narrative. In The

Impure Imagination: Toward a Critical Hybridity, Lund essentially argues that hybridity,

as Canclini defines it, represents a failure in logic as it celebrates “genre mixing,” which

can only make sense under the presumption that genres (including races) were somehow

“pure” to being with. Lund describes this pitfall as a haunting by a “Eurocentrically

determined logic of race” (xv). Lund also problematizes Canclini’s concept of

“multitemporal heterogeneity” by pointing out the ways in which temporal marks and

race are interrelated.27 Although Canclini presents hybridity as a possibility for

interrogating binarism, Lund sees Canclini’s move as a reification: “[T]he binaristic

choice between hybrid (mixed) or binary (pure/impure) presents itself as if it were, in fact,

26 There is a very notable exception to this rule: The feature-length fiction film Semana Capital directed by Hugo Cataldo Barudi. I explore how this film queers the archive in detail in a fifth chapter in the book that this dissertation will eventually become. 27 Lund stresses that “Obviously the critique here is not hybridity the thing or the word, but rather the mechanisms and processes through which the concept ‘hybridity’ enters into discourse” (xix).

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a real choice. In doing so, it conceals the fact that hybridity and binarism are functions of each other,” (33). Is it not possible to simply celebrate mestizo inclusion for hybridity’s sake: hybridity itself is a complicit conceptualization.

Temporalization, Racialization, and Gendering

What does the marriage of otherness, identity, the past, race and nature achieve, and why does film seem absolutely stuck on re-creating this marriage over and over again?

As Walter Benjamin demonstrates while analyzing nineteenth-century industrial capitalism, in order for the “new” to exist the “old” must be constructed. Benjamin describes how archaic images are produced in order to suggest something historically new about commodities. Similarly, it is only through the evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of one, synchronic time progressing to, accumulating upon and being replaced by the “next” that people are able to make sense of national progress.

Anne McClintock discusses how secularizing time represents three points of significance for nationalism:

First … the world’s discontinuous nations appear to be marshaled

within a single, hierarchical European ur-narrative. Second, national

history is imagined as naturally teleological, an organic process of

upward growth, with the European nation as the apogee of world

progress. Third, inconvenient discontinuities are ranked and

subordinated into a hierarchical structure of branching time—the

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progress of “racially” different nations mapped against the tree’s self-

evident boughs, with lesser nations destined, by nature, to perch on its

lower branches … (92)

These points of significance reveal discourses of linear time that posit progress from a

European perspective, serving European colonial and post-colonial interests while linking the past with colonized peoples, specifically those who have been constructed as racially separate. Under this discourse, theirs becomes a preexisting, original traditional space acted upon by modernity. The past becomes a passive, non-Western reality upon which modernizing forces work naturally and independently of any group’s special interests.

Franz Fanon explores discourses of the civilized/primitive binary in Black Skin

White Masks. Similarly to the way in which Benjamin describes the need to produce antiquity in order to sell “new” commodities, Fanon states that “It is the racist who creates his inferior” (93). In order for the colonizer to be dominant, s/he must construct a discourse of inferiority and an Other to apply it to. Fanon explores this process through his critique of the work of M. Mannoni, who discusses what he refers to as “the inferiority complex.” Fanon argues that Mannoni naturalizes the inferiority complex by presenting it as something that antedates colonization. Fanon explains that a Malagasy past cannot be presented in such a way because since colonization, the Malagasy have been reconstructed by the European: “What M. Mannoni has forgotten is that the

Malagasy alone no longer exists; he has forgotten that the Malagasy exists with the

European … alterity for the black man is not the black man but the white man” (97).

Fanon reminds us that the Malagasy as we know them are a construct of their colonizers.

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Despite white dominance, the white perspective is not the universal point of departure nor should it be normalized as such. Consider the way that Benjamin and McClintock’s work suggests that the premodern as a coherent cultural sphere does not preexist the modern, but is instead a discursive construction of modernity itself through recourse to a fictive space outside itself—defined as its lack. The notion of the pre-modern is a modern concept retroactively constructed to legitimize modernization in the same way that the historicized black man in Fanon’s example is constructed retroactively to legitimize white domination.

In the same vein, Stuart Hall conducts a useful exploration of the construction, complexity and fluidity of identity. Hall follows Fanon’s point about identities being fashioned in line with interests of the dominant class. “The ways we have been positioned and subjected in the dominant regimes of representation were a critical exercise of cultural power and normalization, precisely because they were not superficial. They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’” (706). At the intersection of Hall and Fanon we find a construction of the Other that is strikingly similar to the construction of the past presented at the intersection of Benjamin and McClintock. Just as a person in Fanon’s example experiences her/his own Otherness as vividly as if s/he were split in two, the dominant regimes of representation present time’s progression as synonymous with progress in a powerful, universalizing way.

The construction of the Other and the construction of the past are nearly grafted onto one another in Anne Cheng’s example of “Indian Melancholy:”

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In Beyond Ethnicity Werner Sollors talks about ‘Indian melancholy,’

referring not to how Native Americans process their history of genocide

but to how dominant American culture romanticizes and naturalizes ‘the

cult of the vanishing Indians.’ The rhetoric of the ‘melancholic Indian

and his fate’ serves to legitimize the future of the white conqueror. (14)

The Indian is seen as static, rooted in the past and passively subjected to the forces of modernity. The past as something that naturally must be lost, is prescribed as the temporality of the Indian, who sadly—but inevitably—must fade away, also. Through this temporal association, dominant white culture does not bare any responsibility for the marginalization and genocide of indigenous peoples, because it was ‘no one’s fault’ that they could not adapt to modernity. Fanon describes colonial violence stating that “… I begin to suffer from not being a white man to the degree that the white man imposes discrimination on me … tells me that … I must bring myself as quickly as possible into step with the white world …” (98). If the term “white world” is replaced by the term

“modern world,” white dominance is figured as blameless. Rather, the dominant class can state that there is a “cultural clash” with progress itself, and progress, being ascribed to the domain of the impartial and inevitable cannot bear any moral burden. Edmundo

O’Gorman also describes this as a dominant aspect of colonial thought in his book, La

Invención de América:

En este programa de liberación y transformación el indígena quedó al

margen por su falta de voluntad o incapacidad o ambas, de vincularse al

destino de los extraños hombres que se habían apoderado de sus

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territorios, y si bien no faltaron serios intentos de incorporarlo y

cristianizarlo, puede afirmarse que, en términos generales, fue

abandonado a su suerte y al extermino como un hombre sin redención

posible, puesto que en su resistencia a mudar sus hábitos ancestrales y

en su pereza y falta de iniciativa en el trabajo, se veía la señal inequívoca

de que Dios lo tenía merecidamente olvidado. (157, italics mine.)

Argentine academic Rodolfo Kusch echos the same temporalization of indigenous thought in El pensamiento indígena y popular en América:

A uniform way of life does not exist in América. The ways of life of the

Indian and the well-off city dweller are impermeable to each other. On

the on hand, the Indian retains the structure of an ancient form of

thinking, a thousand years old, and on the other, the city dweller renews

his way of thinking every ten years. (2)

In the Sollors, O’Gorman and Kusch examples, hegemonic structures are legitimized and formalized through the characterization of indigenous cultural identities as rooted in the past. In this way, racial hierarchies are presented as the continuation and repetition of an always already socially sanctioned structure. The fixed identity constructed for the oppressed people by the dominant class becomes ever more difficult to question unless one recognizes that all identity undergoes constant transformation and is subject to power plays as well.

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Identity, of course, is not limited to race or ethnicity. Anne McClintock demonstrates how discourses of time and progress extend not only to race, but to gender though the domestication of national time:

[T]he temporal anomaly within nationalism—veering between nostalgia

and the impatient, progressive sloughing off of the past, is typically

resolved by figuring the contradiction in the representation of time as a

natural division of gender. Women are represented as the atavistic and

authentic body of national tradition (inert, backward-looking, and

natural), embodying nationalism’s conservative principle of continuity.

Men, by contrast, represent the progressive agent of national modernity

(forward-thrusting, potent, and historic) … Nationalism’s anomalous

relation to time is thus managed as a natural relation to gender. (92)

Time becomes a fetishistic stand-in for the othering of peoples who the dominant class seeks to repress—including women. A European historicist scheme functions to universalize a European version of historical experience and inculcate beliefs about progress, superiority, inferiority and the proper place of racialized and gendered peoples.

“Women were seen not as inhibiting history proper but as existing, like colonized peoples, in a permanently anterior time within the modern nation” (93) McClintock states.

Anne Cheng helps in the exploration of how these beliefs about race, gender and the alignment of linear time with progress constitute a melancholic ideological discourse.

Through Freudian psychoanalysis, Cheng presents us with the concept of the melancholia of race. First, she defines melancholia as follows:

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In 1917 Freud wrote an essay, “Mourning and Melancholia,” which

proposes two different kinds of grief. According to Freud, “mourning” is

a healthy response to loss … Melancholia, on the other hand, is

pathological. It is interminable in nature and refuses substitution (that is,

the melancholic cannot ‘get over’ loss) … Melancholia thus denotes a

condition of endless self-impoverishment. (8-7)

The loss we are referring to within the context of aforementioned discursive constructs is two part: on one hand, as Cheng would posit it, the unassimilable racial other is “lost,” but “The melancholic must deny loss as loss in order to sustain the fiction of possession”

(9). I suggest that the second component of loss here is the loss of the past. The positions we explore present a completely naturalized binary in which the past is lost yet that loss is denied by a melancholic upholding of the future as progress.

As Cheng states, “Melancholia offers a powerful critical tool precisely because it theoretically accounts for the guilt and the denial of guilt, the blending of shame and omnipotence in the racist imaginary” (12). Any discourse of “underdevelopement stuck in the past” can be analyzed as a type of melancholia; society cannot get over the loss brought on by racist violence, and the more we deny the loss, the more we incorporate further racism by repeating and naturalizing discourses on the linearity of time and its connection to the static and inferior positioning of oppressed peoples.

In the case of Paraguay’s place within “first world” development discourse,

Paraguay has been racialized as brown, gendered as female, and temporalized in the past; all identitarian means of domination, as I have explained above. As a nation that is

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primarily mestizo and bears the mark of Spanish colonization, the connection between darkness of skin and poverty has been naturalized over centuries. Theft problems are blamed on traditional Guaraní communal societal structure where private property does not exist as it does in the West, but rather, all objects belong to the tribe.28 Paraguay has

been infamously gendered as female/inferior as a result of the Triple Alliance War (also

known as the Paraguayan War)29 in which Paraguay staved off Brazil, Argentina and

Uruguay for five years, from 1865-1870. The war cost Paraguay most of its male

population. Women rebuilt the country, and it is widely thought that this moment of

“destruction” of the nation/nuclear family is to blame for many current socioeconomic

problems.30 In John King’s foundational Magical Reels: A History of Cinema in Latin

America there are only a few pages on Paraguayan film. Within those pages, King cites

Paraguayan boom author Augusto Roa Bastos: “The daily routine, the monotonous and

insistent rituals, the power of religion and the grinding poverty are all captured in an

implacable portrait of this ‘land without men and men without land’” (101). The cultural

influence of books written by Roa Bastos and King makes the inclusion of this phrase in the only three pages dedicated to Paraguayan film all the more striking. Both authors describe Paraguay as a place of “land without men and men without land,” (in)directly

28 For a brief op-ed that illustrates popular discourse on how Paraguay’s social problems are traceable to its indigeneity, see “Inventario de un pueblo diferente” by Marzha Navarro http://www.larueda.com.py/marzhan005.htm 29 I prefer the Paraguayan name for this event: “Triple Alliance War” over “Paraguayan War” because I believe it is more indicative of the inequity involved in this catastrophic confrontation. 30 For more on this see “Paraiso de Majoma” o “País de las Mujeres”: El rol de la familia en la sociedad paraguaya del siglo XIX by Barbara Potthast-Jutkeit.

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linking the feminization (without men) of Paraguay to its situation of poverty and uneven distribution of wealth (men without land).

Paraguay’s history of dictatorship has also been read by “first world” political scientists as an indicator of inferiority. As Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith have written about the history of development discourse in the United States:

Implicitly assuming or explicitly asserting that their style of democracy is

superior to all other modes of political organization, North American and

European writers frequently asked what was ‘wrong’ with Latin America. Or

with Latin Americans themselves. What passed for answers was for many

years a jumble of racist epithets, psychological simplifications, geographical

platitudes, and cultural distortions. According to such views, Latin America

could not achieve democracy because dark-skinned peoples … were unsuited

for it … (5-6).

As Idelber Avelar describes it, “[L]iberal democracy emerges as the remedy against authoritarianism. The self-evidence of the opposition is thus taken for granted” (55).

While “democracy” has been related to “developed” political organization, the U.S.- supported coup d'état that overthrew the Stroessner dictatorship continues to be a point of conflict in Paraguayan society. Many, particularly of the working class, argue that the uncontrollable increases in crime, corruption and living expenses that the dictator once predicted upon his ousting have come to pass, and feel they were better off during the dictatorship.

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Skidmore and Smith go on to describe how in the 50s and 60s “modernization theory” appeared, which by name alone situates Latin America in the past while simultaneously gendering and racializing it, as we can immediately deduce from the theoretical frames the present/past binary activates. The tenants of modernization theory described how economic growth would generate social change and therefore, more

“developed” politics. The transition from rural to urban societies would cause an overhaul of “moral values.” Magically, a larger middle class was prognosticated to emerge. It was thought that “Latin America and its citizenries were not so inherently

‘different’ from Europe and North America. Instead they were simply ‘behind’” (6) as

Skidmore and Smith explain.

Of course, the predictions of modernization theory did not pan out. How could they, when the entire theory was based on the logic of the status quo? As Skidmore and

Smith describe, in the 60s and 70s economic gains resulted in even more inequality in distribution of wealth. Domestic gains were proven not to be able to compete with transnational capital. The middle class, instead of playing a progressive and moderating role as predicted, developed a “class consciousness” in which they joined the ruling classes in opposition to the popular masses. Politics took an authoritarian turn instead of a democratic one.

Although modernization theory and other grand theories of development have been generally debunked, dominant neoliberal discourse maintains some of the core concepts of modernization theory: primarily, the secular faith that unregulated economic policy is neutral, natural and solves all problems. Just as modernization theory predicted

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that all Latin American social issues would be resolved with sufficient economic growth, neoliberalism, as defined by David Harvey, preaches 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” (2). In this sense, modernization theory is still alive and well. What goes along with this line of thought is its logical extension: if one is not well-off under neoliberal rule, it could only be because said individual is simply lacking the motivation to exercise his or her entrepreneurial freedoms. As Rodolfo Kusch states in Indigenous and Popular

Thinking: “Volition—everyday personal effort—is what will solve all problems” (118).

He then goes on to describe how the downfall of certain criollos in the new world can be attributed to their passivity: “[T]hey do not exercise their volition in bettering their life circumstances” (118). The connection between Kusch’s temporalization of Indian thought, deductions about failure being attributable mainly to lack of will, and the implications for neoliberal doctrine should not go unnoticed.

To conclude, the text and context of Hamaca Paraguaya represent a valuable opportunity for understanding how certain themes in narrative and documentary film of

Paraguay have become dominant through national/transnational processes of production and consumption. While these processes cannot go uninfluenced by the uneven distribution of wealth under which they are produced and even help to maintain, Hamaca

Paraguaya is an example of a film that plays the field while drawing attention to some of the very problems of that field. Through the analysis of the text and context of this film, we are able to explore how points of connection between issues of temporality, race,

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nationality, gender and class can function as articulations on which coloniality, postcoloniality and development discourse logics are constructed.

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CHAPTER 4: FRANKFURT: AUTHENTICITY, TRANSNATIONALITY,

HISTORICAL BORDER WARDS AND GLOBAL NEOLIBERAL CAPITALISM

“Authenticity” and Transnationality

Thus far I have described what I have identified as a trend in filmic production in

Paraguay; a privileging of the topic of rural life, the rural space and rural language

(dialogue mostly if not entirely in Guaraní). In some interviews, directors have directly framed this as a preoccupation with authenticity; an attempt to represent a “truly”

Paraguayan way of life that is under threat. For example, when I asked Renate Costa why she chose Villarica as the setting for her short film, Che Yvotymi (2007), she told me she considered it a “zona auténtica” where people live in pure ways, following traditions in accordance with true country values. Her response is structured in such a way that connects the past, the land, and the people who live close to the land (and by extension, in the past).

One way of reading this rural-centric phenomenon is by thinking of it as a return to the “origins” of the nation. Paraguayan directors see themselves as creating works now that are potentially foundational for the Paraguayan film archive. Perhaps this brings up the question “where do we start?” which leads to the “obvious” answer: “at the beginning.” If “the beginning” is in the past, one must ask, who is closest to the past? The uncomplicated answer becomes “those who live in the past/rural space, farthest removed from the “contaminants” of modernity. In Brett Levinson’s book, The Ends of Literature,

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he describes a long tradition of “return to origins” narrative in Latin American literature in general. He sees it not as the result of a loss of origins, as some have theorized, but rather, as “precisely the incapacity to lose or translate origins. Mexico’s incapacity to rid itself of its x, for example—makes the return of such origins not a choice but an obligation, a calling, and a responsibility” (17).

Néstor García Canclini describes the return to the origins as an obligatory move for any Latin American trafficking in culture. “To be cultured…is to grasp a body of knowledge—largely iconographic—about one’s own history, and also to participate in the stagings in which hegemonic groups have society present itself with a scene of its origin” (109). To “be somebody” in the world of art and culture, one must demonstrate that s/he is versed in the repertoire of symbolic goods already in circulation. Perhaps there is even more pressure to deal in these “original” icons in Paraguay, given its history of military dictatorship. Canclini goes on to describe how “The dramatization of the patrimony is the effort to simulate that there is an origin, a founding substance, in relation with which we should act today. This is the basis of authoritarian cultural policies” (110).

Does this constant return to the origins represent a “rut” in which post-dictatorship filmic production in Paraguay is stuck? Further on in this chapter I will describe how this melancholic whirlpool applies to the case of audiovisual production in Paraguay.

Another angle from which to study the fetishization of Paraguayan “authenticity” has to do with the history of dependence that has replaced the story of total isolation and independence that the Francia years represent. The condition of lack regarding technological resources (which include training and training opportunities) required to

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make films has manifested itself in the history of Paraguayan film as a transnational curse: for most of the dictatorship, Paraguay could only play a supporting role in film through co-productions. Creative control was mostly in the hands of Argentine directors such as in the case of El Trueno entre las hojas (1956), La Burrerita de Ypacaraí (1962) and others. The lack implicit in these situations has contributed to a (mostly frustrated) desire to produce film that can claim independence from extranational funding, technology and expertise. In a personal interview with Capibara (2008) director Pablo Meilicke, he expressed the opinion that a film should not be considered Paraguayan unless every individual involved, including every member of the crew, is Paraguayan. He was hesitant to qualify Encina’s Hamaca Paraguaya as a Paraguayan film because the art director is

Argentine and the producers are European. This may seem like a hypernationalist reservation, but considering the context, it potentially expresses a desire for a cinema that is finally “free” from a historical dependence on external resources.

In my interview with Paz Encina she makes an interesting comment in relation to her personal identity and its authenticity: “No soy ciudadana del mundo, yo soy del país a la cual pertenezco. Soy paraguaya. No hablo inglés. Y puede que yo este perdiendo un motón de cosas, pero que querés que te diga…” She says this with a strong Argentine inflection, certainly acquired during her years at the Universidad del Cine in Buenos

Aires. Even more ironically, at the time of this writing, Encina is living and working in

Germany. I read this moment as a perfect metaphor for the authenticity/transnationality double-bind of Paraguayan film: the desire to be purely Paraguayan/create purely

Paraguayan cultural products surges from the very impossibility of doing so.

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In her chapter from Transnational Cinema, “Migrancy and the Latin American

Cinemascape” Anne Marie Stock makes the following comment: “Despite the multicultural collaboration driving film-making in the region, critical discourse continues to privilege cultural authenticity. Films recognizable as ‘Latin American’ are embraced; those ‘tainted’ by extra-national elements and influences are dismissed” (157). I relate this situation to the “brand” of “Latin Americaness” that the West exacts from “Third

Cinema,” which I discuss in Chapter 3. The condition of the current market for

Paraguayan film must also be recognized as a force shaping the cultural preoccupation with authenticity, somewhat ironically equated with a rejection of cultural imperialism

(when it is in fact, the product of cultural imperialism.) In Encina’s statement she rejects the English language in a move that suggests a privileging of a cultural authenticity and/or a rejection of the cultural imperialism of the Hollywood, or writ even more broadly, the English language. The irony in how she pronounces her comment, however, apparently escapes her. This is not intended to be personal criticism directed toward

Encina, but rather, an opportunity to read how the palimpsest (power structure) on which her work/cultural ideology is set bleeds through. As Dudley Andrew points out, in the

1980s “‘Authenticity,’ a seductive and dangerous term, . . . could scarcely be avoided by critics looking beyond Hollywood for genuine difference . . .” (77). Unfortunately, the obsession with authenticity did not die with that decade.

Paul Willemen explores the concept of how authenticity functions in “Third

Cinema” through a desire to not only differentiate from Hollywood, but, more broadly, counteract colonial rule in general. He points out the limitations of this reaction, resulting,

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in fact, in a mirror to imperialism’s practices, as I have discussed in Chapter 3’s description of how Paraguayan film’s preoccupation with a specific type of national identity is required for success in international film festivals and in the acquisition of project funding:

The responses to this reciprocal but antagonistic formation of identities fall

into three types. . . . The second option is to develop the antagonistic sense of

national identity by seeking to reconnect with traditions that got lost or were

displaced or distorted by colonial rule or by the impact of Western industrial-

military power. . . . The main [dangers in this] derive from the need to

reinvent traditions, to conjure up an image of pre-colonial innocence and

authenticity, since the national-cultural identity must be definition be founded

on what has been suppressed or distorted. The result is mostly a nostalgia for a

pre-colonial society which in fact never existed, full of idyllic villages and

communities people by “authentic” (read folkloric) innocents in touch with

the “real” values perverted by imperialism or, in the most naïve versions,

perverted by technology. Alternatively, particular aspects of some culture are

selected and elevated into essentialized symbols of the national identity: the

local answer to imperialism’s stereotypes. Mirroring imperialism’s practices,

such efforts mostly wind up presenting previously existing relations of

domination and subordination ass the “natural” state of things. (239-240)

What I would like to stress about Willemen’s critique is that from the point of colonization forward, the “colonized” are unthinkable without the “colonizers.” Those

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who “fall into the trap” of “naïve” thinking that Willemen describes are only part of the equation. To use Fanon’s words, “Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior” (93). There would be no mirroring of imperialism’s practices without imperialism. Just as Fanon points out that “the Malagasy exists with the European” (97), “Third Cinema” only exists with “First Cinema.”

Truly, Paraguayan “authenticity” is also unthinkable without the extranational. In fact, Paraguayan film is, and has been, a necessarily transnational process in the following ways:

1. Film referents necessarily come from outside of the country, being that Paraguay has had very little film history while its neighbors; Brazil and Argentina for example, have a lengthy film history that has received critical attention.

2. Historically, film in Paraguay has only been achieved through transnational co- productions. In fact, the first videographers in Paraguay were not Paraguayan, as represented in Manuel Cuenca’s document on Paraguayan film.31

3. The technology required to develop 35mm film does not currently exist in Paraguay.

Buenos Aires is the closest place in which this technology can be accessed.

4. There is no established film school in Paraguay, so directors must travel abroad to

places such as Buenos Aires (Paz Encina, Pablo Lamar), the United States (Hugo

Gamarra, Hugo Cataldo, Sergio Marcos), Cuba (Ramiro Gómez), London (Marcelo

Martinessi), Russia (Galia Jiménez), etc.

31 See Chapter 1.

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5. There is not a large enough of a market in Paraguay to fund or screen these film projects in a lucrative way. Seed money must come from outside of the country.

Prestigious awards can only be secured at international film festivals.

Given these conditions, people in Paraguay interested in working in film frequently have to confront the question of migration. As producer Aníbal Ríos states in a personal interview, “La pregunta obligatoria es ‘¿No pensás viajar?’” referring to the lack of options for formal training and employment in film in Paraguay. Director Pablo Lamar also comments on the need for migration, his decision to live and work in Brazil and his experience at film school in Buenos Aires:

Tanto en Argentina como en Paraguay… sería mucho encontrar un trabajo

pago o no casi. En Brasil está muy buena ahora la cantidad de inversión. El

presupuesto de la nación en cultura es muy grande. Cortometrajes tienen

realmente un presupuesto bastante alto. Generan una industria mismo. Hay

posibilidades de trabajo real. . . . La cuestión económica siempre es una

cuestión que genera más migración en el país. . . . No se me hace fácil

imaginarme viviendo acá y haciendo lo que me gusta a todo rato, vivir del

cine. Ya me jugué al estudiar eso, hice cinco años de mi vida en Buenos Aires.

Ahora quiero continuar por ahí y no volver a otra cosa. . . . La formación es

importante y de repente la práctica no da una reflexión de formación en

Paraguay.

Rios’ and Lamar’s comments reflect a sort of glass ceiling for audiovisual producers in

Paraguay. People can access some level of training and experience nationally, but must

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migrate eventually if they want to expand their possibilities. This can be a limiting and frustrating condition of film making for some.

The aforementioned comments bring up questions such as: how much of the labor and design has to be Paraguayan for a film to qualify as a Paraguayan cultural product?

Who is a Paraguayan, anyway? Someone who lives half of the year in Europe, the United

States or Buenos Aires? Someone who is a full time resident of another country? What do we make of the fact that most Paraguayan directors have been trained abroad, in places like Argentina, the U.S. and Cuba? These questions can help us to identify a local/foreign binary and try to think both sides of the binary simultaneously in an effort to disrupt the logic on which the dominant Creole narrative of national identity was constructed. What

Paraguayan film leaves us should not be uncritically read as a faithful representation of national cultural authenticity. Rather, in the words of Anne Marie Stock:

…it seems that what remains when film-makers and films constantly cross

borders is, in fact, a critical nostalgia for cultural authenticity . . . Today this

nostalgia prevails among critics who privilege “pure” national films and

cinemas . . . while effectively marginalizing those films, film-makers and

spectators bisecting geopolitical boundaries. Critical discourse remains fixed

within national and regional paradigms, while globalization increasingly impacts

that body of work known as Latin American Cinema. (158, italics mine)

Stocks’ statement reminds us that it is not only filmmakers and their funders who misguidedly exalt the concept of cultural authenticity, but critics and theorists as well.

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One of the dangers of criticism reliant on “authenticity” has to do with authenticity’s connection to the essentialist view of the nation as homogeneous, uncontested space/origin. Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen describe this link in the following way:

The most common way of forestalling questions about the ways in which

economic arrangements shape cultural issues and modes of thinking, while

appearing to solve the problem of that interaction, has been to invoke the

metaphor of the national body and its organic formation in a myth-like ‘natural’

past. (2)

Following Vitali and Willemen, a fetishization of the national body and its origins should be a red flag, directing analysis toward the market; the very space that is being obscured.

Economic arrangements in fact bleed through onto cultural products, perhaps in spite of whatever intentions were involved in the direct and indirect authorship of the product.

This presents a special opportunity for the theorist—not to learn about authenticity, but to learn about the effects of the market. Frankfurt represents a unique metaphor with which to explore the interwoven discursive threads of nationalist fervor (nacionalismo futbolero), religiosity, Paraguay’s location in the global neoliberal world market and the division of Paraguayan classes.

In all the aforementioned filmic attempts to focus on the nation, the primary product is further evidence that so-called national spaces are, upon closer inspection, more accurately described as transnational spaces. This is also why I have included a close reading of Frankfurt here. Frankfurt is a documentary that forces one to ask, for

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example, how it creates meaning about paraguayidad through European protagonists?

How is Frankfurt a story about borders? Is the presence of technology (mainly, the television) in Frankfurt to be read as a culturally “corruptive” force, or is it present in order to spur a questioning of dominant concepts of “authenticity”?

Frankfurt

Ramiro Gómez has a similar profile to many Paraguayan filmmakers: he was born in the late seventies and did most of his filmic training abroad. Gómez attended the

Instituto Superior de Arte de la Habana, Cuba from 1996 to 2001. He also did

coursework in video journalism in Quito, Ecuador and in São Paulo, Brazil. As is

common for audiovisual producers in Paraguay, he got his start in the business creating material for publicity purposes. In 2007, Tierra Roja (2006)—his first documentary—

won awards at several international film festivals. Due to a lack of funding, Gómez’s

second documentary, Frankfurt (2008), did not circulate as much in comparison, however,

it did appear at a few major film festivals, but did not win any awards. Gómez cites

Glauber Rocha as an influence.

When I interviewed Gómez he described his method for shooting both Tierra

Roja and Frankfurt. He described going to live with several rural families (in the case of

Frankfurt, these families were specifically located in Borja and Isla Alta.) He made a

point of not using any material from the first three days of his stay in order to give the

residents time to get used to his presence and the presence of the camera. His

documentaries do not include any voice-over commentary. Gómez states that his goal is

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to simply shoot what he sees. (Of course, even the most minimal amount of intervention involves framing, emplotment and embeds a way of seeing.) This approach echoes García

Espinosa’s prescription of showing the process of a problem without providing commentary as a way “to submit [the problem] to judgment without pronouncing the verdict” (81). As with Encina, both directors seem influenced by foundational manifestos for Third Cinema.

Frankfurt opens with a shot from a dirt floor: a bare foot wearing a flip-flop. This foot belongs to a young man wearing an athletic track suit and fanning a fire. The sound of a chicken clucking is audible. The youth whistles a polka. There is a cat and a dog curled up next to the fire. An older man is nearby; presumably, the younger’s father.

The young man takes the water that has been heating on the fire to make his mate cocido for breakfast. He drinks mate with coquito.32 The yerba packaging displays the

colors of the Paraguayan flag (Yerba Mate Pajarito). The young man has breakfast alone.

The sound of a radio or television is audible in the background. Commentators are

preparing the audience for a World Cup game: England vs. Paraguay. We can only make

out a part of what one of them says, presumably about Paraguay: “Este es un país que ha

sufrido mucho por la guerra…”

The next scene shows the television: soccer fans (hinchas) are wearing national

colors. The television is set against a wall decorated with images from religious

iconography. An older woman, presumably the youth’s mother, hangs the Paraguayan

32 Coquito is a type of bread that hardens and dries out in the same manner as a soft pretzel. This allows people to buy it in bulk at low prices and consume it long after regular bread would have gone stale. It is typically eaten with a hot beverage in which it can be dunked and softened. It is noteworthy that this youth’s breakfast does not include any type of protein.

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flag. An image of a light-skinned God holding the baby Jesus is framed in juxtaposition with the flag. We see another shot of the World Cup game being played in Frankfurt: a large group of Paraguayan fans are visible in the stadium.

The television then broadcasts from Asunción. A newscaster interviews a BBC correspondent, greeting him in English: “Good morning, you are stupid!” The correspondent ignores the comment and gracefully states “I’m in the very best country in

South America.” An hincha named Tania puts a Paraguayan hat on the BBC correspondent’s head.

The camera goes back to the young man’s bare foot in the foreground, catholic religious iconography in the background. The viewer also sees the man’s father smoking a rustic cigar. In off we hear a commercial being broadcast on the television: “Hay gente que sufre. Hay gente que espera, que brinca, que canta, que alienta, que mira, que sufre; hay gente contenta, que pide, que cree, que suspira. Hay gente fanática . . . la pasión se lleva en el corazón y se celebra. Pilsen, sponsor oficial de la auténtica pasión albirroja.”

While we hear this audio, the camera provides a close up of each of the icons on the wall, particularly Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The youth’s face is somber. His father continues to smoke silently. In yet another commercial we hear children chant: “Paraguay!

Paraguay! Paraguay!” and then, an announcer who states: “La pasión por el fútbol y la fuerza de nuestros colores está en cada rincón del Paraguay.”

The son, mother and father rise for the national anthem. The Paraguayan fans in the stadium in Germany are all light skinned, which is in direct contrast with this family’s darker skin. All clap after the anthem: the family in Paraguay, the players on the field,

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and the fans in the stands. The commentator is heard saying “El público paraguayo; espectacular.”

In the next shot there is no audio, just a view of the field as the game starts rolling.

The World Cup camera pauses on some of the most famous players, particularly Roque

Santa Cruz and Justo Villar. The chanting and singing of the Paraguayan fans is audible.

Within minutes of the game, David Beckham is allowed a penalty kick for a foul. Carlos

Gamarra tries to block the ball, but it makes its way into his own team’s goal instead.

Unwittingly, he helps England score a point. The family at home is shocked and

comment “¡Que bárbaro, fue en contra!” “Aquello que tanto habíamos planificado se

rompe apenas en el minuto tres,” the commentator remarks as the son and father look on

somberly. The screen fades to black.

The next scene introduces another family; presumably three brothers getting up

and getting ready for their day. One is playing a game on a Nokia mobile phone. The

light is coming in through the spaces between the slats that make up the walls of the

structure they have been sleeping in. The sound of geese honking loudly nearby is

audible. The brothers are arguing jokingly about who stole who’s pack of gum. We see a

mirror on an armoire. There is light coming through the roof, also. The youths are slender

and muscular; we can observe this as they dress and undress. The sound of baby chicks and the hum of a power generator are audible. The camera focuses on a light bulb which has lit up.

After a brief scene involving a country-side soccer match, (obviously a scheduled game as they are wearing uniforms) the camera returns to the brother’s shack: the shot

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focuses on a blank television screen; it is apparently broken. The three young men listen to the game while they work on something from the bed. The chickens are in the structure with them, clucking loudly; one even hops up on the bed for a second. No one seems to notice. They are trying to solve math problems. There are clothes drying out, hung indoors above their heads. The television is still blank but we can hear the commentator announcing a goal scored by the Czech Republic.33

Next we see a woman shot from the behind in a shack. Another woman also enters the home and is combing her hair. The television is broadcasting the game. Even though it offers only a blank, glowing screen, everyone crowds around it. It is framed like another member of the family.

Back at the other home there is a Ronaldinho commercial on the television

followed by a lottery ticket commercial: “Seneté—millionarios de verdad. ¡Che

poremoi!”34 The commercial promises a chance at winning money and a truck. The film

cuts away to the young man looking in the mirror.

The next scene returns to the three brothers riding all together on a small

motorcycle down a bumpy, red dirt road. They are following a 1970s Mercedes bus of the

type that are still in regular use in Paraguay. A group of men get off and pay their dues.

They then change into their uniforms and warm up for the soccer match they are here for.

33 It is interesting to note that in World Cup games, linguistically, a nation’s team becomes a stand-in for the nation itself. For example, announcers state that “the Czech Republic scored a goal.” In this sense, the confrontation on the soccer field is even more like a confrontation of nations, an event that necessarily connotes war. This link becomes even more literalized at the time of La Guerra del Fútbol between Honduras and Ecuador that broke out after a World Cup game in 1969. Political tensions produced by economic disparity between the two nations had been mounting well before their World Cup confrontations, but the games definitively provided opportunities for those tensions to be expressed with increasing violence, which eventually boiled over and lead to the breaking of diplomatic relations between the two nations followed by a four day war. 34 This Guaraní phrase translates to “Me pica la mano,” a sign of good luck.

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The referee urinates in the woods. (There is nowhere else to urinate.) For some privacy, he stands behind a cab displaying a sign: “Villarica.” This gives the audience further information about the possible location. As the game starts there is a considerable amount of wind in the audio. There is a brief shot of a bull on the sidelines of the soccer field; he turns his head to look rather comically, directly at the camera. At half time the players break and talk about strategy; the coach lectures them about better communication very animatedly and seriously. There is a shot of a light-skinned man shaking the coach’s hand and asking in English, “Are you the new coach here?” He laughs and the coach looks uncomfortably at the camera; obviously he does not speak English. There are a few more shots of the game, then a fade to black.

The film resumes at night. In a framing similar to previous framings, a young woman’s head is situated in one corner of the shot and a Coca-Cola sign is prominent on the wall behind her. Another woman, perhaps her mother, is washing dishes. A polka plays on the radio. The older woman heats water on a stove top. The men sit around a table playing cards. Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie” comes on the radio.

After a fade to black we see two girls getting ready for their day, back at the home with the broken television. The sound of chicks peeping is loud again. The television is on, of course. One of the brothers tries to fix it to get an image again, but nothing seems to work. There is a rather long shot of the brothers trying different channels with no improvement. The screen is blank; it produces not much more than a bluish light. A woman looks on as one of the young men tries to solve the television issue. The spectator may feel some of this family’s frustration as the spectator is forced to watch the blank

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screen for an extended period of time as well, as the shot goes on. The family finally gives up and just listens to the game. The television screen is the last thing we see as the shot fades to black.

The next scene begins with another family’s television. They enjoy a better (but still fuzzy) image of the Sweden-Paraguay game in action broadcast on SNT. This shot is set in a different house, yet the television sits against yet another wall decorated with a collection of religious iconography. There are women and girls in the scene, preparing ice, cutting up a pig head—not watching the game with the men. The camera lingers as a young woman saws away at a pig head. A light-skinned child Jesus, depicted as a shepherd (with a lamb in his lap) is framed against the television. The camera then focuses once again on the pig head being prepared and fades to black.

When the documentary resumes, we see the same television, then another woman from behind; her back is to the television as she clips her nails. The young girl puts the ice in the freezer next to the television, which is also next to the bed. The men drink tereré and swear at the game because it is not going well. Another woman is clipping her nails as she watches the game. The men’s faces turn more somber and the audio turns silent as the camera zooms in on their unsmiling, unflinching faces. There is a toddler on the bed. A man gets up, swears in Guaraní and walks away to smoke a cigarette. They watch with bated breath as Paraguay loses the game.

The penultimate scene is set a little before dawn. It is still very dark and a fog lies over the landscape. The moon is still bright in the sky. The fire is started for warming the mate, and we see the elderly man from the first scene of the documentary drinking out of

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a guampa inscribed with the words “República del Paraguay” and decorated with an etching of a Paraguayan flag. The man packs two machetes and heads to the road. As it gets lighter he walks down the red dirt road. The camera zooms in on his flip flops and bare feet; he is wearing a warm jacket; it seems cold out. He is smoking a cigar again.

The length of the scene suggests he walks quite a ways. The camera pans into the grey sky.

In the last scene the man cuts cane while smoking. His son and another farmer, also cutting cane some meters away, talk about a local soccer game as they work. They are rather dexterous with their machetes, making short work of the cane. The camera changes angel and we see the third man cutting cane, and one horse grazing. The horse eats the leaves off the cut stalks of cane.

Historical Border Wars and Contemporary Global Neoliberal Capitalism

As described in the first chapter, Paraguay’s historical border wars play an active role in the contemporary constitution of national identity in Paraguay; specifically, the

Triple Alliance War (with Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay) and the Chaco War (with

Bolivia). For a relatively small filmic archive, this is evident in the preoccupation with these historic border wars and with current border issues: the film Cerro Corá (1978) is a fascist re-writing of the Triple Alliance War produced by the Stroessner regime; Hamaca

Paraguaya brings historical revisionism to the Chaco War by erasing the glory of this win and replacing it with the loss felt by the couple who gave their son for the war; Los

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Paraguayos (2006)—a documentary by Marcelo Martinelli, commissioned by the

Brazilian oil company, Petrobras—re-visits the contested “heroism” of the Triple

Alliance War icon, President Francisco Antonio López. Soberanía Violada (2007), directed by Mariana Vazquez, equates current-day Brazilian soy agroindustry’s methods in Paraguay with an attack on Paraguay’s borders and sovereignty. What is the meaning of historical border wars as a referent for present day audiovisual production in Paraguay?

Like the aforementioned films, Frankfurt also translates these historical border wars into a current-day neoliberal world order echoing colonial relationships and loss through transnational processes and cultural iconography. Take for example one of the major moments of loss in the documentary: England beats Paraguay. England’s role in

Frankfurt must be read against its perceived historical involvement in the Triple Alliance

War. At the time of the war, Britain was aggressively building infrastructure, largely in the form of railroads, in neighboring Argentina. Britain was able to justify this investment given Argentina’s lack of capital and labor and the fact that Britain was their main consumer of meat and grain (Skidmore and Smith, 71-72). The investment allowed

Britain to monopolize Argentina’s infrastructure for commerce, benefitting the empire while solidifying relations between the two nations even further. In Paraguay, President

Carlos Antonio López also wanted to build a railroad, but did not want to have the same sort of dependence/entrenchment with the British Empire, and therefore negotiated a business arrangement in which the government would pay cash for British engineering.

This much of the history has been documented. It becomes more difficult to prove what is popularly believed: that Britain was irritated by Paraguay’s unwillingness to enter into

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the same relationship of dependence as it had forged with Argentina, and therefore saw

Paraguay as a resistant state that could be subjugated into economic compromise more easily after the Triple Alliance War. Thus, in the Paraguayan national imaginary, Britain supported the gang of three’s attack on Paraguay. There is some historical scholarship available that would refute this claim, demonstrating that Britain was in opposition to the war because all war was generally bad for international commerce.35 However, it is a fact

that Sir Edward Thornton, the British Minister to the Argentine Republic, demonstrated

his support of the Triple Alliance with his presence at the signing of a Treaty of Alliance

between Brazil and Argentina.

The Triple Alliance War story haunts Frankfurt as this documentary (re)presents

the story of a small, impoverished nation where people survive in extreme poverty while

in other (urban and European) spaces, wealth and modernity are booming. Frankfurt

illustrates the incredible scale of this national and transnational inequity in a way that

harkens back to the inequity of three nations ganging up on one. Frankfurt holds up a

mirror—a repeated visual element in the documentary—and asks Paraguayans to look at

their condition: are we in the same spot as we were after the Triple Alliance War? Have

we substituted colonialism and empire for the neoliberal world order?

Paraguay’s contemporary relationships with its neighbors are still tenuous. Many

feel that the government has “sold out” to Brazil, particularly in the soy business.

Soberanía Violada describes specifically how many rural farmers on the Paraguay-Brazil

border have sold their lands to Brazilian investors for low values because they were

35 See Salles, Ricardo (2003). Guerra do Paraguai: Memórias & Imagens. Rio de Janeiro: Bibilioteca Nacional.

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dazzled by the sight of mounds of cash, out of touch with the fact that $10,000 USD does not go as far in the capital city as they thought. Once the money and the land are gone, many of these farmers become destitute homeless people roaming the capital, surviving through recycling and begging. While soy is touted as the export that has made

Paraguay’s macro-economy one of the fastest-growing in the region, the percentage of

Paraguayans living below the poverty line has climbed to 19.3%.36 This contradiction between the macro and micro economies of Paraguay draws attention to the quiet, pro- business permissiveness of the State and the upward redistribution of resources that Lisa

Duggan describes as defining characteristics of neoliberalism as it developed in the

United States and later, Europe. A way in which this neoliberal moment in Paraguay differs from the way in which neoliberalism is structured to function in the United States, for example, has to do with the fact that in the case of the soy industry, resources are not just redistributed upward, but outward as much of the profits exit the country via the

Brazilian investors who actually own the land. Under these conditions, nationalism can be a place from which to express popular resistance (“Stop selling us out to Brazil!”) and it can be an ideology to which neoliberalism can align itself with profitable results, depending on the mechanization.

While multiple theorists have discussed the weakening of the nation state under the conditions of postmodernity, some, such as Gareth Williams in The Other Side of the

Popular, observe that neoliberalism still requires the nation state in order to function.

Neoliberalism exposes the limits of the nation state and at once requires the nation state.

36 http://ea.com.py/avance-sojero-y-pobreza/

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The shell that national structures vacate in the postnational turn is the system that neoliberalism appropriates in order to draw ever more participants into the market. If we follow Williams, to speak of the nation today is always an encoded way to speak of the market.

Idelber Avelar explains the rise of the allegorical in Latin American cultural production as a sign of the transition from State to Market:

If the arrival of the dictatorships and the ensuing transition from State to Market

are coextensive with the end of the boom…then the emergence of these

allegorical machines is also coextensive with the decadence of magical-realist or

fantastic poetics in Latin America. If the latter had made of the symbol the

principle of unification whereby the dispersion of events could be recollected and

raised to a higher master code . . . the end of the possibility of a nationally

sustained capitalism and the passage to the planetary horizon of the Market

coincide with the primacy of the allegorical. (75)

In this sense, I read Frankfurt as part of a trend in Latin American cultural production: the World Cup season becomes an allegory for Paraguay’s national reality and the class reality within Paraguay under global neoliberal capitalism. While some Paraguayans cannot even afford closed-toe shoes to wear in winter, other, lighter-skinned Paraguayans have enough money to spend on holiday in Germany and attend a World Cup game; an upward (re)distribution of resources seems evident.

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The Market, the State and the Church

Frankfurt allegorically links the market, nationalism (particularly nacionalismo futbolero), and religiosity through visual/auditory triangulation. Take for example two instances in which yerba mate is included in the shot. Toward the beginning of the film we see a young man having breakfast: he is drinking Yerba Mate Pajarito in packaging that prominently displays the colors of the Paraguayan flag while a television broadcasting chatter relevant to the World Cup is audible. Toward the end of the film the young man’s father is featured drinking mate from a guampa also painted with the colors of the flag, sporting the etching “República del Paraguay.” These son/father moments of yerba mate consumption nearly bookend the documentary. (Yerba mate has been an important cash crop in Paraguay since colonial times.) The connection between the desire to sell a product and nationalism leads one to ask: what is nationalism asking us to buy into? A market reality? A class position?

In other instances the television broadcasts commercials that make obvious appeals to nacionalismo futbolero in order to sell beer. For example, in one scene the audio states: “Hay gente que sufre. Hay gente que espera, que brinca, que canta, que alienta, que mira, que sufre; hay gente contenta, que pide, que cree, que suspira. Hay gente fanática . . . la pasión se lleva en el corazón y se celebra. Pilsen, sponsor oficial de la auténtica pasión albirroja.” The film further links this audio with a visual component: the bare foot in the foreground and the religious iconography in the background. At this point, as in others, an audiovisual relationship between the television, the flag, the

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religious iconography decorating the wall and the family is produced. The camera lingers on the frames of television and Niño Jesús, for example, creating a moment for reflection.

This audiovisual layering creates a relationship between marketing, religion, nationalism, fútbol and poverty. Marketing for products becomes relatable to marketing for the nation.

The fanaticism of fútbol fandom becomes relatable to the religious experience as an

“opiate for the masses.” When the rural poor buy the products being sold, (particularly in the case of beer), is the end result less money for them and more money for already wealthy impresarios? When the rural poor buy the nationalism being sold via fútbol, are they buying into “the failure of the nation to come into its own,” i.e. a nationalism in service of neoliberalism that only adds to the uneven distribution of wealth in Paraguay?

How does fútbol fandom and religious ideology seduce the rural poor into acting against their own best interests?

Idelber Avelar recounts Jose Joaquin Brunner’s article, “Notes on Modernity and

Postmodernity in Latin American Culture” to highlight his reading of the relationship between Market, State and Church:

Brunner shows how authoritarianism performed the function of “maintaining the

order adequate to the new model of capitalist development,” thus being organic to

the implementation of market values in Chile. Market ideology, military doctrine,

and religious traditionalism—the three components of the “authoritarian

conception of the world”—are demonstrated to form a coherent, unified ideology.

(55)

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Paraguay, like Chile, has had years of experience with military dictatorship, its authoritarianism and its forms of indoctrination (religion, propaganda, torture, kidnapping, etc.)

Frankfurt seems to illustrate how certain aspects of this ideological trifecta are still in circulation, but at the service of neoliberal capitalism. Avelar goes on to link religious discourse and patriarchal authoritarianism in the following way:

As the comforting language of Christianity fitfully complimented the heroic and

militaristic rhetoric of “the armed vanguard,” the dictatorship achieved a

fundamental victory, for the language in which its atrocities were narrated was, in

its essence, the very same language that it cultivated and promoted: macho

militarism seasoned with pious Catholicism. (67)

Militarism may be absent from Frankfurt in a literal sense, but in a metaphorical sense it is definitely present. As I previously mentioned in a footnote, the World Cup connotes a confrontation of nations that is easily comparable to a type of warfare; the soccer field becomes a battle field—especially given popular belief about Britain’s role in the Triple

Alliance War. The gendered environment, on the soccer field as in the home, is visibilized in Frankfurt given how women are mostly absent from the documentary.

When they are present, they are not featured in starring roles but in supporting ones.

While men play the game and men watch the game, women are mostly shown doing household chores such as preparing food and washing dishes. The only way a woman can

“get on television” it seems, is to put her body on display as a sexy hincha; a position of more visibility, but still a supporting role. It important to note how the uneven

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distribution of wealth across classes runs parallel with severe gender inequity in this equation.

Returning to the language of the Pilsen beer commercial, one may find that before hearing the last line, the audio could easily be mistaken for a description of catholic devotees instead of soccer fans. Suffering plays such an important role that it is mentioned twice: (“Hay gente que sufre . . . ”).The language could be describing people who have made a pilgrimage to pay for a promesa, as is customary during the annual peregrinata para la Virgen de Caacupe: “Hay gente que espera…que pide” (who ask for miracles and wait for their prayers to be answered), que canta, (who sing hymns), “que alienta,” (who support each other in their faith,) “que mira,” (who strengthen their faith by gazing at icons), que cree, (who believe) and finally, “hay gente contenta;” (people who are made happy by their faith). Interestingly enough, the word chosen to celebrate this faith is the word “fanaticism:” “Hay gente fanática.” Notice also that authenticity and its empty promises are not left out of the equation: “Pilsen, sponsor oficial de la auténtica pasión albirroja.”

Avelar’s reading of the functionality of Catholicism within the context of a military dictatorship, specifically in terms of Christ’s story, is particularly important for analyzing Latin American penchants for mano dura regimes:

What separates the sacrificial scapegoat from the victorious hero is, in a sense, the

secret itself….Christ holds the secret of his divinity by refusing the temptation of

performing the public miracle that would prove it. The defeated thus reveal

themselves victorious by holding a secret that contains the key to their

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defeat….Could this not be taken to be the meaning of the Christian axiom that

Jesus came down to earth in order to be crucified? (157)

Suffering, sacrifice, crucifixion and martyrdom are the priorities of this brand of

Catholicism. Avelar stresses this asking “How do we explain the paradox of a God who conquers and emerges victorious precisely by surrendering Himself to crucifixion by His own followers? . . . what is the process through which the reactive ideology of suffering martyrs becomes the backbone of national imaginaries and identities?” (136). Suffering, sacrifice, crucifixion and martyrdom are precisely the elements that make the Triple

Alliance War story so haunting: 60-70% of the population, the president and his son, territory and financial independence were all sacrificed. Paraguayan industry was destroyed and the nation went into extreme debt with Britain (one million pounds) after having been so proudly debt-free and isolationist for so long. Although the president sacrificed on the battle field (Francisco Solano López) has been elevated—especially by dictatorship historicism—to the level of a martyr, more recent scholarship revises history to depict him as the man who in fact sacrificed Paraguay by leading it into the Triple

Alliance War. Any way you slice it, Paraguay is left having to make sense of its loss, and using either or both versions of history to explain its current subaltern position and the subaltern position of its working class. Continuing loss and a focus on loss is perhaps a way of not coming to terms with defeat, but, as Avelar explains, a way of elevating defeat to the level of divinity. It is not ironic that the Paraguayan working class should be crucified to by their own countrymen in the upper classes, just as it is not ironic that Jesus was crucified by his own followers. Not only is loss, lack, sacrifice and suffering integral

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to Frankfurt, it is a major component of so many other Paraguayan films as well. In

Hamaca Paraguaya, for example, the couple who have nearly nothing sacrifice their only son for the nation in the Chaco War.

One of the recurrent narratives that Paraguayans tell about themselves has to do with a belief that they are a submissive people. A history of infamous uncontested mano dura dictatorships such as those of Rodriguez de Francia and Alfredo Stroessner are cited as the evidence. A people’s revolution has never taken place: the coup’d’tat that overthrew Stroessner was not a people’s revolution. Andrés Rodriguez, at the head, was

Stroessner’s right hand man. He saw an opportunity to come into even more power with the backing of the U.S. government when it became their priority to end South American dictatorships. Today the “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” narrative is alive and well.

Many working class people remember the dictatorship nostalgically. In a similar vein, when discussing the dismal state of Paraguay’s microeconomy vs. its macroeconomy, I asked Sonia Brucke of the Cámara de Género if people would ever rise up given the level of poverty in Paraguay. She likewise responded that there would be no revolution, ever:

“El paraguayo es sumiso” she stated in a factual manner. In an interview with director

Pablo Lamar he compared Paraguayans to Argentines to illustrate their lack of civic tradition: “En Paraguay nunca existieron las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo. Cuando ocurrió el fuego de Ycua Bolaños la gente ni hizo la mitad del escándalo que se hizo en

Argentina con el fuego X, y murieron menos personas.”37 This submissive and

37 Lamar could not recall the details of the Argentine fire he was using as a comparison. The 2004 Ycua Bolaños fire in Paraguay was remarkable because the people had never faced an accidental disaster of such magnitude; that had taken so many lives. The fire occurred on a Sunday, while many people were having their Sunday lunch in the company of their families in the food court of the Ycua Bolaños supermarket.

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downtrodden attitude is not just chalked up to a weakness, but rather, is described as a passionate desire to follow. If the leader happens to not have the nation’s best interest in mind or is willing to sell out the country’s resources to the highest foreign bidder, that is not the people’s fault. The soldier does as he is ordered. The people make due with what they are offered.

Here my reading of religiosity has to do with its circulation as a specific discourse activated politically in the service of the market. It is important to recall, however, that well before this neoliberal moment there have been historical periods in Latin America when religious and cultural practices have been widely theorized as reflections of racial inferiority. As Jesús Martín-Barbero discusses in his book, From Media to Mediations:

Modernization and Mass Mediation in Latin America, from the 20s to the 40s particularly, social analysis in Latin America was split into two camps: a populist nationalism that searches for lost national identity in the rural space, particularly among indígena culture, and a progressive rationalism that sees the “indolent and superstitious nature of the populace [as] the fundamental obstacle to development” (189). During one of my research trips to Paraguay a dear friend of the privileged class and I were talking about the severe cold front that had moved in. I had read in the paper that morning that multiple rural people had died of exposure. When I told her this, she unflinchingly wrote it off as

Darwinism. This type of progressive rationalism is perfectly congruent with

When the fire broke out, security personnel were instructed to close and lock doors to avoid losses from looting. The fire spread more quickly than anyone expected after sparking explosions, taking the lives of entire families, 394 individuals at final count. There were no fire exits nor were there fire security systems installed. The store owners were initially given a light sentence in court (five years in prison), which caused protesters to erupt in a violent demonstration that eventually put enough public pressure on the judicial system to cause the court to re-assess the sentence.

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neoliberalism’s emphasis on freeing the sectors in power from accountability for the social contract; in other words, there is no sense of responsibility for a social safety net.

The “haves” feel no calling to provide functioning programs for the “have nots.” It is the

“have-nots’” own fault that they have not. The linkage here between discourses on religion, race, class and neoliberal logic would not be lost on Duggan, who specifically stresses that “Neoliberalism was constructed in and through cultural and identity politics and cannot be undone by a movement without consistencies and analyses that respond directly to that fact” (3).

In a similar vein is the argument that if the Paraguayan working class does not mount its own revolution, then they have only themselves to blame for their conditions.

This argument also leaves out the conception that Fanon is so adept at inserting into arguments of racial inferiority:

When they are told we must act, they imagine bombs being dropped, armored cars

rumbling through the streets, a hail of bullets, the police—and they stay put. They

are losers from the start. Their incapacity to triumph by violence needs no

demonstration; they prove it in their daily life and maneuvering. (25, The

Wretched of the Earth)

Bloodshed is not required for the working class to understand who holds the power in their nation; every day is a reminder of who is winning. This problem with this conception, however, involves the fact that it is a viewpoint of loss, and by extension, perpetual loss. Who does that melancholic turn serve? Does it not hermetically seal the status quo? As I discussed in Chapter 3, Freud’s definition of melancholia has to do with

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a pathological type of mourning, “interminable in nature…[denoting] a condition of endless self-impoverishment” (Cheng, 7).

Melancholia and Politics

Avelar writes of defeat in the same way that Cheng describes melancholic loss:

“Martyrdom has been the most successful imaginary compensation for the incapacity or unwillingness to come to terms with defeat . . . ” (155). Is religious discourse focused on suffering, self-sacrifice and martyrdom melancholic? Cheng states that “The melancholic must deny a loss in order to sustain the fiction of possession” (9). If we read Avelar and

Cheng together, it seems the attachment to defeat/martyrdom comes from the belief that choosing defeat is in fact the secret of divinity: “Christ holds the secret of his divinity by refusing the temptation of performing the public miracle that would prove it….Could this not be taken to be the meaning of the Christian axiom that Jesus came down to earth in order to be crucified?” (Avelar, 157). How then, is Frankfurt (re)presenting the relationships between loss, defeat, poverty and religious discourse? When Paraguay losses their last World Cup game, are the spectators supposed to share the same nationalistic grief, or grieve over something larger: the failure of the nation-state to come into its own, the failure of nationalism, the failure of populism in Latin America, the hollow promises of these very discourses?

Frankfurt submits to judgment without pronouncing a verdict. How are we to categorize it then? To borrow words from Canclini, does it “[represent] the national

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destiny, traced from the beginnings of time” (110) or is it a way to shake the viewer into action? Does melancholia enable politics or make political action impossible? Is

Frankfurt further evidence of Paraguay’s incomplete mourning? If so, does incomplete mourning sustain the incompleteness of a political project (i.e. revolution) or is the insistence on loss in filmic production in Paraguay more accurately described as a plea to move from melancholia to a mourning that can end? ? Pablo Lamar states the following on the topic: “El paraguayo carga con el mito de la guerra de la Triple Alianza, que fue un genocidio, y con la dictadura que queda como un fantasma gigante. Yo creo que lo que necesita la cultura paraguaya es que se hable de esos temas para despojarnos de ellos y para ir adelante…” (personal interview).

At the time of this writing, 23 years after the fall of the Stroessner dictatorship, it is rather remarkable that there has not been more audiovisual production dedicated to dealing with the this dictatorship, its legacy, or politics in general in an overt manner (not an allegorical manner). Cuchillo de Palo (2010) and Viento Sur (2011) are the only exceptions. Cuchillo de Palo is a “creative documentary” directed by Renate Costa. In it she interviews people about her late gay uncle and uses the discussion as an opportunity to recount the dictatorship’s overt attack on homosexuals exemplified by the “List of

108” “known” homosexuals living in Paraguay during the dictatorship.38 Viento Sur, a

very abstract short directed by Paz Encina, features the voices of two men who are being

persecuted by the dictatorship and are considering either running from home or staying

38 In an expanded version of this work I will dedicate another chapter to “The queering of Paraguayan film” that takes place with two films in particular: the creative documentary Cuchillo de Palo and the narrative film, Semana Capital. Both films queer the archive in that they differ from the trend of featuring the rural space (they both focus on the urban space) and are also the only Paraguayan films to feature queer lives.

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and possibly facing torture. In light of this situation, Avelar’s comment on the boom is relevant: “…the boom…responded with an aestheticization of politics, or, more to the point, a substitution of aesthetics for politics” (29). Can the primacy of the allegorical in audiovisual production in Paraguay be read as an erasure of the overtly political? Is it comparable to what Avelar identifies as the boom’s substitution of aesthetics for politics?

And if it is, then would our conclusion be that the melancholic focus on loss in the filmic production of Paraguay is an obstacle to change instead of a call to revolution?

In a sense, one could argue that the same social structures of control also offer protection. The fear of offending someone can protect that person from serious criticism.

This plays an especially pertinent role when it comes to reviews of Paraguayan films. As director Gómez puts it, “Este es el país de los incombustibles” (personal interview). If someone has enough money and/or political power, few will dare to criticize them, no matter how worthy of criticism their work may be. In fact, Gómez has published an Op-

Ed in a national newspaper on the topic of “softness” in Paraguayan film criticism

(“Paraguay y su Cine Z”).

Affect and Structures of Feeling

Another important component of Frankfurt is the emotional realm, the realm of affect. As the Pilsen commercial illustrates, nacionalismo futbolero is largely based on emotion: “gente que sufre…que alienta…la pasión se lleva en el corazón…” The faces of the spectators reveal emotion as they watch the game: at times they look on the verge of

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tears, at times they swear in anger. What does the affective power of nacionalismo futbolero do?

One could argue that part of the emotional investment in Frankfurt comes from recognition of one’s own group, on multiple levels. Frankfurt includes scenes of rural

Paraguayans watching urban Paraguayans watching the game: the shared enthusiasm across class and space is visible. Emotion cuts across geography and capitalism to rhetorically join disparate groups under the umbrella of nacionalismo futbolero: a rural person can see him/herself as a fan of the Paraguayan team, and recognize other fans in the stadium: there is delight to be found in recognition and visibility, especially for a nation that has been historically isolated and invisible on international screens. Rural

Paraguayans can also see themselves in the players as well, being that they, too, are fútbol players. Frankfurt makes this understood by including the shots of the rural soccer matches as well. Additionally, many of the national team’s players come from poor rural communities.

On another level, rural spectators who might watch Frankfurt could also feel hailed to recognize themselves on screen in a highly emotional and perhaps validating moment of representation. Not only are they themselves represented; the national, religious and fútbol iconography—all symbols in which the starring rural community is emotionally invested—are present. Recalling Carlos Monsivais’s famous comments on

Mexican Golden Age cinema, there is a powerful emotional component to recognizing one’s own codes and customs on screen, a delight in finding one’s enthusiasm and catharsis shared. Lauren Berlant might describe it as a type of “normativity . . . a felt

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condition of general belonging and an aspirational site of rest and recognition in and by a social world.” (5)

Indeed, at this point Berlant might say the affective realm is fulfilling desires and providing emotional relief, but at what cost? In her brilliant book on affect, The Female

Complaint, Berlant questions the innocence people tend to automatically grant intimate spheres. She explores the connection between the political and the satisfying sentimentality specific to complaint genres of “women's cultures” that tend to blame flawed men and bad ideologies for women's intimate suffering, all the while maintaining fidelity to the same world that produced such disappointment in the first place.

“…political and social worlds are inevitably built across fault lines of contradiction and bad conceptualization that not only do not threaten the general project but make its endurance possible” (148).

The Pilsen beer commercial I repeatedly return to is a fertile place from which to think about the interwoven threads of affect, nationalism, fútbol and the market. Berlant defines an intimate public in a way that interweaves these strands as well:

An intimate public operates when a market opens up to a bloc of consumers,

claiming to circulate texts and things that express those people’s particular core

interests and desires. When this kind of “culture of circulation” takes hold,

participants in the intimate public feel as though it expresses what is common

among them, a subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history and

their ongoing attachments and actions. (5)

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The Pilsen beer commercial tries to sell the product by aligning it with the affective experience that the fútbol fan relates to. Frankfurt makes clear that in the rural space, fútbol has everything to do with “core interests,” “desires,” “history,” “ongoing attachments and actions.” The shots of the local game remind us that dedication to fútbol is not seasonal or restricted to the World Cup: many more people play, coach and organize the game with serious dedication. Similarly, the product being sold in Frankfurt could be seen as nationalism itself. But is the feeling that nacionalismo futbolero expresses as something in common between rural and urban Paraguayans alike more of a marketing ploy, a rhetorical inclusion, a discursive opiate—than anything else? Is this

Frankfurt’s message? Although Berlant identifies it as something that women's intimate culture stands for, permission to “live small but to feel large” is also part of nationalist sentimentality. The intimate sphere of nationalist sentimentality, Berlant argues, functions as an emotional pacifier for the downtrodden, infantilized citizen: “In a sentimental worldview, people’s ‘interests’ are less in changing the world than in not being defeated by it, and meanwhile finding satisfaction in minor pleasures and major fantasies” (27). Would people agree that fútbol is an opiate for their intimate sphere, but yet, would they rather have an opiate than nothing?

In the case of Frankfurt's protagonists, the Paraguayan rural poor, their literal survival is threatened by their conditions. Paraguay is the second poorest country in

South America and the rural poor are at especially high risk given their limited access to functioning medical, educational and social programs. As I mentioned previously, Jesús

Martín-Barbero describes a progressive rationalism that sees the “indolent and

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superstitious nature of the populace [as] the fundamental obstacle to development” (189).

This discourse, one that would have the rural poor believe that they are “nobody, or worse, all wrong” still circulates widely in Paraguay. In discourses of progressive rationalism with origins in the Enlightenment, popular traditions are seen as the fragmentary remains of a rural, pre-capitalist past. The tastes of the popular classes are seen as molded by the corrupting influence of the mass media. Their leisure pastimes are qualified as nothing more than escapism and their religiosity is seen as a factor of alienation and ignorance equal to superstition. Their life plans are written off as no more than frustrated attempts at upward social mobility. All this is embodied in the figure of the campesino, who is frequently “interchangeable” with the figure of the indio being that within this discourse, both of them represent fundamental “obstacles” to modernity. The perceived divide between modernization/rationality and backwardness/emotion is summarized neatly by Rodolfo Kusch in Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America:

“The industrial society . . . wields rationality; the traditional society wields affectivity”

(118). Does Frankfurt suggest this view of the campesino? Does the presence of the television, the radio and the cell phone suggest that the campesino is so incapable of critical thought that the mass media is able to sell them the aformentioned opiates so easily? Is fútbol just a leisure pastime that offers escapism? Are dreams of becoming a professional player unrealistic and frustrated attempts at social mobility? Does

Frankfurt’s framing of religious icons suggest ignorance and superstition? Is the emotion

Frankfurt foregrounds represented as evidence of a traditional society wielding

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affectivity, and simultaneously, its incapacity to wield rationality or to help the nation move in the direction of “progress” and modernization?

The fact that Frankfurt “submits to judgment without producing a verdict” makes the answer to these questions ambiguous, but given the fact that Frankfurt uses a point of view that invites the spectator to relate with the starring campesino families, I would state that perhaps there is less to do with blame and more to do with relief in its message. As

Berlant explains, “When political desire is failed by politics, participants in the sentimental tradition have come to choose traumatic cultural mediations as a way of expressing passionate detachment from politics as such.” (150). Perhaps fútbol fanaticism here can be seen not simply as an opiate, but as an acknowledgement that politics are broken. To extend Berlant’s theory beyond Frankfurt, to the entire body of Paraguayan films that have been produced in the last decade, suggests that perhaps the reason why the focus on loss and trauma is dominant has something to do with having already “given up” on politics and finding a passionate way to express that detachment or loss of faith.

Berlant presents the following as mass society’s historical definition of a collectivity:

…what counts as collectivity has been a loosely organized, market-structured

juxtapolitical sphere of people attached to each other by a sense that there is a

common emotional world available to those individuals who have been marked

by the historical burden of being harshly treated in a generic way and who have

more than survived social negativity by making an aesthetic and spiritual scene

that generates relief from the political. (10)

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Campesinos in Paraguay have undoubtedly been marked by the historical burden of being treated as less than their lighter-skinned, Creole counterparts. The fact of the social hierarchy to which the Paraguayan rural poor are subject is brutal, and the political institutions to which they have anything that remotely resembles access have failed them miserably. Berlant states that in an intimate public, the political sphere is more often seen as a field of threat, chaos, degradation, or retraumatization than a condition of possibility.

That said, it would seem that a Paraguayan nacionalismo futbolero constitutes an intimate public, a mass cultural genre, and a normative identity.

The potential problem that Berlant locates in the sentimental-political is its tendency to protect and work in service of the system which causes the suffering. In a sentimental worldview, people's interests are less in changing the world than in not being defeated by it, meanwhile finding satisfaction in minor pleasures and major fantasies. A related characteristic of the sentimental-political as defined by Berlant is optimism for change without trauma. This is where Frankfurt's ambivalence is greatest. In the scene where Paraguay loses the game against Sweden, (the game that signals their elimination from the World Cup), the camera zooms in on the expressions of pain as the men blink back the tears. The audio is cut so as to allow for silent reflection. Has the fantasy of winning failed to deliver? Is there any pleasure in the dream of winning, changing the world and putting Paraguay on the map, so to speak, when the end result is a loss that mimics millions of losses before it at the hands of stronger nations? Not only is there no change without trauma, there is more trauma and no change. Does Frankfurt hold up a

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mirror to the intimate public that constitutes nacionalismo futbolero to ask them to re- recognize themselves, but this time, as losers in the game they have conceded to play?

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CONCLUSION

Paraguayan film is emerging, and the urgency of this study is clear: the body of narrative, short and documentary films produced in the past decade present scholars with a unique opportunity to study contemporary film that represents the nation in a way that is conceived of as original and foundational. In few places are messages about the national and its place in the world so clearly laid out for analysis. Paraguayan film offers a fertile opportunity to see post-dictatorial “transitional” cultural products speaking to the transition (or lack thereof) in Latin America right now.

Summary of the study

This study begins by providing a review of literature that explores the relationship between Latin American film, the nation and national identity. It also explores the types of relationships that exist between national cinema and Hollywood. It reviews film manifestos from the 1960s, 70s and 80s and scholarship that demonstrates problems with certain aspects of the goals of those manifestos and what following them actually produces. The revolutionary politics behind the manifestos and their complicity with the market are explored.

This study also provides a brief historical contextualization of the Paraguayan transition from dictatorship to so-called democracy and the coinciding transition from literature (or void?) to film as the referent for thought defining the nation. It also

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identifies certain historical and contemporary discourses regarding dictatorship and the arts in Paraguay.

It provides a context helpful for understanding what it means to be a filmmaker in

Paraguay today. It explores discourses of paraguayidad and what it means to be a

Paraguayan. What does citizenship offer? What are the constraints and guarantees of participation in Asunción’s society? How do these effect filmmaking? Additionally,

Chapter 1 includes a brief theorization of the effect of the “foreign gaze” in Paraguay being structured like the “male gaze” is structured in Laura Mulvey’s foundational text,

“Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema.”

This study also analyzes the national/transnational context, form and content of

Un Certain Regard winner of Cannes 2006, Hamaca Paraguaya, widely recognized as the “before and after” marker par excellence of Paraguayan film: the film that showed young directors that a Paraguayan film could “be successful” on international screens. In a double-register, however, this study also demonstrates the problems with this film’s success in its entrenchment within a cultural, economic and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics: the building blocks of the very discourses that maintain national and transnational imbalances of power and wealth.

This study uses Hamaca Paraguaya as a foremost example not only because of the film’s status, but also due to how it exemplifies several dominant trends in

Paraguayan film: setting the story in the rural space, campesino protagonism, Guaraní dialogue, and a focus on loss as the historical referent. Hamaca Paraguaya’s (2006) potential for resistance through formal subversion (slowness, silence, absence), historical

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revisionism, self-reflexivity and political denunciation is explored. Idelber Avelar’s The

Untimely Present, Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction and the Task of Mourning is deployed to explore connections between allegory, mourning, temporal marks and gender.

Specifically in the exploration of allegory and gender, I bring in two short films, Noche

Adentro (2010) directed by Pablo Lamar and Karai Norte (2009) directed by Marcelo

Martinessi.

The transnational power structure is described as a palimpsest against which

Paraguayan film is necessarily constructed and how this bleeds through into Hamaca as a cultural product. I explore the potential problems in how the mestizo campesino protagonist par excelance of Paraguayan film is represented—an argument that extends itself into a discussion of the “right place” of cinemas of the “third world” and film festivals of the “first world.” This chapter relies heavily upon the work of Rey Chow.

Chapter 3 also includes a section entitled “Temporalization, Racialization and

Gendering” which explores the problematic of the marriage of otherness, identity, the past, race, nature and development discourse through some of the concepts of Walter

Benjamin, Anne McClintock, Franz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Sigmund Freud, and Anne Cheng.

In Chapter 4 I argue that the preoccupation with cultural “authenticity” in

Paraguayan film can be read as the trace of the transnational nature of film production; authenticity/transnationality enter into a double bind. I analyze Frankfurt (2006) in light of this, and also as a documentary that creates parallels between Paraguay’s historical border wars and the effects of present-day global neoliberal capitalism. I also explore

Frankfurt’s ambiguity on the relationship between the market, the state and the church. I

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include a discussion on what melancholia may mean for politics in Paraguayan film.

Finally, I explore what Frankfurt represents about how affect operates through nacionalismo futbolero, producing specific results along specific lines of race and with specific market effects, a reading in which I rely on Lauren Berlant and Jesús Martín-

Barbero.

Methodology

This dissertation uses a three-pronged, cultural studies approach: I consider the text (the plot and dialogue of the films), the form (camera angles, how sound is employed, editing among other technical and stylistic choices) and the context (socio-political and historical conditions under which these cultural products were developed.) I use theoretical tools from the cultural studies tool box, such as political economics, film studies, Latin American studies and psychoanalysis. Some of the questions I address in this study are: what is the particular power structure involved in the production of this object of study? What are the ideologies being activated? What are the points of connection between social class, (economics) nationality, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or gender in this equation?

Another piece of my methodology involves a transnational approach, a move I see as essential for any study of the nation, doing for the nation what the concept of gender does for sexed bodies: “provide the conceptual deconstruction that denaturalizes all their deployments, compelling us to acknowledge that the nation, like sex, is a thing contested,

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interrupted, and always shot through with contradiction” (627, Briggs, McCormick, Way).

The transnational approach allows me to couch this study in the assumption of nationalism as ideology. As an approach, it integrates an acknowledgement of the force of nationalism, imperialist aggression and their linkage with capitalist formation. I use a transnational approach in my dissertation as I explore the dominance of a particular essentialized national identity in narrative and documentary film in Paraguay. I argue that this iconic protagonist and space (the campesino in the rural setting) is not simply the site of “true Paraguayan authenticity,” but rather, the product of competing national and transnational forces, specifically due to the way these films are funded.

Feminist theory is also an essential part of my approach. Here I must be clear that to me, feminisms embody a variety of theoretical tools that can be deployed with the end goal of achieving equality, especially through the visibilization of inequality. Historically feminism has been represented as a series of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women, however, the term feminism is now far more capacious in regards to understanding that equality must come for all in order to come for anyone. Highlighting that feminisms are an important part of this study is essential, in my purview, given the current penchants for using terms like “postfeminist” and “postracial.” The real work of feminism and critical race studies is not done. Issues of representation in Paraguayan film make it apparent that the tools of feminism are urgently required to carry out a sufficient analysis of this body of emergent films.

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Major Findings

In researching Latin American film manifestos from the 60s, 70s and 80s,

Paraguayan film seems to be directly informed by an ideology that calls for countering

Hollywood production in form and content while calling for the support of the Latin

American state itself. Realism and “authentic representation” of a particular segment of the Paraguayan population seem to be a major focus of Paraguayan film, a focus that comes directly from the revolutionary goals of the aforementioned manifestos. While

Latin American film at large has moved beyond these goals and in fact is not shy about producing Hollywood-style box office hits, Paraguayan film seems to mark a “return to the origins,” which is congruent with the ways in which Paraguayan directors see themselves: as creating the foundational fictions on which an entire body of national film will be built. Also, the persistent problems of these manifestos can be found in

Paraguayan film’s reiterations: an unsophisticated view of how realism and authenticity can be achieved, a lack of acknowledgement of how, in representation, technology mediates reality; and in terms of “authenticity,” originality is constructed far more than it can be “proven.”

The focus on representing mestizo, campesino protagonists as the essence of paraguayidad visibilizes a public who have been historically nearly invisible. The colonial legacy of racial casts bleeds through into Paraguayan broadcasting and advertising: to sell anything, one must also sell the highest social status, which traditionally features light skin and eyes. For Paraguayan directors to feature people of

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brown skin and more indigenous features marks an empowering moment of self- recognition for many. The other side of coin, however, has to do with what that move actually produces in the broader context of international film festivals and Paraguayan representation on a global scale: an exoticisized paraguayidad which plays the role of a binaristic negative identity contrasted against the “developed world.” Brown campesinos shown living on nearly nothing are oppositionally constructed against their “first world” trace: light-skinned, middle to upper class urbanites of the “developed world.” To borrow a phrase from Rey Chow, Paraguayan film becomes yet another example of “the native in their proper frame:” a spectator’s observation could easily be “Of course

Paraguay is part of the third world, they live in the past!” Global uneven distribution of wealth is explained away; it becomes “only natural” that a people so close to the dirt, so rooted in the past, would not be able to complete in the global marketplace. Their cause is beyond rescue, they are Others virtually beyond comprehension. Using the perspective that Gareth Williams puts forth, taking the popular underclass and elevating them to the level of national icon is a rhetorical inclusion that has historically done little else in Latin

America beside help quell social tensions through empty cultural offerings while maintaining the status quo. This also brings up broader questions about what identitarian politics are good for and who benefits the most from their deployment.

While Paraguayan film is political in terms of its allegorical treatment of the nation, it is, perhaps surprisingly, lacking in terms of material that takes on Paraguay’s political history in a literal sense. Other Latin American film productions take on the topic of military dictatorships quite directly. Why then is there a type of erasure of the

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Stroessner dictatorship in Paraguayan film? To answer this question it is helpful to look at the historical and present narratives of dictatorship in Paraguay. Paraguay was founded on dictatorship by Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The period of his regime lives on in the national imaginary as one of the most self-sufficient, egalitarian and wealthy periods of

Paraguayan history. Perhaps this helps explain why the Stroessner dictatorship was one of the 14th longest rules anywhere by a state leader other than a monarch. Popular

nostalgia for the Stroessner dictatorship is still circulating so broadly that it has a name:

the “Éramos felices y no lo sabíamos” discourse. Indeed, it is has been difficult to talk

about a real transition period or to speak of democracy when so many of the people who

hold political clout, power and land in Paraguay are from the same families that had

important ties to the Stroessner dictatorship. A clannish societal structure that protects

people from a weak legal system, but also from criticism, is described poignantly by

director Ramiro Gómez when he says “Este es el país de los incombustibles” (personal interview). It is hard to find people who would say that “democracy” has been good for

Paraguay when the standard of living is lower overall due to higher crime, unemployment

and unequal distribution of wealth. Feasibly, Paraguayan directors do not see the

dictatorship as the specific problem requiring the most urgent attention, but rather, the

corruption and lack of committed public service that continues to contribute to

Paraguay’s current status as holder of one of the highest Ghini coefficients in Latin

America.

Another legacy of the dictatorship has to do with Paraguayan directors finding themselves having to prove the cultural value of film. The dictatorship was more

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concerned with squelching critical thought and creativity than nurturing it. Paraguay’s economic condition has made “culture” out to be something that only a small elite segment of the population can understand, appreciate or produce. What move then, does a cultural product have to make in order to gain relevancy and legitimacy in this context?

Whereas “culture,” particularly literary culture, contributed to what Canclini calls “a divorce between the elites and the people” (94), Paraguayan film tries to suture this divide by introducing symbolic goods already in circulation among “the people,” particularly campesinos, via a more accessible visual medium. Whereas this move helps increase relevancy amongst the masses, couching Paraguayan film in the origins of national patrimony increases relevancy amongst the established cultural elite. Canclini defines “being cultured” as “grasp[ing] a body of knowledge—largely iconographic— about one’s own history, and also to participate in the stagings in which hegemonic groups have society present itself with a scene of its origin” (109). Canclini also explains how this belief is congruent with the basis of authoritarian cultural policies that use original, foundational substance as indicative of the correct path for today’s policies.

Paraguayan film represents an instance that upholds tradition while modernizing it through the forward thrust of media technology. The question remains: does this do more to maintain the status quo, suturing over difference in a rhetorical rescue, or does is it create space for those who have been traditionally excluded to operationalize the icons of the nation for their own use?

It is important to remember Gareth William’s argument that the populist, rhetorical inclusion of the cultural icons of the lowest classes, elevated to the level of the

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national symbolic, has traditionally served to suture over the racial wounds/class divisions produced by the colonialist moment, quelling social tensions that threaten the status quo. The coup d’etat that ended the Stroessner dictatorship and the events of Marzo

Paraguay—which threatened to return the nation to dictatorship under Lino Oviedo— have occurred within the lifetimes of the directors who are producing work now. In light of this fact and the nostalgia for dictatorship that exists, particularly among the working class, we must ask if the social emergency Paraguayan film seeks to address is in fact the risk of losing the political freedoms and freedoms of expression that have been gained through the “transition” period. How to get the working classes to support democracy when it has not come into its own? A “solution” might be a quest for greater equality across classes, but how could films achieve that? When trafficking in national symbols, there are many more examples of how to achieve rhetorical inclusion rather than equality, whether its promises are empty or not.

Depending on the angle, an embrace of national symbols and culture in Paraguay can be seen as an empowering and radical movement. On one hand, people in Paraguay are acutely aware of the nation’s “development ranking” on a global scale. An alignment with foreign culture has operated as a badge of cultural sophistication, means and worldliness. Conversely, a writing-off of nationally produced culture and goods as inferior has been part of the behavior signs read as “good taste” and “high standards.” In this sense, Paraguayan film is fighting a status quo by not only insisting on the dominance of populist, local symbols, but also by introducing them at international film festivals for all the world to see.

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Similarly, nationalism takes on a revolutionary tone when one considers how the

Paraguayan government has historically “sold out” to its neighbors. Mariana Vazquez’s documentary, Soberanía Violada (2006), depicts the “dark side” of the widely celebrated soy agroindustry that has boosted Paraguay’s economic growth on a macroeconomic level. Soberanía Violada depicts the microeconomic and ecological effects: the story of a government who allows foreign (mostly Brazilian) investors to take advantage of subsistence farmers in order to acquire their land at low prices, polluting the land and water in the process.

On the other hand, however, while Paraguayan film’s content is so focused on the national, a study of its context shows the film “industry’s” dependence on transnational processes. Similarly to the case of tango in Argentina, it is possible that Paraguayan film would not be have been able to attain recognition, valuation and status if it had not become a product for export. The “first world” stamp of approval that comes from winning at European film festivals such as Cannes (and in lesser degree, at U.S. film festivals) has a similar effect as the embrace of tango in Paris, London and New York had for elevating tango to the level of icon of argentinidad. On an even more literal and practical level, most funding for Paraguayan film projects is in fact extranational. The most profitable funding structure for Paraguayan film involves winning seed money from international film festivals and/or foreign NGOs. While this is the primary way in which

Paraguayan film is transnational (crafted for the foreign gaze) there are many others.

At first glance it may seem ironic that Paraguayan nationalist sentiment is contingent upon the foreign gaze. This moment of identitarian politics is particularly

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fruitful for exploring how an essentializing nationalism is in fact dependent on transnational practices. Any cultural moment that insists on cultural purity and authenticity is haunted by its trace: cultural isolation, purity and uniqueness are myths that obscure our interconnected and transnational reality. Paul Willemen’s statements about nationalism are particularly helpful for making sense of this “irony:” he argues that the West created the “problem” of national identity for the colonized territories as part of imperialism. It follows then, to state that nationalism obscures the colonial legacy— particularly, the market and its resulting class positions—in service of those who profit most from that system.

Hamaca Paraguaya is a film that is highly representational of the trends in

Paraguayan film today, in part, due to the way in which it set the tone for Paraguayan film at large as a success story. A double-register is most helpful for an analysis of this film, being that is embodies the double-bind of Paraguayan film in general: a focus on representing an essentializing paraguayaidad that from one angle, holds revolutionary potential as advocacy for the rural class and a denunciation of the State, while from the other angle, feeds into a cultural, economic and political system reliant on binaristic and hierarchical identitarian politics in service of national and transnational inequity.

Hamaca Paraguaya uses long shots and indirect camera angles, slowness, disjointed audio, and absence in such a way that echos Latin American film manifestos from the sixties and seventies call for non-standard language and formal resistance as necessary in the struggle for decolonization. While the director, Paz Encina, does not explain her formal choices in these terms, one can make connections between the

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descriptions of her intimate rationale and certain denunciations regarding a power- structure under which she operates as a filmmaker and a Paraguayan. Hamaca’s slowness creates resistance through a labor reversal between the film and the spectator; its unspoken speech reflexively calls attention to the impossibility of presenting one family’s story as the story of a larger, heterogeneous people; and its use of absence attempts to escape the trap that visibility itself can tend. One could also conceptualize Hamaca’s campesino protagonism as what Rancière might call the miscount; a moment in which politics truly occurs: the logics of domination and equality clash, as at the level of representation, there is a taking part of those who have no part; the rural, brown-skinned poor. Hamaca’s historical revisionism re-writes the glory of the Chaco War into a story about loss heaped upon loss, about a State that takes the only thing a couple has: their son.

When examining Hamaca as a record of violence, as a film about mourning and potentially a way to mourn in of itself, a disturbing question arises: does Paraguayan film’s melancholic obsession with loss, denunciation and victimization transmit an embedded message of doom? Is a focus on things staying the same, a history repeated also send a hopeless message: “this has never and will never change”? Does Hamaca serve as a reminder that the State has exploited the people and will continue to do so in a way that only reifies a paraguayidad that is submissive and devoid of any revolutionary aspirations? Does melancholia help facilitate politics by creating a wounded attachment in which we are constantly reminded of the present/past conditions of violence, so as to keep outrage alive, or does melancholia hermetically seal victimhood and an unending cycle of self-impoverishment? This question requires further exploration.

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A gender analysis of Hamaca Paraguaya, Noche Adentro and Kara’í Norte demonstrates the connections between gender, allegory, mourning, and temporal marks.

The body, gendered female, represents a site for potential disorder and systemic reversal.

In Hamaca, it is Cándida, as mother who is able to cut through the rhetoric of war: her grief makes masculinist loyalty to violence and the nation into a foolish, misguided and empty calling. Noche Adentro presents a bride’s body as the site in which systemic State violence is represented by a graphic and powerful visual allegory made all the more shocking through its juxtaposition with the romance script. Similarly, Karai Norte sparks outrage through the figure of an elderly, poor woman, who is raped by thieves. In this case, denunciation is not aimed strictly at the State, but rather, at everyone who is complicit with the oppression of the poor (she suspects locals were the perpetrators of the crime). Although these instances feminize victimization with powerful results, their resistant potential is ambiguous, given the tradition of situating gender within the domestication of national time. Anne McClintock describes how women have been represented as the “authentic body of national tradition” while men represent “the progressive agent of national modernity” (92). In this sense, one must ask if the use of the body gendered female for allegorical purposes is not in line with melancholic cycle that actually refuses the substitution of the historic position of inescapable exploitation and victimization.

The “winning formula” of Paraguayan film requires the mestizo campesino and the rural space. For success at international film festivals, and even to score money for developing the project in the first place, it is necessary to produce an image that is

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distinctly different from the images seen in film of the developing world. This requirement is visible in the very language certain film festivals use: a language that describes the “third world” as a place of lack, that can only produce “authentic” art of value through the assistance of “first world” funds. What gets produced in the process of shaping work to appeal to festivals and funders is what Rey Chow calls cross-commodity fetishism; the production of value between cultures.

Within Paraguayan film the mestizo campesino is repeatedly rooted in the past and in nature and Paraguay is mythologized as a pre-capitalist space, but also, its third world condition “makes sense” given that the rural poor are rooted in the earth and the past are a drag on the great machine of progress. The lack of technology/modernity in these films contributes to placing paraguayidad in a temporal frame that belongs to the global past. As Walter Benjamin has demonstrated regarding nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and commodity production, in order for the “new” to exist the “old” must be constructed. In the case of Paraguayan film, European audiences can confirm their own modernity and development with “evidence” from Paraguayan film; “There is the past, and it is not like any life we could imagine or make films about.”

A series of binaries come together in relation to the past, linking temporal construction to race, gender, nature, and lack. The people who are closest to the past are also closest to nature (the campesino) and the brownest. As representational of

Paraguay’s “lagging ranking” in terms of development, they represent the obstacles to progress and modernization; “nuestra indiocincracia” as one person commented in an informal conversation. Coupled with this is the feminization of Paraguay through which

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its “backwardness” is explained: the loss of the majority of the male population in the

Triple Alliance War forced the female population to rebuild the nation: a moment of fragmentation of the nuclear family, fragmentation of the nation and feminization.

(Perhaps this mode of thinking also contributes to the trend of using the body gendered female in Paraguayan film as the allegorical site for the nation.) This binaristic set: temporality (past), race (brown), gender (female), nature (tradition), and lack (poverty) function as a postcolonial ideological cocktail neatly set up to construct and rationalize a

Paraguayan identity in line with the interests of the dominant class within Paraguay and the dominant class on a global scale (the “developed” world).

Anne Cheng’s definition of “Indian Melancholy” is helpful for exploring this situation. She describes the phenomenon as the way in which U.S. culture “romanticizes and naturalizes the ‘cult of the vanishing Indians’” (14). In this way, from marginalization to genocide, the extinguishing of the indigenous becomes blameless.

Just as the past is something that must inevitably be lost, so it the Indian, who sadly—but inevitably—must fade away also. It is worth recalling at this point, that the binaristic sets aligned into these sequences of “logic” are not specific to Paraguay, but rather, are specific to imperialism.

A Paraguayan documentary that breaks with this binaristic set enough to create a productive ambiguity is Frankfurt (2008), directed by Ramiro Gómez. Frankfurt creates a space for slippage in the past/future, tradition/progress binary by introducing the television as a major protagonist in the rural space: it is always present, like another member of the family. Frankfurt also breaks with the authenticity myth in the sense that

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it draws the “first world” into the narrative, potentially introducing questions about identity formation and who it serves. Fanon’s words echo here: “Let us have the courage to say it outright: It is the racist who creates his inferior” (93). Frankfurt (re)presents an opportunity to explore not only nationalism itself, but also, the transnational side of nationalism, and does more to draw attention to the market (along with Soberanía

Violada), than most Paraguayan films. It also suggests relationships between the Market, the State and the Church that functioned well in service of authoritarianism, and potentially continue to work well in service of neoliberalism.

Conclusions and Implications

In the course of developing this project I come away with several considerations I

am committed to leading with as part of my analytical approach. In regards to cultural

studies analysis, I must add temporality to the axis of social structure inclusive of race,

class and gender. Power relations are integrally linked to how peoples, places and

products are temporalized: that is, related to the past, present or future. Temporalization

and how it is intertwined with race, gender, class, nationality and "ranking" in the

evolutionist-Enlightenment notion of progress should never go unnoticed.

In the field of visual studies, I argue that images neatly placing “third world

natives” in their “proper frames” and laying claims to “modernity” (meaning

development and enlightenment) by having taken a “subaltern term” (toward the

underprivileged), are likely more accurately described as products of cultural hegemony.

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An alignment with the subaltern does not automatically constitute a revolutionary turn, by any means.

In regards to film studies, analysis of any national body of film must also investigate the forces at play in the conditions of cinematic production in order to shed light on how and why nationality is treated like a genre (vs. horror, drama, comedy, etc.).

Latin American film studies needs to seek ways to break with the traditional, uncritical modus operandi of privileging the relation of film to the nation. If this break is not achieved, national cinema will continue to be reduced to an analysis that quickly finds it limit in enunciations based in two fundamental concepts: identity and difference. Part of what I suggest as an antidote involves focusing on the transnationality of film production and analyzing it with regards to power structures implicit in funding mechanisms and how these echo historical colonial relationships.

Perhaps the most troubling of the implications of this work for Latin American studies involves a grave consideration: analysis of paraguayidad must consider that an essential part of Paraguayan national identity is formulated in such a way that directly contributes to ideologies that help justify/explain away radically unequal distribution of wealth and power.

We are “no longer waiting for Paraguayan film” to borrow a phrase from Hugo

Gamarra. It is here, now, and it offers a specific opportunity for analysis that should not be overlooked. Paraguayan film does not simply present audiences with a “Paraguayan way of life,” but rather, through its content, form and context, presents an opportunity for

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visibilizing the pitfalls of current dominant methodologies used for making determinations about film at large.

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