Making Movies in Latin America by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

Making Movies in Latin America By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro . d o o W s é r d n A f o y s e t r u o c o t o h P Andrés Wood on hen one talks of cinema,” cineastes across the Third World commonly the set of wrote the great Brazilian conceived of building national film industries as “Machuca.” “Wauteur Glauber Rocha in the integral to the building of a new consciousness 1960s, “one talks of American cinema… Every of liberation. discussion of cinema made outside Hollywood In today’s Latin America, a new generation of must begin with Hollywood.” At the time he filmmakers confronts a very different political wrote those words, Rocha and many of his Latin context. Theirs is an age not so much of American contemporaries spoke often of the revolutionary idealism as cautious hope. They need to create a new cinema, one that not only make movies in societies coming to terms with challenged the formal dominance of the traumas of their recent histories, nations “Hollywood aesthetics,” but that also challenged indelibly marked by the dashing of sixties hopes the economic dominance of American movies in on the violent rocks of military dictatorship, the theaters and distribution networks of the dirty war and “structural adjustment.” This new Third World. Inspired in equal measure by Che generation, however, is still preoccupied with Guevara’s New Man and the French New Wave, loosening the stranglehold of Hollywood films the exponents of Brazil’s cinema novo sought to on domestic markets; American blockbusters are make movies that depicted the harsh realities of even more dominant in the region today than a impoverished societies, but that also instilled a few decades ago. And if less eager to make the radical vision of what those societies could stridently political films of their forebears, many become. In an epoch of revolutionary ferment, of these filmmakers — responsible for what 26 many are calling a new boom in Latin American regimes over much of the same period, but cinema — are still critically engaged in making whose large film industries survived relatively movies that address the present circumstance intact). and future trajectory of the national societies to Having grown up under the dictatorship — which they belong. Wood was a boy of seven in 1973 — the director Andrés Wood, the Chilean director who has came of age at a time when there was no way to recently emerged as a key figure in this new study film in Chile. Beginning on a university generation of cineastes, addressed these themes course in economics in Santiago, he spent time in a public lecture at Berkeley’s Center for Latin at Notre Dame in Indiana on a scholarship, and American Studies. Wood delivered his remarks from there, attended film school at NYU. Upon the day after introducing a special screening of returning to Chile, Wood made “Historias de “Machuca,”his acclaimed semi-autobiographical fútbol” (“Soccer Stories”) in 1997, a domestic hit depiction of events surrounding the 1973 coup that was a key example of the small-scale movies against Salvador Allende, a film that was not that young directors were making in the first only an unexpected smash in Chile — it was the years of civilian government. Though a short top-grossing movie in the country in 2004 — decade ago there wasn’t a single film school in but has since gone on to extraordinary Chile, Wood reports that “today there seems to international success. In a wide-ranging, informal be one on every corner”; in the Santiago of talk entitled “Making Movies in Latin America,” Michelle Bachelet, studying cinema is the Wood discussed his own journey as a filmmaker hip course of the moment. Wood estimated and the place of his work in the renewed Chilean that the country is currently producing eight movie industry that has emerged since the end to 10 feature films each year and up to 20 of the Pinochet dictatorship in 1990. documentaries. The emergence of this newly vibrant culture, however, does not mean that the financial In sketching out the history of Chilean cinema, infrastructure needed to make movies has Wood pointed to the importance of early materialized out of thin air. Feature-length pioneers like Raúl Ruiz, who developed a filmmakers in Chile, as in every other Latin successful career in exile after departing for American country (save perhaps Brazil and France in the Pinochet years, and of Patricio Argentina) depend almost exclusively upon Guzmán, whose three-part treatment of the foreign financing to make their films. As Wood politics surrounding the 1973 coup, “La Batalla explained, the financing for “Machuca” — de Chile” (“The Battle of Chile”) remains an which was made for $1.2 million, a miniscule international classic of documentary realism. amount even for independent studios in the U.S. Wood also identified a few seminal figures from — was obtained from production companies in elsewhere in Latin America — Glauber Rocha France, Britain and Spain, along with a small first among them — who had articulated an amount from the Chilean government’s Fund important vision for cinematic art in the region for the Arts. and whose films had spoken to the role that a And, as Wood discussed, gaining distribution “man with a movie camera” could play in the once a film is complete — and the all-important development of national culture and identity. foreign distribution especially — is a further, Wood explained how the Pinochet regime, enormous challenge. “It’s very difficult. Very, particularly brutal in its ideological character, very difficult,” Wood said with a smile, alluding had almost entirely eliminated Chile’s domestic to the struggle he has personally headed up to film industry during its years in power: over the gain distribution for his work in the United near two decades of the dictatorship, no more States (the “Machuca” DVD is still not available than five feature-length films were produced in here, though he promised it will be soon). the country (this in contrast to Brazil and Argentina, which were also governed by military continued on page 30 27 Photo courtesy of Andrés Wood. 28 “Machuca” at CLAS on March 13,“Machuca” atCLASonMarch 2006. Andrés Wood screened hisfilm screened Wood Andrés Photo courtesy of Andrés Wood. 29 two boys from different social classes. different from boys two Set in Santiago, Chile in 1973, the film portrays the unlikely friendship between the unlikely portrays Making Movies in Latin America continued from page 27 Of course gaining distribution is a lot easier Yet as Wood emphasized in his talk, he is wary if you are shopping a product of the altogether of the prospect that only serious films, dramas exceptional quality of “Machuca,” a film that that self-consciously address the national drama, has garnered numerous plaudits on the inter- be the measure of a national cinema. “A healthy national festival circuit, and has attracted rave film industry,” as he put it, “needs all kinds of reviews in each of the 30 countries where it has films — films about Martian invasions and had a theatrical release. teenage comedies, as well as the kind of dramas Critics writing about Wood’s film have I like to make.” praised nothing quite so often as the quietness In Latin America today, confronting the of the director’s approach, his insistence that the Hollywood juggernaut is not commonly defining moment in his nation’s recent history approached as a problem of building a new be approached not as national epic but as aesthetic; it is more often seen as problem of intimate drama. Though the film’s subject is simply building the means for filmmakers to inherently political, “its point,”as Tony Scott put make the movies they want to make, to tell the in his New York Times review, “is not to settle stories they want to tell and to have those stories scores or reopen old wounds, but rather to be heard at home and abroad. explore, after a long period of repression, the Some of these stories will engage explicitly possibility of grief.” national themes; many others will not. But It is perhaps for this reason that Wood’s film whatever their subject-matter, the best films, as was so well received in Chile and elsewhere in ever, will succeed not because of their topic but Latin America. “Machuca” deals with a terrible because of their approach: their use of image, time in the region’s history not by recapitulating character and tone, their ability to engage old debates, but by depicting the epoch’s violence universal themes through local detail. on a human scale. It approaches divides of The true maturity of any national cinema ideology and class not as historical abstractions, must lie in the freedom it affords its exponents but as complex lived realities, laid bare by to make their art as they will: to explore the events far outside the ability of the film’s young limits and capabilities of the medium itself, to protagonists to control. tell stories that gain their power not from This trope that Wood uses to tell this tale — their status as national allegories but from indicting a traumatic history through the their virtues as art. In Wood’s estimation, his sympathetic eyes of children — is a familiar one, homeland, “after many difficult years, is getting and it carries with it a readymade form of there.” Let us hope so. If Chile — and the moral clarity. But it is a trope also prone to larger region to which it belongs — continues sentimentality; tales of young innocence to produce films of the quality of “Machuca” and corrupted devolve easily into both the saccharine filmmakers of the unmistakable gifts of Andrés and the trite.

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