Branding Latin America Film Festivals and the International Circulation of Latin American Films
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Branding Latin America Film Festivals and the International Circulation of Latin American Films Laura Rodríguez Isaza Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy The University of Leeds School of Modern Languages and Cultures Centre for World Cinemas October, 2012 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others . This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement . Except where otherwise noted, t his work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution -Non Commercial- Share Alike 2. 0 UK: England & Wales (CC BY -NC-SA 2.0). Full license conditions available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by -nc-sa/2.0/uk/ © 2012 The University of Leeds and Laura Rodríguez Isa za Acknowledgements I am indebted to many people for their support and encouragement to go throughout the different stages of this research. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisors at the Centre for World Cinemas of the University of Leeds without whose backing this research would not have been possible. I am especially indebted to Lúcia Nagib for her committed mentorship and encouragement to continue despite my frequent blockages. Her extensive knowledge and academic rigour enriched this research through a constant ex-change of ideas that helped me not only to express my arguments more clearly on paper but to develop further my thinking about the complexities of cinema as an object of study. Moreover, her patience, generosity and commitment with students are a true source of inspiration for my future career. I would also like to thank Thea Pitman for her support as well as Stephanie Dennison and Leo Enticknap for giving me the opportunity to teach (and learn so much) at their classes. Many thanks also to Karen Priestley for her fantastic assistance while I lived away from Leeds during most of this research. I would like to thank especially to my good friends Cara Levey and Kristina Pla for making my travels to Leeds not only an academic matter but truly enjoyable moments to look forward despite the bad weather. And of course, I thank them both for all the little (and major) favours they helped me with whenever I could not be in Leeds. To Cara, my infinite thanks for her careful corrections and support in the last stages of this thesis. Many thanks to all the staff of the British Library and the BFI Library where I conducted most of the archival work for this research. Also to the many people at the different festivals at Toulouse, San Sebastian, Havana and London who took the time to chat with me and gave me crucial insights into the world of film festivals and the international film industry. Many thanks to the ‘lunch club’ of the British Library – Cecilia, Tomás, Victoria y Pamela – for sharing lunches and researchers’ anxieties. Also to my friends Michelle, León and Simón for actually getting me out of the library and to Julian and Lina for their friendship and regular visits despite the distance. My especial thanks to Ulf, without whom this research would not have started in the first place and whose caring corrections helped me to improve my English so much. My family has supported me in so many ways and for so many years that I could not thank them properly without getting terribly sentimental. To my parents Hernando y Mabel, I can only thank them again and again for their infinite love, patience and understanding. To my brother Camilo, I thank him for being my brother and helping me no matter what, whenever I have needed. This project has been funded by the generous support of the Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología (CONACYT) in Mexico. Abstract Despite receiving little academic attention throughout most of their history, film festivals have become the ‘natural’ background were most world cinema films are assessed both in terms of their artistic value and their potential for international consumption. Based on their cultural prestige, their crowd-gathering ability and hierarchical dynamics festivals create a multilayered filtering system that determines the varying artistic reputations of films and filmmakers as they travel from one event to another. However, the economic interests and geopolitical biases embedded in the Euro-American dominated system raise challenging questions about festivals’ criteria of artistic quality and supposedly objective ability to map world cinema. While festivals have become strategic regulators of world cinema traffic they affect both the commercial possibilities of individual Latin American films in global markets and the interpretive frameworks through which world cinema is assessed and understood. Using a theoretical framework drawn from the discipline of sociology of art, this research uses the concept of the ‘film festival world’ to analyse the international reception of Latin American cinemas as part of a cultural and industrial process of selection of the ‘best’ films from the region. First, it examines the film festival phenomenon in terms of its interaction with the global film industry and the marketing of film products for foreign audiences. Second, it analyses the international historical reception of key Latin American films from the expansion of the film festival circuit in the 1940s. Thirdly, it studies how contemporary films from the region continue to be assessed and interpreted across the film festival world in accordance with contingent notions of quality and well-established auteurist models. Thus, this thesis argues that the ‘Latin American cinema’ brand has been defined in close connection with the contingent ideas and practices of the film festival world, becoming an interpretive framework that enables the international positioning of cinemas from the region both as cultural artefacts and commercial products. Contents List of Tables ..................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 2 Part I. Film Festivals and Film Commerce Chapter 1. The Film Festival Circuit as an ‘Art World’ ..................................................... 16 a. Film Festivals: Mapping the Field ............................................................................. 17 b. Art Worlds ................................................................................................................ 23 c. Crafting the Hierarchy A Brief History of Film Festivals ........................................... 29 d. The Festival Calendar: Navigating the Film Festival World ...................................... 39 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 46 Chapter 2. International Film Trade ................................................................................ 48 a. Behind the Film Festivals Scene ............................................................................... 48 b. Concealing Art Commerce ....................................................................................... 56 c. Cultural Translation for International Audiences..................................................... 62 d. Paratexts: Drawing on Audiences’ Knowledge ........................................................ 67 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 69 Chapter 3. The Film Marketing Mix ................................................................................ 71 a. Stars and Non-Professional Actors ........................................................................... 72 b. Auteurs and Other Non-Actor Stars ......................................................................... 75 c. Generic Categories: National/ Regional Cinema ...................................................... 78 d. Age Classification ..................................................................................................... 82 e. Release Strategy ....................................................................................................... 84 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................ 87 Part II. What (is) Latin American Cinema? Chapter 4. The Idea of Latin America .............................................................................. 90 a. European Influences on the New World .................................................................. 90 b. The Two Americas: A Fractured Continent .............................................................. 95 c. ‘Pan-America’, ‘Ibero-America’ and other Geopolitical Projections ........................ 99 d. ‘Latin America’ in the Twentieth Century .............................................................. 103 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 106 Chapter 5. ‘Old’ Cinemas from Mexico, Argentina and Brazil ....................................... 108 a. Mexican Screen-Art at Cannes ............................................................................... 108 b. Los Olvidados : The Re-Discovery of Luis Buñuel ...................................................