Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 11, Issue 2, 2014

This special issue of Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas is dedicated to the seldom-studied relationship between poetry and cinema in Latin America. Although studies both of the ‘poetics of cinema’ and of literary adaptation in cinema have become established areas of film scholarship in recent years, the diverse modes of formal, aesthetic and ideological exchange between the poetic and the cinematic have received little critical attention. The authors included in this issue analyze the work of film-makers from the 1960s to the present day who have included poetry in their film narratives or aimed to recreate the aesthetics of poets cinematically. We ask, in the broadest terms, how film and poetry transform one another, and how these two expressive media behave when placed into dialogue. We hope that the lines of enquiry that these articles open up will reinvigorate the discussion by shedding light on the cross-fertilization between written and filmed poetry, and by extending the scope of the traditionally prose-oriented debate on adaptation.

This article proposes that the ‘poetic’ be conceived as an interpretative category for Santiago Álvarez’s film experimentalism. The poetic nature of Álvarez’s cinema includes the use of poems, metaphors, songs, still photography and found footage and a ‘poetic’ approach to documentary, characterized by non-discursive forms such as music, the absence of conventional narration and narrative forms, a dynamic editing of visual and aural associations and juxtapositions, and an emphasis on the film’s rhythm. By analysing these patterns in films made between 1965 and 1970 and by discussing the concepts of urgency, empathy and performativity, I argue that Álvarez’s experimentalism aims to create a new type of critical and revolutionary public. In this sense, he supports and follows the official cultural policy of the Revolution and the politics of other cultural practices, such as revolutionary poetry and Cuban posters. The poetic nature of his films is, however, ambivalent since it coexists with what can be seen as the anti-poetic par excellence: the narrative.

The experimental film Paraíso (Felipe Guerrero, Colombia, 2006) adapts and translates through time and media the work of the 1950s–1960s countercultural and vanguard literary movement of nadaísmo, specifically the verse of nadaísta poet Jaime Jaramillo Escobar. Merging contemporary images filmed in a now-obsolete super-8mm format with archive footage evoking Colombia’s past, Paraíso takes up nadaísmo’s critical poetics forged in the long wake of the Bogotazo of 1948, and places them in dialogue with the variously violent and utopian actions and discourses of twenty-first century Colombia. As well as suggesting temporal and topographical compression, the film’s juxtaposition of visual and audiovisual modes, gauges, formats and colour-schemes renders in film form Jaramillo’s call for poetic language to be ‘supple, slippery, undulating’. Visual and written poetics thus combine to undermine the fixity of thought that engenders violence at distinct historical junctures. At the same time, they hint, with profound ambiguity, at the possibility of imagining Colombia as the ‘paradise’ of the film’s title.

Argentine director Gustavo Fontán has been able to make subtle, intelligent bridges between film and poetry. This essay explores the ways this dialogue has been achieved in two of his recent films: La orilla que se abisma (2008) and La casa (2012). The first one focuses on Juan L. Ortiz’s poems. Fontán seems to know how to ‘translate’ Ortiz’s poetic world into images based on the notion that poetry is vision, a febrile state of our sensitivity during which we can see things that are impossible to see while we pass through other states of mind. The second film shows a house that tells its own story in a very poetic way. The house itself seems to register – from its own point of view – how it is being dismantled and destroyed. Fontán has created an atmosphere close to the oneiric state, an atmosphere where past images copulate with the present, where what it is gone still lives within the current ruins.

Martín Gambarotta’s collection of poetry, Punctum (1996), and Martín Rejtman’s film Silvia Prieto (1999) are significant examples of the cultural transformations that took place in Argentina during the 1990s. Both works show the effects of market logic in social space, speech and on new subjectivities. However, this article proposes that the emancipatory character of Punctum and Silvia Prieto goes beyond the mere ‘exposure’ of the corrosive effects of neoliberalism in everyday life. By way of an analysis of certain scenes and poems, this article will discuss how, by taking a critical position ‘within’ present social relations of production (and therefore, their mediations), these works reveal a critique of neoliberalism through an ‘economy of language’ that frustrates mercantile logic, by submitting its rapid mediations to the effects of anti-narrative.

My concern here is to discuss three adaptations of Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros’ work to cinema: Joel Pizzini’s (1986) prizewinning Caramujo-Flor, my own short Wenceslau e a árvore do gramofone (2008) and Pedro César’s documentary Só dez por cento é mentira (2008). I use the word ‘adaptation’ ironically, because actually the three films are everything but adaptations. They are rather ‘devices’ created to somehow ‘read’ and interpret Manoel de Barros’ poetry in cinematic terms. In doing so, they compel cinematographic language to change its ‘nature’ just as nature compels Manoel de Barros to change his poetry. I also clarify the distinction between poetry and cinema, and expansive terms such as Pasolini’s ‘cinema di poesia’ and Jean Cocteau’s ‘poésie de cinéma’, aiming to illuminate the possible connections between art forms apparently diametrically opposed to one another in the way they function relative to their media. In other words, poetry and cinema can live together as long as some process of intermediality takes place.

Companion to Spanish Cinema, Jo Labanyi and Tatjana Pavlovic´ (eds) (2013) Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 638 pp., ISBN 978-14051-9438-9 (hbk), £120

Aesthetics and Politics in the Mexican Film Industry, Misha MacLaird (2013) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 230 pp., ISBN 978-1137008060 (hbk), $90.

Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in Contemporary Spanish Culture, Ann Davies (2012) Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, vii + 190 pp., ISBN 978–184631–822–1 (hbk), $99.95

Cinema on the Periphery: Contemporary Irish and Spanish Film, Conn Holohan (2010) Dublin and Portland: Irish Academic Press, 198 pp., ISBN 978-0716530220 €60 (hbk); €29.95