Studies in Spanish & Latin American Cinemas - Volume 15, Issue 2, 2018

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, Central American audio-visual production has increased in an unprecedented manner. In the 1990s, the entire region only produced and exhibited one feature-length film, El silencio de Neto/Neto’s Silence (Argueta, 1994), yet in the last seventeen years more than two hundred fiction films have been made and shown in Central America. It is only in the last few years, however, that some of these films have attracted international interest in the form of funding and distribution or have created their own structures for these. This article therefore seeks to answer the question of how and why Central American film industries have been revived since 2000, considering the differing approaches to production and distribution employed by regional organizations, national governments and individual directors.

This article provides a brief aesthetic history of Central American cinema, outlining the impact of limited resources, sociopolitical conflicts and global aesthetic trends on regional film production. Focusing on films produced in the late 1990s and the early 2000s, it analyses how contemporary Central American films have overcome economic and material limitations and generated films that obtained acclaim in regional and international circuits. It also analyses the impact of international film festivals on Central American film production, focusing on the work of the Central American, yet also transnational, directors Julio Hernández Cordón and Tatiana Huezo.

This article explores, describes and analyses the material, linguistic and cultural framework in which the central conflict in Ixcanul/Volcano (Bustamante, 2015) and its mise-en-scène operate, considering the film as an example of an intertextual practice that succeeds in connecting oral and dramatic traditions to a filmic register. By analysing how the film aims to be realistic and locate itself within a contemporary Guatemalan context, this study argues that, due to the film’s political intentions, themes and intended audience, Ixcanul challenges several power structures that preclude decolonial dialogue in the country. Furthermore, by describing how the subaltern subject, María, endures and resists strategies of invisibilization, I read Ixcanul in light of analytical tools drawn from postcolonial and decolonial frameworks to disentangle the structures of domination – the coloniality of power – represented in the film.

This article explores how the feature films Gasolina/Gasoline (2008), Las marimbas del infierno/The Marimbas of Hell (2010) and Polvo/Dust (2012), directed by Julio Hernández Cordón, approach Guatemalan post-war realities using minimalist plots that subvert the principles of mainstream fictional film and in which an experimental impetus plays a key role. I propose a reading of the discursive ambivalence between the experimental, the documentary and traditional fictional cinema that characterizes these three films. They will be seen in relation to their significant contribution to the space of memory cinema, which is directly linked to their indeterminate positions and the oscillation between these differing genres.

Arturo Menéndez’s award-winning Malacrianza/The Crow’s Nest (2014) chronicles the tribulations of Don Cleo, a poor piñata salesman suffering from mental and physical ailments. Cleo’s life is turned upside down when he receives an extortion letter asking for US$500 in exchange for his life. This article examines Malacrianza’s linkage between the protagonist’s body and his ailments and the broader sociopolitical matrix. I argue that the symptoms he demonstrates are manifestations of the impact of civil war and urban violence upon the social telos of Central America. My study explores phenomenological film analysis as a tool for examining affects and their circulations in the film. By using an affective code, Malacrianza engages the viewer in an intimate experience of the violence(s) of contemporary El Salvador.

Florence Jaugey’s La Yuma/Yuma (2010) was the first feature-length fiction film made in Nicaragua, by a Nicaraguan, in over two decades. The film presents Yuma, a young woman from a marginal neighbourhood who finds her answer to the challenges of a hostile environment through boxing. The film employs the narrative and stylistic norms of boxing movies in order to radically subvert them. Jaguey’s mise-en-scène, which includes documentary style elements, the narrative that privileges sociological characterization and intersectional connections and the film’s presentation to the Nicaraguan public as an ‘authentic’ story, encourage the examination of the social tensions represented in La Yuma. Through an analysis of film form, the article examines the representation of intersectional discrimination. The film’s conclusion is ambiguous: at the same time as it recognizes a series of irreparable divisions in Nicaraguan society it also indicates hope for a better future for its protagonist thanks to her optimism and newly conquered autonomy, as well as incorporating humour and the ludic into the narrative solution.

This article problematizes US–Costa Rican cultural and ideological relations through an analysis of Esteban Ramírez’s Caribe/Caribbean (2004) by arguing that it unconsciously invites an international audience to colonize Costa Rica – and Latin America more widely – via the tourist gaze. Beginning by considering Ramírez’s anti-imperialist stance within the film’s plot, which underscores the sovereignty of the Central American nation, I argue that these aims are undone through the exoticization of space and place. The article analyses how the tropical image of the nation is internalized by the film and how hegemonic Hollywood tropes of ethnicity and gender are mimicked and performed.

A Companion to Latin American Cinema, Maria M. Delgado, Stephen Hart and Randal Johnson (2017) Chichester, West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell, 546 pp., ISBN: 9781118552889, h/bk, $195.00

Ism, Ism, Ism/Ismo, Ismo, Ismo: Experimental Cinema in Latin America, Jesse Lerner and Luciano Piazza (eds) (2017) Berkeley: University of California Press, 408 pp., ISBN: 9780520296084, p/bk, $45.00

Las rupturas del 68 en el cine de América Latina, Mariano Mestman (ed.) (2016) Buenos Aires: Ediciones Akal, 476 pp., ISBN: 978987454449, $30 USD, p/bk

El cine documental en primer persona, Pablo Piedras (2014) Buenos Aires: Paidós, 281 pp., ISBN: 9789501275872, p/bk, $35 USD

Despite all Adversities: Spanish-American Queer Cinema, Andrés Lema-Hincapié and Debra A. Castillo (eds) (2015) Albany: SUNY Press, 320 pp., ISBN: 9781438459110, h/bk, $90.00 USD

Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma and the Cinema of Pedro Almodovar, Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla (2018) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 221 pp., ISBB: 9781474431675, h/bk, £75

Spanish Film Cultures: The Making and Unmaking of Spanish Cinema, Núria Triana-Toribio (2016) London: Palgrave/BFI, 156 pp., ISBN: 978 1 84457 821 4, p/bk, £26.99