The Precarious in the Cinemas of the Americas

305 Pages·2018·4.428 MB·English

by  Constanza Burucúa, Carolina Sitnisky

GLOBAL
CINEMA
The Precarious
in the Cinemas of
the Americas
edited by
Constanza Burucúa and
Carolina Sitnisky
Global Cinema
Series Editors
Katarzyna Marciniak
Ohio University
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Anikó Imre
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, CA, USA
Áine O’Healy
Loyola Marymount University
Los Angeles, CA, USA
The Global Cinema series publishes innovative scholarship on the trans-
national themes, industries, economies, and aesthetic elements that
increasingly connect cinemas around the world. It promotes theoretically
transformative and politically challenging projects that rethink film studies
from cross-cultural, comparative perspectives, bringing into focus forms
of cinematic production that resist nationalist or hegemonic frameworks.
Rather than aiming at comprehensive geographical coverage, it fore-
grounds transnational interconnections in the production, distribution,
exhibition, study, and teaching of film. Dedicated to global aspects of
cinema, this pioneering series combines original perspectives and new
methodological paths with accessibility and coverage. Both ‘global’ and
‘cinema’ remain open to a range of approaches and interpretations, new
and traditional. Books published in the series sustain a specific concern
with the medium of cinema but do not defensively protect the bound-
aries of film studies, recognizing that film exists in a converging media
environment. The series emphasizes a historically expanded rather than
an exclusively presentist notion of globalization; it is mindful of repo-
sitioning ‘the global’ away from a US-centric/Eurocentric grid, and
remains critical of celebratory notions of ‘globalizing film studies.’
More information about this series at
http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15005
Constanza Burucúa · Carolina Sitnisky
Editors
The Precarious
in the Cinemas
of the Americas
Editors
Constanza Burucúa Carolina Sitnisky
University of Western Ontario University of Southern California
London, ON, Canada Los Angeles, CA, USA
Global Cinema
ISBN 978-3-319-76806-9 ISBN 978-3-319-76807-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76807-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018939708
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.
Cover credit: Un rey para la Patagonia/A King for Patagonia (2011), Lucas Turturro
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer
International Publishing AG part of Springer Nature
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
F
oreword
If the humanities has a future as cultural criticism and cultural criticism has
a task at the present moment, it is no doubt to return us to the human,
where we do not expect to find it, in all its frailty…
Judith Butler1
What do we know of these people at the demonstration? That, for a large
percentage of them, life is precarious, subject to unpredictable dismissal,
the suspension or reduction of their working hours… Any idea of a future
is affected by the unbearable instability of the present… The past is also
precarious when the future can only be seen in the short term, assailed by
doubt.
Beatriz Sarlo2
At the time of writing, early October 2017, it is difficult to imagine a
more precarious moment, in the Americas and across the wider world.
There is the wildest weather, with earthquakes in Mexico burying
schoolchildren, hurricanes ripping through the Caribbean, inundating
Puerto Rico and other islands, and fires blazing in northern California.
In international politics, an American president exchanges insults on
Twitter with North Korea about nuclear destruction, and fulminates
1Judith Butler, Precarious Life; The Powers of Mourning and Violence, Verso, London,
2004, p. 151.
2Beatriz Sarlo, ‘La movilización de la vida precaria’, Perfil, 19/11/2016.
v
vi FOREWORD
against Venezuela and Cuba. Millions of displaced refugees and eco-
nomic migrants are on the move, gig economies strip workers of rights,
and instability and precarity seem to be the driving mechanisms of global
economic and social policies. In recent decades, as the editors of this
strikingly original volume point out, critics from Giorgio Agamben to
Pierre Bourdieu and Judith Butler have looked to conceptualize terms
such as precarious and precarity, moving away from broad existential
generalities—‘twas ever thus—to a focus on new forms of control that
mark an historical époque and also on strategies of resistance, using the
precarious as a way of galvanizing new alliances and practices. This work
has been developed in the social sciences but, to date, these flexible and
productive concepts have not been applied in any systematic way to the
study of film.
The importance of this volume lies in many, overlapping, areas. The
editors and each contributor to the volume explore the nature of the pre-
carious from a range of theoretical readings which, taken together, are
more than the sum of their parts and delineate a larger design. Their
work is not meta-critical but grounded in the complexities of everyday
practices of filmmaking in the Americas, precarious local industries, and
their relationship to, and insertion into, global production and distri-
bution. The chapters are also based on subtle, close textual analyses of
important, representative film texts. The range is very impressive. Most
work on Latin American cinema tends to focus on the “big three” cine-
mas of Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico. This volume takes us into under-
explored areas, where the cinemas of Ecuador, Paraguay, and Bolivia
stand alongside those of their better-known neighbors. Significantly, film
practices in the Americas are treated comparatively, with articles on indig-
enous filmmaking in Canada and Mexican-American productions in the
US. Fixed categories such as “the national” are opened up to transna-
tional and global debates. Historical continuities are mapped out, while
the focus remains on contemporary production. The volume comprises
leading film scholars based across the world, and the editors have done
an excellent job in shaping the work such that it can be read as individual
studies and as a developing, interlocking series of illuminations.
As I move to a final paragraph, an email arrives from Puerto Rico,
from a cultural historian who has found an internet signal in the midst of
power failures after the devastating hurricane. He says that every evening
the residents in Old San Juan, after working on rebuilding during the
FOREWORD vii
day, meet in the Plaza de la Barandilla for two hours between 5 and 7
pm, before the curfew. The children, suddenly without screens, play tra-
ditional games, while the adults form a musical group they have enti-
tled Toque de Queda, jamming into the early evening. A local resident
filmmaker records the scene with what is left of her dwindling camera
batteries. The precarious, as this splendid book so firmly demonstrates,
speaks to loss, instability, and anxiety but also to resistance, community,
and creativity.
UK John King
University of Warwick
A
cknowledgements
This volume comes together as the result of many conversations with
our colleagues, dating back to 2015, which were held mostly around
encounters at the LASA (Latin American Studies Association) annual
congresses. Many chapters in this book stem from these enticing dia-
logues.
We would like to thank all the contributors to the volume for their
commitment and for embarking with us on the challenge of approaching
the familiar from a novel perspective.
We found in Shaun Vigil, at Palgrave Macmillan, a supportive editor
who trusted the potential of our project from a very early stage, and for
that we are grateful. Victoria Jara’s work as a copy editor was instrumen-
tal in bringing this volume to completion in a timely manner.
Constanza Burucúa wishes to thank the Faculty of Arts and
Humanities at the University of Western Ontario for granting the nec-
essary funds and the research leave to complete the work related to this
book. Carolina Sitnisky would like to acknowledge the Dornsife College
of Letters, Arts and Sciences at the University of Southern California for
their support.
ix
c
ontents
1 Introduction: Forms of the Precarious in the Cinemas
of the Americas 1
Constanza Burucúa and Carolina Sitnisky
Part I Self-reflexive Considerations on the Precarious
2 Beyond Documentary?: Archives, Absences,
and Rethinking Mexican “Nonfiction” Film,
c. 1935–1955 19
David M. J. Wood
3 Precarious Images: Media and Historicity
in Pablo Larraín’s No 41
James Cisneros
4 The Future’s Reverse: Dystopia and Precarity
in Adirley Queirós’s Cinema 61
Cláudia Mesquita
xi