Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

The rise of the trend of film on art in Latin America occurred between the mid-1950s and mid-1970s, in close contact with the modern cinema and the renewal of the cultural field. Today, based on UNESCO recommendations to safeguard moving images and as a result of the effectiveness of new technologies, there is a process of valuing Latin American short films on art. Thus, the article explores this trend in a comparative manner in Mexico and Chile, with the aim of examining its main characteristics and glimpse the similarities and differences around the patrimonial valuation of the works, both in the moment of their creation and in the present time. For this, we carry out the study of the socio-cultural context of the production of the films and the entities of legitimation, the aesthetic and sociopragmatic analysis of the selected corpus, and the reflection on the contemporary institutional revaluation of film on art, in the framework of public policies related this cultural sector.

This essay studies three Latin American documentary experiences that work with archived visual memory. An anthropologist becomes fascinated with an old photographic archive in La Paz, Bolivia. The story of an imaginary researcher who finds some movies about an island far away in the Pacific Ocean, and travels to it, and from there he writes to a friend. Finally, the story of a filmmaker who searched for The Life of General Villa (1914), found fragments of it in La venganza de Pancho Villa (1931), the filmmaker passionate of his own story begins to buy lots of films, old mechanical cinema, and all kinds of visual instruments to live in a utopia called Anarchivia.

The aim of this article is to analyze the construction of two different intellectual subjects in the discursive productions of the group Pasado y Presente (specifically the first two years of the magazine, 1963-1965) and Carta Abierta (the first three writings of 2008) in Argentina, inscribed in two divergent states of social discourse. In the first place, the importance of investigating the figure of the intellectual is raised, to then make a brief overview of the history of these two groups, considered relevant in the history of the country. Secondly, it is analyzed, from a socio-semiotic perspective, the predominant and recurrent logics that appear in the discursive materiality, in which world views, fetishes or taboos, and types of epochal recipients are activated. The results of the research show, on one hand, the construction of a young-revolutionary intellectual subject and, on the other, a critical-organic intellectual subject, both crossed by the common discussion about what an intellectual should be and what role they should have in the socio-political processes of the country.

El movimiento (2015) by Benjamín Naishtat is part of a constellation of recent Argentine and Latin American films that deal with the historical past, but far from being based on a plausible representation of the period, it puts the illusionist nature of the classical narrative in crisis. With the aim of thinking about the communicating vessels that El movimiento establishes with the history and present of Argentina, this article not only contemplates the discursive constructions, but especially the material surface of its images and sounds. Naishtat's film, through a series of formal operations that exacerbate artifice, composes an abstract space and a broken temporality made of anachronisms. It is a procedure of estrangement: it attempts to trace another path, another territory, and other rhythms of time. It confronts a narrative’s form: the celebrations of the Bicentennial and the objectivist visions of certain period cinema to crystallize Argentine history.

This paper addresses a filmic corpus of recent Argentinian first-person documentaries, in which the filmmaker is interested in one of her relatives. In this regard, we hold three hypotheses. Firstly, that the privilege granted to family as an object of inquiry is related to the removal of the category of people, as an effect of the dictatorship and post-dictatorship. Secondly, we ask whether this focus entails a familialist retreat, concluding that the historical-political dimension is not necessarily neglected. In this sense, three groups of films are distinguished within the corpus: one in which the political is absent, another one in which it is subordinated to the private sphere and, lastly, one in which the private and the public become indiscernible. Thirdly, that it is impossible to separate the search for self-identity present in these films from collective history.

The purpose of this article is to present the audiovisual research in the production of the documentary Rio desborde (2019). Elaborated with archival materials and new images about the rivers Tietê, in São Paulo, and Mapocho, in Santiago, the documentary is a reflection on floods and the crisis of the development model of two Latin American cities. From two points of view, one based on the ideas of nature and progress and the other focused on the hidden and marginalized city, four documentaries are approached: Retificação do Tietê (1940) by B.J. Duarte and Lacrimosa (1970) by Aloysio Raulino and Luna Alkalay, in Brazil; Las callampas (1957) by Rafael Sanchez and Mapocho (2008) by Cristóbal Zapata, in Chile. Subsequently, the reuse of part of this audiovisual material in Rio Desborde is commented, discussing the methodology of filming and montage, considering the notion of audiovisual essay.

EAMI, the fourth feature film by Paz Encina, introduces an ethical interest in the construction of a memory already present in Encina´s previous films, but here it assumes a cosmopolitics that redefines the relationships between humans and the more than human. In its ways of accounting for the extractivist advance, the territorial dispossession and the extermination of the Ayoreo world, EAMI problematizes the dichotomy between fiction and documentary not only because the testimonies and recreations that it stages speak the language of that community, but also because they follow their worldview, their understanding of time and space. Based on recent studies on new materialisms and affect, reflections on Amerindian ontologies and visual anthropology, this essay aims to discuss the ways in which this documentary rearticulates the order of the sensible to delimit the order of what matters. If the decapitation of the forest is also the destruction of their common forms of understanding, EAMI’s act of memory seeks to create a sensory atmosphere and a temporality that makes it possible to broaden the audience for this loss. Inscribed in its formal language, the film assumes the denunciation of the Ayoreo and tries to subdue our (in)sensitivity of coñone (the term with which that community refers to all outsiders as "the insensitive") to make us participate in the suffering of another people.

Amid the irruption of new paradigms to approach the past, thousands of orphan home movies claim their place in institutional conservation programs around the world. These documents, until recently considered minor, pose pressing methodological challenges to the work of film archives. This text explores the material and conceptual characteristics of these films to describe the transition between their original private space and their new custody. In the proposed discussion, the experience of the Proyecto filmoteca.cl is observed to analyze the orphan metaphor of these rescued family images, together with the potentialities, risks and ethical scope of their contemporary use. It is also verified that the growing interest in these films without a program is widening the panorama of Chilean national cinema, expanding its range beyond the aesthetic-narrative canon that marked, without counterweight, the making and archiving during the 20th century.

Regarded as the first indigenous ikoods women filmmaker in Mexico, Teófila Palafox gained visibility at national and international scale because of her engagement into Primer Taller de Cine Indígena (First Indigenous Filmmaking Workshop) on San Mateo del Mar, Oaxaca. She directed two films in her career, as a result of different didactic experiences. Unlike her first work -–Leaw amangoch tinden nop ikoods (The life of an ikoods family, 1987), filmed on Super-8—, Ollas de San Marcos (San Marcos' cooking pots, 1992) was recorded on video. In this interview, Palafox relates her experience as a member of Audiovisual Media Transfer for Indigenous Organizations and Communities Project, sponsored by National Indigenous Institute (Instituto Nacional Indigenista), between 1989 and 1994, which consisted in video technology used by indigenous people.

The extensive universe of audiovisual heritage covers various areas. One of them focuses on the preservation of photographic collections. The exponential increase in the production of images, derived from access to new technologies, has led to their mass use in terms of distribution and consumption. This scenario invites us to reflect on the role that photographic documentary collections play in the (re)construction of a collective memory, both in a diachronic and synchronic sense. The case of the Photography Archive Museum, located in the heart of Mexico City, is a space conceived as a repository of a visual memory that shows the transformations of a convulsive and culturally complex capital. In this interview, the visual anthropologist Daniel Vargas (current director of this institution), addresses not only the challenges involved in maintaining a collection consisting of just over two million images in optimal conditions, but also its impact on the construction of a collective memory.