Response: Going to the Movies in the Digital Age

Abstract

The series of technological advances clustered under the label “the digital age” (internet, streaming platforms, etc.) suggest a paradigm shift in our conception of Latin American cinema, arguably even greater than that experienced by the advent of sound. Informing discussions of the digital turn in the region is the idea of a spatial imaginary, aligned to some degree with the concept of the geographical imagination that evokes the literalness of geopolitical locales as the setting of particular films. But the spatial imaginary is more than that. The kind of spatialized consciousness that informs emerging digital film culture leads commentators to focus on cinema’s relation either to national or cosmopolitan tendencies in film: the nation or the city; global markets and audience migrations; finally, an awareness of media convergence intensified through a manufactured cultural proximity provided by television and streaming. Although much of the discussion focuses on the “either/or” of national cinema and its competing concept of transnational tendencies, close scrutiny of the social practices associated with the expansion of digital culture in the region suggests a much more nuanced dynamic whose effect has been to redefine the place and nature of audiences in the digital age.

Keywords:

• Digital cinema
• video art
• spatial imaginary
• transnational film
• geographic consciousness

Acknowledgments

This article has been written in the context of the Research Projects CSO2014-52750-P and CSO2017-85290-P, both funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and co-financed by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Many of those films were marked by a striking visual legibility of national spaces in landscapes, perhaps most forcefully conveyed through the works of Gabriel Figueroa.

2 The nationalism of Mexican films during the sexenios of Manuel Avila Camacho (1940–1946) and Miguel Alemán (1946–1952) and of the impact of Peronism on Argentine cinema have been well documented. For discussion of state influences in the shaping of Mexican cinema in this context see especially Andrea Noble's Mexican National Cinema (2005); for Argentine nationalist tendencies see Clara Kriger's Cine y peronismo: el estado en escena (2009). The antithesis of the nationalist conception of cinema is to be found in the New Latin American Cinema movement of the 1960s and later that proposed a tricontinental identity for filmmaking from the region. See especially Zuzana M. Pick’s. The New Latin American Cinema: A Continental Project (1993).

3 Ripstein’s work was followed a year later by the radical digital experimentation of another member of his generation of Mexican auteurs, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo who, in eXXXorcismos/Exorcisms (2002); El rencor. Rancor (2005); El malogrado amor de Sebastián (2006), would continue to experiment with a range of new digital streaming formats.

4 It is worth noting, for instance, that Peru, with a much more modest history of film production than the “Big Three,” could boast of Hablemos de cine, the longest running independent film journal in Latin America.

5 It would require a separate and detailed discussion of the impact of digital technologies on the rebirth of documentary filmmaking in Latin America. Currently no such scholarship exists. It is, however, partially covered in a number of important sources including Mariana Lacunza’s consideration of Bolivia in the digital age (2018), Cristina Venegas’s Digital Dilemmas: The State, the Individual and Digital Media in Cuba (2010), as well Juan Carlos Domínguez Domingo’s study of Mexican film audiences in the digital age Las nuevas dimensiones del espectador (2017).

6 This position is summed up again by Andrew who observes “the distinction between local and international is thus not about value, but about address” (2010, viii).

7 As Venegas observes in her discussion of visual style and technology in Latin American digital filmmaking, there is a significant historical antecedent here in the French New Wave in which the technologies of Arriflex, light weight cameras, useful for mobile shooting, were able to transform a cinephile’s conception of the medium into a specific series of filmmaking practices that had broader generational resonance (Venegas 2008, 450).

8 Through the Sundance Institute’s Artservices, the film was eventually distributed through iTunes, Amazon and Netflix. See David Montgomery, Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2014/07/07/a.

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Marvin D’Lugo

Marvin D’Lugo is Research Professor of Screen Studies and Emeritus Professor of Spanish in the Department of Language, Literature and Culture at Clark University. Author of monographs on Carlos Saura (Princeton University Press, 1991) and Pedro Almodóvar (University of Illinois Press, 2006), he has coedited Companion to Pedro Almodóvar (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013) and The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinemas, (2017). With over a hundred essays and book reviews on various aspects of Latin American and Spanish cinemas, he is currently completing a book on Digital Cinema in Mexico.