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Abstract
This essay examines the interpretations of 16th-century and present-day human rights found within Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 film También la lluvia. I argue, firstly, that central to the film is the question as to whether human rights can foster justice and contest the cruelty of (neo)colonialism or if, conversely, they are designed and/or doomed to reinforce colonizing relationships and, secondly, that an interpretation of the film’s ambiguous response might contribute to recent criticism regarding the imperializing tendencies and emancipatory potential of human rights culture. By exploring the film’s self-reflexive and critical considerations of the violence human rights have caused as well as its treatment of spaces in which these rights bring about adaptations, inversions, and transformations of colonizing relationships, I propose that the film can be understood to reimagine human rights culture. In order to interpret the film’s representation of human rights, my article identifies and analyzes the processes of negotiation by which the relationship between rights and colonialism is revealed to be an unstable and malleable one, continually subject to change and in need of criticism that takes its adaptive character into account.
Acknowledgement
I would like to give special thanks to Dierdra Reber and Hernán Feldman for their generosity in reading countless versions of this essay and for their many insightful comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See http://howardzinn.org/film-dedicated-to-howard-zinn/ regarding the ways in which historian and social activist Zinn deeply influenced screenwriter Paul Laverty’s project as a respected source on the subject matter, close friend, and colleague with whom Laverty collaborated when writing the film.
2. Issuetainment, a term first coined in 2006 by journalist and screenwriter Charlie Brooker, became more broadly known following Mark Kermode’s review of Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. The term has been applied to such films as Stephen Gaghan’s Syriana, Sydney Pollack’s The Interpreter, and Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda. Film critic Steve Rose’s satirical ‘Heal the World’ outlines some of issuetainment’s key tropes, including exotic visuals (yellow filters, bleached-out color palettes with blinding whites, sunsets, and jerky hand-held camera footage), the establishment of the violence and danger of the foreign space, a Caucasian angel who comes to the rescue ‘in the greatest depths of dark-skinned human suffering ... carrying the conscience of the western world on her shoulders,’ large crowds of cheap, local extras, and a few scenes in which ‘white man’s justice’ is enacted.
3. See Bianca Freire-Medeiros regarding how Cidade de Deus has generated a voyeuristic interest in Brazilian poverty, making it an ‘object of rational consumption’ for global audiences and tourists (2011: 23).
4. As Ignacio Sánchez-Prado’s analysis of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores perros elucidates, the imaginary constructed by these films is often appealing to both ‘the privileged groups that benefit from the region’s neoliberalism and to the voluntaristic politics of the progressive and pseudo progressive sectors of Western intelligentsia, desperately searching for new ways to relate to the Third World’ (2006: 40).
5. See Elizabeth Swanson Goldberg regarding the violence that can be enacted in representations of ‘the national/cultural other’ (2007: 33).
6. See James Dawes on the centrality of storytelling to human rights endeavors.
7. Others studies of the oppressive proclivities of such rights include Hannah Arendt’s, Giorgio Agamben’s, and Jacques Rancière’s philosophical examinations of the bare subject of human rights – the subject of inhuman oppression for whom such rights were created, but who has no means of enacting them.
8. As Rose points out, a Caucasian angel (or, in this case, a white male savior) is essential to the issuetainment genre. For an analysis of a similar figure within Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men – Clive Owen’s Theo – see Sayantanti DasGupta (Citation2010).
9. Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo’s narration of ruthless imperialism in the Amazon is an obvious referent for También la lluvia. Les Blank’s documentary of the filmmaking process captures Herzog’s dogged commitment to the making of this film that further contributes to neocolonialism in the region, raising questions that También la lluvia brings center stage.
10. Documentaries created about the Water War include Florian Optiz’s 2007 The Big Sellout, Sam Bozzo’s 2008 Blue Gold: Water War, and Tin Dirdamal’s 2011 Ríos de hombres. Evidence of También la lluvia’s success at reaching broad international audiences include its winning of seventeen different international awards (among them three Goyas), nomination for fifteen others, and a place within the nine final films considered for the 2011 Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards.
11. See Stephen Holden (Citation2012), Roger Ebert (Citation2011), and Martin O’Beirne (Citation2011).
12. See ‘Even the Rain Filmmakers Juan Gordan & Icíar Bollaín on How Not to Exploit Extras in Bolivia’: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGWJ6rpD0_c. See also Isabel Santaolalla regarding the local film school created by the filmmakers (Citation2012: 209).
13. See also Samuel Moyn (Citation2012), Michael Ignatieff (Citation2001), and Domna Stanton (Citation2012), who posit that the alleged universality of human rights is often imperialistic in its global imposition of the cultural values of hegemonic powers. Though Stanton criticizes these colonizing tendencies, she argues that to do away entirely with such universality is dangerous and counterproductive, suggesting instead that the concept of universality continually be reworked in order to be more critically universally representative, similar to what Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek articulate as a ‘continuous ideologico-political struggle, something that can be renegotiated and redefined’ (2000: 102).
14. See Jorge Rabasa, who challenges this, arguing that Las Casas criticized ‘the institution of conquest itself’ (Citation2000: 7), but that his petitions for justice ‘go beyond the calculability of the law,’ suggesting that even more violence is committed by Las Casas’s writing that demands justice from a source that has no means of enacting it (25).
15. Though it is not mentioned as such within the film, the uncertainty and vulnerability with which Antón desires to represent his character is textually supported by several of Columbus’s letters to his son Diego in which he discusses his deep concern over financial resources, in addition to expressing other insecurities. See ‘Carta a Diego Colón’ in Colón and Varela (Citation1982).
16. See Santaolalla regarding the criticism También la lluvia received by some Spaniards for promoting a leyenda negra version of history (Citation2012: 208).
17. For an analysis of a similar type of linguistic reversal of colonial roles, see Stephanie Athey’s (Citation2012) examination of the use of Mandarin characters not translated into English in Vyvyane Loh’s Breaking the Tongue.
18. By using ‘hybrid,’ I mean to discuss the ways in which different forms of cinema and defending human dignity combine with one another in Tambien la lluvia to create a distinct type of oppression-contesting, self-reflexive film in light of the cultural processes of hybridization described by Nestor García Canclini (Citation2005).
19. Though the films of the Ukamau Group and También la lluvia are quite different, David M.J. Wood’s analysis of the film Ukamau as a fusion of distinct cinematic idioms whose ‘political will to simply tell the story of the Indians’ repression and rebellion [is] constantly compromised by an auteurist impulse to exploit the expressive potential of cinema’s artifice’ points to similarities in their representational dilemmas (Citation2006: 79). Similarly, Ana M. López’s examination of how the Ukamau collective has hybridized ‘the fictional, the documentary, and the historical in their efforts to locate, define, and communicate with their films’ target audience’ highlights parallels in their metacinematic approaches (Citation1990: 421).
20. See the reviews of Jonathan Holland (Citation2010), Maria Delgado (Citation2012), and Alan Stone (Citation2011).
21. See the interview Democracy Now conducted with Morales entitled ‘Neoliberalism is No Solution for Mankind,’ available at http://www.democracynow.org/. Regarding the accusations of human rights violations, see, for example, the Human Rights Foundation’s 2008 Country Report on Bolivia and the organization’s 2008 letter addressed directly to Morales in which they condemn the growing wave of politically motivated murders and violence instigated by the Bolivian government, available at http://humanrightsfoundation.org/programs/hrfprograms/legal-reports.