Introduction: Digital changes in Latin American cinemas

Abstract

This article introduces the dossier of the Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies devoted to the study of digital cinema in Latin America. First, the text addresses the lack of research on the history of digital cinema in Latin America. Then, it proposes a comprehensive analysis of the digital, in terms of film aesthetics, production, distribution, exhibition, and consumption. At the same time, it establishes a dual axis to account for the changes and continuities generated by digital technology in temporal and spatial terms, within both sub- and supra-national logics. In this way, it emphasises the need to understand digital cinema as connected with previous technological and cultural phenomena such as analogue cinema or magnetic video. It also acknowledges that digital cinema is an extension of several local and global economic and industrial processes that different countries have negotiated in diverse and, at times, antagonistic fashions. Lastly, the article presents the five articles included in this dossier, and a sixth, shorter piece that functions as a critical response to the arguments and points addressed by the contributors.

Keywords:

• Digital cinema
• national cinemas
• Latin American cinema
• digital Latin American cinema
• film circulation

This special issue puts forth a series of questions about Latin American national cinemas and the complex borderlines of the digital cinema era. Although digital cinemas have been approached in the last two decades in terms of aesthetic, technology, circulation, and consumption, most of these works focus on the US, European, and Asian contexts. What has happened and what continues to unfold, then, in Latin America? What types of production and consumption is the digital regime fostering in this region? Is it suitable to apply hegemonic theoretical and historical parameters with regard to digital cinema?

In their introduction to their recently published companions to Latin American cinema, Marvin D’Lugo, Ana M. López, and Laura Podalsky point out two conceptual axes to consider the existing studies about this region: a spatial axis, connected to geopolitical issues, and a temporal axis, which deals with historiographic explorations (D’Lugo, López, & Podalsky 2018, 3). The authors acknowledge that this dual spatial-temporal perspective is structured around a delicate balance between those narratives that have emphasised the importance of national cinemas in the region and those that have accentuated the pan-American connections amongst diverse production hubs. As the articles in this dossier argue, if we apply this spatial-temporal axis to digital cinema, a series of political, industrial, and aesthetic impulses emerge that stem from digital propagation, as well as the décalages in their implementation and their adaptation in the different areas and territories.

Firstly, the process of digitalisation in Latin American must be understood as a broad phenomenon, which was launched with domestic Sony DVCAM formats in the mid-1990s, and is also a part of a (seldom and inaccurately told) story of sub-formats and asynchronous standardisation in the different areas of the region. This inconsistent and multi-scale story runs through the whole continent, from the more or less institutional attempts to create a fabric for the production and exhibition of motion pictures in large urban areas to the experiences, in the margins of the industry and very often away from the Latin American metropolises, of collectives and organisations that adapt – and adapt to – the arrival of the digital with other temporalities and heterogeneous rhythms. These adaptations focus on realities that stem from economic inequality and, occasionally, foster positions of resistance and disparity vis-à-vis the homogeneity and standardisation presumed as features of the digital. Within this parallel story, it is worth mentioning certain prestigious filmmakers who, prior to digital cinema (during its pre-history, if we wish), resorted to analogue video formats as tools to combat the lack of access to specific technological means during the 1980s and 1990s.

Examples include Luis Ospina in Colombia, Jaime Humberto Hermosillo in Mexico, or the Chicana Lourdes Portillo in the United States, who, instead of going digital, “embraced” analogue video, since it allowed them to work more freely, anticipating many things to come and gradually garnering a central position in some narratives about film, documentary, and experimental video in the region. Thus, these strategies, considered at one point marginal strategies of survival – deviations from the main cinematic path – undoubtedly faced difficulties in circulating and reaching audiences. Today, they are conceptualised as a set of pioneering practices within a specifically Latin American pre-digital genealogy. Within the context of digitalisation, there is a re-organisation of centre/periphery relations in the temporal, historical stories of Latin American cinemas. As Luis Ospina stated in the late 1990s,

The moment I realised that cinema was dead, at least for me, video was a resurrection (…). It was about believing (and creating) a new electronic rift, without film stock, without a black bag, without a dark room. A step that went from alchemy to electronics (…). Video arrived, saw, and conquered. When I was making films I always felt inhibited, not only because of the fact that as a good cinephile and devoted critic I had seen perfect films, but also because cinematic processes were very expensive. Conversely, with video, no longer used as a slave of cinema, I felt the emotion and stimuli of working with a new format, less codified and structured (…). Video allowed me to work in a sort of permanent postmodern collage, mixing all formats, incorporating texts, and creating special effects that would be too costly [to achieve] in film. (Ospina 2003)

Ospina’s reflections illuminate a more disperse and broad genealogy in relation to what we traditionally consider “digital cinema”. On the one hand, he points out the conditions of production – almost domestic, as a form of homemade craftsmanship – that foster video (digital or not). On the other, in his words there is a necessary re-location of non-cinematic formats, in this case in relation to Cali (Colombia). Consideration of how this key issue of re-location plays out in other foci and geographies of Latin American cinema can yield a more thorough and flexible account of these digital micro-histories and their predecessors, anchored in the personal uses and developments of technology and not only in industrial strategies of dissemination and expansion.

But … where is digital cinema? Distribution, exhibition, and circulation of digital cinema in Latin America

A large volume of digital cinema scholarship has attempted to offer a thorough explanation of the consequences of the arrival of the technology. In general terms, these approaches have conceptualised the digital as an opportunity to pose novel questions about cinema. Therefore, since the arrival of the digital, the traditional question “what is cinema?”, a key engine of film studies from the very beginning, has been displaced by other interrogations, such as “what happened to cinema?”, “where is cinema?”, “when is cinema?”, or “why cinema?” (Rodowick 2007; Bordwell 2012; Casetti 2015; Elsaesser 2004 and 2016).

All these approaches refer, consequently, to the impact of digital technology in terms of cinematic production, distribution, and consumption, to the point of triggering a thorough re-writing of the history of cinema, taking into account the places and times that are fundamental in the endeavour of conceptualising the cinematic experience. Therefore, focusing on Latin America, one must not forget that there is a long tradition of diverse sub-formats that anchor and give meaning to the practices of cultural creation and consumption. The limited access to analogue means of production and reproduction in some Latin American countries has generated, for decades, an intense relation with sub-formats such as photocopying (instead of books), or DivX and pirated DVDs (instead of theatrical releases or original DVDs). That reproduction and illegal copying have become practices of consumption attests to, in Jonathan Sterne’s term (2012), the “general history of compression”. In his study of the MP3 format, Sterne highlights how the theorisation of the format, developed through a history of compression, allows us to understand the appearance and standardisation of audiovisual formats as a result of the interactions between technological innovation and the maximisation of profit for cultural industries. According to Sterne, “format theory would ask us to modulate the scale of our analysis of media somewhat differently. Mediality happens on multiple scales and time frames. Studying formats highlights smaller registers like software, operating standards, and codes, as well as larger registers like infrastructures, international corporate consortia, and whole technical systems” (Sterne 2012, 11).

Rethinking Sterne’s proposal within the Latin American geopolitical context, we can potentially expand Ospina’s ideas to encompass artistic and production processes, infrastructures and institutions, and technological intangibles. Hence, when we understand digital cinema as part of a general history of compression, we pay attention to distribution, exhibition, and consumption as creative transformations that generate meaning in different temporalities and scales. This clear expansion of our field of study re-conceptualises multiple pre-digital practices and, at the same time, questions, from the periphery, the forms and borders of national cinemas, well beyond strictly aesthetic debates.

From this perspective, within the context of digital cinema there has undoubtedly been an overflow of spaces and times within Latin American national cinemas, as David Oubiña remarks in his contribution to this dossier. If, until now, scholarship has mostly paid attention to what we could define as the (transnational) macro-structural processes, it is important to highlight, as part of this overflow, the existence of other phenomena, from below (micro) and, to continue with this terminology, sideways or in parallel.

Within Latin America, indigenous film and video is an exemplary instance of an overflow on the micro scale. Firstly, it is important to highlight that indigenous video exists prior to digitalisation and that it is directly related, in chronological terms, to the extension of analogue video technologies that Ospina mentions. A clear example of this anticipation is the creation, in 1985, of the Coordinadora Latinoamericana de Cine y Comunicación de los Pueblos Indígenas (CLACPI), a still active institution that includes over 30 associations. Works such as Jeff Himpele’s (2008), about the circulation of indigenous video in Bolivia, broaden the cinematic and videographic practices in Latin America to include localised distribution and consumption, and, consequently, offer insights about the social and institutional relations that exist around these formats. Thus, taking the utilisation of video as a point of departure, Himpele proposes an “indigenization of the popular”, which would exist not only in indigenous self-representation video works but also through distribution and circulation strategies, keys to the expansion of “the indigenous worlds” (Himpele 2008, 207).

A second overflow, in this case macro but also working sideways, occurs in the so-called informal economics of cinema (Lobato 2012). Within Latin America, works such as that of Gabriela Alemán (2009) in Ecuador or Cristina Venegas (2010) in Cuba have signalled how digitalisation is altering production flows and centre/periphery relations through piracy and new spaces for consumption, away from the movie theatre. In Alemán’s analysis of Ecuador, this informal circulation, mostly related to the distribution and purchase of pirated DVDs, has generated agreements between distribution companies and local DVD and DiVX stores which were initially inaccessible to large multinational corporations. In this way, informal distribution was based on agreements with the industry and created situations that recognised, at least partially, the alteration of flows within the Latin American markets of consumption, legitimising an illegal situation, which was normalised through its visibility and massive everyday use in the whole country.

However, it would be a mistake to read the Latin American digital scenario as exclusively resistant (micro) or integrated (macro) within the new global context. Even in very protectionist contexts, such as Argentina during the two administrations of Cristina Kirchner (2007–2015), it would be more suitable to speak of a negotiation than either resistance or integration (Morán and Fernández Labayen 2018). As Ignacio M. Sánchez Prado (2014) has remarked in discussing Mexico, homogenisation and diversity are two interlinked phenomena within the neoliberal context in which digital cinema expands in Latin America. Consequently, they are not opposite and/or paradoxical but complementary processes. Given this complementarity, this special issue addresses three types of overflow – macro, micro, and sideways – complementing them with different and related expressions of the same historical and regional phenomenon.

Thus, on one extreme, as Cerdán and Fernández Labayen’s text explains, there is a transnational overflow that entails launching the Fénix and PLATINO awards, which attempt to give visibility to the industrial paths of Ibero-American cinema in the contemporary historical context. Gonzalo Aguilar, in turn, introduces the idea of cinematic spatialisation within the museum as a clear example of a parallel overflow that has been accelerated through digitalisation, although it does not exclusively exist in this specific context. Supplementing these, the other three texts highlight and develop in a variety of ways an idea that Sánchez Prado utilises in discussing Carlos Reygadas’s films to underline three interconnected phenomena that exist within neoliberal cinema. Firstly, the appearance of a plurality of commercial and creative spaces without precedent in the industry; secondly, the creation of niches within this same industry that undermine the traditional concept of national cinema; and lastly, the ability of filmmakers to join the paradigm of global art cinema in aligning their works with this international genealogy (Sanchez Prado 2014, 196). It is well known that the concept of global art cinema was born and consolidated after World War II as a European (even French) tradition, which, today, has been assumed and naturalised without a critical perspective, all around the world. Prestigious scholars such as Thomas Elsaesser have acknowledged this fact, formulating ethnocentric arguments that lament the loss of a hegemonic position of the European auteur film in relation to the new Asian and Latin American cinemas:

the cultural status once enjoyed by European art and auteur cinema has shrunk and all but disappeared. In its place are the emerging film-producing countries in Asia and Latin America (and to a lesser extent Africa) whose sites are the national, international, regional themed film festivals and whose topics are often the social consequences and family dislocations following globalisation. (Elsaesser 2016, 17)

Within this globalising context, Néstor García Canclini warned us, over a decade ago, of the dangers that new power relations were generating for Latin American cinematic production (García Canclini 2004, 195–206). Specifically, García Canclini underlined the challenges of a globalisation that de-globalises, in which the dynamics of a global and digital world created not only greater interconnectivity, but also processes of inequality and cultural exclusion. Fifteen years later, it is imperative to reconsider these ideas in regard to recent cinema: today, on the one hand, there is a radicalisation of the separation between the power centres and southern film outputs, most obviously through the increasing separation of the genre (commercial) cinema and auteur film circuits; on the other hand, this process is diluting in a progressively more hybrid ocean. The emergence of supranational institutions that champion the region, such as Mercosur (Moguillansky 2016) and Ibermedia (Binimelis 2011; Falicov 2013), among others, turns into different types of branding that play a decisive role within the field of soft power and the new economic structures. These initiatives, focused on production, give rise to new platforms for promotion and circulation.

Historically, scholars have classified Latin American cinema into three groups, with Cuba on its own, due to the specific political situation in that country since the late 1950s (Paranaguá 2003; Del Valle Dávila 2014). The first group includes all those countries that have been able to develop a more or less stable studio system such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina; in the second group there are those countries with intermittent experiences in terms of film industry – namely, Chile, Colombia, Venezuela, or even Peru. Lastly, there are those countries which present isolated production initiatives, some in Central America, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Uruguay (Del Valle Dávila 2014, 36).

In the contemporary context, it is not difficult to see how countries from the first group – whose cinematic tradition was consolidated in the studio and NLAC (New Latin American Cinema) eras – have expanded and, above all, diversified their production while getting involved in international co-productions (participating in mostly European film festivals, in a significant way). In addition, these countries have opened new de-centralised spaces for the circulation of cinematic production. Museums and galleries, which had almost neglected popular art in the previous century, have included cinema in their programming and exhibition, which broadened the circuits and spaces that host cinema, as Aguilar analyses in his article. At the same time, alternative circuits have multiplied. In this regard, festivals occupy a privileged space in the transnational context, while more or less regulated exhibition spaces for sub-formats (DVD, Quicktime, DivX, etc) create new networks in different countries. This last phenomenon has grown thanks to the flexibility and versatility of the digital, and the appearance of new hotbeds for audiovisual creation, away from traditional urban centres, re-configuring the maps of what was traditionally considered national production, developing, even if only minimally, the regional fabric of those countries (Kriger 2019). This de-centralisation is undoubtedly taking place because of the multiplication of the production systems facilitated by digital systems for recording and editing, increasing the capacity of intervention of local micropolitics that have had a positive impact on the plurality of the audiovisual landscape within the continent.

Finally, this panorama has been beneficial to other national industries that have had a discontinuous or almost inexistent experience of production. In the new context, these industries are steadily developing, creating an offering that, even if still weak, does articulate certain lines of continuity, often under the helm of new legislative frameworks of the respective national cinemas and audiovisual industries. This happens in countries with some history of production such as Colombia or Chile, and also in others such as Ecuador and Panama, with a far more episodic production in historical terms. But, above all, and beyond these nation-state-driven taxonomies, it is important to highlight the transversal or cross-cutting character of these practices beyond the specific conditions of each national context. The digital shift destabilises national traditions and the power relations amongst Latin American countries, also altering their status in relation to global markets.

The articles

The contributors to this special issue articulate a plurality of answers to the multiple facets of digital cinema in different regions. Their approaches – partial answers to the questions formulated above – deal with the scale and dimension of the changes brought on by digital cinema, in both technological and geopolitical terms. Thus, in line with calls for intermediality, and evaluating the transnational dimension and comparing the “minor histories” that have often remained buried in typical panoramic and teleological understandings of Latin American cinemas (López 2014; Podalsky 2018), the authors propose a more thorough approach, capable of offering a situated, agile, and flexible knowledge, attuned to the mobility and the transitoriness of the contemporary era. Even if partial, these contributions sketch a wider panorama, which needs to be explored further.

Hence, this issue focuses on Argentine, Colombian, Mexican, Bolivian, and Ibero-American cases, even though all them go far beyond the borders of a strict national framework. In this regard, the two articles devoted to Argentina are especially relevant. Aguilar and Oubiña build a multi-scale approach to the different dimensions and strata of Argentine cinema, from local and national production to international reach and festival circulation, also discussing the expansion of cinema to museums and galleries in big cities.

The dossier begins with “Transnational, Digital, Mexican Cinema? Fogo (Yulene Olaizola 2012) and Placa madre (Bruno Varela 2016)”, written by David Wood and Gabriela Torres. Beginning with a detailed bibliographical survey, Wood and Torres question traditional borders in relation to national cinemas and academic scholarship throughout the past century. In this way, they highlight one of the most important topics in this dossier, discussing, in their words, the incarnation and questioning of the “digital transnationality of contemporary cinema”. These authors give great importance to the films themselves and to their spaces of circulation: international festivals in the case of Mexican-Canadian co-production Fogo (Yulene Olaizola 2012) and the Internet for the expanded audiovisual experimental Mexican-Bolivian work Placa madre (Bruno Varela 2016).

David Oubiña problematises the always fertile field of co-productions between Latin America and Europe, in this case emphasising the geopolitical and postcolonial implications that this formula activates. He analyses a film that, in his own words, was born as an “international collaboration”, and that, in addition to being a co-production, is also a self-reflexive piece about the practice of co-production: El escarabajo de oro/The Gold Bug (Alejo Moguillansky and Fia-Stina Sandlund 2014).

Juana Suárez analyses the challenges of defining “national cinema” in the Colombian case, given that a significant amount of filmmakers work abroad, away from the specificities of national cinematic production, even if their films question the concept of nation itself. At a time of expansion and global mobility, in which the figure of the “artist-based-in” different world capitals has become almost a cliché, her text explores in depth the relations that filmmakers Laura Huertas Millán, Camilo Restrepo, and Felipe Guerrero weave with their native Colombia, and their respective conditions as residents of France (Huertas Millán and Restrepo), the United States (Huertas Millán), and Argentina (Guerrero). The article analyses a series of complex intercultural dialogues, functioning constantly in two directions, re-writing the cinematic history of Colombia but also, of course, broadening the horizons of their countries of reception well beyond colonialist absorption. The economic, technological, and human flows, which have also accelerated in the digital era over the last two decades, re-establish the limits of the concept of national cinema to the point that the displaced, migrant, or exiled filmmaker becomes a key figure in a variety of countries today. Meanwhile, the different forms of visibility of the digital contribute to the reconfiguration of the circulation strategies that these filmmakers utilise to show their works.

Gonzalo Aguilar scrutinises precisely the issue of formal experimentation and the relocation of cinema, facilitated by digital flexibility. He conceptualises it as an overcoming of the traditional limits of cinematic exhibition and spatial and temporal representation. In this case, he approaches the fertile relationship between cinema and the white box of the museum in the present century through Albertina Carri’s installation Operación fracaso y el sonido recobrado, displayed in the Parque de la Memoria of the city of Buenos Aires in 2015. Carri’s work, which memorialises the victims of state terrorism, is an invitation to literally walk through the materialisation of memory, an exploration that Aguilar characterises as “physical cinema”.

Lastly, Josetxo Cerdán’s and Miguel Fernández Labayen’s article pays attention to a very recent and also double phenomenon: the creation, for the first time in history and for now with some hints of continuity, of Ibero-American cinema awards. Both the PLATINO and the Félix awards started in 2014, and, despite their brief history, their simultaneous creation, their similarities and their differences present enough cultural capital to yield a critical account of the historically problematic concept of Ibero-American cinema.

Therefore, the five articles included in this dossier explore the subnational, national, regional, and supra-regional dynamics that characterise the contemporary Latin American scenario. Marvin D’Lugo’s text concludes the issue, responding to and critically engaging with the main ideas advanced in the other articles. In addition, he places them within the tradition of academic scholarship on Latin American cinemas. Establishing these coordinates, and in the light of the overflow of the three mentioned scales (micro, sideways, and macro), this last text sets up a re-formulation of the main ideas about Latin American cinemas, both as a whole and individually, that have been dominant for decades. Humbly, we hope that these texts become fruitful arenas to catalyse this process.

Translated by Vicente Rodríguez Ortega

Acknowledgements

This article has been written in the context of the Research Projects “Transnational relations in Spanish-American digital cinema: the cases of Spain, Mexico and Argentina” (CSO2014-52750-P) and “Cinematic cartographies of mobility in the Hispanic Atlantic” (CSO2017-85290-P), both funded by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness of the Spanish Government and co-financed with European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Josetxo Cerdán

Josetxo Cerdán is professor of Media Studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, a member of the research group TECMERIN and the current director of Filmoteca Española, the Spanish national film archive. He was the former coordinator of the MA in Documentary of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (1999–2008), the artistic director of the Punto de Vista Documentary Film Festival (2010–2013) and programmer of the Flaherty Seminar (2012). He has co-edited Mirada, memoria y fascinación (2001) and Documental y vanguardia (2005). He is part of the editorial board of the book series “Aproximaciones a las Culturas Hispánicas” (Iberoamericana Vervuert).

Miguel Fernández Labayen is associate professor and the director of the MA in Film and Video Preservation in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, where he is also a member of the research group TECMERIN. His work has been published in journals such as Transnational Cinemas, Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas, Screen, and the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and in collections such as The Routledge Companion to Latin American Cinema (Routledge, 2018). He is currently co-editing the volume Imaginarios digitales del Sur: Historias de pertenencia y desarraigo en los cines hispánicos (Peter Lang, 2019).