During the 1970s, military governments took power in much of South and Central America. Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, and Argentina all fell under military dictatorships. After 1978, pluralist democracy returned to most Latin American countries, but the new governments faced colossal inflation rates, declining productivity, and huge foreign debt. The IMF imposed austerity measures on Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. During the first half of the 1990s, inflation was brought down to more reasonable levels, and film production recovered somewhat.
Latin America’s screens had been dominated by Hollywood cinema since World War I. The region’s film output had grown significantly between 1965 and 1975, but because most right-wing governments provided little protection against U. S. imports, productivity declined steadily over the next decade. Occasionally, however, local industries gained strength, and some filmmakers found a place on the international art-cinema circuit. Moreover, during the 1990s, construction of multiplexes in the more prominent Latin American markets led to a rise in attendance, though in some cases imported films proved more attractive than local films.
By 1973, guerrillas had clearly lost their struggle against Brazil’s military government. A year later General Ernesto Geisel assumed the presidency and made promises of greater openness. In 1975, Embrafilme, originally a state distribution agency, was reorganized to create a vertically integrated monopoly over Brazilian cinema. The government also increased the screen quota, thereby cutting imports and creating a demand for domestic films.
Embrafilme worked with independent producers and courted television and foreign countries for coproductions. Embrafilme’s efforts helped double attendance and raise production to a level of sixty to eighty films per year. The agency’s powers increased under the transition to democratic constitutional rule. Embrafilme was even able to support the controversial Pixote (1980), which presented an unflattering portrait of life in Brazil’s cities.
The veterans of Cinema Novo (pp. 471-475) retained their central roles in Brazilian film culture. Embrafilme was headed by two Cinema Novo directors, Roberto Farias and Carlos Diegues. Like their peers elsewhere, Brazil’s director relinquished political militancy and formal experimentation in the name of more accessible strategies. Many directors, from Brazil and elsewhere on the continent, affiliated their works with the Latin American literature of “Magical Realism” (see box).
Other directors adapted to an international market. Carlos Diegues’s Bye Bye Brazil (1980), dedicated “To the Brazilian people of the 21st Century,” is a tale of an itinerant sideshow troupe drifting through a poverty-stricken country full of discos, brothels, boomtowns, and TV antennas. The film has a boisterousness and
26.2 Salome in Bye Bye Brazil examines the Indians’ totem, which suspiciously resembles a TV set.
Sentiment reminiscent of the early work of Federico Fellini (26.2). Another lucrative export was Bruno Bar-retto’s Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (1976), in which a man who returns from the dead shares his wife’s bed with her second husband. After the success of Pixote, Hector Babenco won U. S. backing for Kiss of the Spider Woman (1984). Also gaining access to international screens were the women directors Area Carolina (Sea of Roses, 1977), Tizuki Yamasaki ( Gaijin, The Roads of Freedom, 1980), and Suzana Amaral (The Hour of the Star, 1985).
Embrafilme went bankrupt in 1988 and was closed in 1990. A mere nine features were released the following year. At Cannes, Babenco declared Brazilian cinema dead.
Brazil took longer than any other South American country to recover from hyperinflation, with the rate finally falling from 5,154 percent in 1994 to 35 percent in 1995. In 1995, the government tried to end the huge slump in film production with state subsidies and tax credits for investors. The spread of multiplexes from 1994 on provided a larger local audience for Brazilian films. By 1997, Brazil claimed to be the ninth largest exhibition market in the world, and the prosperity attracted foreign investment in coproductions.
Hopes for a Brazilian film renaissance were raised enormously when Walter Salles’s Central Station (1998) won unprecedented international success. The story deals with a gruff ex-teacher who makes a living writing letters for illiterate people. Reluctantly saddled with a boy whose mother is run over, she gradually grows to love him while the two wander the Brazilian countryside (26.3). Central Station boasted Hollywood-style production values, including a lush musical score and beautiful cinematography quite different from the handheld roughness of the Cinema Novo era. It won over forty prizes, and was nominated for Academy Awards.
26.3 Central Station: the wandering pair pause by a small chapel in the country.
Sony Classics paid $1 million for the American distribution rights, and ultimately the film earned an impressive $17 million worldwide.
Older directors also took advantage of increased investment. Diegues made Orfeu (1999), set during the Rio Carnival and featuring vibrant music, set and costume design, and cinematography. Guerra directed Estorvo
(1999), and Babenco contributed Carandiru (2002). During 1999, however, a recession, combined with revelations of corruption in the tax-credit system, threatened local production once more.
During Argentina’s military dictatorship (1976-1983), thousands of citizens were arrested and secretly killed. The regime privatized state industries and cut tariffs, opening the country to U. S. films and encouraging cheap local production. What came to be known as the “dirty war” pursued artists, killing, blacklisting, or exiling them. The ill-judged campaign to capture the Malvinas Islands (aka the Falkland Islands, held by Britain) helped topple the regime and led to the election of a civilian government in 1984.
With the emergence of democracy, censorship was abolished and filmmaker Manuel Antin became a director of the National Film Institute (INC). The industry faced 400-percent inflation, but it attracted attention with several films, notably Luis Puenzo’s The Official Story (1985). The film’s highly emotional drama—a woman discovers that her adopted child’s mother “disappeared” at the hands of death squads—employs traditional plotting highlighted by symbolic incidents (26.4). The Official Story won the 1986 Academy Award for the best foreign film.
Soon the “New Argentine Cinema” was announced. Maria Luisa Bemberg explored women’s roles in Camila (1984), Miss Mary (1986), and I Don’t Want to Talk
26.4 Boys disrupt a birthday party by mimicking a police raid, suggesting that military brutality has warped Argentina’s children (The Official Story).
About It (1993). Most widely seen internationally, apart from The Official Story, was Fernando Solanas’s Tangos: The Exile of Gardel (1985). Argentine exiles in Paris stage a tanguedia, a comedy/tragedy presented through dance. Alternately amusing and mournful, the film celebrates the tango’s place in Argentine culture. Solanas, collaborator on the militant The Hour of the Furnaces (p. 544), exploits art-cinema shifts into fantasy, wrapping his exiles in a cheerful, unexplained cloud of yellow smoke (Color Plate 26.1). Started in France at the same time as the dirty war, Tangos was completed in Argentina and became a box-office hit.
As elsewhere in South America, Argentina saw a crisis in film production during the first half of the 1990s. The turnaround came in 1995, with a new video tax funding loans for filmmaking. The INC became the INCAA (National Institute for Cinema and Audiovisual Arts) and converted an old Buenos Aires film theater into a three-screen showcase for local films. The spread of multiplexes drew wider audiences to films of all types, and a small art-house trend developed. Box-office income for the most popular Argentine films was as high as for the biggest Hollywood imports.
These favorable conditions attracted foreign investment for such coproductions as the Argentine-Spanish project Tango (1998). Veteran Spanish director Carlos Saura staged the love story, with its numerous dance numbers, in a white studio bathed with a variety of vividly colored lights, creating dramatic widescreen images (Color Plate 26.2). Just as Tango’s international success (including an Academy Award nomination) seemed to signal Argentine cinema’s resurgence, the country began to slide into another economic crisis, and the INCAA was forced to cut budgets by half.
Many other South American countries underwent comparable shifts from free-market dictatorship to uneasy and economically precarious democracy. In Bolivia, after a period of repression in the 1970s, the populist Ukamau directors Jorge Sanjines and Antonio Eguino returned to filmmaking. In Chile, the military coup that ousted Salvador Allende in 1973 installed Augusto Pinochet in power for almost twenty years. His government sold off businesses to multinational corporations, bequeathing the country the largest per capita foreign debt in the world. During Pinochet’s reign, over fifty “Chilean” features were made in exile by Raul Ruiz, Miguel Littfn, and other New Cinema veterans. Littfn even returned in disguise to make a film (see “Notes and Queries” at the end of this chapter). During the 1990s, the violent efforts in Colombia to suppress the powerful drug trade led to a reduction in both theatergoing and local production.
For decades the Mexican government controlled the film industry (p. 412), but, during the 1970s and 1980s, the state’s attitude oscillated wildly as regimes changed. In 1975, the liberal government bought the principal studio facilities, founded several production companies, and took over distribution. These measures encouraged production and fostered an auteur cinema. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several young directors had called for a political cinema. Paul Leduc’s reenacted biography of the journalist John Reed, Reed: Insurgent Mexico (1970), marked the official emergence of this group, which included Arturo Ripstein (The Inquisition, 1973) and Jaime Humberto Hermosillo (The Passion According to Berenice, 1976). The older director Felipe Cazals caused a sensation with Canoa (1975), the reconstruction of a 1968 lynching in a village.
Mexico was not ruled by the sort of military government that dominated Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, but it did move to the right in the late 1970s. A new president took steps to privatize the economy and oversaw the liquidation of the National Film Bank, the closing of a major production agency, and the return to private production. The state invested in only a handful of prestigious projects. Film output fell steeply, and only a few genres found success—chiefly fantasy films featuring the masked wrestler Santo.
Mexico depended on oil revenues, and soon a slump in prices forced the government to borrow from abroad. The results were hyperinflation, mass unemployment, and debt. Film culture suffered several blows. In 1979, police attacked the Churubusco studios and, charging the staff with mismanagement, jailed and tortured several people. In 1982, a fire at the nation’s archive, the Cineteca Nacional, destroyed thousands of prints and documents.
The pendulum swung slightly back when, under a new president in the early 1980s, Mexico began an economic reconstruction that included more intervention in the film trade. A national agency was created to finance quality production and lure coproductions from abroad. The sexycomedia, a new genre derived from popular comic strips began to attract audiences. Mexico also became a popular spot for U. S. runaway productions, though by the 1990s, bureaucracy and labor unions made the newly available facilities in eastern Europe more attractive than those in Mexico. James Cameron built two multimillion-gallon tanks in Baja for Titanic
(1998), but these facilities could be used only for water-related scenes.
Many of the directors favored by state policy in the early 1970s became the mainstays of quality production in the 1980s. In Dona Herlinda and Her Son (1984), Hermosillo made the first explicitly gay Mexican film. Leduc attracted worldwide notice with Frida (1984), a biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. Leduc daringly omits dialogue and offers virtually no plot. Episodes from Frida’s life, jumbled out of chronological order, present rich tableaux that recall motifs from her paintings (Color Plate 26.3).
During the 1980s, the government attempted to subsidize “quality production,” but inflation ate up this funding. In 1988, the new government began liquidating its production companies, studios, and theater chains. Pelfculas Nacionales, the major private company, collapsed soon after. In 1991, Mexican production shriveled to thirty-four films.
At the end of 1992, the government lifted a cap of one dollar on admission prices in theaters. The resulting rise in income strengthened the industry. Two firms, the government-supported Imcine and Televicine, the film wing of the giant media conglomerate Televisa, dominated production. Imcine fostered small independent productions. One result of this was Like Water for Chocolate (1991, Alfonso Arau), a popular romance in the growing art-film genre of cooking-oriented films; it earned nearly $20 million in the United States alone. Guillermo del Toro’s stylish horror film Cronos (1993) was also a hit abroad. Like many talented Mexican filmmakers, del Toro was immediately courted by Hollywood, where he eventually directed the sequel, Blade 2 (2002). The film’s cinematographer, Guillermo Navarro, also was lured away, filming such American movies as Jackie Brown (1997), Stuart Little (1999), and Spy Kids
(2001).
Although production declined during Mexico’s mid-1990s economic crisis, Arturo Ripstein reliably turned out a modestly budgeted feature a year, supported by French and Spanish investment. Ripstein was invited to compete at the Cannes Film Festival three years running, for Divine (1998), No One Writes to the Colonel (1999), and That’s Life (2000), the latter shot on digital video. In 1999, Alejandro Gonzalez liiarritu directed Amores Perros (“Love of Dogs,” aka Life’s a Bitch). A former director of advertisements, liiarritu reversed his style and made a grim film with hand-held camera and muted colors. Amores Perros follows three storylines that intersect only once (26.5). The film’s success abroad led to the inevitable offers from Hollywood firms, but the director vowed to stay in Mexico.
In 1999, the government created the Fund for Quality Film Production to bolster Imcine, and a modest surge began.
Cuba and Other Left-Wing Cinemas
As a communist state, Cuba had a more centralized and stabler film industry during the 1970s, but here too formal experimentation largely vanished. Humberto Solas’s Cantata de Chile (1976) was a stirring musical pageant projecting theatrical techniques on an epic scale (Color Plate 26.4), but even it was less daring than the works of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Tomas Guttierez Alea’s The Last Supper (1977), a critique of the slaveholding aristocracy, was far more “transparent” and linear in construction than Memories of Underdevelopment (p. 542). Directors sought a more accessible style, and genre films, such as spy and film-noir intrigues, came to the fore. Like most other countries, Cuba was turning toward more accessible entertainment.
Cuba made only eight to ten features annually, guaranteeing that the films could cover their costs at home. The local films were outnumbered by features from Japan, the Soviet bloc, and other Latin American countries. Yet the domestic product garnered a substantial share of exhibition income, not least because the typical
26.5 In Amores Perras, a horrific car crash brings two plotlines together, while the protagonist of the third happens to be nearby.
Cuban went to the movies nine to ten times per year— the highest average in the western hemisphere.
Cuba also remained the center of Latin American Third-Worldism. Havana hosted the annual International Festival of Latin American Cinema (established in 1979), which grew to include hundreds of films from the region. In 1985, Cuba established the Foundation for Latin American Cinema, which created the International School of Film and Television, directed by the esteemed Argentine pioneer of left cinema, Fernando Birri.
Cuba’s economic position was precarious, depending on the sugar trade and the bounty of the USSR. The United States pressured western countries to avoid trading with Castro. Crop failures in the late 1970s, along with the massive emigration of 1980, created a new ideological and economic tightening. In the early 1980s, the state film agency ICAIC reduced budgets, and in 1987 it was reorganized along the lines of the production-unit system of eastern Europe, with each team headed by a major director.
In the late 1980s, new Cuban directors began turning out youth movies and satiric comedies (e. g., Juan Carlos Tabio’s Plaff, 1988). But when the Soviet bloc crumbled and the USSR dissolved, Cuba was left more isolated than ever. No longer subsidized by the Soviets, Castro had only North Korea and China as allies. In 1991, the ICAIC, heavily in debt, released a mere five features; a year later, it was absorbed into the film sector of the armed forces and the radio-television institute. Cuba’s international film school foundered, and Birri resigned and left the country. Censorship became harsher: Alice in Wonderland (1991), a mild satire, was pulled from distribution and attacked as counterrevolutionary. Some film workers, most notably director Sergio Giral, went into exile. Film stock and equipment, normally supplied by eastern Europe, became scarce. Production slipped to about two films a year. Electricity shortages forced exhibitors to cut back on screenings. Yet the International Festival of Latin American Cinema continued as a major event, and, by the end of the decade, foreign coproductions were triggering a modest recovery.
In the late 1970s, other Latin American countries became identified with a politicized Latin American cinema. In EI Salvador, where an oppressive military government terrorized the populace and fought to quell opposition guerrillas, clandestine film collectives appeared. Nicaragua was taken over in 1979 by the Sandinistas, a moderate guerrilla faction. President Reagan’s embargo on the new regime, as well as struggles with the U. S.-backed Contras, pushed Nicaragua closer to Cuba. A new film culture was launched with the founding of the Nicaragua Film Institute
(1979) and was brought to prominence with Alsino and the Condor (1982), made by the Chilean exile Miguel Littin.
Nicaragua coproduced Alsino with Mexico, Cuba, and Costa Rica, and in this respect the film typifies a tendency that was as significant in Latin America as elsewhere in the world. Cuba successfully gathered funding within Latin America, but elsewhere producers turned to Europe for capital. Guerra’s Erendira was a French-German-Mexican corproduction, while Spanish television funded many features. Such internationalist efforts were also aided by the appearance of new film festivals: at Bogota, Colombia (1984); San Juan, Puerto Rico
(1991); and Viiia del Mar, Chile (reestablished in 1990).
As in Europe and the United States, women directors became more prominent. In Brazil, a feminist group made Mulheres de boca (“Women of the Street,” 1983). A Mexican film collective, Grupo Cine Mujer, also produced works oriented toward the women’s movement. More mainstream female filmmakers emerged; those in Argentina and Cuba were joined by the Venezuelan Marianela Alas, whose Oriana (1985) draws upon art-cinema conventions to convey a woman’s half-fantasized childhood memories.
Most smaller countries suffered during the region’s economic turmoil of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the first half of the 1980s, the government of Colombia encouraged the growth of a modest industry that produced about ten films per year. But these were financed by a tax on tickets, and, as attendance declined, exhibitors withheld revenues in protest. At the same time, the government was plunged into a war with the cartels producing illicit drugs for North America. In 1990, drug chieftains kidnapped the head of the state film agency. The dangers of the streets discouraged moviegoing. The government soon abandoned film production, and privately funded production was sporadic.
The region’s economic crises strengthened the role of imports. The end of quotas in Brazil gave Hollywood a free rein; in Argentina, 90 percent of the films screened came from the United States. Even in Cuba, pirated prints of American films began to dominate theaters. Hollywood’s conquest of eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union was accompanied by an undisputed sway over America’s southern neighbors.
World History
