Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, the mature economies and social democracies of the Pacific area, did not face the problems of their Asian neighbors or of Africa and Latin America. As radicals’ hopes for social change faded in these poorer countries, belief in the Third World as a distinct political force seemed less plausible. Nonetheless, economists began to describe these regions as the “developing world,” pointing out that life expectancy and literacy had increased, employees’ earnings were growing, and the “green revolution” in agricultural practices had expanded food productivity. Some economies began to thrive. South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, for example, became energetic manufacturing and investment centers.
Overall, however, prospects for the developing world were even grimmer than they had been in the period before 1975. Many nations were ruled by military juntas or charismatic dictators. The gap between rich and poor countries widened catastrophically: by 1989, the top fifth of the world’s population had become sixty times richer than the bottom fifth. Mechanized farming increased rural unemployment, forcing families to migrate to urban areas. The developing countries had fifteen of the world’s biggest cities, usually ringed by shantytowns and squatters’ camps.
Most countries failed to substitute new products for the exports they had relied on in the colonial era, and their debt to the West rose dizzyingly. Simultaneously, the industrial countries, shaken by the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, began to cut foreign aid. A world recession in the early 1980s only intensified developing nations’ financial problems. As the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed austerity measures on debtor nations, hunger riots erupted in Brazil, Tunisia, Algeria, and Venezuela.
The underdeveloped nations were also torn by wars—conflicts with neighbors, as in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, or civil struggles, as in the guerrilla wars of Latin America and the ethnic and religious strife of Africa. Disease began to spread; in 1988, one out of thirteen people in Zaire carried HIV. Perhaps most alarming, populations were expanding unchecked. In 1977, three-quarters of the world’s population lived in the developing nations. Based on the same rate of increase, estimates projected that these countries would be home to nearly 90 percent of the human race by 2026.
Huge as these social problems were, the developing world continued to play an important role in world cinema. Audiences remained large—200 million per year in Africa, nearly 800 million in Latin America, and several billion in India. At the end of the 1980s, the nations in the developing world were producing about half of the 4,000 or so features made globally. Even where the Hollywood product commanded the lion’s share of box-office receipts, cinema remained an important aspect of national cultures throughout the nonindustrialized Western world. In Asia, Latin America, and Africa, filmmakers gave voice to indigenous conceptions of national history, social life, and personal conduct. Cinema displayed a sense of regional, cross-national identity as well, as when some directors sought to express pan-African themes. In addition, some films from developing countries commanded the attention of industrialized nations, which made room for both popular entertainment and more unusual fare from its former colonies.
As in Europe, developing-nation governments discovered that if they wanted a national cinema, they would have to help pay for it. Most new cinemas were the result of state funding. Filmmakers also relied on coproduction arrangements with neighboring countries or with European firms—often countries that had been colonial rulers. Euzhan Palcy’s Rue cases negres (Sugar Cane Alley, Antilles, 1983) was financed by French concerns, while Japanese firms eagerly invested in the national cinemas of its former colonies Taiwan and South Korea.
The new cinemas that emerged from the developing world had virtually none of the stylistic or thematic coherence that characterized silent-film movements or Italian Neorealism. The New Argentine Cinema, India’s Parallel Cinema, the Hong Kong New Wave, China’s Fifth Generation—each rubric often lumped together very different directors.
Still, there were a few recurring elements. Because of the problems of developing nations, new cinemas often proposed political critiques. The heritage of revolutionary cinema lived on in films about dictators’ abuse of power, the plight of families, ethnic conflict, and other sensitive issues. One of the more important realms of human rights involved women, long oppressed in developing countries. The United Nation’s designation of the years 1975 to 1985 as the international “Decade
During the 1960s, Latin American writing became renowned throughout the world. The Mexican Carlos Fuen-tes (The Death of Artemio Cruz, 1962), the Argentine Julio Cortazar (Hopscotch, 1963), the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa (The Green House, 1966), and the Colombian Gabriel Garda Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, 1967) were recognized as masters of a literature that mingled European influences with indigenous cultural sources.
Working in a vein of lo real maravilloso (Magical Realism), these writers spiced social realism with myth, fantasy, and fairy tales taken from popular culture. Episodic folktale plots might turn suddenly into symbolic labyrinths, full of images as disconcerting as those of European Surrealism. But whereas the Surrealists sought the liberation of the individual psyche, the fantastic imagery of Magical Realism sought to reflect the collective imagination of colonized peoples, for whom everyday reality was only one step away from the supernatural.
Latin American filmmaking had already been influenced by this strain in literature, as when Brazilian films took inspiration from the tropicalism of the prewar period (p. 474). During the 1980s, filmmakers began to develop the Magical Realist trend further. Often this involved adapting literary works, as in the six-part series Difficult Loves (1988); each film was derived from a story by Garda Marquez and signed by a major director from a different country. Other directors opted for more original mixtures of realism and fantasy, as in Eliseo Subiela’s Borgesian Conquest of Paradise (Argentina,
1981) and Man Looking Southeast (1986).
A key example of Magical Realist film is Ruy Guerra’s Erendira (Mexico, 1982), with a script by Garda Marquez. The beautiful Erendira undergoes a series of grotesque adventures, mostly involving the efforts of her Gorgon-like
26.1 Senator Onesimo's campaign is adorned by a huge billboard ship that mysteriously spouts smoke (Erendira).
Grandmother to gain money from prostituting the girl. They travel across a vaguely modern Latin America, teeming with smugglers, corrupt police, and cynical politicians. Their home is a vast circus tent, housing statues, a huge boat, and a labyrinth of veiled and curtained corridors. The film leaps from the brutality of Erendira’s exploitation to lyrical fantasy: handbills turn into birds, blue fish swim through the air, a political rally becomes a fairy-tale spectacle (26.1).
The dynamic relations between film and fiction were also seen in the ways in which Latin American writers absorbed the lessons of popular cinema. Gabriel Cabrera Infante’s novels sought to capture the raucous vulgarity of movies. Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman (1976) drew plots from Hollywood B pictures; the process of appropriation came full circle when the novel was filmed in 1984. Latin American cinema won a place in world film markets partly through its ties with a prestigious literary trend.
Of the Woman” helped groups address day care, abortion, rape, and other pertinent issues. In the same period, female filmmakers began to enter production, often focusing on women’s concerns.
Even when directors took on political subjects or themes, most continued the movement of the early 1970s away from radical experimentation. Politically critical films from the developing world tended to rely on conventions of classical narrative or of art-cinema modernism (particularly the interplay between objective realism, subjective realism, and authorial commentary). These strategies enabled filmmakers to reach wider audiences. By abandoning extreme political modernism, they gained some access to festivals and distributors in the First World.
World History
