PINNING THE TAIL ON PINOCHET
Miguel Littin, director of The Jackal of Nahueltoro (1969; p. 546), was one of 5,000 exiles whom Piochet’s dictatorship forbade on pain of death to return to Chile. In 1985, posing as a Uruguayan businessman, Littin returned. His goal was to make a secret film documenting life under the regime, with the hope, as his children put it, of “pinning a great long donkey’s tail on Pinochet.”
Littin oversaw three European film crews, each working unknown to the others, and several young Chilean teams. They shot twenty-five hours of documentary footage, including scenes in Pinochet’s palace. After several narrow brushes with the authorities, Littin escaped and produced a four-hour television film and a two-hour documentary, both called Acta general de Chile (1986). His state of disguised exile—unable to visit friends and relatives, fearing that a passerby would recognize his identity—is engrossingly told in Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin, trans. Asa Zatz (New York: Holt,
1986). Pinochet’s forces seized 15,000 copies of the Spanish edition and burned them.
STORYTELLING IN THIRD WORLD CINEMA
During the 1980s, “narratology” led many film scholars to reflect on how cinema mobilized basic patterns and strategies of storytelling. For overviews of these developments see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), and Robert Stam et al., New Vocabularies for Film Semiotics (New York: Routledge, 1992).
The issue of narrative organization had a particular pertinence for cinemas in the developing world, where rural populations still recited or sang folktales. Filmmakers in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa explored ways in which films might appeal to audiences through an integration of film technique and oral narrative. As yet there exists no broad study of how oral storytelling techniques have been applied to cinema, but some critics have made valuable forays into the area. Karl G. Heider studies folklore plots in Indonesian Cinema: National Culture on Screen (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991). Liz-beth Malkmus and Roy Armes offer useful discussions of oral strategies in their Arab and African Film Making (London: Zed, 1991). As our chapter indicates, African cinema has made extensive use of oral techniques. Some significant studies are Andre Gardies and Pierre Hafner, Regards sur Ie cinema negro-africain (Brussels: OCIC,
1987); Manthia Diawara, “Oral Literature and African Film: Narratology in Wend Kuuni," in Jim Pines and Paul Willemen, eds., Questions of Third Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989), pp. 199-212; and several essays in “Cinemas no irs d’Afrique,” CinemAction 26 (1983).
REFERENCES
1. Quoted in Yves Thoraval, The Cinemas of India (1896-2000) (Delhi: Macmillan, 2000), p. 199.
2. Quoted in Catalogue for 23rd Hong Kong Film Festival (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1999), p. 55.
3. Chen Kaige, “Breaking the Circle: The Cinema and Cultural Change in China,” Cineaste 17, no. 3 (1990): 28.
4. Quoted in Stephen Teo, “The Dao of King Hu,” in A Study of Hong Kong Cinema in the Seventies (Hong Kong: Urban Council, 1984), p. 34.
5. Quoted in Magda Wassef, “La Memoire,” in Christian Bosseno, ed., “Youssef Chahine I’Alexandrin,” Cinem-Action 33 (1985): 99.
6. Guy Hennebelle et al., “Mohamed Lakhdar-Hamina: ‘Ecouter I’histoire aux portes de la legende,’” Cinem-Action 14 (spring 1981): 67.
7. Quoted in Judy Kendall, “Mali,” Variety International Film Guide 1999, ed. Peter Cowie (Los Angeles: Silman-James, 1998), p. 217.
FURTHER READING
Bakari, Imruh, and Mbye Cham, eds. African Experiences of Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1996.
Berg, Charles Ramirez. Cinema of Solitude: A Critical Study of Mexican Film, 1967-1983. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992.
Bergeron, Regis. Le cinema chinois: 1983-1997. Paris: In-stitut de l’image, 1997.
Bordwell, David. Planet Hong Kong: Popular Cinema and the Art of Entertainment. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
“Contemporary Latin American Film.” Review: Latin American Literature and Arts 46 (fall 1992).
Frodon, Jean-Michel. Hou Hsiao-hsien. Paris: Cahiers du Cinema, 1999.
Hammond, Stefan. Hollywood East: Hong Kong Movies and the People Who Make Them. Chicago: Contemporary Books, 2000.
High and Low: Japanese Cinema Now: A User’s Guide. Film Comment 38, 1 (January/February 2002): 35-46.
Issa, Rose, and Sheila Whitaker, eds. Life and Art: The New Iranian Cinema. London: British Film Institute, 1999.
Kabir, Nasreen Munni: Bollywood: The Indian Cinema Story. London: Channel 4, 2001.
Key, Hormuz. Le cinema iranien: L’image d’un societe en bouillonnement. Paris: Karthala, 1999.
Lee, Hyangjin. Contemporary Korean Cinema: Identity, Culture, Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000.
Lopez, Ana. “An ‘Other’ History: The New Latin American Cinema.” Radical History Review 41 (April
1988): 93-116.
Malkmus, Lizbeth, and Roy Armes. Arab and African Film Making. London: Zed, 1991.
McCarthy, Helen. Hayao Miyazaki: Master of Japanese Animation. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 1999.
Poitras, Gilles. Anime Essentials. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press, 2001.
Schilling, Mark. Contemporary Japanese Film. New York: Weatherhill, 1999.
Silbergeld, Jerome. China into Film: Frames of Reference in Contemporary Chinese Cinema. London: Reaktion, 1999.
Vasudev, Aruna. The New Indian Cinema. Delhi: Macmillan, 1986.
PART
World History
