LAT AMER: Cine y Realismo

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

This course will equip students with an understanding of how Latin American cinema has addressed the problem of realism from the second half of the 20th century up until the present, how it blended with the European theoretical discussions of the Italian Neorealism and French Cinéma Vérité to develop its own aesthetics such as Cinema Novo, Tercer Cine and Cine Imperfecto in the 1960-70s, and how contemporary Latin American films, in their own way, have dealt with the question of realism. Throughout the course, we will follow the recurring argument that there is a specter that haunts Latin American cultural production, and that said specter is its own reality which through film contributes to show this spectral presence. This course will regard the filmmaker's commitment to representation, to truth and to the film medium's material bond with the real, in this case, Latin America’s uneven projects of modernization indicated by urban crime and delinquencies, countryside violence and the struggle for land, the fight for democracy, race, gender, the environment as well as the question of indigenous identity. Realist theories will include writings of John Grierson, György Lukács, Siegfried Kracauer, Sergei M. Eisenstein Bertold Brecht, André Bazin, Fernando Birri, Glauber Rocha, Octavio Getino, Fernando Solanas, Julio García Espinoza, and Jorge Sanjinés, among others. Typical films might include !Qué viva México! (Sergei Eisenstein, 1979), Los olvidados (Luis, Buñuel, 1950), Araya (Margot Benacerraf, 1959), Vidas sects (Nélson Pereira dos Santos, 1963), Deus e o diabo na terra do sol (Gláuber Rocha, 1964), La hora de los hornos (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, Argentina, 1968), La batalla de Chile (Patricio Guzmán, Chile, 1975-79), Iracema (Jorge Bodanksy, 1974), Pixote (Héctor Babenco, 1981), Cidade de Deus (Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, 2000), Amores perros (Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2000), and Roma (Alfonso Cuarón, 2018), among others.